Hi, this is Tracy Takahama-Spinoza. Welcome to part three of Making Classrooms Better. What we're going to look at now are a bunch of classroom practices that have been around for a while, but they've lasted for a good reason. There's a lot of good evidence, not only in education, that would also neuroscience and psychology that supports their use in application in the classroom. For example, the Socratic Method. Basically, you know, never tell what you can ask. The idea of the Socratic Practice is to get students to think more about their own gaps of understanding. You answer questions with questions. You know, but wow, what's wrong? What is the answer to X? You say, hmm, did you, at what point of the process do you think you got stuck? You know, asking students to reflect on their own practices to identify their own areas of problems instead of giving them the answers. This is very closely related to the general art of questions. Students would love to ask questions. If they give in more space to ask questions, they really will. But this is great because curiosity leads to new connections between ideas. And there is a space then for kids to be more creative in the way that they approach learning in their own environments. So instead of, and one of the ways to actually help filter good questioning activities, is to look at all the ways you can start a question and to avoid the ones that are closed.  That is really kind of limited. Much broader and much more open and much more deep in thinking is to ask how and why. For example, you know, when did the Gettysburg address occur or who gave it is, you know, not as cool of a question as how was it delivered or why was it delivered? So if you think about changing questions, developing this art of questions and then getting students to develop even better questions, that is the art of questioning and that's something we really need to be cultivating more in the classroom. Best Classroom Practice 26 has to do with using specific activities. For example, problem-based learning has been around for a while and it's really taking education by storm more recently because it naturally leads to more authentic learning on the part of the students. So helping them attack a problem that doesn't have a solution yet and taking different approaches on how to reach that solution is really excellent in any field and for any job that a student might have in the future. The idea is that students approach problem-based learning on an individual level, but it's a collective process. It's really collaborative learning at its best. So this is the idea again of one plus one is three. Get each student to add their piece to the puzzle to actually come up with a better answer. This is very, very closely connected to cooperative learning, but basically it's when students work together towards a common goal. So this can be something as simple as like, you know, doing jigsaw in the classroom where you divide the students up, you know, A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D and then with all the A's you divide them up 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. So that the job that the group A did versus B, C, D, when they're finished with their job, they split up again into these groups of 1, 2, 3, 4 and then each person brings or contributes something to the answer that that group is going to have generated. A very key element of cooperative learning, and this is something that's also a huge life skill, is that it relies very heavily on a student's ability to listen to other students. And this is something that will serve a student well, you know, not only in school, but throughout the rest of their lives. Link to this is also the life skill of, you know, appreciating teamwork or being able to work in groups or being able to, you know, carry your level of responsibility and contribute to the overall outcome. Best Practice 28 has to do with incorporating reciprocal teaching. This has to do with an exchange. A student becomes a teacher, the teacher becomes a student, but there's an exchange back and forth between the two so that there's a equality in there. We know that one of the best ways to learn is to teach. So allowing the student to take on the teaching role at certain points in the process is really key in consolidating their understanding of the information. Reciprocal teaching has four pieces. The student has to learn how to question, clarify, summarize and predict. This is an iterative process. It's not that they, it stops there. Once there, then you test that, and then you start all over again. So this goes back and forth, back and forth, and it can be done with something as simple as a child's book, you know.  What happened to the brick house? Will the same thing happen? Will something different happen? And getting them to predict what's going to happen next. This is wonderful for developing better higher order thinking skills as well. My classroom practice 29 has to do with the use of case studies. Before we used to think that case studies were things that were limited to law or business. We now know that in general classroom practice in almost any field you can use case studies. Case studies just have to do with things that are already done. You know, they already have had a resolution. They've already been closed. Unlike problem-based learning, which is open, case studies have already happened. But the idea is to create a kind of intellectual empathy and to get students to look at different angles of the case. You have people play different roles. So for example, let's say that the mayor ran the platform of cleaning up the streets and better trash collection. So somebody can be a homeowner. Somebody can be the man who runs the trash machines. Somebody can be the recycling company. Somebody can be the mayor. You know, you have them approach the same problem from different angles so that they can actually learn to see, you know, broader than their own visions, but also be able to develop debating skills, in fact, gathering skills. Analogies are really key because remember we talked about how the brain always has to compare new knowledge with past experiences. So when you don't know something, the best way to help explain it is through an analogy. So it's a way of introducing content knowledge in a context they might be more familiar with. So the closer the fit of the analogy, the more the learning is facilitated according to Cacic and Negan. Very much based on the idea that the brain is always comparing what already knows with what it could know. So filling in the gaps of information that might exist. Analogies can be based on words, shapes, forms. They can be in patterns of things. They can be in comparing, you know, parts to holes or cause and effect or person to situations or geography. By using analogies, you're actually strengthening and helping students develop their own thought process. If you don't know one thing, you can actually show a parallel situation so the kids can be a little bit closer in their understanding of the new information that's about to come. Best Classroom Practice 31 has to do with implementing the five E's, which are now actually expanded to the seven E's. The idea of creating classroom experiences which always have at least these five steps, if not these seven, really reinforce learning. Why? Because they enhance attention and they are more memorable. So again, attention and memory keys to learning. So what do you do? Instead of starting off a class in biology by just showing or even a third grade science class, instead of talking about genetics, you show them a two-headed snake and you say, wow, what happened, you know? So you've got a hook there. You've got them engaged in the information and then you allow them to explore the information. What do you think caused that, you know?  Then they should explain it to you. They have to tell you, well, I think that might have happened because maybe they got, you know, they were born that way and they were born that way because maybe there's something wrong, you know, with their genes or whatever. Then here comes the teacher's role is to actually elaborate using appropriate vocabulary to clarify. You know, yeah, that's a genetic mutation and that happens, you know, sometimes, you know, go into details of the science behind it and then you can evaluate and start all over. If you have the 70s, you basically do the same thing, but you elicit prior knowledge beforehand. Do you remember when we talked about how normally reproduction occurs in this way, you know? So stimulate prior knowledge and at the other bookend of it that you actually extend this, you actually decide, well, now that we know about the snake, do you think that that could also be true for people or sort of help them see how that information can go even broader than the information that they had before? The 5E's work basically because they allow the students to have definite discovery learning, but it's highly supervised by the teacher. So they don't go really off and wrong and on tangents. The teacher is always there to help narrow and refine and clarify vocabulary and redefine terms and elaborate in the right spaces. So there's a really nice balance there, but if you use the part about eliciting prior knowledge, you're also helping stimulate the use of memory and the engaging part also helps with the attention aspects. This is also one of those methods been around for a long time, highly successful, originally only used related to science classes, but we now know this can be used for really any subject area. Okay, now we're going to get some things that could work and we want teachers to sort of adopt, at least, you know, marry yourself to a one, two, three, or four of these to sort of work on this next coming year because these are fundamental to good teaching. Teachers need to have these types of habits, you know, stuck in their own minds all the time. First of all, they need to improve student efficacy. If we know a student's self-perception as a learner is the most important factor influencing future success. The student thinks he will learn, he can learn. The student thinks you don't think he can learn, he's not going to learn. If we know that that's the most important influencing factor in student learning outcomes, then why don't we do that as the first thing in our classrooms all the time? We need to remind ourselves of that. We need to work on how to develop student self-efficacy all the time. In the best classroom practice 33, we need to maintain high expectations. Study after study after study since the 50s have shown that the higher the expectations, the better the students do. Even students who come in, you know, maybe with a low level of aptitude or whatever, if you hold them to higher expectations, if you help them believe in themselves, think that they will learn, they do. So shooting high is not bad at all. What we need to be doing is to actually help each other. As teachers, always remember that we should be setting, you know, high enough objectives. We should not be shooting for the lowest common denominator. If you have a mixed group of kids in your class, you know, you shouldn't be shooting for the bottom because, oh, they'll all have to achieve. No, you have to shoot high because they will stretch themselves. It's very, very important that we convey that to teachers and help encourage each other to actually do that, to hold people up to higher, higher level expectations. This is really clear because you can have students mixed group ability, of course. You can have low, middle, high students, but that doesn't mean I change this. You know, when you have, when you set objectives in a class, they're for everybody. If you're going to differentiate, then you can differentiate in the way you evaluate and the activities you do. But you don't lower your standards for anybody. You keep those expectations for everybody. So everybody has the same objective. And that, that's the way to pull the whole group up. Best Practice 34, we need to always remind ourselves. And this is something that's very much grounded in attitudes and prejudices. Learning is fluid. Kids can change. Great teachers never label their kids. They understand that learning is fluid. It happens throughout the lifespan. Different kids are going to learn at different paces. And that we have to actually accept that they are going to be able to get better. So we don't ever, you know, put a stamp on them. Oh, you've got an attention problem. So you're limited to X or whatever, right? We need to allow for the space or the belief that the brain is dynamic, ever changing, and that kids will learn. 35 has to do with going back to this really key role of affect and learning. Before we used to think that when we talked or discussed about concepts of learning, we were really only in the cognitive domain. And now we have really so much evidence that shows that the way a student feels about learning moments about the teacher, about the subject or about himself, highly influences potential to learn in our classrooms. So we need to remind ourselves, you know, it has to become habituated in our heads. Am I, you know, communicating the right message? Am I, you know, managing this relationship in the right way in that classroom where the student feels at a minimum that I believe in him. Sending that message is really vital to success.  We know that kids can come into the classroom with different emotional states, but it's up to us to change the mood of that classroom. Part of this is really connected to studies in neuroscience that have to do with levels of threat. And unfortunately, threat is one of those things that's a tenant. It is something that we know influences learning, but it is very, it's highly individual. What's threatening to you might not be threatening to me and vice versa. So we have to understand to what level do you, do you push kids, some kids work great, you know, under high levels of pressure and other kids don't react so well. Some kids need information or pushing from peers while others need pushing from teachers. And when we have to find that really delicate balance, and again, that is the, the art of teaching, you know, finding that right balance, because we know that having a good level of stress is positive for learning. It primes you for learning, but going overboard just shuts you down. And so there are no connections. So you really have to be careful of finding that perfect balance with students. Mary Heleny Mordin and Yang has been really influential in this field related to emotions, cognition, and their overlapping areas and how they influence one another. 36, which is highly related to the role of emotion, has to do with social contagion. You have to accept as a teacher that you control the environment. It's on you.  You are changing the way that they feel about their classroom experience. And so we have to be very conscious and that has to be something habituated into every single one of us. We have to take the lead in social contagion. If we go in and the kids look like they're indifferent or angry and then we let them influence us, that's really terrible. We have to take the lead in social contagion and we have to change them. If we allow ourselves to be changed by them, then we're definitely going to end up on the floor on the tubes there and everybody's feeling negative about the class. We know that the, and this is, you know, totally hypothetical at the stage, because we don't have enough evidence, but it's a very complex mirror neuron system under scrutiny right now, which shows that, or we perceive the other, the way we're perceiving the other. We know that there's a lot of imitation that goes on. There are neurons that fire in the brain when we watch somebody doing something, even though we ourselves are not doing that. So we know that there's this big give and take in the social contagion area and that we have to take the lead ourselves and setting the right mood for good classroom experiences. 37, we have to award perseverance and celebrate error. As we mentioned before, you know, making mistakes is a part of learning.  If they can get that into their heads, then we're good. However, if we only prize people who get it right, then we're sending the wrong message. We're sending the totally wrong message and that they will not develop that habit for themselves. So we have to remind ourselves constantly that we have to be awarding perseverance. I would say that we should take on a new mantra in education, which is dare to err. You know, we should be okay with making mistakes because that's really a strong part of motivating class participation and getting kids to experiment with their own thought processes. So we should be very much open to that and we have to remind ourselves, you know, it's not just like, you know, the good answer, the right answer, the wrong answer. It's really the quality of the attempt, you know, that we should be giving prize to. 38 motivation is a key element in learning. The teachers have to remind themselves that it is part of our job. Of course, it's the students responsibility to learn, but it's our job to actually incorporate, you know, motivating moments so that they feel that they are being pushed, you know, externally as well as intrinsically to actually gain new knowledge. And we know this is a wonderful cycle of motivation. But what can we do as teachers? We can support, we can offer understanding, we can build that good rapport, that exchange between the students and we can keep good classroom management so that we don't let, you know, kids who are answering things incorrectly and the other kid who snickers at them, we have to balance that so that we can be encouraging this kid and getting this kid to stay on task and not to divert the rest of the group into making fun of those efforts. We know that we should never work harder than our students, okay? And we all wish we could live by that. Jackson actually wrote a whole book on this, never work harder than your students. But the idea is basically that we know it's human nature to do the minimum to get by. So the idea would be if we know that if you just tell them you can answer between, you know, five and eight questions, most of them will do the five. Unless you can target, you know, your expectations more clearly, it's going to be very hard to convince them. So related to working out, working as hard as your students, we know that students themselves are really savvy about their energy levels. And so they will not exert energy in places where they don't think it's worth it. And that's why a lot of kids, I mean, learning is hard. A lot of kids feel that it's not worth their effort.  So we have to find some way to leverage things like technology gaming, other things like that, and modes of learning so that we can actually stay on top of this. Kids are not doing anything different than we did when we were younger, you know, they're going to exert the just the right amount of energy needed to actually do as much or get as much out of the experiences they possibly can. We know that by withholding information, we can actually push higher order thinking. The idea of not working harder than your students would actually be going back to this whole idea of questioning as well, help students develop their own questions, never answer a question. That's not your job. Your job is not to answer any more questions. Your job is to help students think about their own thinking processes. So that might mean in many cases, asking them better questions. And that pushes up the level of thinking. This kind of dissonance that's created by that is wonderful, but it does ensure that they are working harder than you are. Be passionate. We know, again, social contagion. If you love what you're doing, you transmit that to your students. So showing your love for what you do is really important. Hattie actually writes that this is by far the most important thing that we can ever tell teachers or help teachers understand or help them develop a habit about. You have to really love what you're doing. This is one of those few professions where you can't fake it.  And if you don't have that passion, if it's just a job, you know, maybe you need to find another job because teaching can't afford people who aren't passionate about what they're doing. This gets to designing engaging classrooms. Management would be unnecessary if we had, you know, totally engaged classrooms. But we need to keep kids on the edge of their seats. You know, we need to keep them wondering about what's coming next. You know, these terribly predictable classroom situations where everything's the same day after day after day. And there's no, there's no surprise in there. And we're not engaging them. Remember the seven E's there. We're not getting them off their seats. You know, no wonder kids find school boring. So we have to find some way. It's not to say that the teacher is an actor, but we have to really get inside their heads. You know, what would catch you? What would make you want to be connected to the material? How can you physically design your classrooms in a way that you can keep track of everyone?  If you have a way that you can actually engage all of them at the same time and make sure everybody's focused on the same place, then you can, you have far fewer management problems. And we know that sometimes kids just totally find what's going on in the classroom way more boring than what, what they want to do in real life. So part of the solution, you know, you're not going to be able to beat them. So you have to join them, I think, on this one. We have to find real life, authentic experiences that engage students in the classroom and make learning real, alive and transferable to other situations. Connected to engagement is management. We know that you can have, you know, the best design, the best plan, the greatest activities going on, and that one kid can throw everything off. So teachers have to have this wonderful balance, this great art of being able to, you know, quell those disturbances when they pop up, take advantage of kids who are maybe barking up because they're looking for attention, you know, re-channel that energy, come and be my assistant, whatever you need to do. But you need to find ways that you can actually manage the group in the best way possible so that the whole, the majority can learn. The teacher has to be in tune with that. Classroom management is a key part of being an excellent teacher. You often think, well, I've planned a great activity. I have every, all my materials down or whatever. I know I'm going to evaluate this. And then it just goes down the tubes because you don't have to manage. So you really have to incorporate this into part of the skill sets that you're developing. We would also like to encourage the use of thinking routines. Richard and colleagues have done a fabulous job of developing deeper thinking skills in the classroom through a series of 21 different or routines that they like to encourage in the classroom. I regrouped them into things that are related to interpretation and articulation, hypothesis development, decision making, synthesizing and summary, understanding ones on perceptions, metacognition, the role of empathy and limiting ones on presumptions. But these activities, I would highly recommend that you have a look at their book. They've done a wonderful job of actually showing how you can get far deeper into subject areas by just throwing back questions or structuring lessons around their routines. Flipping the classroom and leveraging technology in the best way possible is something that is highly encouraged. There is a lot of evidence now. There's a wonderful study now by University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and their medical faculty where they spent about three years trying to see what differences flipping would make. They found really overwhelmingly positive results. Instead of having your traditional lecture classroom and sending kids home to do homework by themselves, the idea is that they get the lecture at home and then when they come to class, everybody's on the same page and can discuss things and and debate things and apply things and do experiments. That is so much more cool than just coming to class and like, you know, who didn't understand number three or one guy doesn't understand number three. So you do that. You spend your time, you know, redoing things for a minority number of students. You should try to maximize your face-to-face time by doing activities that are really engaging as opposed to, you know, teaching the material. The idea is that a lot of the information, things that can be memorized, purely memoristic dates, facts, formulas, should be, you know, put on video and you allow the students to look at that before they get to class so that when they get to class, we can actually apply that information. Going to the greater question of technology. Technology is not good or bad. It's what you do with it. It's like TV beforehand. I don't know. TV is really terrible. Well, there's some, you know, there's educational TV that's really quite good. And there's some really a lot of junk out there. So it's not whether technology is a whole as good or bad. It's actually how we use it. And so we have to try and leverage technology in the best way. Having said that, we need to recognize and accept that technology does change the brain. Your brain adopts to what it does most.  So we have to find a way to sort of balance that out. We know that technology is changing the brain. We don't know exactly how and to what extent this is going to have implications for regular classrooms. But we do know that there are some good hypotheses out there that it changes the tension spans and it changes the mode or the way in which kids like to learn, which gives more credibility even to the idea, for example, flipping something kids naturally like to do would be to watch videos. So it's one way to also use technology to our advantage when we teach. There are other ways of technologies influencing learning. There are some groups with mixed research behind them to show that they have neuroscientists working together with educators to try to come up with interventions that actually work. And a lot of these work on the premise of general gaming algorithms, you know, they don't like Mario works because you don't really fail, you know, every time you start to miss a bit, if you get less than 70% correct, it lowers the level so that you keep playing, right? So the idea is when you're trying to, you can use that to your benefit when you want to reinforce learning skills or certain reading things or reading patterns or if you want to reinforce some general number sense repetition as we saw before is really important. So if you can create a gaming structure that reinforces those things, that can be really positive. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of studies out there so far because not a lot of gaming interventions going on. Paul Howard Jones is doing some great work in Bristol on this area. Hopefully we'll have some more information to share soon. We know that language, for example, is processed differently in the brain when you're reading on screen versus when you're reading in a book. We know that it's processed differently when you're hearing something than when you're reading it. And so different technologies, for example, there's these technologies that are voice to text, right? You can have a whole anything that's in the text can be read to you in a proper British accent or an American accent or a male voice or female voice. So a lot of people are using these things as time-saving mechanisms, right? They'll be on the bus or the train and they don't want to lose time. So they will listen to the book. But there's studies, there's not a lot of studies out there that actually show, we know it's processed differently, but we don't know how that actually is helping memory or hurting memory. Does that actually, is that is, because our traditional way of teaching is through a textbook or orally. Now, a lot of people are getting their information auditorially. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? We just don't know. But it's important to recognize and we teachers have to understand that there's going to be new technology out there all the time and we have to be abreast of all of those changes that are happening. One area of study that's really fascinating right now has to do with technology and literacies. There's some very interesting studies that are going on that are actually showing the balance of things. This is not a bad thing. This is just different, but it's definitely not a bad thing. And you're getting kids who have advanced concepts of literacies and communication at very young ages, because they're able to process perspective, voice, things that we, we would only have done, you know, on a flat way through a book. They're now actually being able to take pictures and create their own stories. They'll tell a story and the words will come out. So they have an enhanced sense of language earlier than we had in our generation. So there's still, you know, the jury's still out on this, but we think that there's a lot of very interesting things that we can do with technology, but we as teachers have to really be open to this and stay abreast of this and not sort of, you know, box ourselves in and say, we're not going to go there. It's here. You know, we either adjust to it or we don't, but technology's here to stay. You know, maybe you're not, but the technology will be. So we have to learn to adapt. So because the brain adapts to what it does most, this is how I've always told my kids, you know, for every minute that they're on any screen, I don't care if it's a computer, a TV, if it's video games, they give me a minute of reading just so that we can balance out, you know, that sustained attention in your, in the brain. We know that the flipped classroom then, for example, has been used by several organizations, Harvard Baxit, University of North Carolina. There's a lot of university programs that I have integrated this. There's a lot of literature. I'd leave it to you to put this in the balance for yourself. But again, it really has to do with the proper selection of what gets flipped and what doesn't. The things that are memoristic, the things that need lots of repetition, probably are good to flip, to leave in videos. And then when you're in the class to actually enhance experience with that information and real life experimentation or debate, that's the best use of that time. But each teacher is going to have to reflect on that point for themselves. If you'd like this information about this from the International Society for Technology and Education, there's a lot of studies that talk about the benefits of flipping and how it's much more personalized and how feedback can be enhanced by this and that it actually helps us be more individualistic in our teaching with students because each student is actually going to have the resources they need to fill in their own gaps of knowledge. Okay, so finally, now there's some school design choices that impact student learning. I throw these out here not because teachers necessarily we have an influence in some of these things, but because I think groups of teachers together can influence administrative policy on some of these points. I would need to consider ages and stages. And this is really important because when modern education came into play and education became free and obligatory for all at the end of the 1800s, we would stick everybody in a one-room schoolhouse and whoever needed to advance at whatever stage, that was fine. We didn't make a discrimination of ages. If you were seven and needed to learn to read, that was great. And if you were 17 and you needed to learn to read, that's great too. We just advanced by the stage you were at. Well, what's happened now? More kids started coming into our classes and we had to begin to decide how to divide these guys up. We chose age, which seemed logical at the time. However, it didn't take into consideration that not all kids are ready to do all things at the exact same time. There's going to be different stages of development. This is due to developmental maturation, but it also has to do with experiences. You might have some kid in your classroom who is just, like, raring to go.  That's fine. But you might have another kid who will need to be three, four, five, six, seven, eight years old before he's at the same stage because he hasn't had the same experiences or he's not, you know, ready developmentally to do that. So we really need to rethink this idea of ages versus stages, or at least to keep those things in mind when we plan learning activities. It's not fair or helpful to expect that everybody advances at the same age or stage at the same moment at the point of the school year. Do I only shoot towards mastery learning then, as opposed to all these different milestones that we're looking for? Do I just hope that over time students will get this information or at their own pace? We really have to think this out because this is a very big school policy issue and it does cause a lot of strife in different countries that actually oblige students to pass all of their subjects or they don't pass a school year. So if you're not advanced in one area, you could be held back for a whole year. Now, is that fair? Is that right? We know that that kind of failure of a kid will change his own self-perception as a learner and the likelihood of dropout is higher. So we really need to think about those things in educational policy. We need to think more about nutrition. I think that a lot of families spend a lot of time with their newborns and they check their weight and they make sure that they're, you know, eating the right things and they get a bit older and, you know, you've got some habits and we're kind of strict. But then, you know, we as adults, we know that about 20% of your body's energy is spent learning, thinking. Your brain is using about 20% of the energy, but not all calories are built alike, you know, so they're not all going to do the same thing for your brain. Not everybody needs the same exact diet, obviously. However, there are some things that we need to use as general guidelines and the bottom line related to learning is that, you know, your heart is an organ, right, as is your brain. Okay, so general rule of thumb, what's good for your heart is good for your brain. Just use that as a general guide related to nutrition until we have better information. Another suggestion related to schools has to do with rows, rows of seats, you know, lining kids up in spaced rows. Why do we do that? Well, generally, we used to do it to keep order, you know, it was easy. And because since we were the focus of attention, you know, it was good for us to be able to see who was goofing off and who wasn't and all the rest of it. The only thing that they need to look at was us anyways. Now that we know that we're, you know, trying to construct knowledge with the students, and we know for a fact that people react to each other's comments more if they can see each other's faces, then actually creating semi-circles or ways that people can facilitate viewing each other is better if what we're trying to do is stimulate discussion. If the only thing we're trying to do is to, you know, deliver information, then you can deliver it in a straightforward way. That doesn't matter how you said. But if you're trying to stimulate debate, discussion, if you want people to interact with each other, which is what I hope we're trying to do when we're looking towards, you know, stronger collaborative of learning activities, then we have to think about how we seat people in classrooms. Number 48, we should consider seriously your around schooling. I think that there's a large increase of schools that are actually adopting this. What's the idea? The basic idea is that you have the same number of vacation days, but they're more evenly distributed. We know from Hattie's work that there's only five things out of 150 that are negative influences on student learning and one of them is summer break. Why? Because while spaced versus mass practice is good, too much space between learning moments leads to forgetting. So there's lack of reinforcement. We know that many more schools are doing this. There's a lot of research going on behind year on schooling, but the bottom line idea is that we began to have school calendars the way we do with long summer vacations because we needed the kids to help with the harvest. And only 1%, at least in the United States of kids, you know, still, you know, work on the farm and maybe 2% live on farms, but most of the kids in our classrooms are not helping with the harvest. And so the reason or the need to have a summer vacation kind of goes against what we know about the brain and learning because the brain is telling us that we shouldn't have these long breaks in between time. We also know that this is actually even worse for low-income kids because high-income kids go to summer camps and they can do all kinds of other informal learning and that's really great. But low-income kids have fewer opportunities and that means that their downtime actually leads to greater losses in learning than for rich kids. So we should really rethink this. I know of some school districts that do this and people love it. I mean, the kids forget less, their test scores are higher, they're less miserable, there's less teacher burnout, there's less cost during school. Parents enjoy it because no parent can take off 3 months. You know, maybe they can take off 2 weeks if they have distributed in this way. So there's a lot of things that we could benefit by. When you ask people why they don't do it, they just say, well, we've done this for 125 years, why should we change? We should change because society has changed, needs have changed. And if we know that it's better for your brain, if you learn better, if it's less costly, if there's less burnout, all those positive things, I think we should really take this into deep consideration and at least have a good debate on the information. 49, this is school day. We know that early school starts can be very negative for some students. Early starts, especially for teenagers, have been shown to actually detract from their ability to perform basically because of the different sleep rhythms based on changes in hormone. And then we know this, there's lots of evidence out there. In fact, even pilot studies to change school hours to change school start times to slightly later have shown that kids learn better, their test scores are higher, there's less classroom disturbances and problems. Parents report that their kids are more pleasant to be around. It seems like it works. So you say, and let's just change it. Let's start school a little bit later. Let's start it at 9 instead of at 8 or 7.30 as it does in Ecuador. Why don't you do it? Because parents need to get to work. Bottom line, it's really unfortunate that there's so many benefits to learning and to the brain and to just general human relationships to have this change. But we don't do it because mom says, I love this, but you know what? I have to drop off the kid at school and get to work on time. And I have to be there at 9. So this late start doesn't work for me. So this is a real, a real big issue because we know that these are policy changes that require bold decisions by administrative leaders, but they could make a huge difference in student learning outcomes. Finally, my favorite, it's reached a kind of a point, almost a little bit ridiculous of high stakes testing and pretending that that's a reflection of what we hope to achieve in education. If as we said at the very beginning of the first video when we were looking at what is the ultimate goal of formal education, if we're hoping to develop creative and critical thinkers who are lifelong lovers of learning, who know how to work with each other and leverage technology and are autonomous in the way that they do things, I don't think a multiple choice test does that. In fact, multiple choice tests, if you think about knowledge, skills, and attitudes, the only thing multiple choice tests can do is test knowledge. Dates, facts, formulas, skill, you know, it doesn't really get that deep. So why do we still use them? We, you know, we want something in our educational system, but we don't have tools yet to match that. But we, or the tools that we do have tend to be rather complicated. In order to test higher order thinking, yeah, we can do that. It involves a lot of observation, rubrics. It involves taking a lot of subjective data and interpreting it. It involves a lot of individual assessment. And that costs more money than a multiple choice test.  But do we really want to marry our educational outcomes to that? Because I think that it's quite dangerous because it keeps us, it prevents us from actually developing the skills that we know will benefit the kid most in the long run as lifelong learners, you know, not only in school success, but outside, and for the rest of their lives, they will be able to use certain skills. The things that they can test on a multiple choice test probably are not the things that we really care about, you know, ideal citizen we want to live with. So assessment tools, number one, we don't use the variety of tools that are out there. So we should, you know, become more savvy about that. But at the same time, we should actually rethink our whole mentality about high-stakes testing. One way to consider this, I mean, for Maddox is a really smart way of thinking, these are Bloom's taxonomy and reaching a level of expertise and knowledge. But the types of evidence or tools that might be used or better used than the high-stakes testing that we use right now. Okay, that's my pet peeve. Now, in summary, what do we try to do? In the first video, we reviewed new discoveries about the brain thanks to technology. We consider the most recent research in education that indicates what influences student learning outcomes. And then I challenge you to consider whether or not you could move from being an educator to being a learning scientist. In the second video, we began to look at things related to visible learning and to mind brain education science. And in the last three days, we were looking at the best classroom practices. Now that we have that, I'm going to challenge you three, two, one. Are there three things that impacted you with this information? Are there at least two things that were so cool you're going to tell somebody else? And then one thing, one thing that you're going to change about your own practice to improve your teaching based on the information we just shared today. That would be my goal. This would be my evidence that this was a worthwhile exchange. I hope that this has been useful. If there's any questions that are lingering, I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much.


In this video, I will give an overview of a lesson that was created with a music and a mathematics teacher to be used in either a math class or a musical composition class. In terms of the mathematics, the lesson is appropriate for algebra, advanced functions and modeling, or pre-calculus students. There's no musical background required, but if a student does have musical background, it's nice for them to be able to see this connection between their musical background and a mathematical topic. The students will create melodies using a free online tool called NoteFlight that is very easy to use, and we have a resource to help them do that. Then they'll create a mathematical model using data, functions, transformations and a graphing tool. We like to start by just showing students some music, and even if they don't read music, they should be able to look at this particular student's melody that she created and think about what they notice when they compare the lines of music to one another. So for example, this first line of music looks very much like this second line in that they start on the same note, but instead of going up here, you'll go down.  So this is actually called what's known as inversion. It's as if we had put a horizontal axis on this first line of music and reflected the music about that axis. This third line compared to the first line looks as if we're playing this first line backwards. So the first note on this line is the last one. These four notes are these four notes reversed, and then this measure is also in reverse order here. Lastly, the fourth line looks like the second line but played in reverse order or listed in reverse order. So this note, last note here is the first note here, etc. So each of these has a musical counterpart and a mathematical counterpart to create the third line from the first one that's known as retrograde. And the fourth line from the first one is actually known as retrograde inversion where we did the reflection both across that horizontal axis and across a vertical axis if we put a vertical axis at the end of this measure. In terms of the tools that we have or the handouts, we have a note flight handout for students who have never used that tool before. We have a musical composition tools handout for students who don't have any background in music. They can make sense of both the timing and what is meant by a pitch on the musical staff. And we have a student assignment handout. If you think about the link to the mathematics, what we want to do is create some kind of mathematical representation of the music after students create their own melodies using these compositional tools. So we're going to map the rhythm or the timing of the notes to the x-axis and we're going to match the pitch or the frequency of the note to the y-axis. In this particular scheme, we'll create all of our melodies using the 4-4 time. So each quarter note is associated with an integer on the x-axis. If you have four quarter notes in the measure of your melody, the corresponding x-coordinates of the points will be 0, 1, 2, and 3. We'll use rational numbers to represent a note that's shorter than a quarter note. So if your first measure has four eighth notes and two quarter notes, then the x-coordinates of the points for the first measure will be 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, and 3. The pitch will be associated with the y-coordinate of the data points. The very first note will define what our horizontal 0 is. So the y-coordinate of the very first note will always be 0, and all of the other y-coordinates will be relative to that note. So for example, if we start on a D, which is what this note is in the treble clef, then the y-coordinate of the E note will be a 1, the y-coordinate of an F would be a 2, this is a G, so it's a 3. The half note is represented using two points with a repeated y-value. This scheme doesn't distinguish between a half note and two repeated quarter notes. That's a limitation of the model that maybe students can find a different way of working around. In this particular example, we'll continue, we have our 0, 0 for this half note, 1, 0 is the second half of that half note in a sense. This one is 2, 1, this one is 3, 3. The second measure will be 4, 2, 4.5, 3, 5, 5.5, 3, 6, 4, and 7, 4. We'll create a data set. I've used GeoGebrant to create a data set for this and plot it, but you can use a calculator or Desmos or an Excel spreadsheet. And what we'd like to do is create a functional representation of this melody so that we can then use transformations of functions. We could certainly transform the points, but because this is appropriate for algebra or pre-calculus, it makes sense to try to create some kind of a functional representation of the music. So what we're going to do is we're going to use our technology to create a polynomial and let students decide which polynomial represents their music the best. So here's an example. The orange one is a fourth degree polynomial and the black one is a fifth degree polynomial. I used GeoGebrant, but again, you can use another tool. So if you think about playing the melody that we created, we can go to the NoteFlight file, play the melody, and then we can create our mathematical representation of that melody. So if you look at this first part, that's our polynomial fit of that melody. So if you look at this first part, that's our polynomial fit. We reflected it about the x-axis and shifted it over to tack it on to the rest of our melody. This next one was in retrograde, which is a reflection about the y-axis or the vertical axis, and then again we had to shift it over to tack it on to our melody. And the last one is both a reflection across the x-axis and the y-axis, which is also known as retrograde inversion. If you look at the terms both for musical and composition tools and the mathematical transformation tools, there's a counterpart for everything in each of the lists. So we've used inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion. There's also something called diminution, which is when you take the length of the notes and have each of the lengths of the notes. So that's equivalent to compressing horizontally. Something called augmentation where you take each of the original notes and have them played for twice as long, and that's equivalent to stretching horizontally. If you change the key of a musical piece, it's equivalent to a vertical shift, and if you offset the timing like singing around like row, row, row your boat, that would be equivalent to a horizontal shift. Some of the student reflections are interesting to look at. In this particular one it says it was interesting to see how music and math could relate to each other. I would not consider myself a musically talented person at all, but seeing how math could relate to music made it easier for me to understand and allowed me to see how math can relate to things that don't seem remotely close to math itself. It was nice that everybody got to make his or her own music because you could make it easier or harder based on your knowledge of music. In another reflection, a student said, I learned you can transform the measures of music just like you can transform graphs and that composers actually use that technique to compose music. I liked that we could use note flight and geogibra together to get a better understanding and more practice with transforming graphs. I also liked that we applied math to a real life application. This interdisciplinary activity was a great reminder on how math is applied to our everyday lives. I like how we were able to extrapolate an eight measure piece of music with two measures. I think it would be nice to go even deeper and make longer pieces or even reverse engineer it to find out what a certain graph might sound like if it were music. If you look at the resources, we have several things. We have this math and music lesson overview video which you're watching right now. We have a teacher handout. We have a note flight handout to show you the basics of note flight. We have a handout on music composition tools, a student assignment. We have a couple of videos, one of which is a note flight demo video, a geogibra demo video, and a student reflection video. Here's some more references and resources. I hope that you enjoy using this mathematical and musical activity with your students to help them see a beautiful connection between math and music.


Welcome back to Misa's weekends. I'm Jeff Deist and our guest this weekend is someone we've spoken to before L.U. Beltral from Misa's Institute Brazil and he's a very important guy not only in Brazilian libertarian circles been in the worldwide Austrian movement now if you've been following what's happening in Brazil You know that the country is in a meltdown. They've had a stock market crash They've had huge currency devaluation and inflation and lately the Brazilians have taken to the streets to protest for the removal of President Rousseff and some of those protesters have been carrying signs and banners that say less marks more Mises and this is something we sure like to see in street protests in the US to put it mildly L.U. and his compatriots at Misa's Institute Brazil are behind these signs and behind much of the libertarian sentiment that is now starting to gather Momentum in Brazil. So if you'd like to hear more about what's happening in Brazil stay tuned for a great interview with our friend L.U. Beltral So great to talk to you and welcome back to Misa's weekends. Thank you very much, Jeff Well, there's so much going on in Brazil so much to talk about but before we talk about the country Tell us a little bit about what's happening with Misa's Brazil about two evenings ago You just had a big celebration and an announcement. So 500 people were there So we want to know what's happening with our sister organization. Yeah, it was a great event Jeff We wanted to gather our supporters and let them know what are the ideas for the next few years And we basically announced that we are revamping the site. It should go online within two months It's a brand new design and brand new facility. So I think it's this is a very good development and we announced the Misa's summer school that we intend to run beginning of next year during four days in a Secluded place in which you can then have all the team all the professors scholars of the Mises Brazil team together with about 30 students And that's that's a new thing. We haven't had that and finally we announced the First post grad course in Austrian economics. We don't have that in Brazil. That's a brand new development It will be a certified Lato sensor specialization To in we are in partners with a university in Sao Paulo and of course, we'll also have a solution for online Teaching as well a separate course for that. That's that should come in the second semester of next year So all of these are brand new things that we are very excited about We are we want to come more and more closer to teaching more people and taking over a little bit of the place that we lost in the academia from several decades before and of course, you know that the Brazilian academia is is a hegemonic in Marxism. It's not even Neoclassical can easily name a can easily is a member of its Marxism So we want to get in and take over some of the the terrain that we've lost over the last few decades and also we had during that evening Jeff we had an announcement of the first four people that we are honoring with a distinguished Membership of Mises Brazil. We have had that in the bylaws for a long time But would never use that so we announced the four people that are receiving that honor and the first one is Lou Rockwell We are as you know great admirers of everything that Lou has done for libertarianism for the social sciences and it's a great privilege to Give this honor to Lou as well as to the three main scholars of fostering economics in Brazil The first one is a bit of time you audio, which is our vice academic vice president also Fabio by Vietti, which is the editor of our For our academic journal and also professor Anthony Miller that you know Well because he's a scholar at the Mises Institute and these are the four first distinguished members of Mises Brazil. Well, I have to say for people who aren't as familiar Mises Brazil has a huge influence I mean obviously Brazil is a big country 200 million people, but yet when we see some of these recent street protests against Rousseff You know, we see the signs that say Less marks more Mises and whenever we see this we always figure that you have a hand in this. Yeah, it's true There are some some figures that may show a little bit of the influence. We've been heading First one is that We are in terms of online presence of social networks multimedia the number one think tank outside of the US in the world And that's compiled by the Atlas Network that Among about 500 think tanks worldwide So that's one thing and the other thing I we are used to talking about is that if you run Google trends That shows the interest in key words and you compare Ludwig von Mises against John Maynard Keynes We have overtaken Mises Ludwig von Mises have has overtaken Keynes since 2013 in an interest in Brazil and that's the only country I've run all the options all the countries that Google trends allow me to do and Brazil's the only country in which Ludwig von Mises has more interest than John Maynard Keynes Well, that's quite an accomplishment. Congratulations on that Now I brought up Rousseff How did this this most weekend this most recent weekend protests go is is there actually a Possibility of her being recalled Well, I would say there is a possibility. Yes. It's an increasing probability I place the odds that Around 30 to 40 percent that she might be impeached by Congress Of course, you you know that Many members of her party many politicians from different parties part of the coalition and government are being implicated and arrested regarding corruption related to the Previously the largest corporation in Brazil not anymore, which is Petro Bras a state owned a state controlled oil company and Rousseff it's up to this point She has not been formally implicated by any of the witnesses of this of this Trial this process that resembles by the way very much the Italian process back in the 90s the Clean hands operation in Italy that resembles a lot because a lot of people are are under arrest So it's because the president was the chairman of the board of Petro Bras during most of this time in which the corruption happened and and because also Apparently we have we're gonna have a final decision by the relevant authorities the relevant fiscal authorities but apparently her government has Cooked the books in terms of fiscal accounts last year to comply with the fiscal responsibility law which by the way puts in prison every year about a hundred mayors Because they don't comply with the fiscal responsibility law. They cannot run a deficit apparently The president and the finance minister have cooked the books last year and this is under process So because of these two Issues There is an increasing probability that Congress may act on the president But of course as you know the impeachment and it's very similar to the US is a political process run by Congress And as you might recall Jeff a few years ago We had another scandal called the men's salon which is basically a month monthly stipend scandal in which it was revealed that The executive branch was paying All the members of the coalition in the House of Representatives to support the government So it's a complicated process because you know, of course The two branches of government in Brazil usually are in bed. So you cannot you cannot know but because of the protests and because of all the public outcry we Suspect that there might be developments there, but it's hard to hard to say exactly if it's gonna happen Well, as far as the economy goes like America, Brazil's got some problems right now There's actually a CNN money article that lists three particular problems with the Brazilian economy I'd like to get an Austrian take from you on this first and foremost is is a ongoing recession and what you know with your trading partner in China the Petrobras scandal which you mentioned and also the possibility of the US Fed raising interest rates, which at least in theory would cause some money to flow out of So-called emerging markets like Brazil, you know What's the feeling that does the man on the street have a really a bad sense of what's happening? And is this going to make the average Brazilian more Marxist or less? Yes, I think the men in the street is feeling a lot because inflation has picked up dramatically because Let me just do a quick review of what happened in Brazil over the last 20 years or so in 94 We stabilized the country in terms of public finances and inflation before that we had crazy insane fiscal management and in hyperinflation and that was based on three arrows, which were Non intervention in in the exchange rate fiscal surplus at least fiscal surplus before paying interest So we had about three percent to four percent Primary surplus before paying interest and then we had about six percent of interest And I'm telling about that percentage of the GDP, right? So we had you had about six percent of GDP in interest so you would run a nominal deficit of around two percent because the country was growing a little bit more than that you had a Decreasing debt scenario, which was very good for a long time and the third and the third arrow of that policy of stabilization was Inflation targeting which actually helped a lot to control inflation over the last four years during the Dilma Rousseff Government she basically tried to dilute all of the three arrows and then she started intervening in the exchange rate. She started Tweaking with the inflation Calculations and basically decreasing taxes on the products that were part of the basket of the inflation So she was and and of course controlling the what we called managed prices Which are basically the utilities in general in which the government controls a lot of those prices of the tariffs so Using those tricks. She was controlling in the inflation Numbers the inflation index but not the real inflation as we know And of course she was spending a lot because the idea of Her government was that we had the 2008 when 2008 happened Brazil was pretty resilient at the time but the government decided to implement Counter-cyclical measures and increase spending increase credit So she basically diluted the three arrows and because of that we now have inflation of 10% a Nominal deficit of 7% of GDP, which is crazy. The trajectory of the debt is is Exploding badly And an intervention in the exchange rate up to about a few months ago now the real Which was worth around two point three reals to the dollar It's now at three point five within a few months So we had a huge devaluation and of course part of that is explained by the the dollar which has Become stronger since the Fed has announced the intention to raise interest rates But all of this is a dynamite for the the man in the street. He's Unemployed increasingly he's suffered from inflation and of course, he's very dissatisfied the the dilemma is That you know, usually the average Brazilian the guy in the street is a schizophrenic because at the same time He understands Jeff that you know taxes are really high He wants less government less taxes less intrusion But at the same time he says that he wants the government to guarantee education health and some other things and What's the the new development in Brazil is that there is a growing section of the population which are influenced by Libertarian and good conservative ideas and and and of course as you mentioned The leader in the movements in Brazil is a is a hundred percent Libertarian So because of this we are having an agenda which has been changed They're focusing now on the impeachment process But the good news is that behind the impeachment agenda There is a good Libertarian agenda that's ready to strike in as soon as the moment arises Oh you most Americans and most Westerners in general do not have a sense of what it's like to live With 10 or 15 percent price inflation at the store, for example What do Brazilians do to protect themselves from this? Well? It's very complicated in Brazil. We because of the memory of inflation and because of the past of inflation You if you have savings liquid savings you you can get protected because If you're sitting down right now, it's better because the interbank interest rates in Brazil are above 14% So this is crazy, right? You can make money Just having the the money is sitting still in the bank and in the US I guess is the opposite because you make zero right now in short-term Investments and you still have an inflation of around 2% So in Brazil we have at least real interest rates and the central bank is now trying to restore Inflation back to the target Let's see if that will happen But at least they are raising interest rates and they are now starting to try to control a little bit of the credit so But getting back to your question the man in the street doesn't have any liquid savings He suffers the full blow of inflation in rising prices, but people that have a little bit of liquid investments Yes, they can put in the US We mainly hear about Brazil in relation to the so-called brick countries And we hear a lot about Brazilian fiscal policy, but we don't hear much about the Brazilian central bank Can you just tell us a little bit about how the central bank in Brazil operates? The central bank of Brazil is completely state-owned. You don't have any participation of regional Banks like like you have in the US. You have the controlling the stake of the central government in the US when you nominate most of the members of the of the FOMC in Brazil everything a hundred percent of our FOMC is Government nominated so it's fully central But it works in similar ways as the Fed does The the different thing is the inflation targeting. We don't have we don't have a dual mandate here. They have to Set a target and work within a two percent band up or down The problem is in the last four years since the government started this counter cyclical measures that they called They call it a new macroeconomic matrix. That's a very status name Since they started that they were not targeting the center of the band the inflation band any longer They were targeting the top of the band which was six and a half percent and now they In the last two years they disregarded even the top of the band So the inflation is running above nine percent very close to ten percent But in terms of actually Actually how the Fed works in Brazil the central bank. It's very similar to the US Well, do wealthy people in Brazil fear hyperinflation and do they keep a lot of their money outside of the country? Or more importantly, do they fear capital controls on getting their money out of the country? They we are not fearing any longer the capital controls because of the large International reserves that we currently hold around 370 billion dollars all into in treasuries Most of it at least you US you mean US US treasuries yes So because of that people are not fearing capital controls What they are really fearing and suffering is the massive devaluation of the real because of the inflation and At least the central banks stopped the intervention. They were they sold around a hundred billion dollars of Dollars to try to control the exchange rate and swaps as well over the last 18 months or so They stopped doing that a few months ago, and that's why the currency hit up to to track whatever the market Is but since we still have this huge International reserves people don't fear the capital controls no well We're almost out of time, but I'd like to leave this conversation with one last question What was the overall experience with the 2014 FIFA World Cup? And you've got the upcoming 2016 Olympics this seems like this is tailor-made for cronyism and corruption. Yes true You know, we have a few stadiums that are no longer used and that were of course Very expensive much higher prices than you would expect in the international market So of course we have a lot of cronyism Related to the World Cup and that's a disappointment and people Back in 2013 when the process protest began they were they were talking a lot about that and and this year Now the protests are a little less about that and more towards less government in general and Impeachment of the president because of corruption charges But of course the Olympics, I guess you have the same thing I don't follow much of the Olympics cronyism But of course you have it and I prefer not to read about it otherwise I'll be depressed Elio, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're not familiar with Mises Brazil You should absolutely check them out It's an organization that punches way above its weight and now you just keep us informed as to what you're doing And we look forward to seeing you in the very near future here in Auburn. Thank you very much Jeff It was great talking to you


Hello, friendly faces.  We don't really have to think about skin until it doesn't feel like it used to anymore. Skin that isn't the way we want it to be. Or skin as it used to be. Mä enemis karetareja on sarjämme the CEO of Lineal Biotech. There's a saying that beauty is only skin deep. Well, let me take you a little bit deeper than just the surface now. We all age and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, right? But there's an increasing amount of us who really don't enjoy the signs of aging, such as wrinkles. Skin is our largest barrier. It protects us from the environment throughout our lives. It takes hits from the outside, such as pollution. And also from the inside, from our lifestyle choices. Over time, skin becomes thinner. It loses fat, no longer plumps and smooths as it used to. Your veins and bones can be seen more easily. Scratches and bumps heal slower. Years of sun tanning may lead to wrinkles, dryness and age spots. And the way you look changes. Skin can also be physically harmed. By disease or surgery. And not all scars are unwanted, of course. But some can significantly decrease the quality of life. Summing up the injectable medical aesthetics market and the scar care market alone in EU and US comes to a 40 billion annual market. This is a market that is continuously seeking but very rarely finding new solutions. Aesthetic market attracts new customers. During COVID, this market was booming. And it found a new group of customers. Those were gentlemen who for the first time had to stare at themselves over Zoom and Teams 24-7. And started thinking about, is there something I want to get done? And what's growing even faster is the regenerative solutions market. Actually at 22 percent. And that is the market where we look for natural and long-term results. Now, even if you are the biggest pop icon on this planet, you're still not immune to aging and you still may want to counterbalance the effects of aging. Current methods do not always produce natural results. In fact, there is a growing concern among the professionals that overuse of fillers may cause very harmful effects and it definitely causes an unnatural result. So is there a healthy alternative? Years ago, two of our cell biologist founders started looking for answers. Answers to the question of skin. Skin that could heal itself properly. What if defected skin could heal itself? Our founders started researching adipose tissue, commonly known as fat, and its components. Fat is widely recognized in the academic literature as a very active tissue with tremendous healing power and it's an excellent source of bioactive molecules. The best practices currently rely largely on laborious and invasive methods, such as fat transfers and PRP. PRP, platelet-rich plasma, was notoriously made famous by no other than Kim Kardashian, but unfortunately doomed very much unaffected by the professional community. Fat transfers are effective, but they are painful and they are painfully expensive for the patient. And also fat can always only be transferred from yourself to yourself. The current aesthetic methods are also not so easy to scale. We are really proud to say that we have answers to these questions. We found a way for the skin to self-heal. Back to its natural state, we call it tie-ends, tissue science. Tie-ends mimics the normal healing function of the skin and the body. Its unique composition guides the natural processes of skin and subcutaneous tissue, making the healing process faster and more thorough. Repairing tissue damage in a way that existing skin care products cannot do. Tie-ends is a result of technology where balanced combination of bioactive proteins and peptides are extracted from subcutaneous tissue from selected donors with a patented, validated and very rigorously quality-controlled method. Tie-ends is manufactured in a tissue establishment clean room here in Finland, using a gentle production process again with a rigorous quality control. Fundamental fact about tie-ends is that it's cell-free, and that's why it's allogenic. So how does tie-ends work? What it does, it promotes epidermal turnover and texture, introduces lipids to the skin, supports the production and maintaining of healthy skin barrier and moisture retention. It enhances the skin structure by stimulating natural production of hyaluronic acid, collagen and elastin by skin cells. It increases microvascularization, which is key to our product. Improving nutrient and oxygen delivery to the skin and resulting in a healthier looking skin. Now you've heard the term putting your skin in the game, right? That's me getting my first tie-ends treatment. Depending on the treatment area and need, tie-ends can be used as an injection as done here, or topically in combination with other treatments like micro-needling or laser treatments. Whether used as an injection or to damage skin, it's always done by specifically trained healthcare professionals such as physicians and nurses. Here at Slush we obviously cannot show faces of our customers, but you can look at some of the treatment results on our Instagram or website where there is more. That's one happy customer over there. We are bringing a completely new innovation to the market. It is packed by 15 years of research and three international patents with the fourth patent family in process or bending as one would say. Based on comprehensive research, tie-ends is safe. No significant adverse events or allergic reactions have been associated to the product. Immunological risks are minimum because this product contains no cells. As a conclusion of the safety study, tie-ends is safe even when injected in large doses. As mentioned, there's a lot of research behind us and we continue to conduct more research to demonstrate the full potential of tie-ends in different indications. Although technology for us is mainly how we produce and manufacture the product, we also work on supporting technology like this app here. This is an app where all of our users can track all the tie-ends treatments that they've done and report the results back to us. We are currently focused on the Nordic market. Our driven international team is however committed taking this innovation to global arenas. And next we are approaching larger markets and for that we are identifying partners. Picture is lacking a little bit behind we are 15 at the moment. We have just closed the first half of our A round of 4 million euros and we continue to look for value-adding investors. So catch me here at Slush if you want to put your skin in the game. Thank you so much.


Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Well, good afternoon and welcome back here to San Francisco, we're Moscone North along with Dave Vellante, John Walls. You're watching our coverage here live on theCUBE of VMworld 2019. Dave, I've been over on the other set. I know you've been busy on this side as well. Show going all right for you so far? Oh yeah, a lot of action going on over here. We had Pat Kelsinger on this morning, Michael Dell with this VMware hat. We got Sanjay Pooning coming on later. Yeah, yeah. Good lineup, and that lineup continues. Greg Hughes, the CEO of Veritas. Great to be here. Great to be here, John. Thanks for joining us. Dave, absolutely. We're actually just outside the Veritas Meadow here. Sponsored this area. This is the Meadow set that we're on right now. Nice to be here. Yeah, I didn't know that. All right, just first off, just give me your idea of the vibe here. What are you feeling? I think there's a tremendous amount of energy. It's been a lot of fun to be here. Obviously, VMware is talking about this hybrid multi-cloud world, and Veritas is 100% supportive of that vision. We work with all the major cloud service providers, you know, AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure. We share thousands of customers with VMware. Some of the biggest customers, the most complicated customers in the world where we provide availability and protection and insights for those customers. Well, it's always been the ethos of Veritas. When you go back to the early days of Veritas, essentially it was the storage management, you know, the no hardware agenda, the sort of independent storage company, but pure software. That's us. And, you know, years ago, there was no cloud, you know, but there were different platforms. And so that culture has really migrated now into this multi-cloud world. Get thoughts on that. Absolutely. Look, you know, I'll give you an example of a customer that we work with closely with VMware on. And that is Renault Americas. Renault is a big joint venture. They've got a huge SAP installation, 8,000 users, 40 terabytes, a big net backup customer. They also use our products Infascale and VRP for availability and DR. And they work with us because we are hardware agnostic. They looked at us against the other competitors and we're hardware agnostic. And because of that, we came in at 60% lower TCO than those other providers. So that hardware agnostic approach works really well.  The fact that this stuff is hard to figure out and really kind of can boggle the mind a bit. It's very complex. How much of an inhibitor is that in terms of what you're hearing from clients and in terms of their progress and their decision making? Well, let me explain where we sit. We are the leader in enterprise data protection, availability and insights. We work with the largest, most complex, most highly regulated and most demanding customers on the planet. 99 of the Fortune 100 are customers of Veritas. 10 of the top 10 telcos, 10 of the top 10 healthcare companies and 10 of the top 10 financial institutions. I spend about 50% of my time talking to these customers. So we learn a lot. And here are the four big challenges they're facing. First is the explosion of data. Data is just growing so fast. Gardner estimates there'll be 175 zettabytes of data in 2025. If you crammed that into iPhones, it would take 2.6 trillion iPhones and go to the sun and back, right? It's an enormous amount of data. Second, they're worried about ransomware. It's not a question of if you'll be attacked, it's when you'll be attacked. Look at what's happening in Texas right now with the 22 municipalities dealing with that. What you want in that case is a resilient infrastructure. You want to be able to restore from a really good backup copy of data. Third, they want the hybrid multi-cloud world just like Pat Gelsinger has been talking about. That's what customers want, that they want to be able to protect their data wherever it is, make it highly available and get insights in their data wherever it's located. And then finally, they're dealing with this massive growth in government regulations around the world because of this concern about privacy. I was in Australia a few weeks ago and one of our customers, she was telling me that she deals with 27 different regulatory environments. Another customer was saying the California Privacy Act will be the death of him. And he's based in St. Louis, right? So our strategy is focused on taking away the complexity and helping the largest companies in the world deal with these challenges. And that's why we introduce the Enterprise Data Services Platform and that's why we're here at VMworld talking about Veritas. So Greg, let's unpack some of those. As I said, Veritas kind of created a market way back when. And now you see, come full circle, you've got multi-cloud, you have a lot of new entrants talking about data management. That's always been your play. But you're kind of the king of the hill.  So that's kind of interesting. But data growth, so let's start there. So it used to be data was a liability. Now it's becoming an asset. So what are your customers saying about sort of data as something that needs to be managed, needs to be done cost-effectively and efficiently versus getting more value on data? And what's Veritas' sort of perspective on that? Well, they're really trying to get insights in their data, okay? And that's why we acquired a company called Aptar. So when I, this is my second time at Veritas. I was here from 2003 to 2010. Rejoined the company in 2018. Talked to a lot of customers. I found that their infrastructure was so complex. The storage infrastructure is so complex that companies were having a hard time figuring out anything about their data. So they're having the hardest time just answering some fundamental questions that boards were asking. Boards are saying because of the ransomware threat, is all our data protected? Is it backed up? Are all our applications backed up and protected? And customers could not answer that question. On the other hand, they also were backing up some data six, seven, eight times. Wasting storage. What Aptar does, and it's really amazing. I recommend seeing a demo of it if you get a chance. It pulls information from SAN arrays, network file systems, virtual machines, SAN networking and all data protection applications to get a complete picture of what's happening with your data. And that is one example of what customers really want. Okay, so then that kind of leads to the second point, which is ransomware. Now part of that is analytics and understanding what's going on in the system as well. So, but it's a relatively new concept, right? And ransomware is the last couple of years we've really started to see it escalate. How does Veritas help address that problem? And does Aptar play a role there? Well, Veritas helps companies address that problem because Veritas helps create a resilient infrastructure. Okay, the bad guys are going to get in. Spear fishing works, you know? You are going to find some employees who are going to click on a link and the malware is going to get in. So all you can do to protect, you ultimately have to have a good backup copy so you can restore at scale and quickly. And so there's been a lot of focus from these large enterprises on restoring at scale very quickly after a ransomware attack. So you're not beholden, you can't be extorted by the ransomware attackers. The third piece was hybrid and of course that leads to sort of hybrid multi-cloud. Let's put that category out there. Now, I've been kind of skeptical on hybrid multi-cloud from an application perspective. In other words, the vision that you can run any app anywhere in the world without having to retest, recompile. I've been skeptical of that, but the one area that I'm not skeptical and I'm encouraged with is data protection. Because I think actually you can have a consistent data protection model across your on-prem, different on-prem, different clouds. Because you're partnering with all the different cloud companies, you obviously have expertise in on-prem. So talk about your approach there, philosophy and maybe any offering. Well, this is really what sets us apart. We have been around for 25 years, 2000 patents. We protect everything. 500 different sources of data, 150 different targets, 60 different cloud service providers. You know, we compete with two categories of players. We compete with the newcomers and they'll only protect your most current technology. They don't go back. We've been around for 25 years. We protect everything, right? We also compete with the conglomerates, okay? In their case, they're not focused. They're trying to do everything. All we do is availability, protection and insights. And that's why we've been in Gartner MQ 13 times and we're the market share leader. Well, so absolutely. Touch race on what Dave was saying though about the application side of this. I mean, just your thoughts about, you know, the kinds of concerns that Dave raises. I mean, he's not alone in that respect. I mean, there are general concerns here right about whether that'll fly. What do you think in terms of- I think the vision is spot on and like all visions, it takes a while to get to. But I think what VMware's done recently in the acquisition, they're basically trying to make the control plane for compute, okay? And their acquisition of carbon black and pivotal add to that control plane. We are going to be, we are the control plane for data protection. I mean, that's the way our customers rely on. See, but that makes sense to me. So I think, I feel like the multi-cloud vision is very aspirational today. And I think it's going to be really hard to get there without homogeneous infrastructure. And that's why you see things like Outpost. You see Oracle has cloud a customer. You got Azure Stack. So, and I think it's going to be a multi-vendor world. However, I do think that as it relates to data protection you can set a standard and say, we're going to standardize on Veritas. So I think that it's achievable. So that's kind of was my point there. The last one was regulations. Do you think GDPR will be a sort of a framework globally? What are your customers seeing there? Well, they're dealing with more than GDPR. Like I talked about that one customer, 27 different regulatory environments. And the challenge there is how do you deal with that when you don't know what you have in terms of data? The 50% of data is what we call dark data. You don't know anything about it, right? So you need help classifying it, understanding and getting insight into that data. And that's what we can help our customers with. But how do you deal with that in that environment? I mean, Dave raises the point. And this is obvious as well. I mean, it's like California, right? Which is somewhat infamous for having, you know, its own regulatory mindset. I mean, how do you exist with the United States has privacy concerns and Congress can address it and various federal agencies can do the same. Europe, obviously, we've talked about. Now Australia now here and now there. You've got this Balkan eye system that has no consistency, no framework. And so how do you operate on a global scale? Fundamentally, it relies on classifying that data, right? Understanding what's where and what do you have? Is it PII, personally identifiable information? Is it information that's intellectual property? What kind of data you have? Once you have that insight, which is what we provide, you can layer on top of the regulatory compliance. And is that Aptar IP? Is it Veritas IP, a blend of? It's a blend of Aptar and Veritas IP. We have a product called Info Studio that helps to provide that. Now remember, one of the things that our net backup product has is a catalog of data. So we know where the data is, from primary to secondary storage, and we have all the versions of that data. And then we can run analytics against the secondary storage and not hit the primary systems, right? So we're out of band to the primary systems and that turns out to be very valuable in these days. A question, the catalog can't do this without a catalog and not to geek out here a little but it'll give out a little bit. When you bring in multi-clouds, other clouds, how do you incorporate that knowledge into your catalog? Yeah, our technology, our catalog works across multiple clouds. So we work with 60 different cloud service providers. There's three big ones represented here today, Microsoft, AWS and Google. We work very closely with all three of them. And that's because you do the engineering at the API level. Our engineering teams work very, very closely together. Okay, so let's talk about competition a little bit. The market's heated up. It's great. It's good to see all this VC money floating in.  Why Veritas? Well, I explained that. We are the leader in enterprise data protection availability and insights. There are some newcomers. They just will support you on your current technology. They don't support the infrastructure you've had for many years. If you're a large, complicated enterprise, you have layers of technology. We support all that. We've been around for 25 years. Against the big conglomerates, we are completely focused. And that's why we're the leader, according to Gartner, in the leaders quadrant, 13 years. And just as we close up, you talked about, you brought up the case in Texas about the 22 municipalities. You do a lot of public sector work, states, federal government, whatever. Just what is the difference, the different animal between public and private and what you need to do in terms of providing them with data protection? They're struggling with the same challenge. I mean, in fact, we work with some of the largest government agencies in the world. And they are struggling with exactly these same challenges. They also want to leverage the public cloud. They're worried about ransomware. They're dealing with data growth. All of these are challenges to them. And that's the, so these are common challenges we're addressing. Our strategy is to help our customers with these challenges so they can focus on the value of data.  Yeah, he does. I'm having a great time. The team fired up. Yeah, we get that, right? It's great to be here. You're okay with geeking out too, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you just talk a little bit about that. Very good. Hey, thanks for the time. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, John. We'll run out of time. We'll get to 49ers next time. All right, we'll do it. Great news, joining us from Veritas, back with more, VMworld 2019 right here on theCUBE. Thank you.


where it repeats itself, as opposed to so many other countries where it doesn't happen. And it's about gun control, I suppose, but maybe more. And all those people in the other countries, they have some sort of weapon, but one of the obvious problems is that it's very—weapons such as Uesugi used make it easy to kill people. That's the Xerox case. Yeah, the Xerox case. If you have a knife, then if you're getting into somebody chasing you around with a knife and you happen to be faster, you've taken care of most of the problem for yourself. On the other hand, if that person has an illegal weapon, which are easy to come by, and starts shooting people in the back, I mean, they're dead as a doornail quickly. So you can kill seven people, whereas if you had a confrontation with one knife and seven people, you're going to be the one who's going to ultimately end up suffering the attack. I do want to discuss Uesugi and the Xerox case in great detail with you, because I think it's one of Hawaii's most famous cases, actually. But just for this short discussion here, I wonder what your reaction would be as a prosecutor to find that the guy who committed this offense, the guy who went to so much trouble to do it, the guy who wrecks havoc on so many lives and families, he commits suicide and gets away. He robbed us of the opportunity to have a public response. There's enough of these people who survive deliberately and have made plans to escape. My own belief is that somebody who ought to be subject to the death penalty, and if they take it and do it for themselves, they're saving us a whole lot of money. And so it's a practical thing, and I think that that's acceptable. I think the fact that we had Charles Manson alive for how many decades after what he had done is unacceptable, and if there's ever a poster child for why you need to get rid of people who are serial killers, it's Ted Bundy. Sure.  Well, he did this because he thought he was smarter than everybody else and succeeded in being very much smarter than most people for far too long. Sick. Yeah. Except he's not sick. This was what he did for a living. Whatever genes were put together, sometimes you get a real loser one, and then this particular guy was very effective and very cunning and very vicious in terms of the killings that he committed. So this is going to continue in our world, and there's an intersection between this kind of serial killing and mass killing and terrorism, which plays on the same field somehow. It's obvious it does. What do we do? What do we do in terms of apprehension, not so easy, prosecution? We got a lot of laws that protect the defendant, you know, conviction, we got juries that get confused, and punishment, lots of different considerations on punishment. Before you get to the end of it, it could be a long time, and is the public's need for counteraction, if you want to call it that, met, is going to be, is rehabilitation important, or is, what's the other word, when you punish, punishment, deterrence, is that important? It seems like these issues are unresolved in our time, and nobody has a clear handle on which way it can go, should go, or which is the optimal way to deal with it on a societal basis. Well, I can tell you that one of the most significant things you need to have in terms of prosecuting people of that caliber is you need to have evidence, and you need to be able to search for the evidence, and you need to be able to break down barriers that have kept you from being able to collect evidence against these types of people. And so when you have something that's as critical as a, you know, somebody who's killed eight people, and there's very little evidence that you can legally get to under the current rules to go get inside the car, to get inside the trunk, all of those things are the types of things that you have to reanalyze in a system that's more sensible than the one we have right now. And pendulum swing. Yeah, well right now, everything is for the defendant. I mean, from start to finish, sacred constitutional rights is what's pounded into your head constantly, and in fact what it is, it's basically an opportunity to get less relevant and truthful evidence before the jury or the trier of fact, and that's not acceptable to me. The criminal justice system has been screwed up that way for years.


This paper examined the application of guidelines and recommendations from the clinical and translational science, CTSA, Consortium to a Statistical Consulting Laboratory, SCL, staffed primarily by graduate students at an academic health center. The SCL was successful in incorporating the guidelines and recommendations, resulting in a high volume of requests and positive feedback from investigators. This article was authored by Adam P. Seimer, Viviana A. Rodriguez, Keely E. Bradbrook and others.