My name is Kevin Cary, I direct the Education Policy Program here at the New America Foundation. And let me just start by saying thank you to the representatives of our universities who were very generous with their time coming to spend the day with us, and to all of you for staying as well. It's been a really interesting discussion. I've enjoyed all the conversations and livened by some great questions from the audience. So this is our last panel. It's going to be relatively short. I'm joined here by Jeff and Hilary and Margaret Rosa from Georgetown University. Is that the best way to... And what we wanted to do is kind of a final conversation was to come back to some of the original themes that we explored in the first panel about what it is that the universities that we studied and that were represented here today are doing on behalf of the broad national interest in helping more students go to college and finish college with valuable degrees. We talked a lot about scale and this notion of what really big and growing universities can be. We talked about information technology. We had a couple of great panels about relationships with faculty. We've seen at a lot of the institutions and all of us actually spent as part of the project and there's a paper that was released today that you'll find on our website that was the result of a series of case studies and we spent most of the last year flying around the country and visiting a lot of these institutions firsthand. We saw strong relationships with community colleges and really... And then a lot of the research that we talked about in the last panel. So it was really... What was striking from my perspective was that all of these institutions were pursuing each of these very difficult aims in concert with one another. They were very aware of how the research mission intersects with the mission of bringing more students to the campus, which changes the kind of faculty that you need, which changes the kind of relationships that you need to have with your community and partner institutions. It's a very complex system and I'm always impressed by the indefatigable people who become university presidents and yet they have time to come and talk to us today. So one of the questions that really preoccupied us in doing this research and we'll continue to focus on going forward because this meeting is not the end of this project by any means, is what can we do to... Incent, encourage to help more public institutions pursue these kinds of strategies. Because one of the challenges of this kind of work is that the people who end up here on the stage are never randomly selected from the population of college presidents. We find them, in this case, based on a statistical analysis of all the public research universities in the United States, finding those that were graduating students, that were making efficient use of resources, that were growing even as their revenues were declining. But that's not typical. These are the institutions that we can learn from, but they're not typical institutions. And for us to really take seriously and to achieve the kind of policy goals that Jamie Marisot has talked about this morning, 60% of all American working age adults having some kind of credential in what is becoming the near future. We're going to have to do what is now atypical will have to become common practice. And so one question I wanted to put to the panel to sort of wrap things up is what kind of public policies, what kind of communications efforts, what kinds of ways of thinking about higher education could contribute to that sort of scaling of practice. And so I'll start with Marguerite, who is one of the, really the nation's foremost experts on education and money in all of its kind of intersections. I hope you can share a little bit about the research that you've been doing and then respond to those questions. Sure. I've been looking at the sort of financial structure of higher education and when I usually say that, people usually mean the revenue side. But I'm actually more interested in the expenditure structure and how that expenditure structure is one that reinforces the kind of patterns that we're trying to move away from. So we even talked in the last session a little bit about how do you get faculty on board and the comment was made that faculty aren't necessarily incentive by the same things that everybody else, but nor are they, or they're not incentive by the things that the institution is seeking. But they're not actually compensated on those either. Many times they have a fixed salary that seems independent of workload or productivity or success with students or numbers of students taught or amount of research produced or any of the kinds of things that were labeled as goals. And so there's some curiosity about whether or not you could change the incentives or layer on a new set of incentives with incremental money over time. That would actually get faculty into seeking the same kind of outcomes that their institution is prioritizing. So I think that's one whole area for opportunity. But another one that we've seen a lot is around state revenue structures for public institutions and what kinds of things they reinforce. And we're noticing that a couple of papers that were out this morning, one on the excess credits, when state institutions fund excess credit taking in the same way that they fund the needed credits, then we may over time see patterns of excess credit taking that are sort of subsidized from the state even though they might be inefficient for many reasons and unnecessary and relatively easy things to change. So we mentioned in the papers some opportunities around changing practices for one about state subsidy for those, two then changing institution behavior so that students take fewer of them or if they choose to take them they're not publicly subsidized. So that's certainly one area for an opportunity. And another paper that you saw that we had produced was around whether or not changes enrollment could be a revenue strategy. So institutions, many of them have reacted to the downturn or the lack of state revenues by saying we'll go get more out of state students or we'll raise tuition. And those are two financially lucrative strategies and many of them have done that. But another one is simply to take in more students and not necessarily out of state students because all students come with some tuition dollars and if you take in more students you have more revenues at which point you're probably thinking well don't you also have more expenditures. And that's where we get into this interesting question of well it's probably unlikely that the scale economies are such that each additional student drives up the expenditure structure proportionate to what the average per pupil cost is at an institution. And there are many ways you can put the institution to work at trying to figure out how if we increase the enrollment that individual units or colleges or departments get some share in that and then they might change their delivery models in ways that can serve an additional student at a pretty low cost. That has this benefit for states of course of getting more graduates through the door or more students through the door and likely more graduates. So when we practically talked about that with universities though the biggest pushback was what happens to ranking. And so there's that whole discussion. And I think that's when we could talk about here not necessarily a policy solution but one that policy could impact over the long haul. Jeff do you want to... Jeff's the author of a great new book College Unbound available at Find Bookstores, eBooks, Amazon.com, etc. And I know one of the things that you talk a lot about in your writing and thinking is what motivates higher education leaders. Marguerite talked about ranking which kind of goes to questions of status. Is status something that we can bring to bear on this challenge? I definitely think we need to because we can't take status out of this conversation because status still matters. There's this great quote that I came across in my research that prestige is to higher education as profits are to corporations. And so there's this idea that something drives something motivates people on higher ed whether it's presidents, trustees, alumni, lawmakers and faculty and it's all trying to get to that next level. And there's this real inability and we saw in our research in the universities that we looked at this ability, they kind of said you know what status matters to us but we're going to still kind of pursue these policies because they're important for the state. But now we're giving them some status by including them in this report, right? So it still matters to them. I mean all of them were kind of excited about being in this report so we need to come up with some alternative, some and I hate to say another ranking because I don't think we need another ranking but we need to have some sort of status whether it's another AAU or another group of institutions that we can hold up on a regular basis as saying they're able to serve the needs of their state whether it's on research or whether it's on students and they're still doing quality research, quality education they're increasing graduation rates, increasing retention and so forth and so I think that to say status doesn't matter to these institutions I think it does. We also, there's a role I think of the government's play in the way that they regulate colleges and universities in addition to the main paper there's a great additional deep dive policy analysis on state policy environments written by Iris Palmer, Iris Razorhand from HCM Strategies it's fantastic and that was something that actually impressed me that I learned by participating in this project was we particularly here in Washington or if you're looking on the US news list sort of think public research university, public research university but when you go to the institutions you really find that the state policy environment matters quite a bit and public research university in one kind of system is in some ways a different organization than one in another kind. Some states are very prescribed and controlling in the way that they regulate their institutions others are more laissez-faire and at the same time we now have I think a growing set of questions being asked here in Washington which traditionally has not chosen or thought it was responsible for asking these kind of questions its role in higher education was basically to find research, fund the Pell Grant and get out of the way Hillary can you talk a little bit about the role of public policy and where that where those kind of conversations ought to go? Well I think you know it's an interesting moment because we will be beginning at some time over these next month's discussions about reauthorizing H.E.A. the Higher Education Act and wouldn't it be interesting if we put aside the piece of legislation that exists and rather than thinking about tinkering with this piece of it or that piece of it started out with a series of hearings or conversations that were more what does the country need from its higher education system today for the 21st century given who our students are given the growth of the country given the point Michael Crow made that we sort of stopped our last great building time of colleges around 1950 with the exception of community colleges to see more of a conversation about these big means that's not to be naive about the ability for a piece of federal legislation to then be creative or you know created new but I think it's striking to me how out of step and really behind our public policy makers in Congress especially probably a lot of the people in Congress are about all the kinds of issues that we've been talking about today and I think for the future of the country we have to figure out how to educate well the next generation students to a very high standard in a very different country so I think from a sort of national point of view we need to figure out how to have that kind of conversation to establish almost the goal posts of what matters and then think about legislation moving backwards from there so I think that's one thing important I think we will also faster than any of us wish or hope be involved in yet the next presidential campaign for I know yet another administration that will have a new president so I think you know we should be taking the long view and understanding that many many kinds of decisions or culture calibrating conversations will happen in this next three to four year window so what do we want those conversations to be about and what images do we want to lift up about what the quote pinnacle of higher education should be so when Michael said, Crow said earlier this morning you know we keep coming back to that one pinnacle that narrow little group of elites that really in many many ways are not that relevant to this particular need I think from a policy level and then I think it would be very beneficial to have more leaders of institutions in those policy discussions I was struck throughout our time in the interview process that many of the things that everyone focuses on at the federal level the structure of accreditation the Pell grants are structured they matter to these institutions but they're not the great be all and end all levers for change for them or ways of helping them do more of what they need to do better so I think it would be interesting to ask the leaders themselves what would you need more of in order to be able to do more of the kinds of things that you guys are trying to do on behalf of the country at the state level you know I think really really really important for state legislators to begin to understand the public good of these place based regional institutions and the role they play in their regional kind of ecosystems with community colleges and the K-12 system and I think there's much positive movement there the emphasis on completion on performance funding I think that's faster and better targeted at the state level but there too I think there's a lot more that could be done to be proactive about the kinds of practices and strategies that we heard about here today last but not least I think we don't need another college ranking but it's really tempting when you hear someone like Chancellor Connolly say a lot of first generation students we're now a college of choice we're a destination of choice wouldn't it be interesting to figure out some way through an advertising campaign or some kind of communication vehicle to get the parents of next generation students to ask much tougher questions about what colleges they want their students to go to if they really want them to be successful and to raise the status and the the stature of these institutions as destination colleges because chances are they are going to be the ones that crack the code and what it means to serve the students that we need to serve better really well is there a we're here in Washington so I'll ask like the easy Washington DC panel question which is there is there a political dimension to this this is to any of the three of you everything that particularly in these days all these conversations tend inevitably to get refracted through you mentioned presidential politics but sort of larger ideological questions I mean I'm always one of the reasons that I tend to be optimistic about these conversations is that I tend to not detect any a lot of politics in the broad goal of helping public institutions succeed and more people go to college I've worked for elected representatives and it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you on you have a lot of constituents who want to be able to send their kids to college and don't want to bankrupt themselves to do it so are there problems or there are opportunities as we stay in the policy realm things we need to watch out for whether it's on performance funding or new kinds of status or new sorts of relations with institutions and how do we what are the political elements of that well take one crack at that you know I remember sitting in a Washington the state of Washington has gathered together all the presidents of its public institutions for a big series of forums backed by the Seattle Times last year and those presidents were absolutely tone deaf to the issues that we heard talked about here today by the presidents who were here it was all about them we should continue to exist because we need to exist because we're the greatest thing that ever happened to the country and we need more resources and we need the public to value us and there was when they were done there was a probably 50 people lined up at the microphone because what they wanted to talk about was value for money and whether or not they their students had access whether they could graduate at a predictable time whether tuitions were going to go up you know unexpectedly so I think to me what was striking today was to hear four presidents who did not coordinate their remarks at all speaking such an owning such an incredibly different language they'd already crossed over to a different kind of value proposition for higher education and I think that is a politically powerful thing that's only going to accelerate and I think that if higher education stays as tone deaf as many of the flagships and others are today I think they will find eroding public support I think one of the aspects of the universities that we looked at that kind of surprised me is that universities tend to be conservative in terms of the way they small see conservative but many of the universities and Mark Becker I think talked a lot about this this morning this idea of scale allows experiment and there was what surprised me going into this project some of these universities I knew pretty well through my previous life but others I for the first time and what surprised me about all of them was that they were willing to kind of take these chances on these experiments and some of them were pretty public in terms of the experiments that they were conducting and might not work so the stuff that Mark Becker was talking about this morning where they would try something out if it didn't work they shelve it try something else change it right most universities don't want to do that right because they don't want to be publicly exposed and not knowing what they're doing in some cases and they don't want to try these things out and so I think that we need some way that universities can operate in somewhat of a safe space away from the criticisms of state lawmakers and federal lawmakers to try things out Marguerite I want to put the question to you a little bit more specifically so you had a home at the University of Washington for quite some time part of the research also a couple of great papers from Marguerite also released today also on our website and your colleagues using some of that data University of Washington is a public research university that could have ended up on this list but didn't didn't meet our criteria in terms of enrollment growth and all the rest of it and you talked a little bit about these conversations you're having and rankings what are the other barriers what would it take for some place like a university that you spent some time in to not just a seed to but embrace the kind of agenda that we've been discussing today so it's usually when you said so when we talk about the politics of it I think the politics are shifting between the individuals in the institution who want it to stay the way it's always been and for anyone and I'm sure I'm not the only one in the room who sat in faculty meetings you just you know how many hours are spent resisting things that are coming down from the top and in different sorts of ways so the politics are very much about those that want to still keep this even an outdated major department that no one is signing up to take the classes and no one is majoring in but there's the sense that we have to keep it for some other sort of reason and the politics of wanting to potentially change and increase the number of graduates and yield greater return for dollar and those kinds of things and I think that those tensions are very real but if we look at them from another angle I also see sometimes if you look at these big institutions that haven't changed yet they're still very decentralized in the sense that these units that they own the university and they do in many different ways and there's a potential to harness that in the sense that if we could find units that are interested in game and willing to try new things we could cut them loose and let them free and try to build something new and I think of the individual departments or the new program offerings we're seeing this a lot in institutions where the office of continuing studies or whatever is the most profitable or largest number of students going through at lowest cost or it's the opportunity for the most entrepreneurial faculty to earn some additional money through this side program that they're doing and in that sense I think we might be able to unlock even if the institution isn't we might be able to unlock some of that innovation from inside it which will actually then ultimately affect the institution and I think where possible where an institution not sure that the politics are on their side for opening up and going for these changes it might just be enough to unlock some of that and let it happen on the inside and I'd say that's probably why I left University of Washington and I didn't think it was willing to unlock and let that happen and we heard before about like many faculty aren't interested in this for the money they're interested in for the reputation and I think there aren't many of them interested in it for the money and a lot of them are earning a lot of money on the side right now and that in a sense there's a way to sort of embrace that entrepreneurial spirit even if it's with a subset of your faculty and make it part of what the institution does so I think there's a way to do it that way so you've partially answered my next question I'm going to ask one more question to the panel and then we'll open it up to the audience and we'll have a person with a microphone like last time but it does seem like the faculty are a huge part of this equation as is normally the case in higher ed panels we've invited no faculty to come and sit and participate in this discussion but that's okay that's on me a lot of our discussion in the faculty panel was about the relationship between research faculty and everything else which makes sense because this is a this was a project focused on research universities but as we know most students are not enrolled at research universities or universities that they may be at universities but they're not universities that are really seriously in the knowledge production business just objectively speaking and a lot of the implications about again the premise of our project was resources are limited our national need is growing how can we become more productive you know lurking behind these fairly kind of benign or even positive words like productivity is labor productivity increasing labor productivity means labor is not getting paid as much as it would have if we hadn't increased labor productivity so it seems like a lot of the anxiety I mean okay I think we only have 10 minutes to go we can go both ways with that I don't so how do we get the quote rank and file faculty what's the place for them in this agenda that's my question yeah well I cut them in on it I guess that's what I would say and I know many of them are but right now if your salaries is detached from your productivity then your statement will be true but you could change the way compensation works and people are doing that with their side time already but I think even if we just talk about teaching and put research aside that we've got our headset on this we can either do an online course or we can do a traditional course and I would say that somewhere in the path on there is a whole lot of stuff on the in between and that means that potentially an I teach a niche subject I'll admit education finance is sort of a niche subject but I could take just the subject matter I teach or that anybody else teaches and say how can I use technology to potentially teach a whole lot more students in my niche subject and we might say well there aren't a whole lot more students at this university want to take this niche subject in which case we could talk about scaling one set of expertise across other institutions and I'll just give you an example from my own personal experience which is I also teach at Rice University and teach a program in Las Vegas and in some other places where students are aggregated, experts are brought in and sometimes it's a two week long institute and I teach a two day segment of it or sometimes it's attached to some other institutions MBA and then the students get a stream in education leadership where they bring their expertise and the expertise can send in videos in advance and then we can come in and do an interactive part and then we can do an assignment and they can email the assignment later and the teaching can take on different forms that both uses the technology and also uses the in person learning and that allows you to scale and also allows you to increase your own wages while increasing labor productivity so it means there's a lot of things have to change in that equation but I can give you any different example of how it's possible even right now Questions from the audience? Yes, in the back. Lawrence Peters, Internship Institute I wonder if you could just address this issue of youth unemployment students today are coming out to a very changed job market one that we could hardly recognize there are no real careers anymore we're talking about students who have to hope for an internship even an unpaid one as the next step and I wonder how our colleges are addressing this because in the good old days just having a degree was a ticket to a good job now work experience of a very specialized kind is usually required so do universities feel they have a responsibility to up their game to change what they're doing to prepare students differently because of this changed job market? I think one of the experiences that we saw at the universities we studied and this was particularly true I think at the University of California at Riverside was kind of using research at an undergraduate level so kind of connecting students to the research experience so undergraduate research experimental learning so having the experience of whether it's co-ops kind of built into the curriculum so I think that all the universities that we looked at where the curriculum is not kind of the main thing and the job is on the side but that the two were very much integrated especially in the learning communities whether it's at Georgia State or again at UC Riverside so we saw I think in the universities that we looked at that the curriculum is really meant to not only broadly educate the students but also to prepare them for their chosen career I think we also heard from the presidents that having internships letting students have access to internships out in the community while they're in college so paid work is an increasing differentiating factor that's something that increasingly parents and students themselves are looking for and comparing institutions between so theoretically that's a place where a great regional research university should have a comparative advantage but it would take again as I agree it was talking about before conceptualizing a major or a field of study so that it included partnerships with companies that were trying to solve real world problems or opportunities to work and that's a there are lots of different ways that different institutions organize themselves to try to help make that easier and more powerful so I think that that's definitely a frontier that needs innovation and expansion and you know the real youth employment problem just to digress totally from this topic is much less for the students that are in some kind of two or four year institution and much more for the students, the young people who don't go to any institution at all but I think colleges and universities could do a lot more in the internship arena Yes, Jim Snyder, a former New America fellow and somebody who's written on education issues fairly frequently for Education Week in Washington Post and several others popular type of articles my question relates to the relative opposition to these productivity enhancing uses of new technology in the K to 12 system versus universities so we know in K to 12 there's tremendous, in many districts union opposition to these productivity enhancing tools, online education because they're very disruptive in a lot of respects and I'm wondering occasionally it's been mentioned with the public universities also unionized I get a sense that the level of opposition is actually much less in the university space than in the K to 12 and I was wondering if you also had that feel or if there are similar obstacles how would you compare the level of union opposition to these productivity enhancing tools in the K to 12 space versus the unionized university space well it's first of all really depends on the labor environment in the particular state so it wasn't that long ago that there were some discussions and conversations, proposals in California to make online learning more available and the president of the Cal State Faculty Senate came out and said we're not in favor of that we're not going to put up with it, we're not going to agree to it we feel like we have veto power over those decisions and academic labor in California is heavily unionized at the post secondary level we tend to think of K through 12 as the unionized part of our education system in higher education everyone's a free agent but that's not true in some places it is and in some states it is but in some states it's not I also think that Marguerite spoke to this a little bit that there is a lot more flexibility both in terms of career path and source of compensation at the post secondary level now some of that flexibility is really rebounded against labor where you find this big pool of adjuncts kind of scraping together a living on what amounts to food stamp wages but at the same time there's not as much institutional control and roles are not as heavily defined so in K through 12 you're never going to teach hopefully if all goes well more than like 35 students or so at a time that's the model we have and that has a lot to do with the developmental progress of children particularly children at the young level I think this conversation changes substantially at the high school level where there really is a lot of these conversations that we're having about lower post secondary are substantially applicable to upper secondary a lot of the same classes a lot of the same models so I think I mean from my perspective I think those are the things that are sort of driving and increases in productivity at K 12 really might just put you out of a job whereas in higher ed there may be all kinds of different arrangements where you could find some other place for yourself they also might not be publicly is objecting but just as effective at objecting and saying and we're not going to put that into place yeah that's a great point so in K through 12 level you might have a person who speaks on behalf of 10,000 people with a very strong and clear public voice on higher ed you might have 10,000 people each of whom have agency but it comes much more by department or institution by institution level we have time for one more question if there is one okay again let me just on behalf of the numerical foundation thank you to all of our panelists and to all of you for coming thank you


Tako, da bomo pošličiti svoje organizacije, za to, da je časno. Zdaj bomo pošličiti kvantum termodynamikov, in včasno pošličiti obtima, pošličiti termodynamikov. To je vse resulte, ki je obtajeno, v kovalenju v Vasco Cavina in Vittorio Giovannetti z Skola Normale in Pisa, in Alberto Carlini z Piemonte Orientale.  Ne musite predstaviti spesivnih vsočenju na termalne vse. Zato smo zelo vsočenje kratičnih sistemov, kaj je vse predstavila vamarkovi in master equation. Zato imaš staj, vse imaš differential equation, kaj je vse predstavila vseh ljubiljanj superoperator. Zato imaš vseh občast kratičnih sistemov. And then a very important property of a master equation is the concept of a fixed point. So this is a state, which is invariant under the action of the Ljuvilje. So it is a right eigenvector with zero eigenvalue. And if this is unique, and then if all other eigenvalues have negative real parts, then you exponentially, every solution, every initial state converges exponentially to the fixed point, which is row zero, when time passes. This is a standard property of master equations. And now assume that we can slowly change a parameter of this master equation very slowly, much slower than the characteristic relaxation time of the system. And then what you expect is that the fixed point will change in time, so the gray line will change, and all the solutions will follow adiabatically this fixed point. This is, in some sense, the equivalent of a quasi-static transformation in thermodynamics. But this is a more general setting. And then the question is, what happens if I do exactly the same protocol, so exactly the same shape of the modulation, but faster and faster. At some point, the system will not be able to relax to the fixed point instantaneously, and so there will be a little bit of difference between the true solution and the equilibrium solution. And then what we would like to do is to develop a perturbation theory to compute this difference. The way to define this perturbation theory is to rescale the time variable, instead of going from zero to tau, which is the length of the driving of the system, we go from zero to one with this dimensionless time variable. And then in this new variable the length of the protocol appears only as a multiplicative factor in front of the master equation. And we can now expand as a perturbation series in one over tau, which is the length of the protocol, the solution. And what we expect is that in the limit of tau that goes to infinity, we recover the fixed point, the instantaneous fixed point of the dynamics, and for a finite tau we have all other non-equilibrium corrections. And if you do replace this in the master equation, you can compute explicitly all these corrections in a perturbative way. And so now, for example, this is an example, we have a qubit in a thermal bath, and we change the Hamiltonian along sigma x in our sinusoidal way, just a random example. You have the gray line, which is the fixed point, the equilibrium solution, real solution is the black one, and then you have the first order and second order analytical approximation that we could compute using this perturbation theory approach. So, up to now there was no thermodynamics, thermodynamics enters into the game when you impose that the fixed point is a Gibbs state associated with the instantaneous Hamiltonian of the system. In you do this, the expression is the same, just use the Gibbs state here for all these non-equilibrium corrections. And then you can ask what is the entropy, internal energy, heat, work using standard definitions that you have in open quantum systems. And if you just replace this perturbation series here, you get basically all the quantities that you can obtain at equilibrium when you do a process infinitely slowly, or all the non-equilibrium corrections automatically from this expression here. And for example, these are the first order corrections to the energy, entropy, heat, work, and I don't go into the details, just that we have basically the analytical formulas. And then what we are going to do is to apply this theory to a Carnot cycle. What is a quantum Carnot cycle in this setting? You can assume that you couple the system with a hot bath and you slowly change the Hamiltonian according to an arbitrary modulation. Then you apply a quench, so you multiply all the energy levels by a given constant. And then you apply the time reversal isothermal process. For example, if you compress a piston, you do the opposite expansion. And then you do another quench. This is usually the definition of a Carnot cycle and you can compute with the previous expressions or the power, the efficiency and so on. So for example, the power is for a cyclic process is related to the heat, which is absorbed by the system and you divide by the time that you are coupled with the hot and with the cold bath. So you have this expression where here we trankate the previous perturbation series to first order in one over tau. And so we have this for the power, this for the efficiency. Of course, if you go to an infinite length of the process, you recover the Carnot efficiency and the power goes to zero as usual in equilibrium thermodynamics. But if you instead optimize the power, you get an expression for the efficiency at maximum power. So this expression actually was known in the literature. But what we can do now is you can just replace our analytical expressions with quantities, these are non-equilibrium heat exchange and we can go further in this approximation, in this calculation. So this is the ugly expression for the non-equilibrium dissipation and unfortunately it depends on the particular protocol. But we are lucky that the fact that the ratio between the hot and the cold dissipation obejsts this universal scaling law where t-cold and t-hot are the temperatures and alpha is the exponent of the spectral density. This is due to some symmetry property of the cycle and of the master equation. To do this, we get our final first result which is the efficiency at maximum power for a generic spectral density and the nice property of this formula is that you recover all the many previous results that were obtained in the literature for different values of the spectral density like for a flat butt, the most important case is the flat butt in which we recover the Kurtzson-Albor efficiency. And this is a plot of the efficiency at maximum power for different values of alpha and these are numerical simulations that follow quite well the analytical expressions for low efficiency and low power while when you go in the regime of high power, high efficiency, which is far from equilibrium, the perturbation theory doesn't work anymore and so at some point this curve cannot be trust anymore in this region here. And that's the point of the second part of the talk where here we were close to equilibrium and at some point we have to stop but in the second part we just brute force optimise the power and we don't care if you are close or far from equilibrium and we do this using optimal control theory basically. So the general question is I have a d-level quantum system and I have two heat-bats, a cold-bats and a hot-bats and I can do whatever I want. I can change the Hamiltonian, I can couple with the hot with the cold-bats, with both if I want and I have only some limit on the damping rate otherwise the power would be infinite. Then the question is what is the optimal cycle, the optimal strategy to extract the maximum amount of power. So to formalise the problem, we use a master equation approach in which we have the Hamiltonian which now depends on an external set of parameters. This is a vector u of t of controls like I can change the frequency of a laser and so on. And also I assume that I can control the damping constant with the cold and with the hot-bats and then again I can define the heat and the work as before and the optimal control problem is the following. I want to minimise heat dissipation with respect to all possible strategies for fixed initial and final states and fixed length of the protocol. Because if you have a cycle then the work is equal to minus q and you want to maximise the power. I think it could be equivalent but in the end that's maybe simpler to do the calculation but yes, because I would say yes because I want to optimise the power. I don't care if the entropy production what is the entropy production, I just want maximum work and then I want maximum work divided by tau so that's the most direct way to do it I agree that you can change the figure of merit. System can be in every state. Yes, I agree, so you have these problems where there is no universal agreement on what is the definition but these problems are usually when the system has coherence. If you have diagonal terms then you have these extra terms to the work that are... In the end what I'm going to apply is a situation in which you have diagonal states so everything is well defined. Even if, of course, if you have coherences you should be careful about what is the interpretation of this quantity basically. Ok, so how can we do this optimisation? We want to minimise q and then we use a Lagrange multiplier approach because we minimise q to all possible trajectories that are normalised and obey the master equation and the way to do this is to use Lagrange multipliers which is a number for the normalisation and actually an operator to impose the master equation. It's a standard approach to do Lagrange optimisation in control theory and the feature of this Lagrange approach is that as in classical mechanics you can define the analogue of the Hamiltonian also in this case you have the pseudo Hamiltonian which is just nothing to do with the Hamiltonian of the system it's just a mathematical object that is very useful to find optimal solutions and as in classical mechanics you have the so-called... the analogue of the Hamiltonian equations gives the dynamics of rho which is just the master equation this is something that we know but then we have this non-trivial solution for this auxiliary state which is something like a density matrix that evolves according to a different master equation this is like position and momentum if you want and again as in classical mechanics the Hamiltonian is conserved that's a very useful property to find solutions so what is exactly the Pontriagis minimum principle it's a statement about optimal solutions that should satisfy three properties so there are necessary conditions all optimal solutions are such that there exist this auxiliary state that evolves according to this equation just the Hamiltonian equation the pseudo Hamiltonian is minimized by the control field at every time and the Hamiltonian is constant as I said before so these three properties in principle are not enough in general to completely specify the optimal solution but they are very useful and if you are lucky they are also enough to find it and so now one could ask ok we have this nice Hamiltonian which in general in control theory has no physical meaning maybe in this case it could be related with some thermodynamic quantity and this is the case and it is strongly related to the maximum power of the cycle because if we take the power which is just minus the heat divided by tau we take the variation of this power we get a term which is proportional to the variation of the heat and a term proportional to the variation of tau then we use our Hamiltonian which is linked to this Lagrange optimization and what we find is that optimal solution should have p equal to minus k so when you are at maximum power then the optimal solution has a power which is just minus k this is this conserved quantity of the control problem so this tells us that we have a clear optimization procedure we just take the set of all possible values of this conserved quantity that are consistent with the master equation and the Hamiltonian equations we check if the power is equal to minus k and if this is the case then we know that this is the optimal power solution otherwise we should try a larger value of k but as I am going to show for your qubit the minimum k is already a good solution but before going to the qubit we may ask what is the general cycle for a d level quantum system in general what is the kind of transformation that is optimal and if you first optimize the damping rates you find that it turns out that the best strategy is a bang-bang type control you couple a maximum rate with the hot bath or you couple a maximum rate with the cold bath there are no intermediate situations plus what is the optimal control for the Hamiltonian it is a regular driving along isothermal transformations but you can have also here some discontinuity some bang-bang effects and these are exactly the equivalent of adiabatic transformation in a Carnot engine so we know that finite time Carnot cycles are optimal solution and we have to optimize over these cycles so this is the general theory now I apply this to the qubit I don't know maybe I have 5 minutes ok then let's apply this to the qubit for the qubit we assume that we can couple the system with two baths of cold and hot temperature that just tends to thermalize the system to the Gibbs state this is a thermalizing dissipator and moreover we assume that we can modulate externally the gap of a two level system by simply rising or lowering the energy level of the excited state the ground state is at zero energy so as I said here we consider diagonal qubit we have also the diagonal auxiliary system in terms of a single variable, q we have this pseudo Hamiltonian that we can compute and we have these pseudo Hamilton equations that just give the master equation for the state and the kind of master equation for the auxiliary state then we have just to solve these equations it's not a physical state actually it's a zero trace object and these are the solutions that we get that's the optimal isothermal, cold isothermal process optimal hot isothermal process for a given value of kappa in the UP plane, what does it mean this is the probability of excitation that's the state and this is the energy so by definition you can compute the heat as the integral as this area below the curve and this is the heat dissipated in the hot isothermal in the cold isothermal, this is the heat absorbed in the hot isothermal but as I said before you can switch between one isothermal process to the other with a quench and now you can do a Carnot cycle basically and actually our control theory approach tells us exactly what are the optimal points where we should apply the quench so not every Carnot cycle is optimal only one Carnot cycle is optimal for a given value of kappa so we have a one to one correspondence between kappa and Carnot cycles Carnot cycle with the minimum value of kappa and we hope that this is the maximum power heat engine what happens when you go to the minimum value is that this Carnot cycle basically collapses to a very small Carnot cycle where the isothermal process is basically a constant Hamiltonian process and then you can say that this is an infinitesimal Otto cycle and this is exactly the optimal control result you have to go to one particular state with a given value of optimal p star for a given temperature ratio here and then around this state, this quantum state you switch the energy level between two particular values of u and you do this exactly as in a standard Otto cycle I change the energy level I thermalize a little bit I change the energy level I thermalize in the opposite path and if I do this I obtain exactly the maximum power of the heat cycle and for which we have this curve and we also have the optimal asymptotic the asymptotic expansion in the limit of high power and also an upper bound and it will never be violated and we can also compute the efficiency at maximum power which is the blue line here and the green line is the Kurtzson-Alborn efficiency we are very close and this is the full solution for the qubit so to summarize I have presented two different approaches to study optimal driving of thermal machines the first approach is based on a perturbation theory which is good when you have a master equation in which you slowly change some parameters of the master equation and in this case you get many universal results but they are not good at maximum power actually they are not good at far from equilibrium and the second part instead we studied optimal driving of a thermal machine using a control theory approach and I've shown you that optimal cycles are finite time carno cycles that the maximum power is linked to this conserved quantity of the control problem, Kappa and using this formalism we could derive the full solution for a two level system close or out of equilibrium Thank you very much


How's it going everybody? Dottonoi here and that's right it has been almost a month since one of the stupider videos on my channel but you guys seem to really enjoy if you don't know what I'm talking about basically we played Rivals of Aether, a game with amazing modding support that allows you to see character combinations like this and yes both of these characters are fully playable in the game and of course with the video so focused around the characters inside the game itself I expected the comments to talk about characters that I should also download but what I didn't expect was to see the same recommendation so many times over and over again I just kept seeing Cosmic Ronald pop up and other comments that were even more vague and so of course you know I had to look this up I looked up Cosmic Ronald and I just saw a ton of other videos by creators like Alpharad the person that recommended that I check out Rivals in the first place Choctopus so I was thinking if he's that hard of course I got to download this guy immediately went to the steam workshop downloaded him along with a few other boss characters and knew right away that I was never going to beat these guys myself and that is why I brought the other idiots in here today to Rivals of Aether as we attempt to tag team on the final bosses of the game through the steam workshop hey yo what is this game bro what is this guy is this tell me this is not a Pokemon right here this is my champions with Lygon tell me I'm lying tell me I'm lying what is it what is it like what's that I forgot what it's called there's a like a little pokemon with a little leaf on the head I forgot its name editor editor draw Lygon just make a Lygon upon screen right now that's a Lygon but anyway that's why we brought you here to finish up these boss battles in Rivals of Aether the comments were telling me all about these things how they were unbeatable and I was like well fine I'm not gonna lose to them myself I'll just bring you guys in and we'll win they've never seen individuals structured such as we are let me introduce you guys to the first boss there's a few bosses to go through I'm thinking we'll probably beat all of them today but boss number one you might recognize him from his appearance in Super Smash Brothers it's Fox it's this guy right here I see it look like that that's the most derpy that looks like Fox but like drawn in the same way Dino is drawn in real life like that is that's what that Fox is right there now remember teamwork's gonna be important this is the level one I just told me we're kind of nice at the game are we really going to be boss number one I mean we're good at the game three it is right here man well I do keep us I do keep us keep us keep us keep us keep us oh Dino hold on I got keep us two let's sandwiches little dog math you don't give us a challenge or some shit you don't speak of you are different levels of like quality in the background all right well you know it's not fair if we went drag him up by the way I'm switching off Krillin I'm not playing my main ever again you know if we beat one boss I'm probably gonna have to hit this guy with the emulga speaking of Pokemon now this is a lie are we gonna do all Pokemon I have a if you want to play Charizard I don't have a Charizard character but there's a Pokemon Ranger I'm looking to smile and and shit all right and since we did drag him out last time let's go ahead and let Fox do some dragon ball let him turn it up a notch where the sat yeah there it is wait he actually has a transformation yeah well now he's in ultra instinct bro he's faster he's never she would even like we can handle like maybe we should have stuck with dragon ball good old instinct might be a little scary we barely use like five percent in the last fight like how hard things get yeah exactly yeah i'm not even worried oh and or even the blind forest map crossovers oh we're We should have stuck with Dragon Ball. He's exposing our Frodulent by hand. He's exposing us.  Oh, he cleaned us up. Okay, wait, wait. I just, maybe, maybe our first win was Frodulent. I have a new idea. I'm going to need you guys to clock out for me. We clearly got a train. I'm going to dial it back a notch, but instead of tag teaming on the first fox, I think we should all fight him individually. Just to learn how the boss is thinking, really getting there. To become a boss of stuff. You know what? I'm going to clock you guys out. Wait, were you confident? I felt real confident there. Now that was a lot of confidence. You got to let him go first. That's enough confidence to me. I'm clocking out. Just get out of here. Go ahead, clock out. All right, let's get this. You think so? You're going to teach him a lesson. Meet, meet, meet. Yeah. What did I say? What did I say? Remember when I said that one time? You didn't hit a fox? Yeah. Get up the game. Whoops, whoops, whoops. Okay. You got it? He's just like standing behind you. Nothing personal.  I turned into a different guy.  Yeah. Yeah. Oh, flex. There you go, camera item. Get flexed on. Hold on. Let me flex on you. Yo, yo. Yeah. I'm good at the game. Come here. Come here. Yeah. Look at me. He just didn't dance though. Wait, oh. He parried it. Oh my God. Oh, and he's clocking you. You flexing me?  Oh, he's got comps. Dion's actually flexing on him. Hold on. Hold on. Loser. Hold still. Oh, I'm kind of good. I'm kind of good. Why are you still here?  I'm going to take one. There we go. Is this the comeback season right here? Come back season. Come back season. Let me just do some jump attack. Let me just, yeah, I can see it. He's never going to get me above 63%. Okay. Okay. Ooh. Ooh, what a parry. I think I hit him with a purple.  Oh, he got you over 63. Is this the beginning of the end? Or the end of the beginning? The end of what? 91.  Easy. Easy. Easy. Oh, there you go. Come on. I'm trying to meah you, motherfucker. Oh my God. He's just dancing on him. What are you doing? Is that a parry? Bro, hold still. I can't seem to track his movements. He got the plague with you. Oh, I thought he was giving us the middle finger. I wish they had one subtle difference for that to be one. All right. Who wants to go next? Clock out. Clock out. He's got him. Let's go. Clock out. This is about to be so easy. He's about to get bodied. But the ultimate character. You got him? I don't think I'll remember. But in an episode of SpongeBob where he was getting beat up. But he's literally built like a sponge so he doesn't get hurt. He's immune? Yeah, a little SpongeBob. I'm not going to get hit a single time. Watch this. I think a different SpongeBob. Yo, fresh off the bus. I don't understand where you stand.  The hooks. The hooks. The hooks. I don't do that. Bring him to the hooks. The hooks. Oh, that would have been sick. Oh, wait. Bring him around town. Yo, SpongeBob just be smoothing.  Set up the hooks. Right there. Set up. Right there, baby. Right there.  Nice. Oh, he made it. Yo, those two setups are actually snapped. Just die, man. The hooks. The hooks. What? I hear him go. The spike. How did you survive that? Kill this guy. Kill this guy. I think the next time he gets hit by a hook, you're going to win. I hope so. I don't know. Two percent. He's got it. Next time he gets hit by a hook. Bro, die.  I'm dead. Oh, right there. Oh, wait. You got two? Oh, man. He escaped the hook. There we go. There we go. Let's go. Karate. You know, taunts on him real quick. Hit the D-pad. Now, now, now. That's my taunt right there. Is that the taunt? This. If you get one more stalk, I'm feeling pretty good about this. Don't worry. Don't worry. Easy. Spike. Spike. Spike. This Karate is weird. I'm getting jumped. That's it. That's it. That's it. All right, Dono. I got one. Dino got two. You got to get three. Oh, I should have gone first. Yeah, Dono, no pressure, but this would have been so much lower. Ryan, clock out for me. You know what? I'm finishing this fight. What was that noise? Get the halo music behind this, dude. Keep that halo music going.    Yeah, go ahead. Shoot him.     Wait, you guys made this look easy.  This is obnoxiously loud. I can't hear because my ass... I don't think I'm going to do as good as you guys. Dono, it was easy. Come on, bro. Have you ever seen Master Chief move like this, son? Dono, I got you. I got you. This is going to make you win. Just listen. Cut off the music. I'll take care of this OST. Okay, go ahead.  At least one stock, Dono. Master Chief planted my pistol. What stock, bro? What stock? Don't let him three stock you. The CPU is a bot, bro. Gravity hammer, watch this. This is how it ends. That didn't do as much as I thought it would do. I didn't do anything at all. Double kill. Killing frenzy. Killing air. Help. Killing frenzy. I feel like we did well enough. I'm not ready for UI Fox again, but there is somebody that I want to get revenge on. Ryan, maybe you remember, Deon, you might not remember so well because you literally weren't there.  And we're not all going to play different characters. Hold on. You know who we're all going to be. Who are we going to be? Take Jotaro. We're all Jotaro right now. As long as he doesn't stop time like Ryan did against me, this should be relatively easy. Look at that.   No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Finally, fun bag. I don't got him. I don't got him. He's jumping me. Wait. I died. I died. We can't. You had to have seen it. You had to have been there. Literally right here. I didn't go there. You just had to see. He looked at me different than he looked at you guys. I got him. Oh, that was sailing. Drifting on him. Are you both at one stock? No, we're not going to lose. Yeah. We literally have never lost before.  Go smash that. Go smash that. No, wait. Wait, if we could both do this. No. No. Our strategy was flawed. We shouldn't have all been Jotaro. We lost to a pixel. One more try against Theo, but your mains use different characters. I'm busting out the big Yoshi. The only thing is I've already been linked and I kind of want to switch it up. So I'm going to go ahead and be. Look at big Yoshi. I'm hitting the ground. Wait, what me? Big Yoshi just minding little business. Big Yoshi don't care about none of this. Somebody stop him from killing Big Yoshi, please. Hold on.   That did nothing. Theo, please. Guys, hold them back while I charge up my punch. Hold them back.  We're getting smoked. There we go, there we go. I got one, I got one. I don't got one. I just need one fully charged punch, guys. Just hold them off. I got them. I got them. Yeah. I'm dead. I'm dead.  Just get one more stock. Get one more stock and then we win. Teamwork. Teamwork. No, it can't be up to Big Yoshi. It's your video. You have to do this. It's your video. As far as I'm concerned, we beat that boss. Let's try taking on UI Fox again. What do you think, boys? Deion, you act kind of sus. Wait a minute.  Why? Tell me what about my character made me sus. Why? Wait, you can't. Why?  Hey boys, I think this guy vented.  Yo, this fox kind of sus. What? He's kind of among us. Oh, my God. Why? He's in a different dimension. Change the wires on him. Change the wires on him. Change the wires on him. He shouldn't have ever came into electric. Yeah. Yeah. No. I got my knife ready. Do we get him? That's up to you. It's up to you. I can do it. That guy's tough. Does anybody want to try fighting him one-on-one?  All right. I hate to embarrass everyone, but I perform much better by myself. All right. Where's this guy going to get embarrassed?  What?  He chose you as our champion. You have to win.  Yeah. I got my licks in. Just let me fight back. Just for a second. That was your licks? Call the police. Call the police. Fuck.   All right. Well, that lasted all the two seconds. I'm sure you don't want to get him in there real quick. You know what? You know what? I was going to just leave it at one. Let me get in there. Hold on. You guys never even seen my... You know what? I never really got to use them. I'm busting out my amoga. Go ahead. Don't tell people what you see here. I'm saving this for Nationals. Evo, I'm going to Evo. Yeah, he changed, man. He broke the game. I am amoga. But what he didn't know. You know what? Hold on. Turn on my B.L.B. Let's fly. Why? Why is he fast? Has he not seen my speed? Let's go. To the hospital. Now that was really three seconds. I think we got a... We got to let Dino get a... You got to let Dino get a chance. Get behind me. Let me show you how this is done, bro. Look at that. That's right when you got out of the bus. Come up here. The hook stays. There we go. Almost. This guy's taking it serious. This guy's not messing around. I'm not anymore, do I? Stop. Stop, brother. I think I lasted the longest.  But I think we're ready for the last boss fight, the ultimate boss fight. Wait, this isn't the strongest one? No, the comments were telling me about another character that would pretty much every single comment was wait till they see this guy, wait till they fight the final boss. And I didn't believe it. So just honestly choose whoever you're comfortable with. I hope it matters. Hold on. Dotto? Yeah. Is there an Arto in this game? Oh, if I'm Sasuke and you're Naruto, I don't think we can lose. Everybody knows if you even add Mega Man to the mix. These are like the best three of them. Naruto, Sasuke, and Mega Man. Who could forget this iconic trio? But the final boss character is the Kavets. They wanted to see Cosmic Ronald McDonald.  I don't know. I thought it was a joke. I thought the Kavets were playing a elaborate prank on me, but apparently he's unbeatable, the hardest boss, something like that. Yeah, but we already know. Especially Naruto, Sasuke, and Mega Man, though. Let's go. Where's this? Come here, Rosette. Oof! Whoa! Kunai. Kunai. What was that? He hit me twice. What? Who's that for? Why is it so loud? Why is it so loud?  Dion Rosette got your dory. I got it. Wait, heels? Heels! Rosette got... I got him. Oh no! Again? Wait, I'm at 997. Kurama Kyubi! Naruto! Naruto! Naruto! I know.  Man, who did the most damage, man? I gave 19 damage. Yeah, let's see. Oh, wait. Never mind. Let's stop looking at that. Let's stop looking at that. Well, real. You never see how quick people change up like that. All right, everybody focus up. We're going to have to win this. Jidori! Jidori! Jidori! Hit this guy, dude. Somebody has to hit this guy. We did it! Heels! Pressing on part two! All right, fellas, I don't think we're going to win this, but I have an idea. I need you guys to clock out for me. Oh God. Hold on, Dotto. It's your video. I'm sure you don't want to go last. You think you guys did it? All right, go ahead. This is Sasuke Uchiha. Yeah!  Is Ronald McDonald and Uchiha? I don't think so. He dodged it. He dodged it! He dodged it! He dodged it! He dodged it! He dodged it! He dodged it! He dodged it! He dodged it! He dodged it! It's like a devastating combination. Hold on. Hit my theme song! Theme song? You're theme song kind of playing right now. Song! Sorry! AHHHH! This is done. You got to get the actual boss character in the game. Go ahead! Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, no, no, no, no, no. Yes. I'm ready. No, no, stop. Bro, this is what McDonald's does to your arteries, by the way. Where's your demon? Oh! He buried you. Oh my god. Damn. That was just a beat down. I don't even think you got a drumbeat in that theme song.  You guys didn't know that I had a secret plan. I was going to turn the boss fight against the boss fight. I need to harness the power. I mean, this is a very even match.  Yep, which is why I can't afford to lose. So, see, play my theme song. Let's go. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. No. Uh-oh. I'm too smooth. I'm too not smooth enough. Hold on. I can be smooth. I can be smooth, guys. Oh, wait. I told you. Wait, wait. How you survived? You survived that?  No. I can't survive it all. My favorite thing about this, you can literally hear him mashing into his control in the background. I'm trying my hardest. Your hardest? That was pretty embarrassing. See, if he knew what I lost with normal characters, he used the boss character and still lost. True, true. I at least almost got a theme song off in my fight. I think I might have to use Myra. We're not going to fall for it, Dada.


Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak. This program is designed for English learners, so we speak a little slower, and we use words and phrases, especially written for people learning English. On today's program, you will hear reports from Katie Weaver, Faith Perlow, and John Russell. Later, Brian Lynn looks back at the year's big science stories. Finally, we hear today's lesson of the day. But first, Katie and Faith have this report on the Louisiana Creole culture. Language experts estimate as many as 10,000 people still speak the French-based language Louisiana Creole. In addition, many others in New Orleans and across the Southern U.S. state consider themselves part of the culture that draws tens of thousands of people to events. The celebrations include Autumn's Festival Acadienne et Creole, Summer's Creole Tomato Festival, and Spring's Treme Creole Gumbo and Congo Square Rhythms Festival. But for locals and visitors alike, everyday evidence shows how strong Creole culture is in Louisiana. The state's performance spaces and airwaves are often filled with the driving, rhythmic sound of Zydeco and other Creole and Cajun music. Louisiana's restaurants offer dishes with rich, complex flavors, including gumbo, hot sausage, red beans and rice, and shrimp étouffée. To celebrate Creole culture is to wake up and live in New Orleans, said Christina Bragg. She is a member of the Mahogany Blue Baby Dolls, a parade group for black and mixed race women. Everything Creole is celebrating our day to day lives, the food we eat, the music we dance to, the way we gather with friends to parade during Mardi Gras, she said. Every day I open my eyes and breathe. It's a celebration of Creole culture because that's who I am. So what is Creole? It's food, it's music, it's architecture, it's style and it's traditions. Mona Lisa Saloi told VOA, there are millions of Creole people in countries across the world. We are all so much more alike than we are different. We create beautiful cultures everywhere we go. And I think that's evident here in Louisiana. Saloi is the writer of the poetry collection, Black Creole Chronicles, and served as Louisiana's poet laureate from 2021 to 2023. She said Creole cultures all over the world have similarities to Louisiana's. Creole styles common in New Orleans like the Creole Cottage or the Shotgun Home can be found in other places with Creoles, such as in other parts of the American South and the Caribbean, she said. Much of our music derives from the rhythms of Africa and the Caribbean, as does much of our food. Prevalence of gumbo such as the long rice and okra, for example, or the prevalence of beans. How the word Creole is defined changes from place to place and person to person. The word Creole is believed to have come from the Portuguese word Creolo, which developed from the Latin word for to create. Some say it was used in the European slave trade to describe a slave born in the new world and not in Africa. The word took on different meanings in different places. Creole in much of Africa and part of the Caribbean, for example, came to mean people of mixed ethnic or racial backgrounds. In Louisiana, the definition has changed over the years. Here, the definition kind of depends on who you ask. C'est Vance Vaucrescent. He is a New Orleans based Creole and owner of a local restaurant, the Vaucrescent Sausage Company. I prefer an inclusive definition, he said. By that definition, anyone born in Louisiana could be Creole. During our colonial era, it was meant to differentiate people born in the Americas, usually a French, Spanish, or African descent from those born in Europe or Africa. Describing his definition, Vaucrescent added, It doesn't matter. If you're born here and embrace the culture, you can be Creole. I'm Faith Perlow. I'm Katie Weaver. Beneath each full moon, a group of women in religious clothing surround a fire near a village in central Mexico. They breathe in deeply from a joint and blow clouds of marijuana smoke out toward the fire. Despite their religious clothing, the women are not religious. They are part of an international group founded in 2014 called Sisters of the Valley. The group has promised to spread its ideas about the healing powers of the drug marijuana. The group also launched a successful small business in the United States, where about 20 states have legalized recreational marijuana use. It sells products made from cannabis, the plant from which marijuana comes. The Sisters of the Valley business made over $500,000 last year. But in Mexico, a drug war has hurt the country, and Christianity is built into society. The group says its image of marijuana smoking nuns is like an act of rebellion, though women say. The Sisters often post on social media, mainly Instagram. The pictures show them caring for cannabis crops, leading workshops, and attending cannabis related events. Their business makes around $10,000 each year, small compared to their partners in the US. The five women are careful to hide possible personal and workplace identifiers in the images they post. They do business out of a building with a false storefront. Cannabis production is a legal gray area in Mexico. Much of the activity remains tied to criminal organizations called cartels. The women say they worry that both police and crime groups could threaten them. On a recent weekend, reporters from Reuters news agency visited. One of the nuns, who uses the name Sister Bernadette online, said the sisterhood is in a totally different context here in Mexico because of how religious the country is and because of the plant's ties to cartels. She asked Reuters to not report her real name as she feared attack or punishment if her identity is discovered. In her main job as a homeopathic caregiver, she prescribes marijuana to her patients with cancer, joint pain, and sleep problems. We want to take the plant back from the drug dealers, she said. The sisters have borrowed some ideas from the Beguins, a religious movement that existed for a few hundred years, starting in the eleven hundreds. The group, made up of single women, devoted itself to spirituality, scholarship, and providing aid to the needy. It was not officially connected to any religion. The sisters worldwide say they wear religious clothing called habits to demonstrate uniformity and show respect for the plant. With the help of Alele Paz, a chemist and marijuana researcher working with the group, the sisters in Mexico grow a small crop. They grow the plants in old paint containers and place them in lines between four walls on a rooftop. Later the sisters move the larger plants to private gardens. Their work is limited to weekends when they care for the plants and produce cannabis goods. The women visit other groups in the expanding cannabis community in Mexico City, pushing for full legalization. The women also give workshops that touch on everything from how to make products like cannabis infusions to the chemistry behind the plant. I'm John Russell. As 2023 comes to a close, we are taking a look back at some of the biggest space stories of the year. A container carrying asteroid material captured in space three years ago arrived safely on Earth in September. The container, or capsule, was released by the American Space Agency NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. It floated to Earth and landed in a desert area in the western state of Utah. The spacecraft captured the asteroid material, or sample, from the asteroid Bennu in 2020. NASA announced in October the first examinations of the sample showed evidence of high carbon material and water. These two substances suggest the possibility that the building blocks of life on Earth may be found in the rock. NASA's Psyche spacecraft launched on a mission to observe an asteroid made mostly of metal. It is expected to travel 3.6 billion kilometers over six years to reach the asteroid, also called Psyche. NASA believes the asteroid could have separated during violent crashes that happened during our solar system's early creation. Scientists think data collected on the asteroid could provide new details about how rocky planets, including Earth, formed. The Psyche spacecraft is also being used to test a laser-based communication method. The system aims to greatly improve data links between Earth and spacecraft exploring deep space. A few weeks ago, NASA demonstrated the technology with a short video sent by the laser technology over 30 million kilometers to Earth. The space agency said it took less than two minutes for the video to reach an observatory in California. The video showed a cat repeatedly chasing a red laser light. Scientists announced last month they had discovered the oldest black hole ever found. The huge object is believed to have formed about 470 million years after the Big Bang. The researchers said the findings confirm their theory that supermassive black holes existed in the very early universe. Last month, the European Space Agency, ASA, released the first images from its new Euclid Space Telescope. ASA designed Euclid to study dark matter and dark energy. Scientists think those hidden forms of matter and energy make up 95% of the universe. ASA said the newly released images covered 1,000 galaxies, about 240 million light-years away from Earth. Data collected by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope helped astronomers identify the most distant active supermassive black hole ever discovered. Researchers said the black hole sits at the center of a galaxy called Sears 1019. The galaxy is estimated to have existed about 570 million years after the Big Bang. Earlier this month, NASA said its Ingenuity Helicopter continues to perform well in tests carried out on Mars. So far, Ingenuity has completed at least 66 flights over the past 2.5 years. NASA said it is also testing equipment on Earth that it plans to include in future helicopters built for space exploration. The latest tests on Earth involved new rotor blades. The space agency said reached speeds near the speed of sound in experiments. In August, India became the fourth country to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon. The Moon lander, called Chandrayaan-3, also became the first spacecraft to land near the Moon's South Pole. The South Pole is thought to be an important area with scientists saying it may contain large amounts of frozen water and minerals. Chinese scientists announced in March they had discovered water in the materials collected during the country's Cheng'e 5 mission. Researchers from Nanjing University reported the water was in the form of extremely small beads found in dirt collected in 2020. The scientists noted that billions, if not trillions, of these beads could exist on the Moon, possibly providing a huge water source. But the team said mining the water would be difficult. I'm Brian Lin. My name is Anna Matteo. My name is Andrew Smith. And I'm Jill Robbins. You're listening to The Lesson of the Day on the Learning English Podcast. Today's lesson helps you do more with Level 2 of our video series, Let's Learn English. This series shows Anna Matteo in her work and life in Washington, D.C. Lesson 2 of Level 2 is called The Interview. Anna's friend Pete has an opportunity for a new job. Anna's boss, Ms. Weaver, is going to interview Pete for the job. The person who asks the questions is called the interviewer, and the person answering the questions is called the interviewee. Right. Just like a company or person who gives a job is the employer, and the worker who gets the job is the employee. Anna also gets a new job, or role, and that's spelled R-O-L-E, in Lesson 2. Your role at work means the special functions or activities you do. Anna still works for Ms. Weaver, but Ms. Weaver tells her, Anna, you're good at asking questions. So, I want you to go back to hosting and reporting. Go back is one of many phrasal verbs you can hear in the video. It means to return. Let's listen to the robot teacher, Professor Botte, talk about them. I wonder what Anna's new assignment will be. Professor Botte here, while you are watching, look for phrasal or two-word verbs. Some stay together, like go back, and some can come apart, like give out. Good luck, Anna. In the video, the word assignments appears between the words give and out. That means give out is a separable phrasal verb. In other words, we can separate the two words and put another word between them. So, Ms. Weaver is telling everyone what their new assignment is. Here's another example, this time with the phrasal verb, turn on. We can say, please turn on the light, or we can say, turn the light on. Both mean to cause a light to shine. Now, let's see what else Ms. Weaver has planned for Anna. And be sure to listen for phrasal verbs as well. So, as I said at the meeting last week, I have new assignments for everyone at the studio. Anna, you're good at asking questions. So, I want you to go back to hosting and reporting. That sounds great! You're also a team player. So, I want you to team up with someone. That sounds even better! Ms. Weaver, someone who is very different from you. That sounds... what do you mean... different? Well, you are very cheerful.  I want you to team up with someone who isn't. Ms. Weaver, I will find that person. What kind of person do you think Anna will try to find? Ms. Weaver said Anna is very cheerful and a people person. A people person is an expression that means a person likes to be with other people. Cheerful means happy and sharing good feelings with others. So, if Anna teams up with someone different, that person probably doesn't usually want to be around a lot of people. Team up with is another phrasal verb. Dr. Jill and I team up with each other to do the lesson of the day on the Learning English Podcast. So, team up with just means to work with another person or group of people. Now, let's listen and see who Anna finds. Pete, hi! Thanks for meeting me! Sure, but I don't have lots of time, Anna. I'm busy looking for work. Pete, you can tear these one-ads up and throw them away! I have good news! Anna, I was working on that crossword puzzle. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Pete, forget about the crossword puzzle. I have a job offer for you. I'm listening. My boss wants me to team up with someone to host a talk show. But the person must be different from me, so I thought of you. Different from you? What do you mean? I'm sorry, Pete. I don't have time right now. Here's my boss's address. Your interview is tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. But what do you mean different? Just be yourself, Pete. Just be yourself. Anna takes Pete's newspaper and tears it up or rips it into two pieces. Tear up is a phrasal verb. And Professor Botte tells us about another one. Did you find any two-word verbs? Here's one example. Pete can throw the want-ads away. Throw away is a two-word verb. Thanks, Professor Botte. But since our listeners are not watching the video, we should explain that throw away means to place something in a waste container. Now, let's see how Pete does in his interview with Ms. Weaver. Thanks for coming in, Pete. Thanks for the opportunity, Ms. Weaver. I need to find out if you have the skills for this job and I want you to be completely honest. Okay. First, let's talk about your personal skills. Pete, are you a people person? Well, okay. Sometimes, I think people talk too much. Pete, what work of yours are you most proud of? Last year, I locked myself in a cabin and wrote a book. I didn't speak to anybody the entire time. It was the best two months of my life. Okay. I think I've heard enough. It sounds like Pete is not a people person. Do you think Ms. Weaver will team him up with Anna? Probably. By the way, Ms. Weaver used another phrasal verb there, find out. She wants to learn or gather information about Pete's abilities. That's because she wanted Anna to team up with someone different from herself.  It describes someone who is a bit unhappy or does not share positive feelings with others. I remember some years ago on YouTube, there was a grumpy cat that became very popular. The cat's face made it look grumpy. Yes. All you need to do is enter the word grumpy in YouTube or Google, and you will find many pictures and videos of that cat. So we find that Pete got hired for an unusual reason, because he was grumpy and not a people person. So that makes him different from Anna. Well, they say that good teams need to have different kinds of people on them. What does that say about us, Andrew? I think we have different ways of teaching, but together they work pretty well. In future episodes of Let's Learn English Level 2, we'll see the kinds of assignments Anna and Pete take on. And that brings us back to the phrasal verb from the beginning of the video. Listen. Hey. Hey. Pete, how was the interview with Ms. Weaver? Well, she said I was grumpy and not good with people. And? And I got the job. I knew it. Congratulations. Let's go celebrate. Okay. To take on something is to accept a duty, job, or responsibility. We say we take on a new job, we take on work, we take on a new role, take on responsibilities, and so on. And this phrasal verb is separable. For example, if we use the pronoun it, we can say take it on. But if we use a longer noun, like assignment, we place that noun after the phrasal verb. So we say take on the assignment. We hope you will watch all the lessons in Let's Learn English to see what roles Anna takes on. And have you taken on a new role at work or in life recently? Perhaps you have a new job, or perhaps you have recently become a parent. Write to us and let us know. You can send us your email at learningenglishatvoanews.com. And remember, you can also find us on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Thanks for listening. I'm Andrew Smith. And I'm Jill Robbins. And that's our program for today. Join us again tomorrow to keep learning English through stories from around the world. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak.