Thank you. I admire your stamina. Everybody, I didn't think we'd have so many people at the end of the day, but the organizers asked me to talk about motives. And so I thought I would give a fairly relaxed, it's an awkward subject because it's a subject that Growth and Deek was very interested in. If you look at his letters to Ser, for example, they come up frequently. But he never published anything, at least to my knowledge, he never published anything about motives. And I suspect the reason was that you run up against some difficult conjectures that nobody, and in fact, I talked with Growth and Deek once in my life as he was leaving mathematics I was coming in. But I did talk with him once and I asked him precisely about what are called the standard conjectures, which are, so to speak, the obstruction to pushing through his program of what are called pure motives. And he told me that he had high hopes that they would be proved before he died. But it was not to be so. So what I thought I would do is give a fairly relaxed talk and I want to emphasize the progress in motives. So the first is what you might call Growth and Deek motives. Those are intimately linked to the Bay conjectures. I think it's fair to say that Growth and Deek was inspired to develop the notion of motive by his attack on the Bay conjectures. Then, well, after Growth and Deek had left mathematics, the subject of mixed motives grew up. Primarily, I think, well, Deline certainly developed the notion of mixed hodge structure and Baylinson, my memory is, and I could be wrong, but my memory is that it was Baylinson who kind of ported Deline's mixed hodge structures to the theory of motives. So here, one of the important motivations was the Baylinson or were the Baylinson conjectures. And in particular, you could argue you might think that it replaced the Bay conjectures. Here, the conjecture is concerned values, a hodge of Bay. So mixed motives, at least one of the primary reasons to develop such a theory is arithmetic. I mean, you'd like to understand these very arithmetic objects. And then the subject, which has become kind of dear to my own heart, has not been really developed very much, but I want to say some words about it in any case, is the role of motives physics. And here, there are two things to say, one of which is true. So certainly, it is the case that Feynman amplitudes, which are the essential numbers that one needs for a perturbative quantum field theory, Feynman amplitudes are periods of motives. I have to explain what that means. The second thing, which very probably is not true, but that's all right. Probably I won't have time to explain it anyway, is that, how shall I say this? Let me just say, it's an Akian theory of quantum field theories. Essentially, I think it's fair to say for Grelten Dieg, one of the central ideas involved in studying motives is that they form a Tanakian category. The pure motives form a Tanakian category. And so we'll have to see a little bit what that means. And the question then here is, what happens if we try to apply the same kind of Tanakian calculus to the study of quantum field theories? And the answer is, I don't know, but there's at least a little bit one can say, and it's kind of amusing. So I hope I'll have time to say some words about that. The stick is there. Oh, well, that's a little. OK, so motives. Yeah, I mean, I've kind of reminded, I taught undergraduate calculus for 40 years. And there were certain things that would always happen. And one thing that would always happen is that after the first lecture, some kid would come up to you and say, the first lecture, I would always devote to sort of talking about numbers, I mean, real numbers, where we were going to do the calculus, the properties of real numbers. And some kid would come up and say, but professor, what is a number? And I never got a good answer to that. But the one thing I can say with statistical certainty is that that student was going to do very poorly in the course. So I mean, it's in some sense the wrong question, right? Math doesn't really tell you what a number is. It can tell you properties of numbers. So for example, it can tell you if you have five pairs of shoes, you will need 10 shoelaces. But it doesn't really tell you what a number is. So I think similarly, if we want to talk about an algebraic variety, you have this phenomenon that is kind of like, I mean, there's sort of two things, and they're close together, and I'm not enough of a philosopher to be able to say whether they're different or not. But one are the sort of manifestations of this mathematical object. And the other are the kind of interactions of this mathematical object with other mathematical objects. And these are two kind of things that we can hope to say concrete things about. And I think that's very much growth index approach. So how do I want to say here? Well, the manifestations, so how to see an algebraic variety, one way to see it, and I think, as I say, it was important because of the vague conjectures, was to look at solutions to polynomial equations. So solutions to polynomial equations, everybody kind of knows how the game is played. If I have, for example, x squared plus 1 equals 0, there's a simple polynomial equation, I can say that this has no real solutions. It has a solution because 2 squared plus 1 equals 5. It has a solution, so we get a solution mod 5. But on the other hand, there's no solution, no solution 3. So the vague conjectures are that. They ask for how many solutions, or how many points, in our variety with values in Fp, or more generally, Fp to the n. So I remind you that Fp is the simplest kind of a field. It's Z mod pz, where p is prime. And Fp to the n, it happens if you study the Galois theory of this field, that there is one extension of degree n, so Fp, n, p, there's one for each n. And so we could ask to study the function, which associates the n, the number of points. So that was the idea. Well, I actually don't want to get into the history, but certainly, Vey studied this problem and others before him. But Vey came up with the basic intuition. And the basic intuition was that you have a Frobenius, so call it, and it's a ring homomorphism from Fp to n, or let's say more general. Well, it sends F of x is simply x to the p. And the fixed points, so Fp, n equals 1 is just Fp. And more generally, the fixed points of Fp to the n, well, the fixed points of nm. And if I look at F to the nth power, then this is Fm kind of thing. Hope I have that right. Something like that is true. And with that in mind, if I have a tuple, let's say x1 to xn, oh, too many ns, x1 to x, what should I say, d, and I apply F to it. So this is x1 to the p, xd to the p. And so if this point, x1, xd, if this belongs to V of Fp, then, or this will belong to V of Fp if and only if. So this will be true if and only if this point, x1, xd, viewed as belonging to a point of the variety over the algebraic closure, is fixed under. And more generally, if I take F to the r, then I can put here p to the r, and F to the r, and I get such a statement. So V's beautiful idea was that we could, using the topological construction of left shits, that we could turn this into a problem of linear algebra. So the point was that if we have, let's say, capital F, an endomorphism of vector space, then we can consider the generating series, the trace of F to the n times t to the n. And with appropriate additional structure, so if we have a duality, if V is given as isomorphic to V dual, then we can work, so I don't want to get too much into it, but we can work in V tensor V dual and write the F and also the identity as elements in V tensor V dual and do linear algebra in V tensor V dual. And this left shits observed made sense if we could talk about topology. So in topology, we take on being a little vague. V is the cohomology of some appropriate manifold with Poincare duality. And then if F is a map from x to x, which has fixed points. So we're interested in the fixed points. We want to study the fixed points of F for his powers of F. And if we're fortunate that the fixed points are in good position, then we can study this by looking at the intersection of the graph of F to the n intersected with the diagonal. And lo and behold, this is exactly in the topological context, the trace of F star to the nth power, where F star is the action on cohomology. Super trace. Sorry? Super trace of 1080s. Yeah, you have to, right, I'm going too fast here. We really should take the ultimate sum of these things. But people are familiar with these ideas. But so the point is that with this mechanism, the intersection here, so in our case, because of the geometric fact that the point is fixed, if and only if it's fixed under the ferminius. So in our case, we take our variety V and we view it as, or we view F as acting on V. You have to be a little careful. It's kind of confusing because Frobenius, you have to work with the relative Frobenius. But again, that's a technical point I don't want to get into. The intuition is that the fixed points of various powers of F exactly count. So the fixed points of F to the r are in one to one correspondence with the points. And granting that, one may hope to apply the left shits machine and to relate our counting problem. So our function, we want to understand our function, which sends n to the number of points of V, F, p to the n. And we relate the generating series that we get from this problem to the sum of the trace of F star. So again, yeah, now I'm starting to cheat because as V observed, we don't have a good comology theory to apply. But if we could apply the thing, well, we do in fact now, but we didn't in those days, if we could apply the thing in the sense of left shits to some nice comology theory, then this we would exactly get.  So they had developed this beautiful program and he applied it in the case of curves because in the case of curves, he could use the Jacobian and the points of finite order of the Jacobian to build an analog of the comology and then he could apply his machine to that. In your forward, I should be a sum instead of a coordinate. Sum, no? Sum's what is that? It's a trace, it's a sum. No, it's not a determinant. It's a determinant, yeah, one more. No, no, this is... Yeah, you're right, you're right. So in other words, it's the sum, whatever it is, it's certainly the sum over i, of the sum over n of alpha i to the n, t to the n, right. So it should be the sum, you're right. The total function is different. But I mean, yeah, once you're here, then all the other manipulations are just familiar, just like in other combinatorial games. So anyway, this is where Gorothendijk started. And so he developed the, in particular, the theory of... So Gorothendijk developed the theory of analytic co-homology, which precisely did that, which precisely gave us a theory on which we could compute these traces and prove at least part of the vacanjectures and the history is kind of well known. The missing was still that the vacanjectures also concerned the absolute values of the alpha-i's and that was kind of inaccessible because, well, for problems that we'll see in a minute. But anyway, he developed this ellatic homology and the problem was that there were sort of too many of them. I mean, there's one of these homologies for every L. It was not the case as in the classical topological picture that you had a Q-valued homology. You had a QL-valued homology and it wasn't, in fact, I think it was Sear who observed that you couldn't hope for a homology with values in Q because you could construct, for example, elliptic curves over finite fields. So, Q-valued homology didn't exist because there existed elliptic curves. I think you want to take it over f p squared whose endomorphisms were quaternion algebras. And so, in particular, they had no, so this was a quaternion algebra, call it Q, quaternion, and it had no two-dimensional representations. And growth in deep new and it followed from V that you wanted this representation in the case of an elliptic curve. It should be a two-dimensional vector space. So, it had no two-dimensional representation, sorry, defined over Q. So, you couldn't have Q-comology but you had this elliptic homology. And so, growth in deep asked himself, we should think of these elliptic homologies as kind of manifestations of this abstract category of varieties. So, he asked himself, well, can we think of these as like the smile on the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. So, the Cheshire Cat has all these smiles that we can see but we can't see the cat. So, growth in deep said, well, can we develop the abstract category which you call the category of motives which sort of underlay all these realizations. So, we want the category motives lying behind. And the story is kind of well-known. I mean, he had a beautiful program to do this but the program was blocked because certain standard conjectures about algebraic cycles were turned out to be, first of all, necessary. These were needed but to this day, no one can prove them. But unknown. But what, I mean, leaving aside the issue of actually proving it, he was left with a beautiful sort of picture of how things should be. And the picture revolved around this notion of Tanakhian category. So, that wasn't kind of enough. So, the category of motives was supposed to be so-called Tanakhian category. And what did that mean? That meant that it was sort of abstractly equivalent, I'm speaking vaguely here because there are many issues but it was sort of abstractly equivalent to the represent the category of representations of an algebraic and how did that work? The idea was that this category, let's give it a name, call it Z, that there should be some functor, which he called a fiber functor, to the category of vector spaces and the category should have a notion of tensor product and the fiber functor should preserve the tensor product and you should look at the automorphisms of the functor preserving the tensor product and that should be the points of your algebraic group called G. So, this should be G, I'm going very quickly. And then this was a sort of an extraordinary idea because suddenly the properties of the category can become translated into the properties of the group and for growth and dig, the group should be semi-simple. The category should be no extensions and the presence of the elatic phenomenon that there were many different comology theories, the fiber functor should be so a variety should be an object, should give rise to an object in here, well I mean there's some issues there with, but roughly speaking a variety should give rise to an object and the fiber functor should just be the cohomology of the variety but of course we know that we have to take QL coefficients and so in fact there are many fiber functors but they're not defined over Q, they're defined over QL and so suddenly there is a fascinating complication that this category is not actually a Tanakian category, not actually a neutral, I mean there are various words that are used but in any case we have to extend the field and for various field extensions we get various fiber functors and even a peatic fiber functors and it's suddenly a very beautiful and very intricate picture but this picture is blocked in the sense that because we can't prove these standard conjectures about the algebraic cycles we can't actually prove their issues. Okay so now what I wanna do is to talk next about the category of mixed motives because I think mathematics is kind of like a river and it flows and every now and then there comes up a problem that nobody can solve but the river, so it's like a dam in the river but the river, that water is coming at you and it's gotta go somewhere and so if you're not careful it just goes off a different direction. So I think inspired by Deline's theory of mixed high structures, the balance and I hope I'm, probably other people were involved but I say balance and it's sort of the main man. Developed the theory of mixed motives and so let me just explain a little bit why these are, what they are and why they're interesting. Well I suppose I should start with the simple case so growth in the theory of Tanaka, I mean growth in the theory of motives was a semi-simple theory, there were no extensions but if one looks around in real life there are notions of extensions of motives so let me just explain the simplest one, the simplest one is so-called Kummer and this is like this and if I have, so I have my variety V but now suppose that I have a unit so I write OV star so this means U is simply an invertible function so it's a global unit then there are various games I can play with U if my ground field so if V is over K and if K is inside C then I can take the logarithm of U and that's of course only well defined so up to 2 pi I or up to Z times so growth in the theory would say that the set of logarithms is a torsor under the group Z times 2 pi I more algebraically we could take the L to the nth root of U and the collection of these guys is well defined up to the L to the nth root of unity instead of Zeta in the algebraic closure such that Zeta L to the n is one and again it's a torsor so these are torsors and if we, it's sort of a little bit more convenient to say things slightly differently if we look at the set of pairs log of U to the A comma A for A an integer then the set of these pairs well it certainly augments off to the integers by sending this to A and the kernel, well the kernel is the set of choices of log here so the kernel is just Z times 2 pi I and that's what, that's sort of a toy example of an extension so this would be written as an extension of Z or of Z of zero by Z of one the so-called Kummer extension or if you wanted to say it elitically I would have zero goes to mu L to the n goes to the set of all pairs consisting of U A one over L to the n comma A where now A wants to be an element in Z mod L to the n so these, but these are not actually motives themselves these are realizations so these are realizations of a quote motive which we haven't defined and the motive is associated to the algebra geometric object which is the original unit U so we've taken something like an algebraic variety in this case not an algebraic variety but an invertible function on an algebraic variety and we've given the smile or various smiles on the Cheshire cat which we want to think of as being associated to a Cheshire cat which is the okay this all seems rather silly but suddenly things are not so silly because as a consequence of a theorem of Borel we have something suddenly something really extraordinary there exists a motive and I'll just state a very, very small simple case of a great big theory which looks like this Z of three M Z of zero so Z of three means Z of one tensor three so Z of one is supposed to be a motive whose realizations include this one and these and our category of motives is supposed to be a Tanakhian category which means we can take the tensor product so whatever it is this makes sense and our category of motives I didn't say it but our category of mixed motives should be closed under extension and so suddenly we have the possibility of looking at extensions but the miracle that the extraordinary thing that happens is there exists one which yields as a period the Riemann Zeta function so this is the Riemann Zeta function at three so Zeta of three which is a completely fascinating number and now I have to explain to you what I mean by yields here we have to and it's instructive so let's actually do that so how do we get Zeta of three from this abstract guy? Well, we have to look at one of the various smiles on the Cheshire cat we have to look at what's called the Hajj realization so I have to explain what that is that I would write it exactly the same way so I'll write it the same way but now I really have in mind that these are Hajj structures so what do I mean by a Hajj structure? Well, this is just a free oblivion group, it's Z well actually say, sorry? Delain mixer structure, so Yeah, so mixed, mixed, mixed mixed, okay so actually let's look at this one that's more instructive so M as a Hajj structure means what? M of Z is a free oblivion group it's Z two times but it has a little more structure it has a weight filtration M of Q so I'll write M of Q as M of Z tensor Q and similarly M of C or M of R same idea so it has a weight filtration and in this case, the weights are W minus six of M of Q is Z minus Z of Q of three Q contained in which is just Q but we don't worry so this is M of Q is W zero Q so it has this increasing weight filtration and it has a decreasing Hajj filtration so I write the Hajj filtration this is actually the crucial point is that the Hajj filtration is only defined once I tensor with C okay and it's decreasing and so what is it in this case? It's decreasing so I have in fact I have zero contained in F zero M of C contained in so it's decreasing so if I write here F minus three that's bigger it's confusing M of C which is the whole thing okay and what's more the category of these mixed hot structures is an obedient category and the operation of taking the various filtration pieces is exact so I then get zero goes to F zero Z of three C goes to F zero M C goes to F zero Z of zero C goes to zero now F zero of Z of zero is everything this is the Hajj filtration on the Z of I's is stupid so this is just all this is just literally C in the sense that it actually has a distinguished element one on the other hand Z of three this is F minus three and so F zero Z of three is actually zero so in fact this is an isomorphism so in other words this mysterious extension has a splitting at least if I tensor with C so I have if I tensor with C I have call it S sub F which is a canonical splitting on the other hand if I look at the the original integral version these are after all just free abelian groups and so I can just choose a splitting so I can take an S sub Z which is defined over Z and then the difference so I can look at S F of one minus S Z of one and those are two elements that map to the same guy and so the difference lies in here so this lies in Z of three C now it's not well defined because even though the F splitting was canonical the Z splitting is not I just simply said there was one but there's an ambiguity so to make it canonical I have to factor out by the Z of three Z so to speak the lattice but this then is just well I haven't explained well but when you think carefully about the situation here what you're doing is you're factoring out by the lattice generated by two pi I cute so there is an invariant of the extension of Hawn structure so what is the logic here I said that Burrell's work gives us an extension of motives and then we take the hodge realization of this extension of motives and associated to this hodge realization is an element in so let's call this we call it B for Burrell but we get the hodge realization so this is sort of called H of B which is an element in here but this is just of course it's R direct sum R I times R modulo Z times 2 pi cubed so if we ignore this part and just look at the real part we find that from this extension of motives we get a real number and lo and behold the real number that we get so the image of this H of B in here is exactly Zeta so that's just a quick sketch of the balancing conjectures which are vastly more general and more inclusive but unfortunately the work of Burrell only applies for number fields so the balancing conjectures remain kind of like the standard conjectures largely unproved but we have many examples and so there's considerable confidence that the picture is correct okay so now let me segue in the remaining 15 minutes to the physical picture actually I don't know what I want to do here so I suppose I should talk about it hurts my heart but I suppose I should talk about the aspect of the physical thing that I know is true rather than the stuff that is probably nonsense but I like so let me talk a little bit at least about so this is physics I want to talk a little bit about the Feynman amplitudes and basically the game is going to be the same physics gives us associated to so this is I should mention my collaborator Pierre van Hove if we look at this graph which somebody had the wit to describe as the two banana graph in physics Feynman's program says that if we imagine incoming and outgoing particles then what happens in the mysterious area where they collide represented by various graphs in this case just three lines and so we have an incoming momentum and an outgoing momentum and we write T for the Q squared the Minkowski length of Q and we have masses here M1, M2, and M3 then associated to the three edges with the masses we have propagators and we are led to try to compute a certain integral so this leads to an integral which is equal to some function which let's call it I don't know I which is a function of T of Q squared and also of course the masses now what is this what is this function it's a multiple valued function so actually the story is in two parts the first part really represents my work with Pierre and that was the case we looked at the case where the masses are all equal M1 equals M2 equals M3 equals M so in that case what we got was an elliptic curve so there was an E which depended on T which is an elliptic curve and there was an extension I should put a T here it all depends on T think of T as fixed for a while M does a dope curve this is again M is my word for motive small M yeah it occurs actually it doesn't you're right that's a good point that's a good point so T is here replaced by so T is replaced by T over M so there's no M you're absolutely right so lo and behold comes this extension which we should think of as an extension of motives but here something's a little funny because when I look at the weight filtration on the Hodge realization this fellow will have weight 3 sorry 3 yeah in minus 3 minus weight minus 3 whereas the two cases we looked at we had weight minus 6 and the first case the extension had weight minus 2 but here we have weight minus 3 but if we have a good theory of motives we can talk about this object not just as a Hodge structure but actually as a motive and we should have extension in this way so suppose that well in any case we have this extension of Hodge structures and we can play the same game we can look at the Hodge filtration and the right Hodge filtration we look at F0 so again F0 of MTC again the same kind of discussion will show that it's isomorphic to F0 of Q of 0 C which is just C so again we will have over once we tensor with C we will have if we tensor with C here and here and here then we will have F we will have an S I should here I prefer to talk over Q so an SQ ok so we will get SF minus SQ which will give me an element in H1 of E T C modulo of E T Q2 I mean I have to it's ambiguous again because the ambiguity of the choice of the rational section ok now we want to get I mean physicists you know you try to explain the Hodge theory and motives to them they are a little skeptical they want a function so Q is we can pair we have omega T which is the holomorphic one form so we can pair with omega T and this gives us a complex number not so well defined because I have to factor out so modulo periods so this is the and that complex number low and behold is I so this is ok and actually there is a lot more I mean we can tell you a lot about this I and there are many interesting properties but in any case it's the first manifestation of the sort of more intricate kind of motives involving well for example in this case elliptic curves with the physical amplitudes and the the I the I is the roughly speaking is elliptic and logarithm now it's not the full story exactly because we assumed that m's all the masses were equal and in fact that's that's the work that we did but things are never constant in physics and so 9-0 and collaborators Adams and Bogner worked out the more general case so the case of general and when I saw their work I told Pierre I was completely furious with myself because it's completely obvious what you need to do namely instead of taking elliptic curve if we now insert general masses what we are led to do is to take an open elliptic curve so we have our elliptic curve we still have our elliptic curve but we now remove s where s is a finite set of points in fact it's 6 points elliptic, elliptic, elliptic finite set in fact 6 points depending upon the masses so we have a movie we have a fixed elliptic curve once we fix the external momentum we have a fixed elliptic curve but if we vary the masses then the set of 6 points varies ok so what's the motivic why was I angry with myself well because suddenly here we have a fascinating situation this is no longer itself a pure motive this is an open elliptic curve if you know a little bit about the situation this fellow will be itself an extension of motives and so in fact the m will be a sort of they'll have 3 graded pieces so the m I'm out of time but let me just say briefly the m d will involve h1 e t q of 2 and it will also involve a direct sum in fact of 5 copies of q of 1 and it will involve a q of 0 now what kind of sense can we make out of such a triple right well this is supposed to be an abelian category and supposed to be representations of an algebraic group so the and the algebraic group in this case because we're talking about so just to finish up we talk about representations we talk about the Lie algebra because in this case the algebraic group is unipotent so the Lie representation would look something like this there'll be something here there'll be something here and there'll be something here now essentially when the dust settles and I don't really have time to explain this in detail the fellow here will be a point so this fellow will actually be a point on the elliptic curve so actually a point this fellow here will be so I'll give this point a name let's say a this fellow here will be the theta function applied to a and this fellow here will be some algebraic cycle on E T cross affine two-space in fact a curve with certain properties and with that data we build a representation of a Lie algebra which is the one that's associated to this mixed motive so suddenly physics is giving us an extremely interesting new object it's not a surprise I don't want to present this as some sort of miracle everybody knew these things were lurking there but it's wonderful to see them arise and particularly to arise in situations where physicists can actually calculate the amplitudes and we can study them so I think I'll stop here but I hope I've shown that the mixed motives lead to a wonderful both arithmetic and physics applications so I stop so the first number up there is the elliptic curve do you also get an L value? this is part of the balance and conjectures yes absolutely L value of water yeah so the L value that would most naturally occur would be the L value of the Haase-Ve L value of H1 of ET I guess I'm assuming the T is rational here so I can talk about arithmetic QL at the point S equals 2 one step beyond the usual point you look at is S equals 1 where you get the period but S equals 2 you have this SF-SQ it's a rank one flatbender does it have a can you characterize it? sorry rank one flatbender SF-SQ it's an immediate step here in the whole story it is in H1C divided by H1Q can I tell you what the bundle is? it's an interesting as I stand here it's a kind of a nice store you have to quantify what you mean by what is the bundle in what terms I could it's a flat bundle you know them and I don't know how to describe which one but there is a way to think about it from that point of view I can say that I'm not quite sure what the right question would be from that point of view but yes you can interpret that way and one has a nice such theory but which ones arise in this way I don't know oh sorry you said that this is connected to the elliptic dialog so if you expand the function you have to think carefully to see that from this point of view but if you actually expand out the number or the function then you get the expansion of the elliptic dialog roughly speaking again the common belief some years ago that we should have only not anything well you see here not really because here part and parcel of the game is that we have external momenta right and the conjecture in physics concerned what they call vacuum graphs where there was no external momenta no I think that one expected complexities and this is simply no I mean but that's a very deep business that no one now knows that by applying to Francis as example yeah Francis has the most interesting examples of ones that are not dialogue any other questions


Is depression associated with accelerated cellular aging? Stay tuned to find out. We'll have this story plus four other stories in this episode of Lifespan News. Welcome to Lifespan News on X10, your source for longevity science updates. I'm your host, Brent Nally. We encourage you to check the description below for links to these stories. Continuing with our first story, grim age is accelerated in major depression. Scientists at University of California, San Francisco, or UCSF, found that cells from people with major depressive disorder, or MDD, had a significantly higher score on the grim age clock, which is a mathematical algorithm designed to predict an individual's remaining lifespan based on cellular methylation patterns. MDD affects about 300 million people globally according to the World Health Organization. The researchers collected blood from samples from 49 individuals with MDD who were unmedicated prior to the study and 60 healthy control subjects of the same chronological age. Although the individuals with MDD showed no outward signs of age-related pathology, the grim age score of their cells predicted that they were about two years older on average. Quote, This is shifting the way we understand depression from a purely mental or psychiatric disease limited to processes in the brain to a whole-body disease, end quote. Said Katarina Protsenko, a medical student at UCSF and lead author of the study. Quote, This should fundamentally alter the way we approach depression and how we think about it as part of overall health, end quote. For our next story, pace of aging shows that youthfulness begins in youth. An international research team used longitudinal data to model individual rates of biological aging. The researchers found that important aging outcomes can already be predicted at middle age. The researchers studied a cohort of 1,037 infants born the same year and followed to age 45. The researchers created a pace of aging score by tracking declining function of 19 biomarkers indexing the cardiovascular, metabolic, renal, immune, dental, and pulmonary systems across ages 26, 32, 38, and 45. The resulting metric ranged from 0.4 biological years for every chronological year of aging to 2.44 biological years for every chronological year, which is a six-fold range already by middle age. Participants with a higher pace of aging in 2019 at age 45 had more cognitive difficulties, signs of advanced brain aging, diminished sensory, motor functions, older appearances, and more pessimistic perceptions of aging. The researchers wrote that quote, A faster rate of biological aging assessed across several organ systems throughout midlife is associated with several measures of functional impairment and frailty risks that have established links to morbidity and mortality in older adults. The breadth of these associations is consistent with the geroscience hypothesis depicting accelerated aging as a common cause of age-related chronic disease end quote. The researchers also raised the value of effective aging biomarkers for setting policy, an intriguing idea that we haven't seen discuss much, quote, widespread application of biological aging measures could represent an alternative to using birth dates when determining the allocation of healthcare and financial support for those suffering from the sequela of aging, end quote. By the way, Lifespan News is released every Tuesday at noon Eastern time, while our other Science and Advocacy X10 videos are released every other Monday also at noon Eastern time. We encourage you to subscribe to our X10 YouTube channel. Once you're subscribed, be sure to click the notification bell and select all notifications to ensure you don't miss any videos. Now, back to the news. The United States National Institutes of Health, or NIH, has recently announced a major project related to cellular senescence, CINNET, the Cellular Senescence Network. The goal of CINNET is to identify and characterize senescent cells in human tissue and their role in health, disease, and lifespan at single cell resolution. The project aims to create an atlas of senescent cells and develop technologies to identify, characterize, and modify senescent cells. While cellular senescence is a known hallmark of aging, and its role in the aging of model organisms has been extensively studied, much less is known about senescent cells in humans. According to two prominent experts, Lifespan.io interviewed on the subject, this initiative is extremely promising, though they disagree on pros and cons. You can find the interview linked in the description below. In the past, the NIH didn't pay much attention to the role that aging plays in the development of diseases and disabilities, but this initiative might signal a paradigm shift for the NIH. Moving on, selenium supplements protect against obesity and mice. A new study has shown that selenium supplementation protects mice against the effects of a high-fat diet, obtaining results similar to methionine restriction, or MR. Methionine is an essential amino acid, and its restriction is known to have similar beneficial effects as caloric restriction. The study showed that MR increases FGF21, which positively affects longevity and decreases IGF1, which is a hormone with mixed effects in humans. Different effects observed in the experiment were surprisingly sex-specific. However, selenium supplementation produced MR-like effects in both sexes. It should be noted that while selenium is a micronutrient in small doses, selenium is a poison at higher concentrations, and we don't know for a fact whether the effects observed in this study apply to humans or not.  Neurons lack the ability to replicate their DNA, so neurons are constantly working to repair their genome damage. A new study by Salk Scientist finds that these repairs are not random, but instead focus on protecting certain genetic hotspots that appear to play a critical role in neural identity and function. The researchers produced neurons from stem cells and fed them synthetic nucleosides. These artificial nucleosides could be found via DNA sequencing and imaged, showing where the neurons used them to make repairs to DNA that was damaged by normal cellular processes. Quote, we flip the paradigm from looking for damage to looking for repair, and that's why we were able to find these hotspots, end quote. Says co-first and co-corresponding author Dylan Reeve, a former Salk post-doctoral scholar and now a fellow at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. The authors found approximately 65,000 hotspots that covered around 2% of the neuronal genome. Proteomic analysis revealed that the hotspots were enriched in splicing-related proteins. Quote, what we saw was incredibly sharp, well-defined regions of repair, very focused areas that were substantially higher than background levels. The proteins that sit on these hotspots are implicated in neurodegenerative disease, and the sites are also linked to aging, end quote. That's all the news for this video. Before you go, there's a few quick, free, and simple things that you can do to help us solve the human aging problem. If you haven't already, please make sure to like this video, share this video on your social media, please make sure that you're subscribed, with the bell turned to all notifications to ensure you don't miss any videos. Is there a recent life extension story that you think we should have included in one of our recent videos but haven't yet? And which of the stories from this video excited you the most? Let us know what you think in the comments below. We really appreciate it, and we look forward to seeing you in the next video, at least as healthy as you are now.


Hey, this is Brett, and this 2016 Ford Mustang GT Premium Convertible is stock number 13766Z. I am here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, you're new and use sports car headquarters. This 2016 Ford Mustang has the 5-liter Coyote V8 engine, puts out 435 horsepower and it's paired up with the 6-speed manual transmission. This car has been fully safety and inspected by our server shop, has a fresh oil and filter change, all the fluids have been checked and topped off, and it is 100% ready to go. I'm going to go all the way around in this video. Inside, start it up, take a look under the hood, take a look under the trunk, and just give you the most accurate representation of the vehicle possible. Guard green metallic is the color, and I shoot all my videos in 4K, so if you have HD capabilities, turn them on now. And if you like the video, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel, which is youtube.com slash summit auto. Click the bell notifications and you will get updates on the videos I do each and every day, as well as having access to one of the largest catalogs of vehicle walk arounds on YouTube, so that's pretty sweet. This one comes with the painted 19-inch alloy wheels, and it has Michelin Pilot Sport 250 540 ZR19 tires in the front here, and I would say that they have probably about 60, 70% of the tread left on them in the front here. So this one also has the performance package, which gives you the Brembo brakes, and as we come around the front of the vehicle, you get the projector style headlamps, the LED fog lamps. Front bumper is in really nice shape, I didn't see any major dents or cracks on there, and the lower valance is in pretty nice condition as well. The only thing I saw is just a little bit of a scuff right there, but nothing too bad. And the hood is in really nice shape as well. I didn't see any dents or dings on there. The passenger side front fender is in fantastic condition as well, and the passenger side front wheel, no major scuffs or scrapes on there. Let's check out this guard green metallic paint. So it's got a little bit of blues and purples in it, really a neat color, and you don't see very many Mustangs in this color. So if you like the color and you like Mustangs, this is really, really rare car, as far as how it's optioned out. And as you go down the passenger side here, take note of how clean that body is, how reflective and mirror-like that paint is. I take these HD videos, so if you are far away or even if you're close by and you just cannot make the trip down, but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle, you can see the car, hear the car, and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here. So when you do get here, there's no surprises. And you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you're at. Now, if this video helps you make that buying decision later, salesmen know that you saw the video, that it was helpful, and that Brett sent you. Very nice on that side. This back wheel is in fantastic condition as well. And in the back, we have two 7540 ZR19 tires. And you can see just how much tread is left on those. Underbody looks pretty clean. I can't really get under there with the gimbal better than that. Coming around to the back of the vehicle, the rear bumper is in fantastic condition. You get the chrome-tipped dual rear exhaust, the backup parking sensors, the LED sequential tail lamps, the GT logo there. Trunk lid is in nice shape. I didn't see any dents or dings on that.  This is your cover for when the soft top is down. And this one has the Shaker Pro audio, so you get the factory subwoofer. And you also have a tire inflator kit underneath there. And it does come with a car cover. So that's pretty sweet as well. Shuts nice and solidly. And as we go down the driver's side, just as nice as that passenger side at Ncini Major dents or dings. And for full disclosure, this back wheel is in pretty nice condition as well. Does come with the capitalist fuel fill, which is a really nice feature. Never get gas on your hands. And as you go down the driver's side door, Densini dents, Densini dings, very, very nice. You get blind spot monitoring and built-in directional signals in those mirrors. Inside, you get the dark saddle with black leather seats. No rips, no tears on the seats there in really nice condition. Power driver seat, factory floor mats, auto headlamps, tilt, telescopic steering wheel, power windows, locks, mirrors, and memory driver's seat. Just a very interesting car as far as the colors, the options, and just a very rare car. Back seats are trimmed out the same way. You get the latch child safety system. And we'll hop inside, check out the miles, the radio, and everything that this car has to offer on the interior. You can see that this one has 14,566 miles on it. You get your distance to empty there as well as a compass display on that digital instrument cluster. And you get the leather wrapped steering wheel.  You get Bluetooth and audio controls on the right. And then this one has cruise controls and adaptive cruise controls on the left. Information center controls on the left. The GT performance package also gives you these oil pressure gauge as well as the vac gauge on there. This one has the sync eight inch radio with the factory navigation system. You get AM, FM, and Sirius XM radio capabilities on here, as well as having a CD player and Bluetooth.  This is for your different steering feels. So you can do normal sport and comfort. And you have your different modes. So you have normal sport plus track and snow wet. So you can swap between all those. And that's what those buttons do, the six speed manual transmission. This one does have the ambient lighting in it. And you can see that this was personally made for Robert Benjamin on June 1st, 2016. So that's really interesting, too. That's probably why it's so unique with all the different options on it, because it was custom built for somebody. Also notice the machined finished dash on there. I always like that on the Mustangs, passenger side format and seat are in excellent condition. And this vehicle has never been smoked and smells very clean. Headliner is in excellent shape. You get your home link buttons for your garage door security systems and lane systems and map lights right there. We'll open up the sunroof. All you got to do is pull that down, turn it, and then push that button back. And there it goes. And you can see that works nicely. We'll start it up. Take a look under the hood. Check out all the LED lights. Start set up. No check engine lights or anything like that. Get the fog lights on here. And I'll do one more final walk around here with the top down. So you can see how it looks with the top down and all the lights on it. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today. And hopefully from this HD video, you've been able to verify the quality, condition, options, looks, styling of this car, as well as the cleanliness inside and out. Like I said, really a unique car. Look at those lights. Right there. Looks really good. And under the hood, we have the 5-liter Coyote V8 435 horsepower engine base. Very clean ones. Very smooth. Once again, this car has been fully-safetyed and inspected by our service shop, has a fresh oil and filter change, all the fluids have been checked and tapped off. And it is 100% ready to go. There is the emissions sticker. I don't know if you can see them, but it's got some lights in these vents here as well. That's a light up when you unlock the car and stuff. Pretty cool. And I would highly recommend this car from a quality and condition and just unique standpoint. Really a cool car. And to see more pictures of this Mustang or one of our other 550 new-news cars, trucks, SCVs, minivans, Wranglers, sports cars, Mustangs, Challengers, Chargers, Corvettes, Camaros, you name it. You've got to go to that website right there, summitauto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle. All at summitauto.com. And if you'd like to check out more HD videos, you can go to youtube.com slash summitauto. Click the bell notifications. You'll get updates on the videos they do each and every day, as well as having access to one of the largest catalogs of vehicle walk-arounds on YouTube, 8,000 videos and counting. In fact, in a second, you'll see a link to subscribe to my YouTube channel on the upper left. A link to more Mustang videos I've done in the upper right. A link to this vehicle on our website and the lower left. And a link to one of our latest YouTube videos in the lower right. Click those. Check us out. We're super excited to help you with this Ultra Clean 2016 Ford Mustang GT Premium Performance Package Convertible in Guard Green Metallic. Thanks again for checking out the video. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on the YouTube channel. I really appreciate it. Thanks again.


So, hi all, thanks for joining again and today we have Anne. So, Anne Marie Cherit advocates a whole team approach to quality. She says we can't predict the future, but we can prepare ourselves to be able to deal with the change, to develop strategies that facilitate rapid learning and the change. So, let's understand how over to Anne, Anne, sorry, stage is yours. Thank you so much, Pooja. Welcome everyone. It's so fantastic that we finally made it here, right? I mean, my goodness. I want to thank all the hardworking organisers. It's certainly a huge thing to shift. You're expecting to go one down one path and suddenly your whole world changes and you're having to organise a conference online. So, I think, you know, they've done an amazing job. And I just want to thank them all for helping us get ready for this. So, you know, what are you? How crazy is this? When I wrote the abstract for this talk, I was thinking of 2019. And I was thinking of what a crazy year it was.  We had gone through this terrible bushfire in Australia. And, you know, we had all the geopolitical uncertainties that were happening and the changes in the world. And I thought, you know, this is a really good time to be talking about leadership and, in particular, test leadership. And then, bam, we have this next thing comes out of the blue called a pandemic. And we're all like reeling from this. And how do we actually deal with this? I mean, there's so much change happening, you know. And lots of, we've all kind of responded in different ways. You know, we've discovered remote working, right? We can all walk around in our pajamas and work at the same time and go, oh, I'm going to do this, you know, on the positive side. But, you know, it's turning out there's downsides too. I discovered TikTok. I became obsessed for about three weeks. And then realized I was just wasting way too much time on it and had to delete it from my phone. And most of us, fortunately in tech, we've managed to keep working and we keep working in a remote way. And for those of you who deal with anxiety normally, maybe you're thinking, you know what?  Normally, this is like I can apply some of my tactics into what I'm into the situation right here, which is certainly how I feel a little bit.  As I said, we had the bushfires in Australia. We had 12.6 million hectares burned down. I mean, this is a huge amount. One billion animals killed. And we see this happening in California at the moment. Floods in Indonesia got droughts. You had a water crisis in Chennai. Certainly things are just changing so rapidly with extreme weather conditions happening more and more. But also in other places as well, our cultures and how we're working have changed so significantly because of the pandemic, right? Yes, we've adjusted really well and we're working remotely and it's amazing considering how much we've had to shift rapidly, how well everyone is coping. But it is creating new problems, right? You know, even logistical problems of onboarding new people and we're having to do that remotely, something that we would never have considered previously. And it's requiring a different type of leadership, isn't it? We need a different style. And people are really coming at, you know, the situation is creating different things in different people. And stresses are coming to the fore. It's proving very difficult for a lot of people to be working remotely and to separate their normal day-to-day life with their work life has suddenly all come together. And that's creating a lot of challenges for a lot of people with mental health, skyrocketing. And certainly there's an emphasis on, you know, are you okay? And so we need to think about our leadership in a different way. How can we help? How can we create social contracts about working remotely? And fortunately, there are a lot of people working in this space to help us through that. We are also seeing distributed teams becoming more and more of a thing. And this is certainly when we look at Australia, we're looking at, you know, people working remotely now and companies going, well, if everyone's going to be working remotely, why don't we just have a whole team in a different country? Why don't we have, you know, why don't we have distributed teams all around the world? And let's start really seriously exploring that. So then those sorts of things are having significant impacts on us. Atlassian, one of our key tech companies, have basically turned around to all their employees and said, you never have to come back to the office. Even when the pandemic is over, if you want to work remotely, you can continue to do that. So that's a huge change, right? But there's also other things. I mean, you know, and these are, you know, these yourself, the technical changes that are happening at the moment. You know, cheap hardware has really dynamically changed how we deliver software. It's become easier for us to trial an error and to test things out and perform little experiments, hasn't it? And so the cost of failure has been significantly reduced, making it easier for us to deploy in small amounts and try out new things and to be able to respond to market demands. Mesh networks, machine learning, AI, I mean, it's all happening, isn't it? And some of us are probably already in the context of trying to figure out how are we gonna test this stuff? How are we going to, what are the risks in these areas and how are we going to discover and how are we going to develop a strategy? So a lot of unknowns here that are coming upon us and we're having to deal with those. And I think because of that, the demand for leadership is just so much higher. And there are demands that we've all got to face, but I feel that testing in itself has its own particular set of demands. For example, I just want you to have a think about this. What? This is a typical user story. And we are all familiar with user stories, right? But I like to create user stories for quality. So one of my favorite ones is to create a user story as if I was a CTO, a C-level person. And why would they do software testing? So as a CTO or a head of engineering, I want software testing performed so that, what do you think that answer might be? I feel this is something that we don't necessarily give ourselves enough time to think about or we don't give enough thought to. Why do people want software testing performed? Now, you could think, well, it's to ensure quality. And I think that's a good answer. But why do they want to ensure quality? Yes, we want happy customers, but is that the only story that's going on here? Yes, it could be to find bugs, but why do we want to find bugs? And so if we dig a little deeper, we want to explore this area and find out what is it that our CTOs are looking for. An interesting statement by Dan North. He said that we do software assessing to increase confidence for stakeholders through evidence. So by actually performing the act of software testing, we're creating information to help our stakeholders be confident about a release. Now, I'll have to say, when I first came this out, I was like, oh, really? Is that really what software testers are meant to be doing? I mean, like I'm a skeptic. I've got my skeptic testers hat on. And am I meant to be a bit skeptical about the product and test it and see and try and look for flaws? That's not really increasing confidence, is it? And then I realized that I was thinking about this from my own perspective as my role. I wasn't putting myself into the shoes of a C-level person or a head of engineering. Their perspective is different. They want us to do software testing because it helps them increase confidence. They're looking for predictability. They want predictable, boring releases, time after time. They're looking for consistency and predictability. They hate surprises, especially ones that come right before release time. So they're looking to software testing to help to provide that information and to give them that confidence that it's okay to release. So in response to that, what do we do? We try and help them with that, don't we? We want to give them that certainty because to some degree, we want to be helpful. We want to add value. And so we generate a type of a plan. We might be asked for estimates. We might be asked for a scope. We might be asked for one of the sorts of things we should be focusing on, especially if there's been asked maybe three months in advance, we might be asked to develop a bit of a plan of how we're going to get to the end. You could be working in a safe type environment. If you're not working in that, you're doing multiple deploys a day.  And so you do have this idea. And then, and you've got this beautiful plan, and then what happens? Reality hits, right? We're in the situation where stuff goes wrong. And we see this time and time again, right? It could be that our software gets delayed because there's more complexity that we had initially understood. It could be that when we first initially thought about a story, we didn't necessarily consider another part of the system or we didn't actually consider a stakeholder was overlooked. And because of that, we've actually omitted a whole part of the system that we should have either designed for or tested and we're gonna have to go back and refactor. And all these surprises that happen and all this uncertainty and all these unknowns create a situation where actually our plan just isn't really applicable anymore.  And we just have to make do with what we have. We respond, we react, we cut out some testing, we do some more testing in a different place, we respond to the situation. That's okay when those risks and those changes are within our control. But sometimes as we've seen from this pandemic, things are outside of our control. There are things that are happening. Our markets disappearing, especially if we're working in travel. There's absolutely no idea. How can we respond to a market which we don't even know is going to exist? We know it will change some point, we'll come back. But for now it's just like, well, no one's traveling. What are we gonna do? How, what sort of software should we develop? And we might find that these companies are having to totally pivot into different areas. So some of these surprises and some of these uncertainties are outside of our control and we just have to be able to respond to it. So what do we do? What do we do with these? And what do people generally do? Now, my experience is that what we try and do is we try and create order. We try and make sense of the situation. There's chaos and change everywhere. There's people running around just trying to make do as much stuff as, let's get this developed as well as we can and just get it at the door, right? It's not a very pleasant situation to be in and it's very stressful. And people we don't like to be in this space. We wanna try and create some order out of this chaos. We try and create a story in our heads in order to be able to work through this. That's we're trying to handle all this change. We're looking to seek order where chaos is. We're looking to try and impose some sort of order so we can handle it. In software testing and in software development, we've developed some strategies that help us do that, right? We've reduced our batch sizes. This is a brilliant strategy, right? We're in a situation where with so much more uncertainty we reduce the batch size. And this is something that we should be doing when we have greater the uncertainty, the smaller the steps we really should be taking because we really don't know what the output or the outcome is going to be. If we take small steps, we can respond to those changes a lot more rapidly and a lot more quickly. We try and really impose a test process and I've seen this time and time again where when things get a bit crazy and it could be that your company is expanding rapidly, right? In your hiring, maybe seven developers a month or something like that. And really the amount of work has just escalated where you were having conversations with people, you knew everyone in the organization, suddenly you don't know anyone. And suddenly having those conversations, those collaboration that you relied on has disappeared. And so people naturally start to think, okay, well, we need to impose a process here because things are not working, we need to think about a different way. The challenge here though, of course, is that if we rely too much on the process, we forget the reason why we had the process in the first place and the process becomes the work rather than a tool to support the work. But we try and knuckle down, we try and apply the process even more as if it's something that we are doing wrong. The process is right, we're just not following it. If we just follow it strict enough, then we'll get it right and then we'll get everyone to adhere to it. Often responses, we need to test more. This is really hard because that's really, really expensive to test more and we need to maintain all that code. These are things that you absolutely know yourselves that the cost of testing is high. There's a cost to designing a test, there's a cost to implementing it, executing it, but responding to the information that you get from a test. So every test has a cost. So just to say let's do exhaustive test coverage to reduce risk is a really expensive strategy to adopt and not necessarily one that's useful for everyone. We try and get better at predicting estimates. Clearly, we're asked to provide an estimate, things change dramatically, and clearly we have to try and get better at estimating. And so the focus is how can we get better, how can we get our estimates more accurate than before? And we try and put metrics in place, right? We obviously don't know, we need to put metrics in to just impose and make sure that things are working the way they're supposed to do. And we'll start benchmarking stuff to so that we know whether it's okay, we can control it. Really, this is all forms of micromanagement, isn't it? I mean, it is that tendency for us when things go out of control of our ability is to hunker down and try and control things. At least that's my tendency anyway. Maybe it's not for you, maybe you respond in a different way. But certainly that desire to kind of be able to control things more and more is something that I've seen. We've got to try and avoid this stuff, right? We want to try and avoid predictability. We've got to try and embrace uncertainty here because things we can't control the outcome of everything but we can respond in a way and we can learn from these situations. We've got to learn to embrace this rather than trying to control this. So here's some ways that I've sort of thrown together. We want to look at rather than actually giving people absolutes. So think about estimates. We don't want to necessarily give people absolutes and estimates, consider trying to give people ranges rather than providing one estimate. Think about sharing information about the nature and unpredictability of software development. Software development, as we all know, is really, really hard. And this concept that we can actually create, accurately predict and measure something that's incredibly complex and is changing is not necessarily always accurate. It might be work for some projects who work in contexts that are pretty much not changing very much, very stable. You might be able to be much better easier to make an estimate in that context. But when you've got high change and a lot of unknowns, it really doesn't make sense to predict far ahead of us to predict that. We need to get thinking about predicting in much shorter terms or trying to focus more about learning rather than providing absolutes. I like to talk about providing information as opposed to pass, fail. So talk about potential risks and what did we learn from the testing as opposed to 600 test cases failed or passed? We don't want 600 test cases failing, that won't be bad. But thinking about that, thinking about how can I provide value in terms of information as opposed to absolutes? I find holding, thinking about, taking a step back, thinking about what quality is and having workshops about that. Start thinking about what are we actually trying to achieve here? Take a step back and think about why are we doing software testing? I try and encourage people to do this thought exercise that if you were not able to do any software testing for some reason, whatever, I don't know. But if you couldn't do software testing, how would you know that you have quality? Because there are alternative ways that we can think about and look about obtaining quality. And it could be that we are thinking about that more at different levels of abstraction or that we're looking to find other ways of knowing that we have quality apart from formally trying to test it. Again, thinking about what did we learn over whose fault was it? Looking to learn about situations as opposed to saying that I'm going to provide you all this information and thinking experiments. And finally, one of the things is I can't help but give a little nudge to exploratory testing because I really think that when you have a lot of uncertainty around you and you have a lot of unknowns, exploratory testing is amazing because it's so rapid in its response. You can, on the fly, change your test or change your test design and respond to the situation based on the information you've just learned. That doesn't mean that we can't use any tooling in that. Of course we can use tooling. But in my experience, when I've created, been in situations where I'm having to respond really, really rapidly, I found exploratory testing amazing to be able to handle that uncertainty and those unknowns. Now, enough about that. There is one more thing I want to talk about. And we're going back to one of our favorite topics here and this is boxes. Because if I face it, we love boxes in testing, right? We love black boxes. We have white boxes. We have gray boxes. We love our boxes. It helps us to explain what we do. It helps us to explain testing, different types of testing. It helps us to convey information to people who don't necessarily have that much information about testing. But there's a problem here with boxes. Is that by describing the box, we're actually also fixating people on that. So if you describe testing in terms of a black box, then that's what people think that, okay, well, this is what testing is. And sometimes it's hard to think beyond that. Now, there's lots of other different types of boxes that we have in testing too. For example, we might see ourselves as a specific type of tester. I'm an exploratory tester or I'm a test automation tester. That's the kind of box too, right? Now it's a very useful box because you can explain to someone else what you do. But on the other hand, it's also limiting you too. Because you're putting your identity against that type of box. And then when people see you, people will say, well, you're that type of thing. And the challenge here is that when you create this mental model of the type of testing that you do or the type of tester that you are, is that people start limiting what they think you can do because of that. Now you know you can do way more than test automation. You know that you can do way more than exploration or if you're a black box, you can do gray box, you can do it. But the trouble is is that other people are not seeing that because it's easy for them. They're stressed, they're busy, they're rushed. They don't want to think about the nuances around, well, what else can be done?  I don't have time to think about this differently. And so you'll find that often people will narrow your ability to do something or your approach based on this. So, you know, they'll be thinking maybe that you'll do three acceptance criteria of a story and that's your role. Not realizing that you could do a way much more testing beyond that and that you could be looking at exporter testing of systems or you could do test automation of a whole system. We want to help people shift out of this, right? We want to avoid this type of fixation within, from other people, but also within ourselves because I think sometimes we allow these boxes to limit ourselves to and our ability to think differently. And sometimes we're limited because we think, oh, I'm not good enough or I'm not confident enough and I don't know what to say. These are our boxes. We've put ourselves in a box too in that way. So we want to think outside the box. We want to shift people's mental models, right? So we can have an open discussion and explore different opportunities that might help us embrace the uncertainty. I want to shift the conversation. One of the reasons why I have personally stopped talking less about testing and more about quality is because of this. Because what I see is that when I talk testing, people think test automation, functional testing, that's it. But the reality is that I'm talking about a lot more and I want to be able to explore those things. By talking about quality and by exploring about what quality means, I am opening up the conversation to different areas that people might not have thought about before. Some things that I look at is thinking about maybe speed. We'll come to that in a minute. Speed as a quality attribute. So here's some examples of how I could try and shift the conversation. One of the things I like talking about is outcome over output. Now, you might hear this spoken quite a bit actually. A lot of people are talking about outcomes, especially in the product space. So, and by what I mean by this thinking about rather than thinking about have I done three acceptance criteria or have I completed my tests, what you're thinking is what is the purpose of doing that? What is my C-level hoping to achieve from those outputs? And how do I know that I'm achieving those outcomes instead of focusing only on the outputs? For example, here we go. Some testing outputs that we might have. Though typically we're aware of test coverage, bugs found, bugs fixed, right? We might even measure these and we might even have these as KPIs for you. But anyway, these are things that are commonly used to measure or understand how well we're doing. Rather than focusing on those, what we wanna do is try and focus on the outcomes. As we talked about previously, how confident are we to release? What are the threats to quality rather than the bugs found? What other threats exist out there? Is it just functional? How are we doing on our security testing anyway? What other ways could we be doing testing? Are we really testing early enough? And then what is the state of quality at this point in time? Even talking about the state of quality rather than at one point in time but thinking about it as a trend. So that would be really interesting too. Another area that I like to talk about is recovery over perfection. Again, this idea that we're focused on one release. But reality, we know we're not. We're gonna have release after release after release after release. And trying to get perfect software out the door all the time in that way when you've got massive uncertainty, loads of unknowns, is really just keeping your fingers crossed and hoping things will work. We wanna start thinking about how can we recover as opposed to getting perfect software at the door? Now that doesn't mean we don't care about beforehand. We don't, we stop testing. That we still wanna do really great testing. But again, the complexities that we have in our systems, and you can think about microservices and mesh networks and all the different technologies are only making the systems that we have more complex rather than easier. And that complexity comes over into our testing. So rather than trying to ensure that we have great quality, how about we focus on being able to recover from faults really quickly? And that means shifting our thinking about testing and production, but also having greater observability, greater visibility into how our systems work. If we can rapidly find the root cause of a system, we can rapidly fix it. Now we all know end-to-end bugs are notoriously difficult in order to find the root cause. So how about thinking about designing our systems so that we make it easier to actually identify where that root cause is? So immediately we've opened up the conversation rather to getting our software testing perfect, but thinking to more about designing our systems that will enable us to recover from them quickly. Another area that I've been exploring with is what I call fix over find. And this came from this situation. This was a long time ago, but I was trying to explain to somebody what I did in my profession. Now this person was not technical at all. And I was trying to explain, I'm a software tester and I find bugs. And he just went, okay, hang on a second, hang on a second. So it's like this. I have a bicycle and it's got a puncture in it. And I take it down to the garage. And I say to the garage, I've got, you know, I need this, I've got a puncture. You take the bicycle, you take the tire, and you do a lot of work finding that hole. And then when you find the hole, you walk away. And it really made me think, you know, I was like, well, there's a lot more to that than that. Software is really complex. But then I thought, you know what? That's the reality. Is that our role to some degree is only about finding. Now this is a really important and a really difficult role to perform. Finding bugs is hard. It's hard work. But the actual reality is, is that we find bugs in order to have them fixed. We want to be focusing on how are we delivering value to our end customers? How can we actually get value out the door as quickly as possible to them? And if we think about, can we possibly find and fix the bug with the technologies we have in place? We've got change control folks. We can always revert back if it doesn't work. We can pair with developers if we're not confident about fixing. We could start looking at fixing simple type bugs and then moving more, getting into more and more complex areas. But I would love to see people exploring this a little bit more and finding out how they can incorporate fixing. Because I can tell you, I can't think of many sea level people who wouldn't think that's a good idea. Okay, I know I promised to talk about leadership and I haven't hardly talked about it once, but this stuff I think is important. So as I said, leadership in this time is more important than ever before. We need leaders to help us through this uncertainty. We need leaders to help prepare people, organizations and systems so we can respond and less react to the uncertainty in a productive way. And we are the quality people to do it. We have the most experience about testing software. We know the complexities involved in trying to deliver quality software out the door at speed. So we are at prime position to be able to help in this space. How are we going to do that? Well, first let's look a bit between test leadership and test management because I think it's hard to actually describe what a test leader is. Now personally, leadership is a very individual thing and I think that's why that's one of the reasons why it's difficult to explain. But I love this quote from Potter. Managers promote stability, leaders press for change. Because there is a slight difference between test management and test leadership. And we've seen really much test management go by the by, haven't we? Because mostly large test teams have pretty much disappeared. But there's still a huge need for test leadership. Yeah, hi, I'm sorry to interrupt. So we are just last 10 minutes. Okay, lovely, thank you. So this is where I talk twice as fast in order to get the rest of the slides done. So there's a huge difference for two. We want things, if you think about management and stability that's going things back to normal. Whereas a leader is looking to embrace that uncertainty, embrace that change. And that's the mindset that we need today in order to be incorporated. Because as I said, uncertainty is the new black.  We are going to have constant change, constant. And we need to be able to constantly respond to that. Now, the key thing for me that I look into this is that we really have to take an acceptance here. Before we can do anything about embracing change and changing, moving and changing and having a vision for the future, we need to recognize the reality and acknowledge what it is. We don't know. We don't have all the answers. And I don't think leadership is about knowing what to do. It's actually about recognizing that you don't have all the answers and being okay with that and being open about that. So if you're thinking about test leadership, I'd encourage you to accept that. And accept that maybe it's okay not to know everything. Now, we might feel a little bit discomfort over this, right? It can be hard to accept that we don't know and it might not feel easy. And we strive to have answers and give ourselves answers and give other people answers because it makes us feel a lot better. But I really believe that having this acceptance is the first step. Because then we know where we're at. We can see the reality for what it is. And once we see that reality, we can start working to the future. And this can be hard for us in testing too because I think like in testers, we like our past fails or black whites and it means that we have to start embracing a bit of gray, right? And I'm not talking about hair color here. I'm talking about embracing uncertainty. One way we can do this is by getting curious. Curious about everything around us. How are our colleagues doing? How are they coping? How is that co-worker who's just had a baby at two months old? How are they doing? Getting to know the people around us outside of our organizations, massively important, especially outside of tech. So getting to know your business people, reaching out to them, not for something, but just to get a better understanding of where they're coming from and their mindsets, these are all gonna be hugely beneficial things for you. Try and let go of that feeling of losing control. I know, I find this scary. It's hard sometimes, especially when we feel like we maybe have, you know, we're used to owning the testing strategy or we're used to owning quality. And maybe for a lot of us, we're finding that we actually have to let a lot of that go because the team is now responsible for everything. And so some of the things that we used to be in charge of were actually handing over to other people. Again, it's hard stuff to do. And that's why we need a big dose of courage. Courage to say, maybe let's test less, not more. Or let's do more exploratory testing or let's test earlier. Courage is trying something new without knowing whether you're gonna succeed or not. Courage is acknowledging mistakes. Courage is speaking out. Courage is acknowledging your humanity, your imperfections and your limitations. I'm talking to myself here. Courage is letting people help you. Courage is taking time to breathe and say enough. These are hard times. I think we should have the courage to be kind to ourselves as well. On a more practical level, vision, strategy, alignment are some of the key things that we wanna be looking at. Having a vision of where you wanna be, having a strategy that helps that. And then alignment, I'm talking about making sure that everybody knows what your strategy is and also how it's changing. Now, when I talk about strategy, I'm not necessarily talking about a testing strategy. Again, I avoid trying to talk about testing strategies. Instead, I like to talk about quality strategies. Quality strategies for me open up a whole field of things I can discuss, right? Quality of the product, quality of how we deliver that product, quality in production, quality in ops, quality of infrastructure, our processes, our people. There are so many different things that incorporate into quality. It allows us to suddenly have a much broader field and discuss things. One of the things I really like is Kent Beck's discussion on the three X's. Explore, expand, extract. Explore is when we have an unknown, so many unknowns. We've got loads of uncertainties. We don't know what to do.  And we learn from them until we get a point where we learn enough and we know that, hey, this feature might be, is the one that we want to go. And then suddenly we wanna grow on that feature. We choose that one product, we choose that one feature and we wanna scale up, right? And so we have this chaotic time where suddenly everything's expanding. We're trying to scale the number of subscribers. We're trying to scale the number of developers. We're gonna rapid growth failed. And finally, once we've actually managed to scale, we get to the point of efficiencies, economics of return. And we're looking at how can we actually get efficiencies of our system. I would just leave this with you here to think about what sort of a strategy, what sort of quality strategy would you implement for each of those different stages? For me, they would be completely different depending on because of the amount of uncertainty in those situations and because of what our clients or what our businesses are looking for in each of those. Again, thinking about emergent quality, thinking about quality as an emergent, something that's emerging rather than something in itself. And not focused only on product, looking at infrastructure, looking at process people and outcomes to help us. Things like quality coaches handing over a lot of our test testing to the developers and providing input as a coach as opposed to someone who's doing the testing. Again, this is proving to be a very popular approach with many people. So we are in new territories, right? We've got new risks. We've got things that we hadn't even considered at the start of the year, stress and burnout. These are big impacts into quality. Psychological safety, in my opinion, is one of the most important things when it comes to quality and understanding quality. For me, I need to feel safe that I'm actually able to speak up and speak out when I'm talking about finding bugs. If I don't feel safe about raising concerns, then it's gonna be much harder for me to do so. And so immediately, we can start seeing the impact of psychological safety on potentially the quality of a product. And so you see that really we need all these factors, all these pistons to be firing in order for us to have a great quality product. And so you could consider looking at all these different elements in order to be able to build a good quality product. Optionality is something else I would have a think about. So often we get fixated on one solution. I would just encourage you to use Jerry Weinberg's Rule of Three.  Explore them and find out are the things that maybe I am biased about or I'm fixated on that is preventing me from thinking outside the box or looking at things in a different way. And finally, looking at habitat. I think this is one of the crucial things creating as test leaders, we wanna be creating an environment where others can thrive and grow. And when I talk, think about thriving and growing and thinking about being able to self-learn, right? To be able to learn about new things and to own that learning. Really important to have the safety to be able to make mistakes in a considered way to be able to grow, to be able to try out new things. To encourage collaboration and people to work together to solve problems as opposed to trying to have as opposed to having people trying to solve them or by themselves, giving people autonomy. And as you see safety is so important, it's there twice. When a flower doesn't bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower, right? So often we're fixated on trying to fix people, but really what if we created a habitat where people would naturally thrive and grow? And just maybe if we create that environment, then people will feel, will be able to naturally grow and become more confident in what they do. A huge part of this that I look at is coaching. Coaching is an enormous part of my test leadership strategy. Not mentoring, not training, not consulting, but coaching. And the way I see coaching is for people to self-realize and self-learn. This means that you're putting people in situations where they don't have all the answers and they kind of have to figure it out themselves. That's part of it. But it's also that you're there alongside them, encouraging them, helping them if, or pointing them in a different direction if they seem to be going off track. Not providing them with all the answers, but helping them to learn how to learn. I don't really have time to go through this, but I would encourage you looking at the Saturn Change Model. The Saturn Change Model is by Virginia Satyr. Jerry Weinberg used to work with Virginia and really it's just a great model for how people potentially respond to change. So if you look at the foreign element, something happens that you're not expecting. Maybe we'll call the foreign element a pandemic, right? And this puts people into chaos. The thing about the chaos, the chaos is a crucial part of people learning how to do things better. At some point, there has to be a transforming idea that helps them see that, you know what, maybe there's a way through this. And I'm sure each of us, each of you have had experiences where you've had this yourselves. And gradually through owning this learning and going through the struggle as you actually get to a point where you're able to have a new status quo where things are better and are improved. As Michael Bolton said, we can expect the unpredictable. We can anticipate it to some degree. We manage it the best as we can, but ultimately we learn from that experience. And my learning about being a test leader in these uncertain situations is this, constantly reinvent your strategy. Create feedback loops in your strategy that allows you to refactor based on the information that you're getting back from what you're doing. Are we hitting the right way? Do we need to change? Do we need to pivot our strategy? Do we need to do something different? Be open to that feedback. Make risk your guiding star. If you're not sure what to do, think about what's the biggest risk around me and go for that. Coaching, as I said, massively important. Push decision-making down to other people. Don't feel like you have to own everything, hand it out to other people and let them grow and thrive by doing that. And build external relationships with people outside of tech in your businesses. Learn from them. Try and understand what they want. This will help your vision expands considerably. And finally, it's okay to have a little bit of healthy tension and conflict. We can expect these times are difficult. Finally, one that's not there is be kind to each other. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks, all thanks. And it's a beautiful learning. My favorite was like collaborating, fixing the bugs. So thank you so much for the minutes, minutes of wisdom with us.