Well I guess we can go ahead and start. It doesn't look like a whole lot more people are coming in and so we can go ahead and begin. This is one of my favorite talks because, actually I like all the talks I give. They're a lot of fun at this point. After having done them several Mises use, I really enjoyed this one though because this is sort of my bread and butter as an economist. This is what I studied when I was at Auburn in grad school and it's an important issue for economists to try to figure out and particularly people who are free market economists who are confronted all the time with these arguments that the market can't handle environmental and resource issues that free markets will end up with the despoilation of the environment and you know we'll have extinction of species because companies don't give any attention to environmental quality and so I'd like to help you with this and I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about Ronald Coase. Ronald Coase is the most cited economist of the last, well maybe ever, maybe Adam Smith but in the last century at least if you count up journal citations which is sort of the way of keeping score for academics. Ronald Coase is at the top. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 19, I think it was 1990 and so he's very well known. He died just a couple of years ago at the age of 102 and something about people who win Nobel Prizes they live a long time. I don't remember how old Hayek was but I think he was well into his 90s and so I want to take you through some criticism of Coase from the Austrian perspective because Austrians will look at Coase and say well there's some serious problems here. We need to think about this more carefully and the rest of the economic mainstream has just been adoring Coase for a long time and I have some pretty strong reservations about his views on things. By the way, I listened to an interview of him when he was about 101 and he was very sharp and if you're vertical at 101 you're doing great but he had an incredible capacity to work through some of these problems. Unfortunately, I think that they misled us in some directions. All right so let's look at two key issues that are tied up in this environmental discussion. One is environmental resource use. That's deforestation. Are we going to run out of oil? What about extinction of species? Things like how are we going to conserve energy? How are we going to conserve water? I mentioned right before the talk began something about the new dishwasher regulations. These are resource conservation questions and those of us that think markets do a really good job of handling resource uses will tend to say well you know if you leave this to the market then as long as you have private ownership of these things and don't have common access then these resources will be priced appropriately. We're not going to run out prematurely. There have been lots of predictions over time that we're going to run out of oil. I mean we saw that prediction about a hundred years ago, believe it or not, people were saying we're going to run out of oil. We've only got seven years of oil left and of course we didn't run out of oil. William Stanley Jevons, that British economist of the 1800s, worried that they were going to run out of coal and the industrial revolution was going to come to a screeching halt. Years after he died his children were cleaning out his attic with a stockpile of paper that he had gathered up because he was worried that they were going to run out of paper. So there's been a lot of these kind of concerns ill-founded I think in a lot of cases but nevertheless that's an important part of what we think about in environmental economics. Second issue within environmental economics is the externality issue and this is commonly regarded as a source of market failure. So if you've taken a traditional mainstream economics course you're going to find there's three types of market failure that are given to you and almost any textbook externalities that is accidental side effects of your production or consumption activity. Public goods are considered a source of market failure that markets don't provide enough public goods. I don't know what enough is or how you'd find out what that is that magic number and I don't know how you know the government's going to not not going to make things worse rather than better but that's another discussion for another day. And then the third is market power and you heard Tom DiLorenzo earlier in the week on antitrust and monopoly issues so I'm sure he handled that quite capably but we're going to focus on this externality issue here. Now things really aren't as separate as it may appear. I mean externalities really boil down to questions over ownership of a particular resource. We talk about air pollution, water pollution, solid waste pollution, noise pollution as being examples of externalities but really we're dealing with uncertainty over who owns the resource, who owns the air that has these particles being emitted into it, who owns the water that has some kind of waste being poured into it. We all use the air or want to use the air and the water for different purposes. We don't necessarily know offhand which purpose is the most valuable so I'm going to argue that if you turn over these resources to private ownership you're going to tend to get the most valuable use of these resources in society. All right so there's three basic approaches to this externality problem. One is the Pagovian approach named for Arthur Cecil Pagu who held what later became John Maynard Keynes' chair at Cambridge and Pagu said well what you need to do is figure out how much this pollution is costing and then tax an amount that will induce the polluter to cut back on the pollution or if you're creating a positive side effect a positive externality then Pagu said we should subsidize the positive externality, subsidize whatever that activity is. So for example if my mother is growing roses in her front yard for her own benefit and her own pleasure and passers by on the sidewalk benefit from being able to look over and see her beautiful roses then according to Pagu she should get a subsidy for her rose growing so that she grows a larger amount since she's creating these these side effects for her neighbors. Well of course that quickly descends into something quite absurd. I should get a subsidy under this kind of arrangement for wearing deodorant since I'm reducing negative externalities by doing so I should be subsidized for this and again this is pretty much everything we do creates some kind of side effect and to imagine that government is capable of identifying all of these side effects positive and negative to imagine that government can measure with any degree of precision what those side effects are worth positive and negative and then administer this fairly without any bias toward the people who funded their campaigns without any influence from businesses that would like to use this tax subsidy scheme to gain economic grants to imagine any of this is just is just in the realm of fantasy I would I would say. Then there's a regulatory approach where government says we're going to force you to reduce emissions to a level that we regard as socially efficient. Now of course the logical question here would be what's socially efficient how do we know what that level is how do we know how many gallons of water a dishwasher ought to use how many how many gallons per flush should a toilet use we don't really know that and and of course neither does government and there are a lot of other problems that enter into this as well for example the regulations that have attempted to get people to swap out their incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescent or LED light bulbs might well be an effort by some of the large light bulb manufacturers to suppress their competition. There are lots and lots of incandescent light bulb manufacturers and GE and I think Phillips and some of the others lobbied to get this new technology mandated by law so that they could sell more of their light bulbs and the competitors could be removed from the market and a third approach is the property rights approach which includes a common law approach which includes attention to tort law as a way to deal with environmental problems and I'm going to suggest that Rothbard's approach if you look at his famous paper law property rights and air pollution Rothbard's approach is one that relies on tort law on nuisance as a way to handle these kinds of problems and then there's Kos who wants judges to decide who should get the resource and then he imagines that if transaction costs are low enough then people might be able to negotiate amongst themselves once the property rights have been decided. Now there's two key problems with the mainstream approaches and I'll try to move through this quickly there is a little bit of technical stuff here but we'll work it out. All right first efficiency is an individual goal seeking problem not a value maximization problem. All right that's Roy Cordotto that I'm referencing here he teaches at North Carolina State University he's written a little book on externalities which I believe the Mises Institute has in the bookstore if not I'm sure you can find it online and it's a great treatment of of externalities and he argues basically that from the Austrian perspective efficiency is attained when legal institutions allow individuals to pursue their ends. This is not some sort of social efficiency that we're after here that we can somehow observe separately from individual goal seeking. All right conflicts will arise over the use of scarce goods that's the nature of scarcity that there is some there are competing ends for or competing goals for the same resource but the Austrian economist doesn't try to assess the value of those alternative uses and then decide who should get what and that is because costs are subjective and cannot be measured there's one thing you get out of this talk this morning that's the thing I want you to see costs are subjective and cannot be measured the implications of this are far reaching. Now if you take a typical environmental economics course you'll run into this graph a good bit most of you may not have seen this if you haven't had economics before I'll try to explain it very briefly. All right so the MPC, MSC, and PB here are marginal private cost the cost to the firm of producing the product. This is the quantity of output on the horizontal axis so the more they produce the higher that marginal private cost is going to go. They have to pay more and more to get the scarce resources into their production process the opportunity costs are rising as they bring more raw materials and more labor into their production process. MSC here is the marginal social cost all right so that is higher than the private cost it's the additional cost to the rest of society from these side effects these externalities so if I'm producing electricity let's say and I've got a smokestack for the coal fire that is heating the water to run my turbines and the coal burning generates some kind of emissions and the emissions cause problems for other people then that's part of that social cost the cost of bystanders who had nothing particularly to do with the production or the consumption of that product and then we have the marginal private benefit which is this downward sloping curve and that's the benefit to the firm of producing the good and selling it that's the revenues that they're getting from selling increasing quantities of the good. All right so I should mention by the way here that the social cost is not just the externalities the side effects to everybody else it's also the cost to the firm since the firm is part of society okay so the firm by itself is looking at its bottom line and it's looking at the benefits to itself and the costs to itself and so it will decide that the optimal quantity of output will be right here at q I think that's an m there I'm not sure why it shows m but that quantity is the is the amount of output the firm would find ideal but if you look at this from the point of view of the rest of society then you'd say oh well there's these other costs the firm didn't take into consideration they didn't think about the smoke landing particles landing on other people so if they had taken those costs into account then they would have chosen a smaller quantity here q star that's what they would have would have chosen had they taken into account the side effects positive and negative of all of their production so the argument then is that the government under say a Pagovian system where they tax and subsidize should try to figure out how much this is how much that distance is and apply a tax to the firm of that amount the tax forces the firm to take into consideration those external costs and pushes the firm back toward q star alternatively they could regulate and say we don't care what your costs are we're going to force you to produce here q star and that's the way we're going to handle it in both of those cases the government is in a position of having to discover something they can't discover of having to have information they can't have they don't know what that distance is costs as I said are subjective they don't know what it really costs someone to have the emissions from a coal fired power plant in their air or their water they don't really know this and there's no no good way to find this out if you went say door to door with a survey forum and said hi I'm from the government I'm here to help I would don't laugh well you can laugh so I would like to know that this this power plant over here is belching smoke into the air we'd like to know how much that costs you every year because we're trying to figure out how much to tax the coal fired power plant and first of all people have trouble figuring this out for themselves they don't really have a good idea of how much that power plants affecting them badly bad or good but then they they they might have their own reasons for either exaggerating on the plus side of the minus side what the what the costs really are so they might have it you know have a grudge against the the guy that owns the power plant or something and they think they were overbilled one year so they they say well it's ruined my life it costs me if you had to put a value on it it'd be a hundred thousand dollars a day or something okay well hundred thousand dollars all right so we go to the next neighbor and we tally up their score somebody else might say well you know I work for the power plant I don't want them to tax the power plant because I have my job there I'm going to say that the cost is nil so you you can't get good information on this and therefore you can't really decide where this point is all right now some implications of this kind of analysis I mentioned earlier resource use questions overuse of resource resources as we see with a tragedy of the commons I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here but basically that's when a resource is open for anybody and everybody to use nobody can say no and the pasture gets overgrazed or the water gets over extracted from the well or the passenger pigeons get shot at a too high a rate or something like that the resource is not owned and therefore it gets overused okay so this you can't see that but it says this assumes that we know the optimal rate of use we don't really know that we don't really know where the marginal benefit marginal social benefit equals the marginal social cost we don't know where those curves intersect and that's important we don't know the appropriate tax and for those people who say well you know I'm pro market I want tradable permits I want the government to issue permits for each ton of sulfur dioxide that this this power plant emits I want them to have to have in hand a permit from the government now the green tinted far left doesn't like this because they regard emitting sulfur dioxide as a environmental sin per se so they don't they think this is licensing bad behavior sort of like licensing I don't know prostitution or something they think this is terrible but then there are others who say well this is really this is really pro market you see because we're allowing these permits to be traded in a market and there's a price and so forth that doesn't solve the problem and it's not really a market it's it's like Mises would say we're pretending at markets but it doesn't make it into a true market because who's determining the quantity of permits available in this mark in this market who can either raise or lower that quantity of markets on a whim that's the government so ultimately we're not really solving the problem now we might gain some some efficiencies from not having to treat every power plant the same the ones that can cut costs cheaply will do so and those that can't cut costs cheaply won't do so so it might not be as bad as some other systems we could think of but you're still setting the quantity of pollution at some level which we don't have the information to do we don't know where that level should be set we don't know the government certainly doesn't know whether there should be a million tons of sulfur dioxide permits out there in the market or 10 million tons of sulfur dioxide or a hundred million tons we don't have any good way to tell where that should be and as long as we don't have that information this is pretending to be pro-market when in fact it's it's really not art carden wrote an article for us in the quarterly journal of austrian economics which i i'm on the editorial staff and we have just in the last year to maybe five maybe it was four or five issues back we had we've had a number of articles on environmental issues which i i think are are valuable if you want to look those up and take a take a take a read art carden says that the calculation objection to emissions trading schemes which i've basically just told you is more than a simple how do you know conversation stopper finding the right amount of emissions to allow might require some trial and error but credible commitment remains an important potential obstacle what incentive is there for a state to specify a particular level of carbon emissions that will be allowed each year and then not change in this in response to political pressure so he's saying well you know trial and error maybe we can find the right amount now i i disagree i don't think i mean i think trial and error requires some real information from a voluntary economy like profit and loss but he's pointing out this credit credible commitment problem which is a very serious one how do we know that lobbying or some other pressure on the government is not going to result in changes to whatever this level of pollution permits we have circulating in the market we don't so the scarcity of these permits could change arbitrarily and with very little notice he says the information needed to know whether a particular regulation works quite literally does not exist and the key difference between firms and governments is that firms trying to decide how much to advertise have market tests for their decisions now that's he gets a few points back on this because he's saying this is basically the test of whether we're using this is basically the test of whether we're using resources efficiently maybe i'll give him all the points back i like art he's a great guy so he says governments don't have this information now this is that one of those articles in a in a several among several that we have in the qj a on on environmental issues lately all right what about cost of the environment well no such thing there are cost individuals who might want to use the environment for various purposes and i don't mean just they want to cut down all the trees or suck out all the oil i mean you might have people who say my use of the environment would be to have ecotourism or my use of the environment would be to leave these acres of trees alone and enjoy looking at them and watching the wildlife that that live there and and that's that's what i think is the highest and best use of the property the issue becomes a matter of violating the property rights of another person not about exceeding some level of emissions or damaging the environment rory cordado whom i mentioned earlier uh says pollution is therefore not about harming the environment but about human conflict over the use of physical resources humans change the environment in such a way that it harms others there's your cost it harms others who might be planning to use it for conflicting purposes that's how we can that's the kind of information we need to determine whether resources are being used uh well or badly carl minger whom you've heard about from earlier this week history of the austrian school one of the founders of the austrian school said when all members of society compete for a given quantity of goods that is insufficient a practical solution to the conflict of interest is only conceivable if the goods pass into the possession of some of the economizing individuals that is private ownership of the resources is essential to um uh to an efficient use and efficient not inefficient and efficient use and if these individuals are protected by society in their possession to the exclusion of all other individuals when you can string barbed wire across a pasture and say that that pasture is mine and you can regulate the use of it according to your own feedback of profit and loss then you've got efficient use of the property now i mentioned i would go through some stuff on coast here now uh i've got a lot i could say later i'm just going to have to take the remaining time i think and go through um go through this on the coast theorem but the coast theorem says that in the absence of transaction costs anybody know what transaction costs are some of you uh no that's a tax a transaction costs exist uh transaction costs exist whenever you have well i guess by some definitions you could use a you could refer to a tax as a tar as a transaction cost right it's a it's a cost of searching out negotiating and consummating and exchange so when i go to the store and i have to wander through the aisles a little bit to find what i want that's part of my transaction cost when i have to stand in line that's part of the transaction cost when i have to pay a little fee to use my debit card and the checking account owner does pay part of that fee indirectly when i that's part of my transaction cost uh that's all now coast says if you can do this costlessly then he says the outcome that is the amount of pollution will be the same regardless of the initial assignment of property rights in other words he's saying with zero transaction costs it doesn't matter whether one party gets the rights to the property or the other party gets the rights to the property now transaction costs aren't zero and he didn't argue that they were he was creating a kind of a fictitious world to to study this and so he said courts ought to balance these costs and benefits to both sides and make a determination of who should get the property rights so we're back to this kind of statist assumption that governments have enough information to make these decisions appropriately this is harrell dimsets by the way the cozy and there's a interesting exchange going way back between uh walter block and harrell dimsets in the old uh review of austrian economics from years years back so it's uh it's uh it's very very interesting it was useful to me in sorting through some of these things but dimsets is a cozy and and the the cozy and approach neglects this problem of the subjectivity of costs and benefits that i mentioned earlier so let's think about this classic case it's in the coast coast paper from 1960 steam locomotive rolling along the tracks sparks and stuff coming out of the smokestack and landing on the fields beside the tracks the fields sometimes catch fire and burn the farmers crops uh or well in this case an orchard so um we're going to talk later about the efficiency versus the ethics here i don't think you can take ethical decision making out of this out of this subject let's think about the railroads versus the orchards the orchards are destroyed by sparks from the passing train and let's suppose there's a hundred you can't read this unfortunately but a hundred thousand dollar reduction in the market value of the property of the orchard farmer he's got to either pull his orchard trees back from the tracks to avoid them being burnt and lose the value of that property or he's got to suffer the occasional loss of the trees uh so let's suppose the market value of the property is now fifteen thousand dollars instead of a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars because of this risk let's suppose that there is a cost of these spark reduction devices that the railroad could employ and that that cost is a hundred twenty thousand dollars so the farmer has lost um a hundred thousand dollars of property the cost of the spark reduction devices is a hundred and twenty thousand dollars so let's suppose the court decides that the farmer should have the rights for whatever reason the farmer wins the case against the railroad the railroad pays a hundred thousand dollars then to compensate the farmer after the case is won the railroad comes to the or after the railroad loses the case the railroad goes to the farmer and says look you won we hate that but um would you be willing to accept a hundred thousand dollars if you allow us to avoid the spark reduction device and continue to throw sparks on your orchard because frankly it's going to cost us a lot to to cut back on the spark so if you just take this payment then uh you'd be compensated we'd be happier and we can all go about our business the farmer would have reason to accept that offer and the railroad of course would would benefit from making that offer so probably uh if the transaction costs are low enough the outcome would be the railroad continues to throw the sparks so the trees are gone the devices are not installed and society according to the cosian gains about twenty thousand dollars relative to the alternative the cause instead of incurring a hundred twenty thousand dollar cost society incurs only the hundred thousand dollar cost the case two the railroad gets the rights the court decides the opposite now the farmer is not going to be willing to pay as much as a hundred twenty thousand dollars to induce the railroad to install the devices so the devices are not installed the trees are gone in other words from the cosian perspective we get the same result and society gains by twenty thousand dollars now let's suppose that in addition to the hundred thousand dollar reduction in the market value of the property so that the farmer now has to suffer the farmer suffers a loss of the trees and the market value of the property is fifteen thousand dollars now as before but there's an additional subjective loss to the farmer the farmer may have some non tangible attachment to these trees this was the orchard that his great great great grandfather planted and he proposed to his wife under that tree over there i don't know what it could be but he's got a nine hundred i'm just throwing out a number here nine hundred thousand dollar psychological loss to the farmer it's just almost uh where you can't he would he would be crushed if he lost his orchard orchard okay so also a hundred twenty thousand dollar cost of spark reduction devices case two railroad gets the rights total market value the property is only a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars um so even if he sold the property he would not be able to compensate the railroad enough to induce them to install the spark reduction device there's no way he can i mean the the psychological loss is not something he can sell get enough money to pay the railroad and he can't borrow money i mean what bank is going to say well your collateral is the psychological value of the property to you can't do that so then the farmer can't raise the hundred twenty thousand dollars to induce the railroad to install the devices and we're assuming there that this is the sum total of his net worth and all of that the point is the devices are not installed the trees are gone just as the cosian would predict but society now loses by a hundred twenty thousand dollars minus a hundred thousand dollars minus ninety thousand dollars uh nine hundred thousand dollars so there's an eight hundred eighty thousand dollar loss to society in this case because the cosian ignored this and i'd suggest to you that it is normal that the value to an individual of an asset they have that it is normal that that value to them be higher than the market value how do i know this well um most people uh most uh most people do not have their houses on the market and don't no they the market value of the house is lower than the value to them the minute it's the reverse what do they do they put it on the market they try to sell it i mean there are some transaction costs but uh or take for example the engagement ring i gave my wife i i know do you think that if she had that thing appraised and then the jeweler said that's the appraisal and i'll give you that plus a thousand dollars do you think she would sell it well i certainly hope not uh this is a this is my gold wedding ring uh i don't know how much the gold and it's worth and it's not a lot but probably give us something for a hundred dollars or something this belonged to my father before he died my mother gave it to me or gave it to my wife my fiance at the time to give to me when we got married you think i'd take the melt value of this for this ring there's a lot of psychological value in this thing if i lost it i'd i'd tear the house apart trying to find it okay so we can't forget that value which is pervasive in society this kind of psychological value coast is only looking at the market value now back to the efficiency question here's of course mary rothbard and in his um in uh rizzo's book time uncertainty and disequilibrium rothbard says we cannot decide on public policy tort law rights or liabilities on the basis of efficiencies or minimizing of costs now tort law says if someone aggresses against another person by invading their property or affecting their person with pollution if i blow smoke in your face if i throw a aluminum can on your front yard etc they can be held strictly liable in a court and required to stop or enjoined is the technical term for this a harm is generally understood as physical invasion of a of your personal property so if i can show that there is a harm to you or a threat of harm that is near well maybe not a threat but if there is a if there is a harm to you that is personal physical you can show that it's happened to you i have let's say i develop um uh disease as a result of your um uh burdening me with with your emissions of some kind then i've got grounds for a court case now it's important to recognize that the decline in value of property is not an invasion so if um if i open up a walmart next to your um your retail outlet and your retail outlet loses value because of my walmart that's not an invasion economists will refer to this as a pecuniary externality changes in supply and demand will occur and will affect the value of your property but that's not inefficient and it's not an invasion um you can't read the next line but i um uh schumpeter referred to creative destruction where there's uh whenever a new product comes out the old products lose value that's not an invasion you're not entitled to the valuation other people put on your assets if somehow people came up with a way to manufacture um diamonds that are identical to the kind you dig up out of the ground maybe they have already i don't know but um that so that the world is flooded with diamonds that are that are identical to the ones that um that people have in their jewelry now um they're not entitled any kind of compensation this is not something that you can sue for because you're not entitled to the subjective value that other people place on your own your assets that's not your property their evaluation of your property is not your property hope that makes sense all right um there's this uh Rothbard goes into this in law property rights and air pollution this the uh reasonable man versus strict liability i'm not going to spend a lot of time on on that um here because i'm running short i will point out that a key aspect of Rothbard's take on pollution issues is homesteading you can homestead property of course if it's unclaimed by anybody else and you go onto that property you mix your labor with the land and a lock in sense and um maybe you fence it off you um graze your cattle on it or something that's your property by homesteading but you can also homestead in other senses so for example if i have a quiet homestead uh and then um somebody buys the property next door to me and builds a um a massive international airport and now i've got jet aircraft screeching overhead at um five o'clock in the morning i'm i'm according to my homesteading principle here i have cause to take the airport to court i had homesteaded a certain degree of quiet or a certain level of noise that was customary in my neighborhood that became part of my reasonable expectation that that i that that was part of my property and so it would be no different than if somebody had opened up a factory next door to me and uh dumped pollution on my head it's an invasion in in Rothbard in the Rothbardian sense so we can have air pollution homesteading at the line you can't see there is that air is a dumping ground um and that is valuable i dump carbon dioxide into the air every time i exhale i'm using the atmosphere as a way to dump uh a a um a gaseous waste in a sense um so that that's valuable it's it's helpful to have a place to dump your your waste any production process any consumption process generates waste we have to have a place to put it that's a valuable use of air but so is breathing and there's no categorical there's no way to categorically say well air should always and only be used for breathing and never be used for dumping waste and we can't say the reverse either these are there are trade-offs that we have to um arrive at and homesteading is a way to establish property rights over something as uh vaporous as air um coast mentions this uh problem of coming to the news since i'm going to skip over that too because i've only got about a minute left uh let's see i'll skip that okay um boundary crossings in the sense of trespass trespass is not just if i walk on walk across an imaginary line uh on your property and i i'm now on your property but trespass can take other forms as well um boundary crossings now is a radio station that's broadcasting and sending radio waves across your property trespassing not according to Rothbard it's it's insensible that is it you can't feel it there's no um i know some people would argue about this but there's no argument there's no evidence that it actually harms you when it crosses your property um you could go on and live your life normally with that radio wave transmission so that's a boundary crossing but it's not really trespass air traffic i mean do you have any claim over the airport because they're flying over your house from 30 000 feet no Rothbard says and i'll close with this because i'm out of time the proper distinction is between visible and tangible or sensible invasion which interferes with possession and use of the property and invisible insensible boundary crossings that do not and therefore should be outlawed only on proof of harm i strongly encourage you to read law property rights and air pollution uh by Rothbard if you're interested in this kind of issue and also some articles in the recent uh qj a e if um you want to look at some of the more recent scholarship on this thank you for your attention have a great rest of the day


negotiators there have had numbers out on the table that we have put there as to a reduction in weapons and there have been no counteroffers as yet to those of other numbers suggested or anything of the kind there has been no negotiating position presented by the so I think this tit for tat goes for Friday in your meeting with Gorbachev. What we say to each other but made publicly until they're presented to us for


Massive flooding has devastated parts of South Asia, especially in North-Eastern India and Bangladesh. In the North-Eastern state of Assam in India, around 113 deaths have been reported so far, while most of these are because of the floods, around 20 were caused by rain-triggered landslides. In Bangladesh, meanwhile, nearly 60 have died. Overall, millions have been affected in these regions. The floods are more or less an annual affair and have badly hit the response to COVID-19 in Assam. As of July 21, there are more than 25,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Assam. The flooding that started in May has also wreaked havoc in the Indian state of Bihar as well as parts of Nepal. Reports have indicated that a third of Bangladesh is under water. Over 7 million people in Assam and 1.5 million people in Bangladesh have been affected. Experts claim that the situation is expected to get worse as monsoon winds will be approaching the region in the coming days. Assam flood situation is very grave at this moment and almost 70 lakhs people have been affected and more than 24 districts of the state have been affected by the flood and Assam has 33 districts and out of 30, 24 districts are badly affected. Among the badly affected, the worst situation is in Balpara district and almost 80 days have been reported as of now and it is expected that the rain will continue for some more days and hence the situation will worsen. Regarding Assam flood, what we need to look at is from the perspective of scientific management of the river system. Assam flood is not new. It dates back to the days of colonial period and after that since a decade the Assam flood has taken its most worst phase because of the large scale dams that have been built and there are mismanagement on part of the rivers and you see that the dams over in Runacal which is actually if you see the map it just lies above Assam and when there is a lot of rain and water accumulates to a very high level then the dams are opened and it comes down directly to Brahmaputra and inundates the plains in Assam. So that has become one of the most important issue that second thing is now the flood carries a lot of sleets these sleets actually damages the crop fields and people are badly affected and also there is an issue of submersion of huge areas many villages, many townships have gone into the water of Brahmaputra and people have to migrate from one place to another in that sense so it's getting worse and this time I think for the last 15 years in 2020 Assam is witnessing the worst flood. According to an Indian Central Water Commission bulletin most rivers in the state continue to be in spate. The Brahmaputra one of the largest rivers in the Indian subcontinent is the main contributor to the floods and has been running above the danger mark for months now. In an alert on July 21st the Central Water Commission said that the water level in Brahmaputra is expected to rise even more the river had burst its bank two weeks ago swamping more than 2500 villages in India Golpara is the worst head district in Assam with over 453,000 people affected followed by 344,000 people in Barpeta and 341,000 people in Murekau Over 50,000 people who were displaced by floods have taken shelter at 521 relief camps According to reports wildlife is also facing a serious threat in Assam as the Kasi Ranga National Park is completely flooded The park is a UNESCO heritage site and it has the largest concentration of single horn rhinoceros as well as other animals.


Hi guys, and I wanted to wish you all a very very Merry Christmas No matter if you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever holiday traditions you have or do not have I hope that you have a wonderful December 25th 2016 regardless I'm so thankful for all of you guys who have built such a Wonderful wonderful community here on this channel It just blows my mind that it hasn't even been two years and we have over 15,000 People who have come together all because we have one same Passion and that is nursing. So thank you guys so much I wanted to let you guys know Something that is really awesome that some of you guys don't know about and that is that nrcng.com has a ton of free That's right free Resources for you guys for a nursing school or if you're a nurse and just need some more like education and stuff They have tons and tons and tons of free cheat sheets that are so useful And I constantly am going on there and using them or going back to them and relooking at them because they're very helpful So I will leave that link down below and you guys should check it out and enjoy it because it's free And it's Christmas. So I hope you guys have a wonderful Christmas Happy New Year, and thank you guys so much for being so supportive. You are wonderful. Make sure you give this video a big thumbs up And subscribe if you aren't subscribed join Thousands of people that have already subscribed. There's a reason why they're subscribing I don't know if it's just because I'm really weird and entertaining or if I actually have good advice I don't know or a combination of two, but you should subscribe to find out Thanks for watching you guys and I'll see you in my next video. Bye


primer in any data processing in the data business, whether you are running data as a service or even if you're running as a say some other domain, if you're having data processing pipelines, what exactly happens there, right? So there are three pillars to this whole data aspect if you think about it. So the first pillar is the sourcing. So if you look at any first party, let me define what is first party. First party is the data the company is collecting about its own customers. A classic example could be Ola collecting customer info based on their rights and their registration and all these things, right? So that the sources of this data could be myriad from say the web SDKs or SDKs apps as well as the walk-ins and the discount coupons and the subscriptions they get and all these things, right?  And if you think from a third party business angle, there is a complete flip in the sense you'll have specialist sourcing teams which actually scouts around on various aspects of the data, whether it is the right data, whether it is in the right format and what are the integrations required and what are the contractual requirements and based on all these, they'll be sourcing this data and this data is what say some company B is collecting from some company A. Some company A is its first party data and that comes and this is termed as a third party data and that is the sourcing aspect of the whole problem. And the second thing is the refining aspect. Refining, if you think about it, it is, there is enough literature as well as lots of data engineering talks around what is refining refinement of data. So in refinement of data you standardize in the sense you standardize into a common taxonomy you do mapping, you do transformation, you do tensing of the data to get the, weed out the wrong data points and get the clean data inside your system and you will have a bunch of enrichments on top of it. Then you can apply heuristic or AI-driven or ML-driven intelligence addition on top of it. Then you have the quality makeovers, whatever is needed when you are creating the statistical quality or it could be anomaly detection and these bunch of quality requirements would be there. And the final point is you will be adding something called the temporality. Now temporality is nothing but the time dimension because any data which you collect, almost 90 data, I wouldn't say all the data, but almost 90% of the data you collect would lose value over a period of time. So you have to add the temporality as well to the data. And from that you move on to creating consumable data sets which can be delivered to the end consumer. Now this delivery, if you think about it, it is more or less the reverse of your sourcing problem that in sourcing you have the same kind of challenges in terms of format integrations, delivery to have the same formats and integration challenges, as well as you will have say a push-based mechanism or full-based mechanism, batch mode mechanisms, streaming mechanisms, AP-based mechanisms or some customer would come and say, I need a self-serve, a discoverable tool on top of your data set, where I can go and define my own criteria, create my own data sets and download it for my consumptions. So these all the various modes of delivery, then other non-functional aspects come in terms of the security as well as the reliability. When I say reliability, it is about the classic SLA management. For example, you could have given a contract saying monthly first week of the month, I'll give you ensure the data dump is available to you. So in that case, what happens if you don't honor the SLA? So these are all various aspects in terms of the non-functional aspects as well in terms of delivery. So if you think about it, this is something very similar to what happens in the current oil industry and it's intended to be so. Data business more or less happens in these three major pillars in terms of sourcing, then refining the data that is curating the data sets and giving it for delivery. So with that, we'll see if you are either already a data business, you will be having pipelines which are doing it. If you are in a different domain, say some other ad tech domain or fintech domain, you might be internally running some pipelines to solve some internal growth or revenue or fraud detection use cases. These particular similar structures or constructs would be available within your company for that.


Onto a discussion panel. So as many of you would know, learning analytics has been a focus of our set at Moodle and about March this year we introduced the open solution Learning Analytics with Project Inspire So with your help, we've worked through phase one and we've collected valuable data and in May the first public release of Inspire as a third-party plug-in was made available and that coincided with the Moodle release 3.3 In 3.4 the Inspire system will become part of Moodle Core making it automatically available to all Moodle sites with a locally managed partner hosted or hosted on Moodle Cloud So today for our learning analytics panel discussion we have from Moodle HQ Damien, Tom and Martin and Grant Bevers from Moodle Rooms, Andrew Bogue from Kettleist and they'll provide some more updates and take some questions and share about the latest projects and their learning analytics within Moodle Thanks guys. Hello. I'll kick off Thank you Rowan. So Rowan just mentioned Inspire but there are many many forms of analytics that we can cover today lots of different projects in Moodle and out of Moodle and so I thought we'd just all have a little spiel here a little chin-wag So let me tell you a bit about the history of analytics in Moodle the very very first module that I wrote in the very beginning so Moodle just had one module and it was the survey module and that's all you could do was analytics pretty much there was nothing else So that survey module that no one likes to use because they can't change the questions was a very specifically designed collection of surveys like the Collis, the Constructivist Online Learning Environment survey which was designed as an analytic tool to understand what the group of students in your class were doing and how they were performing and how they were feeling and by diving into the the graphs and the results of that survey you could really see immediately outliers and you could find particular students who are struggling in some way and you could zoom in on them and then go and talk to them and in the very beginning when Moodle was only that survey it was used in companion with other ways of teaching so you might have a face-to-face class and you would give them this survey or you'd be teaching on I don't know a mailing list or something and you would give them this survey so it's sort of interesting that that was there right from the beginning and there's a collection of other survey tools in there as well and in the very first Moodle course that was ever I used to run that analytic every week so I used to put the students through that survey every week sometimes twice a week and it was just this constant feedback of trying to understand where they were at and then modifying my teaching for the for the following week so that's a historical thing now there's other tools in Moodle still to do with analyzing what students are doing and trying to give you some something to act on as a teacher as a as an educator I'll probably leave some of those maybe maybe these guys want to talk about some of those too but I know who wants to go next who wants to say something okay cool thanks Martin and hi everyone you know the definition of analytics is wide and varied and in different institutions that we work with and and I suppose if I look back at last year and to a certain extent this year but last year I mean I can't think of any institution that that Blackboard or Moodle rooms works with that wasn't doing some sort of analytics project I think if we added all of the dollar value of all of these projects we could we could probably feed you know a few different nations quite easily the amount of effort that's going into that and I think a lot of that's driven by the fact that you know there's a lot of regulatory change going on in the sector there is a greater need to report to government about various things that are going on the way in which we're funded especially in the vet sector going forward and and certainly you know that will flow into higher ed is requiring us to ensure that we see our students through to completion so as a result of that you know we're wanting to use the analytics to track retention rates to identify students at risk and you know and be able to I think probably do a much better job in all honesty certainly in the vet sector you know around ensuring that we've done the very best that we possibly can to identify students before they become problems and so I think the emphasis on analytics as a tool to allow us to do that is probably you know more important than it's probably ever been and so you know I said a lot of people analytics for the sake of analytics is just data if we need to have some sort of call to action around that analytics and and be able to you know take that analytical data and then be able to act on it straight away and we want the tools to allow us and help us to act on that as well and we're starting to see a lot of those sort of tools in built into learning management systems you know I'm hoping that something inspired is is kind of like doing is is not only collecting this data in a way that's meaningful for us to do something with but but is also allow is going to allow us to then reach out to the relevant people that are going to allow us to take action with respect to that data we're doing a lot of work certainly in middle rooms in blackboard we're doing a lot of work around what we call at at the point analytics so we we at blackboard we talk about big a analytics and little analytics the big analytics is the is the bi you know the big data warehouses where we're sucking data in from all around all of the applications we've got in our institution and we were crunching that data and we're spitting reports out for management and whoever needs them the little a analytics we talk about is that those analytics at the point where it's happening inside a course so if we've got a discussion forum or an assignment or a quiz can I there and then click into that environment and see some meaningful analytics about who's doing what where they're doing it who's having trouble who's not having trouble as opposed to kind of like the old style of going out of the system going into a reporting structure running a report getting that information printing it out or exporting it somewhere and then doing something with that data so I think you know we're investing a lot of time in that little a analytics work making sure that whenever you need that data and whenever you need to get access to it it's there when you need it not having to go looking for it and I think you know that's where we should be focusing our time because the time it just takes to chase that data down and then do something with it we could be spending our time doing a lot more useful things and yeah so pass on thanks very much look I'm really interested in this topic personally and we've spent a lot of time talking with clients and amongst ourselves and you know hypothesizing about what data analytics means and and you know what we could use it for look I was really impressed with the middle room's sort of dashboard that you guys just demonstrated I suppose data analytics at this stage has two broad applications in a learning sense and there will be more and there are others but from what I sense is this whole idea that both Martin and Grant mentioned of custodial care right being able to detect when someone needs a pat on the back some help support you know that's this very real reasons why institutions need that right I mean at the very least the finance from a revenue leakage point of view because you know they want students to start to finish in the other end of the spectrum of the certainly from what we've seen in a wish list from our clients is this idea of you know learning analytics that allows us to improve the the educational methodology that we use or the questions that we ask or the quizzes that we deliver or some meaningful feedback saying we need to change this in the course or we need to use this and that's I think I think at this stage a little bit harder because it's just got more data points and there's a little bit more subjectivity about you know what how you measure these things etc and some food for thought around learning analytics because often these things can be really massive from an organizational point of view and they and the tool set itself costs a million bucks and there's a huge procurement process around it but you can do so much with so little if you look at analytics especially in the custodial care component if you look at these things like collaboratively and iteratively like you can do a lot of damage with the right data in an excel spreadsheet and someone who's pretty keen to find the answer to some questions if you really do socialize the outcomes of what you discover and you iteratively look at what starts falling out of it and ask new questions now if you get that flow happening with any kind of analytical process you're doing well right and that's something to bear in mind before sometimes before organizations launch into huge processes you know in search of this analytics tool is to really think well come on let's just see what we can do with a little bit with people who are with stakeholders that are really interested and motivated and know the way around a few tools and I suppose another bit of food for thought I've just thrown there because this is such a big topic and I think I'm really interested to know the questions you guys are going to ask is there are some tools set aside what you want to see aside it's quite quick that we've seen you know you bump into some issues that are challenging for universities I talk about universities for example one of our clients who we've we've got a we've had a number of engagements with on on analytics outputs you know they're talking about it was more custodial care focused actually their outcomes at the beginning when they wanted to look after their students and sort of detect the outlining students and there was a discussion around attendance of tutorials right so from your organizations here who tracks attendance to tutorials okay so less less more often not to track these things now I understand I went to quite a few meetings about the mechanics and should we and shouldn't we and how do we do it and all these sorts of things so I was present in these discussions and I can understand why it isn't a no-brainer but from if you're talking about your ability to ask the question does people going to tutorials correlate to success or failure you need that data point right and from the outside as an engineer who I don't work in universities you know I sort of see that I sort of thought well of course you want that data right but as you can well understand sometimes those questions and sometimes those things get really complicated organizationally so that that's an ongoing challenge that sort of has nothing to do with the with the technical choice but is is very real in order giving in order to give you the data points that you need to provide you with sort of predictive outcomes so I think that's all I'm going to say because there's there's other people on stage and I'm really interested in hearing what you guys are going to ask hi I'm the developer little developer so from our point of view what we've been focusing on recently is this project inspire so the whole idea about that is that it's sort of designed we're building an open API and we want to collaborate with the community in as much of an open research type of way as we can so we've built a really good platform where we can take in all these data points and then feed them into something and then get predictions at the end so we're trying to generate meaningful insights the insights get sent directly to somebody who they're relevant to and that person then has a meaningful action that they can take based on that insight and they can see where it's come from and they can see the data now the thing that generates the insights in our particular case is interesting to me because I'm a tech nerd kind of person and it's about machine learning so we can interact integrate with TensorFlow which is an open source machine learning library from Google and it's really powerful and it's getting used in all sorts of different places in the world now to generate all sorts of crazy things because it works so well so it's really interesting from that machine learning side to see how much progress we've made in the last few years and the idea behind it is that we don't know in advance what kinds of things are going to be the predictors for the insights that we're interested in but what we can do is we can hypothesize and we can say this thing it might be useful let's create an indicator that can calculate a data point based on the raw log data in Moodle and any of the Moodle database tables and there's lots and lots of raw information in Moodle but we want to try and get some meaning out of that data so we can then we can take the raw data we can calculate an indicator and feed it into this machine learning engine and see if it can predict something the machine learning engine might say no that that information is irrelevant but it will kind of work that out itself which is why it's very interesting and then at the end it'll be able to say based on the it can only work with the data that's given so the more data you give it the more accuracy it will predict things and so then it will be able to sort of say with a percentage of confidence that it's actually predicted an insight and when that accuracy goes up high enough that might be something that we're interested in sending a notification to a specific teacher or a student who can act on that data we want to be very careful about sending predictions that make themselves true like we don't want to tell a student that they're doing terribly and they're going to fail we want to we should be sending that kind of notification that a student might be in trouble to somebody who can step in and look at the data and make a real decision about what to do about it so yep so that's from me I'll hand over to Tom. How many of you come from schools that have evaluations at the end of each term or semester for the teacher? Okay I used to do that. How many of you have schools where there's a process where that data is analyzed and some meaningful steps are taken from the feedback that we received from our students? Cool yeah that's not true for everyone there's a big black hole on information that we gather from our students frequently it takes a culture change to think of that information which is very meaningful I like using the word meaningful because we have to make meaningful change based on what we learn about ourselves and what we learn about our learning and what we learn about our our students so when on Monday Joey comes to class and spends two hours in Moodle and then Tuesday logs in and spends four hours in Moodle and on Wednesday spends three hours in Moodle and on Thursday fails a quiz miserably and then doesn't log in for six more days we have to find out what meaningful things we can do whether that's reaching out to him thinking about what we did there with the quiz thinking about a number of variables which are hard to think about but worthy of it so I'm on this panel because I'm really interested in the impact of this new knowledge that we're going to be able to collect and culturally I'm wondering about the readiness of our organizations to to listen to that meaningful data and make meaningful change well that was cool thank you it's open to anyone who wants to ask a question or have a re-observation or a thought or something that you know some news and let's just follow where this meandering discussion takes us we'll need some microphone runners okay and we've got how many one two okay 73 one thing I really like is seeing data presented visually uh in different patterns and you know different people interpret visual data in different ways depending on what it is you're trying to ascertain um I find that Moodle's not that good at presenting patterns the data patterns visually can you make any comments on that um sure it probably could be better of course there are graphs in like logs you know basic stuff like that but yeah pattern identification is definitely something inspire is going to be good at um we've been doing a lot of work with shiny technology I don't know if many of you are familiar with that but the ability to really interact with the data so bring the data into a tabular form to start with and then really start to interact with the graph change the parameters of the graph zoom in on parts of that if you've got very large cohorts looking at large cohort data in a graph can can be quite problematic because of the size and so forth so that ability so um you know I love it the technology looks great I'm I'm understanding that it's a standard for the way in which we we make more graphical stuff more interactive um but I think you know dashboards dashboards are becoming the the way in which we're presenting that data and then the ability to to then get to the raw data is is kind of like the secondary thing a lot with with a lot of that sort of stuff but I think we're seeing a lot more of that than we've ever seen before so um yeah as Martin said there's there's there are graphs in Moodle they're spread about here and there but they haven't really been a focus we did update all the graphs recently so that the data in the graphs is presented in a nicer way and then you can actually go in and see the raw data that is behind each of the graphs that's generated in Moodle so it's good that we've improved that side of the API but so now that API has been improved it would be great to see people are sending it more plugins and putting more plugins in the database there are actually quite a lot of plugins for generating dashboards and all different kinds of reports in the plugins database but I understand that actually there is a challenge there where people sometimes can't install plugins on their own sites and also just the fact that there are so many plugins available it's hard to go through and mall and see which ones are going to be useful to install and things like that so yeah one thing that maybe we can do is we can go through the plugins database and find the very popular very useful plugins and look at adding those to core that might be a good use and also our education team so Elizabeth has gone through Moodle and identified a bunch of places where we could add some more reports that would be really useful for people to put them up front obviously there are other things like in Teleboard it's something that you can just you can plug in and they have great dashboards as well and so there's a lot of options that people can install on their sites but out of the box at Moodle probably is quite a little bit bare on the reporting side yep you lead me right on to what I was going to say that there's a difference between reporting and analytics for me I think reporting is a subset of analytics but analytics should I think go further I mean it's about the analysis it's not just presenting data for you to analyze although that's one part it should hopefully be doing some of that analysis and giving you actionable feedback some sort of feedback that you you can take an action on that's my definition I would say anybody disagree no no it's going to say it's going to say similar I mean we you take a graph and you look at that graph and you say well yeah that's a nice graph but then you look at the graph and you then say wow there's there's four students out lying in in that area there that there's way out from the mean of where everyone else is there there's something happening out there that I need to maybe do something about that to me is the analyst the analytic part of where the reports and analytics kind of like fit together in my eyes and then like I said the really important stuff is in doing something with that and and being able to then you know reach out you know can we can we directly from that analytics reach out to that student who is in the outlier of that grass and click on him and say we need to get together we need to talk about this because there's a problem going on here somewhere so I think it's always got to end in some sort of action that's going to bring about some sort of change well that's not always but but I think you know for the benefit of of the sort of work that we do with our students in retention and so forth it's certainly key um with inspire will you have any plans so that's I think the main thing for me is that making something meaningful and having an action that's meaningful from the data because I think our teachers they're really just overwhelmed you know so then they get all these reports like we have a number of plugins like gizmo inactive user alert I think we've got another one I can't remember off the top of my head but then they've just got all of this data that they're freaking out about you know they're like there is this beautiful looking report but what does it mean and when do they intervene so I think from our perspective it's really educating them on how to use that data and when might the points be so I suppose my question about inspire is will you have some sort of I don't know a rollout plan or suggestions I know that you probably don't want to direct people fully because it's all about what we make of it but I think sometimes that would be really helpful knowing what your intention was you know because we just get something and then we're like what is the intention behind it apart from having all this wonderful data well I could tell you about the intention when we launched the project in in my mind was that the system is creating events so it's saying something's happened I'm going to notify somebody about it and we have a quite a we have a messaging system in Moodle and if you have the mobile app they come through on your phone or an email or other devices whatever but the intention was that you would get these notifications then you obviously want to control them and so we had talked about I don't know how far away this is going to be but some sort of a way of saying oh we actually do have this you can say I don't want any more of these right you can you can kill them on the report page currently right yeah they came in you can say so what happens is the teacher will get a notification that an insight has been predicted and they'll see the details about like this student is at risk of dropping out of a course and right there it'll have the data that was used to calculate that insight so maybe they they haven't logged in for or they haven't completed their profile and but they did participate in the week one activities but they haven't participated in the week two activities and then from that insight directly on the insight you have a list of actions that can be taken and those this is what we call a model which we want we've shipped this students at risk of dropping out model in 3.4 and we want people to come up with the other models and contribute them back to Moodle so that we can all have all kinds of different models in Moodle but it's like the collection of the things that might be useful as indicators of something and then that's going to generate an insight and part of the insight is the suggested actions that you might want to take from that insight so in this case the suggested actions could be to go and look at the students grades in the grade report or to send that student a message and you can also acknowledge the the insight to make it go away or you could say this wasn't actually useful so when you say that the insight wasn't actually useful that in itself becomes an indicator back into the system so it's like a feedback loop so the system is less likely to generate that kind of insight in the future as well. Where I would like to see that going is become like an assistant so Moodle this is what I was saying this morning Moodle's like a voice talking to you in a chat basically and saying hey what about this and you go oh stop telling me about that or tell me more about those or stop bothering me at night or you know you adjust its behavior and the assistant kind of learns what you want and you and you it's like a slider bar you're adjusting the sensitivity of it until it's just what you need. I think that seems to be the kind of anybody could learn to use without any training right it would just be something you would just learn by doing it. You're just following up on that it's a very good analogy Martin so what sort of my perception of those sort of challenges as well let's draw it to something that's more of an outdated existence which is you know running a managed services company and getting support requests and escalation requests that sort of come in through the front door and we have to deal with those the the successful when things are running badly there's too much noise there's too much noise it's coming all the time there's too many things coming to too many people you're not really sure which what you're absolutely expected to deal with and what you're not and there's a lot of there is effort and process around optimizing the way in which those that messaging is directed how it is structured and what the expectations are around action and resolution right I mean great example is when you're monitoring systems for example for if they break or if they fail automated tests I mean you you the perfect monitoring system is one that you never get alerts from right that's the perfect monitoring system but in reality and the very bad monitoring system is one that there's so many alerts that you just look at the you look at the wall and there's all these alerts and you go yeah I'm not even sure which ones I need to bother about because hey that one's been read for two weeks and someone's going to fix that one and all that's I mean that's then that's a reality and I've we've had those systems before so I mean you an assistance great way of looking at I mean often my some of my great team members because I'm not very good at being organized about anything to do other than sort of IT stuff and if they come and ask me questions all the time then I just give them random answers about what to do but if we can sit down for an hour every couple of days and work through things and I don't have to think about those things at all outside of that then we have much more sensible decisions getting made and and that's because you need to sort of get in the in the mode of these things and working through working through these things in a concentrated way but not being overwhelmed and not context shifting and having clear definitions of who is supposed to and I never say care about this but whose whose responsibility it is and what the expectation is around taking actions and and also talking amongst yourselves and saying there's too much there's too much like there's no there's no value in us as an organization getting 50 notifications every Monday about things we've got to do because we simply don't have time so we need to we need to change the way things get escalated so that perhaps things need to go to a higher level before before we're expected maybe the first step is you just send emails to the student saying oh not good enough it doesn't come to us we have our actual involvement in action is required until it hits a higher a higher level for example right but and those are decisions that need to be made organizationally and they sometimes some of them aren't easy and some of them don't necessarily align with what the business expectations are compared to what the resourcing might be available Martin alluded in the keynote this morning to you know future technologies or technologies that are with us now in AI and so forth and I know that some work that we're doing at the moment around IBM Watson I think many of you might be familiar with IBM Watson as the computer that beat the chess champion and and so forth and there's there's Watson projects going on in in many of the universities in Australia and around the world many of you might be familiar with Deakin University student support environment students actually don't talk to a student advisor at Deakin they talk to Watson and Watson gives the answers back so it rolls through all of the data and it comes back with a search that that's been modified and presents the the student with the answers and those answers might be look it sounds like you need to talk to a student advisor click here to create a calendar invite to a student advisor so we've started some work with a number of universities around this concept of a nudge okay and and and mobile driven but the ability to nudge a student or nudge an advisor or nudge a teacher or nudge an administrator based on the the the communication that a student would have with Watson and so you know the student will will will ask questions via the phone or or or some other mechanism and then you know Watson will then determine who should be nudged as a result of that and it may be that the question the student says look I'm really struggling in this subject I don't know really what I've you know how I can how I can see myself getting to the end of this subject without failing what am I going to do you know Watson comes back with some options the student continues to have that conversation and then it leads to some sort of actions about getting that student in front of a guidance counselor or the lecturer or whatever is the case and and therefore informs those people as part of that whole particular process so I'm really excited I've seen some sort of introductory work on that that we're doing I'm really excited to see where that goes it may not be Watson it may be some other AI technology that that that leaves that way but but it's really exciting because the computing power needed to manage and troll through all of that data you know is is not something that's that's available to us in our typical service structures and stuff we have in our organization so you know we're needing tools like like that to be able to troll through you know gigabytes terabytes of of data to get those answers back first I went to a presentation today where Mike from Catalyst was showing this really great little use of Watson and great little use of sentiment analysis and he was picking up data from forums and just simply indicating what some of the overwhelming feeling was in those forums whether it was negative whether it was positive whether it was full of disgust you know and and and I think that kind of nudge nudge your class finds this disgusting you know it's really interesting and useful and and a thoughtful application of of some of that technology so Mike at Catalyst it was great hi guys Zach here from CT in part I have a question which is kind of specific about inspire and one is more more broader about your thoughts my question is is any of the data that's collected through the inspire let's say machine learning engine is any of this data shared with a third party like Google or anyone else who uses that technology is that stored locally on the server because again I don't know all the details and how this works I'm not an expert in the area and the second more broader question is what are your thoughts on on data probably something that Martin talked about this morning where is the line between collecting enough data in order to make those processes machines better and keeping that privacy so I would like to hear your thoughts on this so about the first part of the question about where does the data go so with project inspire it's all run on your Moodle server so it comes with a choice of two machine learning backends initially and we can add more in future one is TensorFlow which is the the Google machine learning library but it doesn't actually go to Google servers at all it's a Python library that you install on your Moodle server so there might be challenges for some people installing things on their Moodle server the other option is PHP machine learning which is a PHP library for a similar thing and that just you don't there's no installation requirements for that one so anybody could use that but again all of the data is kept on your Moodle server and processed on your Moodle server so it's not shared with anyone in terms of data privacy there are some implications just so it depends on what whether this is enabled and what kind of actions are being the data is being used for but it's good if you have a site privacy policy to tell people if their data is going to be used in this way to generate things and what those things might be used for I know it's part of the EU general data privacy regulation changes that are coming up next year that's one of the requirements is that you need to tell everybody not just students but you need to tell people when the data is going to be processed and what it's going to be processed for and give them the choice to opt out of having that data processed and what the implications of opting out might mean as well that's clearly a challenge with any analytics going forwards so yeah I don't know if anyone's got any if anyone had a special interest or looked into this kind of question before here and wants to add their two cents but I think it's a problem we all need to solve and in the inspire case the research forum that we have around it is exactly the place to discuss these issues and bring that research together and best practice so yeah it's a it's a complicated one this one so we were actually being directly affected by the the new EU rules because well we're in the process of understanding what this means because of the way we've implemented our follow the sun support for Moodle so we have a team in the UK a team in Australia and team in New Zealand and we watch each other's Moodles and the when one person is awake and the other one's sleeping pretty simply and this these new regulations have implications in the details around really what the definition of access and data even though data isn't moving around so it's it's it's it's an ongoing challenge and from someone and I've been quite in quite a few discussions around privacy and data sovereignty and those sorts of things with various clients and understanding what contractual obligations you're getting into and what I will say is is that if you have a lawyer a commercial person and a technical person sitting around the room talking privacy they might as well be speaking different languages right like it is complicated so do not think for a second that your that maybe because you haven't had a lot to do with these these things before that you are not qualified to ask any question and there is no such thing as a silly question in these things because it is complicated and different people have different takes on it and and and and also and I hate to say this but from some angles it's sort of a little bit absurd as well I mean some of the some of the requirements are too much and some of them are just broadly ignored but it is something to be paying attention to because the failure in an organization will be you know if data rings up in the place it shouldn't be and something bad happens the failure will be because people weren't asking questions because people didn't go through because your your inability to demonstrate that you went through a process of asking questions and reviewing implications and just sort of saying look we were paying attention is what will be the downfall that's it's sort of like a compliance challenge but it is it is not I mean my personal take on it and our our perception of it is there are some quite curly challenges here and you know hopefully it'll get easier yeah and I think you know with the move to the cloud for for any application it brings with it a whole lot of new challenges that we never had when we were running our Moodle you know in the back office in in on the campus or whatever and that data wasn't really going any further than than that particular environment so you're right you know get a good lawyer if you're concerned and and and work your way through it there's there's not only is there the EU EU regulations as FedRAMP in the US there's there's a whole range of Australian we've just gone through a massive workload with Singapore government which has got the tightest privacy registration of any organization in the world when we brought five polytechnics together in in one environment with with a whole suite of you know there were 12 layers of security protocols beneath each other just to get to the data and and so forth and and you have to meet both hardware-wise as well as software-wise each of those and get signed off and all that sort of stuff so you know it's only going to get worse then it's going to get easier I think is as we move and when we get a Moodle cloud and all that sort of stuff there's going to be implications around that as we have people from all around the world accessing those Moodle clouds as well and where that data is going to live and move and all that sort of thing so one thing I will say though is you've got a much better chance of solving these with open software than anything else just from a everyday user kind of a perspective perhaps what the lady said earlier which was there's an interim step since it's going to take me well for this to to come on board it would be nice to have more data like with from assessments like quiz and assignments we would like to see more data come out of rubrics marking guides and things like that which we're currently not able to get get get a hold of and having that data would be much more it would probably drive our decisions and what we actually deliver as opposed to more and then be able to act on the students so we're not getting any data out on how good our assessments are because it's all buried in marking guides and rubrics and and quizzes and quiz types so we'll be end up being able to have an assessment database and have the analysis of that sort of thing as well so where are you getting it out to are you pulling it out of the database yourself well that's the thing is we can't get access to that so there's no access to all the data from all our rubrics and marking guides from our assignments and that's really rich data which we could so no access from what we're within Moodle itself so from the front end we can't get to that unless we were went to the back end of the database so it makes sense so when you use rubrics and marking guides and once you fill them out what it does is it then generates a score and the score is the thing that goes in the gradebook that's great so what I understand you're trying to say is that you don't actually from the gradebook for example you can't then go and see the breakdown of the rubric or the marking guide that made up that individual score or see like aggregated data about the first question in this marking guide most students got a two out of five and maybe there's a that that topic wasn't actually covered in the course material or something like that yeah or yeah or particular whole parts of the syllabus are done poorly by the students so we should you know address that issue yeah I mean it sounds like a fair comment some places in Moodle do give that kind of data when the the competencies changes that we we added that does give you a sort of a report of a breakdown per competency of perhaps things that aren't being completed by students and things like that but I think yeah for marking guides in rubrics that does seem to be something that we don't do great yes UTS has a room dedicated to analytics called the data arena it's a physical room that you go into and you put on some goggles and you get presented vast datasets and you can actually engage with them in a very tangible way moving your hands and also the goggles give you almost like a virtual reality experience do you think there's any scope for bringing virtual reality and analytics together with Moodle well I mean it sounds awesome sounds like my nollie report or just on that I saw a I saw slightly seagwaying but I think it's relevant I was driving through I was walking through Sydney here yesterday and there was a big add on so on the side of a bus for I cannot remember the university with my university with a person standing there in reality glasses and saying we have made accounting more exciting with VR so if you can make accounting more exciting with VR you can certainly make analytics so it's problems been solved by someone they just need to adjust it a bit I think I don't know how they've done it though I don't believe them look you you won't find a much bigger fan of VR than me here we have we have a VR room at Moodle HQ and we I have one at home as well and I have had since the vibe came out so for quite a while however I don't think it's useful here the computer should be doing the analysis in my I would I would love to boil it down like I said to just little messages like get the computer doing the work I think throwing heaps of data no matter how fun that people was not it's it's not practical it's I think AR is where it's going to get very interesting but again you don't want all that data overlaid on your life I think one other important bit of analytics or bit of data that we're missing and I talked about it in my session and it's something that I know we all deal with but we don't think of the importance of is that as it relates to retaining students and so forth is what we call week zero data so it's the data that you know about a student before they even start you know first in family ethnicity where they've come from are they mature students are they undergraduates or did they finish in year 10 all of that sort of stuff and I think when you start to meld that data with their learning data the actual meaningfulness of that is much greater so I think you know you need to be looking at systems that are bringing not only the data that's being generated out of noodle but adding into that that other data because it can tell you so much there is a lot of historical data out there and there's a lot of things that we know about students from where they come from and where they lived and and all those sorts of things and I think we can learn a hell of a lot from that now that data is sitting in your student management system it's a case of bringing those two together and it'd be great you know if if Inspire had some mechanism of bringing those two things together starts getting starts getting creepy though doesn't it does yeah I was just going to comment that that does once you do start doing things like that that does bring a lot more privacy concerns in so if you start predicting that females are more likely to pass the maths test and males and you send an alert to all the males and things like that might be a problem but it's actually mentioned in the EU data privacy regulations if you start processing that class of data that's classed as highly private data and then it has flow on implications for your reporting and how long you can keep the data and the kinds of things that you need to mention in your privacy policy when you're communicating that data to your users so there are a lot of you have to trade very carefully it brings the other aspect of minority report in which was that he was accused of crimes he hadn't done yet so you know our university is going to start you know cutting students go we know you're going to fail hey I haven't I haven't failed yet like I mean it's an extreme example but like are we are we not giving people a chance also we close the time all right getting the getting the wind up every last question down here is there going to be any facility with the inspire to be able to add in information about once the student has left or completed a course and you can feed that in and see where they've gone on for work purposes or gone to other courses or any of that kind of thing so that you can get that more longitude and all information anything like that well it's designed as a an API platform for everybody to send us examples of things that we want to feed into this engine in future so no not at the moment but that is the intention that people can come up with suggestions for things that might be useful and send it to us and get it incorporated into the system yeah I'm hoping in a year that we'll be seeing dozens of analytics plugins for inspire that take it in different directions as you need to okay I think we're at the end all right thanks Damian Tom Martin Grant Andrew good on you


As soon as the sun comes out and the days warm up a little bit, to me that's grilling time. And when you pull out your grill and you start grilling all your favorite protein, then you're trying to figure out what kind of a side can I serve with this that doesn't take a lot of time and is really delicious. Well, I've got the answer, sweet potato fries.  These start with a real sweet potato. And so I've already started some prep. I peeled some sweet potatoes and I cut them into sticks. I like them pretty thin. I usually try to get them about three inches long and maybe half inch around. And I've got them in my bowl. Then I'm going to drizzle them with some olive oil. And it depends on how many sweet potatoes you've got in your bowl, but probably a couple tablespoons will do the trick for a couple pounds of sweet potatoes actually. Now I'm going to make this delicious seasoning to put on the sweet potato fries.  Stir up this seasoning mixture really well, and then all you have to do is sprinkle it onto those sweet potatoes that are already coated with olive oil. And once you've got that on there, just give them a good toss so that they get nice and coated with that great seasoning and oh, it smells so good. You can smell that garlic powder and the paprika. Now one thing I did do ahead of time is just put a little drizzle of olive oil on my baking sheet, but I'm doing it again just to show you. And just use your clean hand again to kind of cover the foil with the olive oil just to help prevent those sweet potatoes from sticking because you know they're so sweet. And remember that when sweet potatoes bake, they're going to shrink a little bit so they won't be the exact size they are when you cut them. So I'm going to put these in the oven for about 30 minutes and halfway during the baking time I'll take them out and stir them up so that they get evenly browned. After about half an hour in the oven, you've got these little sweet potato fries that are a little crunchy on the outside and creamy and sweet on the inside, a delicious side to go with anything you have on the grill. I'm Sue Dodin sharing good food for Good Life 365.