Welcome to Much More On Medicine. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. You may notice that I'm not in the think tech studio. I'm at my office due to the governor stay-at-home order because of the COVID-19 pandemic. My law practice is an exempt business and so I'm still able to go to my office and conduct the business of helping people during the crisis. For those of you who are in Hawaii and other parts of the world, I'm sure you're aware of the challenges faced by healthcare professionals and residents of New York. Today I'm pleased to be talking with Dr. Nicholas Chiao, a New York physician who not only suffered from the effects of COVID-19 as a patient, but also treats those who have the diagnosis. The topic of my show today is caring for COVID casualties, lessons learned for patient care as a doctor becomes the patient. Dr. Chiao is a primary care physician, clinician, educator, and assistant professor in the Bronx at Montipour Medical Center. He received his medical degree from Temple University in 2010 and his master's degree, master's of science degree in 2015. He is originally from Hawaii and graduated from Punahou. Dr. Welcome. Hi, Katherine. Thank you for having me. All right. I understand that you unfortunately experienced COVID-19 for yourself as a patient. Tell us about that. I did. It's a little surreal. It was a little surreal at the time because we were hearing about cases from China and actually our clinic as well as the rest of the country. We were following guidelines saying, okay, we're screening for the, you know, the travel history and we're screening for these hallmark symptoms, which at the time were cough, fever, and, you know, shortness of breath. I think maybe my algeas, body aches. And at the time I was telling my, at the time I was suffering from my usual annual sinus infection symptoms. So I was like, okay, I just got to watch myself and make sure I don't get a fever. Well, then I got the fever. And then, so I called out and I got, then I then lost the taste of smell, the sense of taste, I had the my algeas.  I think that one of the things that is hard to kind of just describe in medical papers and to describe just in broad research terms is the type of anxiety that individuals can go through while infected with COVID and while in isolation. And being in isolation in general can be anxiety provoking. I have plenty of patients who, even without COVID, live by themselves and have fears of going outside and such, which is a whole set of problems. But every single day as I'm going through my countdown when I can get out of isolation, I'm thinking, am I going to get worse or am I going to get better? And on some days I felt better. And on some days I felt worse. It was almost like a alternating day sort of thing. And I had some pretty, I had pretty common COVID symptoms. As I mentioned, the loss of taste and smell. I had fevers. I had my algeas. I had a cough, which fortunately wasn't that bad. Never had shortness of breath. Thank goodness. I didn't have any of the lower abdominal symptoms. The other thing which, you know, as a physician becoming a patient, it was quite scary for me to go through my countdown because when I was starting to feel better at the end of my first week, I knew that typically we, you know, day seven through nine or 10 could potentially get worse. Worse, meaning my breathing could get a lot worse. I could develop higher fevers. I could start to really have, you know, really bad, you know, nausea or vomiting that can not tolerate anything. The fortunately that didn't happen. My fevers did linger on through day 10, but besides that, I generally just got better and better. One thing I didn't mention was the, you know, kind of dealing with the, like the anorexia of the disease, which some people have, which is just no drive to eat. Some people when they don't, you know, in general, that's not uncommon in other illnesses, but it just, with the lack of taste and smell to it just puts a stop on everything that you want to do. Like you really don't want to drink much. You really don't want to eat much.  And there's times when your body is exhausted and you can't, but you don't want to sleep. Like your body is awake enough and energized enough to not sleep, but you're exhausted, too exhausted to watch TV or too exhausted on the phone, too exhausted to talk with family or whatnot. And so that. What was the timeframe of you starting to have symptoms? What do you remember the date it was? Was that in March? Yes. March 20th was the day that I started my fevers. If I were to be truly honest with myself, the kind of exhaustion and the exhaustion and the chills kind of mostly started late on Thursday, the day before I actually called out sick.  So I was just trying to push through saying, no, this is probably a sinus infection. And then the night that I got the fever, I'm like, no, this is not just a sinus infection. So March 20th was when I went out. So when you started having the symptoms where you identified it as COVID, it was already pretty much a world emergency. Is that right? Yes. You know, it was a world emergency, but it was at a time when all these testing options were just in New York were just beginning to be made to the public and not and made to the public in the sense that they were not just for the sickest of the sick. I'm not sure how close you followed the New York news, but we have a town in our county called New Rochelle. They had a high density of cases. So they set up a drive through testing center. That's actually where I got tested. My own institution as well as a lot of other institutions were still building theirs, but the National Guard staffed this particular drive-in testing center. That's where I got tested. How long did you have it before you actually got tested? When I went out on a Friday, I got tested by Sunday. And then how long did it take before you got the results? Again, I was very lucky. My turnaround time was 24 hours. Okay.  No, that had to be with me being a physician. The drive-in center that I went to was not requiring an appointment for healthcare workers.  Yes. Several of my colleagues got sick. A lot of our nurses got sick. And this speaks to the virulence or the ability of the virus to infect people. Just the previous week before, we were seeing patients. And in fact, earlier in that week, I went on a Friday, that Monday, and I was seeing a full day of patients. And then by that Friday, we had significantly cut down on my patients. But I still saw three or four patients face-to-face. When I looked back, I didn't see any evidence of them having to go to the hospital or anything. But for argument's sake, I might have gotten some of them sick. That's how fast this was moving. That's how little virus. All these things about the smell and the taste, that didn't come out until after I was well into my isolation. So that's a good almost week later. Okay. I saw a tip from a nurse in New York where she was smelling something every morning just to see if she still had her sense of smell. Do you think that that is at all helpful for people so that they have any indication, perhaps, that they might have it? Let's put it this way. I don't think it's going to hurt. I think that some of the early indicators also can include headache. And for me, an early indicator was kind of just like extreme exhaustion. If anyone's had the flu, it's actually probably even worse than that. But the level of exhaustion that someone could get with the flu is pretty similar to what I had before I got my fever. And to be honest, some people don't even have fevers. So yeah, at this point, the list of symptoms is very long. And here in New York, our threshold to diagnose somebody without a test is very low. I've been diagnosing people on the phone for weeks now because there's just so much variability in the symptoms. Hmm. Okay. And so did you have someone caring for you during that time or were you taking care of yourself? Yes, extremely fortunate.  And then my amazing in-laws who live downstairs from us were watching the kids throughout the day and kind of looping back a little bit into being a patient because this is not unique just to me. But the guilt and the fear of infecting other people in my household was very, very significant. So people who are suffering with COVID alone have one set of anxiety and fears, which are very real and very understandable. And people who have family members who they have to then isolate either with or away from have a different set of fears. Because I was isolated in a room. I'm fortunate to have a room to do that. Many of my patients in the Bronx don't. You have to just wear a mask and cross their fingers. And what I speak of in terms of the guilt and the and the anxiety of all this is that I do nothing I can do because I'm isolating myself to not get to my wife's sake or my kids' sake because even if they have the mild disease, I don't want that to be passed on to my in-laws. Sure. And one thing that's similar with Hawaii and with New York is that oftentimes people live in really small spaces.  But, okay, so at this time we're going to take a short break. I'm Catherine Norr. This is much more on medicine on the ThinkTech live streaming network series. We're talking with Dr. Nicholas Chiow about caring for COVID casualties. Aloha. I'm Lillian Cumick, host of Lillian's Vegan World, the show where we talk about veganism and the plant-based diet located in Honolulu, Hawaii. I'm a vegan chef and cooking instructor and I have lots of information to share with you about how awesome this plant-based diet is. So do tune in every second Thursday from 1 p.m. Aloha. We're back. We're live. I'm Catherine Norr and this is much more on medicine on the ThinkTech live streaming network series. And we're talking with New York physician Dr. Nicholas Chiow about caring for COVID casualties. Doctor, when, before we had a break, you were telling us about your experiences with COVID-19 as a patient. How did you, did you have any anxiety or depression as a result of being ill? Yes, I did, Catherine. Like I think, while it's not clinical depression, certainly a lot of anxiety, a lot of guilt. And there were days where I had very, you know, you call it dysthymia or very low mood. You can call it depression, you know, just for the sake of other lack of a better word. But it was, and it was, it was tough because as I mentioned, I mean, it's not for a lack of people reaching out to me, texting me, calling me, and trying to see how I'm doing. But it's more of a matter of just feeling just trapped and kind of hopeless and not knowing how the disease is going to progress, how, you know, and, you know, hearing your, you know, your children cry, you're not being able to comfort them, that kind of, that kind of anxiety. So what I, what I ended up doing, and this is why I have, I share this a lot with my patients, I share my diagnosed, almost all my patients, because the anxiety, the pressure they feel is very real. And I think that actually may become another, we'll call it an epidemic pandemic, once COVID gets under control here, because the, you know, we'll call, you know, post-traumatic stress syndrome, all the financial and emotional ramifications of all this going on will probably launch either worsening of existing diagnoses or people developing them. And I used one or two hotlines just to talk to somebody, you know, that wasn't my family member, because I think that these trained individuals who volunteer their time to, you know, listen to people in time, either time of need, are really helpful and really special. You know, there's, the ones I use were specific to New York, but things like that, you know, the national crisis hotline, the national suicide prevention hotline, those are all, those are all wonderful resources for people to reach out to. And they make you really feel as if you're not, you're not alone. And they kind of offer you an objective here to listen to, you know, in addition to the family members that are there for you. Oh, that's fantastic. And so, Dr., how long were you off work? So the 14, basically the 14 days that I was in isolation and then a weekend, so maybe like 16 days or so. Okay. And then I was back at work. Okay. And then how did this translate, this experience translate into your going back to work and then treating patients? Right. That's a great question because I think about it in two different ways. I have, I had this, even before I got sick, I had this sense of mission of, you know, my colleagues are out there in the hospitals getting sick, getting out, some of them being hospitalized. I have to go to the hospital. I have to help treat some of those patients. So a week after I came back to work in the clinic, I went and got deployed into our hospital that's associated with Montefiore. And I was very fortunate that, you know, we had plenty of PPE. The institution was doing its very, very best to keep up with, you know, with the changing protocols, the changing demands of the patients there. We fortunately had the ventilators, we had the beds. And so I think Montefiore as a whole did a good job trying to adjust to this very sudden tumultuous change. But with my patients specifically, I made it a point to tell a lot of them, look, I got sick too.  And me telling them, look, I got sick, you know, this is what we're going to have to do day to day. It let me also be honest with them because I can't tell them, oh, you're going to get better. It may not be true. And it wasn't true for all of them, but for a lot of them, for them to hear that doctor went through what they're going through to some extent and then say, hey, I'm going to be here to help you work through this. I think made them a little bit, made them feel as if, you know, it's more, it's more than a masked face. Now, we had to all wear masks and all that. I decided to put a picture of myself kind of hanging from my splash shield, just so that they knew what my face looked like, just because they felt like they're speaking to like an identifiable human being. And, you know, I think that also I was fortunate to have a good team. Like I worked with a physician assistant and my residents who made multiple calls to family members on a daily basis because remember, then the Hawaii folks, you know, hopefully don't have to experience this, but when loved ones end up in the hospital because of COVID, there's no visitors unless the person's terminally ill, in which case you get one visitor for about 10 minutes. And so, you know, I remember thinking about this with a patient who eventually passed away, but the last thing he unfortunately heard was, you know, the beat was beeping and yelling as people were like, you know, trying to press on his chest. So, you know, it's, I try to, I try to share these experiences with people because I don't expect everyone to be able to have that kind of experience of that kind of perspective.  And people are people are going to feel the way that they're going to feel, but, you know, here in New York, this is what we're, this is what we're going through. And the difference that the, the, some of the differences that we're seeing here because of the, you know, with the flattening and now as our cases are dropping is because enough people have decided to take this seriously. And I do appreciate that, you know, Hawaii decided to kind of look at other places and start to really kind of try to act early rather than wait for courage to climb more. Sure. And we haven't had a significant problem in Hawaii, but I wonder how's New York, have you seen there be changes like, is it getting better now? Yes. Well, okay, let's put it this way. The number of cases, the number of people getting put on ventilators, the number of deaths are all decreasing. But they're still like on the scale of a couple, a few hundred people dying a day, which is a lot. It's a lot. From what I should say, it's a lot because it's one thing that's killing them. Right? We're not talking about 200 people from a mixture of car accidents, heart attacks, strokes, diabetic thing, you know, diabetic complications. These are people dying from respiratory failure from one infectious disease. And that's frightening. It is. Wow.  Yes, I am. Most of the experts are hinting at it. And I'm preparing for it, meaning mentally preparing for it. And also preparing in the sense that I'm going to try to mentally keep up with the social distancing, the masking and whatnot. Because as the summer hits, we just had a great weekend and people just kind of came out. And I myself include, I went for a bike ride in the park. And the park was big enough where, you know, people were maybe half the people wearing masks, but everyone was being distanced appropriately. So maybe that wasn't quite so bad. But maybe in other parts of New York, as my friends were telling me, you know, you've got people that are like now clustered together with masks down and then, you know, smoking cigarettes and stuff like that, because people just so tight and pent up. So yeah, I am going to expect a second wave. You know, some of the things that we're that we're tracking as scientists are like the mutations that are happening, whether or not those mutations are going to lead to a different type of virus that is more transmissible. We don't see that yet. But that's why it's so important for us to just to keep track of the, you know, keeping track of things. But at the same time, I do want to caution everybody, not just lay people because I myself could be a victim of this, but reading reading a headline and saying, Oh my gosh, this is what's going to happen. There was a LA Times article recently which discussed that scientists recently discovered a more transmissible strain of COVID. And the original paper doesn't really say that that's been confirmed. I mean, that may be the case later, if they prove it, I'm willing to change my mind for that. But as of right now, when that paper came out, and a couple of virologists that I that I kind of read up on, we're just basically saying that these are mutations that they're following, it may lead to more infectivity. But we're not sure yet. So jumping at headlines is something that we all can all fall victim to, but I just encourage people to take like five seconds to say, from the headline with the article, if you can get through the original, you know, research or the original paper, try to read through that, and then try to weigh yourself before you kind of react to it. It's hard to do. I've been guilty of it. So do you, do you feel that now that you've had it that you have antibodies and that you're protected from future COVID exposure? I do have antibodies. I got, well, let's we trust the tests. I do have antibodies which prove I have exposure. I do not know if I have immunity. I would like to think that I have some. The experts assume that we have at least some, but just like the flu, by the pen and depending on which mutations accumulate in the in the subsequent variations of the virus, by the time the fall rolls around, we may have a different virus and that those, those antibodies, which may still be that may not be quite as effective. Okay. Well, you know, you've been, it's been so interesting having this perspective because in Hawaii, we don't have as many cases. We have less than 700, 700 confirmed cases and we have about 17 deaths as of today and but you know, we're really locked down and it's a practice for people to wear masks. So hopefully we'll be okay. But you know, I thank you so much doctor for being here today and sharing your experience. But we're about you're welcome. We're about out of time and we'll have to wrap it up. I'm Catherine Norr. This is much more on medicine on the think tech live streaming network series. We've been talking with New York physician Dr. Nicholas Tiao about caring for COVID casualties. Thank you for joining us today. Please take care of yourself, wash your hands and be kind to one another.


Cultural for has a problem He loves music and he loves jazz music and He loves it so much and he got into the base Yeah into the base thingy by the music so he decided he thought about well What can I do? I like the music? Maybe I'd love to play an instrument and I love to learn and I want to play with wood and machines and Metal and want to think and want to invent and engineer so he put it all together makes it a bit round and and Result was he made a bus guitar himself Very impressive That's why so no the only things he bought was Where the strings and some threaded rods? Please welcome couch sofa The guitar man Thanks So before I start I'd like to know who of you plays a guitar. Oh That's cool. Who of you actually build one. Oh I see a hand that's up. That's awesome. I want to talk to you later So a little bit about my background I'm studying civil engineering I lived in Aachen and travel to Cologne to the Dingfabrik where I built my first guitar and About a year ago. I moved to Karlsruhe and now basically live at the fab lab and That's where I built my current guitar and Yeah, I have a slight background in photography microcontroller and Arduino programming My first computer was a C64 No, not actually my first computer, but the first one I really understood the bare bones of it and I'm really into computational theory and language security and if you want to contact me There are context. I Prefer Java or a Yeah, I'm but has a problem he wants a nice guitar and He wants an awesome guitar. He wants a custom design. That's never been done before he wants to control the entire manufacturing process He wants to do it all by himself from scratch and He wants to learn a lot about building guitars. So first of all, he needs tools and The first tool is a bandsaw. You could use a table saw but with hardwoods that are usually used in guitar construction table saws have their limits and Bandsaws are much easier to use and you can extend them much further mill bigger pieces and the other thing is you need a plane and there are these really big awesome Airplane carrier planes That are really expensive and cool and you don't actually need them. You can do it by hand I bought my raw lumber pre pre-planes from from a guy I know and So I don't actually have to have to use one of those big planes and I can use a fancy hand plane and You actually get into sharpening planes and It's it's a nice nice hobby The next thing you need is a rasp to do the contours. I tried doing them with a table router but I found that those are really clean and continuous and you actually want some flowing forms and doing it by hand with a rasp is gives a much better result and those is a this is a shinto rasp the Japanese saw rasps are actually saw blades woven together to form a rasp and these tools are really awesome about it for For working with bobinger wood, which is really hard it has actually more properties of metal than wood and this thing just bites through it like butter It's really cool Then you need a lot of clams really a lot of clams You could never have enough of them because like this is gluing on a fretboard and you could use wood to Dispense the pressure to spread the pressure of the clams, but you only get so far with it You really need a lot of clams And of course a table router. This is just a little motor that has these cutter bits in it it sticks through a table and on the top of it are ball bearings so you can manufacture templates and put it in put the template on the on the piece of wood and Follow make the make the the tool head follow the template more on that later a CNC is really great. It's not mandatory, but I found that especially Like milling out pickup cavities is much easier using a CNC machine And they're fun to work with so why not? another thing is 3d printers also not mandatory, but really useful and I used a lace because we have a lathe at our fab lab and Yeah, you needed to if you want to do a hardware yourself. You really need a lathe to do the knobs wood Yeah, this is pretty wood. This is like bolts and walnuts and Spotted maple and This is what we usually use in guitar building. It's really pretty. It's really expensive really rare, but it looks just awesome and Those woods look good, but they can't really support weight because the fiber in this world is running crazy and You know, this is this is nice for a top to look good the actual requirements for the wood are moisture content because when the moisture content changes in the wood the wood begins to move and You don't want that because that produces cracks so a figure that that you can work with is about five percent of moisture left in the wood and You could say about one year per two centimeters of thickness of wood to dry to five percent and Yeah, that measures out for Planks use for guitar building to about three or five years that this wood needs to be stored and You can actually accelerate it with ovens, but that usually tends to create tensions in the woods that release when sawing it or milling it and Yeah, it's not really really that awesome No faults. You don't want not holes insects something like that, but These these woods actually have some faults, but those faults look awesome like the spell to maple is a maple tree that grows in a swamp with special minerals in it in the in the soil and then the bacteria Gets into the wood and actually pushes pushes these minerals into the cracks and this these That actually forms those nice stripes so sometimes you're looking for defaults and also saw some guys actually building a tally guitar with Pinewood with as many not holes as they could find just to to because I like the look so yeah Yeah, we use hardwoods and hardwood is a bit of an overloaded Expression it just and I think it originated in In toll booth because hardwood was just you had to pay a different tax on hardwood than on regular wood and After that it all got mixed up basically basically what it means is that it's dancer. It's really dense wood it has high strengths Long grain long long fibers and dense annual rings and it's not dependent on the species you can actually grow a species that's a softwood and bad environment and Then it grows slower and you can make it I have the same properties as a regular hardwood Yeah, and then I put some some measurements in there That's just what you what you usually need for guitar building and they're combining these facts you end up with Yeah, you have to pay a lot of money for good wood and But it pays off can be it can become an awesome instrument There's another thing that's milling because trees don't grow like boards. There are these strange route things you may have seen them if you go outside and we need to make boards from them and to get these parts there are a few ways to mill them and Usually what's what's the most effective way is the one in the middle quarter song because These these rings and the wood they almost are perpendicular and You can imagine that If you have these these fiber fiber fibers stacked that you can actually Compress them really easily, but you can But it's really hard to to Pull them in the direction of the fibers themselves so if you have if the moisture content changes if anything in the environment changes the wood tends to move in the direction of least resistance and With quarter song would you have almost perpendicular rings? And that means that it's only moving in one direction and you can work with that you can work around that. That's predictable If it's not it moves in strange directions wherever the grain is running and it can be quite height a crack can be quite hard quite hard to work with and Create cracks what you definitely do not want, but Lengthwise song would has this really really nice texture and that's what you usually usually use for finger boards Because those are glued on the neck and the neck is already very very strong. So it won't move if the finger board starts to To release some tension Okay, let's get actually started and build a guitar so I'm going to run through some theory and then talk a bit about what I did and about the Applying that theory and I brought some guitar with me and I might hold them out and hold them up and show some things Yeah, we will see about it first of all the hardware the thing that actually holds the strings and create and and Gives you the ability to tune the string by applying tension to it It also should not only tune the string it should also You Want you want string spacing you want the same space between every string and I found that a little bit of movement making them a little bit narrow actually changes the Feeling of playing the guitar quite a lot and so you want that to be a variable something that you can adjust that's also the action the action is the distance of the string to the fingerboard or to the frets and and That's that's a taste thing Some people like to play with really high high action Some people like to play with low action But that's also something you really want to adjust especially because the head is the neck is moving Yeah, the hardware should fix the strings in place so they can vibrate And usually that's done in three parts. You have a bridge. That's the tunings the one that Depart that controls the action and the string spacing you have a nut that holds the strings in Place up here on the head and Sorry, I don't know what happened there So the nut holds the strings in place and the tuners actually pull on the strings and Headless the guitar these things move kind of together and accumulate in two points the head piece and the nuts for fixing the strings and Basically one unit and the bridge and the tuner are on the bottom and I will go into that later Why that's a really awesome design? Yeah designing a headless tuning system It turns out if you don't want to wrap your string around some rods but actually want to pull on the string directly you need about 20 to 30 millimeters of movement to tune a guitar string or yeah a guitar string a bass is also 20 to 30 millimeters and I Think that's version seven of my design I talked to some made the first design and it wasn't possible to manufacture this at all you would need special tools that are much expensive and so I went through a lot of iterations and Finally came up with this design. That's easy to manufacture and works really well and it basically just Holes the string and then you can pull a knob and that knob pulls in a little Threaded rod that's fixed at the point where the string is grabbed and so the string gets moved along and Tension is applied to the string yeah, I milled that part on the CNC at our fab lab and Actually wrote the whole code for it in g-code Parametrically, so if I want to change anything about the design I can just change a variable. I don't have to go through polls or pre-processing anything I can just change a variable out to the code up in the CNC and do it again and this is only possible because I chose quite easy and straight geometry and Yeah, simple as Most sometimes you need a lot a lot of time to get to the most simple solution, but it turns out to be a really good one the knobs are done on the lathe and This is completely hand operated These knobs aren't nerd and I found out that you actually need some structure on the surface to really grab them and So I added some knurling to them and after that I found out that actually the diameter isn't enough to apply enough force so you don't have so you can tune those strings and so I made new tuner knobs with a wider radius and now they're working just great Really really awesome tuning system. I can only recommend getting into headless Yeah, and the headpiece the headpiece is also milled at fab lab and Yeah, they are just set screws in there. That's fix it fix the strings and It's it's quite easy easy piece But it took me about eight iterations to get it right because there were always something wrong and oh man but it's all also written in parameterized gcode and Yeah, so if I ever want to build a seven string base, I just change one variable and it will just mill it and That's how the tuning system looks in the end So you can see that the part where the string is grabbed and the threaded rod that's pulled into the knob and The saddles where the strings are sitting and you can adjust the action You can't adjust the string spacing in this design I haven't really figured out how to do this properly because all the designs I figured out so far I have some flaws in them and so I Decided to do that statically if you have some idea how to fix those. Please talk to me Yeah, let's get into the user interface the neck Most necks are laminates and that's because Yeah, I told you about wood moves and wood moves in the direction or perpendicular to the direction of the fibers the grain structure and So what you usually do is you just saw one board in half Turn it around and glue it together and this way one side of the board wants to move in the left direction one one wants to move in the right direction or up and down and Those movements cancel each other out and that's the whole idea behind two-piece laminate necks and They look quite nice. It's it's a nice nice optic and if you want to Really have a strong neck Yeah, you can you can always do like veneer lamination and make the make the pieces of wood you join together like 0.6 millimeter thick and yeah, then you basically eliminate all the effects of grain structure and the wood necks also have a truss rod and the truss rod is just a little piece of metal actually two rods in the neck and those rods So one is threaded and one is static and if you pull on it it tries to bend and this way you can actually Adjust how much the neck is bent the neck will always bend it will bend due to moisture change due to weather change temperature travel Geek Tars have a special way of construction because there you have a lot of change in and weather and this the effects are Huge and you have to tune them all the time and it's also a thing Because you don't want string buzzing if you want a slight bow in the neck Actually, you don't want a straight neck because if you pluck a string It's moving much more in the middle Than on the ends and so you want a slight bow in the neck so you can account for that and actually get a lower action than you would then it would be possible with a straight neck and That's why there are truss rods and guitar necks The vintage truss rods were actually one rod and The problem with that is you need to pre-bend them and you actually need to mill concave Concave structure into the neck. That's not easily done and You can only adjust those in one direction. So what our next usually use this design, which is also called dual action truss rods If you are paranoid or If you're building a travel guitar or if you're building like I don't know a 10 string bass You might want to consider carbon rods those are just stiffening rods that support the neck and Yeah, that's excellent what I said before like if you have a travel guitar and the moisture content is changing rapidly and Extremely and you just want a little bit of support and on the neck to fix it one really important part is where the headstock meets the neck and The most obvious and easiest way probably to do it to do this transition is to just make it flat and That's actually a nice nice way of constructing. I think stretcher casters usually have necks like that Because you have two planes that you can reference during construction the problem with that is that first of all, it's a nice construction because you get a Lot of forces running in the direction of the of the fibers of the grain and That's where the where the wood is strong. The problem is the break angle You have a different angle on each string and you don't really want that because Each string will Transfer different amounts of vibration from the part that you that you are picking up to the part that's going to the tuner and You get tuning instabilities and the easy fix for that are string trees. You just pull the strings down It's a design a much more elegant design would be to make an angle headstock So you automatically get the same angle on each string Um You might actually you might already see the problem with this you get a lot of a lot of forces perpendicular to the grain structure and This creates a weak point It's not so weak that it breaks due to string tension But if the guitar is stringed up and you push it a little it might do the trick and actually that's a huge problem with old Gibson guitars You find them find can find them on eBay and Looking like this and that's exactly the point where they're breaking whether the sheer forces in the woods Couldn't be supported anymore because of the grain structure the easy way to fix that is to just leave it saw the different part of the same wood you're using for the neck and glued back on so you get the grain structure running in the direction of the headstock and You get the only sheer forces you get are in the glue joint and glue joints are usually much stronger than the wood itself The thing with this design is that you get a visible connection. You can hide it quite good or you can actually highlight it to make it look nice like the one picture there so we near added to it and Yeah, this is a really strong design and I did this on on this base that I built at the Dinkfabrik and I used two woods. So this is mahogany and this is walnut and you can see the The transition and this is a really really strong joint It's Actually, not that hard to manufacture because you can just saw off one piece at an angle Put them together and go over this angle with your plane and you will get two surfaces that are joining quite perfectly The thing is that the fingerboard is The fingerboard is running over the piece of wood that's on the headstock and so you need to to build it in a way that you have a perfect plane all the way through and The easiest way to get it is to just put the pieces on on top of each other and use a plane different way I saw to do it is incorporating a dovetail joint into this and This is really really awesome woodworking and I think yeah, this this neck this this headstock will never break off. It's crazy But it looks really awesome Another way to get around these weak point is to add a wall you to just leave wood at that point where you get the weak spot and that's often done in classical guitars in in acoustic guitars and You can really work around this like the picture on the bottom actually has an asymmetrical wall you to with we're near pieces glued in and I just love this design This is just awesome.  The most easy fix for this is to just omit the whole problem just go around it all completely and Do a headless design And then you basically you don't need a headstock. You just need this piece of metal that's fixing the strings and Yeah, that's what I did in my in my second design and It's a it's a much cleaner solution. I think Yeah Yeah, the front part the fingerboard the fingerboard is The actual user interface. I mean this was kind of the this wasn't right What I said it was more or less the backbone and this is the user interface because that's why you're what you're touching with your thing with your fingers and This is really delicate You're working with your hands on this stuff and you have to be accurate to about a tenth of a millimeter so you have to work this stuff really procedurally and Yeah, you have to be really accurate Usually in fretboards have a radius in them and That's just yeah, it's basically just preference I I built my first base of a perfectly flat Fingerboard and it was totally weird to play. It was I don't know just felt wrong and Some people actually prefer really Smaller radii and some prefer really big radii. I prefer big ones. I think I always use 14 or 12 inch radius and To get this radius consistent You just use a sanding block and move it along the fingerboard and Make sure that you're visiting each spot The same amount of time so you can be sure to get rid of the same amount of material on each spot and This is the easiest way to get a radius But the problem is you have a constant radius Now if you think about how a string is strung up on a guitar and the finger how the fingerboard is running The strings are much closer together on the head and a bit farther apart on the bridge And so what you actually get is a compound radius And that's much harder to achieve There are installations like this like you have two pendulums and ascending a sanding machine on the bottom and This way you can get a compound radius quite easily and quite consistently people have built jigs to achieve this and You can also do it completely by hand But this takes mad skills and a lot of practice and if you've actually tried to Plane some album in your hardwood.  You need a lot of elbow grease and You're not getting very far and man It's it's so hard to work with those woods because you need strong dense woods for your fingerboard to hold up to the To the Yeah, to the to the mechanical attack from the strings and from the sweat from your fingers, which is also really aggressive and yeah, you need strong wood on this part and Strong wood is hard to work with and I found that actually With large radii you don't need a compound radius because The difference would be so small. I think only two tenths of a millimeter is what I came up with and Yeah, it's a game of tenths of millimeters, but it's a game of tenths of millimeters on the length so you need to just need to be consistent and Yeah, I Can't really I have to try that. I never I never did the compound radius, but so far It works out But if you're doing small radii, you should really consider compound radii Okay scales now we have to cross section covered now we need to cover the length The basic Syria offer of scales is just you have a string that's fixed fixed on one point fixed on the other point you pluck it and it vibrates on the frequency and if you half The string and so if you pull it down in the middle You have the wavelengths and you get the same frequency just an octave above So the same note just an octave above half of the of the frequency and If you have the part that's left again, you get another octave and so on and so on I only put two octaves on here because That's about what most guitars use if you act out if you have the octaves you can divide them even further and Usually we do that by 12 semitones it's least in in Western music and This isn't accurate actually it is because they're in brackets equal temperament because this is equal temperament depending on the key urine notes fall in different places and This design where you have these straight lines are this is just a compromise basically a compromise so you can play in every key and still hit about the right note, but not quite and There are solutions for this people have worked around it and they look crazy like the one on the top I think these are also have some microtones in it and some some really weird and awesome Arabic music And the one in the bottom is a dulcimer and the dulcimer only has frets at the notes of one in one key It's perfect intonation, but you can only play it in one key. Well, I want both I Don't want to compromise and With a bass guitar you can actually do this by doing a fretless so What I'm doing is just Where the the notes would fall on an equal temperament I put somewhere near strips in the fingerboard so I have a marker where those notes would fall but while you're playing you can listen to the sound and More or less play by feeling and then you can play you can play equal temperament But you can also play just intonation and other really weird Intonations and scales there's another problem and Yeah, the frequency of a string is governed by the mass of the string, which is quite obvious the scale length and attention and you You try to work around this by using Different different string gauges so the strings actually have different different math, but You only get so far with it for a regular bass guitar with six strings. I got the Distribute distribution of tension and yeah, it works out. I mean 75 newtons to about what is it? 145 newtons no 270 newtons you can work with that that's not a problem but if you want to build extended range instruments like a string guitars or Seven string basses Get a problem that the tension is falling down to get to lower frequencies And you can't actually play them anymore because the strings get floppy or the higher strings I have too much tension and it's not fun or not doesn't feel good to play So let's change some variables We can't actually okay. We can change the mass of the string We'll already do that, but that's just a small factor. You can't go very get very far with that You can change the tension but Yeah, the tension No, you could have changed the frequency the tension is the problem We want to solve you could change the frequency, but you don't want to detune your guitar I mean you still want to be able to actually play it so what you do is you change the scaling and you change it for each string so you get a multi-scale guitar and This has the effect that the frets actually have this fan shape and that's why they're called fan frets So it's easy to get you just use the highest and the lowest string calculate the the points where the frets would fall on the string and On the top one and then you just You just join joined them with a line and you get these this shape and Yeah, I'm now building a six-string bass and I really I Really want to be able to play it and feel nice when you're playing it And so I decided to go for multi-scale now the weird stuff is this is fretless and I'm not really sure by now if you can actually play a multi-scale fretless because This looks really weird and this looks like it would be really weird to play but it turns out that if you have frets there You can learn it in about five minutes if you can already play It's it's really intuitive and it doesn't feel strange at all But with a fretless, I don't know I never tried it I never found one so I'm doing one Oh The back of the neck is also something because you're something really important because you're You're basically applying pressure with your hand with your thumb and then with the fingers on the string so you want to have a nice comfy place for your thumb to rest and Yeah, there are many neck profiles there are many many like it, but this one is mine because This is up to to preference. I mean just go out there try some and Find out what feels great for you. I can't really say much about it. It's just it's just a shape and Yeah Though they're really big ones and bulgy ones They're actually I've seen ones that have sharp corners that are trapezoids and they are supposed to be really great for chord work, but I don't know I Found that I like I like vintage D shapes So really bulgy ones and on this one. I'm trying a new really weird thing That's supposed to work really cool in theory because This on a six string the the the neck gets really wide on the bottom and so I'm doing a trapezoidal shape That gets wider so the base of the trapezoid Extends the sides stay at the same angle and then I'm rounding it over So the further you you get down the neck the more flat space you have to rest your thumb because You're actually on the bottom. You need More more room to play and need more space to move. So I'm quite curious how that will work out Yeah Yeah, that's that's the shape in the making so you can you can see in in the pictures there I started out with a trapezoid and then just rounded it over again with the shinto rasp If you want to get into woodworking really check out Japanese woodworking. They have amazing tools Basically a whole different approach to woodworking really interesting Okay, at some point we need to join the neck to the body and They're both basically two extremes The first one is bolt-on You just mill out the pocket put the put the neck in and screw it down the other extremists You actually don't really build a body. You just use one piece of wood and put wings on it and That's what I usually do So you can see this whole neck goes through all the way and then there are just two wings of wood on the sides and this makes up the body and these two designs have two very different characteristics the through neck design really enforces the lower frequencies and The bolt-on really enforces and it dampens the lower frequencies and enforces presence the higher frequencies and that's actually because Yeah, the vibrational character of the wood of the different woods and it's actually You have two different materials joining at one point and you are transmitting vibration through them and Yeah, if if you have this joint It's never going to be perfect and it's going to be different woods and you lose some frequencies and Lower frequencies are harder to transmit And you can actually scale this so There are guitars that have set in necks that are glued in and go like maybe half way down the body and So you can you can have a parameter you can play with here. You can you can basically add lower frequencies by making the joint extend further further down into the body I will later talk about why I only built through neck First of all, I think it's just a cleaner design and But that's another reason we will get into this when I when I talk about pickup and pick up designs Yeah, the body itself The easiest and obvious most obvious way probably is to do a solid body So just one piece of wood you mill in the pockets for the electronics for the pickups and for the neck And you join everything together the problem is you have a solid piece of wood and As I said, we usually use hardwoods and hardwoods are dense and so the guitar will be heavy and To avoid that You can build a chambered instrument at this point you might want to use a top This particular one just the guy just glued on veneer on the back of the guitar but the The usual con user way to construct this is to To build the body put in chambers and then put on the top of like some some really nice birds or sported maple Just wood that has a has a nice figure and There's also the reason why this guy didn't just make one huge chamber and And most made of the little holes first of all, I think he just loves for snubbits and I agree for snubbits are awesome But there's a there's a there's a reason another reason and that's if you make one big chamber you're moving closer and closer to acoustic guitar construction and in an acoustic guitar the chamber vibrates the wood vibrates you get Standing waves in an acoustic guitar you want that That's actually what makes a acoustic guitar sound because the string the strings themselves don't move a lot of air the wood is moving the air and acoustic guitar and The problem is if you have this this kind of shape and you make a chamber in it. You can't really control Just the standing waves the problem is You get wolf nodes, so at some points at some particular frequencies You get really high resonance or sustain and at some points you don't and so you have uneven response over the neck and Yeah, you don't want that And that's why he used these little chambers Yeah, acoustic guitar this this one is Holabolic construction and you already see remnants of an acoustic time I mean if the huge block of wood in the middle wouldn't be there it would be an acoustic guitar and Yeah This is also a way to construct but at this point you have to consider like the thickness of the wood you're using because at some points some thicknesses different woods vibrate vibrate differently and Get different sustain different sounds and yeah, that's much harder to do This is designer started the designer I started out with This is This one this was the first one and I just drew it up an inkscape and moved around the bezier curves until I liked them and I don't know it took me some weeks I just opened up the file looked at it thought man this doesn't look right I moved it around changed something and then I for the second guitar I took the same design and changed it around and so it's an evolving progress And if you don't want to rebuild a guitar where you have to the plants is readily available on the internet You should maybe draw it up on paper or draw it in inkscape or some other program and move move the cuffs around until they they look right and Then you get into the problem Then you know have a digital design, but you want a physical object and so how do how do you transfer this design onto the wood? Well, you could print it out send down the wood until it fits the curve Boring lasers we have a laser cut at our fab lab and there will be a talk tomorrow about it by actually my Harold Sarah who introduced me and Yeah, that's what I use just put the inkscape design into the laser cutter It already understands it converts it to g-code and cuts out the template that you can later use With a table table router to transfer these designs onto the wood the easy way Yeah, first of all, I joined the bobinger wings with the Walnut Burlwood Cut them out roughly and Then I tried to think with the router and found out that I have woodworking tools And I want to work with bobinger and bobinger has actually more characteristics of metal and it didn't work it's just through the work piece all around the shop and It was quite scary to work with that. So I use a belt sander and a drum sander and That worked out quite great, but Usually you want to use template routing bits with these little ball bearings on top because you can be sure that you have To design you you drew up digitally and transferred to to a physical object Then you glue on the wings and This guitar it's this one. I put some veneer stripes of Wengie between the wings and the neck Just to accentuate the difference in wood and in color and and wood structure Yeah Well electronics All guitars look like look like that inside. No This is a MOOC synth guitar What they I think it's from the 80s. They did something really really great with optical pickups and this is a whole synthesizer board most most guitars are much simpler and There are two ways to do electronics in a guitar the first one's active and that basically means that you have a little operational amplifier on a small PCB that decouples the whole Circuit from the cable that goes to the amp. So you You have a low impedance output and it gives you a different sound But it also eliminates the eliminates the cable from the from the from the from the components that actually make the sound and you also have some some Possibilities with that because you can actually build a nice EQ with boosts So you can actually boost frequencies instead of only cutting them The downside is you need a battery Another way to do it is the old school way passive and Yes, that's a simple circuit of a potentiometer and a capacitor and Yeah, you go the output is high impedance so the cable becomes part of the whole signal chain and You can get some weird effects and humming and you should shield this these things and but I always did passive electronics and they worked out great for me. I like the sound and Another great thing is yeah, I like sound of passive and I Want to get into active but I want to incorporate a whole DSP and I'm talking to I'm about that and maybe at another chaos Event I will talk about implementing Incorporating a DSP into into a guitar There's electronics they were boring let's let's be honest the most interesting stuff are the coils the actual pickups and You see there's this coil so there's just copper wire wrapped around the map around the magnet and Yeah, you see six magnets here, but those actually act like one huge magnet and So a pickup can't Distinguish between The individual strings. That's also why the MOOC guitar uses optical pickups because and with that you can actually Distinguish between the different strings and you don't have to go into Read four year transformations and analysis of overtones and stuff like that Yeah, pickups There are also piezo pickups and Those are quite fun to to play around with especially because you can attach them on any point on your guitar and see what sounds you get and There was some guy on a forum I forgot who it was he attached the piezo on on the neck and he found that actually on a bass guitar there's On the third on the one-third of the of the scalings There's a sweet spot for for a bass guitar and at this point you wouldn't be able to To get a pickup to install a pickup, but you can install a piezo and get a really really great full sound And they're easy you don't even need a pre-amplifier you can basically just connect them to your amp If you want to pair them together with traditional coils, you will need to pre-amp because they are quite low output Yeah, and then there are optical optical pickups, but I won't get into those Let's stay on focus on magnetic because there are three types There are active and those active pickups are basically just say They don't want to it's quite it's quite complicated to do the turns because Yeah, on my pickups I use 10,000 windings of copper wire and You can get away with with much fewer if you just Incorporate a little amplifier in the pickup itself And that's what active Active pickups are they just use fewer windings and put a little amplifier in there and they usually get a more Mid-range mid-range accentuates a tone, but some manufacturers actually include a little tone shaping circuit That makes them sound like a traditional pickup another way is the usual single coil and The humbucker the humbucker address two single coils joined together, but With reverse polarity and reverse winding direction, so you actually get a hum cancelling effect Yeah, okay, those are the two pickups I built for both guitars and I made usually I think they are done with like Paper machine coated with some resin. I just printed them out on a CD on a 3d printer in our lab and a good a good friend from the lab Printed printed this case for me with really awesome awesome quality on his own printer that he designed Yeah, because these things are just designed to hold the windings of the coil and the magnets Yeah, the windings This is 44 gauge American gauge wire This is a quarter of a millimeter in thickness including the insulation 20th of a millimeter. I'm sorry 0.05 millimeters of wire these think these things break Rip apart really easy. I tried to wind them by hand and You just have to breathe on them and to break the way to get it done is Get a get a machine to do it. I haven't figured out to do it yet It's it's it's not that easy, but there's a really easy solution You don't have to think complicated here. I just used some plastic coated paper put the inner part of the coil on there and Moved the the coil of wire around it so that at every time I put too much pressure on the wire the inner part of the coil just moved with me and Yeah, that's that was really easy. I just spend I think Three days winding two coils and watched a lot of lost at that point So yeah, it takes a lot of time and sometimes you fail And then you have to get a copper off and Then it looks like a clown wig and that's what the guys in the forums call us You make a lot of clown wigs and then you make a make a pick up Yeah, that's a really frustrating picture for me because that's one and a half days of work You're looking at that's absolutely wasted. I wind and I won't won't the whole thing up measured for continuity and Something went wrong Yeah, and then you have to solder this small wire onto a bigger wire that you can actually work with and And Yeah, if you have enough wire left, it's quite easy. You just wrap it around a few times and it works We had a guy at our fab lab who installed a coil and in his guitar and he only had about five millimeters of wire sticking out of the coil It took me about half an hour I think or almost an hour to get this tiny piece of wire to solder to a bigger one. It's yeah and after that you dump them you dump them in Wax because think about it you want to build a pickup and a pickup just induces a magnetic Current into into the string and the string moves and so you get a moving field That's moving through the coils and that induces a current and you pick that current up and you amplify it and you get a electric guitar but when you wind the the windings around the coil you actually The wires are not really fixed they move and what have you done when you make a membrane that's moving in a magazine you build a microphone and Yeah, you can build it like that and you can build guitars that are made to feedback and Those guitars you can actually scream it and the amp screams back and to avoid that Usually use just beeswax and paraffin which is you know beeswax is nice to work with it's it's it's has a nice Yeah, it's nice to work with but At really low temperatures it starts to melt and paraffin is really brittle but it stays Solid to high temperature So you just mix both together and dump the pickups in there until no more bubbles come out and you fill up all The the air gaps between the windings. So those are stabilized and you get no more microphonic effects and then I had a good friend at the fortune Samson really who wanted to test these coils because he never saw coils with 10,000 windings on them and He measured them for me and it turns out the Resonant frequencies, I think six or eight kilohertz and they are almost identical those two pickups the These are the measurements for this stick this guitar So you can actually get quite similar coils by doing them by hand Yeah, the finish the last 10% of work, but the first thing a guy sees when he picks up your guitar Usually it's a lot of work. You need to spray booth you apply grain filler you apply multiple coats of of of lacquer and then you send it down It's tedious. What I like to do is mix my own and I just use linseed oil these wax It's called damn, I forgot the name it's it's It's it's a special wax. They usually use in Car finishes and car lacquers. It's basically Canuba wax it's the hardest naturally occurring wax known to man.  I Think it actually smells quite nice, but some people may have a different opinion on that Yeah, and Then I applied after the the first round of sanding with like 40 grids sandpaper And you don't need grain filler because you're filling the wood with its own dust And then you continue and continue and I go up to about a thousand grids at 400 get us grid I start to use a wet sandpaper and At this point you can actually use water because the wood is so filled with this finish that it no longer sucks up the water and after 20 to 30 coats It's can look like this And you can actually achieve a finish that's comparable to a lack of finish. That's much more tedious to apply Yeah, this are the specs for my current project, so I use the bingo walnut mahogany and wangi I'm building a fretless multi-scale, which is this weird project this weird experiment it's headless and Has an asymmetrical neck contour The pickups are a bit strange and that's why I only built next through guitars because I use neodymium magnets that are really strong and usually these things kill your sustain and With next through construction you get a lot of sustain and so I can use that sustain to get high output and With stronger magnets you also get more high frequencies with more windings you get more low frequency And so I get a really nice balance and I actually can get guitar sounds out of a bass guitar with this really unique sound and if you roll off the high frequencies you get a traditional almost up base Sound it's quite versatile Yeah, thanks for listening and build more guitars Yeah Thank you for your for your talk. I'm not going to build a guitar. I'm listen if you play your guitars Thank you for for being here for your attention Please take all your belongings with you. Don't forget anything Any relatives any friends? And a half an IS day. Bye


Hello and welcome to the WISIS Forum 2019. As you're aware, the WISIS process is bound by the framework of 11 WISIS Action Lines. And we are joined today by our UN colleagues who are facilitating these different UN Action Lines. I'd like to start by Deniz, who's from UN Dessa. And they facilitate WISIS Action Lines C1, C11, and Action 9, C7 on e-governance. Deniz, in line with the high level political forum theme for 2019 about empowering people, about partnerships, about collaborations, what are the key trends that you would like to share in this Action Line? Thank you, Gitanjali. So three things very quickly. One thing that's new is Secretary General's technology on promotion of new technologies. So that's taking a lot of our time. Second about e-government, United Nations e-government survey and how e-government can include citizens for inclusion. So that's the second one. Third one, high level panel on digital cooperation. That's also another initiative from SG and also in line with Internet Governance Forum, which is under C11 partnership, which will be discussing digital inclusion this year in Berlin in November. Thank you very much, Deniz. Digital inclusion and partnership, of course, comes across as one of the main things of the WISIS Forum and the WISIS process. I have here with me Halima, who is the Action Line facilitator for C4 Capacity Building. We've spoken about digital skills, empowerment, education, all through the WISIS Forum. And we'd like to ask Halima on what are the plans for this Action Lines, what is being done for implementation at the international level, regional and national levels. Thank you, Jutan Jali. This year we are focusing on the use of ICTs in education specifically in the area of capacity building. And we are doing this because we have had a lot of discussions with members of the academia who have brought about opportunities and challenges that they are facing in using ICTs in the field of education. And as you know, ICTs are becoming diverse, they are becoming complex, but at the same time, they are becoming quite cheap and accessible, making them a mode of knowledge exchange and training that can be used to reach the majority of populations. And by reaching the majority of populations, they are promoting inclusiveness and enhancing equality. So basically we are focusing on this and we are also looking at expanding our reach and focusing a little bit more at the grassroots, you know, to focus our capacity building activities on basic digital skills development. Thank you very much, Halema. Reaching out to the last mile, that is one of the main objectives of the WISIS process. And the highest participation at the WISIS forum is actually from civil society. We are listening to their stories and we are listening to what's happening right at the grassroots here at the WISIS forum. We have with us here today also Mr. Esmal Shah. He will talk about the region of Asia Pacific and what's happening in the region with respect to empowering people through use of ICTs. So Asia Pacific, as you know, is very dynamic and diverse and they have strong emphasis on the use of ICT for everything that they do, agriculture, health, education. The way we work there is through the regional initiatives and by partnering with the UN agencies like FAO, World Health Organization and other UN agencies and local agencies like UNScap and APT and also with the member states very closely to achieve these objectives using ICTs. Thank you Esmal. Of course, it's all about collaboration between UN agencies and between the different WISIS stakeholders. More than 300,000 WISIS stakeholders are following us remotely during these five days of the WISIS forum. We have here with us Sasha Rubel. She's representing UNESCO that moderates several WISIS action lines. And Sasha, what is the role and what are the plans of your respective action lines with reference to the theme of the HLPF, that is of empowering people and promoting inclusiveness? Thank you to Tanjini. UNESCO facilitates six of the WISIS action lines. First action line C3 is a concerns access to information and knowledge. And for us, this is fundamental as it concerns ensuring inclusive knowledge societies, is ensuring first and foremost access to information as a fundamental right. And one of the things that we place an enormous emphasis on is ensuring also open access to scientific information as well as educational information. And this is in the framework of our work on action line C7 on e-learning and e-science. We also lead action line C8 dedicated to cultural diversity, linguistic diversity and local content. And this year, 2019 is the international year of indigenous languages which UNESCO lead facilitates. And so we are looking specifically at the intersection of preserving and promoting indigenous languages, particularly in the online environment to ensure inclusiveness going forward and to meet the SDGs. We also lead facilitate action line C9 dedicated to media. And UNESCO currently is specifically looking at the impact of emerging technologies and artificial intelligence as it concerns freedom of expression and journalistic practice. We've had several sessions in the framework of this forum dedicated to this issue as well as to our work on action line C10 which looks at the ethical dimensions on the information society. And concretely, we are undertaking in global consultation with member states and other international organizations a survey as it concerns the future development of an ethical and human centered AI. So we are looking forward to working with the ITU and other international and regional organizations as well as the private sector and different multi-stakeholder groups moving this agenda forward to make sure that we develop an ethical and human centered AI in support of information and knowledge societies. Thank you very much, Sasha. During this week, we also had some displays of virtual reality technologies and how they can be used to actually preserve the languages that are disappearing. So I do hope that you all had the chance to explore that virtual reality space. We also have here with us today, Mr. Ibrahim Eladha. He is the regional director of the Arab region. And Ibrahim, could you please share with us some of the initiatives that have been taking place at the regional level with respect to the implementation of the VISSIS action lines. As you can see, the regional, the Arab states are so active in the VISSIS forum and the implementation of the VISSIS action lines. Thanks very much, Angelique. As you had mentioned, we have a lot of member countries who are actively working with the VISSIS action lines. And I just referred back to Sasha's as well. The work that we do with UNESCO on digital inclusiveness and digital weeks and so on. We also work with UNSQA. We recently had a meeting between the ITU regional office and the regional development forum, back to back to the regional forum on VISSIS and SDGs. And all our activities that we're concentrating on in relation to, for example, issues of inclusiveness, cybersecurity, capacity building, as my colleagues has mentioned, these are all work together to ensure that we have a collaborative work. We work with WHO, as I said, with UNESCO. And we're very glad that we had excellent experience in trying to assist member states in achieving the action lines and also achieving the SDGs for that. And we're delighted to be here and share all this experience. Thank you. Thank you, Abraham. You also concluded a very successful regional development forum in collaboration with ESQUA last week. So congratulations for that. I'd like to move on to our next panelist and speaker. Sir, could you please share some of the activities you are doing with respect to the implementation of the VISSIS Action Line? Yes, WMO has worked over the past long period of time since the 1800s, actually, with ICT in a sense, to develop methodologies for predicting the atmosphere and warning people of impending losses and possible danger. And that is what we are doing right now. Over the past years, we've been stepping it up. So working to empower everybody with early warning services using modern ICT technologies. Thank you, WMO. WMO facilitates the Action Line on E-Environment along with several other UN agencies like UNEP, the Basel Convention, and of course ITU as well. Thank you very much for joining us today. You heard about different VISSIS Action Lines, their implementation at the regional level, and the impact that they are having on people to empower them and to make their lives more inclusive. Thank you very much.


So Carrie, when people approach you and ask you could you give me a tip? I want to become a better service designer. What is what is your answer? My tip is to Forget about the maps and focus on the customer journey We got to get away from Thinking about maps as the end goal as this bright shiny artifact that we can hand over to our clients Or to our managers on a silver platter and really think about doing the hard work of understanding the journey and uniting our organizations around the customer journey