I am so delighted to welcome you to the first of the 2021 British Library food season sponsored by KitchenAid. My name is Polly Russell, and I'm the founder and the curator of the food season, working very closely with my friend and partner in crime, the season's guest director, Angela Clutton. This is the fourth year that we have run a food season at the British Library. And like the other years, we have an eclectic bunch of events, which will explore every aspect of food. This year, we're going to delve into the history of pies, new food media, exhibiting food, food writing, food and masculinity, food and class, and food and cheese and the politics of coffee. There's a lot going on. Please join us for other food season events and check out all about them on the British Library's website. There's a link at the bottom of this page. On the same page that you're viewing, you'll also find details about the wonderful food season competition that we're running with KitchenAid, where you can win a cordless KitchenAid appliance, a place on a virtual cooking course, and the wonderful pie room book by Callum Franklin. Just a little housekeeping before we get started. Please do use the menu on your screen to provide us with feedback about this event. We really like to hear from you. There's also a donate button. The British Library is a charity, and we rely in part on your support to help us do the work that we do. There's also a bookshop tab on the screen, so you can browse and buy books from our guests this evening. And you'll find social media links at the bottom of the page should you want to continue the conversation on other platforms. Please also, throughout the event, do post questions for Harold and Tara. They would love to hear from you. There'll be an opportunity where Harold will answer your questions. You can do that again at the bottom of your screen, so please do think about that as you're listening to them talk. Right. Now about this evening, I just could not be more pleased or more proud that the season's first event features the legendary Harold McGee coming to us all the way from his home in San Francisco, California, discussing his extraordinary new book, Nosedive, with the wonderful food writer Tara Wigley. I'm going to let Tara introduce Harold properly, but I just want to say a few words about Tara. Tara started out working and publishing before switching to food writing just over a decade ago. She trained at the Balli Mello Cookery School in Ireland and then worked with Yota Motolenghi testing recipes before taking the role of being a writing collaborator. Tara was involved with the creation of books, including plenty more and Nopi, The Cookbook Suite. She's the co-author with Yota Motolenghi of the Runaway Success Cookery Book, Simple. And so she's almost a daily presence in my family kitchen and probably in many of your kitchens too. Her culinary expertise and understanding of flavor make her the perfect person to talk to Harold about his work and his new book. Now, just before we hand over to Tara, there is going to be a very brief tribute to Harold from the one and only Heston Blumenthal, whose life work, as he will explain, was profoundly influenced by Harold and his first book on food and cookery. So I'm handing momentarily over to Heston and then Tara's going to take over. Thanks so much. Enjoy this evening. Hello, British Library food season. I am very honored, chuffed and excited, to introduce my great friend and somebody that has really changed my life, both professionally and personally and preciously is still very much in it, like a valuable jewel, Harold McGee. If I could sum up the impact that Harold and his book had on my, not only my career, my life, the way I view the world, including very, very importantly myself, it's question everything, the importance of questioning. Thanks to that approach, I've discovered so much more about myself and in turn so much more about the planet and the universe and the sensorial world around me. I don't know how different my approach to food, my life in food, because it's very important for me cooking and eating. I don't know what direction it would have taken if I had not have fallen down, this is going to sound really dodgy, but Harold McGee's rabbit hole. The chances are, the chances are it would have been quite different. I might have found something else that would have triggered the importance of questions as opposed to answers. But because it was over, it challenged something so set in chef's bloods that you have to brown meat to keep in juices. It's something so obvious and so simple. The example of it was, oh my word, if this isn't correct, how many other things in classical and modern classical cooking also are not correct? Or maybe they were correct, but the ovens have changed or the pots and pans have changed or the ingredients have changed. Who knows? So it was the magic if we, it's so profound for me, this discovery. There's many important great things about this book. It is like on food and cooking, it is a weighty, it's a weighty tone. If you just walked to your local post office, there'll be smell of tarmac. There might be smell of freshly cut grass. There might be smell of rubber from the wheels of a car. There might be someone's perfume. That's a really complex world that can trigger all sorts of memories and emotions. All we need to do is become aware. And I think this book is a magnificent tool for anyone, whether they're interested in cooking or not, but the power and the complexity of smell, it is our world around us. I love that intro from Heston and love the idea of us all going down Harold McGee's rabbit hole. So Harold McGee needs a little introduction from me, but I'll just give you a little bit of background. He studied at Coltec in Yale. And since 1980, he has been writing about the science of food and cooking. He's the author as Heston was saying of the epic, inspiring, comprehensive and award-winning on food and cooking, the science and law of the kitchen, which made us all, as Heston said, question everything. And Harold often talks about paying attention and this idea of questioning everything and paying attention is just, it seems so basic, but it's so revolutionary when you start sniffing and smelling. He's a visiting lecturer at Harvard University's course from Oates cuisine to soft matter science, former columnist for the New York Times. He's been named food writer of the year by Bon Appetit magazine and in the Time 100 and annual list of the world's most influential people. He is, I'm sure, a very smart guy who is very skilled at giving smart answers to often silly questions a lot of us have about quotidian life. One of the amazing things I think about on food and cooking is that it was written without the aid of Google or Google Scholar. And I just wanna take the chance before we start Harold to say on behalf of all of us, thank you for being our Google, because just as we can't imagine what we do before Google, none of us can imagine what we did before Harold McGee and your Bibles that you give us. So thank you and looking forward to chatting. And as Polly says, if you've got any questions, pop them down and then we'll save them up for the end and we can all find out why we smells of asparagus or horrible after we eat asparagus and all such other things, other questions that we have. But on to Nose Dive. So I love the fact that Harold, you spent 10 years researching and writing a book that is 700 pages long, that has a time span of 14 billion years, but you still felt compelled to invent one new word. You felt like there was room for one more.  Well, thank you, thank you, thank you. Tara and Polly and Heston, boy, my heart is beating fast with all of those wonderful words. Thank you so much. It's a great pleasure to be here. And I couldn't do what I do without libraries, so it's just wonderful to be doing an event that in some way supports one of the great libraries of the world. Anyhow, so yeah, when I started writing about smell, I kept finding myself saying the world of smells over and over again. How amazing is the world of smells? And let's explore this corner of the world of smells. I just felt that there should be a word that encompasses that idea, the world of smells. And so I have a brother-in-law who is a professor of classics. And I consulted with him on several possibilities, several coinings from Greek and Latin roots and so on. He vetoed most of them, but he allowed osmocosm, osmo from Greek root meaning smell, and chasm, of course, the cosmos. So I made us word osmocosm to describe the world of smells and that's what I tried to explore in the book.  The subtitle is a field guide to the world smells and this book is quite literally a field guide to every smell and you cover a lot of ground. We have the smells of earth, of animals, we have land plants, we have waters, we have fruit, we have humans, we have quite a lot of human excrement and we have, before we get to kind of food and wine, but the initial spark for the book 10 years ago did come down to a certain meal with a certain chef and your experience eating one particular type of food. So I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about this spark that took place 10 years ago? Yeah, and it's wonderful that Heston is kind of with us this evening because back in 2004, when I finished the revision of on food and cooking, I lifted my head from my desk and realized that the world of food had really changed a lot in the last few years that I'd been writing. And I talked with Heston about this and he said, you know, you really need to come over here and visit some of these places that are doing interesting things. So I took up his invitation and he and I went around to a variety of places in Spain and the UK and so on. Exploring restaurants that were really pushing the idea of novelty, of making a really memorable meal out of surprising you so that you would really remember that moment. And it was fascinating, but the last meal I had was at Fergus Henderson's Restaurant St. John. It happened to be the very beginning of grouse season and I'd never had a grouse before so I ordered grouse for lunch. And very, very traditional meal, you know, it was just roasted with a tuft of watercress coming out of its behind. And it just blew me away in a way that none of the novel meals that I'd had at the avant-garde restaurants had done. And it did so powerfully that for a couple of minutes I couldn't, I could barely speak. I was sitting chatting with other people and I just had to stop and pay attention to what was going on in my mouth. And that the power that my senses had over my mind at that moment really got me to thinking about the nature of flavor, how it is that that kind of power is exerted and what could it possibly be in this cooked bird that could affect me so strongly. And so that started me down, I guess, my own rabbit hole of trying to figure out what it was about flavor that could be so interesting and so powerful. And it was so interesting to me that you had such a powerful response to it because a lot of us think that our relationship with food and the power of it is tied up with memory. And the fact that you'd never had this grasp before meant that you had no memory to draw on. And then that sort of, it was interesting because we think of it as being so subjective and you, I think, made the wise decision not to go down the rabbit hole that would have been an entire warren of kind of the subjective relationship of food and memory and you would have had to have a kind of 12 volume book. And then that got you onto the firmer ground of your interest in flavor echoes and the mystery of why certain unrelated foods mirror one another on the palate. And I wonder if you could tell us a bit about the flavor echoes and why this is of such a dress. And maybe if you have a kind of flavor echo yourself that you're particularly tickled by, I know that mine is the sort of, when I realized that my dog's paws smell like tortilla chips and I sort of found this confirmation in the book and I've always thought it was kind of popcorn or tortilla chips, but yeah, if you could talk a bit about these flavor echoes that'd be really interesting. Yeah, well, that's really what led me to the idea, led me from the idea of writing about flavor to the idea of writing about the smells of the world because initially I thought, okay, this was a powerful experience. I want to understand it better we now have begun to understand how the brain proves things, lot taste and smell. So I'll write a book about flavor. But then as I began to do that, I began to realize that some of the most interesting things about flavor are in fact, these echoes, these quifts of other things in the world in the foods that we eat that may be other foods or they may be something entirely inedible. Well-aged Parmesan cheese can smell like pineapple and so you have kind of half rotten cow's milk on the one hand and a ripe tropical fruit on the other. What do they have in common? Why do they have this kind of relationship? Or of course, wine tasters taste all kinds of things and wines, flowers are, they're not especially edible but they're kind of pleasant. But then sweaty saddles is another term for particular qualities in red wines and it's true that there is a kind of leathery aspect to some red wine. So it was those kinds of correspondences that really led me to realize that in order to understand flavor, I had to understand why these other things in the world have the qualities that they do. And that ended up shifting my focus altogether so that flavor is, you know, it's a portion of this book but only a portion. And I do delve into dog's paws to try to understand why it is that they have these qualities that really strike us. That when you asked your editor for an extension on the done. And maybe we should talk a bit about kind of what smell is and, you know, I was talking to my kids today about smell and it feels like, you know, it feels like taste, they can kind of list all the different tastes that we've got and that's something they understand but smell when you actually talk about it, it's kind of almost a bit of a neglected sense and yet it's our most direct sense and it's much more, maybe we ignore it because it's sort of so much more complex than taste but when I was giving my kids today some of the kind of statistics about the number of receptors or the number of possibilities, it was kind of mind blowing and it feels like it's a bit of a sort of undiscovered sense. Not undiscovered but people aren't kind of, it's taken kind of nose dive to blow my mind about smell and sort of how that's and why that's happened. Yeah. Well, it really is true that in western cultures smell has been devalued compared to sight and to hearing. So, you know, we can make art, visual art, we can make music with smells, we can make perfumes but, you know, that's been a relatively minor part of our culture, of our heritage. It's very different by the way in the east where incense and perfume have been taken much more seriously and continuously for thousands of years but it is the case that, you know, even though vision and hearing have their interest, I like to point out the fact that both of them are very indirect indications of what's going on around us. You know, their light is being reflected off of surfaces or pressure waves are coming through the air from an object that has moved but in the case of smell, we're actually detecting little bits of the actual things around us. The smells are molecules that are escaping from these material things and flying through the air and into our nose and momentarily becoming part of us as we actually detect them. And of course, the things of the world are many, many, many and so the smells of the world are many, many, many and we have enough receptors and the brain power to be able to distinguish thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe we actually really don't know the theoretical limit of the number of smells that we could possibly detect. So it is this very powerful connection that we have to the world around us that has been neglected but happily is becoming more prominent. I love the way you employ your readers throughout the book to become better smell explorers and I just love this idea of kind of scout leader, Harold McGee leading all these kind of smell explorers behind him and I definitely, I feel like I am smelling more and again, you know, this idea that it's actually volatile molecules of the things coming off into my nose was just something I'd never thought about. But just as the scope of your book changed a lot from where you started, the world in which it's published in 2020 is obviously very different from the one you imagined and I wondered whether you could talk about the impact of the entire world having had their nose literally barred from smells for a whole year. Whether you think there's going to be some kind of collective olfactory euphoria when we have our masks taken off, whether you think we might become better smellers or whether you know any more about the research that's going into people whose smell, it's not that they've stopped smelling it's they're still smelling but their brain is interpreting incorrectly and they're smelling kind of awful things like kind of burning plastic or something rather than food and I know there's a crowdfunding group called Absent which I've heard you talk about elsewhere I didn't know if you knew any more about that research. Yes, so when I started writing about smell 10 years ago I had no idea that smell would be so severely affected for so many people when my book actually saw the light of day and there are different aspects to this. One is that because it turns out that the loss of the sense of smell is a very early symptom of COVID infection and because sometimes that smell takes a long time to come back or is deranged so as you say you smell something that should smell either neutral or nice but in fact people with what's called perosmia smell terrible smells which are not actually there so the fact that this has become a kind of public health issue has meant that there is now much more attention being paid to the sense of smell in the medical and the scientific communities. It's unfortunate that it took this to kind of make that happen but I think in the long run it's going to be very helpful. It's one of the ways we understand how the body works is by investigating what is going on when it's not working so well and so I think eventually this is going to lead to a much greater understanding of our sense of smell and then yeah, when we have to wear masks then we're both blocking the smells in the world around us from reaching our nose and we're becoming way too acquainted with our own smells, the smell of our breath that's being trapped in the fabric and so I think for many people it really does because it is such a change, highlight the fact that this is an important part of our everyday life and also simply the relief, I certainly feel this all the time the relief of finally taking off your mask and then being able to breathe in the world around you I think just helps us appreciate the fact that fresh air is a wonderful thing. Yeah, I mean yeah, I was just saying before we came on air that we had a, me and my husband had a different meal on Friday night to the food we were normally eating and we got as a takeout from a restaurant and it just made us realise how sort of institutionalised we've become in just the flavours that we're sort of eating cooking at home the whole time but it's the same with smell not only are we sort of barred off from the volatile molecules going into our nose, we're not experiencing the world and going to different places so we all talk about becoming a bit institutionalised and you lost your sense of smell during the course of writing the book was that, do you mind me asking was that Covid related or was that separate? No, that happened maybe five years ago so in the midst of writing a book about smell I lost mine and that was scary and it took a couple of months to come back and I asked my friends in the olfactory community the moment I noticed coming down to make coffee one morning and realising that the coffee tasted bad and that was the bitterness and the astringency and they were still there but the aroma was gone I asked my friends how can I treat myself should I go see a doctor, when will it come back and they basically said there's nothing you can do about it we really don't know that much about it usually it comes back but sometimes it doesn't so just kind of hang on and hope for the best and it did take a couple of months and those were very unhappy months That's a happy ending a dramatic turn of events and Covid aside are there ways in which we can become better smellers is it something we can train ourselves to do in a blood house that we can train up or learn from breathing techniques of dogs is it something we can become better at doing and then leading to a heightened sense of pallet and appreciation of food Yeah it's pretty straightforward just smell more and pay attention to what you're smelling and it can be as simple as as Heston mentioned walking down the street and smelling the tarmac and smelling around here in my neighborhood when I'm out in the evening I can smell people cooking in their kitchens and I stop and try to figure out from my own experience what are those smells coming from is it a frying pan and what's in the frying pan that kind of thing it's very systematic about it and I think it can be rather than being a kind of self-imposed training session it can just be a lot of fun to take five bottles off of your spice rack for example and just reacquaint yourself one by one with those smells what I find is that usually my spice rack is full of bottles that have any smell because they're so old and so it's a reason to refresh them but you can also do things like if you happen to enjoy Indian food take down bottles that would go into a spice blend for a particular dish and then open a bottle of the blend that you've already made with those spices or go ahead and make them fresh and then notice how the composite is so different from the individual components but yet if you really work at it you can pick out the fenugreek you can pick out the cumin we tend to think of the smells of food and drink and things in general as just themselves they're all impression but in fact they're kind of like chords in music they're made up of all these different notes of these different molecules that have gone into them and by taking advantage of the wonderful collections that we have in our own kitchens we can begin to become more sensitive to those notes and to how they build to make chords and then carry that experience out into the world again that's sort of such a it seems so obvious when you say this I've never sort of questioned before I've just sort of thought that a lemon smells of a lemon and that there is a smell that is lemon or strawberry and vice versa and that sort of takes sort of reading a book to realise that that's just this nonsense it's chords, it's a bouquet as you say but so do you don't think we can learn something from dogs and the way they're smelling what's happening with their kind of frequent sniff sniff sniff sniff, is it that they have more smell receptors than us or are they just better at sort of, do they smell things more intensely or is it something about the quick smelling techniques, sort of sniffing in and out technique that we can learn from I just wanted to get sort of sniffing sniffing their keyboards as they're their dogs collectively well yeah so it turns out you know we all have this general sense that animals are much better smellers than we are dogs in particular because of you know blood hounds and following trails and that kind of thing but in recent years scientists have actually taken a look at that and asked the question how sensitive are other animals compared to us and detecting molecules and the answer is kind of about the same, mammals kind of have the same abilities, what matters is sort of the experience, the day to day development of that kind of muscle in our set of abilities so of course for dogs which are a few inches off the ground and aren't getting a lot of information through their eyes their world is mostly smell and so they're acutely sensitive to small variations in things and they're sniffing rapidly all the time because that's just the most important sense for them. We're a few feet above the ground it's not so important for us but we can take advantage of their example by sniffing frequently something that I learned actually from my son is that who I guess just kind of figured it out on his own that if you're savoring a glass of wine or something like that you can get very different aspects of it by starting far away from the glass and then sniffing quickly and getting closer and closer and closer to it you get different aspects of the wines aroma at different distances from the edge of the glass so there are lots of different ways to do that just to get more information into our noses and into our brains so that we perceive more of what's actually going on around us. I'm going to start with Angela who is saying how if it's all do our other senses impact upon our sense of smell so again I wonder if dogs, if they're just all about the smell in the food they're sort of very good at that but whether it means that other senses they're not playing into it so much but we were designed by evolution not just to smell things but to perceive the world around us and as a kind of overall unified perception to know whether things are okay or not okay whether to change course or keep going the way we're going and so it's actually a kind of unnatural abstraction for us to focus just on smell and divorce it from taste or try to ignore what our eyes are telling us in judging foods wines, cheeses, olive oils things like that oftentimes the competition will ask you to do these things blindfolded so that your other senses don't interfere with your sense of taste and smell and your judgment but that's so crazy because it takes the experience of taste and smell and isolates it in a way that has nothing to do with our everyday experience of these things so they all do play but it's just never appealed to me on all levels and I also find it really discombobulating it's like if you're trying to watch a movie and then you're eating at the same time I just found it very odd not to be able to see what I'm eating and so it just shows how it's all linked fascinating and we said before that Covid has given us a big reason to all but certainly we all talk about more but it's also a big business I read about scented candles business something like netting 4 billion by 2024 and I wondered whether you had any predictions about how smell will be used by home comfort or tech or entertainment and that smell will be part of our 4D experience if we're watching television or in the cinema or do you think there's sort of new frontiers that Heston and the rest of the world are going to take us to with smell well back in the 1970s before I even started writing about food I remember going to a movie by an American director John Waters the movie was called Polly Esther and it came with a scratch and sniff card and so at certain points in the movie you were meant to smell what you were seeing on the screen and I just found that scratch and sniff card a couple of months ago in my boxes of various things and they're still there so it's been something that people have tried to do for a long time to sort of add the sense of smell to these other experiences that we can be entertained by or enjoy there have been smell operas and things like that they have generally not been terribly successful dealing with light waves or sound waves that's one thing but actually dealing with little bits of matter that come into your nose and then they have to be kind of dissipated before you can enjoy the next one it's just a very different kind of medium that said there's a lot of interest these days in digitizing smell in finding some way of sending a signal through the air to somebody's computer which might have a little USB unit attached to it which would respond and release a set of molecules that would imitate the smell that was at the other end of the system again not a lot of success so far but people are really interested in doing it and the research is turning out to be very interesting because it's telling us about how you can how you can imitate the smell of an actual thing in the world with just a couple of molecules that you've figured out using machine learning for example can trigger your or trick your receptors into thinking that it's that same molecule so interesting things coming interesting I got some sort of business cards last year where it was it had sort of things like beer and bread and eggs and you could it was a scratch and sniff thing again and it was meant to help tell you whether something was going off so rather than just looking at the expiry date you could tell by the smell and I had it on the fridge for a while and it was quite novel and that was just interesting to think that could help against food waste rather than people kind of blindly following dates but all this talk of scratch and sniff reminds me that I must ask when the scratch and sniff version of nosedive is coming out they were obviously all very much looking forward to we had a great big lemon simple on the cover and I was lobbying to get that scratch and sniff but the publisher didn't go for it there's been a lot of questions about something that I wanted to ask about a little bit earlier about there's one about why do spices release smells when they get hot and another question about how does the temperature the ambient or material being smell-tasted affect our ability to identify different smells and it reminds me that I wanted you to expand on the example you give of sugar in the book and what happens to sugar when it's heated is just a really a way of people like me who are not scientifically minded to understand what is happening when heat is applied and the volatile molecules and how such complexity can come from something so initially simple because sugar doesn't have a smell when it's not about itself so writing this book about smell in general really enriched my understanding of cooking in a way that I hadn't anticipated because if you think about it we mostly eat plant and animal materials they're made up of very large molecules that are too large actually to fly through the air and into our nose so they don't have any aroma to speak of the aromas that they develop in cooking develop when we use heat the energy in heat to break apart those large molecules into smaller fragments that are small enough to fly through the air and into our nose and to me the primo example of that kind of alchemy is caramel so you start with one single molecule sucrose which has no aroma whatsoever it doesn't have any other taste and it's white and it's a crystal a solid and you simply add an energy in the form of heat and let it go for a few minutes and first the solid melts and now you have a liquid and then the liquid begins to develop an aroma and then it begins to develop a color and then you end up after a few minutes with your kitchen just filled with this irresistible aroma of caramel and if you taste it, not only do you enjoy that aroma but the flavor now includes not just sweetness but sourness acids have been created, bitterness savoriness so you start with one molecule and then you have about hundreds and hundreds of different molecules all of which end up giving us this overall impression and that kind of thing happens even when you're simply warming something up it doesn't take much energy whatsoever to begin to change the materials that we're enjoying and that's the key to cooking is taking the materials that nature gives us I think the smell of onions cooking saves a lot of people who are running late for the cooking of their meal because you just put the onions on in the pan and everyone in the house thinks that the meal is just around the corner even though you've just kind of three minutes in and again it feels like a form of alchemy this onion which is so un-sexy by itself with the combination of heat and fat in the pan it's just filling the whole house with this incredibly homely aroma it's sort of daily magic James Savage is asking a couple of questions about this rabbit hole that you chose not to go down to in terms of memory and the subjective nature of a smell she said what is it about taste and smell that triggers memory she asks why do we like the unacceptable smells from our own body and not those coming from others so I didn't know if you wanted to talk about what you don't talk about in the book which is this kind of massive subjective of rabbit hole of the subjective nature of it all the Madeleine moments Yes so when I decided to write about smell then I had to think about the fact that there are two aspects to it there are the molecules in the world that are emitted from things around us and that fly into our nose and trigger perception and then there's the process of perception the moment that it hits our receptors and then gets into our brain and that's where the sensation of smell or a flavor if it's a food that I could handle both in a single book You had us to say no So I set aside the issue of what happens after the molecule hits our receptors but that is another terrifically fascinating aspect of the subject and in fact it's just so difficult but also really intriguing to think about because we only know smells by our experience of them you know if we've never encountered that molecule before then it doesn't have any meaning for us so what we end up doing is associating smells with the things that they appear to be coming from and we usually give the smell a name the name that belongs to the thing that it's coming from so a lemony smell is lemony because it comes from lemons and the smell of dog paws comes from dog paws and reminds us of the smell that comes from corn chips we don't have a kind of abstract vocabulary for some other things and that vocabulary depends so much on an individual's experience I give the example in the book of the Brazilian chef Alex Atala making it possible for some of us in the west and the north to taste ants that are eaten in the Amazon but us tastes like ginger and lemongrass because they share those molecules but Alex made the point that when he brought ginger and lemongrass to the Amazon to the Amazonians those things smelled like ants so exactly the same molecules but completely different set of references so of course that is critical and without memory we can't draw on past experience and so the connection between the experience of smell and memory is very very tight and there's also a kind of anatomical aspect to this which is that the sense of smell is wired very directly associated with emotion and with feelings of pleasure and disgust which makes perfect sense because one of the functions of smell is to warn us when we're about to encounter something that's not good for us and so we have that kind of immediate connection and then the kind of more more general experiential connection with memory all of these things are in the pot when we smell something and teasing out which elements are most important depends so much on that particular occasion and the person and so on and so on people talk about the smell of fear does fear have a smell? it so fear causes people to perspire more strongly than they would be otherwise and perspiration carries chemical signals that include what we think of as body odors and generally speaking try to get rid of and so if someone is fearful and they don't have the chance to shower immediately then yes the trace of that experience will be with them for a while there's another question just talking about how different smell is for individuals there's a question does everything smell the same no matter where in the world it's at it was interesting not only did you feel the need to invent a new word it makes a 700 page book but you also then wanted to rename Petricor with another word so I wondered if you could tell us about that and what Petricor is for those who don't know and how it means that the world does smell differently everywhere and what you've renamed it well yeah so fresh air is wonderful but it smells different depending on where you are on the planet and that really intrigued me why it is that the air out in the middle of nowhere has the smell it does and it turns out that decades ago scientists in Australia had investigated why it is that the earth develops a particularly noticeable smell when it rains after a long dry period and they studied in particular the smells the volatile molecules that come off of rocks that have been dry for a long period and because the smell comes off of rocks they named the smell Petricor from a root meaning rock or stone and then icor which is the circulating fluid in the gods so kind of like blood but immaterial and so this was the in a way the essence of the smell of rocks but it turns out that the smell doesn't really come from the rocks themselves it comes from the stuff in the air that ends up sticking to the surface of the rocks and then when rain comes along the rain dislodges that collection of molecules that has accumulated and releases them into the air and that's when we're able to smell them so I think that rather than calling that smell the smell of the rocks Petricor it should actually be thought of as the smell of that particular part of the world and it's not just the vegetation it's industry if there's industry it's whatever is going on and so I chose to come up with the term Gaia icor so it's the smell of all the living processes living and dead processes that are occurring in that particular place in the world over the course of those that period of time epic so yeah 14 billion years the galaxy, the world of Gaia icor there's also a question from Samantha about whether you researched the possible experience of smell of the unborn baby in the womb whether you managed to go on that kind of space odyssey well I personally did not but there are studies that have shown that infants whose mother is exposed to particular smells will respond when the infant is born the infant will respond to those smells in a way that the infant of a mother who was not exposed to that smell would that is to say the mother's exposure to smells influences the baby's experience in the womb and again kind of makes sense because you know you're the mother is preparing the child not only to be able to survive in the world but giving that infant its first tastes of the world its first sense of the world and so many of the smells that characterize the foods that the mother eats end up in her bloodstream and in the amniotic fluid and in her milk and so an infant is getting all kinds of information kind of a preview of the smell world by virtue of its life inside the mother and then being nursed by the mother I have time I think we've got time for a couple more questions Helen is asking is fascinated by the cultural differences in the experiences smelling so for example the durian fruit which south east Asian smellers this is sweet in custody whereas many westerners describe it as disgusting is this conditioning or is there something else going on so again a big kind of subjective question but the actual the actual experiences you know is it language is it context is it association all of the above but I can speak directly to the experience of durian because I went on an expedition to Singapore to experience it to understand what's going on with exactly this kind of dichotomy people who love it and people who are disgusted by it and I experienced both for someone who is not used to it it's a it's a weird combination of sulfury oniony compounds oniony kind of at best and maybe a little more disgusting at worst a combination of those molecules and the molecules that are typical of fruits including things like strawberries so the strange thing I think for people from the west who have never experienced before is this combination of sulfurousness and fruitiness and it just comes off as being strange but the more time you spent with it and the more I thought about it the more I could appreciate that we could do the same kind of thing here and it would be unusual but it wouldn't be disgusting so it really is a matter of the frame of mind in which you experience something and I think the advantage of paying attention to smells and sort of interrogating our experiences of them is that they can broaden our palate broaden our appreciation for things in a way it wouldn't be possible to simply take one sniff and you're disgusted and you never smell it again that's all you're left with but in the southeast Asia the durian is considered the king of fruits and so you're missing out on something if you don't at least appreciate a little bit of that royalty yeah it's fascinating and the context is the kind of the French smelly cheese and the kind of the teenage smelly smell very similar and yet one is kind of delighted and one is not maybe we can end our questions on what your favourite flavour echo is I've heard you talk about a lot about the argo words of the smelling of the incense but do you have a food flavour echo that you're particularly tickled by that's a tough one because of course the more that I worked on this book the more of those echoes I often would first read about and then go to the foods themselves and notice for the first time so it's an example of experience at second hand the molecules tell you that there is this connection and then you go and actually experience the foods and sure enough it's there one of the things that that I really love is the so I love coffee that's how I first discovered that I'd lost my sense of smell and one of the things I love about in particular Ethiopian coffees is the note of blueberry that you can often have in them and to me that's just mind boggling because you have again this seed that's been roasted to 400 degrees Fahrenheit or something like that very high temperature, something that a blueberry would never survive and then you brew liquid from it and you end up with the aroma of a fruit a northern fruit wonderful so we've had less than an hour to talk about a book that you spent 10 years writing which feels kind of mad but I know that a lot of people would be desperate to hear what your next project is so I'm going to go back to food and cooking or moving on to a site or what's the next 10 years well whatever it is I hope it's not going to be 10 years worth I'm actually recuperating from this last 10 years for eight of those 10 years I was late to my publisher I think I'm going to come back to food though because that's where I got started and I now have a perspective on it that I really didn't have before so I want to explore that I think a little Harold McGee novella would get down very well but your publishers must be equally excited and nervous about what potential you could do in the world of food now that you've got Google available to you so we look forward to Harold McGee on food plus Google so I think sadly our time is coming to an end but it's just been so interesting and I just implore everyone to do a deep dive into nosedive and Harold encourages us or reassures us that we don't need to read this the 700 page cover to cover it's a field guide it's not necessarily one you put in your pocket but it's one you're walking around a field but it's one you can return to when you're out like Heston walking to the post office and smelling the wheels of a car you can then come back to this book and dip into it so although it's a big book it's actually incredibly light which is a mystery to me but I'm very grateful for Harold's reassurance that this is one that we kind of dip into and just keep us smelling and paying attention and becoming better smell explorers and as Heston said to question and smell and hopefully taste everything so thank you so much Harold thank you Tara it's been a great great pleasure thank you both so much what a wonderful evening and discussion now is more I'm sure that everybody else could as well there are so many questions coming in like Tara says this book is completely riveting everyone needs to deep dive into it if you are curious about dogs paws smelling of tortillas if you're curious about Ethiopian coffee and blueberries the book is just packed full of wonderful explorations like that and it does make you see the world differently so this was a wonderful introduction and explanation to this book and this work and the world of smell so thank you so much Harold and Tara for just getting the 2021 food season off to the most wonderful start and thank you also to our audience please do check into the British Library website for upcoming events don't miss for example this Friday what is likely to be a very lively discussion between the Michelin star chef Tom carriage and the writer of dudes diets and diners Emily about masculinity and food or indeed the conversation about French cooking and restaurants with the writers Jonathan Meads and Bill Burford and the restaurant critic Trace and Floyd on the 21st of April and there is much much more please again do send us comments we'd really love to hear from you the good the bad and the ugly remember that there is a donate button if you feel so inclined to support our work and finally thank you again to our speakers this evening and to KitchenAid for sponsoring the food season what a great stars good night


So I wasn't here. I haven't heard what anybody else said. So if I repeat what's already been said, please, someone interrupt me. One of the reasons not to be a senator is so you don't have to speak to audiences and hear to at least be trying to make it look like you know what you're talking about. So on the other hand, this is a subject that Senator Leahy and certainly myself have always cared a lot about. And David is impossible to say no to. So I was very glad to be able to come to this. And also just to be reminded of the fact that this has been going on for quite a while, there have been so many people with such commitment and knowledge that I don't have involved. And it sort of makes me realize that our job is basically to support all of you. And I think that's what Senator Leahy has always generally felt. So I know that you've been sitting through hours of listening to this subject. And what I think I'm going to do is just take a few minutes, as David said, and talk really about what the US Congress has to do with this, what we try to do. And if you have questions, I can try to answer them. Because it's fair to say that today trying to understand or predict what the Congress is going to do tomorrow is not for easy. And in response to your question, David, Senator Graham is a huge ally of ours on these issues. But our process is still very much unresolved. We need a budget agreement. We need to know how we're going to finish the fiscal 18 appropriations process. And that obviously includes funding for the office of the ambassador for global criminal justice. I think, and I made a note of this, we're actually pretty lucky that there even is an office when you think about it. I mean, I don't think there's probably many countries that have one. And so it's not a given that there is an office of global criminal justice here. Any administration could abolish it at any time unless the Congress intervened. Or the president could simply not nominate anybody. So this is something where at least we have conveyed to this administration, Senator Leahy early on, made clear that we want the office to continue, that we want an ambassador named. And at least it looks like that's going to happen. We're hoping that the nominee is someone who believes in preventing atrocities, not causing them. But we are, at this point, reasonably confident that we are going to continue to have an office that we can, in good conscience, continue to support. Now, as I mentioned earlier, it's the ambassador and the ambassador's staff, the office, where the expertise is. We're not really expert, frankly, anyone who knows the Congress on much of anything. We have our hands in everything. But this is certainly a hugely important issue for Senator Leahy. He was a former prosecutor. And I think he sees his job as supporting the ambassadors and that office. Our job is to get the funding. Both to ensure that the office continues to exist and to get the funding to pay the ambassador's salary, his staffs, her staffs, maybe someday, and the operations of the office. And that's our job on the Appropriations Committee. And it's one that he has taken seriously for as long as I've been there. We would like if the administration would budget funding for this office and these programs in ways that would make it easier for us and not have to therefore steal money from other places, which is what we are in the habit of doing. But that is what we do because it is a very high priority from our point of view. Now, for the last, well, since 1989, however many years that is, Senator Leahy has either been the chairman or the ranking Democrat of the subcommittee that funds the Department of State and our international assistance programs. And that includes the operations of our embassies, all the State Department bureaus and offices and the programs that they implement. So in addition to providing the funding for the ambassador for global criminal justice and the operations of that office, we also fund programs to implement the recommendations of the Atrocities Prevention Board. The Obama administration created the board, but they didn't provide any funding to actually turn its recommendations into action. So that is something that we, Senator Leahy and Senator Graham, recognized needed to be done and we included the funding for that. Senator Leahy also created a fund now about $6 or $7 million. We've increased it to $10 for fiscal 18 if we get through fiscal 18. For the exhumation of mass graves, identification of remains of atrocity crimes in Sri Lanka, Iraq, Guatemala, Syria, none of that was in. None of that was in the president's budget. But again, something that he felt very strongly about and that program has existed for several years. We also provide the funding for our contributions to the UN Human Rights Council, to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In fact, Senator Leahy includes over $10 million additional above what the administration requests for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and for our contributions to the various special tribunals, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, the form of Yugoslavia, which have not always been popular with the Congress, mostly because they have, in many cases, gone way over budget. They've dragged on for years. But Senator Leahy has continued to support the funding for them because he feels that the alternative is really not an option of letting war criminals escape justice. For years, we've been trying to convince members of Congress to support assistance for ICC apprehensions, investigations, prosecutions, not as a US contribution to the court because we're not a party, even though we should be a party, but other types of assistance, which we have a lot of, if we were just able to make it available. We have the support in the Senate, but not in the House, which is sort of the usual story. But we're continuing to try to do that because we think it would both add credibility to our support for the court, but also give it resources that it really would benefit from. We also find ourselves defending the budget of the State Department's Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations for the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor because, as many of you probably know, the White House has proposed about a 25% cut in the State Department's budget. So both Senator Graham and Senator Leahy are determined to protect those bureaus, those programs. And we are reasonably optimistic that if we ever get through this process, we will be able to. I think that we're all familiar with the fact that weak and corrupt justice systems and impunity are really the norm in many of the countries that provide assistance to. Senator Leahy has written many, many different provisions of law, either to cut off assistance or condition assistance to governments or to other entities relating to where either there's a history of committing atrocities or a failure to hold people accountable. That's the purpose of the Leahy Law, which some of you are probably familiar with. And our job, me and my two staff, is to try to ensure that the Pentagon and the State Department are implementing the law as intended. And sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But that is very much a work in progress. It's really pretty obvious to us that it's the executive branch that has the expertise and the responsibility to articulate and implement policies relating to criminal justice, global criminal justice. But at the same time, Congress provides the funding. We make it possible for programs to be implemented. You can have the best policies, but if you don't have the resources, there's not a whole lot you can do. And when we see lapses or weaknesses in the administration's policies, whether it's a Republican in the White House or a Democrat, we try to use what resources we have or what influence we have to try to change it. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don't. But for us, these are issues that really are important to us regardless of who's in the White House. It's just a matter of principle. There's really only one way to accomplish anything in the Congress, which I think people are relearning every day. And that is for Republicans and Democrats to work together, which may sound a bit like a fantasy. But fortunately, Senator Graham and Senator Leahy, a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat, pretty much see eye to eye on these issues. They were both prosecutors before they were senators. And we're very lucky, actually, to find ourselves in this situation. We could easily not, and our lives would be miserable. And we would have a very difficult time finding agreement to fund any of what I've talked about. So that even when our process breaks down, like it kind of has, or the government shuts down, we know that sooner or later, people will come to their senses, and we will pick up where we left off. And we have to set priorities. We have a $50 billion budget. And, you know, Senator Leahy has, like any member of Congress, a million things that he's being asked to do. But certainly, defending human rights, and preventing and punishing atrocity crimes is at the top of his list, along with quite a few other things. But it's definitely there. And, you know, I feel very lucky to have that support because it's enabled me to do things that I otherwise never could possibly have been able to. I think each of us can think of instances when the United States failed to act quickly enough, or forcefully enough, when atrocities were occurring, including in some cases atrocities perpetrated by people that we were supporting, that we had provided training to, or equipment to, or when we failed to insist that governments hold those people accountable, as we should have. But there are other examples, plenty of them, when it was the United States, and particularly the people who spoke here before me, who played really an indispensable role in galvanizing international support for global criminal justice. And that is what we in the Congress are trying to support, people like you and others who may have left already, but who spoke earlier, to do what you all have been doing for so many years. I think in many ways this is a time when we have to do whatever we can to convince others in Congress who may know nothing about this office, or the atrocity prevention board, or any of this, as well as the White House and the State Department and the Pentagon, that these are not partisan issues, that we need to do everything we possibly can to prevent atrocities, to support international tribunals, to punish those who commit these crimes, and to help the victims. And so that is kind of how we see it. I've known all the different ambassadors, David, Steve, and others over the years. And it's been, I think, for us, just a great opportunity to be able to support them. It really has. I wish we could do more. But we're always interested in good ideas if anybody has any, things that we could do that we're not doing, ways that we could do what we're doing better, areas where a little money can make a big difference. There are things we can do. Actually, quite a few things we can do. You don't read about it. Most people in this country don't know about it. But actually, a lot does happen in the Congress that's positive. And we want to fight the kind of chaos that is swirling around us, continue to do the things that we know make a real difference. I'm going to stop there. Tim has agreed to stay for just a few moments before rushing back through all those duties to take a couple of questions. The obvious question is, as long as we're going to have to develop it. I don't think that will be happening in my lifetime. I mean, there are obvious reasons why that would make good sense. And some other countries do that. For so many of the things that we're trying to do, obviously, it's a multi-year process to enable people to plan. They need to know. But the fact is that budget year to year appropriations build. And for whatever reason, the forces, plus from changing that, are not ones that we're going to overcome anytime. Wish that were, I wish it were otherwise. And we have talked many times about at least two-year budgeting, but we haven't got there. And I pull a lot of optimism that it's going to happen. Anyone else? Yes, right here. Yes, I just had a question. If you could update us on the status of the Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act. And I guess maybe more broadly about the kind of budgetary institutionalization of the Atrocities Prevention Board, which is in part in the act, I think. But just in general about the dynamics about institutionalizing the ABB, thank you. So enacting freestanding legislation these days is not very easy. Anyone can object. Because very rarely does legislation get debated on the Senate floor. And so more often, the way that legislation is enacted is by unanimous consent. And one senator can object. And you can imagine that there would be a few objections to that legislation. So more likely, we will take pieces of it and try to incorporate it into our appropriations bill. But at the end of the day, most important is the money. Because most authorities exist. What we really lack are the resources. And that is where I see the most opportunity. So while I'm hopeful that that legislation makes its way and that we can at least enact parts of it, I know how difficult that has become, unlike 25 years ago, when you actually had debates on the Senate floor and amendments and things happened. It doesn't work that way anymore. So people introduce legislation, try to get the respective committee of jurisdiction to report it. But then invariably, the process kind of breaks down unless you can get unanimous consent. And it's very hard to do that. So we pick and choose pieces. And our committee focus on, OK, are there really authorities here that aren't available, that we need to legislate? Or is the problem really about how to get the funding to implement it? Yes, Ambassador Rapp. It follows up on something we were conversing about not long ago. But in terms of FY18 appropriations, and you've mentioned the great work that's been possible with Senator Graham and Senator Leahy working together. And I know we'd had this slender budget that the administration proposed last year that would have cut the State Department and international development by more than 20%. And you and the Senate committee basically restored almost all of those cuts and unanimously reported out like a $50 billion bill. On the House side, there hasn't been quite that as much action or clarity about where we're going. Of course, we're all interested in money for the atrocity prevention board and for human rights programs and for contributions to international organizations. And that kind of thing. And this is a much bigger picture. But as perhaps we work toward a budgetary compromise and perhaps toward another one of these omnibus bills that has everything in it, which we've had in the past. I mean, where are we likely to end up versus the slender budget versus at least allowing us to continue to be as active as we've been in the past on diplomacy and development and the exercise American leadership? But what it looked like we're heading toward? I actually was quite encouraged by the reaction to the president's budget because it was almost universally repudiated by Republicans, by Democrats, by everybody. And so, while we don't have a budget agreement and I'm always low to predict anything anymore when it comes to the Congress or, but I actually think that chances are more likely than not that we will get some number, which will be a lot closer to the end, the Senate number and that the bill will end up being okay. The House bill is better than the president's budget, but it's not great. They had a different allocation than we did and they have different priorities than we have, but usually we can bring them to their senses, sit down and negotiate with them. And so, while the whole process could collapse, we could end up with a continuing resolution again, but that actually wouldn't be the worst of all possible worlds. Actually, the fiscal 17 bill is not that bad. There would probably be some changes to it, but more likely, if both parties actually believe what they say, which is that they want to find a way to finish this process, and it would be an omnivorous appropriations bill. We've already been negotiating with our House counterparts for the last almost two months. So we're well along in resolving not numbers issues, but other issues. And I think if things go as we hope, we'll end up in a place where we feel okay about it. It might not be quite as good as last year. In some cases, it might be better than last year. But I think that we can all feel quite confident that what the president proposed is not on the table. That's fun shock. Thank you so much. Oh, it's on, sorry. Many people focus on the American Service Members Protection Act as being this sort of bar for many forms of cooperation. But as Ambassador Rapp mentioned, Senator Dodd got put in a little amendment that said, as long as you're helping with non-U.S. personnel who are being prosecuted for atrocity crimes, it opens the door to various forms of assistance. However, there's a previous statute that's an appropriations statute that didn't have a sunset clause that bars any form of funding to go to the court, which could be very broadly defined to include sort of U.S. assessed money that might go to the U.N. that could then indirectly go to the court, et cetera. Are there any prospects for just quietly getting rid of that little statute? And saying, oh, but we've got ASPA, which should be the sort of structure, you know, the framework for our engagement with the court. We don't need this other little appropriations statute and just kind of get that deleted for us. Well, as Todd and Steve and I'm sure David know, I mean, we've been trying to do that for the last five years. We are very acutely, painfully aware of that problem. You know, we know that not being a party, we can't make a contribution to the court the way that we would like, but it is ludicrous to us and help support the prosecutors, help in apprehensions, help in investigations, et cetera, in other ways, even, and we are doing some in-kind assistance, but there is an inherent contradiction between those two statutes. And the provision that we, the Senator Leahy has proposed and which Senator Graham has supported. In fact, it has been reported out of our committee five times in a row, would do what you just said, essentially. But we keep running into problems in the House and the irony is that we have gotten the support of the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, everybody. So there's no logic to opposing it. We've even got the Israelis to agree because there was some concern there. We exempt, obviously, NATO, the United States, everybody that, you know, we're not concerned about. We're concerned about, you know, real war criminals that the court is trying to bring to justice. So we are trying, we're trying again this year. It's in the Senate bill, but I know that when we finally get to that issue with the House, you know, they're gonna say, their Judiciary Committee opposes this, therefore they oppose it. So if we could get rid of the House. And... That's what I was. That's what I was doing. But, you know, we totally agree that this is something that the United States should be doing. I think on that note, that's an excellent place to close and then perhaps begin again with a new life. I wanna thank everyone and I wanna thank Tim, obviously, we'll applaud him in a moment. But thanks to all of you for attending today. This has been live streamed. It is available on the Carnegie Endowment website so you can point your colleagues and friends to the entire video record of it. We'll try to get this up on the Northwestern Law School website as well. This has been an extraordinary event and I have just been humbled by the entire presentation and participation of so many good friends and colleagues. I don't think we'll have a 25th, but maybe if we're all around by the 30th, we'll try this again. And some of our new successors will be able to join us on the panel. I have one organizational demand by many people. Could the ambassadors stay behind? We're supposed to take a group photo for some sort of historical record. And we'll try to get that accomplished. Thank you all very, very much. Have a good day. Thank you.


Legoset, Legoset Terrarium, right here, just get it. Audrey would have a ball. I'm not the world's best cameraman, so, you know. You have to beef yourself up. Yeah. Look, it's Shafi G, Audrey. Audrey's unicorn, she's very proud of him. I'm not touching it. You're not touching me. I'm gonna open some up and everything. I'm frozen lemonade, pretty crazy. Do their, like, a walk somewhere. That'll be fun. Okay, that was the convention for us. We did a lot. I got a sketch from Larry Hama. I got to talk to Ron Ruddap. That was a lot of fun. We picked up some more toys to review on the channel, but I think everybody's really tired now, so we're gonna call it a day. I was really happy to meet a few viewers. That was really awesome. Some of you guys shared your personal stories with me, and that was great. Really nice to meet all of you, and maybe we can do it all again next year.


Hello I'm curious if you might have first of all I didn't understand what your notion of median was in the multi-dimensional world and I'd like to know what it is in your in your concept so why was that upper right-hand corner the median as opposed to something else and secondly it seems that in many cases you do have three observations a recent paper with Indranil Dutta was that case in fact using GSS survey data on life satisfaction happiness where we got some really nice you know uses of the same methodology but with three and is really quite interesting for the single dimension case and I hadn't thought about multi-dimensional in that I'd like to hear if you've thought about multi-dimension to the next case of three as opposed to two thank you okay yes maybe should I answer this first or should I click okay so let me just illustrate the median concept again so the multi-dimensional median here is is the assembly the the tuple or the vector of the regions of the partial marginals so here in this case we have the marginals here is free they are free here and that's seven healthy so it means that and here there are six poor and they have four rich so it's it's the simply the median along each dimension that we combine into the multi-dimensional and it's known and it has been argued in mathematics literature that that is the only natural multi-dimensional median concept for ordinary data and then as to your to your second question you mentioned you mentioned some examples with the free free levels yeah I mean so strictly speaking our procedure that we provide in the paper it only applies to two by two cases with two binary indicators if you have like if you have a two dimensions with three levels then it should also be possible to to to to to work out a checking procedure how it would be more it would be more complicated but but you'll be able to do it what we want to look for is is a completed general checking procedure that applies to to general bivariate data there you will need another approach than we we're taking this this paper here but for those very small small cases like two by two or three by three it should be possible to to work out some ad hoc ad hoc workout some checking procedures that that that work any other question yes please thank you so much very interesting presentation quick observation that when you do bivariate case okay it's intuitive when you go to three-dimensional case becomes a bit difficult and as you move on it of course becomes much more critical so of course you will analyze that what this particular framework can tell you whether inequality is higher or lower in terms of dominance and when you do not have faster or dominance holds then you cannot conclude anything and that's the most difficult thing when it comes to applicability whether you talk about the close on and younger or boogie and chakraborty all this word so it may be interesting to develop as I along with professor Foster has tried to develop sort of idea of robustness so you know if your dominance holds fine you know one group has higher inequality than the other what happens when dominance does not hold can you say to what extent you can make the comparison whether it is not at all possible or to what extent what kind of you know so it's sort of a robustness idea that comes underneath of dominance maybe you can think about it just a comment but it's a very valid comment because it indeed also in this application in many of the cases we don't have any relations we don't have first order dominance we don't have inequality this quality dominance and what we can do so essentially that is a part of the concept it's I mean it's the idea is to make a robust concept and then hence it has to be demanding in a sense however one possible approach could be to make since these are this is sample data to make bootstrap replications of the data and then make the comparisons again and again with the bootstrap resampled data and actually this is what we do in in this paper when we have a dominance observe the dominance we bootstrap the data resample the data and then check how many how many times out of a thousand say we actually get the dominance relation again so that's a sense and indication of the sort of statistical robustness of the of the of the dominance relation you could also do it if you don't have dominance we could resample the data and then check if at least in some cases we actually get the dominance that would be an indicator that will be close to dominance some some in some sense so that's one one way to to to to address this taking a bootstrap approach any other question okay if not then thank you have two questions one is the weights you have you said you're not explaining how the weights were calculated but nevertheless I'm just asking whether the weights are subjective or is there a method for it secondly are they different for different countries and the other question is that especially for India we know that if you're calculating the index from the DHS and only mix then DHS is last was it was done in 2006 and so I wonder why the numbers of destitute has increased when the nutrition data hasn't changed and if you're giving highway to nutrition I'm presuming because it was the top so I because you know if you schooling data is of 2010 or 11 nutrition data is of 2006 so do you make any adjustments for all that thanks may answer one by one questions and then so there was another question in the back yes I like this idea of looking at more information more variables but I wonder how do you really know you are identifying the poor or the destitute is there an external validation of these or you are just providing another index and then with this index you have another criteria to classify people in one category or the other because I don't see any external validation of this index or any other index that uses many dimensions whatever thank you James you also had a question or so you're talking about destitute versus poor the poor definition is already pretty acute and I was wondering if there was any theoretical or in fact any other intuition that you could be providing us as to why you would choose the particular cutoff levels that were chosen in defining the destitute is there a conceptual framework that guided you in doing that or was that sort of just based on what cutoffs were available in the data and you had to go with what you had that was one question I'm wondering if there's another one yeah the second one was the conceptual trade-off between changing depth and changing breath can you offer any insight as to what that does when using a measure of this type which is based on breath but nonetheless you're changing depth and the trade-off between those two could be quite interesting as to who is captured in one case versus another thank you thank you so the first question on weights so when this index was constructed this is an international index and of course it has gone through various drops you know to understand how the weights weights are same across all countries they are not different okay and given that your two questions are related let me just tell you how the multi-dimensional poverty index is different from the idea of composite indices in compo as you said for schooling you have recent data for health we have risk old data so you are thinking in terms of the human poverty index or human development index where you have index for each dimension and you add them up this is not how the MPI is computed the for MPI all data has to be available from one source so that for each household you are able to see the multiple deprivations and then identify the household accordingly and then you agree it across the household so that is the first thing I think it answers also your partial of the second question so all data for India came from 2005 6 DHS dataset destitution increased or not I have not presented in this one but destitution has gone down in India when we analyze between 1999 and 2006 in fact in the Indian context reduction in destitution was much faster than the reduction of MPI so that's the positive story and that is what we presented in the 2013 paper with with Sabina Alkaya subjective weight or different weight weights were chosen in a way finally to represent sort of the idea of the human development index where all three dimensions were weighted equally here also we have three pillars standard of living education and health and as professor Tony Atkinson argues that in this kind of situations where you really do not know how to decide choose the dimensions in such a way that they have equal importance so that was that one factor that that played behind this though dimensions were chosen with sort of equal importance as was done in the HDI and then indicators within each dimensions they were just equally weighted okay so that's I hope that answers your questions how do we do validation what we have done in the past since 2010 that we have tried to implement these indicators to fields so you'd go and talk to people on ground and also collect information if they are really and we try to put those stories in our policy brief policy research briefs and yes so they are valley validated and it has been found that some people whose conditions whether they are really really deprived for the situation we haven't done it yet because for the situation this is just the concept here what we try to do we try to given that the MPA poor suffer in the in those dimensions and we have validated that we try to understand what if we put further threshold further put it deeper down whether or how many people do we identify but I completely agree with you this requires going to this requires validation going to field we haven't for the solution we have not done that but I take your point it should be done from the fosters questions particular cutoff level and conceptual cutoffs so for depth approach of course it was driven by both because electricity for example is a prime example where we wanted to know whether access yes or no is not enough I have been raised in a family where I had ten hour power cut I enjoyed the time I didn't have to study or whatever I had fun time but that was deprivation so of course I did not do my education properly so just having access to electricity is not enough and we wanted to and when we have worked with different country national governments we have tried to select cutoffs based on senior arc for example when we are working with the Iraqi government and even if you were there we try to select the cutoff that at least 12 hours of electricity has to be there which we we could not do here we are working on a urban sample slum project where we find that the household has access to water but it's between 3 o'clock and 4 o'clock in the morning that is the only time we have access to water whether that is sufficient whether that is enough so those are the things that we cannot address from the data because simply in the data we do not have have things so so we set the deeper cutoff but at some places where we can get the maximum possibility for example sanitation another example open defecation that's the minimum possible thing we got and it's a huge bunch of people we could not go beyond that so by part yes it was affected okay universalization of primary education so that actually motivated the MPI cutoff and then we went to a deeper cutoff where we try to say and try to be you know as much how should I say we could debate so we tried to be less controversial so for education we said if no child in that household is attending school then the child is identified so probably it gives you a legitimate cutoff so those kind of mix of conceptualizations and and availability of data what we had played the role in defining defining the cutoff trade-off so for the Indian context as I was telling what we did we implemented the cutoff say instead of 33 percent we used 50 percent the United Nation definition identifying severe poverty and then we have the set of deeper cutoff but keeping K same this poverty cutoff same and we tried to understand the interplay whether we are identifying the same number of people we did not so out of the 56 percent of the population in 1999 we identified nearly 24 percent as deprived in both and there were people in the other two segments as in the previous section was presented when you and we look at the marginal distributions there are people they were mismatch so those were the trade-off and trade-offs high it does not identify the same group of people honestly so so that is what I can tell you at this moment and particularly we have not tried to compute any index sort of that gives you you know the amount of trade-off but this is where we stand at this moment okay thank you very much then we have to move to the third presentation perfect thank you so much hi that's that's very interesting I didn't follow everything because it was presented a bit quickly so I'm not entirely sure what you're measuring in in the inequality section but I just wanted to ask you a question whether you had thought of and I'm not sure if you can do this without having pure diads but if you had thought of using something like the gender parity index to look within households suppose you had households with just one boy and one girl so make it simple what the gender parity index does is it takes whoever is higher and uses that person's as the poverty cutoff if you will and then uses a poverty gap to measure the shortfall from that of the other persons and then you just divide up you first have a headcount right of the percentage of people who were girls are above boys and percentage boys but now you can go into a gap which measures well if so then how far are they percentage wise from their from the person with the higher of the two so it'd be natural to explore not just percentages but to look at how big the gap is and I'm reminded of this because if you look at Rwanda for instance it's educational gap between men and women in married pairs in this case is is virtually nothing it's a half a year but if you subdivide it to those where women have higher education or the spouse that's male has a higher education in both directions it's three years on average and so and it's about 50 you know equal share in both of those cases it turns out and the women with more in the urban area and the men with more in the rural areas but you're hiding all the interesting disparities if you look at the average and that's what you're pointing out I'm just saying there might be another way of pointing it out by means of the gender parity index of the women's empowerment agriculture index which of course was put together by Sabina and myself and a bunch of other people so thank you please tell us which of the indicate a level of chronic under nutrition you're using minus two or minus three zed scores second question and remind us the MICS definition of household is it based on residents or is it based on kinship if the former one would be much less surprised at the extent of disparity if it's based on kinship one would expect to find much lower levels of disparity we take a second question here in the back thank you very much I'm his eye on the disability researcher and this comment is actually for all of the three presenters and if you rely your data on the existing ones that means that many of the children who are socially marginalized are not necessarily included into those and particularly so for children with disabilities and I would like to pose a question to all of you whether you have ever thought of relying on the existing data only and by that perhaps you might be reinforcing the fact that inequalities are continuing thank you thank you do we have another question okay if not yes please minus quick one of the indicators better the registration I couldn't understand how it's going to be like capturing what you want for inequality I couldn't understand really whether it's I doubt whether it's even a very good indicator sometimes to foreign household inequality I don't know I just want clarification okay thank you and maybe you start and because the question before was also to the other presenters then I just hand over to the two previous presenters in case you want to respond something okay it's the first one the gender parity index I think it's it's a good one it's I think it would be possible the one thing is that for some indicators that they're binary how would that work how the gap work so but yeah I haven't thought of that but yeah I think it would be a good way to do it this the way I do it only captures whether girls or boys in households are more or less advantage and and also it I guess it obscures whether there could be differences also across girls or across boys and this assumes that all girls within a household have a similar value and all boys within a household have a similar value under there are the differences that could be due to age for example birth order and that's not captured here this is this only captures gender differences so so that's that's important to take into account the second under nutrition minus two standard deviations and I should mention that although I know there is a newer reference from the WHO I use the old one because most of the mixed service from previous rounds only have the old standards for nutrition so for for comparing across different periods I use the old ones but it's not the best the new standards are much better and a newer rounds have that new standard that all the rounds of the service don't and about the household definition I believe it's on residents but I need to double check with the with the mixed service but yes I'll go on the birth registration and then finish with the with the overall question birth registration is is whether a child is registered at birth and that may not seem highly relevant but it actually is because birth registration gives access to services gives access to many things for children it's part of the right to have a nationality for example gives right to vote when when children grow up so it is actually a very important indicator of child well-being and and I think one of the main things I wanted to do with this is to show a wider range of indicators for child well-being as I said that the convention of rights of child has 17 these are only four so there are many other things that are not included here but I think birth registration is a it's a very important one and the final one on using existing existing data only yes I think it it it could reinforce inequalities because we're not we're not looking at other things and one of the things I I just said is that for example I would have liked to look at many other dimensions of child well-being but I only have four so I work with that and hopefully new service which have more information could be used you could apply the same methodology if you were looking at one specific country for example you could look at other sources of data I'm using this international comparable source which is the mixed service but if you would want to focus on other things you in some countries you could go and find other service in terms of disability I think the WHO has a new module on disability to including household service and I think it's a pilot but if for example that was included in standard household service that would be very useful to have a sense of other inequalities not only for children but for other groups as well I'll leave it to the other families thank you thank you would you like to respond something to this question so yes on data issues yes it's a it's a valid concern that we work with that the existing that says that we have at this moment but you also have to keep in mind that it depends on the objective of the study so here the objective of our study at this moment was to make international comparisons based on what we have and unfortunately we don't have the resources to go and collect the data by ourselves what we can do we compute and we can try to influence those who are collecting the data to include those further things honestly in the Indian context I know the the pavement dwellers they're not included in the service because this is only household service so we have no way of understanding their situation so these household surveys are meant to be nationally representative because you cannot collect a massively large sample has to be restricted by budget but the coverages can only improve over time and even if we want to go and try to collect probably we'll be able to collect data on those particular people but maybe not the others it's a complex problem but I completely take your point that there is need to go beyond what we have at this moment collect information on more dimensions as well as more people to understand and the data reflect the reality last peter anything you would like to add no okay then we are at the end thanks again to the presenters thanks for coming to this session two further announcement first the lunch is downstairs and then if you're interesting to connect a notebook or a smartphone or whatever to the internet I received these instructions and I think it would take this one sorry too much time to explain to you so I just leave it here and you can come to the desk and then check it out thank you