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Cryptocurrency: The Good, The Bad, and the Future
6:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - Come learn about cryptocurrency--what it is, why it's always in the news, and how it effects you! Charles Finfrock is a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS), a Certified Bitcoin Professional, and an expert in cryptocurrency. Mr. Finfrock spent 18 years in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations conducting and leading clandestine operations overseas to collect foreign intelligence, run counterintelligence operations, and conducting covert action at the direction of the President. He joined CIA shortly before 9/11 and he spent the majority of his career in the Middle East and Europe. After leaving the CIA in January 2019, Mr. Finfrock joined Tesla as its first Insider Threat program manager. He developed Tesla’s corporate Insider Threat program and led its implementation of the Insider Threat program in North America, Europe, and China. He also also led Tesla’s global information security investigations program to respond to loss of confidential or proprietary information worldwide. Mr. Finfrock left Tesla in October 2021 to focus full time on a company he founded, Vigilance. Vigilance provides bespoke and discreet investigative and private intelligence and counterintelligence services to its clients.

Un/Masked: 2022 Symphony of Diversity
7:30 PM – CY Stephens Auditorium - The musical energies of the Americas are front and center at the third ISU presentation of the nationally known Symphony of Diversity. Venezuelan violinist Samuel Vargas, winner of the 2021 Sphinx National Competition for Black and Latino talent, will perform Florence Price's Concerto No. 2 for violin and orchestra in a concert that includes Baba Yetu, a setting of the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili and the first piece of music written for a video game to win a Grammy Award. The second half of the program features the choral-orchestral work Illuminare by Des Moines composer Elaine Hagenburg, and Arturo Márquez’s raucous Danzón No. 2. More than half the music on the concert by duration features music by visible minorities, and more than half of the music on the concert by duration features music by women. About Symphony of Diversity: Symphony of Diversity is a nationally noted orchestral performance series that celebrates, illuminates, and commemorates a history of human rights encompassing both of triumphs and tragedies. Conceived and curated by Jonathan Govias, Director of Orchestral Activities at Iowa State University, the concerts are rooted in the ideal that the world itself is a symphony of diversity to be experienced, and unfearingly address current social issues through both contemporary and historical musical lenses. Past guests have included one-handed virtuoso violinist Adrian Anantawan, transgender pianist Sara Davis Buechner, and indigenous rights activist Sarain Fox. The first iteration took place in Charlotte, NC in April 2017, with the sixth and most recent concert presented in April 2021 in Ames, IA. Over the years the concerts have generated unprecedented media interest and publicity for the activities of a university orchestra, for the artistic as much as the social merits of the concerts.

To Save America, Wokeness Must Be Destroyed
7:00 PM – Stephens Auditorium - This event is free, open to the public, and does not require a ticket for entrance. Doors open at 6pm. ISU students will have the first 500 seats reserved until 6:40pm; show your ISU student ID at the SE or SW Tower doors to enter. The general public may enter through the North Doors. No bags will be permitted. Small bags for medical supplies and diaper bags will be permitted but will be searched before entry. No picket signs, banners, or other materials that could block views or be used as a weapon will be permitted. The event will be live-streamed and recorded. Links will be provided as they become available. Ben Shapiro is founding editor-in-chief and editor emeritus of The Daily Wire and host of "The Ben Shapiro Show," the top conservative podcast in the nation. Shapiro is the author of numerous nonfiction books, including The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Courage Made the West Great, Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America, and How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps. Shapiro was hired by Creators Syndicate at age 17 to become the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the U.S. He earned a BA in Political Science from UCLA in 2004 and graduated from Harvard Law School in 2007. After working as an attorney for Goodwin Procter LLP, Shapiro began his own legal consulting firm, Benjamin Shapiro Legal Consulting (Los Angeles). This event is sponsored in part by the Young America’s Foundation’s Fred and Lynda Allen Series.

The Unabomber Investigation Revisited
7:00 PM – Campanile Room, Memorial Union - Retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent James R. Fitzgerald will discuss his role in the identification and arrest of Theodore J. Kaczynski, aka, the Unabomber, in April of 1996. "Fitz" will describe how forensic linguistics, the science of language within the legal system, proved to be a pivotal factor in the eventual resolution of the 17 year-long serial bomber case. This talk will be open to the public and there will be an opportunity to purchase books and receive a signed copy. James R. "Fitz" Fitzgerald remains an active criminal profiler and forensic linguist with his company, James R. Fitzgerald Associates, LLC, even after retiring in 2007 with 20 years in the FBI as a Supervisory Special Agent, along with 11 years before that as a police officer/detective/sergeant on the Bensalem Township police department in Pennsylvania. During his extensive and varied law enforcement career he successfully investigated numerous homicides, sexual assaults, kidnappings, bank robberies, and other violent crimes, as well as matters of international notoriety to include the Unabom, Jon Benet Ramsey, Anthrax, and DC Sniper cases as a profiler and/or a forensic linguist.

Listening to the "Noise" in Data
7:30 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - Listening to the "Noise" in the Data: The Critical Importance of Individual Differences in Second-Language Speech 2022 Quentin Johnson Lecture in Linguistics Like much other research in the social sciences, studies in applied linguistics often compare the “average” behaviour of groups of language learners on such dimensions as proficiency, fluency and intelligibility. A great deal of attention is devoted to theoretical model-building, in which investigators identify predictive variables that capture L2 learners’ performance as closely as possible. Despite the benefits of that pursuit, researchers often pay insufficient attention to variability in the data that doesn’t readily fit theoretical models, and to treat it as uninteresting noise. In this presentation, I discuss the negative consequences of attending too little to learner differences. Through a review of old and new data, I show that close inspection of individual trajectories in L2 speech acquisition is essential not only to a full understanding of the acquisition process, but also to the development of effective pedagogical practices. This requires more than simply classifying learners into increasingly narrow subgroups. Dr. Munro completed his Ph.D. under the supervision of Terrance Nearey. He was also a SSHRC Post-doctoral Fellow in James Flege’s speech lab at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. His chief area of interest is Applied Phonetics, with a focus on the perception and production of speech by second language learners. Together with his colleague Tracey Derwing (University of Alberta), he carries out research on speech intelligibility, fluency, foreign accent, and oral language development in Canadian immigrants. Their work has been extensively supported by SSHRC and has appeared in such journals as Applied Linguistics, Journal of Phonetics, Language and Speech, Language Learning, Speech Communication, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

The Money Game
6:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - There is a game that we all play with money, and at any given point in time in our lives, we’re either winning or losing. The problem is, most students are never taught the rules of how to play the game. Play by the rules, and it’s entirely possible to be completely financially free by your early 30s. Make the rules up as you go and you’re bound to be relying on someone else for your financial well-being into old age. You CAN have everything you want in life--The Money Game will show you how! You'll walk away with practical, actionable ways to win the game you're currently playing with money. Adam Carroll is an internationally recognized financial literacy expert and author of Winning The Money Game, 30 Days To $1K, and Mastery of Money for Students. He is a two-time TED talk speaker, with one of his talks surpassing 5 million views. He is the creator of the Broke, Busted & Disgusted documentary which has been played in hundreds of high schools and colleges, and is featured on CNBC and available on itunes. He is the founder and curator of www.MasteryOfMoney.com, and a contributor to the Huffington Post. Adam has presented at over 750 college and university campuses, hundreds of leadership symposiums, and countless local and regional events. His passion is helping people build a bigger life, not a bigger lifestyle.

Dare to Speak, Dare to Listen: Protecting Free Speech on the Frontlines
6:00 PM – WebEx (see below) - WebEx Link: https://bit.ly/3pgM0nQ The guarantee of free speech is essential to any well-functioning democracy, and yet here in the United States free speech is losing its moorings on both the right and the left, with mounting encroachments on open discourse in schools, universities, the news, media and online. Meanwhile pitched battles are taking place over words, ideas, books, historical interpretations, posts and tweets. In an increasingly polarized America, free speech defenders seem to be increasingly selective, crying out when their rights are encroached upon, but often going mum when the silencing targets the other side. This talk will lay out a blueprint for how we can live together in a diverse, digitized and divided society without resorting to curbs on free speech. Suzanne Nossel currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of PEN America, the leading human rights and free expression organization, and she is author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All. Since joining in 2013, she has doubled the organization’s staff, budget, and membership, spearheaded the unification with PEN Center USA in Los Angeles and the establishment of a Washington, D.C. office, and overseen groundbreaking work on free expression in Hong Kong and China, Myanmar, Eurasia, and the United States. She is a leading voice on free expression issues in the United States and globally, writing and being interviewed frequently for national and international media outlets. Her prior career spanned government service and leadership roles in the corporate and nonprofit sectors. She has served as the Chief Operating Officer of Human Rights Watch and as Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. During the first term of the Obama Administration, Nossel served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, where she led U.S. engagement in the United Nations and multilateral institutions, on human rights and humanitarian issues.

Move Over Free Speech: Exercising Your Right to Protest
12:00 PM – Campanile room, Memorial Union - Freedom of speech gets all the attention when it comes to the First Amendment, but we also have the right to object. In this session, we’ll explore the right of the people peaceably to assemble: what it means and how it works, especially when responding to provocative speakers on campus. Panelists Amanda Knief, J.D., director of ISU Lectures Program Carrie Jacobs, assistant chief, ISU Police Moderator: Julie Roosa, J.D., Greenlee First Amendment specialist

The Future of Agriculture
7:00 PM – Curtiss Hall - Craig Hill, Iowa farmer and former president of the Iowa Farm Bureau, has been serving agriculture for several decades. He was elected president of the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation in December 2011, a position he held for a decade before retiring last December. Throughout Hill’s years in agricultural leadership, he served as the first chairman of the Iowa Ag State Group, which consisted of representatives from all sectors of Iowa’s agriculture. He was instrumental in the development of the leading revenue-based crop insurance product sold in America.

From Jazz Ambassadors to the Simpsons: How Cultural Diplomacy Breaks Political Barriers and Stereotypes
6:00 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - Cultural diplomacy is an intercultural sharing that appeals directly to the citizens of different nations through the work of musicians, dancers, artists, writers and filmmakers. It has been, and continues to be, an important part of public understanding between the people of the United States and Russia. The objective of this lecture is to illustrate how, over the years, cultural diplomacy has played an invaluable role in bringing the people of both nations together by helping break down stereotypes, produce better understanding and to build a common humanity. Maria Lvova is the Program Officer for Education, Exchanges, & Community Building with the US Russia Foundation; she provides guidance to applicants and monitors and evaluates USRF programs in the areas of Russian and American Studies, and Civil Society. Lvova was previously an editor and producer for Voice of America’s Russian Service, where she translated, edited, and produced materials for the VoA’s Russian Service website and social media platforms.