Welcome everyone to the 34th edition of BogleHeads On Investing. Today our special guest is Jason Su. Jason is one of the smartest investors I've met. You guys published more than 40 peer-reviewed articles, won numerous awards, he co-created the Fundamental Indexing concept, and today focuses on inefficiencies in Chinese stocks. Hi everyone, my name is Rick Ferry and I'm the host of BogleHeads On Investing. This episode, as with all episodes, is brought to you by the John C Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a 501C3 non-profit organization. Visit us at bogelcenter.net and your tax-deductible donations are greatly appreciated. Today we have a special guest, Jason Su. He graduated with a degree in physics from California Institute of Technology, was awarded his Master's of Science in Finance from Stanford University, and earned his PhD in Finance from UCLA, where he conducted research on the equity risk premium, business cycles, and portfolio asset allocations. Jason has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed articles, he is Associate Editor of the Journal of Investment Management, and serves on the editorial board of the Financial Analyst Journal, the Journal of Index Investing, the Journal of Investment Counseling, and the Journal of Investment Management. Professionally, Jason has been on the forefront of factor investing as one of the founders of research affiliates, and now has taken factor investing to a new level as he applies it to the Chinese stock market. So with no further ado, let me introduce Jason Su. Welcome to the Bogle Heads on Investing podcast, Jason. Glad to be here, Rick. Well, it's great that you joined us. I've always been super impressed with your background and all the things that you've done in the financial services industry and the investment management industry. Been a very successful person, although I have to say you kind of fly under the radar, and that you've done so much, and you've got so many awards, but you may have fortune, but you don't have the fame, which is a little bit odd in a way, given who you are and everything that you've done. And so maybe we'll elevate that a little bit here, at least among the Bogle Heads.  And before we get started, tell us, going as far back as you feel comfortable, a little bit about your background. Well, going really far back, Rick, I came to this country really as an immigrant. No, you know, I arrived when I was 10. At the time I spoke, I think no English, but the country's been really, really good to me. I learned a tremendous amount. And eventually I found myself at Caltech, studying to be a physicist. You got into California Institute of Technology, and you decided you were going to be a physicist, and you excelled in that. You actually graduated summa cum laude in physics. What happened after that? I mean, you've made a pivot for sure. Yeah, the one thing that I experimented with while at Caltech was I did sort of a weekend gig at a economic laboratory where they had students play essentially market games. And then we were the subject of the experimentation. And I was really good at those games. Eventually they prevented me from participating. And that's when I got to learn about markets and about equilibrium, and also about market efficiency, and how competition leads to price efficiency, and how that generally leads to better outcome for everyone involved. What year was this when all this was going on? 1994, so I was a sophomore. And then you decided after you graduated to pursue a Master's of Science and Finance at Stanford University, you got some pretty good schools in your background. Yeah, I decided to learn about financial markets, really be an economist and understand how this stock market thing work, how the capital market work, how it's relevant to the real economy. And I guess to how society are shaped as a result of how these markets interact. And then from there, you went on to get your PhD and UCLA. That's right. And what was your PhD thesis? So I was studying the differences between American households and Asian households. And the thing that I was trying to understand is why do Asian households save too much and American households save too little? And as a result, what you see as Asian households participate in the stock market very directly and very meaningfully. And American households do not. The participation is very indirectly through their defined benefit pension plans or 401k. There's really very little individual wealth outside of retirement plan that's committed to the stock market. So that was the primary thing that I studied. Well, it's interesting, and we're going to get to this a little bit later on in the podcast. But it's interesting now that you've circled back to that with your new company in a way to try to capitalize on these individuals in the market as opposed to through institutions. I can see where you ended up going with all this is a little bit where you currently are right now. And without getting too far ahead, is that true? Yeah. I mean, I didn't know at the time that that was going to be of any practical usefulness really. I was very much set on pursuing a academic research career. It really was through a sequence of, I guess, happy coincidence that I ended up being a more of a practitioner than a academic scholar. It's like a bigger accident that 20, 25 years later, it ended up being quite useful given the business I'm in. But you did do a lot of academics. I mean, you were an adjunct professor and you were visiting professor at various colleges, both here and in Asia. And you did get that the feel for being an academic. Yes, I did put my PhD to good use. And you also wrote many papers. You wrote 40 peer-reviewed papers. And could you explain what the difference is between just writing something and having it published in a peer-reviewed paper? Yeah. So it is now fashionable in our industry for firms to do white papers. And white papers feel a little less marketing and salesy and perhaps more educational and neutral. But frankly, oftentimes, the quality is suspect. And then you can definitely see an angle where this is just a dressed up marketing document. When it's peer-reviewed journal article, to whether it's industry journals or academic journals, they're meant to be educational. You're supposed to do research. That answers an important question. And you're supposed to use methods that are robust, that it's replicable. And the conclusion you draw from it has to be logical. And there's at least one referee, if not two, and the journal editor will also sort of vet the paper to ensure that it is truly educational and useful and then not sort of a sales document in disguise. So it's a much higher bar that's required in terms of rigor and the time committed to doing a peer-reviewed article. And most articles are submitted to journals are actually rejected and even the ones that can get accepted go through two, three rounds of editing and re-editing. You are also very familiar with getting articles published. Not only have you written 40 peer-reviewed articles, but you're also a member of the editorial board for the Financial Analyst Journal.  You're an associate editor for the Journal of Index Investing and associate editor for the Journal of Investment Management. You could tell the difference, I think, if anybody could between something that's a marketing piece and something that is a actual academic paper. Yep, part of that is the PhD training and part of that is also being on both sides of the table, writing something as a scholar and of course being a gatekeeper to ensure that only scholarly pieces sort of come through. And I've been doing that for about 20 years. Yeah. You also have been in the field. You've got a distinguished career, not only in academics, but also you have a distinguished career in the investment management field first as the co-founder of research affiliates. And co-founded that with Robert. Could you give me a little history because I know Rob and I've known him for many years and he's an interesting character. But I'd like to know how that all came about. Yeah. Again, as I mentioned, a very lucky coincidence. So I was at the UCLA really finishing up. That was my last year in a PhD program and Rob had just sold and exited out of his last company, First Quadrant and decided to volunteer at UCLA Anderson School. Of course, the dean was very excited having someone who's so well-known at some point in the future. It could be a very meaningful donor to this school. And so we were put together to co-teach a class together because obviously I've been a lecturer at UCLA by that time for a number of years and Rob obviously, someone with great war stories. So the dean thought that would be a great pairing. And so that's how we got to know each other. And Rob is someone, I guess at that time, still very young. Had a lot of ambition and had a lot more left in his tank. And he quickly decided, well, he said, hey, I'm going to start something and Jason, would you be interested in joining in the startup? And that's how we got started. Literally two guys in a garage because we didn't have office back then and then a Bloomberg. A living room in a Bloomberg. That's why I actually got started myself in the advisory business. So I understand where you're coming from on that. But that's interesting. And tell us originally about the focus of research affiliates. What is it that you were trying to do with that company? And then what did it evolve into? Like many startups that eventually succeed, what the original founders set out to do is often not what ended up being successful. So I think when Rob and I first got started, a number of ideas we tried. Like we initially wanted to offer software actually. And it was way ahead of the time. It was a smart software to help wealth management platforms to manage rap accounts. It would be very intelligent in terms of tax loss harvesting, crossing off-setting trades. That great idea probably ahead of the time at the time when technology was a lot more expensive, a lot more unwieldy. So that didn't fly. But I still think it was a great idea. And later on, others have currently done a much better job with that idea. We then set out to do liability defecement strategy. Again, a clever strategy that played off of the way the yield curve worked. And we thought there's going to be great demand. But I think liability defecement back in the early 2000 was still a little too early for most pension funds. So again, a decent idea. Even got a seed investor to try out the program, but didn't actually go anywhere. Was almost a side hustle, which was supervising a asset allocation mutual fund, kind of a little pilot experiment for PIMCO. And that ended up taking off and became a runaway success. And like I think what most of you know us for, eventually we used the income from that product to develop fundamental indexing, which is what today, you know, research affiliates like Rob and I are probably best known for and likely will be best remembered for. I recall all of this because I was in the industry at the time and watching this happen. And to me, DFA, Dimensional Fund Advisors, had a real head start on this factor investing, fundamental indexing strategy. But you did it in an exchange traded fund form mostly and you captured that market fairly quickly. Back in the early 2000s, ETF was a very new concept. A lot of people didn't know what it was, right? This mutual fund at the time was the vehicle of choice. All the big ETF players you know of today didn't exist back then and probably back then they didn't want to do ETF.  So very early on, after we wrote the paper on fundamental indexing, we were contacted by Bruce Bond and Ben Fulton. They started Power Shares and they said they are looking for innovative indexes on top of which they can create ETFs on. And they knew it wouldn't make sense for them to do an S&P and compete with a spider. So they really wanted something that was very differentiated. And they saw our research paper that was published in the Financial Analyst Journal and said, this is it, this is it. And so, you know, we met one knowing afternoon in New York, agreed to a deal, found FTSE, had FTSE basically convert our fundamental index methodology into an index. Just to clarify, FTSE is who? Yeah, FTSE is one of the largest index calculators in the world owned by the London Stock Exchange. And they took your methodology and created an index out of it? That's right. It was one of the things that I looked at and I personally said, well, this is an index, this is active management. And that was really a debate, you know, back then. I know that ship has sailed because the SEC said, yes, it's an index. But back then I recall the mud slinging that went on between you or your company and Standard & Poor's. As to what is an index. But I think that the SEC allowed all this to be called indexing and there it was. Much different than what the slang became and the slang became smart beta, which at first you embraced, but then later on didn't seem like you were embracing it so much. Yeah, so Rick, I got to tell you the backstory to that. So we didn't come up with the moniker smart beta. We called our strategy fundamental indexing and we really were trying to play off of cap weighted indexing. We think about cap weighted indexing is market capitalization, which is determined by price times shares outstanding. So really there's a lot of price indexing in that construct. And we wanted to play off of price based indexing. Again, something that's not priced but still related to value. So we think of your company fundamental. So we said, okay, now fundamental indexing would be this play on word and it would contrast against say cap weighted or price based indexing. And that's really how we came up with the name. And like you say, most people didn't think what we created was an index because everyone had by that time come to, except that the index should be cap weighted because that's how S&P is built. And there's the paper by Bill Sharp and others that talked about the merit of cap weighting as a index as a portfolio construct. And so we were really streaming upstream against that established school of thought.  It's not an index. So you really shouldn't be in the ETF space because the ETF is really meant to track passive indices for people who believe in market efficiency. And so we actually had a lot of struggle in the early get go. And I think I was part of the struggle. I was sitting in the audience raising my hand yelling at you. That's right. I do remember that. Well, anyway, it took a lot. I fundamental indexing, I talked with Rob or not about this. I think it's an everlasting term, but the smart beta isn't because it kind of dirties the water and muddies the water in my opinion. Okay. This thing takes off then. I mean, you start rolling like a steamroller with fundamental indexing due to great returns from value stocks after the tech rec in the early 2000s. I mean, you're on the radar and things are growing. Can you just take us through that part of the growth of the company? Absolutely. So from the initial get go where people didn't even like the word indexing to it being embraced by, I think it was first by at the time, powers Watson later on Mercer and they coined the category name smart beta. And like you say, it just grew like wildfire. Once consultants validated the concept with a category name. And we were the first off the board. Yeah. We just had momentum behind us being the first mover being the claim to the original IP. We, yeah, we had a lot of active oriented pension funds who say, hey, we heard about the merit of a lower cost, more transparent index strategy, but we're not ready to go full on passive into the S&P 500. So going into a fundamental index is kind of like halfway move going from full active to full passive. And then that was a good compromise for, I think a lot of pension funds and their investment consultants. And similarly, I think we had a lot of people who already bought into the concept of indexing and love and understood the ETF chassis who said, well, you know, here is a index product that could actually have some credible success in delivering outperformance slightly more consistently and slightly more scientifically. And so we kind of were attracting flows from both sides of the argument, right? Attracting flows from active investors and attracting flows from some passive investors. And then that really, like you say, it's sort of steamroll through the industry and then put research affiliate on the map. You know, I remember this whole period of time and I remember discussions with you and discussions. I know I had discussion with Rob about this. I was, look, you're sort of barking up the wrong tree. This is initially, this is right at the beginning once you came out with fundamental indexing. I remember saying, you know, don't go after the cap weighted indexers. Don't go after them. I mean, that's not your market. Your market is active management because what you've done here is you've lowered the cost of active management and you've made it more consistent than what it was in the past because you have a set of rules. And that's the enduring part of what you're doing. So in my view, it was exactly what you said about a lot of these pension funds. Look, we're not ready to go from active to cap weighted indexing but what we're ready to do at least partially is to go from active to fundamental indexing and at least lower our cost and make things more consistent. When that shift happened, you know, that kind of the mental shift of marketing, if you will, happened, I think that really helped to propel the whole industry that you started. Yeah, Rick, you're absolutely right. I think you're a prediction and then your advice at the time turned out to be, I think, key. I think ultimately we attract a lot more assets from the active camp who really haven't had that much success with active management. But I think it's going fully to pure passive took some meandering, I think, before they could fully get on board and going to fundamental indexing was kind of a safe, middle way compromise. And like I said, it really cut the cost of doing it. And it was consistent. I mean, when you're following a strategy like you're following and you have to follow a systematic methodology, you don't get manager whims don't get in the way. I mean, if you believe in the methodology and you look at the data and you say, well, it worked in the past and this is why it worked in the past. And so we know that since it's a quote unquote index, that this is the methodology that's going to be used in the future. So we can rely on that rather than relying on the manager to one day be a value manager and the next day they're not so much a value manager because that's just not where the momentum is at the time, that there was a lot of value to that. And I have to believe that that's continuing to be that way. Although it was a struggle, right? I mean, after the financial crisis occurred, value investing, fundamental indexing, although a lot of assets were going that direction, those factors didn't perform well. I want to get into here a little bit that they're not always going to perform well and that there is a 25 year, I don't want to say cycle or something, a wave to these things and that people who are in it need to be patient. Yeah, Rick, I mean, I think what we saw in 25 years, probably going out 30 years, there are really two things happening in the background that's made it difficult to be a value investor and given value is a big underpinning of the fundamental index methodology, it's been tough for value investors in fundamental index the last 30 years. And part of what's driving that is market has become more efficient. If you think of value as an anomaly, meaning you can buy good quality asset cheap, that's not supposed to happen. Like good quality assets are supposed to be expensive and it's generally the risky stuff that's supposed to be cheaper. So you're generally supposed to see value stocks as more expensive, not cheaper if they're truly high quality, right? So a lot of value premium you could say was an anomaly for the reason that it existed. But as the market gets more efficient, it's supposed to go away. So I think part of the diminishing value premium is related to the US market becoming ever more institutional, ever more efficient and any anomalies that's been documented historically. It's arbed out or just less relevant. But you also have, I think, the last few years if you're looking at reddit, you're looking at Robinhood trading, you're looking at prices for cryptocurrency and GameStop stocks. You also recognize that US market has the last few years became probably more inefficient. I think retail trading is down from 3% to closer to 30% now. And we're exciting, sexy growth has done much better because that's where the retail flows and retail trading have been concentrating on. So you've got two things, right? One is market becoming more efficiently priced which makes value work less well. And then more recently, market has gone to a bit of a tech bubble which has a further punished value and we combine those two together. It's been tough to be a value investor. But has that been true internationally? And let's kind of work outside the US now and look internationally at developed markets and then secondly, emerging markets. Is it becoming more efficient? Yeah, so generally I would say when you want to get a sense of efficiency, probably the best indicator to look at is the fraction of the trading volume that's accounted for by retail trading. Because I guess market efficiency is about price discovery. So it's about well-informed analytical, rational, experienced investors making trade. And when you're talking about individuals, that's not what drives efficiency. So if you look at developed markets, by and large, they're very institutionalized because they have giant pension funds and very developed mutual fund in wealth management industry. So most of the money's been delegated out and ultimately the people who manage these assets are experienced. So it's basically super smart experience. Traders and PMs competing against each other. So markets tend to be more efficient. That's by and large not what you see in emerging markets. Many of them have underdeveloped wealth management markets. Their mutual fund industry is in their nascent stage. A lot of the trading are still just done by individual investors who are gambling in the stock market. And so as a result, efficiency is generally poor. And the funny thing is in the Asian emerging markets, I would say the efficiencies are particularly poor. Part of what you might say might be culture for gambling. A lot of the Asian investing is more gambling than really retirement planning or retirement saving. And also what you see is Asian households, like my dissertation found out, they save way too much and some of that money end up going to the stock market unproductively. So back to research affiliates, are you still associated with research affiliates? I'm associated with research affiliate as an advisor. So I exited or I spun out of research affiliates in 2016 to launch Rayleigh and Global Advisors to focus on basically China. We are now a specialty China manager, working with large institutions as well as financial advisors to help them get access to all things China. That's my new focus now and it's because that's where I think as a researcher as a portfolio manager, we could still create alpha consistently and reliably net of fees. Research affiliates was a research shop. You actually didn't manage investment portfolios there. You were doing research and you were creating the methodologies for choosing stocks and waiting stocks. Is that what your company Reliant is also? Research affiliates had a very small book of business that was running assets directly, but it was so small as to be not known by most people who've done business with us. Rayleigh and Global Advisors, we now are more like a traditional quantitative active manager. We both developed the IP, the strategy, and while we do license them out to other larger asset managers who wanted our research and our strategies, we also have a thriving practice in terms of creating our own funds. We got funds in China, in the US, and we run segregated accounts for institutional clients. So we got a different business model now versus research affiliates. So let's get into all of the research that you did on factor investing that was pretty much centered on US investors and the US markets with fundamental indexing initially. I know you expanded that globally, but you primarily started it in the US markets and a lot of the work that you did, a lot of your papers and so forth were on the US markets. You take these tools that you created, this research, you bring them to China, and now your first thing you do is take those and did you attempt to apply them to the Chinese market? And if so, what happened? Yep. So the first thing I did was to apply everything as is. So I've taken all of the anomaly factors that we documented in academia based on US data and say, well, do they work in China? And surprisingly or not surprisingly, they work in China and they work quite well. And when I thought about it, I go, oh, of course, right? A lot of the anomaly factors for the US, they sort of lived in the past and are sort of less effective or almost non-effective the last 10, 15 years because markets become so efficient, but they certainly work when the US market was less efficient. Now, if you're applying those same intuition to China, it being a much more inefficient market, these anomalies ought to be larger. And since these anomalies are often related to retail individuals and their behavioral biases, mental accounting, loss of immersion, preference for high volatility, a sort of lottery substitute. So you see all of that in China and space. So what used to work in the US that maybe doesn't work anymore are alive and well in China. I listened to your podcast with Jeff Patak and Christine Benz on Morningstar Longview and you were talking about a 9% performance gap between Chinese fund returns and investors in those funds and just put some background in the US. That gap has been closing significantly over the last 10 or 15 years in the gap between mutual fund returns and market returns and client investor returns has really narrowed down, in fact, balanced funds if you're actually getting an alpha now by being in a balanced fund. But this is not the case in China. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, the two things that are super surprising when you look at Chinese fund data. First of all, if you just track the average mutual fund in China on a net of cost basis, they outperform by about 4% per annum. So this is adjusting for survivor should buy is obviously taking costs into account. So this is really net performance. And of course, that's not what you see in the US, right? In the US net of cost, the average mutual fund underperforms. So that's the first surprising thing. Now again, if you think about it, just tells you US market very efficient therefore even well trained portfolio managers can't consistently beat the market. In China, it's very inefficient.  That's the first surprising thing. The next surprising thing is the mutual fund industry in China is very underdeveloped, meaning most people don't trust mutual fund managers enough to buy mutual funds. They somehow trust their own skill more or prefer to gamble. And so as a result, they speculating the stock market to obviously great detriment of their own wealth. So that's another thing we see in China is despite the outperformance, mutual fund industry is in its very nascent stage. It's actually not grown very fast at all. I was reading a research paper that you put out. China's got talent, fund manager skill and alpha and Chinese stocks. And you track the growth of the mutual fund industry. And back in 1999, there was a whopping 22 mutual funds for all of China. But by the end of 2020, you wrote there was almost 8,000 mutual funds. So most of them were developed in the last call it seven years. How do you think this is going to affect the efficiencies of the market efficiency in China? So usually I would be on the side of competition will bring about greater efficiency. As I study more time with the data, what I have discovered when I look at this proliferation of mutual funds are really two things. One is most mutual funds in China are very concentrated. So unlike the US, where most mutual funds are benchmark huggers, where you're looking at closet indexers and therefore net of cost. It's very hard for them to be the index. In China, most of the mutual funds are quite concentrated. They would have enormously large bets on a sector, sometimes on a single stock. And you kind of think about why does that happen? That goes against diversification. It goes against sensible portfolio management. The reason it happens is Chinese fund investors are very short term oriented, meaning they look at mutual fund performance leaks table on a weekly basis. And they would buy a fund. And if they see another fund that had the better performance the next time they pick up a newspaper, they would be trading out of their last fund to get into this new hot fund. And as a result, if you're a mutual fund company and you want to not lose asset or at least keep the asset within your family of funds, you've got to constantly launch a new fund that's sort of flavor of the theme of the day and that's very concentrated. So when the theme is right, you have insane performances. And so that's largely what describes the funds industry in China. So this funds proliferation hasn't brought about better price discovery or better competition. It's really just everyone is creating more and more extreme portfolios trying to benefit from the volatility effect so they can randomly become the best performer and gather a lot of assets. You know, it does remind me of the mutual fund industry in the United States say in the 70s and 80s. There was a lot of that going on. I think that Fidelity would create a fund based on whatever, didn't matter what it was. We're going to create it and we're going to launch it because people want it. And even though the owners of that company would never put a dime of their own money in it, it didn't matter. They were in the mutual fund business and if this is what people want, then we're going to give it to them. Now that's not so much anymore in the United States. I think it's become too expensive to do that and it's thinned out as far as the amount of money that's available. So it's almost become almost prohibitively expensive to do that. You still see some of that perhaps in the ETF industry, but just not as much as they used to be. But it seems like in China this is what is going on.  And so the fund proliferation really hasn't created a competition to lower fees or a competition for sort of better practices and portfolio management that leads to them that are price discovery, which then would lead to a more efficient market. So we're many, many innings away from getting to that outcome. Now the market in China, if you want to use an INDC, I'm just looking at the China MSCI Stock Price Index. There is a beta there, although if you look back from 1995 through 2001, this market collapsed about, well, it looks like 95%. And then it came roaring back from 2002 up to 2007 by I don't know how many multiples. And then it collapsed again during the financial crisis and now it's been crawling back up again. Can you tell us a little bit about beta? In fact, people who say, well, I get what you're saying about the inefficiencies in the market and that if I used an active manager that I might do better, but I wouldn't know one active manager from another, of course, without getting into your firm yet, of course. But what if you just bought beta? I mean, would that work in China? So if you just bought beta, it would have worked out okay the last 15 years. Prior to that, not so much. Now the question as well is that just me cherry picking the last 15 years. Well, no, because prior to the last 15 years, beta is poorly constructed in the following sense. It was mostly state-owned enterprises. They weren't a lot of companies. And so when you kind of bought that beta, you actually really had just a very concentrated exposure to a few large state-owned entities. And then that I don't think is what you want to buy when you're betting on the growth of China, the transformation from being an export-oriented economy into a more consumption-based economy where you're hoping a very educated, hungry young workforce will drive productivity gains. The 15 years prior to the last 15 years, you just couldn't buy things like that. So it's really the last 15 years that you're starting to breath where the listed market is more than just state-owned enterprises. Actually a lot of interesting smaller cap stocks that were purely privately controlled became listed and were driving value and driving earnings growth. So I think the last 15 years is more representative. Still, the last 15 years, of course, you still had the global financial crisis. You had the European debt crisis that had some spillover. It's like China. You had China's own crisis of the 2015 with the credit crisis. But even through those ups and downs, the beta did deliver about a 11% return, compounded geometric return, which is not bad. So yes, the beta itself, even if you go purely passive, is decent. It is a lot more volatile than say the S&P 500. I found some of your research that you did on state-owned enterprises to be interesting because you divide them up into big mega country-wide state-owned enterprises. And then more local enterprises that are localized. And the research found that these localized state-owned enterprises were far less likely to produce profits. Could you dig into that a little bit for us? Yeah, I think most of us, when we think about state-owned enterprises, we tend to have this very negative view. We don't think of them as actually companies that you just don't see as very efficient, nor do they really care about, say, stakeholder value. And that is not entirely true, but it's true enough. So in the dataset, when we look at just the city-level, town-level, state-owned enterprises, when you look at all the operating efficiencies, they're just not very efficient. They have poor margins. They have a lot of debt. If you look at all the metrics for management efficiency and quality, just not very high-quality teams, and you're not surprised because they're really controlled and dominated by local bureaucrats and then subject to all the issues that occurs when a local political power boss has his sway with everything in town. But when you look at the big Beijing-connected central state-owned enterprises, they tend to be well-oiled machines. The very best of the managers are in leadership positions. And their efficiency ratios are very, very high. And they actually tend to have decent performances over time. You also did research on, and I found this to be fascinating, by the way, the China companies that list in the U.S. market, we are here in the U.S., at least I've always been under the belief that, well, these things have to be, go through a certain level of scrutiny, and that the accounting has to be right before they can be listed on the U.S. exchanges. There's a certain level of confidence that I would have in a Chinese company that lists in the U.S. versus just listing in the local markets in Asia. So I would be more inclined as a U.S. investor to trust those companies more, but your research actually shows the opposite. Yep. I mean, I had the same intuition as you did, Rick. I thought, look, if you are willing to expose yourself to New York, to the financial money center and compete out here as a stock, you got to be pretty good when it comes to dotting your eyes and crossing your teeth and having good governance. As I did more research, I realized it was actually the opposite. So the listing requirement and the level of scrutiny that you have to go through as a firm before you get listed in China is extraordinary. And it's because the regulator at the stock exchanges who is in charge of approving your listing has personal liability. If you list and it was discovered, you made up numbers or for whatever reason you blow up later, that regulator has a lot of personal liability and his career is ruined and he might be going to jail. So they take forever to approve anything. And essentially, they actually have this very cynical view about the underwriter and the investment thing that's helping you go IPO, expecting all of you to be in cohoot to be fraud investors. So they actually have a separate underwriting process. Now, in the US, it's not like that, right? In the US, our regulatory environment and our listing requirements is such that, look, consenting adults making trades, right? If you're willing to buy shares in a Chinese company that doesn't want to subject itself to independent auditing. Hey, it's in the disclosure, it's buyers beware, so you can't blame anyone if you invest in these companies. So as a result, our listing requirements are actually very low and most Chinese companies who cannot qualify for listing in mainland China or Hong Kong have chosen to list in the US. Sorry to interrupt you, but could you say that one more time? So the listing requirement for the US is substantially lower than the requirements for mainland China and Hong Kong. So as a result, a lot of companies who fail listing requirements in mainland China and Hong Kong actually choose to list in the US. That's just fascinating. I would have never known that.  But I would have never guessed that it's much more difficult to list as a Chinese company to list in China than it is to list in the United States. It's absolutely true. It's very strange, but it is true. All right, so you set up the shop over there and you first started out with factor investing. And that was in 2016. But I imagine you learned a lot very quickly and things are shifting for you. Oh yeah, absolutely. So the first thing I learned was while many of these behavioral factors that we research and discover in the US can't work and do work well in China, it is still a different market, certainly with a lot more retail participation. And also with accounting rules are different than the US and then also a market structure that's quite different. It's still got a lot of state-owned enterprises. And the result, you have to localize the research. You got to take all these institutional features that's uniquely China and adapt your research. And so what we found is we found a lot of China-specific factors. So again, they're behavioral in nature, but they exist in China only because either the data is available in China and not available in the US. So they're just more ways to characterize that behavioral bias or they're just sort of features of the Chinese market that allow for retail individuals to express more of their biases. So what we found is you've got to really have boots on the ground, know that market, learn the psychology. And if you do that, you'll discover a lot more factors. Jason, a lot of investors are worried about the ESG factors, which are environmental, social, and governance. In other words, look, a lot of these are state-owned companies. They're not going to report human infractions. They're not going to report environmental infractions. And people don't want to invest in China because a lot of things are covered up. What is changing in China to make more disclosure and can we trust it? Well, today, if you want to apply ESG to Chinese stocks, if you hold them to Western standard, requiring them to be at the same level, clearly you're going to eliminate so many of the stocks as to make the portfolio very concentrated and perhaps one that is unlikely to produce return. But if you want to apply a rule, which is more about the slope, meaning the speed at which they're improving, you'll find many companies to be great ESG citizens. That's because they're starting at a low base and the increase global pressure and increased self-awareness in terms of why ESG matters has actually encouraged a lot of them to make changes. Part of that is because society becomes more wealthy. Frankly, there's very little difference between a Chinese parent and an American parent. They all want better water, better air, better food safety, better work environment for their children. And they're going to demand that as consumers and they're going to demand that as regulators. So we're definitely seeing improvement, even though the level today is clearly not international standard. And the one thing that is additionally interesting is governance is certainly the one dimension of ESG that is highly correlated with return in China. And it may be less so outside of China, but in China it's very correlated. I think it's true for all the emerging markets. I think people who are more short-term oriented in the way they value stocks tend to not care about governance, but in the long run it matters. So it's an underappreciated factor in China. And if you focus on firms with great governance, you often end up having great return. So even without requiring that, most portfolio managers in China and ourselves certainly included in that are very governance-focused. And that's critical in terms of driving portfolio value. Without getting too into politics at all, has been some real changes in things like tariffs and that has affected some exports from China to the U.S. that is until the coronavirus hit. And then we all started spending our government checks on Amazon and exports went up from China after that. But there's a shift that seems out of China now towards places like Vietnam. Are you thinking of expanding your search for companies outside of China to someplace like Vietnam? Well, we're definitely looking for other alpha reservoirs now the thing with Vietnam is it certainly is even more inefficient than China because it's just say even younger stock market. But it doesn't have a lot of depth and it doesn't have a lot of stocks. And then of course for a proper portfolio, you've got to have some breath. And of course as a reservoir to really be able to extract alpha, the reservoir has to be large enough. So for small markets with very little liquidity and have not enough wealthy household that enter the market to supply alpha, it's even though there's inefficiency, it's actually not likely for managers to do very much with them. You're going to be severely capacity constrained. So in a way, if you think about big alpha reservoirs that are available in the EMBasket really, it's China and maybe a distant second would be India. And that has got the population. And they have a trading mentality in many ways. Yep, as the market becomes more wealthy, as sort of the per capita GDP starts to catch up, for the Western world like China has, you'll see more of the household wealth enter the stock market. And that's when sort of retail trading as a fraction of the market and overall market liquidity will go up. And then therefore making the opportunity more meaningful for someone who wants to sort of be actively on the other side of those retail trades. Well, just really been interesting. Let's get to your company. And if our listeners want to learn about your company and what they might be able to follow you, where should they look? So while we've been running a lot of different Chinese equity strategy onshore in China, the success of that business has convinced us to export that. So we've launched our very first active ETF in the US. So to find out more about that strategy, you can go to funds.ralien.com to learn about what it does, whether it makes sense for you. We're obviously looking to build out a whole family of different Chinese equities exposure and fixed income exposure and other alternative exposures. And our belief is most investors are underexposed to China. So the correlation isn't definitely going to come in as a major benefit in terms of making your portfolio more diversified. And insofar that you want to have exposure to a different currency. Now Chinese assets will give you exposure to another major currency that might be emerging and rivaling China. So you don't have to go to cryptocurrency to hedge against your dollar exposure. You can look at the Remding Bee base assets. And of course you want to buy more growth and it's differentiated growth. Like the China is on a different part of the growth curve versus the US. This is a market where you can buy that growth and buy it cheaper. But of course to find out more about our research, go to our website, ralien.com. And if you're interested in the strategy, go to funds.ralien.com. That'd be great. I had to ask you one question because you borrowed up the cryptocurrency. China's central bank is rolling out a digital one making it the first central bank to issue a central bank digital currency. What do you think about this? Well, I think it's super smart, right? Because as we're looking at cryptocurrency, we've often found two things, right? One is the technology, the blockchain technology, which is just a superior technology in terms of settling payment, tracking the flow of funds. Safer and it's just more technological advance, right? The existing settlement process we have came from 60 years ago. So China is pursuing that. It's pursuing the blockchain technology. The rest of the cryptocurrency is a combination of the blockchain technology, which is wonderful, with a currency that you're not sure is actually a currency because it's not backed by anyone, not backed by anything. It's not really legal tender. So I think this actually helps investors in terms of really understanding what the blockchain technology can do for central banks if they want to digitize their currency and improve the existing financial infrastructure. And then it helps us then understand, okay, if you take out the digital aspect and just have this new fiat currency issued by a non-central bank collective, like, is there really value in that? So I think what China has done is genius in terms of adopting a technology. Many central banks are likely to do the same thing. And as that happens, I think you'll find existing cryptocurrencies to sort of be left behind. Well, I don't want to upset too many of our listeners by getting into cryptocurrency discussions on cryptocurrency. We were just recently banned on the mobileheads.org website. But it's been a fascinating discussion, Jason. You've done so well in your career. And we just greatly appreciate you being our guest today on the Bogleheads On Investing. Thanks, Rick. I'm so glad to be here. This concludes Bogleheads On Investing. I'm your host, Rick Ferry. Join us each month as we have a new guest. In the meantime, visit Bogleheads.org, Boglecenter.net, the Bogleheads Wiki, view our new Bogleheads Live Speaker Series, get involved in your local Bogleheads chapter or a virtual community, and tell others about it. Thanks for listening.


The cluster mission was launched in 2000 and consisted of four satellites orbiting the Earth. The cluster ion spectrometry, CIS, instrument was used to measure the ion distribution in the magnetosphere from thermal energies up to 40 keV slash E. This instrument had two different sensitivities, allowing it to have a higher dynamic range than other similar instruments. It was able to obtain good data in the central plasma sheet, magnetopause crossings, magnetosheath, solar wind, and cusp measurements. Additionally, observations in the auroral regions were possible at radial distances of four to six Earth radii. These results demonstrate the importance of multi-spacecraft measurements using identical instruments, as well as opening a new area of study in magnetospheric and solar wind magnetosphere interaction physics. This article was authored by H. Reem, C. Euston, J. M. Boscade, and others.


You gotta see things. See new places and brand new things. Gotta go places and do things. Maybe you won't get it. And just enjoy the festival. So, let's go do this. But before we do that, did you know that that's an elevator? Yep, that magical mirror at the bottom of Spaceship Earth is actually an elevator shaft that takes you up to your grand miraculous Spaceship Earth. This is my first time back to Epcot since interventions, club cool, and the fountain went all closed down. And I'm a little scared to see those walls up. But gonna have to face them sooner or later. Well, that's not the view I'm used to. No fountain. What am I gonna be roll now? It's not permanent but the walls will eventually come down and I'm excited to see how things are gonna look. That fountain actually means a lot more to me than you would think. I absolutely loved the show that they put on. And actually in the older Epcot maps it was actually listed as an attraction and entertainment of such. But I said it before and I'll say it again. Disney doesn't disappoint. So, I'm not gonna linger on the past. I'm gonna head to World Showcase and get some food. One thing about food and wine though is you find things that you really like and you want to get them. But then again on the other hand you might feel adventurous and you want to try new stuff and you can't afford a both. You can't afford feeling comfortable and adventurous at the same time. So I'm gonna take it very easy and look at the menu thoroughly before I just jumping on something. You know, like right now I'm not in the mood for a mimosa. So I'm gonna move on. I'm gonna look for a beer somewhere. So if I'm looking for a beer, I do want to try something I haven't tried before. And that's why we're gonna try this Killianne red ale. That sounds pretty good. I don't know how I would ever feel about the Guinness Bailey shake. Guinness and Bailey's mixed together? I don't know. I feel like it just turns my stomach thinking about it. Well, since I was gonna get the brew house red ale, Disney recommended that I get the Irish sausage with it as a recommended pairing. So I'm gonna have to get them both. I have taken eating on a trash can to a new level.  I don't know who I was kidding. That was not working. So back to the trash can and I already took one bite. I have to say I like it. I like it a lot. I forgot to actually grab a knife. So I'm gonna be eating this kind of awkwardly, but I mean, it is what it is. So in all in all, it cost me $10 for this great pairing. And I think it's a good deal because you get two sausages, which are like the size of breakfast sausages, but they don't have that breakfast taste to them. And the mashed potatoes just taste really good. I like that sausage better than my last outing where I got the lamb chop in Australia. The sausage was a little bit better. So I'm happy that I didn't go back to that lamb chop because I thought about it.  So I might want to get it again, but instead I got something different and it ended up working out great. I decided to backtrack a little bit and head back over to Canada because Canada is closed and they actually have an apple seed orchard. So a whole bunch of different types of apple cider and I'm excited. Wow, my favorite part of Canada is still my favorite part of Canada. They have some of the construction up, but look at, they even added a bunch of boxes of apples over there to go with the apple cider kind of booth that they have inside. And I think that's fancy. Apple seed orchard since 1948. This has been here before Epcot even opened. Wow. Very pretty inside here. It reminds me of the big top. I thought that they had two separate lines, but it's actually two separate things. This side is the cider side. That side's the wine side. But I'm really not that type of wine guy. So cider it is. And it's not just cider, they have beer too. They have so many different offerings. Frozen apple pie. They have a cherry cider. What?  I'm excited. I ran into some friends. Christina and Ears, etc. And actually I ended up getting the flight and he just finished his flight. Well, he took a sip of each one and by the faces he made, I don't know if I'm going to like this flight. Most of the beers are actually apple flavored and they're going to be on the sweeter side. But I'm going to take them down like a champ. Oh, Titusville. That's near us. I developed this kind of non-gag reflex when it came to beer because when I first started drinking beer I never liked beer at all. I actually hated the taste of beer. So what I would do is drink it as fast as I could so I looked like a cool kid and then that way I wouldn't taste it. I got drunk a lot but neither here or there. Oh, that one wasn't bad. I don't know which one it was though. That's more like a cider. The last one's the only good one. Oh, bad aftertaste. The apple pie beer tasted just like a cider but the last one and we can't decide which one it was from. It was either MIA or C-Dog. I actually liked.  They're fake. Fake. You guys got any real apples around here? So I left the Apple Sea tent so that I can actually continue on but instead of going back towards the United Kingdom way I'm going to go actually the opposite way and head over to Mexico since we were right there in Canada and start the whole out. Well, as we walked past Mexico here I felt the AC pushing out at me and I can smell the water. So I'm going to take a quick pick stop. Only during food and wine where you see a line for the Grand Fiesta Tour this long and also diapers on the railing. M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-C That baby may be. I can't leave it here. Hey, can I toss that in there? It's empty. Thank you. So just going into Mexico just let our bodies cool down a little bit but now that we're back out in the World Showcase the sun went down a lot and it feels amazing. Just look at that sky. Wow. Christina got the Pai Pai Shrimp or Pairia Pairia? Pairia Pairia? I don't know, I just saw shrimp and I got it. Pai? It looks pretty good though. I want to show you guys my favorite thing about all the festivities or festivals at Epcot and that is that they take the time to decorate the little train town. Look at the flag poles. They actually say Food and Wine 2019. How awesome is that? I was going to try to catch the last showing a smast mouth but look at the line here and there's still a good 30 to 40 minutes before they start seating people. It does draw a big crowd. A bunch of all-stars waiting in line. Even though the line was absolutely very long, we ended up actually getting very good seats. So I'm very happy. Look at that magic. That was a blast from the past. Wow, smash mouth. I don't think I would ever think I would see them in concert but I did today at Epcot. Thank you Epcot. But now it's time for illuminations and if you're at Epcot this next coming two weeks you should watch illuminations as much as you can. It's starting. It's starting right now. Illuminations was great but it is so weird to be like directed to leave Epcot through this way. Like we're heading over to the land and I forgot that they have the Hohen Taira Fountain viewing area closed off so they have no choice but to do this but wow. I don't even hear the illuminations and the Epcot music playing. Wow. Well I think that's going to do it for me today. What a fun day here at Foodwine. I had a great time.  What can go wrong? Love the life you live. We'll see you next time. Bye.


Hi babies, Mama Dukes here with a product review. Today we're reviewing a Gilden G640 in the color Heather Berry. G640s are made with 100 percent pre-shrunk ring spun cotton. You're wondering what that means because it's a soft style that means that it's processed longer. Say for instance you have a stick of butter and you have the mixer. The butter is kind of hard and firm but if you beat it with that mixer the longer you beat it the softer and more fluffy it becomes. So that's the same thing that kind of happens with cotton when you ring spin it. Sports gray and antique colors are made with 90 cotton and 10 polyester. The graphite heather is 50 polyester 50 cotton. All the rest of the heather colors are 65 polyester 35 cotton. G640s are made with a seamless three-quarter inch double stitch collar. That's why you see the two stitches and three-quarter inch is the size of the red part of the collar. Tape neck and shoulders ensure a perfect fit also makes the seams lay flat. This is the taped neck and the taped shoulder. That's an added seam so it doesn't sit up off of the shirt like this one. It lays flat smooth and clean. The G640 also features a rolled forward shoulder. You see how the neckline is hanging back and the seam on the shoulder is all the way back here. A rolled forward shoulder has the seam more to the front which lays the back of the neckline on the neck smoothie. This also features a double needle sleeve and bottom hem. That is a double needling along with at the bottom of the shirt. It also features a tubular fit for minimum torque. That means there are no seams on the side so there's no shifting and twisting. It just stays flat. This is the original version so it features a gray pearlized tear away bag. They're transitioning now into the newer ones that are going to have a black label but keep in mind that they are all tearaways. These shirts are also deco eligible which means that you can decorate them in almost any way you choose. They are good for bleach dye, tie dye, you can do heat transfer vinyl on them, HTV, heat press, you can spray paint them. The list goes on and on. The G640 has a more vintage feel. It's a little lighter than the classic G500. If you want to check that video out I'll leave a link right here. So that's all for today's review. See you next video.


All right. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Kate Tallman. I'm the chair of the help. I'm an accidental government information library and webinar series. The series is brought to you by the American Library Association government documents roundtable. Thank you again for coming. You'll be muted during this webinar, but we encourage you to participate in the chat. If you don't see a chat window, kind of hover along the chat icon on the bottom of your screen and type in your question. If you have any technical issues during the webinar, Kelly Wilson is on hand to help. She has the name zoom tech. Also, feel free to chat directly with her and worst case scenario, please remember that this session is being recorded and will be available on YouTube. Real quick, I wanted to go over our upcoming webinar. Next up is November 15. This is the nuts and bolts of fruss the foreign relations of the United States. This is with Elizabeth Charles. She's a historian with the office of the historian and the Department of State and she's going to talk about what it publish takes to publish a fruss volume. If you have any topic ideas or would like to present, please let me know. My email is here Catherine dot W dot Talman at Colorado dot edu.  I'm always happy to talk to you as well. And there's going to be a short survey at the end of this where you can share your thoughts on today's webinar and future ideas for improvement. Finally, here's our YouTube link on the screen where you can see all of our webinars published on our YouTube channel and you're welcome to subscribe to our channel as well. So today I'm going to introduce our whole talk because I'm part of the panel. Today's webinar is reporting on the world of government information panel presentation from the editors of government information landscape and libraries, which is a professional report published by ifla in 2021. Today's speakers are cake cell, Professor emerita of library and information science science at Rutgers, Jim church, who is librarian for economics, global studies, political economy and international government information at the University of California, Berkeley, and myself, Kate Talman, I'm the interim director for rare and distinctive collections and a federal depository coordinator at the University of Colorado Boulder. And here is an overview of our webinar today. Kay is going to talk about the contents of the webinar itself or the contents of the report itself. Jim is going to cover some of the editing and lessons learned there and what it takes to publish a report of this size, especially for an international organization like if law. And I am going to talk all about if law geops and try to recruit a few of you in attendance into joining us and learning a little bit more about what if I can do for you. And you'll see here also there is a QR code that you could take a picture of and that will take you directly to the if law professional report that we will be talking about. All right, so I'm going to hand it over to Kay. And thank you very much again for joining us. Hey. Welcome everyone. And I'm glad to be talking to you about this report that we that we completed a couple years ago now. It seems like just yesterday. Okay, so next. So the report is called the government information landscape and libraries. And I'm going to give you just an overview of it in order for you to have a sense of what is in this document. The publication provides a summary of the government information landscape for selected countries and regions worldwide. And it provides information on such things as publishing practices, depositories, legislatures, access to information, government libraries, preservation practices and digitization. The publication wants to make the point that government information is not easy to find. So government information professionals are needed to help users to find the information that they're looking for next. Oh, no, there should be another before that. Oh, no, you're right. God. Okay, so we'll start with Korea and young one Yang provided information on government publishing and preservation in Korea. There's in Korea there is no centralized or systematic government publications methods so each government agency publishes and distributes their own publications. And I think that the beginning of modern government publications in Korea began in 1950, but a recent creation the national digital library is being developed to provide better access for government publications. Next, Canada. So, I think that's why Peter's in provides a history of Canada's government documents system. The government depositories the library system actually goes back to 1927, and they officially ended printed documents in nine in 2014. Most government documents are now available online. And this deposit or services program that's been in business for a long time is now a DSP E collection. And many of the government documents are available on the open government portal. Next, the Middle East and North Africa. So, what happens here, ballet and list that are focused on government libraries in the Middle East and North Africa. They looked at different kinds of government libraries, including legislative libraries, judicial libraries and executive libraries such as libraries of ministries and departments of government. The services include document delivery and research assistance. They commented that the libraries, these government libraries tend to lack budgets, staff and technology. So the authors have suggested that the libraries need to work cooperatively through their library associations to strengthen the understanding of the value of libraries in order for them to be able to to function more better than they are functioning now. Next. The Russian Federation. We can just say Russian to our author did call it the Russian Federation. So, and as Tasia draws Dova documented the progress made in the Russian Federation toward more access to government information. So, since 2011, there's been an official internet portal of legal information. It's a website with legal parliamentary and judicial information. More, more government information is now available on the official websites of government agencies, for example, the federal tax service, and information is also available on the open data portal of the front of the Russian Federation, and on the National Digital Archive of Russia, which is an independent project. Next, sub Saharan Africa. Marisa Kamar and Dr. Clive summa provided an overview of access to government information in sub Saharan Africa, which includes Kenya, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, South Africa, Nigeria and Uganda. There are many challenges to accessing government information in these countries, but they indicate that progress is slowly being made. And they give some examples of some of the things that are happening that shows the progress that is being made. For example, the establishment of legal depositories, such as in South Africa, and government programs, such as in Kenya, collections and access to statistical information, and the establishment of some depository library so they are slowly moving forward, which is really wonderful to see. Next, United Kingdom. Hannah Chandler and Jenny Primshaw provided a very useful guide to the development of official publishing in the United Kingdom. Six official legal depositories in the UK and they work together to ensure that government information is collected, preserved and made accessible to the public. So, since the UK government depositories have been publishing on the internet since 1994. And in 2001, they developed what they call the UK online, which was a way to provide better access to government information for the general public. And this was, this was changed in 2016 to become gov dot UK. United States. Cassandra and a number of her colleagues provided a wealth of information on how to access for various parts of the US government information. Most US government information is now digital, so it can be found on the internet. Over 1000 libraries are part of the federal depository library program, which we call FDLP and provides access to government information. They identified some of the websites that provide information about US government publications. The catalog of government publications, CGP provides access to all publications distributed by the FDLP. Also, there is a government website called gov info dot gov, which provides information on Congress and some of the information on the executive branch. Another is Congress dot gov, which provides information on the US Congress. And finally, NARA and ARA dot gov, which provides information on the National Archive. Next. International government organizations. James Church addressed the nature and origins of international government organization information. He explored former and current functions of depository libraries and documentation centers, trends and IGO open access, and the counter movement of subscription based digital libraries. So that's one of the strategies for locating substantive material within large bureaucracies. So I, I guess that's my cue. I wasn't quite sure where you can end there but anyway, thank you very much, Kay. And Kate as well was a pleasure working with both of you. There's a little slide for me. And I think no further introductions needed. Could we have the next slide please, Kate. So yeah, I just have. Kate mentioned what I'm going to talk about today is more of the story of how we accomplished this fee. The editing and lessons learned and I can see there I misspelled lessons so that's not a good, you know, sign okay for editing in particular. That is mortifying. Believe it or not, I was actually, you know, very involved in the editing but I see that now and my God. All right, so anyway, let's move on. Here are some of the key issues that we faced recruitment formatting citations diplomacy flexibility and correspondence so I'm going to address each of these one by one. Next slide please so the overview and the recruitment part about it. The total time period that we needed to complete this process is actually almost 10 years from start to finish. It was initiated if memory serves at one of the offices I believe in Helsinki. And of course naturally we had the organization and if law which has got its hoops to jump through as well as you know we do and go toward every organization does.  And then we were faced with the task of recruiting people from all over the world, who are willing and able to address government information publications and policy. It took a lot longer than we anticipated. We tried but there were just not that many people were immediately forthcoming and we wanted to doing eventually is working within our network of if a colleague so that's a really good place to start I mean I was surprised I thought we might find more volunteers but surprisingly it can sometimes be difficult these days for working librarians such as myself to car at the time to work on a substantial, you know, piece such as this and it was. It's a really grew at the outset we didn't have this concept that it was going to be as long as it was, but we found more and more people as time went on. And, you know, they contributed substantive chapters so I think we're very pleased with the end result but it did take a lot longer than anticipated so that's definitely a lesson learned plan for a long period of time if ever you're working on a publication it's probably going to be double at least the amount of time that you expect. So next slide please. So again this is sort of the recruitment, it was, you know, more difficult than expected, you know, to find people around the world willing to submit chapters on publishing and policy. So, yeah, at the end of the day we wound up primarily relying on colleagues within or had experience with an ifla. And I know people I asked a lot of people, but most people, you know, you know who submitted chapters wound up from being within the organization with the exception of some people that Kay found for example for the US portion that was, you know, done, done locally so that was great. Next slide please. Formatting. Okay, so this is a mistake that we made that we've really regretted later. So I'm going to distinguish between the formatting and the citations. So again we did not originally imagine that this was going to be a 160 page document publication we were thinking more 50 60 pages at first so we didn't really go ahead and specify strict formats when we asked the authors to submit it but then it became clear that you know the length is going to be quite long. And again I'm not talking about the citation style, whether to use end notes for it notes what's you know which format to use. I'm talking about just you know the margins, the fonts, whether or not they were going to have an abstract bullet points. People from all over the world have very different publishing conventions about how you're going to organize something. And it was just wildly different when we got it so it took a lot of time to reformat everything standardized the spacing and all that I mean it was just surprisingly difficult. One of the biggest challenges we face so again a lesson definitely learned there if you don't have a professional editor or a desktop publisher. Definitely allow yourself some time to do this. Next slide please. So the citations. This was an enormously time consuming constraint. So again, due to our, you know, oversight we didn't specify, you know, exactly which style to use. And we also had to work with various languages, Greek, Russian, Korean, Arabic and we decided in the end to use, you know, these native languages so we had to work and make that all fit in. Some chapters contained dozens, like many, many citations, which all had to be formatted correctly and checked. We also did not really want to choose an American style manual so we went with the IFLA recommendation which I believe is Harvard. And the other thing was of course is that government information is very link intensive. So we had to check every link in the, you know, while we were doing this so it just took a really, really long time. Next slide please. Because of the extended timeframe and people working on this over a number of years, we had to maintain contact and touch with them, you know, during this time period. And while they were working on this, some authors actually moved and had to be relocated. So again, I can tell you some stories.  One of our authors from Lebanon, for example, happened to be working on his chapter when they had that enormous explosion in the port. So is there a concern about him? We had to find him. He was fine, but that was something else. Another one of our authors from Russia, Anastasia, left her job and relocated to the Russian countryside and was completely out of contact of all emails. So I had to rely upon my friend from IFLA to go locate her. And then there was all of the, you know, the contract arrangements and IFLA does specify that whenever you publish with them, at least in this format that you sign a Creative Commons attribution 4.0 international agreement. And those needed to be signed by all 22 authors and returned to IFLA. So that took a lot of time, you know, pursuing and making sure everything was signed. It took, you know, I don't even remember, but it was a lot more than we anticipated. And then finally, we spent a considerable amount of time. And I want to give a great shout out because IFLA headquarters was extraordinarily helpful, but we needed to work with them on the funding, we needed to work with them on the peer review. The publication was peer reviewed. And so it was submitted to several organizations within the, you know, IFLA bureaucracy who had some expertise in this and they all, you know, represented different sections. So they presented comments, ranks and they decided like on a scale of one to six how good is it. And, you know, in the end, I really welcomed their comments and feedbacks because we actually did go back and make some substantive changes as a result of the feedback. So I want to like definitely know peer review may seem like it's an intimidating process. But I think when it works well, it actually can be an excellent standard and can result in, you know, a better result. So, yeah, so next slide please. So diplomacy and the flexibility so if anyone has ever done this, you know, if you work with authors anywhere and you have to be in a position where you're going to be editing and making suggestions. It's certainly a good idea to be diplomatic and flexible. So because there are different styles globally about how to approach writing. You do have to take this in consideration whenever you're doing an international project. So not everybody likes writes like Americans. There's of course difference in spelling but there's also differences in style ideas about, you know, how descriptive you should be how detailed less or more so. So this was something we also had to keep in mind and just work with everybody to make it at once both more or less standard, but at the same time, maintain each author's individual personality and cultural style so this was a very interesting exercise. And what we did do is so we didn't get completely different, you know, submissions we did use an outline where we specified the types of topics that we wanted people to engage in. And then there was also just some flexibility we need to engage with with if the headquarters and all of that, you know, because we depended very much on them to, you know, get this going and make it happen. And once again, I mean I can't emphasize enough, having a good publisher someone is on your side willing to help you out was really an important part of this process. So, I think, next slide I think that's some. Oh yeah, one more. And then finding a cover, little things that we didn't consider, you know right at the beginning, like how do you get a cover that is representative of a government information library. So we thought about this, we're like okay so good to get pictures somewhere and it doesn't need to be our resolution and this and that and the other and eventually what we did was, we found one that had a government documents collection with a creative commons license, you know we asked permission and discussed it and then we just use this one. Sort of an old school government documents collection, and we attributed, but that was also something that we did not think of it first about how to best, you know, engage in this so again very nice and grateful that if it took, you know, a photograph and they created it, you know they used a template for it and I think they made it look really great, if I'm not saying. So I think, actually, that's about all I have and hope that was helpful and illuminating for any of you interested in pursuing a publication on your own, particularly within a group with involving multiple authors and sponsored by an organization, all these things need to be taken into account, you know the informational bureaucracy working with multiple people multiple deadlines, being realistic and planning ahead are really crucial. And if you've got sabbatical that would be great. Because there's absolutely no way I have to say that I could have finished this or we all could have worked on it together had it not been for the pandemic. I had a lot of time at home so to work on this with or not for that. I probably would have needed to take off an extended period of time to work on it because there was many, many hundreds of hours. I would say, altogether, maybe not many hundred, but at least 100 hours. Yeah, it really was. Well, and I'll say to Jim to your point about something that really struck me during the process was the the link checking because we had been editing this late later in the process right so we had, like you said we had to check every single link to make sure that they were accurate and oftentimes they'd actually moved or and then so we would have to for every single one of those links, we'd have to go in and dig around. That website and make sure that the link was act that the new link was accurate and that the content and information that was displayed on the page was reflected in the in the writing by the authors. So, and for the most part I think it was, but I remember really doubting myself when I was doing that part of the editing process, where I was kind of fact checking our authors right because that's what it kind of felt like was fact checking in a way. And yeah, so it was, it was sticky and thorny. So, okay. Thanks Jim. Thanks Kay. Kay, I apologize. I realized that the slides did not transfer over to our PowerPoint today that we wanted them the way they wanted them to so I do apologize for tripping you up there with that. Okay. Yeah. All right. So, I'm going to just talk a little bit about if law and geops provide a few helpful resources if you're interested in getting more into the world of international librarianship, learning about how to get involved and why you would be a part of if law also. First off, I realize we may not have covered some of the acronyms that we have been throwing around here so if law is the International Federation of Library Associations and institutions. It's an international service organization. I do think it's an, not sure if it's a nonprofit, but it has 150 countries represented and 1500 members. Geops is the government information and official publication section and that is a smaller working professional section within the if law structure and within the if law professional committee. So it's very similar to Godot.  Jim is a past chair. Another one of our past chairs Cornelia boots is here today. Okay, Jim and I have all been on if law on geops and I've been the secretary for I was secretary for eight years and then I've started doing that again so and the W L I C or will it is the World Library and Information Congress this is the normally used to be the annual conference and that's up in the air now and I'll talk about that in a little bit. So a couple helpful resources if it does a lot of work, putting out data and information on the library field the international library field so I wanted to highlight just a few things there's the library map of the world. This is a really nice interactive data tool where you can look at kind of basic library statistics from around the world that if it has collected. It's a lot of fun to play around with and I do recommend that you take some time to check that out. There is a couple big publications that they do every year there's the trend report so this identifies five really high level trends and the information. World so shaping the information society spanning access to education privacy civic engagement and transformation. So here's a link to the 2022 if the trend report but it kind of keeps you up to date on what's happening in the field. If the journal is a peer reviewed journal with articles on library and information services on issues throughout the world. There's a lot of different international authors in there. I can imagine that the if the journals work is very similar to what Jim and we went through in editing our our professional report so I can't imagine doing that for many different journal articles throughout the year but that's a great resource. It's open access you can find it online very easily to big kind of piles of resources that I found to be pretty useful through if what our standards and the professional reports. The first are standards so these are up to date kind of best practices produced by the professional committees the sections advisory groups in consultation with other groups and often other professionals. So you can go to the standards page and find current standards on a lot of different topics. I pulled out a few that I thought were either relevant or interesting. There's the guidelines for legal deposit legislation. There's guidelines for libraries of government departments. There's guidelines for continuing professional development and for public internet access and library so any kind of concept within librarianship public or academic special or government you're probably going to find it. Some sort of standard in there whether it's up to date that's a question but you're going to find something there and that's some of the biggest work that if the sections actually do is produce standards or professional reports. And that's what this government information landscape and library libraries report was it was called a professional report. So these often they report back on the implementation of standards but they also report on all kinds of other things as well. So you can see a few examples here document delivery and resource sharing global perspectives. I think that's very similar to our report where they're kind of profiling what document sharing or resource sharing and document delivery looks like around the world creating a maintaining safer online world for children and young adults and libraries and kind of a fun one the world through picture books librarians favorite books from their country. So if the reports are full of and they're all of this is open source by the way all of this is open access. I mean, so you can go on to if those website and grab it. Geops as a section we have I think we're up to 14 or 15 members right now. And we have a newsletter that we put out each year we're trying to shoot for two to two next year but usually it's an annual newsletter. If you scan this QR code it'll take you to our to sign up to subscribe to the newsletter so you can get a copy as soon as it's issued. So usually we have a report from our chair K often does a nice interview with an international government information librarian. We normally have an article from another government librarian and reporting on some sort of work or project that they've done. And then we have information from our IGO partners like the World Bank or the United Nations. So you can join ifla you can either join as a personal member or affiliate or you can see if your organization or institution that you're associated with is a member of ifla and you might be able to join geops or you might be able to join ifla through that. You can also join our standing committee. So we would love to have you geops is a small committee at times we've struggled to keep membership up. We're doing really good right now thanks to Jim and Cornelia and all the efforts of the standing committee over the years. But we would love to have you join us. This is where all of our work gets done. We meet every couple months and right now we're co-opting members for this next term the 2023 to 2027 term. So this would involve joining ifla either as an individual or as a as an institutional member. I could talk to you about that if you're interested. And then you have to fill out a statement of interest that would go to the geops standing committee and we would determine if we can take on new members or not. So if you're interested in joining us we would be happy to have you. Why join. There's lots of good reasons you can meet librarians from around the world expand your network in a way that is very different than you would in the United States. Make lots of connections to people that aren't necessarily going to happen through a la but there's a lot of cross pollination there I would I would like to add. You can attend conferences in very interesting places we just got back from Rotterdam this summer. Dublin was last year been all over the place. So 2024 is canceled. It was going to be held in Dubai. And there were a number of protests and groups that disagreed with some of the organization's decision making around that conference and the organizing committee pulled out. So 2024 was canceled and we're not sure about 2025. So this is actually a good time to join ifla because it's going to be not as expensive. You won't, you know, the conferences won't be as pricey to attend. There's a lot of other good reasons you know building knowledge and professional expertise through the various seminars workshops events etc. And really to me this was this was important to me was it was I was able to explore new avenues for my own research or my own publishing and service. There's a lot of different opportunities with ifla than with other service organizations. So hopefully that helped sell you a little bit on joining us and if we would love to have you. And I am going to go ahead and open it up for question and answer from the audience. Thank you very much. And you're welcome to chat. Or you can raise your hand and we can allow you to talk. We don't have any questions that's okay too. Thank you so much for the question for the audience is anyone else out there considering any kind of professional publication working through an organization or on their own. And it's a butcher raised your hat. Hi Jennifer. Nice to. Yeah, Jennifer. Okay, hi. Thank you for what you guys do. And, and I'm a big supporter of government sources and always have been even back on microfilm. I have a project that's called the zombie list that is looking to organize historical context of cereals. My biggest problem was finding an open source bibliographic tool that could handle cereals. And a lot of, you know, the historical cereals are government sources. So how did you handle the organization of of the time series of the sources. And it was it a proprietary or wasn't an open source bibliographic tool did you use, or was it an Excel because you couldn't find anything that's any good. So I'm not quite sure. I understand. Records for all of the item records. You, or you guys were just doing collections, not title by title, right? No, no, no, we did have some titles in there, but it was, you know, collection of chapters, each of them. I'll say mostly some of them were a little topical like we had one on, you know, information security, you know, or, and we had one on international government but most of them were country specific. In each case, the person would write about the government information policies, the types of, you know, information produced legislative statistical, and would perhaps mention a few of, you know, the websites that were of interest, and talk about like say freedom of information access to information. And so forth. So usually just an approach of how like you would work as a reference library and if you're into taking to, you know, help someone with an interest in a particular country. So if you take a look at the US overview, it's quite, you know, extensive about how government information is published organized, distributed and accessed here. Oh, yeah. So I think with the exception of the topic on cybersecurity, they almost all had a country in focus and we didn't make any exhaustive lists of circles list. It was the policies around access and a policy. Okay, so how, how are you going to keep it evergreen, because, you know, Marrakesh change things. You know, the US open source versus public domain, those are all changing.  Oh, it's not being updated this is going to have to remain like a statute, not a code you'll have to be, you know, blazing at a point in time. We're not doing our vision.  And this is even mentioned, you know, in the by the editorial team, you know, the peer review people to try to get more, you know, people like say, Latin America to participate. That was the one reach in the world where we just could not. We couldn't find someone. So it'd be volume two. Or just an expansion, you know, over revised, then extended version would be great to have a Latin American contributors. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, thanks Jim. I think even more of a focus on the kind of the ethos or the principles of government policy. The principles of government publishing, rather than just the specific sources. Because those are important, right, but also I think just understanding like how a country like sees the production of government information, like in society, not just. Here's the digital library. Here's the repository. Here's, you know, just having that more that over in a lot of the chapters do have a lot of that because you did mention how these are organized. How information is organized, how it's accessed, how it's preserved. And I think more of an emphasis on that in a future volume would be welcome to because it's impossible to keep up the links and all the changes, even that, you know, the US federal government information system is undergoing some pretty dramatic changes right now. That this, the chapter on the United States is, you know, soon going to be more out of date than we'd like it to be. In a lot of the countries, the authors would cite a specific statute or, you know, law passed into Gazette that would point to the country's access to information policies, depository libraries of any publishing programs. So there was a lot of legal citation throughout throughout the text. Right. Right. Well, I would also say in general, the things are changing fast. And, and you can see the beginnings in some of these chapters of the new digital information sources that are being developed in countries to give people better access. So it's just going to keep, you know, developing that way. So there are the, so it'll get better and better. So I think almost everywhere that's happening. And I found when I reviewed all the chapters that, at least for these countries, and at least for the professionals who work in this field, that access to information really was seen as a fundamental right. That's one of the biggest connections that I made between all the different chapters was that every, every country at least stated it doesn't mean that they act that way or that it's, it always comes through and how information is published or preserved in their countries. But it's a, it's a, it's kind of a fundamental understanding within their countries that it's, it's a right to their citizens to have access to some sort of information from their government. And there was also history there. I think a lot of people provided historical background about the region or country. So that was interesting. Everybody shares in the same struggles too. That's another thing that you kind of pull out of there. Everybody has barriers to access and barriers to preservation. So I was going to say that another good thing that IFLA has done, it's helped a lot of countries, like to develop a library association in their country, which really strengthens their ability to, to develop government information sources but other things too. But that's one of the good things about IFLA is, is helping other countries to, to get their library associations active and doing more. Anybody else with comments or questions? I gave it the, well, it may not have been 30 seconds, but I gave it probably 30 seconds. All right. Well, thank you everybody. Please scan this QR code to provide feedback on this and other webinars from the help committee. Again, see all of our great webinars on YouTube. And if you would like to learn about something else, I'm still looking for a couple of presentations for next semester. So at the new year, we have one in November and then we're going to take a break and then we'll be back in February. So thank you very much and have a great day.