I'm delighted to introduce Etill and thank you very, very much for coming. You all have their lunch right now, so I will try to be considerate and speak softly not to bother those who are taking the rest right now. The digital divide that many people are talking about is very important in the sense that we want to make sure that the society that we are building, we don't have some people who have access to the great technology, who have computers, who have laptops, can see the podcast, they have mobile devices that they can do mobile learning. And a lot of emphasis has been around the issue that we don't want a society where some people have access to the technology and some people don't. What I'd like to put forward to you is that we're missing the point. I think the problem is not the division, the divide between those that have technology and those who don't have access to the technology, but the divide between the technology and the learners themselves. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying technology, the access is not important. It's a necessary but not sufficient for success. And you know what? It's good that some people don't have access because before we make sure that everybody has access, let us try to get it right, to have the technology work and be effective and efficient because the problem really is about the effectiveness and the use of the technology and let's get that right and then it starts worrying that everybody will have access. Those of you who have kids will know what I'm talking about when I say you can bring them to the table but you can't make them eat because you're kids, you can get them quite easy to the table but it doesn't mean they're going to eat what's on the table. Even if they eat what's on the table, they don't use utensils. They use their hands. Those who don't have kids and will have kids and let me prepare you to the adventure. And then when they start using utensils rather than using a fork, they'll take a knife and stab the sausage to pick it up so they don't use the utensils properly if they use the utensils. Even once they master those arts, the question is how can they choose which food to eat? If you have for example a buffet and they have a lot of food to choose from, how do they choose what food they're going to eat? You brought them to the table and how much are they going to eat? They're not going to eat enough food. Maybe they're going to eat too much food and they're obese. So we have to ask ourselves and deal with the amount of food. And of course a critical question, do they eat healthy food? Because they say, do they eat? Yes, you can make them eat. Give them chocolate. They will eat the chocolate and they eat it until they'll puke. Right? So the question is, are they eating the protein and carbohydrate and minerals that they need to eat? Perhaps as a parent you want them to learn how to cook themselves or you want to motivate them so you get them involved in the preparation of the food, in the cooking or setting it up. And if you're a restaurant, you may be interested that they're going to pay for the food, they're going to like the food, they're going to come again and again to your restaurant, they're going to tell their friends. These are the kinds of questions that we need to deal with. These are the real obstacles and challenges we have. And exactly the same goes when we're talking about technology. Because with technology, you can have access to technology, but do they use it and is that technology effective? I can sit here all day and give you examples in e-learning, interactive system and IT systems that have been developed by universities, by industry, by government that are not used, they raise dust, and I assume all of you have experiences with every new IT system and you say who developed it, you know you can't use it basically. So there's a lot of technology that is not used because it's not usable, not because the technology doesn't deliver the technological specification. First of all, do they know how to use it? So do the users out there when they have the access, do they know how to log in? Do they know how to use the mouse? Do they know how to surf the internet? Now, many of you are dealing with higher education, so the students that we get are very competent, but then even if they know that, do they use it properly? Do they use the technology properly? Do we use it properly? Take email. Well, I assume that we're all in the same boat. Lots of emails, we slave to emails, and email is not used properly. Many companies are starting now, especially in America. One day the email system is off. You can't receive and you can't send email, so one day a week people are going to get some work done and not spend all day receiving and sending emails. Other companies are starting to have a currency. You get a thousand emails in a certain time period and once you send us, you can't send anymore. Or you have to prioritize your emails and you have a currency. You get a thousand points and you can put ten points or one or a hundred points. How important this email is, but when you run out of your thousand points, you can't give any points. Nobody will read your emails to try to use that technology properly. Can they select that technology? Can they select what to use? The problem is too much information. Right now, when you have access to technology, there's endless stuff. Why should a student listen to me give a lecture when they can hear on iTunes Nobel Prize winners, because MIT and Stanford, Daniel and Harvard are putting all their lectures on iTunes in any topic. So they have huge resources. It's not a matter of access. Can they choose from all the huge amount of e-learning and resources? Or when they do a search on the web and they get 120,000 hits. How do you choose? How do you work with it? And the big question is how much do they use it? They use it a lot, right? Our students text to one another. They text all the time. When you walk around campus, everybody's texting. They don't know how to talk anymore and they have a conversation because they're texting all the time. Is that bad? No, it's not necessarily bad, but they use it a lot. My family is scattered all over the globe and we try once a year to have a family reunion and we bring everybody together. And the last family reunion, I went into the room where all the young generation were sitting. And I went in, there were eight of them, all of them sitting with their laptops, working on their laptop. So I couldn't help myself and I said, can't you disconnect from your friend's back home, get off MSN and Bebo, Facebook, and so on, and be with one another? And you know what they said to me? We're talking to one another. They were all sitting there, connecting across the globe, talking to one another on their laptop, sitting next to one another. Is that bad? It's not necessarily bad. They were sharing pictures and movies and a lot of interesting stuff. But you have a question about how much they use that technology. And I'm guilty myself. If a student comes and talks to me in my office, if it's not important, I'll talk to the student. If it's important, I said, don't talk to me, email it to me. Because then it's in my inbox, I will deal with it. If not, then you come and you talk to me out of my office and your student comes in, my brain. So I talk to me versus email, because I live and die by my email. The network was down in my office, I said it would take a week to fix it. I said, okay, I'm going on holiday, because I've got nothing to do if I don't have access to the technology. So it's not only the younger generation. Now let's talk about the content and the format. So you talked about Wikipedia yesterday, if it's good or bad. Well, a few months ago I was in court on a murder case. No, not that I'm accused, thank you very much, I know what you're thinking. I was an expert witness. And one of the other expert witnesses used Wikipedia and the high court judge was furious. You wouldn't let him talk to you. Wikipedia, anybody can write, it's not peer reviewed. I'm not saying she was right, I'm not saying she was wrong. Wikipedia, what about other content? Phenography, if your kids are intelligent, they will surf the net and panic and control or not is going to help. So do you sit with them and surf to the good pornographic sites? I don't know if you and I will agree which one are the good ones and which one are in bad taste. So the content is critical. The format, just like you can make your kids eat by giving them chocolates or not make them, have no problem, you can have games. They can play games all day but what do they get out of them? I try to get my kids to do homework, it's a struggle. It's a fight to get them to sit down and do homework. I hope my kids are watching on the web, it is a problem. They sit to do the homework, five minutes, daddy can you help me? I can't do this, I don't understand the question. I work for two hours to get them five minutes to focus. They finish your homework and they go and play computer games and I'm interested. They come up and say show me the computer game, let me play. It's so complicated and I said, how did you figure out how to play? I figured it out, they couldn't figure out the most basic things in their homework, but in a computer game they turned from what I call a dead horse to a racing horse and what amount of knowledge? No daddy, you have the wrong gun. This gun shoots very quickly but doesn't have long range. You need to change to this model. What did they learn that I couldn't get them to do their homework? They didn't understand and here one is for the computer game. Is a computer game like chocolate will depend because you could, if you know what you're doing, nest the learning in the game. But it could be like chocolate that could get addicted to it. And of course, user generated and people enroll, do they come again? You can set up technology, you can have discussion groups in contrast to games. And the students don't go on the discussions, they don't participate. So we talked about it in some talks yesterday. So you can set up that technology but do they use it? They may not participate in the discussions as much. These are examples, it's not a whole list. But this is an example of the questions, the issues that we need to deal. Not the access to that technology, but do they use the technology? Do they use it efficiently? Do they use it properly? Do they get what they need out of that technology? These are the real challenges, these are the obstacles. One more word, games. I'm in for games, I'm for animations, but you have to use it properly. And you may not need very fancy, because look at a game like Sudoku. No animation, addictive. People played for hours and hours, figuring the numbers. So you need to think what makes people use certain things, learn, motivated, and engage to use the technology. This is the key. This is what the digital divide is between the technology and the actual users. We want the technology and the users, the learners, to fit like a hand in a glove, and not to have tension between them. They need to work together. Too often the technology doesn't fit the learner. The technology is against the learner, they struggle with it. Not only in content, but navigation. Sometimes you see learning technologies and the learner is spending all the time, frustration and cognitive resources, figuring out how to navigate in the e-learning module. That is not very good. What we need to make sure is that they fit, the learner and the technology fit. What is the learner, the cognitive and psychological underpinning of learning? And we can talk about what learning is, but I'll mention right now, learning is not only acquiring information, what we try to think about. It's remembering it. Have you tried taking your students after you taught them, and they took an exam, and they did well? And two weeks later, give them the same exam without notice, and see that they can't answer anything or not very much. Because they revised to the exam the experts in revising, the experts in getting good GSEs and A-levels in university, knowing how to answer, giving us what we want, and they forget about it. So we want relearning, only not only to acquire information, but to be able to remember it, and very important to use it. And that's not only in university, it's in industry, in the government to apply it. We want it to modify behavior, to get a skill that not only they have here, not only they remember, but they're going to apply it. So this is learning. Technology too often is driving what we're doing. Technology needs to be servant to the learner, servant to the learning, and not by itself. And we know in universities we have e-learning committees, e-learning strategies with its own entity, rather than it's a tool. It's an important tool. I'm not against using technology. I'm a fan of technology. But we have to use it and remember why we're using it. Rather than the new technology out there, let's use it. Or we have some programming skills, so let's put everything in this technology, transcribe our normal lectures or workshops or books into the electronic medium. So I want to go back to the basics, to the learner. I have a paper called It's Not What You Teach, But What They Learn That Counts. Where I try to transform people's thinking because they have new database, libraries, and you go and say, it's beautiful, it's great. Doesn't matter. What do the learners take from it? What do they learn from it? That's what counts. It's not a university professor that comes. The students learn nothing. It's not my problem. I know the knowledge. I lecture it. That's my job. And the student's job is to learn. If they don't learn, it's their problem. No, you need to think it's not what you teach. It's not the graph that you make. It's not the database or web-based using Flash or animation or gaming. What matters is what the learners take from it. Not what you teach and not what you've done is insignificant. And this is a transformation of how we think about it or how I say and I believe we still need to think about it. And you need to think about question. How intuitive and user-friendly is the technology? How engaging and motivating is the technology? How cognitively demanding is the technology? How effective it is? And again, we're talking about learning in terms of acquiring but also remembering and using it. And of course, it's not the technology, but how we use the technology. Technology is like a pen. You can write Shakespeare and poetry and you can write rubbish. Or it's a pen and technology is the same. And it's not access and to use technology that end of it. Great. That's only the beginning. This is what the troubles and the challenges are starting. Now, to answer these questions and other questions, we need to really understand the learner. So who is the learner? Well, I brought a picture of the learner. What this is all about. The learner is right here. That's a brain. That's what is going to see the information or not see it. Pay attention or not pay attention. Get engaged or not get engaged. Encode it, represent it, or forget about it. Remember it or not remember it. Use it or not use it.  And what we're really interested in is not in the biological entity, we're interested in the mechanisms that the brain employs in processing information. So underpinning the brain is information processing. And those mechanisms, the blue ball represents information and we store them, we delete them, we consolidate it with other concepts. We need to understand what goes on here because that's where we want to get our knowledge. We want technology to help us encode the information, remember it, and use it. And we must understand the brain and the mechanisms. I'm not talking about learning theories. There are huge learning theories. There are many learning theories, big pyramids, towers of theories about learning. First of all, which one is true? I definitely don't know. You can pick anyone you want. And what do they have to do with learning when we want to improve learning? They're too abstract. What I'm talking about is undisputed building blocks of how the brain encodes and processes, memorizes, retrieves, encodes information. This is what we need to know. It gets a bit problematic because many people know a lot about the brain. We have a lot of knowledge currently about the brain in the last 10 years.  You need to translate it to how that can affect practically how you design the technologies. That is the tricky part. That's where we need to be sophisticated and clever is bridging, bridging the gap. This is the digital gap to take what we know about the learners, the cognitive architecture. What does that mean in designing and utilizing technology to optimize the learning? This is the divide that I put forward is a big challenge. It's a gap. And you may disagree with me. Overall, e-learning has failed. But it has a huge potential. It can be great, but it's not delivering because it's a missing link, a missing loop, and that you did. I will show you some practical examples of what I'm talking about. Why don't you try and count how many Fs you see up here? I'm going to ask you in a minute. OK, how many people saw 10? Pick your hands up. 9, 8, 7. Pick your hands up. 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Those who didn't pick up their hands didn't see any Fs. If you didn't see any Fs, you have a problem. And come and talk to me later. Most of you saw three Fs. Some saw four, some five. So first of all, let me show you the R6Fs. If you saw only three, four, five, you do not have a problem.  At least not because of this. So everybody saw one, two, and three. But it's of, of, and of, three of here. Again? OK. One, two, and three, but of, of, and of. Let's see another example. Why don't you tell me if you can see here a man, a face of a man?  Right here. Are you blind? No, you're not blind. You don't have a problem that you didn't see that. And I can give you many examples of this sort. The learner, the brain, doesn't pick up all the information. It can be too much information like with a face. It can be information that the brain decides is not important. And I can pay you 10 pounds for every F you see, and you're not going to see, because the brain says to you, of is not important. I don't want to spend resources. So you need to start thinking. It doesn't matter how you design your learning technology. The question is, the learner, the brain encodes certain information and doesn't encode. We believe we don't see it, but you see it. The brain just decides it's not important. It's not allocating attention. It's not allocating resources. The brain may perceive it, but not encode it. They don't remember it. This is critical to know, because this is your parameters if you want to design technology learning generally, but technology is a very powerful tool to help learning if you know what you're doing. So you need to know all of this. You can't ignore the learners. That's their problem. I'm going to design something really cool. Well, it may be cool. It may look fancy. It may look nice to the vice chancellor or get your promotion, but the learners are not learning more. And we know that we don't test our e-learning very much, what we do. And if you want to, we have a paper right now on this that I've done. It's very hard, because you need to do proper science. So I divide my class into two, control group and technology, and I'm disadvantaging the people who don't get the technology. So there are a lot of ethical questions in really testing the effectiveness of e-learning. So there are obstacles in this. But this is what we have to do. We have to use this kind of information. Obviously, I'm not going to talk about the brain for 10 hours now and give you more and more examples, just illustrations, to enhance learning. Give the learners the information in the mental representation, whatever they learn is going to be stored here if they learned it. There's a certain mental representation. Why give it in a format that doesn't fit the brain? They'll not encode it, or they will encode it, but they'll spend a lot of energy doing it. And they're going to waste resources not learning, but transforming the information. Give it to them the way the brain wants it. Why not help the learner to learn effectively? Help them guide the cognitive resources which are limited to make learning efficient. I'll show you two very specific examples of how we do this. Give it in the mental representation. It doesn't matter if you have to identify tumors, or you have to identify health and safety problems, or you have to identify patterns in the data, or where a bridge is going to collapse in engineering, or where floods are going to happen. You have to identify a certain visual pattern, or it can be even a higher concept that's represented. So let's say you have to train people to identify aircraft. You have to train them to identify an F-15E. I've done a lot of work with Air Force, or this is my example. I do apologize.  If the brain is going to represent it like this, let's give it to the learners rather than them working, give it in the representation that the brain is going to use. But maybe it's facing down. The brain wants it facing down. Maybe sideways. Maybe the brain doesn't have one representation, the brain, when they learn to identify. And again, it's any type of knowledge. This is just an example. They want a whole range of orientations. The brain has multiple representations. Maybe the brain just likes weird orientations. Maybe the brain likes only this. There is scientific answers to this question, and let's design the learning to give it in the mental representation that the brain is going to use. If you want to know the exact orientations that the brain uses to look and identify this kind of object, well, you can go to my website and read this long, boring paper on learning presentation, object identification, the function of discriminability, and learning presentation, the effect of stimuli, similarity, canonical frame, alignment, and aircraft identification. I apologize for that. But there is a scientific answer in the paper we laid out. It gets, this is just an example, to give it in the right mental representation. And any learning that you want them to do, even abstract concepts, philosophy, literature, they're going to store the information. If they don't store it, they haven't learned. How are they going to store it? What are the representations? Let's use that information to hit a nail on the head. Help the learner learn efficiently. What happens when they learn? So let's stick with the example of aircraft. And this used to be an old example, but with the latest problems in Georgia. Maybe it's, again, we have American and Russian aircraft, and they need to identify these aircraft. And they're quite similar to one another. So what does the training do? You show them the aircraft, and you say, F-50. Once you know the orientation, so you need to know which orientations and how many. But excuse me, we figure that one out. And you show them the aircraft again, and again, and again, and again. And you know what happens after seeing it? Many times, they identify them.  Or they do a friendly fire. So we need very quickly, when they're upside down and moving, and there's a whole science here. But what happens, they do learn to do that. But it takes a long time. What does the brain do? We're unconscious of the process. The brain picks up the important characteristics and features, the critical information, to make the identification. So if you want to identify an F-15E, and you look at the nose and the cockpit, it's a waste of time. You're not going to be able to identify an F-15, because the cockpit of the MiG-19 and the nose and the SU-17 and the F-15, they're almost identical. Or maybe the wings. No, the wings are too similar. But what the brain does, and that's how we learn to distinguish between identical twins that look the same after we see them time and time again, the brain unconsciously picks up on it. Then you would pick up here that the F-15, the air taker, is different. This, for example, is different from this aircraft from all the rest. It takes time. Until the brain figures it out, learning takes time. So we said, let's make the learning more efficient by a more civilized title, helping the cognitive system learn exaggerating distinctiveness and uniqueness. Let us artificially, during training, exaggerate, help the cognitive system pick up on it very quickly. So we morph, we transform the aircraft. We don't know what's, we don't decide what's important. We don't ask pilots. We have software that does it. And just like every politician that can have a real big nose or eyebrow and do caricature in the newspaper, the same we did with the aircraft. So for example, we made the air taker of the F-15 during training much bigger than it really is. And what happened? It increased training efficiently because the pilots and the people who were trained didn't have to figure out themselves what is unique. We exaggerated the distinctiveness and the uniqueness, the knowledge that the brain picks up because we know what it is. And they picked up on it very quickly. What's important is when they go out to the field, of course, they're not going to see aircraft as bigger air takers. And then we test them in air-to-air combat simulators and you find not only increase in learning, but memory and its application. And we test them six months later. And you see that the ones who learned the exaggerated distinctiveness remember better and shoot faster the right aircraft than those who didn't. If you want all the details, you can read in this paper, it's on my website. So these are just a few examples of what I'm talking about. And time is moving really quickly here. Let me talk about videos for a few minutes. So we use videos quite a lot. And this is the health and safety video that I've developed with colleagues, Tom Charrette and Joe Price and Gary Wills. And you can do it before you train. This is the health and safety laboratory that you train students, for example. And they see the video. And if it's after you explain to them the health and safety, you can say, now look, I want you to identify all the mistakes that this guy is making in health and safety. And write them down and we'll talk about it later. Or you can use it as an assessment. And they have to write down and they get score for it. Or you can use it as a training tool. Here, look at this and think what he's doing that's wrong. And then we'll discuss it. So I'm really happy to see you so engaged in this boring video. But the students are going to turn out. And afterwards, you start remembering the video when he was working, he had his watch on. Who got that? Who didn't get it? The students already forgot. Or maybe I will talk to you while I do the video. And then you don't have to look at the video to listen to me, because the brain is spread thin over this. And we use videos quite a lot. So we can do a few things. For example, one thing we can try to do is help guide attention, similar to the aircraft. We can guide their attention to the problems. Let's see if this is going to work now. So we can show them during the video what are the problems. So we guide their attention to pick it up. That's one thing that we can do. That may be too easy for the students, because we want it to be a bit challenging and engaging. If you spoon feed them too much, that's not good also. So you can perhaps make the video interactive. And there are many, many ways to make videos interactive. They can ask them questions and do lots of different stuff. So here is an example of an interactive version. So you look at it, and they need to click. Oh, yes, watch is worn doing an experiment. They look at it and do that. And it can be more interesting. You can have something like this, where you get multiple choice questions. You can do whatever you want. Technology is a tool. So they get what information should be provided. So you click. Oh, yes, you get feedback. That's good. That's good. Uh-oh, that's a bad answer. And if you notice what's interesting to make it challenging, we have novice and expert. So every time you find it, it lists it. And every time you do something good, it's taking you up to expert.  So we're adding almost kind of a game to make it interesting for them. And here I'll make a correct answer. It's going up, correct answer. It's going up. But incorrect, it goes down, and it goes down. And then when you're done, it scores you right away. It gives you feedback. You've got 15%. The lowest one in five years.  Or being positive because they're going to score better than me. So you have a challenge. Or you say, the one that will get the highest score is going to get chocolate or is going to get the first in the class or whatever you want to do. And after they do that, then it goes automatically. They do it individually at their own speed. It will list and show all the problems in the videos that you've missed. And the video is interactive because if you don't pick on a problem, it will show it to you again later in the video. If you pick up on it, it won't. So it responds and changes in its response. And finally, putting it all together, you will see the video combined with the problems right now at the end. It will list them and show you what the problems and list them as you go along. This is very, very briefly showing you interactive videos that you can make real huge change in terms of challenging, in terms of motivation, in terms of encoding the information. Something we use a lot, but we use it passively. They sit and watch a video. And then we talk about it or not. What do they gain? And try to see what the students do during the video. And many of us don't even stay in class. Half an hour of video. And we go and do email during that time. And so do the students. Let me very quickly, I want to finish to leave time for questions. You need to make information comprehensible because the cognitive system is limited. I'm not going to have fancy graphs like hunts. Nobody can compete with hunts moving stuff. But here's a graph. It's very hard to understand it. It's too much cognitive load. The cognitive system can't pick up. For us, it's easy when we teach something. It's easy because we know it so well. But you can make it by simplifying it, dividing it to two more simple graphs. Because you have too much cognitive load. The brain has limited capacity. The learner, no matter if they're pilots, the top of the crop, they have limited resources. What's going on here in this graph, in this data? Too much information. You can show the students a lot of data. This is too much information for to understand. So you can provide a meaningful pattern. And animation is great. Games is great, depending on how you use them. And yesterday with Hunts, you saw great examples of how to use animation. But here, no animation. I give a meaningful pattern by encoding it differently. And you can see here quite easily that the data means something. Here, when you look at the data, you see immediately, oh, younger voters always vote more, older voters vote more than younger voters, except something. Oh, what happened? In 1984, the older voters didn't vote very much. 1980, sorry, 1980. And now you can see that the line here in 1980 that's different from all the other lines. But when it's like this, you can't see it. I'll give you two more quick examples. Again, here. What's going on here? It's very hard.  Simplified by chunking. You can have the brain can chunk information together in meaningful patterns if you present it properly. And here, you can simplify the number of operations. Even though you can understand this, here, you have to encode the shape and the color and go back and forth. This is operations of the brain, your brain calories, that you should make it easier for the learning so they learn better. If you put the names right in here, they don't have to encode the color and go up and down in the legend. So daily cognitive load, or in a quantitative approach, will be reducing the quantity or what I call a qualitative approach where we package the information more efficiently because we know how the brain works. We know the capacity of the brain. And we package it efficiently without reducing the amount of information. You have to be very careful in what you do with representation information because you're making decisions. What information you convey. If you look at this example, same data. But it looks very different because here you plot the side of the stock market. Look at the US doing great. And here percentage of change. Look at Japan is doing great. Same data, totally different information. So when you represent the information, you'd make decisions because here it's percentage. And even though the US overall is bigger, the slope of the Japanese increase is over 200%. I know this doesn't bother you because you're British in the French or bottom in either case. That's all you're worried about. But there is information here and you make decisions when you convey the information. The last thing I'll talk about very, very briefly is modularity. Different parts of the brain do different things. It's not a new concept. We know this for a variety of reasons. First of all, we have selective brain damage.  Abilities, the cognitive performance, the abilities to learn and to process information, selectively go away. So we have agnosia, we have visual deficit, aphasia, we have language deficit, we have a taxia, motor deficit. And they're very specific. You can get post-op agnosia. You can't identify faces. So we learn what different parts of the brain do by how selectively it breaks down. But also we have the dual task paradigm. When you tap two different parts of the brain, the two tasks don't conflict with one another. You can load a lot on the brain. But if two learning tasks or two performance tasks are underpinned in the same brain area, they interfere with one another. So what we do, we have a primary task and people do it. And then we add a secondary task. And you find that sometimes adding the secondary task doesn't affect performance on the primary task with the different parts of the brain. But if it's the same part of the brain, when they start doing the secondary task, the performance of the primary task falls. Try this and then start this and you'll see you all know this. And finally, we have functional brain scans like PET, pothetron emission tomography, inject radioactive material and we can follow and trace consumption of oxygen, glucose in the brain. Again, I'm taking hours of lectures to 20 seconds and you can see that different parts of the brain are activated when you see and vision, when you hear, when you do use different memory stores and code information in different memory parts of the brain. And we know a lot about that. Again, it's not big learning theories. It's very practical building blocks of scientific facts that are not disputed. Who cares, you ask.  Bet you never asked that before. But it's critical because if you know what parts, what are the characteristics of the part of the brain? What is the capacity? How much cognitive load can I put there? What are the mental representations in that memory store, in that perception score so I can build and deliver the training according to the most efficient way for the learners to accumulate information? We can spread activation and have a lot of learning if we encode information in different parts of the brain. And it goes on and on. We use our knowledge of the human brain of a cognitive system to make learning efficient and effective. This is the point that I'm trying to get across. It's not the access to the technology but having it effective. And effective that it affects the learner. We need to deal and close the digital divide. But the divide that I'm talking about it brings the technology and the learners. Once we have that, then let's make sure everybody has a technology when it's working. To utilize technology, it has to be subservient to the learner. We have to optimize it, not forget about the learner. Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much, Yatil. I'm really stimulating talk. We have got a short amount of time for some questions and I'm sure Yatil would be delighted to take some now. Delighted. Okay, gentlemen, got my eye out there. Was the... Thank you very much for your talk. Your talk reminds... Where are you? I'm here. Your talk reminds me of a book on website design called Don't Make Me Think by, I think it's Stephen Krebs. And would you like to comment on what's going on in terms of design and what you're talking about here? I want to comment specifically on that book. It's also a very good book by Steve Karzlin on graph designs based on the brain. What we need to make sure is that we understand how you perceive the information. You don't necessarily want to make it too simple and not make you think because we need the learning to be challenging. If it's not challenging, if it's not motivating, if you're not involved, if you're not interactive, then it doesn't work. But it has to do with design, but not only the design, but the overall approach, what I call the holistic cognitive approach of the system. And people ignore it. Let me give you one example in terms of security and passwords. We have, all of us have so many passwords to log into the university account, to the library, to database. Every time we submit a paper, every time we do shopping, buy plane tickets, hotel. And each one has a different constraints. We're not supposed to give the same password to everyone because, to all our accounts, because we're going to the library and to activating the nuclear warhead that they can control. I don't want the same password. It's one of the basic security breaches. But I'm not supposed to write them down. So I need to remember 25 different passwords, different, random. And now in the university, because we have such nuclear reactors, they're forcing us every six months to change the password. So I used to be smart and I used to say, change my password, one, two. Now they've picked up, no, your new password is too similar to your old password. So what do I do? I write them down. Now I ask myself, the people who designed, for example, this system, what planet do they come from? They expect us to remember 20, 30, 40 passwords. So here's an example in IT where you don't take into account these different kinds of messages. So it has to do with design, how you convey information, the amount of information, what information you convey, and how you motivate, how you engage, how you use interactive videos and gaming to get the learning across. So they understand it, they remember it, and they use it. And you need to understand the underlying cognitive architecture and remember it's about the learner and not about the technology. Thank you, gentlemen. Intuitive, you know. I'm interested in that word in the context of how computer systems are used, because people are always on about intuitive interfaces. I did come across a chap who said that all interfaces had to be learned, including a nipple. I'm interested in your views on that sort of thing. Which part? What he was really trying to say was that intuitive was in the context of a computer interface was a bit meaningless. In many senses, what he really meant was intuitive had elements of familiarity about it. I'm trying to cut along an answer very shortly. First of all, empirically it's very simple to note intuitive interfaces, built-to-interfaces, take people and run them and see how quickly they figure it out. One that they figure it out faster, regardless of why, is better. Of course, different people have different intuition. Men and women have different cultures. Also, depending if you have a real approach, technological, valid approach in the university, I know most of you are from university, you build all the interfaces, there is crossover, positive crossover. So you don't, every time you get an e-learning module, you have to figure out from the beginning. So once you learn a certain navigation, a certain conceptual approach, it transfers to other e-learning modules you're taking the same school in a different part of the university. So intuitive may be, first time you have to learn, but then it cuts across. So you want to make it efficient, you want the learners to focus on the learning and not on figuring out the technology and getting frustrated and not using it. One question here, and it says, which has come through the backchart. How can non-neuro scientists come to rigorous understanding of what learning materials have what cognitive levels? All notes, sorry. That is a very good question. Somebody's asking if I'm not a cognitive neuroscientist, how do cognitive neuroscientists, how do I do it?  Every, the main reason is, and I had it in one of my slides, is the fact that you know that the brain works a certain way, it's not clear, it's not intuitively clear how you take that knowledge about how the brain processes information and translate it to the practical, tangible way when you go and you build the technology. This is the trick, this is the sophistication that is needed and is the missing gap that I think we need to close. And we're only just touching the surface because we are only talking, all I've talked about is the less interesting stuff, which is how do we deliver training and learning differently because of technology? We have to do it differently. But the interesting question is that how we deliver the training is what learning? Because what we teach needs to change. What are we all here doing? Taking the old material and trying to find new ways to deliver it. But this university challenge, the weakest link, who wants to be a millionaire? What do they test? People's knowledge. Well, I can find the knowledge, any knowledge can offload all of this onto technology. We need to change not only how we teach, but what we teach because technology in the face of society is changing. And if you have students memorizing dates and names, it's a waste of time because things are changing. And we need to talk eventually, maybe next day in the conference, not only how technology should change, how we teach, but what we teach and what learning is all about. Okay, thank you very much, Shatel. I think... Thank you, Wando. Thank you, Wando. Thank you, Wando. Oh, you have a question, sorry. Mark's got a question. Do we have a mic? I tried to finish on a good note. I started with the last question. I have to think of something clever to say quickly now. I'm just going to be awkward. You mentioned simplification quite a lot. And that's definitely relevant. But you also talked about learning needing to be challenging. And where's the boundary line between simplification and challenging? What should we do in those kinds of circumstances? That's a very good question. They go very well together, but we have to think what they are. Talk about simplification of things that don't contribute to the learning. So in the first level, it's a navigation, the interface. But then also simplification in terms of helping the cognitive system figure out how to identify the aircraft or what orientation. We don't want to spend energy. We want to simplify when you put the gas in neutral. When the students and the learners are spending energy and time playing the game but not learning the material. That's where we want to simplify. What we want to do is a challenge to get what we call depth of processing. We have a different level of processing on the learning material itself. So if we can concentrate the cognitive system on the actual learning material, we don't want to simplify it. We want to simplify getting to the core, getting to the meat of what they need to learn. This part, we make it challenging because we want to motivate them and make it interactive and interesting. So some parts you want to simplify and make easy. Some parts we want to do what's called desired difficulty. So we want to desire difficulty but not in figuring out how to log on or what my password is or the interface but in actually engaging them in the learning material. Your question is very good but in two different parts. One you want to simplify. No, you don't want to spoon feed the students. The students we all know are getting lazier and lazier. They want to be spoon fed and spoon feeding them is not the right thing when it comes to the learning material itself. They have to be challenged. They have to be interactive and engaging and they like the computer games. They only play computer games when it's challenging not when it's simple. Unfortunately all good things have to come to an end and the next meeting here will be the AGM at 3 o'clock. That's right isn't it now? Which is just in a few minutes. I found it a really fascinating and stimulating talk and what it's really done to me is to highlight that teaching is actually a purposeful activity. We probably all know that already but we at least have got some understanding for it and this is really I think the cutting edge of where learning is going to at the moment. I'm really indebted to ETL for coming giving a really stimulating talk and on behalf of everybody here I'd like to present ETL this small present of our appreciation. Thank you very much indeed.


Advocate friend is a BCG consultant. He decided to quit his job because he hates the work life's balance at BCG. There's no balance at all. And he received two offers. One offer is doing financial operations for Google. The other offer is working for educational startup to work on their product, which offer should you choose? I'm very proud of him. He actually rejects Google offer by working for the educational company because the better work by balance and he was able to pursue his passion building amazing product. And then next year, when Google start hiring again, he can jump into the interview process and get ahead of getting compared with more people who doesn't have PM experience. I'm proud of you, Andrew. How do you know all of this? I follow Dr. Nancy Lee for management tips and tricks. She's a direct product and featured in Ford. You should follow her too.


Good morning and welcome to Moments with Melinda. I am Melinda Moulton and I'm your host today and I have two extraordinary guests. I'm so excited. I can't stand it. I have with me Bobby Cochran and Barbara Ann Cochran. Hi guys, how are you? Hi, I'm great. I'm good. I am so glad that you agreed to be on my show.  You are both icons, locally, nationally and internationally for your accomplishments in ski sport. And it's really an honor to have you today because all of the Cochrans in the family have won a total of 19 national champions.  So now I start, when I talked to you before I started this show, I said, I know that you're both, your family members are very humble and understated. And I love that so much about your humility. I think it makes you very special, but today, I want you to sing your praises for who you are and the legacy that you leave all of us here in Vermont and around the world. So first off, and your brother and sister, I should tell you that. Now, Barbara Ann, where do you land in the family? Are you the oldest? No, I'm next to the oldest. You're second and then Bobby's third and then Lindy's last, right? Right. So tell us about growing up in the Cochran family and being the children of Mickey and Ginny Cochran. Tell us about your parents who raised four kids who all went on to be ski prodigies.  Tell us about that growing up with your parents. Well, I feel like for me, when we were little, it was like the three older ones, because Marilyn, myself and Bobby, I feel like I'm an Irish triplet because I'm 11 months younger than Marilyn and 11 months older than Bobby. And Bobby and I, actually Bobby and I were born in the same year, I was born in January, he was born in December. And so in skiing, every time we moved up to a new age group, we moved up together because it was done by the year rather than, than, you know, by your actual age.  It's like, growing up, we, we had a wonderful childhood. We, we ended up, you know, my parents were really, they love sports. So, and my mom, I think she survived being a stay at home mom by making sure that we played outside all the time. I don't know, Bob, add in here. You can take us a little bit more.  There was certainly a hierarchy. My father was the boss. He was definitely the boss. Even though my mom truly was the boss, even though my father didn't know it, but then of course the real boss from our perspective, especially Barbara and myself was my sister Marilyn. So she was sort of like the drill sergeant. And you couldn't say no to Marilyn, but, but truthfully, I, I think we grew up in a special time, in a special way. And we're always doing stuff together that was outside and it was active. And, and unfortunately my sister, Linda got dragged along, but I think she doesn't regret a second of it either. Yeah, the beautiful family. So in, in 1972, all four of the Cochrane children were on the US ski team at the 1972 Olympics. Tell us about that. Now competing with your siblings all together. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, so, so all of us had the chance to possibly make the, the Olympic team in 1972. Lindy was the youngest and, and unfortunately she had had some injuries. So she, she actually didn't make the team. So the three of us actually made the team. We all competed in 1972 at Sapporo Japan and Marilyn, Bobby and I, like, so anyway, so I don't know, can I brag right here? Yes, and you, and you won, well I was going to say, and you won the gold. Yeah, and I won the gold medal. Let's go for it. This is a, this is a brag fest. I expect you to share all your important accomplishments with mine. Yeah. I feel like the 72 Olympics it was like, Marilyn just carried the weight on her shoulders with, she just felt like she, she should be, she should win. I think she felt like she should win every race that she was in and she was in all three, the downhill, the John Solomon, the slalom. And, and she, she was capable of doing that, you know, but I think that she, she became kind of a head case too at the same time that, that was really difficult for, I think being the oldest in the family, being a perfectionist, you know, she felt like, like she should, she had to, to do well for, for the US keeps team, for Vermont, for the family, for, for, you know, just everybody. And she kind of fell apart at the Olympics. And, and I kind of just went along and, and was there, you know, like I was used to being second best growing up to Marilyn in, in our races. And, and so I got used to not, not winning. And in 1972, like the thing I remember about 1972 was I actually only did win two races that year. And the, the first was the Olympics slalom. And then the second one was the sugar slalom at Stowe, which was really, you know, just this fun race and stuff. And so it's going, well, my record, you know, if you look at my record, it's not that great. But I think it's terrific. So Bobby, what about you being at the, being in the 72, in the skiing with your siblings? Well, for me, the thing I would really like to say is, you know, being a ski racer, especially back then, you know, which is ancient history when we were racing, but we spent the whole vast majority of the time racing in Europe. And so, and we did not have Skype or cell phones or we didn't have any contact with the colonies. So we're on our own. And I was so blessed to have my three sisters nearby. It seemed like back then we, we would have races that were within, at least within an hour of each other. So I really relied on my sisters for support because it's a very lonely existence. The Olympics, for me, were such a blur. I raced all three races. So it feels like I showed up and immediately had to start downhill training. We had a day off for the opening ceremonies, which was incredibly moving, I have to say. And then just went through and raced the downhill and then trained a day and raced the Giant Slalom and trained and did a qualifying race and then raced the Slalom. But of course, the highlight for me, I was, we had trained in the morning on the day of Barbarian's Slalom race.  It was a horrible day and it was foggy and snowing.  You couldn't see it all. So we knew BA was on the course for her second run. She had, we knew she had won the first run and we knew it was very close. And so we were standing there, watching the clock, knowing and the clock's ticking, but we didn't know anything. We didn't know what was going on. We didn't know if BA had fallen. We didn't know anything. And then all of a sudden- And then BA is Barbarian. BA is- Barbarian, I'm sorry. That's okay. I don't know, go ahead. We've always called her BA, but Barbarian was on the course. And then like a miracle, she came out of this fog and snow and made a couple of turns and went through the finish. And we looked at each other and we sort of didn't know if she'd won, but we knew she was either first or second. And so we decided, well, we're gonna just jump the fence. So we jumped the fence, ran over, put her up on our shoulders. And she was pretty tidy. So we could manage it. We didn't drop her or anything, but Barbarian said that that's when she realized she had won. Even though we had no idea whether she won or not, but we were just so excited that she came through the snow and through the finish that we had to do it. That's standing, what a beautiful story. Now, Barbarian, your son, Ryan Cochran Siegel, just won the silver in the 2022 Olympics and was the first Cochran of this generation to win the World Cup. Can you talk about this and your feelings about that? I know this was just an extraordinary experience. Yeah, it's like, you know, I tried to, it was his second Olympics. And at the first Olympics in 2018, when he went to Pyeongchang, like I wanted to let him know that there are so many people that can get on the podium. And I said, including him, you know, and he didn't do that at those Olympics. But it's like, so I felt like the same thing for him going to these Olympics. And that he actually had had some results in ski racing and had come in first, had come in second. So he actually had been on the podium in World Cup races. And I wanted him to understand that just even going to the Olympics is such a special thing that it's not all about winning the medals or anything. If you win a medal, then it's acing on the cake. But you've got to be so proud of just being one of the few people that make your country's team that that's such an honor in itself. And so, I mean, I was like, there was a lot of attention on Ryan because he was one of the US skiers that had been kind of, the media had felt that he was capable of winning a medal. And, you know, but NBC, like they thought they were kind of pinning it on the downhill and they had it all set up for viewing party at Cochrane's and then that day it got canceled for the next day. So, but they wanted my input as well. And they weren't really expecting it for the Super G. And then they, so I was, I mean, it was in China. So it was like the timing was, it was, you know, past my bedtime when he was racing. So I would get into bed and then have my laptop and watch him. And then, so for the Super G, like I started screaming and I woke my daughter up because she doesn't like to watch him live. And I was going, go Ryan, go Ryan, go Ryan. I was just so excited. And I just, I felt like he was capable of doing that. That didn't surprise me that he got a medal, but just so proud. And it just, I mean, it makes me cry. Every time I think about it, it just makes me cry. Well, congratulations to your beautiful son. And I think it made all of us very, very proud. So Bobby, back to you, my friend. Between 1970 and 1973, you won the prestigious Hanahom Downhill in Kitsbueel, Austria, which is the toughest and most famous downhill races in the world. Can you share with us a little bit about that accomplishment? Yeah, I, well, I didn't win the downhill. I won the Hanakan Combine. Combine. Which is sort of used to be the premier trophy that you could win. It's sort of like winning the Masters or Wimbledon or something. I mean, in Austria, skiing is a religion and Kitsbueel is hard to describe. It's one of those places where you really have to go. I went back because my son Jim was racing in the slalom at the Hanakan. Thank God he was not racing the downhill because I don't think my heart would have taken it. It is so scary. And the thing I would add about Ryan is, the year before his Olympic silver medal in Super G, he had fallen in Kitsbueel and broken his neck. It was so scary watching. But anyways, sorry, B.A. to bring up that. And then made that come back. But it's just one of those things that, I don't know if it seems real still, but I'm very proud of it. And I don't know if I appreciated it. In fact, I do know that I didn't appreciate it at the time.  I remember, in the downhill, I came in third. I came in third. The first and the second places were Roland Colombe and Bernard Russi, who are arguably two of the greatest downhill races ever. And the person in fourth was an Austrian racer by the name of Franz Klammer, who is probably not arguably, who is the greatest downhill racer ever. So that's one of the things I'm the most proud of. What a legacy, my friend. What a legacy. Now, Barbara, you wrote a book, Skeen for Women. And I assume that it's still in publication, right? And I actually didn't write it. There's a chapter about me and about you in it. Okay. And then also you wrote for the Washington Post and you have a business, golden opportunities in sports, business and life. Are you still? That was like a title that I started with, but now I just call it Barbarian Cochran Coaching, B.A. Cochran Coaching. B.A. Cochran Coaching, and people can find you on the web. So and you probably coach on sports, business and life, right? Well, mostly what it's evolved as is coaching the mental side of competition for athletes. I mean, I talk to parents, I talk to teams, I talk, but I, and I haven't really, my idea when I first started doing it was, that I would do it for businesses and really as it's evolved, it's really, I talk to mostly athletes. Athletes are a mentor for how to help them how to help them in competition. Well, I think that's what your family's done throughout their whole, the legacy of the Cochran family. So share with my viewers a little bit about the Cochran ski area, which is family owned and operated. I think, I think Bobby, your son is the general manager. And what does it mean to you all as a family, to the community and to the sport of skiing? Talk about the Cochran ski area. Well, I think the ski area, yeah, when you mentioned the ski area, you mean really you're talking about my dad because he's the one that really started it all. It was his dream. And, you know, now it's a nonprofit ski area, although I tell everyone that it's always been a nonprofit. My parents never made profits. They lived off depreciation. But it's just, I think it's a little gem. And the best part to me, the best part of the ski area is to see all the young and old racers and the families that go there. It's just a community meeting places where you just make memories. Well, it's, you know, one of the things that like over the years, there's been kids that have, you know, learned to ski at Cochran's. And one, like it amazes me, like there was somebody out in, I think it was San Diego or out West someplace that was at this big conference. I think it was like a technical engineering conference or something like that. And there was somebody that was giving a speaker that had learned how to ski at Cochran's and actually had race at Cochran's. And somebody in the back said, did you just ski at Cochran's? He yelled out. And I just think our reach is, you know, so much more than we realized. But I think it's like, I just, there's another parent that when he says he comes up to the, goes up the hill and to the upper parking lot and he makes that crest of getting to the parking lot. He calls it Prozac Mountain.  It's not, it's fair. It is, it's very comforting to go there and to bring your family and to ski in. And it's a very community-based. I think that there's a lot of community for Cochran. And it's very different than what we're seeing today in the ski industry. And one of my questions was that this Cochran ski area has created some of Vermont's finest skiers. And I wanted you to talk a little bit about the mythology, which you did just now, and about the magic. And so you just shared with us a little bit about the magic around the area. It hasn't really changed that much. And since your dad, you know, and mom first bought the land and created the ski areas, some snow making. And, but the magic is peace and community and the fact that you're opening your hearts to the community to come into your family.  And you're letting people come into that. And that's the magic. Would I be correct, Bobby? I think, yeah, it's interesting. You said your home, I always, I think we want it to be home for a bunch of people. And it's interesting, the original lodge, I think this is one of the advances because the original lodge used to be my mother's kitchen and she would make a batch of brownies or something. And that would be nourishment for the skiers. So now we have a separate lodge from my mother's kitchen. So that's one of the major advances. She would make brownies for us for dessert and they'd be smelling, they'd be out on the counter and then there was some skiers that like came in some kids came in to try in and they couldn't stand just the smell of the brownies. They tried one and then before they were done they had eaten the whole pan, but that wasn't for them. She never made them for them. It was like, not until we get the old lodge was that we provided nourishment. Well, it's interesting that you both have these two different views. So Bobby, I wanna ask you that you went into medicine. I don't know how many people out there know that you are a physician and you became a family practitioner in New Hampshire and you have since retired and I know that you were the ski coach at Rice High School because my granddaughter tailer skis for your teen. So I don't think a lot of people knew that you were a practicing physician. Did you ever practice in Vermont or? Well, I practice in a little town called Walpole, New Hampshire which is right on the Connecticut River. So I would make, I would take care of a lot of Vermont patients that lived across the river. Across the river. Well, so I felt like I was always a part of Vermont. Dr. Cochran, I didn't know that and I love running into you at Rice when I'm picking up. So I wanna share with you a little bit. I have a question for you and that today's world is complicated and our youth are living during a time of climate change, pandemics and a shaky political system where democracy is at risk. What do you tell your own children and your grandchildren to steady them to face the world that they live in? What's the Cochran message to our youth about getting through what children are facing today? I mean, I think I learned a lot. It's been a real treat for me coaching the Rice High School. Not only coaching your granddaughter, Taylor, but anyways, the thing I realize is getting outside and moving and using all this energy that kids have, that's where it's at. Well, they have interviewed students across the country and they said the number one issue for high school students and middle school students too, is their mental health. And so getting outside, and nowadays a lot of kids just, they're sitting on their phone, they're in their bedrooms, tick-talking or whatever they do.  That's your words of wisdom. That's a good message and I'm gonna put that up on Twitter today. What about you, Marilyn? What's your message for the youth today? Barbrain. Barbrain, I'm sorry, Barbrain. Yeah, that's it. Barbrain. Yeah, yeah. I think I totally agree that, like I think that it is, there's a huge part of just getting outside and enjoying the fresh air and being part of that. And I think it's like, when you get overwhelmed with life, it's like breaking it down and taking it little steps at a time, like just taking one day at a time. And if it has to be one minute at a time, then you do one minute at a time, but breaking it down into the smaller steps and any problems that arise, you go, okay, yeah, I can handle it. If I do the first step, just take that first step. Great advice, Barbrain. So now I wanna talk briefly, we're coming down to the end of the show. I can't believe it. I could talk to you for hours. What about the youngest generation of Cochran's? Because this legacy that your parents began in 1961, when they instilled in the Rope Toe and the Hillside Enrichment, it still lives on in your grandchildren.  And so talk to us a little bit about your beloved grandchildren and the legacy that you've left for them and what they're all up to over there at the Cochran's ski hill. You wanna go, Bob? Yeah, I just, I love watching every single one of my grandchildren. I have five grandchildren within five miles and the three oldest are my son Tommy's children and they're the three boys that are very active and they haven't raced to speak of, although I'm grooming them to be part of the rice alpine ski team. So we'll see about that. But the thing I always love about any kid that I think that grows up at Cochran's or grows up skiing in Vermont is they can go anywhere in the world and they'll be one of the best skiers on the mountain. So no matter their skiing success or failure or whatever, they can always enjoy this sport. And, you know, I'm hoping that climate change doesn't make, doesn't take away our great sport. I, every fall the first snow, I was like, please, please let it snow.  And for me, like I think that this next generation are our kids' children, like our grandchildren, is, you know, some of them just love to ski. Like I have a grandson that really took to skiing last year at the age of four. And like I was telling Bob the other day, I said, you know, I don't think that he's gonna really want, I don't see him as getting into ski racing, but he loves to ski. And I think that's interesting with that generation is that there are some that just love ski racing and then others that just love the skiing part. And I think that's what, you know, is important to us is just that, again, they're outside, they're enjoying the nature. They have that experience and that in itself is just, it's enough for us that they enjoy being outside and being in nature.  I mean, the skis have changed, it's very different. And so the future of skiing is changing but there is that concern about snow. Now, I believe because of the lake that we'll always have good snow in Vermont, but that's a big wish. Yeah. I'm gonna hold you to it. Well, I think we're lucky to have the lake and that lake effect that comes over the Great Mountains and drops its snow. And you have installed some snow making at Crockins, right? Because now the ski areas are open until May.  Oh, absolutely. You know, I remember if you had any snow and by the end of March, you were happy and now at Crockins, I remember a couple of years ago looking over and there was a really decent patch of snow in May. Yeah. Well, there you have it. There's great hope and future, not only in the future of skiing, but also the future of the Crockins with this incredible legacy of young up and comings, whether they're gonna race or not, they're always gonna be the best skiers on the mountain. And to the two of you who are just so rich in all the beauty of humanity and all that you do and look at how strong and healthy you are.  So I wanna thank you both, Barbara Ann, B.A., Cochran and Bob Cochran. And Bobby, I'll see you at Rice and we'll certainly see you on the mountain when the girls are racing down for G.U.L. Addison's with GMVS this year. So you'll see her racing up the mountain. And stay in touch. And I wanna thank you for your time. I could talk to you for hours. And I love your little, what's the name of your cat that's behind you, B.A.? What's the, who is that beautiful creature? Kingsland. Kingsland. Kingsland.  So he's been looking over your right shoulder. So, yeah. So I wanna thank you for your time and for everything that you do for our community.  So on that note, I'm gonna wish you well and wish you a beautiful day and I will see you on the mountain. And to my viewers, thank you for joining me and I will see you all very soon.


Everybody fourth and Jay here ripping 2023 bowman draft baseball choice and jumbo seven box mixer number seven here It's PYT got Barry with the Red Sox Chad S. Braves Chris B. Cubs David W. Rockies a suitcase with the Jays Elmer has the Royals Brewers and Phillies Gabriel C. A's Giants Jeffrey S. Reds Harbor with the Rangers Jeffrey H Tigers That's Mariners Jeremy H. Guardians John S. Twins Josh and Nationals Justin K. Dodgers Keith J. Orioles Lee Juan with the D-backs Mark S. Rays Matt S with the Padres Matthew B. Marlins Noah G. Astros Peter and Pirates Robert L. Yankees Travis S. White Sox William C. Cardinals and Zach D with the Angels Good luck everybody paper base in this break is donated everything else will ship all the chrome will ship in number paper Looks like Marlins are gone a definitive later. So definitive is now down to six down to six Cool, let's do it. Let's do jumbo first. I'll do the choice case C-minus 20. I'm telling you like everybody in Florida State after that Just imagine Now hear me out. Just imagine Florida State wins And the one person has that song That'd be awesome I'm sure there'd be people betting on like that's a big spread dude 20 is crazy even if we're to say that bunch of players opt out like there's they still got talent there I don't know about winning I think they'll Slight chance. I think they Keep it reasonable Aqua wave to 125 Keener for the White Sox Fractures of Drew Jones Michael Carrico. Oh, finally got the single digit countdown going It's time fractures of Olson and a Rio's Singleton Purple refractor Carlson Reed Pirates number to 250 Fractures of how you Lee and Charlie Soto Glass of Eldridge for the Giants for fractures of Jacob Barry and Mack Horvath a Fuchsia lunar crater out of 199 Stanley Basio for the Orioles Fractures of Munoz Paul Wilson Orange paper to 25 Jacob Gonzalez nice paper here for the White Sox One there first rounder glass for the D-backs is Tommy Troy Fractures you've got questad and Tommy Hawk other orange paper And it is Davis and a Los Santos the D-backs Interest on season orange chrome now D-backs orange paper there the Los Santos refractor auto first bowman pirates Garrett Forester 199 of 199 or 499 actually 199 of 499 Refractors of Juanita Blake Mitchell Be sure to like to stream everybody. We do appreciate it like it up like it up guys fractures of Montero Hurston-Waldrup It's your spots for fanatics Almanac tomorrow. This one was asking about uh This this version of Almanac is used by a personal and it's just treated as such basically there you go Just like buying a personal happy bars off schemes First woman auto raise Colton led better. I know um Opera and Walters. I know in the past. We don't a lot of hit drafts. So this one is just personal's edition Pick a number one through 100 Open it for you one card light blue Carlson Reed Pirates lunar glow may he a cardinals or fractures of Roman Anthony and A first woman auto for the Tigers max Anderson fractures nickels and Foster Light blue Max Clark Tigers on the chrome and refractors of early and Smith. Okay, let me get some big autos here in choice The so-so box the orange papers are kind of cool, but so-so box Not the best Come on choice It's like the bowman mixer sold out cubs gone in the first NT the A's are gone and NT Yeah, but it's a repack that that we make that lean sports cards makes That's the real gist of it. This would be a fun one. All right guys, so it's just NT and definitive for the day here for the daytime Again American football and I guess this is MLS. We call it soccer. This is major league soccer. They should change the Major League football. That's how she changed it, too Let's not do that. Let's let's let's not get American war rod that it already is We don't need that so mad because they changed the name of us exactly Gold shimmer and I start here. We got a Jake Cunningham first woman auto for the Orioles number 31 of 50 Well shimmer Orioles Cunningham there a Choice now to 150 first woman auto is gonna be Quinn McDaniel San Francisco 127 150 a base first woman auto Will be Zanatello for the Red Sox solid box there is not a tello good color a good base auto there, too Lee Corso still So broad can't is he like 90 something he looks confused He just looks confused Okay refractor first auto Johnny Farmello for Seattle number 295 at a 499 Good hit for Seattle in the Farmello First bowman autograph guardian CJ Kepis Choice auto here first bowman is Jake D'Leo Miami 93 of 150 D'Leo Orange orange coming. Oh We got what we got Not show it. It's all the team. I didn't see who it is Tampa Bay Hunter Haas orange wave first bowman auto number 13 of 25 go Ice 88, I thought he was in his 90s 88 still not young Orange wave Haas For the rays. It's gonna say is he played he played football back when they had leather helmets He played he was a Florida state in the early 60s First bowman auto for the age Jacob Wilson is Wilson for Oakland Hey Denton pulled a Bryce Eldridge non-auto super really That's interesting. He was in our fanatics live chat on a release I think he was hopping out different fanatics live chats on the draft release day first auto Jackson Wiggins for the Cubs You know, you put together his own rainbow. Did he you got the super fractor literally everything That's what's up. That's pretty sick Tell why Langford to do that I think he even he even drafted that high I'm not sure if he has the money right now to go up to the wild Yeah, you'd spend all of it Boys chase Davis nice hit Cardinals that was a 72 of 150 first auto Hit Redbirds Lot more player collectors nowadays. They could become more common The first bowman autograph is gonna be Whitman for the Giants Giants on the Whitman and A first bowman auto Luke Kishaw from Minnesota Two more boxes here. Come on. You need a big card. You need a big card Where do you 12 or 15? Come on just show your face. It's all about 15. Come on 12 or 15 Just show your face. I Know we're asking for a lot, but as their phone on top or the little white paper on top Maybe it's a spread you could but there's no yeah, no way Fixed Choice Joe it in the first auto Giants Giants having a solid break here 60 of 150 First woman auto Cleveland Cooper Engel their base first woman auto here will be Jay Beshears for San Diego Come on box six. We need some help here It's been kind of a quiet break Did have some some good color, but avoiding the big names unfortunately so far come on this one time One time with a big name True green to start us off. It looks like yeah true green First auto of Charlie's Soto for the twins twins having a good break 36 and 99 green Soto a green Lava is Wyatt Langford There we go. Yeah last box mojo Rangers There we go. There we go. That is six seventy three of ninety nine Texas Green Lava big-time Wyatt's and then a Soto first auto for the Nationals All right, that'll do for the break. Let's do a recap here. Definitely finish strong there. Yeah Quick on the Color there. We got Soto Bessio Tina orange paper Gonzalez and Davis and Delos on those Autos now of Elyon Soto Jay Beshears Cooper Engel Luke Kishal Joe Whitman Jackson Wiggins Jacob Wilson CJ K-Fist the Zanzanatello Max Anderson Colton Ledbetter Fractures of Farmello and Forester Choice Whitman Delio Davis and McDaniel true green Soto gold shimmer Cunningham and an orange wave Hunter Haas And we had a green Lava Wyatt Langford 73 and 99 Wyatt Langford now do it everybody. Thank you very much on the next mixer


Hello and let's talk about the COVID-19 situation in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the country today where he warned against complacency and against taking the disease lightly and also advised the standard precautions. Now this was especially in light of the upcoming festival season. The Prime Minister spoke even as India on Tuesday reported less than 50,000 cases for the first time in many months. This was in the past 24 hours. India yesterday also did not report the highest number of cases across the world. This was after months of doing so. However, it is definitely too early to celebrate many countries in Europe are reporting fresh waves of cases in some cases even leading to lockdowns and parts of the USA too are seeing a fresh spike and this is a fate that can befall India too. A recent government report has been very confident saying that the peak has passed and India's COVID-19 burden is expected to be capped at 106 lakh symptomatic infections where early next year with less than 50,000 active cases from December. Now this may happen, but one thing that the disease has taught us is that predictions are tough to make. We talked to News Clicks Prabhupur Kaisa on why these on these estimates by the government and what is happening with the vaccines. Thank you Prabhupur for joining us. So today is a significant day because the numbers of yesterday released today morning show that for the first time after many, many, many months the number of cases has gone down below 50,000 and India is also second on the list of countries with regards to a new number of cases again after quite a long time. But how do we see the progress of the disease especially when we look at the statements by the government panel which said that there is a hope that by early next year we will be able to contain the pandemic. Well, you know the basic issue that we have is that US has gone to 57,000 some odd numbers after having gone down only a couple of weeks back. So these numbers going up and down unfortunately are not predictable. And anybody who claims that they are predictable that this is a trend which will continue till February when they expect that this will become completely under control. These are people who are actually talking, hesitant to use the word for government of India's officials, but talking nonsense because if you see the pattern of what's happened elsewhere in the world you will see there have been peaks and troughs. And there's a financial times there is a huge report which is there which is very nice because it's also animated, looks at various things. They said there is no correlation that we can make. Those which had peaks earlier the same places in Europe are seeing peaks again. So it's not that we have really built herd immunity because you have infections in certain places. And primarily this is because the disease or the epidemic is not predictable. It's not predictable because human beings are not predictable. And it is our network that really decides which and who will get affected. So if you decide that you actually can predict large populations, it may be possible. But when you're talking about small populations, which is where the epidemic really travels through, then this is not a predictable phenomena and that's why all the models that people have tried have shown that essentially these are not amenable to kind of modeling we do. We have, if we see today, we can perhaps predict next one week, two weeks. But that's about it. So yes, numbers are going down in the United States as you know, this is the third time numbers have gone down and increased. So US is already seeing a third peak. So we are actually seeing our first drop in numbers. So we still can have peaks, maybe the numbers will go down. But looking at what's happened, you will see if you look at the Indian map, for instance, you will see that states which have done badly, some of them are still doing badly. Some of them are not doing so badly. But if you look deeper down, then you will see some, in this state, some towns or cities which were doing badly, some have recovered somewhat. The numbers are not so bad now. But some of the cities which were affected earlier are still badly affected. They're in fact seeing a second peak, Pune being one of them. And Mumbai, you can see numbers are coming down. But Pune numbers have again gone up. Delhi numbers went down and again have started going up. It's only this kind of short-term predictions you can make. So government of India's attempt to talk about numbers going down, making a lot of song and dance about numbers coming down after having kept very silent for the long period after the lockdowns were supposedly lifted with unlocked dance of various kinds. No talk about any of this suddenly because the numbers are falling and with no correlation that we can see. Then suddenly they're trying to take credit by saying, oh, see, we have done things which we cannot tell you, but the numbers are really going down. Unfortunately, we are likely to see more peaks and we are also likely to see areas which did not see much of the epidemic. They are also areas which can now see more of it. So this is essentially the feature of this epidemic. And this is what we have come to now realize. And if you take Europe in the United States who had this crisis earlier and you can see their figures, the way they are going, France is now quite a large number of cases are coming from there, Spain, the United Kingdom. And as I said, the US is a classic example because it's a large enough country. And being a large enough country means different states, different parts behave differently. That's the nature of the beast. And we, of course, have a much larger population and also a population which is connected differently with different sets of people. So part of the mixing, of course, came from the migrations. But once that stopped, you can see that the states and the dynamics are different. And in this context, could you also maybe talk a bit about the situation regarding the vaccines? What has been happening with the trials? And do we know what logistical arrangements are being made right now regarding that? There seems to be a committee which has been set up under V.K. Paul, who's part of Nithya Ayoga. I think he's a member health Nithya Ayoga. Now, Nithya Ayoga, as you know, is supposedly a think tank. It doesn't really have any more role than that. But he's sort of chairing the high-powered committee. Everything in India, government of India is a high-powered committee, as you know. We don't know what the powers are. So none of the details about what powers they have, who are the members, are public. So this high-powered committee is supposed to correlate all of this. Now, in vaccines, there are two sets of issues. We are in this now talking about vaccine trials. We're not talking about the distribution of the vaccine, which is also being planned supposedly by the same committee. We are really talking about the vaccine trials at the moment. Now, how rigorously are the trials being monitored? Because if the vaccines are tried, and there are parallel trials going on, one is being done by the Serum Institute with AstraZeneca's vaccine. The second one now, which is going to be tried out, apart from the Indian vaccines, is the Russian vaccine. This is the one that's putnik-5. Putnik-5 is being the Gamalaya vaccine, which is also being tried. And they have been governed of India or the drug authority in India, which is really the DGRI. What is it? DGCI or DGRI? ECGI, Drug Controller General of India. Yeah, this is GI. But the India's Regulatory Agency, the Drug Controller General of India, DGCI, has asked Gamalaya vaccine, in this case, Reddy's Laboratory, who's doing it in India, to start from the phase two trials, because they felt that the phase one, phase two trials, the data sample was too small. Now, in Russia, they have moved beyond phase one, phase two to phase three trials, and they have been doing it for quite some time. So the fact here is that we have asked them to do, repeat the phase two trials, and then go on to phase three trials. The question for all these trials, and that also includes the Bharat Biotech vaccine, all these trials, the question that has been raised, is how closely are these being monitored, and particularly what is called the immunogenicity data? That means you look at the immune response. When you look at that response, the laboratory doing it, should it be independent of the one which is also doing the vaccine trials, or should it be an often independent agency? This has been the question which has been raised. How much monitoring is being done of the data being produced by these organizations, and do we have the capacity to monitor the trials and also cross check, are the trials really being carried out the way they're claimed to be being carried out? So all these questions have been raised. As of now, we have no answers. We have no answers because whole process is completely opaque. So we only have questions which have been raised, and similar questions are also being raised about the if the vaccines are made available, at what price, how will they be distributed, who are going to get them, who are your first rank of people who will get them, who will be the second rank of people who will get them, what will be the criteria decided on this, all of this again is up in there, we don't know. And we also don't know too much about the cold chain. The prime minister has said it should be like the election commission. Now you see election commission is a very different thing. This is not a public health exercise. Election commission does. So therefore you can use any body to do it, but this is a public health exercise. And therefore you need to have some understanding of what you're doing in order to be able to do it. So asking the election commission like system to be set up with just deputed volunteers from government agencies, I don't think it's the right way to go. Yes, you have to put the public health authorities in the leadership, and only under them can this be done. And that requires planning, which we are not sure the government of India is doing. So they say they are doing this. But as I said, all of this is completely opaque. We don't know what it is, but let's hope the things will not be as muddled as it has been till now, what we have seen in the lockdowns, because we have seen the home ministry essentially leading the efforts. We are happy to see the whole health minister at least speaking out. So at least the health ministry seems to be playing some role, but we'll have to see whether they will be able to play the role effectively or it will go down the way it has with all the lockdowns and all the other measures till date. So the jury is out on that one. But as I said, transparency, involvement of others, publicly acknowledging or saying what they're doing, none of this is happening. So we have the opaqueness that we have that has characterized the government of India's response still continuing on this. Thank you so much for your talk with us. In our next segment, we bring you a conversation with Zoe PC of People's Dispatch who is in Bolivia as part of an election monitoring team. While the final tally is still not out, all indications point to a clear victory for the movement towards socialism or the MAS party ticket of presidential candidate, Louis Arsé, and vice presidential candidate, David Chakavanka. The MAS, of course, is the party of Emma Morales who was overthrown in a coup in November last year, despite winning the presidential elections of October 2019. In the months that followed the coup, the members and supporters of MAS suffered great persecution even as a host of anti-people policies were implemented by a right wing government. The victory of Louis Arsé is hopefully a step in reversing that direction. As Zoe spoke to us yesterday when about 16.4% of the votes for the final tally have been calculated, as of 6.30pm today, or 50% of the vote has been tallied and the MAS has established a substantial lead. Here is what Zoe had to say. So could you first tell us what's right now the mood on the ground? What is the latest news regarding the results? And as well as the pollster results that have come out? Yeah, thank you so much for having me Prashant. It was a very emotional charge day. I think throughout the course of the day, people were peaceful, very going about the voting in a very peaceful and democratic way, but there's a certain sense of tension because of really uncertainty of what was going to happen. There was a strong sense that the MAS was going to win, but of course there's always room for some manipulation to be happening. So I think finally after hours from when the polls closed and finally the exit polls were released, it was a huge sigh of relief. I'm staying in a hotel in the center and I could hear fireworks going off for hours. People really, really feeling a lot of confidence and feeling proud that their vote was respected, feeling proud that their vote is reflecting, kind of the will of the Bolivian people. And as you said, while the final tally has not been finished, and it's as of now only 16.41% of the tally sheets, which is the sheets that are used to have the official results have been processed. The exit polls indicate an overwhelming victory for the MAS ticket, over 52%. And so we've seen figures from Alberto Fernandez, the president of Argentina recognizing the victory to even Luis Almagro, the secretary general of the Organization of American States. As we know in the last elections in Bolivia, the OAS was one of the key players in calling out the supposed fraud and calling for a second round. So this is actually one of the biggest milestones, I think. And even though we're still waiting on the final results, it seems like it's an irreversible trend. Also to mention there, Jeanine Agnes, the de facto president of the coup regime, also recognized the victory of Luis Arte, David Choquihonca last night itself. So I think at this point people are, in a celebratory mood, still waiting to see what happens with the final tally. But in general, it seems like the will of the Bolivian people has been respected. This is of course due to massive, massive mobilization, massive struggle over the past year since the coup. You know, the people have suffered massacres. They've suffered political persecution. There are hundreds of activists who are in jail just for being mass sympathizers or being trade union activists. And so this victory is not only the result of one day of voting, but it's the result of an entire year of being in the streets, being in every possible location, whether they're in exile and rallying, calling for the return to democracy. Aval's in Argentina and has been continuing to play a really important role in calling for the democracy to be respected. So I think that also has to be considered in this historic, historic victory. Absolutely. So Zoe, you talked about the final count, which is still in its very early stages. And could you just take us to maybe the process of how this counting takes place and what are the concerns, is there any concerns regarding it right now? Yeah, definitely. So the final count is essentially taking all of the tally sheets from across the country that come from each of the different polling locations and from those different polling locations, each of the polling booths. So each polling booth will tally up the number of votes that were cast for each party. And we got to see them yesterday, that these big sheets, and they do the bunch of different checks and say and tally up the number of votes that were cast for the party. And so all of these tally sheets are brought to the central computing location, and then workers from the TSE, which is the Supreme Left Coral Court, essentially do a processing of these tally sheets. And that's what's reflected on the website, which has the final count. As of this point, as I mentioned before, only 16% of the votes have been processed. And so right now, if you go to the website, it's reflecting a Mesa, Carlos Mesa Ciudad, Comunidad Ciudadana in the lead. But as I said, only 16% of the votes have been processed. And I think, for example, a lot of the rural areas of the actas from the rural areas have not been brought in. So I think people are still remaining cautious with this because we know anything can happen. But at this point with the amount of recognitions that have come in from the OAS, from all of these high level officials, it's likely that the final count will reflect the exit polls and that it will in a couple of days, it could be two days, three days, the final results will reflect a victory for the mass. That's all. We have time for today. We'll be back tomorrow with more news from the country and the world. Until then, keep watching news click.