Welcome to everyone, a very warm welcome. Thank you so much for joining us this morning on a very, very windy, difficult Washington morning. My name is Margaret Taylor. I'm a fellow in the post-conflict reconstruction project here at CSIS. We're so pleased, the post-conflict reconstruction project is so pleased, to be co-hosting this event with the organization for economic development cooperation. We're just absolutely thrilled to be here. We've worked hard and tirelessly to put all of this together. And we're happy to have it all come together so well. And again, welcome. I'm going to explain briefly the format for the presentations. I'm going to make very, very brief welcome remarks. I will introduce very briefly each of our guests. Then I will hand things over to Mr. Richard Carey, the Director of the Development Cooperation Directorate, which is the Secretary for the Development Assistance Committee within the OECD. He will do his introductory remarks for about 10 minutes. And then each of the panelists will have about up to eight minutes to make some remarks. Thereafter, I will open the question and answer session with a few questions of my own. And then thereafter, I will open it up to the floor. We will have two microphones for that portion of the event. So if you do have a question, please raise your hand. And if one of our helpers with the microphone comes over, please state your affiliation, your name and your affiliation. And please use the microphone and also keep your questions somewhat short as we want to get to as many questions as we can. I'm sure there's a lot of really great folks here in the audience who I'm sure will have a lot of interesting questions and comments. As I was reading through and reflecting on the global report and some of the individual reports that we're launching today, I was thinking that it really provides us an opportunity to, and when I say us and we, I mean broadly, the international community, donor governments, implementers of assistance programs in fragile states, provides an opportunity for us to really think about what we are actually doing is, what we're doing is actually working in these fragile states. Because it's so important, and that's really the goal we're all trying to get toward. And I think it's easy to forget that in the day-to-day rush of getting money for programs, implementing programs, making sure various domestic constituencies are satisfied. So I think that this report and the work of the OECD DAC is really giving us a good opportunity to think about that in a comprehensive global way. And that's really unique, I think, and we're really lucky to have them. I know as a scholar, I often turn to the OECD DAC website for all manner of information, not the least of which is the graphs and all the wonderful statistics, which really put things together globally. So without further ado, I will just briefly introduce each of our guests here. And I invite you to look at your materials for the full biographies of each of the guests. And I just also want to note that this is being audio recorded and also video recorded for the purpose of, we will put this up on our website also. So first, doing our introductory remarks, we have Richard Carey, the director of the Development Cooperation Directorate. He has had a very long career with the DAC, so we're absolutely thrilled to have him here. Next, we have Minister Amelia Perez. She is the Finance Minister of the Government of Timor-Lest, which is one of the countries that was the subject of this review. And most of the individual country reports are available out in the hallway. She has been involved with this process from the beginning, as I understand. She's going to present her experiences from the Timor process. Next, we have Neil Levine, the director of the Office of Conflict, Management, and Mitigation at the United States Agency for International Development. We're very happy to have the administration, the USG view here to share as well, also a very long and distinguished career at USAID and elsewhere. Next is Johanna Mendelssohn-Forman. We're, again, just delighted to have her. She's a senior associate here in the America's Program at the Center for Strategic International Studies. I consider Johanna to be an expert on pretty much anything. But most recently, she has been focusing on Haiti, not only what's happened since the earthquake, but before. So I think she will provide just a wonderful context for not only the report, but putting the Haiti specific report, but for putting it in the context of what has happened there since the earthquake. And finally, we have Fatima Sumar. She is a professional staff member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where she works directly for the chairman of the committee, Senator John Kerry. She's an expert on South and Central Asia. And she will be speaking specifically to Afghanistan issues with reference to the report, but also the US perspective and the congressional perspective on what the US government is doing in Afghanistan. So we're absolutely delighted to have all of you. And just one note, there was scheduled to be one more panelist named Karen Hanrahan from the Department of State. She called me last night and said the Secretary of State called her into a meeting this morning, and she had to cancel. And I said, that was the only excuse she could give me. That would be acceptable. So unfortunately, she will not be joining us today, but she sends her warm regards and her regrets that she couldn't be with us here today. So without further ado, I will hand things over to Mr. Richard Kerry. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Margaret. And good morning, everybody. It's a real pleasure to be here. And it's also, for me, a very significant event, my last official event, because I'm retiring at the end of the month. As you said, Margaret, I've had a long career, 30 years. But these last couple of days in Washington where we've had a senior level meeting of our international network on conflict and fragility have been one of the highlights, because I think we're here on an absolutely key frontier for the world. And we're working at and beyond the frontier of this very vital subject. So I'm going to introduce the first OECD fragile states survey, but I do want to give you a bit of context before I do that. First of all, on the OECD, what is the OECD? Not a very well understood institution, but it's a place for collective thinking and collective action. And that's what it does. It has conference center. And every day there are conferences. And those conferences are actually the collective thinking processes of the OECD members and increasingly a much wider range of countries joining in to OECD activities and joining into activity such as this one. And that's why we have Mr. Perez here, who is really a central part of this whole process. So this collective thinking process is getting globalized. And in the DAC, we are the place where donors do their collective thinking about the aid business. And again, it's being globalized because we have a working party on aid effectiveness that includes scores of partner countries. It includes the NGOs. It includes parliamentarians. And it's come up with Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Accra Agenda for Action, which are the rules of the game for aid effectiveness. They're not agreed by in any institution at all. They exist in some kind of international space. But they are the reference point. And it's a process like the one we're discussing today on fragile states because the NCAF, the International Network on Conflict Fragility, is also one of these places for global collective thinking about this whole issue, this very important issue of fragile states. And then alongside the network is the dialogue with fragile states. And that's a place where the members of NCAF sit around the table with 15 fragile states in a conversation about what is fragility and what are the ways to help fragile states. And so it's great that Mr. Perez is here to tell you how that works from her perspective. Now, what is the problem atique? Well, for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, the assumption is that we have a set of effective and decent states. And where that obtains, then people flourish. Populations flourish. But the reality of the world is that we have 50 or more fragile states. That is to say states where the political settlement is either non-existent, unsettled, or very weak, or where state capacities are very weak. And these are also countries which, for the most part, highly aid dependent. So when you have an aid industry working at that country, everything they do impacts on the state building agenda, either positively or negatively, often negatively. Because nobody thinks, nobody has been thinking of that. Nobody has been thinking of how to provide aid with a state building lens. And so that's what's going on right now with the international network and the international dialogue and with the principles for good international engagement in fragile states, which were put together in after a conference in London a few years ago. Again, not any international institution, just a gathering of the actors who produced principles that are the point of reference. And so it's those principles that have been monitored and the results of that monitoring in this report, which are in front of you today. Now, monitoring, it's actually much more than monitoring, because the way it's being done is through having teams who work in the country with the government, with the society in the country, and are sitting down and reviewing what is the performance against these 10 principles. And so it's a conversation, and it's a conversation that actually moves the agenda forward, where people can interact with each other. So it's not a set of monitors who are coming in from the sky and ticking boxes. It is a process. It's a process through which things move forward. So I think that that's what you need to bear in mind as you look through this report and as you listen to the conversation today. Now, we have this reality of 50 fragile states in the world. We have the reality that there isn't enough political capital or political energy to focus on solving all those cases at once. We know that a number of these cases are so preoccupying and so central to international security that there is the political capital and energy. Although that's also fragile, as we know. Some countries can't stay engaged. They disengage. One of those countries had a change of government in Europe this week. So it's a really contentious and difficult agenda. So how can the international community provide a way of staying engaged in 50 countries where we need to be very consciously thinking about the state building agenda in those countries? So one of the ways is through this process and through the principles on good international engagement and through the collective thinking process which has produced these books that are outside, do no harm. That is, the aid community thinking very actively of what its impact is in these fragile states. Being aware when they may be doing harm and being aware of where they could contribute to political settlements, to state society relations, to the standing of the government, transition financing. When we're putting money into situations of post-conflict and moving to the development phase, how do we do that? And how does that help the position of the government and the finance minister to have sustainable programs to build human capital and to build institutions? And here, the state's legitimacy in fragile situations. You can't have aid agencies going into fragile countries without them going back and thinking about these issues. And of course, for centuries, philosophers have talked about the foundations of the state. And it's not been in the training programs of our aid agency people. But in these situations, people have to have that in their heads. So just to say that this whole process has brought the state-building agenda into, it was bringing it into people's thinking. And then we have in the United Nations peace-building commission with a mandate to really help develop longer-term approaches to peace-building and to help evolve peace-building strategies so that there's a strategy for peace-building. So these, I would argue, are the beginnings of a way in which the international community can deal with the reality of 50 fragile states and make progress on them. Now, I've spent quite a lot of time on the context of all this because I think it's really important to understand what's going on here and what's going on in the monitoring process. And so we are applying the 10 fragile states principles. We're measuring how we're doing in six countries. And we've got the results in front of us that are telling us something about the way we're managing to behave or not managing to behave well. So in the executive summary, you've got the basic table that tells you, after the survey of these six countries, how we're all doing. And it starts up the top with bold green type, which says where we're doing good overall, and red at the bottom, we're doing weak. So we're weak down at the bottom, and we're good up the top. Where are we good? The 10 principles, if you haven't already got them, are on this little card here. Always to be carried around with you. So what we're seeing in this picture is that we're good, moderate, and improving on about half of the principles and performance is weak, moderate, or mixed on the other half. So half full, half empty. But as somebody said, at least there's a glass. So where we're doing well, we are promoting non-discrimination as a basis for inclusive and stable societies. So international actors, they are watching out for discriminatory practices and arguing and working for more inclusive, stable societies. And there's a lot of awareness on this, a lot of argument for it. Now, we're not succeeding everywhere. We've got some pockets of very bad persisting discrimination. And that's, for example, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the gender-based violence that's going on there, and the use of rapes of war still persisting. So good overall, but by no means have we won the whole case there. Then we go to the moderate and improving section and the recognition of the links between political security and development objectives. That's now pretty broadly recognized. And what that means, of course, is that we need the different policy communities here, the defense community, the diplomatic community, and the development community to be working together. That is what Hillary Clinton's foreign policy is all about. And there, her position is that the diplomacy and development parts of that foreign policy need to be strengthened so that the defense part of it can progressively be reduced. And this also needs an accent on economic growth to get the growth process going in a fragile state so that it begins to help with the reputation of the state and all of the factors that can disrupt the state, like youth unemployment and so forth. But getting these three policy communities really to really act together is still a huge frontier. And differences of terminology, thinking processes, planning processes, et cetera, still make it a really difficult frontier for us. And one we have to focus on is, of course, of extreme actuality right now in places like Afghanistan, the nub of the problem right now in many ways. Now, Principle 7 is also in this moderate improving category, aligning to local priorities according to context. So that donors are working with governments and that the government development framework is the development framework. There is much more consciousness that is critical. That if there are 20 donors in a country and they all come along with their own priorities and programs, that's a recipe for destructuring the government. And it's got to be the government's own program that the donors play into. And then on agreeing practical coordination mechanisms between the international actors, there are so many international actors that this becomes a huge problem in itself, of course. In finding the mechanisms, the discussion mechanisms in country, but also the financial mechanisms to make this work is really hard. We've rated it moderate improving, but still a huge amount of work to do on that and work on instruments like multi-dota trust funds, which are going to be key issue in Haiti, for example, how a multi-dota trust fund can be set up and work in Haiti over a long period of time. And in Afghanistan also, how can the, there be much more pooling of donor money and how can that feed into national programs which the Afghani parliament actually oversees and accountability systems work and national programs are reached out into the villages. So those are issues that have to be worked on. Then act fast and stay engaged, but act fast but stay engaged. So we are seeing cases where there is more rapid response capacity and there is rapid response humanitarian capacity. Now, that's evident in some places, less evident in other places. So that's why it's getting not the full rating. And on staying engaged, we are starting to see people work in terms of 10-year partnership agreements, which really this is a long-term business and it makes a very big difference what time frame you're using, whether it's a one-year thing, which very difficult for Minister of Finance if there's no predictability, how do you plan for investing in human capital and capacity building, et cetera, et cetera. But then we have some countries where there is no engagement or very little engagement like the Central African Republic. It's a lonely country. They feel lonely. They feel forgotten. And that's a country we've covered in the survey as well. Now, on the principle of doing no harm where performance is moderate, sorry, I've skipped over mixed, take context as a starting point. It's actually number one of these principles. But the shared understanding of a given context, you might think that is something that we could do, but we can't do it. It's very hard. It's very hard to get analysis done of the context that is really shared. There's lots of it going on, but the process of having it really shared and really shared with the people in the state itself is difficult. And those of you who are in the business of doing analytical work like this know that it's difficult. And having it shared through political processes and embedded in programming, you know how hard that is. OK, so then to the moderately successful implementation, the principle of do no harm. That is to make sure that your program is not undermining the state-building agenda, taking away from the state's capacities by setting up parallel implementation units, for example. This is an area where we're only moderately successful and an area where aid agencies have to be very, very conscious of what they are doing. Is it doing harm or is it helping? And then focus on state-building as the central objective, closely related. It means that people who are in the position of designing aid programs and working with countries have to have this in their mental framework that actually what they're doing is not this program or that project, but they are trying to help build a state that can function on an ongoing basis and function more and more cohesively and be a more cohesive and effective and decent state that that is the real name of the game. And so it's a question of mentality. It's a question of training of people and agencies. There's an agency management and training agenda here that we are beginning to get on to, but we need to take a lot more further. Prioritized prevention. Prevention is an investment in not having to deal with chaotic situations, but we don't prioritize it enough. And finally, at the bottom, avoid pockets of exclusion. The principle where we were doing best was to promote non-discrimination as the basis for inclusive and stable societies and we're doing quite well there, but paradoxically, we're still having pockets of exclusion where would become real big trouble spots which become areas where there's human degradation and destabilizing trends in societies. So that's where we are. And the idea is that the process will be repeated in a few years' time. We will continue the monitoring in the context of the Paris Declaration because this whole agenda is now in the Accra agenda for action and there's a high level meeting in Seoul at the end of 2011. So we'll bring it into that big meeting but then the process of meeting as we've been meeting in the six countries will continue over the longer term as necessary so that we're working together to build effective and decent states. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Richard. Richard has agreed to remain up on the stage and on the panel so he will luckily be available to field questions later for the Q and A session. Minister Pires. Thank you, Margaret. Good morning to everybody. I'm just wondering how best I should intervene here to make it to add value from what Richard was talking about. I assume, I don't know the audience. I assume that most of you are people working either in the field or in this academic field. So I'm just thinking to react on what Richard was saying in the sense of how people in that field needs some sort of training and changing their mentality. I was actually thinking about that and I'm thinking the only way for you to really understand the effect of aid in a country is for you to actually work from where we are. It's important probably to get into our shoes and it's easy. You just have to work in the aid effectiveness unit or the aid coordination, then you will see the challenges that we face in dealing with yourselves. So it's very, very important. I've been lucky because I've been on the two sides of the world and I remember when Richard was mentioned the Paris Declaration. I remember I was in London when there was an invitation for me to go and go into OECD. I didn't even know what it was all about. This dark business. And then I went into this room and then they asked me to speak and then I spoke and then later on I found out that the Paris Declaration principles came out of all that conversation that I've participated right at the beginning without even knowing for sure that this is where it was leading. But I want to give you a sense. People coming from our side, often we are participating in many things but we don't even know what is the impact because we don't have time to analyze things. We don't have time to sit back, reflect and then see the impact of a policy, actions, etc. So this is why I welcome sessions like this. Nowadays I take time to participate because it helps me also reflect back on what we are doing and how to improve and how to influence the global policies. The other kind of event that was like for me it was important is that I also landed in Accra. So I landed in Accra at the invitation of an institution. Again, thinking, okay, I can go there and share the experience, so what's the big deal? Then as they were talking, and they were talking about how to monitor the international actors when they are engaging in the country, whoa, there's something here for me. I might as well make an ally of these people. And so when there was an opportunity I offered Timor-Lessie to be part of this pilot project. Why? Because I couldn't coordinate these 46 donors anymore. I was going over my head. I just either I gave up or I engaged part of this whole process. And so I had an agenda, a healing agenda to be part of this. Because I needed somebody big as like OECD to help us monitor those donors because they're big, they're not small.  And so I thought, if I get this ally then I will be able to speak and then understand a little bit more and then maybe influence the behavior of these donors. In Timor-Lessie we have 46 donors. It is good because that means they want to help us. But it's also kind of a nightmare for us. Like it is really hard. But I have to tell you, because we are able to sit together and be very honest, be very frontal. So we found means and ways to kind of help each other to coordinate because at the end, when I'm right at the end of my feather, I just say to them, if I fail, you fail. So what do you want to do now? Either you help me be a success story, then you are successful as well. So for me to be successful, you better listen to me. Because if I listen to you, I may fail. And so we go like this, not kind of blackmailing each other. And but then at the end we find, we get to where we agree and then we move on. I just wanted to give you a bit of some examples, real case examples so that you can kind of, if you are facing with that when you are out there on the field, remember these examples. When I came back, went back to Timur after Akra, I was so excited. So I called a meeting with all the donors and then I showed them the Paris Declaration. I said, all your ministers signed this, okay? And that's what they promised in there, to do this, this and that. And then I was very keen because like, these principles were beautiful for us. And in one of them says, use country systems, do this, do that, align your programs to the priorities of the country. So I said, this is what your minister and I have access to them. If you don't do this, I'll make a phone call to say that you are not doing it or OECD is going to monitor you and this and that. And then one of them said, minister, we really want to help you out. But for example, I said, why don't you use our systems? So he said, can I be honest with you? And I said, yes, for sure, go ahead. So he goes, well, minister, you don't have capacity. That's why we can't use your systems. They are weak and et cetera. Like this, you don't have the capacity. We want to liaise with this. We can get this ministry here, et cetera, et cetera. So I said, yeah, pour it all out. Because then I will answer. And so after that, I said to him, yeah, now you tell me you have capacity, yeah? And this was an agency, okay? This was not a donor. So I said, how do you have this capacity? First of all, you steal all my people, the best people I have, the best brains, you steal them all by paying them higher wages. And then you tell me to pay very little wages because I have to be sustainable. But you don't have to be sustainable. So you take the best brains, you give them higher money and you pay. And if these best brains are not good enough, you go to the international arena and you bring in the best consultants, paying very high wages. And where do you get that money from? From those donors who got it from those taxpayers who thinks they are helping me.  It is dangerous to go out. So you have all these police and security, et cetera, in these beautiful white buildings. And how are you supposed to help me? I'm struggling my treasury, trying to deal with this public financial management, free balances and whatever systems I have now with people that I have third grade mathematics or numeracy, because this is what happened to me when I took over the government. I found out that most of my ministry of finance, 60% had third grade numeracy. How did this happen? I have no clue.  So I said, now what? So I asked him, what are you here for? He goes, I have to help you build your capacity. Then you build it inside my system. Stop building it out there. Get those people, if they are Timorese, pay them and let them stay with me. Pay those international and let them sit in my treasury. I've opened, I'm offering you that. So that's very important and still hasn't sunk yet. So now you know, I have a fight in my country because the donors think that there is a brain drain to the government because what I did is lucky for me, I came up with, you know, we, Tim would have a little bit of money. So we said, okay, now I'm gonna match the wages and I'm gonna bring them all back into the system. And so now we are like fighting for those brains. And there was one person who said, you're stealing all my people. I said, your people? Your people? All my people? So you know, it's like that. The other one is context. I have meetings. Now I have like four meetings in a year with all the development partners, with all the ministers. We all sit together, et cetera, et cetera. And then the same question is asked. I don't know if many people knows about the history of Timore, but we've been independent for about 10 years. No, seven years, actually. 10 years, I mean, we've been free 10 years. The first two and a half years was ruled by the UN and then the Timorese government took over. And then the second government now is in place. But for the, between those 10 years, if you look at our history, every two years, we have a bit of, we have a conflict. And the last one that took place was back in February 11, 2008, when my prime minister and president were, there were attempt assassination to their lives. But thank God, since then to now, we've had peace and stability. And this is where we wanted to share with the international community, with other fragile states. How come we managed to get peace and stability for so long? It's past two years now, because every time within two years, and we are like, okay, is it going to happen again? Where is it coming from, et cetera, et cetera. But just this context business. Often donors, they like you to have like a medium term, long term plan. And I didn't understand, because there was like so much pressure. We need your plan, we need your plan, we need your plan. And there we are there fighting fires, putting out fires every day because we inherited a crisis. We came into power because of a crisis. My country nearly ended up as a failed state back in 2006. Even I did not believe that we would make it. But now when I look back, I said, my God, there was a miracle. But it was not really a miracle. So that's why we are in the process of reflecting and finding out what is it that we did that actually contributed to this peace and stability that now we enjoy. And sometimes we forget that it was only just two years and a half where we couldn't even sleep during the night because of consequences of that crisis. And so with people that are demanding of us to have this medium term to long term plan, at the end I just couldn't take it anymore. I said, listen, we need to find out. We need to agree where we are now. And at what phase of whatever, development or post-conflict or whatever, are we? Because there doesn't seem to have a common consensus from everybody of where we are because there are different ways of behaving. When you are in that conflict, you behave in a different way. You are like with the emergency and stuff like that. You are fastest person getting out there. You don't have to obey all these rules. Then you move on to this recovery stage and you do it in a different way.  You have to have your medium term, long term things, expenditure frameworks. You name it, all these slogans or jargons that are in this documented literature, starts applying. But for us, how we did it is we had to take a day at a time, a month at a time, a year at a time. So to satisfy some people, we said, okay, let's try to do a plan, but we have to do a priority for this year. Because there were too many unknowns. Things were so volatile. I had, we had roaming army group rebels running around the mountains being a threat to the national security. Petitioners, which were like 700 soldiers that Ronald walked out from the army. And these people were trained. They knew how to use guns. So all they had was access to a gun and that's it. Out there, and then we had 150,000 IDPs all over the city plus some other districts. Youth, gangs, all over the place. How could we handle that? How could we sit down and do a plan? We couldn't. It was impossible. We had to act very fast. We had to be very flexible. And as a minister of finance, I had to tune in to these things and say, okay, priority for that moment was ministry of defense and security, because without that we couldn't go anywhere. So whatever they asked me, it had to go. Everything stops and we process their paperwork. Then solidarity because of IDPs. Because these were nuclear for manipulation by others because there are bad people who wanted to use these guys that are so fragile to make them explode. So it was like we were living today, there may be an explosion there tomorrow, another one there. So we had to kind of neutralize that, balance all this act. So we did that and we were so ambitious. I remember, okay, then the international community tells us this, oh, you can't fix these IDPs over, it's going to take you 10 years. Now, our mandate is five years. If it's gonna take 10 years, we're finished. Like there will be no other government that can actually handle this because not one single government can sort that out. The people, they have no more beliefs in any government. And there was no confidence in government at the time. So we had to get that as well. We had to get the trust of the people as well, which was gone at that time. So it was really anarchic at that time. So we said no to the international community, we said no way, we're gonna have it within one year. But in reality, we managed to do it within less than two years. We put them all back into their original place. But with a lot of, you see, this is the thing. Often some agencies, they can't change their mentality. And they keep telling, we need some positive support because we are already out there with these big problems. We can't afford to have you coming in and say, you can't do that, it's not going to work and this and that. We are also human beings. We need to know to be a bit secure that we are taking chance.  He used to say to me, why are you listening to these people? Am I your boss or not? Sometimes, because I used to go there and said, oh, you know, they are saying this and they are saying that and this and we cannot do that. And so he said, believe in yourself. Do you believe it? Go for it and do it. I'll be there to back you up. And so we did it. And so we did a few things. We financed those IDPs. We gave them direct money without any go-betweens because normally the practice is you hire an NGO and the NGO is going to go and help the IDPs. And the IDPs says no because the NGO is going to take all that money and then we have nothing at the end and they have the ones like, oh my gosh, there was all that stuff. So we said, okay, we'll sit together.  So what? Yes, but they move back to their places but you make sure that there is this dialogue that it's between two people, equal, not father to child because then the child goes spend and then comes back to the father or the mother. I need more. So we had to get that out of the way and created that atmosphere that it was like we respected. I think at the end, I said to some of my development partners, I said, you know what? I learned a lesson. You need to treat those people with respect as if they were just like you. Pretend, put yourself in their place. How would you like to be treated? And then I remember back in 75, when I was a refugee, how would I have liked to be treated? Like a noted child, someone that you don't trust. What happened? Just because of my situation, I became a refugee. I've lost dignity, respect of a person because so all that, we have to change all our mind setting to actually face these people as normal people just like yourselves. Then go in that way and then you will find the answer. And I'm so glad that we did it that way and now they disappeared. They've gone back and they're not a burden to us. And so we can move on to the next phase. Now we can move on and we're doing that strategic plan so that finally that particular development partner will be happy when we move on to the next month. So these are just examples. Mr. Perez, you've been wonderful and I think you've teed up. Sorry, excuse me. I think you've teed up some really great questions for our next panel.


Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research and a very warm good morning to all the esteemed colleagues out here. SICSR as is the short form of our institute is a part of Symbiosis International University which is located in Pune. The Symbiosis International University has many constituent institutes which are in the diversified fields like Humanities, Law, we have also institutes that offer courses in design in HRM and finance etcetera, but today I am talking from the as a representative of the faculty of computer studies under which we have got three institutes and I belong to the SICSR Institute of it. One thing I would like to tell you here before going ahead is that since our institute is not an engineering institute like most of us here have. So, we as an institute are not offering engineering courses, but we have an engineering college who is offering courses in engineering, but since I am not representing that I would rather speak from the perspective of my institute. So, our institute going ahead offers following kind of courses which are some of the PG and UG courses. Here under the PG courses head we have got two courses, one is the MBA degree which is a master's degree it is not an PG diploma and if this MBA degree is in the information technology field. So, it is it contains all those programming languages and computer related stuff which is technical, but in addition to that it also has a equal focus on the managerial aspect of IT that is in terms of project management, project structures, life cycles of development, service oriented architectures and so on. And our next course which is the MSE in computer applications we can say that it is a purely technical course wherein we can say it is not excluded, but not much of focus is given on architectures or managerial aspect of IT. So, it is a pure technical course. And the graduate degree programs we are having BCA and BBIT again the distinction is the same. The BCA course is a more technical one as compared to the bachelors of business administration from the IT perspective. In addition to these two PG courses that have been listed here we also have a executive MBA kind of a course which was specially designed for an company called as Mindtree in Bangalore. For these, for the employees in that company we have started a new initiative called as an MBA IT course which we would go to their campus and offer there it is a 3 year course because they are going to do the course as a weekend course and evening classes. So, it is stretched on to 3 years instead of 2 and we offer the same degree that is a PG degree from the SIU university. So, that is something that I have not listed here. Moving ahead since we all are speaking from the perspective of CE or C++ what I would like to tell you is we also cover all of it, but the perspective that we go about our approach is a little different because we have students who come post 12th standard for our UG courses. We offer some kind of introductory papers which may be more or less parallel to the computer programming or fundamentals of programming like most of you have projected it to be and going ahead then we have a paper for C and then we have a paper for C++. After those 2 papers in the later semesters we start touching upon object orientation and then move on to Java and then for courses like MSC and all that we go ahead and cover J2 ME, J2 E and advanced technologies in some of the platforms. So here I am showing you a syllabus of a paper called as logic development which is offered for both the UG courses that is BB and BCA. So in this we start with really basic knowledge assuming that the students that are coming in have no exposure to IT apart from using the computer a few times. So here we start by touching upon algorithms, flow charts and some approaches or methods of problem solving. Then we go ahead with telling them about what is a pseudo code and how you can use it when you are doing a programming thing. After that we go on to introducing them to programming. Then here we do some things like sequence control decisions, loopings, control statements all of these but irrespective of the programming language. That is since we have taught them pseudo code or some kind of an algorithm we will do all these structures using one of those approaches rather than any syntactical representations of any language. After which we go on to some introductions to programming classification and so on. Now this LD paper is an internal paper and followed by that I am sorry the things are chipping off but the paper reads as elements of information technology. This is another introductory paper in which we cover a little in depth about the memory and overview of the PC architecture which is really basic because it is for UG students. And some software concepts followed by the data representation that is octal, hexadecimal and conversion from binary to octal and so on, followed by OS, some concepts about OS and then introducing some of the Microsoft Office packages. Now after this in the third semester these students are exposed to the actual C programming as we all have seen and again the syllabus for this C programming goes exactly as fundamentals then looping, decision arrays like it is more or less similar to what all has been covered till now. So I am just running through it and then we go till the IO, we end with the IO operations in C. Going beyond that for the LD and EIT that is elements of information technology papers they are offered for all the UG courses and for the PG courses we have only one paper which is introductory because most of the students who come for a masters in IT are there graduating background is in almost all the cases IT and when we screen them we also take care that we do not try and take in students who are from a different field like you know biotechnology or I mean we do take but then we do not focus on entertaining students who like Bcom or BA or something like that. So that it is easier for those students to pick up the course also we although we have some students like this but then for them we follow a little different path. And in a normal course for the PG courses we only offer one paper called as Programming Concepts and Algorithms which is again a introductory paper. I am not getting into the details of that paper because it is more or less similar to what I have covered the topics and so on. So I am just showing you the syllabus of another Java subject which is Java 1 and it is like core Java. Here we are touching upon the object orientation by taking the reference of procedural programming that they have learnt and then we move on to primitive types, keywords starting with simple classes, what are objects, what are classes, how do you compile them and then we move on to some concepts like packages, constructor, overloading from then on to inheritance, polymorphism, anonymous classes and this topic again enums, assertions and annotations. We give this generally for a self study topic again this is not a rigid rule that we need to give this for self study but this is what most of the faculties who have taken up this course have decided that this should be for self study. But yes we do have a freedom to change that. And moving on we cover everything till swings, swings IO threads exceptions. One more point here is that we have not included JDBC as a part of this course like in most of the colleges they do. Moving forward in all these four courses that we have seen right now, this is just a list of all the languages that we cover generally in semester 3, 4, 5 or maybe second year of some of the PG courses. After that let us move on to the evaluation of these courses. We have a credit based evaluation like we have some allocated credits for each semester, each subject and each course within that. Now here for the UG and PG there is a difference in the way we evaluate them. Generally for all the external papers for the undergraduate level we have a 40 and 60 marking that is the internal assessment for these courses is 40 percent of whatever are the total marks and 60 percent is the external and for PG courses it is exactly the opposite more weightage is given to the internal assessment and less to the external paper. Now all the external assessment in case of PG and UG it comprises of a semester and examination that is like it happens at the university level we get question papers from the university and so on. But for the internal evaluation it is supposed to be a continuous evaluation that is the 40 or 60 whatever it is it has to be a continuous evaluation and the criteria and the break up of those criteria that is the weightage of each criteria is decided by the faculty who is going to handle that course. So if I am teaching suppose Java 1 then at the starting of the semester I am supposed to give the break up of that 60 percent internal weightage and I would say that may be 20 percent weightage would be given to the lab examination, 10 percent to the lab assignments, may be 30 percent to the class test that I take. The only restriction in this that we have from the university is that you have to cover minimum three criteria in the internal evaluation that is you cannot say that for all the 60 percent I will just take one examination throughout the semester that cannot be done you have to split it up across three different criteria minimum and what are those criteria that is something that the faculty is free to decide. The faculty who is taking up the course is supposed to provide the break up and the weightage to the university at the starting of the semester itself. So we have a freedom on that terms because you have some papers which are programming oriented some which are theoretical so in that they may want to take something like case studies and so on. So you can decide the criteria and also these are only a few of them that I have listed a faculty can go beyond that and say that I want to go with some other criteria also. So this is on the evaluation part. This is a sample lab assignment that we have written here a question to I am sorry for the misformatting that is taken place but it was working fine on that machine. The question to here it is a sample lab assignment that we give to students it is asking them to calculate a simple square calculator that is only squaring of the number. Now for the lab assignments that we take care we do not get any kind of a structure or a prescribed format from the university. So it is we who have to devise everything right from scratch and whatever assignment we have given last year we cannot give them this year because our college they have a very strong senior junior network. So if seniors have done it already the juniors will just do it in one day because they have it already from their seniors. So generally we have to give a separate set of assignments every time but we do not have any rigid rules on you know these are the 15 or these are the 20. We can devise it so that is it and generally we put these assignments on the shared drive from which is accessible to all the students they do it and they have a separate drive for their PRN wherein they put those assignments and after finishing they can upload that on the shared drive from wherein we can access them and see them. But only thing is that we do not have a long term storage mechanism for these assignments that is once they are done and evaluated by us then they are deleted by the sysads. So we do not continuously store them. And going ahead this is the lab infrastructure that we have we are having five labs one of these is a network lab because for MSc second year we are having networking as a specialization and there are about 200 plus terminals all of which are connected to the LAN network our entire campus is Wi-Fi enabled since most of the students have their own laptops so they can be anywhere in the campus and be connected to the network as well as to the internet and these are some of the peripherals and accessibility details that have listed. So along with the Wi-Fi we also have a lease line so also internet is available morning 8 to 8 and the labs are also available 8 to 8 to all the students all the five labs are open. There are some question papers I was not able to get a soft copy of these question papers so there is a hard copy here this is just a sample paper of purposely I am not taking a C paper because we all have seen a lot of C here. So I have taken a paper on web technologies if you can see it is for an MSc CA course and here you have a question A which is of 50 marks and there is a sub option in it there are six questions given and the student need to solve five out of them. And these are a combination of theory as well as programming and going beyond on the other side there is one 30 marks question which is a complete application development that is they need to write an application in the paper itself which is of 30 marks. So this is a pattern again we do not have any kind of restrictions as to what should be percentage weightage to theory and to practical so it completely depends on whoever is the paper set on so there is I mean there can be sometimes 20 marks of theory there can be sometimes 50 marks of theory also. So there is no restriction as such but we try to make it as programmatic as possible but since we have to give some amount of theory and also in the internal evaluation we already try and cover most of the programming aspects by giving them some lab assignment evaluation so on. And also about the evaluation we do not have a fixed grade for passing that is it is not 40 percent or 50 percent but we do a relative evaluation as in that in the class we find out the class average of all the students and 0.7 percent of that class average is the passing percent so all those who are in the bottom 30 percent generally do not pass that course they all have to reappear. So this is it and if you have any questions. How many other colleges affiliated to university offer exactly the same programs meaning are there multiple colleges who are going to teach exactly the same syllabus and courses at different places. So also like I have showed in my first slide there are three institutes under the faculty of computer studies so all of them they offer these kind of programming courses but they may not be exactly the same because SCIT if you say they are having separate specializations they have specializations in security management. No when you said university are you referring to Pune university or your own. No I am referring to Symbiosis University or Symbiosis University correct and it has 19 constituent institutes. Correct then why can't freedom be given to each constituent institute and teacher because they are a single university they do not have to borrow rules from other universities. So no. This external means what somebody else will set the paper. Yeah external as in that the paper for those courses we will have teachers across the university who I mean in these three institutes there are teachers who are taking care of IT related the same subjects so centrally there will be a repository collected of what all papers are required and then they will be distributed to teachers of each college. That is my biggest worry that you know I can understand this is the normal practice in the university system but if I am an autonomous institution where is the autonomy of a teacher. Why shouldn't teacher who has taught the course should set the paper. So it is so A because then there are two parts to this one is that the teacher who teaches the course is more or less the internal paper set for that so and there is an external paper set who may be of ABC institute or who may be visiting to any of the constituent institutes. Second is that the thing is that if you allow the internal that is the faculty who has taught the paper to only to be the only paper setter then they have a worry saying that because they ask us many times that question also that what is the what is the guarantee that you are covering the entire syllabus as in that because if I there are ten topics and I take only six topics and set the paper depending on those six topics then there is a issue of maybe non-uniform. My answer to the management is you selected the long teacher for appointment. IIT system has been doing this the top universities of the world have been doing this for like we have been doing it for 50 years. Other universities have been doing it for 150 years and there has been never any acquisition of this kind. Yes, there have been exceptions but there are there have been exceptions even here everything is not uncut or when you are so many people there will be some problem but the peer pressures are very heavy. Their pressures are extremely heavy I mean I will not be so much worried about what will my students say. In fact they will be very happy if I teach less and ask simple questions but my peers will not be. Let me also tell you some very significant thing teachers who have set simple papers and given huge ranks do not get top evaluations by students. Teachers who are some of the toughest teachers who have failed as many as 20 by 30 percent of their students get top evaluation by students. I think students understand you know what is good teaching and what is not good teaching. But this fear is you see this is the chicken and egg so why I am saying this is you are an autonomous institution you are an autonomous university at least this if you change because this does not give me a chance as a teacher to improve myself and come up to that expectation. I will always now feel that my job is this I don't have to think I don't have to apply my mind somebody else will examine and my teaching will again be from that point of view. Then half the questions are going to be asked by her who doesn't know what I have taught. So therefore I will be forced to cover you know cover every portion because I don't know from which portion she will ask the question. I cannot therefore experiment with my teaching I cannot introduce something else which occupies a larger portion. So what you are saying has definitely has a point but then we have maybe not that hundred percent level of autonomy but then we have some amount of say you are not hundred percent autonomous. No no I mean in terms of the papers at your individual colleges. So as in that for the external paper setter we always have a discussion like if I get a list of papers that you are the internal paper setter for so and so papers then I am always given the contact number of the external paper setter and we always discuss that you know this has been taught this is the way I have covered this or this is what I have focused on and all that. Anyway it doesn't concern us but it concerned me because I have been propagating autonomy for every college and for every teacher actually the ultimate objective of teaching learning process should be autonomy of a learner. So some some countries like even Thailand have this I may do some two years of study in Chennai and I may suddenly barge in Pune and I want to do remaining credits from your place that is perfectly permitted all that this university of this new college should say that okay you have done these these courses these are the credits out of these I recognize these credits other credits you have to do afresh now this is the flexibility that a student gets there someday an Indian student should get that flexibility today the only flexibility that poor student has is to purchase for five thousand rupees a readymade project now but going to the teachers I believe please convey this to your university authorities that professor Fatak believes that the university is throwing away a golden opportunity because earlier when you are under Pune University or something you are you seem to be moving towards that you must move away from it anyway sorry for digression because it is not concerned with our course okay so but I'm sure that if I say that this is your suggestion people will definitely entertain it because I'll just tell you one thing that because when when our head had called me to say that you know you go for this workshop or whatever so I was a little hesitant to be very frank I said what will I go and do out there and you know I'm teaching Java and I'm happy teaching all these XML Java and I want to be you know you send me for some learning jet to me I will happily go what will I go and do here so then he held a paper and he said you read this name even if you go and hear this person talking for an hour your entire purpose of going for the workshop is solved so then so no sir really he's also an alumnus of IIT but I'm not sure whether it's IIT Bombay but then he told me that so I was like yes and the name was of course yours so then he said that you know you can take so much from him that even if you hear him once I'm sure that your purpose will be solved so you don't need to worry that why I should go so I really got this opportunity thank you very much I'm embarrassed by this observation but I would like to clarify one thing this workshop is not arranged for you to come here and learn at all this workshop is not at all with that intention this workshop is for all of us together to plan how we will help thousands of teachers to improve the effectiveness of their teaching learning that is the purpose okay each one of us here I'm sure each one of those thousand teachers and each one of those six lakh students who study programming are capable of handling themselves our job is that if certain effectiveness we see today like 20% people failing 25% people failing or having these problems of the teaching and so on how can we contribute collectively and set up a collective mechanism to sort of improve it over the years that's the purpose so the purpose I wanted you to be here is that it doesn't matter what subject actually you could very well be a mechanical engineer for all I care but once you understand what is to be done for those 30 40 teachers will assemble at your place the kind of environment that is to be given to them that's good enough no I'm sure this is a more enriching experience because I can go back and learn now yes


Hello and welcome to the session I am Deepika here. Let's discuss a question which says in a box containing 100 bulbs, 10 are defective. The probability that out of a sample of 5 bulbs, none is defective is 10 inverse 1 over 2 raised to power 5, 9 over 10 raised to power 5, 9 over 10. That is we have to choose the correct option from A, B, C and D. So let's start the solution. Now here we are given a box containing 100 bulbs, 10 are defective. We have to find the probability that out of a sample of 5 bulbs none is defective. Now we know that trials of a random experiment are called Bernoulli trials. If they are finite in number, the trials are independent and each trial has exactly two outcomes, success or failure and the probability of success remains the same in each trial. Now here event of selecting bulbs is independent also the number of trials is finite that is 5. So the trials of the above experiment are Bernoulli trials. Let X denote the number of defective bulbs in a sample of 5 bulbs as the binomial distribution with n is equal to 5 and p is equal to 10 over 100 which is equal to 1 over 10 because we are given a box containing 100 bulbs in which 10 are defective that is probability of success is 1 over 10 where success is that the bulb is defective. Therefore q which is equal to 1 minus p is equal to 1 minus 1 over 10 and this is equal to 9 over 10. Probability of X success is equal to n c x q raise to power n minus x into p raise to power x where x is from 0 to n and q is equal to 1 minus p. Now we have to find the probability that out of a sample of 5 bulbs none is defective that is we have to find the probability of X is equal to 0. So this is equal to 5 c 0 into 9 over 10 raise to power 5 minus 0 into 1 over 10 raise to power 0 because we have n is equal to 5 p is equal to 1 over 10 and q is equal to 9 over 10. So probability of 0 success is equal to 5 c 0 into 9 over 10 raise to power 5 minus 0 into 1 over 10 raise to power 0 and this is equal to 1 into 9 over 10 raise to power 5 into 1 because 5 c 0 is 1 and 1 over 10 raise to power 0 is also 1. So probability of X is equal to 0 is equal to 9 over 10 raise to power 5 but this is our option c. Hence c is the correct option. So this is the answer for the above question. This completes our session. I hope the solution is clear to you. Bye and have a nice day.


This is an exciting day for us all, it's National Accessibility Week. We know that access and inclusion are critical issues in British Columbia. So I'm very pleased that we're able to announce that we have a half a million dollars for accessibility and inclusion projects. Accessibility is really about creating a province where people with disabilities are included, are empowered, and feel welcomed. I'm very committed to embracing the UN Convention that says we are going to do this with people who have the lived experience. I think that the province's commitment to rolling out a poverty reduction strategy is a really vital part of promoting accessibility and inclusion in BC. We've been reaching out to the president's group to ensure we start opening those doors for persons with disability to have the employment and the meaningful opportunities to build full lives for themselves and their families. Today is a day of celebration but there's an awful lot of work in front of us all as we move forward. When all citizens are equal, then people have full participation and then they can move on and adjust and thrive in their communities. I think that it's going to be a really interesting time to BC over the next couple years and I think that there's a lot of exciting initiatives that are going on right now to not just raise awareness about accessibility but to make the province a truly accessible place.


Hey there, welcome back. This is Christy. Just a quick reading for today. I'm going to use my animal deck, spirit animal awareness deck, and just a quick reading. Today is April 3rd, 2019, but anytime you're drawn to this particular video, this should be relevant to you if you're resonating with this channel. If it's not relevant, then by all means do something else, but a couple more shuffles here. And thank you so much as usual for watching. I appreciate your likes, your subscribes, and I love to hear your comments. Really love your comments. So if this resonates with you at all, I would love to hear about it. Or if you have additional insights because all of us are tuned in in our own ways. Every one of us is unique. We each have our own little antennae out there for spirits, and it's really good to share what comes through to you because it is helpful to other people. So let's see what this card is. It is Hawk. All right, so this is card of the day is Hawk, and just feeling into what Hawk wants to say. I'm just seeing Hawk right now just floating on the air currents, just soaring. And what I'm seeing Hawk doing today is just really kind of taking it easy and looking down at the landscape, surveying. It's a vantage point. So there's an opportunity today to take stock. And I'm most attuned to red tailed Hawk. It's the Hawk I'm most familiar with. Red tail doesn't actually, they're not actually hunting when they're up there in the air, but what they are doing is they're surveying, and that's any conjecture anyway. We don't know exactly what goes on in a Hawk's brain, but one conjecture is that they're kind of casing out the landscape, looking for the good hunting spots just seeing with there, but basically it's really just they're being aware. And so the message today is to simply spend some time paying attention, paying attention to what's going on within you, paying attention to your body and your body's signals, feeling your body right now. Are you feeling tightness anywhere? That might be an invitation to stretch or breathe. You know, are you feeling discomfort anywhere? Sometimes discomfort in the body kind of gets channeled into different things or discomfort in it could be an emotional discomfort sometimes gets channeled into the body. So maybe you're feeling a lot of hunger. Check in. Is it really hunger? Okay, let's take a deeper level of awareness. Is it really hunger? Or maybe there's something else, something else that your spirit might be hungry for, or your, you know, your emotional self might be hungry for something else that may be transferring you to that. Sometimes it's just your thirsty and sometimes that gets transferred into feelings of hunger because a lot of times when we're growing up we're in situations where we just, you know, don't have the access to water like we're in school for hours and that kind of gets transferred. Sometimes we, we push down certain things. We do that with emotions a lot and transfer it to different things like fear can get transferred into rage, you know, feelings of inadequacy can get transferred into some of these more powerful emotions. They can also get pushed into the body where they, they come up as disease. So just pay real close attention to what's going on within you and see if you can really take the awareness deeper and figure out what's going on. I know every time I sit down and do a video my dog comes to take a drink. It's kind of to be a habit. So maybe she's saying just like, you know, yeah, pay attention. Get a drink if you need it. Make sure you're hydrated. And also pay attention to what's going on outside of you because I've been getting that this, this is a good month for manifestation and a lot of times it's those connections that we make or things that were happening. We had to kind of be aware of what's out there and so kind of putting your feelers out, maybe unplug for a little bit, unplug from the electronics, maybe see what's happening in your community, reach out to somebody that you haven't connected with for a while, see what's up with them, get your feelers out, you know, get up there, take the higher level viewpoint and kind of get a feel for what's happening around you. All right, so hope this has been helpful and as always, I so much appreciate your watching and if you haven't subscribed yet, go ahead and do that. I'm uploading daily videos for the month of April as a thank you for reaching 1000 subscribers last month. So thank you again. I love you all and have a lovely day. I'll catch you tomorrow.