Richard Nisbitt is a really strong proponent of this idea of kind of unconscious processing, the fact that we really have no insight into why we do the things that we do. And in fact there's a lot of evidence for this kind of coming at it at different angles. A fellow named David Dunning provided a sort of meta-analysis, kind of analysis of analyses of all of these sorts of experiments and there's one kind of really good demonstration that we're all guilty of I think, and that's something called the planning fallacy. It's an old idea actually developed by Daniel Kahneman back in the 70s, but it's as you would expect, right? When there's any sort of complex thing that we have to do in the future, we're really bad at planning for it. And you can imagine this happens all the time with large projects. I think the mother of all planning disasters was right here in Australia at the Sydney Opera House. When it was being built, it was originally estimated to be about $7 million and it was supposed to be completed in 1963, but it blew out, I think it wasn't completed until a decade later for like $102 million. So I mean that's kind of on the large scale, but it's, I mean, despite our best intentions to do something, to plan for this thing and assignments, whether it be anything, we're just horrible. I mean, it's like we only see the best sort of situation that's going to get us from point A to point B. I'm totally guilty of the planning fallacy. I go away on holiday and I bring four books. I'm like, yeah, I'm going to read on the plane and I'm going to read on the beach and it's going to be awesome. And of course, by the time the end of the holiday rolls by, I've read maybe a couple of chapters. That's right.  And another one that's kind of on that line of seeing yourself in the best sort of frame, I'm going to be this diligent scholar and so on, is something called the above average effect. And so we like to see ourselves as being above average in every respect. We're more talented, we're better drivers, we are more attractive, we're more moral, we're more sympathetic. There's a whole bunch of different experiments to demonstrate that we judge ourselves to be far better than average. And in my conversation, a brief conversation with Jeff Norman, who we're going to meet again in episode five, he kind of describes this idea of how bad we are at self-assessment. If I think of all the people who are watching this video, I'm going to ask them all a simple question. Are you in the bottom half of driving skills? Now, half of you should say yes. But having seen this, but performed, having done this in live time, probably one out of 100 will say yes. And yet half of you, by definition, are in the bottom half of driving skills. The evidence is absolutely crushing that people cannot assess where they're at. They basically start with the premise that they're at about 70% and then go up and down from there. I'd like to think that we're a little better than Jeff Norman kind of lets on in terms of, you know, predicting how good of a driver we are or something. Now, we obviously were teaching this stuff. So you'd like to think that we're kind of immune to this sort of planning fallacy and above average effects and so on. But that's not actually the case. There was another experiment done, well, more of a survey, I suppose, by Patricia Cross. And she looked at university professors and asked them to judge how good they were compared to their colleagues. And 94% of these university professors judge themselves to be better than average at teaching, which obviously averages 50%, and we're, you know, way off in that scale. So, you know, I'd like to think that we're kind of immune to these sort of effects and biases, but maybe I'm just being a little bit too idealistic.


from Senator College, if he's going to tell us about the work on, should switch. Yeah, you have it right. His work on bacterial robots. Ah, it's a lot. All right, good. Good afternoon, everybody. And so what I wanted to talk about today is not what I'm doing in my hands-on session, but it uses a lot of the same techniques that we use in the hands-on session. And it uses things that are tabletop experiments, everything that I'll talk about is a tabletop experiment. Using simple things. Here is a physicist's bacterium. I've given it my name. But it has a little gear motor in there spinning this helical flagellum as a model of things like this, like this is a rotobacter's theroids. This is from a movie by Howard Berg at Harvard. And this type of microorganism uses a rotating helical flagellum to propel itself around. And I published a study in 2013 in PNAS with Harry Swinney that I'm proud to say has more than 50 citations. Using the same techniques I'm teaching you in my hands-on session, right? So the idea here is that we aren't playing at science. I'm not pretending that you can use these techniques to do science. You can do science with these techniques and find interesting problems that people didn't think to do. People have asked Harry Swinney, how do you come up with ideas for projects? And his comment is, there's no end to physical phenomena that you might study if you're creative. But you've got to pick the right problem. That's the skill is picking a good problem. I had helped picking this problem because my postdoc advisor in Texas, it occurred to him, and we were discussing this about bacterial swimming, that nobody had ever done a macroscopic test of a theory that had been around since the 1950s. And it was low-hanging fruit is what that's called, and he asked me if I wanted to be involved in it. I said, let's see, I get to build a robot and measure these forces and torques, and I'll explain the fluid that it's in. I'm all in, right? This is going to be fun. I'm going to have fun doing this. It'll be easy, too. It'll be very easy. Well, several years later we published a paper. What seems easy isn't always easy, but that's the way it goes. But that's only one of the types of projects that I do in my lab. All of these are tabletop experiments because I'm at a four-year college. I work with undergraduates like Tyree. I have to have projects that are within the skill set of an undergraduate. I drive them harder than they understand because they don't know any better. They haven't been to graduate school yet to study things like these are E. coli swimming. This is Hapong Zhang, the postdoc I mentioned. This is live bacteria E. coli swimming. This is where we were trying to understand the swimming of these microorganisms and realize we could make a test using a macroscopic measurement. I also study internal waves in the ocean using particle image velocimetry, which is the image you see over here. Here's a movie of a slope moving just slightly in a big fluid motion, but there's a laser sheet taking a slice out of the fluid flow and take a movie, turn that into the velocity field via particle image velocimetry. These internal waves in the ocean depend on a vertical variation in the density of the fluid. It's denser at the bottom of the ocean because of temperature and salinity differences. It gets less dense as you go up, and it supports the type of wave in the bulk of the ocean that we have no real contact with unless you're an oceanographer. There are sea surface manifestations of it you might recognize, but you didn't know what they were. But they may be important in the global ocean circulation pattern, where this is the temperature of the ocean here, and you see the Gulf Stream coming up the eastern seaboard of the United States transporting heat over here to Europe, so it's much warmer. Maybe we don't like it right now, but it's much warmer than it would be otherwise at this latitude, right? Similarly, we can use Taylor-Couet flow. This concentric rotating cylinder system is a model of things like a protoplanetary disk, accretion disks. If you imagine taking an annular ring out of that, that would be the Taylor-Couet fluid, where, again, I've got a vertical variation in density. It's salter at the bottom than it is at the top. It's fresh water, and we get a unique pattern in that fluid flow that you don't see in a uniform fluid. But these kinds of things are using the same kinds of techniques that are in these hands-on sessions. I just published this paper in 2016. Same sorts of things. Taylor-Couet flow, fast Fourier transforms, maybe I needed a faster camera occasionally, did spectral analysis and things like that. And these are the students that have been working with me in my lab, very happy to have projects to work on, do fun and interesting things, so that when they go off to graduate school, they can impress their PhD advisor about what they know. But I'm only going to talk about the bacterial swimming part of this as a part of what I'm working with with Dan Goldman, who's interested in robo-physics, the idea that by building these simplified robotic models of nature, we learn fundamental principles about how nature works. And he makes an analogy that when we built steam engines, we really didn't know what we were doing. We didn't have thermodynamics when we built steam engines. We figured out when we tried to optimize steam engines, we don't understand the physics here, and then we figured out thermodynamics. And so he thinks the same thing is true about building robots to do this type of measurement. Okay? So the specific problem, here's that rotobacter spheroidus. I'm loud. There it is. Maybe it was just me. Don't trust me with technology. All right. This is rotobacter spheroidus. Let me go back. Here he is again. He's swimming around with this helical flagellum. He's been fluorescently labeled so that you can see what he's doing. That is apparently a very difficult thing to do is fluorescently label the flagellum of a bacterium. But here he is, and he's swimming around in apparently sort of random motion, right? He's just swimming around. And they have no brain, right? This is a prokaryote. This type of swimming has been around for a long time. What was that? The length scale here is about, well, let's go back to this slide. I was just about to get to that. Imagine about a one micron wide body, about five microns long. So we're talking micron length scales, something like that. And the cartoon of what I'm talking about is an ellipsoidal body. I won't actually model that, not the ellipsoidal body. Just the rigid helical flagellum, and you may say, well, is it really a rigid helical flagellum they use? This is an amazing structure in and of itself made of flagellum. It can take on different conformational shapes depending on pH, depending on rotation sense, and all sorts of things like that. But to first order, it's a rigid helix when it's swimming around. And I say rotary motor here, driven by a rotary motor. Do I mean a rotary motor? I mean a rotary motor. So here is an artist's conception of what's going on. Here's the cell wall of the bacterium. Here is a motor protein complex that was only relatively recently identified. 20-odd motor proteins. You can see the EM image over there. And it uses a stream of protons, typically hydrogen ions, to drive this thing. And each time an ion passes through the channel, it causes these motors to change a little bit and ratchet the motor. It's like a stepper motor like I use in my hands-on session. Drive this thing around sometimes as high as 100 times per second. So it really can spin quickly when it's in motion. And it's just amazing. I love these images. These are cryo-electron tomography images. I don't actually know how they make those. But the amazing detail, the structure of that motor, these are just pretty pictures to look at. The slice through the middle of it. And just this is the 3D rendering of this. It's even more detail. Incredible detail for something that's a couple billion years old, right? This is conserved across a lot of types of bacteria and really interesting structure in and of itself. And this is from Lew et al. I think it's in the journal Bacteriology. And here's a video showing how this would all work for this flagellum, right? Here's that motor working stream of ions through it, causing it to ratchet it around, driving the hook, which attaches to the helical part of the flagellum. And off it goes, spinning this thing around. A lot of bacteria actually have multiple flagellum. And somehow or another, they synchronize their motors such that they can bundle all those flagella into one basically larger flagellum. And that's why it's legitimate for me to think about just a single flagellum in this type of swimming. And so that's the background. But I want to do this in a tank on a tabletop. And I want to do it right if you've been to my session. You know that I have to worry about this Reynolds number thing. But if you've never studied fluids, here's all you have to do is solve this equation. Have at it. This is the Navier-Stokes equation. It's a velocity field equation. What appears, and it's been non-dimensionalized. There are no units here. It's been non-dimensionalized such that the Reynolds number appears here next to the viscous term. And that is important because the Reynolds number, one way we can think about it is the ratio of the inertial to the viscous forces in the fluid. So that in the world where we live, here's Michael Phelps swimming much faster than me in a pool as opposed to a bacterium over here, where the Reynolds number in our world, when I swing my hand around, I create turbulence, it's high Reynolds number relatively speaking, this little bacterium, that because of its length scale, here's a micron there, he lives in a viscosity-dominated regime. So viscous dissipation completely dominates what's going on. And in terms of the Navier-Stokes equation, that means we can throw away the acceleration in the nonlinear term, which is really the hard part. You have this nonlinear partial differential equation in the Navier-Stokes equation, and we get to throw away all the nastiness. And so it presumably life is going to be easier because now we have a linear equation. Well, it turns out life is not so easy. But what I need to be able to do in, let me go back, let me match the Reynolds number, which I'll show you how I do that in my tabletop experiments, but I'm going to digress. I'm not going to talk about Taylor-Collett flow, but I will talk about G.I. Taylor, he's not recognized for how amazing he is with all the things he did in his career. I didn't know that until I looked it up. He's the grandson of George Boole of Boolean Algebra. He studied quantum effects in single photons in like 1904 or something. He did that. He studied turbulence and weather. He studied propeller blades and learned how to fly. Seminal figure in solid mechanics and in nonlinear dynamics. He invented a boat anchor because he liked to sail. It's still used today. He studied in World War II air and underwater blast wave. He was a member of the Manhattan Project. It's a pretty good career. One of 10 VIPs at the Trinity test, which of course that's unfortunate that that ever happened, but he got in trouble sort of for accurately estimating the highly secret blast energy of the Trinity nuclear test from just the pictures. Where's the leak? Where's the leak among the US intelligence? No, he just looked at a picture and did a ballpark estimate of what the blast energy was, right? So it's good to be smart. And he was seminal in micro hydrodynamics as well. In the 1950s, early 1950s, one of the first people thinking about how does a spermatozoa with its flipping tail, how does it move itself at low Reynolds numbers? And he has a paper that's still very well cited starting that. It was 83 when he published his last paper that was seminal in understanding thunderstorms and electro spinning. So yeah, that's a pretty good career. But the reason I bring him up is I want him to convince you that low Reynolds number is different than our world, right? He's got what here is a little Taylor-Couette cell. So there's some Taylor-Couette and what we're going to do. It's got a handle. He's going to hand crank it. And let's see what happens at low Reynolds number. I think I need to click directly on him. Do you get him to go? Nothing surprising here, right? No big deal. That's not the way my espresso works, right? So... That's important. I thought when I first saw this video they just played it backwards. There's no way. It just can't work like that, can it? Low Reynolds number world is very, very different than our world. And the reason I wanted you to see this second part was he's saying that the motion of the boundary you saw immediately, as soon as he starts moving the boundary the fluid starts moving instantaneously. The acceleration term, the right-hand side of Navier... or left-hand side of Navier-Stokes is gone. There is no acceleration meeting. Things happen essentially instantaneously. When a bacterium stops rotating its tail it stops within a microsecond. They've measured this, right? So it just stops immediately. Viscosity dominates what's going on. And so I published previously a study about bacterial swimming using robots. But what's new and different about what I'm going to be talking about today is the influence of getting that bacterium near a boundary and those long-range and somewhat surprising boundary effects that come into play. And what happens for the bacterium, this is from Laoga at all and this paper will keep coming up, but bacteria near a surface will swim in circles. It was known. And they're tracing out these trajectories of live bacteria, small-scale measurements. And they can see that. And we have a basic physical understanding of why this occurs. So let me unpack this a little bit for you. Remember that you haven't seen this before. One of the first things I want you to see here and remember throughout the talk is my coordinate system. Where X and Y are in the plane parallel to the surface that I'm talking about. Z will be the vertical coordinate over here, right? Z is moving into or out of towards the boundary. So if I look at a side view of the bacterial head here, their bacterial model is about as crude as mine. It's a sphere for the head. The part of the sphere that's rotating because the head must counter-rotate relative to the body in order for this thing to remain torque-free because he's free swimming. So the part of the sphere that's closer to the boundary feels the drag of the boundary more than the part away from the boundary. And therefore, it feels a net force this direction. Conversely, the flagellum, here's the side view and then edge on looking down the helix feels a force in the opposite direction. So that's what this FX1 and FX2 are. They are forces in opposite directions. There's a net torque on the swimming bacterium. He swims in a circle. We know the basics of this. The basic physical mechanism is understood. The details are where it's going to get complicated. So anybody at low Reynolds number can be represented. It's a linear system, 6 by 6 linear system, a big coefficient matrix multiplied by the three components of velocity and three components of rotation. If you know the matrix elements, if you know them all, then you're done. And for every different object, it would have a different set of matrix elements. However, for what we're doing, these matrix elements are going to vary as a function of boundary distance. And that's going to create some complications. I put this here. This is a note in the paper where he has labeled these different matrix elements. And the bottom line is any w, generally, should be smaller than any miy. Because in what I'm going to talk about, there's only going to be y-direction rotation for most of it. We'll do a little bit of x-direction rotation. But m should be much, much bigger than w, so I should be able to ignore w's. And I'll come back to why that's important in a little bit. But then you can figure out your forces and torques. And that's what I did in my previous paper. But now I want to do it, measure the thrust, torque, and drag to determine the flagella's propulsion, see how it's affected by a nearby boundary, and then I want to compare. I'm not going to satisfy this. I'm not really going to be able to compare it to Lauga's theoretical models, at least. Maybe when I have more data can do comparison to numerical models, but not yet. And I'll talk about why that's difficult from his theory. But I did want to say my titles are getting cut off a little bit and maybe I'll unplug and re-plug in and I think we'll pick those up. Why do the macroscopic experiment? Why not just do microscopic measurements? So this is what they have in their paper. Full numerical models here. Approximate model there. These are data points. Those are data points. Those are fish. I don't know what those are. And I'm not really sure what they tell me. Now, Lauga, Howard Stone, and Howard Berg are all on this paper. And if you know anything about these people, they are giants in the field. So I don't tell them I put this slide up, but I'm not really satisfied with this data. And I can do better. And I have done better in the one-dimensional problem of just a rotating helix where that big six-by-six matrix becomes two-by-two with only three unique matrix elements. And I can figure out what those matrix elements are just like. Only rotate but don't translate. And I measure the force in the torque and that tells me what these two matrix elements are. It's just a linear system. And then likewise, I can translate but not rotate. And I can pick that up. I can determine those three matrix elements, which in the literature, the theory that was generally used was called resistive force theory. And resistive force theory says imagine zooming in on the flagellum, picking out a little length considered as a tiny little rod, a thin rod, figure out the forces and torques on that thin rod, integrate over the flagellum and you can figure out what your matrix elements are. It's really not difficult to do. The only problem is it's generally wrong. Because if you look at my data, which are the red data points here, and these are the theories, there are two different resistive force theories here. This is for thrust. This would be one of the matrix elements essentially. Light hill of resistive force theory, gray and Hancock, the errors are order of 100% in the regime where we really care because bacterial flagella tend to be over here. So we're looking at thrust, torque and drag non-dimensionalized in some way. You don't need to worry about that. As a function of the flagellum's wavelength over here, so this is lambda dimensionalized by the helical radius. And of bacterium's tends to be here. Torque is okay for light hill, bad for gray and Hancock, gray and Hancock propulsion a little better than light hill, but they really don't get it right at all. And so I can make very precise measurements macroscopically with a lot of work to track down errors and things. You can do this measurement. Here are two different numerical simulations, slender body theory that worked pretty well and matched what I did in the experiments. High precision measurements. They're not all over the place. And that's what I want to do for the case of the swimming near a boundary. So back to this matrix. How do I do this here and what can I do? Well, the first thing, these are Lauga's expressions for the matrix element, but the thing is he used resistive force theory to get these matrix elements. And I already know that resistive force theory doesn't work well, especially when you're close to another body. That's why the reason back here that resistive force theory did so poorly was because as the turns in the flagellum get close to each other, they interact with each other. Nearby boundaries have a long range influence on other solid objects in the fluid, and therefore, it made these expressions wrong to a large extent. And so these expressions that he drives, he uses a resistive force theory, but I don't really believe them, but we'll see. Maybe his numerical model will work, but it involves all that, and there's some i's and j's in there, something that are these expressions, but we'll see what I can do.  That's axial rotation of the flagellum. So I'm going to rotate the flagellum, and I'm not going to do anything else, and if I measure the force, f y, the thrust force, then I can pick out this matrix element, so I measure the force, vary the rotation, the slope of the line should be linear is the matrix element. Should be able to do that. I can do the same thing. I can rotate in the y direction, measure the torque, and pick out that matrix element, and then jumping ahead a little bit. I could also just move in the y direction, drag it up, and then I pick up the matrix element over there, and I also have a body that mounts perpendicular to the other body, so I can do some x direction rotation instead of y direction rotation, and the reason I want to do that, especially first of all, I want to measure that perpendicular force. So the flagellum is going to be rotating this way, trying to drive the flagellum this way, but it feels a force perpendicular to its motion due to that increased drag at the bottom of the flagellum that's closer to the boundary, and I want to actually measure that. Nobody's actually ever measured that macroscopically, and I can do that, and then I can see, is this matrix element, I mentioned it should be much, much smaller than these other matrix elements, and we'll see if that's actually true. I can do that with an Arduino board, a $10 DC motor, and my setup there. The most expensive thing that I'm going to use is this silicone oil that's right here. So this body, here's my acrylic body, and my flagellum, it's probably been out of this oil for five minutes, because this is not water, kind of looks like water, but I need to keep my Reynolds number much, much less than 1, right? So my fluid needs a huge viscosity, 100,000 times the viscosity of water. It's pretty expensive. You could also use, as G.I. Taylor was using, glycerol, you could use syrup. It will work for low Reynolds number stuff. When I was at a conference, sure, it's density of water. So yeah, same. Yeah, it's 0.98 the density of water. So yeah, the kinematic viscosity is also 100,000 times the viscosity of water, too. Yeah, it's a weird substance in that it's sticky and slippery, and I don't know what to make out of that, but it also has a pretty low surface tension, so it leaks into everything. Drive you crazy, it leaks into the body and then burns out your motor. Because if that hits your gearbox, this has a 300-to-1 gearbox on it, this little motor, and if that high viscosity silicone oil gets in there into the right gear, it'll just burn it out almost immediately. But that's how we do it. That's how I can scale my problem up to a 10-centimeter robot. And I don't have to deal with the complexities of making a small-scale measurement. There's no reason for me to do that. All I have to do is scale my fluid dynamics up and believe in Reynolds number scaling, and I can do that. But like I said, that's probably the most expensive part of it. So the parameters of my flagellum, I'm currently only using one flagellum right now. It's pretty close to the sort of properties of a bacterial flagellum. Not as long as bacterial flagella typically are in this case, but this is how we do it. We say, okay, the radius of the helix is r, and we use that as our typical length scale. That's about six millimeters, a quarter of an inch for those Americans in the audience. The filament radius is an important parameter. Bacterial flagella tend to be very, very thin, thinner than this actually, but that's okay for what I want to do. In the paper that I published in 2013, we used thinner wire in building this helix. Lamb does the distance between these crests, and we express that in helical radii, and then there's the overall length, again, expressed in helical radii, so it's all non-dimensionalized. There's no units involved. Fluid dynamicists hate units. We always want to get rid of them. So here is an action again, and about here, if you saw it before, there's a bubble right there. It's rising buoyantly. You can't tell in the time scale of the movie that it's rising buoyantly, but it will eventually come up to the surface if you wait long enough. There is an action. Okay, so how am I going to do all this? How am I going to measure my matrix elements? And what are the devices that I'm going to use? So over here, again, here's my coordinate system now. My boundary is this vertical boundary. That's the z direction. X is coming out of the plane. Y is along the axis of the flagellum. The propulsion is going to be upward, vertically upward. And I have a stepper motor up here, exactly like the one I use in my hands-on session. I use this torque sensor to make my force measurements. All of my measurements will be made with the same torque transducer, which is an interesting little device that has two shafts in between as a little filament that emits a magnetic field under a torsional load. And that gives me, I have some hall probes in it that give me the torque as a function of, I mean the voltage as a function of the torque applied to that inner shaft. I put that in there. I rotate my flagellum. I move the boundary around. So the flagellum holds still and the whole tank moves. I have a translation stage that was intended for a CNC machine. These are cheap. You can buy them online. And I can get accuracy order of .01 millimeters with it pretty easily, pretty cheaply. Move my tank around very precisely, because most of the action, most of the change in the propulsive characteristics, change in the matrix element, is going to occur over the first centimeter or so as we move this guy around. So thrust and drag measurements, same thing. I'm going to put him in the fluid. He's going to try to swim up. He's constrained. And that's an important point. There's no translation upward. He hits the torque sensor, get an applied torque. We can convert that into a force. And that'll give us the propulsive force. Move the tank around. That's with my translation stage. And I can measure that propulsive force as a function of boundary distance. And then drag. I take the whole thing, the whole apparatus and move it up and down. And I can get the drag force with no rotation. So velocity, no rotation. Rotation, no velocity. I can pick out matrix elements. And so let's take a look at what I can do again, right? Why I'm making these measurements, right? Rotation in Y, but no rotation in X or velocity in Y. I do each one of these independently and I can pick out these matrix elements and look at the data as a function of boundary distance. But each boundary distance for each of these measurements requires multiple measurements from the torque sensor. That's the torque signal up here. And sometimes an experimental problem is an opportunity. We previously took movies of the flagellum rotating and used PIV to pull out the rotation frequency. But we realized that our torque signal oscillates at the same frequency as the rotation rate of the flagellum. So now all we do is we analyze this with an FFT to get the rotation rate of the, a fast Fourier transform of the torque signal itself. We just take the one measurement. And we plot this data out. I claimed it should be linear. I claimed that the force as a function of rotation rate should be linear and up to some scatter is linear. The error bars are about the size of the data points. It is, but it's the tip of the flagellum. Yeah, we're feeling as it's rotating around you'll see if you go back Well, it's actually look at, if you look carefully at the body itself he's oscillating a little bit. And that's because I think Yeah, yeah. And also if there's any misalignment of the helical axis too then it'll Right, well yeah, so the any misalignment of the flagellum I know when it's out of alignment because I'll get I actually see it moving a little bit. It's wiggling around due to imperfections in the flagellum. I do my best. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But it's always there. No matter how well, no matter how well I align this guy, I always see just a little bit oscillation and I have to try to minimize it in my signal. I'm not trying to be a giant. But the thing I want you to realize about what I'm asking my undergraduate students to do is the range of forces that we're talking about here is 3 to 15 gram forces, right? So there's a lot of extraneous control, controlling all extraneous sources of forces on that bacterial body is important. We have to get the wires arranged, right? Oh, track down that error, get inconsistent results. It's a challenging experiment. The idea is simple. The devices are simple. We're using an Arduino board sending a voltage to this motor. Everything is really straightforward, but it's getting the precision that we need to get good results. And that's what was true from my paper in 2013 as well. We spent a year and a half getting data through all that data away because we figured out all the mistakes we were making and we just started over. Clean data after that once we figured out our experimental methodology. It was tricky. So let me show you what the normalized torque here, and what I'm normalizing it by is the value out here, say, by this data point. So I've measured torque as a function of boundary distance. So each one of these is a linear plot and we pulled out the slope and we put it here. And we divide all these values by the slope value out here with the torque. So we see something that I can fit with an exponential. That's called T-L-A-R. That looks about right. There's no reason for me to do an exponential fit. Other than it gave me, I could do a spline fit. Give me enough parameters so I can fit anything. Exponential fit seemed to fit the data. So we did that just to kind of guide your eye. But like I said, you see that all the action is in here, right? We see a 30% increase in the torque as you get close to the boundary. So the matrix element is changing very rapidly as a function of boundary distance. And this really this functional form really doesn't fit what Lauga has. It's pretty hard to unpack what it should actually look like as a function of boundary distance. But it's I don't think it's this. And I need to do more work on that in making more direct comparisons with his data. So that's our torque values and again, this kind of precision versus that kind of precision, like I said, I'm going to get beat up at a conference or something for putting that up. Yeah? What is what is where did you have this like this boundary layer where the boundary How does that really relate to a bacterium? Is that your you're putting only the distance to the boundary but if you normalize with the size of your robot Sure, sure. How many, okay. So my the helical radius is about half of a centimeter. Yeah, you're right. I think that is a better way to plot the data. It's a good point. Yeah, that I really should be non-dimensionalizing this boundary distance as well. It's a good point. Yeah, the divide every or multiply everything by two about because it was a 6.1 millimeter helical radius. I think that would be the appropriate way to do it. And whether this is exactly zero or not, it's tough to tell. It's really hard when the because you've got this acrylic boundary clear fluid and you're trying to eyeball down the boundary to make sure that you're right at the boundary and surprisingly I can't tell often that I'm hitting the boundary as we move our translation stage around. We figured out a way to make that to figure that out though. We tried lasers we tried various other methodologies to get that to happen but I think I figured out a way from the torque signal to determine where we are consistently as a distance to the boundary because with this rapid increase if you're slightly off if there's another quarter centimeter over here you could have been closer then this force would be screaming upward. So it's an important consideration as we track all of these things down. Here these are just spline fits to my data and so what I didn't present on this plot is counterclockwise rotation it's the same here in the torque data but it should be the same for clockwise and counterclockwise rotation in my previous paper but it's not. We were surprised by this result right? Very large difference between clockwise rotation and counterclockwise rotation I told my students I don't believe you I have to see this show me show me in the lab let's do this do it and then maybe I'll believe you that's good to be the advisor but so same thing force free divided by boundary distance same flagellum so again you could multiply by two lots of action early on and you can see we were rastering closer here for these propulsive force measurements and we run into so many difficulties that we didn't get as far this summer as I'd hoped we would but that's the way experiments go but this result is robust there's a huge difference between clockwise and counterclockwise rotation and I got worried when I found this result and I'll tell you why if you look at how we make this measurement over here I am really measuring an x direction torque right? x is coming out of the board my thrust measurement is an x direction torque which says that if there was an x direction torque that should be there according to the mobility matrix is what this thing is called then I've got a flawed experimental design so I was worried about that and sure enough if you look at the x direction torque there could in theory be this matrix element W coming into play and therefore my experimental methodology is just flawed I sweated that for a while and then I thought wait a minute that doesn't make sense because if I flip the rotation rate it should flip the sign of the x direction torque I should not see the asymmetry between clockwise and counterclockwise rotation that wouldn't make sense now it might be affecting my propulsive force a little bit that's possible but it wouldn't have created an asymmetry however if there is a z direction force if I go back then that would be affecting what I see because this is the z direction here if there is an attractive force created by the pumping of the fluid downward if it draws it to the boundary then that would affect my measurement I think that's what I'm measuring and if you look at the mobility matrix again where is the mobility matrix here Laulga writes these down he says that these are zero either by symmetry arguments which he doesn't present because if you integrate over a full period of oscillation then it would be zero however there is supposed to be an attractive force for motion parallel to the boundary so if you imagine that instead of the pumping of the fluid in the y direction I might be picking up this matrix element or something like that I'm not overly sure yeah in both cases I have not done that test yet and yes I would like to do that but when I built these flagella what I did was I had a CNC made to take a groove for me so I could bend the wire around it so doing that requires me to have a CNC laid which I don't have where I'm at but I'm going to do that there's another way I can build these by just wrapping it around tightly around and then expanding it out Kenny Breuier's group that's how they did there Ed Brown that's how they built their flagella for this type of thing so you're right that's exactly I need to do some other tests to figure out does this flip the sign of it I don't know for sure but yeah it's interesting but this is what oh it goes away away from the wall yeah for sure yeah well and I realized that well like other experimental problems it isn't yes I did there's no difference far from the wall so yeah it's a good point but yes when we get 7, 8 centimeters from the wall it's some and you know you reduce you reverse it you get the same value you don't get some weird value because I do have to worry about because of gravity involved in here in these small forces we have counterbalance weights over here to get it neutral and there shouldn't be any reason but we we're still tracking it down it's an early result that happened you know 3-4 weeks ago yeah Logan they do but for a different reason though when they do that that phlegelum unbundles it's bundled it unbundles and takes on a different conformational shape for most I would just kick it so how much force you have to kick could randomize the orientation of the body better so it could still be important especially there at the surface they do pick one direction typically when they go the other thing yeah that reversal but yeah but what I realized though let me go back the curves well if what I'm saying is true what I could do though is subtract this curve from that curve and they give me another matrix element in one measurement the other thing I can do to test this is reorient my torque sensor and see how that and play some games with which direction the forces being the torque sensor axis is whether it's parallel or perpendicular to the boundary but that would be tough to do tough to do with the precision you need to subtract this from that but maybe so maybe we can do that and pick up this other matrix element that's coming into the the measurements so that's how we did that so future work there's a lot more to be done to try and contribute to this problem the boundary I really want to make more quantitative comparisons to the Lagos theory because it's a bit tricky so there's two things about his theory one was that he has these complicated equations but he also did two things he did the free swimming case and he did next to the boundary and I think I can look at his expressions and try and figure out what the functional form should be as a function of boundary distance there are lots of other things I can do with my low Reynolds number setup bacterial flagella synchronize through more or less unknown mechanisms we don't know exactly what it is there's a lot of debate with these types of things whether hydrodynamic interactions are all you need to synchronize but I can do some macroscopic tests where I don't have Brownian motion problems once you can all think that Brownian motion thermal effects are really really important but I have a system with no Brownian motion that's the one big difference between my setup and the real world of a bacterium is no Brownian motion in this the other thing that Dan Goldman and I are working on is another very simplified robot at low Reynolds number which is a three-link swimmer lots and lots of theory by Hatten and Chauset and various other people that goes back to Wilczek a physicist who in his spare time besides winning Nobel prizes for his high energy physics created the field of geometric mechanics thinking about the three-link swimmer and getting rid of all the actual physical equations about the geometry of the problem and sort of group theory kinds of stuff and it's really interesting what you can try to do and what Dan did he did this in granular material here is his three-link swimmer this is what I'm talking about there's just two angles for this three-link swimmer and get a couple of servo motors is what my student is doing right now I'm going to go and test these theories about three-link swimmers at low Reynolds numbers because people can write down what they think the topological phase space is between angle one and angle two you get what they call height functions where if you trace out a gate a repeating motion of this three-link swimmer in this space all I have to do is figure out the area and I can figure out the rotation and distance traveled without knowing anything and so whether these expressions Dan, what he did was used small motions to map out these height functions in granular material because there is no equation there's no navier stokes for the granular material but we want to do that in a tank of silicone oil that's the wrong way I'm not going to talk about that and so yeah, this is a hat in Cho Set and Yang Ding that's worked with him before and we're going to be doing that as well using these low Reynolds number macroscopic experiments using techniques and devices that are orders of hundreds of dollars except for my expensive silicone oil which is about $100 a gallon I don't know how to translate that in euros per liter but that's four liters of silicone oil for $100 US yeah, it's about the same 20 euros a liter 20 euros a liter, thank you but could be done more cheaply so it's all the same sorts of techniques the things that we talk about here to do real science and have fun doing it that's the idea alright yeah, question


We continue today with Chapter 26, The Borderland. Complexity is not of God. How could it be when all He knows is one? He knows of one creation, one reality, one truth, and but one Son. Nothing conflicts with oneness. How then could there be complexity in Him? What is there to decide? For it is conflict that makes choice possible. The truth is simple. It is one without an opposite. And how could strife enter in its simple presence and bring complexity where oneness is? The truth makes no decisions, for there is nothing to decide between. And only if there were could choosing be a necessary step in the advance toward oneness. What is everything leaves room for nothing else? Yet is this magnitude beyond the scope of this curriculum? Nor is it necessary we dwell on anything that cannot be immediately grasped. There is a borderland of thought that stands between this world and heaven. It is not a place, and when you reach it is apart from time. Here is the meeting place where thoughts are brought together, where conflicting values meet, and all illusions are laid down beside the truth, where they are judged to be untrue. This borderland is just beyond the gate of heaven. Here is every thought made pure and holy, simple. Here is sin denied and everything that is received instead. This is the journey's end. We have referred to it as the real world. And yet there is a contradiction here in that the words imply a limited reality, a partial truth, a segment of the universe made true. This is because knowledge makes no attack upon perception. They are brought together and only one continues past the gate where oneness is. Salvation is a borderland where place and time and choice have meaning still, and yet it can be seen that they are temporary, out of place, and every choice has been already made. Nothing the Son of God believes can be destroyed, but what is true to Him must be brought to the last comparison that He will ever make, the last evaluation that will be possible, the final judgment upon this world. It is the judgment of the truth upon illusion of knowledge on perception. It has no meaning and does not exist. This is not your decision. It is but a simple statement of a simple fact. But in this world there are no simple facts because what is the same and what is different remain unclear. The one essential thing to make a choice at all is this distinction. And herein lies the difference between the worlds. In this one choice is made impossible. In the real world is choosing simplified. Salvation stops just short of heaven, for only perception needs salvation. Heaven was never lost and so cannot be saved. Yet who can make a choice between the wish for heaven and the wish for hell unless he recognizes they are not the same. This difference is the learning goal this course has set. It will not go beyond the same. Its only purpose is to teach what is the same and what is different, leaving room to make the only choice that can be made. There is no basis for a choice in this complex and over-complicated world. For no one understands what is the same and seems to choose whether no choice is really is. The real world is the area of choice made real, not in the outcome, but in the perception of alternatives for choice. That there is choice is an illusion. Yet within this one lies the undoing of every illusion, not accepting this. Is not this like your special function where the separation is undone by change of purpose in what once was supposed to be the same? By change of purpose in what once was specialness and now is union? All illusions are but one. And in the recognition this is so lies the ability to give up all attempts to choose between them and to make them different. How simple is the choice between two things so clearly unalike? There is no conflict here. No sacrifice is possible in the relinquishment of an illusion recognized as such. Where all reality has been withdrawn from what was never true, can it be hard to give it up and choose what must be true? And from the workbook, lesson 202, I am not a body. I am free for I am still as God created me. I will be still an instant and go home. Why would I choose to stay an instant more where I do not belong when God Himself has given me His voice to call me home? I am not a body. I am free for I am still as God created me. Amen


Welcome back to Kids Fun Science. My name is Ken. Today's experiment is the T-Bag Rocket. As always, adult supervision is required. What you need for this experiment is a T-Bag, a plate, a lighter, scissors, and a room without a draft. A couple safety precautions here is a potential fire hazard. This demonstration shall always be under adult supervision. The T-Bag will lift off almost every time vertically, but however, if there's any drafts in the room, it will change the past. Maybe it knocks over, but the heat will make it rise up. So this experiment should always be performed away from any flammable materials. So we're going to start off with our T. I use Earl Grey. You can use other bags. I tried Lipton T and it did not work at all. It just burnt the cylinder. So what we do here is you're going to take your T and you're going to open it up. If it has a string, we're going to cut that string off. So without tearing the cylinder, paper cylinder there, so be very careful. If it has a staple, you're going to remove the staple very carefully without ripping the bag. So there it is, strings off. Now we're going to do probably the cardinal sin for all you people to drink tea. We are going to pour the tea leaves out. So we are not having tea today. So I know that will disappoint some people. Put your finger in the cylinder on both ends because you want it to be a cylinder. Hence the name cylinder, right? So once you get it into a cylinder, you're going to put it on a plate, right? So we're going to put it on a plate and straight up and you need a room that does not have a draft in it. If there's a draft in it, it will blow over like that. And sometimes one side stands better than the other. Then once we have it set up, you're going to ask the question, what happens after I light the tea bag on the top? So we light the tea bag on the top, you ask the kids before you light it, what's going to happen to the tea bag? And hence the name, it takes off just like that. It's pretty awesome. Here's slow-mo and the science behind it. There are three principles acting on the cylinder that you made from the tea bag that makes this experiment work. The first principle involves the density of the air with the cylinder as it compares to the air on the outside of the cylinder. The flame burns down the tea bag, it heats up the air that's contained inside the cylinder. This excites the individual air molecules causing them to move more quickly and spread them out within the cylinder. This experiment also demonstrates the second principle, convention currents. As we just explained, the burning tea bag creates hot air, less dense air. This creates a thermal or a convention current. The space created by the less dense air inside the cylinder allows the dense air outside to push upward from the bottom. That movement of current in the air referred to as a convention current. Here we go, blast off, and you can see it's still kind of lit up a little bit of flames. And then right when it gets to the ceiling, it's completely out and it is safe for the kids to catch. As you'll see with my hand right here, it's the fun part of the kids running over and grabbing the ash. It's pretty awesome. But that isn't enough to create the rocket you just saw at the end of the experiment. The third principle, as the bag of tea burns, it turns into both the ash and smoke. The smoke lifts away and dissipates into the air, leaving just a delicate ash frame. Since the ash is so lightweight, the force of the rising hot air is strong enough to pull and lift the ash into the air. This is an experiment we really like to do after dinner when we have company over. So I hope you enjoyed this video. Remember to click thumbs up or to share if you enjoyed it. And thanks for watching.


I think was talked about a lot and celebrated a lot this year was touch the pickle. I think again it's a great example of the fact that Indian advertising can be rooted sharply in a local insight. So a good sharp local insight yet it can have resonance globally. It can have a universal appeal. Often we find a lot of Indian work which sort of hides behind what I call narrow cultural nuancing. We mistake cultural nuancing at times for insight touch the pickle is a great example that if you have if you touch the right chord with your issue with the problem that you're talking about the context it can have resonance around the world. It can it can in a way appeal or cut across different cultures and geographies. You know for the last couple of years there has been so much talk about communication being about storytelling but all too often advertising becomes the story I want to tell rather than a story that people might want to hear. It's really a kind of no brainer was Kali. A complete break from the formulaic advertising for cement and it's a delightful story of the travails of a man who is too strong for his own good. Great courage shown in breaking away from the category and a delightful story that you want to share with others. The cricket campaign Maka Maka great example of how you can be topical how you can sort of provoke a very visceral feeling that we have and of course it's refreshing to see advertising which is not so politically correct at times. So it's great fun the timing was perfect and it's audacious and cheesy in a way that you love it. So I mean I'd give a lot of marks to that one. A second commercial which again told the story of a very interesting kind was the one for urban ladder. Here is our parents coming to live with the son and daughter-in-law and it is the whole sense of what is it like to feel at home. That is not just about good quality furniture or about a well-set place you know. So that was a delightful one.


You too team keep it clean What's going on the same grave in here with another video Brandon Bagley? I said I would have words We I said I had words with you if your chiefs did something like this We got some talking to do we got a whole conversation a half The cheese it's like it's like you just you just knew it you just knew it You just knew it was almost one of those things where it was too good to be true Well, it was too good to be true You you just knew that's It was gonna be somebody now while I do think this is a bit of pettiness But it's also some need to Chiefs just lost a okra for I believe for the season to a torn peck. He's a past rusher for them So Terrell Suggs is a player that That they would need oh and by the way the chiefs they claim Terrell Suggs. I know you see the title of the video I'm sure you heard about it by now, but yes the chiefs They claim Terrell Suggs now What's gonna be interesting is? What goes down? Does Terrell Suggs report to the chiefs? Does he put his money? Where his where his mouth is What's gonna go down is The the whole report that came out that I still do believe that Terrell Suggs and his camp had put out By Adam Schefter, I believe they the ones that really wanted that to get put out there Will that hold true about Terrell Suggs possibly not showing up to any team besides the Ravens Will that report hold true We're gonna see because Had it been what if it had been a bad team like if this was a bad team like a team that wasn't going to the playoffs Team that I mean that's it a team that wasn't going to the playoffs and the team that had just been bad and Like didn't have anything going for them. Then I could be like, okay. Yeah, Suggs ain't gonna show up But this is the chiefs This is a legitimate contender The Kansas City Chiefs So now Does his tune change Does it change? Does he end up being like, oh, well, you know what maybe the chiefs ain't so bad after all Maybe they're not so bad after all What's gonna go down now It's gonna be very interesting to see But again, I am not surprised that he was claimed especially by contending team and Like I said, they are in it is an area of need for the chiefs But It is some pettiness involved in it too, I think I think it is I Think Andy Reed was like, oh, yeah, we need another pass rushing. He can set the edge too. So yeah He can help us out You know what that dude hardball tried to get petty with me in the game earlier and we beat them We beat those Ravens But he tried to he tried to one up me In Kansas City my chiefs these chiefs my team this team He tried to come out there going for two point conversions when he didn't need to They came out playing a completely different style of football and we thought they were gonna play They weren't trying to run that ball at all. They were just trying to get past happy They were trying to play like us in all stadium an arrowhead. You know what even though we beat them I got something else for them. I Got something else for And he did Now again, I know some Ravens fans gonna be upset. You got every right to be that's fine But it's not like to real suck he wasn't a necessity for the Ravens to do what they need to do He wasn't the end all be all it wasn't all it wasn't like cuz cuz there was no and again We do we could use some help and could be a lot better at setting the edge in the run defense Then we have been cuz that's what they've been struggling at Especially against the bills in the 49ers But it's not like there was talk about oh, man, we We sure use to real sucks. We we really need we just really need something to go down to where We can really use this player that but like My point is that there was there was none of all this to real sucks talk before and obviously not because he wasn't a free agent And we know that it's a problem. It's a problem area Setting the edge, but Ravens they they maybe Ferguson might maybe he might turn the corner Maybe all the sucks talk may may make Ferguson step it up that much more than he's already stepped it up There's a past Russia and in some run defense to a little bit, but obviously gotta step it up a little more Maybe it just it might make something from within cuz cuz that can that can be like Motivating he could be stressful, but it can be motivated to like you at your job And you hear an artist talk about your employers possibly bringing in somebody that used to work there that went to a different company and That that person possibly taking your spot taking time away from you. You could be like man like I'm not feeling that I don't like that and then once you find out that it actually won't be going down You could be like hold on wait a minute Hmm, you know what let me really show these dudes that That guy's a thing of the past Let me really show it show these guys.   Well now now it's most likely not gonna happen unless I'm crazy happens with the chiefs and They end up Releasing him and giving up his rights and letting him become a free agent But now that it's the chiefs that put in the claim form I kind of find it hard to believe that he won't show up I think he's gonna show up and I don't know if any does anybody on the chiefs have 55 They probably do because that's a nice number for defense But I'm sure he'll show up and that report that got put out it'll become Null and void or a thing of the past But anyway, that's a good pick up for the chiefs give them somebody solid somebody with good experience That can possibly help them In their postseason, but she's made they made it personal They know what they were doing. They made it personal They really did so now it's almost like we have to see these chiefs in the playoffs And I know that's the team that a lot of Ravens fans fear the most They're like, oh Let the chiefs play the Patriots or something and the Patriots knocked them out like they always do Obviously not a couple weeks ago, but But we're gonna see man We're gonna see how everything unfolds everything unfolds Ravens still got enough to do what they need to do and I'm still Very confident in this team and I do still feel like this team. It is Super Bowl or bust It is Super Bowl but they they have to do this thing man. They have to it just Everything is lining up Everything is lining up So With that being said Let's see what happened man. Let's see what happened. Let's see what goes down. I Just saw that uh Ravens didn't even put in a claim for him But that doesn't say much that's not saying much That doesn't mean anything that doesn't mean the Ravens didn't want him. I just saw the report from Joseena Anderson. She's on point She's very reliable, but it does not mean that the Ravens didn't want him the only thing that that means is that Maybe they wanted to work out a different deal with him if he would have become available Now it could mean that they didn't want him, but it doesn't mean that they didn't want him Because if they were to um put in I mean because it wouldn't matter if they put in a claim for him or not because 30 other teams Would have rights to him before the Ravens since Ravens have the best record. They have the last claim So once the rail sucks hit the waiver wire Every other team has dibs on them Ravens have last so if Ravens didn't put in a claim for him And no other team put in a claim for him and then he would become a free agent So then he could the Raven could just talk to him They could talk to him So either way it would be the same thing had they put in a claim for him or if they didn't so anyway, that's that he's gonna be a chief now and This will make the Andy Reed versus John Hall ball For the third time in two years coming up It'll make it that much. Oh That much more sweeter But the third time's got to be the charm and Ravens got to get the best of them chiefs But this time we're gonna do it in Baltimore team. Keep it clean. I appreciate y'all and I'm out


Thank you very much. I want to take you quickly through the presentation about this particular project called Jamil Observatory in short. A quick one. I think, as everybody else say, the focus of this project is largely in dry land areas, particularly pastoral and agro pastoral areas. And the whole thinking of the project came from the thinking that why are we having drought always as an emergency? Why can't you question the entire landscape and architecture of drought responses? And that has led us to think of this thing called anticipatory action. It's another buzzword. It has to be unpacked. It has to be discussed. It has to be worked. So our research at the observatory is founded on this fundamental question of how do we approach research in a very different way? If we see increasingly, I think just from the examples of last drought, these areas have really faced extreme shock that really the increasing incidence of food insecurity, animal death and decimation, asset loss, I think, somebody in SIPA, who you said something about that, it's very important. But then it's not a very easy question. It's a wicked question. Sometimes because there are multiple people working at different levels, sometimes not speaking to each other, sometimes having different orientation in how you respond. Some are humanitarian, some are in research, some are in development, some of the authority and the government mandate to deliver the early warning and responses. But then when we're looking at the project at the start, we saw this very good opportunity to use data and evidence to shape some of this conversation. If it is well targeted, it's timely, it's trusted, then there's very good potential within data. Still, this is the part which is worrying much actually. The NDMA colleagues say they have robust system, but then I think I'll speak to part of the robustness and then part which is missing. When we started, drought is a very crowded space. So we had many people in this space and we say that as a research organization or a research project, we can't start from clean slate. We have to use people to take stock of what is missing, what can we do, how do we culture research? The first part I think is this thing called data quality, accuracy, and you know the risk profiling. When you go to our risk profiling, when you click my account, it is massive, but you see it entirely red. And yet I know 70,000 kilometers cannot be homogeneous. The heterogeneity within the landscape is not captured in the risk profiling and hence the targeting is a problem. So this is the important part to work on. I think the last mile connectivity, the early warning organized from here, taken to the people, does not speak to the people. When we did the conversation with the elders in post drought, they said none of early warning information matters to us because about trust. How is it generated? How is it delivered? Is it co-produced? These are important questions. Of course, translating early warning to effective early action is another thing. Every time early action or an action is several steps behind early warning. So and drought does not wait for that. It's an ecliptic phenomenon. So it has to change its form and manifestation. So you cannot catch up with drought. Every month you organize this thing and come, it's a different story. The project we target is different. Of course, the institutional arrangement and capacity to coordinate effective drought response is another important layer that is missing. Of course, the financing part. You talk about action without finance or limited finance against huge action required. Policy institutional processes gap is another critical area. And of course, all this evidence gap, you know, with the essential link to food security space is fundamental reason why we formed the observatory and what the observatory focus on. Who we are on the, on this side, these are the consortium. The project is led by University of Edinburgh with other partners. It will receive the children, J-PAL and community, which is also our donor and they double up as investment partner in this particular case. How we work, I said, I mentioned about the community of practice. This is a laboratory for the observatory. When we came, the whole idea of observatory was based on less set up a data platform that you click and get your information. But then we are told, I think this platform die when the project ends. You have to support existing platforms. So that made us rethink our theory of change and say, how do you work with this community of practice? One, to get a well-targeted research agenda and two, to work with people who matters in this particular space. And in our case, we use the community of practice to ask the question. And I think we, in our first meeting in 2022, April, we had multiple questions. And these questions are not very easy ones to answer. It requires a structured conversation for a long time, whether it's coordinating drought. I'll speak to that quite shortly. Whether it's data issue and that, that question, we call it challenge question because it's a big challenge. It's not something that you can do with one research and solve it. You have to have a collaboration. You have to have thinking. You have to prioritize. You have to, you know, validate with the network and then generates more projects. The ultimate issue, of course, is to reduce vulnerability and build the resilience of the people. Of course, this is a quick glimpse through the members. It's very hard to read some of them, but we have around 43 plus institutional members who are the core of the observatory. The challenge question I mentioned, we were given five at the beginning, data for effective value action, financing, effective value action, community coordination as an important area, local level actions. We talk about traditional early warning that does not speak to the contemporary early warning. We have local level action that has delivered in face of drought. Then it's not embedded within the system. Trust in data is a very important area because data is a political thing and anybody will use the way they want to use it. Of course, this is how we organize the work, the essential activities around the observatory is in this five area. Basically, dialoguing around this issue is an important thing we want to do. Evidence, basically, actual research and some of the PhD academic research are within this collaboration. We tend to work with like-minded institutions to get, you know, challenging project, what do you call it, impact collaborations, small grants, and etc. Of course, capacity is becoming a very important part of this because as we work with people and speak to organizations, capacity is one of the things that is really hindering some of this response issues. And of course, engagement, what we are doing now, policy, what we do at UNCCD and, sorry, COP and other places where we always make noise, is part of the engagement. So, on the research, we talk to all, this is part of our clan members, seven PhD students and two postdocs working on different projects. All the PhDs, I think all of them are from the region, Kenya and Somalia, and then they are all based at the University of Edinburgh, the Global Academy for the Financial and Food Systems. Postdocs are already in this room, we are working with our colleagues now. So there are quite a number of other thinking around these research projects. On the dialogue, of course, what we are doing now is an important starting point, but then we don't want to stop there. I think one of the fundamental challenges we have is we have conversation when a project starts, as Rama said, or when a project ends. One of the things we are thinking of is can we have like a dry land assembly where we have a sustained conversation about this issue, anybody can put money in the pot. It could be one topic, it could be early warning, early action, another topic could be on financing, another one is shaping investment. It could be any that you can get from any project. So we are thinking, possibly, if you get the concept quite right and interest, then we want to have this sort of dry land route assembly or something around that. Of course, at the observatory we have been running quite a number of mini-dialogues. These are important questions that we organize 90 minutes conversation and get some research ideas and urgent down it, and we want to do that. We have done quite a number. We are compiling the first ones and we want to invite people soon to speak about issues that really matters in this space. Of course, we also want to engage in a high-level discussion on topical issues in our community of practice meeting, which we hopefully will invite a number of you in May. And of course, there are the strategic policies that we want to have conversation on. This is not exhausted by any way, but this shows huge potential within the room to speak about this issue either strategically or sometimes opportunistically because this is what is happening in the space which we are in. Capacity development, I mentioned this is a very important thing. When we started the observatory, we get a lot of demand from government partners, universities to collaborate with us, and it was very difficult for us to coordinate this. So one of the flagship initiatives we thought and which we announced at COP in Dubai is this thing we call dry land academy. This academy is currently evolving up to maybe mid-this year. But the whole idea is it has two or three strands. One strand is working with international collaborators to deliver more PhDs and postdoc project. The second one is working with local universities basically in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia with the potential for providing this sort of blended online courses. And of course, the second strand is we want to have on job, what we call dry land leaders program. Basically, taking young person into the organization, working with them, it could be co-hosted with institution with like-minded, it could be in policy space. And one of the ideas, these fellows, when they go through this kind of training, we're going to give us a discussion paper on a topical issues of interest. And we'll have a collection of topical papers at the end. Of course, the whole idea is to have this critical capacity among people working dry land because that's where everything starts. It could be middle-level manager in NDMA. This could interest these kind of people in the practice. And as I finish, collaboration, I think we have started already. We have joined Chemnition with CRTD to IDRC call on climate smart life systems. And there are many, I think there's a huge potential in the room to come together. Of course, the impact collaboration is small project that we're talking about on each of the five challenge question. We want to have an impact collaboration project where we put a bit of seed funding and then see how we can pull resources around that. And of course, there are others who are joining this, including the Adaptation Research Alliance and few others who are potentially coming into the collaboration. Lastly, I see Peter is coming closer. The engagement, it's a very important part. I think there is potential whether using the concept of the universe of the bush or any other approach to learn from the people, especially under this resilience from below project. Really, I've done this in the range of land where we talk about ecological attributes interpreted by people. But I think resilience as interpreted by people is very important learning for us. Of course, we have many other platforms, COP29, African climate summit, if it happens again. And of course, engagement in the international area of Camel and Camelids, there are many other forum that we can easily engage. And of course, we have a number of post-doc and PhD students who are currently active in research. And I think the output is going to give us very good important opportunity for this kind of conversation.