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TheScian SF Contest 2009 Results

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to all the participants. The stories will go online at TheScian.com within a few days. First prize - "Stalker" by Shuchikar (author's penname) Second prize - "On board the Ark" by Ankit Bhardwaj Third prize - "Dropping Off" by Ramanand I am pleased to say that all three stories have a darker theme than most of the earlier years' stories. This is good. We are moving beyond the initial awe-and-wonder phase of SF into more mature and adult themes. More on these later after I get them online. The work on the SF book is proceeding at a steady pace. As of…

"YouTube! That's why I became a writer!"

"Book Launch 2.0" This kills me -- but maybe just because I've written books. (Oh yeah -- the links to the books. First two here. Reef Madness here. Buy 'em. Read 'em. They're better than the stuff you're reading now.) This video should follow or be followed by Ellis Weiner's "Our Marketing Plan" from the New Yorker: Once we get back from Frankfurt, weâd like to see you on morning talk shows like the âTodayâ show and âThe View,â so please get yourself booked on them and keep us âin the loop.â If Iâm not hereâwhich I wonât be, since after the book fair I go on vacation for two weeksâjust…

Letter to the Past

Inspired by a thread at Fark, John Lynch asks an interesting question: If you could go back in time and tell your 12-year old self one thing, what would it be? Janet has some thoughts as well. Leaving aside obvious stuff like "Buy Microsoft stock," what I would say to my twelve-year-old self is this: Get over yourself. (Continued...) You're not getting picked on in school because your classmates are jealous that you're smarter than they are (nerd apologia notwithstanding). You're getting picked on because you're annoying about it. You can be the smartest guy in the room without rubbing it…

BONK!

I rarely ever go to a place like Barnes and Noble to buy books, but a few months ago I had a gift card that burning a hole in my pocket. The question was what to buy. As always I browsed through the science section and didn't see much of interest. Most of the titles available were about subjects I was already familiar with or didn't strike my fancy. I was just about to head home when I spotted Mary Roach's book SPOOK. It wasn't typical reading fare for me, but I remembered hearing good things about it. When I got home I started in on it and could not put it down. I even read the whole thing…

Mike Reedy's lowbrow anatomy

Michael Reedy's drawings are like 1980s Visual Man and Woman models plopped down in a half-excavated quarry of visual and literary allusions. He achieves a cut-paper, graphic feel by composing on superimposed planes, sort of like a stage set, with strategic uses of outlining and negative space. And he is a master of figure drawing (he teaches it, so he'd better be). When an artist really knows figural anatomy, he/she doesn't need to do anything flashy with it: you can just tell. While it's not one of the overtly anatomical drawings (like malum E, above), I'm totally captivated by Blash, a…

Goldmund Media Rooms

In the great role-playing game of life, I did not get very many audiophile points.  I mean, fine machinery is something I can appreciate, but I'm pretty indifferent to the sounds those machines make.   So it strikes me as remarkable that anyone would make, much less buy, a $300,000 turntable.   No, you can't go into a store and buy one.  You can't even get one on the Internet.  If you want one, you have to make an appointment. They are made by a Swiss company, href="http://www.goldmund.com/company/" rel="tag">Goldmund.  The turntable is called the Reference II.  They've only made 25…

Are Mac Owners More Pretentious?

Being a (very) recent convert to the World of Mac, it is with great interest that I read a provocative report by Mindset Media comparing the behavior of Mac-owners vs. PC-owners--specifically, who was snobbier? Mindset surveyed 7500 Mac and PC-owners and found that Mac users were more self-important, intellectually curious, and felt themselves to be extraordinary and superior. Mac users are more likely to use teeth-whitening kits (vanity!), buy organic food, be politically liberal, be willing to pay more for green technology, buy a hybrid car, drink Starbucks, and have bought more than 5…

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Mortgage Basics (part 2): The System is Broken.

This is the second part of my series trying to answer peoples questions about how mortgages work, and what went wrong. In the first part, I described what a mortgage is, and how it works. In this part, I'm going to describe the mortgage system - that is, the collection of people and organizations involved in the business of mortgages, how they interact with one another, and how that system has gotten into trouble. The next and final part will be from the viewpoint of a homeowner who is taking or has taken out a mortgage to purchase a home, and what can go wrong from their side. I'll…

Online publishing, new way of peer-reviewing, and blogs

Rethinking Peer Review: In reality, peer review is a fairly recent innovation, not widespread until the middle of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, many science journals were commandingly led by what Ohio State University science historian John C. Burnham dubbed "crusading and colorful editors," who made their publications "personal mouthpieces" for their individual views. There were often more journals than scientific and medical papers to publish; the last thing needed was a process for weeding out articles. In time, the specialization of science precluded editors from being…

Blogs - a means to finding people to do rhythmic things with?

I found this quite intriguing: Those thinking that online social networking is a substitute for face-to-face interactions might want to think again. Recent research in psychology suggests there are some benefits to real-life socializing that the Internet just can't provide; researchers at Stanford University have published a report in Psychological Science called "Synchrony and Cooperation" that indicates engaging in synchronous activities (e.g., marching, singing, dancing) strengthens social attachments and enables cooperation. As most of our online social networking to date is based on…

On the future of scientific communication

Dipterist extraordinaire David Yeates writes: If accepted, a recently proposed amendment to the ICZN allows for electronic publication of taxonomic names.... [T]he logical implications of this proposal are many and far reaching. For example, this change may lead to further advances so that zoological taxonomy bypasses traditional journal publication entirely... I agree with Yeates.  Taxonomy will migrate from paper journals to online databases, and this will happen sooner rather than later.  But I think it worth noting that this is reflective of a broader change in scientific communication…

Mark your calendars for the Great Backyard Bird Count.

The 12th annual Great Backyard Bird Count, sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, will be taking place February 13-16, 2009. This is a lovely (and long-running) bit of citizen science that aims to compile a continent-wide snapshot of bird populations during a few days in February before the spring migrations have started. Participation is easy: Plan to spend at least 15 minutes on at least one of the days of the count (Feb. 13, Feb. 14, Feb. 15, or Feb. 16) outdoors counting birds. You can do a count on more than one of the days if you want, and you…

Selling indulgences for environmental sin

One of the gross abuses that triggered the Reformation was the corrupt practice of Catholic priests of selling "indulgences," get-out-of-jail free cards for your sins in this world. Since the Bush administration is always willing to learn from history where corruption is the prize, they have come up with a new idea to sell climate change indulgences to a public increasingly worried about how today's sins will punish their grandchildren. This latest Bush administration proposal for offsetting the build-up of greenhouse gases characteristically (for them) doesn't operate on the source side --…

Bird Magic

My wife and kids went to the beach last week. When they returned they gave me a present. Frankly, I wasn't expecting a present at all, so I found it funny that they felt apprehensive that I woud not like the present as it was cheap. Then I opened it, and it was.... ...the Drinking Happy Bird!!!! I love it! I always wanted to have one. A craftsman of some sort (watch repair, glass-cutting?) down the street where I grew up had one displayed in his shop window. It was big (about 20cm long) and the legs and stuff were made of metal. It took me a few minutes to get it set up and working…

If you don't stop doing that, you'll go extinct!

Those darned Christians are always ruining our fun. Now we're getting preemptive finger-wagging: we have been warned that sex with robots is always wrong. The author is afraid we're going to someday run out and buy life-like android sex slaves, and then humanity will go extinct…because of course we'd all prefer to have sex with a perfect Christian woman an obedient, unquestioning, subservient machine. (Shhh. While he's busy looking for androids to cluck over, don't let him know that the sex machines are already here. They aren't humanoid at all. They tend to have shapes that vary from simple…

Great Math Music

By way of PZ, I just found [the website of Jonathan Coulton](http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songs/), a musician who seems to specialize in humorous and geeky songs. The music is good; the lyrics are absolutely fantastic. Here's an example that he gives away, called "Mandelbrot Set". (For embedding it here, I drastically stripped it from 160K stereo sample to just 16K mono; go to his homepage to get the real, full-quality version.) Just to give you an idea, here's the lyrics for the first verse: Pathological monsters! cried the terrified mathematician Every one of them is a splinter in my…

no money, no cheerios

head of major supermarket in Iceland encourages people to hoard food and to stop buying foreign products no currency for food imports this is a cultural catastrophe, no more cheerios for breakfast, the kids will have to eat skyr CEO of Bonus, a major Icelandic grocery market says their foreign wholesalers are refusing lines of credit through Icelandic banks and demanding cash payment before supplying further goods. The store has been refused foreign currency. This was 4 pm friday afternoon. He encourages people to hoard food and to start buying locally produced goods only. I guess the…

Yet more sea ice

Continuing from Three views of sea ice. Well, tis now mid-June, so the futurology aspect of the prediction is closing rapidly. Or so you would have thought. I've just taken £50 against CR for the ice being below 4.735 (he gets the low side) or above 4.935 (I get the high side). But my principal debt on sea ice is failing to write anything more about it. so, to remedy that! I was going to suggest that the most interesting way of doing the pool was via Intrade. Unfortunately their Arctic sea ice pool doesn't look very interesting. The bet is "2010 greater than 2009" and is trading at around 43…

Jiggitty Jig

We're home again, at last. Actually, the power came on not quite 24 hours ago, but by the time we learned it was back, we were settled in for the night at the hotel. And it would've taken several hours for the house to warm back up from its sub-40-Fahrenheit temperature to a temperature at which SteelyKid would be comfortable. We've been back in the house since about 10 am, though. Of course, there was much too much to do to read blogs, let alone post anything-- spoiled food to throw out, replacement food to be obtained, more diapers to buy, a Christmas tree to acquire, etc., etc. The…

Krugman: I'm For Math!

Krugman clarifies: I've been getting some comments from people who think my magazine piece was an attack on the use of mathematics in economics. It wasn't...So by all means let's have math in economics -- but as our servant, not our master. Word. (Of course the point I was trying to make was that I read the end of his article as suggesting that because economics must deal with the irrational and unpredictable behavior of humans, that it must therefor be messy and beyond elegant mathematical description. I don't buy this line of reasoning, as I think it is unknown whether the conclusion is…

Reading Diary: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein

We live in a k-cup culture. Focused on the near term but willfully blind to the longer term implications of our daily decisions. Just before the holidays I was watching the CBC TV show Power and Politics and they were discussing a bunch of "Top 5s" in an end-of year story. You know the type, the Top 5 this's and that's from the previous year, 2014, as well as a couple looking ahead to 2015. With a federal election scheduled in 2015, were the top 5 election issues that Canada that Canadians should keep on their radar in the coming year? Economy/Jobs Leadership/Ethics Energy/Climate Change…

Rant on Scientific Journals: Reply from Nature Mag.

About two weeks ago I wrote an entry on what I hated about scientific journals. I intentionally did not include the issue of public access to publicly financed research, but it came up in the comment section. Interestingly Maxine, an editor at Nature, replied: On the access problem mentioned here in the comments -- can't speak for other publishers but institutions almost always have site-license access to Nature which gives complete online access. Nature ran a debate on this topic a while back which is free-access and can be see at: http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/index.html…

Weblog awards

I don't like the way the Weblog awards are decided. Because you can vote once per day per computer you have access to, to win bloggers need to post every day and shamelessly exhort their readers to vote. This felt wrong to me, so when I was a finalist in 2005 and 2006 I ignored the whole thing. But this year I'm not a finalist, so I'm asking you to vote for a couple of blogs. In the Funniest Blog category, a truly vile blog called DUmmie FUnnies must not win. There was an on-line appeal to raise money to pay for medical care for someone called Andy Stephenson, who was suffering from…

Journalism wrap-up from ScienceOnline2010

The complete list of blog/media coverage of ScienceOnline2010 is becoming huge (and also swiftly falling down and off the page), but I wanted to put up on top just a choice of blog posts that completely or partially cover the 'journalism and media track' of session at the meeting, as I found them very insightful. I know, there were many other topics at the meeting, and blog posts covering them, but I feel the discussion of science in the media and journalism was the leitmotif of this year's meeting and it brought about some of the liveliest sessions and most interesting posts (not just for…

Nature Lets It All Hang Out Through Open Peer Review

One of the fundamental principles of modern science, as well as other academic pursuits, is peer review. By subjecting a submitted paper to evaluation by other scientists in the authors' field, the solid science advances at the expense of the not-so-good and the interesting and relevant prevails above the unoriginal. In theory, of course. The effect is a growing body of scientific knowledge that, while still large and unwieldy, is at best authoritative and at the very least trustworthy and accurate. It's a kind of democratization of knowledge, at least in a narrow sense. But, as in any…

The Netroots Candidate

If you read the papers or watched TV today, you may have gotten the impression that Edwards announced his run this morning around 9am in front of TV cameras. Wrong! The MSM folks think they still matter and are blind to everything happening outside of their domain. The first people he directly announced to were about 20 of us bloggers on a teleconference phone call last night around 7pm. Soon afterwards, his campaign posted this video on YouTube, soon followed by the launch of his website. Then, after the NOLA announcement, he spent about two hours on DailyKos answering questions from more…

On My Mind Right Now

My landscape students in Växjö did extremely well on the exam: 79% passed with distinction. And they were extremely kind in their evaluation of the course, which took place before the exam. I've been put in charge of an on-line course in upplevelseproduktion, tourist site production, and so will spend the entire academic year of '12/13 as an employee of the Linnæus University at 20-25% of full time. Yay! My buddy Martin is sending me the manuscript of his new novel for test reading. Fornvännen's autumn issue just came from the printers with a lot of good stuff, and we're handing the winter…

More thoughts on a workable library ebook business model

A while back I posted some semi-coherent ramblings inspired by the HarperCollins/Overdrive mess concerning how libraries were able to license ebook collections for their patrons. I'm not sure my ideas have changed or solidified or evolved or what, but I've certainly come to a slightly different way of articulating them. Here goes. At a certain level, libraries -- public, academic, institutional, special, whatever -- lending ebooks makes no sense at all. If a library acquires a digital copy of a book there is no good reason why every person in that library's community (school, town, city,…

The Computer Industry Is Making Us Crazy

We had a meeting yesterday with the chair of the CS department, who wanted to know about our computing needs. Sadly, she just meant that she wanted to know what computing things we would like our students to be taught, because my real computing need, as I said to Kate last night, is "I need the entire computer industry to operate on a different paradigm than it does now, because the current system is making everyone miserable." I was half joking, but not entirely. I genuinely am annoyed at the whole way the industry operates, because planned obsolescence means that I am constantly being…

Goodbye: Dusky Seaside Sparrow

tags: Dusky Seaside Sparrow, Ammodramus maritimus nigrescens, Joel Sartore, National Geographic, image of the day The world in a jar: Is this the sort of world we wish to leave to our children? Dusky Seaside Sparrow (Ammodramus maritimus nigrescens). Extinct. Image: Joel Sartore/National Geographic [larger view]. The photographer writes; Slipping into extinction almost unnoticed, the Dusky Seaside Sparrow, Ammodramus maritimus nigrescens -- found mainly on Florida's Merritt Island -- declined from roughly 3,000 pairs to none as its salt marsh habitat was sprayed with DDT and taken over for…

Around the Web: Becoming Internet famous, Why some academics publish more and, er, more

Finding Fame, and Sometimes Fortune, in Social Media Why Some Academics Publish More Why book bloggers are critical to literary criticism On Becoming a Phoenix: Encounters With the Digital Revolution (trying an online course at UPhoenix) A Pioneer in Online Education Tries a MOOC FriendFeed Turns 5. The One-Time Pioneer Is Still Here. The Financial Burdens of the CC-BY License for Scholarly Literature Will Public Libraries Become Extinct? It will be hard to find a public library 15 years from now 2012 Digital Music Sales on Pace to Break Record MLA to Launch Scholarly Communications Platform…

Fighting for Open Access in Serbia

Vedran Vucic is a Linux afficionado in Serbia. He and his organization have gone all around Serbia, wired up the schools, taught the teachers and students how to use Linux, taught the teachers and students how to use various online educational resources ranging from blogs to ATutor, etc. Vedran also gives technical support to about 40 Serbian bloggers whose work he also aggregates. He is now putting a lot of energy into persuading scientists, especially the young, not-yet-entrenched ones, to go online and to promote Open Access. It is an uphill battle, but he is persistent! You'll see…

Why Your Professor Would Like You To Apply To Penn State

Mars Gets Women, but he does not get the New Improved Process for Recommendation Letters for Students ...and, may I say, to the graduate program administrators around the country; the commercial on-line application services universally suck my current experience is that one of the online service providers is ok, the one used by Caltech and Harvard astro. I've also had the browser incompatibility and mystery crash issue (no, it is NOT my responsibility to get a current version of IE so that another university can subcontract their letter processing to the lowest bidder). One service asks for…

Museum Catalogues Ice Cream Stick

A bit of museum silliness with thanks to Dear Reader Kenny. As mentioned before, my dear Museum of National Antiquities has not escaped the weird influence of post-modernist museology. In its excellent on-line catalogue, which I cannot recommend highly enough, we find object number -100:559: an ice cream stick, dating from the '00s. Its context is unusually unclear in the on-line info, but it appears to have been donated during an outreach project where kids were invited to give the museum stuff and speculate about how people in the future will one day interpret it. I don't think curating,…

Physics World on the LHC

So, there's a new issue of Physics World magazine out, with a bunch of feature stories on the Large Hadron Collider. Three of these are available free online: Life at the high-energy frontier, a sort of overview of the accelerator and the people involved. Expedition to inner space, a discussion of what they hope to discover at the LHC. How the US sees the LHC, which is obvious. I'm particularly interested in one of the articles that isn't free online, though: "Beyond the Higgs" discussing what would happen if the LHC fails to find the Higgs boson. My interest stems from the fact that the…

Eugenics and the DI revisited

You may recall the event a few weeks ago at the University of Minnesota in which John West of the Discovery Institute attempted to tell us how Darwin was responsible for eugenics. Greg Laden has mentioned that we now have an account from Mark Borrello, who rebutted West in a too-brief ten minutes after the talk; he gets to stretch his legs a little more online and tears West's premises to shreds. In addition, Jim Curtsinger, who missed the talk but watched it online, gets to tell us something about the practice of teaching science: we Darwinists often talk about eugenics in our classes (I did…

Call for entries: Virtual sciart exhibition in conjunction with the AAAS Annual Meeting

FYI: Science Art-Nature and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) present the "Science Without Borders" online art exhibition in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C., February 17 - 21, 2011.This on-line art exhibition, was conceived to display and promote the best contemporary Science Art and to encourage discourse between the scientific and artistic communities. Designed as a companion to the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, each selected piece of…

The First Annual Blogger Bioblitz Begins Today

Over 40 bloggers will be stepping outside for National Wildlife Week, April 21 - 29, field guides, binoculars and seines in hand and pack to catalogue all the species they can find in a local area of their choosing. Early tomorrow morning, I'll be heading out to our campus' arboretum, a small, manageable riparian forest. I'll probably be tackling another area in Western Pennsylvania later in the week. The first post from me should be up be tomorrow afternoon. We have spent the past month refining the process at our forum. Use the following links to access any information you may need. Also,…

Further response to Camilla Long's ode to genetic ignorance

Earlier this month I wrote a post skewering a terrible opinion piece about personal genomics in the Sunday Times by Camilla Long. This was my conclusion: If Long wishes to stay ignorant of her own genetic risks - just as she has managed to remain ignorant of the entire field of genetics, even while writing an op-ed piece about it - that should be her choice. But her criticism of others who choose to pursue a greater understanding of their own genetic risk is entirely, horrendously misplaced. Dan Vorhaus from Genomics Law Report was equally disgusted by the piece. While we were unsuccessful…

USA Science and Engineering Festival Ranks as "50 Essential Twitter Feeds for STEM Educators" by Best Colleges Online!

The second annual USA Science and Engineering Festival is fast approaching and people are starting to take notice of what a great resource the Festival organization has become. The mission of the Festival is to re-invigorate the interest of our nation's youth in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) by producing and presenting the most compelling, exciting, educational and entertaining science gatherings in the United States. We are absolutely thrilled to have ranked as one of the 50 Essential Twitter Feeds for STEM Educators by Best Colleges Online! Throughout the year, we at…

Internet Withdrawal

Having moved recently to a house wired only with telephone copper, my family and I are now into our fourth week without an internet connection. It's a really frustrating way to learn just how dependent we've become on the net. For one thing, we don't own a printed telephone directory, and our only street map of greater Stockholm is in the car. We can't do on-line banking, and we can't mail-order stuff. I can read email on my smartphone, but my wife's going nuts over being cut off. And simple information searching -- woah, I miss Wikipedia five times a day. Suddenly we have to use our printed…

ScienceOnline'09: megaprops to Sigma Xi and all who contributed

It'll be a few days before I can get together posts on this past weekend's ScienceOnline'09 conference in frigid North Carolina. The Friday Fermentable Live! was a terrific success and it already looks like there are seven posts out there (for example, Eva Amsen on her Nature Networks blog, Expression Patterns, put up an account with vasectomy-like precision). I had the honor of participating in two sessions: one on gender and allies in STEM, online and off, with the youthful Alice Pawley and Zuska and another on pseudonymity/anonymity and building online reputation with PalMD. Speaking…

Habermas on Blogs

Well, not on blogs exactly, but internet communication in general. What he says definitely applies to blogs, though. The quote is in a footnote in this speech that Habermas gave at the 2006 annual convention of the International Communication Association. Allow me in passing a remark on the Internet which counterbalances the seeming deficits that stem from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting by reintroducing deliberative elements in electronic communication. The Internet has certainly reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public of writers and readers. However,…

Tidbits, 22 January 2010

Because I scanted you on tidbits for quite some time, have a second tidbits post in a single week! A little library advocacy: Five library resources you should be using. Otherwise-closed data tend to open up in direct proportion to the perceived importance of the problem: GlaxoSmithKline opens up data on anti-malaria compounds. Now let's make this the default stance, shall we? Undergraduate science librarian Bonnie Swoger talks Science Online 2010 and data. Also on the Science Online 2010 roundup, the amazing Kevin Smith of Duke makes trenchant observations about copyright anxiety and it's…

Those deadly chemistry sets.

Months ago, I wrote about the Department of Homeland Security's concerns about chemistry sets. (You know, for kids.) Well, it seems the push to make the world child-safe (or perhaps not legally actionable?) continues. Reader Donn Young points me to this story from Wired about government crackdowns on companies catering to garage chemistry enthusiasts. Donn also shares a story of his own: Growing up, two friends and I had a chemistry 'club' centered around our chemistry sets and 'labs' in our basements. My friend's mother, who was a chemist at Battelle Memorial Institute, would give us…

Dr. Jeff Schweitzer Talks About Living a Moral Life in a Random World TONIGHT in NYC

Who: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer What: free public presentation, "Moral Life in a Random World" Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor. When: 700pm, Thursday, 9 July Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist who has written extensively on morality, religion, politics and science -- and who served as science advisor to former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Schweitzer will talk about how we each have within us the awesome power to create our own meaning in life, our own sense of purpose, our own destiny. He will address how…

Tomorrow Night in NYC: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer on Moral Life in a Random World

Who: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer What: free public presentation, "Moral Life in a Random World" Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor. When: 700pm, Thursday, 9 July Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist who has written extensively on morality, religion, politics and science -- and who served as science advisor to former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Schweitzer will talk about how we each have within us the awesome power to create our own meaning in life, our own sense of purpose, our own destiny. He will address how…

This Week in NYC: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer Speaks About Living a Moral Life in a Random World

Who: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer What: free public presentation, "Moral Life in a Random World" Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor. When: 700pm, Thursday, 9 July Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist who has written extensively on morality, religion, politics and science -- and who served as science advisor to former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Schweitzer will talk about how we each have within us the awesome power to create our own meaning in life, our own sense of purpose, our own destiny. He will address how…