This is a mathematics lecture on the Riemann-Roch theorem for the special case of genus zero surfaces. So genus zero surfaces are particularly easy and the Riemann-Roch theorem for these is very elementary and we can just check it explicitly. So what we're going to do, we're going to verify the Riemann-Roch theorem for a particular Riemann surface, the projective line, and then we'll use the Riemann-Roch theorem to classify genus zero surfaces and show that they're all isomorphic to the projective line at least over the complex numbers. So the genus zero surface, if we're talking about compact surfaces, it means the surface is just a sphere, so you can either take the surface to be the projective line if you're an algebraist or if you're an analyst, you can take it to be the Riemann sphere which is the complex numbers together with a pointed infinity. So the general Riemann-Roch theorem says that L of D is degree of D plus 1 minus G plus L of K minus D where you just remember that D is a divisor, the degree is the number of points in the divisor, G is the genus, K is the canonical divisor and L of a divisor tells you the number of the dimension of the space of functions whose poles lie only on the divisor D, roughly speaking. So let's look at the special case of this for genus zero. Well, first of all, the genus is zero, so we can omit that term. Next, we have to evaluate the canonical divisor. So the canonical divisor is just the set of zeros of a one form, so we could take a one form on C and it has no zeros or poles as you can see and we need to know what happens at infinity. Well, we can see what happens at infinity by making the change of variables y equals 1 over z in which case D z becomes minus 1 over y squared dy and you see this as a pole of order two at y equals zero which corresponds to z being the point at infinity. So the canonical divisor which is the set of zeros of D z is minus two times the point infinity because a pole of order two counts as a zero of order minus two. In particular, we see the degree of k is equal to minus two and L of k is equal to zero. There are no holomorphic one forms on the surface. So the Riemann-Roch theorem for genus zero now looks like this. It just says L of D is equal to the degree of D plus 1 plus L of minus D minus two times the point infinity where L of D is the dimension of the functions f such that f plus D is greater than or equal to naught. You remember this means the zeros of f and this essentially just means that all the poles of f have to lie on D and in fact this formula here can be written down more explicitly as follows. First of all, if degree of D is less than zero then L of D equals zero. This is true for any compact Riemann surface whether or not it is genus zero because the function can't have more zeros than poles. On the other hand, if the degree of D is greater than or equal to zero then L of D is the degree of D plus one and this is because the degree of minus D minus two times infinity is now less than zero so L of minus D minus two times infinity is equal to zero so this term up here cancels out. So we have an explicit formula for the number of functions whose zeros are on D that depends only on the degree of D and we should point out that this depends only on degree of D and this is a simplification that occurs only for genus zero Riemann surfaces. As soon as the genus is bigger than zero then working out this number here becomes rather more complicated but this is one of the reasons I said that genus zero is just a sort of easy warming up exercise. So what we're going to do is just verify this directly and the point is that suppose we're given a divisor D is sum of n i p i and let's take all p i to be on the complex plane and we're not going to take p i to be as infinity for the moment and now let's find a function on C let's say it's rational such that f is equal to D so we're not worrying about what happens at f at the point infinity we're just looking at its values on the finite plane and it's obvious how to do this we can just take the product of Z minus p i to the n i and this obviously has a zero of order n at p i and what happens at infinity well it has the order of the pole at infinity is just sum of all the n i's so on C union infinity zeros of f are just D minus sum of n i times the point infinity so you see this this now has degree equal to zero and conversely you can see that any degree zero divisor can be written in this form for some divisor on C and now it's easy to check that what L of D is first of all for any Riemann surface and if p is a point then L of D plus p is at most L of D plus one so it's equal to L of D if there's no function in this in this space with a pole of maximum possible order at p and if there is a function in the space of the pole of maximum possible order of p then that then it gives you an extra plus one to the space of functions with with poles on on on this divisor on the other hand if the function is genus zero and the degree of D is greater than or equal to zero then L of D plus p is now going to be greater than or equal to L of D plus one because we can always find a function with the pole of maximum possible order for this divisor which will not be in L of D so L of D plus B has to be bigger than L of D so we can find this function just by writing down it explicitly like this so we find that if the degree of D is at least zero then L of D is exactly equal to the degree of D plus one so now that we've worked out L of D in all cases we can just check the Riemann Rock theorem explicitly so suppose the degree of D is one of these numbers minus three minus two minus one zero one two three and so on then what is L of D well it's zero zero zero one two three four and so on what's L of K minus D well this is degree minus two minus the degree of D so so L of this goes like this it goes um it's a zero zero zero one two three and so on so now we can look at what is L of D minus L of K minus D but it looks like this it goes zero one two three four minus one minus two minus three and so on and you can see that this is just the degree of D plus one and what you should also notice is that this line here is a polynomial whereas this line here is not a polynomial and this line here is not a polynomial either and what's going on here is that more generally um L of D turns out to be the dimension of a zero co-homology group and L of K minus D turns out to be the zero to be the dimension of a first co-homology group and in general the dimensions of co-homology groups don't vary like polynomials I mean that it's a polynomial here but then it changes on the other hand if you take the Euler characteristic which is an alternating sum of dimensions of co-homology groups that often turns out to be a polynomial so so this number here is really a sort of Euler characteristic and Euler characteristics often behave really nicely and turn out to be polynomials um well so that verifies the Riemann-Roch theorem at least in the case of the Riemann sphere now what we want to do is to classify Riemann surfaces with with genus G equal to zero so let's write down the Riemann-Roch theorem here we get L of D is equal to the degree of D plus one minus G which is zero plus L of K minus D now as before in a previous lecture we find that the degree of K is minus two and L of K is zero and as usual L of D is equal to zero if the degree of D is less than zero so the Riemann-Roch theorem becomes L of D is equal to the degree of D plus one if the degree of D is greater than or equal to zero and not if the degree of D is less than zero so in particular we see that L of zero is equal to one in fact this is always true this is just the space of constants which is one dimensional and L of P is equal to two if P is a point so this is just to devise a consisting of one point and in particular you notice that L of P is greater than L of zero so there is a function f with pole of order one at P and no other poles so for Riemann surfaces of genus greater than zero we don't get functions with just a single pole and no other zeros so this is a sort of characteristic of genus zero Riemann surfaces well and we can use this function it's now a function from our Riemann surface or algebraic curve to the complex numbers and we notice that f is injective because f minus c has exactly one zero for any number c in c because it's only got one pole so we've got an injective function from x to c this doesn't sorry c union infinity this doesn't actually imply that x is isomorphic to c union infinity because it might x might have singularities if it's an algebraic curve however if x is non-singular this easily implies that f is an isomorphism if you just want to see an example of an algebraic curve with a singularity such that there's an injective map that's not an isomorphism we can just take the curve y squared equals x cubed which looks has a sort of cusp like this and if you take the function f to be y over x then it's an injective map from this curve to the Riemann sphere you can add a pointed infinity if you like but it's not an isomorphism of algebraic curves because of the singular point here it's actually a homeomorphism of topological spaces so it doesn't in some sense have an inverse however this inverse isn't a isn't a regular map of Riemann of algebraic curves so this shows that any genus zero curve any non-singular complete genus zero curve is isomorphic to the projective line over the complex numbers another thing we can do with genus zero curves is they're very closely related to unique factorization domains so genus zero sort of is more or less equivalent to being a unique factorization domain what we can do is is we can define a curve y to be say p1 minus a finite number of points and we can let r be the ring of rational functions which are regular on y for example if if we take y to be just c then r is just the ring of polynomials in one variable over over the complex numbers now the point is that r is a unique factorization domain and you can see this because the Riemann rock theorem implies that for each p in r we can find a function with a pole at this point p and no other zeros and poles so we can find a function gp which is zero at p no other zeros and then we we get unique factorization because any other function f on r is just a product over p of gp to the np where np is the order of the zero of f at p i guess this should be times a unit where u is a unit so we've got a factorization of f into primes where the primes are these numbers here so you see unique factorization to primes has this following very strong geometric meaning it says roughly that given any collection of points and multiplicities you can find an essentially unique function with with those zeros or opto unit or whatever so for genus greater than zero it's very unusual for rings like this to be unique factorization domains that I think there are a handful of examples over small finite fields but usually being a unique factorization domain in the case of curves is almost equivalent to its completion being genus zero so genus zero curves are actually really quite different from higher genus curves really you should you should divide curves into three classes genus zero which we've covered today genus one which i'll be doing a bit later and genus greater than one and the differences are well here the degree of the canonical device is less than zero here the degree of the canonical divisors equal to zero and here the degree of the canonical device is greater than zero if you do differential geometry you know these correspond to surfaces with curvature greater than zero here the curvature equals zero and here the curvature is less than zero in fact in differential geometry the Gauss-Bernet theorem says that you can relate the genus or rather the Euler characteristic to the curvature the Euler characteristic which is 2 minus 2g is just the integral of the curvature times some bunch factor which I can't remember there's also something called the Kadera dimension which is indicated by Greek letter kappa the Kadera dimension is related to the number of one forms which in turn is related to the degree of the canonical divisor so the Kadera dimension is by convention given as zero what minus infinity zero or one and the Kadera dimension really controls the behavior of curves or more generally algebraic varieties and higher dimensions genus zero also has many automorphisms so if you've got the projective line you know it's acted on by pgl2 of the complex numbers genus one also has met quite a lot of automorphisms because this can be written as c over l which is a group so this group acts on itself here there are few automorphisms in fact the automorphism group of a typical curve of genus greater than one just as one element and in general it's always finite um genus zero as we've just seen tend to be unique factorization domains genus one and genus greater than one are usually not unique factorization domains so you see the genus zero surfaces we've discussed genus zero Riemann surfaces we've discussed today are really quite unlike the curves of higher genus we're going to discuss later on okay the next lecture on this we'll be talking about uh the Riemann rock theorem in the case of curves of genus one


Sticking with boys hockey roso visiting East Grand Forks and it was a battle early on in this one no score Eastside trying to get things going but William Woolover says no two times to this puck eventually getting the save the green wave would strike again a couple minutes later.


Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our session on youth and prosperity. My name is Sean Rush. I'm the president and CEO of JA Worldwide. We're a youth development organization that works with about 11 million young people in 120 countries around the world. Just some housekeeping items before we get started. This session is being webcast live, and so those of you in the audience or those of you who may be watching on the web, you can pose questions, email. You can email your question or comment to youth. Y-O-U-T-H at wef-w-e-f dot com. Or if you'd like to post a type of tweet here in China, you can post to Weibo and the hashtag is pound or hash, depending upon what part of the world you come from. W-E-F youth, Y-O-U-T-H. You can tweet on Twitter. It's the same hashtag, so feel free during the session to pose any questions you might have. The session will be conducted in English, and so those of you who need a translation, your headset, you can tune to Channel 2 for Mandarin Chinese and Channel 3 for Japanese. So let's get started with the session. The overriding theme of this meeting of the new champions here in Zhenjin is creating the future economy, and a big part of that future economy is going to be youth. It's human capital will be a major part of how the new economy is shaped, and youth will be a huge part of that. The world reached its seventh billionth person earlier this year, but the median age of that population is 27, which means that half of the world's population is under the age of 27. It's the biggest cohort of youth in the history of mankind. But that cohort of youth is facing some challenges due to the current economy. Global youth unemployment according to the International Labor Organization is nearly 13%. 75 million youth around the world are unemployed, but there are some variations in that. You go to different parts of the world. In the developed world, though, that unemployment rate is roughly 16%. Latin America, it's nearly 15%, but the Middle East and North Africa hover around 29% to 27%. Yet in East Asia and South Asia, where we are here, it's below 10% in the nine. So there's huge variation, but there is a large problem around the world. There's also, I think, a mismatch of skills, because as you talk to CEOs and other corporations, there are jobs available in many parts of the world, but the gap between what CEOs need in terms of skills and what's available in the marketplace is great. There's also, because of this unemployment issue, a trust deficit, as some people have called it, in the traditional institutions that have served us over time. And that trust deficit played itself out among young people over the last couple of years through the Occupy movement, which we all saw around the world. We saw it in the Arab Spring a couple of years ago, and it was driven by, I think, youth disaffection in those parts of the world. And now, additionally, while there's been progress against the millennium goals created by the UN, yet there are still 60 million young people around the world who do not have access to any form of education. At the same time, given those challenges, this is the most technologically sophisticated generation in the history of the world. They were born on the Internet, they've grown up on the World Wide Web, and they use social media and technologies in a stunning manner in ways that even the creators of those technologies didn't imagine. And yet, as we have heard here many times during this week on different panels, this generation thinks and acts differently than prior generations, and they see the world, they see business, they see employment in very novel and different ways. So with that context and that backdrop, I'd like to pose the question to our panel of how should society engage young people in shaping the new economy. So I'm going to pose my first question to the panel, and we have a great panel to help us with that. To my left, we have Dong Xia, who is Deputy Secretary General of the All China Youth Federation in the People's Republic of China. To her left is Jaime Vez, President of Asia Pacific, Japan, and Greater China for Cisco Systems in the USA. To his left is Michelle Tanmeyi, Associate at the Kazana National, which is a strategic investment organization in Malaysia, but she's also created a think tank in Malaysia that will allow young people to begin to participate in the formation of public policy. To her left is Chris Kirk, who will be answering the first question. He is Chief Executive Officer of GEMS Education Solutions in the United Kingdom. And finally, to his left is Andrea Carafa, who is founder and Executive Director of the Green Young Economy in Belgium. Two of these people, Michelle and Andrea, are global shapers, which is a group of young people between the ages of 20 and 30 here at the Forum, who have been identified around the world to be developed and nurtured and mentored through the Forum's activities. So back to Chris, and let me pose that question to you, and that is, how do we engage these young people in shaping the global economy, given that context? Well, Sean, what I'd like to do is start by thinking about the roles that schools can play in this, a lot of the interventions might come after young people have actually left education or around the educational process, but I would like to suggest that there's a lot more that we can be doing actually within schooling itself. And my organization works with governments and school systems right around the world, so we get quite a broad perspective on what's happening in this area. And in addition, GEMS itself runs its own schools in different parts of the world. And we've really spent a lot of time thinking about this issue. A lot of our schools are in the Middle East and North Africa. And for children growing up in that region, how you can create a world of peace is very much on their mind. And they're also very aware of those stark statistics, Sean, that you gave around youth unemployment in the Middle East and North Africa. It's a huge issue. One thing that really strikes us is that in many ways our traditional education systems are quite broken. When you think about what it was that people needed to be able to know and do and how they would behave, when you go back 20, 50, 100 years, it was so different from the digital generation that are growing up now. There was a point in time when in many parts of the world you would have a relatively elite tier of people for whom actually sort of knowing things that the rest of the population did not know was a mark of distinction and a lot of our education processes were geared towards giving them those advantages. And then another large group of people who were destined for the factories, for the industrial world, for whom that knowledge was not so important and actually being able to perform tasks in a certain way was important. Really in many parts of the world, those days they're either gone or they are going to be receding quickly. And we did a new kind of education. And what I'd like to argue is that that education can foster entrepreneurship and a spirit of achievement right from the start. And I'd like to argue that if we can think about the values, the knowledge, the skills and what it is people can actually do as a result of education in a new way, we can give young people a much better start. In terms of values, we have to teach people that risk-taking is not only not a bad thing, it's actually a necessary and inevitable thing and that actually being able to take risks in the right way is a key life skill these days. And not only that, but that understanding rights and responsibilities right from the start is a very practical and meaningful objective for an education system.  There are lots of different ways in which you can foster that sense of trading rights and responsibilities. For example, in some of our schools children would actually sit down and work out, okay, for our school what is the carbon footprint? How are we using our resources? How could we improve that? Give the children a chance to work that through as a real practical and real problem and then engage in making decisions about their schools. What are we going to trade off in order to improve this? Using the curriculum in a way that allows them to apply that knowledge to make some real decisions makes it much more relevant. In terms of skills, you know, we can really move from a model of children in receive mode to children in switched on and thinking mode. For example, why is the teacher teaching? Actually, why do we not support children to think about how to structure a lesson, deliver a lesson and then get feedback on the lesson? With the teacher really just facilitating and supporting that process, let's think about how to help them action plan on things like waste management, practical skills like that. In terms of the knowledge side of this, you know, there are so many opportunities within the regular curriculum to embed different ways in which people can have life skills. For example, in some of the exercises I just described, maths is a really key important topic. But if we learn it purely as an abstract, children do not see the relevance of it. If we're using it to solve practical real world problems, not just to think about them but actually contribute to them, then it becomes real and they'll be much more absorbed in the process of learning the skills. And in terms of beyond the curriculum, you know, why stop with mathematics, English languages? We can be fostering children who are not just adoring pictures but are actually becoming artists and thinking about how they would create and display their own exhibitions and how can they approach that both as an artist and as a business person. We can be creating architects who can be thinking about the design of their school and we can be creating people who don't just learn about cooking skills but actually want to become chefs. Let's see if we can make something which we can actually sell. Let's have days when student food can be made available. And then how do we put all of that into practice? There are a number of great schemes around the world. Sean, in the UK we know your scheme as Young Enterprise and in many of our different schools around the world, Young Enterprise is a fundamental cornerstone to how we get children of an older age to actually think about practical business projects. We also use the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme, which rewards young people for doing service in their community and applying those skills in a way that makes a difference to the people around them. I'd like to suggest if we could really support school systems to embed so many of these things into the way that children are educated right from the start, it could make a huge difference to the way that young people are thinking about life. Thank you. Michelle, you're creating a think tank in Malaysia to engage young people in the formation of public policy. What's your take on how to engage young people in the new economy? I think we need to take a step back before we think about how and think about why are youth not engaging currently. So there are two aspects to that I think. One that they simply are disengaged, what I like to call disengaged, which means they just don't care or don't have the capacity to care about issues concerning the world nowadays. Now, that could be because they either don't have the right, they don't have the kind of amenities to do so, their basic concern is just to get, you know, what's next? What's my income for the next day? How do I get food? And that's the bottom, you know, bottom percent of the population. Now that requires a different approach. And the second group are people who want to make a change. They know that they have a role to play, but they just can't play it because there is no platform to do so. And that is really what my think tank, as you mentioned, is actually trying to do.  Now, why are youth disenchanted? I think it's a very important question. So it could be because of your education system. Now Chris brought up some very interesting points about investing in skills. But also we need to build the kind of character for youth, you know, to have them realize that they play a role in the world economy nowadays, but also to facilitate that kind of discussion in the schools themselves. So what happens in Malaysia is that I think it's a very Asian culture that when you are young, you're told to do what you're told to do, only what you're told to do. It's a bit of a roundabout thing, but you know, you don't ask questions unless you're asked a question. So there is no independent thought in the process. And in Malaysia until very recently we had this Universities and University College Act, which prohibited students from participating in any political activity in universities. Now you would have thought that university students are the mature students who would be able to engage in good discussion. But if you have that kind of restriction, you're actually inhibiting independent thought. And that is a very, very key part of learning and growing up as youth. And also the Asian culture I mentioned, you're not allowed to ask questions. So how are you going to ask the big issues that concern us today? How are you going to say, well, what about this new idea or that new idea?  So that is a very important issue that we should address as well. And so it's very important to provide a platform for students because nowadays youth who feel that they can't assist in anything to do with public policy, they'll think, well, why do I stay in this country? Why not just go abroad? So we have a lot of Malaysian students who migrate overseas after they study because they think that there are better opportunities for them to contribute elsewhere. So the first step to engaging youth, I think, is to provide the kind of platform for students who are disenchanted, make them realize that there is a role to play and we are listening to you. So don't dismiss students as just people who are young and inexperienced because, to be honest, there is a lot that we can learn from them. Great. So you're saying create a platform, create a vehicle for them to provide input. Yeah. Dong Jia, your deputy secretary general of the All China Youth Federation, you reached 300 million Chinese youth. Tell us your perspective from the People's Republic. Okay. I think engaging young people is one of our missions as an umbrella organization through our 55 member organizations. But I think starting from this conference, we are not only to engage young people, but we should also making young people take the lead. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao made his definition of what is new champions in his opening remark. Young people is one of the four elements that he mentioned first. Actually, we find that the audience here, I think, is a good complex mix of both young people and senior participants. I'm one of those. Because engaging young people is not enough. That's what I think from Chinese view that we should make young people take the lead. From our experiences, we think that engaging young people is not a contemporary or temporary solution. It should be an attitude, a commitment. What we need most is resources is mentioned, capacity is mentioned, but what I think most is a culture. A culture which is think young people is the resources, not the problem. Think young people is not only the future, but also the now. A culture that empowering young people and giving them not only importance by voices, but also their real power in decision making process. So the political structure, the social culture and the policy processes, all these needs to be built together to build a system which can enabling young people to take the lead and engaging them. In some areas, if you can't give them a favorable condition, at least you give them equal opportunities. So that's the general cause. I always have the feeling that this iPad generation, they knew more than us about what is new economy. But it is the adult who don't use iPad or who don't use all this way board who is making decisions. So it's not a time about only engaging, but how to be retreating and giving young people more flow. One of my takeaways from that is that you're viewing young people not as a problem, but as a resource. Culturally, for China it is. If you see Chinese history, not the old part, if you see the Republic history of China after we abandoned the Empress in the early 20th century, it is youth movement. It is young people taking the lead in setting up the Republic, in setting up the People's Republic of China, in starting up the reform and opening up process of China. It is this youth movement, maybe not in the typical form of revolution, but in the form of fully engaging, participating, taking the lead, having a career ladder in their careers. They have hope. And I think that's consistent with what Premier Wen-jen Bao said in his opening remarks to the forum, where they're providing free compulsory education through grade nine here in China, and they're providing financial aid so that no young person would have to drop out of school due to poverty. So it's a consistent message. So, Jaime, you're from Spain. You were educated in Mexico. You've worked for a number of technology companies, but right now Cisco for quite a period of time. You have overseen operations in Latin America. You're now overseeing those operations here in the East. So you have a unique perspective on a lot of different things. And from Cisco's perspective, talk a little bit about how the world should be engaging young people. So let me try to frame this in the context of two things. First, the tremendous opportunity we have for the younger generations. I understand that we all talk about unemployment, but I try to frame it more as an opportunity for them. Second, what are the key things that the industry and the governments are doing in general to pretty much address the mismatch that you talked about? But third, also what are the younger generations suspecting from the industry, from the companies, in order to be successful? And you mentioned that I've had opportunity in Latin America and Asia, but everywhere I go, every meeting that we attended, we talked about talent scarcity. It is a fact that the companies are talking that talent today is not enough to drive the technology, create the infrastructure that has to be put in place to make our countries more competitive and in order to drive productivity. Obviously technology, we believe, is one of those key enablers of productivity and we face these challenges of talent scarcity on a daily basis. Now, we feel it, but what's the data behind it? So just let me share two data points that are critical. I'm using IDC information and manpower information. Number one, Latin America, in order to deploy all the technology required just in communication, today needs over 150,000 people to deploy the basic technology. Second, the manpower analysis survey 2012, 34% of 40,000 companies that were interviewed believe that they have difficulty in gathering talent to meet their needs. Now the double click on this one is where? And the first reaction would be emerging markets. But let me share which are some countries out of the top 15. Japan, US, Germany, Brazil, India, Mexico. It's all over the place. It does not really differentiate if it's developed or emerging. And an interesting data point in 2010, 10% of the companies interviewed in the US said they had difficulty. 2012, 49% believed that they're having issues to hire people. So what a tremendous opportunity for the younger generations. And it is summarized in three concepts, skills mismatch, experience mismatch, and location mismatch. And that's why this is such a huge opportunity for younger generations because of the flexibility, adaptive capacity, and ability to learn that younger generations have today. Now what are the solutions? Obviously, leverage technology to be global. Just move people from one place to the other or hire virtual, be a technology so you can actually do the job in other places of the world. Second, retrain and retrain and retrain. Companies are doing more and more training of people, not only for themselves, but for the industry. Cisco in this case, that's not what we call Cisco, at Working Academy, it's shown you and I talked about it in the past. Over 250,000 younger people are being trained today on APJC on a yearly basis. That's the investment we have to make for the future. And their idea is like, you know, getideas.org training for the 21st century where the industry is together working with government and with academia to train people to minimize the skills mismatch. So obviously a lot of opportunity and solutions being put in place by companies leveraging technology, but with a commitment to deploy those resources. But let's assume for a second that we have everybody, all the younger generations in our company. What is the challenge we face? It's not only hire, it's retain them because younger generations' expectations are completely different. It's not about the desk, the computer, and the chair. It's about bringing their own device, having the opportunity to work from anywhere, being connected 100% of the time, and their management expectations, from their management, it's not you're going to tell me how to do it, you're going to give me the opportunity to do it by interacting with multiple people in the company and outside the company in a collaborative way so you can actually get the results of what I do. Driving tremendous innovation. For that, I want to say what Michelle said, it is the company role to build the platform to enable these younger generations to be successful so we capture the innovation, we let them be actually be successful and really grow together with them. So it's also putting the platform for them to enable them for a future in the companies. So what I hear you saying, Jaime, is that there are great opportunities, there are jobs, but for reasons of geography or skill sets, there are mismatches and there needs to be some way to bridge those mismatches in the relocation. Alright, Andrea, you are Italian. You're working in Belgium, but you see the world in what you're doing. You are, have created the Green Young Economy Organization, which is a not-for-profit organization that's designed to empower young people to innovate around the topic of sustainability. What is your take on how to engage young people?  You're part of the generation we're talking about. Talk to us. I think the very first point is, again, how to inspire young people to take action, how to motivate them, how to fuel action because probably the concern we are facing today is that young people have lost this motivation, have lost really the passion that usually young people should have. So, as I said yesterday in the session on the future of education, one day I was asked, who is your best teacher ever? I thought about it only for a few seconds and then I realized that it was a peer and it was even a couple of years younger than me. And actually I think probably one of the reasons why I'm here today is that this friend of mine, because now we are friends, he managed to inspire me. So, probably we should start recognizing the role of young people in teaching, not only peer-to-peer teaching, but actually giving young people ownership of what they are teaching. Let's imagine students in a business school giving a class, a course, two students in an engineering school, and vice versa. And let's imagine, for example, students who start their own youth organization giving a class to students in another school or in a faculty. And I think we can go beyond this just by underlining the reason why this should be done. Young people are able to engage with other young people more easily. They are able to inspire them because they can lead by example. Basically, you know, when I was with this peer, I was inspired because he's like me and he's doing great things so he just made me think I can also do the same things. I'm not saying that more experienced people cannot inspire, but they have a main difference. They have experience. So young people will think, oh, I don't have that, maybe I cannot achieve what this person achieved. There's another concept and approach that I'm trying to promote. This is intergenerational innovation. So bringing together different generations to innovate and tackle issues. And more specifically, I'm proposing to bring together company employees or anyways, people who just retired and students who are about to graduate to play together, for example, innovation games, solve issues, actually, you know, this is a way to have fun because you are gaming, but it can be the beginning of something bigger, a project and a profit, a startup, a patent. Now the point is that this way we can address different issues, not only youth unemployment, but also the social marginalization issue of people who are retiring and we can focus on issues like sustainability, not only actually. And the link between these is networks. That means that when people are retiring, their network ties are fading away. So we are offering them a way to keep their network ties alive because basically there might be this young person who's got this great idea and he just needs connections, resources to be mobilized. So these people who just retired can get back to their own previous company and say, yeah, there is this young person who lets employ him or let's support his startup in many different ways. This can be possible. Thank you. Let me invite the audience to begin considering some questions. If you'd like to email it to us, I have an iPad here. See it if you email it to youth at weft.ch or on Weibo hashtag weft youth and the same hashtag for Twitter. By the way, it's hash pound weft youth, excuse me. But I see a common thread or hear a common thread amongst all of these panelists even though you're coming from slightly different places. Chris is talking about new and innovative ways of delivering education. Andrea is talking about using connecting young people to young people to learn from each other as well as the older generation and the younger generation but providing a platform to do that. Michelle talked about a platform to engage Malaysian youth in the creation of public policy. Jaime talked about a platform where interaction can take place in a corporation. And you're talking about the use of your organizations and your Federation of young people in the development of China. So where do we take this? How do we use, for example, Chris, these kinds of platforms in the redesign of education? That's a great question. We've been really focusing on this question of how education can be delivered and Jaime would be more expert than me on the implementation of this, but we've been looking at the concept of blended learning in a lot of detail. I think we know a couple of things now. One is that the purely traditional, if you like, sort of what we would call chalk-and-talk method of teaching with a teacher in a classroom is not only unnecessary anymore but it's a pretty ineffective way for people to learn. But we also know through, for example, completely online learning in the US that actually just learning sitting in front of a computer terminal, even though you might be networked and linked to a lot of very creative resources is also not really a way to fundamentally learn because one also needs the opportunity for social interaction and for deeper debate. So how can we put together the best of these different modes of learning? There are blueprints now emerging which can really sort of show how you can get the really higher-order skills of learning face-to-face in the classroom facilitated by peers as much as by teachers who will have a completely different role as mentors and coaches and not transmitters of knowledge. That can be done. If I could just take it up a level though and we're at the World Economic Forum I think we're allowed to think big perhaps think a little bit away from the normal sort of allowed territory. I think there are three things I'd like to say that pick up on what the panel have said and this is about sort of macro government policy as well as the micro stuff that we can do in the classroom. First of all, it is true that education remains one of the last sort of undisrupted areas of delivery and I personally believe it's no coincidence that education systems have not kept pace with the way that other industries have revolutionized how they work. I think governments are going to have to get very brave and really liberalize the supply side of education and allow it to be delivered in many different ways in much more creative ways not just by government organizations but by not-for-profits, by private organizations and whilst of course we're talking about vulnerable young people and therefore we need regulation we should also think about how to get as much liberalization as that delivery as we can. I think what we'll see then is education that becomes much more bite-sized I think we'll see much less of a division between education and the workplace we'll see the growth of apprenticeships as a perfectly natural way of people learning skills we spend a lot of time in school de-skilling people from the things that they're going to need once they enter the world of work why would we do it like that so I think that liberalization and finally just to really think about the macro policy you know we do have these pockets of skills deficits and pockets of youth unemployment it seems pretty obvious that governments are going to have to think long and hard about any remaining barriers to the movement of people from one place to another because if we're going to solve this as a world we need to think not about which slice of the pie do different countries actually have but actually if we can all break down trade barriers, break down the movement of people and goods from one place to another together we'll actually grow the world economy and therefore these issues will start to solve themselves. On the topic of one of the institutions that hasn't changed very much in the world the session yesterday on education the provost of Carnegie Mellon University said that higher education hasn't changed dramatically in a thousand years to which Gordon Brown the former prime minister of the United Kingdom responded in England they always say the first 500 years of any institution are the toughest so do we have questions from the audience? Does anybody have an idea? Yes sir we need to put on our headsets Japanese hold on Now I'm from International Rotary We at International Rotary tried to develop use and we have about 150,000 Rotary mainly high school students and we have Rotary clubs again we have hundreds of thousands of participants we have activities globally and we have system for foreign students international students we have exchange of students globally now my question is about international students any experience in terms of sending young people overseas for training or education outside their own countries? Did everybody get the question? For those who didn't have a headset on the question is what is our experience the gentleman is from Rotary International I believe he said and the question is what is everybody's experience with international exchanges of students and giving them a more global perspective I think when we talk about education or capacity building for new economy or for all the challenges that we are facing what we need to address more than before is experience learning and peer education as Andrea already mentioned experience learning and peer education can only be achieved through platforms like this through international exchanges programs and through youth initiated organizations and programs so I think any approaches that we can enhance more experience education peer education this is a way to build a kind of construct the old one and build a new one and we did a lot of in that area and from my federation and in China because China is one of the biggest demanding country for sending students to study overseas we are the biggest foreign students now even in the UK and in Europe in the USA I find this process going abroad to study going back to China or they stay abroad this is a very constructive process they contribute to the modernization process of China and they also contribute to the integration process of China's ideas and Chinese mindsight with the world so we have students exchange programs a very big one and with China Japan we have big scale youth exchange and students exchange and with Europe with the US I think from the government commitment there is a strong will and a big investment in that direction and there are a lot of grassroots organizations and international NGOs like Junior Achievements they are doing that and I find this a very constructive way and I think this should be invested by the governments should we have more investment from the business sector because the investment in education if it is only from government sometimes it is a little bit delayed from the market so we need more shareholders, thank you Thank you, Jaime this plays right to you, you raised your hand this whole connection between the business sector and the educational sector and youth development organizations so let me share what I was going to say before and then try to answer the gentleman's question with a probably different approach I think governments companies have a lot of opportunity to send people outside but it's limited it's limited to a certain percentage of our population but we believe that younger generations deserve 100% of opportunity the truth is let's not underestimate the power of younger generations let's not underestimate their drive their hunger to learn and today they are connected with the world we're moving in a world where billions of devices are connected to a world where trillions of devices are connected these younger generations are already living and connecting with peers with younger people all over the world they see the internet and their social peers as an extension of their brain they actually do not need to be in another part of the world in order to be connected video and collaboration tools are already connecting them and they're already crossing bridging cultural differences by interacting with others within the company Sean you said it is exactly the same companies to their moving people are leveraging people talent by using technology to connect but also then and this is something that is very important we're actually more and more providing tools within the companies you have face books within the company tools today offer the same experience within the companies so social networking actually happens and you will the platform that Michelle talked about in order to capture that innovation and Chris you said something that was critical you said we talk about training innovations I think we have to train management to better develop younger generations in an effort to take risk to drive innovation and let people collaborate in order to be successful and that's within the companies and honestly outside of the companies also Andrea you had a response to the question just a quick comment regarding international issues it is a very important human experience it happened to me it happened to most of us I guess but the social economic impact the way probably it's even something that people don't talk about we are building internationally we are building bridges through the programs and the network ties again that we create among people who come from different countries are kept alive when we are going back to our own corners of the world and we are connected on Facebook they are connected on media so probably because we are in China it might be worth mentioning that you know restricting certain access is internationally might hinder the social economy but of sending students abroad under the international network because indeed when we are going back to our own country we might develop projects together with our own classmates who were coming from a totally different continent and you know right now we are talking about global consumption, global production and Professor Schwab addressed the global shippers by talking about global citizenship we are global citizens we are global citizens we are global citizens we have a couple of questions that have been emailed in maybe we can put that screen back up for a second because it's not coming up on my iPad thank you one of them is that is many European countries have linked their education system with business needs yet they are still facing significant needs on employment and the experience would like to tackle that one I think I should probably have a batch go ahead Chris it's complex because there's supply and demand and they're a long long leading time from these economic cycles I think what many European countries have begun to discover is that for some of them, particularly those that have a particularly large youth unemployment they rather abandon their skill space and they have to be able to produce things and became very, very reliant on a financial services industry because we all know when to use shock over the last five years or so and on a service industry which it becomes really apparent as entirely reliant on other aspects of the economy firing on the cylinders in order to have money this means that you end up with the generation of young people who have knowledge and skills that isn't actually the degree of how the industries look around them but at the same time there's a lack of an ability to grow industries so we can come back as an answer to that to the point about entrepreneurialism which can allow young people not just to become somebody else's business but to think about how they sell them but as I was reminded yesterday as we were discussing this four out of five startup businesses around the world tend to fail we don't want to lead a whole generation of people thinking that they're going to be able to create businesses and that they will be immediately successful it's a long, hard road this leads back to the point about risk taking so I think if we can foster entrepreneurialism that will be one way to allow young people to grow their way out of the recession that many parts of the world are in and at the same time at the government level if we can think of ways to liberalise both education and supply then we may see the rebirth of skills-based industries and a rebalancing of economies in Europe and in the Middle East in particular where we need to do that but it's certainly true that simply blinking the businesses of today with the education systems of today is probably not enough great. Questions from the audience another question we have some on the internet but it would be great to get another one from the audience if you don't I think there's a question on the internet that was up there that I found kind of interesting it was the second one that had to do with can you when you're doing virtual hiring judge the soft skills and I would call those the 21st century skills things like teamwork and collaboration and global perspective can you really get that on a virtual platform and I think this notion I'd like to expand it beyond just hiring is Michelle you talked about a virtual platform for public policy input platform both physical as well as probably virtual for peer to peer learning as well as connecting the older generation with the younger how do we deal with that soft skill issue and just begin to understand young people given the pervasiveness of social media and those kinds of platforms Michelle I think that's a very good question I mean virtually it really is quite difficult to tell the quality of the kind of opinions and comments that are coming through even when hiring virtually I don't think personally I don't think you should actually hire 100% virtually because you need to see the person there things that you know you can't tell from just online interaction text based but if you can use things like skype and video conferencing I think you can know a bit more about the person's character and how the person interacts so in that respect I think virtual hiring can be possible but only you know through the right channels great do you use any kind of platforms virtual platforms in your federation across China we do use we do that for our training our internal training because we have so many branches in the province in the cities and in the counties so we do virtual training when we have we deliver that through virtual training and I want to add a little bit to the first question about the training because I think is very important one for for the whole society to realize that supply is one side so training education but demand is another side so from the finance experience we find that the government's role in generating jobs the content of employment is very crucial so you have to build an economic structure where the contents the numbers of employees are considered as a high priority in the economic agenda the international labour organization once had a study that in the past 10 years or 15 years the world economy is developing but the contents of employment is not developing so that leads to the problems that we see in many parts of the world so for generating jobs from the demand side is very crucial and generating a culture and environment conditions for young people to start businesses is also very important they can employ themselves they can be a business owner themselves so spiritually, entrepreneurship conditionally, capital experiences, networks, mentorship all these are needed to build a larger demand side very good a question from the audience yes we have it, will it be in English or thank you can we get a microphone to this here, thank you thank you for calling me nice woman well, I'm also from Rotary International and I don't know whether this is a good place to ask or not but first of all I would like to tell you a little bit about Rotary International because we have the largest youth program, we are very into youth and just on the last council on legislation we passed youth as the fifth avenue of service for Rotarians so Rotary is a conglomerate the membership of the Rotary are all from the business leaders or the community leaders so listening to you how as an organization such as Rotary International how our program or our project can enhance or collaborate with you in businesses to have a better world I think that's basically my question so that's a great question, I know from the perspective of my own organization we would love to collaborate with Rotary and in fact we're actually having those conversations but I think I put this out to the panelists I mean this is a way to engage business people essentially who are part of Rotary International in the engagement of young people and it's not just Rotary I know you asked about Rotary but it's organizations like Rotary and other business and civic organizations so who would like to take it, Michelle? I think Rotary International can start with an online platform again, back to online virtual world thing I was speaking to one of the global shapers yesterday in a session and he had this fantastic online micro donation system which enables collaboration between charities and businesses and using celebrities as a way to get youth to be involved in a certain cause so in that sense I mean Rotary International with what it does it can engage online with youth very simple, very easily but making sure that you get the right message across as well I think also there's much to be said for mentoring and role modeling for young people and it gets to Andrea to some extent not to say that all Rotary members are part of an older generation but they are older typically than the students they're mentoring and so there is a way to use these kinds of organizations to fulfill your desire to connect at least in part the older generation with the younger generation we're beginning to run up on time we have about 6 minutes left and so I'm going to ask each of you in 30 seconds or maybe 45 I'm saying 30 so you slipped to 45 what is your number one takeaway from the conversation that we've had this morning so I'll give you 5 seconds to formulate it in your head and then I'm going to call on Andrea 5 seconds well it was 3 I think probably there's something underlying what we are talking about which has not made fully explicit and it's the fact that actually young people can inspire other generations so we're not talking anymore about young people being the ones who execute tasks please do that you're the young kid do that no please you young kid inspire me give me your input because you are closer to fresh trends you can be actually the only source of certain inputs and the other dimension is risk failure is not any more a problem anyone can fail this is a way of learning that's it Chris I think what struck me is the importance of making connections and particularly making connections between young people and older generations there's two way learning that can come from that certainly I'd be delighted to have a discussion about how the schools and government systems we're working with could link more to the rotary and see if that's one way to improve that but as a more general point I think providing those connections there was a really interesting piece of work on creativity and the trend of how creative people are with age sort of is like a camel with two humps and apparently the least creative point in our lives tends to be around the mid 40s won't embarrass the panel by asking others where they sit there but I'm firmly in the seat beyond the second hump if we can have more connection at both ends of that hump and perhaps the people in the middle just need to facilitate that then maybe that'll change the way things work because at the moment we tend to focus a lot of the structures around the middle and maybe that's going wrong Michelle I think the power of peer influenced him the most I think the power of peer networks is really really crucial in engaging youth as well as making them aware of stuff so if we can empower one youth imagine the number of other people he can empower and I think that's something we should look at in a more deeper perspective Hi Mike So for me the message is number one there's tremendous opportunity for younger generations tremendous you know what you said it's our responsibility to create the platform for them to be successful both in the business environment and in the social environment the next topic that I believe is critical academia, government industry together working on set or defining the skill set that are needed and in this world of hyper connectivity how can we enable them to better collaborate with peers in this ambition that they have there's a lot of opportunity a lot of innovation and a lot of risk that they're going to take in order to make us more successful and if you give me 10 seconds just two very fast thought number one I was hired over telepresence I was hired virtually my boss lived in London and I was in New York and so far it seems so good so I can tell you it is a fact that technology can help us be more successful but let's never forget the human interaction in this world in which we're going into if you want to engage young people you have to engage the others so the seniors the business people and the government and you have to engage young people professionally because there are a lot of techniques and experiences knowledge is building to that process so we need to work with professionals and professional organizations or expertise in that area that's great and my take away is in an attempt to summarize the panel is I came away from this with more hope than I walked into it it's a tough world out there for young people these days but my take away is on this whole intergenerational and aspect of it it's the peer to peer I mean a peer can be a young person to an older person or it can be an older person to a younger person it's not so much how old you are it's what you can learn from each other that counts and the key to that is really providing retooled educational models platforms by which various generations and individuals can interact and those platforms can be virtual, they can be physical but it's human interaction back to Jaime's point and a question of how do we facilitate those human interactions across generations and among peers so with that I want to thank my panel it was a great and lively discussion I'd like to thank the audience for coming in early this morning after the cultural soiree last night when some of you I'm sure we're out a little bit later than you expected and I'd like to thank the WEF for the opportunity to run this panel so thank you very much and have a good rest of the day I've been asked to ask people to hurry getting out of the room because they actually in a half an hour they're having a television show in here and they've got to retool the set and other things so thank you very much


So how do we do ethnographic observation? Let us discuss the different types of observation. Each of these requires a different way of going about it. In participant observation, we join our participants, taking up a role of sorts and getting involved in the activities that form the phenomena we are studying. So we may string flowers along with the family of flower vendors. Non-participant observation is about observing and not getting actively involved. For instance, we may not participate in a surgery or a dental operation. Generalized observation is to observe everything that is taking place around us with equal focus. This applies to early research when we are just about understanding the scenarios and not quite certain what is more important to observe. Observing people's shop in a mall is one example that comes to mind. Focused observation is to limit our attention to activities or events that are only related to the phenomena we are studying. This often happens after we have achieved some certainty about the focus of our fieldwork. Of course, as with all of ethnographic practice, we can shift between these forms of observation as we go about fieldwork. Let us pause for a moment here and do a small exercise. Here you can see a list of different kinds of observations. Participant, non-participant, generalized, focused and another list of examples of observation. Observing students in the playground, observing a child solving a math problem, cooking with a participant, observing sales staff in a shop. Can you match the items on the first line to those in the second one? Take a minute and complete the exercise. And here are our answers. Compare the two sets. If you feel unsure about why your answers do not match ours, post your confusion on the discussion forum. Now let's return to our discussion. Whichever form of observation we deploy, there are certain concepts that are fundamental to the practice of observing. You may recognize these terms from our previous conversations. While we have earlier discussed these as abstract concepts, here we will try to understand how they translate into practice and particularly the practice of observation. Let us take an example here from a film by David and Judith MacDougall with Morning Hearts. The film is set in the Doon School in the state of Uttarakhand. It is an observation of the life of some students living in one of the dormitories of the school. These are primary school children, all boys, who are getting used to the idea of being away from home and in a boarding school environment. In one of the sequences of the film, the filmmakers observe a class in progress. It is a class of English literature where the teacher is discussing a certain poem. Let us watch the sequence. The summer and autumn had been so wet that in winter the corn was growing yet. It was a pittier sight to see all around. The grain lie rotting on the ground. You know what pittiest means? Yes? No, no. What does pittiest mean? The word pittiest. And a pittiful sight that something that awakens sorrow in you, arouses the feelings of sorrow in you, right? Every day the starving poor crowded around Bishop Hattow's door, for he had a plentiful last-year store and all the neighborhood could tell his granaries were furnished well. The poor people obviously were starving, but everyone knew that Bishop Hattow had kept a lot of grain in his granaries. At last Bishop Hattow appointed a day to quiet the poor without delay. He bade them to his great barn repair, and they should have food for the winter there. Rejoice such tidings good to hear. The poor folk flocked from far and near. The great barn was full as it could hold of women, children, and young and old. Then when he saw it could hold no more. Bishop Hattow, he made fast the door. And while for mercy on Christ they called, he set fire to the barn and burned them all. And they of course started crying out for mercy in the name of Christ. And what did it turn out to be because of the kind of man that Bishop Hattow was? It was a painful death that they got in return. Right? So it's a far deeper crime, do you understand? It's not a crime against a human being, it's a crime against humanity. Do you understand that? Okay, what do you call the voice of the heart? What do you call it? Not ego? Yes, yes, come on. What? Yes, the heart, what do you call the voice of the heart? What do you call it? No, the voice of the conscience. Yes, that's right. Sit down all of you. What does conscience do when you've done something wrong, even a small mistake? It whips you, doesn't it? And that's the biggest punishment, the whiplash of your own conscience. Let us reflect on what we just saw. Can you note down what makes this sequence a rich piece of observation? Many of you may point out the details that the filmmakers observe. Some of you may have noticed the students' expressions while the teacher is asking some questions. Others could have noted how the students engage with what the teacher is explaining to them. These are all very important details and constitute the imponderblia of the classroom. The decision of the filmmakers to pay attention to these is evident of a rich ethnographic observation. But it is not only imponderblia that makes an observation ethnographic in nature. You might recollect our discussion on thick description. We had said that an ethnographic description is considered thick if it is able to convey the web of meanings or culture which underlie our observation. For this we need to pay attention to the context. This includes the immediate physical environment, the social structures and cultural beliefs in which the phenomena is located. What do we learn from the film excerpt about the social structure and cultural beliefs that shape interactions in the classroom? Think for a moment and note down your answers. Some of you may say that the classroom is a hierarchical space with a clearly defined structure with a teacher as an authority figure. Some others may say that the classroom interactions are defined by rules such as raising hands or not speaking out of turn. You might also have noted that the structure sometimes dissolves and it becomes a less formal space. But how did we learn all of this from this short video clip? It is by paying attention to observable behavior that we learn about the intangible aspects of the context. The ways in which children react to a question asked by their teacher by raising their hands hoping to be picked. The expression on their faces denotes excitement and anticipation. This reveals that there is a desire to showcase knowledge to the teacher and other students. The social structure of the classroom is mirrored in its physical layout. The teacher sits in the front facing all of the students and the students' deaths are all arranged in a strict row by row formation. But this structure also dissolves. When the students gather around the teacher, the layout of the classroom is temporarily disrupted and so is the authority that otherwise separates the teacher from students. So you see, this short video clip is a great example of ethnographic observation because it pays careful attention to the imponderably. In order to be attentive in such a manner, we need to be completely present and alert as we observe physically, intellectually and emotionally. We have to be attentive to whatever is happening in the immediate time and space around us. Acts of recording such as writing, drawing, making photographs or even speaking what we observe into an audio recorder can help us be more alert to small details. In drawing something, for example, we pay attention to its details. Similarly, in photographing or writing about an occurrence, we need to articulate what we are observing. The act of not taking makes us look at something carefully to notice its details with as much accuracy as we can. So in fieldwork, we make records, not simply to document, but to observe with greater alertness and attention. For those of you who want to read some more examples of imponderably in ethnographic writing, we have a very interesting paper for you. And after that, you can take a quiz. The quiz we have for you here is based on the reading and on the video clip that we just discussed.


Okay. I will call to order the 66th meeting of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research. And with that, I'll turn this over to Mark Geyer. So good morning, everybody. I want to start with some introduction of new members and announcement of the retirement of some other members. September Council is the time at which there's a transition with the new slate of council members having been appointed. So there are several council members who are retiring and they are Mike Benke, Mark Chee, Rex Chisholm, Rick Myers, Pearl O'Rourke, I should say just retiring from council. Their terms are they're rotating off and I really want to on behalf of the Institute thank them so much for for their contributions during their time on council. They've been invaluable. We will miss them and I'm sure we'll be trying to take advantage of their expertise in many other ways. The new slate of members has been appointed by the secretary. Their first official meeting will be in February but we have invited them to this September meeting as ad hoc members to give them a little taste of how council meetings go so they don't come in cold turkey in February. And so the new members are Lon Carden from Glaxo Smith Klein, Joe Ecker from the Salk Institute, Howard Jacob from the Medical College of Wisconsin, Bob Nussbaum for UC San Francisco, Lucila Ono Machado from UC San Diego, and Artie Rye from Duke. And in advance of the February meeting we welcome them and we look forward to working with them for the next four years and to their to their wise council. I also want to introduce some new staff members to the council and I will ask them to stand in the back when their names are called. We have seven new program analysts in the extramural program. Cathy Sun who is working with the LC program in the Office of Population Genomics, Alexei Oshambo who's working with the knockout mouse project, Deborah Cullantoni who's working with the Genotype Textual Expression program, GTEX, Taryn Marit who's working with the sequencing program, Katya Vatolevich for the working with the 1000 Genomes program and I hope I pronounced your name right Katya. Jessica Barry who is working with the Lynx program and Sherry Joe who's working with the ENCODE program. So welcome to all those staff members and I'm sure council members will be hearing from them many times. We have two liaison members who are here today, Rhonda Schoenberg from the National Society of Genetic Counselors and Joanne Bachmann from the American Society of Human Genetics. And there are a couple of other people who I just want to introduce and let council members know that they're here. They're from outside of NIH. Adam Berger from the Institute of Medicine. Joanne Scott from NICHPEG, the National Coalition for Health Professional Education and Genetics. And Melyon Lee from Deloitte Consulting. So welcome to all of you. Is there anyone who I have failed to introduce who should be? Okay, the next order of business is the consideration of the minutes from the previous May council meeting. Does anybody have any comments on the minutes? If not, can I hear a motion for approval? Second? All in favor? Anybody object? Thank you. And finally I will call your attention to the future meeting dates which are listed on the open session agenda. The council meetings are scheduled at least two years in advance. And if any council members have any problems with any of those dates, please let us know as soon as possible. So thank you and I will turn it back to Eric for the director's report.


Yn ymweld. Yn ymweld, ymweld. Yn ymweld, o'r bodi'n ffordd. O'r gyflawni, oherwydd yma, yng nghymru. A ydych chi'n gwybod yw'r gweithio? Yn ymweld, mae'n gweithio. Mae'r gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'n ddweud yn fwy o'r gweithio. Mae'n ddweud o'r gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'n ddweud yma. Mae'n ddweud o'r gweithio. Mae'n ddweud o'n ddweud o'ch gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'n mwy o'n ddweud o'ch dealladio, a phan o'r gwisig y casio. Mae'n ddweud o'ch clywed o'r gweithio o bobl. Dwi'n ddweud o'r geth, yr hoffa o'n gweithio cyfeinio gweithio. Dwi'n ddweud o'r gweithio. So mwy o'r bod yna'r ffroedd. Roedd yn gweithio. Roedd fyddnod o'r gwlaeddu'i gwneud o'r ei ddeuill, I've only been with my society for about six months. I started in October and I should say that I've come from a political science background. I really knew to a lot of the kind of really digital techie kind of stuff. I don't know how to code. I don't know the difference between general and javascript but what I do know is that citizen engagement, direct democracy, transparency, accountability, these things are more present concerns than ever. My research experience is in trying to make sense of what's happening, why it's happening and what can be done to change things, hopefully for the better. So, why do you research in this field? Why are we at my society even bothering with research, aside from the fact we've got a lovely grant to do it? Well, one of the key questions we need to ask is what we're doing, even with doing it all and you know, echoing what Tom kind of said here. Many of us in this room I think are quite evangelical about our medium. We're very, very sold on what we're doing. We believe it's a good thing but simply believing something is good is not the same as it actually being good facts. So, we need to be able to show that what we're doing can value, that it's actually making some sort of difference in the real world. Otherwise, what's the point in doing that? And in order to do that, we need to take a measured and actually quite dispassionate approach to figuring things out. We have to put our biases aside, collect evidence and look at what the evidence is telling us whether that's what we really want to see or not. But why research impact specifically, this is a very specific comment we're talking about. Impact, we're not just talking about the very broad things you could research, we're focusing on impact. There are many other kinds of things that we could choose to look at. So, why is it so important for us to measure this above all else? Research and user experience, you could argue, is just as important. We don't do enough research there and we know we should. We could also focus on researching success or advice of our marketing efforts. No marketing, no users after all. But I believe we all know that ultimately all these things are secondary to figuring out whether what we're doing is actually beneficial. What's the point of having a better user experience if the outcome of using a tool is nothing much at all? What's the point of getting more users if our tools are actually not effective or not providing them with the things they need to solve their issues? So what we need to know above and beyond anything else in my opinion is whether the current users of our tools are getting benefits from them. What sort of benefits are they? Private, public, short-term, long-term, ephemeral or profound? Wouldn't it be great if they were profound? So I don't have long, so this is what I want to say to you today. First up, why impact research in civic tech is so tough, it's really hard, it's not easy. Impact is hard to measure, it's a fluid concept, it can be looked at in a multitude of different ways. We tend to get caught up in the digital aspects I think of what we're doing, the idea of kind of the internet. But in essence, if we kind of boil it down to really what we're looking at, it's a social science problem. We have to use the limited and often lacking tools available in our social science toolbox to actually conduct our research. Even our definition of impact are open to interpretation. Impact is defined in the dictionary as a marked effect or influence. We need to consider that our work impacts upon many different constituencies. Individuals, citizens, governments, decision makers, funders and other civil society organisations. Getting the data is really hard. Even just getting information that you can actually analyse, it's actually really difficult. We've got things like surveys, analytics, AB testing, interviews to gather data. Often the data we really need is often kind of locked away somewhere or not even able to be collected. By this I mean that it can be in the hands of people who won't or can't share it with researchers like myself and like many of you in this room. We know that sometimes our data will actually be skewed by certain populations being more open to taking surveys for instance or making themselves available for interview. We can try to correct for this but we'll never get a flawless full picture. Everything we do is always going to be open to interpretation because of these factors. The impact of civic tech can actually be more subtle and organic. It sometimes might not even manifest until a significant time after our tools have been utilised. It's impossible to record and quantify all of the kind of ripples that our tools create. So, we've thought about this. You'll be pleased to hear. We're going to do experiments. We're not writing long theoretical pieces. We're going to get our hands dirty. We're going to try and pick up facts. We're going to try and refrain from imposing our opinions and preconceived beliefs on those. We're very much looking at partnership. We want to look at tools that are being used around the world, not just the ones that we at my society run here in the UK. We're looking to be open about our results. We will of course be looking to publish in peer review journals to add weight, to add legitimacy to our findings but we know that this takes a really long time. Those academics in the room will know that... five minutes, okay. The academics in the room, you'll know how difficult and how long it takes to get findings published in the journal. We want to share our preliminary findings with you as we go on our blog. We're not scared of finding out things that are negative. Again, echoing what Tom said earlier. If we find that our tools are really not making a difference or they're having a negative effect, we'll still share those results. Perhaps maybe sit down and have a long, hard think about what we're doing and how we can change for the better. So, we are looking at impact using two axes. On the one way we're looking at time, so before people use a tool, during and afterwards. We're also looking at actors, so individual users. We're looking at civic technologists and the kind of social, political context that these things exist within. We're doing this because impact occurs at multiple points in a user journey and it's shaped by all of these different factors. So, we've developed a strategy based on a Hannah's Matrix model to timeframe these points of impact. So, I've been told to brace yourself for a scary table. Here it is. Don't strain your eyes to see this. There's a copy of this in the research strategy which is in your delegate pack.  But this is our framework for researching impact. We are basically planning on using these boxes to prioritise and frame our research activities. We'll do multiple research activities in each box, focusing on different relevant research questions relating to that point of impact. So, we want to fill these boxes with knowledge about impact. At the moment all we have in these boxes are questions. We want to put answers into these boxes. So, just as an example, this is box C3 and there we are planning on conducting a study in Latin America, looking at how governments over there are reacting and responding to the advent of civic technology. Are they integrating with it? Are they trying to subvert it in any way? What's the impact that civic technology is having upon the kind of institutional government structural environment in Latin America? So, that's just one example of one experiment that's going to happen down there in that box. There will be many, hopefully. And as I said, we're looking to work with partners across the world. So, if you have sites, ideally with some traffic, that we can work with you as part of this big research journey, then please do get in touch with us because we would love to hear from you and love to work with you. So, just to kind of tie this up, when it's all over, we expect to be able to provide intelligence on things like costs, on things like impact measures, whether impact in specific areas is positive, negative, neutral, and whether, hopefully, there's value in our work. Finally, I just want to say that we're unlikely to develop any grand unified theory of impact if that's what you're hoping for from today. I don't think you're going to walk away having got that. The very nature of impact is so slippery. It's very difficult to completely pin it down using the tools at our disposal. So, what we will have, hopefully, is a broad understanding of where impact can and does occur, what that impact looks like and how best to collect the evidence to demonstrate it. We hope this information will be of benefit to the whole civic tech community and will inform good decision making in your own organisation. We're not looking to keep this to ourselves. We're not going to be putting our arms around at homework. We want to share this with all of you because we want this to be of benefit to everyone.