This is our look at the health care marketplace policy changes. This is for permanent open enrollment for subsidies for eligible Vermonters. So, Sean, I've got you first. Is that the way it should go? Are you going to explain this? That sounds great. I'm happy to do that. Sean, Sean, she has senior policy and implementation analyst from the Department of Vermont Health Access. Thank you all for your time. Looking forward to the conversation. Sean, is this like an official request from the state? This I think is more, we're more here. I think out of, I think, partnership and cooperation, this particular rule that we'll be discussing when we reached out in the fall, we weren't sure whether it needed to be dealt with in statute or rule. We've since gotten clarification from the feds that it's fine to deal with in the rulemaking process. So, we wanted to share that with this committee, obviously. Probably best if we understand, because I'm going to get a thing asking me if it complies with legislative intent. It'd be good to know that. All right. Absolutely. So, I think to take a step back, I think most of the committee is familiar with our health insurance marketplace from Vermont Health Connect at a high level. But just to set the stage, open enrollment is the period we're in right now. In past years, it ran through December 15th. This year, the feds extended it through January 15th and Vermont followed suit. So, it runs through this Saturday. Open enrollment is the time that anybody can sign up for health and dental plans through the marketplace. Okay. This is. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. The reason why, under the Affordable Care Act, they set up a period of open enrollment and not have people be able to sign up any time of year was due to adverse selection. I caught on on Friday's session, you were talking about adverse selection. So, good timing to be all primed on that front. Well, I'm having chest pain, so I think I'll go get health insurance scenario. Exactly. Yeah. The idea that if you're feeling healthy, why spend money on health insurance, wait until you get sick and then sign up for health insurance then. So, in order to prevent that, is why under the Affordable Care Act, they set up open enrollment period, the time of year you could sign up. But outside of open enrollment, there are going to be times and occasions where you need health insurance, and they're not trying to play games, they're not trying to only get the health insurance when they need it. So, we have special enrollment periods. Usually, special enrollment periods have been tied to life events. For example, if you change jobs and your old job offered employer-sponsored insurance and your new job doesn't, that would be a life event that would give you 60 days to be able to enroll in a plan through the marketplace. Similarly, if you move into the state of Vermont, you obviously wouldn't have had, you move in in April, you obviously wouldn't have had Vermont health insurance during an open enrollment time. Or, if you're on Medicaid and you're found ineligible for Medicaid, you would likewise have 60 days to enroll in a qualified health plan. Now, what's different about this particular special enrollment period is that it wouldn't be tied to a life event per se. It would be tied to an income level. The federal government is looking at, or is for this year moving, to have a permanent special enrollment period for people whose income is up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level. Medicaid covers you up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level in most cases. So they were looking at people whose income is just over Medicaid levels to be able to come in. Their rationale for that was, in large part, that the subsidies that people who are just over the Medicaid level can get, particularly under the American Rescue Plan. Are so high that you can have that option of getting zero premium health plans. So if you're not signed up for health insurance, it's not because you're trying to save money by not buying a plan, because you could get a zero premium plan. And that takes care of adverse selection there. That was the federal government's rationale. They're adopting that for the federal marketplace, but states that run their own health insurance marketplace, as Vermont does, has the discretion of whether they want to follow suit with this rule and if they want to adopt it on a different timeline or different parameters. In Vermont, we think it would be better to go for, we're looking at a 200 percent upper threshold rather than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. So 200 percent equates to an individual earning up to about $25,000. Up to about $18,000 you'd be on Medicaid. And so rather than being that just 18 to 20,000 or so, it gives you 18 to 25,000. Family of four, 200 percent of the federal poverty level is up to just over $50,000 income. And the rationale here are a few fold. One in Vermont, because we have the additional state subsidy, the Vermont premium assistance, that means that people at a slightly higher income can still get a zero premium plan, a zero premium enhanced over plan with low out-of-pocket costs up to closer to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, whereas nationally with just the federal tax credit, it would be around 150 percent. So that adverse election, actually we can go higher in Vermont, number one. Number two, currently and for the last almost two years under this public health emergency, we haven't been running Medicaid redeterminations. We're not allowed to for the federal government leaving people on Medicaid, even if they would be income or otherwise ineligible. But when the public health emergency ends, we'll be restarting those redeterminations. During those times, there's typically a lot of normal times, which I'm not sure will be a normal time this year, but as we approach normal and get back to redeterminations, there is a lot of churn as people's income is not constantly at Medicaid levels.  This measure would allow people who go off Medicaid, maybe if they've moved and they don't get the mail or the redetermination letters or if they don't open their mail. As is often the case, they find out that they don't have insurance when they go to a provider for their annual checkup. If they qualify for Medicaid, they can roll right back on. If they don't in the past, they haven't been able to. This will allow people even with income significantly more than that Medicaid level to come right in and get that health plan. So that's the gist of the proposal. We believe it would be good for Vermonters, help increase the number of Vermonters who have access to health insurance. We don't think it'll be an adverse selection issue for the reasons I said. And it also would help because it would help the state's healthcare system draw down more federal dollars because these folks are the folks that draw down the most federal premium tax credits. Okay, Senator, any questions? Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you, Mr. Sheehan, for your testimony. Just a question. It's at the start of your testimony, you made the distinction between an open enrollment period and a special enrollment period. And you said essentially, Debo was making the recommendation to allow, based on this new federal allowance, to allow a special enrollment period for people up to 200% of poverty. Is there a period or is it just all year round would be a special enrollment period? Yeah, that's a great question, Senator Hardy. And thank you for clarifying that. Senate special enrollment period is probably, maybe not the greatest term for that reason because the other special enrollment periods, as I mentioned, are tied to life events, generally are a 60-day finite window. This, I guess you could call this an income-based open enrollment, permanent open enrollment period, would maybe be another way of calling it. The Feds are calling it a year-round special enrollment period, but essentially, yeah. Every day is a special day. Every day is a special day, right? Yeah, the idea being that it's tied to income, rather than, so if your income goes above 200%, it's no longer a special day for you. But it would be, as I may not have been as clear as well as this is open enrollment period is something that's specific to the private insurance and to the qualified health plans on the marketplace as distinct from Medicaid. If your income is at a Medicaid eligible level, you can sign up at any time of year. So this is sort of bridging that gap, making a bridge between Medicaid and qualified health plans in the sense of making these folks who have an income in between Medicaid and higher qualified health plans, allowing them to enroll any time of year similar to way folks who are eligible for Medicaid can. Okay, if that makes sense. Thank you for that clarification. You're welcome. Okay, any other questions at this point? Okay, we're gonna move on to Michael Fisher. I'm sure you hate this, Michael. What could I hate about this, Senator? Mike Fisher, healthcare advocate. Thank you for taking this time to understand this. And I think this is gonna be a moment of broad agreement, I hope. I think everything that Diva just said is something that the healthcare advocates can, office can get broadly behind. We think this is a good change and a change that will really help out a set of remunters. And just a brief reminder that, no surprise here, this is a particularly difficult time for families. And the coming transition, currently there's no redeterminations happening in Medicaid, that's gonna change and families are not going to be used to that. So we think this flexibility will be, again, for those folks who are under 200% of the federal poverty level, who have precious few options, we think this will be a good option for them. And it will certainly provide a little bit of good news for my advocates as they're helping people maneuver through this system. So a brief to keep with your, keeping it brief to keep with your timeline, we support this. Questions for Michael? Okay, we'll move on to Sarah Teach-Out. Good afternoon, Chair Cummings and the rest of the committee. Sarah Teach-Out with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Vermont. And I'm happy to tell you that Blue Cross supports expanding the special enrollment period for low-income families. We believe this will be quite meaningful to the few families that it'll apply to every year and will help with health equity in the state of Vermont. So we're happy to support it. I think I don't need to get into any of the arguments because Sean was quite good at explaining to you what this does. And I think our experience with the COVID-19 special enrollment periods gave us a lot of comfort that this will have a pretty minimal impact on the marketplace. So happy to answer questions. If you have them, I'm just here in support. Wow. This is moving along. Okay, Chuck Storrow. Good afternoon, committee. Chuck Storrow, Lienine Public Affairs here on behalf of MVP Healthcare. And, you know, for all the reasons that the previous witnesses have explained MVP also supports Divas proposal. Okay, any questions, Senator Hardy? This is not a question for Chuck, although thank you, Chuck and Sarah. It's actually, I think for Sean, maybe. Okay.  Are you all, Deva is proposing a rule? Is that my understanding? Is that correct? Or is there something we need to do? Yeah, it's a piece that we can handle through the rulemaking process. I think we wanted to involve the legislature for feedback. And obviously there's a number of ways it could go, but it would be consistent to do it through the rulemaking process in Elkhari. We're prepared to do that. Okay, great. I think when this started, if I understood you, Sean, it wasn't clear that it could go through rules. That's correct.  So we put it on the agenda so that we all understand it. And if anyone doesn't like it, they had a chance to say they didn't like it. Okay, so when that little sheet of paper comes in from Demis, I can tell, or Charlene, I can tell her that we're all happy. All right, thank you, everyone. This has been helpful. Committee, we are way ahead of schedule. And I am not sure where to go with this, even though I thought I was leaving early trying to get out of here at five minutes of four. We have a whole extra hour, which I'm sure none of you would mind having. And they're coming. Yes. Pardon me, this is Faith. Would you like to do governors appointees? Have we just got them to hand out? I sent them to you. You sent them to me. All right, let me find my emails. Do you know approximately when you sent them to me? No, that's next week's agenda. Hey, I'll resend it. I sent it yesterday. Yeah, oh, well, since I haven't gotten much time to work on my emails, you're probably a hundred down in here. I just sent it. You just sent it. All right, I've still got Andrew as my top email, but it is updating. Oh, here it is. Okay. I think Senator Brock knows all the nominees. Okay, we'll just let him do it. Okay, the first one I've got is Riley Allen to the Public Utility Commission. This Senator Bray, you wanna do Riley? Sure, I'll do Riley for a long time. I've known him too. The second one is Peter Gregory of Heartland to the State Infrastructure Bank Board. Have I got anybody? Senator McSarachan, you'll do that one. Faith, you're writing this down. And did they happen to send us contact information this year, or like every year, do we have to ask for it? I'm writing it down and I have the contact information for you. Okay, great, so you can get that out to us. We're making progress after 10 years. I've got Karen Hale of Lindenville to the Vermont Economic Development Authority. Senator Hardy, you wanna take that one? Carolyn Carpenter of Salisbury of the Vermont Economic Development Authority. You'll do that, okay. Yes, I know, Carolyn, thank you. I'll take her. Okay. That's it. All right, we should be getting more. And I'm assuming we finished ours up. If I remember, we got them being just under the gun last year. So- A couple that were late, but I think we got them done during a special session. Okay, we can double check on that, but it's probably best if we do them early. Cause, yeah, this year, I am just anticipating things being really hard and it's hard because a lot of things are not gelling yet. We are going to get in to the waiting study. We're still, we're waiting on the governor's budget address because we understand there'll be several more tax proposals in there other than the ones we got in the property tax. And we got a bill today to make federal civil servants, pensions, tax-free. I know about anybody else, but I would expect that the state employees might be a little upset if we did that for the feds and not for them. And right now, I'm not sure I want to touch anything that has to do with state or, employees, public employees and retirement. We have a touchy balance right now. Senator Bray. Yeah, you know, I mean, this is an ongoing challenge, right? We have military pensions. So then federal pensions, then it could be state employee pensions. And the irony is that I get it. We may not score well on some sort of, sheet compared to some other states that provide for exemptions, but I think the reality is for most of our constituents, they're not, they are less well off than the people receiving these payments. So every time we do this or consider doing this, it's to the detriment, I think of sort of the average Vermonter who's going to be asked to pick up the slack. And now maybe we're, you know, some people make that kind of like the remote recruitment of workers. Maybe someone will tell me it's cash flow positive to give these exemptions, but I don't know. There's no work retirement and I don't know that federal civil servants retire early and work afterwards. Senator Brock. Well, I would repeat what I've said, I think in prior years while this has been on the table, I think that military retirement is different. I think that there is a, in the public, a belief that this is a wise thing to do. We're one of only three states that does not do that. And we're losing labor. And if we look at this as an economic development tool, and I hope to be able when I hope this comes off the wall to at least have a brief discussion about it, to be able to provide some facts and figures that show that this is in fact a revenue positive thing in a state where we have this severe shortage of workers. Okay. I think we did establish with the tax commissioner, however, that most of these exemptions went in in the early fifties when we were all feeling very patriotic for our returning soldiers. However, the bill didn't come due for another 20 years. Vermont did a deduction on your home value, a $2,000 deduction, which was significant when homes were selling for 20, 15, 13, $10,000 a year in that timeframe. And that exemption when it didn't go away, it's just you usually do better under act 60 paying on your income rather than taking that deduction. But it isn't like Vermont did nothing. We put our money where our mouth was early on and we did do something. So I'm not going to feel guilty. And we can move forward. I just have a hard time. We have police officers that have to retire at 55. And we're not exam. I think most firefighters retire early. And we are not doing anything for their pensions. And they do serve us. So. Senator Hardy. How do we get here? I moved around. I don't know. I'm just following our course of discussion. Because you mentioned a bill and then it mentioned. But I just wanted to weigh in and say, I agree with you in that center, Brock. I believe we asked the tax commissioner for data last year. And he didn't have any that supported the notion that it was. That it was both a. Draw for retired military retirees or an economic benefit for the state there. He had no data. So maybe. Had no data. And that's what I hope to be able to present to you as data. Okay. Well, if you have it, I would be interested in seeing it. We will have the tax commissioner in. Once all the governor's proposals are out. And we will. And there's a few more floating around. So we're going to take a look at all of them. Before plus. I'm trying to tie down. What if I, what our revenue. What our traditional, they call it the alligator jar, but the traditional track between our base revenues and our base expenses. And they're waiting. They want to see the new Tom. They want to see the new tax proposals. They want to see the new tax proposals. They want to see the forecast and they want to see. All the governor's tax proposals. But as we are going to start with the. Income. Property. Yeah. Property tax based on income. School. An income based school funding. But I'm trying to get all that information out there. I'm trying to get as many of the newer bills on and out. I'd like to get Rige either out or decide. We're not putting it out as soon as possible. So we can move forward. We can move forward. We can move forward. But it's just getting it all together at this point. We obviously have a lot of new people. At joint fiscal. So. That's. Part of what. We're struggling with, with the agenda. So I'm going to try and get as many of the newer bills on and out so we can move forward. So Senator Hardy. Yeah, I just wanted to say tomorrow I'm going to be briefly talking to you all about the pupil waiting. Stuff and what, what. Your thoughts are and. What information you need. So if you can be thinking about that about what you're going to do with. The budget and the costs and the weights or cost equity payments. That part of the program. The poverty measure. And the. The evaluation mechanism. The ELL grants is starting in the. Education committee. And then would probably come over to us when they're done with it, just so you know that. But if you can think about it, you all need. Senator Brock and I spent six months on this and so I'm sure we'd both rather not go over every single thing again, but we want to make sure that you have the information you need to understand the proposal in a way to the Lord. Yeah, this one is momentous. I mean, this is a once we haven't looked at weights and I don't know, not in my time in the Senate. So that means it's been a lifetime. They've preceded act 60. They've been in since oh, yeah, formula. So so they may even precede Senator McDonald. So we will be getting all the information we can on that one. And then kind of as a discussion out of that is is the property tax. So we'll be looking at that. The other thing I'm sure they're still trying to calculate is the impact on the now that we seem to have an agreement on pensions, finding out what that impact is on the ed fund. So we may have less of a surplus than we thought we had. And then depending on what we do on waiting that could have an impact on the ed fund. And so we're going to need to get all of that out there. Because at some point, we're going to set a yield or a tax rate. I still can't understand the yield. We're going to set a tax rate. At some point this year, Senator Pearson. Madam Chair, when do we get the updated forecast? Tom Kovett is coming in. This week or next week, Faith, I think it's Friday. It's Friday. And there's an eboard meeting in the morning. We'll set the revenue figures for the budget. And then Tom Kovett is coming in. And weeks ago, I got an announcement that maybe it's just legislative, maybe it's committee chairs can meet with him at eight o'clock in the morning. But we will have him in after the eboard to walk us through all his economic projections and where he thinks things will be going. He usually doesn't do a formal five-year forecast, but definitely is part of this. He's looking at what's likely to happen. And I think right now where we seem to be swimming in federal money, the question is what is going to happen? Where are we when the federal money goes away? Given the Build Back Better bills progress in Congress, I'm not going to start spending any major federal logistics, except maybe on roads and bridges, which will make transportation very happy. But I think we've probably gotten the big slug. Hopefully the economy will get a slug from infrastructure, but we will find that out.


I think it's time to get started. Welcome, everybody. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of CNI, and you've joined us for one of the project briefing sessions for our Spring 2020 virtual meeting. I'm delighted you're with us, and we'll be doing a presentation. Our speaker is Jamie Wittenberg from Indiana University, and I'll say a word about her topic and turn it over to her in a moment. We will take questions at any point that you'd like to enter them through the Q&A tool down at the bottom of your screen. So feel free to queue up questions as they occur to you during the presentation, and we'll deal with all the questions at the end of the presentation. When Jamie's finished, Diane Goldenberghardt from CNI will appear and will moderate the Q&A. So with that, let me just say this is, I think, a very timely presentation. And we have had a lot of underscoring of the importance of research data management throughout the current emergency, and indeed throughout the last few years of developments. Two of the biggest challenges are understanding what the right infrastructure we need to support that is and how to deal with it at scale given the enormous demand among our researchers. And so I think this will be a very timely and helpful presentation. Thank you for agreeing to do it, Jamie, and over to you. Thank you, Cliff, and thanks to everyone for being here during this difficult time. I think, Cliff's right that this is in many ways timely, especially as we start thinking about how we can consolidate resources and provide access in a more robust way to some of the resources that we have in our libraries. I'm going to talk today about a project called the Cadre Project, the Collaborative Archive and Data Research Environment. And I'm going to start by just outlining the problem for you. Oh, if I can advance this slide. Here we go. And the real dilemma here, and I think this is a problem that's familiar to many of us in research libraries is that we aren't able or historically haven't been able to provide sustainable standardized access to licensed data sets or often to large open data sets for text and data mining. And there are a few reasons for this. A lot of us are actually doing the purchasing. So we're acquiring large licensed data sets for our research communities, but few of us have adequate infrastructure to support it. And it's really not just about storage, about where we sort of put the data sets, but it's also about access. So how do we get the researchers to the data in a way that facilitates exploration and advances their research while also implementing requirements in our licenses and our data use agreements? And many of our researchers have text and data mining needs that aren't being met because we haven't been able to provide consistent and standardized access to these resources. One of the big reasons for this is that for a lot of licensed data sets in high demand, we really can't just, you know, purchase it and put it on a shelf or make it accessible. We need to run annual updates. We have to curate the data. We need to find a way to implement authentication to ensure that only, you know, the patrons that should have access to it do have access to it. Sometimes do education and instruction around what's allowable under the licenses. And in some cases even review derivatives that researchers are creating. And in order to actually implement a model for this at a broad scale, even at a university scale, it's really cost prohibitive for most individual libraries to try to develop and implement this. It requires expertise and technology and neither of those things are cheap. And it's simply just not financially feasible for most research libraries to build and staff and enclave and hire a data steward and run these updates regularly working with researchers to analyze these data sets without violating the terms of the license. So this is true of licensed data sets and large open data sets, you know, that might be too big to download on an average laptop or computer. And a lot of researchers who could benefit from text and data mining, our library acquired and open resources aren't able to do so unless they have a graphical user interface. So often when researchers are working on these data sets, the only way to really do it is to code or build their own databases. And so these aren't, you know, accessible resources to researchers that prefer or are only able to do research using a GUI or don't have the ability to analyze a data set in Python or R. And this means that the majority of our users can't use the resources even if it benefits them. So our solution, Cadre, is a cloud-based platform that provides secure access to library licensed data sets, essentially a science gateway. IU decided to address this problem, writing a proposal to IMLS and asking for funding to build a shared solution. We call it Cadre. And while it's not feasible for individual libraries often to build out large data support, we think that as a community it is possible. So what we set out to do is build a science gateway in the cloud that can support a range of licensed and open data sets. And these are two of the data sets that this platform currently supports, Web of Science and Microsoft Academic Graph. We are seeding it with bibliometric data sets because they're important to researchers in information science and science of science communities. The Clare of it, now Web of Science group, Web of Science data set, enables us to really pilot the platform with a large licensed data set. And Microsoft Academic Graph allows us to do it with an open data set. We also added the USPTO, USPAT and Trademark Office data set to our server in October. And all three data sets are currently available to Cadre users. So by sharing the cost of this solution across a lot of academic libraries, we've been able to build and provide a solution at a lower cost to members and make this platform free, build a free tier for non-members. And the cost is really a fraction of what it would be to provide this kind of service alone. And because we have support from research libraries with the most active users, it allows us to provide that free tier of service. Right now we're working with libraries as you can see here in this project partner slide in the Big Ten Academic Alliance because we are seeding the platform with a data set that has a consortially negotiated license. So the BTAA negotiated a license for all BTAA members with Web of Science group. The project is being led by the IU Libraries, IU Network Science Institute and BTAA with support from the libraries at Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Rutgers along with three out of the four Big Data HUDs, Microsoft Research and Web of Science group. So we do have a graphical user interface, as I mentioned before, and custom computational resources, space to share a marketplace to share queries and algorithms, drive data results, that kind of thing. I think it's important to note that anyone is able to use the platform. So not just researchers who are expert in navigating Big Data sets. And actually right now, not just researchers at all, anyone can use this platform. So users can query the data sets and do their analysis within the platform in the cloud. There's a suite of tools for analysis that are preloaded. And then when they're done, they can save their queries and push their derivatives, ideally to a library repository or another kind of repository for dissemination. And they can run those queries across collections of data sets. So we've already aggregated Microsoft academic graph data and Web of Science data. So bibliometrics researchers, for example, have a larger source of citations to work from that are already joined. This is our project leadership group. The project is led by myself and my co-PIs, Patty Mabry at Health Partners Institute, Val Penche, and Sharon Yan at the IU Network Sciences Institute, and Rob VanRenis at the Big Ten Academic Alliance. And the platform has a sort of series of characteristics that I would say define it and make it sort of unique. So it's cloud-based and it provides secure access. It's specifically designed for library-licensed data sets and open non-consumptive data sets. Before we started development, we collected a series of use cases from potential users and users of an early prototype that was built by the IU Network Science Institute to ensure that the product we did end up developing really met the needs of university libraries in particular and the researchers who would use these resources. Because this is a shared service, we are able to begin rolling out tiered memberships, and what that means is that smaller institutions who cannot afford to participate in membership are still able to access the platform and use the open resources on it in a way that sort of supports this kind of data analysis that their institutions are for them individually. And the project is really committed to making sure that our workflows support both the library-licensed data sets and analysis as well as the open data sets and analysis. Our access to our data sets is standardized and we do our best to work from shared standards to ensure reproducibility. This is something that the project team has been investigating throughout the course of the grant. How can we enable researchers to share their output and their queries in a research asset commons, a sort of medium-term storage space? I wouldn't call it a repository, but it's not quite a scratch space either. It's a marketplace for sharing and collaborating research output. How do we ensure that, you know, when Microsoft Academic Graph is being updated every two weeks, researchers who are interested in reproducing some of these queries are still able to do that in the future. And so there's some exciting research that's happening there to support reproducibility. And finally, user-friendly graphical user interface and other tools enables our users to query data sets in a way that's really accessible for long-tail researchers or researchers who don't have the capability to code. We've received some great feedback on that feature especially from researchers who might not traditionally be doing text or data mining as part of their research, but who can really benefit from it. So this is how it works. You log into the platform from, you know, any institution. You can use your in-house credentials. So, excuse me, I have a cat interrupting me here. You can then access the data sets, both, well, all three of our major data sets now, Microsoft Academic Graph, Web of Science, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office data. You can use the GUI query builder to query big data sets, and that GUI looks a lot like what a user would expect when doing something like, you know, running an advanced search in Web of Science. And you can build your own data analysis and visualization tools so you can analyze the results with shared tools and with open tools, and then you can reproduce your work and share it with other researchers. I won't go into this too much. This is a model of our product, but you can see that these key features of authentication and authorization make it possible for us to seed the platform with library licensed resources, and that we are working to integrate computation and storage infrastructure that meets our user's needs. We don't have a full index of all of the tools that will be available in the product yet, but we are working with our early adopters and alpha users to determine what will be made available, and that will be a sort of iterative process as well. Right now, I want to draw your attention to a new cohort that we have developed, a research cohort for the study of coronaviruses. In response to the recent global pandemic, we've opened up a fellowship program, a special fellowship program, for those who are working on coronavirus-related research. We're calling it the RCSC program, and we're currently accepting proposals to join. This program essentially provides access not only to the data sets that I already discussed, but also the COVID-19 open research data set, which is a national library medicine data set. If applicants are approved to join this cohort, they will have full access to all of our tools, as well as free computing resources, technical support, and the ability to present their research. We have an existing fellowship program that was closed to applications, and we reopened it specifically for this special fellowship program, but I want to take a minute to talk about some of our other research fellows. In early 2019, we opened up this research fellowship, and we had eight fellowship teams across disciplines that discussed really compelling research proposals incorporating big data and bibliometrics. They traveled with our project team to the international conference on scientific metrics and infometrics in Rome in 2019 and are presenting their work in a series of webinars throughout 2020. These research fellows have enabled us to collect really detailed user stories for our product and are doing some really interesting work using the platform and the data sets that it makes available. This first team is from Purdue University, and they're looking at citation of data in STEM education resources in STEM education research, assessing rates of citation for data sets and analyzing a sample of data citations and publications to figure out whether they can help evaluate the relevance of these data sets for reuse, and they're using both Microsoft academic graph and Web of Science for this. This research team understanding citation impact of scientific publications through Ego-centered citation networks is researching network-based citation measurements in the sciences. They're looking at the citation impact of scientific publications using an Ego-centered citation network, so that contains the citing relationships between a publication and its citing publications, and they're using Web of Science and Microsoft academic graph data for this research as well, and are giving a presentation on it as part of our fellow series on June 17th, if you're interested in that. This project team from Michigan State University is building upon a report navigating the structure of research on sustainable development goals, and they're looking at patterns of global collaboration and support for the UN's sustainable development goal call for action, so essentially they're designing a prototype that will analyze and visualize partnerships over time in sustainable development goal supportive research, and they are also using Web of Science and Microsoft academic graph data. They'll be presenting their research on April 29th at 3 p.m. if you're interested in that fellowship group. We also have this highly collaborative fellowship group measuring and modeling the dynamics of science using the cadre platform, and they're trying to better characterize the influence of scientific papers, which of course is usually measured by citation rate, and they're interested in distinguishing between papers that destabilize existing knowledge with new or novel concepts and papers that are consolidating existing knowledge. They're using citation data from Web of Science and Microsoft academic graph for that. These IU Bloomington and University of Warsaw researchers are trying to determine the impact of the introduction of long-distance flights on international scientific collaboration, which I think is particularly interesting and relevant right now, and they're measuring collaboration through co-authorship and co-affiliation here, and they're using Web of Science and Microsoft academic graph data from 1998 through 2017 for this. We have this cohort from the University of Michigan and the University of Michigan Medical School doing a comparative analysis on papers published in math and biology legacy journals and on newer journals with different publication models. They're trying to use our cadre data sets to develop methodologies for comparative bibliometrics and content analyses for these and provide insight into publication trends and theoretical and applied domains here. We also have this research group of one, Samuel Hansen from the University of Michigan, who is using reference and citation, aging and bibliographic coupling and network breadth and depth to try to find similarities and differences between research fields in the maths and the sciences, and he's using Web of Science data from 1900 to 2017 for this analysis, so quite a broad range of data there. We also have a final fellowship group that joined us a bit late in our fellowship program and we were really excited to bring them on. They're from Ohio State and their topic is Assessing the Rise of China as a Scientific Nation. So their project is providing an assessment of the nature of China's publications in science and engineering over the past two decades and they're examining the published scholarship from China including case studies and macro overviews looking at impact and collaborations that are involved in China's rise and they're using Web of Science and Microsoft academic graph data here. They have already presented as part of our webinar series on April 6th and a recording of that presentation is available on their resources page of our website. These are the upcoming presentations that I mentioned earlier. So before I wrap up and address some of your questions, I wanted to just touch on what's next. We're working on a sustainability and governance model for how this platform will continue. We have commitment from our existing members for the next few years and we're interested in expanding our cadre membership beyond the Big Ten academic alliance and determining what new data sets we can add to the platform that would support, you know, big data research essentially at large academic libraries. You can contact us by email, find us on Twitter or access our website to find instructions for logging in to the alpha implementation of our platform or looking through our many resources that includes documentation for all the data sets I talked about. Thank you, Jamie. That was really interesting and not surprisingly our first question has to do with access to the platform. So Emily Gore is asking, is the cadre platform itself open source? Are any other libraries or consortia using or planning to adopt the platform? If so. I'm so glad you asked that Emily. I should have mentioned it. Yes, the platform itself is open source. Everything is available on GitHub and you can access all of our materials on GitHub by going to our website, cadre.iu.edu and you'll find the link there. As far as I know, other libraries or consortia are not planning on adopting a platform in that they're not planning on downloading our open source software from GitHub and standing it up themselves, but we have gotten a lot of interest from other universities in joining our membership model and using our hosted version of the platform. Great. Thanks, Jamie. And thank you for that question. We do have another question that's come in from Monica McCormick and Monica asks, can the platform be used to conduct institutional research? I can think of lots of ways my university wants to mine that data but not necessarily for big data scholarship as much as institutional activities. Is that kosher? Thank you for that question, Monica. A great question. I don't think I am in a position to say whether or not that's kosher from an institutional perspective but certainly from the cadre perspective that is acceptable and encouraged. I can give you an example. One of the use cases, one of our early use cases was an institutional data use case and librarians in the big time academic alliance were interested in determining what their over calling shadow acquisition budget was. So what researchers on the campuses were paying in article processing charges to have open access publications made available in gold open access journals. And they used web of science data in cadre to analyze who the corresponding authors were, what institutions they were a part of, what journals they were publishing in and what the cost of that article processing charge was to determine that figure with the idea that that data might help inform transformative agreement negotiation. Interesting. Okay. Thanks. Thanks, Jamie. And Monica says excellent example. Thanks. And thanks for that excellent question, Monica. So the floor is still open for questions and we've got time for a few more. If you have a question for Jamie, please feel free to type it into the Q&A and we'll fill that live or you can type it into the chat box. We also have the ability to turn on your microphone. So if you would like to make a comment or engage directly with Jamie, if you want to just raise your virtual hand, I can see that and I can turn on your microphone and we can hear your comment or question live. And while we're waiting to see if we have any other questions from our audience, I actually see that we have, Clifford would like to ask a question. So I'm going to step back and Cliff ask a question. Thank you. I thought this one would be easier to ask than type. I'm wondering how you're handling the provisioning of the analysis from a computational point of view. It would seem to me that users could certainly come to this with some things they want to explore that would take quite a lot of computer cycles. Are you recharging them or how are you managing that? So the technical details of that are a better question for my technical lead, Val Penchev, than for me and I'm happy to have him follow up with you. I will say that right now we are exploring what kind of usage our fellows and our platform users need in order to determine how we will continue offering service in our sustainability model. Cloud computing is expensive and I think that going forward we are looking at models for enabling users to use the cloud computing credits or time that we have purchased as part of the project or potentially connecting to local resources at their own institutions depending on what kind of access they'll need. That's interesting because I've seen a couple of other experiments trying to set up these kinds of reference data sets that can be used by a whole community and often those are being put in the cloud essentially with an interface but then you use your own account and instantiate your own virtual machine to host the computation if it's significant. I will say the major contribution or I should say the bulk of the contribution that we've received from our partner institutions in terms of financial support has been funding for cloud computation so it is and besides staffing I would say one of the more expensive components of this project and we are looking at models for how we will continue to be able to sustain that going forward but one thing that has been pretty clear is that the more members we have that are participating the less expensive it becomes for everyone involved. Fascinating thank you. Thank you. Very interesting. Thanks Jamie. Well while we're waiting to see if we've got any more questions coming in we do have a minute or so left I just want to remind everyone that this webinar is part of CNI's spring 2020 virtual membership meeting we're glad you could join us and just sharing with you there and chat a direct link to the complete schedule for the rest of our offerings which runs through May so we hope that you'll join us we have a couple more sessions coming up this week two more tomorrow on IIIF and ARCS in the open 3.2 billion persistent identifiers and we'll have another one on Friday on immersive scholar development documentation display and dissemination of experiential research and scholarship so lots more to come well with that I think we're right at about time and I don't see any more questions come in so Jamie I just want to thank you again for sharing your really interesting and important work here at CNI thanks so much for being a part of the program we really much appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me yes many thanks this is fascinating work and thank you for sharing it with us indeed and thanks so much to our attendees for making time to be with us here we hope we'll see you back at another webinar soon and have a great day and be well bye bye


We're excited this next week to be celebrating the Army's 247th birthday. Our Army has been around for a year prior to the Declaration of Independence, and next week we're going to celebrate that birthday with our soldiers here throughout the week, with some runs, with some cake cuttings, and with a ball here at the installation to make sure that we're able to proudly look back on our heritage of 247 years of service to the nation. The United States Army Aviation Center of Excellence drives change by building adaptive leaders who are ready to join the operational force and adjust to whatever circumstances they find themselves in to make sure that our aircraft are combat ready and ready to serve the nation. Army aviation is an inherently dangerous profession, and so because of the high stakes of what we do, flying helicopters in combat, we put a high premium on making sure that we train safety all the time. One of the things the Chief of Staff of the Army says is that we recruit soldiers, but we retain families, and something that's very important to us here at Fort Eustis is that we have soldiers that have a good quality work-life balance. So our soldiers work hard when they're here at work, but we also work hard to make sure that we give them predictability, that we communicate well with families, and that we've got great activities for the families who are here so that our soldiers can have a great time while they're at work and their families can feel well supported and like their valued members of the community when they're off work as well.


How do you pronounce and-a-duh? Doesn't N at the end of that. Hold on, hold on. And-a-hun-duh-hun.  I'm Corbin, and this is Rick-duh. If you're new to our channel, go and smash the like button, subscribe, and ring that little bell to be part of the notification squad. And please follow us on Instagram, and Twitter, and message us. A lot of you already have been. Yeah, you have just taken the blow by the horn, haven't you? Send us messages non-stop. My phone is just blowing up, and you know we're in different time zones a lot of the time, most of the time, all the time.  And so today, we'll be reacting to, um- And-a-duh. How do you pronounce it? I think it's and-a-duh. No, that's just dumb. It's and-a-duh-duh. There aren't 2Ds. There's only 2Ds in the whole word. And-a-duh-duh-duh. And-a-duh-duh. Here's our reaction. Here we go. Like a lot of twists. Oh yes, it started off feeling like whiplash. Yeah. And la la land combined with no musical numbers. Yeah. And then it turned into some kind of a weird twisted- Yeah, that was- Great trailer! Yeah, I had him go, SUPRA!  Looks great. Yeah, that was I think one of the my favorite trailer absolutely one of my favorite one of my favorites 22 million views So now now I know why so many people are bugging us to see this one. Yeah, yeah, sorry, we're getting to him. We are getting to him If you've seen that If you've commented on every video we still haven't gotten to it just know there are a million that people have recommended That's true, and there are many who request stuff now But you need to just go back into the library like we've done 2.0. We've done zero We've done Bahubali. So yeah, yeah, but yeah, this one looks really really cool. We might actually watch this one I bet it's already on like Amazon. Yeah, it came out because we haven't done a review yet For we haven't seen one of these all the way through to see a movie and we've seen scenes That's all let us know what should it be this one should be this maybe should it be Something else what should it be? That would be good. It's either this Something else


We'll be really in two parts. You heard from Andrea Parmigiani that Vladimir was a person with very broad interests, which ranged over everything, and particular soft matter physics. So the first part of my talk, I'm going to try to do a little bit of intellectual archaeology. I'm going to try to find a strange which contributed to the theory you just heard from Sergei, the Loreman Rochelle theory, from the viewpoint of soft matter physics. I'm a soft metaphysicist. So maybe it's irrelevant, maybe not. It's just the way how I look at it and how I like to think about his theory. It will involve a little bit of mathematics, but do not be afraid, OK? We'll just take it easy. In the second part, I'm going to try to think about ways how we can enrich the theory, because theories are built collectively. We put stones together, and they put up a big stone, and I'm going to try to put a little stone on top of the big stone without further. So my first contact with soft matter physics was in the form of liquid crystals, and it turns out that liquid crystals have a lot to do with this Loreman Rochelle theory for viruses. So we're going to take a big intellectual detour, but we're going to get back to viruses, I promise you. So we're going to start slower with pneumatic liquid crystals. These are the kind of things you have in your watches, which from which you can get your displays. And they have been looked at since 1888, and they've been long known. And I'm going to look at orientational phase transition. You're familiar with positional ordering, like freezing, but here it has to do with elongated molecules, which are in the shape of these cigars. In an isotropic phase, they are randomly at all orientations, and in the pneumatic phase, they have particular orientations, which causes birefringence scattering of light, and all of these nice display properties. It responds to electrical fields. That's why you can change the output. So from the viewpoint of phase transitions, you, for what's called a thermal tropic liquid crystal, as a function of temperature, you go from an isotropic phase, where these molecules point in all possible direction to this pneumatic phase. And by the way, that comes from a Greek word, which means thread. So if you look at these, you'll find nice thread-like defects. So the order parameter is 0 at high temperatures, and then there's this critical temperature where it makes a big jump. Now, not a big jump, a small jump, then it increases and saturates. So you call it the first order phase transition, associated with a discontinuous jump. Now, when this was very natural that you think of the ordering, you want to characterize the ordering with an order parameter, and you do that by just saying, well, it's the direction of these molecules double headed because it doesn't matter which direction is which. But apart from the direction, there's also a magnitude, an amplitude to what degree are they ordered. And there I was informed that you should think of it in terms of the second Legendre polynomial. Where does that come from? Second Legendre polynomial. I felt I'm a Dutch farmer that they were just trying to pull the wool over my eyes. So anyway, here you have it. Ordering is defined by this function, second Legendre polynomial. This is a 3x squared minus 1 over 2, and x here is cos theta. So the recipe, they tell you, is, well, you have to take all of these molecules, find the angle of the molecules with the ordering direction. This is the z. This is this pneumatic director. And average the cosine squared of theta. If it's isotropic, then the cosine squared of theta is 1 third and s equals 0. That's the isotropic phase. And if it's aligned along the z direction, you get 3 minus 1 is 2 divided by 2 is 1. So the order parameter goes to 1. Well, I can think of a lot of functions for which it should be true. It seems so arbitrary. I had to learn about Legendre polynomials in classes about electrostatics. And I despised them. I didn't see any reason why I should, where this has come from. There's a very nice or somewhat exotic type of pneumatic liquid crystals where you get ordering not just in one direction, but in two directions. You can think of these as molecules in the shape of books. They first align the long axis. And they can still freely rotate. But then when they order in that direction, you pick out the second one. So this is this pneumatic director as before. But now you pick another direction perpendicular to one. So biaxial, they're two axes. So they're two order parameters. The first one is the same as before, s. And we have now a new one. We call t from transverse. And that describes to what extent these molecules are ordered by having the large faces pointing in this direction or any other direction in this plane. OK, now let's see what you're told there. What you're told there by this person, Fraser, is the order parameter for s is the same as before. But now for the transverse one, you're told you have to go to the associated Legendre polynomials. Oh, OK, all right. What is that? That is 3 times 1 minus x squared p22. OK, all right. So you can do that. And yeah, you find that if you have ordering along the z direction, then it all works out. It will, this term particular, this is the complex i. This tells you. This is sort of like an x, y model. And it tells you in what direction it orders. OK, it's nothing to do with viruses, right? So this is pretty boring for you. OK, we'll get there. All right, associated Legendre polynomial, where does this come from? Well, there's a good reason. It's not all this show-off, mathematical show-off. Suppose we have a solution that molecules point in what direction. So you might start to think about viruses, densities in different directions. So we can then measure, as an experimentalist, the density of molecules along a certain spherical angle omega, and then do that for all omegas. And I get a density of molecules along a particular orientation in space. And now there is real serious mathematics, which says that, well, if you have a function which depends on the direction on the surface of a sphere, a solid angle, then you can expand this in spherical harmonics. And if you either are familiar with it, because you know about electrostatics and quantum mechanics, and you don't like them because they're messy, or you haven't seen them, and you still don't like them. So for us, just think of it as an analog of Fourier transformation, just waves. But instead of plane waves along a surface, these are like waves, sorry, along a plane. These are waves on the surface of a sphere. And you get exactly the same thing. So this is Fourier transformation of the surface of a sphere. This is a rigorous result. We call this a basis set. And so we have two indices, L and M. L can be anything from 0 to infinity. And M, called the magnetic quantum number, runs from minus L to plus L. I'll get to this part in a moment. These are simply well-known functions. And there you have our friend, the associated Legendre polynomial. That's where it comes from, from these spherical harmonics. So this is a theorem. Any function rho of omega, sufficiently smooth, under some conditions, can be expanded. And these are the expansion coefficients, just like Fourier coefficients. And that's just the order parameter, very simple. So if you have orientational ordering, then that is fully defined by this set of numbers, Q, L, M. So Q tells you what is the weight of the spherical harmonic L, M, in this expansion. And that is the order parameter. That's why these Legendre polynomials. So there's a good reason. It's not just show-off. It's a sensible choice to define your expansion in terms of these Legendre polynomials. So now we understand why they appeared in uniaxial and biaxial pneumatics. But the moment you do this, you realize that you've opened Pandora's box. An infinite number of diseases can pop out. Because nothing is going to stop you. It so happens that biaxial pneumatics correspond to L equals 2, M equals 0. Biaxial pneumatics, L equals 2. And then M equals 0, plus or minus 2. That's the non-zero terms in here. But the sky is the limit. You can go to L equals 456. Nothing stops you. So physicists, particularly in the early 80s, they climbed up this ladder to larger L. And they found that this was very popular in Israel. To look at it, there's a complex series of liquid crystals called cholesteric and blue faces, which are chiral, by the way, right? They are chiral. And they have plus or minus 1 there. So this plus or minus 1 may have something to do with chirality. OK, why should we stop at L equals 2? We press on where no one went before to L equals 4. They haven't been found in nature. But at least we can do them on the computer. They're called cubanic liquid crystals. If you make computer simulation of cubes, then before these cubes freeze, you can cook up a face with orientational order, but not positional order. This was done by Nelson and Toner. So we're slowly working towards Lorman and Rochelle. Now, this Nelson here is David Nelson. He was my post-doc mentor and very influential guy in soft matter physics. You won't miss him if you see him. He went on to L equals 6. And he shifted the paradigm, as we would say. Well, what did he do? He went away from liquid crystals, and you already heard from Sergei. It has something to do with quasi crystals. Where does that come from? Well, let's suppose that we are in a liquid close to freezing, maybe in a glassy state or in a supercool system. So particles begin to cluster. Can the FCC locally face-centered cubic or hexagonal close packed or icosahedral? Oh, icosahedral. So we imagine that we have a cluster of atoms, and I can play the same game. I can measure a density profile of this sort, rho of omega, to look at how maybe these clusters can kind of line up without positional ordering. They may have the same direction without positional ordering. And then I can do the same Fourier decomposition with server surface sphere. And I can say, well, should it be FCC, HCP, or icosahedral? And the question is, what is the best choice? Now, that question has come out earlier in the work of Alexander and McTague. And you do this with Lando theory. That's where Lando theory is. Lando theory is very good in telling you how symmetries appear. So this is left Lando in one of his younger years. I suppose he is in his 20s here, sure. OK, 50s. All right. OK, he looks young to me. So you've heard about Lando theory, and I'm going to tell you about Lando theory in the sense of quantum mechanics, a few incomprehensible rules which just seem to work. We're not going to try to justify it. Here is what left Lando tells you if you have to find out the appearance of symmetry, like, for instance, viruses. OK, rule number one. You do this with free energy, and you have to write this free energy as a sum of scalar invariance of these QLM. What does that mean? It's actually very simple. It just means that you need to write down terms which don't change if you rotate your coordinate system. You can take any coordinate system, and it shouldn't depend on how you rotate it. Makes sense, right? OK, so he says, take these scalar invariance and build them up term by term. That's how the free energy should look like. S03, that's the group of rotations. Don't just these coordinates rotations. Rule number two. That's Sergei already mentioned that. Use one irreducible representation. OK, just means pick one L. Of course, which L is a question we saw already. You can just walk down the letter. And rule number three, minimize the expression you get with respect to QLM. That's the rules. They've proven to be very useful for finding out about symmetries. So a lot can be said about these three rules, but these are the ones we're going to apply. So if you do that, then this is what you get. This looks horrible, but we'll walk you through it. This is the quadratic invariance. So here, there's no linear invariant, but the quadratic one looks like sum m equals minus L plus L. L is fixed, rule number two. And use sum of the squares. That's an invariant under rotation. Called the quadratic invariance always looks like that. It's very simple.  Here's how it looks like. Use sum over all m1, m2, and m3. And as Sergei already mentioned, m1 percent, 2 percent, 3 is 0. These are now three terms, q, m1, l, and 1, l, and 2. They're boring. These mysterious things are called Wigner 3J symbols. Now either you have had physics or chemistry. Paul, do you know about Wigner 3J symbols? Chemistry. So chemists have seen them physicists. And if you haven't, don't worry. We'll see in a moment where they come from. And finally, you get quadratic invariance. Good. These terms are W and U. They're phenomological parameters. They have to come out of some more microscopic description. But Landau informs us that close to a continuous or near-continuous transition, the free energy, when you change symmetry, must have this form. No matter how complex the system, it must be this one. Yeah, well, it's a little bit simpler way to see it by saying, well, we want to write down a free energy as a function of its density on the surface of a sphere. And well, if you do a simple Taylor expansion, there's no linear term. Because the average density is fixed by the number of particles. Then you get rho squared, rho cubed, rho to the fourth. And if you stick in this Fourier decomposition, out pops the quadratic invariant here, expansion rho, the cubic invariant here. Now you can see where this comes from because you get three spherical harmonics that you have to integrate together over the surface of a sphere. And that's exactly what this weakness 3J symbol is. And I wrote to the fourth, which is awful, so I won't show it. So here, we have the free energy we've done step number one, step number two, and we only now need to minimize with step number three. So if you do that for L equals six, remember? That's what Nelson did. It turns out the icosahedral symmetry has the lowest free energy. Hooray! We begin to understand maybe where icosahedral symmetry comes from. This is great. Here's how it looks like. You have a combination of spherical harmonics. Notice how few there are. Just one, two, three. It's only five and minus five. This is m equals zero. This is just a constant, so you can as well forget about it. I think this should be six zero. I'm sorry. This is not a constant. So this is very simple. The only thing which is left is the amplitude, the pre-factor. So L equals six is called an icosahedral spherical harmonic. It's just a linear combination of spherical harmonics which transforms as an icosahedron. And the only thing left is the pre-factor. If you stick this into the free energy, this is what you get, a simple polynomial expansion, quadratic cubic quartic. If you plot it, it looks like this. And if the minimum is at zero, then the isotropic phase is stable.  And you get a nice first-order phase transition at, well, r not necessarily zero, but somewhere near zero. Here you go from an isotropic phase, boom, first-order transition, just like for pneumatics. And there you get the icosahedral phase. Very simple. It's a first-order transition. And it's a first-order transition because like Sergei already said, there's a cubic term here. So for L equals six, you have a cubic term. It's non-zero. It's a first-order transition. So it means there's nucleation and growth and hysteresis and all the wonderful things we associate with first-order phase transitions. So this is very simple. And what's important, Nelson and company checked for the stability, meaning that you already heard from Sergei, fluctuations are important. After you find an extremum, you need to check that it's stable if you push it a little bit away from the extremum. If you push it away, it should go back. So it's a minimum. The whole possible direction in phase space, you can check it and it's stable. So that looks like a wonderful starting point to think about viruses, don't you think? But keep in mind that this is a model for a global phase transition, orientation-ordering. Viruses are very small. So it's a little bit hairy. And so now we come to this paper by Norman and Rochelle. So now we've gone over this intellectual background and here's a picture of the capsid canine parvovirus. It's the smallest, parvo means small. So this is a small virus. And Norman and Rochelle noticed that the density of these kind of viruses can be very nicely explained in terms of an expansion spherical harmonics. That's by itself, you can always do an expansion spherical harmonics because it's a complete set, so you can do it. But they noticed that this particular virus, which is a T equals one virus, can be very nicely fitted by just sticking to L equals 15. And then you need some sort of linear combination. Here you have the order parameters and here you get the spherical harmonics. So the L equals 15 icosahedral spherical harmonic, that's just like we saw for L equals six, is just a particular combination. You see the maxima here, one, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. Minimum in between, ta, ta, ta, ta. Well, you don't get all the details right, but that's okay. That might be higher order terms. So it's not bad. And I encourage you to read the paper to see how nice these simple expansions seem to explain the density of viruses. It's very interesting.  So a little bit more intellectual history. And this is Mr. Felix Klein. This is a different Klein you heard before. He lived in the 1850s. And he's the one who invented them. He was a number theorist. And the statement is that for certain L, not all L, there is a unique linear combination of spherical harmonics. You call it Y sub H. I don't know where H comes from. That transforms as a scalar under the icosahedral symmetry group or as a pseudo scalar. I'll tell you in a moment what I mean with scalar and pseudo scalar. So if you take even L, like electrical six by Nelson and the crazy crystals and super cooling, then it's even under inversion. If you go for R to minus R, then you get basically the same density. So that's electrical six. This is electrical 10. And they become progressively more complex. Then for all L you have 15, which we just discussed, 21, which Sergei discussed, 25, 27, these pseudo scalar densities because they're all under inversion. And as Sergei already mentioned, there is something interesting about it. You flip chirality. If you invert this structure, you get a different chirality. If this is left-handed, this becomes right-handed. You can kind of see it by looking at the way these triangles pointing here. The blue triangles are pointing one way and here the blue triangles are pointing in another way. So you create chiral isomers, all right? And the next thing they said is you should only use the even ones. You shouldn't, excuse me, you should only use the odd ones. Capsa densities cannot be represented by the even Ls. Why not? Well, they're made of amino acids. Proteins are made of amino acids. Amino acids have a chirality. You cannot just flip the density. The left and right-handed amino acids are different. So if you take this capsid protein, which appropriately from the Russian origin is called the sputnik, if you take this sputnik protein, then it's very different if you take left-handed and right-handed. So they concluded since capsid densities are definitely not invariant under inversion, you should only use the odd spherical harmonics. And since you're only allowed to use the odd spherical harmonics, the smallest capsid should correspond to the smallest odd icosahedral spherical harmonics, that is L equals 15. And there we have the T equals one viruses by the power of pure reason. I can guess the density, or rather they guess the density of small viruses. It's beautiful, right? Beautiful idea. So powerful virus T equals one should have a density proportional to the icosahedral spherical harmonic L equals 15. The only thing unknown is the amplitude just as before for the quasicrystals. And if you stick it into the free energy, you get a particularly simple expression. You get a quadratic part and you get a quartic part. There's no cubic part because it's made of odd L, since it's odd under inversion if you integrate over the surface of the sphere for every plus R, you get minus on the opposite side. So it cancels. So the odd terms cancel and that means you have a second order phase transition. If you now plot this amplitude as a function of R15, when it changes sign, the amplitude nicely rises from zero. Again, Sergei mentioned that already. So it's a second order phase transition and it has an interesting feature. If you lower R15 for positive, you have positive part here and then when R15 is zero but then changes sign, the positive curvature here becomes negative. So you have two minima. These two minima correspond to left and right-handed chirality. Okay. The position of the minima just follows from R15 and you. And we call this spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking. So the theory by Lorman and Rochelle has spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking coinciding with the assembly of the virus and a continuous very specific transition. Oops. I want to tell you something briefly why this is actually a very attractive picture because viral assembly shouldn't have a large barrier because you can't go over it. You rather have a continuous transition. So it's actually a very nice idea to propose that this is a continuous phase transition. So that's my understanding of the background of the Lorman-Rochelle theory. So the next part is going to see, well, questions. First is, is it a second-order transition? Keep in mind, we're only looking here at this collective assembly pathway. You heard from Mike Hagen. This is the kind of situation where we imagine a kind of disordered aggregate transitioning to an ordered system. So you can see there's a kind of orientational ordering transition from this aggregate to an ordered shell. And there are experiments. You heard about them from Bill Gelbart in UCLA. They did this for CCMV and here you see the RNA outlined. The blue here is the RNA. As you, I like the word to use titrate in because physicists have no idea what titrate in means. So here, what you do is you titrate in proteins. And when I talk to physicists, they have no, but they don't dare to say, what's titrate in? So I love to say it. You titrate in the proteins. That means you just raise the concentration. So as you do that and change the acidity, you can go from a disordered to an ordered structure. So that's the kind of transition. And another speaker at this conference, Guillaume Trissay, use fluorescent thermal shift assay and he finds it's a first-order transition. It's a little worrisome. The second thing is this spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking because the uniform state, before it orders, already is chiral, right? It's made of capsid proteins which are chiral. So the uniform state and the ordered state both are chiral, the same chirality. So you can't really have spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking if the components have a chirality. So it's like you have doing a magnetic phase transition where you have an ordering field. It's a bit of a problem. But the biggest problem for us had to do with this thermodynamic stability. So let's remember this free energy, London rule number two, which you have to minimize. Well, if you check, you'll find that this is an extremum and you still need to check that if you put little fluctuations around it, it stays at the extremum. So we took this solution of Lore-Mann and Rochelle and put a small fluctuation around it. So we said, let's perturb the order parameter in an infinitesimal way, in an arbitrary way, but we keep L equals 15 and see what happens with the free energy. Well, because this is an extremum, you don't get linear terms, but you get quadratic terms like a harmonic oscillator. And this is how it looks, no surprise. Sum over all m, m prime. And here is this delta Q. It's like a displacement away from equilibrium. And these are the coefficients, so it's like a matrix, 31 by 31. And you can show, basically by diagonalizing this, that this matrix must have positive eigenvalues. That's what thermodynamic stability means. So when we did it, and that is not easy, it was a massive numerical calculation, we computed the eigenvalues, means diagonalizing a 31 by 31 matrix, we found seven negative eigenvalues. It's a saddle point. So the Eichler-Sahid, L equals 15 state. Unlike L equals 6, it's not stable. So what is stable? What is the lowest energy state? Well, we found that in the L equals 15, it's d5. This is done by minimization using Mathematica. So we cannot prove it. We just did the best job we can by trying to search in this huge 31-dimensional space. And this is what we came up with, d5. That means that it should have one 5-fold symmetry axis. You see it here. And 5 2-fold axis, they're a little odd, because if you take this 2-fold axis, you have also to flip the density. OK, this doesn't look like a virus at all. And the horrible thing was, all odd icosahedral harmonics are unstable. Everyone we checked, at least.  We have proven by rigorous Lando theory that we shouldn't get the common cold. That's not a funny joke, right? But OK, I'll just give it. Sorry? OK, Paul, you're welcome. The Dutch are known for many things, but not for being particularly funny. OK. The only stable ones we found was 6, 10, 12, and 18. They're thermodynamically stable. Allical 16 is unstable. And we found that in the mathematical literature applied math, this is actually an active field. They studied these even L icosahedral spherical harmonics, and they discovered that instability starts with allical 16. Mr. Matthews, who turned out one of our referees and says, why didn't you cite my paper? OK, good. So there is instability. So maybe the allical six states, and even L, we should have another look, and that's exactly I'm going to echo the point with Sergei made. Lando theory doesn't exactly tell you what you're going to put up this structure. And if you take, like, the picorna virus, you have 12 identical pentagons, so 15 cap proteins. They are stable in solution. So assembly is not from proteins. Assembly starts from these collectives. They have these pentamers floating in solution. So Lando theory is never going to give you the density of this thing. I mean, where would it come from? And you can only hope that it tells you the density of, let's say, the center of mass of these things. So what's wrong with saying reinterpreting this and saying, no, no, these are not single proteins. This represents the density of capsimers. So you might have a perfectly achiral icosahedron, and nothing stops you from putting, from decorating this with chiral units. It's like you have a cubic Bravais lattice, and then you put molecular units in, which may be chiral. It may change the symmetry. You have to check, but it doesn't have to. So there is no intrinsic violation in starting from an achiral mathematical lattice on which you put these guys. So we said maybe we can interpret rho for omega as the density of capsimers centers. And for l equals 10, this is CCMV. It also works. This would be the pentamers, and this would be the hexamers. By the way, for CCMV, they barely show chirality. You would have to look very hard to see that they are. So we would say this is l equals 10, and maybe it's not a bad idea to have a first sort of transition there. It's still suspicious, because if this thing begins to fluctuate and wobble, you would guess that it begins to communicate some of this thermal fluctuation. They're going to pick up on the chirality. Is it possible you completely hide this chirality? Intuitively, I would say I'm on the side of Lohrmann and Rochelle. The chirality ought to show up, and this doesn't have any. So something is not quite right. So we suggested two small extensions of the Lohrmann-Rochelle theory. The first one is, since we're already in Russia, we stay there, and we go from not just London, but London-Brasovsky. So Brasovsky was a student, and from London, I assume. No. OK. Then I don't know. OK. Brasovsky extended London theory. Is that correct? Good. And he applied it to all sorts of problems in liquid crystal, soft matter physics, and what he said was, well, remember, this was this integral of the density. He said, you can do a much nicer job if you don't just assume that this depends on the density, but also allow it to depend on the gradient of the density. So where does this strange term come from, and what is K0? This is the key difference. This is old-fashioned London theory, and this is London-Brasovsky theory. By the way, I'm not saying that liquid crystals are necessarily represented by this. This is just a very simplest way to include a gradient of rho. K0 here is a wave number. It's 2 pi over a characteristic length, a, which is the protein size, or the capsimish size, is the microscopic length scale of the system, 2 pi over a. And you can understand why Brasovsky included that term, because imagine that you want to have a density wave. Rho of r is e to the ikr. Along some direction, this is like a director, and K0 is the wave factor. So you'd like to have a theory with waves, like density waves. In fact, that's the original paper of Lorema and Rochelle was about density waves. So let's put these density waves in by hand. They put them in by hand. Here we say we write in a free energy, which produces density waves. And in fact, if you work with not plus squared plus K0 squared on this wave, you just bring down two factors of ik0. That is minus K0 squared, plus K0 squared, e of 0. So you see immediately that this theory tells you the density is going to consist of waves. And these terms, these nonlinear terms, are going to tell you how they interact. So this is the standard way you look at crystallization. So if you think of the formation of a viral shell as the crystallization of a spherical surface, then this is in fact a natural theory. I'll try to convince you there's an advantage. At first, you might say, what's wrong with just keeping the simple form? Nothing. So here's an example of how long the Rossovsky theory works. Let's take three density waves along the direction of an equilateral triangle. You put them in. You sum over them. This is called a star. And lo and behold, you get a hexagonal lattice. You can take other combinations as well. In this particular case, you get a first order transition again, because the cubic term is nonzero. Because k1 plus k2 plus k3 is zero. So these two terms do not cancel if you take the cubic term. And this theory has been extensively applied in all sorts of problem in liquid crystals. And it's very rich. You can now look at the competition between different symmetries. Far beyond simple Landau theory, you can get micellar faces, hexagonal faces, cubic faces. It's a very rich theory. And we're going to do this on a spherical surface. So we take this term, our old friend, and I'll stuff it in the Landau-Rossovsky theory. And what you get looks very similar to what we used to have. There are really only two differences. You now sum over all L. You no longer pick L. It's not up to you. It's not the, I think, electrical six. Where does it come from? The value for L itself has to come out of minimization of the free energy. So now L is no longer fixed. It's by itself a parameter. So you sum over all L. For the rest, it looks the same, right? This is the quadratic invariant. This is the cubic invariant. That's the quartic invariant. Except we have L1, L2, L3. L is no longer fixed. So the big payoff is that you now get an expression for the stability for different L. This R sub L here is our old R, the one which you got from the quadratic term. These two terms come from the London-Brasovsky one. L times L plus 1 minus K0R squared. This is this wave number, K0, 2 pi O for the protein size. And R is the radius of the shell. And with this, you can now predict the L value of the capsid, which actually is a, it's a parameter. It's like a variational parameter. Here's how it works. You plot this term for different L. They're all parabolas as a function of K0R. No, they're not parabolas. They are more complex. But they all have a minimum when K0R is close to L squared. So this is the L equals 15. This is R 15. This is R 16. This is R 17. Now suppose you reduce R. The transition is exactly like Sergei said. It's where you first hit 0. The point where instability starts is the parabola which goes to 0 first. So in this interval, it's this parabola which goes unstable first at this point. But if you increase K0R in this interval when K0R is bigger than 16, it's the second parabola. So there's an infinite sequence of parabolas. And for given K0R, you can predict which L is going to appear. RL is a minimum and K0R is L. So the big advantage of Lambda-Brasowski is that you can look at the competition between different L. Step two is the correlative. So French colleagues will recognize Pierre-Jules de Genne who thought a lot about how chirality should be included in a Lando theory. And he said that you start with the A chiral theory with scalars. And then in order to include chirality, like for instance in cholesterically with crystals, you have to add the lowest order pseudo scaler. Now for cholesterics, it's a very simple term. You write it down immediately. Alas, it's not so simple if you have to construct your pseudo scaler from the normal to the surface and the gradient of the density. This is the lowest order pseudo scaler. I can't help it. It's fourth order. So it is still within the realm of fourth order expansion. It has this form. You can see it's a pseudo scaler because this is an axial vector dotted into basically a vector. And so it's a pseudo scaler. Those of you who come from soft matter physics may recognize this as related to the pseudo scaler of hell free and prose when they looked at chiral surfaces. That's the way it is. I'm not going to justify it. I'm just going to tell you that's what it came out. It was proven by a brilliant postdoc of mine, Sanjay Dharmavaram. I couldn't do it. I tried. And but he came up with a solution. So now we try again with this, let's call it boosted Lorman-Rogel theory. We just put in these little mathematical extensions. OK, we still get L equals 6 and 10 to be stable minima and nothing new. It's a first order transition for even L because we have an cubic invariant. But there is a small change. When you look at the thermal fluctuations around, that is just what Sergey mentioned. If you look at the thermal fluctuations, they are chiral. So even though the density, the ground state, is a chiral, now because of this thermal fluctuations, they begin to talk to each other. Chirality appears. So both the isotropic state and these structures are now chiral. With that, there's no spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, which I would argue shouldn't appear. It's gone. And we can conclude that at least Dix, these four icosahedral spherical harmonics are possible representations for viral assembly. They are kosher. That still leaves the odd. We've seen that the odd ones must be physical because the Parvo virus worked beautifully with L equals 15. And L equals 15 remains unstable when I stick to 1L. If I stick to 1L, to 1 parabola, I can't save L equals 15. But I can change K0R and I can mix in a little bit of the neighborhood. Now I know why I like London-Brasovsky theorem because it allows me to look at the competition between different L. So what we did is let's say we're looking at a transition point in this region where these two sectors compete with each other. And then we ask, could there be a stable icosahedral order parameter composed of two irreducible representations, L equals 15 and L equals 16? This is a study in 64 dimensions. I have finally beaten my colleagues in string theory. They're always both about 50 dimensions and you have 60 dimensions. Do that. OK. 64 dimension in theory. However, and this is all done by my friends, my colleagues. I didn't do it. We did an extensive numerical study of the Landau theory. For L equals 15, it's non-icosahedral d5 and other stuff. For L equals 16, it's non-icosahedral, other stuff. But magically, remarkably, in this intervening region where they talk to each other, somehow these two unstable states interfere constructively and stabilize the icosahedral state, which now appear as mixtures of different L. If you make K0R run in this direction, less than 16, it's more K0R. It's more like the L equals 15. If it's going to here, it's more like L equals 16. So this is a chiral structure, mostly L equals 15. And this is a chiral structure, mostly L equals 16. This one is 16 maxima. Maybe that one, this is 72 maxima.  So we have rescued the L equals 15 states at the cost of complexity of having to mix in, if you want, Sergei calls it fluctuations. You have to just mix in some of the other Ls, and then you restore it. No spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking? That's nice. That's when trouble starts. You remember Lavlando? He is not happy. There is some sort of, you can hear the vibrations coming up that we violated his second rule. Only one irreducible representation. This is not just some sort of parasitic order parameter you drag along. We need really both irreducible representation to get an icosahedral state. Lando's ire inspired one of our referees to get really upset. How dare we? How dare we? We were violating this basic rule. We were able, in the end, to convince him that this is what comes out. We can't help it. There's very good reasons for this rule. It works nearly always, but apparently not always. So we found here a new region for study of Lando theory, where this rule is no longer applicable. Quickly two examples, then I'll be done. If you stick to the left-hand side, you get the Parvo virus, which is still very nice. It's a little density. Maybe you can even think of that as explaining that. I don't want to push it. If you go to the other direction, when you see these peaks appear, looks a lot like the polyomavirus, a 72 maxima. OK. Is there any confirmation of this idea? Well, you can do numerical simulations of 72 particles on a spherical surface, maybe with Lenard-Jones interaction, just as a check, to see if anything I said makes sense. No chirality, so we don't have this chiral pseudo-scaler. Paul, do you recognize this? Yeah, you do it. This was done by Roya and Paul. It's Stefan Paquet here. Oh, there we are. Three people in our audience did this. They said, well, what is the minimum energy state? And they got a zoo of states, nearly the same energy. D5. Did you remember D5? That's what we got. D3, icosahedral tetrahedral D2. Woo. The icosahedral state is just very stable. If you change the perimeter of a very small interval, so the icosahedral state is very fragile. It competes with other structures with completely different symmetry. So this is the reference. Has it been published, Paul? Yes, OK. So you see my scholarship is failing here. Why was icosahedral symmetry selected for viruses? It's not just free energy, because the icosahedral state is just a little sliver of stability for this T-pull-zeffen structure. So this tells us that icosahedral states are quite delicate. Roya and Bill and myself showed that you can further stabilize them if you allow spheres of two sizes, smaller and bigger. And if you just tune the ratio right, you can stay. But there must be a reason why icosahedral symmetry was selected. So in conclusion, Lorman-Rochall theory is, with some extension, is a very powerful mathematical tool for the study of capsid assembly. We found two modes. First, for mixed L, it's a continuous transition or weekly first order. For pure L, for certain limited even L, you have strongly first order transition. So you can get two completely different modes of assembly. Of course, this is the more interesting one. Viral assembly is a wonderful laboratory for the testing and maybe violation of lambda theory. Big experimental problems. How do we test first order, second order fluctuations? We are lacking the tools because these structures are so small compared to the wavelength of light. Finally, I want to thank my group, particularly Sanjay Dharmavaram, who did all of this hard analytical work finding this pseudo-scaler, Joseph Rathnick, who invented or developed codes for doing these searches. Amit Singh, Josh Kelly, Bill Kluge. Many may remember him. He was my dear friend and colleague. He died last year. And I also want to thank Bill Galbart and Chuck and Rhys for providing us with these data on assembly and with that. I'm sorry I went a little bit over time, but that's it. Sorry to keep you from your lunch. Thank you.