 I was going to read a paper, but, you know, honestly, I'm too tired, and I don't know that I could read. So I'm just going to talk for 15 minutes. And I'm going to talk about Synthesis Hunters, which, so since 1995, governments, agencies all over the world have supported Synthesis Hunters. They now exist in North America, Europe, China, Australia. And they work in fields like, well, they started in ecology with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. And they now work in genomics and mathematics and biomedical research. And there's even one in archaeology. And so there are now about two dozen of these things. And the whole idea, well, first of all, if you measure them by any sort of metrics, and there are now people who study Synthesis Hunters, it's a thing. And they demonstrate in their articles, they measure them by academic standards like publications and impacts, et cetera. They far exceed anything else. And if you measure them by public impact, the Ecological Center has done lots of issues around the world, like fisheries and biodiversity and all sorts of things that have worked their way into public policy. So they've been transforming for those sciences that they existed. And they all are based on the cornerstone of all of them is this idea of collaboration, that you have small face-to-face groups that work on a problem for a relatively short period of time. And in Synthesis, it's between 18 and 24 months. And the goal is to actually answer something. It's not to end up after two years and say more research is necessary. The goal is to actually come to a conclusion. So archaeologists had been sort of following these things, mostly jealously. But no one stepped forward to actually be the lead on it. And then there was an outgrowth in the United States that emerged after this thing called the Grand Challenges in Archaeology, which was, well, we have Grand Challenges, so how do you answer them? And particularly the organization called the National Science Foundation, which funds a lot of science in the United States, said, well, we do these things called Synthesis Centers. And we said, great, we'll take one. And they said, no, because the biologists get four or five million dollars a year for their Synthesis Centers. And we're not getting that. So we had to come up with a different model. And so this nonprofit that I'm associated with called the SRI Foundation said, for the interim, we'll take the lead. We sponsored, along with the universities in Arizona, a session at the School for Advanced Research called Fostering Synthesis in Archaeology. And we came up with this sort of hybrid approach. I am co-president of the coalition. My other co-president is Keith Kinty. And he's an academic, I'm in cultural heritage. But Keith and I both had been president of the SAA. And the one thing we knew, because the way Synthesis Centers usually work, is that the national organizations, things like the EAA, will petition agencies for that. I can tell you, the SAA would never do that. It's just not in our nature as archaeologists to work collaboratively that way. We are very competitive. It just would not work. And so we took a very bottom-up approach, which was this is not an American thing. This has got to come from the discipline. And that will have a logistical center and an administrative center that will do the functions that need to get done. But the direction of research will come from the bodies of archaeology. So partners control the coalition for archaeological synthesis. So partners include the EAA, the SAA, the Archaeological Institute, the Archaeological Institute of America, AIA, the African Association, PANF, the American Anthropological Association, ARIA. There are a variety of professional organizations. There are cultural heritage management firms. There's NGOs like Wintergren, and a variety of museums like the Field Museum and the Purse Museum. There's even law firms that are involved in the legal aspect of heritage that are partners. And they drive where we go in terms of synthesis projects. We started with about 15 partners and 30 associates. The other thing is that individuals can join for free. Partners actually pay a couple hundred bucks, which is not much. We didn't want the barrier to participate to be financially prohibitive. So it's really modest. Associates, individuals like everyone in this room, you just join. It's not just that you hear about opportunities to participate in synthesis. You get to be part of the process of deciding what things we study. So we started with about 15 partners. We now have about 40 or so, and we started with 30 associates. We have about 250. And that's a couple of years. So where do projects come from? Well, we use, synthesis centers in general use something like an open competition. It's just like anything else in science. You put a proposal together. You say, this is what we want to do. And it's evaluated and the best ones win. It's like any grant proposal. That's the way. So we have two proof of concepts. We have one in biodiversity, which is led by Stephanie Crabtree, who's now at Utah State University in the state, but also Jennifer Dunn at the Santa Fe Institute studies complexity. And they're doing one on biodiversity. And this comes out of Australia where the government of Australia is concerned that biodiversity is shrinking five minutes. And they want to increase it. And so the question is, how do you do that? So I'm going to skip ahead. The other one we're doing is fire management. This came out of the forest services in the United States and Canada, which have a real problem because in things called wilderness in both those countries, the idea is that nature is supposed to trump everything else, so that you do not do prescribed burns in wilderness. Nature is supposed to take its course as though humans have not been part of the adaptive system. And that's been really tough for these folks because the fires have gotten bigger and stronger. And folks have said, do the climate change and all these other things. But actually when you study it, what happened in North America anyway is that once you remove native peoples from the forest, fires stop. So the duration of fire increases, but the intensity has increased dramatically. So we're getting bigger fires. It used to be they were at longer intervals, but now they're actually at pretty short intervals, and they're bigger. So the question became, how do you bring back humans into the environment? And that also came from a government agency or from both countries saying we need to understand the long-term process here and come up with a policy that actually makes sense. So the other thing, I figured we're in burn. We ought to at least let Albert be on the screen for a while. The idea here is, well, another way to think about that, about where good ideas come from is to let the discipline, let them emerge from the discipline. So what we're doing now is the EAA and the SAA have come together and said we want to study human migration. It's a big issue in both Europe and North America, clearly. And archaeologists might actually have something to say about why humans migrate over the long term and how that's been successful and unsuccessful in the past. So what we're going to do is at the end of the month, so we sent out our request for information, and we invited 15 people to come together, not to actually address migration, but to design projects about migration. So we have people. The other thing I didn't mention about NSIS is that it's very inclusive and they take social engineering very seriously. So you have students and postdocs and you have senior people. You have gender balance. You have geographic balance. That's very important. So we've taken that model, and later this month we will bring 15 young, old men, women, developing countries, industrial countries together to come up with designing three or four projects, which would then be open to competition. And I still have a minute or two? Yes. Okay. So this is all based on the idea that, time's up, but this is all based on the idea that there's a knowledge deficit, that if we as scientists just give, that people are making decisions because they don't have enough information, and that if you give them the right information, they'll make the right decisions. It's called a knowledge deficit model, and it pervades most of thinking in Europe and North America that that's what science should do. Well, recently there's been a lot of, and it is what all science synthesis centers are based on. There's a lot of research that says that's just not sure. There's a big article in the New York Times that basically said that on some scientific subjects, it's not the people who disagree with science, disagree with it, but also believe they know the science better than scientists, and they believe it very strongly. And this, it started with work on genetically modified foods. Science is pretty clear about that, but the public is clear that they know more about science than the science, and that's how decisions are made, and it's true about vaccines. It's repeated on a number of issues. So I think rather than knowledge deficit, what we want to be are honest brokers, which is a different concept. It's a concept that I'm familiar with in cultural heritage where everybody views you skeptically. If you're working for a developer, the public and indigenous communities, they already think you're bought and sold. The developer thinks you're out to screw them because if you find good stuff, you're going to get more money. And the whole notion is you've got to work through that to the point where both parties think it's in their best interest to believe what you're saying. It's very difficult. But that's what I believe in essence. That's where we need to get to as opposed to sort of knowledge deficit. You need to be viewed as people that you can trust. I'm out of time, so I'm going to stop there. Other than to say, you all should join the coalition. We're going to come after you if you don't. Thank you.