Hello, this is William Chow, and welcome to TORTS Introduction and Intentional TORTS Module 4a, Part B. In this part, we'll finish our introduction to TORTS by looking at vicarious liability, remedies, and liability insurance. Who is liable for a TORT? The most obvious person is the person who actually committed the TORT, or in other words, the TORT and the TORT feeser. Another person could be the TORT feeser's employer, if the TORT was committed in the course of employment. That first type of liability, liability against the person who committed the TORT, we call that personal or direct liability. Liability of the employer for a TORT committed by an employee is called vicarious liability. The victim of a TORT can sue both the employee who committed the TORT and the employer of that employee. So again, the employee's being the person who committed the TORT would be directly liable. And the employer may be either vicariously liable for the employee's TORT committed in the course of employment. And the employer could also be directly liable if it committed its own TORT. So for example, if they were careless in training the employee who committed the TORT, if they weren't properly trained, that's why the employee committed the TORT and they were careless or caused damage to the customer. Then because of that careless training, the employer could be directly, directly liable. So we know that employer can be held vicariously liable for a TORT committed by an employee as long as it was committed in the course of employment. So what is actually meant by course of employment? That's what the Supreme Court of Canada looked at in the case of Basley and Curry. So the facts of this case involve an employer called the Children's Foundation, which ran two residential care facilities for the treatment of emotionally troubled children between the ages of 6 and 12. The foundation's employees were authorized to act as parent figures for the children in their care. The employees were to do everything a parent would do from just general supervision to intimate things like bathing and tucking in at bedtime. The foundation hired a specific employee named Mr. Curry, who happened to be a pedophile, but the foundation didn't know he was a pedophile. They had checked him out, checked his references, and they were all clear. But the unfortunate thing that happened is that when Mr. Curry was working at the foundation helping to take care of children, one of the children in his care, he sexually abused.   The foundation took the position that it had done nothing wrong. It had done its due diligence in hiring Basley. They checked his references and they also supervised him in an inappropriate way. But Basley's position was that it doesn't matter if the foundation did his due diligence or did nothing wrong. The foundation is still nonetheless liable as the employer by way of vicarious liability for the tort committed by its employee, Curry. So the legal issue in this case is whether or not the foundation, the employer, is vicariously liable for its employee's sexual assault of a child in its care. So the court had to determine what is the applicable law for determining vicarious liability. And it's said that there are two ways that an employer can be held vicariously liable. The first way is when the employee has done something that is authorized by the employer, which in this case obviously the foundation did not authorize Curry to sexually abuse this child. So that doesn't apply to this case. But that's one way that an employer can be held vicariously liable. The other way, the second way is where the employee has done something that's unauthorized that's not allowed by the employer. But what they did that was unauthorized is significantly connected to the employment duties of that employee. So as long as there's that significant connection between what happened, between the bad thing that happened and the employment duties, the job, the authorized duties of that employee, then the employer can be held vicariously liable. So the court looked in detail at the facts of this case. And there's an excerpt here, which I'm showing you, but I won't read through it. But they basically come to the conclusion by looking through these facts that there was a significant connection between the sexual abuse committed by Curry and his employment duties. It was his employment duties that required him to come into intimate contact with the kids at this institution. And those employment duties gave him the opportunity to sexually abuse the victim here. So to sum up the legal test that comes from Basley and Curry for vicarious liability. So an employer is vicariously liable for tort if either number one the employee's wrongful act was actually authorized by the company or the employee's wrongful act was significantly connected to the employee's employment. Please take a moment to read through this quick quiz question by pausing this video at this time. So read through it and choose what you think is the correct answer. The answer to this question is D, any or all of the above. So A, B, and C are true statements. A says Brad and Angie personally liable for their negligence. So Brad and Angie are the ones who committed the tort so they can be held directly or personally liable. B says gold star liable for its negligence in hiring incompetent staff. So gold star could be held directly liable for that negligence because they're the ones who were negligent in hiring incompetent staff. The third choice is a gold star vicariously liable for Brad and Angie's negligence. So Brad and Angie chose very bad investments for the clients. Obviously that wasn't authorized by the employer. Gold star would never or any investment firm would almost never tell its investment advisors to you are authorized to pick inappropriate or bad investments for your clients. So it wasn't authorized but even though it wasn't authorized they were picking those investments as a part of their job with gold star. So there was a significant connection with their job and based on the test from Basley and Curry gold star would be vicariously liable. So that's why the answer is D, any or all of the above. Let's not talk about remedies. If you sue in tort and win a court may give you one or four different remedies, compensatory damages, punitive damages, nominal damages and injunction. The first type of remedy is compensatory damages. This is where the court orders the defendant to pay money to the plaintiff for the purpose of compensating for the losses or injuries that the plaintiff has suffered from the tort. There are three legal tests that need to be applied to determine compensatory damages. The first is that the amount of damages should be the amount that puts the plaintiff back in the same financial position as if the tort had not occurred. The second test that we apply is called the doctrine of remoteness. So this limits the ability to claim losses to only those losses that can be reasonably foreseen as a consequence of the tort. So if a loss is not a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the tort then that loss is not allowed. This limitation, this doctrine of remoteness, however, does not apply to intentional torts. It does apply to negligence torts. The third test that we apply is the doctrine of mitigation. The doctrine of mitigation says that the plaintiff, the person who has suffered a loss, has a duty to take reasonable steps to minimize the losses arising from the tort. And if the plaintiff does not take those reasonable steps to minimize then the damages that they're entitled to are reduced. The second type of damages is punitive damages. We've heard about punitive damages before back in module 3C when we talked about remedies arising from a breach of contract. This is the exact same concept here except in the context of damages arising from a tort. So the rules are the same. The purpose of punitive damages is to punish the defendant for harsh, vindictive, reprehensible, or malicious behavior. So this is really extra bad behavior, which is much worse than just meeting the minimal requirements of the tort that was committed. So punitive damages are not awarded that often in Canadian courts. It's much more common in U.S. courts. The leading case on punitive damages, which we discussed in detail in module 3C, is the Supreme Court decision in Witten and Pilot Insurance. So you should go back and have a look at module 3C to refresh in your memory on what that case is about and what the legal principles are regarding punitive damages. The third type of remedy is nominal damages. So this is where you sue because someone has committed a tort against you, and let's say you win. But the court says, well, you win, you won because you've proven that the other person committed the tort. But you didn't really suffer any damages. You didn't really suffer any loss because of the tort. So you win, but you get no damages. You don't get anything out of the lawsuit, in other words. So you have that feeling of victory for maybe a few seconds, at least until you get your legal bill in the mail, and then that feeling of victory disappears really quickly. The fourth type of remedy is an injunction, which we had also talked about in module 3D for breaches of contract. So this is where a court orders a defendant to either do something or refrain from doing something. One example is the story of the Sriracha Hot Sauce factory in California. Some of the people who lived around that factory were complaining about various odors coming out of that factory, these spicy smells that irritated them. So the town actually took the factory owner to court and had the court order the factory to be at least partially shut down. So that was an injunction, the court ordering the factory to partially shut down. Most businesses operate under the risk of being sued and torred. To manage and to minimize that risk, many businesses will purchase liability insurance. Liability insurance or an insurance policy is a contract between an insurance company, which we will call the insurer, and a person or business, which we will call the insured. Under that contract or policy, the insured agrees to pay premiums, so this is the cost of purchasing the insurance. The insurer, in exchange, agrees to provide coverage under which the insurer will, number one, pay damages for tort liability on behalf of the insured. So if there is a successful lawsuit imposing tort liability on the insured person, the insurance company will pay for those damages. But the amount they'll pay will be less an amount that we call a deductible. So the deductible is relatively a smaller amount compared to the tort liability, but that deductible amount is paid by the insured. The other thing that the insurer agrees or is obligated to do is to defend lawsuits against the insured. So if you are, let's say, an accountant who's being sued by a client for negligence, the insurance company has an obligation to arrange for your legal defense in that lawsuit. They will hire a lawyer and pay for that lawyer as well. Now most professionals, such as CPAs, lawyers, engineers, they are required by their governing body to have liability insurance. So CPAs get their liability insurance from a program called the Charred Professional Accountants Professional Liability Insurance Program.


شكرا for being here today, and thanks Mark for the good introduction. So I'm Rajay El Khadim from LinkedIn, and I cover the relationship with the governments. And today the subject is about startups, how we can help the startups if I'm not mistaken. And LinkedIn was a startup, this is how we started. And then until recently we still think that we are a startup although now it's a billion dollar business. And we are growing very fast. So hopefully today we'll be able to share with you some thoughts on how we do business and how we can enable you also to do your business to see how LinkedIn can be as a tool for you as an individual, as an investor, as a business owner, and so forth. But before we start I want to ask the question is who is on LinkedIn today? Good. Who is not on LinkedIn? So half the room is on LinkedIn and the rest are not on LinkedIn but are on LinkedIn. Good. So today do you want to have information? I want to ask the crowd who is doing his own business today? Who is launching a startup so I can identify. Good. Can I get some examples? Yeah, my name is Majel Lebebi. We actually are a digital media supplier. We are developing a Wi-Fi advertising platform in public places. So anyone connected to the internet through this white private works. Looking at these, I'm in place at this location. Nice. And what are your goals now? What is your immediate goals? What do you want to achieve today? At this stage? We will get more views on your place. And that's our market to expand outside the arena. Very good. And which platform do you use? Your website? We are developing an application. Okay. Trying to achieve or to develop that makes LinkedIn an advertising platform. So you are going to work an example. Excellent. Thank you. Yeah. Who else wants to give us an example on what they are doing today? I saw some hands being raised so can I get another example? Yes, go ahead. What we do basically is we help businesses in Qatar. We have a system where we have described all the data from the European. So all the companies are there on a platform. And they can promote there whatever they have. If it's a product or a service. And you can give promotions and everything. So it's a unified platform for all that. And what is your biggest challenge today? The biggest challenge right now is to make everybody come on that. And have an ecosystem of all the companies there. And have their promotions on it. Okay. Thank you very much for this information. So when I was building this content I was thinking. So as a startup what is your challenge? And of course I'm not the expert. I started from a business point of view on how we help our customers. I was able to get some ideas. Maybe probably at the initial stage is forming the company. Getting the seed funding right. Eventually launching. Getting the customers. Hiring the best talent. And selling. And those in a way is what any company that would like to thrive and be successful want to do. So how can you leverage LinkedIn as a platform? And this is only one platform. I'm sure that today on your website or on your platform or application. LinkedIn is not going to get to the whole business. But in my opinion all the tools at your disposal to make that happen. And this starts with how we can leverage this.  And people start their day on Facebook probably. What's up. But also on LinkedIn as a way to start their day from a professional mindset. And when I say professional is because today we are not. People don't come on LinkedIn to have fun. They either come to network. Consume knowledge content. So we call ourselves a bit of a more serious network. Compared to the others. Where on Facebook you have your personal life. On Twitter it's more about you know being out there. And then reaching out to people with the status. So today I'm going to take the example of Mark. He's a patent lawyer. I would not connect with him on Facebook. But I would connect with him on LinkedIn. And if I want to have advice on patent law. I would reach out to him on LinkedIn. And not on Facebook. If we want to be friends. It's going to be Facebook. We'll share family photos. A nice video. So this is how we are today. And I'm sure the people that are using LinkedIn already know this. How do they use it? It's once you log on to the homepage. As a member today. And also how do we form ideas as startups. Is all the businesses and all the people doing things. Are today on LinkedIn and talking about it. And we have multiple channels. Where you can know what's happening today. In big data. In social networking. In the business of Internet of Things.  To access this on our platform. Additionally. We have a list of influencers. Have you heard of the influencers on LinkedIn? It's the top 500 personalities. On LinkedIn. People like Bill Gates. Richard Branson. And so forth. Local and regional and global. And those people have done it. Been there. Done that. They don't have to be billionaires. It's people also from. Doing their own startups. But they have something to say. And once you can read. What those people have to teach. It's just another. A tool for you. To be able to get further ideas. On how to evolve. Maybe going viral. What are the best marketing tools. Et cetera. And this saves you from just searching online. You know it's all out there. Then. Today we mobile. And that's good. Because you have access to all that information. Whether for you or your clients. Through mobile devices. Now people used to think that. LinkedIn is only for hiring people. If you want to a job. You want a job.  You change your profile. And then that's it. I'm going to. That's that's LinkedIn. But the problem is that. People maybe will change jobs. Once. Twice a year. But that doesn't. That doesn't mean. That they will come back to LinkedIn. So. The media platform with content. And people come to read content. And content is now six times more. Engagement than jobs. And this is where the brands are. Told leadership the news. And this is where you can get all your. Relevant information. Because of that. Millions of people now are. Connecting on LinkedIn. And it's. Instead of just going to CNN. BBC. New York Times. The Guardians. It's all in one stop shop. The reason I'm talking about this. Is not because I'm. Promoting LinkedIn. But just to tell you that. This is how people are using it. And if people are. Out there with that mindset. That gives you a notion. Of how we can use it. To your advantage. Whether it's an individual. Or a company. Because today our mission is. To connect all those people. And make them more productive. And successful. By providing value. 350 million. And that's. Either your connection base. Customer base. Whatever you want to take it. Those are the members on LinkedIn. And they're growing by. Two members per second. So. Every second that passes. Two members. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. مرحباً لكي تريد أن تدخل أنفسك. This is your identity. This is your brand. The network is today we are in the room. We don't know each other. But tomorrow we will connect on LinkedIn. I met today Indika. He gave me his business card. Probably I'll put it in my bag. But I will connect him with him on LinkedIn. And we remain connected on LinkedIn. And that information is always updated. I don't have to really ask him what are you doing today. I will follow him and make sure that I know what he's doing. And the knowledge are the things that I talked about at the beginning. That is the knowledge that you get. I had one meeting last month in Dubai. With one of the government agencies. And they wanted to know about innovation. So I'm not an expert about innovation. And I went on LinkedIn. I inserted innovation. And I got at least 10 to 20 articles. By really gurus in innovation. Where it enlightened me. And I was able to present a case to them. Based on this information. And you can do the same for yourself. As well we help people find work obviously. But also be great at what they do. Based on the above. How do we help companies. And this is I think the key subject for you today. Is tripolars. Any company needs to hire talent. They need to market their products. And they need to sell their products. Those are the basis of the business. And because of this. We identified that in each basis. It requires us to identify the right person. Whether we're hiring a person. Or we're marketing to a person. Or we're selling to a person. Who is that right person. And this is a decision. That is challenging. For any person to take. So it requires us to identify the right person. Engage them with content. Okay. So if you want to hire a person. Need to engage him with the right pitch. For him to join the startup. Why should I leave my great job at LinkedIn. And join your startup. You want to do the next LinkedIn. Right. You have a vision. You need to sell it to me. So you need to talk to me in a way. That will make me join your company. If I'm an engineer. If I'm a media expert. If I'm a social media guru. Whatever it is. So this is very important. In marketing. Is engaging your customer base. With content. And if you're selling. Is to engage the person. Who's going to buy from you. With content. And if you're an investor. It's also engaging. Sorry. If you want to get people to invest in your company. Is also to reach out to the right person. And tell him this is a great idea. To buy with us. Or advertise with us. And so forth. So. Basically is. Motivate them to act. And this is how. The basis of the business we. But to. To do this. To hire market and sell. We consider that. You know. On LinkedIn. Companies. Or individuals are like a shopping mall. And then. Your storefront. Is your startup. How do you get those people to come to you. Why would they come. And then buy from you. Or work for you. This is the question. And this is the challenge. And I think. The way to do this. Is using the big data. That we have. Who's who. On Facebook. I cannot know that mark. Is a. Patent lawyer. But on LinkedIn. I can know that he's a patent lawyer. On LinkedIn. We know that. People. They have degrees. They are working. They are successful. And we can. Say that. This is. Those are the people we want to talk to. So. This is a small example. This is Pascal. Our marketing manager. And. I know who she is. I know who she knows. And what she does. And based on this. Imagine all this information today. You have around 3.5 million. Companies. On LinkedIn. So the best advice for you. Is now to start. Your company. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. لذا, مجرد today is I'm going to show you this graph here is that with LinkedIn we are trying to digitally map the whole globe by having all the members all the companies all the jobs and the skills and everything to give some kind of relevant data for anyone that wants to use it. And because of this we are becoming and this it is the most accurate way to reach professionals on the internet. Can I ask you who is you are trying to reach to some kind of profiles to sell or to market to on LinkedIn. Is that a specific profile you want to reach for example? For your business. So who might be somebody that you want to meet or that you want to connect to today as a business to be more successful. So you can meet with them and sell them or try to pitch them something. And a title will be marketing manager for example. Let's say at LinkedIn. How would you do that? Today how would you go and find out who is the marketing manager? In general. Exactly. So in the past we had to ask who is the marketing manager at LinkedIn and then I showed you Pascal Comati. Nobody knows Pascal Comati maybe today.  And okay you can send her an email or a message and then you ask for a meeting and because it's professionally done she might accept. Otherwise you'll have to cold call her and then you have to give her a 30 second pitch saying you know we have a great product what to sell you and then she's too busy she's not going to meet with you. Even more once you go and see Pascal your researcher profile and then turns out she studied at maybe Qatar University or AUB and then you studied at the same university and you graduated maybe before her or after her. Or you said you have some common people and that will help you also identify who that person is. In the past we used to go to meeting blind. Who is that person? How does he think? How does he look like? Today we are more prepared to meet with that person and this is the valuable insight for you to leverage it and today it's all about social selling or social marketing or social recruitment. In addition to your abilities as people you have to use the power of the web to do this and with LinkedIn we provide this. You can target people with job functions, seniority, company size, education, company name and if you want to sell them today you can also send them an email. As an example Emirates Airlines they want to sell or promote business class travel to the US or first class. Who might go first class today? Give me a profile. CEO. Okay. MDs or people with money. Let's suppose I want to connect with CEO's and MDs. On LinkedIn I can take a list of who is an MD in the MENA region and I will send them a personalized message personalized on LinkedIn. And on LinkedIn why is it better? Because if you send it by email it might go to junk because he receives a lot of emails. On LinkedIn you only receive one or two messages from LinkedIn as a content. And Emirates will tell him this is a great offer for you. I now have a new route from Qatar to Washington DC and the open rate are usually up to 40% and people will consider it. So this is a great tool for you to start talking to your audience or to the people that you want to reach in a professional way. As well create your company page. It has nothing to do maybe with your business but it will show professional. I was reading an article today about the startups that started on LinkedIn. GoPro, Dropbox. And they saw that the people in the Bay Area in San Francisco who at an early stage engage with those companies to work for them or to see if they're cool or not are those the companies that now today are thriving. But they started long time before. Whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, it's everything. We're just one platform guys. It's not everything. But this is from our side. So create a presence. Tell your story. If you tell me today I have a company. Okay what is this? If you tell your story on LinkedIn maybe I will consider it as okay this is professional. It makes sense. Maybe I'll look into it and so forth. And of course content always on strategy. What are your achievements? Today my customers have their own websites. But they are also on LinkedIn. They are on Facebook with different messages and always pushing and getting followers. If you have more followers it will help you. And this whole strategy of being out there with different messages for different audiences will help you. And of course if you'd like you can always reach out to us. And we will help you as courtesy also to tell you best advice. So build awareness. Engage with people. Build a relationship. And reach out as I said personalized messages. Whether on a personal level or a business level it will help you. You know the sponsored update model on Facebook. We have the same on LinkedIn. Display ads. So our platform is not cluttered. It's only one place to place ads here and here. So it's really prime real estate that you can use. But at the end of the day it's all about measuring success. If you can't measure it it will not work. How do we help our clients measure success? Is by also helping them quantify their brand. And the brand is mainly the reach that you have. The people that know you. That are connected to you. Versus the people that are actually engaging with you. Clicking. Researching a job. Looking at an article. Liking and so forth. And this will give us a score that we give some companies. And that score will give them their brand index. Whether on talent or anything else. Versus peers in the industry. And we tell them this is how we need to improve on things. And we help them measure that thing. So I hope that today we give you some kind of a toolkit. That you'll be able to use with LinkedIn. To do things better for you. And if there is anything we can do from our side to help you. It would be our pleasure to do so. Thank you very much.


This is a map of Ireland and Europe today. This is Abraham Ortelius' map of Ireland and Europe from 1595. Do you notice anything different about these maps? Although there may be a few differences, the main focus of today is this mysterious island depicted just off the coast of Ireland in the 1595 map, Spell Braphil. Although this island has various spellings down through history, it is known most commonly as High Brazil and it is said to lie just off the west coast of Ireland in the Atlantic Ocean. The name is said to come from an Irish name, meaning descendants of Brazil, an ancient clan of Ireland whose name may come from a word meaning beauty or mighty, or it may mean the High King of the world. One of the strange things about this island is that it appeared in numerous maps down through history. As far back as 1325, nautical maps identified an island called Brasil, just west of Ireland. The island appeared in countless maps under slightly different names for centuries, including an Abraham Ortelius' map of Europe in 1595. It is often depicted as being circular, with a river running east to west across its diameter. By 1865, it would refer to as Brazil Rock on many maps, stories and myths about this island abound. One such story is that the island is shrouded in clouds of mist and it can only be seen once every seven years, although it cannot be reached. It has been described as a place where saints lived, or where an advanced civilisation dwelt.  My opinion in general is that most of these stories have some sort of seeds of truth. There were numerous expeditions to find this island around the 15th century or so. Many came back empty-handed after months at sea, although there are other stories of people seeing and setting foot on the island. Numerous expeditions left Bristol in the 15th century in search of the island. A letter written by the Spanish diplomat Pedro de Ayala, who was employed by Ferdinand II of Aragon, stated at the 1497 expedition by the Italian explorer John Cabot, found land discovered in the past by the men from Bristol, who found Brassil. Numerous other expeditions left in search of the island, but returned months later with nothing to show. In the 17th century, a Captain John Nisbet claimed to have seen the island when on a journey from France to Ireland, noting that High Brassil was inhabited by large black rabbits and a magician who lived in a stone castle alone. Yet this story turned out to be an invention of Richard Heads, an Irish author and playwright. A sighting of the island was described as late as 1872 by Robert O'Flaquerty and T.J. Westrop, with Westrop claiming that he brought his family on to the island with him. What is interesting is that High Brassil has been linked to the Porcupine Bank, an area of the Irish shelf that is broadly in the location where the island was depicted on maps. Could this be where the seed of truth lies? Did explorers and navigators know that there was something in this general area and someone decided to draw it as an island one day? The Porcupine Bank is a relatively raised area of seabed, around 200 metres below sea level at its highest. The island is often referred to as Ireland's Atlantis, with Atlantis of course being a story of an ancient civilisation, advanced civilisation who lived on an island that was then swallowed up by the sea. As told by the Athenian philosopher Plato in his book Timaeus, published around 360 BC, my next video will go into more detail on the story of Atlantis. Thanks for watching, I'll see you next time.


Good morning. I'm Shobna Narasimhan. I'm from the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, and I'm chairing this session, especially given the topic of this session, which is topological materials and phenomena. We thought we'd pause a minute to mourn the unfortunate passing and also celebrate the life of this person who is Shu Cheng Zhang, who contributed so much to the themes of this session and was a brilliant physicist. I did not know him personally, but I certainly admired his work. He had many links also with ICTP and this photograph was actually taken when he won the Dirac Medal. He was one of the co-winners of the Dirac Medal in 2012. The Dirac Medal is a very prestigious award given by ICTP. He also organized conferences at ICTP. For example, this one, which is it's on high-dimensional quantum hall effect, Chern-Simon's theory in non-commutative geometry and condensed matter physics and field theory. The interesting thing to note about this conference is it was in 2005, so it was a year before topological insulators exploded onto the field. So the Kane and Melly paper and the Bernoulli and Zhang papers were in 2006. So this conference was like this one organized at ICTP to introduce the themes of the two talks today. I thought I would use two quotations from Xu Cheng Zhang. He said as a student, I was deeply attracted to Dirac's style of searching for physical laws of nature by looking for beautiful mathematical structures. And he also said, once you have a topological way of describing physical phenomena, there's a huge mathematical literature that you can exploit. And in his Dirac Medal lecture, he mentioned that he started out life as a particle physicist working on field theory and then he started getting very frustrated because he thought that the theories that he was coming up with, he couldn't find experimental tests for them. And then he went and talked to Xi'an Yang who suggested to him that maybe he should turn his attention to condensed matter because in condensed matter, it's much easier to find experimental realizations. And so the two talks today show both aspects of this. They show that if you use these theories that were initially developed either in mathematical physics or in high energy physics and field theory, you can discover very beautiful properties of condensed matter. And also somewhat surprisingly, condensed matter physics can serve as a test bed for theories of phenomena that you normally think of as happening at high energies. So without further ado, I think I'm not really an expert in these topics. So I think it is better if I turn it over to the two speakers. So we have two talks in this session. The first talk is by David Vanderbilt who I think doesn't need any further introduction to this audience. He's been coming to this conference for many, many years, I know. He's at Rutgers University and the title of his talk is Axion Coupling and Magneto-Electric and Topological Materials. Okay, I think we're in business. Thanks, Shobana. It's wonderful to be here. A lot of old friends. It's an honor to open the conference. What I want to do in this talk, there's a huge development in topological materials, topological insulators and semi-metals in the last decade and I can only take a little bite but the piece I want to introduce is the so-called axion coupling and what gives rise to so-called a kind of topological insulators known as axion insulators of which currently we don't know any experimental examples so you could regard that as a disadvantage or as a challenge. I obviously prefer the second point of view. Before I forget to advertise the many collaborators who have contributed, who are co-authors on various points of papers that I will mention during the talk, here are a few I won't read the names but many of you probably recognize many of them and I'll mention the papers as I go along. So what I want to do is do a very brief introduction and review of baryphasis and electric polarization which I hope most of you have some degree of familiarity with and then I'll talk about anomalous Hall conductivity and then the axion coupling theta which is closely related to the baryphase phi but in three dimensions instead of one dimension and the physics that it's related to which is a magnetoelectric response instead of electric polarization and then I'll talk about axion insulators and assuming I have time I'll talk a little bit about some recent work that we've been doing with my student Niko Varnava about calculations on tight binding models of axion insulators. As I mentioned, we don't have any good physical realizations in the lab yet so we're working on models. So I hope this gives you a sense of one piece of what's going on among many in the topological literature. Okay, so a baryphase is defined for a one dimensional insulator. I've drawn the one dimensional bryuan zone here as a loop instead of a segment because it's pi and minus pi are identified and I've plotted the energy band vertically and so the energy band is a loop and a loop supports topology or at least a geometric phase. You can define a geometric phase in this way. Unk is the cell periodic block function and from this derivative with respect to k you define the baryconnection and then the baryphase is basically an integral of the baryconnection over the bryuan zone. There's a gauge dependence which means if you put in a phase twist of the Unk and k does change but the baryphase does not change except some integer times two pi so it's well defined modulo two pi, it's a phase. And what is it useful for? Well, let's go up to two dimensions and suppose I look at a two dimensional bryuan zone in terms of kx and ky and for each kx along the ky direction I calculate the baryphase and plot it and here I plot two images because they differ by two pi. Either branch would be equally sensible and if I take the average value of the baryphase across the entire bryuan zone what that tells me is the component of the electric polarization in the other direction in the y direction. In fact, most of you probably know that these baryphases are related to the positions of the YNA centers so you can regard this as a framework in which we keep kx as a block wave vector labeled in the x direction and then we wanyarize in the y direction so called hybrid wanyar representation. So you can also think of these as plots of the wanyar center position in y as a function of kx and if you average these then you get the polarization in the vertical direction for a three dimensional crystal of course you have to average in kx and ky so here phi is really the average of this baryphase over kx and ky and there's a surface theorem that tells you that the surface charge that you find at the surface providing the surface is insulating must be given by exactly this polarization plus an integer and the integer can be regarded either as in the two pi ambiguity of phi or more physically you could add a layer of charge one electron per unit surface unit cell that would change the surface charge by that same amount. Okay there's another strange thing that can happen in rare circumstances you have to have broken time reversal symmetry so this has to be a two dimensional ferromagnet and in that case since the left hand side and the right hand side of this one dimensional B1 zone are identified with each other whatever value the baryphase has here it also has to have here but it doesn't have to come back to itself without wrapping it can wrap by two pi or by minus four pi or by some integer times two pi and if that integer is non-zero then this is a topological system it's topological in the sense that you can't adiabatically connect something that does have a wrapping with something that doesn't have a wrapping without a bulk gap closure in the two dimensional material and so this integer is called the churn number and what it's physically related to is the anomalous Hall conductivity of this material so most materials that don't have this wrapping if it's a two dimensional insulator would have to have a zero anomalous Hall conductivity but there are exceptions where it can be an integer and if it's an integer the reason why it's connected with the anomalous Hall conductivity here I just give a quick physical idea if you imagine applying electric field in the X direction so what that does is it applies forces to the wave packets and the wave vector KX migrates to the right and as that happens the wave packets their Y coordinate the very the 1A center in the Y coordinate migrates in the plus Y direction which is a current in the Y direction so if I apply an electric field in the X direction I get a current in the Y direction even though this is a gap system so in that sense it's an insulator but it can support this kind of anomalous Hall current since 2013 we've had experimental realizations of this two dimensional quantum anomalous Hall state starting basically all of them that we have today are low temperature realizations in magnetically doped topological insulator systems so they do exist we'd like to find more robust and higher temperature versions of them and that's one of the things that we've been working on off and on in my group but for the purposes of this talk I want to go on and talk about not the two dimensional anomalous Hall conductivity of a film or isolated two dimensional system but the surface of an insulating three dimensional crystal so I can ask the question so what I told you before is that for an isolated two dimensional system the anomalous Hall conductivity has to be zero or two pi times an integer and so you might think the same would be true at the insulating surface of an insulating crystal so in other words you apply an electric field and you measure the transverse current at the surface and you might expect that has to be quantized like that and it turns out that's not true this is an example of what is called an anomaly something that can happen at a surface of a higher dimensional system and cannot happen in an isolated system and the way that you usually get out of an anomaly is that there's something else somewhere in the system that compensates and so what happens in this case is if you apply an electric field you get equal and opposite currents on the top and bottom surface if you make a film out of this the total anomalous Hall conductivity is still zero so it doesn't violate the two dimensional theorem that I told you before but you have currents at the surface and in fact what happens is you get currents all around the surface and in fact what this is is an orbital magnetization and of course you can have an orbital magnetization in an insulating three dimensional crystal and it drives surface currents that are given by you know by m cross n hat is the surface current k and so basically the orbital magneto electric coupling and the surface anomalous Hall conductivity are the same thing from this point of view. Okay, the magneto electric coupling I just wanna briefly mention is more complicated than I'm going to be treating in this talk in general it can be defined either as the derivative of polarization with respect to magnetic field or magnetization with respect to electric field you have to have a broken inversion and broken time reversal for this to be non-zero in general it has lattice contributions coming from atomic displacements which we will ignore in the frozen ion limit it has both spin and orbital contributions will ignore the spin contributions and just focus on the orbital frozen ion magneto electric coupling even then it has several components here's the total magneto electric tensor up here there's this green part which we called in our papers either Kubo terms or cross gap terms these are more or less ordinary terms that can be written it's not obvious the way it's written here but as energy you know perturbation expressions with energy denominators and but those are non-topological and mainly I'm going in the direction of topological terms so in practice for real materials where all of these effects are small this may be larger than the red one but I'm going to be interested in cases where this red one can become very large so the other term is a purely isotropic term we write it as theta over 2 pi times e squared over hc and then this is the isotropic tensor and this theta, this geometric factor is written here let me write it here where I again remind you of the definition of the berry connection actually this is a berry connection matrix if there are four occupied bands this is a four by four matrix there's a trace of this product of this is called the Churn-Simons 3 form actually Xu Cheng Zhang was the one who first introduced this formula in the condensed matter context although it was well known in certain contexts in the high energy field okay so here's the thing this integral, the integrand is called the Churn-Simons 3 form the integral gives you what's called the axion coupling theta again the integrand is not gauge invariant if you do a phase twist or a unitary twist among the occupied states however the integral is gauge invariant modulo 2 pi in exactly the same way that the berry phase is only well defined modulo 2 pi now in the case of the berry phase it's normal for the berry phase to be on the order of pi or 2 pi that gives you the you can have large polarization in some materials in these magnetic materials these magnetoelectric materials that we're talking about this axion theta is usually very small so for example we calculated what it was in chromium oxide and it's a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than the other spin and lattice contributions in chromium oxide and smaller than other these are other materials that are known to have large magnetoelectric couplings but if this theta were on the order of pi then it would give rise to a magnetoelectric coupling which is among the strongest magnetoelectric couplings of materials that we know so if we can get up to theta equals pi by some topological magic we jump into a region that's very interesting and so that's where we're that's really where we're going okay so I mentioned that the surface anomalous wall conductivity is really the same thing as the magnetoelectric coupling there's a minus sign because well in my convention when you apply an electric field in this direction the orbital magnetization is defined by the right hand rule of the current flowing around but the surface anomalous hall conductivity would be positive if the current were going in the other direction but it's basically the same thing these two things when you've thrown away those Kubo terms all of these things are identical and from a physical point of view we can understand why it is that this theta coupling makes sense that it's well-defined modulo two pi because if I start with some material this white block of material inside it has some initial coupling theta and then I glue onto the surface some quantum anomalous hall layers each of which carries E squared over H of anomalous hall conductivity then you've effectively increased the total magnetoelectric coupling of this block of material by taking theta to theta plus two pi so that's a physical explanation about why it makes sense that this mathematical fact that the theta coupling is only well-defined modulo two pi okay so here's the analogy between baryphase and electric polarization and the theta cup which is basically a one-dimensional problem although here I draw it in three dimensions but kx and ky are basically spectators and this is a fundamentally three-dimensional phase object in this case sigma is the surface charge and for insulating surface it's given by the baryphase plus an integer and in this case the surface anomalous hall conductivity for an insulating surface is given by the bulk contribution theta plus a possible integer so there's a very strong analogy mathematically speaking you skip dimensions so mathematically speaking there's another phase angle in five dimensions and another phase angle in seven dimensions but I don't know what they are like and I guess they're not useful to us okay now what about topology and symmetry so what happens is that if you have either inversion symmetry or time reversal symmetry in your crystal then you'd expect theta to be equal to zero because it's basically a magnetoelectric like property and either one of those should vanish normally if you have time reversal or inversion however because it's well-defined modulo two pi there's a way out theta can either be zero in which case the symmetry is mapped theta into minus theta of course zero goes to zero that's fine or theta can be pi then pi gets mapped to minus pi but minus pi and pi are really the same thing because it's only well-defined modulo two pi and there are two well there are more than two but you can combine these things with other rotations and so on but in the simplest case if you have time reversal symmetry that quantizes theta to be zero or pi and so does inversion symmetry so in the case of time reversal symmetry in a material like bismuth selenide which is one of the well-known strong topological insulators it happens that yes time reversal yes theta has the value of pi and so that means that in some sense and I'll explain that in a moment you would expect a half integer surface anomalous Hall conductivity also in the case of inversion so here I have in mind a system that has inversion but not time reversal so a magnetic three dimensional magnetic material with inversion symmetry but not time reversal symmetry you also have the possibility of theta equals pi and so we know that there's an existence proof for a material like bismuth selenide that this is possible and so we've jumped up to a very strong magneto electric coupling in some formal sense but can we make it behave that way in the real laboratory so again I'm reminding you that theta equals pi means that there should be half integer surface anomalous Hall conductivity actually each surface could have its own anomalous Hall conductivity like minus a half plus a half plus three halves it just has to be one half plus an integer multiple of the quantum and if we can create materials that behave like this it'll be quite interesting I'll show you some reasons why a little bit later okay so I said this can happen either with time reversal symmetry or inversion symmetry the case we know about which is strong topological insulators is time reversal symmetry and there's a paradox here at first sight you would say well the surface anomalous Hall conductivity should be non-zero because it's given by this bulk theta which is non-zero on the other hand if I make a crystal light like this and it has time reversal symmetry including at the surfaces then I know that there can't be any anomalous Hall conductivity because that would break time reversal symmetry so what's going on and what's going on here is that what I told you before was for insulating surfaces if you have metallic surfaces there's another term that you have to add both to the surface charge so for the surface charge you have to add a term which is an integral over the two-dimensional bulk real-en zone if there's a Fermi pocket you have to add up the total charge contributed by that occupied Fermi pocket F is just the occupation function and for the anomalous Hall conductivity you again look at that Fermi pocket and you integrate up not just the area of it but you multiply times the Berry curvature so omega here is the Berry curvature and that gives you a contribution to the surface anomalous Hall conductivity so this is quantized part plus a non-quantized part coming from the metallic surface now what happens the way you get out of the paradox in a time reversal preserved system so strong topological insulator is that these effects cancel each other so from the bulk you get this formal theta equals pi contribution to the surface anomalous Hall conductivity or equivalently to the magneto electric coupling but from the surface you also get pi and the reason is that on these topological insulator surfaces time reversal surfaces there's a Dirac cone there has to be for topological reasons a Dirac cone when you integrate up the Berry curvature inside that little Dirac cone it's equivalent to calculating the Berry phase around the Fermi loop and that's pi it's exactly pi because of time reversal symmetry so this is pi and that's pi and the two things add up to be two pi which is equivalent to zero and so the total surface anomalous Hall conductivity is zero and that's good but what it means is if you have a material like business solenoid it does not act like this magneto electric behavior at least not unless you break time reversal symmetry at the surface for example by interfacing it with a magnetic material so there've been some attempts to do things like that but you have to engineer a new behavior in order to make this kind of material exhibit a large magneto electric coupling on the other hand I wanna talk about so-called axion insulators are the ones in which the theta equals pi is protected by inversion again the bulk theta gives a contribution of pi but the surfaces can naturally be gapped the reason the surfaces can be gapped is that the symmetry that's protecting the bulk topology is inversion but inversion is never a good symmetry at a surface because of course there's vacuum on one side and not on the other and so it turns out that it's very natural for axion insulators if we can find them it's very natural for them to have insulating surfaces and therefore for the surface anomalous hole conductivity to reveal itself as plus and minus e squared over h with no extra work with no extra engineering and that's why this is an interesting avenue to pursue so if we can find these axion insulators they have theta equals pi the surfaces will naturally be gapped each surface will carry a half integer quantum anomalous hole response the big problem is that we don't have any examples of these yet there's one example which is almost like this which is manganese bismuth II at tolerium IV which is an anti-ferromagnetic topological insulator I'll say a bit about that but the big thing is we need new materials five minutes, good. Okay, here's about the anti-ferromagnetic topological insulator this came from a paper by Mong, Esen and Moore some years ago where they imagined stacking alternate quantum anomalous hole layers layers having alternate turn numbers in a kind of anti-ferromagnetic material and they showed that theta equals pi was possible in that case and in the last few months there's been a spew of papers four or five papers about this manganese bismuth II at tolerium IV which is a kind of example it's a little bit like the bismuth selenide materials but there's an extra layer of manganese all these are tellurides but manganese telluride in the middle and then one layer has spin down the next layer has spin up the next layer has spin down and actually what protects theta in this case is time reversal composed with a half translation along the vertical direction that's also enough to reverse the sign of theta and what they find by doing surface angle resolved photorelectron spectroscopy is that there is a gap common to both the gap common to both the bulk and the surface and if they do some kind of high resolution processing to get this image cleaned up I think it's a second derivative of some kind what you see the big black cones are the bulk bands the bulk valence band and the bulk conduction band and then inside there's a direct cone which would have been crossing all the way through the middle if the material were not magnetic but because of the magnetic property there's an opening here just a little gap opening here and if you could get the Fermi level right in there then the surface should have an almost all conductivity of half the quantum unfortunately the Fermi level is up here so this is again one of these systems where there's a lot of defects and the chemistry hasn't been improved to the point where we can bring the Fermi level down where we want this material by the way would have insulating surfaces on the top but not necessarily on the sides because the time reversal times half translation would naturally be a good symmetry on the side and that would preserve the vanishing of the anomalous all conductivity on the side surfaces which requires them to be magnetic so in the last couple of minutes let me just talk about how you might observe this behavior and what you might do with it there's edge channels and the magnetoelectric effect there's also a direct way of measuring the surface anomalous all conductivity optically which I won't talk about anymore but I think that's also an extremely promising direction so in order to get a better idea of exactly how the various surfaces of an axion insulator what determines for example the sign on different facets what we did with Nico was to take a simple model of a pyrochloriridate I won't go through the details since I'm obviously a little bit behind time but in this model the real pyrochlorys lie up here as trivial insulators but there's a region this blue region where we get an axion insulator phase so we decided to play with this model here the blue curves are the surface states on the top the on the bottom the red ones are on the top so you can see that on a given surface you have a nice gap a reasonably nice gap at the surface we used a method that was developed by Ivo Souza and coworkers for calculating not only the total surface anomalous all conductivity but it's layer by layer resolution so we can see how it approaches one half as you include more and more layers near the surface and I won't tell you everything we find I'll actually just tell you this is one of these things where you do the calculation and then afterwards you realize you should have understood this from the beginning what happens is that if you have a crystallite and two faces of the crystallite like the top one and the bottom one are related to each other by inversion symmetry then they have anomalous all conductivity in the same absolute sense that's the meaning of these arrows however we're going to adopt the convention of measuring the anomalous all conductivity from the inside to the outside and in this case these have opposite anomalous all conductivities and I'll color them in opposite ways and then the total magnetic point symmetry of this Pyrochlor is such that if you go to any neighboring facet the surface anomalous all conductivity reverses and then here on one facet to the next facet you have a change of the surface anomalous all conductivity by one quantum it means you have to have a chiral edge channel running along every single edge like this chiral edge channel is like what you find at the edge of a quantum anomalous all insulator it's a one-way channel only if you, so this was for the anti-ferromagnetic state if you study the ferromagnetic state you can play some cute games for example if you tickle the magnetic state in such a way that the magnetization is in the x direction then your chiral edge channels run this way and they connect the vertical wires if you turn the magnetic field then they go this way and they connect the horizontal wires so by flipping the magnetic field you have a little quantum switch where you can a double pole, double throw switch there are a lot of other games you can play if the system back is in the anti-ferromagnetic phase if there's an anti-ferromagnetic domain wall then where the domain wall hits the surface then you have a chiral edge channel if you have a single height step on the 001 surface it turns out that you have a chiral edge channel and these can be used to carry dissipationless currents and so on so if you can really do this it might be very interesting so one application is to engineer these chiral edge channels into your material and use them the other application is to get rid of them so if you want a material that behaves like a strong magnetoelectric you don't want to have different facets that have different colors different happen to your anomalous hole conductivity because then what happens is you apply the electric field and the surfaces currents are going in opposite directions by the way it looks like you're violating charge conservation here but that's not the case actually what happens is because there's a chiral edge channel here charge runs in and takes care of the charge conservation but at least on the 001 surfaces of the pyrochlor system what you can do is add a half layer I mentioned before that adding a half layer changes the color so if you can come into this system and spray on an extra half layer this is the kind of thing that theorists love to tell experimentalists to do spray on an extra half layer of material you basically change the sign of the magnetization at the surface and now you have a consistent flow of surface current all the way around and so now this thing has this very large magnetoelectric coupling it generates a magnetic dipole field which is as strong as some of the strongest magnetoelectric materials that we know about okay so that I think I probably just squeezed into the water under the wire that's my general introduction to this field there's a lot that I left out but I tried to emphasize the formal similarity between the Berry phase theory and the axion theta talked a little about materials but there's a huge need for new materials and if I can just have 10 seconds left I want to do a little shameless advertising here I've just had a book published on Berry phases and electronic structure theory that talks about polarization magnetization 1A functions, axion insulators and many other things and over here on the table I have some flyers that have a 20% discount code on them so sorry about taking a little commercial but otherwise thank you for your attention and I'd be glad to answer your questions


Over the past few days, New Delhi, the capital of India has seen right-wing mobs unleash horrific violence in which the Muslim community has been targeted. Over 20 people have been killed and close to 200 injured. Houses have been burned, a mosque has been desecrated, and armed mobs roamed around the city shouting offensive and provocative slogans and beating up people. Leaders and members of the ruling party, the Bharati Janata Party, have been publicly making statements calling for violence and specifically targeting the protesters who were taking a stand against the Discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act. In this episode of Around the World in 8 Minutes, we look at the mobilization of the left against these right-wing attacks. On Wednesday, members of various left parties, activists and concerned citizens staged a sit-in for peace in the wake of these deadly riots. Our team was on the scene and brings you this report. In a systematic way, the Hindutva forces, the BJP RSS, is trying to create a situation like during the Gujarat carnage in Delhi. We have been seeing that there have been peaceful protests going on across the country, including in Delhi, against the Divisive Citizenship Amendment Act and the NPR and NRC process. And even during that time, there has been an effort to divide the society, to try and polarize on communal lines. That process went on throughout the entire Delhi assembly elections. And now what we are witnessing in Delhi is probably after 1984, the worst kind of attacks on the minorities, especially the Muslim minorities are being attacked in a big way. The police have totally colluded with the perpetrators of the crime. From different areas, we are getting calls about how women are being sexually harassed and no one is willing to listen to the complaints of the victims. This is a situation which we are witnessing over the last few days in Delhi. Today, as part of demanding that peace be re-established in Delhi, a large section of organizations, left and secular political parties have come here, calling upon the government to ensure peace in Delhi. And also, it is very important to note the role of the Delhi police. They are accountable for the crimes that are happening against minorities in Delhi. They should be held accountable and those who are responsible for the total failure of law and order machinery, they have to be sacked for it. Also it is very clear that whatever is happening is with clear blessings of those in power. So there is need to isolate the forces which are trying to polarize the country on communal lines and reap political benefit out of it. The peace-loving people of Delhi have gathered today at Jantar Mantra at the call of different organizations, different individuals and civil society members. So all of us are very much pained, very, very pained and disturbed by the violence on Muslims, the communal hatred that is being played out on Delhi streets, especially in Northeast Delhi. Till now around 20 people have lost their lives, several are injured, people are not being able to reach hospitals, there is a situation of utter panic and threat in these areas. We have seen how rioters are breaking doors, entering inside houses, trying to attack people, trying to kill people and it is a targeted attack on Muslims, I mean the police. Why I am saying so? Because we have seen how the ruling party BJP, some of their leaders, have instigated violence and the police is clearly, the section of the police is clearly, they are also communally motivated and we have seen how Muslims are being targeted, you know, especially. Yes, many Hindus are also injured, yes, police constables are also injured because if there is a communal violence, even if it is targeted against Muslims, no one can escape that, it will affect all communities, it will affect the Hindus, it will affect the Hindu poor, police constables, everyone.  In our next story, the social protest in Chile against the neoliberal government of President Sebastian Pinera continued with demonstrations at the 61st Veena Dilmar International Song Festival on February 23rd. Despite strong police presence, hundreds of protesters mobilized in the city and demonstrated in front of the amphitheater, taking advantage of the lights and cameras to denounce the anti-people, anti-social and anti-democratic regime of Pinera. In addition, a group of protesters succeeded in entering the festival site and raised slogans against the president, comparing him with the last Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. This manifested the discontent of the majority of the Chileans against his administration. For many, the protest had symbolic importance as a festival, which costs millions of dollars to put on is largely for the bourgeois, elites and celebrities, while the government claims that there is no money for health, education or housing for citizens. These in Chile continually demand structural changes in the system in order to guarantee fundamental rights for all in the country. The officials of the National Police Force, the Carabineros, brutally repressed the peaceful protests with water cannons, spraying toxic water and excessive amounts of tear gas. This led to violent clashes between the protesters and the security forces. Three state vehicles and five private cars in some government buildings were set on fire by the protesters. In the aftermath, barricades were erected in different parts of the city and the militarization of the city was intensified. The streets of Winadilmar transformed into a battleground by late evening. Incidents of police repression were also registered in the neighboring city of Alparaiso, where people mobilized against spending millions of dollars on a music festival amid a serious social crisis. The protesters received the support of national and international artists who took part in the event. Chilean singer Mon Lafete and Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin criticized the militarization of the city and the despotic attitude of the president towards his people. The popular uprising in Chile against the right-wing government of President Pinera and the neoliberal state model in place since the last military dictatorship of General Pinochet began four months ago on October 18, 2019. In these past four months of anti-government protests, 31 deaths and thousands of cases of human rights violations have been reported and condemned by national and international organizations. According to the National Institute of Human Rights in Chile, between October 17 and February 18, due to heavy police repression, 10,365 people have been arrested, 6,158 have been severely injured, 445 have suffered eye injuries and vision loss, 520 have been tortured and threatened, and 197 have been sexually harassed, and 1,073 people have been dealt with with excessive force. The social movement, with the demand of a new and inclusive constitution with people's participation, is expected to resume with greater strength and march with the number of demonstrations planned during this month. That's all we have for this episode of Around the World in 8 Minutes. To read these stories and more, visit our website peoplesdispatch.org and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Thanks for watching.


My name is Anna Maroutian and I'm currently the center manager at Francis King School of English Dublin. And I've been here for about two years now. One of those years was a pandemic year, so I think that counts for four. And before that, I used to be the DOS, the academic side of things, different side of things in Grafton College. So, Anna, I want to start by asking you what challenges the pandemic has posed in your classroom, because I think we're going to talk about the teaching experience. Yes. Well, to be honest with you, I've always been a teacher, like even with the academic work and admin work that I've always been involved in, well, I have been in the past seven years. I've always been in the classroom, like I've always had. I've done my Delta in the process of the whole situation, so it was a very hands-on experience for me in the classroom itself. And when the pandemic hit, basically on the 13th of March, we were all teaching, we were all involved in teaching, especially since the nature of the kind of school we have is majority concentrated on the summer period. So our students, our students are, you know, young learners as well as children, as well as family, so it's a bit of a mix. And as a matter of fact, just before the 13th of March, the week before that, we had a large, gorgeous group of German teachers who were, ironically, with us for a course in IT, so technology in the classroom, and they were basically just getting their CPT done, trying to figure out how to apply technology in general in their teaching environment, which I thought was quite funny considering that, you know, seeing that a week from then we were all thrown basically into exactly that. And if I were to assess what happened during that week, during the course, which I was co-teaching with two of my colleagues, we realized that it wasn't as much the technology itself that was an unknown, it was just not quite clear as to how to apply this technology in the actual teaching process. So say I knew how to share a Google Doc and I knew how to, I don't know, use Nearpod for an activity, but it was a difficulty on its own, basically, trying to use that in a constructive way online. So if you look at the actual challenge when this happened and when the live classroom kind of ceased to exist and we went into this virtual world, I had luckily had some training with Edmodo at that stage, and I was able to kind of help our academic management team to put everything basically into the VLE virtual learning environment and include everyone, and kind of share the information with the teachers, with the students as to how to log on to it, you know, how to do the basics of creating, as you will, a classroom in its own right, a school in its own right. So teachers themselves had obviously the issues that all teachers have and humans have with technology at first, so we had to adapt to all that. So the main challenge was to create an environment that would be constructive, it would be helpful, and it would actually allow our students to continue to be in touch with us because as you know yourself, teachers are the first point of contact for the students and we're talking about people who are far away from home, people who are dealing with their own daily lives, work problems, and obviously pandemic didn't help with that. So it was just the case of creating a safe environment for everyone to feel like, okay, we're in this together, sort of speak, and we are going to, you know, get through the whatever hurdles come our way and whatever does happen, we have each other support, and which is exactly what happened support was the key thing in the whole process, in my opinion. So what was the feedback because I think we've kind of covered the response to the challenge, the challenges and how did it kind of influence the way that you developed response. Well, initial feedback from the students themselves was quite predictable, you know, it was in some ways predictable in other ways not so predictable. Well, there were the issues of not having a device. Okay, it went down to the basics of things. So some people had tablets and they had a phone perhaps but others didn't, they just have their mobile phone. So that is not the best device to be to use for this type of thing because of the length of time that you need to spend in front of the screen, you know, having three hour four hour even classes per day. You know, it just wasn't practical so a lot of students had to adapt to this process and have to throw devices or you know there were some who rented them I know some teachers obviously were given devices by us in the beginning of the whole situation just to assist people with, you know, getting set up and the current kind of brought us to, you know, microphones and how do I do this and video, some didn't have their cams working so technical issues first. And then, after that, the feedback was mostly on negative at first let's say it wasn't it wasn't any change I find is always difficult. Doesn't matter if it is, you know, for the teacher or the student you know it's not a, it's not a clear cut easy process and we were all dealing with, you know, mental and emotional parts as well of the whole situation. So the initial feedback was that like students felt like you know they they were not getting what they had signed up for but then again nobody was. And it took a little bit of time for for them to adapt and to see the benefits of, you know, having this technology and having these continuous support because even down just seeing the face just seeing your teacher's face and seeing someone familiar and your classmates who you've spent you know months at a time with it all. It all started showing its benefits and just having them, you know, be a bit more open minded towards, you know, the process and giving it a try essentially was key, I find, because you know it took time for them to be a learner to be trained so learners had to be trained to use all things that we were using as teachers. Some learners were proficient enough to help the teachers themselves, and then it was really a give and take. It really was it if anything built the community in our case, even further like it brought us even closer because we found each other as the only sometimes human point of contact you know when you are in a house with yes you have, you know flatmates and whatnot you are you don't spend as much time with them as you do at school at work. So it was, it was, I think helpful at the end and the feedback change drastically within a very short period of time. You, we did, we almost run feedback sessions for nightly I would say, at least, at least that, just to also on the, on the, you know, mental health level and just support to students outside of the whole you know how is the learning going but how are you doing and do you need any help or, you know, people would get a flu and think it was something else and they didn't need, you know, classmates to say you know don't worry about it everything's going to be fine, or, you know, pass on their, their, their knowledge and say you know you should go there and you should do this. I think that helped a lot and in the process language acquisition as well, you know, benefited from it as a result, you know, at the community kind of continue to exist outside the actual physical world as well as you know, not not in a traditional style. And so, apart from kind of all the technical fixes and that kind of thing that you had to become an expert in. Yeah, what else would you say you've learned along the way either organizationally or personally. Well, efficiency, time, time benefits are, are quite extensive really. And as, as it were, I mean, you know the it world in the past scared people more. And, you know, considering you know having a meeting online or even having an interview or recording online or even just recording your own voice didn't come across as something that people did, you know naturally or was that even an option. And when it did become an option. I mean, if you look at staff meetings just keeping in contact and being able to, you know, call on each other's expertise, quite swiftly without any need to do anything other than press a button or invite into a zoom room or or that sort of thing so time efficiency wise, it actually helped a lot and things like what we learned was students didn't use their L2. There are one in the classroom on zoom I am still trying to understand why that is the case because the group of people is exactly the same, and yet we wouldn't have anyone using their own language they'd be all focusing on English and communicated in English. Perhaps it's the nature of like all eyes and on you sort of, you know, approach, perhaps that's what does that I am not quite sure. But we found that it was beneficial for them because they they used, you know, L1 everywhere, all the time, you know, in the real world and here they were on zoom and English seemed to be the only way to go so that was great.  I mean, I don't see how this will not affect future of BLT. I mean, there is no way that people will have an induction in person when everything can be done, you know, online perfectly in the comfort when you're on home via video or audio or both or or recordings or the opportunities and possibilities are endless. So that side of things plus the comfort of not having to, you know, move and commute and all that as well helped I think a lot of people became more efficient they had more time to do homework, for example, because they had the possibility to kind of save time and do that side of things. Yeah, that's, that's what comes to mind. So, kind of around the topic of the future.  What do you looking forward what do you think will will come back and do you have a, do you see have a positive view of it when you look forward into the future. I do, I don't think we have any option but to have a positive view I think that's the only way forward. It is the case of, I think, blending the both worlds because Ireland in itself and Irish culture and you know, that's never going to be substituted I don't think that there will ever be a time when you know someone will rather watch a video of a place or a people or a culture, rather than experience it live, you know, it is a completely different experience altogether and that has to be said, you know, I'm not under any illusion that this is going to disappear and we're just going to be an online entity No, definitely not. But I think definitely the blended proposed like it has to be blended because there are so many, you know, objectively speaking, benefits to being online as well as being in real life so the future, in my opinion will be experience the actual kind of live learning cultural shock effects and all the all the fun things that, you know, come with tasting a pint of Guinness or, you know, visiting the cliffs or whatever it is that is always going to be the bigger part of our community and what we have to offer to the English language learner and, you know, any learner at that point. But there are definitely incredible advantages to to having something like this set up where you know a zoom class can can help you prepare for what you're going to experience. Once you do arrive in Ireland. It can help you keep in touch or choose to continue to be part of the classroom in a different way. If you want once you're back in your country. Once you have made friends and perhaps that will lead to more development. I just don't think that I don't think we realize what the possibilities are until like we get to that point and we do get creative with it. And we will most certainly come up with the most beautiful ways of integrating the two worlds really in such a way that you know it's seamless and it's helpful. And the experience will be enhanced. I believe you know because we are we are becoming a very, you know, techie generation, well ours and the ones that come after us so they we have the phone and the computer and the tablet and the watch and the whole thing constantly connected to the world so I don't see why that can't be used to, you know, us learning and experience and experience of countries such as Ireland and what it has to offer and things are, you know, endless, there's so many.


What are you going to kick Johnny Knoxville at? I'm going to kick him right between the legs. Let's see their daddy. I want you to go very gentle. No, don't question the young man. You guys go one after another, just step forward with one kick. Boom, boom, right in the cup. And then step onto the next person goes, one kick. He's a bad guy. You've got to kick him right in front of himself to fifth. Hi, I'm Johnny Knoxville, and this is the cup test. Kids kicking me in the groin. That was one of the worst pains, because they could get between the nether region and you'd get it right in the pernium. Yeah. The coronal ridge. Like right here? No. Wait, I got to get everything in there. I don't want you things sticking out the side and getting pinched. Where's the last one? But you got to be not be such a f***ing girl and hit it. It's got bad news written all over it. Dude, that's bad. No, no, no, no, no, you got to not hit me in the leg. I've never been hit, so I've never been hit. It's a pretty dead on hit. Most of my packages in this region. That was the pain ball at the bottom. Is that blood? Yeah, it breaks the skin. What do you do with that? I'm going to drop it on his nut. Here you go. Tell me if you want to show it to me. Sorry. Tell me if you want to show it to me. Sorry. They got it. They got it. All right, on.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's casebreaks.com coming at you with 2020 Panini Donneress Optic Football blaster break number five, giving away the last mystery crate spot. But David saves me the all the heartache of the randomizer and the break itself. Now the cost of the of this box was also baked into all those spots, David. So he's opting to pick this up seal to get this to him sealed. You can sell it if you want to, you can rip it yourself if you want to. Thank you. So David gets that last spot in the mystery crate. That video is coming up in a separate one. We'll see you for that Jaspy's casebreaks.com.


Just so you're doing usual then kind of look in the box go. What's the first thing that that jumps out of you from it? We forced 18 turnovers. There's a few things that stood out. We got nine more shots up there now It was tired on the boards. We got 30 assists That shows us a locked-in team right there. So I think we were locked in all night on both sides of the ball and We was able to get a nice cushion early and You know their championship quality team so they gonna fight back and get to the game So we wet the death storm when they cut it to ten cut it to eight. We say to make big shots and get big stops and Great team win for us Kevin is as recent as maybe no a week or two ago It'd be you guys would have a hot start No, maybe give a bit of the lead back in the second third quarter then come a little bit down to the wire Just seems like these past few games and you guys have had a lead even if they've punched back You guys have answered and hasn't really gotten there just where do you think you guys have grown in that aspect?  We didn't get too high too low and we was able to You know cruise to a win too quick ones for you Kevin 45 to 45 on the rebounds just for that to have been an area that you guys been struggling with basically all season What went into you guys being able to tie them on the boards tonight a few? I'm gonna say almost a month ago. I'm jog put up this box-out stats for us and A lot of guys didn't like what they were as far as percentage of you know, it's just boxing out not even grab a rebound just putting a body on somebody and I Thanks, since then we've been making a conscious effort of just trying to touch somebody up when they run into the glass and all Of us trying to gain rebound as well So last few games have been doing this been it's been solid for so I think everybody's locked in on that side of the game And that's something we can't have slippage on you know, we got to be there every possession and second Bucks are a team where you know, even if Middleton is out They've been together for so long where they know how to play they've run the same system You guys have had guys in and out of the rotational year even made multiple years You guys have had guys in and out of lineup Just what does it say for you guys to be able to beat this team and show kind of your continuity and chemistry Building over the season. Oh, you gotta give a lot of credit to our coaching staff for getting us prepared every day you know, I think We put in the right amount of work every day in order for us to be a you know Solid team on both ends of the floor, you know watch film we walk over stuff So, you know, I think the coaching staff done a great job And I think guys just you know, I want to not want to buckle down and just get better You know, it was simple as that Kevin you guys been piling up a lot of wins over the last couple weeks, but both you and Jack said This is a championship team playing against the Bucks What does it do for the confidence of the room to get this win on top of what you all been doing? That's good for us. It was good for us to keep stacking days. We respect Milwaukee We understand how dominant they've been this season So we wanted to come out and we understand that everybody was watching this game Everybody came to this game Looked at this as big in the regular season game.  It was on us to come out here and match it and play our brand as well And you know, we've been trying to stay at that level, you know It's consistent, you know as much as we can it's tough to do in the regular season with injuries and You know, it's a it's a ebb and flow in a year But on the season, but we try to stay locked in as much as we can Kevin when TJ came back you're kind of quick to say, you know, he's been off for two years It's given him some time before he gets in a role You know for his first five games have been in double figures No, it seems like the past two he's given you guys some clutch shots when when out of your Kyrie been on the bench Just has he surprised you're all given how quickly he's shown something and what have you seen at him in this in this Recent stretch even a small sample size. Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm surprised I mean, we all know he can score with the best of him He's I think what's surprising actually was his how good he is, you know deflecting the basket on defense sliding his feet You know scores like him really don't get that rep on defense but I think he's somebody we could rely on the guard up and Make an impact on that in but you know, he's a natural I thought it was gonna take him some time just to get his legs his win his confidence back But I was wrong about that You know, hopefully he keeps it up, you know Coaches trusting in the teammates trusting in them six rebounds tonight. That was just huge for us off the bench So, you know, he's been playing well. We need him to keep it up Kevin Royce had five threes I think three of which came after he set a screen for you when the buck sent to your ways That's something you guys are like expecting in terms of how you're gonna be covered coming into this game Or did you guys kind of dissect that or you really dissect that on the fly? Yeah, that's something we've been running for the whole season Quick slip out for three me and Joe do it a lot me and Kyle have done it some Me and Royce worked on it, you know, I just think that's just a part of our package as a as an offense and You know the first few we wanted to see how they played that and they they jumped out and left Royce's body It was a he was able to get some space and shooting and shot it with confidence You know Royce made some huge shots there for us in the fourth And I think those players where you can get open and knock down the three that gives you confidence Having so many guys that can pick and pop like this. What does that add to your offense? just just you know gives us a Just a new look, you know late in the clock for example Somebody may run up and slip out of a screen and they might they might you know show two on me and now We got a good shot late in the clock. So it's something that we can we don't want to rely on too much But we also know we got that in our back pocket just in case we don't have much going on the offense in that possession So we practiced that we work on that and it's on me to deliver the pass So whoever's in that pick and roll situation to deliver a good pass Ben and the way he played tonight garden. Yeah, and it's pushing the pace Just what did you see for me on both ends of the floor? He was incredible You know 12 11 and 8 3 steels. I think his aggression was good all night a Couple of those files. I don't think we're fouls, but it is what it is See if you playing physical it might be some questionable ones there. He me honest If you honest the most physical guy in the league, so it's gonna be some questionable ones there, but I Think he stayed with it all game and was able to you know make life tough And I think we all did a solid job of you know showing them a crowd a little bit making them kick out Forcing the turn the ball over seven turn over. So Ben was the catalyst for that and we're gonna need that going forward