prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: Who is the program chair of this conference?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 1: HOFFMAN: I'm delighted to introduce the chair of the last session, Mara Liasson from the National Public Radio  Mara is Congressional correspondent for NPR, and covers activities in Congress in D C  Right now, this week, she has been covering the tax bill, which people currently are going at hot and heavy  She took time off from her busy schedule to come here to help us sort out some of these key issues for today, and more importantly, for what happens in the next decade and beyond  I'll turn it over to Mara to get the panel going 
LIASSON: Thank you very much  I am probably the only person here who has absolutely no background in technology  Anyway, I am the only one who does not understand what the panelists are going to be talking about (laughter), and although they have already told me that they do not appreciate people who think that that's a great quality and look down on people who are technical, and I certainly do not, I will reserve the right to insist that they all talk in terms that people like me can understand, since there is more of me out there than you, although not in this room today  (laughter) What we are going to do is introduce each panelist, and each one will make a short three- to five-minute presentation  Then my instructions say that we are going to have a McLaughlin Group discussion, which I guess means lots of yelling and screaming and talking at once  (laughter) After that's over, about 4:10, we'll open up the panel for questions from the audience 
To my left is Peter Denning, who is Chairman of the Computer Science Department at George Mason University and also the associate dean for computing  He is the program chair of this conference, has also served as the president of ACM, and he is currently the editor of Communications 
Simon Davies, to my right, also wears blue suits, but you can tell him from Mitch, because he wears a white hat  (laughter) He is from Sydney, Australia, and is the Director General of Privacy International, which is an international network of privacy advocates  He is also an author, a journalist, and radio commentator 
To his right is Roland Homet  He is an information policy writer and thinker who recently opened his own public policy writing firm here in Washington -- it's called Executive Ink, not Inc , as it is written in your programs, so you can scratch that out 
Esther Dyson, at the end of the panel, is among the most respected commentators on developing technology trends in the personal computer business  She publishes two newsletters, Release 1 0 and Rel-EAST  She has also been one of the driving forces promoting East-West relations through computer networks  She is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as well 
I'll ask Peter to start 
P  DENNING: Thank you  Starting around 1850, people of many countries looked to their governments to regulate commerce, erase inequities, and build societies of better human beings  For over a hundred years, many people, from peasants to intellectuals, had faith that strong governments would bring them a better life  This faith was part of the clearing in which Communist governments flourished; although the United States took an anti-Communist stand, the same faith fostered a strong government that promised salvation by great national programs including Social Security, welfare, food stamps, the War on Poverty, and the Great Society  This faith is now shattered  People no longer trust that powerful government can deliver a better life 
The dramatic collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union illustrates this, as does the growing disillusionment of the American people for federal, state, and local governments  The poor track record of government is not the only reason for the shift  Information technology has accelerated the process  Communications that took weeks in the last century now take fractions of a second  Business success depends on what happens around the globe, not only on local conditions  Radio, TV, fax, and now E-mail are common worldwide, so much so that not even a powerful government can control what information its citizens have  Because the space of opportunity for people to engage in transactions with each other has been so enormously enlarged during the past decade, faith in marketplace democracies is on the rise worldwide; correspondingly faith in central management mechanisms is on the decline  This shift has brought with it a shift of the power of institutions  Government institutions tend to try to hold onto their power by regulatory coercion to enforce the old ways  This can produce big tensions and even promote breakage 
Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the cryptographic area which we have just been talking about in the previous hour  This technology, cryptography, produces mechanisms for digital signatures, authentication, electronic money, certificates, and private communication -- all offering a way for standard business practices now based on paper to be shifted into the electronic media  The success of worldwide enterprises depends on this shift being completed rapidly and effectively  As more people realize this, the momentum for incorporating cryptographic technology into the information infrastructure is accelerating 
In this country, the National Security Agency has long been given the authority to regulate cryptography  This authority was granted in another time when the success of the country depended upon the ability of its government to gather intelligence and communicate in secret  These premises made sense in a world where most of the power resided in governments, but the world is changing  Much economic power is now accumulating in large apolitical transnational corporations  These corporations place their own concerns and strategies ahead of those of governments of the countries in which they do business  Like governments, they are interested in gathering intelligence about competitors and in conducting business in private  Unlike governments, they want open access to the technologies of authentication, electronic money, digital signatures, and certificates that will allow them to conduct business transactions across the network  So it is no longer true that national power and national security are increased when government has the sole right to gather intelligence and encipher communications  Now the strength of a country depends not only on its government, but also on its corporations  The old premises have fallen away in the new reality, but the old policy remains  It's time to rethink the policy, before tensions between a threatened government and corporations produce significant social tension and perhaps breakage 
Well, digital media -- computer-based communications -- are the printing press of the 21st century, and as the printing press transformed society, created the modern individual, gave rise to the basis of the democratic state and to the notion of individual rights, I suspect that we will see a similar, radical transformation of the very constitution of global society in the next century, facilitated by this enabling technology  I would be the last person to try to sketch out the details, or tell you what the issues are going to be, but I want to share with you some feelings about what is really going to matter, as we go about this -- and I'll start with something about myself 
You see a guy wearing a suit; most of you know I have a lot of money -- I'm a successful businessman  God knows what images propagate around the media and settle in people's minds, but I've always seen myself, and felt myself to the core of my being, as an outsider, every bit as much as a self-proclaimed outsider, as Tom Jennings -- who spoke so eloquently about this at the Pioneer awards* yesterday -- was  *The Electronic Freedom Foundation presented its first awards at a related, adjacent reception which was not formally a part of the conference 
I think we are all outsiders; we are all different, all unique  We're not the same  We share an underlying common humanity, but we should not be asked to subjugate ourselves to some form of mass society that causes us each to become indistinguishable from one another  I believe that computer- based communications technology is an enabling technology to liberate individuals and to free us from the oppressive influence of large institutions, whether those are public or private  And I am talking about an economic restructuring that results in a much more decentralized society, and social restructuring in an affirmation of the simple right to be left alone  I think Cyberspace is good for individuals, and I think that's important  I also think that the flip side of the coin, the creation of community, which we so sorely lack in this country today, can be facilitated through these technologies 
I have experienced that for myself, as many of you have on your various computer networks on conferencing systems like the WELL  It is enormously liberating to overcome the artificial boundaries of space and time  We are prisoners of geography in the physical world, and our communities are largely a product of who we can see face to face each day, even though our real comrades and colleagues may be scattered all over the world and our interests -- whether they are hobbies or political interests or religious interests, whatever they might be -- can be facilitated if we are able to get in touch with, to form bonds with, to exchange views and ideas with other kindred spirits  And I believe this technology is an enabling technology for the formation of community  My hope is that we will have the wisdom to create policies which enable individuals to flourish free from the chains of mass society, and which enable voluntary communities of people, individuals, groups who come together to be with each other and to work together  I hope both of those become possible 
DAVIES: I feel very warmed by the various visions of the future that have come out of this conference, but I am a cynic, and cynicism is good, because it adds fiber  (laughter) How nice the world would be if everyone was like Mitch, but they're not, because the future is in the hands of ruthless, greedy little men 
I want to paint the vision of the future that I have, and I hope it's not too depressing because there is a future, a good future    possibly  I agree, as many of you do, that the future is going to be like some giant informational Yggdrasil* *Reference from Old Norse mythology -- the Yggdrasil was a giant ash tree whose roots held together the universe   We'll all be part of interconnectivity, the likes of which we can scarcely imagine right now  I imagine it will be like an organism where we're independent and interdependent, and so it's like a two-edged sword  That's all very nice, and we can see that we form part of that new community  But, I see a world with 15 billion beings scrambling for life, where four-fifths of the world lives on half a liter of water a day, where people grow up to see their children dying, where new political frontiers are destroying freedoms and the democracy that we have developed over the last two centuries  I see a world where there is very little hope for nearly everybody on the planet, except for the elite -- that's us -- except for those of us who are plugged into the informational Yggdrasil 
What I see is that 14 of those 15 billion people are a lot of pissed-off people who have their eyes set on what they see, not as a wonderful informational community, but as the beast  And they see that that is where the resources are, and that's where the opportunities are, and that's where the political power is  I can't see a future for us in a world where ultimately the great demon becomes information  It might be good for us, but for the disaffected four-fifths of the world, information is going to be something which, frankly, we can do without, because in a world with almost no resources left, surely information is selfishness 
HOMET: Thank you  I'm grateful to the organizers for including me in these proceedings -- they are reminiscent for me of some information policy conferences that I organized 15 to 20 years ago for the Aspen Institute  The particulars have certainly changed, but the dynamics remain much the same  For me, these are well-represented by Peter Denning's image of a changeable clearing in the woods  At any given time, as I see it, the clearing is an acceptable standoff between the forces of modernization and of traditional culture, between freedom and discipline, between structure and spontaneity  Now we voice these as opposites, but in fact, they need each other  It is the creative tension between technological innovation and established order that allows society to hold together and progress to take place  Take away freedom and order will be overthrown -- witness the Soviet Union  Take away tradition, and modernization will be crushed -- witness Iran  The clearing must be respected and it must move  Just as Benjamin Cardozo of the U S  Supreme Court said 65 years ago, the genius of the American system is its penchant for ordered liberty  When both halves of the equation work against each other and together in Hegelian terms, the clearing that they produce is, at any given time, a prevailing hypothesis, which is challenged by a new antithesis  Together they can produce a fresh synthesis  And all that is very familiar  What is new and trying is the sweep and pace of innovation today, plus -- and this is what we sometimes forget -- the political volatility of the value systems that this can induce  If you doubt that, consider the Buchanan campaign and what's been going on with the Endowment for the Arts and public broadcasting  These are signs of people running scared, and they can cause damage 
So the answer for the 21st century is to proceed under power, but with restraint, to practice what Mitch Kapor in another connection called toleration for opposing forces and perspectives  We need each other to keep the enterprise together and on course  For computer practitioners represented in this room, this means restraint from provoking unnecessary and damaging social backlash  A good example might be New York telcos offering free per-call and per-line blocking with this caller identification service  For regulators and law enforcers, restraint means asking, "Do you know enough to freeze emerging conduct in a particular form or pattern?" I was very taken by the role reversal exercise organized by Michael Gibbons on Wednesday night  It led me to wonder what might have happened to the government's wiretapping and encryption proposals had they been subjected to a comparable advanced exercise before introduction 
Sixteen years ago in Aspen, Colorado, I convened a gathering of federal policymakers and invited them to consider a suggested matrix of policy values and processes in the information society  The first two of those values -- it will not surprise you to know -- were freedom of discourse and individual privacy  But there were more: freedom of economic choice is one; the general welfare another; popular sovereignty, worth pausing on, I described as avoiding concentrations of economic and political power in any sector of industry or government that impinge unduly on the freedoms or welfare of the citizenry  And then there is progress, social progress, the fostering, I said, of market incentives and opportunities for technological and service innovations and for widened consumer choice among technologies and services  Now obviously if you give just a moment's thought to it, you will recognize, as I think we have in this conference, that these values can collide with each other at key points, and therefore accommodations must be made  For that we need processes of accommodation  I also suggested some of those  After you identify the relevant values and goals, you then should ask yourself about the necessity and the appropriateness of having government make any decision on the matter  And this has to do with such things like the adequacy of decision-making standards, the availability of adequate information, and the adequacy of personnel resources to deal with it  Then you get into dividing up the possible roles of the various elements of government -- the regulatory agencies, the Executive Branch, the Judiciary, and the Congress  It doesn't stop there, because you need to ask about international implications, which we have done some of here  And federal/state implications -- very often allowing the state to make a stab at social ordering in the first instance is, as Justice Brandeis often said, the best way, through the social laboratory technique, to try out what is the right answer, without endangering the whole society  And as we have heard today, we need also to think about the availability of non-coercive instruments of accommodation, like a federal data protection board 
DYSON: I want to just say one thing about this business of crypto technology -- it is a very simple sentence, and everyone seems to slip slightly by it; that is, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns  Crypto technology is fundamentally a defensive weapon  It may protect murderers and thieves, but it is not a weapon that murders, kills, does anything bad; and so it is a very different kettle of fish from any other kind of weapon  The whole point is that information is powerful, and that the free flow of information, privacy-protected, empowers the powerless and is dangerous to the powerful -- and that's why we need our privacy protected 
Now let me just talk a wee bit about the future  A couple of days ago, a reporter called me and asked what the EFF stood for  I kind of floundered around and said, "Well, we want privacy, we want good hackers to be protected and bad crackers to be punished  We want people to understand the difference, and we want all these good things, but we really don't want to grab power " The guy kept on not quite getting it  The real answers were pro choice  We don't want someone else to make all these decisions for anybody  We don't even want the majority to rule  In every way that is possible, we want the minorities to control their own conditions in their own lives  There are very few things that are the province of government, but way too many things nowadays are being given to the government carelessly, fearfully, whatever  In my terms -- and I happen to be a right-wing person in terms of the economy and private freedoms -- I want more markets and fewer governments  Markets give choices to individuals  They let people trade what they don't want for what they do want  Again, to the extent possible, they want people to make individual choices 
What worries me is large concentrations of power, making choices for people  Big business, big government, even big media  The media until now have mostly been our protectors, because they go out and produce information, they use anonymous sources where necessary, and they make that information free  What protected global networking is going to do is give more and more of that power to individuals, and help reduce the power of big institutions of any kind  We are going to have small businesses flourishing, because it is easier for them to collect resources  You don't need to have a giant monolithic corporation to be efficient any more, and so a lot of marketplace economies of scale will even disappear, as we have better networking, better coordination  We have markets like the American Information Exchange, and if you don't know what that is, come and see me, or Hugh Daniel, or a couple of other people 
On the social side, I think 20 years ago    when you mentioned 15 years ago, I thought, Yes, that must have been about 1940  Then I realized    Anyway, some time ago there was all this talk about the global village  We're going to have mass broadcasting, we're going to have mass E-mail, we're going to have this global village  We don't  What we have is a lot of global villages, but as Mitch said, they're no longer geographical, physical villages  They're small, geographical villages of people with like interests  The big question becomes, How do we avert tribalism? It might not be nation against nation any more, but it certainly will be rich against poor, and franchised versus disenfranchised 
LIASSON: Thank you all very much  Now we can all try to stir up the pot a little bit  Somewhere between Mitch's paradise and the Simon's apocalypse is probably what's really going to happen  I want to just jump off from what Esther said about you all being in a minority and what kind of responsibility you owe to the rest of the world  We're in the midst of a presidential election and not one single candidate has said anything about Cyberspace  I am wondering if you think they should, and what are the kinds of extremely important issues that you think should be discussed? Should they be discussed in a kind of mass, political forum? Or should they be left to an elite like you to discuss and decide, and not really spend a whole lot of energy trying to translate or disseminate them to the great masses of people? I guess what I am wondering is, if you were an advisor to one of the presidential candidates, or a candidate yourself, how would you go about interjecting these things? Or wouldn't you bother at all?
DYSON: Does he want to get elected, or does he want to make a point?
LIASSON: I think he wants to make a point  If he wants to get elected, I think the discussion would stop right now 
DYSON: Let me just try a serious answer  I think what a candidate could say is, "I'm no longer going to protect the textile industry, the peanut butter interests, the sugar guys, the antediluvian steel mills  If I'm going to have an industrial policy and help anyone, it's going to be new technology  I'm going to focus on investment in R&D  I am going to create a national infrastructure for telecommunications, just the way we created a highway system years ago  I'm going to put people to work doing these things " I think that would go over reasonably well  I think it's something most of us would agree on  (laughter) We have an industrial policy -- we might as well acknowledge it, and we might as well have it be forward-looking 
KAPOR: Now there is something about the question as to whether this is presidential material that I think is ironic, given that most people really want to vote for "none of the above " We know in our hearts that we have come to a particular period in history in which the presidential spectacle seems to be particularly irrelevant to whatever set of problems we have on our minds  As a great believer in democracy, I think this is incredibly lamentable  We need to do something about this, because there are a lot of issues, but Cyberspace is not ready for prime time  It would be trivialized -- I have seen what Geraldo did to hackers, and I don't need to see any more 
It seems to me that the presidential candidates are really not the leaders that they ought to be, but are always putting their finger to the wind to see if they can detect some current of values or beliefs that can help get them elected  And I think that -- I'm not espousing utopian vision -- there needs to be an utopian vision out there, so people have something to give them some inspiration  But values are a lot more important than technology  There are some values in this community -- and I'm not sure if it's an elite or a minority or both -- but it's really in the propagation of a sense of values about openness and tolerance, acting on that basis and living one's life, and saving capitalism from itself and things like that where we can make a difference  If some of the expressions are technological, that's fine  We are living in an era where people like buttons, and so on  If we do that well, the presidential candidates are going to be coming to us 
LIASSON: You talk about Cyberspace not being ready for prime time -- I still want a definition of Cyberspace in 25 words or less -- but I think you want to transform prime time to a certain extent 
DYSON: Mostly I agree with this, but the press does have two roles: one is collecting information and uncovering things, and the other is setting the agenda  If 12,000 voices are crying out, who's going to listen to them? Who's going to notice when they do discover that the President did something wrong? Again, it's a check and balance sort of thing, but there is a certain community that is created by collective media 
KAPOR: Esther, what makes you believe that in Cyberspace Mara won't have two hours a day of her own that everyone listens to  (laughter) She might get more time than she gets today, because people trust her 
DYSON: But then she becomes prime time 
LIASSON: But you said before that instead of one global village, we have a lot of little global villages  I'm wondering if instead, we won't have millions of little huts  I mean individual huts  There are just so many different choices 
LIASSON: What I'm wondering is, if everybody becomes their own producer, publisher, what does that mean for the future?
KAPOR: I think we'll get a much more fluid, self-organizing state  I don't think in practice everybody is going to be what we think of today as a broadcast publisher  I just want things to be able to sort themselves out in a much more equitable fashion  We have this enormous, artificial scarcity today over the means of communication, because the government awards licenses which self-perpetuate  They are about to do the same thing, and give every broadcast television station another license for HDTV  So if you've got a license today, you get a second one; if you don't have one, you get nothing  That is going to be our policy about HDTV  I think it would be a lot better if we had more markets, more choices, and better values  I don't know how to do better values, but we know how to do more choices  So the point is, we'll wind up with some new regime which I don't think that we can particularly predict  I don't think that it is going to be chaotic or anarchic  I think there is something about people as social animals or creatures -- we will create some new forms of social organization  There will be information middlemen; there will be the equivalent of editors and packagers  There will be trusted intermediaries who help organize these new media  If you open it up and equalize things so that everybody can participate, you will get more diversity of points of view, you will get less homogenization  One of the reasons that tons of people have just dropped out, or are in terminal couch-potato-dom is that the sets of choices and the values that come across the tube are not ones that stir the human heart  And people know that  They can't figure out what to do about that, so they sort of fuzz out on drugs and alcohol  I say let's edit TV, which is the electronic drug  Let's do something about that 
DAVIES: I like your idea, Mitch  I think it's sweet  (laughter) The problem is that I really worry that the ultimate test of the future is going to be the outcome of the quest, the battle between those who are looking for the sort of vision you've got of the right of the individual, the individual being the producer  And that, probably, is the way we solve our problems on this planet  But there is the other side, and that's the planetary managers  Planetary management is the path of the least resistance  You know all the powermongers go for the planetary management model, because they all think they can clamber over the bodies to get to the top  Ultimately the test is going to be who comes out on the top, the individual rightist or the planetary managers  Unfortunately, I'm not a betting man, but at the moment I'd like to bet on the planetary managers 
DYSON: Part of this issue is reducing the value of incumbency, whether it's incumbency in prime time live, or incumbency in the government  There is much more fluidity of movement; you can't accumulate power because the unorganized forces have more power than you do 
P  DENNING: I feel a little strange being on the left end of the stage, because most people think of me as being on the far right sometimes, but right now I'd like to comment on something that is halfway between what Mitch is saying, and what Simon is saying  The way I hear what Simon is saying, is that there is a disease of today which I will call inward- centeredness  We are very worried about ourselves and our organizations  We find in that orientation a lot of instability of things and technologies that change rapidly  In order to achieve the world that Mitch is talking about, we need to cure the disease, and instead come from an orientation that we could call outward-centeredness, instead of inward-centeredness  The question is the shift from, How do we accumulate power? to, How do we help others accumulate power? How do we go from looking for stability in things to looking for stability in relationships? In watching my own children grow up, I am convinced that they know more about this than I do  In listening to some of the younger people here, I'm more convinced that they know more about this than I do  They know something about the outward-centeredness that I have yet to learn  Observing this among children and among students gives me a lot of optimism, as a matter of fact, against the apocalypse that Simon talks about, because Simon is talking about the world that would be created if we continued "us," and I think that the world that is being created by our children with their outward-centeredness is going to be the kind of world that Mitch is pointing towards  And I am much more optimistic about that than Simon is 
LIASSON: Roland, I wonder if we can interject you into this discussion a little bit  You have been a policymaker  What can be done to make sure that Simon's vision doesn't come true, and something a little closer to what Esther and Mitch describe does happen?
HOMET: I think we probably need both doom seers and paradise seekers  We'll always have them, and we should have them  It's between the swing of those two views that things happen  I think that this notion of replacing the gatekeepers and letting everybody perform his own dance, to the amusement of those who chose to tune in, is one that many of us were promoting 20 years ago  That's not 1940 -- that's 1970 (laughter), and we were quite convinced that was likely to happen by the end of that decade  Now it's 12 years beyond the end of that decade, and we're nowhere near having that happening  We just have newly-named controversies, and so, as you heard me say in my little short remark, I think that our objective ought to be more modest, and that is to keep the questions open, not let them be foreclosed -- certainly not prematurely, and not on the basis of inadequate evidence  I would say something about the apocalyptic view, which is, I think there is a difference between information policy questions and welfare questions  The poor we have always with us, as somebody once said, and whether information, Cyberspace -- whatever you want to call it -- is promoted or not, that is true  It may become more glaringly true in an advanced information society, in which case, more may be done about it  So I wouldn't despair about that, and I wouldn't hold back on the development of instruments of interconnection simply because we can see that there is and will remain an underclass  Perhaps if we do the one, we'll be better equipped to do the other 
LIASSON: In just a minute or two, we're going to open this up to your questions, but I want to try to end maybe with a discussion of something quite specific, which is, Who should own the new infrastructure and information systems? Should they be publicly owned? There are lots of conflicts even within the vision that you lay out 
KAPOR: The first point I'd make is let's not make the unnecessary mistake of betting on a single infrastructure  Technologically, we don't need to do that  In the 1930s, pre-digital, the old Bell system was the social contract  You get a monopoly, you have an obligation to provide universal service  We've learned a few things about how to do things with interoperable standards and how to interconnect multiple, independent providers and carriers  One of the fathers of the Internet, Vint Cerf, is sitting here in the front row, and he deserves an enormous amount of credit for insisting on this vision and promulgating it  A lot of the risks that come with private ownership of infrastructure go away when it's no longer a monopoly  The abusive problems that are sometimes experienced with local phone service and cable companies -- both of which are private sector monopolies -- I would say come more from not their private sector character, but from their monopoly character  If it is possible for there to be competition, that serves as the most effective check that we know of in this society against abuse  So I would opt for private infrastructure, but lots of it  Government has to make sure that everybody stays interconnected -- it's the referee that keeps the playing field level, doesn't let people cheat, and sort of bangs a few heads together when people get a little too greedy, or a little too selfish  If we do that, that will provide for the most choice and the most diversity 
LIASSON: Are we all in agreement on that?
HOMET: Not entirely  I think the question is less who should own infrastructure than how it should be classified  There may be a role for government in, for example, extending communication pipes to rural America for at least a period, as with the TVA  We have always had that question  There has always been a mixed economy with government doing some things and private sector others  It's a debate and should be a debate about who does what best  It should be revised from time to time, but the important question is, If we get a significant distribution system like cable television, how should we classify it? I speak here from the heart, because 20 years ago, I was trying to fasten onto, or gain the recognition for, cable as a broadband distribution system which was only trivially in the program production and publishing business, but was very much in the distribution business and ought to have been treated as a common carrier open to all information suppliers  Had that happened, we would have been very much further along in the vision that some of us had 20 years ago  (applause) It tends to support what I said about not going in for premature freezing or characterization of how things look  It was decided, because the broadcasters felt threatened, to treat cable as a species of broadcasting  That's the greatest frittering away of resources in my lifetime, and perhaps in the lifetime of the United States of America  Let's not make that mistake again  Let's be clear-eyed and ask the broad-scale questions about public use and benefit  Thank you 
LIASSON: Let's open it up to the audience  If you have any questions     oh my God, wrestle your way to the microphone!
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Let us not forget the history of the commons in which a wealthy society creates in its overflowing abundance structures on which all people can participate  This was originally, back in medieval society, the structure that was created for the support of the poor  In the abundance of the land in which the overpopulation was not a question, and there was much agriculture to go around, and the poor were supported out of the commonly-owned things that were jointly owned by all society  That's all I have to say 
LIASSON: Who wants to start?
DAVIES: Sticking to my apocalyptic vision just for the moment, because that's how I'm characterized, what I would like to see, just as my own social experiment, if you like, is for the various groups that this room represents and groups that you are all involved in, is to actually set up the apocalyptic vision, and then see how you as part of the information technology community can utilize it, stop it, or reverse it  It's only when you see the vision and see your own part in it that we are actually going to set up solutions  I mean, that is a straight, outright homework assignment, and I think would be a great benefit for everybody  Then go on and publish them through the E-mail, or the Internet, whatever 
DYSON: Something along the lines of go find the most influential person you know well enough to influence, who you do not agree with -- assuming that you all agree with me, of course -- and attempt to win that person over to your point of view  In other words, don't stick to your own community  Don't just talk to the people who only agree with you  Go out and evangelize or proselytize to people who don't understand what this stuff is about  Do it in such a way that you are not superior or offputting; don't try to be right; try to win and expand this community, not in terms of pressure or rightness, but in terms of understanding what we are about  The biggest problem is ganging up on some of these politicians and having them think that this stuff is not cute, or weird, or colorful, or irrelevant, but incredibly important  Make the rest of the world know about us 
HOMET: I would like to second that motion  The story is told that when a beautiful woman comes out on a street in Paris, every man within eyeshot becomes in that instant much more intensively himself  (laughter) What I would suggest to you, if you are energized by this subject, is to be yourself  To thine own self be true, and perhaps to add to that the biblical admonition to the apostles -- if I remember it correctly -- and this picks up what Esther was saying -- to be wise as snakes, and cunning as foxes  Go out there to persuade 
P  DENNING: I'd like to add to that  It is not only within yourself that you have to look, it's within others  Don't assume that you know the answers, but go talk to people  Don't just talk to us, because we already know what "us" has to say, but go to talk to people that we haven't talked to and find out what concerns them 
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, my name is Lou Woleneck  I'm from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas  I'm a graduate student  I have a question, a general policy question, about how we should go about providing the information resources to the have-nots that the information elites have access to now  What sort of strategy that you all would have for that?
KAPOR: A 30-second or less answer, which is to set a national policy that updates a universal service for the 21st century that says everybody needs to have basic minimal access to a digital platform that reaches into every home, into every office and school in the country  We should focus our attention on how to put in place the least expensive amount of infrastructure that will produce that  What we find is, if we do that, then the overwhelming majority of American families will find it already within their budget to be able to do that, because it will be priced like basic phone service  To the extent that we need to continue or even slightly expand the kinds of lifeline programs that subsidize today's basic voice telephone service for a small percentage of the population, we should be prepared to renew that commitment  We don't need to bankrupt ourselves to give everybody access to a digital platform 
JIM WARREN: My name is Jim Warren  Two quick observations: there were several cynical comments during the last several days about a number of IRS people being here  It turns out, because they never had a platform to say this, that the whole crowd from the IRS who are here, as I understand it, are from the IRS privacy project, intent on developing policies to assure privacy protection for taxpayer information  So let us not be so cynical about their being here; otherwise, remember that they are simply doing what they are told to do by our representatives  (laughter and hisses) I was also bothered by both Simon's, and (my God!) Esther's comments on those evil little men, and the men in politics, etc  Gee, this is a modern age, let's say "men and women," for evil deeds, as well as good deeds 
DYSON: There aren't enough women in politics for there to be any evil ones 
WARREN: Well, I am sure that I can find some evil ones for you  (laughter) Anyway, to the main points: I would say that we are not so much elite, in that we are open to anyone who takes the initiative to join us, and many of us are active mentors in trying to get others to join us  I would say simply that we are a minority, and it occurs to me that revolution has always been a minority activity  It was not millions of Russians who opposed the attempted coup several months ago  It was ten, twenty, or thirty thousand in Moscow, with the aid of communications  It was not a massive movement, a populist movement, in America that resisted the Crown, two centuries ago  It was a small minority of activists and we are the activists here -- we are the revolutionaries  Freedom has always been a do-it-yourself activity, but the key syllable in that word activity is act  Let us reaffirm freedom of speech, press, assembly, security against undue search and seizure -- the basic constitutional freedoms and privileges  Let us demand that our politicians and our political candidates do the same in explicit formal commitments to act in behalf of protecting electronic civil liberties, just as they validate and speak favorably for traditional civil liberties  We can write our politicians, write our candidates and say, "Take a position in favor of civil liberties, regardless of the technology of the moment " Thank you 
GLENN TENNEY: Thank you for the introduction, Jim 
LIASSON: Are you from the IRS?
TENNEY: No  (laughter) My name is Glenn Tenney, and I have a question for you, Mara  I think that I have enough supporters on the panel  I'm not too curious about their views, but they are welcome to them  You questioned if the presidential election and race is ready for Cyberspace  What about Congress? I'm running for Congress -- is it ready for me?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Ms  Liasson, I believe that you have opened a can of worms called politics for this little hacker community  You certainly have with me in your comment about asking for comments for the Cyberspace era from presidential candidates  I have very strong reactions to that  I think that I am going to try to express them, as a pure statement, or maybe an actual story  Several years ago, I was discussing with a friend of mine the current presidential, the then-current presidential election  He was asking me why I wasn't rabidly supporting Jesse Jackson  I thought about it, and my first response was, "Well, let's talk about the other candidates for a second  What about -- and I'll take a random name -- Michael Dukakis?" And my friend looked at me and said, "Michael Dukakis, he's just an administrator, he's not a visionary " I thought about it, and I said, "Hold on, I'm an American, I'm not someone who's a slave of the Queen of England, or something like that  I'm my own visionary, I decide where I am going " I don't want the politicians walking around telling me that I am going to have an expressway system that's going to pave over all my favorite swamps to play in  I don't want the politicians walking around defining what I'm going to do in my life  I want to elect politicians to manage government for me, to provide the barest minimum necessities to keep us smoothly greased as individuals in living together, and I want those politicians to be of the people, and I don't want them to tell me what my opinions should be  Finally, I want to cap that off with when we have government deciding how our systems work for us, we can then end up with situations where we can say, "Oh yeah, that IRS guy or that government net guy, he was just doing his job when he banned cryptography," or something like that  That's not the sort of world that I want to live in  I want to live in a world, where each of us defines our little space in it  Thank you all 
LIASSON: I think we have time for just two more and then we'll have to wrap it up 
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, to the apocalypse types  I'd like to say just one thing that somebody said: The truth will make you free  In that this technology is a vehicle of communication, I believe that it is a vehicle of the truth, and as long as we keep it free, the truth will be heard that much more  Now I have kind of a question with a bit of a statement  I am a learning-disabled college student  I didn't ever finish high school  I had a freshmen education in high school, because of educational problems, and adjustment problems, I never really got too far beyond that  I write probably a fifth of the speed of anyone in this room and I have a real hard time doing math without a calculator  That's part of the reason why I wasn't able to do well in school  I read very well, fortunately, so I was able to go in when I was eighteen and take my GED just flat out without studying for it  I'm not dumb, or uneducated by any standards, but what has allowed me to get an associate's degree in college, and what has allowed me to approach graduation and get a bachelor's degree in college is the kind of technology that we are dealing with  I have never had easy access to that technology  The barriers that I have faced have been ones of order, regimentation, and where people try and say, "Oh well, you don't fit in, you're not a CS student, you don't need those resources " I'm good with computers, I do a lot with them, I spend a lot of time with them  I hack, I don't do anything illegal, but I took a hacksaw to the frame of my nasty little 8088 about two years ago to cram some RAM into it, because that was the only way I could get it to fit and I needed it  Now I'm in a little bit better shape  I'm approaching the point where I would like to see ISDN real soon, because I need that kind of connectivity  You know, I'm doing interesting things that I find absolutely wonderful, but the idea that the kind of technology that is available to us, that is just there for the using, could be limited and unavailable to people, or that people would have to go through some of the things that I have had to go through, not being able to do well on tests, because I had no word processor available to me  That type of thing, even though they are all over the place, elsewhere  It was just that that wasn't an acceptable solution  That type of policy planning, that type of government, that type of order scares me  And I have to ask, what is your answer to that?
DAVIES: The apocalyptic vision of a world in grief and individual rights in crisis has nothing to do with a Luddite mentality, and it would be very dangerous for the people in this room to link the two together  I, for one, believe in technology  I am very grateful for it, and I think the world is a better place for it  I have great faith in the future, but technology's not a silver lining for the future  It's not an El Dorado, it's more like plutonium  The very great thing that technology does for all of us can also be used by the people who would repress our freedoms and all I am saying is be aware of that  Let's not marginalize people like me, who are saying, Hey look, we are going to have 15 billion people on the planet  We are going to have a political inversion, you know, that is going to create massive tensions that are going to repress our rights, or at least create a tension that we have never known before  Don't marginalize me -- don't shoot the messenger  I believe in technology, so please don't equate the apocalypse with Ludditism -- the two do not match 
LIASSON: We're about out of time  I'm going to turn this over to Lance 
HOFFMAN: Thank you, Mara  I'm really unhappy that we are out of time, but I feel that we have a contract to those who want to leave in a moment or two  Those who want to stay, can stay up here, are welcome to continue, until the hotel throws us out  Since Lu Kleppinger is in the room at the moment, I don't know when that will be, but we can probably have it for a little while  I just want to make a couple of comments before I formally close this meeting 
We have seen an awful lot happen in these last three days and there has been building, and indeed we will be continuing to some extent the work that Jim Warren started at CFP-1 -- a sense of community  It has been increased by the participation of various diverse groups  My one hope is that you do not stop that here  When each and every one of you goes home, contact -- I don't care whether it's by letter, or electronic mail, or even telephone, if you must -- three people that you have met here that you didn't know, or didn't know very well before, or perhaps only knew electronically, and now you know them in person, and continue talking with them and to their friends and colleagues  If you do that, this will be a success 
The other comment that I want to make is that Bruce Koball is going to need a lot of help for CFP-3  Please talk to him -- he is listed in the roster  Or better yet, don't do that, talk to him here, and then give him a month to chill out in Berkeley before he has to start working real hard  Check the message board, there are some messages that have not been picked up  You have your evaluation forms  If you haven't filled them out and you would like to, please do and turn them in  I have nothing else, except to thank you all for being such a good group and, hopefully, we'll see you next year in California  Thank you very much 
Support efforts at engaging society and government on the appropriate legal and social uses of technology 
Context 2: Paper Info

Title: Two-stage Pipeline for Multilingual Dialect Detection
Publish Date: Unkown
Author List: Ankit Vaidya (from Pune Institute of Computer Technology), Aditya Kane (from Pune Institute of Computer Technology)

Figure

Figure 1: Class distribution of dialects
Figure 2: System diagram for dialect classification The LID classifies the input into one of 3 languages The sample is then further classified into dialects by language specific models 
Figure 3: Confusion matrix of 9-way classification Note that rows are normalized according to the number of samples is that class 
Our complete results for Track-1 using the two-stage dialect detection pipeline Model-* denotes the language of the models used for the experiments 
Performance on Track-1 validation dataset of individual models used in the two-stage pipeline "Lg" stands for language of the model used 
Comparative results of two-way classification using the finetuned (F T ) predictions and predictions adapted from three-way classification models 

abstract

Dialect Identification is a crucial task for localizing various Large Language Models  This paper outlines our approach to the VarDial 2023 DSL-TL shared task  Here we have to identify three or two dialects from three languages each which results in a 9-way classification for Track-1 and 6-way classification for Track-2 respectively 
Our proposed approach consists of a two-stage system and outperforms other participants' systems and previous works in this domain  We achieve a score of 58 54% for Track-1 and 85 61% for Track-2  Our codebase is available publicly 1  

Introduction

Language has been the primary mode of communication for humans since the pre-historic ages  Studies have explored the evolution of language and outlined mathematical models that govern the intricacies of natural language   Inevitably, as humans established civilization in various parts of the world, this language was modified by, and for the group of people occupied by that particular geographical region 
This gave rise to multiple national dialects of the same language  The VarDial workshop (colocated with EACL 2023) explores various dialects and variations of the same language  We participated in the Discriminating Between Similar Languages -True Labels (DSL-TL) shared task  In this task, the participants were provided with data from three languages, with each language having three varieties 
This shared task consisted of two tracks -Track-1 featuring nine-way classification and Track-2 featuring six-way classification  The second track included two particular national dialects of each language (eg  American English and British English), and the first track had one general  We ranked 1 st in both of the tracks 
Moreover, we beat the next best submission by a margin of 4 5% in the first task and 5 6% in the second task We were the only team to surpass the organizer baseline scores  We present our winning solution in this paper  We used an end-to-end deep learning pipeline which consisted of a language identification model and three language-specific models, one for each language 
We converged upon the best combination by doing an elaborate analysis of various models available  Furthermore, in this work we also analyze the performance of the pipeline as a whole and also provide an ablation study  Lastly, we provide some future directions in this area of research 

Related Work

The present literature encompasses various aspects of dialect identification  We study this from three perspectives: large language models, language identification and dialect classification problems 

Large Language Models

The success of transformers and BERT based models was inevitable since the initial boom of the transformer  2017) model  In recent years, many other architectures like RoBERTa and ELECTRA have further pushed the state-of-the-art in this domain  Moreover, autoregressive models like GPT and GPT-2 have also shown their prowess 
Multilingual versions of RoBERTA, namely XLM-RoBERTa are also available  Lastly, language specific models like Spanish BERT (la Rosa y Eduardo G  Ponferrada y Manu Romero y Paulo Villegas y Pablo González de Prado Salas y María Grandury, 2022) and Portuguese BERT are available as well  Our winning solution makes use of these large language models trained on specific languages 

Language Identification Models

Many multilingual language identification models have been developed in order to classify the language of the input sentence beforehand  Even though the initial works used n-gram models and generative mixture models or even conditional random fields and other classical machine learning methods like naive bayes , modern methods have shifted to the use of deep learning for language identification  
Recent works have mainly focused on deep learning based language identification, where handling codemixed data is a big challenge in the domain  For our experiments, we use a version of XLM-RoBERTa finetuned on a language identification dataset 2   This model has near-perfect test accuracy of 99 6% 

Dialect Classification

Dialect classification has been previously solved using statistical methods like Gaussian Mixture Models and Frame Selection Decoding or Support Vector Machines (SVM)   It has been explored relatively sparsely, mostly in the case for local languages   Deep learning approaches have been explored in previous editions of the VarDial workshop shared tasks and otherwise  
Dialect classification was also explored previously as a part of other shared tasks   We want to stress that given the multilingual nature of the dataset, using the present methods directly was not an option  In our work, although we take inspiration from the previous works, we propose a novel system that surpasses the performance of the previous systems by a large margin 

Data

The dataset  We observed that the class PT-BR had the most number of samples (2,724) and the class EN had the least number of samples (349), and thus the imbalance ratio was almost 1:8  We have illustrated the data distribution in Figure   We tried to mitigate this imbalance using over-sampling and weighted sampling methods 
However, the improved data sampling method did not affect the performance 

System Description

This was a problem of multi-class classification having 9 classes for Track-1 and 6 classes for Track-2  The samples were belonging to 3 languages having 3 varieties each, so the classification pipeline was made in 2 stages  The Language Identification (LID) model which is the first stage classifies the sentence into 3 languages: English (EN), Spanish (ES) and Portuguese (PT) 
The LID is a pretrained XLM-RoBERTa that is fine-tuned for the task of language identification  It is able to classify the input sentence into 20 languages  We classify and separate the samples according to their language  The samples corresponding to the specific languages are then fed into the language specific models for dialect identification 
For dialect identification we have used models like BERT and RoBERTa with a linear layer connected to the pooler output of the models  Then fine-tuning is done on the models for dialect identification   using the samples corresponding to the specific languages  For the task of dialect identification we experimented with several pretrained models like XLM-RoBERTa, BERT, ELECTRA, GPT-2 and RoBERTa 
All models were fine-tuned for 20 epochs with a learning rate of 1e-6 and weight decay 1e-6 with a batch size of 8  The best performing model checkpoint was chosen according to the epoch-wise validation macro-F1 score  5 Experiments and Results

Experiments using Large Language Models

For the task of Dialect Identification we have tried various language specific models like XLM-RoBERTa, BERT, ELECTRA, RoBERTa and GPT- 2  The base variant of all these models were used and all the models were used through the Hugging-Face library  The pooler output of these models was passed through a linear layer and the models were fine-tuned 
First, we experimented with different models for Track-1  All the models were trained for 20 epochs with learning rate 1e-6, weight decay 1e-6 and a batch size of 8  We used XLM-RoBERTa as the baseline for all 3 languages  The best performing models for the English language were RoBERTa and BERT whereas GPT-2 was the worst performing 
Similarly the language specific versions of RoBERTa and BERT performed well for the Spanish and Portuguese respectively  Overall the worst performing model was GPT-2 across all 3 languages  The validation F1 scores are present in Table   The two best-performing models for every language were chosen for Track-2 
The same procedure as specified above was used and the F1 scores are present in Table   The train and validation F1 scores for 2-class classification are higher for all models as compared to the F1 score of the same models for 3-class classification  This was mainly due to the poor representation and accuracy of classification of the third class 
We observed symptoms of overfitting in all models after 12-15 epochs and the best validation F1 score was obtained in the range of 4-8 epochs 

LID experiments

The pipeline for dialect identification is divided into two parts as the sentences in the dataset belong to different languages  The stages are described in Section 4  The XLM-RoBERTa we have used for language classification has a test accuracy of 99 6% meaning it correctly classifies all input sentences and hence, can be considered as a perfect classifier 
For the final pipeline we experimented using the two best performing models for each language in Track-1 and Track-2  For both the tracks we experimented with all 8 (2 3 ) possible combinations of models and calculated the validation F1 score for the combined validation dataset which had sentences belonging to all languages 
The validation scores for Track-1 and Track-2 are shown in Table and Table respectively  For both the tracks, the three pipelines with the best validation F1 scores were chosen for submission 

Using 3-way classifier as a 2-way classifier

In Track-1, participants are expected to train a classifier which classifies amongst 9 classes, and in Track-2, participants are expected to train a classifier which classifies amongst 6 classes  These 6 classes are a proper subset of the 9 classes from Track-1  Thus, an intuitive baseline for Track-2 is to use the model finetuned for Track-1, whilst considering only the relevant classes for the latter task 
The classes EN , ES and P T , i e  the classes without any national dialect associated with them are not included in Track-2 as compared to Track-1  Thus, we calculate the predictions for the Track-2 validation dataset using the models for Track-1 and exclude the metrics for Track-1 specific classes to get the metrics for this "adapted" 2-way classification 
We show the results of this experiment in Table and observe that, as expected, the adapted 2-way classification performs worse compared to the explicitly finetuned variant 

Results for Track-1 and Track-2

We now present our experiments and their performance for both tracks  Our experiments for Track-1 are described in Table and our experiments for Track-2 are described in Table   The participants were allowed three submissions for evaluation on the test set, so we submitted predictions using the three systems which performed the best on the validation set 
As mentioned in Section 5 2, we performed 2 3 , i e  a total of 8 experiments using the two best models for each language  We observed that RoBERTa base on English, Spanish BERT base on Spanish and Portuguese BERT base performed the best on the testing set for Track-1  The same combination, with RoBERTa base for English, worked best for Track-2 
All of our submissions were the top submissions for each track, which surpassed the next best competitors by a margin of 4 5% and 5 6% for Track-1 and Track-2 respectively 

Ablation of best submissions

We hereby make some observations of our submissions and other experiments  To assist this, we plot the confusion matrices of our best submissions for Track-1 and Track-2 in Figures respectively  Note that these confusion matrices have their rows (i e  true labels axes) normalized according to the number of samples in the class 
Here are observations from our experiments: 1  BERT-based models outperform other models across all languages: We observe that BERT-based models outperform ELECTRA-based and GPT-2-based models, as shown in Table   We speculate this is because of the inherent architecture of BERT, which combines semantic learning with knowledge retention 
This combination of traits is particularly useful for this task  2  Common labels perform the worst across all languages: We observe that the common labels EN , ES and P T perform the worst, both in the individual as well as the two-stage setup  We hypothesize this is because of the absence of dialect specific words, or words that are specific to the geographical origin of the national dialect (for example, "Yankees" for EN-US and "Oxford" for EN-GB) 
3  English models work better than models of other languages: It can be noted from Figures 4 and 3 that the English models have the best performance across all classes  This can be attributed to two reasons: absence of national dialect specific words and lesser pretraining data in the case of Portuguese 
4  British English is most correctly classified class: We can observe that the Spanish or Portuguese models make equal number of mistakes in the case of either national dialect, in the case of Track-2 (see Figure )  However, in the case of English, the label EN − GB is correctly classified for more than 95% of the cases 
We speculate this is because British English involves slightly distinctive grammar and semantics, which help the model separate it from other classes  5  The proposed 2-step method is scalable for multiple language dialect classification: We can strongly assert that the novel 2-step deep learning method for multilingual dialect classification is a scalable method for the task due to two specific reasons: firstly, the multilingual models (like XLM-RoBERTa) might not have the vocabulary as well as the learning capabilities to learn the minute differences between individual dialects 
Secondly, this system can be quickly expanded for a new language by simply adding a language specific dialect classifier, provided the language identification model supports that particular language 

Conclusion

In this paper we propose a two-stage classification pipeline for dialect identification for multilingual corpora  We conduct thorough ablations on this setup and provide valuable insights  We foresee multiple future directions for this work  The first is to expand this work to many languages and dialects 
Secondly, it is a worthwhile research direction to distill this multi-model setup into a single model with multiple prediction heads  The obvious limitation of this system is the excessive memory consumption due to the usage of language specific models  For low resource languages this system is difficult to train and scale 
We hope that these problems will be addressed by researchers in future works 



ground_truth: Peter Denning.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What models were used for dialect identification?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 3: McPherson County (standard abbreviation: MP) is a county located in the U S  state of Kansas   As of the 2020 census, the county population was 30,223  The largest city and county seat is McPherson  The county is named for Civil War General James B  McPherson 

History

Early history

For many millennia, the Great Plains of North America was inhabited by nomadic Native Americans  From the 16th century to 18th century, the Kingdom of France claimed ownership of large parts of North America  In 1762, after the French and Indian War, France secretly ceded New France to Spain, per the Treaty of Fontainebleau  In 1802, Spain returned most of the land to France, but keeping title to about 7,500 square miles 

In 1803, most of the land for modern day Kansas was acquired by the United States from France as part of the 828,000 square mile Louisiana Purchase for 2 83 cents per acre  In 1848, after the Mexican–American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Spain brought into the United States all or part of land for ten future states, including southwest Kansas  In 1854, the Kansas Territory was organized, then in 1861 Kansas became the 34th U S  state 

19th century

From the 1820s to 1870s, the Santa Fe Trail passed through, what is now McPherson County  The trail entered the county, east of Canton, then south of Galva, then north of Inman, and west towards Lyons  In 1855, Charles O  Fuller established a ranch adjacent to the Running Turkey Creek Crossing about two miles south and one mile east of Galva  Fuller's Ranch provided accommodations for travelers on the Santa Fe Trail and was probably the first white settlement in McPherson County 

Peketon County was established in 1860, by the passage of a bill by S  N  Wood:  An act to establish Peketon County  Section 1  - That all that territory west of the sixth principal meridian and south of Township 16, in Kansas Territory, be and the same is hereby erected into a county, to be known by the name of Peketon County  On February 17, 1865, Peketon County was abolished, and McPherson County was made a part of Marion County, which extended from the west line of Chase County to the present western boundary of Kansas 

In 1868, Solomon Stephens and L  N  Holmberg were appointed Justices of the Peace—the first officers in what is now McPherson County  The next year (1869) occurred the first election for the township, now the county of McPherson  McPherson was regularly organized as a county in the spring of 1870, a mass meeting being held at Sweadal  Sweadal, the county seat thus selected, was located about one mile and a half southwest of the present site of Lindsborg  In September, however, the County Commissioners resolved to meet at the latter place, McPherson which had already been located some two years 

In April, 1873, a petition was filed for the county seat re-location  It was signed by 483 voters, and a special election was accordingly ordered for June 10  Upon that day, McPherson received 605 votes, New Gottland 325, King City 3 and Lindsborg 1; McPherson's majority over all, 276  In May the McPherson Town Company had offered, as an inducement for the location of the county seat at this point, the free use of rooms for ten years, and the donation of two squares of land on the town site  The offer was accepted the next month, the County Commissioners selecting blocks 56 and 65  Thus the county seat was established at McPherson and has remained since 

As early as 1875, city leaders of Marion held a meeting to consider a branch railroad from Florence  In 1878, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and parties from Marion County and McPherson County chartered the Marion and McPherson Railway Company   In 1879, a branch line was built from Florence to McPherson, in 1880 it was extended to Lyons, in 1881 it was extended to Ellinwood  The line was leased and operated by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway  The line from Florence to Marion, was abandoned in 1968  In 1992, the line from Marion to McPherson was sold to Central Kansas Railway  In 1993, after heavy flood damage, the line from Marion to McPherson was abandoned  The original branch line connected Florence, Marion, Canada, Hillsboro, Lehigh, Canton, Galva, McPherson, Conway, Windom, Little River, Mitchell, Lyons, Chase, then connected with the original AT&SF main line at Ellinwood 

In 1887, the Chicago, Kansas and Nebraska Railway extended its main line from Herington to Pratt   This main line connected Herington, Ramona, Tampa, Durham, Waldeck, Canton, Galva, McPherson, Groveland, Inman, Medora, Hutchinson, Whiteside, Partridge, Arlington,  Langdon, Turon, Preston, Natrona, Pratt   In 1888, this main line was extended to Liberal   Later, this line was extended to Tucumcari, New Mexico and Santa Rosa, New Mexico, where it made a connection with the Southern Pacific from El Paso, Texas   The Chicago, Kansas and Nebraska Railway was absorbed by the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway  This line is also called the "Golden State Route" 

20th century
The National Old Trails Road, also known as the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway, was established in 1912, and was routed through Windom, Conway, McPherson 

Geography

According to the U S  Census Bureau, the county has a total area of , of which  is land and  (0 3%) is water 

Adjacent counties
 Saline County (north)
 Dickinson County (northeast)
 Marion County (east)
 Harvey County (southeast)
 Reno County (southwest)
 Rice County (west)
 Ellsworth County (northwest)

Major highways
  Interstate 135
  U S  Route 56
  U S  Route 81
  K-4
  K-61
  K-153

Demographics

The McPherson Micropolitan Statistical Area includes all of McPherson County 

2000 census
As of the census of 2000, there were 29,554 people, 11,205 households, and 7,966 families residing in the county   The population density was 33 people per square mile (13/km2)   There were 11,830 housing units at an average density of 13 per square mile (5/km2)   The racial makeup of the county was 96 53% White, 0 81% Black or African American, 0 34% Native American, 0 32% Asian, 0 06% Pacific Islander, 0 79% from other races, and 1 16% from two or more races   1 94% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race  37 1% were of German, 12 9% Swedish, 12 1% American, 6 7% English and 6 3% Irish ancestry according to Census 2000 

There were 11,205 households, out of which 33 00% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 62 50% were married couples living together, 6 00% had a female householder with no husband present, and 28 90% were non-families  25 50% of all households were made up of individuals, and 11 80% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older   The average household size was 2 49 and the average family size was 2 99 

In the county, the population was spread out, with 25 40% under the age of 18, 10 30% from 18 to 24, 25 20% from 25 to 44, 21 80% from 45 to 64, and 17 30% who were 65 years of age or older   The median age was 38 years  For every 100 females there were 95 90 males   For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 92 90 males 

The median income for a household in the county was $41,138, and the median income for a family was $48,243  Males had a median income of $33,530 versus $21,175 for females  The per capita income for the county was $18,921   About 4 20% of families and 6 60% of the population were below the poverty line, including 5 20% of those under age 18 and 8 10% of those age 65 or over 

Government

Presidential elections
McPherson county is often carried by Republican candidates  The last time a Democratic candidate has carried this county was in 1964 by Lyndon B  Johnson 

Laws
Following amendment to the Kansas Constitution in 1986, the county remained a prohibition, or "dry", county until 1996, when voters approved the sale of alcoholic liquor by the individual drink with a 30 percent food sales requirement 

Education

Colleges
 McPherson College in McPherson
 Bethany College in Lindsborg
 Central Christian College in McPherson

Unified school districts
 Smoky Valley USD 400
 McPherson USD 418
 Canton-Galva USD 419
 Moundridge USD 423
 Inman USD 448

School district office in neighboring county
 Goessel USD 411
 Little River-Windom USD 444

Museums
 Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery in Lindsborg
 McCormick-Deering Days Museum in Inman
 McPherson Museum in McPherson
 Lindsborg Old Mill & Swedish Heritage Museum in Lindsborg
 Kansas Motorcycle Museum in Marquette

Communities

Cities

 Canton
 Galva
 Inman
 Lindsborg
 Marquette
 McPherson (county seat) 
 Moundridge
 Windom

Unincorporated communities
† means a Census-Designated Place (CDP) by the United States Census Bureau 
 Conway
 Elyria†
 Groveland
 Johnstown
 New Gottland
 Roxbury†

Ghost towns
 Alta Mills
 Battle Hill
 Christian
 Doles Park
 Elivon
 King City
 Sweadal

Townships
McPherson County is divided into twenty-five townships   The cities of Lindsborg and McPherson are considered governmentally independent and are excluded from the census figures for the townships   In the following table, the population center is the largest city (or cities) included in that township's population total, if it is of a significant size 

See also
 List of people from McPherson County, Kansas
 National Register of Historic Places listings in McPherson County, Kansas
 McPherson Valley Wetlands
 Maxwell Wildlife Refuge

References

Notes

Further reading

 Wheeler, Wayne Leland  "An Analysis of Social Change in a Swedish-Immigrant Community: The Case of Lindsborg, Kansas " (PhD dissertation, University of Missouri-Columbia; ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1959  5905657) 

County
 Through the Years: A Pictorial History of McPherson County; McPherson Sentinel' Heritage House Publishing Co; 1992 
 McPherson County First Courthouse Built About 1869 or 1870; Lindsborg News-Record; March 30, 1959 
 Pioneer Life and Lore of McPherson County, Kansas; Edna Nyquist; Democratic-Opinion Press; 1932 
 A History of the Church of the Brethren in Kansas (includes McPherson College history); Elmer LeRoy Craik; McPherson Daily; Republican Press; 397 pages; 1922 
 Portrait and Biographical Record of Dickinson, Saline, McPherson, and Marion Counties, Kansas; Chapman Bros; 614 pages; 1893 
 Standard Atlas of McPherson County, Kansas; Geo  A  Ogle & Co; 82 pages; 1921 
 Plat Book of McPherson County, Kansas; North West Publishing Co; 50 pages; 1903 
 Edwards' Atlas of McPherson County, Kansas; John P  Edwards; 51 pages; 1884 

Trails
 The Story of the Marking of the Santa Fe Trail by the Daughters of the American Revolution in Kansas and the State of Kansas; Almira Cordry; Crane Co; 164 pages; 1915  (Download 4MB PDF eBook)
 The National Old Trails Road To Southern California, Part 1 (LA to KC); Automobile Club Of Southern California; 64 pages; 1916  (Download 6 8MB PDF eBook)

Mennonite Settlements
 Impact of Mennonite settlement on the cultural landscape of Kansas; Brenda Martin; Kansas State University; 1985/1988  
 Mennonite settlement : the relationship between the physical and cultural environment; Susan Movle; University of Utah; 1975/1886 
 Status of Mennonite women in Kansas in their church and home relationships; Eva Harshbarger; Bluffton College; 1925/1945 

External links

County
 
 McPherson County - Directory of Public Officials
Historical
 , from Hatteberg's People'' on KAKE TV news
Maps
 McPherson County Maps: Current, Historic, KDOT
 Kansas Highway Maps: Current, Historic, KDOT
 Kansas Railroad Maps: Current, 1996, 1915, KDOT and Kansas Historical Society

 
Kansas counties
1867 establishments in Kansas
Populated places established in 1867



ground_truth: BERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA, GPT-2, and XLM-RoBERTa.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: Who is the county seat of McPherson County?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 4:  administration announced the establishment of the U S  Pentagon's Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, and exploit both the natural resources and the variegated peoples of the continent of Africa, the very cradle of our human species  This current bout of U S  imperialism is what Hans Morgenthau denominated "unlimited imperialism" in his seminal work Politics Among Nations (4th ed  1968, at 52-53): The outstanding historic examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler  They all have in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world  This urge will not be satisfied so long as there remains anywhere a possible object of domination--a politically organized group of men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror's lust for power  It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind…  On 10 November 1979 I visited with Hans Morgenthau at his home in Manhattan  It proved to be our last conversation before he died on 19 July 1980  Given his weakened physical but not mental condition and his serious heart problem, at the end of our necessarily abbreviated one-hour meeting I purposefully asked him what he thought about the future of international relations  iraqbbc newsgabriel gatehousethe new york timesjohn lelandhaaretzzvi bar'elthe jordan timestaylor luckthe associated pressjeff karoubthe los angeles timesraheem salmancnnjomana karadsheh
Terry thinks she's a man
Yesterday on NPR's Fresh Air the hour went to a male TV critic  It's always a man with Terry  Always  And somebody tell her that a snotty, snooty TV critic really doesn't make for good programming This is C I 's "Iraq snapshot:" Thursday, December 23, 2010  Chaos and violence continue, Iraqi women make clear their displeasure over the Cabinet make up, Daniel Ellsberg and Veterans for Peace get some recognition, and more  Last Thursday a protest held outside the White House  One of the organizers was Veterans for Peace and Pentagon Papers whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg participated and spoke  Juana Bordas (Washington Post) advocates for both of them to be named persons of the year: Veterans for Peace and Daniel Ellsberg should be this year's person of the year because of their courage and bravery to stand up for all of us who believe that "war is not the answer " Moreover in a time of economic recession, the war machine is bankrupting our country  As John Amidon, a Marine Corps veteran from Albany asked at the White House protest, "How is the war economy working for you?"While unemployment rates hover near 10 percent, there is no doubt that the U S  economy and quality of life is faltering  Worldwide we are 14th in education, 37th in the World Health Organization's ranking on medical systems, and 23rd in the U N  Environmental Sustainability Index on being most livable and greenest benefits  There is one place we take the undeniable world lead  The US military spending accounts for a whopping 46 5 percent of world military spending--the next ten countries combined come in at only 20 7 percent  Linda Pershing (Truthout) reports, "Responding to a call from the leaders of Stop These Wars(1) - a new coalition of Veterans for Peace and other activists - participants came together in a large-scale performance of civil resistance  A group of veterans under the leadership of Veterans for Peace members Tarak Kauff, Will Covert and Elaine Brower, mother of a Marine who has served three tours of duty in Iraq, sponsored the event with the explicit purpose of putting their bodies on the line  Many participants were Vietnam War veterans; others ranged from Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans in their 20s and 30s to World War II vets in their 80s and older  They were predominately white; men outnumbered women by at least three to one  After a short rally in Lafayette Park, they formed a single-file procession, walking across Pennsylvania Avenue to the solemn beat of a drum  As they reached the police barricade (erected to prevent them from chaining themselves to the gate, a plan they announced on their web site), the activists stood shoulder to shoulder, their bodies forming a human link across the 'picture postcard' tableau in front of the White House " Maria Chutchian (Arlington Advocate) quotes, participant Nate Goldshlag (Vietnam veteran) stating, ""There was a silent, single file march around Lafayette Park to a drum beat  Then we went in front of the White House,  There were barricades set up in front of white house fence  So when we got there, we jumped over barricades and were able to get right next to the White House fence " Participant Linda LeTendre (Daily Gazette) reports: At the end of the rally, before the silent, solemn procession to the White House fence, in honor of those killed in Iraq and Afghan wars of lies and deceptions, the VFP played taps and folded an American flag that had been left behind at a recent funeral for the veteran of one of those wars  Two attendees in full dress uniform held and folded the flag  I had the image of all of the people who stood along the roads and bridges when the bodies of the two local men, Benjamin Osborn and David Miller, were returned to the Capital District  I thought if all of those people were here now or spoke out against war these two fine young men might still be with us I was blessed enough to be held in custody with one of those in uniform; a wonderful young man who had to move from his hometown in Georgia because no one understood why as a veteran he was against these wars  Even his family did not understand  (He remains in my prayers )Our plan was to attach ourselves to the White House fence until President Obama came out and talked to us or until we were arrested and dragged away  I don't have to tell you how it ended Mr  Ellsberg was one of 139 people arrested at that action  We've noted the protest in pretty much every snapshot since last Thursday  If something else comes out that's worth noting on the protest, we'll include it  We will not include people who don't have their facts and it's really sad when they link to, for example, Guardian articles and the links don't even back them up  It's real sad, for example, when they're trashing Hillary (big strong men that they are) and ripping her apart and yet Barack? "Obama's inaccurate statements"??? What the hell is that? You're inferring he lied, say so  Don't be such a little chicken s**t  It's especially embarrasing when you're grandstanding on 'truth ' Especially when you're the little s**t that clogged up the public e-mail account here in the summer of 2008 whining that you were holding Barack to a standard, then admitting that you weren't, then whining that if you did people would be mean to you  Oh, that's sooooooo sad  Someone might say something bad about you  The horror  You must suffer more than all the people in Iraq and Afghanistan combined  While the action took place in DC, actions also took place in other cities  We've already noted NYC's action this week, Doug Kaufmann (Party for Socialism & Liberation) reports on the Los Angeles action: Despite heavy rain, over 100 people gathered in Los Angeles on the corner of Hollywood and Highland to demand an end to the U S  wars on Afghanistan and Iraq  People came from as far as Riverside to protest, braving what Southern California media outlets have dubbed the "storm of the decade " The demonstration, initiated and led by the ANSWER Coalition, broke the routine of holiday shopping and garnered support from activists and even passers by, who joined in chanting "Money for jobs and education -- not for war and occupation!" and "Occupation is a crime -- Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine!" Protesters held banners reading, "U S /NATO Out of Afghanistan!" and "Yes to jobs, housing and education -- no to war, racism and occupation!"Speakers at the demonstration included representatives of Korean Americans for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, KmB Pro-People Youth, Veterans for Peace, Party for Socialism and Liberation and National Lawyers Guild  Tuesday, Nouri al-Maliki managed to put away the political stalemate thanks to a lot of Scotch -- tape to hold the deal together and booze to keep your eyes so crossed you don't question how someone can claim to have formed a Cabinet when they've left over ten positions to be filled at a later date  One group speaking out is women  Bushra Juhi and Qassmi Abdul-Zahra (AP) report, "Iraq's female lawmakers are furious that only one member of the country's new Cabinet is a woman and are demanding better representation in a government that otherwise has been praised by the international community for bringing together the country's religious sects and political parties " As noted Tuesday, though represenation in Parliament is addressed in Iraq's Constitution, there is nothing to address women serving in the Cabinet  Aseel Kami (Reuters) notes one of the most damning aspects of Nouri's chosen men -- a man is heaing the Ministry of Women's Affairs  Iraqiya's spokesperson Maysoon Damluji states, "There are really good women who could do wel       they cannot be neglected and marginalized " Al-Amal's Hanaa Edwar states, "They call it a national (power) sharing government  So where is the sharing? Do they want to take us back to the era of the harem? Do they want to take us back to the dark ages, when women were used only for pleasure " Deborah Amos (NPR's All Things Considered) reports that a struggle is going on between secular impulses and fundamentalist ones  Gallery owner Qasim Sabti states, "We know it's fighting between the religious foolish man and the civilization man  We know we are fighting like Gandhi, and this is a new language in Iraqi life  We have no guns  We do not believe in this kind of fighting " Deborah Amos is the author of Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East  Meanwhile Nizar Latif (The National) reports that distrust is a common reaction to the new government in Baghdad and quotes high school teacher Hussein Abed Mohammad stating, "Promises were made that trustworthy, competent people would be ministers this time around, but it looks as if everything has just been divided out according to sectarian itnerests  No attention has been paid to forming a functioning government, it is just a political settlement of vested interests  I'm sure al Maliki will have the same problems in his next four years as he had in the last four years " Days away from the ten months mark, Nouri managed to finally end the stalemate  Some try to make sense of it and that must have been some office party that the editorial board of the Washington Post is still coming down from judging by "A good year in Iraq " First up, meet the new Iraqi Body Count -- an organization that provides cover for the war and allows supporters of the illegal war to point to it and insist/slur "Things aren't so bad!" Sure enough, the editorial board of the Post does just that noting the laughable "civilian deaths" count at iCasualities  As we noted -- long, long before we walked away from that crap ass website, they're not doing a civilian count  They're noting how many deaths Reuters reports 



ground_truth: McPherson.