My name is Ravi Santana. I joined HTFC Bank as the chief marketing officer in year and three months back prior to that I was in telecom in order phone and reliance and prior to that in power and in banking. I was a banker and accidental marketer who moved into marketing long time back. So before I start the topic is digital disruption and our work day as marketers I just want to have a simple case and conversation supposed to be the way right. So how many of you believe that your work day is different today compared to say five years back if you're working in marketing. Ten years back I don't see so many people having work for ten years at least one or two hands. What's the difference? What's primarily the difference in your days? Mobility yes then. Choice of media. Information availability okay. Let me give you my understanding of what was different. Ten years back if you have to ask me who's the data guy in your team used to call him the MIS guy. So people who are old enough will know that we used to have a data guy in our team called the MIS guy. Now what do we have? We have data scientists. People who talk something which we don't understand if you have not been in that space. Ten years back we used to have in our teams called media planners. How many people work in media planning here? Now in addition to media planning what we have in our team is platform specialist. Somebody is a double click bid manager specialist. Somebody is a programmatic specialist. Somebody is a social media influencer specialist. Somebody is a social media specialist and suddenly what you're seeing is there's a huge amount of new things that have come in and has it changed our typical day? How many of you feel a sense of unease in this? That's so many new bus words are being talked about and I don't know the full gamut of what this is all about and I do feel unease about all this because many of the things that somebody comes and tells me I never heard before in my life. But the only thing which I can tell you is look at evolution. We have always been having change. We have adapted over the years time and again time and again time and again. So is there a need for us to worry? The answer is definitely a no my side. What is this that we need to adapt to looking at what's happening around us if you're talking about digital transformation? I'm going to just share my thoughts on three things which are the bus words which we keep hearing. Any conference you go to nowadays even including this conference it's all talks about these three things. Artificial intelligence, digital transformation and the third thing is most probably you might not have heard it in these terms but I'm going to talk about it shifting customer interfaces. So let's take one by one. Let's talk about artificial intelligence. When people talked about artificial intelligence this is what I pictured myself doing. In a beach in a hammock enjoying the sun and the beer but what actually transpired? I don't have the time to actually go to the beach now. So what I also realized is this utopia of artificial intelligence doing entire marketing for us is a misnomer. So don't believe anybody comes and tells you that it is going to do the marketing for you. It's going to define your marketing strategy. It's not going to happen. At least in the near future it's not going to happen. So I'm an engineer also by training and artificial intelligence was taught to us in engineering 25 years back. It's not a new bus word that has been created now but what has happened is and it has been long part of popular culture. How many of you have seen Terminator? Matrix.  Do you believe human beings are going to be used as fuels for furthering the interest of the rest of the artificial intelligence powered community? Matrix. We all have got this romanticized version of artificial intelligence which is what I call as strong AI and in other words artificial super intelligence which people have been talking about I don't think this is imminent. It's not going to happen so fast. What's happening it's also not going to drive your marketing strategy or the PR. Whenever you have a problem in PR take the example of Starbucks. All of you know about it what happened when somebody was not allowed the use of a washroom. Is artificial intelligence going to come and solve this problem for you? So as marketer we feel safe. This is not going to change your life but what is important is if you look at artificial intelligence and redraw the boundaries of what is artificial intelligence you will see AI everywhere in our day-to-day work and let me give you some examples. First thing stop pursuing the ultimate marketing bot. None of the bots are going to come and do the job for us the way we want it to be done. So stop pursuing those kind of things. Today if you look at it it exists media buying definitely use artificial intelligence big time. If you look at lead scoring for other leads that are coming into the organizations we do that. Propensity modeling from old techniques we are doing and we are seeing a huge shifts because of the data crunching capabilities of the artificial intelligence. So what do we do? Start with business needs clear use cases and not techniques. Don't go behind the buzzword of artificial intelligence. Go behind what it can deliver for your customers. Go with clear business use cases with clear business objectives set out and then see it will work for you. This what I call as the applied artificial intelligence. So go away from the theoretical artificial intelligence and move towards applied artificial intelligence. If you look at artificial intelligence where it has worked what is intelligence? Can somebody define intelligence for me? Fantastic. Where is a problem? There is a solution. Intelligence is used to solve a problem with an algorithm you call it artificial intelligence. As simple as that now look at it the empirical evidence of where artificial intelligence has worked. Whenever the use case is defined very narrowly artificial intelligence works brilliantly. The more the generic the use case we are staring at failures. So most important thing for all of us to do is to move towards this applied artificial intelligence which is defining a very specific use case. What are the steps that we need to do? It's not easy. You have to put in a lot of work. AI is not going to come and do the work for you. This is again and again I'm repeating because of the experience that we have had. We need to put in a lot of work. There are two things that we need to do. What is the first thing? Good AI depends on good data. Put it together. At least I can see this set of crowd will now obviously not their head when I ask this question. How do we actually grow in our personal careers? We put in a lot of effort in the first 10 years, 15 years maybe and that is the industry period being industrious about what we do. The next 15 years we do a lot of work to actually earn money right if it is one of your goals. What are the next 15 years all about? This is what I call as the enterprise period. We want the money to work for us. That's a goal of the life. When you want to retire you want the money to work for you. You worked hard to get the money industry period and the enterprise period is when the money needs to work for you. So as marketeers we have worked very hard to collect a huge amount of data and they are existing in different silos across board. Now we need to make the data work for us for the use case that we are looking at. So put it together. That's the biggest challenge that we'll all face and that's the first thing we all need to do. The second thing is data alone doesn't make any sense unless you add the human element because human element which is what marketeers are supposed to bring into any conversation allows us to get the common sense and the context that is still eluding missions today. So bring the human element because the human element brings the context to the conversation that we want to have. I'll give you two examples from HDFC Bank's life. What's working for us? Subject line prediction in emails. We do use artificial intelligence to predict the subject lines on the email communication that we do. It gives us a phenomenal open rates. We just put into a machine what is the subject line and what has been the open rates in the historic context. So it is able to pick up words and able to predict what is going to be the open rate next time when you send another email. Do you think you can work on this without the human context? Somebody has to still physically see what is the context of the email and then look at what the subject line predicts. Once you do that you will see a good uplift in whatever you are trying to do. Second thing, net banking behavior. We want people to move to the digital world. We want people to transact digitally. What we found there is more than 12 million of our customers who are already using net banking for many of their transactions. There is also an equal number of customers who are not using. So we have to understand what is it that we can do and how artificial intelligence can come and help us move these 12 million customers also into the net banking world. Humongous amount of data. We pushed everything into the artificial intelligence system and we said do a path analysis and tell us what is the path that these 12 million people who are already into net banking have gone through and what are the right steps for us to actually promote to the other 12 million was still not coming on to the net banking or to the digital world. It gave us a path. We piloted. What do you think is the success rate? It is telling us these 12 million had this path A, B, C, D, E. Follow A, B, C, D, E. Promote A first then B then C then D then E then they will stick on with your digital mediums. What do you think was the success rate? Artificial intelligence at work. It was not so great. Why it was not so great? Because the human context was missing. Now if I tell you this context you will understand yes that's right. What we found out with the 12 million who are not actually going on to the net banking world when we spend time with them as marketers to understand what we found is consumers who found convenience as the primary reason to move into net banking. They've already moved. The people who are now not moving into net banking for them it is not convenience which is stopping them. They say they're having enough time. Not a problem. I can go to the branch. What they were worried about? They were worried about security of their transactions. Now this is where the human context comes in. This is where the human intelligence comes in. The moment we started tackling that particular issue of security saying how much net banking is secure and give them correlations in real life of how it is as secure as what you do normally in the branch then the combination of human and the mission comes together and then we have a huge uplift in terms of the ability of us to convert people into the digital world. So what we are wanting all of you to take over is applied AI define the use cases narrowly then put the consumer context you will have lot more quick and long-lasting wins from the artificial intelligence solution. It's changing your life but still remember consumer context is what we are supposed to be bringing in as long as you bring that in you should not be worried too much. This takes to the second thing that we want to talk about which is digital transformation. It was a buzzword maybe a year, year and a half back and artificial intelligence had it for break first right? Now everybody talks about AI and nobody talks about digital transformation and maybe after one and a half years people will talk about blockchain in marketing I also already saw somebody questioning people about blockchain in marketing. So these buzzwords keep coming in what is digital transformation most of the organizations tend to do this because somebody else is doing it everybody is doing it so we lie almost an FMCG company you take any industry everybody talks about it. Now the first question that we want to ask all of us is technology or consumer who is first? This set is all about consumers. Technology or consumer who is first? Consumer right? Now I'm going to give you two examples then answer the question again. Apple very successful company it says how will consumers know what they want to know unless you show them so they say technology first. Now I'll give you another example Amazon another big successful company for us to learn from. They say consumers start from consumer and work backwards everything will be right. Now answer technology or consumer who is first? The underlying thing while superficially it looks very different but the underlying theme of them is whatever they do at the end it works best for the consumer. So when you look at digital remember does it solve a problem which your consumer currently has in your business? Don't go for the sake of doing digital but please view it from the lens of the consumer. The day you start viewing it from the lens of consumer in terms of what it is you will see. So what's a marketer's role? It's all about consumer experience consumer journeys and that's where we should focus on. There are lots of other departments and functions which will start focusing on cost because of digital but we as marketeers should be starting to focus on the consumer experience. And when you talk about consumer experience it's not about one person going to do this. It cuts across the entire company and I was just talking to Deepak in between and I remember D. Shivakumar all of you. He was telling me like digital is how do you define digital? You might have a chief digital officer in your organizations many companies will have it right? Somebody will be called as digital expert digital marketing expert and all the stuff. He said take the analogy of cricket. You have some people who are batsmen they say I don't want to bowl. Some people are wicket keepers they can neither bat nor bowl it's fine as long as you do a proper wicket keeping and some people are bowlers will not be able to bat full and there are some all around us. But all of them have to do one thing very well which is digital has to be like this everybody has to be a fielder. So since digital transformation cuts across the entire organization make sure that as marketing you need to understand that it is intertwined and try to be the inspiration behind getting all this stuff. This customer experience consumer journey is actually a sum total of the delight or the repulsions the consumers face across all the channels. Just don't look at digital. The channels which we serve to the consumers today might be very different. We have a phone banking channel in the bank. We have a retail channel. We have a digital channel. We have an outbound channel. We have many inbound channels. We have DSAs going and talking to people. It is about the consummate experience which the consumer derives and that's what we need to focus on. Again how many of you know about Radiocaps? Merucaps? Why did they fail? Why it's not there anymore? Bad customer service. If you look at it they defined the experience that they are going to target very narrowly. What they said is my experience is you are having difficulty in booking a cab in Bombay for example. I will give you a phone number where you can book the car. It will come. So they definitely solve that problem for all of us but they never bothered to see what happens if the car comes on time. Is it delayed? Is the car kept clean and neat? And if you don't like the driver's attitude or you don't like the car is there a way that I can give a feedback loop? Now when there is a new competitor a digital first company Uber, Ola, how they have defined this experience? Think about it. It's not an app which is there. Maybe for us Uber is an app when we started to think about it but today what we are seeing as Uber is I book the car. The car comes. Path is clearly known. Waiting time is known. I get into the car. I go to the destination. If I don't like the car I can give a feedback and if I don't behave properly the driver can also give a feedback about me and see how it is working. All of us have just moved on. So what we need to understand is it is the entire experience and not one narrow piece of the whole experience that we need to do. What is this experience? It is the customer focus baked into the product or servicing and that's what these examples are showing us. So there are four things that I want you to remember like I said artificial intelligence two things get the data and get the people together. When it comes to digital transformation just there are four things that all of us remember. Never make it a tick in the box. Purely view it from the consumer prism and see how it is going to help your consumers solve whatever is the problem. Evangelize the customer orientation at every opportunity you get within your organization. Don't focus on the front end alone. It is not the screens. It's not the user interface alone. It is the entire end-to-end experience from discovery to fulfillment. Look at the entire spectrum. Own that piece. Inspire people to look at it from that prism of an end-to-end experience. And the last bring people together for a common goal. This is the most difficult thing for everybody in our organization because we have vertical silos where horizontally optimized for a consumer the answer is no. We are vertically optimized for different functions the answer is yes. And that's how organizations are today. Create virtual teams. I'll give a simple example again. We have these term loans on credit cards. Credit card most of you people have. How many of you know that you can take a loan on your credit card? Many people right? We have this product and we also have a personal loan. We looked at the past data and we looked at what's happening what's the kind of difference that exists between these two products. The ticket sizes are low data tells you very clearly here it is like thousand dollars there it is like ten thousand dollars. There's a one is to ten difference in terms of the loan amount. When you actually went and sat with consumers what we found is people who are taking loans on credit cards want instant money. Want predictability that the money will come. Why do you want to go ahead and borrow on your credit card? Because there's something urgent that you want to spend it on or you have an outstanding somewhere you want to close it and then consolidate your borrowings and it's all small ticket items. You want to go ahead and go buy a tv to watch FIFA. You want a loan. You don't want to go to the personal loan. They want paperless transactions. So what we did we looked at what the actual consumer issue is put in all people together and we said first thing is get pre-approvals done which means tell the consumer in advance you have so much of money available for you in advance. At any point of time you can take it. So this pre-approval has suddenly changed the game. You don't have to apply anymore. You know that you have a lakh ten lakhs five lakhs whatever is it that is eligible for pre-approved available for you. No charges because it's a credit decision which the bank takes. The moment we have done it then we have to indicate to the consumer here is your pre-approved loan. Anytime you want to come in take it. You have to also make the discovery easy. So we went behind analytics looked at what was it that people who have already borrowed doing question who is it that looks similar to this kind of a consumer in our base went to them and started talking to them saying hey here is a pre-approved loan for you ma'am anytime you can take it and just two clicks the process login choose the amount choose the tenor EMI will come accept terms and conditions 10 seconds the money is on your bank account no questions asked because we are pre-approved right we know you you know everything about you more than your mother knows as a bank so this is what we have done and we put a team together across functions and say a shared goal is we want this to move upwards of 25 percent in the next three months. Origination digitally fulfillment digitally more than 25 percent six months we are already at 35 percent this is the power of bringing people together with a common shared goal and with the customer experience as the focus the next thing which the fight is going to be an experience is what i call as the customer interface so what's happening in this space so let me again ask a question how many of you bought a phone five years back so when you wanted to buy a phone what did you do ma'am before that where online where google today when did you last buy your phone this phone where did you go to find out before that where do you go today if you want to buy a phone first spot five years back it was google today it is do you see this change in the consumer interface when you buy when you want to buy a ticket five years back it was maybe google today it is straight book by show make my trip depending on what you want to do five years back if you want to buy a car you would have gone to google again now you go to car deco cars 24 whatever it is and then directly do what is the difference that has happened silently we all have noticed it we all have changed behaviors do we consciously do it what's happening what happened segregation of the market according to the niche again discovery understanding what others are doing and saying about the same product actual users getting reviewed we started trusting so many people nowadays it's not about anymore of whether we know them or not you go and choose something in amazon you look at the review one star no so suddenly the entire customer interface for many of these products have moved away from google isn't it staring in your eyes now they are all battling for the control of the search now if you are a marketer and if you want your product to be sold you need to be present in both you need to ensure that your product does the job for the consumers so that the reviews are good it's no more about search it's no more only about display networks suddenly the customer interface is changing and it's happening category by category depending on which category you are you have to start thinking what's happening in your category i'll talk about the category which i'm working for which is banking it's a jungle out there now and let me tell you what is that VC where do you want to go if you want to talk about financial aggregators you all go there bank bazaar paisa bazaar policy bazaar that's true so on one another spectrum for a discovery of a product human beings have this great need to compare right starting from finding a girlfriend to whatever we do now everybody wants to compare what i have versus what others are offering it's true so using that as the human insight there's enough people who are kind to now take the discovery portion out of the bank right look at the next one we all use google days amazon payments are going to come and these are big companies now they are competing with us on the other side of the spectrum which is the final transaction piece payments so as a bank you see your sales which is the first part of call moving to a finance aggregator and the transactions the payments which is the last side between the first and the last people are slowly pitching in the interface for people which is in the journey is moving away from the banks it's true for my category think about what your category does for you but we have an advantage the advantage for us is we are a transaction company people do come back to banks for transactions look at your industry look at your category and let me take airlines for an example how many of you have moved into jet airways website to do something if you're not flying very rarely but when you fly first port of call you said is make my trip not jet airways hotel booking you might have a preference towards the Taj but how many of you go back to a Taj website again and again never right but banks have this advantage that you do want to know how much money is there in your balance money has a great stickiness whether you're going to use it or not you just want to see it and feel happy yeah it is there nothing has happened i have this my salary has come so immediately when the sms comes you want to log in and see whether the money is there in the account great for us so the banks have an inherent advantage that the sales transaction of buying a home buying an insurance policy buying a car buying taking a personal loan for a holiday or buying a credit card these are once in five three ten twenty years event but there are daily events which are happening in your life where you are still going to come to the bank now understanding that what we are doing we are making sure that we utilize this opportunity of when you're there in the banks interface we talk to you we have conversations with you about what we can do for you we try and see whether we understand you fully well because of the fact that you have two humongous amount of data about what you do we exactly know what you did yesterday i can tell you that because you swipe your credit card whether you were in kamal lounge at 12 o'clock we get to know so using that we can make the conversations with you much more clearer concise precise and relevant for you so we want to be relevant in our conversations with you when you come back because we have this opportunity but that doesn't mean we will not be present in the locations where you are going to be present as consumers it's not of either or it has to be both so think about from your category perspective and see where the consumers are going to be there are you going to be present there are you going to be relevant in the context of what people are doing when you are going to do that you don't have to worry about the shift of consumer interfaces because you're thinking about your category and seeing what is going to happen in my category just take a step back and think through you will see a lot more happening in your category which may not have been noticeable when you just do on a day to day basis so take the disruption head on and use it to our advantage yes times have changed lots of things are happening in the last 10 years and five years so summary keep an eye on the disruption of the consumer interface every brand every category see this as your first port of call what's happening to your consumers where are they going now what is going to happen two years three years five years down the line are you ready use digital customer experience that helps you face this disruption again come back use the emerging technology like artificial intelligence rationally for use cases and for your business objectives to ensure that the disruption that's going to happen in the customer interface is taken care of finally i'll leave behind this thought with you put the customer first and enjoy your work day which is differently different and you will always have fun and hopefully all of us can put our legs up and have a beer in the beach thank you


In today's episode, we're going to take you up Camelback Mountain. This is one of the most popular hikes in Metro Phoenix and a hike that we've done before many times. But since we are participating in the Six Pack of Peaks Challenge that we talked about in the previous episode, we decided to do this hike one more time. Hey guys, we are at the trailhead of Camelback Mountain here in Phoenix for the second peak of the Six Pack of Peaks Challenge.  First legit rest spot, I would say. Today, I was hoping for the trail to be less busy compared to usual because Camelback Mountain, both trails are usually the busiest trails in the city, but even with the COVID-19, it's like there are a lot of people. We're getting now to this section here with a little bit more stairs and then rails. So quite a bit of scrambling, but it's the part that I'm excited for most. Here goes Uncle Todd, Alex, looking for number two, and Thomas, no more. It was the perfect weather to be on the trail, especially with the sun out and with the beautiful and colorful wildflowers. You're doing great. High five. We're getting to the end of the trail here with the last push on the Eco Canyon Trail and I can already see Alex up top with Thomas and can't wait to show you the view from up there. We're here at the top of Camelback Mountain. Yeah, the second mountain in our peak, our Six Pack of Peaks Challenge, and we can't wait to show you the view here. Now going down Troyer Trail, and we already worked on the arrangements about parking the car in a different trailhead and can't wait to show you the views here. The trail is marked pretty well, and I think they do a good job here of making sure that there are enough markers on the way down. These reflectors here are new. I don't remember seeing them last time when we were here. We only had the paint, which is pretty cool. We're nighttime hiking. There are one or two spots where you can easily get lost if you didn't know where you were going. There's crumblings here and we're at the helicopter. So the rest of the hike is going to be straightforward. Photo, I'm in the photo, I'm in the photo. Are you having fun? I'm having a blast. It's good. It's good weather for this. It really is. So it looks like when there's a rescue being done up here, somebody has some need for help. They did this rescue and progress sign. They'll string it up or chain it up between three of these metal poles here. The one thing that these trails offer, that compared to Eco Canyon Trail, is a nice view of all the houses here in Scottdale Paradise Valley and the golf courses. We're coming to the end of this trail here. Second peak, four more to go. Thank you guys for watching. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe to our channel for weekly vlogs about hiking and backpacking, your trekking paths Habiba and Alex, and we'll see you soon on another adventure.


Without further ado, Professor Song for Zidia. So cute. I'm sorry. I just fall in love with them every time. Like, like I even thought I'd do it. That's Samantha and that's Eddie. They're four years old. Or as we say, the effing fours right now. Okay, so let me start. They really are sweet. My son sure circuited the house because we won't get into that. Okay. He wanted to show us. He was very proud, but somehow he knew how to grunt himself. But the tweezers were burnt and melted. Okay. Takes after grandpa. Okay. So thank you very much for the introduction. Kind of was, I thought I would talk to you about some of the research that I do in my lab. I hopefully you'll find it interesting. And basically what we're trying to do is just make every hypochondriac out there in the world happy by being able to do point of care diagnostics. So, and honestly, that's one of my motivations now. So what I'm really interested in and very motivated is like, how can anyone really efficiently diagnose cancer? And what I've sort of shown here is sort of an outline of what the doctor goes does. Now I understand what you mean by pulling it there. Okay. Like essentially what does a doctor do in terms of diagnosing cancer in a patient? And you can see it's a very complex process where essentially in the end a doctor would have to biopsy a tumor. There would have to be extra sample processing and cell purification to try to access these cancer cells that may be in the tumor. And then do something called aminofenotyping or aminostating. That is that there are receptors on the surface of the cell that identify that cell in a particular way. And we have antibodies that are attached with what we call fluorophores that can glow under certain wavelengths of light. And with that we can identify different types of markers or proteins that are on the surface. And this is done through something called fax or macs and also just general microscopy. So just to give you sort of an idea of fax and macs because then you'll see how simple our device is really. Fax is a multi-million dollar machine that's in the hospital. And essentially, again, what a doctor or technician will do will be to take these cells that he or she is obtaining from the doctor. It's really a pathologist. And then they will stain these cells and then run it through a machine that essentially, oops, sorry about that, that essentially will sort of run these cells across a flow of water, across laser light. The cells will glow different colors and then you can sort them based upon different colors. It's a very complex process. It takes a couple of days sometimes and you definitely need a technician to help you out. There's another sort of generation technology and that's called macs. It's based upon attaching magnetic nanoparticles on the surface of a cell and then essentially using magnets to hold the cells that have been sort of tagged with magnetic particles. And then essentially you can just sort of remove the cells that you don't want and then ultimate, and the cells that you do want are held by magnets and then you can remove the magnets and then in the end you can then collect the cells of interest. Now the thing is, is that all these instrumentations they're at the hospital, they're at all debates, they're at UCSF, et cetera, but they all require, again, the sample prep that's very extensive and you can lose your sample along the way. It's very difficult to isolate subpopulations and cell viability to do post-analysis. Everybody talks about these days you might have heard in the news about personalized medicine. This is where that would come into play, where you want to be able to take those cells from a patient and then try all different drugs to see what drugs might actually save that patient or at least improve prognosis. All of this costs time, technical expertise, and everything like that. So this just gives you an example. This is at USC, their Comprehensive Cancer Center, but this is actually a fax machine that really would take over this whole stage right here. Multi-million dollar system. What I want to tell you is a story of what we're doing in the lab in terms of cancer diagnosis. So I've just given you generally what happens in the very general terms with oncologists. One of my best friends that I met in college, Lucy Godley at University of Chicago, is a hematologist oncologist. And she told me a very compelling story that I was really amazed. And this is also something that she's very passionate about. So there's a leukemia that's known as apromylicic leukemia. And it's among all the leukemias. It is rare in the sense that only about 7% of newly diagnosed APL patients could die within the first 48 hours upon presentation. Essentially, these patients who have APL in the most extreme form just bleed out. And really, you have essentially 48 hours to diagnose it and then give them a pill that I'll talk about in the next slide. In the US, we have great health care to some extent. We won't get into the politics of that. But essentially, 7% can die. In the third world country is where the technicians, the instrumentations are not available. Up to 50% of patients could die of this particular disease. And it's really, really, really sad. And the thing is, is that if you could diagnose APL right then and there, you can give them this pill, it's known as atra. Just one pill, if you give that patient that one pill within 48 hours of the patient bleeding out, you save the patient. If you give the atra to a patient who does not have APL, nothing will happen.  And the reason being is that insurance companies, it's a very expensive drug. So the insurance companies want to have an absolute diagnosis of APL before the doctors allow to administer atra. And my friend Lucy has had many patients die in the ER because she cannot beat that 48-hour clock with the formal diagnosis. So let me just show you, and this is morose, but it's kind of interesting, sort of like, what is involved to actually do point of care and how our technology, we hope, will actually address the situation. So diagnosing APL, you do have this 48-hour window. And what really happens is it's very subtle that the patient will suddenly start to have a fever and will have bleeding gums and feel sort of just general malaise, okay? It gets to a point where the patient decides, oh, I have to go to the ER, something's wrong. They'll take, they'll do a blood draw, they'll do a CBC count, and you'll see that the doctor will see, oh, it's patients anemic, has elevated white blood cells, and so forth, possibly APL. He'll send, he or she will send the blood over to the pathologist so that they can actually immunophenotype the APL. So in other words, they would use the FACTS-MAX to actually do immunostanding of white blood cells to see if these specific markers exist. And then there would be confirmation and then ATRA could be administered. So again, one of the problems is that what if that pathologist has gone home? Or what if you just don't have a pathology lab as you might have in third-world countries, okay? What we're trying to do after I heard this very compelling story from my best friend, well, we decided, well, is there a way that my lab, what we develop, well, whether or not we can actually cut that 48-hour window, be able to give confirmation of APL and then be able to administer ATRA. And here, we're not even talking about, you know, we're only talking about most, like, 15 minutes. That's how fast our diagnostic chip works. Okay, so let me just show you what we're doing. And this is a picture of the chip itself. That chip, actually, we're developing in the lab, we're hoping to insert it into an iPhone. Okay, so that gives you the sense. This was this big fax machine that I was talking about. We want to be able to have, everyone could be able to have, they can insert the chips into an iPhone and do a diagnosis for themselves. That's why I'm also saying a hypochondriac. This is their dream. Okay? My mom is very happy. Okay, this chip work and so forth. I really have to tell you, we were inspired very much over 10, 15 years ago, really dating myself by nature. So there's something that should say alpha. I'm sorry about that. I never know how to use the computer unless a student teaches me. So anyway, that's supposed to say alpha hemolysin. It's a protein pour, and it comes from a staph bacteria. Okay? And this is what the crystallographic structure looks like. The main thing you should know is that it really looks, if you look down on that protein, it looks like a cylinder. And it's what the staph bacteria uses to dump toxins into your cells, into your gut. Okay? Then in 1994, there was a group that essentially they were able to use this pour and insert it into a lipid layer, so essentially a fat layer. And essentially they were able to do something called resistive pulse sensing. And the beauty of this technique is just, as I show you right here, that essentially what you can do is you can just measure the current across that pour, that protein pour, and then essentially you will measure a constant current, but when a cell, or for me it's a cell, but for the bacteria it's some kind of particle or toxin, when it passes through that pour, you see a drop-off in current. Okay? And then as the cell or particle passes all the way through from one reservoir into the next, you see a rise in current. And this is called resistive pulse sensing because you get pulses out every time something passes through the pour. Now, what people have done in the 90s and even to this day is that they've been able to do single molecules, essentially they're able to detect single molecules passing through this pour. There's hopes that you can actually do DNA single molecule DNA sequencing. And there's a company out there that's supposed to announce within the month that they've actually been able to achieve this and then you'd be able to sequence your DNA for dollars. And again, this is great for a hypochondriac. Okay? And then essentially you can do all this genetic modification to get specificity. Okay? You can see that sort of the length sales is all on the nanometer scale. All right. So essentially alpha-hemialycin is very, very delicate. And so one of the things that my group decided is, well, why do we have to use a protein pour, a biological protein pour? Can we do something? Can we make it out of something else? And in the end, we ended up using something, using a plastic, so. I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Yes, sir. I'm listening. Yes, sir. Plastics. So, and I think it's appropriate that I'm now at Berkeley. So anyway, okay. So I'm going to show you our plastic devices. They cost pennies, quite literally. And what it's really made out of, instead of a pour, we have just a straight channel. It's made using lithography. And this channel is made out of, it's done using photolithography. And we do something called soft lithography. That is, we make a negative master of whatever we're trying to make. In this case, it's actually the channel. And we run particles through. But let me just show you. This is called. So this is soft lithography. Okay. And essentially what we use is a printing technology, photolithography, to create negative relief structures. And then what we do is we end up pouring our silicone rubber onto our chip. And the silicone rubber is what you would use in, which is what you would get at Home Depot. It's RTV silicone.  So you can always go to Home Depot and do this at home. And I have done it. Okay.  And then essentially it would be a perfect mold of whatever you were trying to make. And then you can seal it onto another substrate. So this is hard to do. I've actually brought one that we've got made. It's a great demo. So this is a silicone rubber mold of an array of posts. They're on the micron scale. And you can see how well it replicates it. And that is how you get it to make a nice diffraction app. I've made the silicone rubber too thick because usually I can actually stretch it and then you can do it before you transform it. But anyway, I can cast it around. But it's... Okay, so... It's cool. Okay. I like... I one day want to make a silicone rubber mold of myself. Okay. I too. It's really kind of freaky. Okay. So let me tell you about these devices. I know it's very disturbing.  Okay. So this technology is very simple. We use a DC measurement. We literally run these chips off of a 15-volt battery. And all we're doing is measuring cells as they pass through our channel, which we call the poor. Okay. And that would be like the alpha hemolysin. Okay. And we just measure current. We are able to do CBCs. And this is just an example. So the current pulse magnitude that we measure corresponds to actually the cell size. Okay. Because it's a volume to volume ratio that we can measure. A volume of the particle versus the volume of the poor. And so we can actually take the magnitudes of our pulses and get cell size. What we can also do, this is a case where we've actually looked at the cell's blood and that we're able to count red blood cells and white blood cells and differentiate them. They're different sizes. Okay. We can also do something else, which is essentially equivalent to immunotyping. We can actually functionalize the glass surface that the mold sits on top of. And we can actually functionalize certain antibodies. Those antibodies can interact specifically. And then the cell takes longer to pass through the channel. And we see that in terms of a current pulse, transit time. Okay. Or the width of this pulse right here. Okay. So what you can just see is essentially what we did was we were looking for a particular marker. This is a leukemia marker, CD34. Okay. And what we're able to see is that by taking leukemia cells, we can run it through our device that corresponds either to CD, that has anti-CD34. So the cells pass through and stick and just travel much more slowly than if there's nothing in the channel or is functionalized with isotype control. So that's sort of specific. So let's skip over that. Okay. But we can also do so much more with this device. And that is what we're working on right now is looking at circulating tumor cells. Okay. And this is a new topic for my lab. So circulating tumor cells are cells that blub off of a primary tumor and they travel in the body and they're thought to be responsible for metastases. And it's often the metastases that kills the patient versus the primary tumor. The problem with CTCs is that they're very, very rare. We're talking about one to ten cells in seven and a half mils of blood. And the number of CTCs can really indicate whether or not a patient is going to survive or what is really the prognosis of that patient. Right now there's only one FDA-approved system. It's called the Varenex Cell Search. And what it bases itself on is maps, magnetic cell sorting, using these magnetic nanoparticles. And they're looking for CTCs that are EPCAM positive. And that's a particular marker for a particular type of tumor. The problem is that it's also looking for these one to ten cells per essentially ten mils of blood and the success in counting is only 60%. And that's FDA-approved. So what I want to show you is what our device can do if we functionalize it with anti-EPCAM and look for that EPCAM marker. And essentially what you see is what we've done is we've mixed different types of colon cancer cells with one that are either positive or negative for EPCAM. And essentially I always like to show people this one right here. That is, we can actually pick out that one of the cells that are positive for EPCAM out of a hundred or so cells that are negative. So we're much better than pheronex at this point. So I'm kind of sort of speeding along because I used up so much time trying to get my demo to work. But essentially what you can see is really that our device is that there's no sample preparation. Literally what we do is we actually just take blood from a patient, we just take blood from a mouse or whatever, and we just inject it into our device. And the device was prepared with certain antibodies and so forth. Only small volumes are needed. So instead of taking that 10 mils of blood out of a patient that you would do when you go to quest diagnostics to get a CBC done, we can actually just take a prick up your finger. So it's very much like also like detection of diabetes or essentially measuring your sugar content. It's rapid and very sensitive. We can do our measurements within minutes and we can tell someone if we're positive for whatever marker positive for whatever type of leukemia. It's done with traditional device fabrication. Literally the devices that we make are circa 1960s micro fabrication technology. So what's in your iPhone is a lot more complicated than this device here. It's very compact and expensive and disposable. Our chips are literally just an inch by an inch in an area. And it is user friendly. We have high school students now running experiments in our lab. So that's a good test. You know, you'd be surprised. In the end, we're hoping that anybody can use these devices in the home or in the clinic or really even in the remote locations. So where we're really heading off right now is that we really want to be able to detect the presence of disease like APL. We've actually expanded also this technology so that right now we can also literally count HIV viral particles in human plasma. This is something that cannot be done with current technology. We want to be able to determine minimal residual disease. We want to be able to have the patient to be able to actually monitor his or her disease as he or she is doing therapy and be able to report it back to the doctor through the iPhone. And essentially this is a whole list of other things that we can do. Okay. So in the end, I just want to say that we just have a very powerful technique that can be life-saving. Again, I just want to remind you this is what my friend Lucy has to do when if a patient presents sort of basically is presenting himself as bleeding out in the emergency room. She has a 48-hour window that she has to work against to try to prove that this patient has APL and that then she can give that patient Atra. We're hoping that we can be able with this simple chip be able to do detection of this disease within minutes upon presentation in the ER. And so with that, I just want to acknowledge my entire group. I have a large group, lots of undergrads, lots of grad students, and a variety of collaborators in my funding. So thank you. I think I could be all your mothers. Yeah, sure. Can I say I write 10 cells every 10 milliliters? Yes. If you have, if a patient has 10 cells per 10 milliliters, that's bad. That's really, really bad. It's not, it's really bad. So, um, I see the plastic being maybe inside the body to be able to pick something up. But we're not even going to pick a blood anymore. Like, how are you getting it? So that's a really great question, right? Right, so we'd only be able to do pricks. So the question is, you know, I'm talking about for circling tumor cells, we're talking about one to 10 cells per 10 mills of blood, essentially. But the things that our device can do are essentially sort of a prick of blood. Okay, so clearly we can't, you know, we can't compete against the statistics that way. So this is where I can't tell you what we're really doing to address that particular part because of Siemens' funding make. So, I need a month to clear out what I can say. Don't put that on the internet. So, um, please cut that out. I'm in trouble. But essentially, our diagnosis chip would be on the back end after we do all the sample pricks who go through 10 mills of blood, then we'll be able to tackle circling tumor cells. Absolutely. So, it turns out, the question is, do we see any clogging in our chips when we use blood? And that is the most amazing question that we have never seen clogging with blood. And we don't know why. There is something, you know, sometimes you just luck out. We don't know. We've actually, you know, we have films of whole blood passing through. It's really cool. You can see red blood cells traveling through. We've never seen clotting and stuff. So, there's something special about it. And the really cool thing is that if you remove all the red blood cells, you remove everything, and just look at just plain cells through, like, you know, white blood cells, that's when you get clogging. So, the red blood cells actually help us. So, yeah. What's the timeline that you're hoping for to get this impossible? So, what is the timeline that we hope to get this in the hospitals? So, for the APL, we're hoping that we can actually, we're funded by the NIH on that project, and we're hoping that we'll be able to go into pre-clinical application, like in the next year or two. So, I feel like I've really done something, and then my mom would actually understand what I do. She only understands the Henry Schoen thing, so. At least it made her happy, so. Yeah. So, you said you look at viruses. Did you have to change the pore size of viruses? Sorry? Did you have to change pore size? Ah, great question. If we wanted to look at viruses, did we have to change the pore size? We actually have a twist now with our device that we actually insert nodes in the channel, and these nodes actually give us a characteristic electronic signature that we can pull out very quickly and very nicely.  So, it's really become a very sensitive device. One more question. So, what kind of electric signal are you getting? Are you worried about, you were talking about you want to get a third world country, but awesome. Yeah. Are you worried about temperature and conditions and things like that, playing a part in the electric signal? So, great question. So, if we were to actually put this into third world countries, or, you know, what would we have to worry about environmental concerns? So, we do have to, the one thing that we're still investigating is whether or not, how long do these antibodies last?  And so, essentially, we'd have to develop it so that someone who's going to use it would have to inject the antibody in into the device and then be able to use it. But otherwise, it's pretty hardy. Hardy device. Yeah. Can you use, like, label-free, like, label-free chips that you're being equipped to say, like, your example with the APL. Mm-hmm. They may be multiplexed together, like, specifically, like, lithographed. Absolutely. And specifically towards a different type of disease, like, say, detecting, like, say, the common cold, or even, like, even drug detection. Absolutely. So, the question is, you know, with our device, you know, can we actually multiplex it? Can we have various other detections, you know, look for other things as well? And the answer is, yes. We're, you know, we're doing R&D in my lab. We make these devices. But if you were actually to put it into a real, you know, manufacturing process, you could put hundreds of things on a single chip and then diagnose it. It's really great for a hypochondriac. You can really diagnose everything you ever wanted to know, so. Do you have any more questions? Okay. Any other questions? Okay. It's hard to seem to. Yeah. Are you going to have further populations to support your job? So, do you have any questions? Ah, great question. Do you want to work in my lab? Ah, absolutely. That's something that we have in the work. So, it turns out these F-CAM positive cells only are sort of a sub-population of epithelial-based cancers. And so, there's a whole host of other ones that people are trying to search for. And we have a project that we're going to use high-seq analysis to do biomarker discovery. So, people know that. I'm a physicist. I'm learning as I go the biology, you know. I did low-temperature stuff. So, my advisor will be with you. So, you'll probably qualify. Okay, well, thank you. And how would you interface the, how would you interface each one of the chip modules to talk to a computer? So, and talk to a computer and, like, eventually allow results to be transmitted to a computer or say, like, electronic record, patient records or use, like, the vital signs of pain. Right. So, the question is sort of, how would we collect the data and so forth and really transmit it? So, again, I offer you a job as well. I actually have this great research scientist who's working on that right now. Like, how would you interface it with the iPhone? How would you interface it with the computer and then be able to transmit all the data? So, what we have going for us is a DC measurement. So, things are very, very simple. Thank you so much. Thanks very much.


Good afternoon everyone. This is Melissa with thestuckswish.com and welcome. I always like to look at the market on the weekend when I'm not trading, just have some time to just think and relax and kind of see what everything happened and how everything worked for the week. And I always review my trades and my own trading stuff on the weekend too. So I think it's important for everyone to do. There's never a time that you shouldn't review your own trades and your trading. This is how you keep getting better. This is how I keep getting better. I don't think it's important for anyone everywhere to do it. That's a trader. So let's look at the market. Here we are with the Q's and my call in the market was spot-on. You know, we're holding that gap. It was an important gap and we're holding it and we're not going to break it. So there it is. For anyone that doesn't understand gaps, once again, I'm just going to highlight the power of the gap. Okay? How many days do we run up here? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. 12 days up. We gapped up. It was a real gap. It was a good bullish gap and we're holding the gap. It was 12 days up before we did this and we're holding. And during this period that the market was coming in here, red and bearish every day. Every day it was bearish. 1, 2, 3, 4.  We were the least bearish Friday of all the days though in the morning before we did this green bar. This bar that really happened traded really into the afternoon because it took us until 12, 12 o'clock lunchtime to break over the high and then we wiggle and shake a little bit before we really rallied into the close. And I saw it happening.  I thought it was going to be Monday but we did it Friday. So we're going to gap up Monday after this kind of trade up here into Friday. This late, late thing we're probably going to gap up Monday and could possibly even actually gap up over this area on Monday. We could gap up to about 76-ish on Monday. We might do it. In fact, what did we do post market here? Really nothing. It was Friday but we could gap up very well, gap up there on Monday. So anyways, this just highlights once again how understanding gaps is essential to reading trends. Knowing what gaps are a good gap. Knowing what gaps are continuation gaps. Knowing what a corrective gap is. Understanding everything about it and the power of the gap. If you understand the power of the gap or how to read gaps and understand gaps and look at gaps then you saw the same thing that I saw. The same thing that I said and the same thing that I've been saying. And very interesting. What a strength of show of power. You want to look at buying power, strength. All you have to do is look at the cues. Utter, utter, utter, strength. 12 days up. Gapped up into itself. Held, rallied, rallied for five days after it. Gapped down, didn't mean anything. Wasn't a good gap down. Held, held, traded in week in the holding of the gap that happened back there on this date. I think it was a 9th, no it was 11th. And then we just took off out of nowhere Friday late afternoon.  I just didn't think it was going to come until next week and it came on Friday. So I think we gap up Friday and possibly up to about 76th ish and follow through higher. Here we are. Here we're going. This is what I've been talking about all along. Let's look here at the bigger, bigger picture. We got nowhere to go but up. So market's going to follow through higher for 2013. I've been saying that for a while. And how do I know how to read the market so well? Because I understand how to read gaps. And the interesting thing is I prefer to go short. I just love shorting. That's what I really, really like to do. That's what I love. However, the market's been bullish and I've been reading it accurately. So learning how to read gaps is essential to becoming a qualified trader, to becoming a professional trader. I think anyone that wants to be a professional trader needs to understand and learn gaps. And whether or not you want to trade them or not in the day of the gap, understanding how to read gaps and read gaps and what they mean and which ones are good or which ones are nothing on a chart is essential to understanding trends. And really it makes a difference between being able to make money or not make money. It makes a difference between me being able to make a call like I made that that gap was going to hold and that the red that was coming down was not going to break it. To be able to, I, when I make a call like that, I don't know what people think and I don't care. But honestly, I know that no one else is saying the same things I'm saying. So, you know, people just, you know, really generally read gaps much differently than I do. I really have a knack for reading them well. I'm just honed in on them. I'm just like honed right in on these things. I can see things in such a formulation and a fashion and such detail and focus that it makes me a good trader and a good teacher of gaps. So if you'd like more information on how to read gaps, email me at Melissa at the stockswush.com. The next gap class is August 3rd and 4th next weekend. Love teaching my class. Love trading gaps. Can't wait to this week. What a good week it was trading gaps this past week. Earning season is under full swing. Fabulous day to trade in the morning and go down with your day. So if you'd like any more information, email me at Melissa at the stockswush.com. Thanks everyone. Have a great weekend.


Namaste. I'm Johannes Broadwell and I'm here from Agile, India with Corey Haines. Hello. Hello. It's great to finally meet you. I've been doing some of the stuff that you've been teaching for a few years, so it's good. Yeah, I see your name all over the place, so it's good to meet you and more than just like a little tiny picture, so. Yeah. So, you gave two talks at the conference today. Yes. One of them was sort of just thoughts and lessons I've learned over the last ten years of practicing XP. I got introduced to it in 2004, and so this is sort of ten years on, and so it was just kind of just sort of some ideas and thoughts and lessons I've had around some of the technical practices and some of the team practices and just things I've seen that I've taken into myself and work. The second talk was a much more code heavy. It was about the four rules of simple design and some of the lessons I've learned in applying those at code retreats, working with the people, the participants, and making comments about them and doing very small, subtle design decisions. Right. All right, so let's start with, there's two things there that I don't think everybody knows. So what's the four rules of simple design? So the four rules of simple design, they were codified by Kent Beck in the late 90s, and the first is that your tests pass, which doesn't really matter how good your design is if you can't prove it works. The second is that it expresses intent or really good names. Really pay attention to what the code, how the code reads. The third is no duplication or the dry principle a lot of people have heard about the don't repeat yourself principle, and that one is a really about duplication of knowledge rather than sort of the mechanical duplication that we oftentimes think of, oh well here's two pieces of code that look the same, let me eliminate duplication, but really looking at the knowledge points of your system. So what would be an example of knowledge duplication? So for example, one of the ones that I gave was in Conway's Game of Life, which is the sort of domain that I was giving examples in, oftentimes you'll see, because the problem is on a two-dimensional grid, you'll often see people passing around X, Y to a bunch of methods. This is really the knowledge of the topology, and so eliminating that duplication as soon as you see it causes you to think about what are those X, Y represent, so you reify it into something like a location object or something, and so that's really knowledge as opposed to this mechanical, there's two things that look similar. So as a sort of, if you think ahead a lot, which I don't know if we're supposed to do, then if you put it into location, then you can add a third coordinate without changing your code. It's very good. The whole goal of simple design, the point of design in general, is to make it easy to change, but you can't know what needs to change, so you're not building systems that are ultimately configurable. That's right. Do that, but by really extracting out these knowledge centers, you get the right classes, you get the right abstractions, and it's happenstance that you end up finding that, oh, well, making a change to the dimensionality is there. Another benefit that comes out of it is you get what I call behavior attractors, which is when it comes time to add a new method, say, you need to find the neighbors of a certain cell, oftentimes you'll have a method that's like neighbors of something, and there's that question of where do you put these methods, and usually... Oh, that's a static method, isn't it? Yeah, it's a static method, of course. And so oftentimes we will just like, well, I'm in this file right now, so I'm just going to put it here and wait, but if we extract knowledge into domain objects, then they tend to be natural places for behavior. So a location object, which you created by extracting this duplication, is a natural place to find a method that has to do with the topology, such as give me the neighbors for a location, and so you sort of accidentally have these domain objects, which naturally attract the behaviors that you're trying to build. Someone here at the conference mentioned the word serendipitous design, I think. Yeah, that's a great way to talk about it.  That makes sense to put it there. So there, the fourth one real quick. Yes, yes. The fourth one is small, which is once you've done your refactorings with two and three, make sure that you don't have anything there that you don't need. So that would be pencil the test, good names, no duplication, and small. Yep. Good. And that's the goal of talking about the four rules for me is that I've over the years come to sort of think of them as the sort of the generators of all the other design guidelines that we have. So just by applying these, you end up with things that abide by the solid principles, you find sort of design patterns come out, and so you find a lot, a lot of demeanor just sort of falls out oftentimes. Yeah. And so just over the years, I've gotten to where I pretty much just use the four rules, and I use the others as more of a descriptive form. So if you take a step back here, just when you talk about the sign, what's the process of the sign like when you work with code? There's a couple different layers of design. So there's always like the sort of the system design and the upfront thinking about how might I put together my system.  I like to say that it's great to do upfront design, but it should remain where it belongs, which is on the whiteboard.  And so I tend to use test driven development as my design methodology.  And I refactor according to the four rules, really the middle two. So the example where you have the index, int y, and you extract the location, that would be a refactoring happen. Yes. So why not do it right the first time? I'm not a very good developer. That's, I mean, honestly, that's what it comes down to is the majority of the experience I have in the design I have or the design experience has shown me that if I think very hard, I can come up with a reasonable design. If I think very hard and let refactoring guide me, then I come up with something better. And just to reiterate, the whole goal that I have for design is being able to change it easily in the future, regardless of what the change is. And so because I've found that I can do better if I think hard and use my test to guide me, that's the way I like to do it. And so just let it fall out, things come out as they come out. And you also, it might not be the location, extracting this was the best thing. And so you can move it back and forth. And I mean, it's over time design should change as you get more knowledge about the domain. I've found that often pair programming is an interesting tool in that sense. When I was less experienced and I pair program, if I would pair program something with someone that I had done before, I would very quickly try and force the design down the path I've done before. Yeah, I tend to, Ron Jeffries, I believe, told me one time a great anecdote that I were saying that I like to remember. And he said that when he first started pairing, he would always fight for his design. And over time, he got to the point where when there was a disagreement about what design path to go down, he would always yield to the other person. Knowing that if he was, if he was, if the other person was right, he would learn something. And if the other person was wrong, the he was a good enough developer and his techniques were good enough so that they would find out soon enough to shift the design over and to fix it.  Hey, it's encouraged one of the Core XP values. So I think that kind of comes down to seeing that in your behavior and trying new things. So the other word that you touched on in the beginning is a code retreat. So what's a code retreat? So a code retreat is a day long workshop that is entirely focused on practice, really low level kind of design practice and technique practice. We came up with the idea of me and three other guys, Patrick Welch and I, and Hydro Alola and Gary Bernhardt, about five years ago now. And over the years, really evolved and settled on the format. And so it's a day long workshop. We work on pretty much Conway's Game of Life. And you work for 45 minutes, paired up. And every 45 minutes, you delete all the code and swap pairs and start again. And then every session, the facilitator introduces a new set of constraints for you to sort of investigate the problem with. So things like no if statements or no primitives across method boundaries or no return values or these methods less than three lines. And so you introduce constraints that sort of jolt the developer out of how they would normally do it. Because like you said earlier, you tend to have this idea of how to develop it or how to build it. And so it's really hard to break out of that. You think, this is how I'm going to do it, this is how I'm going to do it. But by introducing constraints that keep the person from doing it that way, they have to come up with new ideas. And so it's a day of really like just really low level practicing coding techniques. So why would someone want to go to a code retreat for a whole day? Well, some of the stuff that I've heard people say at the end of it is it, you know, it really opens up your mind to alternate ways to solve problems, alternate ways to look at building software. Because we force you out of your comfort zone, you have to look at different things. And the other great thing about it is because we delete the code every 45 minutes, it's a safe place to experiment. Because I tell people that no matter how bad it is, on average, 22 and a half minutes later, it will disappear into the ether. And it doesn't matter. And so you get this opportunity to try new things. A lot of people come and they've never paired before. And so it's a day of safely learning about pairing or safely learning about TED. And since we don't show the code to anybody, we don't go and present it on a monitor, it's okay to make mistakes. It's okay to struggle. It's okay honestly to write no code. Like to struggle so hard that you can't write that test. I sometimes I tell people that write, you know, take a session and focus so hard on the tests. So hard that maybe you only write one or two, but they're the right ones. And having that practice means that when you go back to your work, and when you go back to the grind of deadlines and having to keep your code and all of that, you've practiced a little bit. So it's a little bit easier to do it in your day to day job. And it's a fun day. Like anytime you get developers together to code, you've got a good day. I'll have first time facilitators contact me and, you know, be nervous about I don't think I'm a great developer or I don't know if I have anything to offer as a facilitator. And I tell them that if you just kind of go by the format and you just get people together to code. And the format is freely available on the net at coderetreat.org. Coderetreat.org, the format's there. We have some sample constraints that people have. It's not the best organized site, but it's up there. Jim Hearn and Audie Balboaca, they are really kind of leading the global community now. They're sort of stepping up into these, well, have stepped up into very much leadership role in sort of the global community around Coderetreat. So I can definitely say that Coderetreat's changed my life. That's a great thing to say. That's I like hearing that. All right. Are you ready for the lightning round? Absolutely. So during the lightning round, I'll ask a question and you should answer it as quickly as possible. Okay. And then you will ring the bell so you can test it out. Okay. That's good enough. That's good enough. Is that when I answer the question? That's when you answer the question completely. Okay. All right. So what is your favorite programming language? I would say Ruby. And what's your favorite coding cartoon? My favorite coding cata. Lately, I've really enjoyed the Roman numeral cata, the converting numbers to Roman numerals. It's so simple and it's just a really fun one to do. And you said you have learned from thousand examples of game of life. What's the most important thing that you've learned? Um, write code. A lot of people will spend a lot of time discussing. And there's a thing I say that I'll find people who have been talking for 20 minutes and I'll come over and I'll say, you know, I'm not a I'm not a linguist or, you know, language historian, but I don't think English was intended to talk about software design. And you're sitting in front of a language that was explicitly built to talk about software design. So along with the conversation, if you have an idea, write some pseudocode or write some code and that way there can be no confusion about what you're thinking about. And I've learned that. So would you like to repeat the short answer? Oh, the short answer. Write code. Great. Communicate through code. I talk a lot. Thank you very much, Corey. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot.


So you want to get into residency but what's a few things that you can do besides getting a high step one score or going to a prestigious school to help increase your chances of doing that. Exactly what we'll talk about. Let's get into it. Hey everyone, welcome to the channel. My name is Lakshman, internal medicine resident and this channel and the podcast is completely designed to help people succeed on their medical journey but do it with less stress. So if you're new here, consider subscribing to the YouTube channel as well as the podcast and hitting the like button if you're watching this on YouTube to go ahead and show me that one you enjoy this kind of content but also support us in the fancy YouTube outfit. Today I want to talk about how to increase your chances of getting into a good residency and I want to give you a little bit of a backstory that way you can decide if you want to listen to my tips or not. I went into internal medicine and when I was applying I was told that maybe per my step score, my step two score and my GPA I needed to apply to about three programs to have a hundred percent chance of matching. I ultimately applied to a little under 23 and I went on 10 interviews, got 14 and only went on 10 of them and ultimately got into my number one choice. So those are basically my numbers but more importantly I want to illustrate that my stress during this entire process was much lower than you know my typical peer and that's not because I was confident that I would get into my number one. There's still some stress involved but I think I was involving a lot of these tips that I'm about to give you that increase my chances of getting into the programs that I truly desire. Now a few things we should talk about before the tips is to really understand what residency programs value.  Clearly the grades and the valuations are important but I want to make sure that this video in this episode is valuable regardless of not if you've taken step one step two and gotten the grade that you wanted for your desired specialty. The second thing I want to make clear is it's really important to understand what a good residency program means to you. Now would you really want to go somewhere that has high prestige value but may not be the perfect fit for you and maybe three plus years of misery and most of us would probably ideally say no so it's important to map out your most important factors and I did this when I was applying to residency is I listed kind of in four columns different things that I value so things like geographic constraints I really want to be close to my family for both my sake as well as my wife's sake training quality I wanted to make sure that when I finished my three years of internal medicine residency that I was a very competent physician that had seen a little bit of everything and also whether or not it aligned with my future goals and so you know all of us will have different things and you may not know exactly what you want to do but you want to say is this program focused on the things that I may be considering in the future so if you want to work in a clinic for example with HIV patients but the facilities that you're going to be working at this potential residency program don't really have the infrastructure allowed for you to get that experience in that training maybe it's not the best place to go given your future goals and finally other things that you can consider things like salaries as well as kind of call schedules and those are things that come a little bit when you're applying to residency but they're still important things to consider because if you're somebody who is with a family you don't want to move to somewhere that is a high cost of living but your salary may not be able to support both you as well as your family but once you understand your ideal residency what it kind of looks like what type of things you hope it offers you then let's get into different tips that you can use to increase your chances so the first thing to help you increase your chances of getting into a good residency after you've kind of done the good research is you want to constantly work on something that I love calling your angle for your specific specialty compared to when we're applying to medical school when you're applying to residency it's even harder for you to stand out from the rest of your peers if you're going into a field like radiology there's only so many experiences and reasons that people want to go into this field so almost everyone kind of looks the same on paper that's definitely nerve-wracking and you can increase your anxiety when you're going through the application process so to make it a little bit less stressful you want to ask yourself what's my angle and the simple way to do this is ask yourself what experiences have you had and what qualities about yourself as well as your future goals would make you look different for the specific residency specialty so for example if you're going to orthopedic surgery you may reflect back on your experiences and realize that you yourself were a college athlete or a high school athlete and you had a lot of different injuries and you were really interested in the musculoskeletal system and you know your future goals aren't working with specific athletes in the community or on a more local or national level this is a perfect example of how you can use your past experiences to create an angle towards your desired specialty because then you can do the next few tips that we'll talk about of using this angle and constantly shower it all throughout your letters of recommendation your personal statement and your application as well as your interviews now finding your angle is by no means an easy activity it's going to take several reiterations to go through but a simple way to kind of understand where your angle may be it's just map out different experiences you've had that you think are unique than your fellow peers either different experiences different viewpoints of what your intrigue may be and while everything individually may seem a little superficial may seem like somebody else has it once you combine it you end up with an application that only looks like you and so you want to use your best ability to make sure you highlight the different varieties in your experiences and your desires that will best complement that specialty now once you have your angle the next step is to make sure that you find what the program values the programs that you really want to go to that you consider to be a good program and you want to make sure that you tailor your letters of recommendation and your personal statement specifically for them it's important to remember that you don't have to send the same draft or generic personal statement to all of the programs that you're applying to if there's a few programs that you would love to get into just ask yourself what makes each of them unique and how can you align your angle from step number one with their specific or unique kind of propositions that they're offering for you and then you would try to include that into your personal statement and you would upload that specific draft that would go to that institution you would ask your letter writers to potentially talk about one of your experiences that match well with what the residency program may try to offer you as their unique selling point as an example and this is just off the top of my head let's go back to the applicant who's applying to orthopedic surgery we've already established that they want to work with athletes in the future and they have an athletic background and maybe they've had some experiences in medical school kind of working with athletes themselves and then they find a residency program that may have a specific clinic for young athletes or an ability to be on the sidelines of a football game or a basketball game for them to be able to practice their skills that may seem like a perfect fit for them and something that they would consider to be a good residency program so they would make sure that their personal statement has those different pieces of saying hey you have this at your program and these are some experiences that I've had I would love to continue moving this forward to my ultimate goal of doing you know working with athletes um as an orthopedic surgeon and similarly you would tell your letter writers hey they have this awesome clinic or this experience at this program I would really want them to know that I would be intrigued in doing so do you mind writing a specific draft just for them and obviously you don't need to do this for every single program you apply to but do this for the ones that you think that maybe your chances of getting into could be improved if you made your application more specific to them. Step number three is something you can do in medical school and that's constantly looking for experiences and opportunities to add to your angle so this can include things like research shadowing going to different conferences whether that be at your institution or something you could travel to is working on different projects that you can just say you did that may be working on a poster presentation and abstract you want to just kind of create a resume and not things that stuff it but things that are meant to show hey these are my ultimate goals and here are a few things that I've done that co-inline with that once you understand what your angle is for desired specialty you stop saying yes to all different experiences you may be offered but instead find would it be tailored for something that I want to accomplish in the future you know if I want to become a cardiologist would working at a health fair where you're teaching patients about their cardiovascular risks and their health would that align with my future goals absolutely but if it was something else like you know working at a free clinic for a different specialty I wouldn't be interested in maybe my time could be used elsewhere but it doesn't matter if you're a first year medical student or if you're just about to graduate and apply for residency you can still find experiences even if they may not go on your resume of things you can talk about on your interviews and your personal statements if time allows so if you think that your application is done it never really is you always want to be finding experiences not only to get into residency but increase your chances of getting into fellowship as well as just defining whether your current goal for your future you know in medicine is actually what you want to do you know if you only work at a few clinics working with athletes and then you do a whole residency where you're working through that unique experience then you realize you hate it well you could have easily avoided that by doing more experiences as a medical student so find as many opportunities as you can to go ahead and be as diverse and variety packed as possible and use that to sell your angle during your interviews during your personal statements and on your letters of recommendation those guys are my various tips to help you get into a good residency program if you guys enjoyed make sure you hit that like button it tells me one that you enjoyed this piece of content you want more on tips for residency as well it just kind of helps the channel out and supports it and consider subscribing if you haven't done so already finally if you are looking for more tips for medical school as well as residency i'll link down a few resources if you're just about to start residency relatively soon then we do have something called the intern survival guide which is a nice kind of training program to make you not only somebody who is a good intern but a fabulous intern so that'll be linked down below in case you guys are interested i'll link down a below a few other videos that we have on residency and applying for residency as well thank you guys so much for making it to the end of the video i really appreciate your support hopefully i've been a little help to you on your journey thanks for being a part of mine see you guys in the next one peace


So reading quickly has to have some kind of system. System I use in medical school was go through a few paragraphs of a whole section and mark the parts that I would consider to be important. Then either after my reading was all done, usually with the case, or during that section of paragraphs, I would come back and write questions on the margin or convert those into a word doc. Then that means I have my questions for the part that I read. And this way, each time I wasn't going from note-taking to writing it on my word doc, I was getting to the reading, I indicate what's important and come back and convert those either into notes or any questions I could use later.