Changing the Collective Mindset, remarks by John C. Brown at the 2012 ARL Fall Forum, convened by Susan Gibbons. So good morning, my name is Susan Gibbons. I am the University Librarian at Yale University, and I have the honor of starting our session this morning called Changing the Collective Mindset. And it is my pleasure to start our session and to introduce John C. Lee Brown, or JSB, as he likes to be called. The program's description includes a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince, which is quite fitting, we think, for this morning's session on change. It says, There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Today, research libraries are struggling and endeavoring to make sense of the change in our higher education organizations. When it comes to making deep changes in our libraries, we're forced to consider what is pushing us, what is pulling us, and in what direction. What does it mean to create deep change, and why do we need to do this? What does it mean for our library workforce to bring it back to the HR focus of this entire session? So JSB is going to help us today by exploring the challenges that we're facing, by helping us to test our assumptions, and by getting us to think differently about the future. Now in the package, you have the full bio of JSB, but let me give you a few highlights of his career. He is currently the independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center of the Edge, and a visiting scholar and advisor to the provost of the University of Southern California. Prior to those two roles, he was chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox Park, a position he held for nearly two decades. JSB is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, a fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, and of the American Association of Advancement of Science, and a trustee of the MacArthur Foundation. So the fact that he has time to join us today is really quite remarkable. He is a co-author of the book, The Social Life of Information, which I really think needs to be a required reading for all of us, and if you haven't read it, I highly recommend you do so. His current book is The New Culture of Learning, co-authored with Professor Doug Thomas at USC, which was released in January of 2011. And the last piece I want to point out about his career is that while at Xerox Park, he helped to develop what I refer to as the Work Practice Study, and I hope that's the right way to refer to it. In other words, going into work environments, study how people do work, and then think about how you could create new services or new systems to improve that work environment. The first place that they went was to Cornell Library and looked at their preservation department, and then they went to RIT and looked at their slide library. And if this sounds familiar, it's because that was the methodology that the University of Rochester then adopted and hired an anthropologist, and for the last nine years has been using the anthropologist to study library users and to think about the modification. So I was formerly at the University of Rochester and I owe a huge intellectual debt to the work of John C. Lee Brown, and I think my career has really had a different trajectory as a result of it, so I'm very much indebted to him. So it is a great honor today to introduce JSB to you, and I'll invite him up to the podium. I'm not quite sure why Xerox originally hired me, but I was kind of a hardcore geek, and I had the wonderful opportunity to suggest that the problems facing the 21st century were not primarily technological, but primarily social. And so I changed the people we were hiring from being only physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists to then bringing up a whole new set of people, sociologists, anthropologists, actually philosophers, believe it or not, and an artist.  So I do want to talk about change. I'm hardly an expert on change, but being at the cutting edge of modern technologies and their uses, you can't help but discover some secrets along the way. So if you wanted an organizational theorist, you probably got the wrong person, but I can tell you a lot of war stories and some kind of bigger ideas we're now working on in terms of mammoth change, almost how do you change entire ecosystems as opposed to just standalone institutions. I was also saying as I got up here that we're in an interesting world because I work a lot in, right now, in big data, one field, and obviously things related to schools of information. And I have to say that if there's a war for talent, you guys are it. If you actually look at schools of information, I'm finding, I don't know, you have a couple of deans of schools of information sitting here, I think, the ones I'm looking at basically are being paid, kids coming out of these schools, are being paid about 10% more than coming out of hardcore computer science. And I believe everyone I know is getting hired. So the war for talent is on, especially in the fields that you have to think about, which I'm sure is going to be an interesting topic in its own right, maybe later on today. So let's get on with this. I want to kind of briefly go over our context and then talk about what this might all mean. I'm arguing that, in fact, perhaps for the, maybe dramatically speaking, the first time in the history of civilization, but at least for the last 300 years, we are actually experiencing something civilization has never seen before, which is one of the reasons why we're all struggling one way or another. That's to say that almost all infrastructural change in the past, road systems, steam boats, railroad, cars, airplanes, et cetera, et cetera, have a very interesting property. There's a period in which they're first invented and then there's a sharp kind of exponential period for brief moments of time when they make their transition into reality. And then once they kind of get distributed, then they stay there relatively unchanged for 50, 60, 70, 80 years. There are long periods of relative stability and this period of long stability is when we reinvent the social practices, the work practices, et cetera, the take advantage of this technology. So for example, cars, actually it's somewhat of a specialty of mine for other reasons, have not really changed in 50 or 60 or 70 years. That first change is about to happen in terms of Google's autonomous driven vehicles, but basically cars are the same, airplanes are surprisingly the same, the roads in this country seem to be decreasing. But these infrastructural changes, you do go through this kind of moment of electrification in the United States around the turn of the century, the last century. There's this brief period of everything that shakes them up and then things stabilize out. So people that keep saying we've never seen so much change, that's actually wrong. We often see jumps of tremendous change. The catch is it's followed by really long periods of stability in which we all have a chance to catch our breath, reinvent who we are, so on and so forth. Then something happened. School's information came along now. Something happened. And what actually happened is we suddenly shifted from the era of S-curves driving infrastructural change, underlying infrastructural change to a period in which now our infrastructures are basically being driven by something called digital, in which basically the digital technologies, the infrastructures of course more than technologies, we can come back to that if you want, but the digital world appears to be on a relentless, exponential curve. Now I say relentless because those of you with a physicist here know that we can't push some of the Moore's laws more than probably another five years. But let me tell you, it's not going to stop. This exponential law is going to take on new forms, computer architectures, ways of running these machines, stringing these machines together on so on and so forth, that are going to continue this path for the foreseeable future. I'm talking 20, 30, 40 years. I actually do some work on quantum computers, which provide a jump of another factor of 1,000 to 10,000 on what we're currently used to and so on and so forth. So this ain't going to change, I think. And therefore, we have this sense that now, about every 18 months or so, the technology is going to potentially double in capabilities. And you folks, better than almost anyone, know that Moore's laws are relentless in terms of what this exponential curve means, but data is faster than Moore's law. Data is increasing faster than Moore's law, which technically means we don't know how to handle it. If data was exploding at about the same speed of Moore's law, then we'd be able to say, oh, we'll just use bigger computers, faster computers, and they'll take care of our problem. But it's not working out quite that way. Data is exploding even faster. We know how we think we know how to handle that, and we can talk about that later if you want, but this is a kind of an arms race, so to speak, between compute power and big data. And that's pretty, for those of us in this game, it's a pretty interesting set of tensions. But what I want to argue much more to the social practice game, et cetera, et cetera, is we're entering a world because of these exponential changes on the underlying infrastructures is that the half-life of a given skill has shifted from when I grew up. Basically, I thought that I could be trained in X, and that skill would probably last 40 years, something like that. Now we're down to about five years, half-skill. Think about it. The skills happen to be completely refurbished every five or so years. Obviously, there are a few things that do matter, critical thinking is more than a skill, but the fact is that we're now in a world in which we're constantly having to refresh our own skills. And guess what? There's no way that you're going to be able to refresh your skills by going back to college, universities, because universities can't handle this kind of flux. If you listen to Sir John Daniels, we're already one university per week behind the game in terms of being able to get universities to educate all the people in the world in terms of the skills that are needed. But more importantly, in this kind of relentless change and this kind of half-life of skills shrinking is we have to kind of maybe change completely our eyeglasses. The shift from thinking about basically stocks of assets, collections, money, whatever, in terms of basically we used to think about how do we kind of deal with kind of efficient ways to handle these relatively fixed assets to now a world of it's not so much the assets of matter, it's how do you participate in the flows. And this shift from stocks to flows or this shift from a world of push where I could determine ahead of time all the skills you need and then educate you in a highly efficient way called mass teaching into a world of flows which basically you have to participate in those flows, you have to be able to pull your assets, you pull your knowledge from those flows and then reinvent yourself every few years or so. This is a different game. But in fact, you folks and all folks see it in a different way. Not only is everything I just said more or less true, but we also come out of a very strange world in which as you know, the genres emerge as negotiations in practice between readers and writers. And it takes often a decade or more for that negotiation to stabilize out into a fixed genre and those genres remain relatively fixed and those notions of what constitutes a genre determines how you do collections, how you do cultivation of those collections and all kinds of other things like that. Well, that game has also changed. It's a very core of your business. No longer are genres fixed by large. They're becoming excessively fluid. And these things like transmedia are coming up into action now. Well, let me tell you, I work in transmedia. That game is changing about every year. What it even means is changing. Just read Henry Jenkins' book on the participatory cultures. You will see how fast this is changing. So we have a different game now in terms of how do you actually stay ahead of these fluid genres. And I was really struck by a colleague up at Berkeley, Carla Hesseb, Carla Hesseb, on what she thinks of, actually we both do, in terms of what I'm going to call basically an epistemological shift. Let me read what she says. Quote, knowledge is no longer that which is contained in a space, but that which passes through it like a series of vectors, each having direction and duration yet without precise location or limit. In the future it seems there will be no fixed canons of text, no fixed epistemological boundaries between disciplines, modes of integration and moments of encounter. The moments of encounter is a critical notion in terms of this notion of negotiation in practice between readers and writers. These moments of encounter are excessively fluid. That's the world everyone in this room works in. That's pretty daunting if you go to the root of what that really does mean. And that again comes from this exponential march in terms of the infrastructures underlying this. I said differently, the challenges I think we face are both fundamental, I guarantee you they're fundamental and substantial. We have moved from an era of equilibrium to a new normal, not a new economic normal, that's arguable, of constant disequilibrium. And I think it is safe to say our ways of working, our ways of creating value, our ways of innovating, our ways of learning, our ways of teaching now must all be reframed. That question of that reframing is a challenge we all have. But you know, we've seen this before a little bit. We've survived maybe. Let's look at this. I think we're going to argue this time that our job is going to be harder than we've ever thought before. Because now, in this world of fundamental fluidity where we have the epistemological shifts that Carla was talking about, we must now step back and not just pick up new skills, which most of us are pretty skilled at by now. But we must also think about how do we change our mindsets. The curious thing is if we have to change our eyeglasses, most of us are unaware, even if we wear glasses at one way or another. We look at the world through a set of lenses.  I've had no practice in changing lenses. I've had all kinds of practice in changing what I know, how do I interpret things through the lens, how do I do it myself? I think the challenge we have before us is actually re-grinding lenses and maybe we have to continue to be able to re-grind these lenses. Let me show you kind of historically an example of how easy it is to get into a rut, not challenge certain background assumptions and maybe to fall into what I'm going to call kind of the competency trap. Because basically as we get better and better at something within a particular paradigm, with a particular skill set we actually, as we get better, we have a hard time seeing new patterns. I just want to show you historically a dramatic example of how once you get really good, you can think you can keep pushing that boundary further and further and further and you become in some ways excessively more blind to a new pattern that you should actually think about shifting to. So I want to go back to the 1880s, the era of the famous clipper ships. Here was one of the most impressive clipper ships there ever was in the 1880s. What it could carry was fast, furious, huge. It was the king of the ships in those days. But guess what was happening? There was a clunky thing called the steamship coming along. And the steamship was kind of starting to kind of edge up on what the clipper ships could do. And so they built the Grand Levalin to kind of put that race to rest. But alas, the steamship kept marching along. But fear not, the good engineers said, we know what to do. We'll build the France too. And if you compute the number of sailors in the sail area, this is impressive. And everybody felt good. But I think you gathered guess what happened? The steamship got even better. And the engineers and the capitalists and the crowds said, don't worry, we know what to do.  I may build the prusa. And this amount of sail area, this thing was awesome. It cost per ton per mile. Lower and lower. Things look really good. But the story, of course, continues. And lo and behold, oh, the Thomas W. Lawson was crafted. This is really an impressive ship. And actually, this one now is shifted to a steel hull, so it's going to be really robust as well. And on this maiden voyage, on Friday December the 13th, I think they should have chosen a different day, but on Friday December the 13th in 1907 it went on this Virgin voyage launching off of England. And it got maybe 100 miles when the storm blew up. And they couldn't maneuver around the storm. And it crashed into a set of rocks and sank. And curiously, completely unlike corporate America, strangely enough everybody died except the CEO. I mean, part of the captain. I kid you not. I don't know how he was the only person to say but he was. Check it out in Google. This was kind of in winds of like 60 knots it lost control of the boat. And that basically was the end of the clipper ship industry. And the world now switched to move to steamships. That was the kind of thing that happened over like a 40 year period to basically have to reinvent the very notion of what a ship was and to move substantially with a completely different kind of technology. I think we can conclude as this little example shows that competency traps can often rain supreme. And we have to think about this each in our own particular way. I can tell you later on lots of my own stories about trapped in competency traps. But I think there's something that we all I think share one way or another here. There is a great challenge not only our own beliefs but then how do we change our institution's belief. And I like to think about that when I first went to Xerox Park I actually tried to convince the corporation that we should hire anthropologists rather than hard core computer scientists. Fortunately I was a computer scientist so I could have some credibility making that argument.  Because how do you create action? How do you bring about change? So let me just say if you think about that a lot most of us throw up our hands if you deal with architects as I do say e-gads we don't know how to do this. But bear with me let me stumble along we can all stumble along maybe some personal examples and then some more general principles especially in terms of the broader approaches that brings me to Washington in terms of even bigger sets of changes we're trying to pull off right now. I said most simply and everyone here kind of already intuitively knows this part of the catch of trying to capture somebody's attention and what to pull them through a change is how do you actually design kind of evocative experiences beyond the cognitive you never talk somebody through a change of religion giving up an old skill set to pick up a new skill set so how do you think about this how do you create experiences that capture their imagination pull them along talk to their emotions let them kind of engage in the gut and so on and so forth and it's not too surprising to this group that narratives turn out to be pretty damn important because narratives actually go beyond the cognitive although we could probably argue that let's show you one example that where we used the narrative to bring about an extremely major change in the corporation and how we did that this is in the early 80s actually it started happening in Rochester we designed kind of like the mother of all clipperships the mother of all Xerox copiers the end was the famous 8200 machine which is an awesome machine three levels of Ethernet built inside of it 30 processors an AI machine that would diagnose it I mean it was amazing it went through all the user tests everybody including the CEO could figure out how to use this machine it did huge copying jobs by the way it's going like 60 pages a minute and duplex and blah blah blah blah I know it sounds pretty simple today but in the 80s it wasn't we put it in the market and we lost something like a billion dollars that's a lot of money back then in Washington they say what that was last year how could that happen how could it go through all the user tests and nobody pick up anything and couldn't it be fixed so on and so forth so they gave us the machine at Xerox park I was just coming there we had the Lucy suspense group but we had like six anthropologists at that time so we'll kind of figure out what's going on here we may have to invent our own methodology to do that because obviously the machine never would have been turned out this bad if somehow the academic community had given us the right practices to look at user science that was failing so what we did is we put this little machine it wasn't a huge machine kind of in this room and without anybody for free you could use it you only use it if you have huge computer jobs and copy jobs but we made one restriction you had to use it with somebody else you could only use this machine if there were two of you using it and you had to be willing to let us constantly run the table the video recorder and of course what happens completely contrary to how anybody did use the testing in those days it's with two of you there you start swapping ideas about what the hell you're supposed to do with the machine jam what this instruction actually meant and so these wild conversations what happened and what you recorded video and we discovered a lot I won't bore you with all that many books now written on this topic I'm on this example actually we knew we had a serious problem at this point we thought we'd have to pull the machine out of the market and basically design it from scratch again leading somewhat to what machines you probably know is called the docutex but how to get the corporate office to kind of go through the belief that we had built a billion dollar baby that nobody wanted and so we took and we crafted one of the tapes of these two folks struggling to understand something about this machine took it to the to the board room played it for the directors of the corporate officers and about halfway through this like eight minute interchange one of the people slams his fist down and says come on brown let's get those guys off the loading dock didn't you and I say well actually no you might not recognize but this is over here one of the most famous professors of artificial intelligence ever to graduate and actually a university research professor at a small place called CMU and this is Ron Kaplan over here who is probably the father of computational linguistics these are just two normal people trying to use this ridiculous machine and they look at you and they say we got a problem don't you so yeah you got a serious problem and by the way just capturing that one story changed everything so it was kind of a cute little example of every once in a while the right narrative can do this amount of work for you unfortunately those narratives don't happen very often this was so much stage I mean we have to admit that we did recordings about three months before we got this key story but you know I have to change a corporation as big as Xerox they thought that they knew everything they did about competency of how to build one kind of machine they was going to be very hard to convince them to the difference so let's talk more now about bringing about more systemic change inside your organization and systemic change is something which is not just a question how do you do once which is the S-curve world would be sufficient but rather how do you actually think about transitioning into systemic change of constant systemic changes how do you move from transition to transitioning to constant transitioning and that is kind of the whole notion of how do we now have to build new types of institutional architectures to use a fancy word that are fundamentally agile and we all know that in fact that curve I put up was a technology curve technology again is not infrastructure but actually if you look what's really happening is from an infrastructure point of view there are kind of small moves in terms of building new skill sets, new social practices new needed services etc etc that you try to install hopefully before they become obsolete but in fact in this world these little S-curves that make up this exponential curve have about an 18 month lifespan that is terrifying personally speaking you know just the last three of those bumps where I had to go through myself I'm a hardcore computer scientist been trained pretty well by the way in the predecessors school of information at Michigan but you know I was kind of knew a lot about kinds of architectures and then had to relearn everything around cloud computing and then had to relearn everything about how do we really run what I call big data in terms of a dupe architectures I put tens of thousands of small disks and tens of thousands of computers in front of those disks and then how do I actually understand how to use GPUs graphic processing units that come into these like $500 game sets how do you take that processor and actually build a super computer out of it that's a fundamentally non von Neumann machine and everything back up here was about Neumann machine I had to kind of completely relearn everything to do that we build actually some of our best super computers today with that kind of technology but in fact that's just the last six years those are the fundamental changes I personally have to go through and I have a pretty good network that's willing to kind of help me because we do most of our learning through peer based networks these days but that sense of this kind of change is decidedly kind of non trivial and in fact that kind of underlies what I consider to be you back that up a little bit to the real challenge I had running Xerox PARC Xerox PARC we had about 250 300 PhD researchers now including the anthropologists et cetera et cetera and the catch was when I kind of inherited running this operation in the early 80s how do you get researchers who are not used to taking instructions very well and in fact they're probably worse than full professors because we had no soft funding everything was kind of guaranteed us ahead of time we were paid 90% of our salary came from Xerox PARC you know how do you actually think about this and given that the exponential career I was talking about was already showing its nasty head back then it didn't get full force until I would say this century but nevertheless this issue of constant change was upon us so when we took it over I became very much aware and that not only did Xerox have to change a lot how it was doing things but we researchers had to change a lot so the first problem I find is I could beautifully characterize how much the world has changed and they would say you know John is really poetic I'm so glad that the world has changed but that's not for us in fact I had the disadvantage that in those days those of you back in those era Xerox PARC was probably the highest flying and considered probably the best research group in the world I actually think Bell Labs and IBM are equally good but the press like us and so almost without fail any one of the laboratories in my center the heads of those laboratories and various researchers there in compounding on my door saying you know John don't you know we're the best we don't need to change you get that message often enough you kind of wonder what are you going to do well it turned out that that was a really interesting challenge to be given by these folks because what you can do is turn that whole thing around and say we're all researchers right all academics in some sense we're not just spouting a ping in we're supposed to have empirical proof of things how do you know you're the best how do you know you're still the best and if you're still the best how do you know you can't even be better and it turned out that framed that way these folks got actually engaged with how would you build a metric a measurement system that was attuned to their sensibilities their value system but I would actually prove categorically that they were producing more value than anybody else and couldn't produce any more value and that turned out to be kind of a very reflective and very powerful move we turned this all this thing around any time I would create a change metric you would see what the number of papers don't count and the number of grants you bring in don't count and the number of patterns you know if you break John the company patterns you create the company doesn't count so on and so forth any measurement you come up with isn't going to work so it's an interesting issue to turn this whole game inside out and see oh hey guys let's see it so the game here was to turn this thing into kind of a meta research project to see if they could actually discover for themselves the truly legitimate measures that actually measured something and that they would buy into that by the way opened up the conversation space unbelievably and it turned out to be a pretty interesting reflective experience for a year or so but then the next thing we wanted to do because there were really those exponential curves coming along starting kind of the year long process getting folks in the lab out to kind of seriously look at who were the folks that were doing true breakout research now after the fact five years after the fact it's pretty easy to see that this was like 1990 we're talking about here nanotechnology wasn't even a term that was being used back then let alone how do you build atomically precise machines out of nano structures at the atomic level that turned out to be by visiting two or three laboratories around the world getting these kids to get out there we kind of realized that people were starting to ask questions we didn't even know about and from that easily come back and start people start saying like should we actually get into this field and some of you may or may not know that we were probably the first ones into this country nanotechnology to try to kind of build a new kind of material science that was kind of another very simple change was actually asking researchers when they go out we all go out and we love to talk we feel good about it well the smallest tiny change saying go out and give talks blah blah blah build a reputation blah blah blah feel good blah blah blah but when you come back I want to hear from each one of you a small little one page report on what you personally learned from that experience and that actually started opening up their ability to listen and to kind of try to distill distill what was really going on the biggest change because as you know because most of you come from universities college students tend to be pretty much graduate students at least pretty much on the cutting edge they are often even ahead of the faculty in terms of picking up the wind of what's really going to turn out to be important and so I started very ambitious basically 50 intern summer program we've been in 50 interns from around the universities actually the world of the most came from the United States but that's not too unusual it was a little tiny bit unusual as I would address them when they first came in I said your job folks needs to be thorns in our side and in fact I want to take out each one of you the dinner during the summertime I want to hear your opinions but most importantly I want you to be thorns in the sides of all of us researchers this turned out to be surprisingly powerful because we had invented our own computer languages we invented everything no no you see programming you kidding me we can build a better language John I said yeah you can so what but that didn't work out too well and for example you learn a set of tools it's just true everyone of us sitting here and somebody comes in and says well you know that tool set is kind of old you don't want to hear that you don't want to pick up it consider golf consider tennis oh that stroke Jesus Christ picking up a new skill set a new tool set actually regresses you for about a half a year to figure that tool set out and so it's very interesting to have the graduate students these 19, 20, 21, 22 year old students start to ask our august researchers why do you guys still use that tool and it was discussed on their face much more important than me and that turned out to be a way to actually almost every other year to kind of start getting kids to question kind of why they were doing it by kids I mean by researchers I was a kid too back then but you know why we were so slow actually kind of taking this competency trap and not getting over it faster but that's only the beginning because you know if you actually look at the problem the universities have in spades in terms of these silos how do you actually think about something in 10 minutes very good so what I'm going to do is not tell you about how you do physical space social space and I want to kind of go ahead to something a little bit more significant I will say one thing on the path to that this I actually do more with now major corporate execs you know what I find and I find this true with provost I work with three provost now but it's it's very hard to get out of your own comfort zone and it's very interesting how do you get somebody to even take a week out to say go to a conference but you don't know anything about maybe maybe maybe there's some slight chance that you do and Jack Hittery is my hero I ran into him a few years ago at aspirin and he developed a brilliant practice of every year taking off three days to go to a three day conference in something he knew nothing about but he developed a practice of how to do that he says here's what I do John the first day I sit in the conference room I listen to the conversations I listen to the talks I try to kind of pick up the technical lingo that's being used then one day you kind of get that the second day I sit outside around the coffee pots and what I do is I listen to the genres of how they talk to each other what how do you how do you discuss this kind of and then once I pick up that genre then the third day I enter the conversation I kind of know the terms I get the ideas vaguely I know how you approach people in that particular epistemic silo so to speak and then I start to engage in the conversation myself and the time I was with Jack I watched him do this you actually know Jack Hittery but maybe not by his name he's the guy that created he'd never done anything on Energy at all he went to this conference and I met him on Energy he did all of the things I just said and he's the guy that created the program Cash for Conquers got this idea at this conference went to Washington at the year sold it to the White House and he also drove Bloomberg into the hybrid cab taxi program inside so ironically now he's chairman of the Energy Commission but he still does it for something new so it's just been very interesting to see this happen but I want to talk about his two notions we might call change I called the first one kind of change 1.0 and change 2.0 this is a beautiful little article called The Rhythm of Change by Mike my book Henry Minsberg I know I don't know the other guy some of the best organizational theorists on change a beautiful kind of simple quote change has to be managed with a profound appreciation of stability and in this game of change 1.0 they say well you know there are three kinds of changes there's kind of a dramatic change we're talking the corporate world where the CEO dramatically says we must do X sometimes works there's also down at the bottom in the grassroots there's kind of a sense of an organic set of changes the folks are figuring out they want to just do things differently and they're doing kind of local improvisations and so on and then kind of coming from the side there are more kind of systematic procedures such as how do you do your performance reviews and how do you do new types of 360s and all this kind of stuff how do you start to systematically put in some of these new practices they say like you know something very interesting happens you kind of think about these three kind of approaches to our change they said there's a rhythm that starts to develop because from the top dramatic change alone can be guess what just drama systematic change by itself can be deadening I think we all know that an organic change without the other two can be chaotic they must be sequenced and paced over time creating a rhythm of change a rhythm of change that honors the value of stability because most of what we do does stay the same but we have to then be able to focus on what really does matter and I think that was kind of a very kind of interesting observation and it worked pretty well I want to not talk about change 2.0 I got into this myself and this is actually why I'm watching it right now because it hit us partially because of the Arab Spring and some other things that were happening that we know a lot about kind of diplomacy is a form of change but we think about it in the 20th century is basically the topic of statecraft all our diplomacy is based on from the top down the dramatic coming down from the top and we know a lot about how to do this not too many blocks from here at least we think we do but in the 21st century as we kind of woke up and discovered there's also something that we don't know much about streetcraft which is kind of the organic change in terms of the change 1.0 the interesting question is how does dramatic change up here statecraft actually start to meet basically streetcraft how do you take the things that are happening down here and how does the thing up here start to create a gradient force a pull that actually pulls these things into a collective action for example the Arab Spring as you know turned out to be pretty much a disaster because they were against something not really for something being against something can get something going but once you get that thing going there's no kind of clear notion of what it is you're really trying to do and so basically this whole sense of how do you kind of begin to understand from the bottom up and the top down and that got us actually thinking about this for some bizarre reasons and we took as a guiding example in rethinking this whole problem a movie Minority Report how many here are seeing a Minority Report I hope almost everybody but you may not know is Minority Report at a very key person Alex McDonald you know him now through a bunch of other more bizarre movies but Minority Report did not have a script it was the first movie created without a script what Minority Report did is it actually built a world it envisioned a world basically it built up a mock version of this world mostly electronically so that basically the producers actors etc etc could live in this world and build this world together in terms of various types of concentric circles having to do with social practices technology practice all kinds of things they were building up and they got this world built in a way that they could they lived in this world very much like a really professional actor could do they started to assume the properties of that world and then out of that the first was the Minority Report that was not particularly scripted now that's only partially true we now have gone much further than that but that's the way that that that was the first kind of example of this so what we really saw is there was a sense of the Minority Report to kind of create a vision going back much more to the etymology of the word vision is about sight, perception imagination so they started to construct an imaginary world and it's about kind of world building kind of building out the full kind of context of that world you've seen that before with Star Wars George Lucas built seven worlds actually he built six worlds but maybe a seventh we don't know about and then he shot the movie starting at world number four because he could actually show he understood the history of how this world came to be and then what would happen with the world he wanted to construct the silos of worlds so that he could kind of and the actors could live in this world we saw a much more deep understanding of the social morease all these things that would define that world so change 2.0 that we're looking at now is how do you actually start to construct a vision that kind of prepares a certain kind of I'm going to call it a metanarrative that sits above the stories and then looks at the kind of the micro-narratives that are happening on the street this can be inside your own organization it can be in Afghanistan where we're actually trying some of these ideas out Columbia as well etc etc and looking for kind of to find kind of a vision and kind of the role of this metanarrative that is kind of really compelling aspirational but this is the weird thing strategically ambiguous so next shift from Minority Report to Robin Williams' beautiful movie did poet society I think you will all seeing that movie already what did he actually do what he did in that movie is for the kind of seven kids in his class he had this notion of a metanarrative the metanarrative at one level was be the most extraordinary version of self you could be and the real metanarrative he said in Latin what translated was seize the moment in order to be the most extraordinary version of self so that was a metanarrative that is inherently ambiguous in terms of the micronarratives of the different people in his class but he would find the right moment to take that and say seize the moment and that moment then led to an epiphany that basically altered the life of each one of his students some so dramatically that one you know committed suicide because he changed so much that his parents kind of went berserk and he went berserk now it turns out we've been looking at this can't talk much about it but in Columbia in terms of the drug trade name I had a beautiful chance to kind of run into the new chief strategy officer for IBM who had just actually unwittingly with the CEO of the new president constructed their own new metanarrative the new metanarrative without using that terminology he said this was the right what he was doing is IBM the essential the idea of calling it the essential company interesting overtone to it let that dwell on that a moment and then he said to each kind of employee be essential you can figure it out for yourself but be essential how do you convince yourself you are being essential mixed to it authentically but you know I just blew my mind that that idea has just galvanized and I'll ask like a few months IBM created a kind of strategic alignment and yet honors in some sensibility but also honors saying each individual will figure that out for yourself and we the company will figure out what makes that essential as the companies and it's you know I haven't kind of fully materialized that myself I mean it was an amazing conversation I had with him in Columbia bringing the drug lords and the government very complex story that's not yet public I mean we're not allowed to talk too much about it but the meta narrative is in English no more blood believe it or not every single warring group has bought into that narrative a strategically and figures interpreted completely differently by each group but that they could buy into something kind of so I think this idea of and how do you do that how do you create the metanarrative how does it honor the micro narratives each of us have our own stories about ourselves then what are the mechanisms that one might use to kind of pull the micro narratives into alignment with the metanarrative and how besides these mechanisms you might do that might you also use social networks to kind of amplify the ability of the metanarrative to take hold of the micro narratives and so on and so forth so this look at this moment the metanarratives we think of as in terms of a world building the mechanisms for the on the side could be things like transmedia if you want one of the most beautiful examples of how transmedia may have worked out I don't know how many of you know the world without oil it's an amazing computer game, network game tens of thousands of people play it it's basically a world building activity by the way the best example of world building is Harry Potter Harry Potter is a fantastic ability to build an entire world Star Wars is another example but you know that created a world that you could then enter it's one of the reasons why kids you can't take Harry Potter away from kids they have entered that world and they've made that world that strange world very familiar very interesting way World with oil they've had tens of thousands of people play that game to try to live in the way of suppose we had no oil and they use then social networks to be able to pass ideas back and forth as well as a few games I have actually seen as an augmented reality game an alternative reality game more technically called that actually has led to fairly major change of behavior of many of the people in it the reason why we're interested in this today is if you look at problems of chronic disease we're looking at how might you use some of these mechanisms to actually crack the problems of chronic disease in terms of finally finding a way to change your behavior we have a lot of really cute apps on our iPhones they kind of give us all kinds of measurements but they don't change behavior and so the one question is how do you start to do that that's the mechanism we're talking about here and then in your own organization you want to think about in terms of what are the structural holes in terms of the networks of communication in your own organization so these are some of the kind of tools that we now have with that I'm out of time thank you thank you very much so we have about 15 minutes for questions there are microphones across the room you know it's curious because let me look step back a moment and I'm sure you know this from your own experiences but I'm constantly being asked about the return on attention the lack of attention that kids have the lack of interest in reading that they have and their inability to write on the other hand I study Harry Potter I study what these kids do I don't know how much you've been tracking but these kids have fan Harry Potter sites last I checked there has been 1,500 books of over 400 pages per book written by these kids there are probably 500,000 or more each of two sites in terms of kids writing amazing things about the backstories and so they're evolving a new form of close reading they are taking the white space and building the backstories that actually suggest what's really going on what could be happening next they're filling the whole thing out and so I find it interesting that we think of these kids as being very superficial but in fact the ones that I study are doing and they have invented a new form of close reading and so we have to be careful the purpose I brought up trans media is that sometimes if you look at what they're doing on one media you're not really aware of what they're doing in other media so it looks like they're kind of just always multiplexing but if they're on the other media actually building the backstories for the front media that is a new form of close reading that doesn't happen all that often but it does happen enough to pay attention to so I mean I think one of the tasks we have is we've got to begin to realize that when you have these multiple media you may use one kind of media for one kind of backstory and another kind of media for something else so I actually find that there's much more focus of attention than we might first think and we have to be a little bit careful we've done as you may know probably the biggest ethnographic studies of today's digital millennia around the entire United States not just in the Silicon Valley types or New York and we're not finding this to be as big a problem as we first thought and since I spend most of my time working with and talking to corporate officers and CEOs I actually find the attention span of CEOs much less than kids that I'm in the boardroom I have about 30 seconds to capture their attention and if I can capture for the first 30 seconds I have two whole minutes to make my point and if I can actually use a graphic story graphically have multiple meanings to do that I may carry the day and so what I really do have I don't think this attention span is actually that new problem completely contrary to what's in the public myth that's highly debatable by the way he may be oh okay I'm in the bathroom sorry Hi I'm Tito Sierra from MIT can you elaborate on the point of a strategically ambiguous it seems like a very fascinating concept but can you elaborate on why the ambiguity is important well the ambiguity is important because you what you need is something that's under determined so that for the particular kid I can in this particular case instantiate he and I they and I for the particular person can actually craft what my metanarrative means relative to the more narrative of that kid and so you need one thing up here that can actually be interpreted to make it completely personal down here so that that's kind of the idea behind that so the for example the essential corporation I mean what does that really mean well it gets me to ask myself what am I doing today that's essential you know it's that ambiguous and yet relative to my personal micro narrative of why I met IBM or what I'm trying to achieve I have no trouble entering that when posed that question and so it's a sense of you know how that produces attraction and focus on the micro narratives down here but still creates kind of a sense of togetherness now that's I mean this is pretty new kind of thinking we're playing it out in terms of world politics right now and we're trying some stuff but I was so happy to see IBM but if you really take this big shift seriously what we're going to do as you know at universities is our old institutions the architecture of those institutions have been turned inside out and it may just be that the old institutional architectures structured everything so well we always thought we knew exactly what to do next more of us if we're going to bring agility to the forefront in the as a new kind of institutional architecture then what creates alignment and let me tell you the strategic intense very group I know when they tell them to me as I just go to sleep it doesn't work and so we're trying to figure out what might work in terms of actually pulling people but yet honoring the individual our terminology is somewhat in flux I mean these terms are only like three months old it's the it's developed in this new I mean the book will be out the book will be finished at the end of this month you know I happen to have said that three months in a row those if in fact you have a culture of collaboration as opposed to a set of processes of collaboration and process is not the same as culture you know I actually think that a culture of collaboration actually has more to do with listening deep listening and if you're capable of listening to each other especially across epistemic boundaries and listening with ability to honor then you have tremendous agility so I actually see those things very much in alignment if you have it as a set of road practice road practices and processes then you've got a problem but it's I think is a crucial distinction the in fact the reason that I accepted your kind invitation to come is I'm actually here because of higher education I just came to the complication at Georgetown two days ago and blah blah blah but the as you may or may not know I kind of education is one of my hot horses, hobby horses, etc I've never seen as much fear and confusion about higher education in the last six months in the last 30 years the shot across the bow has been fired I call it Muka Mania I can't tell you the number of presidents of major universities that have been calling me saying you know you come in and talk to me and my staff about what may be going on and you all know that the old game is up partially because of the new technologies although those technologies were not that new but they give a good name you've got one but also because of the financial challenge so let's take the mooks for the moment I mean by the way the mook itself is a piece of technology blah blah the what it does through flipped instruction is of course gives you the chance to say let's use the classroom in a fundamentally different way and in fact if all you're doing is learning material in terms of conceptual material facts then maybe we don't need to have these highly these courses are 200-300 people per classroom in the first two years they can be done maybe in better other ways and everybody should be happy about that except there's a dirty secret and dirty secret pays some of your bills in your libraries that the dirty secret is there's a power law distribution 80% of the revenue comes in 20% of your courses and it is exactly that 20% that the mooks may attack so if you think that you've got a financial war going on now the long term consequence of the mooks if they get figured out could radically change the economic basis of higher ed that's why I think the provost and the presidents are beginning to worry much more about oh my god the foundations of how we've been running this corporation which we don't ever want to talk about we had to actually subpoena the records along the universities to find some of this stuff out the task force to look at this that nobody wants to talk about the cross subsidization that's going on so that's another force here and you have this $1 trillion debt of student loans so you have the perfect storm at the exact same time that this technology rears its head and says oh we can train a million people we'll have to both quote train and so I think that I think all of a sudden people are honestly saying what do we need to do what could we do with the new tools that and is there a new way to think about this game you know the irony is in fact I thought that you first asked me and it turned out not to be at all because it's a different set of libraries but you know some of us have been very much engaged in we conceiving the community library with our argument that the community library is going to be the center of learning for most kids in the future and they're going to be kind of hacker spaces, make spaces if you look in Chicago the media work there is just spectacular and so on and so forth so I think you're going to find more and more you're going to find a complete new conception of the role of the community library you know it's going to kind of take advantage of the fact that the Ewing has locked the formal schooling down in a way that most learning happens with after school programs if you look at the learning ecology the ecosystems inside cities in terms of all the resources that kids actually use today the only reason we're looking at new ways to do badging is how do you get kids to be able to get some credit for what they've been learning outside of the formal school the libraries are going to play one more key role in that so I think that through the K through 12 game or 6 through 12 you're going to find libraries playing a huge new role so therefore I think K through 12 12 through 16 and 16 through 20 you're going to see huge changes in each one of those I think that's why the ability to kind of really look at new lenses to what becomes not to make a pun essential how to play that game I think we're going to see some very new interesting proposals coming forward the one thing that's really nice about it and I was at a curious meeting where the argument was made that anybody who thinks for example Google replaces the library research library has no understanding of preservation so there's certain things that you guys do that are so incredibly critical of which nobody values until after the fact that point is too late so you know there's you talk about creating a new metanarrative you may want to start thinking about a metanarrative about preservation because it is critical and by the way preservation is getting almost impossible given the flood of information going on and how do you do the curation of that well you know you gotta blah blah blah I'm from USC so the Shoah Foundation's preservation project with those videos you know I can appreciate even with our infinitely high technology is decidedly non-trivial and Spielberg once had done it the bitwise precision level so I mean the theory most about in higher ed is the things that may have the most value or the things that are seen they're kind of below the radar screen and we don't necessarily know how to articulate the value of that until it's kind of too late and you can say we'll save everything well that doesn't mean make much sense either save everything at what preservation rate how well do you want to save it so on and so forth and I think you guys are again in this perfect storm not only the financial storm but the information is exponentially exploding faster than Moore's law you're hardly getting being given the money to be able to handle some of these problems but you know I come out of this work on storage the ways we're now architecting storage you know today as opposed to three years ago it boggles my mind how do you do, how do map reduce for this kind of stuff etc etc you know the university is not even training schools of information are finally getting at it the computer science department are actually kind of behind the eight ball some of this stuff so you know you've suddenly gone to the outer edge of technology so the needs are greater than ever the technology is greater than ever and anybody willing to invest it is less than ever thank you for your job thank you for listening music was provided by Josh Woodward for more talks from this meeting please visit www.arl.org


I welcome to the session where is discussed the following question. The question says show that in Boolean and Trefla, A or A complement and B is equal to A or B. Now we begin with the solution. Now let's first consider A or A, A complement and B. Now by using the distributive law we can write this as A or A complement and A or B. We know that A or A complement is equal to 1, right? So this is equal to 1 and A or B. We know that 1 and A is equal to A, so this is equal to A or B, complement and B is equal to A or B. This completes the session. Bye and take care.


Tell you where it's on 9-1. Well, some rock fella called up. He wants to get in this act and send me a long wire. Bobby Kennedy is also called. So what you better do is talk to Senator Kennedy and tell him that this is Lindsay's problem and tell him what this idea is as you see it. And that we don't have any small business money. They're talking about the old small business loans and veterans loans and housing loans and what they want to do is transfer their frustrations and their hopes to somebody in the federal government. And you ought to tell them that we're willing and we're anxious to be of any help that we can that you don't recommend a special session in the legislature a special appropriations city council but they can do it specially just as much as we can and they want us to declare the major disastrous area immediately. So I told them within an hour I'd have a man to call them back so I think you ought to talk to Frank Dryden and Buford Ellington over at the Office of Emergency Management then talk to Gene Foley over at Small Business see what he has said up there that's what he could legitimately do talk to the veterans housing people, veterans loans see what they could do that's drier over at his shop and see what Kennedy thinks we ought to say he's bell aching because he says he's got a New York senator and trying to see which one can get the most money for New York and I said now I'm not going to get in he said you sent me a Democratic senator into New York you sent him in here and I said now I'm sending him out anywhere we will don't get me involved in personalities but find out best you can from the executive people what our limitations are, what we can do and how we think we ought to do it and then send them over to their offices there in New York, Small Business or the things without bringing it in to the White House Veterans housing in New York or Small Business in New York loan in New York and you and Senator Kennedy after you talk to the executive people agree how they ought to handle Rockfella and you call him back if you can within the next couple of hours I told him I'd try to get you in the next hour on and he won't send a wire Kennedy or Rockfella but I want to point you since you've gone up there and we're in it to talk to driver of Veterans Administration what he can do on one piece of paper so you can look at it and tell what poverty can do what Small Business can do that's what they have in mind that's what Small Business what Housing can do and this is Housing H this is just BHA I guess so that's what he started reading his wire when I stopped and he was going to get the wire and say we had come up and hadn't done anything now he wants to demand that we do these under that first we declare disaster area find out if we can and if we should that's number one he's Governor he's got to request it I doubt that we ought to make it a disaster area on this I think that includes tornadoes and storms and stuff but it may be and find out from Frank Dryden and Buford Ellington what their judgment is about it if they got that kind could they certify it as he could it be done legally and in the meantime while you got them working and Driver of Veterans Administration working and Gene Foley over to Commerce working be sure you coordinated with Bobby Kennedy and maybe the head of the House delegation I would think Seller and Kennedy so the Democrats touch base maybe Powell so that you got some people that will will pull Rockefeller off of us if he gets on us and let them know what he's asking and what he's going to do and here's what they ought to do under our set up they ought to go see the Veterans Loan and it's at 475th Avenue 1419 Smith Young Tower Al Smith building whatever it is giving these addresses and then call Rockefeller and give him a coordinated answer at my direction after you have talked to the Kennedy's and Powell and Seller that ought to touch that New York base pretty good after you talk to these others three or four they're getting panic they say the people are getting ready to blow up so on and so forth and I said well I want to work with your mayor any way I can and but I've got a security meeting here now and they just call me and interrupt me and you just go and take it from there and let me or Bill Moyer or Joe Califano and all the facilities we got at your disposal you can use them here any way you want to alright I'll fill in the answers this but the answer's got to be no it seems to me all of these well I put money into pay operating expenses for an outrageous wage demand well I would thank it what he's saying you may after you get a background it gives you a knowledgeable working thing you might see what it is he wants by after you talk to Kennedy too and then say that you'll explore it look into it I don't think he wants us to put any money into the city I think what he wants us to do is to say to George Meany Jr small business man down in Brooklyn that God we got no transportation your stores closed your broke will lend you five hundred dollars in the small business act and I think you could do that I think he says that to a veteran at his destitute that you could make him alone for his house if his payments haven't been met he says that these employers are not paying them for not working and these fellows can't meet the payments well it seems to me that for a month they got a postponement the bankers could hold back we don't have to turn over the treasury to them but there are some things we can do and we want to do everything we can consistently legally we want to be careful not to set an example that every time they have a strike we become a strike breaker by running in here and putting up a lot of dough yep I'm over here talking to George Meany now about this he's going to call Mike Quill well you tell him how bad it is and the main thing though you do you contact at least three people in the federal government Gene Foley housing and veterans small business that's four then you contact at least three people in the congress is Kennedy and Seller and Powell and then you contact Rockwell as quick as you can and make him tell you first what it is that he wants to do and you pick it to pieces and say we can buy this we can't buy that we'll do this we'll do that but if you can make him do it right in New York and make him do it through his mayor say the ideal way to do it is for the state not to get in here and take it away from the mayor for the federal government not take it away from the mayor but have the mayor say to these folks these various offices keep that ball right in his lap he got elected thank you


To begin with, I request Professor Prakashvaj to complete the portion that he started discussing. And after he is done, I would introduce the new topic related to actual presentations in which I will indicate to you a set of talks available under Creative Commons, which you will have to listen to and prepare a summary report. The actual assignment will be given next week, but today I will be giving you a pilot assignment for your own benefit to understand what exactly we have in mind. So, press away all yours. The sole section is looking empty. I think these people should come forward. So, first we will cover some portion which we left off last time. In grammar, we saw most of the punctuation. By the way, there is a World Punctuation Day, which is 25th September every year. You can look up that how important punctuation is considered. So, we will learn few more minor punctuations. One is apostrophe. So, apostrophe has main function that it indicates that some letters have been dropped. We saw some of these things like it is and it is. So, letter may be dropped initially in the word when the word will start with apostrophe. Letter may be dropped in between when there will be apostrophe in between or letter may be dropped in the end when it will come in the end. Normal confusion is between s of possessive case and apostrophe s and s of plural. Many people put apostrophe for plural which should not be put. For possessive case, the apostrophe also indicates that something has been dropped. Historically, the suffix for possessive case was e s. It has become shortened to s. Even now, for some words, we have to use e s when s cannot be placed directly. But historically, it was e s for all the words. Like kings was written as this. The old spelling of king was k y n g and it was written as k y n g e s. When this e was dropped to indicate that the e has been dropped, apostrophe came in there and it has remained historically. Instead of a letter being dropped, if a word, a phrase or a sentence has been dropped, then how do you indicate it? Suppose you are quoting something and you find some things are interesting which you might highlight. In between things are not important but you want to indicate that you are dropping those things. Otherwise, the sentences will not remain consistent. If you take out some sentences or some part in between and if you start reading, you will find that it does not make sense. So, the device to do that is called ellipsis. You must be knowing this. Only you may not be knowing the name. Many times you must have seen text with some dot dot dot followed by text. This dot dot dot is called ellipsis. So, generally people tend to give as many dots as they can fit without bothering about some standardization. The standard for this is three dots. Whether you have dropped one word or whether you have dropped many sentences. This is only a signal. It does not indicate how much matter you have dropped. So, it is always three dots. So, if you have dropped it within a sentence, this indicates that the sentence continues and some words have been dropped. This has to be full words not letters. Sometimes you might drop a whole sentence. So, the previous sentence will end on a dot. Then these three dots are to indicate ellipsis. So, you will have to use four dots to indicate that previous sentence has ended and some full sentence or part of next sentence has been dropped. If you miss this dot, it means the same sentence continues. It is a signal to tell that the previous sentence is complete. Some people tend to use ellipsis all over the place. Whether three dots or more dots. That is because they are running out of thoughts. They have some patchy thoughts and to join them they use ellipsis. But this is not a good practice because it gives a signal that your thoughts are not in continuation. So, it is only when you are purposefully dropping something, but you have the matter. Not because you do not have the matter. Then only you should use ellipsis. But not to cover up the fact that you could not find the bridging sentence. You all got a sheet last time about paradoxes of communication. Did you think over this? And do you have some comments on this? Before you start reading, I will tell you something about how to recognize the paradox. There was an old Hindi movie in which there was a master and his servant. So, the master used to ask the servant about what happened or what is going to happen. And he used to tell his opinion. The master used to say this is not possible. Then after some time, it would turn out that whatever the servant was saying was right. So, the fixed dialogue was that after the master asked the servant, the servant would start with a false word.  But master used to say then he used to tell and master used to say and then it used to turn out. That is paradox that the first appearance, it appears false. How many of you have spent about two hours? You have spent about a hour? Why? Because the class is spent. And the first amount of time, how time is passed to promote your activities or what happens? Everybody is aware of that. That's right, I don't think you have spent two hours to re-work related to this engagement with the state department. And at least one hour. How many of you have actually spent three hours? You've been asking? On this particular one. On this particular one. Then we don't need to continue. They're all finished. Last time I had a mistake. It doesn't make it to you. That is not right. And I lost my interest. I'm not going to answer the other questions like that. I think that is a big mistake. It can be a problem. The proper communication will be. Anybody who comes late and does it, that is what I want to say. This is made 25, and it's 25 to 50 hours. That's a 30 hour. That's a 30-day student you have. Now, when there's 30 hours in your hotel. That's a good thing. People will say that the registration of the rest is not right. People will say that it takes time to walk. You're supposed to cancel all these things for the engagement. They are going to become probationers tomorrow. I tell you what I'm telling you, because I am telling you, the nature of the Karakas is to be committed, because going across the limits is not to get to us, because there's a lot in this area here. And I think what I'm saying is not to get to us. For a moment, no. For a moment, it is true that they are going to get to us. The president of the assembly was carrying out a greater number than one hour. He looked at the bar and said, there has been 17 lives time in the bar. Three people walking away, seven days before the last time. It was not successful as a professional now. And this is in early 17th century, it was evolving, he remembers that of life requires you to respect time. There's no way you can get away with it. And unless you follow the habits here, then it is going to be difficult to show it. And you will do it under stress. So I don't know. This commutation is probably a best of time. But can I expect it to go to sleep? It's time to sleep. Can I expect it to take special, special measures which you cannot exactly figure out what it takes to show your thoughts to trust the earth. So it's life life already takes and measures you have to respect. And time to become a person and just start trying to do it. The whole world does it. Only we took it in years to not do it. They're not, they're very smart. They're very smart. They're very stupidly, but they're very modern people. You know the standard, you know, the standard time. It's not a problem. It's just not a problem. Anyway. Right? If there is time, it is important. But more important is the fact that if time wants to be realized properly, for us to do it, it doesn't mean to be a problem. So not thinking this is not okay. Anyway, today I will just make the introduction and then I will just talk to you on, on, on this, on this, on this. That means you just need to have the, on this, on this, on this. In Washington, there is a large diplomatic community. And you know that diplomatic community has its own rules and etiquettes. So one prime etiquette is being on time. So if a diplomat has an appointment at some other embassy or somewhere, he cannot be a minute too early. So what do you do? Because for safety, you have to go early. So he will reach the area and in his car keep on circling to wait for that minute to arrive. And he cannot be a second too late. So exactly when the minute finishes, he will press the bell. You see how much care people take for this. So all the paradoxes listed here are which you have come across. We have studied this. That's why we gave this list to you. There are more paradoxes which we haven't studied. So we haven't told them here. So first is about writing. That writing requires corrections. It only, not only requires corrections, but it requires rewriting. You can define writing equals rewriting. You have to keep on correcting, keep on rewriting even the content till you are satisfied that nothing better can be done. Just being good enough is not acceptable. So all great writers, we have a feeling that they are creative and somehow they just put their pen to paper and start writing. Which is not true. Majority of them are just plain hard workers. And it is because they are hard workers, they become great writers. There are many other people who are equivalent talent, but they are lazy. As Oscar Wide once said that poor grammar is an indication of laziness. And poor writing is also an indication of laziness. Because you don't take time to rewrite it and refine it. For example, in one interview, Ernest Hemingway, the famous novelist, was asked whether he rewrites. So he said extensively. For example, his novel Farewell to Arms. He said he wrote the last page 39 times. So the interviewer asked him, were there some technical problem. He said no, each of the versions was right. I didn't get the words right to express what I wanted to. No wonder he became a famous author. You see, biography of any author, they will insist on the same thing. That it is hard work. So writing requires corrections is the first thing we have to understand. Then you can't detect your own error that we found. You can't detect even others' errors that also we found. Because when we were given up one page write up, we couldn't detect all the errors. Then correction requires a special sign set. That we saw that intuitively you cannot do uncorrecting. Because other people won't understand. And we learned that sign set also. It takes a lot of time to proofread. Typically it takes about 20 minutes to write one A4 page. And to correct one A4 page first pass, you will take 20 minutes. If you just read it might take 3 to 5 minutes. You don't pay attention to the errors. But to read for errors, it takes same amount of time that the writer took. So even if you are the author, you will spend more time checking the errors and correcting than the original writing itself. The original writing will be a small proportion of the total time. Then after correction errors are still found. This is surprising to many people. For example, in industrial quality control, the Indian method is you can't trust anybody what quality it is. So you have an outgoing inspection. You have inspection department which is separate from the production department. And they will do 100% inspection. When the product arrives at your customer, he can't trust you. So he has an incoming inspection department. So he will again inspect 100% whatever is coming in. You might feel that with 200% inspections, what goes on the factory floor will be flawless. Experience tells that it is not true. Having 100% inspection does not ensure that the product has quality. If the product is to have quality, your production process must be controlled so that it does not produce defects. You can't first produce defects and then keep on searching for them. So the technical explanation for this is we think that production is a kind of random process. But inspection is perfect. But inspection is also a process. And like any process, that is prone to errors. So even if you try to do 100% inspection, you will still make errors in inspection. And you will do errors. So this says that iterative procedure is required because we will just see what is the typical portrait. Normally in a raw manuscript, we will have one error per line. Even this is lucky. Why we are doing double spaced typing? Because we expect there to be more than one error per line. And then we can't indicate them in the margin. This you must have experienced. But average may be one per line. And there may be 30 lines per page. So there will be 30 errors per page. If you do your first pass correction and you correct the errors indicated on the manuscript and retype it, we reprint it. Now what do you expect to happen? Will it have zero errors now? You will find that now you might find some error which you had missed. So it will come down to one per page. If it is a 10 page manuscript, after this correction you will find that there is one error in the 10 pages. You have to still do it the third time. And if it is a 100 page book, then you will have to do it the fourth time. This is the minimum number of times you have to do correction. And if you don't do even this, then you can imagine how the manuscript will look. If you don't reread it and correct it, it will be pretty bad. Now the effect of this is you might say that since you are not noticing the errors, others are not noticing the errors. They are understanding the meaning. So why take the trouble after all meaning is important. What is the counter argument to that? If meaning is important, why bother about form? The reason is our brain is quite forgiving. It corrects the errors while reading. So it ignores the errors, even spelling mistakes, all other kinds of things and it extracts the correct meaning. So that is why you find that even manuscripts with errors are read and understood. But the subtle effect is that the brain takes effort to mask these errors and such manuscript becomes irritating. So you may be reading only one page, but your teacher or examiner has to read hundreds of pages and any of them will tell you how irritating it becomes. You see examination papers where first they have to bother about whether it is correctly written before trying to find errors. So in professions in which correct writing is important, half the energy is spent only on error correction. For example in journalism courses, all they have to do is keep on writing on different topics. They might have done their research, taken an interview, thought of their own thing. Then they write something and submit. What did the instructor do first? Assuming the student has corrected his own errors, the instructor first grammatical error. He marks them with the kind of symbols which we learnt and then he hands it back to the student without commenting on the content. He will grammatically the submission is correct. The instructor does not comment on the content at all. After it is error free, then he will start addressing the content. Then he will point out more errors about the content, about how the paragraph should have been, how the thought proportion should have been. But before correcting grammatical error, he does not even start it. And most of the time in journalism courses is in this back and forth of error correction. The final manuscript does not take time to read. In the olden days, you used to have a separate tribe called proof readers. Each publisher or newspaper used to have a room full of people who used to do only proof reading. So, the authors could be careless because the proof reader would hopefully take care. But now, we have the error of desktop publishing where you are the author and you are the publisher, you are the proof reader. Now, we cannot rely on other people to do this. The present standard in journalism is that they do not have any proof reader. Whoever files the story, the reporter is responsible for accuracy of that. If you see policies of journals, even professional journals, they say that you have to submit a photo ready file in so and so format. No corrections will be done. If there are errors, they are to your account. In publishing, the author is responsible for all errors. After the publisher has typeset the manuscript and send printouts to the author. Author is supposed to check them and certify them that the proof is correct. Normally, this is done in duplicate. The author makes corrections on two copies. One keeps himself and one is sent to the publisher. But later on, there cannot be a dispute about whether the error was pointed out or not. In the olden days, you used to have errata. Have you seen this in any book? Errata is plural of erratum. That is error. So, there used to be an appendix called errata. Because after typesetting, the publisher might find some error. And in olden days, it was not possible to reset the type. Those errors would be listed in this page number, line number. What is the error and what is the correct thing required? If there are only a few errors in the whole book, then now the convention is that there is no errata given. These are alert people. So, unless there are some substantial errors, there is no errata given. But the errors are noted and in the next printing, those are corrected. So, if you see international publishing, any book, any journal, any magazine, which is published to tight timelines, you will find not a single error in the whole publication. Now, you know the symbols and you know how to look for. You try to locate errors in any foreign publication. That is the standard of edited English. They have already achieved and they have done it so long ago that they do not even talk about it. It is presumed that it has to be error free. Since we are at an early stage, we have to learn this and set our benchmark high. That where is the same standard? Because when you publish your papers or your thesis goes for evaluation to some external examiner or you write articles or other things for the international audience, you will be expected to follow the same standard. So, best time to start is now. There are couple of things I would like to quickly add for a bit more to this discussion. He indicated that you should set things in order whenever you publish any material or write a report for international audience. I strongly object to that. If we wish to set a high benchmark and become as good as anybody else in the world, I think we need to do it first for ourselves, for our own readership here. As I said, if we are not careful about everyone around us reaching the same high level mark, there is no point in fighting the global battle because we have lost it even before we started it. We do it for ourselves first. You are all compulsory students so it relates to the importance of the production process, the error finding. Can you relate it to your software bugs for example? When you write programs, today it is fashionable to let compiler do all syntax checking. There was a time when we learnt it that way. We had to write programs on a form and like proof editor, the team manager would read at it and would shout at you if there was a single error anywhere.   Three times at least, more than that, the semantic errors start appearing later and those are the errors that we really care for whether it is written production or whether it is a program. And how long does it take to correct semantic errors? How many times you have to run it? That is inspection, right? Testing and any amount of testing cannot guarantee that the program is error free. It only guarantees that testing has not succeeded in finding a bug. When you release the program in production, the bug could be found as late as six months, one year later, even in big financial system. So, that is why the production process must ensure that you write the program correctly, both grammatically and semantically. In exactly the same passion when you write, that is the time when you have to pay attention. Now, this might come as a shock that if you write for 20 minutes, you need to spend 20 minutes in checking it. Nobody would have done that kind of checking, right? For any writing once, one's own writing also. In fact, you do so little writing that the question of checking does not arise later for us. Anyway, so let me digress a bit and give you a writing assignment today. How many of you have heard of this technology, entertainment and design? Can you raise your hands if you have heard of this? Quite a few. Those of you have not heard about this place, raise your hands. I would like to know people who are not, there are some 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. So, in fact, I am glad that I asked this question, because this is actually an extremely important initiative. It is called TED for Technology, Entertainment and Design. This was a group started in 1984 as a group of people who wanted to discuss something very peculiar. What was that? Ideas worth spreading. You know, all of us when we read about either a novel or some newspaper report or something, we occasionally do come across an idea which we feel is nice and we talk about it to some friends. That is an idea worth spreading. Each one of us, depending upon one's own inclinations, likings, etc., might like different ideas worth spreading. But, curiously, a large number of people who are differently aligned in their approach in mind and thinking might still come around to say, ah, this particular idea is worth spreading. That means they all coalesce in saying this idea is good. And there are millions of human beings and there are millions of ideas and out of which thousands upon thousands are found by all humans to be worth spreading. So, this is a group which started that activity in 1984 and they started arranging talks, an annual conference and talks. These talks are all 18-minute talks. This could be on absolutely any topic on the earth except that people should jointly feel that it is an idea worth spreading. These 18-minute talks were recorded and they started releasing them on a website which was set up in 2007. This was Ted.com. Very recently, they now have new.ted.com. This is 2014. The site is still under consideration. It has just been constructed. So, actually if you go to Ted.com, they will advise you to go to new Ted.com. The group also supports openness of knowledge of all kinds. So, they do not work on anything that is proprietary. All talks therefore are released in open source under a creative commons license. How many of you are familiar with creative commons? Very few. You have all heard of open source? Open source software that you are familiar with. Linux, Ubuntu, whatever whatever. Now, just like software has the notion of open source, there are other creative things for which there is no equivalent. For example, Professor Prakash with the mention of journalism, if I show a simple one-minute video clip of a film or to play a part of a music to explain something to the audience, I would infringe upon the copyright of the original filmmaker and original this. I have no freedom even to quote it for explaining further or to write a critique. I certainly have no freedom to extract from it and give it to people or to take the whole thing and distribute it to people because I think it is a good idea. Because the original IP owner who had probably made a CD or DVD will say my copyright and my commission you have to pay. So in order to address these issues related to openness of knowledge in creative work, a creative commons was formed. Commons is actually the name which is derived from the English commons which is in India also where this equivalent is it stands for common property of villagers like a common land for cattle to graze, common water which the entire village owns. There is no ownership by an individual. That was the notion of commons. And creative commons is a common, what should I say, property of everyone for the creative ones. So this creative commons on the lines of open source created many licenses. The first license is just a CC license, creative commons. That means I give it to creative commons, I don't care how people use it. More popular licenses are BY, that is by attribution. So you can use it, distribute it, do whatever you want to do with it but you have to attribute it to the original author. So this particular creative work was done by so and so is what you have to acknowledge when you do it. There are other classifications such as NC which stands for non-commercial. That means you can distribute it but nobody can sell it for profit. If you don't say that people can even make money on it. There are two other alternate qualifications that are possible to this license. One is called share alike. This is more like the GNU-GPL license. That means if you modify a creative work, then whatever modification you have done must also be given in the same license to the whole world. The other more restrictive form is ND which is no derivatives. That means the original can be distributed, can be freely used but you are not permitted to make derivatives. The TED talks are released under creative commons BY, NC, ND license. They are all available here. The talks are mostly in English but several talks are in different languages. There are more than 1500 such talks. I would like to show you a glimpse of one such talk but before that I will tell you the assignment. There are 1500 talks. Now what you have to do between today and Thursday morning before you come back is pick a talk of your choice. Each one is an individual assignment, not a group assignment. And since there are 1500 talks, I will be very surprised if 30 of you randomly choose the same talk. This is like in the U.S. airport security when after 9-11 they started randomly picking people for details security except that I and several other Indians always got randomly picked at every airport. So such randomness is not very conducive to health. Now what you have to do is you have to listen to that talk. It is an 18-minute talk. Listen very carefully. Listening is an art. You have to listen to it very carefully. Then you have to write a summary of that talk in your own words. You have to write a summary of that talk in your own words. That should be about half a page summary. You have to write one A4 sheet. Nothing should be beyond one A4 sheet. As usual it will be a typed assignment so you will have to type it in and stop right-hand side.  And then you will give the reference to the TED talk, then you will have about half a page of summary. Half a page or three-fourth of page. You can divide that A4 page into two parts. One part is summary and the second part is slightly tougher. You are critic on the whole talk. So summary suppose is my talk. Then you have to write in the first part the summary of what I have said. In the second part what you have to say is what you think about what I have said. You agree with it? Do you disagree with it? What points made sense to you? What do you think is useful to others? How do you think it should be taken further? Or what are your counter views? Not a big essay in just one paragraph. So summary and critic. Is that understood? Just these two. So let me quickly show you the glimpse of a talk there. new.ted.com You can read the details on the... You may not be able to read this but I would strongly suggest that spend additional 10-15 minutes going through the list. There are topics of various kinds that are listed there. Most of the talks are very exciting talks. How many of you have heard of the hole in the wall experiment? Professor Sugato Mitra while working for NIT did it in Delhi and since then he has expanded it enormously. He was a Ted Award winner speaker recently. In a Hoobli conference he spoke on the further work that he has done. He has opinions which are completely contrary to my own convictions. He says no teachers are required. He says students will learn better if you throw out all teachers. Maybe he has a point because students anyway don't come in time to the class so teachers are not required for that. So this is the site. You choose a topic. Please spend 10 minutes in choosing a topic, something which you can relate to something which you can understand. Do not necessarily select topics only from technology and science. There are n number of things in life other than technology and science and there are very very interesting talks here. But as far as this course is concerned the task is very simple. You have to listen to that talk and you may while listening to it you might want to make notes. I will grant you that an 18 minute talk might have to be heard twice in order to understand. That will take 36 minutes. You will take 20 minutes to write the first A4 page as Professor Vaidya has said and you will take another 20 minutes to correct it. This is the composite assignment for this entire week so that there is no subsequent assignment after next Thursday to be submitted in the next week. Next week is mid-same week, right? We of course will not hold any mid-same exam. So please utilize this time to do well in the other subjects for which you have to give the mid-same. However immediately after mid-same the actual activity will start. There will be another specific activity a group activity individual in a group activity which will be given around this data. So this is a sample pilot assignment. It is an obligatory assignment. Submissions due next week, no sorry this week Thursday morning. The handwritten note as usual has to be submitted here in the classroom. No excuses this time. I know most of you do not have a lecture before 9.30. So please come at 9.15 if required. Drop your submissions here and take the class. And type in whatever you have written with corrections of course if you want and submit it on the web. Thank you.