All right, everybody, let's get started with our second talk tonight. And we're gonna learn about growing pears in North Dakota. Pears are vigorous trees, but they're not always hardy. And so here to share with us, the findings of our research is Kathy Widerhold. Kathy's the manager of the two and a half acre Northern hardy fruit evaluation project at the Carrington Research and Extension Center. She's been there since 2006. Georgia has 10 different kinds of fruits and Kathy loves them all, but pears are her newest fruit. And so she's got some new information to provide for us tonight. Kathy, welcome to the forums. Hi, thank you, Tom. Welcome. Let's see, I am going to talk about pears and we've been growing them since, I believe 2015 at the research center. And they're unique, they're kind of, they're nicer, you know, really delicious, which is wonderful. So let's get into these and see what they're about. So pear trees are not apple trees, right?  So we'll talk about that. And when you look to buy pear trees, most of them are not hard enough for North Dakota. You know, what I listed here, if you find something labeled extremely hardy or very hardy, if you could confirm that it's suited for zone three or four, I mean, three is of course better, but there's not many that are zone three. And then you wanna see something that's hardy to negative 30 or negative 40 Fahrenheit. So we do need something quite hardy for a pear tree. Also maybe your description of the pear, we'll talk about when your fruit ripens. And you know, I think about honeycrisps apples all the time. Our honeycrisps, boy, they are barely, I would say they're never ready before October 1st in Carrington. And we always get a freeze around October 4th, October 10th, more so around that 4th, 5th, 6th time. And I mean a hard freeze. That's when it's below 27 degrees or so. So if you could get your apple trees and your pear trees that will ripen in late September by late September, that would be your best bet. And the other thing about pears is there are some self-fruitful varieties, but a lot of them need two varieties to actually set pears.  There's a few of them out there. There's Prairie Gem from NDSU Research. That ornamental pear will pollinate your fruitful pear tree, but if you have the space, get two. And they do take up a lot of space. They're not a small tree. They're not a small tree. There aren't any dwarf pears. So when you think about your pears, then you have to think about tree care, right? And when you plant an apple tree, you generally have kind of wide roots. They're kind of shallow when they're wide. And we know how to deal with those. And when you have a pear tree, they have what they call more of a carrot root. You will get kind of a long taproot. Really, it's kind of a taproot. It might be cut off from the place you get it from, but they've done the proper thing to it, so it should be okay. But they've got some side branching on those roots, but mainly this taproot. So when you plant that tree, you have to be prepared to dig a little deeper for that center area, perhaps. But I recommend staking these. I mean, all the time, we don't recommend staking your trees anymore. But for a pear tree, I'm gonna say you should stake them for one or maybe two years, but use a loose support. You don't want your strings to be like super tight. You want them to be kind of loose. So your tree can wiggle in the wind. When your roots wiggle in the wind, they grow faster, stronger, better. They will help support your tree. So I would use, I prefer three, but a minimum of two supports that can go on your tree. And I use like some kind of a T-post and then string to some of these nylon straps that go around the tree just to support them for those first couple of years. You know, we didn't dead first. I thought they'd be fine. And yeah, like in a week or so, we had a wind and two of them kind of laid over a little bit. So then I got the stakes on them. So pear trees are also really vigorous. And this is where they're not like apple trees. You need to keep your pruning very light, like not even prune them for the first, say three or four or five years of their life because it really stimulates the water sprouts, you know, the vertical shoots that come up on apple trees when you prune. So pear trees are just, they're just a little different. What I really suggest is shaping your tree, those first few years that you have it. I think the tree in this picture is probably been in the ground for one year. That's about the size it looks. I made spacers. I used, well, we have all kind of little wooden stakes that go in the ground for marking things out in the field. I also bought some laugh and then I have access to a band saw but you could use like a hand coping saw or something but I use the band saw to cut these really deep Vs in the end of the laugh. And then I use those to make spacers between the branches. You want to create a 45 degree angle, you know? So here's your 90 or whatever. Well, this would be 90, right? But you want a 45 degree angle. That would be the strongest crotch angle, make the strongest branch. As it's kind of a compromise between branch strength and then vertical shoots do not produce fruit but horizontal shoots, horizontal branches produce too much fruit. So you're kind of doing a compromise strength and then the amount of fruit that you're going to get. So you want to kind of go for this 45 degree crotch angle between the trunk and the scaffold branches. So use these spacers for quite a while. You'll laugh at my next picture. This is the young tree and then use them for about three to five years. And here's great, right? On the right hand side there, that is my husband calls that my art project. I think it's a science project but either way, science and art kind of go together. And on the left side, showing you this very upright growth of the pear trees and they're all like that. And even once they get older and they start to settle down, any pruning you do is still going to make these vertical water shoots on the trees. I've taken some pictures but it's just really difficult to show them against the green grass background. So you'll have to take my word for it that they really make upward water sprouts when you prune. So another thing with tree care, this picture on the left is an example of sunscald. Sunscald can happen on any tree, can happen on maples, it happens on apples, it happens on these pear trees. This example is actually the variety named Stacy and it's the only one I've seen it on. So Stacy is probably maybe on the edge of hardiness for North Dakota, I'm not sure. But the sun, usually what happens with sunscald is that in like now, March, when it's very cold the sun is really strong, right? Our streets are melting here in Carrington but there's snow everywhere, only maybe 12 or 15 degrees today, but that sun is warm on the dark bark and it starts to melt all the sap that's under the bark and then stuff moves around. And then at night, it freezes, expands and it breaks open the cells and kills them. And so what it looks like in a year or two when you can actually see it is, is this on the left-hand side? This, you can see down to the wood of the tree, there's an opening and the young right in here. This is new bark that is reforming. It will grow and we'll cover over this area. This is the wood, but you want to avoid that. Okay, so on the right-hand side, what I did is I went to our local running store. I got the cheapest sprayer I could, which luckily was only $10 the year that I did this. And I went to the store and if you can get cheap latex paint, good luck. It's so expensive now, but at the time I was able to buy latex paint for less pre-pandemic, less cost. Anyway, just use flat white or semi-gloss, it doesn't really matter, but I think I bought flat white and I diluted it 50% with water, put it in the sprayer and then I just sprayed and don't wear anything good, don't wear anything good and don't do it on a windy day. And you want to spray like the south and west side, southwest is mainly where this sunshine happens. And that's because the hottest part of the sunny day in March is in the afternoon and the sun has moved to the southwest. And so that's where you're going to see this damage. So you want to spray the south and west sides of your trees with this paint. Like I said, it's good for apple trees, good for pear trees, good for any tender, thin barked tree, like in maple trees. You know, just don't worry what your neighbors think, just do it for the health of your tree. In a few years, the bark will get thicker, you know, it gets gnarly and then the sun won't bother it so much then. Some trees are maybe always susceptible to it, but once the bark gets thicker, then you won't have as much trouble. So the fruiting, fruiting of pears, people are always like, oh, when is my tree going to fruit? It's been in the ground three years. Well, you know, our variety, shorter hardy ND, actually began fruiting in its second year in the ground. It only had like two or three pears and it had two pears. And I went to look at them and I just touched it and it fell, one of them fell. And then the next day, a squirrel got the other one. So, oh well. But my recommendation is really don't encourage your young trees to have fruit and I would discourage them until your tree is about five years old.  But I think your tree should be in the ground at least three years, maybe five years before it has fruit because you need to get the trunk to a nice dirtiness and you need to get your scaffold branches to be sturdy.  And when I do let a tree start having fruit, I actually remove the outer fruit and I just let it have a few fruits towards the inside of the tree where the branches are more tough. So, but anyway, so when will your pear fruit? So it depends on the variety. Same for apples. This Schroederhardy ND began fruiting in the second year. They've had fruit every single year, super, super productive. Our other trees did not really have pears until the fifth year. And I've got two trees of each variety. And in year five, it was weird. Just one tree of the two varieties had fruit. And then we had no fruit the next year because it was the drought. Well, we always, I feel like we're always in a drought in Carrington, but it was the second year of a pretty strong drought here. No fruit. And then this past year in 2022, both of the trees of each variety had some fruit or a lot of fruit just depended. So it takes a little while. It takes a little while. They have to get mature. They have to get fruitful. So the one thing I will say about pear fruiting is that the pear fruit attachment seems really brittle. So what happened to me is I was on vacation and I came back on September 1st and I ran right to the orchard and I looked at the pears and I said, wow, tomorrow I'm gonna have to pick some of these. And there was a thunderstorm overnight and the next day all the fruit was on the ground. So a high wind or a thunderstorm can knock the fruit down. I got almost no pears that year just because their connection just seems kind of brittle. So this is what I saw. So that's pretty disappointing. That's from the Schroederhardt ND with all the fruits on there. They were still pretty green and kind of small that year but it's too bad. So let's see, fruit harvesting. This is kind of another science slash art project to harvest your pears I think. And I've been a little frustrated because one of my varieties and I think I'll talk about that next. But the normal suggestion for harvesting a pear is that when your fruit turns from dark green to light green and when the lenticelles which are the little tiny pores on the pear, when they turn from green to brown and you can kind of see this in the picture the bigger greener fruit on the left, it has spots on it but the centers of those spots are kind of whitish or light green. And then in the middle one for sure you should be able to see this but there are very tiny brown spots in the center of those pores. Those are the lenticelles. That's how a fruit breeze through its lenticelles. But when they turn from green to brown the whole fruit color is dark green to light green. And then the same way you test an apple you put your hand under the fruit and you lift it a little and then you twist it. And if the fruit comes right off in your hand it's definitely ready to be harvested. And for a pear that really that's when the pear is mature a pear is not generally ripe on the tree it's mature on the tree. And then you pick them and you put them in the cooler. And this is, so they're not ripe generally, generally there are some but generally you pick a pear at maturity and then what do you do with it? It's so complicated. Pears are also different from one another. So they ripen off the tree and this lets the fruit it converts its starches to sugar. So if you bite a freshly picked pear it's probably not very sweet and kind of hard and grainy but eventually those starches in there will convert to sugars and make it juicy and sweet like we would expect them to be but how do you ripen them? This is the million dollar question. Some pears need to be stored at room temperature after you pick them. Most would like to be a cool temperature or a refrigerator temperature. That's the best way to keep a pear for a long time if your pear variety goes along with it is to put them in the refrigerator. Then the next question is how long do you put them in the refrigerator or room temperature or in a cool place like your basement or a root cellar? Is it a few weeks? Is it three months? Who knows? It just depends on your variety.  And if that gives then that usually means your pear is ripe. So I have felt so frustrated and like I said, a science project, proper harvest, proper ripening time because one of our varieties, I think it's a bad variety. So we'll talk about it still in a second. Okay. So here with the ripening, you know, this is where I said you don't, it's hard to know what to do. This variety pictured here is Patton and Patton is from South Dakota. So that's nice, it's close, it's probably hardy for here and it is for us. But so I picked them when they changed from dark green to light green. And then when I take them out of the refrigerator and put them at room temperature to ripen and soften and maybe turn slightly yellower, they spoil inside. So like every single one was spoiling inside. So those were the earlier ones I picked. So then I left some on the tree. I had better luck when the fruit was more of a light yellow. And then I refrigerated it and then a week, two weeks, a month, about a month maybe. Then I took them out and just ate them because if I left them at room temperature for any amount of time, they turned brown inside. So, you know, part of it might be how our soil conditions are, how like our calcium magnesium balances are in the fruit because of the kind of soil we have. I'm not really sure, I'm not an expert on this. But I have read, there's some comment in somebody's something or other that says Patton is one of the favorite pears and it's smooth and buttery. Well, ours are not smooth and buttery, they're crispy but they were still good. They were still a good pair. So I probably still have some work to do to figure out like what's the best way to harvest a Patton pear. So our varieties that we have, the ones I'm listing right here, these three are so far the best ones that we've grown out of the six varieties we have. Nova is the first one listed, a very nice pair, a pair you would expect from the grocery store. They're very smooth and tender. They call it buttery when they're smooth like that. They're juicy, they're very good. You would, you know, you're very similar to a grocery store pair, that's I guess what I could say. I picked them at light green, I refrigerated them and then when I brought them out at room temperature they turned kind of light yellow and they softened up beautifully. They're kind of a mid-September, early to mid-September they start ripening. Patton, which I mentioned, also a good sized pear.  But they have been crispy for us. So far I've been letting them hang to a light yellow on the tree, picking them, refrigerating them and just eating them. So they're ready pretty late, kind of mid-September and then I had to pick some right before the frost this year, the freeze this year, which was in early October. So they are a little bit almost too late for North Dakota but they were still okay. And then the last one here is Stacy. I think it's good, I think it's good. I am not sure. I feel kind of bad about this but the last two years that it has had fruit like two years ago and this year, I was on vacation and it ripened somewhere in the third or the fourth week of August and I just could not see it. So whatever, they were overripe by the time I got home the wasp had eaten out the inside. So they're kind of a medium fruit, they should be good. So I'm gonna hopefully next year I will be able to get these pears, we'll see, we'll see. So these three pears, these are the last three of the six that we bought and planted. These are, I would not recommend based on what we've seen. The Ayr's pear, it is listed as extremely hardy or very hardy in the St. Lawrence catalog but it died back two years. The first year a little bit, second year to the ground and it was a bad open winter.  So Ayr's no go. Ely, Ely is from the, also all of these are from St. Lawrence nursery. And it's a smaller tree, which is nice. I almost think it could be an interstem grafting maybe to make pears a little smaller but it has some spines, plum trees do, some pear trees have spines but the fruit has been very small and tannic. When I look at the description, it says small and sweet and juicy but ours are small and tannic. They have turned yellow on the tree. I've picked them so they can turn yellow in the refrigerator or out of the refrigerator. They've fallen off the tree yellow meaning they should have been definitely ripe on the tree but they have not been good. I have not been able to eat one really, really tannic almost worse than a eronia because they also have acidity but the catalog says they ripen in October which is really kind of late. So I'm not sure if we can actually ripen them here even. And then the last one is Schroderhardy ND very vigorous, very productive. The fruit is pretty nice size but it tastes terrible. It tastes terrible. And there is something about the vitgo pear. The Schroderhardy ND and vitgo pear are supposed to be the same pear from the same tree but the one they call vitgo is supposed to taste bad and the one that says Schroder is supposed to taste good and mine tastes bad. So I think I have the wrong graft in the trees that I bought. So I have informed the nursery about this so who knows, we'll see. So let's go, we're at about 21 minutes. So I think this is about it. Other pears that I've heard are good and I've heard this from multiple people over the years that I've been here. So I think these three are pretty good. Summercrisp from University of Minnesota. This one ripens on the tree. This is the unusual one that ripens on the tree. It's crunchy and it says it stores pretty well. I didn't try to grow these because people said that they were probably okay for North Dakota. So the other one, golden spice, kind of a small, medium pear used by a lot of the winemakers. So I've heard that something about after storage, then it gets this spicy flavor. I don't know if many people know about the spicy flavor. And then Uri, Uri is Euceriances in Asian pear from Asia and they're quite small but tasty. They don't last very long at all but super, super hearty. So lastly, this is the last slide here. Pears are tasty. I made this pear galette and hopefully you have access to this afterwards or write this down, but I got it from this blog called The Kitchen. And if you look for pear galette, you would find this. I made the recipe, like it said, it talked about frangapane. I don't know how to say that, frangapane. Probably said a different way in French and it's like an almond buttery thing you put on the crust first and then you put the pears on there. I use the patent pears because it calls for a firmer pear. So I use the patent pear. I tell you what, how good this is. I think about this darn thing all the time and my husband asked me about making it. So maybe I have to get pears from the grocery store and finally remake it. I have more frangapane in the freezer. So yeah, they are good. And I hope people will try pears. I said they're a big tree. They're kind of a little daunting, but if you have space, it's worth a try. And all trees are eventually firewood. So just give it a try. Oh, I should maybe in the, and this is just for the chat maybe. There is a handout. And what I did in that handout is I talked to a guy named Greg Krieger and he's from Galesville area and he has, he's talked to a lot of people over the years about pears and he's kept a list. And so I have kind of edited and given you that list in the handout of pears that may, may, may, may be okay for North Dakota. It's always a gamble. Like I said, that Ayer's pear said extremely hardy and then it winter killed. So you just don't know until you try it yourself. So all right. What do we got going on? Okay, thanks Kathy.  Is that what you're telling me? I love the seed catalogs that say, oh, this kind of fruit is sweet. It's sweet, it's sweet. And then you try it and they're all sour. You know, Kathy, that's why we have you. Yeah. The research. That's why, that's why we need you to tell us what's the right one. I'm serious about that. Okay, here we go. There's two pall pear trees. Never heard of a pall pear. They're close together. One is a crazilla tree. Why did I start with this question? Last year, zero fruit year before, maybe one or two, but nothing to write home about. This person's from Manitoba. So it's a pall pear. They're close together, but they're not getting fruits. So what would you say for somebody who's not, maybe the tree's not old enough yet? Maybe that's it. Yeah, they're probably not asking the question to know if they're old enough. Did you say they're both from Manitoba? Two pall pear and then there's a crazilla tree. Oh, okay, which is supposed to maybe cross pollinate it. You know, they always say, maybe you've got too much fertility in your soil or I really don't know that they may not cross pollinate, but if you think they're supposed to, if the catalog said they're supposed to, there's that. Sometimes they just take a long time. The sweet 16 apple tree, 10 years before we even saw any fruit on those trees. So I would do like an apple tree, maybe if you can take a branch and weight it down so it's below horizontal during the growing season and then let it back up at the end of the growing season, it should have accumulated sugars that maybe will encourage it to fruit the next year. And then that fruiting should spread throughout the tree. That's the safest way. Maybe they can see, did it bloom well to start with that? Yeah. Could be, be activity, could be issues. How about some more companion planting here? Does a will-seckle pear trees cross pollinate with patent? I don't know. Are seckles hard here? I'm sure it would. I think it would because this picture on the last slide of mine is actually an ornamental pear and they will cross pollinate. As long as they bloom at the same time, they'll cross pollinate. Yeah, okay. And here we go. Old trees never use the spacer. Is it possible to begin shaping these old trees? You can always try to shape them. You know, just don't do very much. Just, you know, it's going to take you, if an apple tree took you three years, maybe you should work on this for four or five years. I would just not shape, not take too much out of them. And even, you know, I try and they still make water sprouts. So... Yeah, but you put the spacer on a younger wood, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need to be able to push it. I didn't know if you were talking about like spacers or if you're trying to prune it into shape. Both, huh? Well, pears, I think pears are one of the most upright of all trees. Yeah. They just want to go up. They just handle it. I would just let them. But it is nice to get that center opened up a little bit before they get mature. This guy's neighbor's got a lot of pears, but all the pears are small. So what are the size of the fruits in your pictures? What size of fruits were those three inches across you were talking about? You can see my head. If you can do this with your finger, they're not quite that big, but if you cross your fingers about an inch or so, they're nice. They're a nice size pair. Some of them are smaller. And I don't know if I can. Let me see. I'm going to go back here. You see this? I don't know. You guys can still see the slides, right? Yes. On the bottom left-hand side, those are both shorter, hardy, endy pears. One tree had barely any fruit, and the other tree was loaded. And I didn't thin it. And so that's the difference between a thinned tree and a loaded tree. A loaded tree will have very small fruit. How about Kathy? Have you ever heard of the early gold pear? I have not. I have not. I've grown it. It's great. It's a great tree. It's one of those urie. That's a urie selection. It might be in my handout list. It's in your handout. It's in your handout. Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one. It is in Bismarck. I don't know about. And I think those Eucerian pears in general are zone three. So we should have success with them anywhere in North Dakota.   And I probably had a ladder out there. I'm not sure. But I would go up for as big of wood as you can. You know, get it until the bark is small or the branch is small. Go up as high as you can when the tree is young. It just looks ugly. It doesn't hurt. And you put it on the southwest side, right? If you use pale pink or pale green or something like that, then you cannot do that. And it's got to be white. That's the whole purpose, right? To reflect off the sun's rays. A pale color is OK. Well, you're just a rebel. You just like to push the envelope, don't you? Yeah. How about do you recommend calling a pear tree? Maybe an old pear tree. What does calling a pear tree mean? Do you mean to thin the fruit? Maybe? How about just, yeah, when I think I'm calling, I think about cutting it down. Cutting it down is what I think we're called. Maybe they'll write another question. Well, what would you say about an old pear tree? Would you ever think about cutting down a tree on the prairie, on the northern part of the prairie? Is that a thing? Well, if you have another one to put in its place, why not? That's right. You can use your pearwood for making smoked meat. So there you go. But you know, I mean, if it's not fruiting anymore, if you have the space, you can leave it. But sometimes old trees will harbor diseases, too, you know? So it's up to you. I'll tell you what I think about that, Cathy, with apples, especially. And an apple tree is like a person. It can live 100 years. But once it hits 40, it starts going downhill. So it had to be realistic. How about, do you want to talk about an insect or disease situations that we have to worry about with pears? The only disease I've maybe mentioned in the handout is a fire blight. That's the major concern with pear trees, is they're very susceptible to fire blight. That's about it. I don't know much else for insects. That's the killer. As soon as somebody calls me with a pear question, I know it's fire blight, pretty much. How about when you paint a tree, Cathy, does that allow the bark to breathe or should it be using something like burlap instead? What do you think about that? I mean, I can't specifically say, but it's recommended. It is recommended practice with apple trees and pear trees. And you're only doing half the tree. And you don't have to put it on super thick, so. Yeah, it's fine. The tree's fine. I've never read anything that is a problem. No, it's not a problem. How about you have to worry about bunnies? Do bunnies like to eat pears? I don't know that, but I'm sure they do. I put wire around them just like I did the apple trees. So you put a like a quarter inch hardware cloth ring around the base of the tree. Yeah. How about, you know, is a Parker tree hard enough? What do you think about that? Parker is not as hardy as Patton. So I would not go for the Parker is what I've read. You know, I've just just different stuff. My Parker's hardy in zone four. Well, I'm not in zone. But I wouldn't go to zone three with that thing. OK. How about Cathy, do you know this? I don't know this is gold. What about a golden spice cross with the Parker? Because they're different. Pirates, you serieness and pirates. Yeah, would they cross each other? Would they fertilize each other? I don't know. I don't know. I don't maybe not. You know, and most of the stuff you read is about the European pears, which are most of the pears we get in the grocery store. So I don't know. You don't get to read much about northern hardy pears. I will try to ask Jim Louie. He's a plant breeder, tree breeder from Minnesota. I'm going to ask Jim Louie about that. That's a good question. How about the water up here? Any different than your water and apple tree? No, no, they're pretty hardy. How do you stop a deer from eating the fruit? You put them in your freezer. The fruit or your fruit or the deer? You still put the deer in the freezer. There we go. OK, I think I know what you're talking about. You know, you're just going to have to. What I've done with younger trees, where I've had a lot of deer is take the like two by four inch wire and you can be a couple of feet off the ground and make a circle around that tree with some tea posts because the deer won't go under the tree. And if you have it out far enough, the deer, they won't jump over it or up or something like that. So if you just kind of interfere with where their face goes, it kind of bothers the deer. How high up do you go at that?  And they don't want to go under it. That part I've read from the DNR over the years. OK, how about to have to worry about thinning out the fruit in springtime? I if you thin your fruit, you'll get bigger fruit. On the other hand, you have to don't thin it too much because your pear tree is so vigorous that it's good to have the fruit slow it down. But you'll you'll get bigger fruit if you thin it.  I have not seen it on the pears, but I've get it on Aronia. Their pear slug soft lies in your yard. You're supposed to be able to blast them off with water. You can also use a spinosid pesticide insecticide that I know spinosid works against them. So pyrethrins, I'm not sure because they are a fly. They're not a caterpillar. I don't know if that works or not. But I know a spinus spinosad or spinosid will work against them. And that's pretty safe for humans. Oh, yeah, and pear slugs are not usually killer. No significant. They're just more of a nuisance in most cases. How about if it's really bad, you might have to do something. Yeah, definitely get that blast of garden. Especially if it's several years in a row. Then yeah, this person, this person's got a hard situation because they got those pear slugs and then the trees are 13 years old and no fruits. Oh, still bearing. So they have two different varieties and but they flower at different times. Oh, that might be a real clue. Better try another variety. You know, whatever flowers later, you might consider taking a branch off if that's possible. And you can smash the smash the end that you cut, put it in a vase of water, bring it inside. And you should be able to get it to bloom sooner and then just set it by the pear tree that's blooming earlier. And that's called forcing. Forcing, right? Yeah. OK, it might help. Oh, yeah, just plant another tree. That's that's I think the easy way to go. Let's see here. Let's see. Let's go to our chat box here to see if there's anything over here. Will a Urie pear work in Western North Dakota? It should work. Yeah. That's almost like a weed. That's a. Yeah. A herb, a hudar, H-U-D-E-R. Hudar, hudar, pair. Pairs I have. And I just don't really know. I don't know anything about them. So. Yeah. They talk about how these usurian pears are used in conservation plantings and but we would also take their value in an orchard situation. Some of them are just ornamental and they'll never taste good because that like prairie at the research orchard. We have one of the. I think we have the parent tree of prairie jam, which is very small pears. It's ornamental, but we have other seedlings around it and they have a lot of pears and they pollen. They cross pollinate with everything, but they. You know, they're not good to eat, but yet the Urie, the Urie and the early gold are usurian also. So somebody got lucky and those were tasty. Yeah. Yeah. Don't grow prairie jam for the fruit. No, that's not the purpose. Let's see, my tree got sunscaled, Cathy. What should I do about it? Well, in the beginning, I would try to maybe cut away that bark. If you're getting damp conditions, you might want to cut away the bark that's on the outside and that's dead because it could harbor funguses underneath there. So you want to let it dry out and I would just kind of maybe give that tree a little extra water in dry periods just to just so it has some oomph to to close. It needs to close over that that burnt area. So don't paint it or anything. Just let it naturally heal. And and if it's called it once, I would definitely paint the area around it. I mean, you don't have to use a spray or you can use a brush. The first time I ever did this to apple trees, I just used a brush and but the sprayer is definitely easier. And but it's also sunscaled. It's not a killer. It's generally just a narrow crack. So it's just it's just too bad, just too bad, but it's OK. And it takes a long time to heal. Right, Cathy, it takes it does. It can take several years. Yeah, maybe five years or more. Depends on how vigorous it will grow. Right. So OK, Cathy. You solved our question about can we grow pears in North Dakota? Sounds promising. I see one question. We have to rely on you to find. I see one question about somebody pruned their pear young and got water sprouts like me. This year, I tried pruning them in summer after they had fruit on them. And I will report back someday and see if that work because cherry plum apricot trees, the stone fruits, you should prune them after they set fruit. So I'm I'm trying this with my pear trees to see if it'll help. So what about a fire blight? You're begging for fire blight when you do that. Am I in the summer? You're making a wound during the growing season. That's when fire blight is active. But you're supposed to for black rot. So who knows? I know. I don't know about that. I don't know. I'm skeptical about that. I because fire blight is so devastating. That's just well, that's nothing to mess around with. No. But OK, this is why we have you to do the research when we look forward to results. I really mean that, Kathy. Keep it. Keep it going there in Carrington. It's got the most interesting research. And yes, you I think keep it going. All right. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you, Kathy.


this morning that we're recording, which is last Tuesday, if you're listening to this the day it's released, Apple announced all kinds of new stuff. They've got their, well, two new chips, the M2 Pro and the M2 Max, and then updates to two of the product lines, I'll call it, the Mac mini product line and the MacBook Pro product line. The chips are, so we've had the M2 for a little while. Now we have the M2 Pro and the M2 Max. The M2 Pro goes up to a 12 core CPU and a 19 core GPU and up to 32 gigs of unified memory. And the M2 Max takes that up to a 38 core GPU, double the memory bandwidth and up to 96 gigs of unified memory.


Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the AWS executive summit that AWS reinvent made possible by Accenture. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to talk about the automation advantage, embrace the future of productivity and improve speed, quality and customer experience through artificial intelligence. And we're here with Bhaskar Ghosh, who's the Chief Strategy Officer at Accenture and Regendra R.P. Prasad, who's the Senior Managing Director and Global Automation Lead at Accenture. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Good to see you. Hello, Dave. Thank you. Hey, congratulations on the new book. I know it's like, it's not like giving birth, but it's a mini version, if you will. The automation advantage, embrace the future of productivity and improve speed, quality and customer experience through artificial intelligence. What inspired you to write this book? Can you tell us a little bit more about it and how businesses are going to be able to take advantage of the information that's in there? Bhaskar, maybe you could start. Okay. So I think, if we say that what inspired us, primarily the two things really inspired us to start this project, first of all, is the technology change, step change in the technology. Second is the maturity of the buyer, maturity of the market. So let me explain a little more. When I talk about the technology change, automation is nothing new in the industry. Starting from the industrial revolution, always industry adopted the automation. But last few years, what happened that there is a significant change in the technology in terms of a lot of new technologies are coming together like cloud, data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and they are getting mature. I think that created a huge opportunity in the industry. So that is number one. Second thing, I think the maturity of the buyer. So buyers are always buying the automation adopting the automation. So when I talk to this different buyer, different industrial buyer, suddenly we realize they are not asking about what is automation, how that will help. But primarily they are talking about how they can scale it. They have all have done the pilot, the prototype, how they can take the full advantage in their enterprise through scale. And after talking to few clients, few of our clients, then we realize that it would be best to write this book and help all our clients to take advantage of this new technologies to scale up their business.   Second is the industrial automation which deals with the group efficiency. And third is the intelligent automation which deals with the business efficiency or business value. So we believe that this is what will really change their business and help our client, help the automation IT users to really make real an impact in their business. Yeah, and so you talked about that, the maturity of the customer.  So the point is you're not just paving the cow path if you will, automating processes that maybe were invented decades ago, you're really trying to rethink the best approach. And that's where you're going to get the most business value and thinking about the maturity. I think pre-pandemic people were maybe a little reluctant as Bhaskar was saying, maybe needed some education, but how have things changed?  It's accelerated things, but what's changed in the business environment in terms of the need to implement automation RP? Thank you for that is an excellent question. As we went through the pandemic, most of the enterprises accelerated what I call as the digital transformation, technology transformation. And the overall time that it takes to do the transformation is compressed. Most of the enterprises now do compressed transformation. The core of it is innovation and innovation-led technology and technology-based solutions. To drive this transformation, automation, artificial intelligence becomes hot of what we do while we are implementing this, accelerators, innovation enablers within the enterprises. Most of the enterprises prior to the pandemic were looking automation and AI as a solution for cost efficiency, saving cost and deriving capacity efficiency as if they do the transformation journeys. When we press the fast forward button through the transformation journey, leveraging automation, what happens is most of the enterprises switch the focus from cost efficiency to speed to market, application availability, and system resiliency at the core. When I speak to most of the CIOs who are involved in the tech transformation, they now embrace automation and AI as a core enabler to drive these journeys towards growth, innovation-led application availability and transformation and sustainability of the applications through their journey. Our book addresses all of these aspects, including the most important element of AI, which is compute storage and the enablement that it can accomplish through cloud transformation, cloud computing services, and how AI and machine learning technologies can benefit from transformation to the cloud. In addition, we also address and talk about automation in the cloud, automation taking journey towards the cloud and automation once you're in the cloud, what are the philosophy and principles you should be following to drive that automation? We also provide holistic approach to drive automation by focusing process, technology, that includes talent and change management and also addressing automation culture for the organizations in the way they work as they move forward. So you mentioned a couple of things, compute and storage and when we look at our surveys, guys, it's interesting to see, especially since the pandemic four items have popped up where all the spending momentum is cloud, for obvious reasons, scale and resource and be able to work remotely, containers, because a lot of people have workloads on-prem that they just can't automatically move into the cloud but they want to do development in the cloud and maybe connect to some of those on-prem workloads. RPA, which is underscores automation and of course AI and in RP, you mentioned compute and storage and of course the other piece is data. So we have all this data, but so my question is how has the cloud and AWS specifically influenced changes in automation and AI? Brilliant question and brilliant point. I say, whenever I talk to my clients, one of the things that I always say is, AI is nothing but an UI for the data. Let me repeat that, AI is the UI of the data. So the data plays underlying and very critical part of applied intelligence, artificial intelligence and AI in the organizations, right? As the organization move along their automation journey, like you said, robotic process automation to containerization, to establishing data, building the data cubes and managing the massive data, leveraging cloud and how AWS can help in a significant way to help the data stratification, data enablement, data analysis and data clustering, classification, all the aspects of that, what we need to do within the data space, that helps for the large scale automation effort. The cloud and AWS plays a significant role to help accelerate and enable the data part. Once you do that, building machine learning models on the top of it, leveraging containers, clusters, DevOps techniques to drive the AI principles on the top of it is very, it kind of makes it easier to drive that and faster enablement advancement through cloud technologies. Alternatively, using automation itself to kind of enable the cloud transformation, data transformation, data migration aspects to manage the complexity, speed and scale is very important. The book stresses the very importance of fueling the motion of the entire organization through agility, embracing new development methods like automation in the cloud, DevOps, DevSecOps and the importance of overall cloud adoption that builds the foundational elements of, making sure your automation and AI capabilities are established in a way that it is scalable and sustainable within the organizations as they move forward. Great, thank you for that RP. Bhaskar, I want to come back to this notion of maturity and just apply it to automation. So Andy Jassy made the phrase undifferentiated, heavy lifting popular but that was largely last decade applied to IT and now we're talking about deeper business integration. And so automation certainly solves the problem of, okay, I'm going to take mundane tasks like provisioning storage and compute and automate that. Great, but what are some of the business problems that deeper business integration that we're solving through things that, I want to use the phrase that you used earlier, intelligent automation, what is that? And can you give an example? That's a very good question, Dev. See, as we said that the automation is a journey. If we talk to any client, so everybody wants to use data and artificial intelligence to transform their business. So that is very simple. But the point is that you cannot reach there until unless you follow the steps. So in our book, we have explained that the process that means, we defined in a five steps. We said that everybody has to follow the foundation which is primarily the tools driven, optimize which is process driven, then efficiency improvement, which is primarily RPA driven, then comes predictive capability in the organization which is data driven, and then intelligence, which is primarily artificial intelligence driven. Now, when we talk about the use of artificial intelligence and this new intelligent IT in the business, what we mean is basically improve decision making in every level in the organization. I'll give you an example. We have given multiple example in this book. In a very simple example, if I take, suppose a financial sector organization, they're selling wealth management product to the clients. So they have a number of wealth management products and they have number of clients with different profile. But now what is happening, this artificial intelligence is helping their agents to target the right product for the right customer so that this success rate is very high. So that is a change. That is a change in the way they do business. Now, some of the platform companies like Amazon or Netflix, you will see that this skill is a very native skill for them. They use the artificial intelligence, try to use everywhere. But there are a lot of other companies who are trying to adopt this skill today. Their fundamental problem is they do not have the right data. They do not have that capability. They do not have all the processes so that they can inject the decision making artificial intelligence capability in every decision making to empower their workforce. And that is what we have written in this book to provide the guidance to this in this book, how they can use the better business decision to improve the, create the more business value using artificial intelligence and intelligent automation. Interesting, Bhaskar. I want to stay with you. In their book, in the middle of last decade, Eric Brynjalsson and Andy McAfee wrote The Second Machine Age. And they made the point in the book that machines have always replaced humans in sort of various tasks. But for the first time ever, we're seeing machines replacing humans in cognitive tasks. And that scares a lot of people. So how do you inspire employees to embrace the change that automation can bring? What are you seeing as the best ways to do that? That's a very good question. The intelligent automation implementation is not an IT project. It's primarily change management. It's primarily change in the culture. The people in the organization need to embrace this change and how they will get empowered with the machine. It is not about the replacing people by machine which has happened historically into the earlier stages of automation, which I explained. But in this intelligent automation, it is basically empowering people to do the better job. I'll give you an example. That is the thing we have written in the book about a newspaper, 100 years old newspaper in Italy.  And now what is happening? They are using artificial intelligence. So they are writers are using those technologies to write faster. So when they are writing, immediately they are getting supported with the data. They are supporting with the related article. They are supporting with the script. Even they're supported with the heading of this article. So the question is that it is not replacing the news, the content writer, but is basically empowering them so that they can produce the better quality of product. They can be better writing in a faster time. So it's a very different approach. And that is why this needs a change management and it's a cultural change. Got it. RP, what's in it for me? Why should we read the automation advantage? Maybe you could talk about some of the key takeaways and maybe the best places to start on an automation journey. Very good question. The first step in your automation journey and cloud adoption journey is to start simple and start right. If you know what's having for you, one of the process guru says, if you don't know where you are on a map, a map won't help you. So to start right, a company needs to know where they are on a map today, identify the right focus areas, create a clear roadmap and then move forward with a structured approach for successful adoption. The other important element is if you automate an inefficient process, you are going to make your inefficiency run more efficiently. So it is very important to baseline and establish the baseline and know where you are on the journey map. This is one of the key themes we discussed in the automation advantage book with principles and tips and real-world examples on how to approach each of these stages. We also stress the importance of building the right architectures for intelligent automation, cloud enablement, security at the core of automation and the platform-centric approach. Leading enterprises can, adopters and whether they are in the early stages of the automation journey or they're in the advanced stages for automation journey, they can look at the automation advantage book and build and take the best practices and what we provided as a practical tips within the book to drive their automation journey. This also includes importance of having right partners in the cloud space like AWS who can accelerate automation journey and making sure a company's cloud migration strategy includes automation, automation led AI and data as part of their journey management. That's great, good advice there. Bhaskar, bring us home and maybe you could wrap it up with the final word. So let me keep it very simple. This book will help you to create difference in your business with the power of automation and artificial intelligence. Now that's a simple message and no matter what industry you're in there is a disruption scenario for your industry and that disruption scenario is going to involve automation. So you better get ahead of the game there. The book is available of course at Amazon.com. You can get more information at Accenture.com slash Automation Advantage. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. Thank you, Dave. Thank you. And thank you for watching this episode of the AWS Executive Summit at Reinvent, made possible by Accenture. Keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire, you're watching theCUBE.


The study evaluates six novel nucleic acid extraction technologies from different developers using blinded panels of stool, sputum, and blood spiked with variable amounts of quality-controlled DNA and or RNA-based microbes to determine their diagnostic accuracy, suitability for resource-limited settings, RLS, and cost estimates. The technologies were ranked based on overall diagnostic accuracy and other metrics such as sample input and output volumes, total processing time, user-required manual steps, and cost estimates. The study aims to identify component technologies for incorporation of reliable and affordable sample preparation with pathogen-nucleic acid amplification, flash detection into an integrated platform suitable for RLS, towards reducing infectious disease-associated morbidity and mortality globally. This article was authored by Shivani G. Biel, Jason Cantera, Maureen H. Diaz, and others.


So, this is work done in collaboration with, okay, with Irene Valenzuela, Fernando Marchesano, Francisco Pedro, and Sean Billiman, and the title is Historic Inflation and Stream Theory. So, let me start by recalling the issue of Fundamental Scholar in Physics. We all know that scalars are a bit special in field theory, they are hard to maintain light. Here are the most famous scalars in particle theory. The Higgs, which is supposed to give masses to fermions and gauge bosons. The Inflaton, which is a very efficient way to understand many aspects of cosmology. A little bit more in-depth is the action. But there is an important difference between these three objects, which is that this one has been observed. So, on the other hand, well, this is completing the standard model, the consistency of the standard model, but it's hard to believe that this is the end of the story. In particular, it's known that if one just extrapolates what we know of the standard model, the self-coupling of the standard model, high in energies, the potential seems to become stable. The vacuum becomes at least metastable at a scale in between 10 to 11 and the 14 GB. Of course, there are errors in this estimation, but it seems so. And some people say that there is an instability problem. So, there should be some new physics turning on at these large scales. And possibly, one of the simplest possibilities would be that about that scale, we have a high-scale supersymmetry. So, supersymmetry appears in those large scales, as I guess it was first proposed by some people in the audience. And the idea is simple. Above that scale, the potential becomes just positive definite. So, the scalar potential of the standard model becomes stable. And, okay, now the supersymmetry breaking scale is then 10 to 11 to the 13 GB. There is an additional motivation, because one could say, well, supersymmetry will introduce to solve the hierarchy problem. So, why don't we get rid of it altogether? Within string theory, there are additional motivations. Supersymmetry is a fundamental symmetry in string theory. It's there. And also, you need it, even if you have such a large scale for supersymmetry breaking, it is hard to build models which are vacuum-free if the theory is not supersymmetric. So, having supersymmetry is a nice thing, an expected thing in string theory. However, not necessarily all the way down to the low scale. So, in certain cases supersymmetry would be needed not to solve the hierarchy problem, but to stabilize the standard model, which would require that the scale of supersymmetry breaking is smaller than 10 to 11, 10 to 13 GB. So that the potential is all the time positive definite. When I talk about the scale of supersymmetry breaking MSS, I'm referring to the mass of the soft terms, not the real scale of supersymmetry breaking. That's the size of the soft terms. So, then the solution of the hierarchy problem will have to be fine-tuning. I'm sorry about that. So, possibly a landscape type of idea, although I'm not going to elaborate in that direction. So, let us consider for simplicity the most MSSM and that there is the most general MSSM is mass structure, which is this one. We have a diagonal masses and then the diagonal B term you wish there. And then there is a fine-tuning which is taking the determinant of this matrix equal to zero. And then at that, if you do that, at that scale, 10 to 11 to the 13 GB, you get a mass less doublet, which is this particular combination of HU and HD in the MSSM. So, that would be identified with the peaks of the standard model. Here, tangent beta is not the ratio of any band. It's the ratio of these soft masses here. And then there is the orthogonal guy, which is massive. Another doublet, which appears in the MSSM. If you look at the scalar potential of those energies, you have the potential of the massive field, which will decouple below that large scale. And we will be left with his potential, which is going to be just this piece. We know that at that scale, the potential seems to be almost vanishing. So, that suggests that tangent beta is close to 1, because tangent beta is close to 1, cosines to be close to 0. Then at that scale, you have a mass less, as I said, the Higgs field, which would be this combination. And this combination, when tangent beta is close to 1, this guy would be massive. And then the potential is close to 0 at that scale. And then you know that then almost automatically, the mass of the Higgs layer of certain mass at low energy is going to be around 126. In fact, you can obtain this plot if you just allow free the scale of supersymmetry breaking. You can compute the Higgs mass in terms of the quartic coupling. And if you just assume that the two Higgs masses are equal at some unification scale, strength scale, combatification scale, whatever, it doesn't make much difference. Then you find that barine, the value of the muter, different ways, above the scale of 10 to the 10 dB, essentially the mass you obtain for the Higgs mass is around 126. By the way, these kind of plots should have been computed before LAC finding the Higgs, because it would have been a very nice prediction. Unfortunately, it was pictured after. Anyway, so now let's go to the other topic, that of inflation within string theory. We have learned some things already from the talk of Gary. So inflation before March the 17th of 2014 looked like this. Some quartic inflation model like the quartic was almost close to its exclusion. So models with a small r were very popular and suddenly came this data from this that you already saw indicating that r could be in between 0.1 or 0.2. Within the chaotic type of inflation, which is this polynomial potential with these powers, you obtain those values for inflating excursions large in between 11 to 20 times the planned scale. So you need a good favor of large field inflation. We have learned that the data, in fact, are compatible with just dust, although still there is room for relatively large values so far, it's more than 0.12. So still large field models are well alive. We will have to wait probably one or two years to settle the question. Still as Gary said, it is interesting to explore what if these large values of r are found. So if such a large values are there, that would indicate the scale of inflation that you see in GEV, Hubble parameter 10 to the 14 GEV, and then inflaton scale of 10 to the 13 GEV. And now the bell rings, could that be related to this large scale of sushi breaking we were mentioning before? It could be. So I repeat that the sushi breaking scale here is the size of the software. So that's the idea we would explore. Then the structure of scales would be like this. We had the inflaton at 10 to the 13 GEV, inflation scales at 16 GEV, and the value of the inflaton traveling above the previous plan scale. So we need, as usual, that the inflaton must be stable under corrections. This is the eta problem. We need that the field, the inflaton can have a large field range. And then we need stability under corrections for when the value of the inflaton is large compared to the plan scale. So the tradition is that 1 and 3 could be cured if there is some shift symmetry, a simple way to obtain large ranges for the value of the cakes wheel is that there is some periodicity in the inflaton. So within string theory, large inflation can be accommodated in a variety of ways, identifying the inflaton either with an action, a Wilson line, or a deep brain position. In fact, these things are somehow related under the dualities, ns dualities, depending on the case. But this is in Dorfield's law for large transplucking scarcians. So that's something which is found often in the string theory, in principle. And there could be gauge symmetries in a standard sense. I'm not talking about you and gauge symmetry, for example. Of Dorfield's, make the potential stable against corrections to this potential. So this is the idea underlying this monotherm inflation that Gary mentioned. But first, considered by Silverstein Westphalm, there has been a lot of work, particularly last year, after this sort of discovery by Bicep. So I'm going to talk about a variety of this, which goes under the name Higgs-Ottock inflation. It has this peculiar name because it is the Higgs-Poo, it's going to be the inflaton and Otock because this is sort of caotic type inflation. The idea is simple. Why using the Higgs as the inflaton? Well, it's within the context of string theory, which is, I think, a reasonable context. Or I would say in any field theory context, having light-scaled light is not that easy. So it is already amazing that we have a Higgs so light. So introducing another fundamental field, which is also light to get inflation, would be an additional miracle. So it would be interesting to try to combine both. In addition, the Higgs has been observed, so it would be nice if both things could be combined. This, in fact, of course, is a very old idea. Many people have written papers and models with Higgs inflation. One of the most popular ones recently is one in which you have a non-canonical coupling of gravity to the Higgs, but with some parameter, the group of Shapposnikov et al. Should say that this, that's OK for me, no problem. But I don't think it's easy to embed this into string theory. So in any event, I'm not going to talk about that. But I want something simpler, as far as I can see. As I said, at the scale 10 to 11, 10 to the 12 GB, the potential of the Higgs in the standard model is close to zero. But there is another massive guy with a mass of order 10 to the 12 GB also. So again, it brings the bell. So perhaps you can use this heavy guy for producing chaotic inflation with H the inflator. We will see it is a bit more complicated than that. It's not a light Higgs and a massive Higgs is something more sophisticated. But this is the essential idea. So still you need that the large inflatons pressure should be possible and the potentials should be stable. So what we are going to do is look for a string implementation with some sort of monodrome inflation in which the Higgs is some sort of wish-online or deep-brain position. It can be done both ways, because in fact they are T-dual and string theory. So I will concentrate in the case in which the Higgs is correspond to deep-brain positions. By the way, I will not address here at this stage full modular stabilization, because here I'm going to isolate the sector of the theater associated with the Higgs. It would be a more complex problem still to be addressed. Okay, so let me consider how you get the Higgs MSSM-like type of fields in maybe obtaining type 2 orienting force or in heterotic. Here it's a standard model, toy model test of type 2B orienting force. You have these seven brains, in particular a set of six, these seven brains, sitting locally in a geometry of this form with two torus in the third complex plane and this is a C2 with a singularity which is set 4 and here is the action of the set 4 in the three complex coordinates and the corresponding channel patterns. You don't need to understand the details. You get a gauge group which is U3 because U2 because U1, there will be, if you have a compact model there will be some heated sector, etc., but we are interested only in this sector. And what is interesting is that you have fields which are precisely the behavior and the coupling constants and the structure of the Higgs of the MSSM. So schematically you have these six, these seven brains in this singularity, when one these seven brain goes away from this point to the bulk, well there is a mirror because this is an orientable, it has a mirror, then the symmetry, this geometrical movement corresponds to the gauging of the standard model symmetry down to electromagnetism and QCT. So the inflaton breaks the standard model of gauging symmetry and there is a D-flat direction is U equals HD, parametric by the parameter, real parameter sigma and then the relative phase theta. So these are going to be our two parameters. So within string theory you can see that the position of the D-brain really corresponds to beps of these Higgs fields. In particular this is the position in the third complex plane, this is the position in the tutorials and while the real part can be identified with this Higgs field and the other one with this. These are real fields now in singlets because they are defining here. So let me explain in a bit more detail the degrees of freedom here. So we have eight real scalars in the minimal set of Higgs in the MSSM. Three are scalars and become massive when there is a path. Then there are three gauging bosons but you are still left with two neutral guys, this sigma and theta that I told you, which really parametrize the position of the brain. When you are at the origin, the symmetry restored, when you are away, your symmetry is just QCD times U1 essentially. One important thing to realize is that in string theory it is not true that what is the mass of a gauged boson, is it the coupling versus times the bed? No, that's only true in the effective field theory. The mass of a vector boson here is really given by the distance in between the position of the brain and the origin. So that's because it is just given by the tension of the open string in between those two points. So the Higgs can have a very large bed and travel all this way around the torus having a much larger than the radius is still the mass of the W since it never exists in the combatification scale. Okay, so the potential is flat up to now. It was a flat direction but in general you have in this combatification fluxes which are present. It is well known this type to be oriented for. You have these Raman fluxes and Nevespar fluxes which combine in this way in rise to a complex free form and depending on the tensorial structure, you have this tensorial structure, they give rise to supersymmetric breaking, give rise to non-super symmetric soft turns, do you wish? And then with this other tensor combination you get supersymmetric turns, essentially new turns. So we are going to assume that we are in the presence of this type of fluxes and then we know the Lagrangian, the local Lagrangian for the deep brains and has the influx that is given by the Dirac-Born infill action and the Chelsimian action of the D7 brain. So here is the expression of the Dirac-Born infill action. This is the pullback and E is the sum of the metric and two in the centrosymmetric tensor. And well here you have the B2, C6, C8. You need to know much about those. These are the Raman and Nevespar fluxes which appear in type to be. What is interesting is that in the presence of these backgrounds, the values of these fields depend on the value of the adjoint of U6, the gauge symmetries. So this is the guy which is, you wish, parameterizes the full movement of the Higgs, in particular the components in here, but they are contained in a 6 by 6 matrix. So, okay, doing the full exercise, putting these fluxes inside the Dirac-Born infill and Chelsimian action, in fact you find that they give the same contribution with sums and you get something of this form for the Lagrangian. You get a potential and you get something which is important. You get a non-canonical genetic term which is proportional. There is a correction, it's not just one, but there is this correction which is proportional to the potential itself. And this is non-parameter in terms of the compactification volume and the tension of the seven brain. And the potential is something which is just a quadratic potential in terms of the fluxes G and S. And okay, when the G is equal to S, when both Susie and non-Susie fluxes are equal, you get, as you can see here, a massless Higgs field. This is the associated to the standard model, and this is the heavy guy. And well, one way to parametrize. So the particular size depends on the relative size of the Susie breakings and fluxes. So one can define this parameter A which measures that. It's in between 0 and 1. And if you want to obtain a massless Higgs at some which should be identified with a standard model of Higgs, A should be equal close to 1. If you take into account that there is a running in between 10 to 11, 10 to 12 GB and the unification scale, it is not equal to 1, but the choice of fluxes should be more closer to 0.83. Okay, so in angular coordinates in these parameters sigma and theta, this is the way the potential has, which this A parameter which is close to 0.83, you want to consider the massless guy associated to the standard model Higgs. Sigma, which is the distance to the origin and theta, the angle, the relative phase in between these two fields. So while there is essentially in principle two free parameters, this g tilde which is associated to the size of the fluxes. So it is associated to the scale of supersymmetry breaking. And the parameter A, but we know that A is close to 0.83. And one can estimate the g tilde in this, putting all the parameters in here and assuming there is a sort of isotropic modification. You can estimate that the g tilde is always of order one over the plant scale times the factor which could be 3 or 0.3 or whatever, but it's always around one over the plant scale. So okay, we are left with a very specific potential. There is this interesting point that the kinetic term is not canonical and it has a very special form in this non-canonical kinetic term. For example, if I take the A equals one limit, which is close to the reality of A, 0.83, you can see what the potential is essentially just a quadratic piece for the heavy Higgs. Then you can compute the canonical normalized Higgs in terms of an integral which you can perform analytically. And you find that the potential, instead of being quadratic, at the larger values of the canonical normalized field is really linear. So it is linear for large inflaton. This is built in. It's nothing that I did to lower the power of the inflaton potential. It is there. This is something which in general you have to do numerically. You cannot do analytically. So in the end, you're left with a two-field inflaton model in which you have a metric in field space which has this form. It's diagonal, but still it's not trivial. It's curved. So in terms of two-field sigma and tau, and you can study, of course, the evolution of your inflaton fields. One of the questions one would ask is that we are in a two-field inflaton model. What happens with isochromatic perturbations? There are two large isochromatic perturbations. They are very much bounded by plant data. So here is the form of the potential. And here is the theta. It is the relative phase of HUNHD. And this is sigma, which is essentially the size of the wave of the Higgs. So the dynamics depends on which region you start with. This is theta and sigma again. And these are several examples of trajectories which you'll find. And it is true in general when the inflaton starts evolving, not only you have adiabatic perturbations along the way, but there is perturbations in the normal direction. And they interact. And there is a transition. There are isochromatic perturbations which contribute to the curvature of perturbations. So you have to perform a full analysis. And you find that this is the ratio of isochromatic perturbations. So really, 10 to the minus 20, 10 to the minus 20. They are really very much suppressed. And this is for 50 and 60 e-folds. However, one effect which is present is that curvature of perturbations so R decreases due to the isochromatic or curvature conversion. So this number here is the ratio of the curvature perturbations compared with ignoring the effect of isochromatic perturbations. So you can get enhancements of order 2, in fact. So this is why the experimental data has disappeared. You obtain, this is depending on 50 or 60 e-folds, a value of R in the region 0.07, 0.12, depending on your initial conditions in the potential. But it's always like that. Here you can see, well, the results you would get that is for some particular set of angles you would get the very large R. If you ignore the two field effects, but we shouldn't do that, so this is the right answer. And for NS, this is what you get. This is structured in here. So most common plot, this is R versus NS. And the colors mean this is for a variety of initial conditions. You get for most of the initial conditions, you end up in the region close to 0.08, 0.09, or the red point is more abundant. This is rarely you end up in this region. And this is, by the way, what you get. If you ignore the two field effects, you would get also this kind of funny structure, which is not there, in fact. So many people are not used to using the Dirac-Borninfeld action for computing scalar potential, and are more used to a supergravity description. Here is a scalar potential, which gives rise to some of the dynamics I showed, which is this scalar potential in this way. This is the complex structure of the two torus in which this is where it is traveling. This is the complex dilaton. And these are the his fields. This is the kind of scalar potential that you get in this type of model. Well, of course, there are other pieces. But the sector, which is interesting for us, then assuming that there is a constant potential and a new term, and you just compute the potential, there is no scale type of cancellation, and the residual potential you are left with is this. If you assume that the supersymmetry braking simply comes from an embarrassing auxiliary field for the modulus, this is the quadratic structure that we showed. But if you use this kind of, if you try to use this supergravity description, you are going to fail in the sense that you are not going to get flattened. I mean, this is going to be quadratic forever. You should include all alpha prime corrections to this supergravity lagrangian to be able to describe the flattening effect, to get the real potential for last field. One thing which is interesting is that in this supergravity approach, you can see that there are duality symmetries. In particular, the complex structure fills under this duality transformation. The dilaton gets shifted, but also the hits transform. And the color potential is not invariant. It is not the color potential which is invariant. It is the full potential which is invariant. The potential is invariant, or the color potential is not. So you expect that the alpha prime corrections should be powers of the potential in order to preserve this, which this symmetry would be broken only spontaneously. This is consistent with what we obtained from DBI and Placere-Simon expansion. If you do an expansion for small field, this is the kind of power that you obtain. I don't have time to explain it, but you can also understand the stability of this potential in terms of this caloper sorbo structure in terms of four forms that I'm not going to describe. Just a few words. Data problem, let us know that data problem here in the Higgs tuning problem, they are not independent. You need an inflaton mass of 4 to 10 to 13 GB, but that's also the scale you need to break supersimilar to get a lag Higgs, which is 126 GB, well, to get a lag Higgs. So there are not things that you can separate. The large inflaton range comes from the multiple winding around one cycle, which is the existence of these cycles. It's common in stream theory. One important point is there is this generic flattening of the potential for large inflaton, which is something you cannot capture using supergravity potentials. I think we are lacking at the moment the technology to use large alpha prime, to sum up the alpha prime corrections in the supergravity and in supergravity, because if not, I think we are going to miss important information in the potential inflaton potentials. Reheating is quite high and it's still compatible with leptogenesis. So let me come to the conclusions. Well, the surface mass leads to a stable or metastable vacuum at a scale in between 10 to 10, 10 to 13, 10 to 14 GB. And one elegant way to re-obtain stability is that supersimilatory is found at all scales. In fact, that range is consistent with Higgs mass around 126 GB. And then, of course, minimality. Economy suggests to study whether the SUZI Higgs sector with supersimilatory broken at that scale can give rise to inflation. So what we find is that the MSSM Higgs system may work in using two field inflation. The Higgs degree of freedom inflaton may be realized as a decision position. Of course, there are varieties in which you can realize the Higgs in terms of a DC domain position or Wilson line. That depends on your model building abilities. And fluxes, which are genetic in these compactifications, then induce a potential, which can be computed in terms of the Dirac border interaction and the chance of an action. And what you obtain at the end is a variant of a two field chaotic inflation with, essentially, something you have to perform. In the original case, it's something you kind of do analytically, you have to do it numerically. But essentially, you get something which is linear-like type of behavior. There's a coverage of perturbations on mass suppress in one of 10 values of R in this range and also for details, which hopefully will soon be tested. So one of the virtues of this approach is probably that in one year or two, it could be ruled out or in. Thank you. Questions? So I don't know if I understood correctly. But did you mention that you break the electric symmetry at the high scale, at the 10 to the 13? No, no, no, well, I mean, the inflaton is the Higgs. So it's broken at the scale. The minimum of the potential after inflation, the baby's 0. What is broken at that scale is supersymmetry, not the. It's like usually in any Higgs inflation model, the Higgs has a baby. So the electric symmetry breaking is broken. But at the minimum of the potential is 0. And it's recorded. Yeah. I think there was a question in the back. Hello. So as far as I understood, you started from the point that our vacuum is not stable. Actually, this point is very discussive one. I see many reviews about it. And it could be stable or metastable and up to plan scales. So my question is the following. If you proposed to use it at the scale of 10 to 11 GV, how would you solve problem of the proton decay, for example, because we have already measured that proton decay will lead to the much more higher energy scales? Well, that depends on the details of the scales. What is important is the unification scale can be large, can be 10 to 15, 16, 17. So there is no, the only problem from proton decay could be the scalar triplets, where below 10 to 10, 10 to 11 GV. But if it is 10 to 12, it's perfectly consistent with proton decay. OK. And another question is, will the loop correction give additional mass to the infantron, not to the infantron, to our hicks? Will the loop correction form such a high scale? Well, this is protected. The hicks and the inflaton is protected in several different ways. First, you recover supersymmetry. So that counts as some of the corrections. But there is this built-in symmetry, which protects your potential, which tells you that any correction cannot come, it has to come in powers of the potential, essentially. So it should be, the potential itself is very small, because it's an inflaton scale over plant scale to the full. So any correction would be very, very small to the potential. So there are different ways to see this. You can see in this particular model, you can see it also because of the built-in duality symmetries, also because the built-in caliper sorbo symmetries, they are all related. But this is something which is really stable. I think in string theory, the scalar potencies are always stable. It's not my model. By the way, all the action models in string theory, although people don't say it, they are monodromy models. Because the monodromy story is something which is built in string theory. It's not up to you. You don't have actions of other kind. All actions in string theory have a monodromy behavior. So they are stable. You mentioned that the reheating temperature was something like 10 to the power of 213 because your influx is. Well, this is just perturbative. This is something which we have to do. We haven't done a serious analysis of. That will be in conflict with the gravitino. You could have gravitino problem, no? This is very model dependent. So I cannot answer to you. It depends on how you do your cosmology. It depends on the rest of your spectrum. Be concentrated. But your inflaton is heavy, right? Is it like 10, 12, 10, 13 GB? So you want to produce it thermally. So that's why you want the reheating temperature to be something like that. A repeat again is that's very model dependent. Depends what I do. If I preserve our parity and things, many things. I have one more quick question here. How about non-gaussianity model? What? Non-gaussianity. Non-gaussianity? Yes, well, it's something which we are considering now. We don't expect there are very similar two field inflation models, which is very, very typically these non-gaussianities are proportional to powers of the epsilon and eta. So we would like to find some effect, in fact. But we don't expect the sizable non-gaussianities, unfortunately. The inflation ends just at the end of the inflation end with the violation of the total parameter, in this case. I'm asking that if this model of inflation ends with the violation of the total parameter of the overall condition. Violation of the overall condition. Slow-roll condition. Ah, small-roll condition. We haven't studied how the end of inflation takes place, so cannot tell you. Not yet. So we're OK. Let's thank Luis Sabanez again.


Fantastic, great to be here in this wonderful hall standing below a pipe organ. I used to play these things, so that's why I'm doubly excited. Anyway, I am talking about this topic, which is quite a mouthful, so let me shorten this. This is a presentation about the learning designer and online tool that we've developed, and that is supposed to do exactly that. Yeah, be an online platform to help teachers design their courses. So this is just a bit of background about me. I'm working at the UCL Knowledge Lab. It's an interdisciplinary research lab in the middle of London, part of UCL and the Institute of Education. But what I'm presenting here, actually, I only play a really tiny role because to get the learning designer to where it is today, all of these people were involved, probably more, who I forgot to mention. Sorry if you should be on there and aren't. But you can also see on the right-hand side that there were a number of institutions involved. So it's not just a small cotton industry or a small pet project, but quite some significant thing. And this thing started back in 2006. It's quite a while ago. But let's look into the purpose of the learning designer. Or can I have a quick show of hands who of you have actually gone to the website of the learning designer? Oh, well, yeah, a few, not quite half, thank you. So, yeah, let me talk you through the purpose. One purpose is to help people, teachers in particular, because teachers can juggle multiple things when they need to design a course. And that is actually quite a lot of stuff that they have to think of. So we want to provide a platform that provides some support. So that also brings people together to help out each other so that people can learn from other people's designs. But also we want to provide the ready-made molds where the pieces of a puzzle fit in in order to make the design easier. Now, when we talk about learning design, I am using the definition brought forward by the La Nacca Declaration, that was 2008 or so? Well, quite a while ago. And since then we've seen a few learning design frameworks emerge. I've mentioned a few of them in my slides that are on the old session page. These are all clickable so you can find your way through there. And alternative frameworks are available. This is not an exhaustive list. But what these frameworks have in common is they work on the assumption of a process with the steps that I've listed there to the left. They are not the exact steps that are replicated everywhere but broadly, these are the steps that you follow when you're designing a course, more or less. Now, the learning designer does not want to respond to all of these steps. The learning designer focuses on activity development, first and foremost. And then I've mentioned another thing, the ABCLD, ABC workshops. Hands up if you have heard of the ABC learning design workshop. Oh, many more hands. Right, brilliant. So I don't need to say too much about this but you will know that the ABC workshops address more the first stages when you start learning designs and so on. You already get a little bit into sequencing but it stops there. When you want to develop the activities in detail and insert proper pedagogy and think about what students actually do down to the little details, that's what the learning designer is for. And in theory, the learning designer could also effectively does already address all of these other aspects but they are not featuring very highly. Maybe in the future, it did in the past. Speaking of the past, let me run you through the history of the learning designer. As I mentioned, starting in 2006, we started with the London Pedagogy Planner at the then the London Knowledge Lab, now the UCL Knowledge Lab. And at the same time, Phoebe, the Phoebe Pedagogy Planner from the University of Oxford was developed both just funded projects. And when they ended, we joined forces and found significant funding from ESRC and the TLRPTEL program in 2008 or 2009 or so. So still 10 years ago. And we built a really big team to develop the learning design support environment. Out of that resulted a number of resources like the CRAM tool, cause resources allocation modeler. I won't ask for any hands up if you've heard of that. Probably not, but it still exists more on that later. The learning designer arise from the Pedagogical Pattern Collector which was part of the LDSE. And from the learning designer, that was actually the origin of the ABC workshops. So the learning designer was there first. Just mentioning it. Here's a screenshot of the early version of the London Pedagogy Planner. And if you look closely, I'm not sure if you can read the top tabs, but it says module outline, module resources, then calendar and session planner. So back in that time, we actually thought about the larger things, not just activities, but how to combine these activities to a proper module and how to link learning outcomes with topics, how to link that all with assessment types. Now we've taken all that out for the moment because these things are properly complex and putting them into a tool is a challenge. It's not easy and it's not a challenge that we have cracked yet. So what we've also developed is this economic modeling of a course and that's the course resource allocation modeler. It still exists. There's a link in the presentation where you can download a Java version of it. We have developed it already as a web service to be used for the UCL life learning, non-accredited courses, design and so on. I'm not sure if they are using it at the moment. So we have the web service ready, but we have not yet released it because it is really rough around the edges. It's very specific to UCL at the moment. So, but you can still go and download the Java tool if you want to the economic modeling. The benefit is you can then see how expensive your pedagogy actually is and you can compare how much you're saving or not when you move a course from face to face to online or when you try to capture economies of scale. Now, yeah, and then we also experimented with timelines in the LDSE, all of which we've taken out. Why? Because we wanted to develop a tool that is usable for normal people. If you have all these tools that I've just shown you with all their complexities, they are complex. Use them, you have to put so much data into it that you lose the will to live. So your course design would never be ready. So what we've tried over the years is to simplify the process. We have thought everything through in pretty much great detail, but it was unmanageable. So we reduced the complexity and what we've ended up with is the current version of the learning designer which makes a number of pedagogic assumptions, theoretical assumptions, also pragmatic assumptions, but these assumptions have been researched over the past few years over these previous activities. Therefore, we can be reasonably sure that these assumptions are reasonable to make and are representing reality. And that makes it effectively easier for the person who now uses the learning designer because it's a manageable process. So this is what we have at the moment. We have the activity designer as the learning designer. We have the ABC workshops as quick fire team-based workshops when you want to start your module designs. And we have the CRAM tool to model the economics. And modeling economics is quite interesting when you consider the stakeholders of learning designs. You know, most tools, most frameworks even concentrate on students and teachers. Maybe QA gets involved somewhere and maybe there is some strategic involvement because when you're designing more than the module, the whole program that always has strategic components in it. But financial planners and support services, they are probably an afterthought or do not get involved at all in the learning design. And that's what we want to tackle in the long term. We have the basics in place with the CRAM tool and so on but we still need to find a way to make this manageable in order to get an environment where we can properly involve all the learning science stakeholders that I've listed here. Just a word on the QA people. Our learning designer produces outputs you can export, for example, a word document and the idea is actually that you can then use these documents to pass it into the QA process when your module is validated or so. So yeah, I think it's important to consider all these non-obvious stakeholders and not just focus on teachers and learners. But that's our main focus, good pedagogy. So this is how the learning designer looks and it's free to use. It will always be free. There might be some paid components later on but that's a long way away. The core and substantial component will remain free. The learning designer theoretically is based on Dyna-Laurelard's conversational framework going all the way back to Gordon-Pasch conversation theory and so on. So there's a really good body of theory behind it that's well thought through. And more recently, I mean, yeah, Dyna-Laurelard has distilled these learning types, these six colored things here, acquisition, collaboration, discussion, investigation, practice and production. And these learning types, I've seen them, well, you've seen them in the ABC workshops but I've seen them elsewhere as well. They seem to strike a chord and they actually can represent any activity under the sum that you can imagine. You can represent this as a combination of these learning types. So whether you do resource-based learning, collaborative exercises, some, I don't know, debates and so on, you can represent this as a combination of these learning types and that works quite well. It's just six types, easy to grasp, easy to get into and when you stick to these types then you can quite easily, well, design things. And when you understand these types that's effectively the framework that we can use to have a common language. And when we have a common language then we can communicate our designs much easier. And that's the second purpose of the learning designer. I should say you do need to know what these learning types are about. They are more or less almost self-explanatory but you still need to internalize them. So you do need a bit of expertise when you are designing. Even though we are making the process easier with these tools it is not as simple as we see in other industry where you suddenly can create a full movie on your telephone. Well, you can now create learning designs on the telephone which I'll demonstrate in a second but you do need some background knowledge, some really serious background knowledge. So I'm actually very happy to say that at least in our little bubble of academia for the education schools we, it is still not time to get rid of experts. So this is where we are with cram to a learning designer module and the ABC workshops. And we are going to rebrand the learning designer so you see a potential new logo there. What we're currently working on is an API in order to allow other tools to connect with it. We want to develop sharing learning designs and that's what we need the common language for that I've just mentioned. So these learning types have propagated quite nicely so well let's use them. We have the platform where we can upload from ABC straight into the learning designer, learning designs and then we can share them and people kind of understand what they are because they have worked with these learning types before. And then we also want to export straight into the VLE so that when you create a learning design in the learning designer you can export it not just to Moodle later on also other VLEs they are also available and it automatically populates a structure in your VLE. So in terms of integrations there's this yeah the API we already have a working example for our API so it works in practice which is the rapid input tool which we are developing in conjunction with the further developments of the ABC workshops. And yeah I'm not mentioning my program but Simon Walker who has developed this is now also at UCL so there's an option to link it with assessment as well but this is a video demonstration of the mobile friendly learning designer tool so this is how you would design, oops this should be a video this is how you can design this lecture here how you can represent this lecture based on a mobile device now where's the button here? So we choose the read watch list yeah I have done this in the background and in the learning designer this is the live view of the learning designer I can then enter all the details like the instructions for students what they have to do and then I get all the additional analytics experience so I can see what your learning experience of this lecture is very acquisition driven and then I can export it straight into the VLE if I want to and I even have entered some outcomes based on Bloom's taxonomy and so on so it's pretty heavy theory driven but it's actually pretty straightforward to do learning science even on your mobile device yeah so this is, let me just finish off this is the learning designer roadmap version one zero already exists and the next step is we want to develop blocks so that we can bundle activities into a module the public API is already working but it's undocumented yet so not available to you, wait a little bit we want to develop a new support site in April I'm starting a new MA module fully online which is about this topic here and we also want to offer some workshops without any accreditation in order to do better learning designs then we want to develop the community we want to enhance peer review functionality in the learning designer so that people can collaborate on the learning designs and then in the long term we also want to monetize this with a paid plan for institutions so that institutions can have a walled garden and their own review processes and so on so currently we have 150 daily users more than 3000 a month and we do have evidence there's a paper linked that tells you quite a bit quite a lot of detail about what the responses to the learning designers were in the past few years and I will stop here and not talk about shareability that's not really necessary only so far if you're interested in an institutional deployment then absolutely do get in touch we'd like to explore this in more detail thanks for your attention thank you Tim let's start with some questions in the audience here anyone raise your hand to get a roving mic no there's some questions online though someone says where's the learning designer available at this address you need the UCL logon is it open source? you do need a log in but it's not the UCL log in so you need to create an account so if you go to the ucl.ac.uk slash learning-designer website you need to register an account first before you can access okay that answers that question you answered the second one also can be edited by an institution to make it specific they need to come to you and talk to you yes we are not there yet with creating walled gardens but that's our plan and we need to engage with the community in order to see how best to take that forward and there was another question with our RSE is the LD open source now the code of the application is not open source but it's open access really so it's a free tool it's open to use and the learning science that you create there's no license or ownership attached to that but the code we are not making available so you cannot install it on your own system okay it's software as a service yeah you also asked you answered this one about running a workshop more than just the ABC is the learning designer run as a workshop or something that an academic would use after attending an ABC yeah the idea is users would use it on their own at the moment but as I've just mentioned at the end we want to create or offer workshops to help you get to grips with the learning designer and how to make best use of it but also we want to enhance the tools within the learning designer to allow a collaborative design building because at the moment well you can assemble around one screen or so but a student of mine has just written her dissertation and put forward a few ideas of building an integrating online community where you have multiple people working on on the same design at the same time okay okay thank you any more final questions from the audience Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupyter Notebook servers our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education future developments include a text and data mining service working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology