California and the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Youre fortunate in utah to have a strong base of conservativism. We do not have that in california. I was wondering, for republicans and conservatives like us, can you comment on how we might able to regain the state and bring it back to the reagan days . As to the second question, i am only two states away, so i am happy to provide you with some conservative representation in washington. It turns out that your two senators are not conservative. I dont know if you knew that. [laughter] we do occasionally agree on things. I think it leaves not only me, but also the rest of us wondering if something has gone terribly wrong when we vote on the same thing. I think it relates back to the question that we asked a minute ago. The fact we have to do a better job explaining not just what we are against, there is always a place for that, but what we are for. Just as importantly, why we are for it. We are not just about tearing down bad government, not just about cutting out that government, but producing good government. What we are trying to achieve at the end of the day. What it is that we want is a society in which everyone, including americas poor and middleclass, a society in which they will have an opportunity to get ahead, to work hard for him and to better their station in life. I think that message will work in california and everywhere as we learn how to express what it is we really want. The best thing we can do with regard to russia and ukraine, involves really aggressive production of oil and natural gas. [applause] i am a member of the Senate Armed Services committee. I recently asked some very highranking military officers whether that would make a huge difference, and they agreed emphatically, yes it would make a huge difference. Because Vladimir Putin would never have dared do what he did if we were aggressively producing and exporting oil and natural gas. He would never have gotten away with it. Economic sanctions, we have to go there. In order for them to matter, in order for any of this to matter, we need to be the worlds leading energy producer. [applause] one more. It seems like every day we are up against the media, up against democrats, up against a great deal of our own party republicans. Can you speak to some of the successes the conservative movement has had lately . [laughter] how about another question . [laughter] first of all, the mere fact that were talking credibly about the possibility of obtaining the majority in the senate, the mere fact that we can talk with some credibility to the possibility of pushing forward some of these incremental reforms that ive mentioned a few minutes ago, all of that was made possible only because of a phenomenon that started to be recognized in 2009 and 2010. Spontaneous grassroots conservative waves that hit the country. Not everyone knew what to call that. I just call it a return to americanism. It is what strengthened our weak position in the senate, and is the only reason why we could be looking seriously at the possibility of having majority of both houses. To get there we have to recognize that there is some natural tension that is in any political party. Not just an hours, but in any. Tension between the base and the senior leadership, the elected officials within that party. That tension will always exist. And right now it has created a hole in the Republican Party. The way to bridge that hole is an affirmative agenda that talks about what it is but we want, that nearly all republicans can get behind, it is the only way we can get there and unite the party. It is what reagan would have us do, and it is what reagan did. [applause] thank you. A couple of live events from the heritage foundation. The look of philanthropy on defense funding. That is live tomorrow on cspan. On u. S. Relations with asia later on the day between japan and south korea. The former director of National Take part inwill the discussion. Live coverage at 2 00 eastern on cspan. Cspan presents debates on what makes america great. Evolution and economically modified moods. Oversight, student loan date and Sexual Assault on onpuses new perspectives Global Warming and fighting Infectious Diseases and food ur. Ety and the history to he find the tv schedule one week it event at www. Cspan. Org www. Cspan. Org and let us know what you think. Call us. Or email us at comments cspan. Org. Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. Discussion about congressional transparency next and the use of internet site wikipedia. Panelists to talk about the efforts and challenges posed on posting wikipedia about congress. The interdigital followed this onehour event. Thank you for coming. Is the peoplee most knowledgeable about the bills have an aversion to this. People who were upset with wikipedia the people who work are members, work with crs largely not editing the website at that a large segment of the American Population uses to get information about hills pending in congress. Hugeve the potential for a manner in which government can deliver transparency to the public and the public and likewise can demand their outcomes. To help navigate the roles a littleikipedia and history on the legislation, we have three dollars here jim harper is the senior fellow and works with privacy and intellectual property and transparency and security. 2014, he was the director at cato. In 2014, he was the senior fellow of the bitcoin foundation. Michelle, she is a legislative researcher and writer. She has a bachelor degrees in political silence and and mass degree in International Relations is from the university of staccato university of chicago. 1392 unique mazes. She has created 900 articles come most of which are about legislation. We have jim hayes who is a member of wikipedia d. C. We will turn it over to jim. Thank you for being here. I am pleased to have the cspan audience because i think we will talk about some interesting stuff today. Advance thelot to ball in transparency and congress. Issues are very interesting wikipedia editing with Congressional Staff a version on capitol hill and there is an distrust within the wikipedia community. With work and care i think we can improve that. I want to open by doing a brief history, the sort of modern history of the transparency issue him and the work we have been doing at cato, before i turn it over to michelle and then jim. Michelle obviously has the numbers to prove that she can make a talented and capable wikipedia and we want to make others as good as michelle at producing information for people together to get insight into what people are into what is happening inside congress. What is going on within transparency . Ive been working on it longer. Since 2000, i run a website called washingtonwatch. Com. It has had a lot of traffic. 200,000 comments on a single bill come a for example. Really impressive stuff. But really, the transparency project has never taken off like a good command that is basically because the data is not available. I was excited when president obama was first elected with the promises of transparency that he made. Goodfaith promises, and i think a goodfaith effort was made within the first couple of years of the Obama Administration to deliver on transparency. But i think a problem existed, and that is, people did not early no how to deliver transparency. This people did not really know how to deliver transparency. What is been spared the within the government . How does it deliver on the oversight that we want for the public today echo today . I have seen a slowdown in the transparency efforts during the Current Administration also and i wrote a couple of pieces that are available, and i think they are available on the desk outside. What do you have to do with the asked on the transparency side . What we want them to be doing to provide transparent data. It has to be available from an authoritative voice, so be below where to get it. Availability, and completeness. That is, you want all of the relevant data in a given area. You want it to be up all the time come and to stay in one place of there can be a consistent datastream and website asked and Information Services can be built on a datastream that is reliable. Of course, the machine for searching is important. Google and other crawlers need to be able to find the data and deliver it to people. And the most important parties readability. Structuring the most important part is readability. Structuring the data so that it is usable. A subsequent publication is called grading the public grading the governments availability of public practices, grading the legislative process, the budget and appropriations process. The grades are generally fairly poor. There have been steps taken in the congress and in the administration in and in a new law recently passed called the did act that may well improve those great those grades quite a bit. In a study we are about to commence, again, regrading the availability of data, the numbers will still be fairly poor. Actual data about what is going on in congress is not readily available. Actual data about the budgeting is not readily available. But over the years, we have set to work at cato trying to make some of that work available that Data Available for sub you can follow our work on these bills on twitter. Cato. Org Resources Data is where the data is downloadable in bulk, or through the api. What we do is gather versions of the bill from the Government Printing office, and then using highly software highly customized software, we add xml that indicates when there is a reference to an existing law in all of the ways that reference might exist. When it is referencing a bureau, we have the data automatically available for those who want to parse and find it. We have a bill when we have a bill that contained spending, or an authorization of appropriations, or an appropriation, we also make that available as data. The publishing of these bills and making them available for anyone to use, and the did the data that we are starting to seize, for example, the Washington Examiner has a page called appropriate appropriations. They are displaying to their users the existence of the bill proposed to spend money. A few months ago when this came out, this was the first time anyone could systematically find what ails in Congress Proposed to spend taxpayer dollars. It is surprising and fascinating that there was no systematic way of learning when congress was proposing spending. But the appropriate appropriations page on the Washington Examiner uses that data within these bills to make that available to the public, positioning for better oversight of the congress. The New York Times is a better user of this data. You do tracking of legislation, votes, and such. On pages about legislation there, there is a section in the lower right called mentions. They use the references that we have to show what agencies are mentioning what bills. If you are interested in what is happening at the department of labor, or the Environmental Protection agency, the data we produce allows you to see all of the bills that affect these agencies. When i mentioned that it references existing law, that is another thing we mark up in all the ways that robert refers to them. The Legal Institute at cornell has begun using this data to let their visitors know that when they are visiting a page of the u. S. Code, that code is subject to amendment by the u. S. Congress. We have relatively sophisticated people going onto the cornell law website and many of you here are filling with that and many people out of the land are familiar with that. It is usually the top searchers when you are searching for u. S. Code. When you are on one of those pages and the section of code you are looking for is up for amendment in congress, they are giving you a link to that. You can go to congress. Gov and look at the bill must find out who authored it, and where it is in the process. Look at the bill, find out who authored it, and where it is in the process. That will be Important Information for those who are looking for the code and the legislation that is pending. They may be able to offer educated opinions on what congress is doing an improved democratic processes. We at cato are also using the data on wikipedia. I come now to the subject of todays topic. We take the data that is produced in deep bills and we produce info boxes that we use on legislative pages. Youre probably familiar with the info boxes on wikipedia about a movie star, political actor, what their party has been in their career, and so on and so forth. Wikipedia info boxes can show any discrete way what is going on with a particular bill. Those are produced with deep bill data as well. And to sort of highlight what is going on with wikipedia now, we have created a twitter bot that is a riff on the congress at its twitter boxed. Congress recently came out with a great deal of interest in this. It tracks anonymous edits coming from capitol hill. There has been a little bit of backandforth and forth between one or more anonymous editors, and the cutie at large, because the Community Seems to be trolling the edits that they do. It is interesting stuff. Someone edited them i believe, the Cato Institute page on wikipedia anonymously on the hill about this event happening. It was kind of metaand we saw our minds a coating when that happened. It tracks all edits, not just those coming from the hill. You can see the bot at wiki bills. You can see what legislation is being edited. You can take a look at what people are doing with bills and find those there. Many of the edits are coming from michelle, who does so much work. We are trying to make government more legible. We are trying to make it more available. Editing wikipedia is a way of doing that. Getting the notable bills up there, getting them written about, so people when they are doing a search to find out what is going on in congress can go to that resource, which is so valuable for so many things. And at least start their investigation there. As john mentioned, there has been reticence on the congressional side to wikipedia, and that has to do with history early on. There was controversy, because people from the hill, people from Congressional Offices were going in and editing the pages of the members of congress that they work for. There would be back and forth and there were conflicts of interest in doing that. Generally, there is. There is a version to wikipedia editing on the hill. There is suspicion of wikipedia editing from the hill on the part of the wikipedia community. But we think that suspicion can be abated, if not gotten rid of them entirely. But it will be hard. There are customs and rules on wikipedia against rules against conflict of interest, for cabell, but i think have to be navigated very carefully. Michelle is going to for example, but i think they have to be navigated very carefully. Michelle is going to talk about this culture. She is very highly decorated within wikipedia. Im very pleased with her work. Her experience of the culture is an experience that others have had. Theres a lot of controversy that goes into these bills. We will have more discussion around what the rules are and how to navigate the process. We very much like to see Congressional Offices flipped from a version to embrace wikipedia. After a sort of initial phase of concern and worry and suspicion, i think things will change dramatically and wikipedians will come to expect that the mers of congress are sharing with the public in the best possible way ways to introduce congressional legislation. The question is, which will which Congressional Office will step up and start editing wikipedia first check on unofficial banana, but shes here to talk about her experience. Wikipedia first. I dont know if michelle will talk about that, but shes here to talk about her experience. In march, 2013, we had a meet up with wikipedians and the transparency activists within d. C. And sat down to talk about how we can use the deep bill data that jim just described in a way to make the wikipedia boxes on wikipedia better. And improve the discussion. One of the things we discussed that day was how we determine if a piece of legislation is notable. Obviously, the person who introduces it hopes that it is notable. They put it there for a reason. But with 10,000 pieces of legislation in a congress, we cannot really do with the pd articles on all 10,000. One of the lines that we decided on at this meeting and have held to is that pieces of legislation are notable if they come up for a floor vote in the house and senate. That is several hundred bills so far in this congress. And we have articles about 350 of them. Obviously, there are many more that we do not have articles about. One of the things ive noticed as i do this, is that you can track to hit count an article gets, and you can track exactly who the editors are of an article. I can tell you that when we write an article, posted out there, put it in the article people read it will stop people read it. Especially bills like immigration bill, farm bill, those get attention. If you search for the bill name, your article is up on the first page of the google hit. People can find it and they use would be as a source of information. They will go there and read the article. The problem is, once you put the article up there, there are some hardcore wikipedians they come by and do some maintenance on the article. Very little Additional Information gets added. That is what we would like to see people on the hill do. You guys know more about these pieces of legislation than anyone does. You have personal and professional interest in their being correct there being wrecked information for the general public in the bill and why the information is good or bad or terrible and how it can be improved. You have incentive to add to these articles. What wikipedia can provide is, one, a knowledge of the rules, and the culture of wikipedia. How to maintain neutrality in an article. How to ethically address conflicts of interest situations. How to spruce up the article by adding images. And maps that show the vote counts for which states or which District Voted for or against a piece of legislation, and how to make cool info boxes. That is something wikipedians can add, but we still need people from the hillside, experts and policy, experts on policy for my to add to the comments side. We had a situation where bill was passed. There was no accurate total of, you know, bob voted yes, john voted no. You can make a map of visually who voted yes and no. But there was a guy who just cap putting a map on there. It turns out he was using data from a vote taken on a bill by the same name, but from the 112th congress. And he did not notice the difference. That is something where we need people who are experts, like yourselves, to do and help us out with. That is also a thing that can come up with multiple versions of the same bill with different titles, but have completely different contents. That is something wikipedians dont necessarily understand, but staffers would. Staffers would understand a legislative vehicle they go straight over the head of wikipedians. I think its a very valuable project. If you think about a piece of legislation, even if you can pull a summary of it from someplace like the Congressional Research servers, it will not necessarily make sense to a layperson who does not have deep knowledge of that issue. And the great part about wikipedia is that you can make a link to all of the concepts and agencies and organizations and locations and places that are in the summary. They are studying up on their congressperson to decide if theyre going to vote for that guy again. He can go in and look at the legislation and say, i dont know what a hydropower dam is, but i can clicked on this link in wikipedia and read about what that is. I would love to see more people edit wikipedia. I think there are good reasons to. Hopefully, jim will be able to tell you some about wikimedia here in d. C. , which is a group that knows wikipedia really well and would love to partner with you guys to help staffers and people with knowledge to edit in a strong and knowledgeable way. Jim . Thanks for coming. Thanks, cato. We look forward to more collaboration in the future. By way of background, wikipedia i mean, it seems ubiquitous, and that is wherever one page hits go. Where everyones page hits go. But keep in mind that the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit and they run the servers and software and are based out of san francisco, but all the content is written by volunteers. We have a local chapter of volunteers called wikimedia, d. C. We are very active trying to have local funds for distribution, including through the Cato Institute, and we have worked with the smithsonian and international archives. Conflict of interest has a long history on wikipedia. There is an article you can read about it that gives you all the gory details. Conflict of interest on editing on wikipedia. In 2006, and congress was part of that. There were some good takeaways from that and some good examples. There was an article about congressman joe wilson that was a precursor to some of the conflict of interest rules where staffers put content on the top page, and then it was incorporated in the article and the article was relatively good quality after that. That is on your handout, some of the concepts about neutral point of view and conflict of interest. Things have become more formalized over time. Now, there is a nice, long, written policy about conflict of interest. The idea is to give you some best practices of how to do fax correction in articles a fact correction in articles, if you find something that is not correct them even if you have a conflict. The idea is not to the idea is to register your account, declare your potential conflicts of interest on the user page, and then make the comments on the top page. And also, if you need help editing, there are some good suggestions on your handout. If you need help editing, there is some good its suggestions on r handout we also suggest that there is a for him call the teahouse. Friendly people help you. Come to more help our local events that are you get a nice backstage pass. There are many social media people there and we can help you with your concerns about editing. A lot of this conflict of interest is also tied into some pr controversies that have occurred on wikipedia. There are certain Public Relations firms and there is kind of a spectrum there and some bad actors who are creating a bad atmosphere on wikipedia. Some local firms have gotten together with some Public Relations firms and there is a statement from wikipedia on from participating firms and that is something we might consider among staffs and have a statement for people to sign on to. It helps to foster a sense of cooperation, and perhaps do some cold throw management there among wikipedians. Also, conflict of interest has been found within the terms of use. It is giving you more tools to deal with bad actors, and part of the editing practice would be to differentiate your at it from what bad actors might do. Also, one thing that our chapter does in the spring is we do wiki loves capitol hill. We have been having some conversations with the staff of the ip subcommittees. However, if you are interested in talking with us in the spring, we would be happy to talk to about that. We are looking forward to questions and i would be happy to expand if you have general concerns. Thanks. Before john gets up and takes over as master of ceremonies, im curious to know among people in the room, who among you feel you are experienced wikipedians and you edit fairly regularly. Ok, we have five or six. And the rest of you, you know what wikipedia is, i take it, but not regular editors. Actually, of those who raise their hand, who hell who here is a hill staffer . For those who did not see, only two. That raises a good point. We have plenty of time for questions if anyone has any. I will just say i will take moderators privilege and take the first question. I was on a hill not too long ago, and even though i might be open to the idea of editing wikipedia, lets say my boss is ok with it and all of that, wikipedia still has a sort of stigma to it where you would not find it on a college paper. It may not be accurate. It may not be the best place for a source. How do you address that . I know for sure there are hill staffers that edit wikipedia. A couple of them commented on a discussion i was having with them people what we are planning this event, that they were very interested in knowing about the event. The twitter bot that captures edits from anonymous edits from the house and ip addresses have proved there are people from the house editing wikipedia. I think anyone who looks down on wikipedia needs to reconsider their mindset. It does wikipedia is one of the six most heavily trafficked websites in the world. And your constituency use it. Its ok if your College Professor doesnt want to cite the article. Your College Professor is not really your audience when you are editing wikipedia. You are editing it to speak to people who will go to your town hall and ask you questions about the legislation you voted for. And they are the people who are going to donate to your campaign, and to help you out and who you are supposed to be helping in turn. It is ordinary people who read wikipedia, and most of the world is full of ordinary, normal people. We are the people who care about wikipedia. The other thing i would point to is wikipedias rules regarding citations have improved over time, and people are much more vigilant about properly citing information i goes into wikipedia than they used to. I that is something i would encourage any of you as staffers or anyone at all editing wikipedia, cite your sources. Cite your sources. Cite your sources. If you use proper citations, which there is a little button. You pick the button and tell it whether you want to cite a book, website, or newspaper, and then you fill in the blanks and it does all of the citation for you. If you do that, people cannot accuse you of taking things up. They have a hard time deleting information that you have added, because you have shown where it came from. I think that adds to the legitimacy as well. Sure, you dont cite wikipedia in your college paper, but you do look there first and you find all the citations and use those as information. Clicks on that subject, i will share a story from some years back. Understanding the value of wiki editing, or wiki style editing, it is quite a while back now i added to washingtonwatch. Com. It is not wikipedia, but a capability still exists today on the site. I went around on the hill and talked to some friends and said, you know, hey, this is a chance for you to put on Public Record a really good description of your bill. Your bill can access a lot more people this way. And you will be able to give them the story directly. How does congress to indicate with the public now . You are still very much intermediated by the press. You have someone in the press. You reach out to them to try to get a story written. You try to get a favorable release. It is sometimes highquality and sometimes lowquality. You have people come to your individual member website, yes, but the flow of information out to the public about legislation is rather poor. On the other side, you have a lot of people who are highly suspicious, because the flow is so poor. The information they have is widely varied and not very reliable sources in many cases. There is a lot of distrust. The instinct on the hill has been not to want to actually engage. I had a friend it was in jest, but a friend said, o, the last and we want is for the public to actually know what we are doing up here. It was in jest, but it was based on the fact that often, the loudest of the members of the public are the most distrustful. There is antagonistic elision between congress and the public at large. But that can be flipped. And i think straightforward, meritorious information about the hills can be communicated to the public. Likewise, the editors and authors will sometimes joust with one another on how to get to certain issues. Out of that jousting, the competition, youll get very good information. Wikipedia handle some of the most controversial debate. People work very hard to choose words carefully, to choose the structure of articles very carefully, so the debate is accurately represented on wikipedia. You cannot go to wikipedia and use it to win debates. You just accurately represent the debate, and from that challenge comes good information for the public to use. It presents an opportunity for a seachange in transparency about what the hill is doing. A sea change in Public Attitudes about what the government is doing. As john stated at the beginning, and i believe this as well, this will the this will position the public to understand better what they want from congress. They will be able to communicate accurately, communicate about specifics rather than phone banks coming from the home district. People calling saying, hey, i understand that hr 1234 does x, y, and z, and its up for Committee Vote next week. How much better does that work . Those phone banks versus the person calling up to say, ive been told to tell you etc. , etc. What is the gap that cato has filled about what congress is doing and its relationship nine clicks im sorry, could you go but and its relationship [indiscernible] im sorry, could you repeat the question you asked the gap in information between what congress is doing like oakham of the community should gap between what congress is doing and what the public knows is going on. So, how many pages do you have up on wikipedia from this project echo from this comment, not very many. Those that existed were repeat multiple congresses. Since i had an article the violence against women act had an article. It is not very many. There is one for equal Employment Rights for gay people. If the employment nondiscrimination act. The employment nondiscrimination act. Yes. There are about 10 or so. They preexisted us adding. Bills that have come up yearoveryear, they had articles. And sometimes, they would accurately represent one congress and the next bill in the next congress, and so on and so forth. At but as for systematic reporting from congress, virtually none. A bill would go by without any article at all on wikipedia. Now we are getting them there. And as michelle said, we need to get those articles fleshed out so there is more Information Available to the public. Or take the National Defense authorization act. There is one of those every year, as i recall. They have articles on many of those, but one particular year, the article will be 5000 words. You know, fairly lengthy. And the Previous Year it will be three sentences long. I think most of us would consider each year to have equal weight and equal importance to our country. Just getting more information and making sure that we write a more robust article every year is something that is important. Yeah, but i would say the gap a summary style of what is going on on the hill. You are well aware of the specialized media that is around tracking things, but i dont think its getting to the web in an easy to digest or find method for the average person. Theyre obviously googling trying to find out about bills, but how do we mediate between that search to lead them to the more specialized references . That is the gap we are filling in. The problem is, a lot of this ends up being even driven. You have a relatively good editor that writes about this one year and then does not come back the next year to do the same thing. One thing that is important is the conflict of interest. How you might handle it. You work in a Congressional Office. I dont want to talk about editing members pages. It is probably a bad idea to edit members pages. But you could. How about legislation . You work for a member of congress. Your member of congress had legislation introduced. You know a lot about it. And you could provide a lot of information. But on the other hand, there may be a conflict of interest with the page. What is your thinking on whether there is a conflict of interest and what to do about it . My way of thinking about the conflict of interest rules is that your Mindset Matters as much as your actual technical conflict. If you are just editing your site and going to remove all counter arguments, all information from your opponent. You will act like 100 of the world is behind this bill, that would be a conflict of interest. You are not treating the topic ethically or fairly. I would say, your first step if youre going to edit a piece of legislation, or any article, really, is you should join and become a user. You dont even have to give the website and email address. Just a username and a password. This is good because it gives you accountability. If you are logged in, every edit you make is tracked to that account. I mean this not confused with edits made by other people. You can as tablets, yes, i am a Good Community member, and even though i am you can establish, yes, i am a Good Committee member, and even though i am editing from this same building as this jerk over here, my edits and hit his edits are different. That can keep others from saying, you did this good at it here, and here, but you did these terrible ones, so we are blocking you. Having your own user account is important. Another thing you can do is right on your own user page. It is kind of like your profile, and you can write on that just like any other profile about yourself will serve you can write who you are on this page. You can say, i am bob, i work for congressman such and such, and im interested in these fields. You can say what your credentials are. Like, i have a bachelors degree in Agricultural Economics will so that it interesting for anyone who read your edits, because they can say, o, they studied this in school. They know a lot about it. You can give you credentials. Establishing editor accounts also improves other peoples perceptions of you, because you show more commitment to the website. People take you more seriously. They can also reward you by giving you these things called barn stars, or cookies. That can be good. It also allows you to build relationships with people. By doing that, you establish that you want to join this community and be in good standing. The next thing you could do is if you are really unsure and you really dont want to make any mistakes, because you could edit on the talk page instead of on the main page. Behind every wikipedia article is a page called a talk page. That is for people, editors to write about the article without writing the article. They can say, hey, i found this paragraph in here and it is total junk and its a bunch of lies by our filthy appointment opponent, and we want it taken out. And the editor would say, well, you shouldnt say filthy dog filthy, but i think youre right. Or they can have this whole huge battle. You can be more cautious right on the top page. If youre ready to go anything you have good information and you will contribute well and are comfortable with doing it, you can just edit the main page and make sure you cite your sources. Wikipedia, and i think i listed this on the worksheet, has very clear guidelines for what good and bad sources are. Anything from the Mainstream Media premuch counts as a good source. Pretty much counts as a good source, and from books and journals, things like that. If you cite your sources, use neutral phrasing, and say, this is such and such group or persons opinion instead of saying this is true, then you have been helpful. Most have a watch feature. You can if you are logged in as a user, you can watch a page. Which means if you go to your watch pay your watch list, you can go to the most recent edits from the last three to seven days that are on your watch list. People can watch the page you did, and if they grew if they agree with your edits, they will let it go. If they hate your edits, they can change them immediately. That is one of the best parts about wikipedia. It is a selfgoverning society, and it protects you and your opponents, and cuts down on some of the political fighting because people are viewing what youre doing, and they can undo your work if you are not behaving appropriately. Yeah, i would say, if its a bill that you have an ax to grind, you definitely have a conflict there. It is important to try to maintain a neutral point of view, which is another policy. Yes, top ages, people dont know that they are there, but yes, please, lets use them. There is a process we are supposed to follow called edit, revert, talk. If someone reverts your edits, please dont am revert. It then you are edit warring. Please go to the talk page and try to engage in a discussion about what your issues are. The idea is that we are supposed to be writing an encyclopedia that is based on facts. And we are going to now have a metadiscussion about what the facts are, and then try to mediate with the best references are to make an argument about what the facts are. I think the panel did a good job of talking about how people who are knowledgeable can become more engaged, and improve public and government, essentially. I think what is on most staffers mind im not really being paid to engage in public debate. What benefits are there to Congressional Staffers, and maybe can clarify with some bills that are being attacked in the media. Could you elaborate on war tangible benefits that would encourage a staffer to go out and become more engaged . I think the battle over legislation, and i think most people know this, it is largely fought and built on a terrain that is built out of talking point. It is a contest of talking points, a contest of getting favorable constituencies or authorities to weigh in on your side. It is really not as high a quality debate as we all would like to have. I think wikipedia allows you to provide information and allows for the public, the actual constituents, to access information and make up his or her own mind. I think quality articles about bills will convince or dissuade people on the merits, and all of them will be happier with the opportunity to do that than they are now where there opportunity is to choose what team they are on, or what ideology is theirs. There are facts about what is happening in congress. There are fax that can be gathered there are facts that can be gathered and arguments that can be organized. There doesnt seem to be a lot of opportunity for a lot of folks, because again, that is the consensus out there is actually anger in discomfort. And to indicating with the people in the land is actually what often brings back that discomfort or anger. But i think you will find people are motivated and concerned about wanting what is best for the country, and they are more willing to work toward consensus than they were would fight. Most of what happens in this debate is about fighting. But theres a great mass of people out there who want what is best for the country and they want a way to productively work toward that. I think, informing them through wikipedia would facilitate that kind of democratic deliberation. Yes . There have been some questions around the twitter bot. And in the last couple of weeks, there have been questions about edits in the house, ip addresses being blocked. Do you think this discourages people from editing because congress edited x, y, and z, or does it encourage people in general you are on the whole, i think its good to Congress Edits twitter bot, because it spurs discussion. The discussion is profitable and worth having. On the other hand, it is not a full win, because there are anonymous edits that are not as good, and certainly not as well trusted as edits by users who are logged in. Anonymous edits coming from the hill, they are immediately cast with the likelihood that there are low quality edits and inappropriate edits that have to be reversed. I dont know the intentions of the designer of the bot, but perhaps it was to show that congress is monkeying around with wikipedia. There is another way to do things, and that is why we created wiki bill. Its in the same spirit. I dont think Congress Edits are all bad. But wiki bills, our bot, is just meant to show edits happening to legislation. It doesnt matter whether it is coming from the hill, anonymous, or not. Theres a fair amount of editing happening, but not enough. The more people follow wiki bills, the more they will be aware of what is happening and inclined to participate on the hill and off. It is a net positive because its for discussion and inspired our own wiki bills. The starting point is that the editing from congress is a negative. Nothing that can be reversed. We can have high quality, careful editing of wikipedia that would be a very good thing for transparency. The twitter bot made a lot of news, because its easy and its automated. But again, you had the same problem in 2006 with ip editing. The story could have been written anyway, even without bot. And part of this is a volunteer at mintz who Block Network volunteer administrators who Block Network i fees ips. After all, they blocked the d. C. Public library, too. Its not like they are picking on capitol hill. Its that they see a problem and they want to address it. Could you both discuss the policy called dont bite the newbie . Maybe that will encourage people to edit. This is another policy that im afraid all of the older wikipedians have forgotten about. I keep fighting this battle myself, trying to get people to be more friendly to new editors. And there are a lot of issues, such as the tea house, and we do a lot of this at our local events. Keep in mind, this is a cultural thing going on among average wikipedians, that they will tend to view new editors as spammers and whatnot. You will have to build up some report to prove yourself, which is unfortunate some rapport, which is unfortunate. There is a guideline dont be a jerk to someone just starting out. Hopefully, you would not be a jerk if you were there for a long time. But wikipedia was having some trouble recruiting new editors, and part of that was because they would recruiting editor and they would not do that great because they did not do well with the editing tools or the secret code that goes on behind the scenes, and they would get yelled at or have all of their edits reverted, and they would never come back to the site. The tea house that he mentioned is a message board to be friendly to new people. I also encourage, sign up as a user. Get your own username because then you can write on your talk page that says high, i knew, and i would like advice and help. And if you have a problem with one of my edits, please talk to me about it and we can have a discussion. I found this very much to be true. I was being persecuted or hunted by this particular user who renamed every article that i started because he didnt like the naming convention that i was following. We had it out after about six months of him editing every single one of my pages every day. That was eventually resolved. But if you do join, it dont let a handful of crazy people on the internet keep you from joining and being helpful and joining in with the community. Talking to the people in the trinity, talking to myself, talking to other editors. There are people who want to talking to the people in the community, talking to myself, talking to the editors. There are people who want to help you. I dont know if it is done, but you could almost create a taxonomy of wikipedians. There are some who have a technical specialty, fixing a certain element of every article. And they are indifferent to what the article is. It is some convention and they will fix it to where all the articles are polished to some particular convention. And in there seemed to be a wikipedians the wikipedians that feel a certain way about a certain issue. We had some folks with a certain ownership because they had been the only ones there and they were doing good work and contribute in positively or productively. Two people can only do an incomplete job. My characterization would the that when michelle started working there, she had headed it before, obviously. New kid on the block kind of treatment. You will not be around for that long. Heres how we do it. We have been doing it this way all along but her persistence and care in addressing forthrightly with the issues are and encouraging discussion, sheing conversation established herself as an known shend credit with the community. You build a history on wikipedia and you will be a strong editor. Her first day or two on the job may not be comfortable because Public Policy and politics do have high temperatures around it inpeople will a suspicious the early going. You stay with it and build a history and you will establish a reputation on wikipedia for honesty. I will help you. Michelle will help you. Youre saying that they cap changing what he had to say. Is there a specific group that has this ability to review what youre about to publish before goes online or how does the process work . Rex there are different when you have a user account you have different user privileges. There is a small group of 1000 people who are administrators and they can block users for violations of policy. Usually if someone is being a vandal just going in and editing articles to include curse words word deleting the article or general mischief there is a series of warnings that you post to the user page and after a certain amount of warnings they are blocked for certain length of time. And with congress peoples patient pages is there an edit war or someone has been very demeaning material that is incorrect and does not canng in a biography they put a block on the page to stop inexperienced editors from editing the page for a particular time. You personally are having a purse a problem with someone harassing you, if there is a situation that needs to be blocked there is ways to bring that situation to an administrator and get them to deal with it. Fromocks or different reversions. Any editor can revert any edit in general. There is exceptions. Typically if an editor is interested in the same topic matter you will find yourself editing a lot of the same articles. There is there are dispute resolution processes to follow. Theif a certain article is subject of dispute and it is not being resolved on the top page then certain admins will come by and put locks on them and maybe sanctions if people act out too much. Things thatels of happen to people. He wanted to say this bill passed the house today in a boat of x to y, citation. All you have to do is go to the page whether you are logged in or not and login and the edit would be credited to you or it would be credited to the ip address. You click the edit page and type in the sentence. You hit the button and there is a box at the bottom where you say what your edit was. That is good to add a description and hit save and it is done. That is the simplest way to edit. As go have edit live as soon as you save them, there was discussion about having a preview of changes by at mens but that is on ingush gpd a. Other languages do different things. Wikipedia has done some of that and they call it pending changes. Edit now if you want to you could change things on the fly or live. I use it every day but i never edit anything. About thenow anything talk page. How do make sure how casual casually users know how the page is being maintained . That is an interesting question. One thing that the community is a disputeere about the neutrality of an article oftentimes at the top of the article someone will have added a template that gives you an alert notice. The neutrality is under dispute. We see the talk page and there is a link to that. To a certain degree reader beware. All the citations are footnoting footnoted. If they see a sentence and they want to know if it is true they can find the footnote. Occasionally there is a way if itther if an editor reads a citationadd notation and readers will be able to see that. Beyond that i guess it is a reader beware system. Thet is a problem that average reader does not understand. A lot of the editor culture tends to be toward other editors who have this body of cultural knowledge about how were are doing this whole thing. There are some initiatives and there is tagging that goes on and part of what we do is deal with local cultural institutions and educational foundations in college and what not. It is a big problem Going Forward for wikipedia. There have been studies done the reliability and accuracy of wikipedia to other formally written by advanced degree holders degree holder scholars. They found that wikipedia was just as reliable as those other encyclopedias. Ofre is a list somewhere Scholarly Research done on wikipedia. It is more accurate than you may fear. We do have some nice brochures on how to evaluate quality of articles so there is some semipeer review of articles for quality. Again if the average reader tends to not get that so we are trying to explain as we go along. Your question, another reason it is important to have people like this audience, you have expertise, you should share that with the world. One more question can you talk about how you write neutrally about a bill . It is a matter of presenting both sides or is there a way that you can write neutrally . When i write a piece of legislation, we have a skeleton that we use that includes the sample box we want to put in which is info, just dates and people. A background section, a provisions of section, th congressional budget officee section report. If there is a report. The procedural history and the debate section. The debate section is probably the most controversial section and the most nonneutral place that you could have problems. For the provisions, whenever available i just use the commercial summary. I wiki link all of the nouns, counting on crs to be neutral for me. The congressional budget office, i use their info, and i used these governmental institutions with responsibilities to write about this legislation. With the debate, that is one of the places i would like to see more everything happened. So often, it is easy to find what one side is saying about the bill, and not to find with the other side is saying. Especially with bills that pass under suspension. The people who want, who got their bill passed, are very proud and pleased to announce it and say look at this great thing we did. It is easy to find what they say, it is harder to find the organization who has some great objection to it and say what they say. In terms of being a neutral i try to decide who said it to cite who said it, so you know youre getting this persons up email rather than presenting the opinion as true facts. Other than that, people read the article, and they will help me to change it. In a lot of respects the article skeletons are the beginning of reporting. You say who said what on both sides. People can follow those links if they want to. Part of the goal of this event, and our push to get Congressional Staff and other interested people, is to get further into the debate of who said what on each side. Here are the current social, economic facts. Here is what the bill would do, and that is also contestable. It is something that the article could flesh out and handle. The result would be an improvement in the state of affairs in the country, on one side, or it would not on the other. These are things that we should caveat. There is no snap of the figures and in every wikipedia articles fully informative. But by getting a cohort of people who are highly knowledgeable and good editors will start to see Higher Quality articles that go deeper into what a bill does. What the circumstances are now, how it would affect his, and what the outcome would be. Both sides ackerson accurately represented and well and neutrally represented. Just to be circular, we can save the Washington Post, and put a sentence in there about with the Washington Post said. There is a certain level of adding references on the newspaper level, and then the next that is to go to the scientific papers. We will try to find Academic Studies with support statements. That is the next level of quality as we go along. We are just about out of time. Thank you for coming. If you work on the hill as a Congressional Staffer, you care about the wellbeing of our republic, hopefully this battle has encourage you to become more involved in wikipedia editing and improve the debate. Michelle is already on record as saying she will help you. Im sure that the jims will not mind helping as well. If you have any questions, we will stick around. Please join me in thanking our speakers. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] next, debate on genetically modified food. And an update from the United Nations on the israelipalestinian conflict. And a meeting with california congressman xavier becerra. On the next washington journal a look at how the Obama Administration has been handling events in the middle east and the situation in ferguson, missouri. With dan berman. As for that we continue our discussion on Lyndon Johnsons Great Society was patricia harrison. President and ceo of the corporation for public broadcasting and we will talk about the broadcasting act that was signed in the 1960s. Scullyaring from tom about the creation of medicare under lbj. We will take your phone calls and look for your comments by facebook and twitter. He getting at 7 a. M. Eastern on cspan. Next debate on the safety of genetically modified food known as gm of gm owes. This twohour event was part of the vail symposium held in march. S are Jeffrey Smith. He is a leading consumer advocate promoting nongm of choices. His book includes seeds of deception. The worlds bestseller on gm os. Jeff will be speaking this saturday at noon in carbondale. I am sure you can find it on the internet. Gregory stock who is to my immediate left. A biotech entrepreneur bioethicist, bestselling author, and public communicator. Ands a leading authority founded the program on medicine medicine and technology and served as the director for 10 years while leading a broad effort to explore trickle technologies. Highprofileies of lectures he has broadened debate about todays revolution in molecular genetics and bio informatics. One of you raise your hand and ask him what that means. And how to translate progress in the basic sciences into their picks and health care. Among his books are redesigning humans, the inevitable genetic future. Metaman, and the book of questions. We look forward to your presentation. [applause] im in the right place. Forgive me if i have recognized and the raccoon eyes today. I went to vail for the first time. How many of you here are farmers . Lets hear it for the farmers. [applause] how many of you are gardeners . How many eat . Make note of it, there are more people who ski than eat here. [laughter] strange place. We are here to talk about something that is in our food and you may or may not know about it. Genetically engineered food is in nine food crops. Soy, corn, cotton, canola, sugarbeet, alfalfa, zucchini, yellow squash, and papaya. You can ask me to say that slower later during q a. The reason they are on our plate is because of a sentence in the fda policy from 1992. That sentence says that the agency is not aware of any information showing that gmos are significantly different therefore no safety testing is necessary. No labeling is necessary. Companies like monsanto, the biggest gmo producer, who deviously told us that agent orange and ddt were safe, they can determine on their own and maybe get it right this time that the gmo seed and the crops they produce are safe. It turns out that that basic sentence, which is in fact the basics for the u. S. Policy overseas, the state department, etc. , etc. It was a lie. It was complete fiction. We did not know about in 1992, but we found out about it in 1999 game 40,000 secret internal 1999, because 40,000 secret internal memos from the fda were forced into Public Domain from a lawsuit. Not only were they aware that gmos were significantly different, it was the consensus among their own scientists that they were different and of high risk, that they could create allergies and nutritional problems. They repeatedly urged their superiors to require longterm study. And every time they read the policy, they noticed that more of their science was removed from that policy and tell one person wrote, what has become of this document . It is a political document that does not give the side effect. The person in charge of policy at the fda, the political appointee was michael taylor, monsantos former attorney. The fda was given instructions by the white house to promote biotechnology. They created a position for him. Taylor became monsantos Vice President and chief lobbyist. Now he is back at the fda as the food safety czar. One of the scientists at the fda predicted correctly that, without required safety studies, the companies would not even do the normal studies that they would do because they are not on the fda list. So we have very few safety studies. But enough for the academy of environmentalism to evaluate and discover that the rats and the mice that were fed gmos had gastrointestinal disorders, organ damage, accelerated aging, reproductive disorders, and dysfunction of cholesterol and insulin. They said this information is not casual. It is a causal relationship based on standard scientific criteria. And on that basis, all doctors should recommend nongmo diets to all patients. This came out in 2009. In november of that year, i went to the conference with a video camera. I started to interview the doctors who had been prescribing nongmo diets. Up to this point, i had been representing scientists around the world, independent scientists who found that the entire approach to genetic engineering of food was completely premature, that we did not yet have enough information about genes, dna, insertion process to safely introduce it and expose it to the entire population who eat, which is most of you. And we could not release it with confidence into the environment with the self propagating polluion of the gene pool without the effects of Global Warming and Nuclear Waste because it is the background to the genetic pool. The only thing that lasts longer is extinction. So i was interviewing the scientists and translating their concerns so that everyone could understand. And anything i wrote in book form was looked at by at least three scientists. Scientists speak. They may say, converging lines of evidence suggest that i might be chilly. Nothing is definite. But when i meet these doctors at this conference, they did not speak like scientists. They said gmo cause inflammation. Gmos cause my allergic patients to have more allergic reactions. One woman said that she diets tod nongmo every patient and every patient gets better. I was skeptical. For years, people would come up to me and say i react to gmos, and when i take him out of my diet, i feel better. And my skeptic brain was saying how do you know . Maybe its true, but probably not. How do you know . I was looking for a background scientific trend, not individuals who would react or not react. But here were doctors. I was skeptical. I said to this woman, what percentage . She said 100 get better, maybe 98 . I asked her again, how many patients do you have that you prescribe nongmo diets to . She figured it out. 5000 over the years. I said, can i come to your office and talk to your patients . She said sure. I went there with a video camera. Someone with 25 days into a nongmo diet, they had symptoms disappear in three days. They had lost 10 pounds. Their crown disease symptoms disappeared. Kids with terrible that pain had disappeared. Another person, irritable, gone. Irritable bowel, gone. Another doctor was invited into their office and i interviewed their patients. So many dramatic improvements. Then i started asking rooms like this, how many of you have noticed improvement in your health . Every single time i ask this, the most consistent reaction is gastrointestinal Getting Better. Energy issues, weight loss, allergies, asthma, and also behavioral problems with kids, autistic problems. When i ask people as i did in the doctors office, how do you avoid gmo . They are not labeled. And they often say they buy organic or reduce processed food. So soon as they buy organic or reduce processed food, because im representing the scientific community, i say there are too many cofactors. Maybe its the diet. Is it the nongmo aspect of the diet . Is it a reduction of the chemicals that are not in organic . Is it the chemicals that is usually found in processed food . At the same time, i started visiting farms and veterinarians who had taken livestock off of gmo corn or soy and they took him off gmo corn or soy and they were Getting Better from the same problems that the people were Getting Better from and there were no other cofactors. The danish pig farmer said in massive his uncontrollable diarrhea he had been facing for two years disappeared in his pay. They called it diarrhea. In the chicago office, it was called irritable bowel. Then i would talk to veterinarians who deal with pets. Moresaid when gmos reduced, gastrointestinal problems and immune system problems. They would tell their pet owners to take the animals off of gmos and they get better. I have video of several veterinarians and pet owners repeating the same thing. Now we see a pattern. Studies,imal feeding gastrointestinal, immune, reproductive organ damage, etc. People Getting Better from these same diseases and disorders when they remove gmos from their diet. Pets and livestock get better from the same diseases and disorders when taken off gmos. These same disorders and diseases are on the rise in the u. S. Population. Paralleling the increase in the roundup, theand herbicide sprayed on gmos. There is a big variety of disorders and diseases. How was it that gmos might impact these . If you look at gmos there are two main traits. There is the pesticide producing a toxin that make little holes in the insects to kill them and then there is a nervous side designed for roundup herbicide and it is absorbed. Lets start with roundup. About 85 of the crops out there and prayed with round up. The crop does not die, because it is engineered with a viral or bacterial gene which has been inserted. Roundup was the subject of a paper last year and the authors, just looking at the biochemical property, linked it to cancer, obesity, diabetes, alzheimers, anorexia and depression. They came up with another iticle two weeks ago linking to gluten sensitivity and celiac disease, and death by kidney dysfunction. The way roundup works is it binds with nutrients with trace minerals, making them unavailable to plants, making them unavailable to us. That is one of the reactions in our body that can deprive us of important nutrients. It is also opposing antibiotics. A potent antibiotic. How many people here have learned that gut bacteria is important for help . It is like a gut bacteria revolution at medical conferences these days. There are many, many talks on gut bacteria. The bacteria is critical for digestion and immunity. Roundup is an antibiotic. It kills bacteria but it is selective. It kills the beneficial bacteria , but not the e. Coli, salmonella, and botulism. Ofit causes an overgrowth negative gut bacteria. This was confirmed in laboratory studies. When it messes up the gut bacteria, that can affect the immune system, the digestive system, cause leaky gut, holes in the gut walls. Undigested food proteins can get in there causing immune reaction, inflamation, allergies, autoimmune disease, and has led to cancer or parkinsons and alzheimers and other diseases. Roundup also blocks a certain pathway, a metabolic pathway. It does not matter what the name is. Monsanto said humans dont have the pathway so it doesnt matter if it gets blocked because it does not get blocked in us. But our gut bacteria uses that to produce tryptophan, which is a producer of serotonin and melatonin which is our mood , changers. It can cause sleep issues when you get rid of serotonin and tryptophan. There is plenty of specific details that roundup does, endocrine disruption, which can mess up a reproductive capacity, possibly linking to birth defects. It links to all these different diseases. It has a strong competitor in the bt toxin. The toxin breaks little holes in the stomach walls of insects to kill them. It wasnt supposed to have any impact on human beings. But a 2012 study found that it did in fact break. Holes in human cells just like in insects. If it breaks up a little holes in our intestinal walls come it also creates the leaky gut that we just talked about. It doesnt just allow the undigested food proteins to get in there. But also the bt toxin and the round up. So in the blood of Canadian Women that were tested, they found bt toxin and roundup. In pregnant women, 93 of their blood and in 80 of the blood in their unborn fetuses. If it gets into their blood another study with mice showed , that it caused damage to the red blood cells. So it might be causing damage to our blood cells. And then when it gets the unborn fetus, there is no developed blood brain barrier. It might get into the brain. Toxin thatolepoking might be in the brain of the offspring of this generation. Another i talked to a scientist, several scientists, who talk about the bt toxin in the blood, saying it would probably watch out very quickly. If it washes out very quickly, why would 93 of the pregnant women in canada have bt toxin in their blood if it washes out quickly . It must have a constant source. It probably came from the milk in animals fed bt corn. I think there is another plausible explanation. In a 2004 study, they found that part of the roundupready gene , the gene of the soybean sprayed with roundup, transfered into the dna of the bacteria living inside our intestines. And that that bacteria was only was until a bowl was unkillable with roundup. This suggests that doesnt prove that when the genetically engineered crops transfers to gut bacteria, it continues to function. Genetically modified proteins continuously, 24 7 inside our digestive tract. They didnt see whether eating a corn chip could turn your intestinal floor into a living pesticide factory. Corn in the United States is made with bt corn and with round up ready corn. What if it transfers to the gut bacteria and continues to produce the bt toxin . That might explain why 93 of the pregnant women tested had bt toxin in their blood, as they are producing it continually inside of them. This was never confirmed. This was never tested. Which is a tragedy. Because we are feeding it to the entire population. But if you just look at the quality of the bt toxin and roundup, it could explain all of the different reports we are hearing from now thousands of physicians prescribing nongmo diets. I have counted 5000 or 6000 in auditoriums at medical conferences when i asked for a show of hands of how many are prescribing nongmo diets. In 1987, 13 said they were avoiding gmos. Last year, it was 39 . We are seeing a change, and a lot of it is concerned by the medical community. Unfortunately, the biotech industry has earned a reputation as being underhanded and lets say not so appreciative of the facts. When scientists discover problems, according to nature and other publications and interviews i have done with those scientists, there are they are typically attacked, often fired or gagged during they lose funding, lose access to seeds. They will be demoted. So much so that there are very few scientists willing to do research in this area. And we have tracked very consistently the reaction by biotech scientists in attacking these independent scientists and denying or distorting their evidence. When you look at industryfunded studies however, they are designed to avoid finding problems. We call it tobacco science. I sit with scientists and go over the Research Done by the industry and they point out exactly how this thing it is either not tested or they dont use modern techniques and if they do find problems, they just explain it away with often nonscientific explanations. So during the q and a, if you want to know more specifics about how they rig their research, there is an adoption. There is very humorous and entertaining descriptions everyone can understand. Fortunately, by educating people about the health dangers, many of us have seen the revolution that is occurring. Nongmo label products are the fastestgrowing. The products that were labeled nongmo in 2012 grew faster than any other category in terms of sales than any of the other 35 health and wellness claims. Last year, it was the second fastest. In europe, we saw a solution to the gmo issue, not by political and enactment but from consumer education. What i want to do is, i will talk a little bit about the way out of gmos if you like. But i want to describe i want to show you some pictures for the visual learners. Because some of you will take home more of what you see on the screen. Im just showing some of the photographs, not the peerreviewed published studies. Just some of the photographs. Here on the left side is a normal intestine of a rat. On the right side, the change in the architecture and cell walls along the intestines after eating a genetically modified potato. This is the stomach lining. This potato is not currently on the market. You see how the stomach lining is twice as big . This is after eating the genetically modified potato. This was almost certainly due to the genetic process of genetic engineering, not the particular gene that was inserted, because it causes massive Collateral Damage in the dna and causes unpredicted side effects like. Like this. In india, thousands and thousands of farm workers who pick the cotton that produces the bt toxin are reporting itching, rashes and other gastrointestinal or immune system problems. I went to a village in india where they allowed their buffalo to graze on bt cotton plants for a single day. All 13 of their buffalo died within two or three days. Many of them have been eating nongmo harvest plants for up to eight years. Rats that were fed genetically modified soybeans, their livers are shown on the right. You can see the substantial disk difference compared to rats that were not fed gm soybeans. Rats that were fed gm soybeans, their testicles change from pink to blue. I normally drink some water so this light can take its toll, but i do not have much time left. I gave a talk at the european parliament. Are russianspeaking rats. She fed them genetically modified soybeans starting two weeks before they got pregnant. More than 50 of their offspring died within three weeks compared to 10 in the control. The offspring were also smaller on average than the controls that eight nongm soybeans. Nongmo soybeans. There is a study that was done in france showing massive multiple tumors, organ damage, and early death. Im sure my colleague will pick apart and i will be happy to pick up the pieces. I will reinstate the scientific importance of this study. Here are pictures of pigs stomachs after they were fed genetically modified seed on the right. It is hard to see in this light, but it is severe irritation and show 25 larger uteruses. Other studies showed significant also rations. Through going to flip some of the cause estimates. This does not guarantee causation. But if gmo has a problem and we are feeding it to the population and if it is significant enough that we take people off gmos and theyre Getting Better we would expect to see Something Like this. This is death from senile dementia, tracked with the use , the activee ingredient in roundup. This is death from parkinsons disease. It is tracked with the growing acreage of gm soy and corn. This is number of new cases of diabetes diagnosed annually. If you take out the trendline, factor before the gmo came into play. You see that it looks like that. This is the number of hospitalizations for acute kidney injuries. Endstage kidney disease. Kidney and pelvis cancer incidence. Thyroid cancer incidence. Incidents. Liver and bile duct cancer. If you look at cancers increasing in the u. S. Population, those in the red, they are the target tissues for glyphosate and roundup. This is autism. This is low birthrate baby. Birth weight babies. Hospital discharge diagnosis for inflammatory bowel. There is a similar one for irritable. Chronic constipation. Death due to intestinal infection. Hospital discharge and notice of peritonitis. Obesity in the u. S. Population. Rheumatoid arthritis. Celiac disease in a canadian hospital in an area where they increased the planting of roundupready canola. There are other explanations for this data, but the correlations are rather shocking. They are very parallel. So what i would love to do is come back in about 21 minutes after my esteemed colleague and competitor has a chance to try and rebut all of this information, and give you a sense that gmos are easy, are safe to eat. We will be able to pick apart the argument in great detail. I want to thank the vale symposium for this opportunity. This rare opportunity for this debate. Thank you so much. [applause] before i turn this over to dr. Stock, those of you particularly in the front row, i need you to notice the computer stand here. With that, dr. Stock. I am not going to try and rebut these things at this point on a casebycase basis. This is the most absurd fabrication that i have ever listened to. I didnt know anything about Jeffrey Smith before i agreed to come to this. And actually i assumed that it , was less distorted than i am really listening to. This set of graphs, for example, about, it is suggestive. I get the same sort of graphs that try to claim that use of the internet was potentially possible for all of these things, everything increasing over time. But what i am hearing is that gmo crop are the most extraordinary poison that ever existed. They are responsible for all sorts of diseases and yet you would have all of the major Scientific Organizations and medical organizations be in some sort of a extraordinary conspiracy to deny this. It denies all of these institutions. And you have someone here who is actually profiting by, or in groups profiting by the gmo controversy, and has zero scientific training and talks about speaking before medical audiences, speaking before scientific audiences. We will get into that in a moment. So i will ask you to suspend your judgment on some of the stuff. What i want to do is to try and talk a little bit about the context of these changes. With gmos there is only one aspect of the way we are using technology and the changes taking place today. I want you to step back. Some things that are absolutely fundamental in the history of life are occurring right now. There are two revolutions that are without precedent. The first is the silicon revolution. What is really occurring is taking the inert materials around us, silicon, and reading a level of complexity to it that rivals like itself. Thats why we have all of our amazing gadgets and such. They are almost intelligent and this is just the first baby step in that direction. What we are doing is animating the inanimate world around us. If you project forward a little bit, it is mindboggling to even think what will be possible in a short period of time. Its not surprising that this is creating a certain angst about technology. The second revolution that is occurring, every bit as profound, which is made possible by this first revolution, and that is the biotech revolution. What is happening there is that life, through us, through our cerebral cortex is, through all of our device, is learning the process, understanding it at an intimate level the processes of life at such a level that we can begin to intervene and tweak them and adjust them in ways. That is something that is the central part of all the possibilities in medicine and biology and the Life Sciences that are arriving today. It is a step that nothing will ever be the same. Life is beginning to control its own future and we are starting to alter the world around us to where it becomes almost intelligent. This is blurring a lot of boundaries. The kinds of things that are occurring are to the boundary between the born and the made, between life and the nonliving. Here is a synthetic light created by craig venter, a designed bacterium. Here is claudia mitchell, the line between our tools and ourselves. She is using this prosthesis and controlling it with her mind through just thinking about how to to move it, which excites the nerves on her chest, which translates into movement of her arm. And this is just the baby steps of what is occurring. Here is a guy did you print up the list that i sent there is a video of him at a tech conference. Eight ted conference. You have to look at this. This guy was a climber. He got frostbite. He was caught in a blizzard for three days. Both of his legs were amputated. , which areprostheses extraordinary, he can go from 47 feet in height. He was a great climber before. Now he is a much better climber. He said he would never go back to having legs [laughter] it is extraordinary to watch that video. We have targeted drugs to our individual biochemistry. I do not think anybody would say that is anything but benign. Just using trial and error on ourselves. Here is embryonic stem cells that are being repurposed in various ways in order to create tissues and various aspects of that are interesting. Of therapies that are interesting. This is a journey to who knows where. And it is moving very, very rapidly and it is happening right here, now. And the kinds of questions we are really dealing with, is the cutting edge of life and silicon cutting edge of life going to shift to another substrate . Not carbon and nitrogen and biology, but silicon and all of its ilk. If you project 50 or 100 years, what will they be capable of . But right now, we are talking about biology. The next frontier isnt what they thought in the 1960s, out there in space somewhere. 2001, a space odyssey. Its ourselves. It is this inner journey into who we are and what life is it. And it is a very jarring thing. It is very amazing whats happening. So it comes up, genetic engineering in general. And with food is this something , that we should worry about really with gmos . I am going to give you a few examples. First of all, there is a lot of gmo angst. I think jeffrey wasnt going to eat some of the fruits up there because some of them have gmo possibilities. There is a lot of angst about all sorts of things and we will talk about it. Is it warranted . The areas where you can have potential concern about gmo by the way, gmo is not a state. It is a process. It is a technique by which you can create certain kinds of plants, and that is why it is not regulated the same way by the fda. I will get to that in a moment. It is not something that you can detect. This is an item that is a poison, no. It is a product. Some things are societal and some things are environmental. Agribusiness, all these sorts of things are much bigger than gmos. Gmo is a little part of that. And we may have issue with the way the world is organized, but that is separate, above and beyond the issue of the specific technology, so i will not get into that issue. There is environmental issues. There are much bigger fish to fry in that realm as well. You can make a strong argument, by increasing yields, you really are very much in a positive way affecting the environmental footprint of agriculture. We are in a state where you try to go back to a pregreen revolution agriculture, we could have the paul ehrlich kinds of starvation and such that were feared back in the 1960s. What i want to talk about his two other things. Health, the issue that this is a poison that is responsible for every ailment we seem to see. Once again, i have never heard such nonsense. 5000 patients have all been cured by getting off of gmo ingredients of some sort or another . Doctors are absolutely certain about that and somehow the whole world is ignoring it. The other is spiritual, fear of the big thing. What are the limits of what we are doing and how do we feel about it, and what does it mean to be human . That is where jeffrey really comes from. And the sense of the spiritual place of man, and that is what we are really talking about. When we are talking about anything, it is a matter of cost and benefits. Here, the costs would seem to be extraordinarily high, and the benefits almost nothing. But for whom . That is the real question. It seems to me there are two sets of people. One is the person there on the left, and many of us have fallen into the affluent category. And there are people on the right who are actually just scrabbling along, trying to survive. It actually makes a difference some of these things because they solve very real problems. Lets talk about some of the possibilities here. One, bt cotton. This bacillus that jeffrey pointed out as, oh, my god, that is horrible. Why are farmers using that as their selected pesticide on everything . If you are worried about that you better really be careful , about sprays on organic foods. This reduces Pesticide Use by about 40 . That is an abstraction for us. Its something we can really, is that something that is important . If you are one of these little kids who goes around with a backpack on his back all day long, spraying pesticides in the field, and the little white stuff on his stomach is pesticide he is swimming in the stuff. Not to be using as much of that is a big deal. I dont see a problem with that. Is is an some onus here xanthomonas, which is affecting crops of banana, a huge staple of the population. In africa, about half a million people. The only good way to try to prevent that disease, which causes this using and destroys the banana crop, is to engineer rice that ism protective against that disease. Here is another example, floodtolerant rice. We have a protective gene that is available after flooding, to continueladesh, to produce significant yields, versus the stop on the right. That was developed at uc davis. Floodtolerant rice. Citrus greening disease, something that is wiping out the citrus crops in florida. Nobody knows how to deal with it. One avenue is to engineer in some resistance. Some people who are citrus farmers there dont know what to do because of the campaign that has been waged about the dangers of gmos. You can see here what the oranges look like after they have been infected with a disease bacteria that is associated with a psyllid. It is wrecking the orange crops there. Papaya, there is no way to avoid this ring spot virus. So in a short time and most of the papaya in hawaii has been protected from the virus by this resistance gene. When you eat papaya, if you can find nongmo papaya, it has about 1000 times the level of aya. S in it of these gmo pap then, there is golden rice, which added vitamin a to rice. I see no evidence that there is a safety problem, a Health Problem with rice. It is so safe that in fact it is opposed because it might be a wedge crop that would somehow get people used to the idea of gmos. When you are thinking about the real danger of genetically modified organisms, lets think about what really is a danger. I can assure you that the issue is not how something was made. It is what was actually made and whether it is safe or not. The danger is not and i will tell you what the background is in a moment. Maybe some of you can guess. But the danger isnt food that is actually being engineered or being creative by very wellmeaning scientists. Very wellmeaning. You can think they are misguided, but they are trying to do something. As far as the testing that occurs, there is no testing on nongmo crops with a variety of crosses and genetic alterations, all of the crops that we have today are not the natural original crop. Basically, not only is there a great deal of testing, its much more so than other aspects of the food supply. And its voluntary. You dont think you want to be affected by it. Just eat food is labeled it is not gmo. It is called organic foods. Just stick to organic foods. It will help your health anyway not to eat processed foods. We all know that. So you can improve your diet. What about people who actually would like to modify organisms in order to really cause us harm . Bio weaponry, things of that sort, which has nothing to do with this debate. What if you were to take smallpox, which has now been eradicated but still exists, and engineer so it can be transmitted in the air, airborne. Not probably an impossibility. A pretty serious thing. In case you dont know what that would be, here is a photo. You cannot see it very well, but that is a young girl with smallpox. That is what smallpox does. These are the kinds of things in genetic modification that you really need to worry about. I am not worried about gmos in the least in terms of the food. I find the logic for them to be completely unconvincing. In fact, virtually every science, Scientific Organization that has any credibility absolutely agrees with that. There are any number of health risks. They are actually real and that we should be worried about, including your cancer, heart disease, stroke. , it is a say the least joke it is such a stretch the , idea that these diseases are all caused by gmos. Its not as though they were not epidemics prior to gmos. You get the flu vaccine . Car accidents, suicides. What about just people who are having a bad diet . Its not like we dont know what we should be eating. More leaves, more vegetables, less meat, getting some exercise. These are the things that will really do in our health for most people. What about Dietary Supplements . Relatively unregulated. All sorts of contaminants, mercury, all sorts of issues there. That should be heavily regulated. Or environmental toxins, something that i work in. I have a company that is selling a genetic test that tests individuals susceptibility to low levels of mercury. Things that you can get