Shankar IAS Academy Admissions open for UPSC Coaching 2021-22 Classes starts on June 28th. Admissions contact 76677626. A warm welcome to the Indian news analysis by Shankar IAS Academy. These are the list of news articles that is chosen for today's discussion. They are given along with the page numbers of different editions. Also, the link for the handwritten notes in PDF format and the timestamp ink for the discussed articles are provided in the description box as well as in the comment section for the benefit of mobile phone viewers. Now, look at this news article. This article says that a COVID-19 Delta Plus variant was detected in Tamil Nadu. See, recently the Union Health Ministry had categorized the Delta Plus variant of the novel coronavirus as a variant of concern and it also directed the states to take up immediate containment measures in clusters where the variant has been detected. So, what exactly is this Delta Plus variant? See, the Delta Plus variant is a further mutated form of the Delta variant which is also known as the B1617.2 and it is originated in India and was predominantly responsible for India's second wave. See, this Delta Plus has an additional mutation called K417N and it was also found in the beta variant that was responsible for a massive surge in cases in South Africa and moreover this additional mutation is also found in the critical region of the virus that is the receptor binding domain through which it gains entry into the human cell. So, so far other than the Delta Plus variant, four more have been designated as variants of concern by the World Health Organization and these include the Alpha variant that was originated in UK, the Beta variant originated in Brazil, the Gamma variant that originated in South Africa and the Delta variant and the rest are considered as variant of interest. So, what exactly is this variant of concern and variant of interest? As we know, a combination of mutations in a virus results in various variants and in general there are three classes of SARS coronavirus 2 variants and they are variant of interest, variant of concern and the variant of high consequence. See, a variant of interest is a variant with specific genetic markers and they are associated with changes to receptor binding and reduced neutralization by antibodies generated and they may also result in reduced efficacy of treatments, potential diagnostic impact or predicted increase in transmissibility or disease severity. Coming to a variant of concern, so it is a variant for which there is evidence of an increase in transmissibility and more severe disease and it also results in significant reduction in neutralization by antibodies generated, reduced effectiveness of treatments or vaccines or even diagnostic detection failures. So, a variant of concern has many more attributes compared to a variant of interest and this includes substantially decreased susceptibility to therapies, reduced vaccine induced protection, increased transmissibility and also increased disease severity. Now, coming to a variant of high consequence, see it has clear evidence that prevention measures or medical counter measures have significantly reduced effectiveness relative to previously circulating variants and it has also got many more attributes compared to a variant of concern and this includes significant reduction in vaccine effectiveness, significantly reduced susceptibility to approved therapeutics and also more severe clinical disease etc. So, these are some of the important points that we need to remember from this article. Now, let's move on to the next news article. Next news discussion is going to be based on this editorial article titled, the gender technology gap has to end. As the title hints, this editorial article talks about the gender gaps in technology. So, in this regard, let us see what the article is got to tell us. The syllabus covered by this editorial article is highlighted below for your reference. First, let us understand what is gender gap. See, gender gap is defined as a difference between the way men and women are treated in society or between what men and women do and achieve and this editorial throws light on the reflection of this social difference in technology as well. See, technology is supposed to be gender neutral but technology is merely a product of the social setup. The gender gap has percolated into technology as well and in saying so, the author has quoted some facts to substantiate his claim or statement. See, according to the global system for mobile communications estimates, over 390 million women in low and middle income countries did not have internet access and if you note in India, only 14.9% of women were reported to be using the internet. Now, say for example, if a family has only one digital device, then it is more likely that the father or sons will be allowed to use it exclusively. So, this has got a huge impact. What happens is, the women in the household are deprived of the perks of internet, mainly the services through internet and essential services like education are scorned by men because they only get access to the device and if you see the vaccine coverage among women is 17% lesser when compared to that of men and we know that vaccine coverage recovers coven registration which in turn requires access to smartphone and computer. So, here we see health services are also denied to women due to this technological divide and besides this, it shall also be noted that most technology are created by men and this man who is making the technology ends up making technology that supports his kind exclusively and if you see apps or applications, there are about 2 million apps most of which cater to young men whereas the number of apps that cater to women specific needs are not many. So, this points to the need of adoption of feminist technology or FemTech. See, feminist technology is nothing but an approach to technology and innovation that is inclusive, informed and responsive to the entire community with all its diversity. In the year 1950s, dishwashers and washing machines were promoted as a method of emancipating women and this can be regarded as the primitive thought form of feminist technology. So, in those lines, the United Nations women along with the informations and communications technology has initiated a number of initiatives like equal and girls and informations and communications technology aim to rope more women into science, technology, engineering and mathematics that is this aims at transforming the making process of technology to be more inclusive and thereby making the technology driven products also inclusive. So, the author concludes by saying that women and girls are the largest consumer groups who are left out of technology and that said they could be major profit drivers. See, according to the global system for mobile communications, closing the gender gap in mobile internet usage in low and middle income countries would actually increase the GDP by 700 billion US dollars over the next five years and technology working on women benefit has the advantage of 50 percentage of humankind has new and unexplored market and the private sector can and should be quick to reap the benefit while achieving the novel goal of gender equality and that brings us to the end of the discussion on this editorial. See, during the course of our discussion we came across ITU or international telecommunication union. So, let us see about it very briefly now. See, the international telecommunication union is the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies and remember this international telecommunication union is at quartered at Geneva Switzerland. If you see it was originally founded in 1865 as international telegraph union and in 1947 only it became the international telecommunication union and this international telecommunication union it tries to mainly promote cooperation among international telegraphy networks of those days. So, this ITU predates many other standardization bodies and interesting few are the standardization of the use of the Morse code and the world's first radio communication and fixed telecommunication networks. But now this body does a number of functions in tune with the present day requirements and this includes like allocating global radio spectrum, allocating satellite orbits, developing the technical standards that ensure networks and technologies to seamlessly interconnect and it also strives to improve the access to informations and communication technologies to underserved communities worldwide. Or to simply put every time you make a phone called via the mobile access the internet or send an email you are benefiting from the work of this ITU or the international telegraph union. So, with this we have come to the end of this editorial discussion. Let's move on to the next news article. Now, let us take up this editorial article titled Engage Iran. See, recently the United States decided to block dozens of Iran linked websites and it even includes the websites of Iran's state-owned press TV and this has caused tensions in the ties between Iran and the United States. So, in this context let us know about the issues surrounding it along with the discussion on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Agreement which is expected to resume in the future. The syllabus covered by this editorial article is highlighted below for your reference. See, last month there was news about the initiatives by world powers to hold high-level talks and this initiative was aimed at bringing the United States back into the nuclear deal with Iran. So, in this setting let us refresh our memory about the nuclear deal which is also called as the JCPOA Agreement. See, the Iran nuclear deal also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is an agreement between several world powers. To make it clear, this Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is a result of prolonged negotiations that took place from the year 2013 till 2015 and this negotiation was between Iran and the P5 countries alongside Germany and European Union. Know that the P5 countries present in negotiations are the United States, United Kingdom, China, Russia and France. So, as a result of this negotiation, a deal was signed which is named as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or the JCPOA. See, this deal came after years of tension over Iran's alleged efforts to develop a nuclear weapon. But, however, Iran insisted that its nuclear program was entirely peaceful but the international community did not believe that. So, later on after back channel talks between the United States and the Iran which was quietly brokered by Omen, the deal came into force in January 2016. In addition to these information, let us know the features of this agreement in brief. See, this agreement sets out rules for monitoring Iran's nuclear program and in return it paves a way for the lifting of the United Nations sanctions on Iran. As a part of this deal, Iran agreed to limit its sensitive nuclear activities and also to allow in international inspectors in return for the lifting of economic sanctions. Note that it is a win-win situation for all the players in the deal and the aim of restoring peace and stability is rightly balanced through ensuring economic development in Iran by lifting the sanctions. Now, here note that the United Nations is also involved in this process and as said earlier there is a monitoring mechanism that is put in place in order to assure that Iran complies with the accord and hence for this purpose the UNSC or the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution in the year 2015 and according to this resolution the United Nations Atomic Energy Agency which is called as the International Atomic Energy Agency will continue to have regular access to information on Iran's nuclear program. So, this is all about the JCPOA agreement. Now, let us see what happened to this deal and why it is often mentioned in the news. See, the agreement got off to a fairly smooth start and the IAE or the International Atomic Energy Agency certified in early 2016 that Iran had met its preliminary pledges and even the United States European Union and the United Nations they responded by repealing their sanctions. Most significantly the United States President Barack Obama's administration they dropped secondary sanctions on the oil sector which allowed Iran to ramp up its oil exports and additionally the United States and many European nations also unfroze about 100 billion dollars worth of frozen Iranian assets. But, however, the deal has come to near collapse since President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from it in 2018 and reinstated devastating banking and oil sanctions over Iran. See, according to the United States ex-President Donald Trump the agreement failed to address Iran's ballistic missile program and its proxy warfare in the region. And after such a move from the United States, Iran accused the United States of reversing its commitments and also faulted Europe for submitting to the United States unilateralism. And later on, following the drone strike on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Cops commander General Qasim Suleiman, Iran announced that it would no longer observe the JCPOA's restraints and after such incidents it was reported that Iran began breaching the deal and started nuclear enrichments and later on after the formation of a new government in the United States several news reported that the US delegation in Vienna they took part in indirect talks with Iran and hence both countries indicated signs of finding a solution to this JCPOA issue. However, as the article mentions, there is an argument between the countries on who should resume the deal first. The United States, they want Iran to return to the terms of the original agreement while the Iranians want the sanctions lifted first. So this is the tussle that is going on between the two countries at present. Now coming to the news article, the recent decision of the United States to block the Iranian websites is seen as a roadblock for furthering their ties. See the United States decision is based on the accusation that Iran uses news websites to spread disinformation and even if this accusation is true, there are other effective ways to fight disinformation campaigns like promoting information and strengthening of independent journalism etc. Hence the article mentions that this move from the United States will only delay further the progress in finding a solution to the Iran nuclear deal. So these are some of the takeaway points from this editorial discussion. With these information in mind, let's move on to the next news article. Now let us take up this news article. This article says that the Tamil Nadu School Education Department has released a schedule for admissions under the Right to Education or the RTE Act of 2009 and as a part of this, all schools have been asked to submit the details regarding the total intake capacity. So in this context, let us discuss some of the important provisions of the Right to Education Act of 2009. The syllabus covered by this article is given below for your reference. See in India, children between the age group of 6 and 14 years have got the Fundamental Right to Free and Compulsory Education and this right is implemented through the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act of 2009 which is also called as the RTE Act and this act is applicable to all categories of schools including both government as well as private schools. Know that Section 3 of this Act deals with the Right of Child to Free and Compulsory Education and this section says that every child of the age of 6 to 14 years shall have the Right to Free and Compulsory Education in a neighborhood school and this right is extended till the completion of his or her elementary education and note that for this, no child shall be liable to pay any kind of fee which may prevent him or her from pursuing and completing the elementary education. So as we know elementary education means the education from first class to eighth class. See there may arise a question like what if a child is not admitted to or failed to complete elementary education. See in such case the Act says that such a child shall be admitted in a class appropriate to his or her age and in order to ensure that the child is at par with others, he or she has got the right to receive special training and such a child shall also be entitled to free education till the completion of elementary education even after 14 years. Also Section 6 of the Act mandates the appropriate government and local authority to establish school within the limits of the neighborhood and as per the Act this should have been within a period of 3 years from the commencement of this Act but even today we may come across lakhs of children in India who miss their elementary education due to lack of accessibility. Now come into financial responsibilities. See the central government and the state governments they shall have concurrent responsibility for providing funds and as per the Act the parents and guardians are duty bound to admit his or her child or what to an elementary education in the neighborhood school and the Act also provides for preschool education. See as per Section 11 in order to prepare a child above the age of 3 years for elementary education the appropriate government may provide free preschool education. Now coming to Section 12 of the Act see this section has got the provisions to ensure the school's responsibility for free and compulsory education. If the school is established or controlled by the appropriate government then it shall provide free and compulsory elementary education to all children admitted. Next is the case of an aided school receiving aid from government to meet whole or part of its expenses. See such schools shall provide free and compulsory elementary education to a minimum of 25% of the total children admitted. So what if the schools are unaided and they are not receiving any kind of aids or grants to meet its expenses from the government. See even then they are mandated to provide free and compulsory elementary education to at least 25% of the children belonging to weaker section and disadvantaged group in the neighborhood and this is applicable for class one admissions of such schools. So finally as per the RTE Act no school or person shall while admitting a child collect any capitation fee and also neither the child nor his or her parents or guardian shall be subjected to any screening procedure and in case of contravention the school shall be punishable with fine which may even extend to 10 times the capitation fee charged. So with this we have come to the end of this discussion with these points in mind let's move on to see what the next article is got to tell us. Our next news discussion is going to be based on this news article. See this news article is regarding the fake currency circulation in the country. So along with a few facts related to it we shall discuss the measures that the government has taken to address the fake currency circulation. See fake Indian currency note is a term that is used by officials and media to refer to counterfeit currency notes that are circulated in the Indian economy. And according to the Reserve Bank of India's annual report for 2020 to 2021 the overall fake Indian currency notes in circulation during the period 2020 to 2021 decreased as compared to the previous year. But surprisingly the fake bank notes of rupees 500 denominations were found to be increasing. At the same time period that is 2020 to 2021 reported an increase of 31.3% in counterfeit notes that were detected in the new 500 rupees notes denomination has compared with the previous year. Fortunately there was a decline in counterfeit notes that were detected in other denominations or to be more specific a total of 39453 fake bank notes of rupees 500 denomination series were discovered during the year. And in addition 1.11 lakh fake notes of rupees 100 were detected during the year. And the Arbe report also said that a total of 2.9 lakh fake bank notes of all denominations were detected during the year and this number was significantly down when compared to the 2.97 lakh fake notes that were detected during 2019 to 2020. So these are a few facts related to fake news circulation. So now let us discuss the steps that were taken by the government to address the issue. Now let us see it one by one. See firstly a terror funding and fake currency cell has been constituted in the National Investigation Agency and this cell conducts focused investigation of terror funding and fake currency cases. Secondly an advisory on terror finance has been issued in April 2018 to states and union territories and guidelines have also been issued in March 2019 to states and union territories for investigation of cases of high quality counterfeit Indian currency notes. Thirdly training programs are regularly conducted for the state police personnel and before discussing the other measures you have to know that the fake Indian currency notes network is one of the channels of terror financing in India and hence in order to address this the FICN Coordination Group or the Fake Indian Currency Notes Coordination Group shortly known as FCOT has been formed by the Ministry of Home Affairs and this group functions to share the intelligence information among the security agencies of the states or center and this helps in countering the problem of circulation of fake currency notes and most importantly the government has strengthened the provisions in the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act of 1967. See this act assists in combating terror financing by criminalizing the production or smuggling or circulation of high quality fake Indian currency as a terrorist act and alongside this act enlarges the scope of countering terrorism by allowing takeover of any property that are used for terrorism. In addition to all these measures the government has increased its security at the international borders so that no external forces disturb the internal security. So with this we have come to the end of this topic discussion. Let us now move on to the practice question discussion. Now look at this prelims practice question about the mutation in novel coronavirus. See statement one says that delta plus variant is a further mutated form of the alpha variant that originated in the UK and statement two says that a variant of concern have a much greater transmissibility and may easily become resistant to established drugs compared to a variant of interest and we need to find the correct statement. See when you take statement one this statement is incorrect because the delta plus variant is a further mutated form of the delta variant which originated in India and not the alpha variant which originated in the UK and as we saw earlier this delta plus variant is said to be predominantly responsible for India's second wave. Now coming to the next statement from our discussion it is clear that this statement that is the second statement is correct so therefore the right answer is option b that is two only. Now let us take up this prelims practice question with reference to the right to education act of 2009. The first statement says that it provides for free and compulsory education to all children of the age of four to eighteen years and statement two says out of the class one admissions in unaided schools at least 25 percent of the children shall belong to weaker section and disadvantaged group in the neighborhood and we need to find the correct statement. See when you take statement one this statement is incorrect because right to education is an act to provide for free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years and not four to eighteen years so this statement is incorrect. Coming to statement two see this statement is correct because in the right to education act the class C of section 12 makes it very clear it says that unaided schools shall admit in class one to the extent of at least 25 percent of the strength of that class children belonging to weaker section and disadvantaged group in the neighborhood and they shall be provided free and compulsory education till its completion. So statement two is correct and since the question wants us to identify the correct statement the right option is option B that is two only. Now let us take up this prelims practice question. Statement one says that as per the RBI report the overall fake currency circulation in India has decreased in the year 2020 to 21 and statement two says that terror funding and fake currency cell has been constituted in the enforcement directorate to restrict the fake currency circulation and we need to find the correct answer. See as we discussed earlier the Reserve Bank of India's annual report for 2020 to 21 says that the overall fake Indian currency notes in circulation during the period 2020 to 21 decreased as compared to the previous year and similarly the RBI report also said that a total of 2.9 lakh fake banknotes of all denominations were detected during the year and this number was significantly down when compared to the 2.97 lakh fake notes that was detected during the year 2019 to 2020 and therefore statement one is correct. Coming to statement two see while discussing the measures taken by the government we saw that a terror funding and fake currency cell has been constituted in the national investigation agency and not in the enforcement directorate and this cell conducts focused investigation of terror funding and fake currency cases and therefore statement two is incorrect and since the question wants us to find only the right statement the correct answer is option A that is one only. The list of main practice questions is displayed here you can write your answers and post them in the comment section below. So with this we have come to the end of today's indoor news analysis. If you like the video then don't forget to like comment and share and do subscribe to Shankar IAS Academy YouTube channel for more updates regarding UPSC civil services preparation. Shankar IAS Academy Admissions open for UPSC Coaching 2021-22 Classes starts on June 28 for Admissions Contact 76677626


The US has sent the first 37 units of the 250 M1117ASV Guardian Armored Vehicles to Ukraine. The Ukrainian media has reported. According to the report, the armored vehicles have been delivered to the Constantaport and sent from Romania to Ukraine by rail. It is unknown when the next batch of armored vehicles will be dispatched. It should be noted that the first report about the delivery of M1117ASV Guardian Armored Vehicles was circulated in November.


All right welcome back. So this is the first part of the chapter performance on the conditions of change and I will talk about plant change in this clip. So after this clip you'll understand the theory of plant change who are the inventors and what is its status today. To start off with what is meant with plant change. Plant change is basically the idea that an organization is in a current state and it wants to move to another state. So for example it's using one software system now and it's predicted or it's thought it might be a good idea to use a next software system in a year. People are usually happy with the state it is so what to do in order to make sure that everybody uses this software sometime next year. So that's the idea behind plant change. You define the end result and then you move from the current state to this future state in a planned and organized way. This thinking that you are in one state and you want to move to another state was can be dated back to Lewin's theory of plant change. Now Lewin was not an organizational manager or organizational scientist. He was a sociologist he was very much interested in how societies develop and literally he was most interested in understanding how societies develop from a totalitarian state. Read from Germany after World War II to a democracy. And he introduced a number of concepts that have heavily influenced change theories in the field of management. So what's the idea? According to Lewin change is a social process. If you want to change something you need to have the people on board and getting these people on board is difficult because societies and groups they are usually just happy the way things are maybe a little bit discontent but mostly they are in an equilibrium. There's general happiness. If you say to people we're going to do things completely different tomorrow there are probably a lot of resistance. So if you want to reach a change you need to pay attention to this resistance in groups who are happy with the current state of being. If you want to understand really what it needs to make a change you first and foremost need to start with understanding this force field in a group in a society in an organization in a team wherever in this social entity that makes the equilibrium there are always forces that are very strong attached to the current state and there are maybe a few people that already are open to new ideas. So who are the forces against and who are the forces in favor of this proposed change? After this step you can start to convince the group of people who are not yet on board of the change. So you try to push a little bit and try to expand the group of people who are in favor of change until that moment that there is a critical mass. So if the majority of the group is happy about the proposed change then you can roll it out and move and really implement the change. So key to the idea of Lewin is to conduct a force field analysis starting point for any planned change initiative is trying to understand who would like the change and who's probably against the change. So how to do this? First is very important to define the desired situation. What do we have now? Software A. Where do we want to go to? Software B. Then who are in favor of keeping working with software A? So what is the benefit of this software A? What is hindering people to move along? Is it a matter of the elected time to learn the new software? Is it deeper? Are there political, so to speak, preferences for the one system versus the other? So really understanding what is the matter and what keeps people using the old software rather than moving to the new software from point A to point B? Also try to understand how the foregoes, how the people are already in favor of the change. So what do they see as a benefit of the change? Also try to really understand what drives them. And after knowing these restraining forces and driving forces you can group them together and evaluate. So what could be the package deal for everybody? What could be the buy-in? What's in it for me kind of evaluation? Why people would be willing to go to the next phase? And don't think about this too easily. There can be many things that make people willing to go to the next phase. It's not just about pay or it's also often about acknowledgement. It's often about uncertainty. So all these things you need to address in making a map of all these restraining and also the driving forces. And only after you've collected all this information you can design a plan of action. So the figure illustrates which are the driving forces, which are the restraining forces and after conducting a force field analysis you probably know from all the employees involved and don't underestimate, I literally mean all the employees, everybody who's supposed to be working with the new system, what their pros and cons are and you also know how to address the cons of the people are opposing. You can make that just part of your action plan. Then moving to the desired state involves stages. So if you know the force field you can use the information that you collected to prepare people for change. So we, Lewin calls this the unfreezing phase. So that means telling the advantages, challenge the ways they are doing things. So for example in this, keep with the example of the software, say oh yeah it's still nice now but there will be any updates. So prepare people that there will be a change and there's not really an alternative. Then when the majority is there you can roll the force field out and you can start modifying the behaviors. So here it's important to keep everybody on board and see the organization as a system of learning. So you can refer to chapter three where we talked about knowledge and organizations. So the learning perspectives, knowledge transfer, learning organization theories, these are things that you can do during the movement phase. And again this is about exchanging, transferring the knowledge between individuals and make sure that everybody is on board and that they know what is expected of them once the system is implemented. Then after the system is implemented, so the experimentation phase has been done, the implementation is done, it's evaluated, blah, blah, blah, then make sure that you're refreeze. Get rid of the old system, the new system is the new norm, all the procedures that feed into the new system they are adjusted, top management should reinforce that the system is used in a good way. So you move from the old situation to the new situation. In a few slides it looks like this. So unfreeze, like I said, increase the driving forces, produce resisting forces or a combination of both. So you're pushing and trying to make the change happen. The next phase is the move phase and the move phase is illustrated in this figure as a period where the driving and opposing forces are kind of combating each other but slowly, slowly the resistance against the new changes is reducing until it reaches the level that everybody is happy with the new situation and then it refreezes. So that will be the new norm where everybody is happy, there's a new equilibrium and the system again works. But then in a new way. So this model was kind of hijacked by consultants. And the most known consultant that hijacked this thinking by Lewin was Kotor. And Kotor has this eight-step model about make change happen. And it's kind of a recipe book that you recognize the three phases that were suggested by Lewin very clearly into. So there's this unfreezing stage and Kotor says you need to create a sense of urgency so that the entire organization knows that something bad is happening if we're not changing soon. Then there's a move period and Kotor has kind of a recipe how to navigate through the move phase for example by installing a guiding coalition with the most important people in the organization or the people who could be most opposite make them part of the guiding coalition and then they probably be happy about the change. Have a clear change vision so communicate clearly to all the people in the organization where the change is heading to you. Communicate change vision, communication is key and Kotor's idea of change management. Empower others to take action so make sure that there are subgroups who are involved in parts of the change so everybody has a little say in the change that has happened so this is also a strategy to keep people on board and make sure that the changes sometimes the change is really really big and in order to prevent the people lose track you can make sure that you celebrate small milestones in between. Eventually after the change has succeeded then the freeze phase comes consolidates the change make sure that it's part of all the systems like also Lewin already suggested and institutionalized the new approaches so institutionalized means that it's part of the policies the practices all the management talk that's happening in the organization it all supports the change. Lewin is big you just google it and you'll find many consultants working following this change trajectory it's kind of the golden standard of change management however and this comes with a large disclaimer there is a lot of criticism on this idea of plan change in fact the reality of change management is really really messy it's never the case that there's one change happening in an organization there are oftentimes if you go to organization there are many changes happening at the same time it's not just the software system there's also a new manager and by the way the manager changes during the process and by the way there is an economic crisis so something from outside is happening there's also something to do with the with another production line that is causing troubles so which plans change is prioritized over the other is oftentimes very difficult to disentangle it's also often the case that they influence each other a new manager may think that the changes may be not such a good idea after all they have a better experience with another system for example what is also underestimated is the employee side of changes it can't be emphasized enough how much employees are affected by change and their behavior in the end brings success to the organization or not any change is causing some kind of stress in employees so just moving on and ignoring the employees might feel stressful eventually harm their performance and therefore also the performance of the organization another criticism is that many changes just happen software system of course you can you can you can tackle it as a as a plan change but sometimes it's just a small addition on what is already happening and it just is implemented because it came along and we just did it rather than plan for it and then yeah that that helped us a bit but it was not kind of disrupting or anything um so really plan change projects big ones uh reductions in employees or mergers and acquisitions those are the things that are oftentimes subject to the really plan change pros projects and from those projects we know that in many times many cases the outcomes of the projects are not in line with what originally it thought of in fact there's this very interesting meat analysis analysis done by park and show in 2013 they uh investigated into plan change initiatives that involved a reduction of workforce so about firing 500 employees and they were checking to what extent the organizations were actually doing better after they did this reduction did they really meet the targets that were communicated before the change was initiated and they found literally that in 80 percent of the change initiatives the original goal of the change was not realized so despite the golden standard of change management there's probably some additional theory needed to really do effective change in organizations and that is what I will discuss in the next knowledge clip and that will be on uh dynamic capabilities so to wrap up for now uh you know now that change happens in plant and unplanned ways we discussed Lewin's theory of plan change we are introduced you to Kotter's line of thinking about plan changes which is adopted in consulting however I also warned you for the criticism on these kind of theories that they are in reality change is much more messier than Kotter and even Lewin could have predicted in the past so thank you


Hi, my name is Ken Durant, and I'm from Calvary, Alberta, Canada, and I'm also a trucker. And you are watching Trucker Josh Vlogs. Chevy's very excited because diesel's very excited. What else? Can you sit? You sit? Diesel can sit. So diesel's coming with me on my first regional trip. I'm not in the Kenworth yet. I'm in the Volvo, but diesel's coming with on this trip because that truck hadn't been detailed in a long time. So I'll clean it when I'm done. And Chevy seems to think he's coming too. You wouldn't like it, buddy.  Or are you just upset that I'm taking diesel for a nice one night, Chevy? You're taking his diesel? My diesel is my friend. My brother. It's interesting how they know when something's happening. Okay, chef. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm ready. It's another rainy day out, too. But our apple tree's blossoming. Nice, eh? It's always nice in spring when it does that. Diesel, you're not going in the mud, are you? Diesel? You be a good boy, Chevy. You take good care of mom, okay? Don't cry, buddy. You can stay with mama in the littles, okay? Keep her safe. Oh, Chevy, no, no. You're going to stay. Chevy, you stay. Chevy, you stay. Sorry, buddy. Okay, let's not make this harder than it has to be. Bye, Chevy. I'll be back tomorrow, okay? Tomorrow. Love you. Love you. Hopefully our next trip will be in old blue. Hopefully the decals don't take too long to get here. The decals. The decals. Got to get them on the doors on the side before we can take a trip with it. Might put temporary ones on if we have to. But we'll be together soon, okay? Look at me like that. I don't want to drive her. I don't want to drive the Volvo. He doesn't know me too well yet. He's not too sure of me because I got this Volvo out here right in front of him. He's getting kind of nervous, but don't worry. Look at this. I'm 5'10". Look how high this grill is. I'm standing as straight as I can right now. 5'10". That's a big grill. Cool thing about this truck, which was another bonus. I forgot to tell you in yesterday's video. I wasn't expecting this, but check that out. That's pretty cool. That was a big bonus. And I haven't shown you guys the horns yet. It's the best part, obviously. Got the two air horns up there. And don't worry. I have this funny feeling that there's going to be a bit of an upgrade in that department. Not too far in the future. But we don't need to worry too much about it because these are pretty nice already. It's up all blue. It's me again. I know we're getting to know each other. You've got to get to know my scent. Okay, ready for this? It's going to be kind of loud in here because I'm inside the shop. So headphone warning, all right? Okay. Made my day. I'm a kid. I know I'm a grown kid.  Make sure they give me the arm pump, okay? I'm just looking for an excuse to honk those things. Okay. Let's go to Saskatoon. Saskatoon. See you soon. Your interior lights are going to go off, right? Of course before we go. All tucked in, safe and sound. Geez, how's it feel to be back in the saddle, man? Can you sit? Can you sit? Of course you can. Good boy.  So we got our paperwork. It's trailer 509. I'm not sure if they left it tied down or not. I'm pretty sure they didn't. So probably I've tied it down here yet. That's usually how it goes because when I was a city driver, I know how it goes. This was brought in from the state somewhere, either Iowa or something like that. I'll have to check the paperwork here a little. It's going to Saskatoon though. Let's go find it and hook up. We got all the straps thrown over, all the protection in place. Always use protection. Let's tighten it up and get going. Right diesel before we go though. Want to go for a little walk? Brought his stairs with, of course. Good boy. Good boy. Those are called pet loader and you can find them on Amazon. If you're wondering. It's the weekend so I can let them run around. It's a fenced in yard here as long as you clean up after your dog. But during weekdays and when the forklifts are operating in the yard here, you got to have your dogs on a leash. Nobody's around right now though. So just me and him. Want to stretch his legs a bit. Hey diesel, this way come. Come on. Going without you bud. Got to go to the driver's room. Come on diesel. Another driver's room. Check it out man. I'll be right back.  Ready to go trucking. Let's go see what Saskatoon's got going on. Go see some cows. Cows are his favorite. Awesome. Come on. Up up up. 13 hours and 0 minutes of remaining drive time. Aye aye. So we got Karen with us here. And Miss E-Log here. Both telling me what to do. Can I control the the bunk fan from here? I should be able to. Yeah there we go. There we go. Okay we're ready to rock and roll. Karen says it's 861 kilometers to our destination. We have to deliver this load. 7.30 am sharp tomorrow morning. Let's roll out. First trip on regional for me. And I'm looking forward to hopefully the next trip when I get to say it's the first trip in the Kenworth. It would take us about 9 hours to get there. We've got some trucking to do. Volvo trucking. Are you diesel? At least he's comfy back there. You ready diesel? I was born ready man. She's born for this. There's Karen. Yelling at me already. This is a pretty nice truck though. Okay I bugged Volvo a lot but it's a good truck. Don't take me too seriously. Friendly banter. Looks like we are clear. In this lane. There we go. Stay so high up. They need to be adjusted so that they stay down tomorrow. Oh well. Not a problem. Not a big problem. Little problem. How's it feel Diesel? Sounds like this motor is struggling man. I think you need a bigger motor. I agree. Good thing the Kenworth's got a bigger motor. I don't have any problems pulling with that thing. Just stop to check the load here. This is that little pull out. On the east side of Brandon. Brandon is just down that way. That's the way we're going. Same way as this guy. Missed the sounds of the highway. All that sound. This is a little rest area here. Figured I had to stop to check the straps and everything. And while we're here. I know there's a little trail in here.  I'm hoping not to pick up any ticks in here. We're going to go for a walk because we're trying to make this a habit again. When we're on the road I want to get in shape and I want to start walking every day again. And this is one trail that I went down a couple of years ago. It goes around over here through the bush and comes back out behind the truck over there. He has his tick medication for this summer already. Not too worried about him getting any wood ticks.  We still want to be careful. That's why I have him on the leash here right now. I thought of letting him just run down the trail. He'd be fine. But I don't want him getting a whole bunch of ticks. We're going to try to stay on the path. But look at all this wood. You see that? Why is it like that? Diesel just stay here for a sec. Look at this. Down here is darker and then suddenly it gets lighter up there. Almost like the bark has been peeled off all the way up all of these trees. Not on this side but over here. Weird. Right? So I got my app called Map My Fitness running right now. It has GPS tracker. It will follow me on here and tell me exactly how far we walked how many calories I burned. That's the app that I use to lose so much weight for our wedding. The wedding was in 2017. And I lost all of my weight. It was in 2017. I think I lost 40 pounds, right? 30 or 40 pounds that year. I gained it all back. Plus some. So this summer we're changing things up. Me and Diesel are hitting the road again. Not going too far but we are hitting the road again. And we've got a nice truck that we're going to be rolling down the highway with. I want to make sure that when I get out of the truck it stops. I matched the truck that I look good too. So we're going to do this. I'm just going to walk. He needs to get in shape a little bit too. He's been a little spoiled at home. It's a smaller yard. It's a nice little nature trail in here. I miss this. I feel like I'm exploring again. Getting out into nature. Seeing the world a little bit again. Diesel, can you get out of there? Is that a squirrel? Caught me off guard buddy. You leave this squirrel alone, okay? I'm alone. What you got walking to do? See it goes around there, the path. And that way. And then back out that way. I want to do this every day. I want to stop every day. And what did I do last time? I walked at least, I made it my goal to walk three miles a day. For five kilometers. Nothing similar now. The trail goes that way too. We'll see where that goes next time. I know where this one goes. A little bit muddy. Everything's muddy out here. Manitoba is very wet this spring in 2022. But everything's turning green. It's beautiful, right? No Diesel, no. Stay on the path. No, stay on the path. There's the truck down there. Diesel, stay out of the puddles. There's the truck, right there. We're almost back. Here it is, man. Trailer 509, that's us. Oh, that thing's just giving her. Here we are. Okay, we did the wood tick check. Checked Diesel. Best I could. I had one on my neck. I don't know how it got on me. I stayed on the trail the whole time. He wandered off a couple of times. I had to keep calling him. Stay on the trail. I didn't have any ticks. How did I get one, man? I didn't latch on or anything. It was just crawling on my neck. Hopefully that's the only one. All right, lights on. Let's go. Come on, Volvo, let's go. Let's go to Saskatoon. We have another 650 kilometers or six and a half hours or so of driving. Or maybe somewhere around there. There's like a little rest area in here and stuff. That guy drove past me like five times. I was wondering if he's going to come say hi to me or not. If you were going to, then hi. There they are. See little rest areas in there. Nothing fancy. One kilometer turn left on highway 464. That pickup behind me just vanished. Where did it go? What? Did it drive down the trail? Just vanished. Let me get back on that highway there. And head into past Brandon, into Saskatchewan. No need to stop for Timmy's today because I brought coffee from home for today. I think I meet up with the road over there somewhere. I thought there was a driver. A driveway closer by here, I guess not. Haven't been here in a little while. We made it Saskatoon and you may recognize this guy. I did it. There you go. From an intro not too long ago.  This is our friend Adam. I wandered. He's been one of Britt's friends actually for over 15 years I think. Yeah. And he was one of her best friends growing up if not her best friend. And now I'm stealing him. Now he's mine. I'll take it. I talked this over with Britt. She wasn't happy. Yeah, man. Saskatoon here. We're going to chat for a bit and then head off to bed. Not bad lighting in this truck. Whoa, it's not fall over now. It's been a long day driving. I'm going to edit my video right here. This is my editing station for tonight. There you go. I'm going to put this all together for you so you can watch it tomorrow. Have a great one everybody. The first day back has been awesome. I'm looking forward to getting back to old blue. But for now, Diesel and I are going to enjoy our night here in the Volvo. It's actually ran really nice all day. It's a really smooth running quiet truck. If this is what you're looking for, if you're looking for highway comfort the Volvo is a great truck. I poke fun at it all the time. I'm supposed to do that. I'm a Kenworth, yeah. Kenworth Peterbilt to the bone. But these are great trucks if that's what you're looking for. So Diesel, let's say good night. Good night everybody. Lights out. Lights out. Turn the lights off, man. Turn the lights off. Time for bed. Thank you.


It is now time for us to begin the long-awaited Star Wars show and as Logan can tell you today's show is going to be full of a huge variety of acts there will be singing, there will be dancing, there will be instrument playing of both traditional instruments and not traditional instruments like seashells.


Are our moms responsible for the lingering wage gap between men and women? A European research team claims that by trading in high-powered careers to provide child care, mothers have created a social norm that's been hard for today's generation to shake. Although today's workforce features more women than ever before, women still earn 15% less than men. Among the many factors creating this wage gap, the researchers focused on women's life choices. Using a rigorous theoretical model, they linked these choices to whether mothers had high or low future earning ability. The model argues that the previous generation's decisions determined the career paths pursued today. If most mothers in the prior generation took lower-level jobs to allow time for child care, then their daughters aren't likely to opt for a high-powered career because of this social norm. Likewise, if most fathers in the prior generation pursued high-powered careers, then their sons may feel stigmatized when choosing a lower-level job and therefore avoid it, ultimately leaving the choice about child care to the woman. Using the model, the researchers examined two career options, jobs with high earning potential but no time to provide child care, and jobs flexible enough to allow time for care. They predicted that only women with high future earning potential will pursue high-powered careers, but despite their potential to provide for their family, they will still feel guilt for not taking care of their children due to the social norm. The team then looked at three policies for shifting this social norm and closing the wage gap, quotas for the number of women in high-powered jobs, child care subsidies, and parental leave. Quotas for women and child care subsidies were the most effective because both options increase the number of women pursuing high-powered careers. However, parental leave perpetuated social norms because going on leave comes at the cost of fewer job promotions, and women are usually the ones taking leave. These findings highlight the complex interplay of factors determining a woman's willingness to pursue a career and underscore why addressing the wage gap is so difficult. Companies and governments must pay attention not only to current factors in designing policies, but also how past social norms affect present generations.


Alright everyone, this is a short session and we're going to get started. This is A.B. testing with Optimizely, hopefully you're in the right room, if not, sneak out. Alright, quick introduction, my name is Kristen Paul, I live in Santa Cruz, California, in the United States, I've been doing Drupal for a long time, in tech for a long time, and here's some contact information, my silly kids from a few years ago. Alright, some goals for today, we're going to give an overview of A.B. testing in general, learn a little bit about Optimizely, and then there'll be some resources on the slides that I'll post after the session. Alright, so to start with, what is A.B. testing? A research methodology that compares two or more versions of a product or strategy determine empirically which version is superior. Okay, what? It's a lot of words for something that's really not that complicated. So, we'll talk a little bit about how A.B., the concept of A.B. testing started, actually in the early 1900s, it started more in agriculture, and there was this idea of having two fields and having more fertilizer on one field, and see what happens. Well, that's like, they didn't call it A.B. testing back then, it was sort of the scientific method, but it was a very simple example of how to do A.B. testing. Fast forward, and that was started to be applied in the 1950s to clinical trials in medicine. So, it's a pretty standard thing, you don't normally call it A.B. test, sometimes they will say that group A and group B, but usually you have like a placebo group who's not getting anything, and then you have someone who's actually getting the medicine that they're trying to test for. Well, marketing decided this is kind of a cool thing, why don't we do this? In the 1960s and 70s, print marketing started to use this for things like postcards. So, they would send a postcard to two different kinds of postcards that were different, and maybe the phone number would be different. So, they would know which card you got and what kind of response they got. And now, more recently, since around 2000, we have A.B. testing for the web. So, for the web, the actual term A.B. tests, they attribute it to Google. It's not really clear, it really was Google, but they say the first official A.B. test was in 2000. So, an A.B. test for the web would be that you're going to make two different versions of a web page, and then, or more than that, and then try to decide which one is quote-unquote better, and we'll discuss what that means. So, why would you want to A.B. test? There are a lot of reasons. So, if you're trying to get people to sign up for something, and you've got web forms, you might have two different versions of your web form, and hopefully, you're able to optimize that and get more conversions. You get more leads, more sign-ups, more people interested in your product or your service, and hopefully, you're actually getting people more engaged in your site, and then, maybe, they'll want to come back and stick around. So, this might mean more money, but if you're not selling something, it isn't necessarily. This could be good even if you're higher education, a government site, you want people to find your stuff, you want them to be using the site more effectively. So, one of the kind of side benefits is you can also get people on the site longer, and that can actually help with search engine optimization, where your bounce rate is lower, and therefore, you get higher search engine rankings. Hopefully, you get happier users as a result. So, those are some reasons why you would A.B. test. So, what are the types of things that you can A.B. test? There's lots of things. I'm going to focus mostly on, basically, on web testing, but you can do parts of a web page. So, if you wanted to just do, you know, classic is like, I'm going to change the button, right? Everybody's, okay, A.B. test, I'm going to change the button. But, you don't have to just change a button. You could have a completely different page. You can have a page with a completely different layout. It's totally different. There's nothing that looks the same. And actually, that can be a very powerful test. You can also test more than just a single page. You can actually test a whole funnel, they call them, of pages, where the whole funnel is different. You could even have a different number of pages in the funnel. So, one funnel might have three pages, and the other one has two, and you're trying to see where people are dropping off the funnel, if you're losing people, or if they're actually going through the whole process. Another place where people A.B. test is in advertisements. So, Facebook ads, AdWords, that kind of thing. And you have usually less to work with there. Pricing models is a pretty standard thing. I'm sure most of us have gone to the pages where there's a software as a service, and there's like the typical either three or four options there. There's like the cheapy one, and the real expensive in the middle one. And they've probably done A.B. test on the size of the one that they're hoping that you're going to choose, and the color, and that kind of thing. So, there's a lot of work done with the look of the pricing, but also even the numbers. So, they might change the numbers. You might get a different. I think some people might have seen this sometimes when you're going to airlines, and you're like, wait, just two seconds ago, I swear, on my phone, that was not that same price. So, that could be interesting. Another thing is emails. So, if you're doing any kind of email marketing, something with MailChimp, or things like that where you can target things and try to see who's coming to your site, who's clicking on those links based on the type of email. So, if you're looking specifically at a web page, there's lots of things you can change on the web page, right? So, here's an example where I can change hello. I can change the image. I could make it completely different, but if there's just sort of targeted things I want to try out, I could change, you know, text, you know, the layout, add more links, remove them, so forth, and do any kind of combination that I want. So, you can get pretty flexible. So, part of this is talking about how do we do this. And there's many ways you can approach A.B. testing. A pretty standard approach is to use some sort of software as a service. And that's mainly what we're going to talk about today, is using Optimize.ly. But you can do A.B. testing completely with custom code. You don't have to use a service at all. This is Drupal, and if you're a coder, I've actually done this kind of thing in the past, and we have one site where we're doing a combination of software as a service and some custom code, and doing a hybrid approach.  But there's other aspects of it. You can do a redirect A.B. test, and that's where you have two completely different pages, at least conceptually different pages, where they're different in terms of the URL. And then you split your audience into, say, it was 50-50, 50% go to the original URL, and then 50% go to the redirected page. So that's a classic redirect test. You can use your software as a service, so something like Optimize.ly, and you can use their editor, and we'll be looking at that, where you can go and you can just change all sorts of stuff. So that tends to be popular, especially with people who are non-technical. But believe me, you can do some pretty funky things in there, and you can change HTML, you can change CSS, you could add JavaScript. So in some ways, you're like, oh, the marketing group, you know, or the non-technical group can go in and play with this tool and do some stuff. But, you know, you might end up having some interesting A.B. tests, if that happens. Or you'll be called in to help them with the technical side.  So obviously you need to pick some tools, and there's a ton, ton, ton out there. We'll talk about Optimize.ly today, but there's many competitors. Aquialift is an interesting tool that does not just A.B. testing, but all sorts of personalization. And actually a lot of the A.B. testing tools are trying to expand more into the whole personalization space as well, which is just providing customized, personalized content to their users no matter what. You just go somewhere and it's tailored to you. Everyone's gone on the web, and you're on some random website looking at Hawaiian vacations, and then you're like an advertisement for Pantheon or for Aquia, and you're like, I'm looking at vacations. Why are they talking? You know, it's because I happen to go and look at Drupal stuff all the time. And so they think for some reason that, you know, that's the kind of ad they should show me. So that's the kind of personalization. You can, I have it personally, but there are A.B. testing frameworks you can use at a code level. So something I found was PHP A.B. It's on GitHub. You could try that out, or you can just write your own code. So an important part of A.B. testing is making sure you understand what is your goal. So what are you trying to test for? So you can make it A.B. test, but then not have a goal, and you're like, oh, well, I don't know. I guess it's better. I mean, that doesn't help, right? So typically a pretty standard thing is they filled in the form and clicked the button, or they just clicked a button, or sometimes it's just how long they've been on the page. That can be some indicator that the page is more useful. But you need to have some sort of goal that you're set up. I would argue that you shouldn't have too many goals. Try to be very selective and be very focused on what goals you want to focus on. All right. So for optimizly, this is one of the software as the service tools that you can use to do A.B. testing. And I'm going to go through the UI. I'm going to do a demo. Hopefully the Internet will let me. So obviously it's a third-party tool. You need to add some JavaScript on your site. Probably how many here are developers? Hands up? Oh, almost everybody, or probably everybody. You know how to add JavaScript to your site. I'm not going to, you know, put it however you want to do it. There's many different ways in Drupal, right? So put it somewhere, and that's how it's going to actually be able to pull in the stuff optimizly. Once you've done that, then you'll be able to, and a note on that is you could be selective and decide only to add it on certain pages of your site if you want to do that, because optimizly does have a little bit of a performance hit, so you could, you know, just opt in for certain pages. So then at that point you're going to create an experiment, which is an A.B. test. And, you know, I'm going to show an example of just one page, and you create, you can create variants. And in my case, I'll just create one. You make whatever changes you want. You save it. There's at least an optimizly. You have to make sure to remember to save, but there's also a publish. So you're like, eh, where's my change? And like, oh, I forgot to hit the publish button. So that's kind of a side note. There's a lot of settings you can do in optimizly, and we'll touch upon some of them, not all of them, because there's a lot there. But you can have many variations. So it's, you don't have to have just A, B. You could have as many as you want if you want to do that. Would only do that if you have enough traffic to be able to support that kind of thing, because you need enough traffic in order to look at the results and decide if something was statistically significant. And then you could do multiple pages if you wanted. We'll look at just one page. One thing that you'll often want to do is look at your audience. So a very standard segmentation is to have desktop versus mobile. So an A, B test, you probably wouldn't want to do them both for all different devices. That's a pretty standard thing, is you'd have an A, B test and you'd actually split it between the two. Then you can do things, you could look at clicks. That's mainly what we'll do, but you can do custom metrics if you want. You can add JavaScript and CSS. And then you can do, the traffic allocation is, how many people do you want to, do you want to just do a split 50-50 between A and B? Or do you want to say, well, this new page is super risky. This is a high traffic page. I'm a little nervous about rolling this out. I'm going to do 90-10, because I just don't know. I might be completely shooting myself on the foot by doing this test. I don't want to lose all my leads overnight by going 50-50, so I'm just going to kind of ease into it. So it's not uncommon for sometimes people to do more risky things, but do it at a lower percentage. And then you can actually schedule A, B tests to roll out at certain times if you want. So once you have configured everything, you start your experiment, you have to wait. And how long you wait depends on how much traffic you have. If you get a lot of traffic, you don't have to wait as long, because you'll have lots of data. If you don't have that much traffic, then you'll have to wait longer. If you have too little traffic, it doesn't make sense to do the test. So you have to judge how many people are hitting the page, and does it even make sense for me to try to do this? So you wait a certain amount of time. The tool will tell you, have you gotten enough data that it makes sense to look at, you say, was it a good test or not? If you're doing A, B, and B wins, then you implement B, and you move on, you do another test. So that tends to be the process. You can have as many A, B tests running at the same time if you want to, you know, all your landing pages, your home page, whatever, all your forms, you could go crazy if you want. So at this point, I'm going to try to demo. We'll see how that works. Maybe not demo the Slack. We'll quit out of that. All right. So, oh, it's so small. Sorry. It looks super tiny up here. All right. So, first thing I'm going to do is show you kind of what my example is. So here is a web page, and it's got some text, it's got an image, it's got some links, and I'd like to change it. I'd like to change it. So it looks like this, because why not?  I'm going to actually, it's hard to tell, but my find out more is actually a slightly darker orange, and I've made orange up in the top on the contact. So I've made actually four different changes on this page. And there's going to, I'm going to show that test, and if I have time, I'll show another one where the original looks like this. And I was like, ah, it's kind of boring. I don't know. I want to play around with it. My new one actually looks completely different. And actually, this one I set up with a redirect test. So the original and the new one are actually at completely different URLs. So I was, I've used Optimize.ly a lot for a certain client and was used to their interface. It's not a great interface, but last week I'm like, well, I can't use the client's account because that's just, you know, shouldn't do that. So I set up a new account. Well, they completely, the new interface is completely different than what I've used. So I've been clicking around and learning the new interface. So hopefully people, I might want to make it a little bit bigger. There we go. So the interface here is, this is Optimize.ly, I guess, 10 for the web or X. Along the left, they have kind of like the bigger buckets of things. And I'll go over those briefly and then we'll dive into experiments themselves. So here I have five experiments I have tested or set up. Like I said, I have one that's like desktop versus mobile. And then let's look a little bit about some of the other pages. So they have a settings. I won't go into too much detail, but you can add jQuery to your config if you want in order to add that when you're adding JavaScript. There's, you know, other things that you can add. You can play with your caching. Like when you're testing, you might want to turn off caching just so it's easier for you to see stuff and then enable that later. So I'm not going to go too much into the settings. As far as other stuff, so audiences, they built in, they have all sorts of audiences you can build from. So if I were to create a new audience, please refresh your browser. Okay. I'm scared. Oh, no. Okay, there's no internet. All right. Well, that's going to be a problem. Let's try that again. Drupalcon. Everyone else needs to log out of the internet. Okay. Well, it's going to be a hard demo when I have no internet. Okay. There you go. Turn it off and on again. Let's try it. Cross your fingers. Yay. Maybe that worked. All right. Give the man a prize. All right. So we've got here, we've got audiences that you could add. I added some earlier, you know, some mobile desktop Austria because why not? And that's kind of a fun thing. It's kind of an interesting interface.  Language is Arabic. And then you can and or them. So very views like or actually a little bit context. So that's kind of fun. You can add your own audiences and use those later. So another thing that they've added is something called attributes where you can actually add your own custom things from your code with JavaScript.  So your user has been and it adds some JavaScript and then all of a sudden that properties available to you in your interface, which is kind of cool. They have some extension stuff, which I'm actually not going to go into because we probably won't have time. But let's go back into the experiments because that's kind of the meat and potatoes. So I have this homepage experiment split between desktop and mobile. Take a look at desktop and hopefully the internet will hold up. Okay, good. So you probably saw it flicker, right? It showed off showed the original and then it wrote over it and it's showing the new thing. So we have, I changed four things on this. I changed this contact. I changed the text here. I changed the color on this button and I changed the image. So it's pretty simple. If I wanted to change this text here, all of a sudden we have here, you know, and we can add some stuff, right? And we save it. But there is a publish button as well, which I haven't clicked. So it's very, very simple to change things. You have all sorts of options. So for the image, it just lets you upload a new image. Pretty simple. I swapped it out there. It has all the CSS selectors and it's very straightforward. So to give you some ideas of the things that you can change, you can change layout. You can actually move things around. Actually, for the mobile test, I did that. I moved the image above the text and you could do, you know, position it however you want and relative to a selector, you can add borders. You can change the size of something. You could add your own CSS. In this case, I actually bumped up the image because there was too much white space on the top. I haven't played with the timing. But the track clicks is that's where if you want to actually add another thing, like a goal or event to track. So I actually have that for here. Find out more. We see that for this one, I changed, I think it was the color. I think the background color, I changed the color, made it darker. And then I have a track click there because I want to know if they click that. So for my success here, my goal is that they either click this button or they click this content button. I'm hoping that I'm going to engage them more and they're going to do one of those two things. So those are my goals for that. So it's pretty powerful. You can do all sorts of more things. You can insert HTML, you know, well, that's an HTML, but you know, you have the idea. And then you can say where you want to insert it. So before, I want to insert that before. And then all of a sudden I have this gobbledygook there, right? And then, you know, I could save that if I wanted to. I haven't published. So it's pretty amazing how simple it is. You can insert stuff. You can add CSS. You can insert a new image, insert HTML, change things, which is what I had done here. I had changed different elements. You can do a redirect test, which is another example I have. So it's pretty simple. Some of the other things. So those are variations. You can create as many variations as you want. And so it has the different tabs. So once I'm in a specific experiment, I have another set of tabs on the left. And I've said, okay, I'm using this particular page. I actually tacked on an argument just to differentiate it for myself, for the test. But you can specify the URL there or other pages that you want to affect. And then you can specify what audience is. In this case, I specified it was just for the desktop. And because I have a desktop versus mobile test. Integrations, I did not add anything. You could actually integrate this with Google Analytics or other things if you want, maybe AdWords. But it has a whole list of possible integrations. So Adobe, some of these I'm not familiar with, but some of your standard ones. So have fun with that. And I mean, if you added it with Google Analytics, if that's what you're using, then you can tie it in with your data there and get much better idea of conversions. So the metrics are the things, the goals that you're trying to track. So I set up, click the contact button, click to find out more. And then, well, if you visit the page, that's not such a great goal. But your time on the page would be better. So you have a primary and secondary metrics. And you can get the data for those. You have some shared code that's for all of the different variations, which is kind of interesting. I don't know exactly why you would want to do that, but maybe I added an alert, because why not? And here's where you do the traffic allocation. For testing purposes, I recommend that you actually do a split, zero, 100, if you're doing AB test, because when you're testing, it's very easy to see your variation in real life if you're doing 100%. Don't forget to change it. Once you're actually running the real thing, you'll want to do your 50-50, or your 90-10, or whatever you want to do. But for me, personally, I like to do the 100% while I'm developing to see that make sure it's actually working. Scheduling, if you wanted to do that. And that's kind of all the main things there. So let's take a quick look, got a couple minutes. Take a quick look at mobile, because that's slightly different. The page is the same, but the audience is mobile. So that's the differentiator. So optimally, it's going to split those people up for you. And in the variation, the main difference here, actually, it was, I think, pretty much the same test, except for I bumped the image on top. So if I look at the image, actually layout, I moved it. I just moved it there. So you can have fun and do all sorts of interesting things. Will it necessarily work on every browser? I don't know, probably not. But play with it and try it out and do your normal kind of testing that you would do to make sure that the devices that you care about are supported. So that's like the standard sort of AB test. I'll quickly go over a redirect test. So I had this other one where I was redirecting from this Autodesk by itself to Autodesk-Vienna. And we can quickly take a look at that. So we have a redirect test. And actually have it split up into two, which is kind of interesting. We have the redirect test itself. And it's pretty simple. All it has is a redirect. So it just says, okay, I'm going to send some traffic to this other URL. So in my case, I'm directing them from without the Vienna to the Vienna. And that's it. You can preserve parameters if you want. So that test is super simple, but it has all the same things that you can change as far as the traffic allocation and all that stuff. Where it gets a little more interesting is I said, okay, why don't I layer that on top of having a test that actually changes the thing that I redirected to. So I actually made another test on top of it, which only looks at the one that's Vienna. That's this URL here. And so it has just the Vienna. So I layered them, because why not? And then in there, I just played around and hid stuff and just had fun. So I just got rid of the old title completely and actually added, actually, this is a completely different page. So in Drupal, it's actually physically a different page. So that's why this content is actually completely different here. It's a different page in Drupal itself. But you can also add content within Optimize.ly, too, if you want. So that's fast and furious. I think I'm pretty much out of time. If anyone had a quick question, then welcome to use the mic. Anyone? Okay, cool. I like when you do the A-B test, maybe on a home page, and then do a redirect, the user will recognize them being redirected in the URL. Yeah. So yeah. So be careful, you know, if you want a more seamless experience, sometimes it can be a little bit jarring. And I don't know if you noticed, you can, so if I go to this one, I go there originally, let's see if it does it. See the flicker?  It is actually loading Drupal twice, right? It loads the disadvantage of using a third party service is it's loading the page and then deciding, oh, you want to change the page? Okay, fine. Let's change the page, right? And it's changing it, especially for the redirect, right? Then it's loading a whole other page. For the non-redirect test, it's just doing some JavaScript on the page, so it's just a one-load thing. But you do need to take that in consideration.  So make sure that you're testing it, that you're not, you know, slowing things down too much that you're affecting the test itself. Any other questions? All right, so I'm just going to... There are some... Here, I'll go back into here. I do have a bunch of resources that are in the slides themselves, so I will put these up on the session page today. There are some other kind of tips that you might want to look at, and I just want to call out to my son. He did all the doodles in the talk, and he actually made this, so we're making stickers for this for Bad Camp in California, so I just want to say thanks to Aaron. And come Friday to the sprints, if you can, and help contribute. You do not have to be a developer, I think, pretty much everyone was, but you don't have to be a developer to help at the sprints, and that's it.


Okay. Let's do this. Hello. So for the next 20 minutes, now we'll talk about automated system partitioning using hypergraph for 3D stack integrated circuits. Okay. That's quite a long title. I had quite a hard time remembering it. So can I make it simpler by simply saying, we talk about integrated circuits again, and how to make them 3D, and also why we want to make them 3D. Okay. So back to basics first. I'm sure most of you already know it works, but just make sure. The most basic block, just transistor, we back together to make some logic gates, and also gates put together, we make some logic functions. Again, all the logic functions will make an IC, like start just explained a few minutes ago. After that, you can package them using whatever kind of package you want, and what is important to guarantee the performance of your IC is that you have good transistors and a good quality interconnection system. Okay. Good network. Now, what does an IC look like when you have everything done? So there are three essential parts. You have on the bottom, the substrates in gray here on which are all printed your gates, your transistors, and then a few metal layers to interconnect them all together. So what is important to understand here is that a regular 2D IC only has one layer of transistor, and that is one of its limitation. So what do we want to change? How can you go further and what are the limitations of this current technology? Well, one of those limitations is that when you look at the standard cell, all different dimensions defining your standard cell technology you're using for designing your IC, well, you have metal pitch, fan pitch, and all the distances between elements in your design, that if you want to pack more features in your IC, you need to have more transistors. If you want to have more transistors without making the IC too big, you need to make the transistor smaller. Obviously, you can't do that forever. So at some point in time, you will hit the physical wall and also financial wall. So you can't just shrink them forever. One other problem is that you can't simply make the IC bigger.  You need to know that there are a constant amount of defects on the wafer. So if the ICs on the left are bigger, you will have a lower proportion of good dies as a bad dies. That's what we call the yield. So if the yield is lower, the chip will be more expensive. So you need to limit the size of the chip so that the yield is sufficiently high and can stay affordable. That's for example what Xilinx did for the latest Vertex 7 technology. So I'm not a big fan of Xilinx anyway. Just so you know, instead of being one big IC for the FPGA, they split it into smaller ICs that are easier to manufacture and then they are all interconnected together inside the package under the hood. So it's quite frankly expensive, but it's more affordable than it would have been with one IC. Okay, so now, what is a 3D IC? How do we go from a 2D into a 3D IC? Well, okay. Let's just take back a regular 2D IC and, well, the most straightforward way to make a 3D is simply to stack two layers of ICs and you have a 3D IC done. Okay, golden now. Can make it better though, instead of having then what we call phase two back, that is the substrate facing the metal layers, you could have directly the two metal layers facing each other so that the interconnection between the two layers is smaller. Can go even further by directly having two layers of transistors, two layers gates, directly on top of each other and all the metal layers above them. But that are all manufacturing problems, not really what we want to focus on today. Somebody still needs to decide on which layer you will place each of your gates. So that is the decision that needs to be made. Now, what are the benefits of going 3D? So we saw can limit the size of the IC but also, for example, we have on the left a 2D regular IC with all the blocks interconnected and on the right you have the red blocks that have been moved to a second layer on top of the blue and green blocks. You can see that all the connections are shorter and by having the connection shorter you have actually a lot of benefits. You can increase the performance by reducing the critical path. You will also reduce the power consumption by reducing the power drop. They also improve the array utilization simply by reducing the routing congestion and limiting the use of buffers since the nets are shorter. So a lot of benefits just by making all the wires shorter. Now, for the rest of the presentation we'll see how we can transform a 2D IC into a 3D IC using existing 2D flows and what blocks we need to add to make that transformation. So very quickly, staff explained it very well half an hour ago. For the 2D flow, first RTL just describes your design then you synthesize it using any open source or closed source if you want tool that will generate net list and the net list will be placed and routed using a dev file that we'll use later. And if you want to stop there, that's fine. You will have a 2D IC, generate some layout, send it to staff. It will manufacture it for you. You can use it and that's it. But we want to go further. We want to extend this 2D flow into a 3D flow. And that extension, well, first would be to simply manually partition the design.  And we need a very clever designer to do that and to interrupt the flow manually patching it and replace and route each die.  We want to automate this manual partitioning so that we have a wall 3D EDA flow. Okay, so see how it works. We'll take an example. So let's say that this is representation of a design. The objective here is to simply split it into, that's what we call a bi-partition, so having two partitions at the end. And we want those two partitions to be the same size. That is a balanced bi-partitioning. And also one other objective is not simply butchering the design and then doing anything. I want to limit the 3D interconnectivity that is having as little nets that are 3D as possible. Okay, cut as little nets as possible when doing the partitioning. Okay, to do that first, we actually need to cluster the design, not directly patching it with first cluster. Why? Because, well, earlier I told you that we want to reduce the wire length. So if we just keep the design as is on the left, we may just cut some really short wires. And those wires, when going 3D, going through the all interconnection for the face-to-face, the face-to-back, or the virus, etc. That would actually be made longer. So we would lose in performance. So we want to cluster designs that can hide all the shorter wires inside the cluster and just highlight the longer wires. So now we have two choices aside from the clustering method is to choose the clustering grain that is the amount of clusters you want in the design. In this case, for example, just a four cluster. So we have a very few nets, that's great, but the problem is that some longer wires are still hidden inside the cluster, and that's not great. On the other hand of the spectrum, you could have a lot of clusters, very small clusters, and this time, that's great. All the longer wires are outside the cluster. You can't cut them, you can't work on them, and you prove the system. But the problem is that, well, there are a lot of nets and you may cut more than needed. So one of the trade-offs, one of the game here is to decide the clustering grain to balance between the two aspects of the clustering. Okay, once that's done, let's say that this is the clustering grain I want to use. Okay, the next step is to extract the graph that is representing this design. Well, really easy, actually. So each cluster, each blue cluster, we become one node, what we call a vertex of the graph, and then each net connecting two clusters will become one edge of the graph. And do that for the whole graph, extraction complete, that's it. Well, not exactly, because there are some nets, like the red over there, that is extracted as two edges. Oh, it's one net, it shouldn't be two edges, it should be one object also in the graph. So the graph is actually two limits and a definition to really represent the architecture of a design. We need to extend this notion using what we call hypergraphs. We'll just add one really easy thing to understand is that instead of having simply edges connecting two nodes to vertices, you will have hyper edges, like the blue one in the background, that would connect several nodes all together using one object, one hyper edge. Okay, so if we come back to the net that was problematic here, one transforming this net using hypergraph, it would just be one hyper edge. And as when you cut one part of the net, you actually call the whole hyper edge and not two separate edges. And you can do that for the whole design and have something a bit ugly, sorry for the cloud blinds in the room. And once that's done, you can finally move on to the next step. Okay, so no one can really portion the design using some portioning algorithm, so I won't dive into the details here, not necessary. The idea is to respect the objectives we set at the beginning, so there were to have a balanced partitioning that is having, in this case, we have the same amount of clusters in the partition, that's great. And we only cut two hyper edges, so that's great as well. Okay, let's say it's done. The next step is to generate some net list. So in a 2D ASIC flow, next stuff said earlier again, you would generate a net list after the synthesis and then you will use this net list to place and roll to design. Well, for the 3D flow, it's exactly the same. You need to generate a net list for each of the partitions, for each dive, for each layer, that you can then place and roll to interconnect together.  So some of those blocks are homemade, like for example, the clustering. We just take the def file that is used during the place and road step of the EDF flow to extract all the design geometry. We use also the def file for the gates and properties. And once the design has been clustered, it's sent to the graph extraction algorithm, also homemade in this case. Just while work on the graph extract some information, set the weights and the objectives for the graph partitioning and formats the designs that can be read by graph partitioning tools. So those were not homemade because they are really great passioning tools that already exist out there. So no reason to make our own. And the two, for the sake of credits, we used our HMATIS and PATO, respectively from the Carapace Lab at Minnesota University and one developed by Professor Kataljorek during his PhD at Bilkan University. So those two are really great hyper graph partitioning tools if you want to use some. And the last step is still not on GitHub yet. Really out of the stage of developments and we're trying to, like I said, take the net list from the 2D synthesis. The information from the graph partitioning and then generate a split net list for the design. Okay, this flow has been tested on several designs among which we had the LDPC, which is a very small core for error correcting code. One version of RISC-5 and what was it? Berkeley University, yeah, Berkeley. And then some modules of the OpenSpark T2-SLC. So we did not tackle the war and OpenSpark at one time but we split into just the SPC, which is the core. The CCX, the memory crossbar, the RTX, the Ethernet module. So all of them different properties, different sizes and different amount of gates and nets. So it can be interesting to see if or flow is robust to different kinds of designs. And talking about robustness, well, yes and no actually. So what you can hope using this flow for this particular designs is to gain up to 77% in total wire length reduction when going 3D. But you can see that it heavily depends on the design that is tested. So the crossbar highly benefit from it but the Ethernet module in green on the right can gain up to, well, down to 0% of games. Just lose some performance. And also widely depends even for the same design on the clustering grain that is used. That's great. But also on the ways that we set and the objective we set for the graph partitioning. So do we want to reduce the amount of net that are crossing in 3D? Do we want to reduce the total wire length or maximum total wire length that is cut? And all those kinds of objectives will impact the gain in the end. One other gain we're gonna have apart from, well on top of having the shorter total wire length is having a shorter critical path. So that is important for the performance gain. And again can see that the crossbar will gain more than the orders and up to 61% but more than let's say 35% in average. Okay, but there are still a lot of open questions. So this work is far from being over. It's all part of my PhD thesis I've still have three years left so I have some time. But at the moment some of the question we're asking ourselves are what is the best clustering?  It's just geometric one. You just take the design and then split it into squares or rectangles of the same size. But you will cut a lot of short wires and that's what I want to avoid. So there must be a better clustering method and we're looking for that best clustering method. And then once we find it does it actually have an impact on the design partitionability? Is it really important to have a better clustering method or not the change really anything is the grain that important? So we saw in the early result that it seems to be but is it always the case for all the designs? And on top of that can we predict the partitionability of design? So if give us a 2DIC you designed can we guarantee you before trying to do the workflow for the EDF flow that we can gain up to, I don't know 30 or 40% performance by going 3D is it worth the hassle? So those are just the frambling. A question was asking ourselves if some of you own now we'll be more than happy to answer them. I thank you for all your attention. Please. It's all very new for me, but just the design can you also integrate the design to have a partition? I think you could have a picture design too or something Does it really operate on a much later level in your design process? Yes, at the moment it's really later than the process. Oh yeah, sorry. So the question here is can you directly design your REC for example in 3D instead of having to partition it later? That's it yeah, okay. You cannot yet do that because you would lack some 3D awareness in the flow. So if you design your REC in 3D that is the aim in the future but in the near future we can't do that yet because we lack some tools to place and route for example the three dimensions. So all the place and route tools are just two dimensions X and Y. And if you want to have a 3D aware flow you would need to add one set of coordinates to the place and route and that is not done yet. So no, you still need to design it in 2D and then split it. What impacts? Performance. Performance. Interconnection, yeah. So it's asking if there are performance impacts when you're going 3D versus in regular 2D REC. Yes actually so indeed when you if I just go back to the slides it would be easier for everybody to understand. When you go in 3D you have obviously interconnection between the two layers like here. And those interconnections are longer than the regular metal layers. So the one you have A at the front C is longer than the metal layers you have here. And we try to reduce the performance loss due to this longer vias interconnection between two layers by cutting the longest nest that would be shorter even when going 3D. So you would have actually yeah performance loss if you could really short wires that would be elongated by going 3D and trying to avoid that. So for one layer to the other place or at least to inform the other one what kind of big ones would be independently? I do not really know it works. So yeah, sorry. My guess is either way is fine. You can't say to have a place and a route for each layer without constraining anything because they would just take the same design. They simply use the same constraint they had in 2D but with more space to work on. So you could say for example that going with the red blocks on top what would be all scrambled and moving away. In fact, it would just be placed closer to each other and the top left cell would not be on the bottom right. It would stay on the top left because 2D placed in a route when it had less space and more constraints place it there. So when it has less constraints it would still place it probably somewhere around there. So I'm not sure. But I guess we could still work without all the constraint between the two layers. I think it would still work without the constraint between the two layers. We wrote it indefinitely. Great.