This is SiliconANGLE Wikibon as theCUBE, our flagship program, we go out to the events and expect to see them from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. Aleem Cummins is here. He's a practitioner with John Lewis out of the UK. It's a large department store and has some other businesses. Aleem, welcome to theCUBE. Well, thanks very much, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here, sir. So tell us a little bit about John Lewis. Many of our audience may not be familiar with him. Well, John Lewis' partnership is a fascinating organization. We began 150 years ago and approximately 85 years ago, the founder, John Speed and Lewis, he actually turned it over to the employees. So rather uniquely with John Lewis, if you work for John Lewis, you own John Lewis. So I'm an owner of John Lewis and we all call each other partners and it's a very, very special place to be. So we have two aspects to us. We have the department stores. Let's call John Lewis and we have supermarkets and they're called Waitrose and they're really, really popular and very successful in the UK. So the retail business obviously is going through some massive transformations driven by the internet, the cloud, technology changes, consumer buying behaviors. Talk about that a little bit and how it's affected your business over the last decade. Well, yeah, I mean, when we started off 150 years ago, what we were all about was customer experience, trust and the responsibility we have. Now, what's changed in 150 years is how people buy from us. So back then, we had shops. Now we have shops, people can buy via the phone, they can buy via the internet and growing in a huge way, people are buying over the mobile. So mobile is now a massive, massive part of our business and it's becoming more and more popular all the time. So we have to adapt to that. We have to be ahead of the curve. It's a very exciting place to be. It really, really is. So talk about the Splunk implementation you guys are doing because we've had some other folks on yesterday, big sites and they have all kinds of issues, log file, management, DDoS attacks, all kinds of operational challenges that they're surfacing with Splunk. So give us an overview of what you guys are doing with Splunk. Yeah, I mean, we started using Splunk about 18 months ago. I guess like many companies, it was quite small and we had some visionaries, some hobbyists and things like that. And with Splunk, it kind of goes from something that's a hobby, a proof of concept to like enterprise expectation overnight. You know, that expectation curve is sometimes it's interesting to surf. So we have more recently, I mean, we had a brand new platform for John Lewis come live on Valentine's Day was a lovely thing this year. And that really gave us the opportunity to use Splunk in a really powerful way. It has been a game changer. In fact, sometimes to a degree, it kind of feels like a new game. And that has allowed us to solve some real problems from real issues to the benefit of ourselves as a business and certainly to the benefit of our customers. So the customer experiences has been definitely, you know, improved by us using Splunk. Have you seen more cost reduction problems you solved or revenue generating activities? Well, it's a little bit of both.  I mean, they might manifest themselves by customers ringing up saying, look, I've got an issue, but sometimes they don't necessarily. So with implementing Splunk, what we can do is we can kind of for once, we can have our glasses on and we can see the low hanging fruit and we can go there. So we are actually solving problems that we wouldn't necessarily know that we had and also we're able to, you know, get good intelligence about what our customers are doing and their behaviors. And then we can act accordingly and make sure that what we have in place is what they need to shop the way they want to shop.   And now of course everybody's focused in your business on the Amazon effect. How are you addressing that? You obviously got a great brand. You said early on customer experience was everything you guys started the company. And I suspect that's part of the answer, but I wonder if you could talk about those competitive forces and how you've adapted and survived and thrived and given that context. Well, I mean, we're quite fortunate. John Lewis is kind of a barometer of the UK itself. If John Lewis is doing well, the UK is doing well. We have a special position within the UK. We're highly trusted by our customers. We're loved by our customers and we love our customers. So they tend to stick by us and they know that what we try to do is the right thing. So our customer service hasn't changed in 150 years. It really hasn't. So they know that if they come to us, they can look it up over the web. They can come pick it up in store. We're allowing them to shop the way they want to shop. So our click and collect now is massively popular. It really is. People can go to the John Lewis department stores. People can go to the Waitrose supermarkets. And now last week we just introduced Collect Plus so you can pick up your items from thousands of places around the UK, which is new and that's something other companies or somebody can't do. So you mentioned mobile, so it leads me to my next question, which is logistics. I mean the logistics component, especially for the online piece is really dramatically changing. You're seeing pressure for next day delivery or even people not talking about same day delivery. People talking about Sunday delivery. I wonder if you could talk about those trends, specifically as it relates to the UK and your organization because I'm not as familiar with that. And then is there a Splunk tie into that logistics play? Well, I mean, click and collect and people picking stuff up in the store has just exploded in the last several months and coming up to a year. And the fact that you can pick it up in the store the next day is huge.  And that is just fantastic and that's really, really popular. In terms of using Splunk for that, well, Splunk I like to think of as a very friendly, positive type of quicksand. It pulls stuff in and the more we can pull in, what comes out the other end is the gold and is the customer experience. So we will be doing more exciting things about that and looking at our behaviors of our customers, but that's to come as part of our vision. So click and collect, tell me more about this. So I shop online, I find what I want, I don't have to call and say to you have it and then go in and get it. I buy it and you're saying I can pick it up by three o'clock that next afternoon or sometimes same day, how does that work? It possibly wouldn't be same day, but if you go to our, no matter how you do it, no matter what challenge you choose to use, it should be available for you the next working day and you can pick it up in the stores and we've got 30 to 40 stores and our supermarket Arm Waitrose has over 200 now so there's a lot of places people can go. But in some cases I could go to the store and get it faster, is that true or no? Depends right on the item. I guess it does depend on the item, yeah, but the item would be there the next day. Yeah, when you click and collect. Yes, absolutely, yes. Or I could just walk in the retail store. Well, you could just walk in, yeah. You get it the same day. Well, you would, yeah, we got it. The beauty is we've got the presence on the internet, we've got the presence in the stores. So I'm saying as a consumer, I want you to compress that. Is it technically feasible to do that in say the next year or two? Compressing that cycle, maybe not same day, but morning of the next day or maybe even same day, is that even feasible? I think so. What's the gate there? Is it a logistics challenge? Is it an inventory challenge? Well, I think it's a bit of both. I mean, certainly, when we have all of our data for our generalist.com available to us in the Splunk platform and we're about to start bringing all the data from the stores in as well. So we can start to see, for example, that if we launch a new campaign to sell, I don't know, new iPads, we can see in real time how that's trending, how we're doing, what's the impact, and then we can adjust logistically in the back end of that to make sure that we are going to have the stock in the right places to keep our customers happy. And what about the other way? What if I don't want to get out of my easy chair because I'm watching the soccer game and I want you to deliver it to me? We will, I mean. So you'll do that. We absolutely will. And you're seeing that same type of trend where consumers want you to compress the cycle time in which they can actually get their product. Yeah, I mean, at the moment, we'll deliver it to you and we can probably do it next day as well, but the same day is quite interesting. It is quite interesting. I mean, is that a discussion you guys are having? I'm not necessarily privy to that, but I guess if I was a customer, that might sound like an exciting prospect. I guess it depends what it is, yeah. If it's a new iPad and we have them into the roofs, yeah, we could probably do something there. Aline, what do you think about the show here? Obviously, the folks out there watching yesterday got a good vibe from us, but you know, day two had a good party last night from out of town, you're in Vegas, Splunk is shipping code, making announcements, a lot of happy customers. What's your take on the show? What would you share with the folks out there? Well, John, I've been at this show for, well actually, I came early to do some Splunk University training and the energy, the vibe, the enthusiasm is just electrifying at this show. I mean, when we went to the keynote on, when was it, Tuesday, it was absolutely amazing. I think he was inspiring as well. We really, I felt invigorated and you really want to go back home and share what you've learned with your colleagues and partners back home and I think Splunk are tapping into our psyche. They're allowing us to dream and I think that's quite an exciting place to be and along maybe, along may we dream. What's so magical about the Splunk product that people get so excited about? I mean, the fan base amongst the customers is really high. Again, the dreaming, it's enabling solutions. What is it about Splunk that people get so jazzed up about? Well, I mean, you know, traditionally, I mean, before we would have had Splunk, we would have really, really good experts.  He's got to repeat that whole scripting process and if he wants to do it for yesterday, oh, sorry, we've recycled the logs. So the fact that we can all tap into Splunk, it means our expertise is being channeled into the same area. So collectively we grow together and our best practice can really, really increase and our knowledge transfers. So they automate a redundant step that's kind of manually going over and over again. Yeah, but the thing is because the entry is quite, it's not steep, it just means that if there's an issue, you can jump straight in and you can find it pretty quickly. I mean, I did the searching and reporting in the last couple of days and what we can do now is stunning. I mean, I'm not necessarily the analyst guy from the internet, but I can do analyst stuff now. I mean, that's, so I think the roles tend to blur a little bit, so which is quite exciting. So it's just important that what we learn here we share with the teams. But what I do like about Splunk is that it definitely fosters collaboration. Because Splunk, where does it sit? Is it this team, this team, this team? Well, actually it's the organization that spans a lot and it does bring us together and we kind of grow together. We have our post-traumatic growth, if you will. Yeah, so Splunk allows you to dream, which is great. I mean, you got to dream the future before you can create it. As I say, you got to invent the future. What do you see for the future for you guys? I mean, what's the dream? What's your dream scenario for going forward? I mean, I think the dream scenario for us is that we never get calls from customers to say they have problems. I mean, if people are calling, that's for us is not a good thing. We need to be doing proactive, preemptive, alerting. We need to be trending. We need to be seeing where this thing is going. So the more data we're going to pull in from our estate in terms of CPU, memory, disk utilization, network utilization, that's going to come together and that's going to really let us know at the get-go where we're going. But also what we're doing, which is quite exciting, is when we have new big projects now in John Lewis, from day zero, we're actually having a Splunk 101. We're engaging with the projects from day zero, making sure that when we come to landing the project, we have the dashboards. We have the ability to report on the non-functional requirements, the key performance indicators, and the dashboards people need to see how healthy we are. And that's very exciting. Because I think traditionally in the past, people might have thought, oh, we'll do that monitoring thing at the end. And at that point, your monitoring is only as good as what you store in terms of your logs. But because we're engaging early, we're actually getting higher quality, higher throughput. It's just a great place to be. William, thanks for coming inside. Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. Obviously, hearing from the folks in the trenches, not just the company, but people using the products, great. Thanks for sharing that with the crowd. This is The Cube. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back, live, day two coverage of Splunk Conference dot conference 2013. This is The Cube. We'll be right back.


Hello, I am Jim Hebden and Professor of Biomedical Optics at the UCL Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering. My research is focused on the development of ways to image the brain by shining harmless amounts of light across the head. We're particularly interested in applying such methods to premature babies to identify those that may be vulnerable to brain injury, resulting from insufficient oxygen reaching the brain during or immediately following birth. I was a child when the Apollo missions landed on the moon, and this was a massive influence on my later choice to become a physicist. The Apollo mission required many thousands of physicists and engineers to create solutions to brand new technological problems, and this still inspires me today. Perhaps the medical physicist who had most influence on me during my early career was Professor Robert Kruger, then of the University of Utah, who took a chance on me by offering me two years of funding to explore or create any new area of medical imaging. It was a fantastic opportunity. The most exciting thing about medical physics is probably working alongside doctors and other health workers and appreciating how advances in medical physics can have a major impact on patients.


I want to give a discussion about the past, personal future of cybernetics and system research. I just want to have this image of the background of the scientists. Where are we coming from? Where are we going? Just to have a reflection of what have been the achievements of cybernetics and system research as a current state and what are the future challenges and opportunities and how can we reach a future decided state. For this occasion, it is my pleasure to distinguish a final point here. I would like to make a brief initial statement about the use of either the past, present or future of cybernetics as a system research and also to locate its more broader, scientific, philosophical background about time. Afterwards, the floor will be open for questions and comments from all of you. The idea is to produce a document summarizing all the ideas that will be discussed here. Just a final note, I would like to ask everybody not to focus so much on debatable of the achievements but the achievements and challenges of cybernetics as a whole field. So, with that, I would like to leave the world to Elena. Would you like to be first? Good morning. My name is Peter Erdi. I would like to be here with my distinguished colleagues. So, history, past, present, future of system theory and cybernetics. So, I believe we should give some credits for the pioneers. So, I would like to leave you very briefly some elementary concepts of system theory and cybernetics. So, of course, this conference is organized by the Bertolofi Center, Bertolofi Viennese, who has a Hungarian name. Here are a couple of Hungarians. We are not Russian for Kolkostagori. So, a couple of questions. So, analytic and syntactic methods of Bertolofi emphasize. This is very important. So, to emphasize the necessity of organization principles. Of course, he emphasized the difference between closed systems and open systems and pushed this direction which became later the term of open system, the term of open systems of thermodynamic system, physical structure, synergies. So, he opened that broad pathway. He emphasized the concept of similarity and isomorphism. He realized and recognized the necessity of integrating approaches, but he still badly need. And there is a question, how to do it in the education? Actually, there are other students. So, even in this room, there are only a very few students, how we are able to attract students? But still, do we really need the new generation needs the concept of system theory, cybernetics, or that we are just something as a disarmament for the past? In terms of cybernetics, one important concept of McCalloch was experimental epistemology. He was sitting in the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT, Bertol, for me, he is experimental epistemology. So, to find the overlap between the physical and, I think, the metaphysical systems. And of course, there was the logical measures and how we can consider the brain and computers, the logical measures, the early cybernetics. So, then, as everybody knows, there were ten conferences, the mid, supposed to be, I mean, the Josh Macy Foundation. And that is just a mere coincidence, but the first meeting was almost on the same day when Churchill gave his famous Vultor speech. The concept of Iron Curt, which influenced our life very strongly, was mentioned the first time. And the very last conference was in the March of 1953. The same husband Stalin died. And so, you also have cybernetics, of course, was based on the concept of information theory, which was, that time, a syntactical information theory. And no, I'm not after to shun them to use the concept of entropy to measure information. And they have different types of concepts of entropy that maybe Stefan will mention today. I don't know, maybe not, but he has a lot of knowledge about it.  And slowly, slowly, we are in a situation where we recognize that neurological and psychiatric disorders, many of them are dynamical diseases. That is an emerging new field called computational psychiatry, which has a double meaning. First, how to use computational methods in understanding psychiatric disorders and diseases. And the second is the psychiatric disease as an impairment in the computational systems of them. I see this more than enough. Thank you. I think that systems research and cybernetics research have some line or inner logic of development. So, it is interesting always to follow their sort of say, adventures of ideas in systems research and in cybernetics. In my opinion, in my summarizing, my experience in thinking and in result in studying of systems and complex systems, I would say that the systems perspective which is in the middle from cybernetics and I view some rules of cybernetics even in physiology, in medicine, in their views of physicians. For example, in 19th century, the cybernetics and then systems research and then complexity, theory of complexity and theory of complex adaptive systems. So, for me, as I see all this line of development, past, present and future, I think that the challenging points for the future and still problems which we have in systems research may be connected with the emergencies or phase transition, the most difficult transition from non-living matter to living matter. First, then from living matter to human being and then from living being to human mind and human spirit. So, for me, as I view this line, so, cybernetics was mostly dealing with the process of homeostasis, with the processes of how to maintain the equilibrium. Now we want also to view not only homeostasis, but also the first development, first development. Why? Because the world is very unstable, unstable, full of crisis and to understand the inner mechanism of this first development, phase transition of bifurcation, of cascading of bifurcation is airport. And concerning these emergencies in the big history of nature and mankind, I would like to make focus on such two points. Why? One, it is, for me, it's a surprise, I was wondering why the world, for example, cognitive science. And epistemology does not deal with the higher level of human mind, with the human spirit, with the concept of spirit, is lacking in the modern field of research, in the modern books, in the huge literature about it. And why? It's very interesting, why if we, Bistrich Schachter, will not think about the higher level of human spirit, another spiritual, or local, or local people from church will do it. It is another, it's out of view, it's out of view. And another point, and I will finish when it was, it's two main bridges, I think it's very interesting, between life sciences and cognitive sciences. Life sciences and cognitive sciences have to develop a very wide systems and evolutionary perspective. And from this standpoint, trying to combine ethics, human ethics, freedom, and also ethical issues, responsibility, aesthetics, the feeling of beauty, and the processes of cognitive processes, the searching of truth. So, this is a philosophical task, and we can do it now, using our developed notions of systems thinking. I consider it as a big challenge for the future. Hello. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you. My name is Stephen Turner. I have three jobs. One is that I'm having a complex systems research institute at the Medical University. I am a part-time researcher at the ASA, which is an outside of Vietnam Faculty of Scientific Institute. I am sorry that I cannot really say something about the progress of psychometrics and systems research. I'm not really part of the community, but I feel that I can say a little bit about the progress of complex systems science in the past years. So, what is the difference between these two fields? I really don't know much, but that's a little bit the feeling that the themes are very similar that are discussed. But, into psychometrics, when all the social scientists enter into complex systems, the physics is right. This could be maybe a little bit, it might be, how our community is different. About complex systems science or the science of complex adaptive systems, this is more than 25 years old. A few top physicists and economists decided to tackle problems which were not approachable by any scientific method before. Basically, these types of problems were problems of dynamical systems with ever changing boundary conditions. So, if you think of traditional science, science is something where you fix your boundary conditions, you cut something out of the universe, and then you can describe it with a set of differential equations, for example. So, most of the boundary conditions, you can never solve differential equations, you can therefore not make predictions, you cannot test it experimentally, you will lose science. As we were taught how to do science by new physics, we have to do it easily. In complex systems, you have the problem that there is a dynamical system, and this system, you cannot cut out from the universe and study by itself, but it has boundary conditions and it influences and changes these boundary conditions as part of the dynamical process. If you think of this, what this means mathematically, this is a set of differential equations, where the boundary conditions are part of the complex system and this is a mathematical monster, you cannot treat it. And this is the type of problems that, about 25 years ago, this set of people, some of them, for example, started talking about. The game changer, why is it now possible to address these problems, is of course the use of the computer, the use of HEE-based models and completely new type of statistics. The progress that has come out of this field is, I think, pretty remarkable. We are in these years now in the position that we are constantly advising decision makers in the United States, in the OECD, in the Fed, in the United States, in the European Central Bank, the European Union, as you may have seen last year, has spent about 50 million euros in calls that are related to complex systems science. Another project around the corner, whether you maybe will set up the billion euros for the next couple of years, completely dedicated to quantitative science and complex systems. When you are sure about the European flagship projects, which will be decided on very shortly, Futurizing Dream is the name of these complex systems that's waiting to be approved. Complex systems scientists are thinking about how to reform our financial markets, they are designing search engines for the internet, they design your traffic systems, think of the billions which are spending systems, biology, which is a little rather big, rather, even of complex systems science. And these are some of the results. The triumphs of complex systems science in my personal view is network theory, and network theory in combination with statistical mechanics, and the set of applications that come out of it. Namely, departments could make real progress in understanding evolutionary dynamics. And also the combination of network theory and statistical mechanics leads to a deeper understanding of what non-equilibrium economics is, and we are at the edge of representing whole societies in so-called multiplexes. I don't know if you know what the multiplex is, this is a set of networks which connect the same set of people. That's basically what the society is, it's a collection of social networks between the same people, where these networks mutually influence the other networks. A highly complicated mathematical problem we are at the frontier of understanding societies as such that they make a lot of complex networks. The reason for those successes, I think, is so that you can see a single effect that the science of complex adaptive systems is predictive and quantitative science. So the representatives of these science, they have undertaken the boring, boring job of using data that's now being collected at tremendous rates, and to use this data to test and reject their models. This is, I think, the reason for those successes, that so many models that have been produced in complex system sciences get rejected, that's the big progress. Because the few ones that survive testing, they have the potential of predictive use. I think that complex system science is changing society, it's co-evolving with the revolutionary changes that are all around us. Complex system science is somehow a catalyst for societal change. So if you think of the Internet, if you think of, for example, that your sense of knows more about you than your mother does, these things have to learn about you. It is not a neural network that is learning these things about you and your neighborhood and surroundings. It's a combination of things. It's a combination of network theory, understanding of social networks. It's a new type of statistics that has to be combined with this and technology and search engines, page rank things that it's designed. So in this co-evolvation, we're speaking up with our contributions to revolutionary changes in society and creating also demands for data. And let me stop with an outlook. We cannot ask if this is really cool what is happening. So one thing that's happening is that we're collecting data about societies more and more and I'm sure you all know about what happened on April 1st this year, two years ago when we did look. It's not a joke. All the information about your location, about your emails, about what you click on the Internet, what you read, what you exchange with friends on your telephone talks are recorded. They're not used for anything up to now, but it's just a matter of time that this data will be publicly available because it gets stolen or because the commission will ask our scientists to make sense out of this data. And this of course has implications on our concept of civil rights and I think this would need more debate, a large-scale debate if we really want this. Of course we want the progress of complex system science to understand more about our species, but at the same time we should, in my opinion, not go in the direction of reduction of civil rights. For various reasons, I'm coming from Budapest, Hungary. And first I would like to give some comments on actually reflections for the question of why do I think that systems of approach is important. I think there are at least three reasons, obviously there are many more, and the discussion may uncover some many more. But first of all there are data now available, as Stefan already mentioned about his recall from the Society of Data, but also in biology and in many systems, which are system level data, and therefore he was the chance, at least, to work with them and to try to understand them as a whole. Now the second, as we also mentioned already, just I would like to put this together, as it has been put together in my mind, that the 31st century will be most probably a century of crisis situations, which are coming up one after the other, because the surrounding, the environment of Western civilization has been changed a lot, meaning that they reach the limits of growth, in the sense of earth or capacities of the earth. They have an overpopulation, which we haven't had to this extent previously, and so on and so on. So this situation has changed, and therefore the behavior has to be changed, but obviously the behavior is not changing smoothly. Most of the time the behavior has to be changed through a crisis situation series, which needs to be predictions. And this needs to be a systems of approach. Last but not least, I would like to pose it in a way that we are recovering from an extremes of reductionism in science. As in yesterday at Symposium, Paul Peter Ehring posed it very nicely for me, that we are recovering the biology from the tyranny, as we told of molecular biology. Since I was a molecular biologist five years ago, I am now in the position of a dictator who was overthrown, or a representative of a dictator who was overthrown, and I'm very happy to be overthrown, because I understood that once you have this extreme reductionist approach, like having one protein isolated, as in my case it was, having another protein isolated, and then seeing how these two single proteins are interacting to each other, this is nonsense, because in the real set there are hundreds and thousands of other proteins which are interacting with both, and influencing this single interaction. So your data, which you recovered after a lot of suffering, are nonsense, in fact. So I'm not saying these data are useless, because these are the data we are using at the moment, but by themselves we're using the word this single thing, and not understanding that the word is more complex. That is an extreme which we should more avoid. However, there might be another extreme, and I would like to warn ourselves, not to go to the extremes of system balancing, and forget about the data themselves, and forget about the details themselves. So I think a firing kind of balance is useful, and I would like just to close my little remark by three kind of methodological comments, which probably relate to this. The first of them, that I would like to warn ourselves, that we should be humble, in the sense that to understand that a complex system does have limits. I just would like to give you the story of a protein, which is in our brain, or which is in the brain of a person. This protein enjoys the company of other proteins, and enjoys the dynamics of other proteins. Other proteins, the neighboring proteins, are kicking this protein because of these dynamics. There are information exchanges going on in the neural cell in the brain. Now let's suppose, or let's think about, that this person, who is the older, is a young boy or a young girl, or she or he is just before the very first date of her or his life. She or he is very excited, obviously. Therefore the neural cells are very excited, and therefore the proteins are kicking the neighboring proteins physically at an extreme level. Now that poor protein in the middle of this turmoil doesn't have a clue. Why is this turmoil going on around me? I mean, why the others are kicking so wildly at this very time? That protein has no idea of the dead's brain. It has no idea that the brain has an owner. And the owner is just before the first date of his or her life. And that's the major reason why this whole turmoil is on. So I think if we just believe or think about the moment that we are the proteins in the brain, which has a owner, which has a company, or a lover, about the first date situation, then we start to understand how humble we should be when we try to understand these systems at the higher level. So this was the first remark. We have to be very cautious. One reason why we have to be very cautious is because it has a very big difference that we try to find solutions to problems or we try to find problems to solutions. And at systems that are sitting, often we have nice models, and Stefan already told that it is a major thing that some of these models are disproved because they are not very useful models. But sometimes we are sticking to our models very much and we try to find the second of the world which is finally, luckily, can be described by that model. I would like to warn ourselves to the dangers of this type of thinking because it is not dangerous by itself, but if it goes to the extremes and they figure out the world as such, having some data which are probably something that is existing to justify a model that is dangerous. Now, very last remark, that's actually a kind of person, I think, why do I have to be at this conference? That we have to be open minded. I think in this conference there are people who are very much open minded and that's a major advantage of this meeting. I just want to give you an example of the importance of being open minded. Last summer there was the network sign at this conference in Budapest that is a major conference for network people at the moment and I was happy to chair a session where there was a lecture about actually a phase transition type of event in networks. It is called the Archival Test Processive Summit. It is familiar with this in the network. That was a woman who was making an account on this phase transition type of thing and at the end of the lecture she was a physicist. At the end of the lecture she was interrupted by a mathematician from the audience that all what you have said about this phase transition is stupid, is nonsense because if you extrapolate this network to the infant so there are this infinite number of nodes in this network then this phase transition becomes not to be a phase transition so in the strict definition sense it is nonsense because it is not a phase transition. Then the woman answered that but come on I mean it is nowhere happening that there is such a big network which has infinite number of nodes and if we have proved if the network is having an infinite number minus one nodes then this is a phase transition so in all real cases it is a phase transition but obviously in the clear case of mathematics it is not. But then the woman continued that I just would like to recall a paper from Nature which was written by biologists when they were telling them about critical transitions and I would like to scold them because critical transitions are really not phase transitions not from even this point of view those are messy and this phase transition is a real one not from a mathematical point of view but at least from a viscous point of view this way of thinking about phase transition as an example tells us how open-minded we should be because in this particular case biologists, physicists and mathematicians have a completely different concept of this kind of subtle transitions what you mean by critical transition phase transition if you are less or more strict and I think also all of them are right and we should be aware of it of the chain of proteins of the areas you know how to handle them and I would like to do a little bit in terms of both retrospective and the current assessment of the prospect just briefly since this is a very rich presentation in the red building and I am looking forward to having some conversations around them hopefully I can also throw in a few things that might be a little bit more controversial this approach of systems and cybernetics as a general approach to be able to understand complex the complexity of the world in which you live to be able to have a way to reduce the input that we receive all the time sensorically and process it in terms it can make sense that we can have actionable frames of engagement within our realities not reducing the means to structure very much in the classical forms of science but now we are using them more to questions of processes and dynamics we often trace this back to von Berthau view and that is a very good place to begin and to look at these approaches here in the western world but it goes actually back much much further of course we can think of this in non-western frames in terms of engagements with holistic holistic engagements with reality holistic engagements with our cosmology and even back in our western frames the tales of Miletus and then since then to Nikolaus the Causa the North Whitehead there have been plenty of precursors including Alexander Boglov who very much in a similar time of von Berthau came forward with these approaches that transcend the silo of views of nature and of phenomenon in this I think is the particular contribution of systems and cybernetics to be able to allow our system to see across disciplines to see across perspectives this quest for isomorphisms and now we are looking not just at isomorphisms across disciplines but we are looking at it in the contemporary frame in terms of experiences as well so this push that has come and traced at least in the western foundation back the tales of Miletus and forward then in 1954 with von Berthau and Kenneth Balding and Anatole Rappaport and also George Miller and Graff Gerard and Paul Weiss and these are many of the seminal thinkers in the area and have looked towards framing for the unity of science so we can move beyond these arguments between the mathematicians and the biologists and the chemists and the physicists and that's just within the sciences but also to then transcend and address some of the questions and concerns that for example C.T. Snow will forward in the famous lectures about the two cultures between the sciences and the humanities and I think this is where we are now coming to much more we are still very much working with the systems and cybernetics sciences and the challenge that I feel we are facing now is to think in terms of sciences that embrace also the human sciences social sciences, psychological sciences looking at emerges phenomenon that bring in to play multiple intelligences and here we have moved in the direction of thinking in terms also of emotional intelligences there have been frames of ecological intelligences there have been frames of trying to expand and create dimensions of appreciation of thinking of cognition that explore spiritual intelligences now these are all areas of cognition and areas of perception that have been explored quite recently but I would suggest that they are still psychological and that what the systems and cybernetics approaches can offer is a systemic intelligence a holistic intelligence the risk here also is to take it to explore not to take it to extremes because we can move from a form of reduction to the parts move away from that to what Ben-Gur Moran has pointed out as a recent holism that takes us to a reduction to the whole where we appreciate things only at the level of holistic phenomenon and do not appreciate the fine aspects of their sub-systems in other words, looking at the analytical and being able to dissect the system is also important at the same time understanding when it's appropriate not to dissect when it's appropriate to understand it at the level of the whole but not always and only strain ourselves to an understanding at the level of the whole again that would be a reduction to the whole so seeing and I think one of the real challenges of our time now is to move and embrace these approaches that involve aesthetics ethics as was mentioned earlier and to engage in a type of integral systems approach that brings into play more than western appreciations more than the classical scientific appreciations that brings into play forms of intelligence forms of appreciation that are part of our heritage as a species and engaging now in forms of meta-log dialogues with self dialogues with each other dialogue with nature expanding our ways of creating meaning together how can we do this and this is one of the challenges that systems and cybernetics approaches have to offer and to explore the ways in which we can appreciate self-ass instruments in this process and not just develop technologies upon which we rely to explore the world around us but finding ways of fine tuning our own perceptual ability this I think is one of the challenges that we have in moving into a frame of meaning that one might think of as integral systemic or holistic meaning and I would like to then just conclude with some challenges perhaps we heard a little bit about the ways in which systems and cybernetic sciences tend to be predictive and quantitative and I would invite us to explore ways in which we can move towards more of a forecasting nature rather than predictive nature and beyond that to the design frameworks in terms of social systems design in terms of evolutionary systems design that involve back casting approaches that involve idealizing the future state so we talk about very strongly idealizing the design so that John Moorfield and Bella Banffy and several others when we approach them there is to be able to vision and vision use our ability to dream the powerful ability to dream to imagine desirable states protobias not utopias but realizable futures to dream and live ourselves how do we bring ourselves to those states here then we come back to processes of creating the prototype systems that will bring us forward into those states but involve a back casting approach and rather than seeking to predict futures I will look for ways that we can curate the emergence of protobias curating the emergence of systems involves a much more humble approach it involves listening, observing seeing what is emerging involves being at the liminal state of consciousness as well rather than purely at the rational frame and being able then to truly embrace the power of what began the kind of tales of the lettuce as an appreciation of complexity that was not divided into either epistemological or ontological fragments and this is still a big debate in the new system of communities is the systems approach ontological or epistemological but prior to that division it was seen to be new theological gnosis, I mean from the notion of gnosis appreciating the ways in which we construct our realities and a formulation of conceptual patterns that relate directly to and have a direct relation with our life experiences how can we bring back this framing, this new theological framing rather than falling into the further divisive patterns at the end of epistemology and ontology so finally then I would like to just point to some very interesting directions that are emerging along these lines the quest for creating these protobias has to be embodied in organizations that can walk this path organizations that live according to a whole arctic process of engagements and that begin to engage in an emergent processes that aren't predictive exclusively predictive engagement because once you can predict the system that is to emerge is no other emergent for to be truly emergent there is this element of all of sacredness and of awareness of that which is emerging for us to be engaged in these dynamics in a process that births new realities we have to take on a triple role and I think the sciences of complexity can help with this this triple role involves us being both midwives to protobias that can emerge at the same time as we midwife in this sense of curating emergence of the possible we must also be the mothers we must also give birth we must also be the ones who produce two new organizational forms two new relational awareness these new dynamics in social systems so we have to be midwives and we also have to make that which is being born we ourselves have to be the new systems the new social systems and there is one very interesting organization that is just coming to be that approaches this in ways that seek the greatness of the educational frames the Giordano Bruno Global Schiff University just coming up and offers a way of exploring this past, present, and this eliciting this emergence process through an educational framework that brings people into a story dwelling engagement not telling us stories which are the typical educational findings not even simulating stories where we get to work with models and experiences in relations with the algorithms but actually bringing us into narrative engagements with our own living world and exploring how we can further those narratives into these portfolios into a true global eco civilization I think this is the major challenge for systems and cybernetics in this section Thank you very much for all the panelist we have now half an hour for our discussion I would just like to ask people to take more than three minutes to cover the discussion after three minutes so we'll take the microphone from you then we would like to start the question or comment for our panelist Victoria for Halep's asgo several times you have mentioned Rotoques but I don't understand what is the first week with Rotoques Thomas Moral of Rotoque what do you understand for Rotoques the question is that almost all the people has agreed to improve to live better, to have better quality in life but the problem usually is how to get this new better quality in life and I think the problem usually is that we don't meet a limit to make change known for ethical values because with actual occidental values safe and free materialism and capitalism it's very difficult to get a better quality in life forever that's it thank you well yes exactly the idea of giving a better quality of life for everyone this is quite a utopic dream the framework around Rotoque suggests that there are there are realizable now configurations for social systems in interaction with the biophysical world that would allow for an improved quality of life that would allow us to manifest now many aspects of our dreams but not in the end not in the purely dream frame utopias generally are ideals they can be approximated as a copy of it but they cannot be actually lived into full existence when they have been tried when you've tried the experiment many social experiments to create utopic living conditions but they intended to function on principles and on design approaches that are very ideal that are specifically abandoned by ideals but this combination between bringing in reality and then actionable changes that would allow us to come into relationships that are not just sustainable but that are thrivable and these relationships have to align along four at least four dimensions they have to be coherent at the level of the intrapersonal so the intrapersonal dynamics how one lives one's life how one is able to maintain the integrity of oneself as a biophysical and sociocultural psychological system as an individual that's one level of system viability that has to be respected and maintained and this needs to be then aligned with the intrapersonal dimension at the intrapersonal dimension we have to create non dysfunctional systems that's only at the level of sustainability and this thrivable system and we have so many experiments along lines of alternative currency along lines of ways that bring forward new forms of relationship that can also be brought into alignment with the intrapersonal so now we have two levels intrapersonal and interpersonal then there is trans species the trans species dimension of systemic internal systemic that involves our engagement with the more than any world the more than any world and many of our social systems design many of our systems approaches are constantly concerned with the human world it's very anthropocentric very incurable emergence it's very almost how then we begin to see ourselves as part of a living web of life of course like at Pope Isen and Miller also will look pretty much at this approach and so has the culture of copper and so on in terms of the web of life then we have to bring in the framework that is trans temporal and so now we move from intrapersonal trans species and trans generational or trans temporal and in that frame now we start to see ourselves as part of a narrative that respects trans sisters and of all species but also then brings into our collaboration process the future generations or the voices as well of those who are not yet present but who are stakeholders in whatever decisions we make and there is much that we have to learn from wisdom cultures around the world because they often have these built in they have these types of have the empty share for future generations the 7th generation group so again being able to create these protocols are things that we know how to do but if we function only on the basis of our dreams only on the basis of the ideals then I think we will we will watch short thank you very much for some stimulating ideas some of which I found rewarding and others which I would if conversation allowed I would like to suggest that a key aspect of being systemic is to be able to move to different levels of abstraction so my invitation is to move to another bit of abstraction and to reflect on what we have done when we have done what we did as scientists doing systems and scientific over the last 15 years and to think about that in ethnographic terms I think that could be a revealing inquiry and my second reflection then would be to think about what we need to do if we accept the explanation that humans are changing the climate of the world which brings us into a new period in human history which I would suggest throws up for consideration not only ideas but all of the institutional arrangements we have built in the past amongst which I would include the doing of science and what I found a common trait between all speakers was a desire to conserve a particular notion of doing science and I wonder if there is a reflection to be offered by panel members on the doing of science in the future thank you any way you would like to comment or we can gather several comments and then go back to the panel perhaps thank you very much especially with the idea that sort of a mystery which is still somewhere there which makes us humans I'm not sure you know this because from the time I was struggling for a certain time then practically all the examples you have studied and that can make a walking situation to oppose to myself to myself are there robots around and me and myself as well and then she went to come back to the mystery I think that this very productive tools kind of art artistic representations which we are more visibility around and which we are using in our metaphors, associations and in our languages also I want to point here that I think that the mathematics itself is the same kind of artistic language and don't worry about that because actually this is the most purest, the purest, the most constructive but in any way that's the same kind of artistic language and it depends on our ability to understand what kind of resources we put there and how we will be flexible with that to bring it out and have the answers so to my right I think that we and academics and systems researchers exactly in the position now to find out how this non-formal and formal things and preparation can be done in the best way Thank you I'd like to come back to the topic of ethics and simply a further question I think it's very important this is the application to see if you talk about ethics it's the point of responsibility of applying those theories and this has got to do with education it's if you have to teach our students what I think in many cases we do we just teach them explanations and we don't teach them the simplifications categorizations, classifications go into and watch behind it we don't teach them really limits of the applications that's due to the way we teach in some sense in science and so I'd like to make sure we can come back to two to three sort of positives which I think at the bottom we understand them we understand both the logic and in a much the way things and then we can reflectively correct that's the point okay first positive first of all our concepts naturally it must be fuzzy because we have to simplify things in order to make predictions about the parameter values we mustn't use the parameter values just to steer reality and then to identify the parameter values second point is theories are maps, theories models are incomplete of course I don't need to get into that that should be noted to all of us so which is the thing that I think is most important is that in many cases we just project our theories or our understanding projecting on maybe take them much too literally and therefore action guiding descriptive in this sense and if we look at these three elements we come back to that very different way of teaching and then perhaps we see that you have to discuss more dialogue and more thinking we keep more careful about the implication of whatever we think it is is that the fuel salt let's have one more comment before returning to the panel I feel that there are signs and I would like to comment on the basic questions from this point of view if we consider from this point of view of the past, the present and the future or these disciplines I think we should have to apply the concept of analogy analogy which because I think actually if we consider the concept of systems or concept of side effects this means that in these cases they apply a kind of analogy between the different kind of beings in the world in a certain sense this is a very crucial point in these cases and the question from this point of view is that can we accept or can we see the same similarities in the recent time in the future can we see the same similarities between the events or between the things between the conditions as it was in the 30s or the 40s with this or we can but we should have to find some different analogies now so for example it's very clear that in the 30s the totality the problems of totality was a really important problem of course and it was also it's very clear again in the 40s 50s the government or the control of the things was also a very important problem not only in the measures sciences but everywhere you can see but the question is how can we find the traditional common characteristics of the event now so how do you think about this if I suppose that all of this depends on a kind of culture environment or the culture much more than the simple scientific or simple business context would any of the panelists would like to speak so why do we know to this camp it's too serious to lead it for the social sciences and reverse for the politicians so there is an emerging field computational social science which might be interpreted as a successful of cyber genetics and complex system research and we should take it really seriously so those of us who come so still believe in this two world but those of us who came from this hard science what we are talking about we try to use concepts which have some definition and of course we know that some systems can be predicted some if not so we should know what are the limits of predictability maybe widening the limits of predictability to accept that there are systems which are inherently unpredictable you mentioned ways in which our framing of things in terms of problems take from the sciences also when we bring that into these fuzzy aspects of social systems design we can come into some ethical to think of people as problems to be solved it's not so healthy and we do that all the time to think about life as a problem to be solved but everything that we do many times what we do in our approaches our approaches that we try to think of as scientific we look at in terms of problems in your solutions but when we look at the process in a more organic emergent frame and see what is let's say the way in which what is coming now from aspects of biologically for example how does nature create conditions that are conducive to life the idea again that Jeanine Binius put forward that life creates conditions conducive to life there is a sense ability here there is a ability to appreciate perhaps in surgical vigorous as appreciative systems that we can be what is the system what are the systems with the nature of the systems that are emerging I think then it is part of our engagement as systems the thinkers and practitioners to then say well then how can we influence the system to perhaps create more create dynamics that are more life from future oriented and opportunity increasing will we know can we predict that the ways in which we nudge the system maybe setting up certain attractors maybe minimizing other inputs and influences will we know what kind of outcomes are going to be generated what secondary tertiary implications are well we can start to model that and get some good ideas but I don't think it is a question of us for sure but it is dancing with a process of change and learning how to continually model and re-model rather than to have a fixed model that we seek to apply but this continuous re-designed process rather than giving no problems to be solved but engaging in this dance I think that is very much part of the emerging approach scientific approach and I think the power of analogy and metaphor and not to be confused with homology when we start to see things specifically with the structures are the same identical and from one to the next but we are looking analogically and metaphorically that brings forward the whole art and the aesthetics and the spirit of our creative potential thank you Alex we would just like to summarize several of the comments that have been mentioned already I think that is one of the big challenges of cyber-ethics and systems research complexity less in the fact that we are quite an ambitious field I mean we are trying to solve big problems in science and in society and in technology so I mean what Peter was saying that we have to be humble is also a bit of contradiction because indeed we must be humble but at the level at which we are also being quite ambitious I think another challenge of cyber-ethics for the future it's we could say it's memetic propagation because even when the methods and theories that have been developed in cyber-ethics have propagated into whole sciences everything is a mix of systems I mean it's a methodically nowadays everything is a mix of systems only that let's say they don't refer to it directly from that level and I think similar thing has happened with cyber-ethics many of the approaches that people now call complexity they are called from cyber-ethics only that people are called from cyber-ethics the same is happening with complexity many people in different disciplines are using methods and techniques from complexity but there is a constant way so in terms of memetic propagation of the field I think one of the issues would be perhaps concerned or perhaps not that much because it's just a matter of technology the ideas that have been generated and cyber-ethics and systems research have been spreading and they are producing in most of the positive insights but the field itself with the name it seems to be not propagating as fast as it might we can see a reflection of this in the number of basis tools that are attending this conference compared to several other conferences so we should also consider whether we want to involve more students or whether we just want to give up cyber-ethics and use some of them because it's just a matter of austere technology it is so cool that certainly we are interested in finding out what is system and cyber-ethics but very often we forget that systems and cyber-ethics are something that human beings have been using a lot of time before to establish some ideas about systems also apparently it is covered in cyber-ethics but the main question that I think we should be dealing with system and cyber-ethics is to realize what is the situation of the world today and how, what are the coincidences of that first of all that is why most of them because he mentioned we do not know what we are we do not know where we come from we do not know where we are going and that is the big problem we are facing but some unique problems that we are not realizing that we in this system and cyber-ethics very often how we are interested in this is what to do with the new systems we are doing nothing as sister and son of cyber-ethics what we are doing about the warfare that started many millennia ago and continue and is increasingly that of the great destruction of the planet of the annihilation of human beings what are we doing about the dehumanization of human beings because most people is humanized and it is not recently if they started to dehumanize as soon as some level of our existence started to invent it is later it is later and it is later to continue you can see the factor is and recently it is quite illustrative what are doing the companies with the workers they are more slaves than many other people before but we are doing with animals we are abusing we are exploding all the animals I am personally vegetarian not because of health because I consider that all animals have the right to live with dignity but we are doing about our situation because human beings are in predatory species you can see what we are having the the the current of what are they doing which is mentioned what is doing human beings is taking advantage of everything what are we doing against the industrialized countries who continue trying to exploit all the planet what are they doing with the purpose for the sake of others are they doing something for in order to prevent the contamination of Mr. Obama in order to continue organizing humanitarian work what are we doing about the Russian failure because only are statements but nothing is done in order to force United States of other countries at least to sign the Kyoto agreement what are we doing about the chemical deviation whether in the battle it was established of God that we could take anything from us even more dangerous what are we doing about this the position of the leader who is training the new work order what is this new work order is talking to force all the masses of people to be selected by the selected people and last thing is that I think that system thinking and cybernetics has been idealized and it is corrupted because we are dealing with the real problems that we are facing and the real problems need quick actions movement as it is done by J. Kodal to solve the problems with small communities that's a long list of questions that we might talk about yes I had something summarizing my views on this discussion so what we need we need I would say common language vision of the world some people why do we need such face transition why do we need such critical transition why do we need such system views because I am doing my own science independently of your system thinking independently of your complex thinking and in this regard we cannot impose this system please think systemically in a non-linear way so we can combine another problem how we can combine the human human life our own world of life level sweat phenomenological approach our own experience in science how we can introduce the dreams as Alexander said and this system view and in the future studies for example so this is of course a great problem for us and as I see the problem can be the world can be changed when each of us will change Haley already said that the world will change when one man will change so the future and the world depends of us and it will go only through some slow transition through generation through new education because this new thinking should be already in mentality of the human kind not being forced on the people already in mentality it should be already in the air in the air and so the new education is needed also in new education because systems thinking somebody will say this approach is already reductionist it's already reduction to the systems you are reductionist so we have to combine this maybe reduction also needed somebody reduction reductionism is a good path to the Nobel Prize to reduce something to reduce something to reduce biological organism living creatures to physics to physics today some basic laws of magic why not why not so we need a combination a combination of holistic and reductionist a combination of this phenomenological and theoretical form of position in order to solve this global problem we need a co-evaluation we need an active position of each of us and a way of conversation with nature so I would say unity in the in the way of the Russian cosmism unity of truth good and beauty and I would say active position to elaborate this systems thinking and new evocation and in as Alexander I. liked it in trans-generation way not now, but here and now maybe in trans-generational way the human genes of the human blood each of us our children our grandchildren is there any final comment from the panelists there were three or four reflections of how science should be done just a personal comment on this we don't have much choice science is a brutal evolutionary process that works in a very simple way or has worked in a very simple way in the last 300 years the best ideas win the best ideas are those ideas that change society the surviving science is the new starting point it's the new science very simple if we like to throw away all sorts of beautiful other scientific ideas or other ways I think it's just irrelevant another thing another comment on doing system science by analogy the purpose of metaphors I think this is a very nice way to get the feeling for a system but it will never get blue there is no way around if you want to understand the system you have to understand the system and it's a very trivial comment but I think to understand the system what you have to do always and what you had to do always the last 300 years is to ask very humbly very quietly the system to nature or nowadays society and then you have to listen very carefully what nature implies and if you are sensitive enough you can put your flag on a discovery or something I think even though I like very much the idea of doing a new science or doing it in a different way I think much of what you have said being humble and listening this is already there and this is a very successful program something very short


to welcome you on behalf of all of the members of the National League of Cities, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that and thank all of you for a warm welcome and good afternoon. I'm delighted to have another chance to speak with the National League of Cities. As you probably remember, some of you at least, when we met in this room three years ago this week, I didn't have much good news to give you. The United States faced the worst mess since the Great Depression. Our national economy was nearing the breaking point and so were our cities. We'd paid a steep price for years of good intentions, badly misdirected. Families felt helpless in the face of double digit inflation, 21.5 percent prime interest rates, and a virtual halt in economic growth. Cities were especially hard hit. The eroding tax base had widened the cost revenue gap of city budgets. As labor costs increased, services were cut, doubling of tax exempt bond rates knocked local governments out of the bond market, so you had to delay your infrastructure projects. And the private sector couldn't provide much help because high taxes and the high cost of borrowing had drained them of money and flexibility. Decades of federal programs costing billions of dollars hadn't done the job. And the dramatic increase of federal participation in local government complicated urban problems and threatened the foundation of our federal system. We had begun to lose sight of the fact of how our cities first became great and that loss of vision may well have been our worst urban problem. Ingenuity and innovation built our cities and made them centers of commerce and education, culture and communication, and of progress and opportunity. But the gradual shift of power toward the federal government moved us away from the very principles which kept our cities on a sound footing for most of our history. Back when I was getting a degree in economics, taxes, federal state and local were taking a dime out of every dollar earned. And two-thirds of that went to state and local government. Today, government is taking more than four times that much and two-thirds of that is the federal government's share. Communities had lost control of some of the most basic decisions affecting everyday life. Local policy makers became less able to respond to the needs of their community as the federal government became ever more intrusive. The growing burden of federal oversight did little but put cities in handcuffs. We knew America could not get back on its feet without our or with our cities flat on their backs. And that's why we appealed for your support to embark on a new course. Our compass would be those time-tested principles which have never failed us when we've lived up to them. I think we're beginning to make headway both in addressing the causes of urban decline and in lifting your cities toward a new era of prosperity and stability. We believe there are four keys to success. First, strong and steady economic growth. A healthy economy is our most powerful tool for revitalizing urban America. Second, federalism. By sorting out who does what best, we can return power to levels of government closer to the people. And third, private and public-private partnerships. We want to pool government and private sector resources through positive incentives and enterprise zones so that we can harness the power and creativity of the marketplace. And fourth, a return to basic values. We seek to promote a renewal of community life and to strengthen the social fabric of the city, excellence in the classrooms, volunteerism, a sense of responsibility and safety on the streets. We should be confident. We are the same people who put our ambitions and skills to work and built the best cities in the world. If our program is fully enacted, today's problems can be overcome. Now, I know that success will not come easy. It'll take great effort and patience, but it can and it will be done. Rebuilding cities begins with economic growth and I believe our economic recovery is the most important urban renewal program in America today. The breadth and strength of this economic expansion are carrying fresh breezes of hope and opportunity to more and more urban areas. Industrial production has increased for 14 straight months. Factory orders, factory utilization, and residential construction are all gaining strength. The growth of service industries continues to expand. Last year, auto sales were at a five-year high. More than 100,000 auto workers have been recalled and with real fixed business investment up by 13 percent. That was last year the biggest gain of any recovery in the past 30 years. We see a bright future with more growth and jobs and that's good news for the cities. One example sums up the difference between the old policies of government pump priming and our approach that begins with trusting people. Last year, there were demands for us to support an old style three-and-a-half billion-dollar training program that was meant to place 300,000 people in make-work jobs. We turned it down so that economic recovery could do the job. Well, this recovery has put as many people back to work each month as they claim their program would have done in a year. We have added 300,000 jobs every single month for the past 14 months. That's more than 4 million new workers on the job and paying taxes. The second key to success is a renewed emphasis on federalism. We believe that when it comes to running cities, local officials can do a better job from city hall than bureaucrats can from Washington. You tempt me to quit right there. In our discussions, you said you wanted regulatory relief and reform, general revenue sharing, and block grants. But we agree. We want to make programs more responsible to the people that they're and more responsive to the people that they're meant to help. And we want to put an end to cumbersome administration and spiraling costs at the federal level. Well, we're beginning to do this. We supported general revenue sharing and the Surface Transportation Act, which provides dedicated capital funding for mass transit. We've consolidated 56 narrow-person categorical grant programs into eight block grants. And we replaced two regulation-birded programs, CETA, and Title 20, with flexible block grants. The cut in wasteful overhead has been dramatic. 647 pages of regulations have been eliminated. And your paperwork burden at state and local levels has been cut by 90%. We estimate that local governments were spared $2 billion in annual costs and between $4 and $6 billion in startup costs. Our current budget proposes further grant consolidations to let state and local levels determine their own priorities, transfer funds to high-priority areas, and further reduce overhead. This new flexibility for the states is now being felt at the local level. Six states have consolidated portions of their health block grants into mini-blocks for their local governments. Now, admittedly, that's only a start. We'd like to see more states doing the same thing. Federalism can't stop at the state capital. Public-private partnerships are the third important key for sparking economic opportunity and development of urban areas. Partnerships can take advantage of every opportunity available, and they can use these opportunities in the most efficient and productive way to meet local needs. So no single sector of our nation, government, business, labor, or nonprofit organizations can solve our urban problems alone. But by working together, pooling our resources and building on our strengths, we can accomplish great things. Starting with a $2 million CDBG grant, Columbus, Ohio's partnership with lending institutions, a community housing group, and a local management company revitalized a neighborhood that was threatened with displacement. The project generated over $24 million in private investment, and the neighborhood of low and moderate income families was saved. In Wilkes-Bare, Pennsylvania, a public economic development agency used its $1.7 million grant to create a revolving loan fund. The fund generated over $12 million in private capital to revive the downtown area and begin development of the city's industrial park. Nearly 1,000 jobs have been either created or saved, and Wilkes-Bare's tax revenues have increased by more than $500,000. Long Beach, California used its CDBG and UDAG grants for a major downtown redevelopment program, and the private sector contributed $100 million to build a regional shopping center. City leaders tell us this partnership has sparked $1.2 billion in new commercial and residential development, 1,200 new jobs, and a major increase in tax revenues. Partnerships produce jobs. The Job Training Partnership Act gives local government new flexibility, and by using private industry councils, it matches local needs with sensible training. The program will train over a million permanently displaced blue collar workers per year for productive jobs. CETA did just the opposite. It spent $53 billion to find private sector jobs for only 15% of the participants. Well, CETA's days are over. Our commitment is to a genuine partnership for real jobs with a real future. While I'm talking about jobs, let me mention that more and more people recognize the minimum wage puts unskilled young people at a disadvantage in finding that crucial first job. Our Youth Employment Opportunity Wage Bill will give a much needed boost to those looking for their first summertime job and it deserves your support. There's one more initiative that could mean exciting renewal for urban areas of hardcore unemployment and blight. 15 months ago at your annual convention in Los Angeles, I talked about our enterprise zone legislation. What has been on Capitol Hill now for more than two years, the Senate has passed it. The House continues to bottle it up. How in the world can some people give speeches about creating jobs and hope when they refuse to take action on a bill that's designed to provide just that? Enterprise zones encourage growth where we need it most in areas of high youth and minority unemployment, in urban areas where the tax base has been hit the hardest and our legislation will give cities the flexibility they need to make this innovative idea work. 21 states have already passed their own enterprise zone programs and the results are very encouraging.  Well now, all of you will be on Capitol Hill this week. Permit me to make one request. Please tell those people to look at the evidence and give our enterprise zones bill a chance. I've said it before and I'll say it again. They don't have to see the light, they have to feel the heat. The fourth and final key to a stronger, more prosperous and stable urban America is a strengthening of basic values through a renewal of community life. People coming together in a spirit of neighborhood is what makes cities worth living in. It's what keeps businesses and attracts new ones and it's what keeps faith with the fine traditions of the past while enabling us to build a future with confidence. Shakespeare said the people are the cities and if our cities can create thriving neighborhoods that offer excellence in education, efficiency and affordability, safety on but drugs and crime off our streets, then they can become great centers of growth, diversity and excitement filled with sound colors, warmth and delight. For too many years crime and the fear of crime robbed our cities of their strength and vitality and frightened away the business community while common sense is beginning to pay off. In 1982, the crime rate dropped by 4.2% the biggest decline in a decade and all over the country, people are banding together and working with law enforcement agencies in thousands of crime prevention programs. We're cracking down on habitual criminals, organized crime and the drug pushers. Federal task forces are stepping up the pressure and we're working hard to improve the criminal justice treatment of the innocent victims of crime. But formidable challenges remain. The scales of criminal justice are still tilted toward protecting the rights of criminals. I believe it's high time we restore a proper balance and start doing more to protect our law abiding citizens. Linear judges are only lenient on crooks, they're very hard on society. The way to get along or to get long overdue reform begins with passage of our comprehensive Crime Control Act. It passed the Senate last month but here again the house continues to wait. When you're on Capitol Hill this week maybe you could give our friends in the house another message. When it comes to putting dangerous criminals behind bars, when it comes to keeping our people safe in their homes and neighborhoods, there should be no Republicans or Democrats, only Americans working for the common good. We should also work together to improve the quality of American education. The report and the commission on excellence in education made it clear that nothing short of a grassroots revolution would bring back quality education to our classrooms. Total expenditures for our schools rose more than 600% between 1960 and 1980 but scholastic aptitude test scores were in a steady decline and 13% of our 17-year-olds were functional illiterates. We should take a lesson from New Hampshire. In fact, I'm a little, not just what happened recently. In fact, I'm a little surprised so few people noticed it during all the time they spent there in recent weeks. New Hampshire ranks 50th dead last in state aid to education but New Hampshire ranks first in scholastic aptitude tests in those states where at least half the students take the test and it's maintained that honor for more than 10 years. Very simple why. In New Hampshire, control of education remains in the hands of the people at the community level. I believe that education already is playing its part in America's renewal. Parents, teachers, administrators, local office holders and school boards are finally getting back to fundamentals. They're providing leadership, working harder and thinking smarter. Today all 50 states have education task forces and major reforms are being adopted in academic standards, discipline, curriculum and basic values. We're seeing signs of improvement in test scores. Excellence in education is on its way back. This spirit of renewal is the American spirit and we see that spirit everywhere we look from the healthy rise in corporate and private giving to thousands of exciting private sector initiatives and from neighbors helping neighbors to a welcome return to our basic values. Now I know that over the last three years we've had to make some tough decisions and there are still some tough ones to come. I appreciate that the cities you represent have felt the pain of reducing the growth of federal spending. But to continue down that path that America was on would have meant disaster. We all want what is best for those who live in our cities. They deserve no less and together we can make it happen. And with your leadership and with our partnership it will happen. Thank you, God bless you all. Thank you.


Hi, this is Pastor Jared Pizarnski from Hold Fast Baptist Church in Fresno. I just want to make a quick video just letting everybody know about our big one-year anniversary weekend coming up on the 27th and 28th of August. We would love for you to come down or come up wherever you're going to come from to visit and join us for this weekend on Saturday. We're going to have a soul-winning event in Fresno. We'll be soul-winning in the morning and soul-winning in the afternoon. We're pulling out our most receptive maps that we have in the Fresno area for the special event. So join us for soul-winning on Saturday. And then on Sunday we have Pastor Roger Jimenez from Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California, preaching for us for the Sunday AM service on Sunday morning. And then on Sunday afternoon I will be preaching the evening service for the big weekend. Please join us. Looking forward to there's going to be all kinds of activities, food, fun and fellowship. Look forward to seeing you all down here or up here or wherever you're coming from. It's going to be a great time and there's going to be a whole schedule of events and we'll put that in the description below. Look forward to seeing you in a few weeks.


Data, it's unrealized potential within an organization. It's the biggest asset that I think most enterprises have. And a lot of them are realizing that right now, and they're really trying to do more with it.


Το Δηλήθημα από Αλτενού είναι έλεγα και όπως πάνω πάνω υπάρχει κάτι για όλοι. Αλλά έχω εδώ τα τέτοια πόρια μου. Αυτή είναι πιστήση της εμπλόδας. Είχα πολλά εμπλόδια και πολλές τόνες κομμάτια. Λοιπόν, αν θέλεις να συμμεταχνεις, κάντε σωστά να δείξεις μου εμπλόδιο. Λοιπόν, εδώ είναι τα τέτοια πόρια μου από την εμπλόδια. Αυτό είναι τα πόρια και τα πλάντα, ένα στήμα. Είναι ένα στήμα μεταγωνικό που μπορείς να το πεις. Παραγή στο βασικογλ muros갑 για τα εμπλόδια τους. Λοιπόν, φυσικά έχω να χρ alarυάψεις ένα από τα τέτοια πόρια του εμπλόδι. Μερατογραφού στήμα και πόλη with many lovely sentiments. Στο διδάς και θα ζωθείτε π ότι ναρείτε algo φορειών. Και συγκραπεύτε, αυτό είναι το τύτο ήταλοντας εμπλόδιο τόνο. Θα βρειτε τελευτακόμου εμπλόδια, Of course sentiments and it's one of those layering stamp sets that you can either use the stamps to color or you can actually color the outline images. So let's go ahead and make three cards using all these three stamp sets. I'm starting with one of the plans and I'm going to stamp that with ink that is alcohol marker friendly so that I can color it in with my alcohol markers. I'm using here my alcohol markers by Altenew and this is the Green Valley set. I'm mainly using three colors or on some of the leaves which are smaller, just two colors, the darker at the base and as I go to the top of the leaf I go with the lighter. I always do really quick coloring, I don't spend too much time with that but it always looks just fine at the end. For the basket I went with vanilla colors and light brown ones and now I'm using the matching dye to cut it out. The design that I'm going for with this card is pretty basic, really easy to put together but the size of that plant as well as some few extra touches that I will show you is going to take this card into a next level. So I'm starting out by cutting a panel that's three and a half by four and three quarters and it is a vanilla colored panel since I wanted to stay away from vibrant white. Now this is a lovely 3D embossing folder, it's from the latest release and it gives that lovely basket look and feel. I'm making up one of the flaps with a vanilla colored ink pad by the way this is a butter nut, if you want to know the exact name, it is going to deepen up the edges and add some shadows on all the nooks and crannies and I'm going to run it through my dye cutting machine. By the way this embossing folder is called Hooven Basket and I think it makes an amazing background. You can definitely use it as it is, place your basket on top and end up with a clean and simple looking card however I'm going to take it a step further and add a vintage look and feel on the card.  And I'm also going to bring in my dye cut, I will add a little bit of shadow on one side of my basket and then I will also get rid of that white outline just by lightly inking with whatever is left on my brush. Now my cutout looks as if I did the stamping and the coloring on craft cardstock and it matches lovely with the background that I already have. So for the main card base I'm going with dark green one, I used foam tape to stick this panel and then at the back of my pot again I'm going to use foam tape so that I can add even more dimension. This card design can be easily used as a masculine card as well and I absolutely love the color combo. For the sentiment I cut out the word hacks using gold cardstock and this is definitely one of my favorite sentiment dye cuts, I have been using it throughout the year so much and in this case I took the time to add tiny foam tape pieces at the back to add dimension. I scattered a few gems and I'm absolutely happy with the result. Here are some close up photos on the first card that I made for today. And here is a reminder, don't forget to like the video as well as hit that bell so that you can get notifications whenever I post a new video. And let's move on to the second card and make something really colorful. This is the Colorful Soul stamp set. I will have lots of fun with layers for this one so I'm starting with the leaves and since I don't know how many leaves I'm going to use I will just rotate the paper so that I get an extra set. There are three layers for the leaves so you start with a lighter ink and you can gradually darken up your ink as you go. And for the flowers there are actually two flowers, I stamped one of them twice so that I end up with three flowers for the finished composition. And these layers are really easy to align, I actually didn't even bother to align correctly the third layer of the flowers, they are so loose so no matter how you stamp them they are just going to look fine. I'm using the matching dies to cut out all of the leaves and the flowers and also one of the dies that cuts out my sentiment that I have already stamped with black ink. For this card I'm keeping the design clean and simple so I'm going with a white panel however I want to add something extra there so that it adds interest without stealing anything from the focal points. And that's why I went with this 3D embossing folder that gives that hood crane look. For the flowers I did use foam tape at the back so that they are quite raised however for the leaves I'm just using glue and I'm going to tack them underneath the flowers. I decided to matte my panel with a green light green color cardstock that matches the colors of the lighter leaves and I'm going to stick this panel on top of a standard card that's 4.25 x 5.5. As you can see I did add a few gems just here and there and here are some close-up photos on the second card for today. And let's move on to the third card for today where I will be using the Old Things Suite stamp set and with this one you can either color yourself inside the lines or you can use the layering stamps. I decided to go with coloring it in with my alcohol markers which is something that I rarely do when I have a layering stamp. But I mainly went with pale blue for the glass and then I went with vanilla, light browns and darker browns to end up with this chocolate looking sandy. For the frosting I went with pink and a little red cherry on top. I used the matching dies to cut out my image and now for the background I will use this cover die which is called wave form and I have to say to combine those two products wasn't my idea. The idea came from the leaflet that was included in the stamp set it's always nice to go through that it will give you lots of options and since I did have those wave dies I decided to use them. I am going to use only three of the layers there are many of them here and for the layers I went with dark chocolate brown with craft and with vanilla. And then my card base is going to be white so I will end up having four different colors on my background. Now I want to somehow connect all those pieces so I turn them at the back and I am going to stick them together with foam tape. This way I will end up with one panel that I can pop on top of my card base. And here I am just using lots of foam tape at the back to keep all those pieces together. I will stick that on top of my card base and you can see that I mentioned that I got. Absolutely love it it looks like meli chocolate at the top of the card base. I am going to place my cut out on top and I doubled up at the bottom so that everything is nicely leveled. Now I am going to stamp my sentiment I went with the word happiness from the same stamp set and I am stamping that with espresso. A dark brown ink so that it matches with the rest of the colors on my card. I am going to stamp that a couple of times to make sure that I get a good impression and then I will add a secondary sentiment underneath that I white and boast on that dark brown cardstock. And this is going to finish off the last card for today. I am absolutely happy with this one as well. Actually I have to say that out of the three cards this is my favorite just because it is unique. I also love the first one with that basket woven background. Let me know in the comments below which one is your favorite. Thank you all so much for joining me today I hope that you had fun, that you got inspired. You will find a list of supplies down below and I hope you will all have a lovely weekend.


Hi, this is Asha explaining this portion of your book which says the sum of first four terms of an AP is 56. The sum of last four terms is 112. If the first term is 11, find the number of terms. Let's now start with the solution and we are given that the first term Let us denote it by small a is equal to 11 and the sum of first four terms is equal to 56 So let the first four terms be a plus d a plus 2d and a plus 3d where D is the common difference Now we are given that the sum of these four terms is equal to 56. So we have a a plus d plus a plus 2d plus a plus 3d is equal to 56 or if we have 4a plus 6d is equal to 56 Now a is 11 so on substituting 11 we have 4 into 11 plus 6d is equal to 56 or we can say that 6d is equal to 56 minus 44 So 6d is equal to 12 or d is equal to 2 So our common difference is 2 let this be equation number 1 Now also we are given that sum of last four terms equal to 112 Select the four terms be a n plus a n minus 1 plus a n minus 2 Plus a n minus 3 from the last so their sum is equal to 112 Now a n is a plus n minus 1 into d a n minus 1 is a plus n minus 2 into d a n minus 2 is a plus n minus 3 into d and a n minus 3 is a plus n minus 4 into d So this is equal to 112 or we can say that 4a plus 4nd Minus 10d is equal to 112. Now substituting the values of a and d we have 4 into 11 plus 4n into 2 minus 10 into 2 is equal to 112 or we have 44 plus a 10 minus 20 is equal to 112 or 8n is equal to 112 minus 24 Which implies that a 10 is equal to 88 or n is equal to 88 upon 8 which is equal to 11 And that's the number of terms is equal to 11 So this completes the solution take care and have a good day


From VOA Learning English, this is the Agriculture Report in Special English. A coffee growing cooperative in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is giving former rebels and soldiers a fresh start. They are being encouraged to make a better and safer living from coffee. The cooperative, or co-op, is called Sopakdi. Its headquarters are in Minova, a town along Lake Kivu. Many people trying to escape conflict have moved there. The co-op began in 2003. The co-op's President Joachim Munganga says getting a fair trade certificate for the group's coffee took two years. The group had to meet standards for respect for the environment and workers' contracts. This year, the co-op won an organic certificate. It now has seven buyers in Europe, the United States, and Japan. The purpose of the co-op is not simply to produce coffee. The founders of Sopakdi were trying to find ways to help resolve ethnic conflicts in the area. So they brought coffee producers together and persuaded them to form a co-op. Members of rival ethnic communities now work together at the co-op's different offices. They all work for themselves, but they also work together to elect leaders and promote common interests. There are trucks that take the coffee to Sopakdi's own washing station. There, a machine depulps or removes the outer flesh from the coffee berries that contain the beans. Doing this process by hand takes a long time and can mean a loss of freshness. About 160 people work at the washing station. Many were fighters in the past. One former rebel says he is very happy with his new job. He now spends his nights in a house, instead of sleeping in the forest. For VOA Learning English, I'm Mario Ritter.