Very impressive turnarounds in a lot of names, right? If you look, for example, like Tesla in the middle of the day, this thing looked like it was about to fall off a cliff, and then yada, yada, yada, you know, three hours later, not only did it reclaim its area, it took out two days worth of selling, which again, it's not out of the woods just yet, but you can see here, if you could take out this channel here. Welcome to Access to Trader, the number one community for those who are committed to taking control of their trading in order to achieve success, profitability, and longevity. Thank you for joining us. Here's Dan Shapiro to help you find your edge, master your process, and own your future. Hey guys, happy Monday everybody. Welcome to another edition of the AccessToTrader.com Nightly Wrap-Up Show. Hope everybody is doing well. If everybody had a nice day today. So let's quickly talk about the market. If you watched the weekend video, we talked about the queues establishing the highest close in the whole formation. Pretty decent job today. They continued to build on Friday's close. It was very touch and go for a while. You did see, although the Nasdaq was up pretty much the whole day, you did see a lot of weakness and a lot of names. Amazon continues to struggle, if my quotes would work would be great. Amazon continues to struggle. A lot of the semiconductor names, again warrant that semiconductors had a great run. So they're entitled to kind of get a rest, but you kind of saw the same names just drifting lower. Alibaba, Microsoft until it finally kind of woke up towards the end of the day. Excuse me, not Microsoft, Tesla, before it turned out towards the end of the day. You saw a lot of weakness. But again, to give the bulls a lot of credit, and this is again why technical analysis is the most important part of any trader's journey. And this is your lifeline, right? You can ask opinions left and right to a thousand other traders. If it's not for technical analysis to give you levels off the trade where stocks supposed to hold, where stocks supposed to reclaim, and rejected depending which side of the market you're trading, it really is the only thing that you do need. And if you look at today's session, you'll see a lot of really big movers. But if you traded the first half hour, 45 minutes a day, it was touch and go for a while, right? There was a lot of names that took out opening ranges, went up 50 cents a dollar, came in. Until finally around 11 o'clock or so, which is the second candle of day, you started seeing organic strength wake up in a lot of those names that were strong in the morning, got rejected off those opening ranges, and they started reclaiming big levels. And when you look at the final numbers today, they're not that impressive, but they're impressive enough. And the most important part is when you are establishing a new level as the queues did on Friday, again, closing the highest in this whole formation here, your job is just to literally just keep on building upon that fact. Again, you don't need a gang buster $9 rally in the queues to kind of put the victory flag in the ground. All you need is to continue to build, not to sell off the least amount of selling pressure that you get on a certain day after breakout or even an inside day, the higher probability this trend is going to continue. And that's exactly what we saw today, really good strong close and a lot of names, very impressive turnarounds and a lot of names. If you look, for example, like Tesla in the middle of the day, this thing looked like it was about to fall off a cliff and then yada, yada, yada, three hours later, not only did it reclaim its area, it took out two days worth of selling, which again, it's not out of the woods just yet, but you can see here, if you could take out this channel here, maybe you can finally start pushing back into the 640, 650, again, it's not on the table, it's not imminent, but it's something definitely, definitely to watch. You look at a name, for example, like Zoom that we covered on the weekend video. Again, very, very close. It did a great job, not busted out yet, but it did an absolute great job compounding on Friday's gains. And now you could clearly see it, right? See this orange line? This is the last supply zone. If Zoom could start reclaiming this area here, you could finally get a big, big push. Facebook that we covered on the weekend video, we talked about the top of the range here, the top of the earnings highs. You could see it broke out as well. And slowly, but surely, you're starting to get a lot of names doing exactly the same things. Even names like Snow, which turned out to be a pretty good trade today. Even names like Snow, which again, are not out of the woods just yet, but you can see it had a big move, consolidated this whole range, getting above this range. And now it's like literally a couple of bucks away from stretching out into the 260s, 270s and 280s. And again, if you go and if you are believing an option flow, you saw a really aggressive June and July buyers coming in for the 275s, for the 280 coal. So definitely, definitely keep an eye on names like that as well. Even names, for example, even names, for example, on the smaller side, there's a lot of smaller names, they're catching very, very good order flow. Like check out this name, NMMVs. You know, a name that I'm definitely watching for tomorrow. You saw a really good call buying coming in in the June, I think 11 days expiration of the June 5 calls. I mean, I'm not the smartest guy in the world. This thing is a 380, they're coming for the $5 calls. If they start reclaiming today's range, who knows, maybe this thing could take off. A name like Givo, for example, right? Another name, they came today for, it was either the June or July expiration on the 10s, but you could see it, first close out of supply. So you're getting a healthy balance today of smaller cap names, beta names, and a lot of heavyweight names, for example, even Boeing that's starting to make the turn here and reclaim the five days moving average. And the one common denominator they all have is short-term option call aggressive repeat buyer expiration that are over supply. So it doesn't make a difference if you're looking at Boeing, or if you're looking at a smaller name, that play is still the same. Option flow, short-term expiration, and if they confirm the previous days channel what we're looking for tomorrow in certain names, maybe you can get a day to run with a lot of aggression. So if you look at today's action, it all depended what you trade. Snow really saved my day. I was getting some paper cuts early in the morning, like nothing was following through. And what I mean, paper cuts, literally, like paper cuts, like 10 cents, 12 cents, like literally stocks would take it out highs, going up 50 cents a dollar, and then just really collapsing. So I caught like a lot of small paper cuts in the morning and then snow, there was a monster offer sitting there. Like it felt like a million shares offered there at 250. And you just saw like buyers were coming in. They just were not intimidated of that offer. You started seeing those 275, 280 calls coming in and check out snow intraday, that was really cool. I mean, this thing literally just exploded on one shot. So here is that two, let me just show you here. So here is the whole 250 area. You see this whole 250 area and it just absolutely went nuts here as soon as they cleaned up the offer. So that was a really good save. But if you look at the day's pivots, a lot of really strong moves you had GameStop going absolutely nuts. Nvidia again continues to give big order flow. Snow, Tesla, again, Tesla is starting to wake up. Again, a couple of days, but it's starting to wake up. Facebook, Roku is ready to go. So you have something for everybody today. I tried again, I'm trying to put as many of the smaller cap names with option flow on the Twitter feed, something for everybody just to have a piece. Because again, it doesn't make a difference if you're trading a $2,000 share pivot or $2 stock. As long as there is option flow, repeat option flow and you have a range or volume, it is all valid. So let's talk about today's action. This one was the most, you wanna hear the most amazing part. Dell was actually one of my focal points of the day and I said to myself, let me watch this thing, right? And it was so thin and it put an initial move of like one hole for 40 and then we were watching it for a second entry and watching it and watching it and never came and absolutely never came. Ironically, if you look at Dell's chart, look at this beautiful chart and yet, right? Look at this gorgeous, gorgeous chart and yet absolutely it didn't make even a debt, not even close. So it is what it is. Aluminum $15, I still like it here. Beyond went absolutely nuts. Congratulations for all you guys who caught beyond 148 needs to build. Here was beyond, right? So here is the 148 right over here, right? This whole channel here, 147.76, 148 and took out the 148. Absolutely when nuts went to 156 on its first candle, really big move there. Again, this is my point about small cap for small cap players, right? DS small cap players, 336, 340 needs to build. I still like it, not a huge move but they did come on Friday for the $5 calls which was very, very odd. But here again, went to 347, first close above the Bollinger Band, still looks pretty good. If you are in it, Facebook, nice move on Facebook, 334, macro needs to build. Here was Facebook, it took out this whole 334 channel, went to almost 338. I still like it, I still think it sees 340. We saw short-term 345, 350 call buyers come into the name. Again, NVIDIA continues to be a rocket, keep in mind, it's super overstepping, everybody knows that, right? For experienced traders only, 707 needs to build, maximum risk a dollar. This is a continuation from Friday's pivot and NVIDIA had its first move, really, really big initial move here. You can see this whole 707 channel, it went to like 712 and again, this is the point of a stock being overbought, right? They took it down right after and they took it all the way down to 687. So again, guys, keep this in mind, there's only one breakout, right? The breakout on NVIDIA was right over here, okay? Everything else is continuation. So the higher, right? The higher a stock goes away from its breakout level, there's always a higher probability that it's gonna get pulled the hardest. So if you are trading a stock, again, understand the difference between a breakout and a continuation. This is obviously one big continuation. You're still continuing to buy this thing into dips and running it ahead of this one. So again, pretty decent move there. Google, sneaky area 2400, it reclaimed the 2400. Now it's set up for a macro, for a macro move. So here is the 2400 area. Didn't do anything yet today. Close the 2402, but you could see it's setting up for this run to the 2431 area. Google looks really good as long as the market continues to play nice. Neo, big call volume coming in for the 45s. We even saw the 50s as well. Neo 43 needs to build. Here is Neo, nice push today, one is pretty much closed at the highs. I still like it, I still think this thing gets to this 44 and a half, 45 level. Still looks pretty good for tomorrow. FSR, big move on FSR, FSR 1640, another name we talked about briefly in the weekend update, 1640 needs to build. Here was FSR, right? Took out 1640 and traded all the way to the next supply zone at 1745 for the highs of day. Again, this thing starts building over 1750. This thing has more room to run. Eyes, I still like. It triggered near the close, I still like this eyes. Eyes, seven needs to build. We also talked about this in the weekend update. Here's eyes, it took out seven, went to seven, 10, closed right at seven. This thing starts building, guys. This is 715, 720 level tomorrow. I still like this thing, really, really big move, potential in this thing if it starts to confirm. Airbnb, I don't believe, I wasn't watching Airbnb, I don't believe it got up there. Airbnb, 153 needs to build. Nope, didn't get up there. There's a reason why I wasn't watching it. EA, 146 rejected twice, needs to establish a new base. Here was EA, right? Here was EA, right to this 46 level, still didn't confirm, guys. I definitely will continue to watch this thing, folks. This is three times, once, twice, three times. You see this all under 146? As soon as this thing starts building above 146, it's going to, well, it should go. So keep an eye on EA as well. Zoom, 340 needs to build. Here was Zoom. The macro move is coming, guys, it's coming, right? So it took out 340, it went to 345. The key is this whole area here. If it starts building above this whole area here, this is where you can finally start stretching. So I think it could be one day away.   I actually took a 28 cent loss on Peloton. 106, 80, 107 needs to build on the upgrade. Peloton, as you can see, I completely screwed it up. It went to 111.  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Dick Sporting, that's 98, 98, 50 new base on the Morgan Stanley upgrade. Here is Dick Sporting goods. So it took out the 98, 98 and a half, went to almost 100 and then completely died out. Didn't do nothing after that. Fubo, 29 needs to build. Here was Fubo. Fubo had a big strong move. Congratulations for you guys who caught Fubo. Took out this whole channel at 29, went to 3140. Lot of short interest in that stock. Game stock went absolutely bananas. I wasn't watching game stock. So if you caught game stock, God bless, I wasn't even watching it. Game stock, the experience traders only 265, 266 needs to build. And apparently from what I understand, game stock went absolutely nuts and traded all the way up to 282. So if you took it, congratulations. I had nothing to do with it. Snow, nice pop on snow. I highest sales in the 252s. Again, the same thing guys, you see the call buying? It's call buying over and over and over again. Same things, the June 18, $20 calls came in, closed at the highs on FSR. Roku again, 337, 338 needs to build. Again, they came for the 340 weeklies. Here's Roku, right? They came for the 340 weeklies and Roku pretty much closed at the highs 342s. Nice pop there on Roku. Again, zoom, take on the way up 350 call buyers. Again, the same thing over and over and over again. Call buyers, short-term expiration, range confirmation, snow, nice move, nice meal, nice move, blah, blah, blah, blah. So look, the market continues to be really, really good. Guys, also for all you guys who like these smaller cap names, keep an eye on this A and Y. There was a late day press release, something to do with some Instagram influence about making some coin, blah, blah, blah. Who knows, man? If this thing starts maybe building above this 205, 220 range, maybe this thing can light up here. A lot of volume here came in. So keep an eye on this thing for the next few days. Guys, have a great night everybody. God bless and with God's help, I'll see you all tomorrow. Take care.


The work that we're talking about is drawing on funding from the Canadian government as well as the social sciences and humanities research council of Canada, plus draws on core insights from my time I spent at wider last fall as a visiting fellow. So we anecdotally observed that some states remain stuck in what we call a high state of fragility despite copious amounts of aid failure to reform there are questions of fungibility in other words aid finds its way into avenues for which it was not intended there are questions of selectivity and over and under funding of these fragile states despite all these concerns we observe that there are a number of states remain stuck in what we call a fragility trap. Typically we think of the fragility trap as something where there are countries with poor policy environments that the failure to effectively use absorb aid if you will or where conflict and poverty or a combination of those two things is endemic but the same is true for the most extreme cases. I mean we find that this is typical of many fragile states but can we say the same of say the top ten this is the question we're going to investigate. Unfortunately there's no sort of single causal relationship between highly trapped states and those countries that that are less trapped. In other words we find that there are instances of high levels of violence in trapped states and situations where they are not trapped. So we come to the conclusion that conflict intensity is probably not a core driver of fragility although much of the policy domain I think associates high levels of conflict with extreme cases of fragility we're going to argue that that is not the case. So we're going to look at some of the common features of fragility walking through some of the empirical results my co-author and a lot of this work is an economist also at the School of International Affairs and then present some results which we've tracked fragility over time. Time permitting we'll look at some of the implications of the differences across cases. Now there are some core studies that focus on fragility traps there was a study by the World Bank which basically identified poor property rights high levels of violence I believe low economic growth is core factors associated with fragility but those authors really don't come up with a formal causal explanation they don't have a theory they're just simply saying these are things we think that are relevant to high levels of fragility. Similar Chauvet and Collier in a very important study found that over a lengthy period of time that fragile states typically despite high levels of aid simply don't adapt reforms that are asked of them and again though they don't they don't come up with a reason as to why that behavior exists. So part of our goal is to explain why states remain trapped and moving on drawing from that analysis what way can we develop effective targeted policy interventions that will move these states out of fragility. Moving forward some of our work will be conceptual some of it is empirical some of it is case study work. Our point is that we need to ground our fragility analysis in solid empirical research but also come up with conceptual framing that would allow us to compare cases individual cases and compare those individual cases with others over time. This gives us an opportunity to look at relative stages of fragility in other words to compare states that are stuck in fragility as well as those that have exited. What we have found is that the literature is telling us that there's significant focus on fragile states especially those that remain trapped but by and large the policies aren't having the intended effects why is that. Well we came up with a an empirical reference point our own work the country indicators for foreign policy project an open source database which has collected data for over a project which is collected data for over the 25 years now we've tracked performance of states over time and we categorize them according to those that have been stuck in fragility trap those that rank highly in our index those that have moved in and out of fragility that is they shift along the index from highly highly fragile to out of the top 40 and those that have successfully exited those states that have been out of the top 40 most fragile states for the last 10 years and in doing so we're able to come up with a list that we feel comfortable making public although there are some controversy here some of you may take issue with some of these cases for a variety of different reasons this is driven largely by our own data work so your results may vary according to the sources you draw on but those states that have been remain remain in our top 10 for the last 20 years or so consist of the front fragility trap countries Afghanistan Pakistan Chad Ethiopia Sudan South Sudan Yemen DRC Somalia Burundi and Uganda those that have safely exited or stabilized and consist of Algeria Bangladesh Benin Cambodia Guatemala Malawi Mozambique and those that have moved in and out of fragility are the list that you can see there now what we're going to do later on is focus on pairs of these cases in each category to explain why we think some states have exited why others have not but for now we're just going to do some conceptual brush clearing so what we did is we looked at those countries that rank in our most extreme cases of fragility and that's the list that we produced you can see over a period of that 1980 to 2014 that's the number of times they appeared in the top 20 so that's quite significant and that's the time their fragility scores exceeded 6.5 which is in our ranking system and I don't have time to detail it would be considered highly fragile so you can see that Afghanistan outstrips all other countries in terms of extreme fragility this despite the fact of the copious amount of aid that has received over the last 20 years Burundi likewise also ranks highly but has only scored 18 times in the top and extreme cases of fragility or with a score of 6.5 or higher now countries that may stand out to you is not being near estimation fragility might include for example Pakistan what Pakistan it's a middle-income country how can it possibly be considered fragile I'll get to that in a minute similarly possibly Uganda you might you might take issue with nevertheless those are the results that we've produced now the question is why do we think those countries are there well we could look at any number of possible explanations and this is all derived from the existing economic literature poverty trap you're probably familiar with the conflict trap the capability trap and the legitimacy trap let me just briefly explain each of these to you poverty trap which has largely been debunked suggests that the poor simply not capable to accumulate and save enough money to invest and therefore remain trapped in poverty other factors including nutritional deficiencies reduce wages and so on and continue to force the quality of life downward well there is some reason to believe that some countries have experienced the poverty trap at a regional level large sample data suggests that it's periodically not true and the question is does this logic apply to our trap states the ones that we just listed conflict track trap essentially argues and you've probably heard it because Paul Collier spoken here many times that those countries that fall into civil war more likely to experience it in the future furthermore those states that are cut up in regional conflict are likely to have their economies driven downward the resource curse is often thought to be anecdotally at least empirically related to the conflict trap in other words if you're graced with the high level of resources you're more likely to find yourselves engaged in conflict again that's dependent on the region and so on capability trap is something we're less familiar with as is the legitimacy trap it is something that has been discussed and examined in detail by Pritchett and his authors and a frequent contributor to studies at the World Institute for Development Economics research but here the reference points are isomorphic mimicry and premature load bearing essentially that these states lack the ability to properly allocate resources to their populations they lack the capabilities in other words although they may have the will they may they may function democratically but the capabilities are lacking and that furthermore donors impose certain demands on them which creates what they call premature load bearing legitimacy trap is almost the opposite countries that have access to resources but as they accrue and generate greater revenue much of that doesn't trickle down and affect the population in a more positive way creating essentially weakness in the government structure of the state and generates what we call lack of legitimacy in other words a disconnect between the population and the and the government government so we have these four potential competing arguments perhaps a complementary we've proxied these with our data set so that we have some nominal measure of each so that arguably each of these should be correlating highly with the fragility trap our results well correlated correlational here also produced through regression study which you can find in our working paper that was produced for for the World Institute but also a book that was forthcoming you'll find greater detail and analysis in it essentially what we find is that the poverty the poverty trap simply doesn't hold for the most extreme cases here we have a positive relationship now if you look anecdotally again at our list of most fragile states we number amongst those couple of middle-income fragile states failed in fragile states or myths MIFFs so that it stands to reason that you know Pakistan's going to drive that up but in other words as states become more fragile at least those stuck into the bottom poverty is not strongly associated with their their characteristic of being trapped similarly conflict for the the sub-sample is weakly correlated not strong as strongly correlated for all those that might be considered fragile so we conclude on the basis of those two observations at least that probably the poverty trap doesn't resonate with the fragility travel all that strongly nor does the conflict trap there may be some mild relationship there but it's not strong where we get into some interesting relationships is in government effectiveness and voice and accountability essentially measures of legitimacy the ability of a government to effectively allocate resources provide public goods and in turn in a reciprocal way be supported by the people I guess this is the belief system that our keynote was speaking of earlier although he I don't think he parsed that out in great detail I think this is the supportive belief system that is functional in many states and lacking in the most fragile states there's a legitimacy trap I think where we want to focus our attention for a couple reasons one is it's largely neglected and poorly understood and it's difficult to do to fix because it typically policy instruments are designed for either improving the economy or reducing conflict for example so I'm not going to go belabor the results you have just sort of sort of said them and it's in in a summary form so what I'm going to do in the brief time that I have available to me is to move on to our case studies and see if we can tease out some of the great more important implications of the of the differences between those that are trapped and those that are have successfully exited so for our type one or trap states we have Yemen and Pakistan type two in and out we call them those that are moving in and out of fragility Malian Laos and type three Bangladesh and Mozambique I'll simply for purposes of simplicity refer to graphs that capture baskets of indicators associate associate with authority legitimacy and capacity which are proxies for the things I talked about earlier the conflict trap and so on we'll look at main inflection points and try to determine why there have been shifts in and out of fragility for some countries of other hasn't been the same for others so in looking at the common elements we find that all six cases that I just identified have experienced conflict at some point in their 35 year window of course a couple of those have been extreme war well others have not all have struggled with democracy some of them some are nominal democracies some are hybrid states some are quasi functional backsliding democracies nevertheless there's some evidence of democracy in at least three of the six now most importantly all six have experienced growth at some point in their 35 year history in fact Mali was in aid darling Pakistan tremendous growth yet we still classify it as a trap state why well let's look at Pakistan's fragility ranking in relative to other countries we see if you take as that baseline average that Pakistan has moved in and out of the top 20 over that time period it's spent by our estimation more time below the line than above putting it in trapped status category now it is moving up and who knows what the current government will achieve but our suggestion is that it has remained trapped for sufficiently long time that we can conclude that it has serious structural issues our trend line with the upward line suggesting increasing levels of fragility and associate with our subset categories authority legitimacy capacity also indicate that Pakistan has struggled Yemen as you know has gone through sporadic cataclysmic upheavals not withstanding the most recent case which we don't cover in this data but there has been a general upward shift in its fragility scores over time and by and large it spent more time below the line making extremely fragile than above why well what we found is three things lethal and vicious feedback loops in which the shoring up of authority structures in other words the clamping down on civil and political rights which simply leads to more uprising rebellion which in turn leads to more clamping down so in other words you know instead of an opening up the society we get a closing down elite bargaining essentially elites conspire to seek out rents either from the aid community or from a variety of different other sources including military and development assistance Yemen lack of control over ungoverned spaces and very weak patron client relationships and all ultimately a minimal commitment to reform an inability to effectively implement reform because the elites are constrained by and non-autonomous actors who are held back by the constituents they represent I don't mean the elected the electoral population but rather the people to which they are beholden moving on to Molly because they don't have a lot of time and you can access this data through our working paper as I said earlier you can see Molly has moved in and out of the fragility line putting it in what we call in and out status and it's trendwork it's upward trend suggest increasing levels of fragility over time whoops and I just lost my slides and there's Laos similar kind of problem but not quite as severe Jeremy scores being increasing significantly in the last five years or so so what makes these countries moving what suggests what is suggestive of these countries moving in and out of their high levels of fragility well they more than any other country in our study they emulate forms of democratization reform without actually implementing that reform Molly probably more than any other country in our case study a country that has claimed to implement aid reform and democratization but it's failed to do so in combination with the inability to control on undergoverned spaces and I nuanced this a bit more in our paper I know it's problematic there's a ultimately a loss of control over territory and loss of revenue associated with that keep in mind that one of decisions by the Molly elite was to decentralize and also weak in the military for fear that they the government would experience another coup while there was net result of that was a fairly weak state apparatus opening up the opportunity for incursion of twaric rebels in the north but long before that was a weakening of the state structure in the northern hinterlands Laos in similar ways is is weak but it's rent seeking elites largely benefit from the growth of its neighbors Vietnam and China and so on and so there has been some some shift of this country outwards out of fragility and there's if there's good news here it is probably that Laos will be dragged along with its regional neighbors out of fragility whereas Molly is probably likely to fall back into it now we come to our success stories and perhaps success should be in quotations because there's great deal of debate as to whether we've captured these states effectively and one of our speakers me big issue with the way we've characterized Mozambique nevertheless we do consider these countries to have successfully exited fragility you can see that Bangladesh in particular has moved thoroughly out of that top 40 ranking significantly and it won't it only really falls back into it when there's an election and there's some contestation and high levels of violence between the elected elites and it's trends not nearly as promising here you can see down the trends great post-election period but a lot of large not stellar news but certainly good news is that this country has now has a GDP per capita in Pakistan its neighbor which if you think where this country was on fact both of these countries walked into the war just prior to the onset of a period last life of candidates find a way up to the Mozambique story not nearly as good indeed you can see that downward dip in the last five years towards increasing levels of agility and for where it has probably done better in terms of legitimacy with the opening of the political process what capacity continues to struggle with capacity of reference to economic development. So why have these countries succeeded well whereas the others have not there has been commitment to reform among states essentially we get a process in Bangladesh a successful civilization keeping in mind for all intents and purposes but there has been an opening up of the political process what's most important in Bangladesh is my estimation that there's been greater inclusion of participants in the political process and despite what our keynote said today forms of what we would call virtuous corruption in which money has certainly been spent unwisely perhaps through bribes as well but that money finds its way back into the economy so as long as there is a capital flight that money is contributing to this country's growth or so the story goes in addition to that commitment to reform and certainly saw it in Mozambique's case post-peace process opening up massive transformation of political orientation there has been complementary and substitution in civil society organizations in the face of Bangladesh filling gaps where government appears to tread as incapable of engaging particularly with respect to poverty are these countries resilient that's our question here there are constraints in both cases surely a patient client relationships are holding back democratic society corruption is also a mainstream issue there human capital I think is a key driver for this country monocled system certainly there seem to be commitment in this country that this is a country that can succeed and has here's been supported in doing so by the international community Mozambique probably the last positive ending given their emerging North South divides and increasing loss of accountability which are weakening the overall economic in this country so what do we take from this fact occur when the state fails to establish strong legitimacy even in the face of improved capacity you can have a strong economy if your government isn't legitimately nice to people and we've seen that in the most extreme case of Pakistan the enemy so legitimacy for us hold the key the risk non-states phase is the closure of the political system even when economic growth is achieved so you have to have that balance in economic growth and strong political structures which are open and accountable and representative I know it sounds perhaps easy to say but that relationship between states is not an absolutely central to creating this illness more specifically and with respect to isomorphic memory you need to look closely at how a local needs interact with nationalities are they on the same page is rent seeking working to subvert the activities of the national state apparatus at the local level well this remains important for knowledge when we see a lot of localized rent seeking development community which is not constrained with the larger state apparatus. I'm going to wrap it up here with implications for policy why reforms don't work in cross-states leaders can simply perpetuate their gains if they're able to survive with a small support base they tie their own benefits to the welfare of the fence that's supposed to enter from their particular policies even if the state lacks the overwhelming ability to affect change they will not the leaks will not affect change if they don't have the autonomy to do so. They're the older sector to survive. This is crucially understanding Pakistan's situation. I'm skeptical that the current leader can actually implement reforms but I think he's too caught up in the nation. The elites in this case are large he goes around accountable they're not lacking and without being held up to account they have to lose affecting change that benefits them and not the larger population. So what do we do with all this? We need to look at the clear disconnect between the desire for reform and the allocation of aid. In particular the implication is that they need to focus more on the government whether it's indigenous or otherwise and see whether the elites are actually acting in the interests of the working population. Indigenous systems of governance in other words are absolutely crucial. If you look at the output side as well ultimately is they having an effect that is intended is service delivery improving because ultimately service delivery will be a key component in determining whether or not the state is acting in the interests of the population. We can parse that in a number of different ways and then finally talk to the population who surveys find out how they feel about the government structures in place. Do they feel that they're being treated not very well? Is there an inequitable distribution of resources? You may get different viewpoints depending on the country you're examining. One would have to guess that more positive upbeat perceptions exist than the effect as opposed to the quality.


Yeah, we on boss talk one-on-one. Yeah, we gonna check it man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah My guys here man team on the building man stop playing Yeah, yeah, T-Mobile Actually, this is in Texas.  I'm too on point. Just like a cloaking dagger I ain't just saying that because my song on cloaking dagger You think the niggas popping cuz they entertaining rappers.  I was a stand up I'm glad you actually noticed that both of what I'm the coldest in Texas Not just my city and really I took it global potential to make a million people switching a modus move from the hood It's still gotta watch for the rats and roaches look two words most bars separate me so far down into designer But my travel luggage go yard hot sex with your bra the whole north Well, how you thinking she always in debt with the maker has she oh god South on shatty I got from the flea market.  Gotta pay attention Can't you surf and see the end of workings?  You did now. You're hurting. I ain't learned that lesson cuz right to this day I grip the burden could turn the most popular nigga to a missing persons was born around them animals Like a Christmas sermon Was popular nigga to a missing persons was born a random animal just like a Christmas sermon that songs on TV Spit for sway. How could you call me local video game on the grand champ? How could you call me local nigga really make racks from rap? How could you call me local globally my name good fellas? That's worth the Ray Liotta came from the mud with no biggie the sky's the limit you better fix your grill like a Dennis I've been a minute. It only hold 30. I'm trying to put 50 in the clip look like Mexican stuff in a hundred I got the cheese. I got the chips. I feel like chest.  These are the sounds of separation That means I don't need you heavies the head that wears the crown I rather that than leeches these goofy flexing gotta watch for the slaters and screeches See how amazing my speeches you gotta pay for these features Man, I need it.


Okay, this is the second in our series of videos about MOSMOD, and in this video we will be introducing policies, and in particular discussing the definitional policies, and introducing the tax and benefit policies. First, I want to go back to the user interface, which we looked at in the last session, and look at that in a little bit more detail. As I've already indicated, the policies are listed in the second column in the user interface. That's their actual names. The policies are usually named for the output variable. They're clearly described in the comment column, and classified between definitional policies that begin with D E F, tax policies that begin with T A X, social insurance policies that begin with S I C, and benefit policies that begin with B E N. Now the ordering of the policies is important, and that ordering is called the spine, and then you can see there's numbers running from 1 through to 18, and for each of the policies, and that's the order in which they're simulated. The order sometimes doesn't make any difference, but for some policies you need to have the result of a previous simulation before you can simulate the policy you're looking at. So the order is crucial and needs thinking about. So for example, if a policy to give some kind of social benefit required that the person wasn't receiving some other kind of social benefit, then it would have to be placed after the other social benefit, so that the simulation could make a check to see whether it had already allocated the previous benefit, in which case that might disqualify you from the subsequent benefit. I hope that's clear, but basically ordering is important, and that ordering list is referred to as the spine. As I indicated, there are three types of policy, there are definitional policies such as the first policy, up rating. There are tax policies both direct like income tax and simplified tax, but there are also indirect taxes like VAT, and then there are benefits in which case mainly the direct social support programme, and I also indicated that there are social insurance policies too. I'm going to go through the definitional policies in more detail, and when I do so I will actually flip to the model and talk briefly about each one of them. So there are up rating factors, that's important because the data set is a data set for 2008-9, yet we've got policies for 2015, so data from the data set needs to be up rated in various ways. There are income policies, income concepts, excuse me, those are defined in income lists and we'll go through those in a bit more detail. There's a definitional policy on tax units, and tax units describe the composition of households and if there are special definitions of other groupings within the household they're contained in these tax units, so a couple may be defined in a tax unit, a family as a subset of a household may be defined in a tax unit, etc. Constants are, as the word indicates, things that don't change within the model, it's where values of benefits are often put, it's where tax bans and tax rates may be put, it makes it much easier to update the model if you've got those figures as constants rather than hard coded into the model. And then there are two expenditure variable policies relating respectively to value added tax expenditure and excise duty expenditure. And then there's a standard output at individual level definitional policy. Now one and four, that's up rating factors and constants definitions will need probably annual up rating, I mean certainly the up rating will and often the constants will. Two and six may need amendment if a new benefit or tax is introduced, so that's the income lists and the output policy. The definitional tax unit will rarely need amending, basically they're set to reflect arrangements in the particular country. And of course the expenditure variables will only need amendment with the introduction of a new data set. Now I'm going to take those one at a time and talk in a little bit more detail. So if we look at up rating factors, this policy inflates values in the input data set to bring them up to date and is used with the up rating indices country tool. So as I said the underpinning data set for Mods and Mods is currently 2009 and therefore for 2015 all values need to be adjusted for inflation. What inflator is the CPI, that's what will be used for things that aren't specifically specified but other specific inflators can be specified for particular values. For example, earnings are inflated by wage inflator calculated by looking at annual changes in the minimum wage averaged across all sectors. Now let's go and look at the model and look at up rating factors. So here's the model and if we look at the model the first policy is up rating and let's look at it here. So the data set is specified, this is the data set we're working on and then the default factor and then a special factor for wage and self employment income. Now they're referred to as a factor that begins with the dollar sign, a bit like a constant as we'll see. Now they're actually in the country tools there's an up rating indices section which is where you define these factors and the factors are defined here. You can see that there's a CPI total, CPI food, non food, general wage inflator, CPI for alcohol, tobacco and fuel. These are differently used in different parts of the model but they're all contained together in an up rating indices section and additional years can be added, years can be deleted and that manages if you like up rating. So that's where those values for these three factors that are in our up rate policy are stored. I'll close that and go back to the model, sorry the presentation. Okay the next is I've mentioned constants and the constants contained in MOSMOD are shown actually in this screenshot. They mainly actually relate at the moment to the rates for excise duty, VAT etc. Now that doesn't mean they're the only constants that exist within the model, there are other constants and one of the tasks on this year's agenda is to move more of the hard coded amounts within the model into constants. Now I've mentioned income concepts or income lists, there are many different income concepts and required to simulate taxes and benefits. So for example the income components included in the means test for social transfers or the income components that make up taxable income. So the policy Ildef underscore MZ specifies which income components relate to each income concept or income list. It's not necessary often to amend this particular policy as I indicated earlier but it's something that one needs to be aware of. So here are the income lists in MOSMOD itself and you can see that it covers taxable income used for non-employment income, taxable income used for PAYE, for simplified tax etc. I'll move to the model to actually show you these in more detail. So if we look at the income lists, first of all income list, taxable income used in personal income tax for 2015 for non-employment income if no simplified tax is payable. When we look through the model in the final video I will explain that in more detail but important to know that the income list is slightly different in cases where there's no simplified tax, basically it includes self-employment income. So here is the income list, you've got income from employment which isn't relevant because that's dealt with directly in the model. There's other income, income from property, income from agriculture, income from self-employment income from interest. Now what an income list does is basically adds, if there's a plus sign, those incomes together and puts them in that income list which is a bit like a composite variable. It's the way to think of it I think. For some income lists, if you put a minus as opposed to a plus then it will subtract that from the total. So there are income lists for simplified tax where you have self-employment turnover added to agricultural turnover for the simplified tax income list for example. And then some income lists are actually standard income lists that are defined for example, original income and disposable income etc. Again these familiarity with these will come with familiarity with the model and in my final video I will go through all of the income lists. Okay, now back to the presentation, there's now we want to talk about tax units. Tax units are groups of people, I sort of indicated that, individual, couple, family, household. Family and household may be synonymous in Mozambique and some countries they're quite closely defined and don't include necessarily all members of a household. And tax units determine who's included during the policy simulation for example. Local income tax is calculated now at the individual level. One of the means tests for the direct social support program depends on per capita household income being below a certain amount. So that's calculated at the household level and these levels are specified and have to be specified in each policy but not usually necessary to order these definitions. So I'll just quickly again shift to the model itself and give you a site of the so-called tax unit definition. So actually in MozMod we have a household, as you'd expect that's all members of the household. We don't have a family definition in MozMod in the conventional way but we do have a particular kind of family that we use in some policies and we have obviously individual but we also have couple. So these are one, two, three, four different tax units that are defined. And the tax units we'll say something about and I'll give you an example, sometimes quite complicated to grasp but this particular family unit includes, it's a subgroup of household, it includes dependent relatives, it has a condition for partners and a condition for children. Back to the presentation, all of this will become clearer as one uses the model but as I said these particular concepts are not likely to need amendments very often. So we then move to tax policies. We have a policy for income tax, simplified tax, value added tax and excise duties. So two direct tax policies, income tax and simplified tax and two indirect value added tax and excise duties and these can be extremely complex and indeed income taxes is very complex in Mozambique, simplified tax on the other hand is very straightforward and they're only likely to need amendment if for example we're testing out new ways of financing new benefits or if the tax system is radically overhauled. I'll go just quickly to indicate tax policies. Let me start with the straightforward turnover tax. The turnover tax is a tax for people in self employment whose turnover is less than 2.5 million Metacals a year and it's a very straightforward and simple tax. The person, often an informal trader or whatever, doesn't have to keep accounts, they're simply charged 3% on their actual turnover, it's a very straightforward policy. Income tax on the other hand is a much more complex policy. This is the PAYE income tax policy and as you can see if I fully expand it, it actually starts here, there's actually quite a lot of computations which conclude down here. No need to get baffled by this at this stage, again with experience of the model all of these and method, what do I want to say, clear thinking these policies can be perfectly well understood by anyone that can understand simple formulas, they really are basically simple conditions of entitlement and simple formulae so really nothing to get concerned about and probably will require quite infrequent amendment. Okay moving on to benefit policies, we've got really two main ones, the direct social support program and the basic social support program and we're going to cover these in a future session so I won't mention more at this stage. I talked about the spine and it's worth repeating, it's a list of policies simulated by Mozmod, each policy is numbered and ordered in the main window and policies are executed in the order by the program itself so it's imperative for example that policies which depend on information generated by an earlier policy are positioned after that policy and that's what I was indicating earlier so I think the activity associated with this particular presentation is to explore the model, identifying different types of policy and becoming familiar with the definitional policies which form the basic framework of the model and then in the next session we will look at social benefit policies in more detail and indeed in that session we will look at the construction of each policy in terms of functions and parameters and that's all for this session, thank you.


I'm sorry about that. Good, thank you to Brown Rivers, everyone. Welcome, and again, just to reiterate message from the previous talk, thanks for sticking around with us on the last talk of the day. I just felt a lovely breeze, however, on my back, so it's nicely freshened me up for the talk now. So just some very quick introductions. So I'm Jamie Morris, I'm based in the Higher Education Futures Institute at the University of Birmingham. And then, I'm Joey Spink. I'm also based within, I'm gonna say, HEFE. Yeah, yeah, if we use the term HEFE, it's an abbreviation for the Higher Education Futures Institute just to clarify that acronym. We tend to use acronyms a lot in not just our institution, but nearly every institution. So just clarify that. So what we'd like to do is give you a very, very brief whistle-stop tour again, and contain some of our reflections from certainly the last couple of years, organizing and managing our annual learning and teaching conference in HEFE as well. So we will give you a bit of context on exactly what HEFE is. But I think then get into the really interesting part, which is where Joey will come in and talk about what tech we used to really facilitate that and bring it to life and make it an ongoing and active event as well. So as I mentioned, HEFE, so with the Higher Education Futures Institute, that's a very brief synopsis of what our mission statement is. The reality of that is that we do a lot, lots of different things that encompass that, but we are a staff-facing development unit and very, very roughly what we aim to do is encourage staff to adopt good learning and teaching practices, be it generally, but also using our core digital tools at the university as well. So again, we are based centrally, and we've been around since around 2017, which predates certainly when I joined in 2018. And we very crudely have two strands of work and team. So I'm in the educational development team. So we run various accredited programs at the university. So that includes a PG certain higher education for new staff at the university who are involved in teaching and learning, but also having our in-house professional recognition scheme to apply for fellowships at the Higher Education Academy as well, which we call the Beacon Scheme as well. So that's roughly what we do. There are lots more provision that we do, but that's in a nutshell what education development aims to do is core. And we also have our happy digital team, which have a mixture really of centrally based staff, but also teams that are situated within colleges as well. So quite an interesting mix. And I suppose it's worth also noting as well that in relation to the conference, it often acts as quite a nice focal point for educational development and digital to come together. I think historically we have been quite separate in some elements and the certain collaboration that it goes on, but I think the conference often provides a nice opportunity to bring us together. We do tend to deliver the conference at the end of the academic year as well. So it acts as quite a nice culmination, I think, and reflecting on the academic year gone and just offering a space really for staff who are based within our colleges and in professional services to come together and talk about their learning and teaching practices on whichever theme we base the conference on. So if you go to the next one, Joey. So just to give you a taster really of what we do in relation to our annual learning and teaching conferences in HEPI, they tend to be focused and certainly influenced by what's going on externally as well. So if I point to this here, you can just see a very rough overview of what we've done since 2018, since I've joined in terms of having a very rough overarching theme. And then it's our job institutionally to explore that and offer that space for people to come in and showcase what they do in relation to learning and teaching. I suppose just to reiterate the overall aim of what we want to talk about is our narrative will really focus on our reflections from 2022 and 2023. So our conference on sustainable education also had a sub theme of future skills, but also it was really influenced by the sustainable development goals. And also the 2023 version this year, which we'll finish with some reflections on, was very much influenced by the teaching excellence framework of having recently submitted narrative for that. And we decided on educational gains because it was very much this nebulous area that I think in particular how you sort of articulate is quite interesting to get people from different disciplines and then talk about their practice. So that's roughly what we want to do at the conferences very generally as well. Yeah, so in terms of what that looks like, there's quite a lot involved in the planning of a conference. And I think where that kind of a Dev and Digital strands of heavy meat is kind of how to maximize the efficiency of that conference in terms of inputs. So how we're having people engage with the conference, whether that be on our Edge Basin based campus or Dubai campus, how we make that feel like one conference and not two kind of distinct versions of the same conference and then how we make sure those themes are permeating through how we do all of that. So initially, one of the challenges we had coming into planning HEPI 22 we're looking at now was a sudden peak in COVID again. And we're talking a week, a week and a half before the conference ran, which meant that we weren't just getting dropouts of people that were attending, but we were getting dropouts of people who were planning on speaking. So suddenly a conference that was designed as being the kind of big return of face-to-face conferences for HEPI had to pivot slightly and provide a bit more of a hybrid model than we were planning on. There was always some intention to deliver hybrid in some capacity. So as we mentioned, we have the Dubai campus. There was a need to provide a version of the conference that was accessible to them. Suddenly we had speakers that had to be presenting from home and whether that be through COVID or I think we had a speaker who rolled his ankle the morning of the conference. So it still managed to speak, but had to do it remotely. All of those factors meant that we suddenly had to rapidly change the way we were approaching a lot of this. The themes of sustainability permeated through. So we had poster presentations. We made sure that those posters were displayed on screens rather than printed. And that kind of idea of having things digitally available where possible also folded through to our conference app. So all that being kind of pulled into one place as a kind of central focus for the digital aspects of the conference. And then again, a quick touch on the Dubai campus provision. So all the sessions were recorded, but there was that need to kind of deliver it in remote where possible. And there was kind of some conversations and decisions on how much of the conference do we offer. And I think one of the takeaways from heavy 22 was that we probably bit off a bit more than we could chew in terms of the delivery of that remote conference. Partially coupled with the amount of work we were taking on partially coupled with the changes on schedule, but there was kind of an attempt that streaming as much as possible. And actually that meant that the requirements from staff members to support that was much higher. So the next slide to take you through our conference app which is really kind of the centerpiece of everything that we put together. We say it's an app, it's not really an app. It's of course developed in Articulate Rise, which if you don't know, it's a browser based authoring software. The idea behind this was to provide the resources and agenda for the conference as easily accessible as possible. So we could send this out via a link. If you look at the top right hand corner, we're able to stream essentially the same version of this app on any device, which meant that we could send it out beforehand so people get an idea of the program, but then on the day they could use their phones and still be looking through that program initially. What you'll see is we actually ended up expanding the use of that much more than we initially intended. So all of the conference recordings eventually sat in the app, all of the resources, so whether that be posters, slides, any of the kind of peripheral stuff around the sorts of the launching stuff of the conference, that all sat within the app. And actually became a bit of a bigger project than we initially intended, but one that was really well received. So we go to the next slide. We've got some feedback. So we had an average of 4.5 for our overall experience, really positive. The hybrid presentations were received really well. And I think from our point of view, that felt like the more chaotic side of it. We felt like that was maybe where we fell over and definitely took some of those learnings into the next conference. And the conference app was praised. And I think this comment from that feedback really informed a lot of what we did the next year, which was we felt the app was quite good, but kind of didn't really see that practically on the day. But we got some feedback saying that it felt like it was a treasure trove of conference resources and meant that there was a support resource there that was there well beyond the conference itself, the feedback we got was. So that was really interesting because this thing that was initially just a digital program actually became a real focal point for the feedback we got. So moving forward, what did we take into HEFE 23? This was predominantly a face-to-face campus and a face-to-face conference. And because we didn't have the complications of needing to provide hybrid as consistency, as consistently, if we had Edge Bass and colleagues, they were told that it would be face-to-face, they would be on campus. Remote provision was simply for Dubai. So there were some conversations around how we do that. We developed a Dubai-specific program. So the decision was made to slightly scale back what we were doing before, not stream every room because that kind of prevented flexibility on the day, but take one room, stream that room fully for Dubai, make sure the campus know which rooms are available, know what they're gonna be seeing from that and know kind of how to expect that. But also part of the decision to make sure Dubai didn't feel like they were just watching a stream of a conference, but they were in a conference, informed some of the other stuff we did. So the conference app suddenly became less passive. So all the questions for the day ran through the app. Every room had a paddling wall, that paddling wall was used to answer questions whether or not you were in the room watching Geat Ball sat at home in Dubai. And that meant that there was an equal footing in terms of whose question was gonna get asked and whose ideas could be kind of explored within the room. We included the social media wall and a specific Dubai program to them. So again, pulling that out of the app and giving them their own version so they weren't seeing, well, I can see one room but there's actually eight rooms, but it felt like a focused curated program for them. And then making sure we were plastering hashtags plus all of those social media channels. So that again, all that kind of feedback from social media whether that be on Edge, Boston or Dubai comes into the same place. And that has a kind of development of the app as the kind of, I guess central side part of the conference really kind of improved my use of Peppy 23. And then one of the more important things we did, it's underrated, but we pulled in a lot of students to volunteer, which meant that some of those problems we were having in the first year, people not knowing where the rooms were, people arriving late and not having their badges. Some of the people that were more technically able to support weren't involved in those queries. We had students who could help make sure people knew how to get to the app and where they were going, which meant that I essentially sat in a room and helped stream a room all day, but means that some of those kind of firefighting issues that are the crop of the day that you can't expect, you've suddenly got slightly more capable people available to support on. I guess it's also part of an ongoing, I guess area of strategy, I suppose, to bring in happy to start including students in lots of our core areas and core practices. So although quite a small inclusion in terms of bringing students in and helping with the organization is actually huge just so we could focus efforts, particularly on that hybrid room that we used in the end was not. Yeah, it didn't all go perfectly. So this is the stream that we have from Dubai. I think you'll pretty quickly notice that there's no heads in that image. That was a result of using a teaching space room that was tested for use a day before the conference. Everything was fine in between us testing and getting the conference running. So when it'd been in there, the camera had been moved. So there's definitely takeaways to pull from that to make sure that you can see faces, but also understand that the conference is bigger than Hethi working in a building, but there are other departments that handle other parts of this that need to be aware that there are parts of this conference that need to run smoothly. They also involve quite a lot of running across campus. So the next slide is just us with trolleys and hundreds of bottles of water running across campus. The sorts of things that you don't really think about, you buy water for your conference, you put it in your office, you forget that that needs to get to the conference. So it was a very sweaty morning running through that. But overall, I think Hethi 23 went really well and there's some really good feedback we can kind of pull from that looking into next year. Yeah, and yeah, as Javi said, there were certainly areas in regards to the sort of tech components that we can take away and improve on, particularly the headless keynotes and various other things. But yeah, I think in generally went well. The RISE app was evaluated quite well and mentioned quite consistently in the feedback that we got, which was great and it was great to see also the active component mentioned as well. The social media one was great, wasn't it? It was a real sort of hit overall and that consistent place to sort of reference the social media engagement was great. And also the inclusion of that student voice, as we mentioned, we've been trying to do a bit more consistently was also mentioned as well. I think actually the feedback overall was, as I mentioned, very much positive in relation to that, but also we did get some slightly negative feedback around some of the more logistical elements of the day, which were things that we can address. So we were comfortable with that in the end. So if you wanna go on to the last couple slides, Joey. So we have put together a very short list of our sort of lessons learned and recommendations and those of you who have been involved in conference organization might agree. We mentioned that RISE was received well and I think we'll continue to use that, I think for the next conference. The idea of making sure, particularly for that Dubai element and not treating it like an add-on, but as something that's core and central to the development of the conference program was key in something that will be continuing to do. And one thing that was really useful, particularly just to give an overview and ensure people were confident on the day when facilitating sessions were giving very detailed briefing documents and offering a space to brief any facilitators before the day as well. So they were also received very positive. If you go on to the next slide, which I think is the last in terms of the slides around this, it was also good to have a look at some of the literature. There was actually an article based on organizing and delivering hybrid conferences and higher education, which was great. So there were some examples of recommendations. There were around 15 or 16 of these recommendations or slightly more. And it was just great to have a look at some literature which basically reinforces some of the principles that we'd adopted in the first place, which is like a slightly backwards way of doing it, but it was always good to know that some of those are reinforced. And in particular, and it's something that's been noticeable today as well, is the importance of having those spaces for interaction, for that informal networking and digesting the talks as well. So I think that's it from us, I believe. Happy to take any questions. Otherwise, thanks everyone for coming along and listening to us. Thank you. Yes. Thanks. Thank you. It's always me that goes first with the questions. I thought that was brilliant. I'm really, really interested. I'm responsible for organizing our... I like your branding, HEFE conference. Ours is very imaginatively called the Huddersfield University Teaching and Learning Conference. So I think we need to look at that. I think we need to look at our branding. I think you've done some fantastic stuff there. I just wonder if I could contact you after this and we could share ideas and share your experiences and perhaps leverage some of the fantastic things you've done to organize our conference next year. We are face-to-face. We don't do hybrid. We didn't do hybrid in 2022. Either we wanted to have that social and peer networking element to our conference. Actually, 22 was relatively successful. We had quite a high take up on that. But I'd love to talk to you offline and bring some of my other team in to have that conversation. Look at the stuff you've done and pin some of your ideas if that's okay. Easy answer to that, yeah? Happy to do that, yeah? Great, thank you. Absolutely. Happy days. Thank you. Yeah, I think we've got time for one more question. I don't want to keep anyone from drinks, which I'm sure are out there, but I think I think you deserve another question. Yeah, it's fantastic. The organization looks really good. Just in terms of my reflection on when I've engaged with conferences online, have you noticed any difference or did you notice any kind of difference in the engagement to your face-to-face participants in the online with things like the engagement with the Padlet? Was that something you were even able to get some kind of metric on? Yes. So the majority of the Padlet comments from Dubai was that they couldn't see any faces, which was useful feedback. I think we didn't necessarily have a way of determining which ones were from Dubai and which ones were from the room. Partly by design, I think the idea of having them all feel like one bank of questions meant that we weren't really asking them to differentiate. We had consistent viewers in the room. I think the sign-ups from Dubai weren't huge, but it's not as big a campus. So I think where we were looking at a few hundred kind of on campus, we were looking at kind of within the 10s and 20s in Dubai.  We'd say that if the technical side of things and the cameras were working better, maybe the retention for some of those is that they went on would have stuck around. But also the timing is weird. It gets later there quicker than it does with our conference program. So I think there's some feedback we got from them and all the feedback kind of spoke to what we already saw. So it's good to know that we were at least planning on fixing problems that did exist and weren't being given new ones. Perhaps there's some room for us to... Perhaps there's some room for us to think about because what's missing when you attend online, unless you specifically design it in, which I think we could do the next time, is where that social interaction takes place. You're there and you can follow along with the sessions, but what goes on beyond that in terms of networking and that collaboration and conversations that happen is probably something that we could potentially consider the next year as well. Okay, thanks everyone for coming. Thank you to the four speakers today. I hope you've had a good day, one of this conference and have a lovely day two and three as well. Thank you very much.


Hold on a second, we'll save that for a little later on, Sean Colvin. Anyhow, what I've talked now about something that is happening next week, it's Social Inclusion Week, I touched on this yesterday on the show, but I'm talking about a couple of guests now, we're going to flesh it out a little bit more and it's going to be launched this Saturday by Cahir Look, Councillor Lee and Blaney and in Greenham Theatre Saturday afternoon, half-past one is the launch and then followed by a big festival of colour hosted by the letter Kenny Indian community. But Mary Clyde, who's coordinator of I don't think all the public participation network and the artistic director with Yellowwood Arts and a programs manager with the Waterside Theatre, Andrew McNulty have joined me in the studio and good afternoon to you both. Good afternoon. Hi John. Especially you Andrew, scenes were the movies together many, many years ago. We were indeed. Just to explain, it was a scene, well we actually weren't, we were filmed in the scene and we never even made the funny start again. I know it was terrible, I had all my family sitting around as well, John, to watch the film, yeah, and total disappointment when I couldn't be seen. I'm coming up now and no worries, puff of smoke, that was it. Secret of Rowan Anish. Amira, you said, oh fair, is that going to go? Did you actually, you've seen it? I saw it in Lifford cinema many moons ago. It's sitting there on your own watching it. Well not on this big crowd there now. All your fans were there waiting to see it, very, very disappointed that you went. I can imagine, yeah. Anyhow, back to the present and back to Social Inclusion Week. An overview of this, explain what's, what is the purpose of it. So the idea behind Social Inclusion Week is to reach out to communities, maybe living in disadvantage or not being able to participate in usual activities. And this is a way of, in particular, working from the Public Participation Network, which is kind of a community and voluntary social inclusion, an environmental body that reaches out into communities, works with community groups, and gives community groups and individuals the opportunity to represent themselves on public committees and stuff like that to as well of interest. So what Mary and myself have done was we came together and Mary came up with a timetable and said, let's try and fill this now, see what we can do, see how we can reach into those different communities. Well, you certainly have filled it. Now I misunderstood this yesterday. I thought it was reaching out to newly arrived communities and not necessarily, not that anybody's excluded as such. In fact, it's the opposite, but there's not that particular focus. And Mary, you have filled the programme, both and beyond. Yeah, yeah. I suppose maybe backtracking during COVID, we did an awful lot of online activities and there's quite a few of these now incorporated into this as well, because people have been coming back and saying, oh, what about the yoga? What about the mindfulness? So doing the well-being as well, because I think that's really important because there's still issues, a lot of issues. So I was just going to ask you that. Things are still not 100 percent. They're still not back to where it is. Absolutely not. And we have found up with a lot of our groups when we're reaching out to them that the numbers have depleted. A lot of people just aren't coming out again or they're slower to come out again as well and engage just in person. For different reasons. Some people just get out of the habit of going out. Now you have to be encouraged and coaxed. Yeah, to come back again, you know. And by social inclusion, we can initiatives like this, it gives us the opportunity to provide a platform once again for them to come out, to mix and hopefully provide some kind of activities that they can all get around and it will be of interest to you as well. Well, there's plenty of activities here and they're all very accessible and it's important to stress that they're all free. Absolutely. So let's zip through a few of them. And it starts actually tomorrow really with First Aid and CPR out to Mannequinningham. But on then to the launch, which is on Saturday. And after that launch then there's a festival of colour and that's hosted by Indian community. That's a family event. But from there on, let's say Sunday, for instance, in the town park in Lattacanny. We'll do an over and back here. Wherever you've organised an event or you're over familiar with it, then step in. So I'm not too sure what you're supposed to do. So the sports partnership are actually having a less family event in the park on Sunday too as well. So that's from 10 o'clock until 2 o'clock. Monday then there's, I'll just stay with you Andrew for this, a Donegal community garden. This looks to be a big event because it's a gathering of groups all around the county and that's going to be at the vestry in Nettocanny. That's right, yeah. That's the Donegal community garden network. They're the spring gathering event. So community groups will be invited to a networking morning there. And we know there's scattered all around the county and it's a great initiative. We're just a chance to come together, talk, meet, plan. That'd be great. That'd be absolutely. And that network already exists as well and it's very well supported. And one of our own secretariat members, Joanne Butler, will actually be heavily involved in that too as well. So she'll be looking and leading out on that too as well. Okay, I'm married to Monday and there's, well there's yoga and there's music and there's a workshop, a couple of those online. Yeah, yeah. The Zoom is our first one and this healing flow yoga Jacqueline Toner from Nettocanny and she did a load of these with us previously and she's very, very good, excellent. Okay. So it's nice for people to get, people to get involved in that as well. You know, it's online and it suits all abilities. So anybody can take, you know, it's chair yoga. So anybody can take part in it. But it's really, really good. Yeah. And it's, yeah. Andrew, sorry. The music, yep. That's going into the nursing homes and stuff like that. That's on a Monday too as well. That's with two great guys. That's Jack McHale and Miles McIver. And this is following on from my work. It's great crossover work that I have in Derry too as well. These two guys, we devised a project where they would go into residential care settings and they would work with older people in those settings and they actually created a brand new piece of music into a CD. So this is going to be like a mini version of that where they're going to go in and they're going to play a few tunes and they're going to try and just come up with a wee song by the end of the day and rattle that out then too as well. So it's a great idea. Now, on Tuesday, there's a walkability audit in the Melton. What's that Mary? It's ourselves with the Donegal County Council Access, Officer of Trudy O'Reilly. And we've done these in a few different towns that have regeneration going on and we take people with different levels of disabilities and, you know, older people and children and buggies and we go around towns and walk and we look at the issues that are there and then we send the report to, you know, the regeneration team to look at the issues, you know, because there are a lot of issues in town. And I hope that, yeah, there's money there to do things. So hopefully it'll impact then on that. And Andrew, there's an art class on Tuesday as well. This is a very special art class. I work with a group called Different Strokes for Different Folks, who have now evolved into Yellowwood Arts. Yellowwood Arts are an arts and health group. So what it does by arts and health, there's many different types of arts, there's arts and disability, there's traditional arts, take a listen at the theatre or in a gallery, arts and health is where we pair up a professional artist and the person, the service user themselves too as well. And they create art, they co-design, co-create art. And the idea came about when I was working with a great guy, Larry Masterson. And he also has an event on Tuesday that I better mention as well, Joe. It's aphasia conversation group. And that is for people with aphasia. It's also called aphasia cafe. And Larry will be heading that along with a speech in language therapist too as well. And that's to provide a facility for those with aphasia because it's quite a challenging, I suppose, thing to have in aphasia because it affects your speech and your language. This provides a very safe environment, led by Larry and Louise, where they can come in on Tuesday and that is in the central library at 11am. I could see a point in there. But the art class, if I can scoot back to that very quickly, so that came out of Yellowwood Arts and Arts and Health. But it is going to be led by Fiona McGee. Fiona McGee herself had a stroke there a few years back and she was a teacher in Little Angels here and she was unable to carry on her career. But after getting involved with a few of the different projects, and I'll speak about one of those that's happened on Thursday, after getting involved in a few of those Arts and Health projects, she's built up the confidence now to take on a class for herself. So what about our opportunity then Social Inclusion Week to have an Arts and Health project led by the artist herself, Fiona. And she's terrific. She's great. She this all evolved and Mary made mention of it earlier too as well from COVID and online where everything was pushed online. And Fiona actually, we were running a series of classes with stroke and brain injury survivors online. And they were general drama based. But Fiona actually said that she would do an art one one night and we all drew Donald Duck and it was fantastic. And I was delighted with myself. It was really good, really, really good. Over the course of the week, there's a focus on cybercrime awareness and this being highlighted at most of the events. And on Wednesday, for instance, there's something titled fraud fighters and data heroes workshop. So that ties in with that theme. Yep. Yeah. It's all to do with scams and frauds, which everybody's just all too well. Not that we're over familiar with them, but we're aware. Yeah. And I think it's Eve Kern that's doing these for us. And I think just looking at social platforms, how our information is getting out there, where people getting this information from and looking on how to try and, you know, just some tips and how to improve our own security at work and at home. And that's online. That's online. Yep. That's online as well. Yeah. And also on Wednesday, there's some mindfulness. Yep. That's Mary Cara from Angels Cove.  Really. Yeah. She's brilliant. And Andrea, then on Thursday in the Radisson Blue Hotel, there is, again, Yellowwood's art involved in a special presentation or a special Yeah. This is a great partnership. And many thanks to Mary for jumping in behind this, too, as well. And this was an international project originally, Brainwaves. And it involved the group that had mentioned before, different strokes for different folks. Those that survived stroke. It involved the Playhouse in Derry. It involved Kings College in London and Rosetta Life and Wall to Wall in Derry, too, as well. So it was a great project. It was an international study. And we will be presenting that film. We had talked about films earlier, John. Yes. I'm glad to see there's a film involved. We'll be presenting that showcase on Thursday along with then I'll give a bit of background from the artist point of view. Larry, who had mentioned earlier, too, as well, Larry Masterson. He's a powerhouse. He will be talking about a participant point of view. And we will have the members of the group that was up to 13. I think it was involved in that. So they'll be there on the day to have a chat and all of that about the project and the process of getting involved in it. All right. Great project. And that will be in Radisson Blue Hotel. That's right. Yes. Okay. On Thursday. And on Friday, Mary, there's a social media workshop again. I presume they're touching on the theme of cybercrime. I think I'm mostly looking at the different social media platforms and just a workshop and showing people how to use them. You know, it's Evelyn McGlynn that does it.  Maybe you're not too familiar with social media and want to learn, you know, how to use it and what's there. And on Saturday then, it finishes up again with our class with Fiona. And we are actually reaching out to new communities there too as well, John. You've mentioned that earlier. So we will be working with Ukrainian refugees on that program in Kodaf. They're based there. And that's through the secretariat and the public participation network that we work on. So it's through that that we got a connection that identified that there may be possibly a need there to work and to provide the classes out there for them too, as well. So it's really good. Jam packed. That's only a snapshot. I know we've touched on, well, we've mentioned a lot of items there, but there's more besides. There's more events on. One in particular that I just want to mention on Wednesday, the 28th at 10 o'clock and the clanry is the Old Reperson's Council, AGM. And they are looking for new participants and they haven't had an AGM for a few years. So really it's from over 55s, you know, onwards. So that wouldn't include any of us. But they're looking for new people, you know, and they're trying to widen that network. So they have an Old Reperson's Council and then they will have an Old Reperson's Executive Committee. So they're looking for new people. And anybody, loads of people have retired in the last few years that maybe are looking for something to do. And this will be a great opportunity. And they've loads of ideas and they do loads of things. So really important that people come out. Everybody's invited to it at 10 o'clock on the clanry on Wednesday. Yeah. All right, brilliant. And more information online if you want. Donegalcoco.ie. It's on all week. It starts, well, it starts really tomorrow, continues through then until Saturday week. And everything is free. Everything. That's right, Joe. Ryan Andrew, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thanks very much for having us. Thank you.


Bangladesh is a developing country with a rapidly increasing demand for petroleum-based fuels in its transportation sector. To meet this demand, the country imports LPG, refined, crude, and furnace oils from abroad while also relying heavily on diesel, petrol, C8H18, and LPG as primary fuels. However, these fuels are not sustainable due to their high carbon emissions and limited availability. Therefore, the government must look towards renewable sources such as bioethanol, which can be produced from agricultural residues and waste. In addition, bioethanol can reduce dependence on fossil fuels, reduce their environmental impact, and improve engine performance. This paper examines the potential of bioethanol production from agricultural residues in Bangladesh, including the feasibility of producing bioethanol from various crop types, the challenges associated with bioethanol production, and the potential benefits of using bioethanol as a fuel source.