If you can play an instrument or paint a picture, you're considered creative. If you can figure out how to get a big stone to the top of a pyramid, you're also considered creative. Is it the same kind of creativity? We have a chance to find out. Southern Oregon University hosts another Creativity Conference , starting July 11th. Speakers and sessions deal with creativity in many forms and for many uses.

The people we meet in our Stories of Southern Oregon segment mostly worked the land: farmers, timber workers, miners. There are certainly not as many people working the land as there once were. Flo Bohnert has one of those stories to tell; she and her husband Don farmed land near Central Point that came into the city's urban growth boundary and has since been developed. She shares her story in the studio.

It's a scary thought: how different would the world be if the Nazis had developed a nuclear weapon first? We'll never know. But we do have the ability to learn more about the covert operation by the Allies designed to disrupt the German nuke-building project. Science writer Sam Kean visits The Exchange for a fourth time to tell the story, as told in his book The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb .

Richard Nixon was a new president and men walked on the moon in the first year of what became the Oregon Country Fair . Nixon and moon walks are both long gone, but the Country Fair is going strong. The 50th anniversary celebration brings OCF back to the woods near Veneta on the weekend of July 12th, with food, fun, and music, including Grateful Dead veteran Phil Lesh.

There are still people who spend their summers on mountaintop perches, scanning the horizon for wildfires. But lookouts staffed by live humans have largely been replaced with remote cameras. And networks of cameras are being combined into a system called ALERTWildfire , a joint project of the University of Oregon and several other schools and agencies. It bears some resemblance to the ShakeAlert system for earthquake early warnings. And the two programs share some people, including Leland O

We've reached a point where there is widespread knowledge of harassment and bullying in the workplace. But does that mean we are working to eliminate bad behaviors? Not everywhere, says Lauren Stiller Rikleen, lawyer/mediator/author. She points out the workplace culture issues that often perpetuate bullying and harassment in her latest book The Shield of Silence . Step one: break the silence that prevents people from speaking up about workplace transgressions.

First Friday is a day to celebrate the arts on the Jefferson Exchange. But the Independence Day holiday presents a minor obstacle: we're not working on Friday, July 5th. So our monthly First Friday Arts segment becomes, for July only, First Wednesday Arts! We send out the usual invitations to arts organizations throughout the region: call 800-838-3760 to tell us about the musical or theatrical or gallery events in your town in July.

Just about every country on the planet has its own distinctive style of dance. Charya Burt works in the style of her native country, Cambodia. Cambodian music and culture are presented at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this year in the play "Cambodian Rock Band," and Charya Burt Cambodian Dance plays the Green Show stage at OSF July 4th and 6th. The piece to be presented honors the memory of the singer Ros Sereysothea, who died while the Khmer Rouge held power in Cambodia.

This week we celebrate the events in Philadelphia in the sticky summer of 1776. But those events would not have been possible without the sacrifices of men and women who believed in something other than long-distance rule from England. Rick Atkinson, who won a Pulitzer prize for his work on World War II, turns his attention to much earlier battles in The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 . The book is the first installment of a planned trilogy.

We're still half a year away from 2020, but preparation pays off in conducting the census of the United States. Parts of the country identified as hard-to-count even have their own acronym, HTC. And California contains several hard-to-count areas, including some rural areas in the northern part of the state. California Complete Count is putting state resources to work in ensuring an accurate census.