Welcome. I'm Glenn Vanderburg.
Like James, I've spoken at every one of these conferences,
although I actually made it in person last year.
but that's ok because I didn't have a baby
being born that weekend.
I didn't know what James was going to talk about, and because
I was really bad about getting my topic and abstract to Jim on time,
James didn't know what I was going to talk about.
And I joked with him earlier, two years ago,
he spoke right after me, and he said
"Wow,I have to get up here and talk and
follow Dave Thomas and Glenn Vanderburg. That's tough."
So now turnabout's fair play
and I knew I'd have to get up here and follow James.
I could not have asked for a better set up though, because
my talk is really nicely complementary to what James was trying to say.
James was talking about science, and
science is what you do.
I'm going to talk more about the thinking aspects of it:
how you evaluate the evidence that's in front of you
and how you reason through things
and draw conclusions
and how you go ahead and get work done
and make decisions when you don't have good evidence right now
and things like that.
Like James, I am a skeptic.
Unlike James, I am a Christian.
Some of you, in this room, I would wager,
would think those are a contradiction in terms.
I say that by way of full disclosure
not that this is a religious talk at all,
but if you choose to ignore everything I say
based on that, go ahead.
Anyway, the talk is called 'Misunderstanding'
and it's the first in a series of talks I plan to do
that are named after good old Genesis [the band] songs.