Red Hat Summit that's coming up next week, as well as DockerCon. Stu, it's open source season. And we're excited. The Cube is going to be at both of those events. Gosh, you know, I've had on my schedule on the white board a list of all the shows we've been going to. And at the bottom of it, it says, is it July yet? And we've got like one more week, Dave, where we've got a lot of events. We've been doing almost two a week with the Cube. It's been exhilarating and a ton of open sources, as you said. So let's talk about Red Hat. We were talking off camera today. Red Hat is a company they've, they're almost $2 billion, about $1.8 billion last year. They'll do $2 billion this year, everybody's forecasting. They've got over a $14 billion market cap to throw in off, very, very profitable company. They throw up $600 million in free cash flow a year. 94% gross margins on their subscription business is a very attractive business. The stock has been acting beautifully. What's going on with Red Hat? Yeah, Dave, I mean, a fascinating company to talk to, I'm excited we're going to have Jim Whitehurst on the Cube again. We were at Red Hat Summit, their 10th anniversary event last year in San Francisco. And we're back here in Boston, local to us. So, you know, we asked Jim Whitehurst last year, you know, why aren't there more billion dollar open source companies? And Jim's answer was, you know, selling free is tough. So, you know, Red Hat has really pushed far into cloud. Last year, we talked a lot about Docker. We're going to go into that more in this segment. But, you know, Red Hat's, you know, a major player in OpenStack, interviewed a bunch of their executives, some of their customers at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, and want to make sure that no matter where customers go with cloud, whether it be the on-premises or public cloud, that Linux is going to be an important part of that, and Red Hat's going to find places that they can monetize that. So, for people who don't understand, so most of Red Hat's business is around what they call their infrastructure business, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and sort of related stuff. And what they do is they have a free version and then they sell support services, essentially a model of support. It's a software model, but it's a software support model for pay, and that's the bulk of their business, right? And now, they've been branching out. They've still got almost $2 billion in cash on the balance sheet, and they've made some acquisitions that we'll talk about, but you see them broadening their business. So, talk a little bit about Red Hat's business, its core, and where they're broadening into. Yeah, so Dave, most of the revenue falls under what are called subscription services. So, absolutely, that means I'm buying an open source product, but Red Hat, make sure that they've tested and give you a distribution that I can trust and I can put in my stack and I'm not gonna break things. And as new releases come out, I know I have a train I can follow and I've got somebody I can call if anything goes wrong or any issues, and they've tested out a bunch of it. As we always talk about, Dave, in the stack, what piece do I have to test in-house? What piece does somebody else does? Red Hat, make sure that they've done a lot of that work to make sure it is trusted. I mean, I tell you Dave, 15 years ago, when I worked for a big storage company and we were trying to figure out how Linux worked, it was just crazy to try to figure out, you know, as the kernel.org just kept changing, they tried to test a configuration and then figure out what customers have. Red Hat really provided that adult supervision and made what was originally Red Hat advanced server, now Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so that they could wrap their arms around it and it knew it was something that as the enterprise I could trust it and reduce my risk, and that's one of the big drivers in IT is always as to how do I take that risk out of that environment so I know it's going to work and it's not going to just fall down off. Well, security's a big deal. Everybody's using Red Hat Linux. The free version is not going to get the support if there's some virus or malware that comes out. Red Hat's all over it. They put out some kind of patch. If you're a paid for customer, you get the patch, you get the fix within hours, most likely the free guys are pretty much on their own. So it's a sort of a no-brainer for large enterprises and many, many large enterprises, of course, use Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux now, but they're also branching into new areas, which subscription, but it's sort of application related. It's Paz, it's middleware, it's OpenStack. It's storage as well. Absolutely, so OpenShift is a big area that Red Hat is pushing. That's their platform as a service initiative, trying to help foster the next generation of applications. Of course, you've got Pivotal and the Cloud Foundry Foundation as kind of enemy number one in that space. And Red Hat being really the poster child for open source, it's interesting to see Red Hat with OpenShift. You've got the Cloud Foundry Foundation on one side and even some of the other Paz players, Apprenda is actually going to be at the Red Hat event and it's really an alternative for Paz. So how does Red Hat drive revenue, but still say open, contribute to various projects? It's really a fascinating space. So OpenShift, we should think of OpenShift essentially as Red Hat's cloud play, is that right? It's their Paz layer, so really it sits above a cloud because the real value of Paz is that it can sit on any type of infrastructure, whether that be a public cloud, whether that be OpenStack, which Red Hat's a major contributor to, or just my on-prem version. Now as well, Red Hat has its own OpenStack distro, correct? Yes, that's right, that was launched last year and it was one that the community felt that almost, you know, is Red Hat being open or are they doing the same thing that they did for Linux, which makes, say, I take the pieces, I put it together, I test it and then I say, here's it worked. But some in the community felt that, well, Red Hat's trying to block out some of the other players because they say, oh, well, here's my OpenStack distro, but what if I want to use Ubuntu? No, no, no, we're not going to let you use it. What if I use something that's outside of the Red Hat family? And you mentioned kind of some expansion from a storage standpoint. Red Hat has bought both Gluster and they bought Ink Tank, which was kind of one of the main drivers on the staff. So people that were looking to use OpenStack, Red Hat's been buying up some of those pieces in addition to some of the storage ones. They bought some of the major contributors from CentOS, which was a popular open source Linux built for kind of these type of cloud environments. So when Red Hats do buys like an Ink Tank or a Gluster, what are they actually buying? So the main thing they're buying are the contributors, Dave. So if you've got an open source project and you've got a community, I might have the people that are putting it together, all the customer support people, but a main thing is who's contributing and driving that initiative. So I just finished reading Jim Whitehurst's book on the Open Organization and what Jim really talked about in the book, a lot of different things, but he says, you know, how do you really, you know, incent and engage a broader community so that more people come in and more people contribute? It's not just about communicating to them, it's about, you know, being a rallying point and being the person leading the charge, but not being the whole mission. And that's kind of a new way that Red Hat's been pushing it. They're really a poster child for open source, as we said. And you're seeing lots of other new companies that are leveraging open source, but none that are fully, you know, built around open source like Red Hat. So you came back after last year's Red Hat Summit, you know, really enthused about containers, a lot of talk about Docker, a lot of talk about microservices, then Kubernetes enters the fray. So that was really sort of the launchpad of the Docker momentum. What's going on with containers and Red Hat? What's the fit and what you're taking all that? Yeah, so first of all, last year with the major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I actually treat Docker as a first class citizen. So for those that aren't familiar, Docker was taking the containers which had already existed. So it's something called LXC or Lexi, which are Linux containers which sit on top of the operating system, specifically Linux. And it allows me to have a simple way to instantiate, use and, you know, really get rid of when I'm done. A single application, that's what Docker does is a single application, it has the libraries and the binaries either tied directly per application or shared, but it sits on top of the operating system as opposed to say, traditional virtualization like VMware, which sits on the bare metal and the operating system goes in each VM. So it's lighter weight, it's much quicker. Talking about something that can be, you know, spun up in seconds, rather than typically, you know, a minute or more. And companies like Google and Yahoo and Facebook have all been using these Linux containers for a bunch of years when they have millions of these apps that they need to spin up, things like web services, typically today, stateless applications, but really starting to see the developer community rallying around this. What I got super excited about, Dave, is for so long it's been the infrastructure has been that boat anchor that stopped me from moving forward on my applications and even server virtualization hasn't helped move that needle. Containers and specifically Docker really gives a vision for freeing that creation of new applications from the infrastructure. Just like we talked about platform as a service, it's kind of that top use case of platform as a service. Docker does it in a lightweight way. And, you know, one of the questions, I don't know how anybody's going to make money on containers, but it's a super exciting space. Well, presumably it'll drive demand for, you know, new application development platforms and paths. And of course Red Hat's play here is presumably to make those containers enterprise ready and secure and the like. So that leads to a discussion of Docker and DockerCon. We're going to be at DockerCon next week, Monday and Tuesday broadcasting, Wednesday, Thursday for Red Hat Summit. So give us a DockerCon preview. All right, so last year I went to DockerCon in person. It was by far my favorite show of the year. I mean, who doesn't like, it's a 400 person show, very intimate where you get to hear directly from the architects of, you know, Google and Yahoo and Facebook and say, this is how we're building, you know, the best data centers in the world and really the applications that are driving kind of the hyper scale, web scale world. And it wasn't a Docker show, it was a container show. And they're saying, this is how this technology helps us to really deliver on our vision. This year the show is supposed to hold 2,000 people. It's at the San Francisco, what's it, the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. 2,000 people. I heard the wait list last I heard was over 500 people. So everybody wants to be at this show. Partners are all tripping over each other to be there. You've got big companies like, you know, IBM and Intel and Red Hat and EMC that are all having a major presence there. Google also has a big presence with like what they're doing with Kubernetes. And this really robust ecosystem, all the VCs are showing up. So it is a majorly exciting show really at the center of DevOps, at the center of this kind of cloud native revolution. And, you know, boy, I mean, I think Dave that just containers in general and Docker as a leader have the opportunity to really help transform that next generation of applications that we've been talking about for years. Just why all of a sudden are containers?  They've been around for a long time. They're fundamental to the Linux platform. Essentially, you know, you can put stuff in containers and have been able to do that for years with Linux. Why all of a sudden is Docker taken off? Yeah, so just actually, you know, VMware didn't invent the idea of server virtualization and Docker didn't create the container. It's like, you know, Ford didn't invent the car and Apple didn't invite the invent the MP3 player. These are the ones that are helping to really bring it to the market as a whole. One of the things that Docker did that made it really easy is each Docker container is for a single application, which really simplifies it. We always talk to Dave that trade-off between kind of, you know, give me one thing versus be really flexible. Sometimes starting out, it helps to not give too much choice. And secondly, they really made it easy to start with containers for the developer. There's the Docker Hub now and there's other companies that are creating enterprise versions of the Hub where if I want to start with an image and then build off of it, I can get that. There's tons of templates out there. So I have a good starting point. I can build what I need on it. And the developers just frigging love it. I mean, it really, the echo to me is back in like the early 2000s when I talked to all the engineers that were using like VMware desktop. It was just like everybody's using it. Everybody's doing cool new things with it. Now getting it into production and having it, you know, it's not like people are running their mission critical, you know, traditional database workloads on it today, but it's, we see the revolution and, you know, Docker can help. So the, what you're saying is the contents and the processes that I put into the container are application specific. So I can have my little application, you know, fence in my party and my quality of service, but I don't need infrastructure stovepipes to support that. Yeah, absolutely. So the first time I talked to Ben Golube, who's the CEO of the company, I said, you know, what is this Ben? Come on, give me the elevator pitch. And he says, what we're going to do is we're going to separate my application management from my infrastructure management. And that's really powerful because when I, you know, when I talked to all the people last year at Red Hat Summit, I said, explain to me what's different. I said, well, when I build that software stack, I need to worry about what sits underneath it. You know, David Floyer, when we talked to him, our CTO, and said, well, you know, what was the problem with database architecture? He's like, well, database expects that it had a spinning disc underneath it. So the way I do the commits and how many things I can queue up, it just fundamentally are hard coded into the application. And if I want to take advantage of Flash, I have to rewrite the application. So if I write something that's going to live in a container, I don't need to think about what operating sits underneath it. It's a standard service. Today, it happens to be Linux. Microsoft is also working on containers in partnership with Docker so that I can use Windows. You can have things like .NET that are going to be part of this whole container revolution. But it really simplifies that. And by the way, that Linux stuff, Dave, I mean, where can Linux live? Linux can live anywhere.  It can be anywhere. It can be OpenStack. It can be Azure. It can be Rackspace. It can live anywhere. And it's really going to reduce the amount of developer time to be able to create an application that can be broadly used. And there's the potential for portability, but I don't know that that's necessarily the early use case, because we know people tend to use something and they don't move around at all. Well, it sounds like the early use case is just simplifying, like you said, application management. Whereas virtualization separated the physical infrastructure layer from the logical pools and allowed me to create and share those logical pools that didn't attack my application management problem. And it's still a very complex problem. You're saying Docker and other container technologies attack that directly. Yeah, and one of the things it also does, Dave, is virtualization didn't change my dependence on the operating system. And as I said, you know, one of the early use cases was let me take my old legacy application, running in that old operating system. Heck, 2002, it was like Windows NT's going into support. Let's shove it into VM. Let's leave it there for another five years today. It's, I'm sitting on some kind of Linux and whether that be Ubuntu or Atomic from Red Hat or CoreOS Linux or RancherOS just came out, there's all of these options now for really kind of lightweight Linux for containers. So the operating system is going to matter a little bit less. The application becomes the center of the universe, which is where it always should have been when you're talking about infrastructure. So Red Hat Summit, some keynote speakers, Jim Gontier from Dell, now at Dell, formerly HP, CubeAlum, Doug Balog, another CubeAlum, another one of the keynote speakers, both of those gentlemen are coming on theCUBE. Of course, you mentioned Jim Whitehurst, a number of other folks from Red Hat, I presume we're going to have customers and bloggers and the whole scene. What about DockerCon? Yeah, so this is the last piece to tie those two together. Red Hat has this cool little event called DevNation to help really drive some of the developers and we're going to have Sarah Navotny on who will be speaking actually at DockerCon and Red Hat Summit. So doing the West Coast to East Coast trip, just like we'll be doing, Dave, to be able to do that. Last year, we had Gene Kim on from DevNation. It was a phenomenal interview. He wrote the Phoenix Project book. If you haven't read that and you don't know about developers, it's actually a fiction book that helps explain to you what's going on with the whole developer world. So that was a great interview and at DockerCon, so starting with the Docker team itself, we're going to have Solomon Hikeson who's the founder of the company, Ben's the CEO, Adrienne Cockroft, everybody knows from his Netflix days now over at Battery Venture, I've got a bunch of users going to be on. It's orbit, lift, big web companies mostly and a couple more enterprise companies there, some really good thought leaders in the space and really exciting lineup at both shows. I mean, if you talk about the impact that Linux has had over the last two decades and where the really early days of where Docker is, so you were saying, Dave, what's Red Hat's? Market caps are up 14 billion and Docker's listed as a brand new unicorn at a valuation of over a billion dollars. So revenue of less than 10 million dollars in Docker. So absolutely it's really early, early, early days but boy, it's nice to be sitting at the ground for that. Tech valuations are like major league baseball salaries, Stu. They just keep going up and up and up, it seems. Although I guess major league baseball salaries, there's never a bubble, they never burst. Tech every now and then they burst but they keep going north. Stu, great lineup for DockerCon, really excited about that. Like you said, Red Hat Summit 2. I'm excited to be doing Red Hat Summit with you. Enjoy your time at DockerCon and thanks for setting up the two shows with us. All right, we'll be there on the ground, the Cube, SiliconANGLE, Wikibon. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next week at Red Hat Summit and DockerCon. See you then.


Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to Top 5 Friday. Today we are talking about my Top 5 Female Authors. This is notable because if I were to go through my Top 5 Authors period, most of them would be female. I think there's only two men on the list, so three of them. In fact, I would probably go as far to say that if the Honorable Mention today keeps on going the way it is, there's going to be four females and one male. And of course we all know my favorite is Stephen King. So I'll do a Top 5 Male if you want me to. Or a Top 5 Authors, but I'm just going to be repeating myself pretty much. But if you still want to see that, let me know down in the comments below. Right off the bat, I have an Honorable Mention, so this is kind of like a Top 6. The Mere Wife by Maria Davana Hedley. I think it's Davana. I'm not sure. Davana, I'm not quite sure. So I am 170 pages into this roughly, and this book is fantastic so far. It might end up, if it keeps up the way it is, she might end up taking the spot for number two on this list. If it keeps up the way it's going. I don't see any reason why I wouldn't, but her writing, I've never read anything like it. Her prose is perfect. If you have any problems finding, like editing down, if you're a writer, finding the exact perfect word, the top two on this list and this lady right here are perfect examples of how you should be doing it. So that's the Honorable Mention at number six of the top five. Number five is, and this is literally only because I haven't read anything else from her, Mariana Enriquez. This is her story collection, Things We Lost in the Fire. This has one of the best short stories I've ever read, period. It's called Under the Black Water. This is a magnificent collection. If you have not read it, I mean this is better than Clive Barker's stuff in my opinion, and I think Clive Barker, before I read her, Clive Barker was probably my favorite short story writer and now that goes to Mariana Enriquez. I can't wait to, she's an Argentinian writer, author, and I can't wait to read a novel or something longer form and sounds like we got a cricket in here. If you guys can hear that, I apologize. Okay, so number four is a brand new edition. It'll probably end up being number two. If the mere wife stays as good as it is, that's going to end up being my book of the year. But my book of the year right now is actually from the same company, McD Books and FSG. It's Our Kind of Cruelty by Araminta Hall. This book is fantastic. It is a perfect response to the Gone Girl sensation. How the woman in the situation is the villain and you can't trust anything she's saying. This is a perfect response to that whole string, the psychological thrillers that came after Gone Girl. All the ones that say, well, I actually chili and fling, blurb this one says, I loved it right down to the utterly chilling final line and she ain't bullshitting. But Araminta Hall is not only a terrific author. She's a down to earth and wonderful person. I follow her on Twitter. I've spoken to her a couple of times. Amazing, amazing author and I cannot wait to read more from her. So at number four on the list is Marisha Pacelle and I have loved two of her books. Her most recent one, not so much, but we're not here to talk negative stuff. Special topics in Calamity Physics was a terrific take on the college, high school, kind of YA serial killer vein. She went far beyond that. It's a very intellectual book. It was also a study in movies and how the literature tied into the story. Every chapter heading I think was a different piece of literature. This one, however, is my number three favorite book of all time hands down period over and done with. The lore and everything around the director in here, Stanislaus Cordova, is amazing. And the main character is an unreliable narrator only to the extent that he has no idea what the hell is going on. And you're going along with this guy and Pacelle really gives you the feeling that you are inside this story. And that's one of the things that she does really, really well is stories within a story and puts you there, makes the confusion real, but it doesn't make you feel like you're missing something.  So number three for my favorite female authors, Marisha Pacelle. This is turning into book reviews, too. I apologize. Let's just talk about the author. So next up, I have number two spot is Jesmyn Ward. This is my first book. Also, I'm picking the books that not necessarily my favorite from them, because my favorite from her is where the line bleeds, but I'm picking my introduction to them. And this is a sing and buried sing was my introduction to Jesmyn Ward. The only thing that puts the number one spot above Jesmyn Ward is plot and character development. Jesmyn Ward is great at all those things, but there's only one person that is above her in my eyes, in my view. But Jesmyn Ward, what she does really well is the perfect word choice and thematic elements. She really brings theme full circle in her books, especially in where the line bleeds. That's one of my favorite parts of that book is how it begins and ends in almost like the same scene, and she brings everything back around. So if you're looking for a amazing literary experience, you can't go wrong with Jesmyn Ward. Last but not least, my favorite female author, not only is she a terrific person. I've spoken to her on Twitter. Not only is she a great person and a great author, but her plotting, the way she deals with her characters is unlike anybody else I've ever read. Every single character, no matter how small, is given a full story. And she is, I don't want to say the female Stephen King, but she's on par with Stephen King. It's not sometimes better than Stephen King when it comes to character development. And that's Caroline Kepnes. Her novels, You and Hidden Bodies are a series with the pro antagonist, Joe Goldberg, who is a stalker that it also, you could say that Our Kind of Cruelty, number four on the list, is a response to this book also, which is cool because I've seen Araminta and Caroline, I've seen them talk on Twitter and go back and forth, and it's cool watching those two having written completely different books, both about the same subject, stalkers, both in the same first person and have two completely different takes on the genre and then be so cool to each other about it because it's almost like Araminta Hall's books is like, here I'm challenging that aspect. You is a novel that I think Gone Girl should have, this should have gotten the critical and all that success that went to Gone Girl, I think you should have got. In fact, my blurb for Hidden Bodies that they chose to put in the UK edition was you excel, no, Hidden Bodies excel, they were Gone Girl, Fail, something like that. That's not a perfect quote. Oh wait, Caroline Kepnes. If you have not read her stuff, please go check her out. Oh yeah, it is hot here in Alabama. If you haven't read her, go check her out. She's my number one favorite author, not saying she will always be, but right now at this moment in my life, Caroline Kepnes takes the top spot. So until next time, I have been E, you've been U, this has been Top 5 Friday. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.


Good afternoon or good morning wherever you are. This is our fireside chat. I'm not sure how cozy everyone is feeling but I have my mug of tea in front of myself and it's a relatively cool afternoon here in Maputo so I think we can it's not cold enough to light a fire but we can suspend our disbelief for a few moments. Just to introduce myself my name is Sam Jones. I'm a research fellow with UNU wider as I said based in Mozambique primarily working with the Ministry of Economy and Finance but today it's a real privilege and honor to be able to have a brief conversation with Professor Miguel Urquiola. I probably got the pronunciation wrong so forgive me. Thank you. I think Miguel if I may I mean I'm sure that to most of us here you need no introduction but just very briefly Miguel is a professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Columbia that's the one in New York and is also a member of the UNU wider board. Miguel's research has focused primarily on I mean very broadly speaking on education but particularly around issues of school choice and the ongoing debate around the merits of public versus private provision of education. If I recall I think I first came into contact with his work in the 2006 Apples and Oranges paper which I'm not sure if you remember but I thought it was very helpful because it gave some kind of innovative and interesting measures of education system performance and how to do that using survey data. Some of the more recent work has looked at school vouchers there's a very important survey in the general of economic literature on school vouchers and also a recent discussion about whether education is a consumption or investment good in the annual review of economics but more recently Miguel has turned his attention to higher education and he has a recent book out entitled Markets, Mines and Money and he asks and answers of course why is it that the vast majority of top ranked research universities are located in the USA? I mean I guess for many of us we just take that for granted but as he shows in the book and it might want to elaborate on this wasn't always the case in Europe I mean Europe European universities UK Germany in particular were some of the leading centres of education for a long time until at least the end of the 19th century and I'm sure that for many of us attending the conference here we have some academic interest or role with universities so how universities can be strengthened and particularly the research element of universities how that can be strengthened and nurtured is very relevant. So we're going to start our chat with a little bit focusing on the book but I should say beforehand that if anyone wants to drop in and ask a question you're more than welcome so please just place that in the Q&A make sure you click session and then Q&A and feel free to write your question there. So turning back to the book Miguel you I think you grew up in Bolivia but took your university education in the US so was this choice of topic just did that come from your personal experience in any way? Yeah I think so I mean you know like any topic it comes from you know somewhat from personal experience but also like a trajectory I think as you said I grew up in Bolivia and I worked there after I finished college and one piece of advice I got there that I followed or I had to follow because it was a boss's instruction basically was to travel to Chile and see a little bit about education reform in Chile which is a forefront country and so looking at Chile I became very interested in educational markets because as you know Chile is one of the forerunners and sort of putting in place vouchers and sort of having a for-profit whole large educational sector that was news to me I did not know that and then I would say I spent the next many years of my life working on that type of thing and kind of you know I think that most of my work on Chile at least and on vouchers some of it says that markets are not a free or not a silver bullet of sorts in education things may not work very well I think I had made that point you know which is a controversial point but I think that the a lot of the experience shows that surprisingly perhaps certainly surprisingly to me when I first approached it they don't seem to work that well in some cases and so I have been doing that for a long time and then for the book I thought well why don't I think of a case where I think that markets worked well in education and can we look at the factors that make them work badly in one case and why did they work well and so then I was looking around and of course one way you know I've lived in American universities for a long time they're very market oriented the US educational system has so much of the US is very market oriented and then and then you see that lo and behold it has a university sector that in terms of research at the top performs extremely well and as you mentioned was not always the case the US was not a leader and so I got into it that way sort of saying can I see a place where you know the opposite of what I've usually said is true and can I explain why and are the same big factors behind both observations kind of that's how I got to the book topic that's yeah that's interesting because I was actually going to ask exactly because a lot of your research has been the opposite showing some of the the risks associated with this private provision so perhaps I mean could you very briefly just just for us who may not have read the book you know what's stood out for you as some of those factors then that explain why private provision in this case worked well and not another so I would let me just mention two factors and each of these will say sort of there are things that get messed up in education usually when there's lots of markets and for the case of research might not one is a factor I called sorting which is I think it is an innate you know trait of many educational systems to sort of sort people out to their customers and all kinds of actors want to sort people out by sorting I mean basically a tendency of like to congregate with like so you know it could be wealthy people want to go to school with wealthy people people of this ethnic group want to go to school with this ethnic group people of this religious group want to go to school with that with the same with the same religious group this is you know I think I'm not going to say universal but it is a predominant tendency in many countries in many educational systems my sense is that in K through 12 this often messes things up because it becomes very hard for the customer to kind of tell apart quality from from you know sort of say tell apart what we call usually as economist value added versus just absolute achievement it is very hard if if you're a parent I'm going to say in Maputo or Lima or London and you're looking for a school it's very hard I'll speak for myself to sort of say which school is actually good at teaching and which school is just full of kids who I you know who are high at you by contrast I think that sorting I argue at the university level creates a series of dynamics that might not be bad for the production of research for example tends to concentrate resources stuff like that things that you need for research it tends to concentrate talent and stuff like that so sorting I would say is factor one and it kind of messes things up in some cases and it makes them work in others and it's not obvious when that's going to happen the other thing let me just to not speak too long mention a second one which is observability and relates to this issue like what can I observe in people's performance as we know because there's a lot of people working on things like teacher value added it's very hard to observe performance of teachers for example this is why we work on it right if it were easy to know which teacher is good or bad we would know right away and in fact even for researchers it's hard to predict which teacher might be good or bad it's hard to know just by looking at videos of teachers by contrast I think for researchers there's a lot more observability it's certainly not perfect there's noisy stuff but we can sort of see with you know which chemistry professor is writing papers are these papers having a big impact or not observability is a key thing if you don't have observability this is not just about education if you don't have observability almost nothing will work well uh and that's interesting could i just just interrupt i mean i'm just interested i mean you know some of us would say wow this kind of the this i mean revolution in terms of observability yeah has been for many of us it you know you could you could say well this is the last 30 years maybe that the many universities have moved to research excellence frameworks and so on was this true earlier on uh that perhaps we you know some of us might be them might not be aware of and was this already starting in the early 20th century right so that's that's a little question so you mean the sort of observability of research often research yeah it yeah i mean impact fact i'm thinking impact factors and uh you know top yeah sorry go ahead there's one way there's one place where you can draw a big distinction between europe and the us in europe it was already the case by the end of the 19th century for sure that there was some observability for research in the sense that for example there were journals where people were publishing these sort of reports from scientific societies the us lagged behind badly in this uh and one of the things that it did around the turn of the century 1890s uh is you have things like the american economic association the american chemical society being created and creating journals and sort of observability to see whether people are doing research that is one area um there is a there was a famous mathematician who got a job at john's hopkins was recruited this english guy uh and he told this anecdote that he said that the president of john's hopkins and this was like 1880 who really believed in research kept bugging him to create a journal for mathematics in the us and he said i kept telling him there's nothing to publish so why would he do this you know uh and so that anecdote illustrates that this is an infrastructure for observability that has to be created it it has to be nurtured the us was late to the game relative to your but it's one thing that helped it sort of catch up for developing countries i think you know it's costly to to set up uh uh net you know a system to measure research output and for developing countries my guess is that actually thanks to the internet and things like that it's much easier these days to sort of piggyback on a on a on a measurement thing that already exists right so like uh journals these days are more globalized uh and so you don't have to create like the us had to create its own journals in a way because things work differently it's not obvious to me that say you know uh say say you know countries have to do it now yeah i mean talking about developing countries i mean i think it's it's a particularly interesting issue i mean perhaps more than anything academia is a global market these days right i mean you you yourself came from bolivia um you know there's many many of the the top researchers in the world gravitate towards the us yeah now in a way you know that's sorting right which is exactly what you talk about yeah but what does that mean for students in developing countries particularly at the undergraduate level where you know the ability to move is is difficult particularly it's highly costly i mean could could there be a i mean is this a classic brain drain problem that you know the top researchers now go to you know foreign universities leaving a lower quality of instruction back home yeah i think that it is a problem uh and it is true that like you say um academics at least has become much more global and at the top level of academics this is one you know there's a lot of also sorting has this feature that it's very self-reinforcing right so that that the fact that the u.s has such great universities makes it easier to recruit away people um in terms of an undergraduate though i think that here is where the observability comes back i think that the u.s university is by and large based on noisy measures imperfect measures are able to recruit some of the best researchers in the world this is clear if you're a german top academic you'll get offers from the u.s it's not obvious to me that this means that they're recruiting the best teachers and when you're an undergraduate what you want are good teachers uh and researchers you know top researchers can be excellent teachers they are by definition excellent teachers for teaching for example phd students and people at the cutting edge because they kind of know the cutting edge so they know how to talk about the cutting edge at least but it's not clear that they're that they're necessarily better at teaching micro economics one right and so in terms of the more basic type education in a way one might be better off i think in places where there are less less focused on this rat race for getting the best researchers and teachers at many you know universities across the world which are not elite research universities may just be more focused on you know providing or their space for them to be more focused on providing a good chemistry you know organic chemistry class rather than trying to write something that is cutting edge so i don't worry as much for the teaching side i don't think it's obvious that saying stanford has absolutely the best teachers it could be but it's not obvious to me so sorry i was just uh muted that i that kind of is very interesting you say that because there's a trend certainly you know in a lot of most countries including developing countries to say that you know all all university teachers or university you know university faculty should be focusing on research um so i mean it may be what you're saying is that should we be going back i'm just provoking a little bit perhaps should we be going back to a model which was uh existed in some countries uh you know a number of years ago where you have a distinction between research universities and teaching universities i mean is that maybe a comparative advantage of some institutions could be on the teaching what whilst other um universities could be on the on on on the research is this i mean is this is this a model you think would work or am i getting into dangerous territory here you are you are you are very provocative uh i i am sympathetic to the idea that not every institution should do everything right so so for example um i think i've heard a famous education economist caroline hoxby say this you know caroline hoxby has said stanford or harvard do not have a comparative advantage at training a large number of people in sort of basic things that's just not what their comparative advantage is in uh and i think she's used the the words it would be misplaced energy kind of to try to make them do that and so you have for example ratchety has shown in his research amazing schools at training a lot of people one close to where i live in new york is is the city university cuny uh and you know now this doesn't mean and here you know uh on average i think universities everywhere should aim for their faculty to have phd's for example but it doesn't mean that everyone should try to do everything and i'm sympathetic to that idea and therefore i'm not hostile to the idea you mentioned that one could have some faculty focused more on teaching and some focused more on research yeah i mean i think that is happening in some countries i mean some academic job postings now tend to say well some of them i've seen say teaching specialization research specialization it doesn't mean that you you're exclusive but it's a focus i think i think then the question uh would be is teaching at the university level as observable as research yeah i don't think it is as as as observable i think that once one looks at teaching at the university level one starts to get back into the world we live in when we look at teaching in the k-12 level that it it gets harder you know we can see student evaluations uh and so we know which teachers make students happy in some sense but for example the real outcomes we care about when we teach at university is is this person going to be productive in the long term right is this person going to have a good job is this person going to be an interesting person is there will they contribute to society we don't see those outcomes until much later on uh as much as for example in the previous education session we were saying uh or the moderator was saying you know it's tough to measure uh you know learning uh in many developing countries and measure performance there we're looking at outcomes where we say we'd like to see where you're at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year and ideally we can measure that well at the university level it's even harder and so there's a really there again you're in a this quicksand where things are very hard there may be teachers who are really good at the university level and are unpopular right and they're so um and i think even students realize that with with a long term they they say you know professor professor jones yelled at me but exposed years later years later there's a there's a story i think so some people in they did some research and actually took in a trained actor to do a lesson and you know the the brief was to be as you know as kind of a fun and engaging as possible don't teach them anything and of course the course evaluations were the best that they'd ever heard of precisely because it was picking up uh not that in fact they've learned anything just the fact that they enjoyed being there it was entertaining yes so yeah this is one thing i mentioned in the book that as chair of the department if the dean or the provost came to me and said miguel hire excellent researchers i would say easy just give me money right if they came and told me how you're excellent teachers it's not as easy yeah observability there becomes becomes problematic yeah exactly no i'm seeing the time is is is is quite short so could i just ask you maybe i don't see any questions in the chat or anything so maybe one last question i mean from develop from the perspective of development economics um you know there is actually the criticism that may be the concentration of all the great researchers even if they're from developing countries originally the fact that they're not in these you know the countries where they're doing research yeah and also uh the fact that you know that there's a concentration of influence in in you know a handful of universities that could be bad for the discipline do you have any any thoughts on this debate at the moment yeah that's that's a good question uh it is risky i think primarily for the reason you mentioned which there's less exposure uh and i think that is the risk in this and you know that's a risk that's a bit specific to development economics or certain you know so lots of fields not to all of them like we would worry less about that for someone who's doing i don't know some type of classical music or something that that that that is a concern perhaps it's somewhat mitigated in recent years by greater ease of travel and you know things like we are on right now these screens but maybe you know maybe travel is getting harder and so i think that is a concern uh i have to be consistent with what i say in the book i worry less about the concentration than most people i think but i agree i agree that there is a danger that things become kind of like insular and then you're not looking at the world in a way that you need to yeah i guess it's about what conversation are you part of if you're part of a conversation amongst other elite academics only yeah uh then that can be somewhat detached from i guess some of the the challenges and problems that may be uh do the the to which it would be exposed if individuals were located in in a developing country but as yeah yeah i mean but as well as you said uh you know technology potentially is a is a is a way around that i guess as uh particularly now that you know you can get good internet connections uh you know not just in urban centers but also in rural areas to a certain extent right if you've got the money if you have the money but it's become so i've been advising a couple of bolivian universities and this would not have been possible pandemic you know uh exactly yeah and you know probably internet connections there are not better than the ones you're experiencing right now so no no no exactly and even in Mozambique you can get um you know a reasonable 3g internet yeah connection in many rural areas these days and that's a change you know over the last five years so you can do stuff online that you could never do before if you have the the megabytes as it were huge i agree yeah great well i i think we better um unfortunately i mean it's a sad to cut it off um but let me just say thank you so much miguel for for your time uh and for your insights uh i think really stimulating and i would recommend uh anyone to to to take a look at his new book it's it's actually very interesting um and thank you for your time and i would encourage you now to move to the next session uh whichever that may be thanks a lot thanks to everyone thanks bye bye thank you bye bye thank you


To find the image of a convex spherical mirror we're going to use again our three special rays the one that is parallel that will go through the focal point The one that goes through the focal point will become parallel and the one that goes to the center is reflected as if there will be a plain mirror here. And now with the concave mirror we have figured out that that kind of behaves like a converging lens where an object left of the focal point will produce a real image and object on the right of the focal point will create a spherical image. So we expect here to get similar behavior like with diverging lens, meaning that we get a virtual image. Similar to the diverging lens the focal distance is given as a negative number, meaning that we're going to be using the focal point on the other side. Here we use the focal point on the left side to draw the rays. Here we're going to use the one on the right side. And just remember how you figure out the focal distance if you know the radius of the mirror. So the magnitude of your focal distance is to radius over 2. So let's start with our special rays. Let's start with a parallel one. So a parallel ray is spread out. It's diverging. So in my convex mirror it's kind of like a diverging lens. The parallel rays do not really meet in a focal point. They spread out. But if you backtrack time it looks like they all would have come from that one focal point. One that is in at the focal point should be parallel to the central axis. And that would be at least the one that goes to the center of my mirror. So here we'll behave as incoming angle is equal to outgoing angle. I have found as expected a virtual image.