So I've identified three types of Christians. I mean, obviously, social scientists would make big generalizations here, and there's all sorts of subgroups that fit into these categories. But there are three types of Christians, Catholics, conservative Protestants, and liberal or mainline Protestants. I've identified three possible types of conflict. And sociologists have examined religious people, and we can make some conclusions about whether these types of conflict exist for different religious groups. So let's start with the question of systemic knowledge conflict. Do ordinary religious people have a different way of knowing fact claims about the world? Now, people certainly think so. So when you look at popular culture, in the United States at least, we know this Christian fish that I think people have often seen, okay? It's a symbol of Christianity for whatever reason, historically. But in the US, people who oppose Christianity have taken that fish and written the word Darwin on the inside of it, okay? And sometimes this fish even has little feet, implying that the fish evolved feet. So it's the claim somehow that belief in evolution somehow invalidates Christianity. How could that possibly be? It only makes sense if Christianity is an entire way of knowing about the world. Science is an entire way of knowing about the world. And if you believe in one claim, you have to reject the other entirely. If you believe in Darwin, you can't believe in the fish in Christianity. Now, of course, the people who are opposed to Christianity aren't the only people who do this, okay? The religious people fight back. There's a famous version of this in the US with the Darwin fish flipped over on its back like it's now died with a religious message underneath saying essentially, you know, the Christianity is true. So this perspective of this systemic conflict is shared by all sorts of people in the US. But is it correct? Are religious people actually in systemic conflict with science? So first off, social science in general will be skeptical that citizens have any form of systemic knowledge, be it religious or otherwise. The systemic knowledge perspective assumes that ordinary people have these logically consistent, coherent systems of belief back to first principles. You know, that is that you could look at the Bible at the top of some knowledge claim all the way down to fact claims. Well, social science research will conclude that various elites like academics probably do think that way, okay? But regular people probably not. As one social scientist says, social scientists should no longer build into their assumptions or methods the idea that culture and ideas are a definition of system, like an ideology. But instead, we should measure the amount of coherence that actually exists. So do regular citizens sit down and organize their ideas in a coherent manner? Do they think to themselves, well, I believe that the earth is 6,500 years old like it says in the Bible and that's based upon a, not on a scientific method but scientists claim this based on a scientific method and therefore, since I don't believe in one but not the other, I can't then accept this one. To put it bluntly, the only people who engage in this form of reason are people who are rewarded for doing so. So college professors will be punished indirectly if they do not use a logically coherent form of belief but ordinary citizens don't have the time and are not rewarded for doing this. So in general, social science is skeptical of the idea that any regular people have these coherent, conflicting idea systems. But let me turn to the specific claim about religion and science as totalizing idea systems. So in a series of studies that I conducted, I examined whether religious groups are different in the extent to which they've been exposed to science. The assumption here is that if a religious group was truly in systemic knowledge conflict with science, they would avoid all science because that would be in conflict. So what I did was I compared members of each religious group to the non-religious and comparing these two groups does one avoid science more than the other. What I found was that all Christian groups in the US, including the conservative Protestants, are less likely than the non-religious to believe scientific claims about human origins. But there is no difference in the extent to which they know uncontested scientific facts like how electrons move and the like, the extent to which people have taken science classes, have a scientific occupation, and so on and so forth. So there's a disagreement about one limited scientific claim, human origins, but this one fact claim does not lead to disagreement over other scientific fact claims and does not lead to a systemic avoidance of science. So in other words, they are not in systemic knowledge conflict with science. Now other research can be interpreted in a very similar way. There's been a number of studies of whether higher education leads people to have fewer religiously based beliefs about the natural world. The premise here being that higher education exposes you to science, which I think is generally true. So if there is, again, if there is systemic conflict, exposure to any science should lead to less belief in any religion, but particularly religious beliefs that directly conflict with science. So one study shows that education in general does not lead to the decline of religious belief during young adulthood. But if you look at young adults, religious belief declines the most among people who didn't go to university. Other studies show that attending college has no influence on preexisting belief about evolution and that taking classes in the natural sciences does not cause a great decrease in religious belief compared to taking classes in other fields. Or social psychologists, for example, have conducted experiments and conclude that people have no problem holding seemingly contradictory beliefs like evolution occurred naturally and evolution was caused by God. These social psychologists conclude that quote, there is considerable evidence that the same individuals use both a natural and a supernatural explanation to interpret the very same events that there are multiple ways in which both kinds of explanations can coexist in individual minds. So again, if there was a conflict between holding any scientific claim in religion, then being religious should make a person likely to avoid all of science, but that's not what we find. So social science conclusion is that there are no religious groups that are in systemic conflict with science. But Christian groups are in propositional knowledge conflict over human origins. Now that was expected to be found with conservative Protestants. And it is a bit of a surprise for Catholics and liberal Protestants to have the same view. All I can say given the limited time in this lecture is that members' views of things are often quite different from what the leadership would say about things as I articulated before these official positions. Now I think that the primary conflict between religion and science for the public is moral and it's not about knowledge at all. Yes, there are these disagreements about a few fact claims, but even those fact claim disagreements seem to be largely motivated by moral concerns. So let's return to the conservative Protestant opponents of evolution and Darwin. So if you go back to the 1920s, in America was the time of the Scopes Monkey Trial, a very famous court trial in American history where a school teacher was convicted of violating a state law that forbade the teaching of evolution in a public school, a government funded school. So in the 1920s what motivated those people? So if you go back to the time, there was a very famous figure in politics named William Jennings Bryan, who was a presidential candidate at the era and later took on leader of the anti-Darwinist movement. And he was definitely the most famous anti-evolution activist of his day. Yet even he was opposed to the scientific fact claim about evolution, but he was motivated by the belief that learning Darwinism somehow corrupts people's morals. For example, he thought that World War I had been caused by the impact of Darwinism on the minds of Germans of the time. It made people think of all of humans in this sort of animalistic way. In fact, if you go back to that trial where William Jennings Bryan was the defender of the anti-Darwinist position in that trial itself, the textbook that the teacher was accused and convicted of using, which was an evolution textbook, it was called a civic biology and like most Darwinian texts of the time, it was actually advocating for eugenics, which is a moral project if there ever was one. There's a famous pamphlet produced in the 1960s by anti-Darwin activists in the US. And it tries to get people to be motivated in this anti-Darwinian effort. And what is wrong with evolution from this perspective? It says essentially that evolution causes relativism, abortion, racism, all of these social ills. Okay, now, whether or not this is true doesn't really matter. What is important to say is that people at the time thought that the conflict about Darwin was that it leads to all these moral problems. You go to the present age, one of the intellectuals who's most opposed to Darwinism is the US historian who makes the case that the Holocaust and what happened in Nazi Germany wasn't directly the result of Darwinism, but that Darwinist ethic was sort of a required precondition for all of that to happen. So in general, there's been much conflict over Darwin, but from the very beginning, this conflict was about morality, not necessarily about facts about the natural world. So again, you reach back to the Victorian era right after Darwin finished his publications. Yes, there was conflict about whether or not it's true that humans evolved from other primates, but the motivation and much of the discussion at the time was about the moral impact of believing in such a thing. This continues to this day with the intelligent design movement is what it's called in the contemporary era, and if you look at what motivates the intelligent design movement, it's similarly a moral concern that Darwinism teaches a form of materialism. This materialism has a negative impact on the morals of the use of America.


Hello and welcome to the news click today on COVID watch we have with us Satyajit Rathu talk more about vaccinations and as and when it's just you know getting clearer by the day that how important vaccinations are in in this process of getting safe against COVID. We want to ask him you know where we are right now and what we really need to be doing about about getting these vaccinations and where we need to be going right now. So Satyajit firstly I wanted to ask you about the study that has just been conducted in this in this town in Brazil called Serana where they basically I think inoculated pretty much all the adults and they had some very interesting results can you tell us about that what happened after this Chinese vaccination coronavirus was used. You know there's a great deal of fuss made about these studies and it's all driven to a significant extent but more by politics I suspect rather than by science because it's really not surprising that any of the standard vaccines that have been circulating whether they are of Chinese origin or Russian origin or of European or American or Indian origin will provide reasonable degrees of protection. The science behind it is relatively simple and straightforward if you have high levels of antibodies that neutralize meaning that stop a virus from sticking to a cell then you are going to cut down on the extent of infection and therefore the extent of transmission but most importantly you're going to cut down on the severest form of COVID-19 illness which results in hospitalizations and deaths and unsurprisingly in the Serana study that's being talked about there's 80 90 plus percent protection I think populations about 40 000 plus adults and you get excellent protection against death you get very very good protections against hospitalization and you also see evidence for extremely robust protection against pretty much all symptomatic infection the numbers tend to decrease and that's been the general pattern in pretty much every vaccine report whether it is as I said the American Moderna vaccine the European Pfizer vaccine the adenoviral AstraZeneca Covishield Johnson and Johnson the Russian Gamalaya vaccines the Chinese vaccines which are both adenoviral and killed virus vaccines all of them in the early months after immunization are providing respectable degrees of protection particularly against hospitalization and death and this study confirms that and it's it's it's interesting just how much of fuss is being made about this and as I said it's in part driven by this entire notion that Chinese data and Chinese studies or Russian data and Russian studies are somehow less credible or believable and and regardless of whatever that credibility or believability of evidence from any part of the world is the science behind it is that these are all pretty much the same vaccine platforms the same vaccine designs the world over and it's unsurprising that they all provide about as much protection as each other right I'm talking nonetheless yes I mean I mean even this vaccine which supposedly has I mean according to clinical trials not a very high efficacy rate I think it was only about 50% which is just a threshold which and still it's has given quite a bit of protection so I should I should clarify this and remind our our viewers because we've discussed this that 50% number that was quite widespread at one point as a criticism of the Chinese vaccine leaving aside the fact that there are multiple Chinese vaccines but even so that number was actually against asymptomatic infections with SARS-CoV-2 or mildly symptomatic infections against SARS-CoV-2 in a design which is not very common so we have discussed this at that point that that number was not surprising and that what all vaccines were showing really good protection against was severe illness hospitalization death and somewhat less percentage efficacy or effectiveness against milder disease moderate illness or mild illness or asymptomatic illness and these numbers are pretty much in the same ballpark it's notable that these numbers are in Brazil and therefore likely in all likelihood to be showing protection against the so-called P1, P2 virus lineage I forget what the Greek letter now is because we are now supposed to be using Greek letters for this variant but this was this has been a variant of concern this is one of the small handful of variants of concern and it's comforting though unsurprising that there is very respectable protection and coming to India where we are also where our government is also now at least trying to course correct where the earlier liberalization vaccination policy which was a complete failure as we saw and now we see that the central government is saying that okay we are going to procure at least 75% of the vaccines and take care of the distribution still leaving 25% for private shares but even you know beyond this we see that the vaccination rates in India remain dismally low and the availability is still of course a matter of concern and for that what we know is that it's the production which really needs to be ramped up and even now that co-vaccine we see that some public sector units have been given the permission to start producing but even that's happened just awfully so how soon can we really expect for this process to be set up and for for vaccination numbers to really actually see the kind of increase that we need that they need to be seen. So leaving aside for the moment the politics of the so-called course correction which the formal government announcement acknowledged no course correction whatsoever or did not acknowledge it as a course correction and quite frankly it falls in the category of derai or tanik durustai not entirely an appropriate course correction a partial course correction if you will but leaving all that aside the fact as you point out remains that if there is no water in the well redesigning a larger bucket is not going to fetch you more water so how are we ramping up production and the fact remains that our major vaccine supply the largest quantity still remains Sirum Institute of India's AstraZeneca Covishield vaccine. The Sirum Institute of India had said months many months ago that it needed a financial injection in order to expand its Covishield manufacturing facilities that was done again in the derai tanik durustai mold and only a few weeks a couple of months ago by the government of India and the the Sirum Institute's estimate is that by sometime late next month they should be able to start supplying a somewhat larger volume of Covishield doses so my expectation is given how these things go that by August we should be seeing a respectable increase in the Covishield supply let's keep in mind that we are holding back Covishield supplies to the WHO international Covax initiative through which a fair fraction of the global south needs to be vaccinated let's also keep in mind that case numbers across Africa are showing buddy some signs of rising that's true in Southeast Asia as well and therefore you know there's always going to be pressure as Covishield manufacturing goes up for resumption of supply to the Covax initiative but in all of this my suspicion is that by August we will start seeing an increase in Covishield supplies the second is as you point out Covax seen and that's supposed to be manufactured by a whole range of both private and public sector enterprises within the country but I really have not as yet seen in the public domain any actual estimate of when supplies from those sources will start there has been some indication from Bharat biotech that they themselves will start supplying somewhat higher amounts in another month or two but given that their original supplies over these past six months let's keep in mind have been 10% or less of the total vaccine rollout in the country again that's going to be small patchy limited and I don't expect any real non-Bharat biotech vaccine supply to start before September or so the Sputnik supplies are at the moment even smaller than the Bharat biotech supplies and let's keep in mind that this partial rollback of the vaccination campaign strategy announced this week by the government of India persists in 25% of the vaccine commitment to the private market let's also keep in mind that at least about 60% of the private market sales over these past weeks have been to a handful of very large very high end hospital chains in metropolitan India so vaccine inequities continue and are going to be fed I seriously doubt that we are going to see any of the governments just thumping claims about when they will vaccinate how much coming true fairly soon although I wish they were right but I do see that by August we should start seeing some amount of increase let's also keep in mind that the highest per day vaccination that we've ever managed is 40 something luck vaccinations in one day and that was really a spike it was not a maintained number current numbers are 20 lack optimistically speaking in fact quite frequently on many days much below that the argument therefore that we are going to achieve you know half the country by the end of the year if you calculate it as 70% or 80% of the adult population of the country by the end of the year that amounts to about half the population by the end of the year will involve a 120 130 crore doses to be done by the end of the year and 20 lakh 25 lakh going up to 30 35 lakh a day is unlikely to do it hopefully we will see more and more vaccines coming in but how and when the approval and the supply process will kick in high gear still very much remains to be seen and I mean even at the global level this urgency of resolving the issue of vaccine inequities is not being seen I mean you know at the WTO where the intellectual property rights waiver is being negotiated there's still not been a lot of headway despite as you said that COVID-19 is not being sent out to the co-vaccination of anymore and numbers across the global south across Africa and Southeast Asia are rising but even then you know even the small step of raising of of waiving intellectual property rights even that much is not been achieved well there are there are two three issues too for us to keep in mind in these dire straight situations and at this juncture about that issue number one while the US administration has made some supportive noises as you point out that has not resulted in any actual forward movement about the kind of comprehensive waivers that were being discussed but also keep in mind that even if for example suddenly tomorrow magically these waivers are agreed upon at the WTO for companies to gear up and to start expanded manufacturer companies across India across Korea across South Africa Nigeria across Malaysia across some countries in South America and Central America none of this is going to be an overnight matter especially because for many of these technologies it's not simply the formal on paper waivers that matter but also the actual handing over of cell lines and and of and of starting um seed material in actuality for virus for vaccine manufacture and as a as a consequence of that the sad reality is that um for many months even under the most optimistic of circumstances hugely expanded vaccine manufacture is unlikely to be the case and therefore for us globally to be dreaming of meeting WHO goals or forget about meeting WHO goals but even dreaming of a reduction in the inequity of vaccine distribution across the world is a fairly dim hope um it's on that background that um self-righteous and holier than thou announcements at the G7 and related fora about how this or that G7 country should and will take the lead in equitable vaccine distribution across the world are deeply aggravating and finally Satyajit I want to ask you about the question of booster shorts because you know um do we you know have any data as such at the moment about how long the immunity lasts because as we know it has been pointed out that if uh the if the immunity of you know the first section of population that has been immunized is over then and we start then immunizing a second section of the population and you know in this sort of uh process can we really achieve herd immunity how can we achieve herd immunity so let's get three issues straight firstly when we begin thinking about the intermediate term future let's not even call it the long term future but something beyond just getting everybody vaccinated for the first time um there are three issues involved first how long do the current vaccine generated immune responses persist at very good levels that's simply a matter of collecting data information evidence from ongoing trials from ongoing rollouts that have started last december but the trials remember have started last june so the initial data from those are extremely promising and those say that antibody levels neutralizing presumably protective antibody levels persist quite well at least for the mRNA vaccines for 10 months or so for the AstraZeneca for the kovish shield uh vaccine also seven eight months there are really very good maintained antibody levels and if that's the case then my guess is that suddenly it's very unlikely that booster doses will be required in less than a year of time how much more than a year is still completely up in the air simply because we don't want I mean I can make guesses about it but we don't want to be making guesses about that we need for that policy to be driven by evidence and the evidence is there it accumulates month by month by month and I suspect that what we are going to see is each month we are going to see reasonably comforting data that's my guess that says oh we can push it to a year in a few months and so on and so forth so that's the first component so either I suspect is reasonable to to to think about but the second issue with respect to this question is to do with is protection over this period maintained only against yesterday's strain or against today's new variants and strains as well and again the information from that both from this recent um you know Chinese vaccine study in Brazil in Surano that you're referring to at the beginning of our conversation today as well as the UK and HS data on on the so-called delta variant protection by kovish shield and so on and so forth all of these are indicating that real life protection against the virus variants that have so far come up prominently protection in terms of hospitalization and death is quite reasonable and continues to be so which is again in a very cautious and qualified fashion reasonably good news this does not mean that we are never going to see variants against which next generation vaccines will need to be generated and that's really my third point in response to your question and that third point is we still do not know what the currently emerging variants are because the world has not learned a lesson and in this matter I must underline that despite many other disagreements the UK's program starting from late last year about extremely wide large-scale virus sequencing in order to monitor variant emergence over real time has not yet been emulated by the bulk of the world certainly India's instacog is nowhere even a fraction near that and until we manage that kind of intensive careful virus variant monitoring and surveillance we're not going to be in a position to be tracking variants that may require next generation vaccines in order to nip them in the bud and therefore the real unanswered question is going to be when we are ready for boosters is that booster going to be the same vaccine that we took a year or so back or are we going to need a next generation vaccine as the booster and on that the jury still remains out thank you Satyaji thank you so much for joining us today and that's all the time we have keep watching this click


My name is Chloe Hill and I am the EGU's Policy Officer and I'm really excited to welcome you to the webinar today. That's going to be all about sharing geosciences online, which I'm sure you've heard a little bit about already, but obviously you're interested to learn more. To help explain this concept, what it will involve, why EGU is hosting it and what we're aiming to do, and also how you can participate. We have two excellent speakers. Our first speaker is Alberto Montenari, who is the EGU's President. And as President, he has overview of pretty much everything that the EGU does. So he's obviously been very involved in this process. We also have Suzanne Boiter, who is the EGU's Program Committee Chair. And that means that she actually organizes the program or helps coordinate the program for the general assembly every year. And she's also been a really vital player in coordinating the sharing geosciences online all week. Before we do get started, a couple of logistical issues. The webinar today will go for about 30 minutes, and that will be followed by 15 minutes of question time. So this is where if you have any other questions, you can ask them and we're going to aim to answer as many of them as possible. If there's some questions that we can't get to, you can always email one of the EGU staff members. You can email me, Chloe Hill, and you can ask those questions that we didn't get to. So that's everything from me. I'm now going to pass over to our first speaker, Alberto. Hello, Chloe, and thank you everybody for attending today. We really appreciate your support, your contribution and your interest in this shared EGU general assembly online. And I'm now going to share my screen, even that we have to share geosciences online. Now the time to share my screen, and I have a couple of slides that will help me to convey the message that I'm really excited to convey to you today. First of all, I am, of course, talking from my home. I have been staying at home for already 30 days, and so as you, I am really leaving this strange period with strong motivation to connect and a strong motivation to give my contribution to solve this challenge that we are experiencing now. We all know that it's a global challenge, and we really want to contribute in order to make the world after COVID-19 a better world with an improved science. So we want to give the opportunity to all the scientists and researchers to give their contribution to recover from this, because this is what we perceive. We perceive ourselves in the first instance, but we can also perceive a strong wish by the research community to give their contribution. And I think this is something which is really nice in this bad situation. So we want to do our best to transform this unfortunate experience in an opportunity. It evolved very quickly. At least for me in Italy, in one week we passed from, let's say, some weak concern to a complete lockdown. And also in EGU it was very quick. We had to devise a solution, a new solution in very few days. And now we are seeking also your support to improve the solution and to make plans for the future, because it's not only the general assembly. There are a lot of activities organized by EGU that we want to bring forward, and we want to bring them forward in an improved context. Not only we don't want to suffer from this situation, but we want to get the opportunities, because this is our duty. Science must go on. And I think when we talk about science, I refer to science as a whole. This is a global challenge. It's a challenge for all scientists. Now we have the opportunity to gain again a renowned public trust. We can really perceive that the public is looking at science now with new eyes, and we have to make our best to give back the trust that people have in us. And so the first requirement is science must go on. And for this reason we had no doubt to decide that our general assembly must go on as well. With a concept that we have to devise very quickly, with a concept that we want to be innovative. We got in touch also with sister associations and to some extent with the community to devise a new concept, which I think it is something that we want also to be a model for the future. Because the future is, of course, uncertain to the current situation, but in any case, the future, as I said, must be an improved one. So we want to support worldwide connection and networking by giving the two people the opportunity to connect by meeting also what are our traditional principles in EGU, equality of opportunity, access and transparency, bottom up approach in line with our founding concept. So the support of the community again, it's extremely important and diversity, equality and inclusiveness and also compliance with the EGU code of conduct that was recently revised. So these were the driving principles that guided us in elaborating, conceiving the new concept of the online general assembly that Susan is going to present. We could benefit from our previous activities. We made, I think, an important step forward in the past to green our meetings. And also we were launching our new repository, EGU sphere.  And this was something that was conceived last year. Of course, we had no idea of this emergency, but we realized that we had to promote online interaction as a greener way of networking as a forward looking way for overcoming barriers to physical interaction. And I think that today this concept of a repository which is open for discussion is really something that is essential, something that you want to profit from. This is a repository which we lost our discussion papers, we lost reprints, but it will also host the abstracts submitted to our events and in particular the general assembly with discussion alongside with the presentations. So abstract and presentations can be discussed here. And this is what led us to elaborate the concept of the general assembly. The general assembly will be focused on two lines of discussion that Susan is going now to present. I just want to thank you once again and to really invite you to attend this general assembly because your attendance will be a way to contribute to recovery from this situation.  So Susan, please, I'm now sharing my screen and I give the word to you. So what I aim to do is to explain our concept, and I will mainly do that by using the websites to tell what the possibilities are for authors, conveners and attendees from now until the end of May. So when we had to cancel the general assembly in Vienna, it was immediately clear for us, as Alberto already said, that we had to offer activities online. And we felt it was our responsibility to ensure that all the science, all the apps that had been submitted to the general assembly could be presented and shared, and that all the authors and conveners could participate across different time zones. And in a way that it would be accessible, and that's in terms of bandwidth, for example, because we're not all on the latest version of broadband, but also for any of our colleagues with hearing or visual difficulties. And we had to come up with a concept that would work for all presentation types because we had already accepted the abstract as an oral or a poster or a pickup. So these were our considerations when we started working on sharing your science online just a few weeks ago. And it's been an interesting couple of weeks. But we're very excited with what we can offer. It's been a tremendous effort by the EDU-MITI, by Council, by our conference organiser, Copernicus, by the EDU office. And I cannot promise that we've got the perfect concept. We're still developing many aspects, and that also means that you will see changes on the website. And I would invite you to regularly visit our websites to see the new concepts, the new activities we're bringing online, new questions that we've answered. But I do hope that really many of our authors and conveners and participants will join us in this big experiment that we're putting together of bringing activities for a meeting of our sites online. To put that a bit in perspective, in 2019 in Vienna we had over 16,000 abstracts and over 16,000 participants, so it's a large event. So what is our concept? Very brief, in a nutshell, we're inviting authors to upload presentation materials and receive feedback on those from the beginning of this month until the end of May. We also invite conveners, authors and attendees to discuss materials during a live chat. And we invite everyone to participate in unions, oppose a great debate, some short courses and more activities. And I'll explain a bit more about these points using the websites. And as I'm about to mention, we also hope that EDU can gather experience from sharing your science online with bringing activities online. So one crucial thing is that our concept depends on your active participation. It's made for and by authors and conveners and attendees. So we can only do this if everybody is going to help us. So I will now share a different screen with you because I will go to the websites and show you the different possibilities for authors and conveners and attendees using the website materials. So the point of entry for sharing to your science online is this page here. And I would just like to say that any of the links that I'm going to show you, there will be at the end of PowerPoint and we will be sharing the PowerPoint. So you can either just click along with me or just at the end when you get the PowerPoint, you can find the links there. So this site has information specifically for authors, for conveners and for attendees and for our regular scientific sessions and for our other activities. But before I go into more detail for the authors and conveners, one important concept is that for sharing to your science online, we turned all our presentations into so-called displays. So we no longer have orals or posters or conveners. But instead we have something that's called a display and that means that every abstract has the same presentation format in sharing to your science online. And you can see that when you go, for example, to a session. So here I'm just bringing it going into our program and I could select, I will select Inter-interns Disciplinary Events. And then you can now see that from these sessions, they all have displays. So if I click here, all the abstracts are then listed and they're numbered consecutively and they've all got the D for display now. So if I go back again to the sharing to your science online starting page and we will look specifically into what the options are for abstract authors. So here are the possibilities for authors. So all authors submitted an abstract and the abstract received a DIY and it's published material under a Creative Commons license. Now what we now do is we offer the possibility to upload presentation materials with your abstract. And these presentation materials will be directly linked to your abstract and they will share the same DIY. Now what are these materials? So they can be anything at all that will help an author highlight the points that they want to make with your abstract. So this can be one of our figures, a few slides, an animation, a PDF, a map, an equation, anything at all. So the only constraints are that it has to be one file, it has to be below 50 megabytes, so to allow for us to download. And we ask you to think about formats so that the format of your file works across different platforms. So rather PNG than TIFF, PDF is fine, MP4, things like that. So we have a presentation upload recipe that gives you much more detail of the steps to take to uploading materials. So we really try to keep this as easy and straightforward as possible. So EDU is an advocate of open access to scientific research and therefore in principle we assume that your presentation materials are like your abstract under a Creative Commons license. But if this is not possible for you then you can indicate another copyright, so you can reserve the copyright for yourself for example. Now let me show you how this works. So just click the presentation up button. You will be asked to log in, I've already locked myself in and you will see a list of your active abstracts. Then there's further information on the license and copyright agreement. And then here you can just upload materials. I will certify, yes I've read, this is vacation section, I will distribute on the Creative Commons license. And then here you can choose the file to upload and then the bottom right, you choose whether you upload and allow discussion or you upload without discussion. And these steps are also indicated on the presentation upload recipe. Now you can revise your presentation materials, you can make as many versions as you want. And if you opt into the discussion, the discussion will be on a certain version and the versions and the discussion are archived in that way. Now this discussion, anyone can contribute to open commenting, but what we do ask is that people log in with Echo Panic as user ID, so commenting is by name. The discussion is open from the beginning of this month until the end of May and it will be archived online. So I will try to show you one example of how this actually works. So if we go, let me see, I have to open a new tab. We go again to the program. And of course I've already looked at which abstract already has some comments. So if an abstract has uploaded presentation materials, this icon appears, and if there's a comment, then this icon appears. And then we can open the abstract itself, we can go to the discussion, and then you can see the entire HTML abstract, the presentation version, a contributed comment and an auto comment. So I'll go back again to the site with the materials for authors. So we offered authors the possibility to upload presentation materials and to opt into commenting, which is active over two months. Now, in addition, during the week of sharing geoscience online between four and eight of May, we open a chat channel for a scheduled session. And what we have in mind here is that anyone can participate. So the chat is not by name, but of course people can put their name. It's not recorded because we really want to stimulate an open discussion. There's not live streaming, but what we encourage is that people look in advance at the uploaded presentation materials at the abstracts and that they then together discuss, for example, open questions in their field. Now, how this looks like, for example, is if you look in the program, you can see for a session that there is, for example, here you can see there is a chat scheduled. And this link will become active 15 minutes before the chat and it will remain active about half an hour after. We're going to make an how to, in more detail about how the chat works. But we're still selecting the software. So, so that is not there yet. As I said, we're developing as we go. So these are the possibilities for authors. So there's, there's two ways of receiving feedback and of giving feedback. It's on your uploaded presentation tiers through the commenting and it's through the live chat during the week between four and eight of May. Now, all of this we can only do with the help of our conveners. And we really hope that the conveners will help us making sharing to your science online and an active event. Because finally, we depend on you to make this work. So what we kindly asked you is, is to moderate the chats. So like you would in Vienna, the General Assembly convene your session and chair it. And we're here asking that you, you chair or you chairperson and moderate the chat. And we kept as much as possible the original time of your session and large sessions are scheduled in blocks of about 30 displays. So it should be a manageable number of abstracts during the one hour and 45 minutes of your scheduled chat. Now, what we sort of could see what the role is when you're moderating the chat is that you can introduce your session. You also get the possibility as convener to upload some materials with your session. So you can, for example, upload some introductory slides that people can look at in advance. You can make sure that all the displays get some attention. You can ask some questions. You can formulate some maybe some open questions in your fields. For example, with my co-conveners on our session, we already got together and discussed how we're going to do this. One of our ideas was that we would look at the abstracts and the uploaded materials in advance and see if there's any common points, any open questions that emerge in our field. And then we could use this chat to bring everybody together and see what the discussion can bring us. So as I mentioned before, the chats will not be recorded in order to stimulate an open discussion. And yes, one of our wishes is that conveners will really get the role of a moderator. So I hope this explains a bit of how conveners can help and in a way to bring the General Assembly of Vienna convener role into an online convener role. Now, and then, of course, we're all attendees. So, and I would really like to stress that sharing to your science online is open to all. You do not need to register. And it's free. So as an as an attendee, you can view presentation materials and you can comment on these presentation tears, as long as you log in with your companion consumer ID and just disclose your name. And during the week of sharing to your science online, you can participate in chat. We also have other activities like the union to pose a great debate, etc. And I will say a bit more about that from the slides. You can also make a personal program like you would for the General Assembly in Vienna. The only thing to keep in mind is that instead of individual abstracts, you will be selecting sessions because we do not know when an individual abstract is scheduled in the chat, of course. And I'll quickly like to point out there's already a very nice blog on the geologue from from you on how to plan a week of digital interaction. So I now go back to my PowerPoint. So sharing to your science online, I might have mainly discussed the regular scientific sessions, but we also aim to bring our union to pose your life and the great debates. And hopefully a selection of short courses that are either live or prerecorded. But we also will have other activities. So for example, for the General Assembly in Vienna, we had selected to artists in residence. They will hopefully become our artists in residence for 21. They've already agreed, but they've also very kindly agreed to be artists online during share edu 20. And we would like to invite anybody who has or all the artists among us to to share their art and science using the hashtag share edu art. Please vote in the 2024 competition. So the pictures you see here were from the 2019 for the competition, and we will be announcing the 2020 finalists. And then you can vote during the week of four to seven from four to seventh of May and we will announce the winners at the end of the share to your science online week. So I really hope that you will join us online from now on until and especially from between four to eight of May and help us bring science together online. Okay, so the first question we have is there is still some confusion about whether there will be live presentations like the one that we're having now, or whether it will be more of an online typing chat. Suzanne, maybe you want to address that one. We're going to have some live presentations. And that is the Union white events. So the union symposia. And the great debates and we will have one each day. And then you can see them already in the program. In addition, we might run some short courses life as well. But for the rest, we would really like to encourage everyone to use our life tax based chat. We have about 700 regular scientific sessions. And with the chat, we are able to bring, you know, our about 17,000 abstracts online and offer the same feedback opportunity to all. So I really hope that people will will join us in this pilot experiment that we're running. So the question about the medal lectures and division meetings. Can you address whether they're happening this year. I guess you can add electors. So all the metal actors from 2020 are postponed to 2021. So that means in 2021. So if we have the general assembly in Vienna, we will be running double medal lectures, which is exciting because these are really interesting talks. So. But I think that gives them the best buzz and visibility on the onsite experience for our medalists. So this is why we decided to not host a medal talks online but instead to have them. They will be the union white metal actors are also a web streamed when we're in Vienna. So the division meetings. We're looking into this. But they will likely be a form of a division meeting. What we're currently thinking of is to the division presidents can share materials before. And that there will then be a text based chat for feedback by the community. Yeah, we have another question here that I just read about how we intend to avoid online abuse. I also had one question that I'll address asking why the chat everyone couldn't see the Q&A is happening right now and only the panelists and the host can see it. That's one of the one of the reasons why we've kept the question that question answers private just in case there is any sort of online abuse going on. I think it's a bit easier to monitor. But maybe Suzanne do you want to answer that more fully. Well, one thing is that we do ask people when the upload materials and all our authors and anyone participating to adhere to the ego code of conduct. So this is explicitly assumed any participant is bound by the ego code of conduct. For the comments that is fairly clear because you log in and you register by name. And these are also archived for the chat. That's true. And we opted for anonymous and to make it as easy as possible for people to participate. And this is why we're also looking into giving convenience moderator access so that they can if necessary block a participant and I really hope that this will not be necessary. Yeah, and so just to confirm there won't be any need for a pernicus ID to join any of the sessions for example. Not for the chat. No. Yeah. Okay. Very good. I'm changing tack a little bit now so far they've mainly been logistical questions so they've gone towards Suzanne. But I better if you if you want to jump in if you have anything else to add feel free. They are okay. Another question is will there be pure networking sessions. For example, join dinner events, virtual coffee breaks or similar pure social human interaction in online events. That's a very interesting one I've been thinking about it so far we have not. I've been thinking about maybe we could have later afternoon to bring some events online. Yeah, I can't promise anything. We're thinking about it. I mean it's been the last week it's been tremendous it's been really exciting and it's been really exhausting in bringing everything online. But I know I like the suggestion. I can't make a promise but apart from that we're thinking about it. May have something on this. It is indeed an issue that we are seriously considering and the problem is that we want to make any of the event accessible to everybody who wishes to join it and potentially then we have to predict a very huge attendance. So we are trying to identify the solution for hosting the plenary meeting anyway which is something that is attended by several hundreds of people usually and indeed we are also thinking of some social events which at the same time we need to make accessible to everybody. So definitely there is something that is in the plate and we will provide the additional details later on. Okay. And now for a trickier question. Will EGU go back to business as usual after the corona crisis or use this as a change for rapid transformation in brackets decarbonisation? I can say something Suzanne in general and then I'll give you the word to you for comments on the specific of the General Assembly. As I said, we want to transform this crisis in an opportunity and for sure the opportunity is to evolve towards a greener model for scientific activities. We were already working on it with EGU sphere and with greening the General Assembly efforts. So I think that indeed this could be the opportunity to move forward that way which is pretty easy for small events for the General Assembly is a different story but Suzanne will say something. And I'm not saying that this will be this will be the model the model that we use this year of course will evolve. So this is the first experiment that was also shaped by the urgency of finding a solution in one week. As I said, I think we can take this opportunity to work together for definitely converging towards a new model, not only for research also for education. Because I think this event helped us to discover what we can do without physical attendance. On the other hand I want to point out that I still believe that our physical meeting has some advantages that we have to preserve. Yeah, and I would like to add on to that because I think one of the reasons I mean we've been thinking a lot about why do people go to conferences and it's because they want to show and share the work they're doing and to learn from others. And parts of these aspects you can definitely bring online, but they also want to meet their colleagues and discuss and get to know new people and that that networking aspect of conferences is much more difficult to bring online. So my personal opinion is that there will always be a need to meet in person. But at the same time I think you know the experiences now with sharing your science online will will help us in greening the General Assembly. And we're finding ways like for example with the short courses. We had 90 scheduled we're not going to run 90 short courses online, but we will run some and days will be recorded and hosted on each YouTube channel. And in this way we can build a catalog of materials that people can view anytime. So and that will then go beyond the General Assembly. So I think there's a lot we can we can learn from from the situation we're in. Okay. Okay, so I'm just again scrolling through your question answers and there's a lot of questions guys which is great. Really great to see. There's quite a few about the types of the types of files that can be uploaded. So what is the recommended format for these displays? For example, is it a PDF PowerPoint? Is there a particular format that you would recommend? Or on the flip side of that, are there any formats that aren't accepted? Well, I shouldn't say this probably but I mean, you can upload anything you want within the 50 megabyte file. But you know if you upload a format that cannot be viewed on different platform then of course it's not so useful. So you can upload the recommended formats that we have thought of so far would be PowerPoint slides, PDF, MP4, PNG for an image. But avoid for example TIF because that doesn't support it very well and it's very big. So that would be sort of the recommendation. Okay, next question. Kirsten from the Iceland Meteorological Office isn't allowed to use Zoom because of security issues. Now this has been an issue that we've been hearing about the last week. Suzanne, do you want to answer this one? That's a tricky one. I mean at my university they have also been concerned. But actually the last signals we got from Zoom is that a lot of the issues are actively addressed. So for example my university is considered that we will use Zoom for teaching. It's of course very unfortunate if we have a platform for a university portion in great debate that some participants cannot watch. I will say that all of the webinars that we host, whether it be the great debates, the Union's symposia, all the short courses, they'll all go on YouTube afterwards. So we're going to aim to upload them on the same day. And so you can always watch them afterwards. It will just be that the Q&A sort of if you want to ask a question, that's what you'll miss out on. So there is always that option as well. And I think Zoom to my knowledge they have been addressing some of these issues. So maybe it'll be okay in a month maybe. I've seen the latest signals I've seen just the last days have been very positive in that respect. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so there's a question here about the exhibitors. What do exhibitors do in the place of being at the exhibit? They're keen to support this new way of exhibiting. And that is from Marie Springer Nature. I guess Marie's the name. Well, the very straight answer is that we cancel the exhibition. But we, and we just hope that all the exhibitors will join us again the next time we're in Vienna. But I also really hope that exhibitors will of course help us and join us in sharing your science online. As any attendee, we just encourage them to participate in the commenting and watching materials in the chat. Okay, yeah. There's also a couple here from people who aren't sure whether they can make their allocated session times. So there's someone who's concerned they're on the local emergency response teams for the COVID-19 virus might not be able to attend the chats. Is there some way that you can recognise these activities for those working on COVID-19 who cannot actually attend the allocated session times? Well, I mean, if anybody is on the COVID-19 emergency response team, I mean, this takes priority over everything. But what I would recommend in that case is to upload presentation to us in advance. And you can add an auto comment with it to explain a bit more what you had in mind with uploading these materials already. And you can invite colleagues to contribute to the commenting. So you can create a bit of buzz around your own abstract in that way. And of course, it's very unfortunate if you plan to participate in the chat in the last moment, it's not possible. But then I would say these things happen. There's a question here about the short courses. The question is, when will we find out about the short courses? I hope as soon as possible. We're working hard on it.  And now we're working on the union, supposedly great debates, the short courses. But I mean, please be assured, we're really actively working on the short courses. So I hope soon. I also would like to add that some, a couple of union session will focus on their original topic, but by also opening the door to discussing what are the implications for the scientific community of COVID-19. So I think it will be also a nice opportunity to attend these sessions in order to discuss what is our best strategy for the future to get connected, to continue working in an improved way. So I really invite you to consider also these opportunities for discussing of the situation. There's actually a couple of questions here about trying to show, for example, 20 displays in a one hour and 45 minute time block. Can one of you give a bit more information about how that might work with such little time per display? It's a good question because we haven't tested it ourselves yet. So what we're planning to do is we're going to run a trial session to see how this works. We will also then record a trial session to give some tips. But I think if you have 20 to 30 displays in one hour 45 minutes, I think it's actually, it's a good time slot where you can find common points between the displays. You can discuss different materials together. And I think one hour 45 minutes for a chat is probably already fairly long and I wouldn't really want to extend the time. Some sessions have two or three of these blocks. So it's quite a lot. And I think, you know, if there is more than fits in the chat, then people can return to the commenting because this will be active also after sharing geoscience online until the end of May. Okay. Will all co-conveners have moderator status? It might be too much for one convener to cover all of the displays simultaneously. Yeah, we're looking to that. It's a good point. It's on our list. When looking to download material provided by the authors, the function to download is not at all obvious and took some time to find. Can this be improved to make the material more visible? I guess that's more of a feedback than a question. I have to think about that one. Maybe the person asking the question could give some tips as what they would like to have more visible. Yes, that would help. Yeah, sure. Sure. So there is in brackets here the small icon after the abstract. Is the item too small? Apparently. Yeah. So I'll also say if you do have any feedback, I know Suzanne and Alberto are both ridiculously busy. But if you want to send me an email policy at egu.eu, I can always forward that onto the relevant person. Whether it's feedback, I can also help answer questions. If you have any questions that we haven't been able to answer today. Yeah, you can always send me an email. Yes. Yes, that's fine. Okay. Okay. There's someone here who is wondering if they can upload a talk onto the server at their university and share the link. Because I don't think 50 megabytes will be enough. They can because you can just as presentation materials, you can upload a link. So yes, you can do this. But I would take into account to make sure that the file doesn't become too large because not everybody who's working from home has very large bandwidth to download big files. And this is why we restrict it to 50 megabytes. Okay. This is a good one here. What can conveners do to encourage authors to engage with sharing geoscience online with materials before the week slash scheduled sessions? Can egu provide specific wording? One obvious way is to contact your authors. So all conveners have access to a mail tool as before. So you can log in with your session as convener and then you can email all the authors of your session. And in this way, give them some tips. So what I would do is to point them to the sharing geoscience online web pages and then the specific section for authors where there's already a lot of tips. You can even just copy that and put that in the mail. And I think it's really a great idea to contact the authors in advance and encourage them to upload materials and participate in the chat and also as conveners to tell in advance what your plan is for hosting the chat. So I'm going to say second last question. Will there be a replacement for the outstanding student poster and Pico presentation contest given that it is a huge motivation to deliver a good presentation plus the advantage of a free waiver for next year's registration? Unfortunately not. And this is because we, you know, the presentation is by the chat and that there's no way that, you know, on the basis of an anonymous chat that this could be judged. Yeah, so I'm very sorry, but the OSPP hasn't been been cancelled for this year, but we'll be reactivated as soon as we're going to be convening in Vienna. Yeah, I also would like to say that even if we converge to a different model, which is not a large scale physical attendance, of course this kind of recognition will continue. And there was just not enough time now to organize the competition in a different way. But for the future, for sure it is a distinguishing feature that will continue whatever it happens. I mean, even if we have to converge to a full online format, it will be preserved. We just need the time to organize it and the technology is put in place. I'm sure it will continue like mentoring activities. Any other activity will continue. I hope in an improved manner, thanks to the technology. Okay, so, okay, two more questions. There's just too many good ones. Once you upload your presentation, is it possible to modify it? In that case, would a history be shown if how many times the file has been re-uploaded? Yes, so you can upload presentation materials and it will be called version one and then you can revise it and upload a new version. And we will keep the different versions and this is because maybe in the meantime, somebody already commented on the first version and there's a dialogue there. So the versions and commenting history will be preserved, but you can absolutely just revise and you can revise also on the basis of the comments that you're receiving. Very cool. Okay, final question is where we find the link to the recording of this webinar. I would like to share it with colleagues that are not connected now. So that is a very good question, Francesca. It's actually going, I'm going to try and upload this webinar. I'll edit it a little bit and I'll upload it onto YouTube aiming for tonight. It will then be in the newsletter, the EDU newsletter that we'll go out tomorrow. I'll also include a link in the email that you'll get tomorrow as well. So good question. Is there anything else that either Suzanne or Alberto, you want to say or end the webinar on? I would just like to say that it's really brilliant to see all the people participating in this chat and the interest in sharing to you Science Online and I just hope that everybody will join us in our big pilot experiments that we're currently running. Yes, I also would like to say that has a final conclusion that we had an underlying principle here to give to everybody the opportunity to present by giving equal status equality of opportunities to all the presentations. And given this driving concept we devised we know that it's not easy to discuss many presentations in a limited time, but we devised the two ways of interaction, the discussion and the chat. I know that also the situation in terms of bandwidth now it's not really, really optimal because all the people are connecting. So we had to devise ways of making this interaction cheap in terms of bandwidth. But if you really think I can understand that some of you may have the concern that your presentation would benefit a lot from seeing your face, something that is uploaded on a video. And the suggestion that Suzanne gave to you like, yes, it's possible to put a video, a short one I would say on a repository and link it. So this is something that you may use with your creativity and really I think this way of interaction gives ample room to your creativity. And finally I really wanted to invite you to join, to join. Of course we are not expecting that all the people stay all the week on the PC, but even in attendance that is in a way not continuous but concentrated on your interest. It's extremely important not only for EGO we are talking here about science, science and scientific associations in their complete set. So it is really if you want to do something for helping all of us and society to recover from this and transform this in an opportunity. I think attending at the scientific activities is a really very helpful move. So I'm really looking forward to see you there.