This is the very tradition of Amrita that that is why I wanted to open, we always start a talk with the Om Amriteshwariya in Nama and in our college we never wish with a hello or good morning, we always wish with a Namah Shivaya. So I wanted to keep the tradition of Amrita, so that is my first slide and this is the brief about the computer science department. It has started in the year 2002 and we have grown quite a lot in the six years. We have two bachelor's program, one in computer science and one in information technology. Now it is no longer a separate department in Amrita and we have started our first post graduate program also in embedded systems and mostly by next year we will have our second post graduate program started and our infrastructure is we have classrooms with the seating capacity of 60 70 with OHP facility in all classrooms and right now we have also started having a LCD in 2 to 3 classrooms. So very soon we will have a LCD projector in every classroom. If we require audio video teaching facility then we have three seminar halls which we can book in advance. So this is one of our e-learning center, I have a bigger picture of this. This is what we would be using for the edusat thing for the program of IIT Bombay. So this is our video conferencing hall. We have three screens there and we have always our three campuses seen simultaneously the Bangalore, Coimbatore and for the first year programming labs we have three labs actually one is a thin client lab with a Linux server and two computer labs. Every lab has 34 computers and other than that we have departmental labs for the faculty and some senior students. Now this is the curriculum which almost all of you have been telling. So I will just skip it off. We have the usual C concepts arrays, the functions, pointers, structures up to files and the prescribed textbook is Shom series and for reference we use mostly use Herbert Shield and Dennis Ritchie. Now this is one of our important features actually I do not know many of you mentioned that you have eight faculty or eight sections of C programming being taught in the same college. So how do you coordinate that all of you are in sync like all the eight faculty do a similar job. I do not know whether you have addressed this problem or in Amrita we have three campuses and we have eight sections running in all the three campus. So we have a method of coordinating that all the 24 faculty synchronize well and that is taken care by defining this well defined course plan in the beginning in addition to your course. So this is how we make use of the flexibility since ours is also an autonomous system. So although we have a prescribed curriculum but faculty have the flexibility of modifying it to their test but what is done in such courses the first year courses we have a chief mentor and local mentors in every campus. So we do not do the modifications as we require but we discuss and we make a course plan. So in the beginning of the semester we have all section wise, topic wise and also the question paper pattern decided in the beginning itself. So all the three campuses will know how to go about the course and periodically we have the test also at the same time on the same dates in all the three campus. So even that is very well synchronized. So we have one rare university which is autonomous but we run across campuses and still we are able to maintain that synchronization. So that is one of our good features and yeah this I wanted to I brought it on a slide intentionally because I wanted to focus I saw many of you showing your lab programs but in Bangalore rather I had made a focus that most of you list out the programs just like that. So in every lab we had made that on what concept you are going to give the program and as few faculty were addressing that there are there is a diverse set of students and some students finish the lab very fast and some of them are lagging behind because they come from different backgrounds. So what we had done is this basic set of programs the first set is compulsory for all yeah that part the first beginning programs are compulsory for all and the additional programs can be done by the good students who finish the lab soon. So we do not give very big programs we see that actually the students in our local colleges are not so sharp as the IIT students. So at the end of the course the focus is that at least few lines of code they should write independently because students end up memorizing the programs and writing it. They do not write even ten lines of code without any help. So that is why we have made the first set of programs very simple. So the whole lab is divided into ten labs and in each we have a concept to be discussed that day and very simple programs to be done by all and some heavier level programs we do not take that programs of leap year and all on the very first day because the concept of finding a leap year itself is something complicated and they are neither comfortable with the syntax nor with the logic. So the focus is that either we make the logic simpler so that they focus on the syntax or we make it a problem solving class where we do not focus on the syntax. So we should keep the two things decoupled. So this is actually just the ten labs which we have. So here also see even in case of a for loop it is yeah here it is very specifically mentioned that all the looping constructs should be used and the programs are designed in a manner that the focus is that for that program you have to use a do while and the program question is such that it cannot be done without a do while. So the students understand when you have three looping constructs when you should use a for when you should use a while and when you should use a do while. So every small program has a concept in that it is not just designed at random. So I can just skip this was actually some slides are made for a different purpose. As I said we have a course plan we have a very well designed academic calendar also in the beginning in which all our dates are well defined and we do a course registration just like the IITs and we go through various methods of teaching I will skip this slide because it is the evaluation consists of the attendance first that is 80 percent. So if you do not satisfy that requirement you cannot take the exam and the continuous assessment we have a 50 percent for theory courses that is the continuous assessment part in which we have two periodical tests of 15 marks each and 20 marks is again the flexibility of the faculty. But here for the first year courses we still have a well defined pattern like for the higher semesters we give it as a flexibility, but in the first years we have at least three quizzes have to be conducted and when five marks can be for a project or whatever and the end semester exams carries a 50 percent weightage. For the lab courses every week lab sessions are evaluated and that is taken for 50 marks. So almost every alternate week a Viva has to be conducted and that has to be the marks have to be recorded for every week and there is a mid semester exam for 20 marks and end semester lab exam for 30 marks. This is our grading system just like IITs we also have a relative grading system where we decide on the our minimum passing marks can sometimes be 30 also depending on the course. So, it is not necessary that 50 is the cut off for passing like that it depends on what is the level of the course and the highest A can be from anything above 70, 80 depending on the course. So, we have so many grades from starting from A plus to D and D is the below D is fail. Now, here I brought in a few sample questions I have the soft copies which I will pass on, but why I have put this on the slide is what I was seeing is we generally set a question papers or we conduct a quiz in a very random manner. But here we have tried I have a few set of questions which is only on the concept of switch case. So, how you can bring about a small concept with so many questions so that nothing is missed now just 5 minutes all of you I do not I have the answers in few I have do not have the answers in few, but just browse through each and you will find that whatever concept you tell in a small switch case everything is there in these questions. So, if you design your multiple choice like this students at the end when they solve such a quiz on that concept they are very strong. So, just please browse through it and look for the answers yourself and you will find that everything about the switch case is there in these 6, 7 questions. So, the concept is retained if you put it like this and as I said one of our major strength is our own learning management system the AUMS where starting from the course registration maintenance of attendance uploading of the course material quiz conduction mark sentry up to the mark sheet printing everything is taken care by this and so we faculty actually we never use moodle or anything from the beginning we have been using our own university management system that is all I have to say. Hello, what is the seating capacity of your seminar hall where the edusat is 120 almost 120 it can happen 120 and lab like lab we have 34 in each lab so, but all labs are adjacent so we can conduct it parallely like in 2, 3 labs no we can.


Thank you, and thank you, Nick, for the introduction and also for your tribute to Malcolm, who was a key collaborator for us and actually a strong source of inspiration for many of us. So I'm going to talk not about the whole programme, which Nick has already covered. I'm going to deal specifically with some questions on the epidemiology of malaria, and it's important ways to give credit where it is due. So the work I'm presenting is not really my own work. It's work that's been led by the three names you can see there, Abdi Salam Noor, Bob Snow and Alice Kamal. Alice Kamal being a PhD student, well, recently passed her PhD and is now working as a postdoc with us in the programme. So there are going to be some key concepts for the talk. So the first is this acronym PFPR 2 to 10. So that refers to posmodium felsiparum malaria prevalence in community surveys of children between the ages of two to ten. And the importance of that measure is that that is considered to be a good way of capturing how much transmission of malaria there is in a particular community, based on the idea that people are losing parasites all the time. So if you've got a particular percentage of parasites in that population, that implies that there's a sustained exposure to infected mosquito bites at a level sufficient to maintain that percentage. So that's just infection that we're talking about, and that's not necessarily symptomatic. Then on the right, there are three different disease states that I'm going to mention. So one is cerebral malaria, which at all intents and purposes means a child in a coma in Africa. And the coma is defined by the Blantyre coma score, the score that Nick mentioned, Malcolm Molyneux having been co-inventor of. There's severe anemia, which is caused by the parasites chewing up all the red cells and is defined as a hemoglobin less than five. And there's respiratory distress, which is caused by a high acidosis in leading to rapid breathing. So I'm going to keep going back to those four concepts throughout the talk, but I'm going to start by just mentioning why are we studying all of this. I'll come back to it at the end. But the point is that there are some control measures for malaria. Bed nets and residual spraying to kill mosquitoes are two key ways of protecting children from infected bites. Anti-malarial drugs can be given as treatment, but they can also be given to prevent malaria in the first place. And you're going to hear about vaccines from Adrian later on in the day. So the question I'm going to deal with is how do we monitor the impact of those? How do we look at Africa as a whole to see whether the control measures are effective in reducing malaria transmission? And then in the second part of the talk, I'm going to deal with the question as to how much good does that do? And there are reasons both for and against which I'll return to. So this is the 115 year dataset. You can see across these 115 years, there have been many surveys. Each of them is indicated with a green dot. So as you might expect, there are many more surveys done in the modern era than there were done previously. And so that means that one has to do some geospatial modelling to bridge the gaps between all of these surveys. It's complex. I mean, let me capture the idea for now as just saying it's pretty much smoothing between two points. If you've got two points either side of a district, which both show a very high malaria prevalence, then it's a safe bet that in the middle of the district, there's high malaria prevalence as well. So as you might imagine, that is a more speculative proposition between 1900 and 1944 when you've got relatively few surveys compared with 2010 to 2015. Nevertheless, if you do all of that, you do get a pretty consistent impression of the extent of malaria transmission in Africa. So on the left, there's the map as we would reconstruct it for 1900. And on the right, the map for 2020. So you can see that the central Western Eastern Africa has remained malaria throughout those 120 now years with the five year projection. If you look at North Africa, you can see that a lot of North Africa has succeeded in eliminating malaria. Some of those countries are certified by the WHO as having eliminated some are not certified, but nevertheless, to all practical intents, they have eliminated malaria. And then you can see in Southern Africa, the margin has retreated. So there's almost no malaria left in South Africa. And Namibia, Zimbabwe also looking pretty good, although Mozambique still with quite a lot of malaria. So that's sort of qualitative. Is there malaria there or not? We're also interested though by how much malaria there is. So this GIF is showing you the animation of how things have changed over time. And you can see that there are some areas. So if you cast your eye around the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Somalia, and the northern part of Kenya, you can see that malaria transmission towards the end of the 1900s and particularly into the year 2000 and beyond, there is now relatively little malaria in those areas. But if you look at Central Africa and the west of Africa, you can see there's a very dense area of malaria transmission where there's some up and down, there's some reduction in recent times, but there remains a lot of malaria in those areas and really insufficient progress. So one key question is what is causing the trends. So this graph at the top is showing you PFPR, again the prevalence of malaria in the community, on the y-axis. On the x-axis, you can see the year. So starting in 1900, finishing off in 2015. So the red bars are telling us how many surveys went into measuring malaria.  But the average PFPR for all of Africa is shown by the thick green line with the confidence intervals in lycra around it. So you can see that there have been some declines. There's a decline that occurs in the sort of run-up to 1950 and then there's another decline that occurs after the year 2000, which is much more dramatic. So the 1945 to 49 decline is probably largely driven by DDT and a WHO effort to control malaria. That effort to control malaria was abandoned and you can see that malaria then increased after that. The reduction in malaria after 2000 is probably related to at least three factors. So one is that the bed net, or ITN as I'm putting it here in the point, but it refers to bed nets, have really increased in use across Africa. So in the pre-2000, bed net ownership in Kenya was generally down at sort of 5-10%, whereas today bed net ownership in malaria-randomic areas is around 70%. So it's a huge difference and we believe that has had a substantial impact. Anti-malarials have become more effective. Anti-malarials have become available since 2000 and we think that that has also had an effect.  So if you look at the four graphs that I've got on the bottom now, so again PFPR is on the y-axis for all of them, there are four different potential explanatory variables. So the minimum mean temperature across Africa, the mean rain as measured in the Sahel band, and then socioeconomic factors, so the percentage of the population that is in urban settlements versus rural, and the mean GDP across Africa. So you can see that there are trends in all of those things. I mean the world as we all know has got warmer between 1900 and 2010. It has got, well actually it's complicated to work out whether it's got drier or not, just looking at the mean Sahel rain because there are opposing effects of climate change. There have probably been trends in two different directions. It's become more urban and there's been an increase in GDP. So while all of those things are trends that broadly speaking might go along with the reduction in malaria, you can see that if you look at the year-to-year variations, none of those things tell a consistent story. You know just tell a consistent story, what you would want to see would be 1900 in the top left of the graph, 2010 in the bottom right of the graph, and a straight line joining them in a sort of linear progression between those two points. And you can see that that isn't the case. So it remains complex to predict what's going to happen with malaria, and I don't think we are able to model the future based on that, but we can at least monitor the past and the present. So in case people are wondering about how the modeling is supported by observations on the ground, these are longitudinal data from the Kenyan coast. So this is an area where we've got a lot of data. We've done lots of malaria parasite surveys during the period between 1974 and 2014. And you can see that with the one Sentinel location in Africa, you can see that there definitely are trends. It's not just sort of random noise that we were looking at previously with the African map, and that you can relate some of the events that I was describing to the trends that we were seeing. So I'm going to leave talking about parasite prevalence now in the community, and I'm going to talk about the severe malaria phenotypes that I described earlier. And so I want to tell you about two observations that have led people to be concerned about the outcomes of malaria control in Africa. So this sort of graphic is showing you what happens to the epidemiology of severe malaria as you go from a PFPR, which is very high on the left of the graph, to one which is very low on the right of the graphic. So there's the picture for severe malaria anemia towards the higher end and cerebral malaria towards the right. And that's because it's been a long established observation that as malaria transmission goes up, you see more severe anemia and less cerebral malaria. And that is a concern because cerebral malaria has a much higher mortality rate than severe anemia. If children are admitted with severe anemia to hospital with blood available, the mortality is almost 0%. Whereas with cerebral malaria, the mortalities that we see are depending on the hospital range between 10 to 30%. Along the bottom, I'm showing you histograms which are the distributions of the ages of children admitted to hospital. So in the far left, you can see a histogram with a very big peak down at the 0 to 1 age group. And as you move right, you can see that that distribution flattened. And that, again, is a long established observation that with more malaria, the presentations are in more malaria transmission, I should say. The presentations tend to be in younger children. And as malaria goes down, you see older children presenting with malaria. And that makes sense because with malaria exposure, children become immune to malaria. And so as they become older, they get less malaria. That effect is less marked at high transmission intensity. So both of those effects made people worry that if you improved malaria control in Africa, you might actually have a harmful effect. And so this is an old graph. This is a graph from 1997. The initials on the graph are referring to different places in Africa. There is, again, the parasite prevalence in the community along the exact axis of the graph.  This was an earlier era when that was the standard way of doing things. But it would be very, very similar to the 2 to 10-year-old estimate. And on the y-axis, you are seeing the disease rate among children. So what you would expect to see on this graph would be a straight line from the bottom left corner, where you would see sort of zero parasites in the community and zero parasites in hospital, to a straight line to the top right, where you would see the maximum number of children being admitted with malaria and the maximum transmission in the community. But you're not seeing that. So I mean, B is in the bottom left-hand corner. Katie and then H do tell that story that as parasites, transmission in the community goes up. So the disease rate goes up as well. But after that point, you don't see that. In fact, if anything, the disease rate starts to go down again. And so that led people to conclude that in a community with more transmission, the mortality that you might have seen with malaria is offset by the acquisition of immunity in childhood. And worse than that, that actually reducing malaria might even increase the mortality due to malaria. And this caused a very significant controversy in the malaria field with quite, you know, I mean, the sort scientists took very polarized positions in the same way as you're sort of seeing around COVID at the moment. And this was a decision that was of extreme public health urgency. So here is an updating in 2021 of that of that relationship. So you can see that, you know, the ability to draw graphs in the community is clearly sort of improved in terms of the mathematics of it and the presentation of it. But it's basically the same thing. What you're seeing on the bottom is the parasite prevalence rate in the community. And what you're seeing on the left are the admissions per thousand children per year. And you can see that in this graph, you are seeing what I was saying we would hope to see, i.e. that as parasite prevalence goes up, the admissions per child per year go up as well. So it raises the question, were we just wrong in 1997? Did we, you know, choose the locations badly? Or was it the fact that it was a smaller data set, perhaps less precisely measured? I think there's another factor, though, as well, which has changed. And that is that back in 1997, the access to treatment was very poor. Children would frequently be left in the community for many days, if not a week or more, with a fever without access to anti-malarial. Whereas in 2021, the average child in Africa lives five kilometers or less distance from a dispensary. And the likelihood of that dispensary being open and able to give them an anti-malarial is much higher. And their access to hospital care is better. And so my own view is that that is what's changed the relationship. That back in 1997, the main survival advantage a child infected with malaria had was their immunity. Whereas in 2021, it's the health system that is there for them. And it is less likely that immunity is going to be the determining factor. And hence, we can now be confident that reducing malaria is unequivocally a good thing and reduces the risk of severe disease. Now, my slides seem to have frozen. Ah, got it. So I'm now breaking that relationship down by severe malaria, respiratory distress, and cerebral malaria. And you can see that what I said is true for severe anemia and for respiratory distress. For cerebral malaria, it's hard to know what is true, because actually it's just a very rare outcome. It was an extremely noticeable outcome for us in the early days because it's such a dramatic thing. And there was probably quite a lot of misdiagnosis of severe anemia as well in the old days. But when you measure it carefully, although cerebral malaria is very dramatic and those children need treatment, it's actually not the thing that drives the epidemiology of malaria. And so the potential increase in cerebral malaria's transmission goes down. Turns out not to be such a problem for us. Now, what about the age distribution thing? Well, here that is again with data compiled in 2021. And you're seeing those graphs again as transmission, I'm sorry, perhaps rather confusingly, I put it the other way around. So on the left, this time we've got PFPR, the parasite prevalence being less than 5%. And then moving over to on the right, being higher than 30%. So you can see that it is true that as you get more malaria transmission, it's increasingly younger children that you're seeing and the older children are relatively protected. But what you can see, I think, from these graphs is that there's so much more malaria at over 30%, compared with below 10% say, that actually the relative protection of older children doesn't even come close to undoing the impact of the overall increase in how much malaria there is. So I'm going to come back now to some longitudinal data. That was data across East Africa that I was showing you previously. I'm going to come back to longitudinal data in a single site, and that being Kalefi County Hospital. So the graph on the left is showing you the median age of children admitted to hospital dying.  And you can see that again on a local level, we are seeing that as malaria transmission goes down in Kalefi, the average age of children with malaria, that's the graph on the right, and the average age of children dying with malaria, that's the graph on the left, does increase. So the older children are relatively less well protected. However, in Kalefi, we've also got the advantage of being able to match the children who are admitted to a population. And that means that we can get quite an accurate estimate of the number of children compared with the population denominator who are admitted to hospital. So the graph to focus on here, I think is the top left one mortality and the blue line for mortality. And you can see that although, as I showed you in the previous graph, the average age of children dying has gone up. There are many fewer children dying of malaria in Kalefi as time goes by. And that is true in the other graphs, you can see that that is true of other forms of severe malaria. And so I think we can be again reassured that the reduction in malaria has been a good thing. It has had positive impacts on public health. So that brings me onto my conclusion slide that I think that we can see that malaria transmission in Africa as measured through parasite surveys shows some reductions over 115 years. And we can see that in certainly in East Africa, and we expected to generalize to Africa as a whole, we can see that more malaria transmission leads to more severe malaria. And so even though immunity is acquired with more malaria, nevertheless, that isn't enough to undo the harmful effects of malaria. And so I'd leave you with the hopeful conclusion that malaria control is possible, and it reduces deaths, and is no doubt a good thing.


I am Mr. Sarvajna Gandhi working as assistant professor in Department of Mechanical Engineering from Walshan Institute of Technology, Soolapur. So today we are going to have a discussion on topic named as Root Locusts. At the end of the sessions students will be able to understand the concept of Root Locusts and rules to construct it. So introduction to Root Locusts. Root Locusts is a graphical method introduced by W.R. Evans in 1948. It indicates movement of poles in S plane by changing specific system parameters, those are called as gains from 0 to infinity. In designing a linear control system, Root Locusts method proves to be quite useful. Root Locusts methods specify Root Locusts plot clearly showing the contribution of each open loop pole and 0 to the location of closed loop poles. So if we change the value of k that is called as gain from 0 to plus infinity, it is called as direct root locusts that are generally used. And if we vary the value of k that is called as gain from minus infinity to 0, it is called as inverse root locusts. Thus we can say that Root Locusts of a closed loop pole obtain when a system gain that is k varied from minus infinity to plus infinity is called as Root Locusts. So transfer function and characteristic equations. So as you can see in figure one which represents block diagram for closed loop control system, we can see the block k and G dash of S are transfer functions in forward path whereas H of S is a block with transfer function in backward direction or we can call it as feedback. And this closed loop system is negative feedback system. So if we try to write the closed loop transfer function for this block, so we can write it as k into G dash of S divided by 1 plus k into G dash of S into H of S. So we can substitute the value of k into G dash of S as G of S. So the equation comes to be G of S divided by 1 plus G of S into H of S. Then if we want to write the characteristic equation, so we can write it as 1 plus G of S into H of S. So if you observe the closed loop transfer function, so whatever is present at the denominator that represents characteristic equation of closed loop control system. So if we take the roots of this characteristic equation then those roots are called as closed loop poles. And if we want to take the open loop transfer function for this block, we can write it as G of S into H of S. And if we take the roots of this G of S into H of S, then those are called as open loop poles or open loop zeros. So generalized representation of open loop transfer function can be written as G of S into H of S is equal to k into S plus Z0 S plus Z1 dot dot dot up to S plus Zn divided by S plus P0 into S plus P1 dot dot dot up to S plus Pn. So we can have this as numerator upon denominator. So whatever is present at the numerator those are called as roots and whatever is present at the denominator are called as poles. So at the numerator you can have a polynomial equation or you can have the simplified version of it. The same case applicable for denominator also you can have a polynomial equation or you can have the simplified version of it. So if you see this open loop transfer function carefully, so you can see at the top that represents numerator. So the roots lie at S is equal to minus Z, S is equal to minus 1, S is equal to minus 2 up to minus Zm. So if we see the denominator part, so we can find that there are poles existing there and the roots are at S is equal to minus P0 minus P1 up to minus Pn. So system stability, so whenever a control system is designed, the inherent capability should be stable. The system should be stable. So for that stability is the desired property of any design control system. A system is said to be stable if the system eventually comes back to the equilibrium state when the system is subjected to initial conditions. A system is unstable if the output deviates without bound from its equilibrium state then we say that the system to be unstable. And a system is said to be marginally stable if the system tends to oscillate in its equilibrium state when subjected to initial conditions. So these are some concepts which tell us regarding the system stability whether it is stable, unstable or marginally stable. But in the control system we are going to define a system to be stable or unstable depending upon the roots where they lie. So it is advantageous for us to know the movement of closed loop poles in the S plane. So which is found by using closed loop characteristic equation. So in this slide we are going to study regarding movable and immoveable roots. The roots which are obtained from open loop transfer function. So those represent open loop poles or open loop zeros and these roots are called as immoveable roots whereas the roots which are obtained from closed loop characteristic equation. So those roots are called as movable roots and which are obtained by varying the value of k correct. So the zeros whatever we are going to get are represented by a circle symbol whereas the pole that we get are represented by cross symbol in S plane. So what does S plane means? So in this we are going to have x and y axis on x axis we are going to represent the real part and on y axis we are going to represent the imaginary part. So if you consider the example of open loop transfer function which is given to us G of S into H of S we have at numerator k into S plus 2 divided by S plus 3. So whatever is present at numerator that represent zeros and whatever is present at the denominator those represent poles. So if we try to plot this on the S plane we get roots at minus 2 and minus 3. So as you can see on the figure 2 which represents S plane so it is there on the left hand side which is shown in green color. So the roots which are lying on the left hand side of the S plane represents that the system is stable and if the roots are lying on the right hand side of the S plane then we say that the system is unstable and if the roots are lying on the imaginary axis. So we have two cases we can say that the system is marginally stable or system is unstable. So it depends upon the roots fine. So now we are going to discuss regarding angle and magnitude condition for a given closed loop characteristic equation that is represented as 1 plus G of S into H of S equal to 0. So we are going to rearrange the terms so we can write it as G of S into H of S is equal to minus 1 plus J into 0. So we are writing it in complex form because we are going to represent this in S plane. So for any point to be on S plane so we need to see whether it lies on root locus. So for that it needs to satisfy the angle and magnitude condition. So first condition is called as angle condition where we are going to have angle signs on both the sides that is on right hand side on left hand side. So if we try to equate that then whatever the angle we are going to get should be odd multiple of plus or minus 180. So it can be plus or minus 180 plus or minus 540 or it can be plus or minus 900. So it can be equated to plus or minus 2Q plus 1 into 180. So if this angle condition is satisfied then we can say that the point lies on root locus. If the angle condition is satisfied then we go for checking of the magnitude condition. So we are going to put mod on both the sides of the equations and we are going to find what is the value of K marginal from the magnitude condition. So while checking the magnitude and angle condition we have to note that magnitude condition can only be used when a point lies in S plane is confirmed by the existence of angle condition. So one question for you, what will happen to root and root locus by changing the value of K? These are my references. Thank you.


I think we can get started. Hello everybody. Next up, we have Sangita Raghu Poonati for who's going to be talking about user onboarding, get the user on board. Over to you, Sangita. Thank you so much. Hi everybody. Thank you so much for attending this session. Let's get started. So what what sells your product? So looking at when they actually choose your product. Product value. How does the product help? How is the product going to help the user? Is it going to help them achieve their business goals? How is the user experience? I mean how easy or difficult would it be for their employees to sort of adopt your product? And do you have user onboarding or tips and tricks to help that users get started? So in this session, we shall be looking at the what, how, why of user onboarding. As always, let's begin with the textbook definition. So Wikipedia says user onboarding is the process of improving a person's success with a product. So what it means is it means helping the users use your product without too much of effort. It means they don't have to go around looking for help when they're using your product. Rather, your product is intuitive enough or has enough help inside to keep them moving. It also means talks about the users reaching their aha moment. So what's an aha moment? It's a moment of sudden insight or discovery. The point at which your user is going to understand the value your product brings in. So if I want to convert a dog file into a PDF, the moment I convert it into a PDF, I have my aha moment. I know exactly how your product is going to help me. So let's break this up a bit. So when a user comes to your product, they come with a lot of apprehensions. Is this application going to help me? How do I get started? Am I going to achieve my goal? So every time we try something new, we have a lot of questions, we have a lot of fear. So an answer would be to make the journey more easier for the user, right? So the answer to all these questions is providing good user onboarding. So what does user onboarding actually do? It sort of provides a starting point for your users to use your software or your product. It helps the user get started. Imagine that a user is trying to use a trial version of the application and they just can't get started. So they're going to leave the product and go to some other product. So it's very important that we have good guidance or pointers to help the users get started. How do you get the user started? You could use messages, tool tips. You could use a combination of animated gifs, regular gifs, product tours to help the user get started. So before we get into the details of user onboarding, let's look at an example so that we all are on the same page. So this is the home page of an application called as Kanpa, which is used to create graphics. Now imagine I'm a first-time user and I come to the screen. I would be intimidated. I would be scared and I just don't know where to start. So what does Kanpa do? The screen that actually comes up once you log in for the first time in Kanpa is this screen. So if you see here, they have categorized according to the user personas or the user requirement.  So based on the persona, they have various templates available. So as a first-time user, it's easier for me to choose. So say I choose personal. So the next screen that comes up is this. So what is the onboarding statement that Kanpa is trying to tell us that we are going to help you create your first design. So that you understand how to use our application. And by the end of this, you have your first graphics or a design created. Now if I click presentation here, I come into this presentation space. And what Kanpa has done is to help the user understand their application better. They have created a product door. So a product door is actually a tour of your product. So on the click of next button, I'm going to go from one bubble to the next. And that's going to help me understand or navigate the UI. So by the end of this, end of this hand holding, I would have created my presentation. So now I know how to work with Kanpa. I know how the application looks like. And the next time I log in, I go back to the home screen, the first screen that I showed with with all the graphic images. But now I'm not scared. I understand the product better. And I can create my designs on my own. So how can you onboard the user? So you can onboard them in the application and you can onboard them out of the application. So within the application, you could use your welcome screens, your tooltips, product doors, some indicators on the UI to onboard the user. And out of the application, it's going to be more text. It's going to be a help topics, your promotional emails. So together, the in-app and the external onboarding artifacts should have a common goal of helping the user use, understand your application better, use your product in a better way. So in short, you have artifacts in your application. You have some amazing functionality in your application. So you're going to link these functionalities to the artifacts and have interaction with the users at regular intervals. For example, Kanba. So what did they do? They already had templates created and categories created. In the starting, they just added a new dialogue with these categories so that it's easier for the user to choose. They could have left the user on the home page, but they thought it would be a better way, easier for the users if they have a window that sort of shows off all the categories. So that's what we need to think, how we can link our application to our existing artifacts. So if you have web-based application, these are a list of some onboarding platforms. They are a combination of proprietary and open source. They have some really, really good onboarding. You can create really good onboarding artifacts. So all the artifacts that I'm going to be talking about today can be created by using these applications. The proprietary applications are available as browser extensions and the open source ones would require a little bit more of programming knowledge. So even if you don't want to like invest, maybe in these applications, do check out their trial versions because they give you a very good idea about what sort of onboarding artifacts you can create. So let's begin by understanding how do we create an onboarding strategy. So everything is going to begin with a business goal. So what business goal do you want to achieve with a particular onboarding strategy? For example, Kanwa, their onboarding strategy was to help the user create their first graphic. So how do you analyze? So once you've decided the user goals, you're going to see for that goal, what are the user personas? So what are your user personas? What are your user? What is the user journey for those personas? What is the technical level of your users? So once you have this data, you're going to sit together and think which user persona and which user journey is going to require onboarding. So for example, say you have admin tasks and you have end user tasks. So for an administrator, which tasks do you think are going to require onboarding strategy? What functionality or what use case would a user require help with? So you're going to sit back, think about it. If you have analytics, you could use analytics to decide the functionalities where you want to create onboarding strategy. Say your users are churning out at a particular functionality, you create a strategy around that. So once you have your onboarding strategies in place, discussions with your stakeholders, you create the strategy, publish it. But you keep reviewing your onboarding strategy because every time you have a new feature or a new release out, you may have to change it. So we will be talking about the shelf life of onboarding artifacts as well. So let's look at the type of users that you can address. So typically in an application, you're going to have three types of users. First time users are the users who come into your application for the first time. So an onboarding strategy here would be to help them get started. The basic users, the onboarding strategy here would be to make them into power users. And of course, applications might have power users. And here the onboarding strategy would be to help them discover more complex features and help them use the product even better. So once a user decides to use a particular application, they are always in a hurry to get started. So if we continue with the example of wanting to create a PDF from a dog file, I go to the internet, I search for an application, I download it. And now the next thing I want to do is just create my PDF. I don't want to waste too much of time filling in forms or trying to configure it. So most applications these days use single sign-on. So you can use your Google account or your Facebook account to sort of get into any application. So the strategy here would be to give access to your product as soon as possible. So once the user has access to your product, the first screen that they're going to see is the welcome screen. And a lot of times, you know, we can sort of ignore the welcome screen or the welcome dialog box. It's just like welcome to product ABC version one, two, three. No, you could probably do a little more with your welcome screen. Let's see how. So as I said, this is the first interaction user is going to have with your application. A lot of emphasis these days is on personalization. So you could welcome the users with their name. So reiterate the product value because that sort of helps the user makes the user more sure of, you know, what this product does. So give a line that that actually tells you what is it that what is the business goal you can achieve with this particular product or the USP of your product. List a couple of more functionalities of your product. So say I have come to your product to do a particular task. And if you list, say I can do B and C as well as a user, it sort of helps me realize that, okay, I can use this product for doing these other tasks as well. You could use a combination of image and text really good micro copy use the voice and tone of your organization. So everything in the welcome screen should talk, talk about your product as your product would speak to the user. And in the welcome screen, you can actually split the users the onboarding based on user persona or user journey. For example, admin tasks versus end user tasks. So this split the same way. You could do it in your welcome screen. So let's look at some examples. So this is the welcome screen from Dropbox. So what they have done is they have used floating windows or scrolling windows. And they also have added an animated gift insight to sort of show how the application works. So they have a problem. They have the functionality listed up there. They have good graphics. And they also have given a link to the intro video. So you don't have to actually go and create a video. If you have an existing marketing video that would work as well because the user here just wants to know how to get started and just understand what is it that your product brings in their organization. So once you click the get started button, you're going to get into the Dropbox application. So what does Dropbox do to help you further? They have a new for you window here and this window slides out only on the click of an arrow. So it's not going to interfere in their actual application. And here they have listed whatever is new in the release. They don't stop there. They also have used animated gift to actually show how you want to achieve that. And they have a call to action buttons that actually start that actually start that functionality. So you can actually download Dropbox from here or you can actually create a shared folder from this window as well. So they don't expect you to sort of go and search for share a folder button or command in the application. Rather you can get started just right here. So that's a very good example of onboarding the user just in time in the place where they are right now. This is a screen from that hat. So when you get into the insights dashboard, you can see that you have a couple of lines that tell you what does insight actually do. And it also helps the user get started. So they tell you if you want to begin. These are the commands that you need to use. And if you need some more information, here is a link to our getting started documentation. So this pattern that I have used in my presentation shows what you can do after you go back. So for if welcome screens, what can you do better in your welcome screens? Add what value your product brings in. Use some good text and images, good micro copy to create the function, the value that your product brings. List a couple of functionalities. As I said, you could use a given link to your video so that it's easier for the users who don't want to sort of go and read through all the text. You could give a link to the product or we're going to see that next. And wherever possible, always give a link documentation or your learning management system, because that's that's where the users are going to get more information. So let's look at a demo for product or first and then we'll talk about it. So product or actually guide the users in your application and you can actually ask the users to interact with your application in a product or so that by the end of it, they have achieved a goal. So in this video, we're going to see how to create a task in Gmail. So if you see here, the user is actually expected to click the icon. So the instructions that are given to the user are click the task icon. So once the user clicks the task icon, the application is of course invoked in Gmail because that's what it does. And then the user is asked to click the add add a task button. After that, actually write the task that you want to want to add to the list. And after that, we have further gone and show them how to complete a task as well. So and at the end of this, you can also ask feedback if the store was good or bad. So I created this tool using Warfix, which is the proprietary software. But in short, you can actually use product tools to help the users interact with your software. So with product tools, you can provide guidance on how to use your application. They are action oriented because at the end of it, you would have achieved a user goal. So in the example that we saw, we actually created a task. So that way, if you have any functionality that you want the user to complete a business use case, you could actually create a product tool to help the users achieve that particular goal. And you could create it for your first time users, basic users, different personas. So if you use the onboarding platforms, you can actually list all the product tools in a window and sort of display it in your application. A common use of product tools is to highlight new features because it's new. The users haven't seen it before and having a product tool where you actually guide them, the clicks and the configurations on your UI would help them understand the functionality better. And with product tools, don't try to make it too complicated. Stick to that one user goal that you want to achieve because sometimes you can do two, three things and that's only going to confuse your user.   So Getting Started Product Tool is a tool that's automatically invoked the first time the user comes into your application. So it's going to take the user around your application and sort of show the different features that are available. If you don't want to invest in product tools, you could use animated GIFs the same way as Dropbox did. So you record a small animated GIF and when the user invokes a particular functionality, you could open up this window so that the animated GIFs keeps playing and the users can use that as a reference to sort of navigate in your UI. You could keep that optional as well. You could ask the user that do you want to see an animated GIF. So you know, it's totally up to you how you would want to do it, but you could use animated GIFs to sort of guide your users as well. Tool tips, you know, you have any onboarding artifact tool, but tool tips are a must have because they are the best guidance that you can provide for the users. And if you use product tools, if you use the applications listed, you could link videos, documentation, everything in that product. So the third artifact that we're going to look at is task list. So nowadays, if you see every time you log in to a new application, they have a getting started short list. So these are lists of tasks which you are expected to complete so that you better understand the product. And as you complete that, you can see you get a check mark and you get a percentage. So this is nothing but a list of tasks which at the back end is actually linked to your existing functionality. So let's look at how we can use task lists. So these are tasks that you list sequentially. The hope is that the user would follow those tasks in a particular sequence, but not necessary. So you keep them in a sequence, but they should not be like interdependent on each other. And the user should have the flexibility of beginning with whichever task they want. So what we are trying to do by creating a task list is sort of giving the users a direction as to how to use the product. You're trying to show them the best way of using your product. Since you are expected to use these to run these tasks as soon as they log into your software, don't keep them very complex. Keep them simple. And show completion status because as humans, we love to see a tick mark and 100%. So use that as a motivation for the users to complete the tasks. Give them small rewards for completion of tasks. Need not be something big and applause or a balloon or a clap also makes us happy. So just keep them motivated so that they complete their task list because then it will help them understand the product better. And as with all onboarding artifacts, you should be able to just cross and not worry about the task list. So onboarding artifacts, you've got to take it with a pinch of salt. Sometimes the user may or may not use it, but when they need help, you have to be around. So that's like a help documentation as well. So they might not go and read it every day, but when they need help, they go to your documentation. So what can you do after you go back? You could use counters in your installers and login screens because then it gives an idea as to how much time more do I need to invest to actually finish the installation. So if I want to go for lunch, do I wait for the installation to get over or I come back and do it? So it kind of helps the user make the mind. Task list, good to have because it's going to give the users a direction and it's easy to create because you already have your existing functionality. You just need to figure out what needs to go into the task list. Progress bars you could use to either track the completion rate of your task list or if you have if you want the users to give them to give you more information about themselves, their profile. You could use a track path to track those details as LinkedIn does it says your profile is 50% complete. So you know, sort of motivate the users. So numbers always motivate us. So you use it to our advantage. And as always videos and documentation is something you can always add. So in short, what can a simple onboarding example look like?  So for an admin you have a task list ready where then you have four or five tasks which you expect them to complete. And you can link actually you can actually you create product tours and list them as tasks or you could use tooltips to guide the user. So if that's too confusing, just create a task list. Let's look at some other onboarding artifacts that are available. So you can you if you don't have anything else you could use overlays. So I'm sure all of us have seen this sort of an overlay. So it's like a transparent screen on top of your application. And the overlay is going to just point arrows to the various commands or functionality that's available in your user interface. Tooltips as I said your best friends are always always have them hot spots are these the spot that keeps flashing. So wherever you want to get user attention, you could use this. You could also use this to indicate a new feature in your UI because that sort of gets lost. And you you write it in your health documentation but you know the user needs to see the icon match it in the UI and then understand hey this is something new. So instead of that you could use a hotspot to indicate new features or new functionality in your application. And in the app. In the app messaging is something that we already see a lot of upgrade related information or updates are pushed by various organizations with this with these with the pop up windows that you see coming up in your application saying that hey the product has been upgraded. We don't support this Java. So those sort of messages could be sent by in app messaging. So we have been looking at how to onboard the user within the application. Let's see how we can do it outside the application. So as I said this is going to be more text based. So you could use your promotional and triggered emails to help your users understand your product better. So what are triggered emails so triggered emails are emails that are triggered because of a user action. So say I have subscribed to your newsletter. So the triggered email would be and welcome email that comes to my mailbox. So in your promotional and triggered emails have your customer testimonials some use cases so that it helps your could be users or your prospective users understand how your product is going to help solve their business problems. All organizations send out product release email. So list what's new in the release. Give information. Be elaborate. Don't expect them to go back and see your documentation because sometimes users make a decision based on, you know, based on one artifact sometimes. And if you have link if you have created videos or tutorials for those new health features, try to add them in your in your product release emails because then every all the information related to that release is available at one place. Say for the sales manager or the CDO to sort of see see everything in one place. Health documentation is used as pre sales for pre sales research. So if an organization is trying to decide which product to use or which product to invest in, they're going to look at everything that's available in the market. So then say there are 10 products. So it's humanly impossible to download 10 products and see what features are available. Right. So which is the easiest place where you're going to see a list of all the features that are available. Of course the health documentation. So ensure that you put in a little bit of thought and effort in your health documentation because that's also something that's going to help you sell your product. And and a pointer is from from all of these external onboarding artifacts. Have a call to action button to your download page because you know, maybe the user would be motivated to at least look at your trial version. And this is my last slide. So as promised, we're going to look at the shelf life of onboarding artifacts. So they're going to be some permanent artifacts like your tooltips are not going to change. If you have a getting started tour, unless you have added something really important or something that you want to showcase your getting started tour is more or less set your basic task list. More or less is not going to change. So these could be some of your permanent deliverables. Now, based on your product adoption rate, based on your support analytics, you may have you can change certain existing onboarding artifacts. So for example, product doors. So if you have if you have product adoption rate is pretty quick. So release on release, you can create product doors for new features and remove the product doors of the previous releases. But say your product adoption rate is a little slower. So you cannot remove all the product doors from the previous releases, you may want to retain some important ones. So it's your product, you know, your end users based on that decide where what artifacts fits best what content fits best. So if you think that you can onboard or guide your users with tooltips, then just do it with tooltips. If you think that an additional window with an animated gift is going to help the user think if that you know you could add in there. Can you categorize or make it easier for the users to choose between different categories? Can you create a window with different category options? Makes it easier for the users to choose. So give it a thought. I'm sure by now you would have realized that user onboarding cannot be an afterthought. So you will have to start thinking about user onboarding when you start doing your product documentation. So I hope that you know you have some ideas about what you can do after you go back. These are some of the references. All the onboarding platforms that I spoke about have got really good material to check them out. I did a presentation on micro copy and animated gifts. So if you want to like look check them out, I'll be happy. And I'm ready for Q&A if you have any questions. And thank you so much for listening. Thank you for the amazing talk, Sangeeta. Guys, please feel free to drop in and chat with any questions that you have. Thank you. If you don't have any questions, they're good. I think everything was very clear for the audience. There is also a breakout room link, which I'm just going to post in the chat. So please feel free to hop in there even after this talk if you want to directly reach out to Sangeeta. I hope you can hang out there for a couple of minutes. And yeah, thank you so much for the talk again. Thank you so much for all your coordination and help. Thank you everybody.


Welcome to another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Likeable science is all about why you should care about science, why you should relate to science, why you should embrace science. Science should not be isolated until things are kept off distant laboratories done by strained scientists. Science is something we should all be involved with every day. Here to help me talk about that today is Dr. Mary Haganorn. Welcome, Mary. Thank you. Welcome back. After about four years ago, I think you're on one of my very early shows, so it's very nice to see you. Oh, sure. Mary has been working on coral reproduction for something like 14, 15 years now. It's made tremendous rides, runs now some of the world's largest cryopreservation facilities for coral eggs, coral sperm, and coral embryos, if I'm not mistaken. Right. Yeah, so that's good stuff. So a lot of people are going to say, corals, just under the water, why should we care about them? So coral reefs do a lot for us, and I think the major take-home message is, without coral, life on earth would not be sustained. So they're really important for us to survive as a species, as a population, as a group on earth. So coral and humans should like coral, because they help them survive. So make that link, if you would. Yeah, yeah. So some of the things that coral help us with is they're one of the oldest ecosystems on the planet, and one quarter of all life that lives in the ocean at some point lives on a coral reef. So a vast nursery ground, and they also help us think of the tsunamis we have had over the last five or so years. They protect cities and coastlines because they take the impacts of the waves before our city or our home. And certainly, I've been grateful for those coral reefs on the Kanioa side who have taken those impacts of the tsunamis that have come to Hawaii. They also provide us with novel sources of pharmaceuticals, and some of that is still very much in research. But when you think about the resistant antibacterial strains, corals may provide us with new types of pharmaceuticals that will help with those kinds of things. And moreover, they provide livelihood for lots of people on Earth. Almost one billion people on Earth depend on coral reefs and the fish that they house for their major source of protein, like in the Pacific here. And then finally, and I'm not sure if I said this, I might have already, but excuse me if I'm repeating myself, about 350, they add about 350 million, sorry, billion dollars to the economy every year. So it's quite substantial in terms of tourism and snorkeling and just, you know, they really help us. Yeah, the impacts on many, many different ways, that's fascinating to see. And of course, now corals face a lot of threats these days, right? I mean, the ocean temperature is getting warmer, which is bad for corals, the ocean is getting more acidic, which is bad for corals, the ocean is getting more polluted, which is bad for corals, right? So is this sort of what helped get you involved in this whole business of looking at coral reproduction? Yes. So back when I started, I understood that we were overusing fossil fuels. And by overusing fossil fuels, we're putting CO2 in the atmosphere and warming our atmosphere. 14 years ago, it wasn't quite as much in the public mind as it is today, but it was in the scientific literature. There was no question that we were warming our ocean and causing more acidity to our ocean. Now, this dual action of warming our ocean and overusing fossil fuels is causing stress for coral. So any time you cause stress for any living organism, think of humans and, you know, when you get too busy at work or wherever at school and you just are not eating right or not exercising right, you get stressed and you can easily catch a cold or any other kind of sort of disease that's floating around, it's often easy to get sick. And it's the same for coral as well, because they are animals, they are not rocks, and they are not plants. I know. I'm a misconception, right? Well, they have those qualities, you know. So just like we have skeleton in our body, like in my hand, which is very hard and rock-like, they produce their own skeleton. And they also have algae that live inside their cells, which are plants. So it's easy to see where people could get confused that they might be a plant or they might be a rock, but they're really living organisms, they're animals, and they reproduce. Right. And that's really what you've made the focus of your work over the last few years. Because they reproduce the way animals typically do. Some produce spurns, some produce eggs, these meet up, happy, happy, they form a little embryo and that grows and at some point drifts around or swims around, settles somewhere and new coral appears. Exactly. But this was not well studied, certainly 15 years ago, right? This whole process was not well studied. You're right in some respect that the first time people even understood that coral did these mass sponnings was in 1985. So it's relatively, oh, then it quotes, relatively recent that we understand that coral reproduce and how they reproduce, but I think what's come more recently, say in the last five to seven years, is the effect of these changes to the ocean and how it's affecting, dramatically affecting reproduction, because as the oceans are warming, we get these things called bleaching events. And it's a stressful event which causes the algae that lives inside the coral. Now these algae are critical for sustaining the coral's life because the algae takes sunlight and it produces sugars and it passes those sugars to the coral. So they basically feed the coral. And the coral, in turn, protects the algae. Exactly. Exactly. So it's a mutualistic. Exactly. And we call that symbiosis. And the, so when the coral gets stressed, what happens is that the symbiodinium start going through, it's called oxidator stress, and they are often, they go through a series of physiological events that damages their photosynthesis and they leave or get expelled by the coral. And so then the coral looks bleached. And I'll just use this example here, and this is a 3D printed coral, but it looks very white and it's really just showing what a coral model might look like. And so when coral bleached, they have this very white look to them because we're looking through their tissue, kind of like the invisible man that's that model you put together when you're a kid.  And so in 2014 and 15, we had major bleaching events here in Hawaii. And many people would stop me and go, what is wrong with the coral? Because they could see from their cars, as they drove over H3 or in Kailua or wherever it might be, they could see that the corals were white. It was very clear that they were white. And people were very disturbed by this change in the coral. So these bleaching events are becoming much more common around the world. And they're driven by the overuse of fossil fuels and the CO2 in our atmosphere. And as we get more and more bleaching events, it's stressing the coral and it's impacting the reproduction. So they're not reproducing as they did, say, 20 or even 30 years ago. And they reproduce very sort of synchronously, right? They all, some very odd combination of tides, moon, time of day, they all know that this is the perfect time. And they all release sperm and release eggs in one mass, which, of course, sort of have to do. It's a big ocean, right? If you just dribble them out, they never find each other, right? No, that's very right. And I think the thing that's very fascinating about the coral invertebrates in particular is they obviously, they can't move. So many animals synchronized by moving together, they can go to one spot or something like that, migrate, but coral can't do that. And they have, there's only about 10 cells within a coral body, but they have proteins that are very similar to the proteins that are in our eye. And so they can take moonlight and sunlight and process the change in the sun and the moon. And so in addition to warming waters, which happens in the summer, the sun and the moon becomes very important to their circadian rhythm. And that means we have a clock, it's called a circadian clock. All animals have a circadian clock, it's in their DNA. And so they synchronize their spawning based on this sun and the moon temperature and their circadian clock. Yeah, that's critical. And of course, yeah, as you say, they're warming the oceans, they're being more stressed, a number of things could desynchronize that would make it harder for them to sink and sink. So then when did you get this sort of this idea that the way to conserve them and maybe to preserve the species was to sort of gather the sperm, gather the embryos? So what I do, just the most simply, simple way to think about it is I use human fertility techniques, exactly the same things like if you were, your family member would go to, you know, a clinic, that's the sorts of questions, the sorts of cells, the sorts of approaches that you would experience there are exactly the same thing that we do with coral. So the coral, we know when the coral are going to spawn, so our next spawn here in Hawaii is going to be the night of June 14th at 9 p.m. You're welcome to come. And so here in Hawaii, the corals are very synchronized. And so we can predict when they're going to spawn and prepare for that. And there are many ways we do that, we can either go out and collect a small sample and bring it into our flow through our sea water system, or we can put nets over the coral and collect the material that way. Now, many corals produce these things called egg sperm bundles. And I'll use my hands here a little bit. So think of it as a small ball of fat with many different eggs, like somewhere between 10 and 20, depending on the species. And in the center of that ball of eggs is a sperm packet. And so corals are hermaphrodites, meaning they can produce either sperm or eggs, so they have ovaries and testes. And they package that egg sperm bundle up about two days or a day before they're about to spawn. And then at the time of spawning, they release these and they gently flow rise in the water column to the surface. We often collect them in kayaks and we scoop them off the surface, or as I said, we can go ahead of time and get small fragments and bring them into our water tables. Wow, I hadn't realized that. So are they primarily self-fertilizing then, or do they break apart then? Yeah, that's a really good question. Some species do, not many do, but those are the pioneering species. So species that go into new environments, some of those can self-fertilize, but most do not. And so they have to break apart, the eggs have to hydrate or get expand and get ready for fertilization. And the sperm has to swim away and find a near neighbor. OK, wow, that's it. It's very complicated. It is complicated, no. And of course, this is not just a Hawaiian problem. This is in the Caribbean, this is around Australia. It's basically all tropical islands basically have. All over the world. It is a global issue. And it's pretty bad everywhere, right? Some places are better than others. If you think about some of the troubles that the Great Barrier Reef has recently experienced in the 2016 bleaching event, one third of the northern Great Barrier Reef died. Just died. They didn't bleach. They died. They bleached and then died.  You can recover if you get your algae back again. But the southern Great Barrier Reef is still in good shape. And there's areas there that still have a lot of diversity. And hopefully the northern Great Barrier Reef will recover. But I think that was a huge wake-up call for many biologists, coral biologists in particular in Australia, to think that so much of the Great Barrier Reef could just die in just short order. Right. I think there's some reefs around parts of Palau that are still doing quite well, even though the water has warmed. So there's obviously a lot of unknowns here still. Exactly. And I think that's the thing that gives me hope, is that we can go ahead and start cry preserving and archiving some of this material. But we also want to save it for the near future, so that, say, we do have something like the Great Barrier Reef has a problem, we could then use our frozen sperm and help bring those populations back again. And in the near future, we hope to do this thing called assisted gene migration, where we take, say, sperm from Palau and perhaps, and this is, we're not doing this right now, but it's something that we could do. We could take our frozen sperm from the corals in Palau that are doing quite well and perhaps bring them to another area and cross-fertilize them. Wow. So we have the ability to move around the really robust genes from the corals who are doing well. We have the capacity to do, to move it around the world. The question is, do people want to do that? Is there permitting to do that? And is it allowed? So we have the capacity. We just don't, we're just not doing that right now. And when we come back, we're going to dig in much more deeply into this, what can we do? What are we doing to bring corals back? Right now, we're going to take a little break. I'm Ethan Allen. Mary Hagedorn is with me here in the ThinkTech studios. We're talking about reef reproduction and restoration. And we'll be back in one minute. Aloha, I'm Keeley Ikeena, and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock PM on ThinkTech Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together, we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government, and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 PM on ThinkTech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii Together. I'm Keeley Ikeena. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's going to scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on ThinkTechHawaii.com 1 PM on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up. And please follow us.  Aloha. And we're back here on Likeable Science on ThinkTech Hawaii. Dr. Mary Haginorn has joined me, your host, Ethan Allen of Likeable Science here in ThinkTech Studios. And we're talking about coral reefs and coral reproduction and coral reef regeneration, basically. We were talking the first half of the show about how coral reefs aren't being trouble worldwide. They've been hit by sort of the triple whammy of rising temperatures, increasing acidity, and some pollution, all of which stress the corals and inhibit their reproduction. Mary has gathered up sperm and eggs and embryos from many types of coral in many places and stuffed them in super cold freezers, basically, where she can actually pull them back out and make voila coral again, right? But you do more stuff than that, right, really, now, right? So let me just briefly summarize what you just said. We have over 20 species of coral now that many of them from the Great Barrier Reef that we've frozen the sperm for. And we have, actually, many, many samples from those. Those live in Taronga Zoo in Australia. And then we have sperm from the Caribbean and from Hawaii that are stored at USDA in Fort Collins. The, in addition, now, we're starting to cryopreserve a variety of different types of material. We're working on larvae. Eggs are still difficult, but we're gonna try them this summer. And we have some very high-tech ways of freezing them and thawing them. We actually use lasers to thaw them super fast, like, at millions of degrees per minute, because one of the things that can really damage large tissue, like an embryo is large. A human embryo is, say, less than a grain of sand. But a coral embryo is more like a tapioca bead. So they're largely different in volume and size. So that makes a difference in terms of their physics and how water and the antifreeze that we need to get into them moves in and out. And so we worked on larvae first, because that was easier, and we'll try eggs this summer. But one of the things that can happen when you're freezing something is that an ice crystal can form inside, or many ice crystals. And that can tear the material apart. We do this all the time in our home. If you don't cover your ice cream appropriately, you'll get big ice crystals growing, and it tastes terrible. We call it freezer burn. But it's really those big ice crystals that are growing. And that can happen in cryopreserved material as well. And you don't want that. So by using lasers and warming them up, we warm them up at 4 million degrees per minute. It's very fast. Not very long, actually. Yeah, no, no. Exactly, exactly. We were able to then stop the, there's some ice crystals there, but we stopped them from growing. So they just go into stasis, which is perfect, and then material's perfect. So in addition, and I want to point out this show and tell I brought, there's a small piece of coral on a silver pin outside the glass there. And we call them coral microfragments. They're dead. It's just the skeleton that you're looking at right now.  They heal over. And then we're doing a number of experiments. And our goal over the next six months is to get these live, so they would look green or green brown, coral microfragments, to live through our cryopreservation process and to come back out and be alive. And there's many ways we know that they're alive. They actually, coral have tentacles. If you look at them very carefully, you can see their tentacles waving in the air. And actually we use behavior more than anything else to show that the coral are alive. We look to see if they're waving their tentacles around. So you could actually, in theory, freeze pieces of coral of that size and then bring them back to life. Hopefully, that's the goal. So these are more as adult corals. Yeah. And so then the thing about the difficult things about working on coral reproduction is you only have about two nights a year that you can work on this. And it's only like about four hours each night. So you have eight hours to do all of the work that you want to do. And in Hawaii, it's a little bit longer because we have coral reproduction more extended. The gripper if it's not, it's just one and done basically. But with these microfragments here that we have in front of us, we could potentially work almost throughout the year because we could go, we actually take a tiny little microdremel. It's like dental tools. And we just take a tiny little chip out of the coral. We don't damage it at all. And we put them on those silver pins and we stick them on material that raises them above the ground in our water table. And we let them there for about a week and then we start our work on them. All right. And then with the idea of being eventually you essentially replant that on some substrate and set that back in the ocean and that grows back up into a full-size coral again. Yeah, there's some amazing work that's being done by groups in Florida. One in particular is a moat marine lab and they're the ones who really have pushed forward this idea of microfragments. And they can take microfragments and put them in different combinations like close together and they can grow them so they merge and they grow much faster and they reproduce much more quickly. Interesting. They like being with another. There's a critical mass. Yeah, so it's a way to accelerate the growth of the coral. So if we can freeze these, we think it's gonna be transformative in terms of the way we can conserve reefs around the world. Excellent, because I recall when back in 2011 you were saying you thought the coral reefs were in grave danger some three or four decades out and the estimates only sort of gone down from there, right? So... Yeah, you know, I guess I'm a little more, I don't know, I'm a little more patient now, I'm a little more hopeful. I think there are places in the world like you mentioned Palau where corals are adapting and I'm hoping that people are really, they're waking up about coral and I think they would like to do something about it. And so I'm hopeful. Okay, well, I don't know, that's great. I mean, you gotta have hope to do this kind of work, right? And it's critical stuff because again, another key role with these reefs play in life cycles of fish, marine invertebrates, everything the fish eat. So yeah, coral reefs collapse and the fisheries collapse and people's livelihoods collapse and then people collapse, right? Well, one thing we know for sure is that hunger will increase. If reefs start to fail, hunger will increase around the world and that's not a good scenario at all. I don't know. I mean, already the major fisheries around the globe, most of them are already being unsustainably fished and overfished and in decline. Yes, yes. And it's only projected to get worse, as I understand it. Absolutely. So all the more reason that we need to give the coral every bit of a helping hand we can. Yes, absolutely. So I mean, do you have a set goal here? Are you gonna, you know, re-colonize the great barrier reef or? I do have a goal and so if this, these microfragments and other types of material that we are working on are successful, we know the sperm is successful, we know the larvae is successful, but it's being successful in the lab and then being able to make that applicable for restoration. So it's a very big difference between that. So there's some spin-up that you have to do to go from sort of a small scale to large scale. So we have to be engaged with that, but I would very much like to have teams that went around the world in every ocean that could engage in some kind of conservation and cryopreservation for coral and be banking them in every ocean. So there's not, the unfortunate thing is we don't have repositories in every ocean that material can go to and the permitting in some countries is very difficult now. They don't want people taking genetic material out of the country, which is completely understandable because of biopiracy. But I'm hoping that in the future that they'll make exceptions for science because we aren't making any money off of it and we're there to help them and maintain their genetic resources. Right, and since the oceans a few decades now are likely to be a different place, you actually probably need a different mix of types of corals to have some new hybrid species that has the desired characteristics of being acid tolerant, heat tolerant, plastic tolerant. Exactly, and some of that's happening already. We're starting to see a lot of hybridizations in the oceans. I mean, I was recently... Natural hybridizations? Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's one, there's a very famous one in the Caribbean, it's called Acropora prolifera. It started hybridizing in the 50s. So the Caribbean has been ahead of the game here for good or for bad. But also I was in Morena recently and there was just so many different, I just had to call them Acropora complex. And Acropora is the major species or genus, sorry, that are reef building. And you couldn't tell one species from the other because they just were so mixed. And I'm maybe a good systematist who really did this for their life, could tell, but they just looked so similar. Interesting, interesting. Well, it's great to know that the mother nature herself is actually doing some of this work for you, right? Yeah, she's taking a hand way ahead of us. But it's also most excellent valuable that you're doing this and sort of wrapping it around back to our starting comments. This is, I mean, really, there's, in some sense, no more important work to be done, right? For me, there's many importance that work to be done, but as a marine biologist, for me, there's... Right, yeah, if the coral reefs do fall apart, yes, and the oceans are in big trouble, basically, as we know them. And since what one out of every two breaths we hate come from the algae in the oceans. Yeah, and we don't really know how the coral reefs interact with algae so that our oxygen could be threatened. We don't know the answer, you know? We're messing with a very big, complex system and if you pull enough parts of it out, does everything else crash? Yeah, I kind of liken it to the 2008 financial crash in the United States. It just rippled across the globe, you know? Yeah, and this could conceivably do a very similar thing. Wow. We hope it doesn't. Yeah, we hope it doesn't, and due to good people like yourself, it's looking like maybe there's hope. I hope so. All right. I want now, before we wrap up here, I'm going to take a side step here and ask you a completely off the wall question, nothing to do with coral at all. But if you could have the superpower of either flying or being invisible, which would you choose and why? Oh, yeah, that's a good one. I think I would choose being invisible because I think that that allows you to go places and understand things that you wouldn't necessarily be able. I can fly on a plane, right? But I can't be invisible. So I think I would choose being invisible just to increase the amount of understanding that I had both politically, politically, mostly. Because many things are set in confidence, and I would obviously be eavesdropping, but I think we understand complex things when we are engaged in conversations and being invisible would be a good one. Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you very much, Mary. Mary Haggarorn from the Smithsonian is here, has been telling us all about coral and how much she's doing the amazing work on coral reproduction and restoration of coral reefs. Thank you so much. I look forward to talking to you in a few more years and we'll see what things are going on. Thank you so much, Ethan. I hope you will come back and join us next week on Likeable Science.


Summer is here and you, your family and friends will enjoy the warmer weather and outdoor recreational activities. The 101 critical days of summer is the time between Memorial Day and Labor Day when many sailors and Marines are injured due to preventable accidents. It's important to know some basic summer safety tips like wearing sunscreen, using caution when grilling and staying hydrated. Remember, keep what you've earned. The Navy's flagship responsible drinking campaign. Prepare and have a plan to stay safe if you're going to drink. Having a plan means using common sense and applying risk management. For more information, tips and summer safety resources, visit the Navy's Safety Center website. From the Defense Media Activity, I'm Petty Officer Jen Blake.


Hi, all Liz here again today and we're still talking about training. Today we're talking about floor basics. The basics of cleaning a floor and the things that you need to ask about, you need to know about, you need to learn about, you need to figure out what you do in your company. So I'm gonna hammer again just a little bit on the reason for doing it your company's way. Because floors is another one of those things that we all think we know how to do it the best way. We've been cleaning floors since we were two years old and we know how to clean. Some of us are insistent that sweeping is better. Some of us are insisting that vacuuming is better. We all think we know the right way. So I'm gonna hit on this one more time. It's more important that you clean your boss's way than that you clean the best way.  If we're supposed to be the best company, then why aren't we cleaning the best way? Well a lot of times you will be but you just don't know that yet. And your boss is going to be figuring out how to do it the best way for your company. So your company has a lot of different objectives. If you don't know what those are yet, find out. Your company's objective might be to do the most houses that they can possibly do in a day and give as much help as possible to as many people as possible in any giving day. Your boss's objective and your company objective might be to do all of the pickiest cleaning in the whole city. The cleaning that nobody else wants to do, that nobody else can do. So perfect that even cleaning one toaster takes an hour to clean. Maybe that might be what your company wants to do. I don't know what it is. And every company is different. So your job is to do it the way your company wants because your company has objectives to meet that are not yours. All right, so hopefully I made my case on that one again. All right, back to floors, floor basics. Again, not doing it the best way. We're doing it the best way for your company which is exactly the way your company wants it done. Now, sometimes your company will ask, hey, do you guys have any suggestions? Seems like we're getting maybe a buildup on this floor. This isn't working as well as it used to or blah, blah, blah. That's the time to give your advice or to give your suggestions or to give your ideas any help that you might have, but not when it's unsolicited. It's not helpful then. Just do your job the way you're supposed to do it. If it's not working, then ask for help. Ask somebody to help you. Okay, the main things that you need to focus on when you're cleaning the kitchen are the edges and smears and the amount of moisture that you put on. And actually buildup. Buildup is a really big thing too. Sometimes it is a big thing. Sometimes it's not. It sort of depends on what you're using to clean with and what the customer is using in between. But those are probably the four things that you want to look at. You need to find out, do we do the edges or not? How do we do them? What's the product that we use? Do we use a stick? Do we use a brush? Do we use a plater's brush, a tile brush, a grout brush, a fingernail brush, a toothbrush? What kind of brush do we use? Or no brush at all. We don't brush them. We use a microfiber and a stick, maybe. I don't know. Do you do edges or not? And how often do you do them? Do you do them every time, only when they get built up? Every quarter, once a year, only when they're ordered? I don't know. But you need to find out because if you don't know when and how to do the edges on your floors, you're gonna get in trouble for that. There's gonna come a time where you're not going to have done it correctly and you're gonna get in trouble, so find out. Also, how much moisture do we use on floors? Different floors are going to require different types of cleaning also. If you're talking about a kitchen floor, it's going to be different than a bathroom floor, although many times similar. And different than floor, maybe in a family room. Your laminates are going to take a different type of cleaning than your tile floors. Your marble floor is going to be a totally different type of cleaning than your vinyl flooring. So you first are going to need to know what type of flooring you have and how do we clean this type of flooring. The reason why this is confusing is what happens is when we're getting trained, a lot of times you'll get trained on kitchen floors. And so they'll train you that on the kitchen floor, you clean it this way. But what if your kitchen floor is tile? And the next one is vinyl. And the next one is a laminate. Those three floor types can't be cleaned the same way. If you do try to clean them the same way, you're going to end up with one of, who knows how many different types of problems. So you need to learn how to clean different floor types versus room types. So cleaning floor types, you need to be focusing on what products that you're using, how much moisture, and the tool that you're using. Sometimes you'll be using a flat mop. You might be using a sponge mop. You might be using a steamer. You might be using a brush, a duck brush, if you have tile with deep grout. There are a lot of different things that you could be using. That's what you need to find out. The moisture, the product, and the equipment that you're using for all of the different floor types. And there are at least five different floor types that you're going to be running into on a regular basis. So that's what you need to find out about. And don't forget the edging. Okay, final thing on floors is how do you dry them? Very, very important to know how you dry flooring. Different floors can dry different ways. Many floors can dry on their own. Tile floors many times can dry on their own. Many laminate floors must be dried. So it just depends on the type of flooring that you're cleaning and you need to know, how do I dry this type of flooring? Okay, and also, ooh, one more thing I almost forgot, colors. Different colors have to be cleaned in different ways many times. It doesn't seem like that would make a difference, but it does. A black laminate flooring is going to show different things than a golden oak laminate flooring. So you're going to have to treat it a little bit differently. All right, that's it. Basics of flooring, you got some good questions to ask. So my question to you today is what is the question that you know you're going to ask first? Maybe it's about somebody's house, or maybe it's about a certain kind of wood type or floor type. What is it? What's the question that you really can't wait to ask? Okay, I'll talk to you tomorrow. Bye.


With your look around the Air Force, I'm Airman First Class Seyomi Sabornin. Airmen from the Florida Air National Guard began clearing roads and moving debris following the devastation of Hurricane Ian. The 202nd Red Horse Squadron was airlifted to Pine Island and used barges to get crews and equipment to Sanibel and Captiva Islands. They also cleared roads in Fort Myers Beach. They worked as part of a joint task force of more than 5,000, providing life-saving measures and starting the rebuilding process. The 202nd is a self-sustaining unit that's highly mobile, providing a rapidly deployable civil engineering response force to take on heavy damage repair. They respond to contingencies worldwide, but in this case, they're working to restore infrastructure in their own state. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall addressed the department's approach to maintaining air and space dominance with the latest update to the Climate Action Plan. He says the Air Force mission is to continue to fly, fight, and win anytime, anywhere. But there is recognition that the world is facing ongoing and accelerating climate change, and the department must be prepared. The updated plan defines efforts to preserve operational capability, increase resilience, and mitigate future climate impacts. It adjusts policies, technological innovation, and evolving operations. Supervisors writing awards have a new approach for nominations. Starting this month, the format used for awards changes from bullet statements to narratives. Writers should use plain language with a goal of clarity, improving the ability to understand an airman's performance correctly and equitably. Writers using the new guidance have flexibility and freedom to capture an airman's performance. Uncommon acronyms and abbreviations should be avoided. The new format will be used for all Air Force and installation level nominations. There is an exception for Department of the Air Force awards already announced that include bullet-style statements in the award criteria. And that's your look around the Air Force.