Hi, this is Encompass Live and it is Wednesday, April 29th. Today we have with us Amy and Sean Burrish. Shane. Shane, I'm sorry. Amy and Shane Burrish. And they are from the... Oh, we're from Spanish. We're from H. People are from the... From the commission for the blind and digitally impaired, which is the state agency. And they're going to talk to us about assistive technologies to the blind and visually impaired. And Dave Ortley, who is the director of talk and booking rail services of the library commission, is also here and he'll also be contributing content. So without any further ado, let me go ahead and turn it over to them. Go ahead. Thank you, Susan. I wanted Amy and Shane to tell us some things about themselves to begin with.  Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here. I have been blind for my whole life. And so I'm a longtime borrower of books and several formats now over the years from Braille to cassette and record back in the day. And now the digital downloads from the talking book and Braille service. I have a degree in psychology, sociology and criminal justice from Pre-State College. Shane is my husband and we have a three-year-old little boy named Noah. All right. And I'm Shane Burrish. And I also am totally blind and have been since birth. I used to have a little bit of vision growing up, but I've always been a borrower of the talking book and Braille service materials since I was in probably the first grade like Amy. We were reminiscing before this conference started. We go back to the record and flexi disc days and now all the way up through the cassette books and on into the digital download, which we now do. I also went to Peruse State College. I am an educator, so I hold Nebraska certificates in teaching math, special education, and I'm also a certified teacher of what is called blind or visually impaired students. It's just kind of a specification under our specific population of kids. But I work at the Nebraska Commission for the Blind as was said before as a home teacher. We call them orientation counselors, but essentially what that means is if any of you out there know someone who's blind or visually impaired, we can come out and help them to be independent through learning skills or sometimes acquiring equipment and things like that. And Amy also works at the commission. She is a rehabilitation counselor. And so we also work with people who have lost their vision or who are losing their vision in the area of their vocational needs. So helping them to find employment or perhaps retrain if they've been an over the road truck driver and we don't have any techniques that would get a blind person to do that kind of thing. You know, sometimes it's a matter of reach training and those kind of things. But what we're really here today is, and I'll turn it back over to Dave, is to talk to you about some of the ways that blind people can access print and things. Thank you, Shane. We have a number of gadgets that Shane and Amy brought with them to demonstrate and to talk about something called the KNFB reader is first on the list. So why don't you show what that is and we'll talk about it. Sure. The KNFB reader is... Well, at first it stands for Kurzweil, which is Raymond Kurzweil, in partnership with the National Federation of the Blind, which is the oldest and largest consumer group of blind individuals speaking and organizing for themselves. And so it was a partnership that developed this really cool piece of technology. Yes, I don't know if any of the libraries out there, any of the people in the audience have ever had the Kurzweil reading machine. It was big. It was big. It was probably the cabinet. It was like a General Xerox machine. Right. And that was, I believe, invented in like 1974. It cost a fortune to... It certainly did. One of the side benefits of that, it was invented by, as Amy said, Raymond Kurzweil. And that machine is the predecessor to the device that I have in front of me now. But it essentially invented the whole idea of optical character recognition, or OCR, which we use in pretty standard, not only in the blindness field, but in your day-to-day office setting or library setting where you're scanning print and turning it into electronics. So that technology was actually invented in 1974 for that reading machine. And it was the idea that you could take pictures of print and then have a database inside that could turn them into the text that they were and it would know what that was. And then the next step was to then verbalize that through a synthesizer. And you can see that over the years it went through several generations, but it's now down to a piece of software that's put inside of a Nokia phone. So this is really a standard Nokia N82 phone that you can do all the functions of the phone, especially if you put an extra piece of software on which this one does not have. Then you can read all the menus and do your internet browsing and text messaging and all those things. On this current one here, I just currently have the piece of reading software, which is the Kurzweil Technologies inside of it. So I've started the phone, as you may have heard earlier, and now I'm going to boot up this software. Did you want something to photograph? Here's a print. Here would be one on... These are pieces of printed material that Dave's provided.  We haven't seen this before. This is the asset text right here.  I'm going to make sure that I... From living well magazine to give them due for credit. Okay. The first Kurzweil reader I saw was a large piece of furniture. The second one I saw was something that was half-holdable and it was probably like a fair size camera. The one that Shane has was fitting in your pocket. Yeah. Because it's a Nokia phone essentially that's been modified. Yeah. Have we gotten a decent picture of it? Let me move the camera a little bit. Okay. Yeah, I think. Yeah, we have. All right. Yeah. So I'm going to fire this up here. That's our theater model. I'm going to plug this into... Instead of external speakers is all I'm doing. So if we get a better volume out of this thing. Hopefully anyway. All right. So I'm just going to... Does this slide pretty much text Dave? Yes, it is. Okay. It's mostly text. One of the things I am totally blind and one of the things that is really cool about this is that Dave could have handed me this magazine upside down. This software not only converts stuff into text and then into the speech, but it also can correct for all kinds of errors since the person might be totally blind and have the text upside down in those kind of things. We literally just kind of are snapping. We're using the digital camera feature that the phone already has and we're going to snap a photo of this page. Take a picture. And once that flash has gone, I can literally... I'm sent a picture of both articles and labels format. I can allow the reader to go ahead and interpret what it saw. It's told me that I had a two degrees of rotation which would tell me if I had chopped off maybe some of the text in, you know, at the margins. The counselor can assist older adults by answering questions and referring them to service providers for various needs including in-home services, long-term care, funding options, information on Medicaid, whether certified facilities are Medicare part of the... and a number of other items. Go ahead and finish it. Finish out its sentence there. There were just a few errors in there.  Also can deal with liability and this is kind of a glossy material too. You have another sample of something, Dave, we can... but you can see for the most part it is fairly error-free, really. This is a book, University of Nebraska, called Passion and Principle. It's the story of John and Jesse Fremont, the Fremont Nebraska fame.  Now it does have a fold in the book. That should be okay. That should be all right. Okay, let's see how that sounds. Yeah, less graphics. Tricky part sometimes. One of the things I do to correct for that error, that rotation error is you will see I'm actually kind of tactually lining the camera up on the book before I go ahead and raise it. And I'm going to go ahead and snap the photo here. Cancel again. Ready. It's still wanting to read the previous photo we took. There we go. It should work now. Take a picture. So while I'm pressing that, I'll kind of explain... The power of this machine, too, is that we can, like Dave said, take this in our pockets somewhere. We can also take pictures of text in any direction. So that could be a plaque on the wall or a sign on a door since it is so mobile. That's what gives it power over like a flatbed scanner that you might also scan this book on. So it... The path of my current is life 1840 to 1844. End of the med set off with it. TL with the middle AD of the stake and only median was at 13,500 on the measured C-HG-L second. Yeah, I didn't do very good with that page. It's 14%. Processing canceled. You can adjust it as you have the time. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't matter what kind of typeface you're using. Not really. It cannot do handwritten materials. It doesn't need to be text. It can compensate for a lot of fonts. I would say the closer to your standard aerials and things like that. Aerials, time through all my aerials, the more standard book of fonts. Yeah. It does have software, as part of the software inside it, it does try to compensate for colors. So we can also do things like labels on, you know, or packaging in the home, like cake mixes and things like that. You can try to read the directions and things. So it tries to compensate for contrast of different colors of print on different types of, you know, backgrounds and things of that nature. But as, you know, with most things in the OCR of our world, you know, the closer you get it to the standard black on white or white on black and standard fonts, it does do a little bit better. But it's certainly a device that I could see a library having so that a patron could sit down and, you know, browse through a book. You're not going to probably browse the shelves of books with it to find a book. That'd be two times as soon as you can tell how long it takes to recognize the text and things. But a person certainly can sit down with it or like in our own homes, we sort out our mail and throw away all the junk ads we get and stuff before our regroups come. And I know that's later in the presentation when we're going to talk a little bit about that. Now, the first time I saw a model like Black Shades, one of the problems came is that in my office, I wanted to show you this, so I did. And he was just thrilled because he said that I could read my own mail this way. I could read my medical bills and whatever. And this man had dyslexia. He wasn't blind. He had dyslexia, so he had a broader application in the blind hospital. Yeah, they're getting better all the time. Oh, by the way, in case you're saving your pennies, that's $1,599 is the listed price. They don't give it away, but it could be worse. Right, right. And it can be obtained from the National Federation of the Blind, which their website is nfb.org. We also have a company up in Omaha that is a distributor in Nebraska for this device, which is accessibility.net. And the man there is Patrick Fisher, is the owner of that company. So if you need more information about that, you can contact us at the commission, which I know will be giving out that information later for any of those dealers too. So by the way, if you have any questions, just bring them up as they occur to you because we want to keep moving and we'll lose you unless you ask your questions as they arise. Let's talk about the Victor Reader Stream. Okay. Got one of those too, huh, Shane? I do. You want to introduce that to me while I'm kind of switching cords here instead of them? Yeah, sure. The Victor Reader Stream has been next to the KNFB Reader probably one of the coolest inventions to come along in terms of giving us access to printed material and any kind of things in audio format. It's an accessible MP3 player, so a lot of students now have this and take it around their college campuses with a small SD card. You can have your music on there. You can have your textbooks, which you can download from recordings for the blind and dyslexic as well as books that are available for download through the NLS library system, which we'll talk about here in a minute. But I think you're able to see it there. It's a very, again, a very small piece of equipment.  We're still, you know, fairly good size. We had boxes of cassette books and, you know, lots of equipment. It was a lot of fast forwarding and rewinding. If your professors would go to page 200, you know, you'd have to look at a little Braille index that told you what cassette that it was on and pull that out of the box. And then fast forward till you heard a short beep, which meant the beginning of a page, was the beginning of a chapter. You know, so it was a very complicated process. I'm going to crash at the time for you, too, because the class hasn't done its job yet. That's right. And now with just a touch of a button, you can type in the keypad 200. It'll instantly take you to page 200. You can jump really easily by paragraph, by page chapter. So it's a very easy to use, very and less time consuming and you can navigate around in books as well. So it's a very, very cool piece of equipment. All right. Are you wanting me to also talk about the NLS project at this time, Dave, as I showed this? The website? Yes, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. Well, do you mean they barred? Yeah. Well, because I was going to show one of those books, I didn't know how you wanted to organize it. Welcome to the curator. Okay. This device... That's files. We choose by generation VRM. If you were able to hear it, you just heard an example of both types of the speech that this device has. Again, this is a very multi-purpose device. It has aspects of it where a pre-recorded human voice does the law of the descriptions of, you know, as you depress buttons and things like that. It uses an SD card inside of it, which is very, you know, standard today if you use a digital camera or anything like that.  The card I have in there now, I believe, is 16 gigs of information, which you can hold quite a bit. It could be like a whole library. It could probably have maybe 50 books or more on that. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Maybe more? Yeah. Maybe more. Because... And so the structure of this device is much like if you look at, you know, a directory on the computer through Windows Explorer or something. So there are pre-recorded sections that a human voice says, like talking books and music, podcasts, text, files, notes, et cetera, et cetera. But then once... So we can both do audio things like your iPod, you know. We can put music and all kinds of file formats on there. We can also do text though, which is what I was getting right now. And so that would be like a document that would come out from Microsoft Word, perhaps, or a person's email or, you know, any kind of electronic document. As long as you make it into a text file, it can be placed inside this Victor stream and read aloud. So that's really important for students today. Sometimes we can get electronic copies of textbooks and then they can be rendered into here and read with the synthesized voice. I'm going to give you a brief example of that right now. And it's going to be... It's a synthesized voice, so it's probably going to be pretty difficult to carry over the audio here, I'm sure. Okay. This was actually the book jacket from the John Gurcham novel Bleachers. And I didn't want to confuse things, but what is really cool is there is an aspect of the National Library Service Talking Book and Braille services, which is called Web Braille. And those are electronic Braille files. We'll probably talk about that later. But this was actually not only a text file that can be put in there, but it was actually a Braille file. And so this machine knows how to take the Braille and make it into speech as well. So what you discovered was synthetic speech, not human voice speech. Right. Now I'll give you, as I go through these folders, I'll go up to the Talking Book section on the Victor stream, where you could put both National Library Service audio books. And then I'll show you another folder where I have some audio books as well that are just, you know, standard from CDs or whatever, or you might get from one of those services, like Overdrive or something. Bookshelf, text files, 33D, books, 3D. Wait for speech confirmation to be up. Notes, forward. So now you're hearing human speech. On the books, 13, books, 1, commentary movie. Okay. Now, what I'm in now is the Talking Book section. This is an audio file that I digitally downloaded from the Library of Congress. The same books that we now get on cassettes and are converting to the digital format. Have you talked about that on these encompassed things before, Dave? We had a demo and we showed them the barred site. Okay. So, yeah, as of now, I was able to download those files and put them into this Victor stream. And then I have some degree of navigation. I'm actually going to go to the next book here because I have a little more navigation in there. How the states got their shapes. Okay. So, because these are, you know, the digital files from the audio books that NLS is doing, they're human voice. And we have all kinds of navigation capabilities very similar to what you would have, like on an audio CD's tracks where you skip from song to song. We call that daisy formatting. I don't recall what that acronym stands for. It's digital or something or other. Yeah. I have it written down. I can dig and find what it is. And so, essentially, like the chapters and the sections and the various paragraphs and things can all be navigated very easily. So, for the first time ever, we're able to really jump through the books much like a sighted person would. And I'll show that. This book that I'm going to give you a sample of is called How the States Got Their Shapes. And it's a text about that very thing. So, there are, you know, it's laid out by states and then sometimes subsections. And so, that'll give you a really good example of how if I wanted to look at, you know, why isn't Nebraska the way it is, I can jump through there very quickly much like you would be able to leave through with the print. And that's something we never had in the audio cassette days. Now, certainly, we could do that with Braille texts that we had, but we've never really been able to do that in the audio world before. That's our young brass. And it went all the way to Canada and west all the way to Pinejump. One, mid-level. Two, the Continental. Nebraska's western border. In 1863, Nebraska's northern border revisited.  If I go up to another level here, what they call level one, I actually would go by states. Now, go back to Nebraska. And why are Nebraska's northern, southern, and western straight-line borders located where they are? Great questions. Now, I want to give you a brief sample of just so you know the capability of these machines and how the typical person who's fairly experienced with them, like myself or Amy, would use them. I am reading at the natural rate that it would be if you put that file into the player or in other words, the same rate that the person was reading as they read aloud and it was recorded. But we have the capability within this machine to speed up the audio to do the equivalent of a person being able to speed, read and prevent. It's something we do a lot to get our overall reading rate and comprehension of when we're doing particularly materials in school or whatever. What is really awesome about this technology though is being digital, we can speed up the audio and keep the actual tone and pitch of the person's voice the same. In the cassette era, when we would do that, you were obviously turning the wheels of the cassette quicker and it would raise the pitch so we all got used to doing that but people would be like, why are you listening to your books like Mickey Mouse kind of thing? So I want to show you this briefly because you're not going to be able to understand it very well because the average person can't when they first hear this but I want to give you a taste of how I would actually read this book because right now it's very slow to me and it's kind of driving me crazy. So you can see how much more quickly we can cover a book by being able to do that. And students who are blind and learning to speed read like that and you still do some type of change. Absolutely. I remember my parents used to think you're not really doing your homework and that you're not really happy to get through it all. Days each down for digital accessible information system it's the system that covers all of the copyright protected books for the blind program. We would demonstrate Bard live but it's down today because it's left its pilot phase yesterday. Today's the down day. Tomorrow for Bard to reopen it as a permanent site, some enhancements and since October Bard has been attracted and signed up by I think 5700 people who use talking books. I'm 5700 people happy to buy their own players for instance and so they have that much invested in that so I think it's been a real success. It's a great, we're excited. It's going to take off so we'll be even more. Let's talk about Bookshare.org that's one of the sites we have on the market. It was started by Jim Fructerman and Mr. Fructerman was a rocket scientist that's the true story and he left that career and he started working with accessibility software he came up with Arkenstone scanners which was a scan and read system that dominated the field for I don't know maybe a decade perhaps and that was bought by Jim Scientific and with the ProCity he started the Bandit Tech Foundation which is this website and Bookshare is one of his programs under Bandit Tech. I want to talk about Bookshare one of you and we're seeing the site now. Right now, so the books are out there isn't it, but it talks about it a little bit. Do you want to or do you want me to? Okay. Yeah, essentially this is a really awesome concept that in the world of publishing stuff it's really great that I was able to come to fruition because essentially what has gone on here is that using some of the same copyright legislation and things where we're able to get access to things because they're in an accessible format people are able to share content with one another because they have to be signed up and proven that they have physical disability now we're mainly talking about blindness here today but Dave made a great point earlier that I kind of forgot to stress is that a lot of these devices are like the KNFB Reader the VictorStream are oftentimes used by people who just have they're sighted but they have print disabilities and that's a population I think we sometimes forget to acknowledge quite as often as we should for these kind of technologies but anyway essentially Bookshare is like it sounds there are thousands of books that are on the site that can be downloaded and used by the people who are subscribed to the service and again they have to qualify for that but what is really kind of revolutionary about it, particularly at the beginning of its time was that the share part of the Bookshare and that is using scan and read technology people were able to scan in books that they had in their own homes thereby contributing to the overall catalog that was available and it also there is a program by which if you contribute X number of books your subscription fee goes down and so on and so forth but what is really cool is the books are I believe pretty much all available in braille format and they're also available oftentimes in audio or that daisy type format which we showed you how you can navigate them and things so people are able to download the books they can print them out on embosters so that they get actual hard copy braille paper under their fingers they can be put into refreshable braille displays machines that have braille displays and or listen to and so the community has and this project has grown to the extent that they actually I believe they're a non-profit but they actually have a staff that go over the files if I'm in my house and I contribute a file I rate what quality I think it came out after it was recognized by the scanner and things but they have people like Google's files to try and clean them up a little bit it's a tremendous project that gets even more books into our hands now we're looking at a list of books we're seeing things like Black Beauty and some of the classics some of the more recent books are listed also so it includes the classics books, modern books there are 45,000 subscribers to Bookshare I think it's what 25 dollars set up and 50 to 50 dollars a month a year now there's the grants so that all students K through college are covered though yes they've received a grant from the Department of Education so any K through 12 or higher ed student can use the service for free while they're in that stage of their life and when you go down you can have a Braille file or Alstree has a synthetic speech one of those two and the files have gotten quite a bit better, the clean up the accuracy is near perfect now what does it mean I'm looking at a list of a say New York Times best seller and it has its author, the title and then there's an ensemble column and there's nothing is about the column I believe that and I could be wrong on this but I believe that's because we're not logged in as a subscriber so what it is is that allows a person well like many of the people probably listening to this who are live brains or something they could help a person resource whether a book is available on Bookshare but because you have to qualify with a print reading disability those links would appear in that column if you were logged in as a subscriber so the titles that we saw on the most popular list that did have different file formats that you could download will probably be the public domain why? I believe so people have to use a password they have to prove that they're they qualify because of the suitability they do pay the fee and then they have to use an ID and a password don't they so there is concern about the newer books under copyright so it is that they can comply with the shape of copyright provision Bookshare is up and coming it's um Mr. Traptoman is one of the great minds in this whole field of blindness absolutely when we move on to WebRail you mentioned that before we can bring up the NLF site I did want to pull out Railbook Preview see if I can hold it up you may know of talking book topics that is talked about a lot talking the topics lists of brand new books on an audio format from Library of Congress right now would be cassette I assume it will be flash digital cartridges as well as cassette well as counterpart is Railbook Preview the newest books in Rail and I did find so I wanted to see if we could just look up it would be the the NLF WebRail catalog site market to you did okay and that's the final call that should be on the screen NLF WebRail but I'm so used to typing and it will see that I mistyped it there it's easy to find just set your browser on National Library Service and when that page comes up click on search the catalog and that takes you right there anyways two easy steps and it will list all the books including Nebraska's own studio books it was to them that catalog yes try that that should do it alright under keyword I'm going to give you VR Spaced 17 455 there's a new book you see out for a book about global warming called Inconvenient Truth there it is it's in one volume and it yeah it was in two volumes so that book requires two volumes which means two downloads now Amy brought along a PacMate let's bring that into the conversation now and explain what that does and how that feeds them to to Braille PacMate is a essentially like a PDA or a poem pilot that you might use but it also has the capability to you know it has SD card slots that kind of thing so you're able to need all kinds of various materials on here it has a keyboard as you can see similar to a QWERTY laptop keyboard so it looks like that without the screen but it has a Braille display here it comes in 20 cell or 40 cell if you've got the 40 cell which is the equivalent of the size of a paper and you can navigate around here and then read the text on the Braille display and have books in here you can also use the synthesized speech capability that it has drives me insane I prefer to just I've been reading Braille since before kindergarten so I very much prefer the Braille and the speech kind of drives me a little nuts so I turn it off but the pac-mate has a number of applications including Braille display most people buy it because of the Braille display isn't that great yes and the Braille display is also detachable so for instance if the right equipment was there at the computer or went on a page and could maybe bring it into the library and you know connect the Braille display to a computer and have accessibility to some materials that way you can so Braille display is on their own if you were just to purchase a standalone Braille display is you know you're looking at probably I don't know between 6 to I mean 10,000 and this device is under 2400 listed so it's dropped down each piece of technology you know as as it is with most things you know you think back to even a lot of vcr cost you know back in the early 1980s to what they were just in a few years ago with the advent of DVD everything eventually goes down in price as it becomes more common and the same is true with all of these pieces of technology that we're showing you today they do decrease as time goes by now you can compose something a paper or a letter and save it and then you can read it back in Braille is that right? that's correct you can and you can then transfer that download it or send it to your PC most of the time what these pieces of equipment we call them note takers what they're really the best for is writing down brief notes kind of getting maybe the outline of a paper or something but I probably wouldn't do the whole editing and all of the work on here because it does have internet capability on here as well but it's slow and kind of limited so it certainly does not take the place of a PC or laptop or that kind of device but it does give you some more options to begin the work I would probably do the fine-tune editing especially as a student on the computer but it does allow you to do that there's a calculator on here a clock stopwatch and you can listen to books and as well as read them can you download a book from the NLS Web site a Braille book and read it on a Braille display? yes you can and with what we do is we download it into an SD card like we have in the Victor stream now and you can place it in here it has a place for an SD card on the top or something it does yeah the web Braille files that you download are obviously electronic but they're also Braille files meaning they've been ran through a special program that has converted them into the Braille code so if you had a string of text you know it's been translated we call it into the Braille code so those files that are downloaded from the NLS Web Braille can very well immediately be put onto a card and then read one line at a time but still in a hard copy Braille format just as if you actually have the physical books in front of you they can also be though embossed out from the computer so you can actually have that file that you downloaded from the NLS Web Braille you can actually emboss that out onto paper if you have a specialized embosser which is essentially the Braille equivalent of a printer we call it embossing since it's making a tackle marking on the paper but we often don't do that because it's like this book looked up the others to do volume so I'm guessing that would be probably two or three hundred Braille pages we often wouldn't necessarily do that unless we wanted to keep it or something but we would probably prefer to read it on a device like the PacMate electronically and it has this basic issue as well and you can put it more portable this way and the PacMate is just one device there are a couple of others Braille Note which is made by Humanware and then the Braille Sense which is made by a company called GDW Micro and so they're all essentially for those of you who this all seems to have for and to they literally in terms of the guts for the brain of it they literally are PDAs or like your you know eye packs or your palm pilot style devices and so that's what Amy was getting at is you know somebody wouldn't sit down and compose a novel on their eye pack using a stylus so even though this has a keyboard and it's a little bit easier to get information into it it's still for computing power and things it's essentially just a handheld PDA it just looks larger it doesn't have a stylus so we mentioned the Braille Sense the Braille Note and the PacMate they're just kind of like Ford and Chevy you know they're just different brands different versions of similar things with a few different features but you know having been one for our whole lives it's really nice to see now that there is some competition and some choice where they're used to not be as much you kind of had one company one product to work with and now you are able to make choices about what's going to be the best for you so that's very exciting as well. That's one of the changes that we've seen in the last maybe decade. How about in the Newsline and it has a related program called Newsline in your pocket. Newsline has been around since late 1990s we got Newsline in Nebraska in 1999 it was a dream a long time dream of Dr. Kenneth Jernigan who was a long time president of the National Federation of the Blind to make newspapers easily accessible to the blind and for us to be able to read them when we wanted to and be able to navigate around jumping by sections articles paragraphs just as a sighted person would and you skim the paper every day so it started out as a service free to those again that qualify who are blind or visually impaired with a reading disability and you call a toll free number it was helpful if you had a speaker phone and the service is still available and just with the pushing buttons on your touch down phone you're able to jump around papers and navigate through them as I said in Nebraska started in 1999 we had three papers originally USA Today, Washington Post and I think then we got the Lincoln Journal Star very early now we have five Nebraska papers that are available Omaha World Tarot Lincoln Journal Star and Nebraska Associated Press is available and the UPI too but since the days of just using your touch down phone we've again sort of grown with the technological times and you can download papers and put them on your victory stream which I'm going to show you as well as a new cool website feature as well yeah we can as Amy was saying before the advent of news line where you could do the paper over the phone we had these still exist but the only way for a blind person to really get the daily newspaper was through a radio reading service and so that's like it sounds someone would read the paper again this does still exist and it serves a great market and a great purpose but one of the issues with that is that for folks like ourselves who you know are working 8-5 we're often not available when that paper is being read because you had a radio device sorry I interrupted but you had a radio device you had to turn it on you had to be there at that prescribed time when it was scheduled for that reader to read it and then the other thing with that too was that sometimes they would not read the entire paper they would just read selected articles or sessions so you still weren't necessarily getting the whole content and things that you may want to read out of the paper yeah and so that's where the concept of really on demand 24-7 came about and again we're talking about when we're saying phone or now what we have in front of you the website we're talking about synthesized speech again is the actual delivery so a person doesn't have to kind of get used to that synthesized speech so yeah the two new ways to deliver the newspapers and by the way there are 280 papers from across the nation so we highlighted the Nebraska ones but anyone who is on NFB Newsline does or is eligible to read from all the papers from all the other states so there are also some periodicals too like the AARP magazine and a few others but this web interface is really really good because of the for several reasons people say well you know there's a lot of papers now have websites you could go to thejournalstar.com and read that or the Carney hub or the Denver Post or whatever and that is very true even for a blind person we have things called screen readers and we can do that but there's a lot of extraneous stuff as you know on websites and since this content has already been approved by the papers to be delivered to this newsline service the web interface for this is very clean it's literally just the headline and then the article in a really straight text format so people with low vision or like ourselves no vision listening to it we're able to use our screen readers and browse the paper in a very straightforward manner where we oftentimes a lot of people get kind of clogged up in the traditional websites and then the other device or service that's now new on here is NFB newsline in your pocket and what that refers to is a device like again like the Victor stream here that we used earlier basically what that is is that's a piece of software that you install one time on your computer and then you can designate up to six newspapers that are your favorites that you might read from every day and you connect up this Victor stream through a USB cord just like you'd use on a camera or any other device and it literally goes on to the web and grabs your favorite papers and pulls them into the SD card on the Victor stream or there's a couple of other players that will do that as well but anyway I did that before I left my office today I'm going to go back up to this little here I'll go to the Lincoln Heart Star here associated six moving in journals star on life through out 8K criminal 12 26 2009 moving in journals star on life through out 8K criminal 12 2009 I'll slow this down a little bit because I had sped it up to that other book speed speed 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 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So, let me welcome you to IIT Bombay. Many of you would have visited us earlier. How many of you were coordinators in the first workshop that Prasiddharshan conducted sometime ago? Is there anybody from that group here? One, two, three, four, very few. How many of you have attended the first course on databases Prasiddharshan conducted that was again two years ago. One good thing is most of you are new to this game. So, which means you have left to be learned. Let me first introduce the context. As all of you are aware, you are here as coordinators for a workshop which will be conducting for ten thousand teachers. You would have read much about this program very briefly. We conducted thousand teacher training programs for several years. Our model being that these thousand teachers assemble at specified remote centers which are 30, 40, 50, engineering colleges such as yours. In the main workshop, the lectures are given from IIT Bombay in an interactive mode using a view and the local laboratories and tutorials etcetera are conducted for those 30, 40 teachers assembled at a remote center and this conduct is supervised by workshop coordinators. Now, the workshop coordinators are like teaching associates to the main teacher. This is a practice which IITs follow for almost 40 years, 50 years that I have been here. So, for example, when I taught my first course in computer programming as a young teacher, almost all my colleagues including my own head were my teaching assistant. That is the privilege that we have and we found that that thing works well. The point is that teaching associates also require some inputs as to how to conduct the labs, how to conduct the tutorials etcetera etcetera. Now, earlier when we used to have 30 or 40 remote centers, it was relatively easy, but last year as you are aware, we scaled up our efforts to try and train ten thousand teachers at a time. Ten thousand is a figurative number, could be six thousand, it could be twelve thousand, but basically a scale of order of magnitude larger scale. That is what is being attempted. We conducted the first course in this modified structure in December in thermodynamics, which Professor Uday Gaitondhani's colleagues conducted. What you will be helping to conduct will be the second such course in the series. We are required to conduct fifteen such workshops over the next three years, training one lakh fifty thousand teachers. The responsibility that all of you have is enormous. Approximately ten thousand teacher colleagues of ours from across the country will be interacting with all of us, primarily with you in your respective colleges and it is extremely important to try and motivate them to do a much better job of quality education provision for our students. That is the objective. The exact methodology that is adopted is well documented. Professor Sudarshan will explain the process a little bit more, but in this first session I thought I will share with you some of my ideas in general about the way the education is moving forward and in particular I would like to state a few things about the importance of data management. Not just the database management system per se, which is the technical component that you will be all perfecting within yourself and also helping others to perfect, but the impact of the database management system in the larger plan of things in the world. Let me begin with the basic problem that all of you are aware of. How many of you have studied Indian demography, the age distribution, all of you are familiar with that? How are the Indians? How old are the Indians on an average? How long will they live? How many are young Indians still studying? No idea. So, I begin with a suggestion that while all of us, each one of us in fact, is a teacher in a specific area, specific field and working for a specific institution. Because we belong to an institution called teachers, it is important for us. It is expected of us by the society that we are in general aware of all problems inflicting education in the country. And the beginning of that understanding will come when we are aware of the huge scale and the challenge that that scale poses. At least all of you are familiar with the population of the country, no confusion there. So, about 1200 million, give or take a few million. The median age of the nation, what is the median age? Close to 25 years. We are all older than 25 years, barring may be one or two, I do not know. That means half the country, more than half the country is younger than us. The number of people in the age group of 0 to 19 is more than 370 million, 370 million Indians. This is larger than the population of most countries. These 370 million young Indian brothers and sisters of ours seek good quality education and they are not getting it today. A majority of them give up after the high school education. Those who attend college of any kind beyond high school is a small percentage of the total people who qualify in high school. That percentage is called gross enrollment ratio. Have you heard this term? Gross enrollment ratio is the percentage of qualified people who are qualified to attend college but who actually attend college. The gross enrollment ratio for college education in most advanced society is upward of 60 percent. In India the current gross enrollment ratio is 18 percent, about 6 years ago it was only 11 percent. That means only 18 percent of people eligible to go to college actually go to college and I am talking about college in general. You are familiar with the state of education in all colleges. Since the education quality is not very good, people flock around to professional courses hoping that they will be able to make a better living etc. by getting a professional degree. Most of you are teachers in Indian colleges. You know the kind of mara mara that happens for Indian college admission, specifically in good colleges etc. The percentage of those 18 percent who go to the college of that 18 percent, how many come to Indian colleges you can calculate, very small percent. The nation proposes to increase this gross enrollment ratio to 30 percent by 2020. That is almost twice the number that we have today, twice. That means the number of colleges, number of universities have to be doubled in next 7 years, doubled. Can you imagine that? In next 7 years. It is a near impossible task. So this is the context. Good primary school education, good secondary school education and good college education and good professional education is an urgent requirement of the nation. The fact that the nation has so many young people is considered a demographic advantage. No other nation has it. Even the Chinese demography is slightly skewed towards older people. Western civilizations are all old civilizations, old nations. But this great demographic advantage can become a disadvantage if we are unable to educate our young. There will be chaos in the society subsequent. So what you and we together deal with is a tip of the iceberg, the engineering college students. And even there if we are unable to give quality education, if we are unable to teach professionals a better way of doing things, then this better way of doing things will not percolate down in the society. Engineers do not represent only an educational dimension which is professional in nature. They also represent a professional education which will permit them to generate societal wealth in a non-linear fashion. You are familiar with the fact that the smarter people and the professional people generally contribute to larger share of wealth generation for themselves, for their families and for the society. And that is why it is important for you people to ensure that your students learn not just one subject wealth, but learn the entire engineering education, science education, holistically understand the context of wealth generation for which this knowledge has to be deployed. And therefore, imbibe the best professional practices while they are studying. So this is the larger context. I would only like to mention that if you examine the education that goes on in our colleges, including IIT system, you will find that every step there is a possibility of improvement, there is a possibility of improvement. In the IIT system because we are completely autonomous, we take upon ourselves to upgrade the syllabus, to upgrade the teaching methods, to enhance the work that we give to the students, to engage the students by giving them more and more challenging problems. We would like all of you to tell our teacher colleagues later that that is what they have to invite. Very often I am told that people have to teach as per the syllabus and the exam system is all standardized in the university. I entirely agree with you. But let me ask you one question. Does it prevent me as a teacher? I imagine I am a teacher in a small town called Jharsakuda. There is a rule book which says this is the university exam. Does this system, does my college prevent me from doing the following? Does it prevent me on my own in studying some research papers? I might independently want to do it because I am pursuing PH. Does it prevent me from calling students in the evening and on Saturdays, Sunday to my college saying forget the system. Those of you are interested in solving challenging problems, I will spend two hours on every Sunday. There are teachers among us who do that regularly by the way. And those teachers who do that, their students benefit non-linear. There are two things that we will have to do friends. One, we will have to change the present system of affiliation, somebody teaching, somebody else setting paper and somebody else examining. That does not work. We will have to change that. But till such time that the system changes, we will have to use the very system and use whatever we can do additionally to buttress that system, to make that system better and more fruitful for students. Most of us are sensitive teachers. We will generally take care of people who are not doing well in a class. That is standard. The poor students will come to us, will engage extra classes, something, something. We will of course teach the bulk of students as per the university syllabus. There is one point that I would like to make which you might want to consider. What do we do for the smarter children in our class? Forget all other majors. The common major of quizzes, tests, examinations, CPI, percentage of marks. Okay, good, bad or ugly. That is a mechanism which sort of filters out the relatively smarter people, the relatively more committed people, the relatively more diligent people up in the class. There will be at least 10 or 15 such students in every class that you teach. Do you agree? Now, here is a question that I would like to ask you. What spatial thing do you do every semester for those 15? The point is we generally don't because it is presumed that those 15 are smart enough. They will take care of themselves. The point is we want them to take care of the society tomorrow and we want them to take care of themselves much better. And therefore, I submit to you that they deserve to be paid a special attention. They deserve to be challenged with something which is not in the syllabus. They deserve to be exposed in a much greater fashion because they are more capable. They can perhaps put in their mind to solve more complex problems. I was just wondering what is it that IITs do differently and I found this, that whenever in our classes we have some people who look to be different, we generally will engage them and challenge them with harder problems. This happens intrinsically so it is not documented anyway. But I have realized that this does not happen in other colleges at all. Barring a few, one or two teachers in every college somewhere on one's own whims and fancies, one does it. But it is not a part of the system. I am recommending to all of you that we should imbibe this practice of challenging the smarter students in the class with harder problem and outside the conventional examination system if necessary. Because that will help the entire ethos of the class to go up because these students do not work in isolation. They have friends. They will talk to others. They will say I am being given this hard problem. We are struggling with this problem etc. I think that is an ethos. Why I mention this to you? Through you, I want the 10,000 teachers who will come just to learn and teach database management system to imbibe this philosophy. That A, they have to spend far more time on their students than what they either to have been doing and B, they have to specially take care of the smarter people and the people who are at the bottom. The average of the class will take care of it. I would very quickly like to mention the changes in the entire education pattern that is happening. So far our teaching learning and all of us have gone through the same process revolves around the following activities. In the beginning of a semester, I am allocated a course during the summer months or whatever I prepare to give lectures. My primary task is to give lectures, 30, 40, 50 lectures in a semester. My associated task is to conduct labs and assignments and conduct tests and examinations. And finally there is an examination which as I said somebody else sets up the paper and conduct it. It creates an ethos where the interaction between me and my students is very limited. During the class teaching if I ask some questions or some soon ask some question that is the interact. Why is this done? It is done because it is a show that it is important for a student to listen to a lecture or series of lectures by a teacher to understand some. Consider today's technological age. The lectures from the best teachers in every subject are available now in a pre-video recorded format. You are aware of NPTEL courses, process solution's own course, the previous thing when he had given all the video recorded lectures are there. We are going to record these lectures here again. Now, suppose I again put myself back into that Jharsugula college. I am a teacher there. I use process solution book to teach. Now, I say that look process solution himself is teaching. Those lectures are available. So, why should I force myself on my student? I may be a good teacher, but I am certainly not as good as professor Sudarshan. So, if his lectures are available, why can't I tell my students? Let us watch professor Sudarshan's lecture on normal life. We are actually in the process of recommending to the government that up to 25 percent of the lectures can be actually delivered by the expert lectures which are pre-recorded. This should be permitted for that. The problem with the government is the government says if that happens, then a teacher like you in Jharsugula will simply sit like this and say what? So, does it absolve me from my duty? In my opinion, it actually increases my job. What is my job? Now, I will say you listen to professor Sudarshan's lecture, but then we will engage in problem solving. We will engage in discussion. This is called flipping of the lecture or flipping of the classroom where people attend lectures at their homes and come to the classroom for tutorial and lab discussion. You will notice that in this particular workshop, professor Sudarshan has arranged the timetable such that there are very few lectures, but most of them are lab sessions and discussions. We expect in the coming years this is how professional education will evolve. So, in conclusion, I would say that the role of the teachers is going to be actually more important in coming years, but that role is going to be more and more engaging with students, discussing with students, solving their problems and helping them understand and imbibe a particular course or subject very well in their minds. All of this is easily understood. There is only one problem, solving their problems. Now, again I put myself into the shoes of a teacher in Jharsugula and if I have to solve people's problems, I will not be able to solve those problems unless I have solved at least 100 of them myself. When I taught the first course in programming for teachers, I inquired how many lines of code teachers have written themselves. Very few lines of code. In a practical course of this nature of any engineering course, in fact, unless a teacher has darted his or her hands, I do not think a teacher is fully prepared to solve all the problems that arise in students. Even after teaching for 40 years when I taught CS 101, I wrote at least 200 programs in the summer before that and not 10 line or 100 line programs. Several of them were 2000 line, 2500 line programs. It is only then I get a level of comfort and confidence in my own mind that yes, any problem raised by any student I would be able to solve. So, friends, this is very hard work. I am sure since you are all coordinators of the workshops, many of you would have at least done this, but those of you who have not done that, I would sincerely advise that please imbibe this philosophy of darting your hands. So, for example, if I have to ask a question on or forget me, if a student has to ask me a question, sir, I do not get the left outer join correctly. Now, I will not, if I do not know, of course, I will say absolutely, I do not remember this, I will read and come back, but ideally I should have written at least two or three square scrapes which do an outer join and which do an outer join for solving a specific application problem. It is this a thought that I would like you to imbibe first in the next seven days and you would like, I would like you to help all of us to these 10,000 teachers to imbibe. Information processing is vital in the society. It has always been vital. It is becoming increasingly more critical. And when people like us teach students data management, which is a larger problem than just database management system, as I said, we are actually trying to make them understand how efficiently, effectively and affordably handle a lot of information. Meaningful information handling by groups of people is a requirement. On the other hand, Indian ethos is such that in general return articulation and in particular awareness of the other people's need or how the information should be presented, lack very much in our society. You would all be familiar with student submissions. You say, you say, assignment five, please upload on the model. How many fives do you get which have a name, assignment five? I get at least 50 in a class of 500, 10 percent. Now, if I get assignment five, assignment five, assignment five, assignment five, how do I know whose assignment it is? I ask my staff to scan some documents and they, every day some documents are to be scanned. Every day I get fives. Scan one, scan two, scan three, scan four. I have 500 scan ones, 700 scan tools. I can't make any sense of all of you would have faced this problem. Now, how many of you have announced in a class, not only in your class, but in general for all Indian college students, that whenever you submit any file online, any digital file online, this should be the convention for naming that file. Without that, if you submit a file, it will be rejected. We never do that. I am giving this as a simplest example, which all of you can appreciate. But I want you to appreciate the real reason behind this problem. The real reason behind this problem is when I submit a file to my teacher, I am completely unaware of that teacher's requirement of having to handle 100 students. I am looking at it only from my perspective. And this is the typical Indian problem. We look at any piece of information only from our individual perspective. We don't look at it from the general perspective. So, when you teach database management systems, please also emphasize data management and please also emphasize some mundane simple common sense rules of terms which must be followed. And these common sense rules of terms, they are not in the syllabus, you see. There is no question in any examination. He says, please, this is the description of the contents of a file. Please suggest file name. We don't ask such question, because that is not in the syllabus. That is not in the examination part. I am elaborating this simple example just to tell you that there will be hundreds of such examples that you can construct. But if you start thinking like this, you are all experts in databases. How are the attributes names by named by students in their database design? How are the abbreviations formed? Are the attribute names meaningful? Can people make sense out of those attribute names? X, Y, P4, 1, 2, 3 is not a meaningful attribute name. When you automatically generate database schema from such tools, such funny names may come. But when people design attributes, name is an attribute. In one table, the name may make sense. But if there are five tables, each one has name with different connotation. Somewhere it is a person's name, somewhere it is a subject name. The name is name. How many of us have come across this? And yet, how many of us have not taken pains to ensure that in our lectures, the first lecture will actually emphasize this point. Listed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This is not to be done in this course. That is what my friends is teaching. Teaching is not just giving knowledge. Young students are at least as smart as we are if they are not smarter. They can all learn on their own. The best lectures as I said are available. Our role, therefore, is increasingly more complex. Our role is to tell people, invite them to think about such attendant practical and theoretical problems, which will make the knowledge richer and more beneficial. Now, if we have to reach the students, finally, we have to reach the teacher. And I'll conclude by saying that these 250 people who are assembled here have an extraordinarily important role to play. Please remember one thing. The 10,000 teachers are not coming to IIT. They are coming to your colleges. They are not going to see Professor Sudarshan face to face or any other teachers who teach them face to face. They are seeing them face to face on video, but they will not be able to interact as freely as they would interact with you in the afternoon. And please remember one thing that happens in IIT. When I teach a course here and I have, let's say, 20 course associates, then for my 500 students, those 20 course associates are my direct representative. They see in each one of them me. They expect in each one of them the same capability, same dedication, same answering that they expect from you. Therefore, are the direct incarnations of Professor Sudarshan in your courses. That's a very heavy responsibility.  I know the kind of tough job he does and expects. But the point is, it is also a great honor to be in that position. It's also a great honor for all of us to be in that position where we are the teaching associates for a course conducted by none other than Professor Sudarshan. And therefore, if I were you, I would remember the following. I am a workshop coordinator. My job, therefore, is not merely to conduct the workshop well. My job is to represent Professor Sudarshan in my college. My job is to interact with those 30 teachers who assemble in my college exactly the way Professor Sudarshan would have interacted with them, working with them in the labs, being available, discussing in the evening, during tea breaks, in the nights. That is my job. It is a tough job, but I will tell you it's a very enjoyable job. And I will also tell you that those 30, 40 teachers who assemble in your colleges, if they see you doing this, they will not only benefit, but they will be grateful eternally, because they will be carrying back something far more than just the knowledge. Please understand that knowledge is already encapsulated in the book and that book is almost followed by most of the institution. So, it is not per se the knowledge that we are looking at. It is the ability to grasp that knowledge, dissect that knowledge, understand it in various contexts, correlate it to solve different problems. That is the objective. And you are the people who are our representatives. Well, there is a lot that I can speak on, but the nation is making a retrived attempt to put back the education, the proper level of quality and the proper level of skill. It will take next 7 to 10 years. Precisely during these 7 to 10 years, things are going to change drastically in the educational framework, as I told you. More and more students are going to directly listen to the lectures. And therefore, the role of teachers is going to be in engaging the students in solving problems, discussions, motivating them, etcetera. And that is what I would like you to emphasize to these 10,000 teachers. Please remember one thing, the 10,000 teachers, they will come to your centers. They may ostensibly be teaching only the database management system course.  So, for example, if I am a teacher attending that workshop and when I go back, I not only learn about databases, but I learn about different ways of life that the teacher has to spend. And I will talk to my colleagues in other disciplines. I will share with them the benefits that I get while teaching a course to my students. So, this is how the ethos will spread. There is a subject. There is a syllabus. There is a learning and examination system. And there is an ethos. There is an environment of learning that subject. It is that environment which I submit is slightly different in IIT system because it has evolved differently. And we would like you to imbibe that ethos when you are here for the next seven days and spread it both among your colleagues in your colleges as well as in the 10,000 teachers who come to us. Of course, our prime responsibility is those 10,000 teachers. Make a difference to those 10,000 teachers and I tell you, you would make a definite difference to the quality of education in this country. Thank you very much. God bless you.


Hi guys, welcome to my channel, I am Arapata Karwa and in this video lecture I am going to talk about how you can make your own timetable if you are preparing for UGC net English. Now let's first look at why making a timetable is important, guys it is important because of several reasons. Reason number one is that it will take randomness away from your life.  The second benefit from making a timetable is that it will help you to save your time and it will help you in organizing your preparation. See guys, it's not about working hard, it's about working smart. There are so many people who work hard but successful people work smart. So if you want to be a successful man and if you want to clear this exam in first attempt, then it is important that you make a timetable so that it will save your time. You will be able to give enough time to the important areas and you will be able to give lesser time to the less important areas. If you don't make a timetable, you will somewhere feel that important areas neglected, lesser areas may have devoted a lot of time and energy. So that is the major use of making a timetable or a study schedule for that matter. Now let's look at how you can make a timetable. It will depend upon five factors. These are the factors that I have thought it might differ from a factor that you identify. If you identify some other factor, then do write that in the comment section below so that it can help other people as well. According to me, your timetable will depend upon five factors. Factor number one is that it will depend upon the time available to you. For example, if you are preparing for a net exam in which you just have two months, so your strategy would be different. If you are preparing for a net exam in which you have four months, the strategy would be different. And if you are aiming to give net in the next year, that means you have about an year or six months in order to prepare for net, then the strategy would be different. See guys, it's IPL season so it's better if I give you a metaphor which can be related to cricket. Just like if a team wants to chase about two twenty runs in twenty hours, then their strategy would be different. And if the same team has to only make one fifty runs, their strategy would be different. Okay. So similarly, it totally depends upon the time available to you.   But if you are pursuing your MA from distance learning and you have a lot of time, then you have to devote more time and you will be able to complete the course relatively earlier.  So your study timetable will differ according to that. And if you are not doing anything, you are done with your masters and now your whole focus is on clearing the net exam, then you have everything in your hands. The third important factor on which your timetable will depend is your personality type. Guys, everybody is different in their own way and everybody studies in a different manner. For example, I am a kind of person who can study for 16 hours at a stretch. And I'm not kidding, friends. That is a God gifted thing to me. Whenever I do my note making thing, I can study for a stretch of 16 hours without taking more than two or three breaks for lunch and dinner or something like that. Okay, but there are people who need frequency break. Okay, then it will also depend upon whether you can study better in the morning or you can study better in the evening. It's about this theory called midnight owl.  Do you retain more in the morning or do you study more in the night? It will depend upon that. It will also depend upon what kind of study method do you use? Do you study individually or you study in a group? If you study in a group, then your time and your timetable will vary according to the group members. I used to always study in my secluded room and I used to study alone. So my timetable would only depend upon me. So personality type also plays an important role in preparing a timetable. The fourth important thing on which your timetable will depend is the level of preparation. If you have already given net exam and you have like prepared almost the entire course, then you might give less number of hours and you will might devote more hours on revision rather than on making notes. If you're attempting this net for the first time or for the second time and you still think that you have to cover a lot of syllabus, then your study timetable will have more time devoted to making notes and learning things and less time to revising them. The fifth and the last important factor on which your study timetable will depend is the source from which you are studying. If you are studying on your own, you're doing self-study, then you have to devote a lot of time and understanding things in making notes in learning and then revising. This is the kind of graph that will move. If you are preparing the course from like some online course, like if you subscribe and join my online audio course, then I will tell you very clearly that you have to just devote six hours every day or five hours every day, two and a half to three hours to listen to the audio lectures and keep on writing down the pointers that will help you in making your own notes and that will help you in learning and retaining things and it will also help you in understanding concepts. So all the understanding, learning, making notes will happen in two and a half hours, two, three hours because I upload audios of about two to three hours every day. Now, my role ends and your role starts. Your role is to learn those things because learning is something which is very personal to each and every person. I've already made videos on how to make notes. I've made videos on how to learn effectively. You can refer to that videos on my YouTube channel. So that is what it will depend on. If you have joined any coaching institute, then your timetable would vary according to their classes. If they have their classes in the morning, then every day in the morning you have to go to the classes in the evening and you have to make notes and then you have to learn. If they are having their classes in the evening, then in the morning you have to learn and revise. So it depends. I started with this online course because I wanted to give flexibility to each and every student. In spite of the fact that they are involved in other activities, every day a person can at least take out five hours from their daily routine in order to study for UGC Net. So you can listen to my audio lectures anytime, anywhere. You can keep on writing down the pointers. And then once you're done with the pointers, you can just learn those pointers and you are through. And after every seventh day or eighth day, you can just revise whatever you've learned in the entire week. So this is how we go about with it. So now, since we have looked at why timetable is important, why a study schedule is important, and how it will depend on majority of factors or on different factors, now let's look at how you can actually make a study timetable. And what all points you must remember if you are making a study timetable. So the first thing that you must remember when you're making a timetable for UGC Net English is that the order of importance of the topics in the exam. If you go to my website, arpathakarwa.com, you will find a list of modules in which I have divided the entire course. I have made 10 modules and they are organized from the order in which the first module is the most important and the last module is the least important. Order of importance is essential in order to keep in mind how much weightage each module has. For example, most of the questions are asked from British module. So you must focus more energy in learning about British writers. There are only a few questions which are asked from literary groups and movement, and very less questions asked from history of English language and English language teaching. So they are module 9 and 10 in my online course. If you are preparing for your exam, keep in mind that you take the important topics first and then you move towards the less important topics. Second important thing that you must keep in mind is the order of your weakness. Every person has some or the other weakness when we are preparing for any competitive exam. In English literature, some people struggle with literary theory and criticism. Others struggle with post-colonial literature. Some are really bad at rhetorics and prosody. So whatever is your weak point, you must devote some time in the morning every day in order to study the topics which are a part of the weak areas. Why in the morning? Because there's a book by Steven Kovey where he has said that eat the ugliest frog first.  It will be able to register more. It will be able to decode complex information. And it will be able to give its 100%. Deere deere jab din khatam hota hai apki brain ki energy deplete ho jaati hai. Like I was a very slow learner when it comes to maths. So whenever I used to study maths in the night or I used to study maths in the evening, I used to actually struggle understanding the concepts.  But whenever I used to do maths in the morning, I used to actually understand each and every concept. Also you must remember that in the initial months of your preparation, do give time to the weak areas. Because last months mein exam jab aane wale honge us time pe you will be so stressed out that you will not be able to actually devote enough time or you would not be able to put your 100% in the weak areas. And if you don't put your 100% in the weak areas, it would be really hard for you to attempt the questions from those areas. The third important thing that you must remember while making a study timetable is that you must focus on different subjects at the same time, different modules. That means you need to keep a combination of two or three subjects or two or three modules. Don't study only one topic, one age or one writer throughout the day, you will get bored very easily. That is why in schools we have periods which have different, different subjects in which we have been, you know, there's a period of 50 minutes of English, then the period shifts to maths, then to SST, then to science because our brain doesn't like monotony and if you keep on doing same thing, it will create monotony, it will create boredom and somewhere after two or three hours, you will lose interest and you will don't feel like learning anymore. Also you must remember that when you are making your study timetable, every time devote some time for your leisure and for your entertainment purpose also because somewhere our mind gets drained out when we are studying, so it is important to rejuvenate the mind as well. The fourth important thing that you must remember while you are making a study timetable is that you need to balance, have a balance between hard topics and easy topics. For example, if you try and take all the main romantic poets in one day, you will fail because words worth cold, rich kids, Byron, Shelly, all of them together in one day, it will create a havoc in your brain. So you need to balance. Take some major writers, some minor writers and then study them together so that your brain can balance important or less important information. Okay, so these are few things that you must keep in your mind if you are making a study timetable. Now I'll be giving you a sample timetable through which you can start your UGC Net preparation. In order to make a study timetable, the first thing that you need to do is that you need to divide your day in four segments. Okay, or you can divide all the activities that you do on a daily basis in four categories. So let's see what are those four categories. Number one is routine work. All the routine work like bathing, sleeping, eating, then we have traveling, then routine works like if you are a homemaker, then you need to cook food for children, you need to invest time in cleaning the house. If you are a professional, then going to office will come another routine work. So routine work will have all the areas, will cover all the areas that you have to do regularly. Maintenance ke jo kaam ote jiske bina you cannot live, all those work will come under the routine work. The second category is urgent work. Now, in spite of the fact that we are preparing for a competitive exam, there are times when you have to do certain works which will not help you in the exam. Some work which are important in order to fulfill your family responsibilities or to fulfill your daily life functioning. For example, agar apke ghar mein null toot jaata hai, so it doesn't matter whether you are studying, aapko sabse pehle tapko fix karwana hoega. So that will come under the urgent work. That needs to be addressed urgently. Then if you have to pay the fees of your college or school and you have to go there in order to fill the formalities, then that will come under the urgent work. There is some urgent family function that you have to attend. You cannot skip. Bahati close relative ki shadi hai ya kuch hai. That will come under the urgent work. The third category is your study time. The activities that concerns with your UGC-NET preparation. Be it making notes, be it revising, be it learning, be it listening to audio lectures, be it attending some coaching class. And the fourth important segment that we all love is entertainment and time wasters. Jis mein humara sabse zada time chala jaata hai din ka. They contain all the activities which will not help you in your life. Okay, now guys, let me tell you where the problem lies. The problem doesn't lie with the fact that we don't have time. We all have 24 hours. The most brilliant minds in the world are also having 24 hours and we also have 24 hours. We have players like Vishwanathan Anand who have done such miraculous work in the field of chess. And he too has 24 hours and we also have 24 hours. The only difference is that Vishwanathan Anand and great men who are there in this world now or who were there as a part of this world earlier, they all invested their time in the right pockets. Out of these four categories, they made sure that they invest their time in the category of study or work, whichever. Currently, we need to devote time to study. Later, we can devote time in making career or in our job.  So make sure that you are able to delegate certain works which are falling in the urgent work category. If you can give it to other people who can do it for you, you can tell it to your parents, you can tell it to your colleagues if they can help you out with it, so that majority of the time you can devote in the study category. You can devote maximum time in studying for UGCnet. Guys, I know it's IPL season. There are great cricket lovers who will watch IPL for like four hours, five hours every day. But understand in your peak or when you have to study, you are watching IPL. Whereas Virat Kohli, Mahendra Singh, Dhoni, they are in their peak or they are making their career. So that's the difference that lies with us. They are investing their time in making their career and we are investing our time looking at them and not getting anything in return. So you must remember that this is high time and you must invest your time on which you want to build your life on. Okay, there's a famous saying which says that on which you invest your time, it grows. If you devote your time in watching YouTube videos, hilarious videos, comic videos, watching comic gurus or watching stand-up comedians, your playlist will grow, but that will not help you in your exams. So what is important is that every day, you cannot skip the routine work. You have to do it. Then the second thing is that get done with the urgent stuff. Do it fast so that now you have your time left. That time you can invest on your studies. Then at the end, if you are able to do, match your target, the study target of that day, then reward yourself by doing something from the fourth aspect, which is the time wasters or entertainment category.  So problem doesn't lie with this. Problem lies when you invest four hours in watching a movie and then study for one hour. It is every time acceptable if you study for four hours and then give one hour for your entertainment. It's all right, but then the process get reversed and that is the problem with most of the students. So I hope I was able to make something clear in your mind and you'll be able to now know how to build your own timetable depending upon the factors that I've mentioned. So I'll be meeting you in my next video lecture till the time I meet next. Happy learning and before you end this video, do subscribe to my channel and you can follow me on all the social media platform because I post a Go Net quiz on these social media. You can go to my YouTube channel and watch other videos that I've made, especially for UGC Net aspirants. Also visit my website, www.arpatakarwa.com. You'll find all the previous year papers there. Also you will find a list of all the important writers that you must study if you are preparing for UGC Net English. If you like that list and you are interested in joining my online course, you can give me a call on the number displayed on screen. So till the time we meet next, happy learning, keep loving literature and stay tuned to www.arpatakarwa.com.


In this lecture, we review the language and some of the issues in implementing a discrete event simulation model, also known as simulation programming. Welcome to the lecture. The fundamental elements that distinguish discrete event system simulations are time, randomness and output. And each one of those is going to merit its own lecture later on in the course. Here we're going to spend a little time looking at the language of model implementation of simulation model programming. The system, I know you know what that is already, but we'll say it anyway. The system is the real thing that's being modeled. It's the real system. It's the real world. The model is the simulation algorithm, the simulation program. And you can design your conceptual model, but until you actually put together something that can be run using whatever software tool you use, you don't have a real implemented model. So that's what we're talking about here. Our simulation is composed of entities and attributes. Entities move through the system. They can be customers, parts, calls, tax returns, mortgage applications. Entities are the objects whose activities are being modeled, the objects that move through the system. Entities have attributes. An entity can be colored red. It can be colored blue. It can have a name. It can have a time of arrival. These are all attributes. As entities move through the system, they require resources that have constraints. They need servers. They may need some product. And there's not an unlimited amount of whatever it is that the entities need. As they move through the system, they request a resource. An entity might request a resource. It acquires a resource. If there's only one such resource, that means some other entity can't have it just now. And then after the entity is finished with it, that resource is freed. That's a resource. A queue is a waiting line. It's a place where entities go when they are delayed and they have to wait. For whatever it is, their activity that they're trying to do in this system. A delay is a time period during which nothing happens. Maybe. It could also be a time, the entire time that an entity spends in the system doing things and not doing things. MOE stands for measure of effectiveness. It's a performance measure, a performance criterion. It's the metric that you use to decide whether the system is a success or not. It's what you're optimizing. And it's a performance variable. You can be talking about how long entities have to wait for service. You could be talking about the utilization of the system and so on. State variables are variables that describe the state of the system. One typical state variable is the number of entities that are in the system at any one time. The state of the system is the set of values of a collection of state variables at a particular moment in time. The clock or the simulation clock is a variable that contains a value representing time, simulated time, usually starting from zero. A list is a collection of objects in some kind of an order. Simulation model implementation or programs use lots of lists for lots of different reasons. One obvious one is the queue, a list of entities waiting for service. Activity is something that has a start time and a stop time, and it has a duration and it represents an activity in the real world. One example would be service. Events in discrete event system simulation are exactly what it sounds like. These are moments in time, discrete moments in time, at which the system variables change. And this is what the simulation model moves because the events move. We'll see how that happens. Each event preschedules another event. For example, a customer arriving at a bank is going to then cause another customer to be prescheduled according to the known inter-arrival time distribution. The event notice is kind of like a ticket. It's a piece of data, a piece of data with multiple parts that represents the event, either an event that is happening that has happened or that is waiting to happen. And then the event list is a list of those event notices. FEL stands for future events list, and that's the way the timing routine in an event-oriented simulation program works, where it takes all these event notices for events waiting to happen, puts it in a list called the future events list, and in order by, what do you think, time to occur. So when the system then is looking around and saying, okay, I did everything that's in the system now, what's next? Well, what's next would be the event notice that's at the front of the events list because they're in order by time, and nothing will happen until that time. And so you pop it off the front of the events list and do whatever it is that it says. There are two major world views in simulation programming, and it's not a trivial thing. Very often you'll find when you try to use a particular software tool in simulation that it focuses only on one worldview, not on the other. So you have to know what you're doing before you decide what tool you're going to use. The event-driven approach is where the simulation moves forward because one event pulls up another event. The events are scheduled, there's pre-schedule to happen at particular times. And the timing routine finds the very next thing that's supposed to happen in in time, adjust the simulation clock, and then moves forward. Things are being done in this simulation on a very, very microscopic level. The process-driven approach, on the other hand, follows an entity as it moves through the system. The entity engages in activities as it experiences its way through the system. It might have delays. It might have unavoidable delays. It might be delays because of whatever it is that the entity is trying to do. Service, for one, participating in the activity, engaging a resource. So it's a different approach. It doesn't look at individual events. It looks at, well, what happens to a single entity as it moves through the system? And the program is built that way. When you are working in arena or clouds, you're working in the process-driven approach. If you're going to build a simulation model of, let's say, a banking system, you want to identify what are the entities, the attributes, the activities, the events, and the state variables at the very least. The entities are the customers. The customers are what we observe moving through the system. A customer has an attribute, for example, account balance, presumably more attributes than that as well. An activity might be a deposit where the customer needs to go into service to make a deposit. The events are, there's the arrival event, and there's the departure event. The departure event happens when the customer service is complete. And of course, the state variables that could be used are the number of customers in the queue, the number of tellers that are busy. And similarly, if you look at a transportation system, the entities would be travelers. The attributes would be where they come from, where they're going. In production, the entities are machines. A machine could have a speed, a capacity, and a time to break down, the time to the next breakdown, right? The entities in a communication system, like over a communication network, might be messages. And in an inventory system, we are working with products in a warehouse. The warehouse might have a capacity, and we might, the state variable might be, let's say, backlog demand. These are just examples. Again, to place us in context, this is the part of the course where we're looking at model implementation, which means building the actual simulation model, which means writing the simulation program and whatever software tool we're using. The essential distinguishing features in the simulation model for discrete event simulation, managing time, generating the output statistics that we have to collect over time, and anything connected to modeling random phenomena. Those lectures are coming up and I hope you join me. Thank you for joining me in this lecture today, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the series as well.


What's the difference between design thinking, design sprints and agile sprints? Some combination of this always comes up. First of all, I would recommend you watching the video I made called What's the difference between design thinking and design sprints? Because that will help you get the first part of the puzzle. I'll go through it quickly here, but I'm going to be mostly focusing on what's the difference between these two and agile sprints. So design sprints are basically a step-by-step system for solving big problems as a team. So a team comes together, they don't know exactly what product they want to make yet, they have some ideas of what they want to do, but they still haven't validated whether anybody really wants this thing yet. So it's a step-by-step system that allows a team to come together, solve big problems and at the end of the week have a prototype that they can test with real users. Now at AJ & Smart, we do a four-week process where we have two design sprints in there and at the end of those two design sprints, essentially you have the results which is a high-fidelity prototype that's been already tested in two rounds which is essentially ready to be turned into the MVP or the minimum viable product or essentially like the very first version of the app. Now this means that the design sprint is a system for essentially coming up with ideas and validating ideas. Agile sprints have nothing to do with that. Now the name obviously makes them a bit tricky, but agile sprints are essentially a system within a company for getting things developed. So if you would finish your design sprint and you have all of your screens and everything ready and you're saying this is what we want to do, this is the app we want to make, this is how it's supposed to look and basically we want to make an early version of this app, then if your company is running an agile system within your company so agile development, basically everything from the design sprint gets handed over to the developers or the product team and entered into the backlog so broken up into smaller pieces and prioritized and agile is essentially a system for getting that executed. So an agile process within a company is basically that the developers themselves work in sprints and many companies have their own way of doing that it's often two weeks and essentially that means they're going to work on a specific part of the app for two weeks and work on actually getting that finished. So agile sprints are for executing the work that's done after something is validated and the design sprint is something for validating ideas. So they're not really related at all, it's just that the word sprint was taken from agile sprints and put into design sprints to make it sound kind of cooler. So the difference between these two is very clear, this is for validating and creating new product ideas and this is for actually executing and making the product. This has no, there's no like creativity built into this part, okay? So this is after ideas have been generated and things have been put into the backlog. Now if you're a product manager watching this and you're saying well actually in our agile sprints we have ideation built in every six weeks or something like that, yes that's that's something that I've seen as well in a lot of companies but I just want to clarify that agile is more of a process of executing and actually creating software whereas design sprints is something more about taking an idea to something a bit more tangible and validating it. Okay so hopefully that's clear I'll actually just make the, so design sprints are about validating let's say product ideas and agile sprints are for executing, developing the software, okay? So actually usually a design sprint would come before the agile sprint. Now the difference between design thinking and design sprints, this is just something I'm going to touch on really quickly like I said because there's a video you can watch but the difference here is the design sprint is a very strict step-by-step recipe for validating product ideas. Whereas design thinking is a more open process lots of different exercises you can try a mindset and a philosophy for sort of understanding the user and working from a user-centered perspective. The design sprint takes the philosophies of design thinking and turns it into a recipe. One way of thinking about it is design thinking is kind of like the OS like Mac OS or iOS it's the system and the design sprints are an app for executing one very specific thing out of that. So design sprints are a recipe are an applied execution of design thinking. So for me that's a simple way of looking at the difference between design thinking design sprints and agile sprints this is your operating system this is like all the things you can do and all the things you can pull from if you want to get the user perspective on a problem even helping you find the problem.  Agile sprints are you know once you're actually ready to execute and create something within a company so these are these things are not related but generally this will come after this. Okay so I hope you enjoyed that video I know that was super simple and if you're a product manager you might be rolling your eyes and saying why did why did you even make this video it's a really common question that we get from you know our clients and also a lot of the community so there's a reason we make it don't type in the comments hey everyone knows this whatever there's people who want this video that's where we're making it thank you so much for watching it I hope this lo-fi echoey I don't know maybe not high quality approach was okay make sure you check out the other videos in our channels we've got hundreds of videos on workshops design sprints design thinking all that stuff thank you so much for watching do let us know in the comments if you have a better explanation for these three things and thank you so much for watching have a great one


Good afternoon everybody, I'm Tommy O'Brien, coming to you live from TfNN headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida, 12 noon Eastern time on Monday, middle of the trading day, and we have a pretty calm market so far to start off the trading week. Dow right now, negative by 13 points, trading $26,545, you get the S&Ps basically flat, trading at $29.05, NASDAQ positive by two points, trading right at $8,000, and the Russell 2000, negative by six points, or about four tenths of a percent in the negative for the Russell, trading at $15.59. As we start off the update, let's jump over to the VIX and check out the volatility index. As we've seen the market climb a little bit higher throughout the trading day, that VIX going from about $13.36 on the open, now $12.77, quite a number as we commit to some summer trading potentially. Let's jump over to the markets, we'll start it off with the Dow. So there is your 930 volatility, basically the session low, right near the open of $26,450. We're now approaching about 80 points above that level in the Dow, trading $26,532. NASDAQ 100 accelerates from the open, trading at $76.71. We make it up about 50 points to $77.20 and we've trailed off a bit in the last few minutes. S&Ps trading higher from the opening bell as well, 935, the market really begins to take off, trading from $28.99. We spike above $29.10 briefly within about the last 15 minutes. Currently of the S&Ps, June contract trading $2908. Crude oil, gunning for $66.00. We almost made it up there late last night. We made it to $65.97, we're back approaching that level $65.91 in the price of June crude and gold pulling back a bit today as gold, trading $12.7614. Kicking off the news with some oil news as you have President Trump aiming to drive Iran's oil exports to zero as he's ending sanctioned waivers. So this is stopping allowing some countries to import Iranian crude, yes to import Iranian crude so certain countries had been able to get waivers to be able to import Iranian crude, all of that ending on May 2nd. Tesla getting a downgrade at Evercore on slowing demand across all models. We get Tesla earnings two days from today and Kraft Heinz getting a new CEO after quite a tough year as AB Inbev's Miguel Patricio. Patricio is going to replace their CEO in the coming months. Stay tuned folks. We got Basil Chapman coming up right now. He did his show earlier than live programming. Steve Rhodes, Dave White all this afternoon. Have a great Monday.