Let me now describe the evolution of business incubators as we see them globally. Business incubation as a place where you admit the groups of individuals to set up large companies is not a very new notion but it is not a very old notion either. The idea of formalizing this notion of business incubation started somewhere in 40s primarily in the United States of America. If you see the evolution of the modern enterprise or a modern company the companies and the legal structures around it have been evolving in the entire 19th century and early part of 20th century. This is nothing new already 150 years old. In fact some of us will recall the chagrin that East India Company was also a company like this became too big and created problem but that is a different story altogether. It was realized that such companies help on the positive side help generation of wealth which helps the entire population of a society and therefore it has always been considered a good act and this is nothing new. I mean if you some of you have read Chanakya would recall that Chanakya in his Arthashastra specifically states that one of the important responsibilities of the king is to ensure that the wealth generation happens in the population so it is nothing new. However the incubation in some crude sense as we understand it promotion of entrepreneurial activities started taking roots in 40s. Some of the earliest examples that I have been able to decipher from the recorded information is in the early 50s establishment of sort of two environments in the United States. One the research triangle park in the vicinity of North Carolina area and the other of course in the Bay area you have heard of Xerox initiative famous things about internet protocols came out of those environments there. Today the largest number of business incubators exist in United States. Some of them are entirely private business incubators run for profit kind of company majority of them are not for profit endeavors a large number of them are either part of academic system or are in association with the academic system. You must also appreciate that the wealth generation mechanism in the United States has been considerably propelled by the huge amount of technology R&D that happens in its vibrant educational system. The R&D that happens in the American universities is of a different class in nature for quite some time they have been able to manage that by getting the talent across the world attracted to come to United States and work in those and those R&D initiatives in universities American universities were far more closely with business enterprises than similar relationship elsewhere. So this has been a very important home it was noticed even in the American system that as company becomes large it becomes capable of managing its resources far more efficiently and therefore is capable of generating profits year after year after year however it does not necessarily retain the capability of doing any new innovative things in either it technology or products not that it does not do so but by enlarge the ability to do any innovative new thinking is found to exist more relatively in smaller enterprise in smaller company in smaller startups reason the smaller startups have a much greater urge to prove to the world that they are different a large company has already established its brand it need not prove anything to people people accept that company people accept that brand they have to merely sustain it but a smaller startup has to start by setting up a brand for which there is nothing and therefore the innovation occurs more frequently such innovations leading to companies companies leading to large profit making ventures you go to practically the history of every well known American university Stanford for example practically runs a virtual incubator but the history of Stanford is aligned to a history of practically development of IT well generation earlier it used to be the area around Boston those of you know that East Coast area where a whole lot of thing MIT most of you know the wealth that is generated out of the ideas which themselves got generated in MIT and research of well known I think somebody said that if you count the total well generated by those companies which came out of MIT they will form the 26th or 29th largest economy of the world today that's the potential that has been exploited through some of and incubators have had a reasonable contribution to make in this respect closer home the incubation idea in Asia started again quite some time ago but it has spread in the last decade like wildfire on the CD actually this is a printed document so the list of the incubators should have been given is a fairly large list many of them actually are links I mean the name there so if you if you see the word document you click there you can go to that side but in the printout you don't get the link so I requested him to extract those links and put against them so each one of you can see that I would like you to look at these because different incubators operate differently so you can find out what is the mechanism of different incubators of admitting people of mentoring them of providing them support charging them etc etc and getting out but one more name I would like you to list this we will not be able to take out a summary like this I would appreciate if someone else does that it is called the association of Asian business incubators abhi if you do a Google search for abhi you will get the necessary link this is the Asian association of business incubators you will find of course India is there China is there Japan is there Korea is there Australia is there Malaysia is there and guess what Kazakhstan is there Kyrgyzstan is there every small and big country of the region understands that I must encourage the younger part of my society's population to get into understanding of well-generation mechanisms through technology or otherwise and generate wealth for the society there's a huge list of partner things each of the list there is a association of that nation under that for example Department of Science and Technology is explicitly listed here under that we will find a lot of activities anybody knows exactly how many incubators operate in India today no good I thought I was the only ignorant person the exact number is not known and the growth has been phenomenal of late so even if you give some number I can genuinely say that may be true as of yesterday evening I do not know what is happening yes for a country of 1 billion people it is in the 20s that is the correct number and this is the this is the concern that I have and many others have usually the number of incubators serve a certain area and a certain population range just like doctors per thousand people for a country with 1 billion people I believe the number of 20s is very small that's why I shared with you the anguish and the desire that this nation should have 100 well run incubators after all incubators don't create wealth but they create well generating engines and that is why this number should increase so I would I would request you to look at the abhi site abhi.info is the website actually as I said many of these incubators are privately run as for profit kind of organizations many are run as not for profit organizations many of them are run by educational institutions and different incubators have different models for their own operations see there is no free lunch that's another American saying I like very much there is no free lunch in life if I am getting a free lunch that means somebody somewhere is paying for it now who that somebody is that question usually when you mention for example right at the beginning that education must pay for itself or recover its cost so let me transgress and get into what I was to share with you later namely the cost of running an incubator when I thought of running an incubator I looked at some of the models particularly the model at incubator in place called St. Louis incubator in Texas okay and of course the well known Stanford kind of philosophy and several other incubators and I decided that I will I will have this incubator running with a guaranteed revenue mechanism which will be on monthly charges to be paid by any incubating company for the services which I render because I need to provide some facilities some infrastructure I have to run the pilot which I had planned was an IT business incubator I will tell you why and so on later but this charging policy which I initiated generally required about 40 to 50 thousand rupees per month of an expenditure including of course investment recovery and so on so for a year it would mean about 5 to 6 lakh rupees of expenditure for any startup company this was in 1998 1999 the money did appear slightly large but we said anybody who want to start a business potential of building something very large in the IT area you remember as process user was he said this was the days of IT boom I mean if you I had found out from my friends who regularly visited VCs in Bay area it was very atrocious as you just give a name to the ventures saying internet something or e-enabled something so he says you can even get a million dollars for running e-enabled toilets he said that was a joke of course but those were the days so he thought that this should not be a problem one of my experiences so one group which came in when I when I circulated that was setting up this pilot a large number of people wanted to come in and that fellow said my father wants to meet you why does father want to meet me I agree I had a meeting with that father and this father said you know you are encouraging these youngsters I like the idea but this too much of a race suppose the venture fails so what will he do I said after one year he has got a IIT Bombay degree so there is no problem that fellow will get a good job just like you would have got a good job now what is your problem but this much expenditure has to be made I said if I understand there are three or four of your people and each family can definitely take some loan of one lakh or two lakh rupees so I do not see there is a big deal then he came up with his real question he says professor suppose after one year the venture fails he will of course get a job but he will start a job with a two hundred thousand rupees loan on his head tell me who will marry him that was the biggest problem the father had so I said what do you mean who will marry him he says in our community if a fellow is not credit worthy from Devan the marriage is going to be a difficult task I thought about it then what I realized is that the ability of Indian middle class people to take rest is very low to begin with and the ability to take the risk of failure is still low failure in a venture in India is considered a distinct stigma which does not get washed out easily that is not so in Europe and United States if somebody fails everybody says that is ok he tried did not work he tried again it does not work here it did not work ten years ago hopefully things are changing now but till such time that a large number of startups fail and the society sees that it has not affected the individuals who are behind the startup and that some of them are trying again and that will generally take a cycle of generations which is about ten to fifteen years till such time this mentality may prevail so actually called up Nandan Nilekani the Infosys chief and Kamal Rekhi was one of the supporters of this whole idea and I told him I told them I have a marriage problem they could not understand what is a marriage to do with starting an incubator so I explained them they asked me what is to do so I said I am changing the model of my incubator in my model I will not charge anything to a startup company for one year they again gave them particularly Kamal who has been insisting again and again on a very important principle he says do help them but do not handle them too much otherwise they will start acting like cocoons they will never learn to fly you must expose them to harsh realities of the world as early as possible and here you are saying they will color them for a year so he said otherwise I cannot start finally it was agreed Nandan Nilekani agreed to give me a donation of one crore rupees which I said I will use it for initial setup infrastructure and initial expenses and we announced that we will not charge anything to people but we will hold a percentage of that company I wanted that to be a very notional thing I started with 3 percent we shall see later when the sign and all they explain to you how it emerged and that is how of course that particular group did not get selected on some other reasons one of which was the qualitative evaluation frankly somebody who cannot convince his own father there is one while taking the race why leave it how is the rest of the world he is not sure of convincing his would be bride anyway that's the one of the ways that he had I am not sure convince the market and therefore I said nice meeting you let's have a cup of tea but try something else better take a job so that you get married very quickly your father will be happy you will be happy it's not your cup of tea basically saying that incubators which are ways of operations and it is important for you to study all of these my own learning from seeing all these better models is that there is nothing like a single model fit all there's no single answer or single model which will what worked in IIT Bombay may not work in Surat Kal what works in Surat Kal may not work in Allahabad we have to examine what will work from a better understanding of the environment let me give you some examples of environments that I have seen there are engineering colleges of course nowadays there are two thousand engineering colleges and that's why I think hundred incubators a small number amongst these two thousand colleges typically about 50 to 100 colleges are really good colleges many of them are state colleges some of them are private college but they're good colleges go back and find out the history of what the graduates of those colleges have done in the last 20 years and you will find that there are graduates from a few colleges who become entrepreneurs in larger number and larger percent Manthya Pradesh the state where I come from for example has five or six good engineering colleges but if you look at people passing out of Indore is one of the places largest number of past students are entrepreneurs some small-scale middle-scale something like you take Maharashtra College of Engineering Pune is one such place where you'll find a uncannily larger percentage of entrepreneurs coming out of that is it only because the college perhaps not it is also because of the ethos of the city in which those colleges exist if that city has an entrepreneurial culture you will find more and more people are encouraged what do we do then in cities which do not have such entrepreneurial culture at all we have colleges where the students and their parents the only ambition they have is that the student should get a government job not even a man job why because that place has been worried about security of a job for large number of decades in the in that place I think the other things that we need to factor and we need to counter we need to build an ethos where ability to take risk is encouraged where we suggest to the society that failure is no problem and that if somebody fails either one can start again or one can do something else but this encouragement has to be given by components of the environment other than the incubator if those components do not exist I submit that running an incubator well would have a problem because then you will be running an incubator in isolation or in vacuum this is the reason why I have invited Sunita Singh of National Entrepreneurship Network and DST Dr. Anita is coming here unfortunately Mithal and Lara parking who are behind who are the basic dreamers on these both are busy but please listen to them in terms of the entrepreneurship promotional activities that they do and at your places and also at those places which you will no doubt advice your colleagues based on this course when you conduct a similar course at your place please ask them to imbibe those initiatives to whatever extent they can because it is only as a supplement to those initiatives that an incubator could become very great and without that it will not be very easy because it is it is the spirit see when you incubate as I said you're not creating life you're bringing life to life the life must exist basically when you hatch a egg you did not inject the life there life existed it was in a dormant form which you're bringing up if there is no life an incubator cannot give life and the life is in terms of the the fire in the belly as you say of the people and that is why I will remind you the individuals is the key so although you are admitting startups to an incubator it is always the group of the individuals one of the activities of mentoring that I have done personally and our sign continues to do is that when a startup company is otherwise found okay for admission to the incubator but we find some inadequacy in the composition of the team we see too many techies who advise them get somebody who understands marketing get somebody who understands finance when we monitor the progress of a company within five to six months when they have actually built a technology prototype which is now ready to go we advise them now get an experienced CEO do not confuse between owning a company and running a company if you are good continue to run there are umpteen instances I have seen in the US where the original promoter who actually holds a large stake in that company is actually working as a vice president marketing if he is good at marketing but his CTO his CEO could be completely different because it is the right people doing the right job which matter for taking the company forward so that is why concentrate on the individuals help them to build a good team I believe if you look at the incubators and if you look at the success rates and then you go back to those incubators and find out who are the individuals who are running incubators and try to get stories related to those individuals this is the unfortunate problem our documentation will give you a whole lot of quantity it will very rarely tell you about the qualitative piece of information who are the people I had the fortunate privilege of learning from Kamal Rekhi Suhas Patil Nandan Nilek and these are the people from whom I learned hopefully when I was working there were others who perhaps saw me doing something and imbibe and added their own luster such series of people Dr. Lagu about whom we shall have a session tomorrow he is not able to come he will be talking to you in absentia we had taken a one-hour interview tomorrow Dr. Mukta Atre and Pohini Bhatt will be actually presenting to you his case if he was not there there would not have been any incubator today afternoon a colleague of mine Arvind Patil who is now with our center for distance engineering education program he was the project manager in crescent without him there would have been even a simplest possible infrastructure that we made it is not only people that you have to concentrate on when you talk about startup companies it is also the people that you have to concentrate on when you build a team to run the incubator you cannot generally advertise saying I want an officer or see you or this and that and get good people there you have to hunt for those people and you get and get I will I will like to mention that getting individuals rightly disposed and then some mentoring and then building them as a team is the crux of success of any incubator once you set it up of course it runs the large number of incubators that you see not all of them are equally successful so before closing this session let's define how do you measure the success rate of an incubator how do you associate success after yeah please successful exit yes so either selling or IPO or something yes successful exit of any company fairly good definition although it is slightly broad what we would also like to perhaps look at is the amount of wealth that this company is able to generate both at the time of exit and subsequent I'll give you a familiar example most of us are teachers so this will apply we have students who pass out one of the measures is the percentage of students who do well in the university examination if in my state my college has produced the toppers from that university I'm pretty happy and sure that I'm doing a good job however the real branding of your institution happens when these students go out in the field and on some name for themselves so they're professional activities IIT brand name is not created merely by us teachers or by the facilities here it is largely created by these success stories of our past students who go out if you want to measure in terms of the similar parameter for the success of incubators I would submit that while this is an important and perhaps number one parameter for measuring success but I would say well generation over a period you can define this period 10 years 5 years 20 years whatever in fact for a startup incubator incubator itself is a startup there will be no period because there'll be no no examples okay you will get these examples only over the years it is exactly same as building an institution and its reputation when the institution is new when IIT Bombay was set up 50 years ago nobody knew about IIT Bombay they were bright students who did not come to IIT saying what the hell is this entity I don't understand let me go to Vijay Tia let me go to college of engineering Pune let me go to Jabalpur Jabalpur was one of the best-known colleges in Madhya Pradesh those days whatever so but today it is exactly the other way around it takes time to build the brand and the brand is built by a valuation of people over a period of time so we take the successful exit of a company as the fundamental parameter because if that parameter is not like if if 50% of my students are failing then I am obviously a useless institution doesn't matter what those of course some failure may like Bill Gates you know set up a billion dollar company but that will be an exception not a rule okay but how do they proceed further secondly when we say successful exit we might want to define this successful in more quantitative terms which can be done but this aspect will be covered in the sessions which deal with the sign progress and so on so I'm not emphasizing what is important is that we measure the people when they get out and we sort of continue to measure how they are doing for example if a company leaves this successfully meeting all the obligations of the incubator but in exactly two years it gets folded I may not want to call it as a feather in my cap if a company continues to do well expands further over next 10 years I will say yes that is important it is not to be little the people whose company folded earlier the person may have exactly the same capability as person here person may have learned exactly the same thing market opportunities might have might have been different the situation might have been different but as far as I am concerned I have to measure these different if I can produce one in four system 10 years that was my ambition when I said that if I hold 3% stock of Infosys today I don't need research funding from any government yeah process Sharma you agree 3% of Infosys stock today is is is in fact I can I can pay back government every year if I want but that will happen once in a while and Infosys today is most certainly not interested in giving IIT Bombay 3% of its year even if it were to be incubated so you have to decide what you do we'll discuss that when I describe the the history of incubation and the path to the formalism which has led to the sign issues here but the global experiences that you have to consolidate to sort of summarize early 50s store the early incubation signs in the decade of 90s that is the last year's 90s decade was a phenomenal growth in United States 40% of the incubators actually IT incubators you should not be surprised because of that even in India which is primarily IT seen as services largest companies are IT services companies if you take engineering admission more than 50% of the students admitted to undergraduate programs in engineering in India are in computer science IT or electronics so the proportion and ratio roughly matches it is very unlikely that a IT or a computer science graduate will start a machine shop very unlikely although it is quite likely that a mechanical engineering student who actually was interested in computers but did not get the computer science brand studied throughout those four years more about programming and less about mechanical engineering may start a computer engineering come in fact one of my first startups had a had a partner who was a civil engineer okay we'll talk about it later


So, unsurprisingly, Republican governors across the country are continuing to use children as political punching bags, specifically LGBTQ-plus children, trans children. And I want to talk about two governors in particular, we'll focus on Glenn Yonkin here in a moment. But first, I want to look at Texas, because earlier this year I talked about how damaging it was for Texas to designate all parents who seek out gender-affirming care for their trans children as child abusers. And now they're investigating parents who seek out gender-affirming care as just that, as child abusers. Now, at the time, we can only speculate what this could lead to. At a minimum, these parents are being terrorized by the state. But at worst, this could literally lead to state-sanctioned kidnapping of trans children where they're taken out of these loving homes, and they're placed with foster care parents who are not affirming of their trans identity, that force them to detransition and psychologically, the damage that this would do to these trans kids would be irreparable. Now to my knowledge, that hasn't happened yet, but there are many families who are under investigation. And I've talked about the effect that this has on families in Texas, but I want to talk about the effect that this has on its protection agencies specifically for children. Because it's not good. So as Dallas News reports, continuing to investigate the parents of transgender youth could put Texas' child protection agency over the brink of collapse, a group of its staff are set in a new court filing. In an August 25th brief filed with the Austin Appeals Court, 16 current and former employees at the Department of Family and Protective Services said there has been an exodus from the agency that could hamper its ability to perform basic and necessary functions. They urged the court to keep the abuse investigations on hold while the policy continues to be litigated. As career DFPS employees, they wrote to respectfully advise the court that DFPS is on the brink of collapse and that the politically motivated decision to compel DFPS employees like themselves to investigate non-abuse of loving and supportive families who merely rely on good faith on their doctor's advice would put DFPS over that brink. The great mass of DFPS employees did not choose the child welfare profession to break up loving families who with no ill motive, malice or negligence toward their child are simply following medical advice and administering medicine under a doctor's supervision they added. That was all caused by one politically motivated decision, this mass exodus that is hindering the DFPS from performing basic functions. Now what are the implications of this? Children who are in abuse of homes, they don't get the attention that they need because now they're overburdened with all of this since many staffers are resigning and the ones who are left, they have increased work loans because of this dumb transphobic policy. So children who are actually in real abuse of situations, they could be harmed because of this policy. So do you understand? CIS kids may actually be harmed as a result of this anti-trans policy. Now the reason why I bring that up is because these lawmakers, they don't care about trans kids but they do care about CIS kids, the straight ones anyways. So perhaps once they realize the damage that they're doing to DFPS and how they are effectively helping to keep kids in violent, unstable situations, bad households, well maybe then they'll reverse it once they realize they're hurting CIS kids. It's sad that we have to like rely on their sympathy for CIS kids and not see the effect that they're having on trans kids but that's kind of where we're at, we're desperate and anything that will stop this horrible policy is going to be welcomed. But yeah, this is how these anti-trans policies sometimes do have unintended consequences. You think that you're targeting just trans kids but no, now you're targeting all kinds of kids, CIS kids as well and it's the same thing with regard to puberty blockers. These are things that a trans young person can get with the consent of their parent and doctor and the right has been hysterical over this because they don't necessarily know about gender, affirming care, they're ignorant. So they say, oh my God, these puberty blockers are so terrible and they want to restrict access to people under 18, not knowing that puberty blockers are also given to CIS girls to prevent them from developing too soon, to prevent them from getting their periods at such young ages but they don't get it and they try to create these arguments based out of fear.  Like when I was a young man, my parents got me on Prozac because I had obsessive compulsive disorder. Like of course there were side effects but my parents made that decision, they had the autonomy to make that decision in concert with my doctor. But what these conservatives want to do is they want to be the parents. So it's despicable but I don't actually think that this is very surprising, I mean the fact that DFPS is on the brink of collapse, they should have anticipated this because these people believe it or not, they are in this field probably because they want to help families. I'm sure there are some people who are bad actors but like I have a family member who is within this field, she's a social worker and she does this out of a passion for helping people, out of a passion for children and if she were placed in this position I don't know that she would want that job.  Now there are other ways that governors are trying to harm trans children. For example, Glenn Yonkin called on school officials to essentially out trans children. Now if you don't know why that would be really devastating, I'll explain in a moment but let's get to the article here. John Russell of LGBTQ Nation explains Virginia Governor Glenn Yonkin called on school officials to out transgender and gender nonconforming students speaking at a parents matter rally on Wednesday, Yonkin criticized Fairfax County Public Schools Regulation 2603 which allows students to use pronouns, restrooms and other facilities at the school that correspond with their gender identity and does not require school officials to notify parents of students transition. They think that parents have no right to know what your child is discussing with their teacher or their counselor Yonkin said, particularly when some of the most important topics, most important topics that a child may want to discuss are being determined. What's their name? What pronoun will they use? How are they going to express their gender? This is a decision that bureaucrats in Fairfax County believe that they should be able to make without telling the parents the governor continued. Now keep in mind that he got elected off of the whole CRT hysteria so it's not really surprising that he's taking up the whole don't say gay mantle thing or he's at least adjacent to that movement if you want to call it that. But if he were to actually enforce this by law, it would be a disaster because trans kids who don't come out to their parents, it's for good reason. Oftentimes they're not comfortable, not ready to come out or because they're living in a hostile environment. So if they were to come out, they could be in danger. Their parents could abuse them. Their parents could kick them out. When I was a teenager, you know, I didn't want to come out.  I'd be on the streets like that. Now thankfully, you know, he never kicked me out. He ended up accepting me.  So if teachers were actually in a position where they're forced to out their students after previously being safe people to come out to, like this is literally endangering the lives of these students. Studies show that having just one accepting person in the household drastically improves their well being, their mental well being decreases, you know, suicidal ideation and whatnot. So to force trans children into this predicament would be a complete disaster. But this is what Republicans are doing. They don't know how to appeal to voters. So what they're doing is just fear mongering about trans people. And they're focusing on trans kids. Now I always say that you should never punch down on marginalized communities. But they're focusing on children, the most vulnerable, the most innocent in our society. And that is a special kind of evil. So this is what we have to deal with. And anytime you have a state that is potentially floating something like this, you know, does what Texas did or calls on teachers to out superintendents, it's really incumbent on all of us who are allies to push back as forcefully as we possibly can.


We're so glad that you could join us this afternoon. Michael Reise is something that, when I got started, I didn't know anything about it at all. And so as a result, partly to explore things, we made an experiment out of it. And my children will try it this way. So I wanted to introduce my children, because they've done a wonderful job. There's certain parts of this project that they more or less took over. And they really learned an awful lot from it. And hopefully, we can teach you guys a few things, too. This is Patricia. And this is Sebastian. So I'm going to let them get started. And I will go to the conclusion. OK. So our project is using commercially available Michael Reise inoculant compost, or Michael Reise inoculant and compost when transplanting small berry bushes. OK. We got this grand start because we wanted to plant some berry bushes. And we were told by some sources that it would help the bushes if we were to add Michael Reise. There are some other sources that said that Michael Reise is already in the soil. And it's a waste of money to just add more Michael Reise. Some research indicated that a good compost actually enhanced and helped the Michael Reise growth. So what is Michael Reise? Michael Reise is a beneficial fungus that forms a symbiotic relationship with 90% of plant root systems. There are many different types of Michael Reise. Most berry bushes have endome Michael Reise. It makes of 80% of the plants that have Michael Reise. Why would you want to add Michael Reise? Well, it increases the root area up to 700%, increases the plant's ability to help take nutrients and moisture, helps prevent infection by detrimental fungi, and has proven to help plants in nutrient deficient soils and resist toxicity in high metal soils. We used PHC tree saver Michael Reise. It has a variety of endo and ecto Michael Reise with bacterium nutrients. OK, so what is compost? Compost is a mixture of decaying organic matter as from leaves of manure. It also contains bacteria, fungus, and nematodes. The nutrient content can vary, so it is important to know what kind of balance and formula you need in your compost. Why would you want to use compost? Well, it supplies organic matter. It aids in the proliferation of soil microbes. It encourages root growth. It improves the soil structure. It improves the cation exchange, enables soils to retain nutrients longer, and buffers the pH. We used purple cow organic compost. So our grant method was we used Ronia and elderberry, and we had four groups of plants within each of those species. We had a control, which we just planted. We had a commercially available compost only. We had commercially available Michael Reise only, and then both compost and Michael Reise. OK, the elderberry, we put in a perlite vermiculite mix. And the Ronia, we put in a bark peat perlite mix. So we planted the plants. We harvested the roots at two, four, and six weeks. We stained the roots. We viewed the roots under a microscope for Michael Reise, and the data was recorded. We included pictures of plant root mass at four weeks. So now I'm going to pass it on. So here they diagram of what Michael Reise looks like. And here they hyphae. This is called the entry point of a Michael Reise, and it comes through the cells. And this is an arbuscle here, this sort of tree-like structure. And then it also forms things called vesicles, which look like these big oil-filled bubbles in the cells. And so here they picture what vesicles look like under the microscope. Here's vesicles and some hyphae, and that thing. And then here's an arbuscle with a tree-like structure. And then here's both arbuscle and vesicle. There's some vesicles there, and here's an arbuscle. And you can see how they look very significantly. Next slide. So here's what the eronia control looked like at four weeks. Then here's what the eronia compost looks like at four weeks. You can see it's a lot fuller than the control. Then here's the Michael Reise at four weeks. You can see also a lot fuller than the control and a close second to the compost. Then here's both, a lot less full than the Michael Reise at the compost, although it had long, stringy roots. And here's a microscopic view of an eronia plant that had grown and is well-developed. You can see very many vesicles all in here. And so here's what the eronia control looked like before planting. You can see there doesn't look like this much in the way of Michael Reise in there. And then here's the control at two weeks. It's hard to see, although it also looks like here they're not very much in the way of Michael Reise. And then the control at four, the eronia control at four weeks. It doesn't look like there's any Michael Reise in it, although it's a real clear picture of what the cells look like, okay.  So it did really well at eight weeks. Then the compost at two weeks, it developed Michael Reise right away. Here they vesicle and you can see the high fade. This looks like the entry point. And then here it's hard to tell, although it doesn't look like there's too much in the way Michael Reise here at the compost in four weeks. And the compost at eight weeks, it looks like there might be some arbuscular growth here and possibly some here starting. And then the eronia microreise at week two, there doesn't look like there's any microreise they developed in the road, although it's a good example of a root tip. And then here's it at four weeks, it doesn't look like there's any developed here. Although then at eight weeks, it clearly appears to be forming an arbuscle right here. And then the both at two weeks, it looks as though it's started form, shamed the vesicles here real early on. And then the both at four weeks, it doesn't look like it has too much here that we can see. And then the both at eight weeks, it looks as though there's some vesicle forming here in those places. And then now we're into the elderberries. What the elderberry looked like at four weeks, the control nice full long roots. And though the compost was really full and dense right at the top, there we actually had trouble shaking out some of pearlite for the picture. And then the microreise they, it also looks very full, though not quite as full as the compost. And then the both, it really doesn't look at all full at the top, although it looks a lot longer than the others. And the elderberry can troll before planting, it doesn't look like it had anything here. Although then at week two, it also doesn't look like it had anything. Although at week four, it does look like it's forming something here and possibly something here.  Then it looks as though this might be a vesicle here. And then the compost at week two doesn't look like it had anything. Although then the compost at week four looks like it's forming loads of vesicles all over along here. Then the compost at week eight, it looks like it's got plenty of vesicles in here. And my cry day at week two, it doesn't look like it had anything. And then at week four, it also doesn't look like it has too much. And then at week eight, it looks like it clearly has a vesicle right there. Then here's another picture at week eight where it has a nice big R-buscle. Then the bowl at week two doesn't look like it really had anything. And then at week four, it also doesn't look like it has too much. Then at week eight, it looks like it's formed a nice vesicle here with a high-phase draining down here than a nice R-buscle right here. Okay, I don't know about you, but whipping parcels pictures sometimes gets really confusing. So I'm gonna try and clarify some of that for you. First of all, I just wanna comment. These kids did a lot of internet research in order to figure out what these things look like. And they look different for every single plant. So you can't say, oh yes, it looks just like this picture over here. And there was no evidence that we could see on the internet of anybody else who's done research on berry bushes to see what their R-buscles and vesicles look like. And so it was kind of a hit and miss. We kind of went through things and figured out what we should be seeing maybe. And there were some things that were questionable. And then we went and we talked to, there's a lady, Dr. Ray Drivers, an expert at University of Nebraska at Lincoln who's worked with Michael Ryse. And she basically concurred with our decisions and said, oh yes, there's lots of times when you just can't tell for sure. So anyway, just from our quick assessment, what we saw was that treatment group A or one would be the control group, treatment group two would be the compost group, treatment group three would be the Michael Ryse only group and treatment group four would be both Michael Ryse and compost. So what we had at week two in the erronea, we had Michael Ryse showing up in the compost and in the both. And so the significance there is they both have compost. So our question is, are we doing a little better with the compost than we are with the Michael Ryse? And the elderberry was planted a little different type of soil and so we didn't, we're assuming that we didn't see anything in the elderberry until a little bit later because of that. But here you could see that we had in the compost, again, we very clearly had Michael Ryse. But by week eight, they all had Michael Ryse in it. And so it's true, there's Michael Ryse in the soil and eventually it will inoculate it through the soil. But in the meantime, that's eight weeks down the line. You know, do your plants need to have that early start in order to survive? I think it probably depends on your environment, depends on what's going on. One of the reasons why we thought the compost might be a little faster is it comes as a, you know, it's like a living compost when you have a well-balanced compost. Everything is moist, it has fungus in it, it has nematodes in it, it has bacteria in it. And so it's all balanced out where when you get the Michael Ryse, the commercially available Michael Ryse, it's like little granules that you mix in.  So go ahead, dear. So what we did was just a few days before the conference here, we wanted to show you what these plants were doing. Now, I'm assuming everybody here had similar conditions that we had this year. 100 degrees wasn't unusual and almost no rain at all, all summer long. I don't know about you, but I definitely reached the limitations of my watering ability because I kept trying to keep up with all the watering and that. And so we had some liabilities. First of all, our aronia didn't do well at all, but they were a little younger plants and when we planted them, they didn't have as much time to start, so we think that's part of it. Plus it appears like the deer, like the aronia a little bit better than the elderberry. And so we lost a number of aronia plants to the deer. And so it was kind of hard to compare things. So we're just comparing elderberry for you. So we started out with control. First of all, what we did is part of our methodology. We planted three plants and to make sure that nothing else infected the plants in the way of other treatments, we put guard plants in between that were treated with nothing and then we had enough space, you could probably plant at least one more plant in between each plant. And so they were really spread out and then we had other plants in between to prevent, if you added mycorrhizae to prevent it from spreading over to the other treatment groups. So we started out with our elderberry control. We had one plant left out of the three. And so you can see, we put this cardboard behind it because we thought it'd be easier to visualize how tall it is and everything. You can see it's about a foot tall and looks healthy but it's still kind of a small plant. So now here's the compost. This, you know, I'm not at all surprised the way this grew out the way it did because that compost root, if you remember that compost root, it was very compact. It had some beautiful roots just under the surface but it didn't have those big long roots. And so this grew out, it's nice and bushy and it's actually almost a foot and a half. Okay, now with mycorrhizae, we actually had two plants that survived out of the three, but they're not quite as big. You know, these are just about a foot for each one. And again, they're healthy looking plants. Go ahead. Now what impressed me was the elderberry both actually was much taller, all three plants survived. And we found that interesting because it had that kind of scrawny root that just kind of extended out. Now, I guess the theory about that one is maybe that long, scrawny root actually got deep down enough into the soil that it actually went to where the moisture was and where the nutrients were. And so all of the plants survived. And this one got tall enough that it actually showed that we weren't using the greatest piece of cardboard.  So that's about a three foot tall bush compared to those one foot tall control and the mycorrhizae ones that were about a foot tall. This one's about a foot and a half, maybe a foot and three quarters.  And so, you know, to me, that seems to be very significant. One of the things that would be important, we had a little bit of trouble with our cuttings, getting them to grow in the special perlite, mix that we were trying to grow them in to avoid inoculating them with anything that might have come naturally in a soil or whatever. And so by the time we got our cuttings, we didn't feel like we had enough cuttings to be able to do replications, to plant others in other areas so that we could see if the results could be repeated in another area. And so we would like to, I mean, I think to show that this is a good study, we probably need replication. But in conclusion, the things we saw, we saw the early signs of mycorrhizae appeared at two weeks in the eronia compost and both, that should say and both, and four weeks in the elderberry compost. The roots pictured at four weeks show the compost with the most feeder roots, those roots just under the soil with the mycorrhizae treatment second in size while the both treatment had a longer thinner root system. And then after a season of extreme heat, almost no moisture, the elderberry both had all plants surviving with more significant growth than the other treatments. So I don't know about you, I'm very proud of my children. Sebastian took this project, this was his first time in the lab. And what he told me at one point he looked up at me and he says, mom, he says, this is awesome, this is so much fun. And so just made it all worth it. He decided to take that and make it into a science project. And so that's his science fair board that he had. And he designed that all himself. I did help him get some of that plastic on there because that was a little tricky. But other than that, that was his work. And so I'm very proud of him. Do we have any questions out here? Yes, sir. Like if you have raspberry or blackberry or blueberry bushes, do you need a different kind of mycorrhizae than that THC tree saver that you got or don't you? The blueberry has a different kind of mycorrhizae. There's like five or six different kinds of mycorrhizae. Raspberries are endomycorrhizae. What they say is they say 90% of the plants in the world have mycorrhizae in them. 80% of those are endomycorrhizae. So the majority of plants that we see are endomycorrhizae plants. Things like orchids have their own type of mycorrhizae. Blueberry bushes have a little different type of mycorrhizae. Trees, some trees have different kinds of mycorrhizae. The next largest proportion of mycorrhizae is probably the ectomycorrhizae where you'll find some of your conifers and things like that. Yes, ma'am. If you want to cut that down to the ground, you can save those cuttings. A big difference between two to three foot of cuttings and 12 inches of cuttings. Oh, there's no question about it. I think, oh, okay. This lady apparently has elderberries. And so she was saying that when she's planting, she would think that she would need to use both the compost and the mycorrhizae mixed. So she's saying it's very expensive to buy thousands of cuttings and to get that much significant difference between the plants, it would be worth it to her to use both. And so I tend to agree with her. Take her down the ground in January. So what she's doing is she's cutting them down to the ground in January, and then she's getting cuttings from those. And so you get significantly more cuttings if you have a taller bush. Yes. What is my takeaway from this presentation? If I have fertile soil and I want to grow elderberry bushes, or if I have very poor soil and I still want elderberry bushes, what do I do in each case? Okay, has everybody heard that question? Okay, first of all, if you have very fertile soil, I think our soil that we use the elderberries with would be considered fertile soil. We've been putting in organic batter and doing the best we could to keep everything as organic as possible. And even one of the farmers who came down and helped till up our soil said, wow, you've got such great soil here. How is that when everybody else has sand around you? And so I think it just goes to the way we're treating the soil. But you could see that we got a head start. It actually helped the plant out. And it didn't just help the plant out in the year we planted it because this went through one whole season. We planted it last fall and it went through one whole season. You can see the difference. And so infertile soil, I think it helps. But mycorrhizae very clearly has been proven that if you have spent soil, soil that isn't very high in nutrients, that the mycorrhizae will help that. It'll help it significantly. The plant will do much better. Any other questions? I have a question. Yes. You're talking to? So, okay, so the way that he asked how we made this slide, and the way that we made this slide is we took this slide, then we put the roots through processing and we put them on the slide, which is just like a rectangular glass piece. And then there we put some liquid on it and then we put the slide cover on carefully and then that's how we made the slide themselves. I was just gonna add one thing. We, in order to see that mycorrhizae, we had to use a stain. And so it's kind of a tedious process to go through and process those roots. And so we harvested the roots, making sure that we kept everything separated and labeled properly.  Wash the roots, yes. Yes, yes.  And I don't know if anybody's interested in hearing, but we started out with potassium hydroxide, which is a very strong base. And then that clarifies the roots, which is something that you need with the woody plants if you're going to stain the woody plants. And then we use some hydrochloric acid, which neutralizes the strong base. And then we put a mixture of lactic acid and tri-pan blue and glycerol and water in to stain the slides. And then we process them more in the water bath.  We took them out one at a time, labeled the slide, put them on the slide, put them under a slide cover. And he got pretty good at being able to identify the mycorrhizae. Well, both of them did, actually. But to identify the mycorrhizae and to be able to take a picture of it, we had wonderful support. If anybody's interested in doing a SARA project or any project, don't hesitate to talk to your local colleges. There are tremendous people out there who are willing to help you along the path. Yes, ma'am? Are you some more of them? Yes, ma'am. I wanted to know what your production is like in year two. Normally, we get some production in year two, but it's maybe one-tenth of what your full maturity plans will have, or a little more than that, maybe a fifth. So because your plans are getting so much bigger, the first year, I'd be interested to see what effect it has on your production and your second year. Well, we did have some flowers on the both. And what we did was, when a plant is getting started, I usually just pull them off. And so that's what we did this year. And so I am also interested to see just what the plants are going to start producing. We'll see what happens. It was the same variety for all of them. It was wildwood. And the guard plants were actually, which might actually cause confusion later on, but the guard plants were Bob Gordon and Ranch. And so we'll see how it all works out. OK, time. Thanks so much. Appreciate you coming today.


As we end lecture 11 with this video, it's appropriate for us to reflect on what we've done so far in these first 11 lectures. So you'll recall that our first few lectures introduced us to the notions of set theory, just very elementary stuff, just the basics of set theory. And that was our first unit. Now we're in the middle of a new unit about combative torques. And these notions of sets and counting sets are helping us understand better advanced mathematics. Now, in order to understand advanced mathematics, we have to also understand the notions of logic. And so every lecture in this series so far has had a lecture that teaches something about logic. And many of those lectures have been focusing on what we refer to as Boolean algebra or Boolean arithmetic, sometimes called Boolean logic. That is this algebraic manipulation of statements. And so we have these operations of conjunctions, disjunctions, conditionals, negation. And so these are very much like arithmetic with logical statements. It's important to be aware of the reasons that we have studied logic so far. Honestly, there's probably three main reasons why in a class like this one, math 3120, we study logic. First, the truth tables we study tell us the exact meaning of the words such as and or not and things like that. The second reason I would say is that the rules of inference, which we'll talk about those in the next lecture, the lecture 12, these rules of inference provide a system which we can then produce new mathematical truths from already known, already proven mathematical truths. And then the third reason is that logical rules like De Morgan's laws, which we talked about in the previous video help us correctly change certain logical statements into other logical statements. Hopefully more useful statements which have the exact same meaning because they're logically equivalent. So this would be like in an algebra or arithmetic class doing something like, oh, I could take X plus one and I can foil it as X plus two times by X by two. And so you end up with something like OX squared plus three X plus two. This is algebraically equivalent as an expression. Maybe this is more useful than the factorization or sometimes we go the other way around. So what we've done with logical laws and truth tables is understanding how we can do algebra with logical statements. These are all very important things for us as we transition into advanced mathematics. Logic is the common language that all mathematicians use. So we must have a firm grip on logic in order to write and understand mathematics. After all, math 3120 is a communications class. We have to be able to read, write, speak, listen, mathematics and we cannot do that if we don't understand the, we don't understand logic. If we think of mathematical communication like other languages, then in order to read, write, speak, et cetera, we have to understand grammar. So grammar in language is important. And for us, this is kind of what logic is doing. Logic in some essence is the mathematical grammar inside of our language. And grammar, of course, serves as a fundamental role in any spoken or written language. In much of the same way, logic's place is fundamental in mathematics, but much like grammar, logic's place is actually in the background of what we do. It's not the forefront. Our study of logic going forward in this lecture series will be more focused on proof patterns as opposed to the arithmetic of logical statements that we've seen thus far. And this is analogous to how one might study a language, might study writing in a language like in English. Grammar is a part of it and we do have to understand the grammar, but when it comes to writing, it's so much more than grammar. And grammar is usually just a minor thing we worry about every once in a while. We think about when I write, do I write with clarity? How well composed is my writing? Is my writing correct? Is it clear? These are the types of things that we worry about. Grammar is only one small little part. It's important. If you don't follow the rules of grammar, then your language, your writing will be garbage, but be aware that grammar is just one of the small things we consider. And so therefore in the next lecture, lecture 12 and in future lectures here, when we dedicate time to talk about logic, instead of the Boolean logic we've talked about so far, we'll pivot towards more logical inference, which we'll talk about in the next lecture, and then the consequences of logical inference, which is how do you argue mathematically? How do you prove something mathematically? And so the structure of mathematical proof is what we will see going forward. We'll continue to study mathematical topics like combinatorics and sets and future videos as well. And so like I said, this does bring us to the end of lecture 11. I appreciate you watching this video and all the other videos in this lecture series. If you learned anything from these videos, please like them, subscribe to the channel to see more videos like this in the future. And if you have any questions whatsoever, please post them in the comments below and I'll be glad to answer them as soon as I can.


Welcome to Toffy TV, it's the Everton News Daily. Marko Silver has held his press conference today ahead of tomorrow's game against Fulham at Gooderson Park.  If you'd watched the match preview yesterday, you would have seen a baz spoke about these. The rumours that were on the keep basically came from the player's agent and some reports in Columbia, the South American Press, saying that he'd cracked a metatarsal and would be out for three weeks. Now, we did say that there was an injury, but obviously the extent wasn't known at that point. But Marko Silver has laid the fears today, confirming that he did have an injury. Bernard stamped on his foot in training and he is going to miss this game. But he said that's just it, he's going to miss just this game. It's nothing more than a stamp. He has had metatarsal injuries before and obviously he's been recovering from a metatarsal injury, but this is a different injury on the other foot. Now, obviously it'll be interesting to see whether the club take precautions over this in the future and maybe insist that he wears stronger boots or boots with better lining in it. Obviously, I think it was around the 2000s in this country. There was a spate of metatarsal injuries in a lot of England players. It was almost fashionable to have a metatarsal injury at the time. And I think a lot of the boot companies got their heads together and sorted something out so that there was protection around the area. So maybe that's what Evan will have to look for in terms of making sure that area is strengthened because that's three injuries in just over a year, metatarsal injuries. So, although this one isn't too bad, maybe this is an exposed problem that needs to be dealt with and can be dealt with. It can be dealt with quite simply. So hopefully he will be back because obviously there's a lot of question marks over a player that a lot of Evertonians haven't seen. We're nearly in October now and obviously as fans, we get worried, Natalie. It's Evan at the end of the day. We get worried so hopefully that will be sorted out and the player will be on the on or in the team soon, hopefully. Marcus has also mentioned the injuries to Seamus Coleman, Phil Jagielke. He said Phil Jagielke had trained all week. So he didn't say whether he was in contention for this game but he said he trained all week. And he said hopefully Seamus Coleman will be back next week. And obviously with the prospect of a league cup game next week as well against Southampton, maybe that would be an opportunity to reintroduce those players into the side whether they be on the bench or starting the game. It would have been a fantastic chance for Jerry Meenon as well to come back into the side or come into the side but obviously it may have come too early for him and it might have to wait for the league game next Saturday for him to come back in. We'll have to wait and see. Yeah, so hopefully injuries are starting to sort themselves out bit by bit, hopefully. Gomez hopefully will start training next week as well and will join in again. I don't know whether the game against Southampton will be too early for him but it would be good to have him training with the first team and getting involved with them and hopefully we'll see him in the team soon. Marcus over also mentioned this guy here, Charleston. He said that he was asked the question about playing centrally and he said that it's a possibility he played centrally in Brazil and he's been training all week in a central role. We'll almost drop on a hint that he could play there. Obviously with him playing well for Brazil in that position. Bernard being available to play on the left as well and tomorrow's game likely to be a little bit open for them on an open side. Everton needs goals, it's as simple as that. No one who's watched Everton this season will disagree that Everton needs goals. The last couple of games I think if we took our chances we win both of those games but that's what you need to do in football. That's why strikers are worth millions and millions and millions of pounds. So hopefully we'll see a goal tomorrow. Will they come from the Charleston from that centre here? We'll have to wait and see but it's an interesting prospect. I know a lot of fans are asking for that. Would that take something away from them though last week against Arsenal coming off that left hand side? He was good but what I would say he only really had one chance in the box and that come from a set piece.  And also being able to stretch the full and back line having a centre forward that can go over the top. That would be a big help and that's nothing against Towson but Towson tends to drop in and then helps the opposition. They feel push up and I like Towson but when you're in desperate need for goals sometimes you've got to change things around a little bit. So it would be interesting to see what happens there. The manager was also asked about the prospect of signing Alan Ramsey who looks like at this moment will be leaving Arsenal. He's free to leave next summer. But you would imagine that if he's not in the plans for the current manager January could be a prospect and you know you're going to buy a player in January you've got to start working on it around now. So maybe Everton could be in the home field Alan Ramsey but he battered away. He didn't want to talk about it which you can understand. He didn't want to talk about the player. You know if he'd been big Sam he probably would have said yeah we're going to have a chat with him but he said he didn't. He didn't want to talk about it so fair enough. But the question was posed to him but he didn't want to talk about it. He also spoke about Jordan Pickford who was asked about obviously him signing a new deal and he said he can be a world-class leader because he was obviously asking the press conference about leaders and the lack of leaders maybe in this squad. He said he can be a world-class leader. He could be captain one day. He can do whatever he wants basically. So all very positive I think coming out of it today obviously even the meanest situation because beforehand it had been oh he's out for three weeks it's a cracked metatarsal. The fact that he said oh he's only going to be missing this game is positive. So you know let's hope he's back next week. Let's hope everyone's back next week. I mean if we can get into a situation where we've got all our players fit it'll give us a big bonus but three points tomorrow we'll do no matter what. No matter how we get them we need those three points so let's hope the blue's delivered. Away from Marcus Silver's press conference today. Everton have suspended head of academy recruitment Martin Walden. The club are being investigated by the Premier League over breaching rules on the transfers of young players. So Everton have done their own internal inquiry and have obviously felt they needed to suspend Martin Walden. So it could be that Everton are heading towards a ban on bringing in academy players which obviously other clubs have faced before and you know if they've broke the rules then so be it. So if you haven't already checked out the match preview please do so. It's good. Bas sat down with John Blaine from the Everton Business Matters podcast to discuss it. The start of the 11 video will be out as well where we put out who we hope will be starting the game and if you haven't joined us on page to make sure you do the slow to great programmes out this week. Bas will be looking over the Arsenal game in the tactics show. We've done our Everton Waste Ever Premier League team in the debate. Bat over. We've just built Everton's greatest team, Premier League team over on the debate. We finished that last week now it's on the Waste Ever Everton team on the debate. They're all on page and check them out.  If you join patron, Bat's patron free for a month essentially. So if you want to go and see what it's all about get over there. All the podcasts everything we do is over on there on podcast as well. That's a pound a month. And listen if you're in a generous mood as well. Me and Bas are jumping off a mountain forever in the community on a zip wire. It's going to be terrifying. We're going to put a video out. It's going to be funny to see Bas crying. So if you want to donate to that as well the link is in the description. As ever, thanks for watching the Everton News Daily. I'll see you later.