There is in fact right now a podcast on internet you can find where he talks that after that look it has become an obsession for him. Every morning he in fact has a ritual of translating this form again. They interviewed him on Radio Lab. He is a portion of a larger show but he talks about that project. That is the other thing is that there is so much online now that people translate it, translate it, writing and speaking. So there are so many and our students can find more than I can at least you know of resources. So theory is a part of it and I have already done introductory course of these people so we have done some basic theoretical background but the main idea is probably thematic to going through some of the different challenges that you come up with. And then after that we do exercises at home and bring them to class and work through those and then from there each student has a project going into their native language, something untranslated if at all possible. The other thing we did is do audiovisual translation which is a complete learning experience for me and I had a student who actually was working on video game translation so he kind of took over and helped me do that section because I don't know what I was doing. But it is fun too because it is so creative and it really is. There is a lot of similar and same strictures that you have to face. It is very fun class to do. I would love to be able to do it in a more multilingual format like some of you have done. I would be curious how you have done that because I think that is what our university is going to try to move towards is more teaching a workshop like they do at Kent or something where they do it in English and then break off. I would like to be able to do it. I am not sure how to do that so that is my question. I want to start with that question. The multilingual environment, they break it up. It is not related to language at all together. I don't currently teach people like that but there may be an opportunity for me to do that on an online site in the near future and I was hoping to later ask them ideas. I am really raising my hand because I have actually done it. But you want to know. When I was a graduate school I took a seminar. This was a very long time ago which I took my first ever seminar on organization here in practice. And what my professor had done, because none of the students in the class spoke the same language, he used Navajo's very eager, ego-survived, literal translation of Pugina Megan as the trot that everyone would use to translate it into these languages. I tried doing it. My name is Margaret. I teach at Hunter College. This year for the first time I am serving pilot, running a translation major in a Russian program. I have a lot of experience in that. I have a lot of experience in that. I have a lot of experience in that. I have a lot of experience in that. I have a lot of experience in that. I am running a translation major in a Russian program for under-graduates. Which is why I came here hoping to steal ideas from everyone else. I have to teach this to under-graduates. And one of the challenges that I faced was designing what was called a foundational translation course that would introduce students to basic tenets of translation. And then after I finished designing it, they told me that the world made the enrollment to non-Russian majors. The students who knew their scope of language is an algae professor. So to translation majors from other countries would have to by the way an excellent program that stands for translation. And also to students who thought they might be cool to speak other languages. So I tried a smaller version of that of taking something that they could translate from a normal translation. And it worked okay. So you started with a literal translation and that they worked with different languages? Yes. And then it also allows them to do, they can translate it into another language. But if they don't have a language, they can simply translate it in English. So how did the discussion go? Well, it took us inequivably into directions. It really allowed the students to focus on a notion of literality. And how that itself can be problematic. I had to read a household article about that. And of course, the community changed from that book. And everyone will sit around the time it was published. But also the possibility of translating poetry. I have a very productive discussion of a very interesting book, which is Poetry, Seeking for the Eosocratic Structure. Could you repeat the name of the work or the person at the Bacchus? It's Eugene O'Negan by the translation of Bacchus. I was going to add that with a multi-lingual group. I don't teach at the University, I teach community at the Bethesda Ryder Center. I'm Nancy Lee and Carlson. And when we have a group of everybody speaking different languages, one technique that I like is taking a Shakespearean sonnet and then having everyone translate into English. And that way you get into the whole concept. How to look for beginners, how to look at translation, how it really stresses that it brings out the point that it has to read like a contemporary, contemporary written piece. And that gets them talking, even though they come from different languages. I should mention while I go when you ask my target audience that these are undergraduates and they're liberal arts students, select liberal arts. But I probably should have included with what's the value of it. You know, I don't have to tell us where the congregation. But I thought it was very interesting to end the keynote when, you know, here's some like from Middlebury saying, oh, by the way, translation. And we have that same polemic in our department where when you ask, is this done in English or in Spanish? This is done in English. And I felt maybe my colleagues weren't looking down, but I felt like I had to defend it a little bit. And one of the things that I started using these as cliches and after a while I sort of convinced myself it's true. What the course evaluations have said that they've gotten out of the thing is not only a better understanding of language, but critical thinking in that you can't translate and not work with critical thinking skills. I think this was at first bogus, but now understand what they're saying. And it was the ability to really have a collaborative project. You know, when you're dealing with two and then four and then eight and 16, this generation has to learn how to collaborate. And so they, and then the final thing was this, I hate this cliche, but it's this tolerance of ambiguity and, you know, this notion of even though it's the humanities, they still are told all the time what's right, wrong, and binary type way. And they really, it's a liberating thing to find out that your translation and mine are both okay, but now how are we going to defend it? And the final clue on that at the end, this is something we should probably all be doing with all our students, is when I do criticize them, they get upset. And at the end of the semester, I show them my own comments that I've gotten from editors and they think, wow, they really, I can't believe an editor told you this. It's like, yeah, this is what happens in translation. So these are the values that go beyond just the product that I think we can tell our own. We can do a better job telling our own colleagues who are not in translation what the value our students receive in these translation workshops. I want to say something here because last year, I'm at the University of Iowa. I direct the MFA in Literary Translation, which is a multilingual graduate level program where any given year we may have anywhere from 6 to back last spring we had 13 different languages in the class. A couple of people were translating from more than one language. It's really amazing, we gifted group and everything. The other interesting thing that happened in Iowa is that the program moved into the division of world languages, literatures and cultures. It's a little bit like putting the lamp inside the lion's den right now. And there was quite a bit of resistance because of the paradigm, right? I mean Russell has written very beautifully about this. In language instruction, translation is a pedagogy to learn language. And so we began... It is an outmoded pedagogy. It is an outmoded pedagogy. So we began my arrival there with conversations like saying, of course we're translating today. Of course they don't have enough language skills to really do translation, to do justice and all that. So one thing that occurred to me, and I am surprisingly managed to convince everyone, is we created an undergraduate minor in translation for global literacy. Now, so that students can actually take courses bi-directional. The courses they take in Spanish and French and German where they translate into the forum language also count toward this minor. Because the goal of the minor is to encourage an exploration of translation as both a mode of inquiry and a mode of exchange, right? I mean value exchange. So we created a course called Transition and the Global Society. That's the gateway course. And here students will be sort of exploring translation in all sorts of contexts. Human rights, health, public health, literature, arts and everything. And then students have to take two just outright translation workshops. These are going to be geared more toward the textual literary translation. But then students can take two additional courses in their language programs. Because again what we did is we sort of broadened the frame and we said okay what we're doing here is understanding the functions of translation in the global era. And you know there's a huge amount of literature right now about global literacy as a liberal arts objective. And it has learning outcomes. If you go to the Association of American Universities and Colleges, the website there you can download all their learning outcomes and rubrics up to your nose if you want. But the interesting thing here is those documents give you a safe, neutral, common space to not even engage that age-old friction between literary translation and language inquisition. Language pedagogy. But this was a good one. One example is one of our very brilliant and seasoned, like 20-20 years he has been teaching a stylistic course. French studies and he always underscores French. After this dialogue he came and said, you know what maybe I can do this multilingual. So there is an interesting thawing that happens when people engage the questions somewhere outside their territories. If you're interested in all this it's all on the website. Just go on the MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa and there is a link there, Translation for Global Literacy. And the whole program is Outline Goals and all of that. And it surprises this. I don't know where you are but public research ones are suffering tremendously from budget cuts and all of that. And lo and behold the college fast tracked this minor. So much so that the minor got approved before we could finish putting together the syllabiants. They got so excited. So I mean there is an interesting new space you can carve for yourself. I'm laughing because I used to be at that institution. So I know that the multilingual environment, the multilingual workshop pretty well from having taught in it and it's very dynamic. It's also a little slightly, I mean I commiserate with Aaron all the time because he's now in it and I'm not. And I recognize the slightly privileged environment and it probably looks slightly privileged from your standpoint too because it's highly writer centric environment. There are lots of writing programs. There are five different invent bays in creative writing. Creative writing for non-fiction, fiction, poetry, play writing and then the translation workshop. And there are all these writers all around. And so all you got to do is add a little bit of language expertise and you get great translations. You get fantastic translations. And so it's in a way it teaches itself when the director of the program retired. There were a couple of years, Danny Weissport, when he retired there were a couple of years when there was nobody to teach in it. And the students were so good they just did it themselves. These are grad students that they just taught themselves. Last night they had the session. I mean this includes Jennifer Croft. She was a graduate of those years. She has published like three or four Polish translations already. Becca McKay and Jamie Richards. They were all graduates of that year. Jamie is a finalist in the NTA for this year. So they all pretty much did it themselves. They were just amazing. Very high quality students. So I sort of think if I look at it now from outside I think, wow that was great that I could teach in a program like that. But we don't all have that kind of luxury. Well undergraduate translation workshops, I mean we begin as if this is a creative writing workshop because they had to first figure out how to read and how to read a work to understand how it is constructed. I mean that's really what we do as translators, right? That's where it begins. So it's perfectly fine to spend the first month feeling like am I teaching translation here or is this really a literary analysis course? Well you're doing literary analysis but you're also constantly infusing that conversation with translation techniques with terminology. That's where I was going. So I'll go to the next step is not being in that environment. I took things from it that I think are highly important. You can take them to a lot of different places. So one is an environment where you're just teaching an undergrad lit class. Just undergrad lit any kind of literature. And one of the exercises you can have students do is you take, it has to be a work that has some canonical status because you need multiple translations. You get five translations of the same passage from this work and you give it to students and you say, well let's look at, first you do a little analysis, you look to see what the stylistic differences are and you talk about choices. Well why is this line different from that line? Not better, just different. You're not looking at the source text. They don't even have access to the source text. I don't even show them the source text. You talk about the stylistic differences and then you say, okay, well this is a page taken out of the Writers in the Schools program in the Center for Theory, Art and Translation. You do this with third graders. You say, well let's make our own. Let's make our own versions. You pick the lexical pieces that you think are better or the lines that you think are better and make your own version of whatever this is. I've done it with five tercets from the Inferno. Just five different versions of three tercets, let's say, nine lines from the Inferno. I've done it with the first paragraph of notes from, does Dayeski know it's from underground? Which is really, really good because the differences in lexical choices are really amazing. Is he wicked? Is he evil? Is he spiteful? I mean, he didn't really change the psychology versus the morality of the character and you talk about those things and then when they create their own version you don't just stop with that. You say now you write me 500 words about your version. In other words, tell me why you made the choices that you made and what it is you're trying to do. That's the only way I can judge it. Right? It's a rhetorical document. You're trying to convince somebody, you're trying to move somebody somehow so you have an audience in mind. Is it high school students? Is it college students? Are you going to create a scholarly apparatus? Is it people who read Twitter feeds? Have had students do their version? Is it a series of Twitter feeds? Just tweets. Have had students do LOL cat speak. You know, LOL cat speak? Cats that talk on the internet, anyway. But the 500 word description is the real thing because then they have to describe what it is that they just did and then you can judge by comparing what they say that they think they did with what they did. And then you can say, well, you know, a third grader is not likely to know these words. So you should think about your audience a little bit more. It's too sophisticated for an audience or your apparatus is all wrong for the audience that you're thinking of. So it's a very easy thing you can throw into any course as long as you have multiple translations of the same work. Are there other multiple translations that people use that they recommend? Let me say to you that Russell and I, because we've talked about this before, so this year I went and put together a course called re-translation. And the whole course is on re-translation. And in fact, it so happens that the translation studies people having nothing else to do now are very heavily into theorizing about re-translation, which in the end you realize you really can't. You can be theoretical about it, but I don't know that you can have a theory. But we did some theory things, and then I asked each person to choose a landmark text in the language culture they know and present sort of an analysis of re-translations. And it's just going wonderfully. They can do this work now. There is a beautiful handbook, Princeton. No, is it Princeton or Oxford? Guide to Translation in English. It's a handbook that lists all the translations done into English of all major works. I mean, there is a section on German. You have all the real-key translations, all the gaze transitions. So you can also populate the course if you want with them yourself. But the students themselves and then the third piece of the course will be when they will re-translate a passage from those texts. So they will have also experience with it. But it's a great pedagogy. The other thing is, you know, we talk about the 3%, just think about it. So there are about 500 titles that get translated into English. Most of these books sell about from 200 to 500 copies. So we really need also to emphasize a cultivation of a learned audience for translation. The performing arts colleagues are ahead of us, right? They had these courses on music appreciation. I mean, really badly unfortunate the title. But they know that they have to create patrons of their art. So in a way, teaching students about translation and the undergraduate level is all about teaching them to become learned appreciators of translated texts. Because if we don't increase the number of readers, it would be really lethal to increase the number of translations out there. I was going to add to one of the things I do that I didn't know whether to have the right to use the 500 word essay how to make your choice and then I found in times they would vary from they would want to spend four paragraphs on sort of showing off why they chose that word and other times they wanted to go quick. So what we ultimately decided on I thought it would be terrible but I think this generation doesn't mind at all. They just use, we do everything on word and sharing, they just use the comments and the margins. That also helped them with their partner then go through and either accept it or decline it. They got them in that editorial mode and that was a very quick way for me to go through and let them take my eyes to where they wanted to see them. That was a very easy way to grade things too. So a book that I've used that I think is pretty helpful it's called The Poem Itself. It's a Stanley Burns shop. The reason I like it is that it's got everything you need on two pages. So let's say it has a poem by Baudelaire in the original and then it has a linear translation so it's a literal pretty rough translation. Then some discussion of commentary the context, a little historical literary historical information and some interpretive like a man analysis but it's all in two pages and so you can give that to the student. There's no polished translation there. That's what's not missing what that's what's missing. So you can give them those two pages and say let's make a polished translation on the basis of this. And it's called The Poem Itself. And I think he's got French, German, Spanish, Italian in that. There may be one or two Russian poems in there but mostly it's French, German, Spanish, Italian and mostly canonical writers. Then he has a second book I think it's called The Hebrew Poem Itself. So if you want to pick a language that nobody knows in your class you could try Hebrew but you have to make sure nobody knows Hebrew whereas everybody else that's going to be able to usually Spanish or German or so they're going to find something in that book that they know. Yes. And then you can do your own. Natasha just comes in and 19 ways of looking at one way. A major advocate for the book. Yes. More books have been sold. A very popular book turned out for undergraduates who took the translation workshop was in fact the beautiful collection of essays that Susan Bernofsky and Esther Allen put together in translation. These are also essays that are very accessible but also very sort of hands on. They really focus on the practice of translation. Students absolutely loved it. Can I say one more thing about you asked about multi-lingual workshops and I've seen a whole bunch of a pretty wide variety of approaches. Some people don't use any modeling at all besides the students own work and some people like to use a lot of modeling so they bring in samples and you do analyses and then in between there's a variety. Some people use trots very heavily so they ask the students to create their own trots a kind of homey for the work a very literal translation where they show the original at least in a Romanized form assuming you can do that with Latin letters and then pretty much show the words that correspond to those underneath and then show even an intermediate translation in some cases they show an intermediate like a first try or a second draft something like that and then a polished version and you go through all of that together and I've seen all of those and I think they all work pretty well it really depends on your proclivities and your emphasis in your class. It's a professor how much creative writing to a figure in a graduate literary translation program because for a non-lative speaker that's in English it's your four language your second language they can get all the grammar right they can do all the grammar you know analysis but they cannot do great writing in English would you get the translation it reads so bad and it's just a for a non-lative speaker it's not a literary work if you walk into the graduate workshop any given evening you will wonder if this is a creative writing workshop or not in part because we focus quite extensively on the literary properties of a literary translation so we have to actually ask the translator not to come clear about come clean about the equivalency between words but whether this piece of writing now works as a piece of literature in the receiving language what are the analogs what are the correspondences what are the correlatives and the other thing again Rina Russell mentioned this it's a very it's a very exclusive place Iowa because the translation workshop will have the MFA in poetry people there and MFA in fiction people there and they will in fact insist on keeping the literary discussion going the literary and creative discussion going how much do you so the question though that I take from this is how much might you engage in editing or a discussion of editing at the stage where someone has brought work to the class who is a non-native speaker of English let's say and the articles might all be wrong from the standpoint of the native speakers they're looking at it saying well I can't make heads or tails because I think this needs an uh and this should be plural and that should be past tense and so on how much of that discussion do you actually have in a class environment like that I think it's a hard question well for example tomorrow there is going to be a session on punctuation you know not to anticipate but these sort of it's about how you approach these questions because for example when you have a sentence in a prose translation you can ask this you can say to the student this is not reading well in English and that's not necessarily a translation statement but when you ask the student why did you create this particular syntax why are the articles missing and in fact because sometimes they remove the articles because they are counting beats they are trying to create a certain cadence now that becomes a translation discussion do you see what I mean so the onus is on the translator and our job is to make them more and more conscious and deliberate about their translation of choices well I asked the question because the translator you have I mean that literature course appreciation of literature itself the origin of the text of the translation falls down 19 weeks of translation in one way if you are asking me I would say 17 or 18 of those translations miss the whole point it's because one way the poem is zen and the the invisibility of the subjectivity of the poetry I almost all the English translation so far from the I is the subjectivity there it doesn't matter how good we have a one way specialist in the background that's my no no no you're up so the sense of the literature appreciating the origin and also for me the bias is the translator a specialist in poetry he or she better be a poet sort of too I know Natasha you want to say something about one way well I do because I want to say that in fact the genius of that book is the group of combination of the translation of the chemical commentary which is a competitive of strategies and methods probably furthered by the inevitable language barrier of voice so which in fact is furthered in the sense that it gets as good as personal take so that it's one and that you know that it would be three more in fact I wrote a personal file of poetry which I collect additional translations of the beer park as one of the language group's losses has it because the latter is really looking for and in some ways that is also where for we're going to do the things that is what you say go ahead produce two things produce seven, eight, seven, eight and supply and loss where you clarify what you're going to do the things because in other words the translation of the poetry of the beer makes the sunny and the full way to be close to everything at all I mean quite fatigued because there are two people who are completely off in language they're working in everything so we have to simply say there are different personalities, there are different views, there's an audience, there's an audience there's always a way you're always passing for that invite just to act and generate but yeah I think precisely one of the strengths is the shortcomings of some of those transitions and the idea is also that they were actually projecting their own global bias that is all but I think that's interesting and I just wanted to give you by heart I'm going to use one of the things that I've tried to do when I'm dealing with speakers of different languages that really helps them understand that translation is first and foremost a process of interpretation and at the same time introduces some fundamental translation is have them first you've got to and then they could and then do so called a truly bold translation practice where I will assign it to a complicated text like two-pack paragraphs or some very two-paragraph or some very dense or some dense literary text and then I'll have them read their translations and discuss and then we'll sort of have an entire class discussion of how was it that they were translating the text from English to English and they have 17 completely read text so in a way you can sort of do this exercise without even having to go to the realm of inter-world relations so that is a actually that's a that's a pre-step to the use of a book like itself before you give them a trot and an explanation and say go make your own poem you do a series of exercises of paraphrase where you say okay I want you to take this text and make it sound biblical or take this biblical text and make it sound like bureaucratis and so they're translating stylistically where you can take I don't know exercises in style and take any five of the things that he does in there and say I want you to take this one and just look at the model and now I want you to take this passage from this ordinary language piece and make it into that retrograde or its surprises or whatever it is the totes he uses all sorts of them and that's a stylistic exercise it becomes a writing class it becomes a translation class and then you give them the next stage which is the poem itself with the paraphrase I think we're really lucky to be in this room with all these people because you don't get to talk to people about this very often and I'm curious what other people are doing or what their experience is I think that even a privileged situation is not necessarily is not necessary for this kind of thing you might be teaching in a community college or a high school and have people who have really linguistic and cultural knowledge that some people who are translators don't have so I'm curious what people are doing or ideas that or other text ideas to please share I did teach well I am teaching again, I retire but now Denver School of the Arts which is a bi-audition high school a variety of arts majors dance and music and all the usual things but it also has a creative writing major and that's what I taught in and working with the high school creative writing majors it also has a middle school so the majors they go through seven years of a creative writing program and full of music program and we often the feedback we often get from those kids when they go off to college is these people don't know anything about writing because they have to take their freshman courses so I tried to do a little translation workshop with them in the last couple of years without really knowing what I was doing and today's going to be some great ideas already but I just took because what they teach at the SA and so I took a couple of little a lot of New Yorker check homes was there any New Yorker check homes a couple of little small ones they're small but they're difficult those little homes and some French I forget who I used French I don't know but it didn't matter because there were students who did and I divided them into groups and they worked on their translations and we had this whole discussion about to go to Google Translate here are the cautions and here's what you've got to do and here's the best way to do that you know because that's what they're going to do immediately and I gave them some time to do that and then when we came back and people read their lines and we got the variety of vocabulary that they came up with for a particular noun say something easy still it was pretty neat to watch the light you know this is what translation it is and my favorite one was a senior creative writer who said to me Mr. Bravo I am going to translate something every day from now on so and there are a couple of people who have told me I'm still working on trying to do translation but it's not something people who are not in this realm ever think about that and especially about high schoolers that oh there are choices involved here there's interpretation there's interpretation so that was fun but that's all I've ever done it's just that little in the morning or in the afternoon but not first period for seniors because they'll be asleep you know basically in that program I was at a faculty symposium this year we heard about the companies that tested teachable loan literature and they talked about the comparison of multiple translations which I always was my favorite exercise especially my teacher literature but when I got feedback on the genius foundation translation course for the first time there's a comment that we heard in literature and we didn't simply have a very good translation they were all divided by their names I hope they had a good translation translation for bills and fund dollars funeral and have them think about what they think what they were trying to do did you think that a positive feedback was that they had a communication part of our education this month when the student comes to the another edition of a foreign language program says do you mind writing to this edition instead and you look at the comment because the edition is not acknowledged in the presence of a trustee the one one caution that I have that I always feel the need to express I always feel the need to express the caution about doing just a little bit of translation in a class where I remember a story told by a teacher of mine where he did that one day he was a translator so he was committed to it but he did a little bit of translation in this class and after the class he talked about differences among like a variety of translations and after the class the student came up and said thank you professor for showing me the differences in these translations it really opened my eyes to translation I don't think I'm ever going to read another translation in the world again because I see that oh I failed I'm just doing a little bit can be dangerous that's also why I would really encourage you to consider taking this global literacy angle and creating a modest four course sequence or five course sequence and just let it come then you have more space to do all of that yes discussion of all the amount visible in the language itself all the text that comes with it so I give them an exercise early on sometimes right away sometimes I get it to them before the class is even back it's a great place because I'm from Spanish I often use for instance a page from the opening page of Pride and Prejudice and because this is something that I can then get I can then get a translation of the Spanish version and I can use different texts from Spanish to English I have all of them translated both eventually when I work individually they will translate but for this exercise they're supposed to do each text both ways knowing presumably nothing or very little some readers among my students will know they're usually not that many of them and so immediately they have turns like an illness Poach and Four you know other people's part is left at last and so the irony the vast irony about the truth university knowledge but just makes it really to have something sure in a context do this then makes it really clear what we're being about note cards are passing around asking you to put your email addresses because one of the projects that we're working on is to have a website, a resource website teaching translation and I'd like to connect with you Natasha you had your hand up you wanted to see it's you in the workshop format it's a task format that I think is adjusted to in fact I worked with you in the very last session of this conference and I did an unfortunate happy hour moment but that's one way in which one can raise consciousness about the question of translation because that's how obviously I feel immediately that circulates has always circulated in translation and everything that has to do with you cannot help by me and you can do it either way you can take a John Ford film subtitled into Mandarin and dubbed into a Spanish with the possibilities are endless you can start asking questions almost every aspect of the translation and it's easier with other graduates to promote themselves to it than it is to go with each subject because then other issues come up one language both tone voice etc I was going to ask you with your emails that are passing around is it possible that that could become a I know we have our lists with ALTA but if we knew who's teaching Larry I can say by the end of the year the next phase of the website is supposed to be launched including discussion forums so if you're interested in teaching translation then you'll want to be in that forum your emails can go in there what I am asking your emails for is that I'm going to send you an email when I get back asking for you to send me electronically your ideas or your syllabi or what not and I will create a reserve now once the ALTA website creates this we will migrate that there but for the time being because you know this is the third such session I've attended every year we have a session like this and it has probably the most animated conversations and we need to really keep us in touch after the session I think one of the other practical questions I have is I'll be teaching undergrads liberal arts this will be their one touch translation and the the reality is at the end they get a grade so my question is how you evaluate this kind of work the analysis that goes with right so if you're asking them to create a rationale or there you have to spell it out what goes in the rationale what do you want to know I want to know why you picked these words I want to know who your audience is for instance and the audience is a big part and then you give them some variety of possible audiences and also you want to know why they've chosen the form that they've chosen so in some cases they'll say well they look at that first paragraph of notes from underground and they say this is a lot like a dialogue isn't it a dialogue but he's talking with himself so they make it into a dialogue and that's a really good way to do it and it's kind of exciting but they have to explain what in the original text made them think that it looked like a dialogue they think that piece out so if they're able to do that what you're grading on it is a kind of coherence of their rationale with what it is that they've done also you can ask them to evaluate their attempt I mean what are the parts that gave you the most difficulty and what are the parts you think you've done I am doing an independence study with an amazing polyglot freshman I gave him one of the most translated real case the archaic torso of Apollo he got so excited he came with two versions of it and I of course had about 18 others but the beauty of it is he said you know I spent an hour on this but what is so wonderful though is he now has spent several weeks on this one poem and willingly understanding so really we have to remind ourselves that like those emotional stages denial, anger whatever translators also go through them there is a moment of surrender the acceptance is not right away evident to even the translator and I think these stages have to be recognized by our students that in fact it takes enormous amount of time and effort and creativity and intellectual labor as well to come up with that transition and this may not work at all universities but so in my grading I do put a lot of emphasis on the comments the justification comments and the margin but the majority of the grading since this is a collaborative workshop where they're in pairs, then teams, then units they do, I give them a template but they do peer evaluation and at first I didn't think that would work but undergraduate can be brutal with each other I mean the first week they're all hunky dory and they fill you know a little bit but once they have confidence they can be much more brutal with their comments with their peers than I really would be and so I rely a lot on peer evaluation and not only do I give them a template but I remove names and details but I give them peer evaluations for former years to show them we need to keep it civil but it's got to be constructive and so forth but they really don't want us to the course when they begin to learn how to evaluate somebody else's work and then that goes to the grade as well I can give the template what the other thing is there are also preliminary stages you can ask them to do one is they have to give you a trot and then there is something called mapping right, map this text what are all the non-negotiables that you really need to you know Venuti talks about the ratio of gain and loss and so what are the things that you will fight the hardest not to lose right so I mean they have to really map that piece to also give us some encouragement this summer three groups of high school students arrived in Iowa City a group from Armenia a group from Turkey and a group from the US and we put them through a very interesting exercise and we ask each person to bring a poem or a passage, a literary passage that they would like to give the other as a gift from their own language and then we ask them to help the other translate that poem to the other's language so they work very closely with each other and this can be done very well with heritage speakers in your classes and again it's highly unlikely that the exercise will yield award winning translators but most of the translation I do even in order to get to the final published translation is not award winning so I mean we're sort of giving them the experience with all the stages anything else yeah yes yeah it goes to Rilke when he says when you come back from another country you bring a word or a phrase that's what is lasting yes I mean it depends on what you're looking for there are two major source books out there one is Venuti's translation studies reader the other is Danny Weisbord's reader translation and the Venuti one is much more like a critical theory collection and I would strongly discourage you from using it with unsuspecting students because it is quite substantial but there are pieces there Jakobson is there Steiner is there there are some landmark statements about translation that you will find there the advantage of Weisbord is that he always combines theory with examples so we will talk about Bible trust as you will have Martin Luther and all the prefaces to King James but then he will also give you versions that you can incorporate so it's very handy I have a couple more so I like this I've used this book called The Craft of Literary Translation which is a University of Chicago reader that Reiner Schulte and John Fagan put together there's a bunch of short pieces The Craft of Literary Translation Reiner Schulte and John Fagan they're the editors and it's a collection a bunch of different things and then the other one I've used in class is by Lefebvre translation in a comparative literature context and the reason I like that one is that it has a lot of very short sections it's all written by the same person Andre Lefebvre but each one is very short and so I find them portable in a way you can take a little section and say let's look at what people have done with homophonic translation and it's a very short little section that deals with Zukovsky's experiments in homophonic translation and it talks about why the Katalas and why it's very thin it's only about 120 pages so I find it's not too intimidating there's also an article in translation review that Kelly Washburn about translation workshops that has a good that Zukovsky site and that's a great one Lefebvre thank you guys


So let's wait for everyone to show up. So I guess the, this was the e-bots. We had to have this like a round table discussion with maybe like some questions that were raised during the meeting. And, you know, kind of get the input from everybody on. Kind of for some of these like longer term planning is like, are there some like things that we want to discuss some like potential directions in which this one ecosystem is going. And we can have some questions. So one was the question of the like symmetry. So the question was why do money functions in the max localized scheme why do they break symmetry. It looks like there are some ways to kind of improve on this. We had some talks. And then you know we had many other questions. So there was a question of, is there anything that could be gained for from non orthonormality of the money functions if they are not orthonormal. Then on Monday and Tuesday in the summer school there was a question of descriptors. I think after Nicholas talk, Raffaele's talk, there was this question of, you know, can we get some meaningful descriptors out of any functions. And how do we deal with this choice of gauge in that case, or is that even a problem. I didn't think Raffaele had this comment that like a lot of the chemical intuition. So once the chemical concepts are not really like, maybe strictly formally mathematically well defined and seems to work just fine. Then we had questions about this idea of when you compute the position matrix element of diagonal and diagonal and then in the diagonal case you use the logarithm formula. And how do you and then you know that for the diagonal you don't so then you know is there some way to fix those. There are certain problems with translation variants that appear. Anyway, so there are a lot of questions so I don't know if anybody wants to start by giving some comments on this or maybe raise some other questions. Please do. Yeah, I think this works now. Yes, I think we should also keep it as an informal conversation. So maybe we go through this topics. And also, David can hear and is a muted. Probably there should be one more microphone around so that people can feel and comment. But maybe we can start with the symmetry David what do you think. Sure. You know there is the possibility that you hear two very different opinions. So I'll give David the chance to have the last word that's usually it is the last. It is the last word. But you know I would even go back for a moment to molecules rather than solids. If you think at molecules, you can have different localization criteria, you can have the foster boys criteria and that is the R square minus R squared, or you can have the admin son Rudenberg criteria and that you maximize the global economic self interaction. And you get not only very different symmetries in the orbitals but also very different chemical intuition that if you want is a negative statement about the fact that there is in my opinion, actually, no symmetry that natural naturally means from localization or no chemical intuition that you know naturally means that say formally comes and then there is a lot of heuristic understanding but I think we made the case of CO2 last week, whereas CO2 localized the foster boys or localized admin son Rudenberg give rise to completely different orbitals. You know something that looks like a triple bond with foster boys that doesn't make any sense in molecules like, you know, ethylene a CH4H2, you get the banana bond so that the chemistry don't look like, don't like.  But I David I don't know what you think on this. Well, I guess I would start at a slightly more elementary level I mean we certainly know lots of cases where the symmetry will get spontaneously broken by the maximum localization I mean the simplest case is just a closed cell Adam with s and p orbitals. So if you start out with s projections and px py and pz projections, you're going to minimize to sp3 hybrids. You know, as we know for finite systems the minimization basically just tries to push the centers as far apart as possible. And so. So certainly that's a case where you break symmetry. I think it might be useful to distinguish two different kinds of broken symmetry there are situations where.  If the two hybrids, if the two one a function still map on to each other under the symmetry operation, then, you know, it will still produce a perfectly symmetric representation when you do one a interpolation and so on. So that's still acceptable, although you have to understand that you're not quite dealing with atomic orbitals, as you put them into the projectors. And then there are cases where it's just going to break symmetry in some kind of random way and scramble things and that's I think what we want to be more careful to avoid. So that's my initial comment. I'm from the audience. Hi Raffaele. I don't know if your camera works but you're super welcome also to. What do people in the audience I think, or, you know, I think, maybe the question is also, when is symmetry very relevant. And I think all the people building low energy amiltonians care a lot about symmetry. As you know I'm obsessed with Cookman's functional and orbital density dependent functional, but again there you know we have actually, if you want an intellectual failure that it's not evident that the spectrum of orbital density dependent. I'm Eltonian as the symmetry properties that the spectrum of a real amiltonian should ever. So in some ways is also related to some of this other development so part of the question actually was even just practical, like why. Okay, so why didn't you implement to begin with my 90 using symmetry that is, instead of summing over all the cave actors in the brilliant zone, just using the irreducible part. So that question that there's a very deep answer. And it's the fact that I knew the code that I was using that was a derivative of cast step, sort of what we call the old bands ensemble the ft code. It was a calculating gradients with respect to everything.  So, you know, maybe in the limit of gamma sampling only but still with k points like the carparinello code that was developed here in the east actually at gamma sampling only. Well, the pwcf code was built with symmetry from the very beginning, but I would say it's just random I mean the code that I was using was was built without symmetry. And I think we discussed at the beginning because David with Dominic King Smith and others have developed, you know, the first ultra soft so the potential code, rightly so but we said that maybe it's better to start not conserving it might be a bit easier. And that was absolutely true actually. So, and so, so that's it just by chance. I think that we had the time reversal just for simplicity but I don't know, David. I think just historically is that, you know, the attitude was that the computer time to do the maximal localization was going to be trivial compared to the computer time to do the DFT calculation. And so we just weren't worried about it from the point of view of computer time of course, maybe we should have been worried about it from the point of view of preserving symmetry but it was sort of two early days for us to worry about that I guess. And just as a side note, you know, some of the interesting thing about breaking symmetry that is actually a numerical broken symmetry is that when we were first doing calculations say with silicon or gallium arsenide. And if you were to do a monk or spark measure that was unshifted containing gamma everything was symmetric but if you would do the shifted measure, you would actually have a numerical breaking of the symmetry with one bunny a function having a center and a spread that was likely different from the other. I think David explained me to me why that was and I keep trying to remind myself why that was, but I remember the phenomenology of this. But, but so, so if I do a calculation in. You know, like, that could plot spread as a function of all of the degrees of freedom in the gauge, which is you know huge number of dimensions if I have 10 by 10 bands with 500 k points that's like 10 by 10 by 500 degrees of freedom in that space.  And this is my spread. And so maybe there's some point at which, you know, a gauge is symmetric, but there's some choice of matrices where gauge is not symmetric. So, I mean the situation that, you know, we are like this, or like this, you know, so both of these cases, the gauge is symmetric. So, you know, in one case is over here so I've been the situation that when money functions break the symmetry. Then, you know, we actually have two choices for very similar gauges with the same spread but then the code just picks one of them. Or are we kind of guaranteed somehow to be in a situation that the maximum localized gauge is going to be the one, like you know the one that does preserve symmetry. So, this whole gauge space has so many degrees of freedom that we kind of don't think about how does the spread look like as a function of degrees of freedom in the gauge space and you know I remember also this. Until in the 97 paper you guys mentioned magnesium oxide, where apparently we put oxygen orbital on oxygen P orbit on the oxygen that whichever way you're oriented you always got the same spread. So that means that basically that landscape of gauges, your spread was basically like very flat right.  It happens a lot, especially things like manganese oxide and nickel oxide the 3D in an oxide. You said it was like 10 to the minus 12 like you're 10 or something like many, many, many digits so even if you say you're on it. Shouldn't there be like a little variation somehow in there that you know, but the orbitals want to point along the x axis and y and z and not like in some random. So the numerical, not noise but in precision in the finite differences, you know, representation of the position of the later and so. So in there. So, I think there are actually two questions or maybe that yeah we separated. And so if we go back to the first. You can also imagine, you know, we are using our square but we could use our fourth and all of a sudden use which are different physics that could make you swap from one to the other so. But let's pick one, let's pick because but I don't. So there isn't, you know, I mean, so it's accidental that you are in the double well versus the single well situation, depending on the chemistry of the system and the localization of that you have defined. So, again, maybe I'm too generic, but I don't see anything that should say we should always be in the top case with a single well or so. I don't know. Let me say one other thing. I think Cinecia's question was getting at the question of whether sometimes it's exactly flat. And I think sometimes it is exactly flat in some sense so, for example, suppose you had some some Adam with p p x p y and p z orbitals, and it's in a cubic crystal where hydrogen atoms in the plus and minus x plus and minus y and plus and minus z directions, you know, symmetrically disposed around it.  And, and so you can rotate the one a functions by some angle theta. And I think you can prove that the spread functional has no higher harmonics than like cosine of two theta or something and in the cubic crystal you can't have anything below, you know, cosine for theta and therefore it has to be exactly flat. So I think there are cases like that where it is exactly flat. And I think that even follows over to the to the crystal environment like, you know, some kind of magnesium oxide or something like that. Exactly. That means that unless you start from a high symmetry point, you're almost guaranteed to end up in a low symmetry state. Yeah, in that case, right. Yeah, but again you swap from square to fourth and is not flat anymore it's almost flat. But, but I think exactly because of this. You know when we did the manganese oxide that we were co diagonalizing our square in order because exactly you would end up in anything that was random basically. And so we decided that, you know, we had the five D when your functions mixed together and we would co diagonalize in that space are square. Okay, yes. So just a comment. If you go to the second, if you go to the second image where we have the more parabolic picture more symmetric minimum and the double minima in the Mexican. So, I also have the feeling that according to the way you minimize you can get either solutions. And so the one thing I've been many something like if I minimize I don't know copper with six funny functions and you obtain something with seven functions, I may need to break the symmetry to get in something that is more localized. Perhaps one interesting question there could be under which conditions one get the symmetric minima if any, or what what is the physics so it's amount that where we have the broken similar to think it looks like a more frustrated situation and I don't know so this is just and waving and feeling. And again I don't know if it's my opinion but you could have an isotropic expansion or contraction of the system so you don't change any symmetry, but our square changes and I would imagine that you can swap between this just by tuning this global handle and that's why I sort of I tend to be a bit pessimistic or whatever not over interpreting. But I think this question of like if you have six and then make seven. You know the thing is that you know like, if you have five the orbit, you know, you know, each, each, each represent, you know each representation of the point group or space group has a certain number of degeneracies right so you know they have to be five these states to have four then you kind of naturally so I think probably as you kind of add more and more you know you're kind of filling up something that exactly has the number of degeneracies in the representation for that group right so. I think if then if you're in the situation that you know you needed a two dimensional representation but you only added one more state, then maybe you naturally will break it but then with another one maybe you want. But I would also separate the, you know, composite separate bands of an insulator as a problem, and the disentangled of the metal work. Yes, everything. Everything goes. Yeah. Something else people want to. I wanted to, to maybe pick your brain on a question that was raised in one of the flash talks, which is that I forget who it was but he was doing supercell calculations on a pristine system with a smaller primitive cell than periodicity. And he found that the maximum localized funny functions broke that primitive cell, the periodicity. And well, so the question is, I guess that has to be numerical. One possibility that came up in the discussions is that this might be related to the lack of size consistency of the discretization of the derivative so there is this work by Stengel and spouting where they solve that problem so I'm just, I guess. So what we are saying is that we take silicon in the primitive cell and we get something with the silicon in a supercell, and we could have a symmetry breaking. Yeah, so the funny functions in the supercell are not exact replicas of one another. Yeah, yeah. So, I think so there are two possibilities that come to mind, one that I find it very physically interesting that is but maybe it's not the one that you want to discuss that is when the system would have a charge transfer and stability so in general in a supercell you could also have an electronic state that breaks the symmetry of the primitive cell and that's one thing. But let's suppose that that is not the case. Again, got feeling is that this would be possible. I mean, in principle, the only thing that comes out all the time is that maybe you know you get the px orbitals and they have swapped signs or things like this or the the orbitals that are mixed that would be mixed in different ways at every site. Now, it's true, but maybe it's good to have David on this. I mean, it's true that in principle, model of the constraint that you need to get a periodic charge density out of this that probably is the hardest constraint in terms of, you know, breaking things again in the principle, you have actually a larger degrees of freedom, you know, you have a larger set of degrees of freedom or you have a different set of degrees of freedom, if you're not imposing the symmetries. I don't know David what do you think on this. I don't know it sounds. It sounds unlikely to me but so I mean I guess. Well, one comment. I think if you if you do the two calculations in a completely parallel way so that for example the K point sampling that you choose in the supercell maps on to the, you know, in the usual mapping sense maps on to the same K point sampling that you're using for the supercell calculation. Then, in principle, and let's say I'm we're just talking about maximum localization of a of the occupied states in an insulator for the simpler case. It seems to me in principle the algorithm ought to end up doing exactly the same thing. I mean actually in the supercell calculations some of the matrices will be blocked diagonal, although there's some instability and so on. So, now it could be that the, again that you're actually at a saddle point not at a minimum and that there's some instability in which the system can lower its spread by breaking the translational symmetry. There is such a case to see it, you know, to see it, you know somebody find one, I mean, it sounds unlikely to me but I certainly can't think of any a priori reason why it couldn't happen so it would be interesting if someone can find a clear example where that where that does happen. But I think if I could, I don't know if I done the calculations right you might not have the same number of degrees of freedom because you have let's say in one dimension a primitive cell with two bands and two k points you have two two by two matrices, but if you double the supercell and keep the consistency on the k points you have one four by four matrix rather than having a block diagonal. You know, you have a four by four, but everything is in principle non zero rather than being to zero zero so is it correct I think you have more degrees of freedom. So you do have the degrees of freedom to break the translational symmetry. I'm just saying that, you know, I think it's analogous to the other kinds of symmetry suppose you have some mirror symmetry and you choose projection functions that, you know, make your positions be mirror Eigen states, but that's actually a saddle point and as you run the minimization you eventually wander off the saddle point and get into some other minimum. So, you know, if the situation is like that. That's one plausible scenario, although, you know, I, as I said I, I find it a priori surprising so if there is such a situation I'd like to know. Somebody want to comment on. Yeah, I may say something. Oh, yeah. Now what they say what be interesting in those cases since the maximum localized you are maximizing the localization of all together that is minimizing the spread of the sum of the spreads. It may happen you have an instability this in the sense to to when if I should should be equivalent one is a has a larger spread and another as a smaller spread and with that you gain in the total spread. Could be a let's say that instability coming from the fact that you want to minimize the sum, and you can minimize the sum not taking both equal but taking, possibly very much different. But you still need to have a periodic charge density that I think is a. No, I mean, so what you say, sorry, you still need to have a periodic charge density that is a hard constraint. Yes, the system as a true. It may happen that you may have a periodic charge density with two to financial which are no longer equivalent, just because one has a much larger spread and the other one has a much smaller price, and you send it to spread. But it seems very accidental. This actually, and sorry, I let you talk reminds me of a question that I'm very fond of and that is, is the dynamics of the centers of charge. Continuous in a molecular dynamic simulation by my wild guess would be that is not but I'm not, I'm not aware actually of never really monitor that. So I have a short comment about the super. I have short comment about the Supercell thing. So, if you have if you consider a premium standard Supercell, then due to the definition the final difference approximation for the spread functional that that the definition in the Supercell 1997 paper breaks super the size consistency so even if you use the exact same one your function and put that in that equation, it will get different results so that might explain some. Yeah, yeah, very good point. Let me make one other point which is that in one dimension this could not happen. Because in one dimension, you know you have a non iterative construction of maximum localized one a functions, and, and you're guaranteed I think to get one a functions that are periodic images of one another. So, if it cannot happen in one dimension but it can happen in two dimensions or three dimensions that also seems to me a little odd. I mentioned it can happen if you, you know, diagonalize the, you know, if you use the procedure from one day but if you follow the procedure from the paper and apply to one day. It might be that you know for a finite came as you somehow run this problem. Because I think the claim is that in the finite came came as the way you kind of compute these imagine part of logarithm causes trouble. I mean, I guess I'm thinking of it in terms of a more abstract question which is that, you know, to suppose you just asked the question what are the maximally localized one a functions is there ever a situation where the most localized maximally localized one a function to break the periodicity. Now, I would be very surprised if the answer is yes, so I suspected some kind of miracle thing like that. Yeah, what like was just discussed. Yes, I think the question was mostly about the miracle. So just as I comment, unless I mistaken at the impression that the symmetry the rotational symmetry problem we were discussing before it's just the alternative view of this discussion here in terms of translation or symmetry isn't it. I mean, we should have the same answer to the two aspects. There is a follow up. Maybe in the case in which there is there is some degeneracy. Maybe this can happen, maybe try to draw because it's a bit easier maybe if you take a linear carbon chain. If you take p orbitals, right, it's a bit similar to what we were saying before about having some flat region. In principle, you could rotate if you're say pie and pie orbitals on the, on the direction of the chain, but you could have the p orbit as a p x and p y here, you could rotate them. And then you could, in the end, they are still the same spread and just rotating them. And so in principle, you know, in a super in a unit cell, you have the publicity but in a supercell. I guess, I know this is a special case because it's flat in a sense but in a specific unit cell you could have now here, 090 here 45 degrees. Some other random angle, the Hamiltonia would have maybe is what Nicole was saying I would have some half diagonal components. It's not any more unblock repeated, at least in this facial case if you want, which is some degeneracy. You can have a lot of very equivalent cases in which probably numerically if you start with or with projections which are p x p y everywhere the system will not numerically will not try to go somewhere else but yeah, maybe I'm wrong. I think it's absolutely correct if they don't talk with each other. And if they start talking with each other. It might actually not be the case because they might want to format this banana.  So in principle, you could rotate each of them. I don't know maybe it's true. Yeah, I mean, in this case, if you're, if you're just doing a one dimensional maximal localization and in the, in the long dimension. You'll get, you know, one a functions that come in pairs with the degenerate center. If you have degenerate centers then yes then you can, you can rotate those one a functions on each individual unit cell independently and I don't think there's any cross talk. So that would be, I mean, that would be a case where we're breaking the periodicity doesn't raise the energy but it doesn't raise the spread doesn't lower the spread but it also doesn't raise the spread. Another question is, is there really a case where you're really at a saddle point and that by breaking the symmetry you can lower the spread that I doubt. At least in one day. So should we move to another topic. So, in the case you talk a little bit about this chemical intuition thing. That was, I think also topic in the summer school. Paper from 1984, which has a very nice quote in it. It says that the money functions are still one of the most useful but underutilized methodologies of solid state physics. And in particular it is in the language of money functions that I feel the chemical implications of Ben theory are most effectively expressed. And this paper from 1984. So kind of the question of like you know how do we build these. This, you know, in the light of this question or maybe some other problems like how do we build like, you know, also what Nicole said about you know you don't have to minimize our square maybe you have to minimize something else. Like, is there some way to kind of agree on some kind of descriptors that would be useful or maybe there's a way to find kind of descriptors of this chemical intuition which are gauging variant. Or, you know, we just have to like pick whatever, you know, at a certain situation makes no sense. Or, like, what are kind of common descriptors, do we just look at the bunny centers, or is there something that the game from, you know, looking at some other operators in the bunny representation like Tony or maybe some other operator. All the questions I don't know. Yeah, no, I mean David, do you want to go first. I don't think I have much to say about that one why don't you take a shot. I, you know, I think the chemist agonized on this for a long time. So, I mean, I mentioned already foster boys Edmondson Rudberg, but also people may say, so there is actually a very intense literature from the late 60s and the early 70s, where exactly chemist think what is the chemical intuition that is attached to this chemical bonds and to this localized orbitals. And at the end, it's not that there is a consensus, I mean there is a, if anything, you know the consensus at the time was that the admin son Rudenberg was the one that was more, you know, similar to what the chemical intuition that people had built was. If you can't do it for molecules in a sort of isolated system. I don't see any other reason why you know the solids should be sort of better or easier or different. So this alternative minimization. The principle is, did anybody ever do it for a solid or the difficult to. So, that's the one way where you mean myself interaction. So you maximize this, you maximize the self interaction. No. Okay, so, did anybody try that with like a points for soul. I, I'm not super sure. I mean, you know, when we do stuff with the Purdue Zunger functional. So what the harness young son has been doing with the Purdue Zunger functional and what we do with the cook months okay IPC functional that gives rise to localized orbitals that are more in the spirit of maximizing the self interaction that is then subtracted. So in some ways that's another, you know, localization criteria with the caveat that I think the Purdue Zunger. So if I remember correctly if you apply Purdue Zunger to a Gaussian there is a sort of switch where at certain point you make it less localized things rather than more localized. I forgotten who who did this work I think is a and read you remember the guy. He works with Andy Gore link course door for Thomas course or for I think so I mean that there is some stuff but I wouldn't over emphasize it if anything we you know I've seen a lot of that. You know, the key IPC localized orbitals that is driven by the Purdue Zunger term in solids look a lot like maximally localized when you're function so so I think the general statement is that all these localization schemes look very similar. Unless they look different and they look different more in some you know small high symmetry molecules, but this is super realistic guide. And you know in terms of chemical intuition I think, you know, the something that I really liked, I mean, David and I are also co authors but it was really driven by the first effort of Michele Parinello and Perino Sylvester Ali to apply. So, you know, they, they, they have functions for chemical intuition so there is this 1998 solid state communication paper on amorphous silicone in which you know they took the point of view that I find it very interesting to have, you know, exactly as you describe amorphous or different solid with per correlation functions, rather than having ion ion per correlation function, they had the vanier function center ion per correlation function. And that was actually very insightful to understand that because of, you know, one of the conclusions that is that you could have geometrical environment that actually look very similar. And one doesn't compare and one doesn't. And so this, you know, electronic awareness was actually very interesting. And there have been of course works using many a function centers in this respect, but also the symmetrization of the hydrogen bond in high pressure ice and the like, but I always find it quite interesting and maybe underexploited in a more way that some liquids and this kind of, yeah, systems. Some other comments. No need to be shy. Okay, so, for example, these. Let's maybe try this SCDM so this automated thing that Linlin talked about the people have understanding for. So basically works by the vanier is automatically by you know you want five functions and it finds a five five points in space. Where you basically put delta function, the way I understand it and then you could use that as initial projections. Is there some kind of understanding for like, how are those points selected this is some kind of chemical picture of like what's going on there like, it's a very mathematical algorithm the way to represent this QR activity. Yeah, there's some. Yeah, so Giovanni understands it. And that's why we did the project ability disentanglement of which I will comment in a moment but Giovanni go ahead. I don't know if I understand that I understand the first part of the algorithm and then now it continues. It's harder to explain intuitively but in the end, you can imagine. So you have to construct this density matrix and say the simplest way I have to picture in my head as that you imagine to be in a grid real space grid. And so a column would be the so this is a density matrix is a projector on the balance. So we have a two column, not a single column, a two column. That's the same in the Hilbert space. If you're only looking at the violence states. And so every column can be fought as the multiplication of this matrix we have a two zero zero zero one zero zero zero so as you say it's a delta function in a specific position in space. And you can do a lot of projections and if you do very near by points you get very similar. near sight. Essentially they are all localized. And so the question how you do get not a million because you have a very dense grid but you get only a few and so you do this QRCP which essentially is an algorithm to find the few which are most orthogonal. So you have two which are very close you don't want to have this. Of course you pick n of them so n being the number of any functions it will most probably anyway expand the space but it would be very close together in medical evidence table. So you want to get the most orthogonal and then in practice you also do a load in your calculation at the end. The way the algorithm works in practice is that the first one it picks is the one with the largest charge density I think the maximum. Yeah so it finds the point with the largest charge density and that's how it picks the first one. And then from there on it's more like finding the most orthogonal one in the rest of what you have. And then maybe it's less artistic means that's easy to picture in a sense but you know you find one and you find one with highest density and then you find the next one which is the most orthogonal to it and then you continue like this. And since they are localized you get a basic set non-orthogonal yet but as orthogonal as possible if you want. And then so in this way the idea is that once you do the load in orthogonalization you remain as close as possible without destroying the localization. I don't know if this was clear but there's a way I understood it. And of course this was a gamma molecule then if you have k points. I think David said that he has to leave it's four foot five in our time zone so. I can stay for another five or ten minutes. I have another meeting I have to run to so. So like maybe so okay so there were questions about um like is there something I don't know who posed this question is there something that could be gained by having running functions which are not orthonormal and also do we really need exponential localization so I don't know who posted that question yeah but but like for some of the kind of population purposes um actually I think that this paper that I cited I think the from Phil Andersen's you call them it's ultra localized I don't think I think his are important let's start with the north or maybe again David do you um well I don't know uh I mean there's a lot to be gained and also much to be lost I mean obviously the uh non-orthogonal 1a functions can be more localized and there's a huge chemistry literature on using non-orthogonal wave functions as a basis set but then of course you lose uh you know all the fact that you can relate the 1a functions to each other by unitary rotations they just become generic rotations and and then you have to keep things balanced in some way um I guess you make sure that all your 1a functions have unit norm but are not necessarily orthogonal to each other um but then you know for example the representation of electric polarization in terms of 1a centers is broken um you know the change in spread having to do with 1a centers moving apart from each other is broken a lot of things get broken uh so uh that's my reaction um uh you know in terms of actual practical uh experimenting with this idea um you know I don't I don't have much experience so I'm speaking somewhat from ignorance but but that's that's my my perspective no yeah absolutely and I think there is also an ill conditioning if you think of it because just think sp3 hybrids if we were uh you know not forced to be orthogonal you could have basically an s orbital with infinitesimal amounts of p and you know that there's you know exactly any combination yeah yeah so so yeah okay uh so I don't know who posed that question so I don't know if somebody wants to comment maybe further um yes yes you know I yeah I raised the point but I tend to totally agree with the with the answers in a sense I also had the feeling that there's not much to gain yeah the question was exactly is there anything to gain uh following that path maybe before David signs off uh it would be interesting to to hear his thoughts on Jemos question which I think was uh if we are in a situation where there is for example a topological obstruction to makes me to exponential localized vani functions and they are just polynomially localized is that still good enough to use them for numerical work did he have in mind like interpolation or okay he's nodding so I think he's kind of agreeing but maybe you can elaborate uh is that a question to me well let me comment so uh I don't think so isn't my short answer I mean first of all I mean when you have a topological obstruction it means that the gauge uh has to have a there's a point in case space where there's basically a vortex present and and first of all you know that will give you parallel tails that makes it I think impossible to cut to to define position matrix elements and then secondly the location of that vortex in case space is completely arbitrary by changing the gauge you can move it around and so it just sounds to me like a rather unpleasant way to proceed that's my reaction but I you know I've never tried it I had a comment on that that is if even if the localization is not exponential when you write the inverse transformation you get a periodic gauge so so I think this is by absurdum you you can prove that that is suppose I have topological material if they can find or turn over when you're functional no matter how localized they are I write the inverse transformation and I find that the block states uh fulfill a periodic gauge which cannot be it can be if there's a if there's a singularity in the gauge right in other words uh you know like I say a vortex basically there's a point in the gauge where an infinitesimal circle around the gauge gives you two pi um uh you know you can you can soak up the uh the very uh you know you can soak up the churn number by putting the vortex in instead of by having the gauge be not be uh non-periodic but but it seems to me that if you write the inverse transformation that is you write from the when you're functional to the block then the block is an is a periodic is a periodic gauge for any k yeah but if you start with 1a functions that have these horrible power law tails and then do the 1a you know the inverse transformation because they're so poorly localized in real space to get a singularity in case yeah yeah I can be non-converged at this I'm serious yeah yeah yeah I see I would say it's also important to distinguish between uh the topological side and the metal side because when we disentangle we have actually something that is basically exponentially localized uh exactly because it's smooth I mean in some ways that you know forgets of the discontinuity so but as anyone try that to localize that topological material because uh you know being an engineer also you know algebraic and exponential are more or less the same so I think actually when scdm was started yeah I had conversation with Lulein he there is a paper by David and uh tonauser on the aldane model where it is very clear that the overlap matrix you cannot invert it anymore okay oh that's a plastic reference the 2010 is David's yeah yeah yeah that's basically the top lot that's yeah that's uh that's related to this topological obstruction that we've just been discussing there were papers um I'm I'm not going to remember who but for metals there were papers where people constructed a a kind of a scaling um renormalization group type of structure where you have most of your 1a functions are very localized and then you have a few that have a larger distance and then a few that are very delocalized and as you get close to the Fermi level you have a you know a very small fraction of 1a functions that are extremely delocalized it might have been a rowy buyer I think yeah that sounds right that sounds right I mean I think in metals the issue is that you want to localize a broader manifold so that's the issue I mean of course if you want just to represent the occupied states you have exactly what you described but the interesting thing to do is just localize the disentangled manifold that includes also the conduction yeah I think I remember when when I talked to Lin Lin that he took a finite Haldane model by the SCDM and then most of them were localized and some of them looked at like this long tails but there is I mean you have you know the representation of the Fermi operator on the disentangled so there is no need to just transform the occupied exact exact exact okay I do have to leave any final question for me maybe maybe a slightly related question is what about this fragile topology why you can't bannerize those bands I have these fragile topology but that you know the overall chair number is still zero but yeah well I mean again it I think that is always embedded in questions of symmetry I think it's always questions about whether you can I mean if you're willing to break symmetry in the in the generation of 1a functions I think those problems you know I think the fragile fragile topology is defined in the context of certain symmetry constraints and because you need to reproduce the symmetry representations at high symmetry points in the Breland zone in a certain way I don't think I better say anymore right now because I'll just I'm not up on this enough to have a clear a clear picture in my head at the moment but that's my first reaction thank you David it's very time thank you this was fun any questions to wrap up or I didn't get a chance to ask David if he had any regrets for example like okay so this when people there was a lot to talk about the electron phonon right so you know use vanier functions you take this operator and then you can compute whatever you want with however many k and q points you want it's very useful if you kind of think more broadly are there some other solid state calculations where you would gain from vanier ising for example like beta cell peter gw are kind of expensive calculations okay in gw you can get away usually just with shifting bands because gw doesn't change orbitals too much but let's say you want to you do beta cell peter for example something else on like a coarse mesh and then you vanierize it somehow like would it in in principle be possible to kind of vanierize everything or maybe there are some things that you can't or maybe you can think of something else or I mean there's some other operator you could you know also vanierize you know I think anything that depends you know completely on the Fermi surface on states of the Fermi surface really benefits from vanierization when you have to do this you know integrals to capture the response from a line of states or anything actually we you know very early on we had a project with myilda zack and francesco maury on nmr in metals and we needed to calculate the spin susceptibility the orbital susceptibility and the night shifts and those were horrendous sort of integrals to converge because exactly they they they require that response so I mean in general I think anything that requires exactly a low dimensional manifold with respect to your entire brain zone I will will need a lot of k-points to be calculated precisely and then when realization is good so for example there's a prl from louis group on betasalpeter and I think molybdenum disulfide I think where they to get the spectrum of excitons correct they need to I think effectively had to do like a 700 by 700 k-point grid and you know that's like a and they had some tricks to do it but you know there's a way to kind of speed up those or maybe you know there's some other code you know something else that people compute that could be sped up I don't know if people have some yes yeah I think that concerning betasalpeter there were some early attempts of using vanille functions by claudia tacalite and a few other people but 10-15 years ago and I think that is still something that could be further explored in a sense because you typically need a few bands so it's okay you also involve empty states but typically those are a few just for the lowest line parts of the spectrum but you have a very incredible number of key points or somehow the shape of the betasalpeter metric should look pretty differently once on the k basis other than the vanille space so I think there's room for improvement but paulo maria has been doing a lot of you know the gwl code the gw the betasalpeter all in a vanille basis or a combination of vanille functions yeah I mean others I suppose but yeah whenever you need empty states so let's say gw that's where playing where it's shine because all this localized business and let's say let's put aside vanille functions because like siesta and everything the the basicity is not complete so you cannot go you cannot converge actually so maybe what the right thing to do is do a rewrite things in terms of the occupy states only so people like star night doing star americ equations there that that makes sense because you have the occupy states only and and you can work in a localized basis but yeah so we have with the empty states I don't think it's a good idea to go near factions yeah so basically in johann stonk there was a you kind of basically vanille is turnheimer equation in the fbt in some sense sorry but I I haven't thought deep about that aspects but normally the bottleneck for solving but the superior occasion is to diagonalize the case space that they all couple to each other so even if you obtain somehow those huge matrix in case space like several thousand by thousand it's not it was difficult to diagonalize them so there is that problem oh I see so normally that's the the difficult part for when it comes to the exit on physics I don't know whether there is a way that one can do entirely localized moment sorry real space thing but that's because exit on is made of all the transitions together and then somehow I see so I have two comments about this so first for a bsc thing I have very I have little experience I have no experience with bsc but maybe iterative dilation methods might be my soul the problem should have mentioned if you can represent the Hamiltonian in some localized basis so in a sparse manner and regarding the previous topic about the empty states so as sinisha mentioned our work on linear function perturbation theory is a way to solve the problem of empty states in in case of perturbative calculations so you can represent the wave function perturbation which includes a lot of empty bands but in a localized manner so it's not applicable to all problems but in my soul some problems for example the self-energy real part of the self-energy which we calculated in our paper okay good uh so when are we doing this meeting again next year I would the developers meeting from what I've seen that is very little since I've been very successful in bringing together so it's not for me to say but I thought there was a lot of enthusiasm of making this a more regular event because I think it really brings people you know together to think and do problems and and it's very easy to get bits of funding from everywhere so actually funding is not a problem and it's actually maybe you know this is a general comment that in some ways I mean I think Xavier Gons said it very early around I mean Xavier both said that you know biodiversity of codes when referring to electronics such a cause is a very positive thing so but very early around actually use the you know case of the 90s a very interesting effort that was actually sort of you know working with all these different different communities and you know I've always been convinced that you know software and simulation software is really you know one of the powerful pillars of 21st century science and I think this is one of probably the nicest examples so where we exactly bring together very different communities pieces people with different interests and different codes because again you know biodiversity is important but you know we have the long view that I think is good to develop you know a powerful environment so so I see this as a very interesting very successful and also very pleasant example and you know probably we should do our best as we are as you guys are doing I don't do anything these days apart from writing grants basically but I think you should really continue because it's such a nice example of how to do science and computational science this century without somehow the stress that some other communities have I think maybe you know I think it was good to have kind of people who kind of go in depth to understand the code very well and are discussing a lot of like technical things that are you know useful for us who kind of use this more than develop but then also kind of have the breath with people who kind of came from wide range of things where areas where they kind of use some of these funny or late ideas and also in terms of diversity I think also the idea that you know you know maybe there are people who are kind of more in a like coding side or more in like development side I think that's good to have a kind of depth that that makes okay until next time I guess okay thank you guys so thank you thanks everybody we still need tomorrow so I think it's nine we've got summaries of all the kind of things that were achieved during the meeting at nine


As a grade 5 class at Wheatland Crossing School prepares to learn about the importance of text features, the teacher begins by reading a fiction passage. She then compares this with a non-fiction passage. This helps to prepare them for the upcoming text feature hunt using their social studies, voices in Canada, and text books. Three differences, go! Explicit instructions and recognizing text features helps to improve comprehension and convey author intent. Learning about how the text is organized using features such as headings, italics, bold text, pictures, graphs, and timelines provides insight into the key ideas and supportive details. These insights facilitate understanding and foster thinking about the text. As a strategy to anticipate information, student comprehension of non-fiction texts can be increased by students' recognition of textual cues, visuals, and organization of the text. I think it's important to realize that this is just not a skill that you're born with. I think so many of us take for granted that we know what a title is, we know what a heading is, we know that this picture is trying to give us more information about what we've just read. You really have to break it down. We're in a society now where so much information is thrown at us all the time. How we interpret that information needs to come down to the tools that we're given. They're not given to us at birth. They're not given to us in grade one. It's when we start seeing more non-fiction texts in the higher level grades that we really need to make sure the foundation and the tools of text features are really established. So that these kids are ready to take on these texts and digest these texts in the best way that they can without overwhelming them. While the students work collaboratively through the text feature hunt, Alex circulates around the room assessing the student's ability to find and record examples of text features. He is checking to see if the students are finding examples of text features and are wondering why the authors have included the text features that they have. Alex finds the whole group in smaller breakout groups effective. The heading breaks the full paragraph down into just a small thing. It tells it what it's about. Text features are great for promoting more meaningful predictions around the content being studied, learning how information is organized in a text, anticipating learning, and locating information in a text. So then if you need to make sure Ms. Catholic knows one part, you can bold it or slant it. And yeah, you can just... So there's important stuff that you can show her without having to tell her. So the small groups allow me to really target which kids are really clicking and which kids are not so that I can give extra instruction. I find the biggest successes with these kids is right away they're able to look at a page and decide what it's going to be about, how they're going to tackle it, what the tools they're going to need, the highlighters, whether they're going to take anecdotal notes. And the kids that are struggling, I'm able to pull them aside while the other kids are working on this and really give them that intervention and pinpoint the areas that are not exactly clicking with them yet so that they can use text features as a tool for them when they're reading as well. Because I know what the heading is so that I can see what the whole entire thing is about. And then the title tells me what the page or the chapter is about. Yeah, because in the textbook I'm nervous, like if I don't know a word, then I'm not going to understand the whole class and then I could look in the glossary. So before I find when you ask a student to look up some information in a textbook or in a non-fiction book or even on the internet, right away they've grown or they're completely disinterested and disconnected when they see the amount of text on a page. Whereas after we've talked about the text features and the tools that can help us, they're willing to commit more to a page that might have a complete text block or might have some charts that they might not understand right away but they're willing to take a little bit more of a risk in reading because they know they don't have to read the entire thing. They can chunk it, they can use the headers, they can use the captions and understand what they're reading in sections rather than trying to group it as a whole.