I think we're about to start the final stretch of today's events. My name is Georgia Holmer. I advise on counterterrorism and CBE policy at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and based at the secretariat in Vienna. But I'm also formerly the director of CBE here at USIP, so I am Leanne Erberg's predecessor. And I have to say how wonderful it is to be back here, back in this building, back in this community. This is a place that you never really leave, and it's a place that never really leaves you. So it's very special for me to be back here in Washington and very special to be back here at the Institute of Peace. We have a very wonderful panel lined up this afternoon that's going to focus on the issue of disengagement from violent groups. And I can tell you from my perch at the OSCE that this is a topic that has singularly seized the international community, mostly in the context of dealing with returning foreign fighters and their families. I think we're going to talk about it a little bit more broadly. We have some brilliant researchers here with us today that are going to talk about it in the context of the conflict in Iraq and Syria. But we'd like to talk more broadly about some of their trends and research that have to do with disengagement from violence and violent groups. As many of you know, some of the issues that are being faced with dealing with the returnees have to do with the very specific needs and concerns surrounding children. It has to do with the very specific experience of having been exposed to trauma in a conflict zone. It has to do with the issues surrounding the capacity of the criminal justice sector to respond to the needs and issues that these returning groups face. And it also has to do with the details around what happens in the non-custodial or post-prison environment when individuals need to be reintegrated back into the communities, some of these are the communities in which they radicalized in the first place. So there's a whole host of issues we hope to touch on in the next hour. And we're going to start with some opening remarks from our three panelists.  So to my immediate left, we have Dr. David Mallett, who is an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. He previously served as the Director of Security Policy Studies at George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs. And he is the author of Foreign Fighters, Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts, which was published in 2013, if I'm not correct. Next to him, we have Dr. Shiraz Mayer, who is the Director of the International Center on the Study of Radicalization at King's College London. He also leads the Center's research on the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts and is also an adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. And last but not least, we have Dr. Lisa Scherich, who is a research fellow for the Toda Peace Institute, where she directs the Institute's Social Media and Peace Building Program. Lisa, many of you know her as a peace builder. She is also on the International Review Panel of G-Surf. And in 2018, she published a book on the ecology of violent extremism, which very much integrates a peace building lens into the topic of addressing that form of violence. So, we're gonna start with David here. And I'm gonna open up the question of asking, what are the current trends and research that we're seeing around disengagement from violent groups? And how would you characterize what's happening in that space? Thank you, Georgia. I guess this is gonna be the panel of slides. So we'll navigate those. I think a picture is worth 1,000 words, so I can cut down on a lot of words by just showing you a couple of quick graphics. Is it, or not? Green button, other green button. Okay, that's, there we go. So just when we look at, I'll put this back for one second. When we look at the question of FTFs and returnees, oftentimes it's presented as sort of a binary question of are returnees a threat and perhaps can the threat be mitigated by not permitting their return? One question that I was interested, I worked in with Rachel Hayes and I published a study actually that came out last year that looked at the question of returning FTFs and the question of how long are they a threat? And what do we know about what they do when they return? And just really quickly, looking at a couple of hundred cases, we found that the average returnee who does become involved in domestic extremism, attack or attempted attack does so within approximately six months of returning less than that. There are a few outliers beyond that, but when we're going to focus on, this is just the grass scatter plot looking at the time, you can see clusters down at the bottom and they're really between 1980 at one end and 2016 at the other end, there hasn't been any variation. The different conflicts Afghanistan, Syria haven't really mattered in that impact, so there's nothing changing in that regard. The lag time between returning and some sort of extremist action is, for most of them, well under a year. So what this basically means is that when we are concerned about security or we're concerned about directing reintegration resources, there's this critical window within the first few months that we should focus our attention on rather than perhaps a long term question of reintegration beyond that. And one thing I should note that's relevant to current debates is that prison hasn't been a factor because if somebody is going to engage in a terrorist plot, they do so within such a short amount of time that they've not gone to prison. So we haven't seen people coming out and we haven't seen attacks plots or attacks delayed by prison sentences at this point. And I also wanted to show very quickly a project I'm working on with Chelsea Damon who's at American University and Janine DeRoy-Venzweiderwein who's at University of Leiden for the very first time. Looking at the question of what happens to those who don't return and we were able to find 54, what we're calling career foreign fighters. And it turns out that they are on an average of two and a half conflicts, about a third of them, or a quarter of them were active previously and about a third of them are active when they return. We broke them down, we're looking at career progression, we sort of broke them down between top level, executive, mid level, and then operational foot soldiers. And those who are in the leadership positions have been in slightly more conflicts, something like 2.8 versus 2.2. But what we're finding is that in terms of their prior experience, it's actually the mid-level operatives who were active in domestic extremism first. We tend to focus on the impact of being a foreign fighter on what you do as a domestic extremist afterwards, but it looks like there may actually be some experience gained at home. It's actually important for what they do in the field, whether they're a leader or not, doesn't seem to matter much in terms of how active they are when they return. If you look at the conflicts, this has been the case. A lot of people went to Afghanistan first, Bosnia, I mean, obviously those were longer ago, so that makes sense. We're seeing Syria not so much as yet as a first-time destination, but it's a place that people have gone afterwards as foreign fighters. And then finally, just looking at career progression with three being the foot soldiers and one being the leaders, I think the most important finding for us is that most of the people who come in as foot soldiers don't stay at that level. They tend to progress into leadership. So by having individuals who don't return home, you're actually looking at the possibility of them impacting other conflicts, gaining more experience becoming in leadership positions later on. So within that context, I'll just wind it back. Within that context, when we look at trends, we're finding that people who have been extremists abroad are basically participating at the same sort of rate that they have been in the past. This could change because we have new policies in relation to Syria. But actually recidivism happens at a lower level than it does for domestic terrorists or common criminals. And part of the reason for that more work needs to be done on this might be the battlefield experiences of foreign fighters. Many of them report being very disillusioned. We're seeing high incidences of PTSD, which were not reported in the past. And so these need to be taken into consideration when we're crafting policies to address reintegration. I'll just follow up very quickly on that and build on that with a few remarks, which is I think if we're looking at the field and where academics who look at this issue from all sides of the perspective are agreed upon really is that we're repeating a lot of the mistakes that we've made in the past. We have this very high number of detainees right now, former ISIS fighters who are held by the Syrian Democratic Forces, principally in northeastern Syria. And there isn't any kind of really well-conceived plan at the moment by a number of countries about what should be done. Lots of people have posed different ideas. And I think what's particularly interesting is there's a huge disconnect right now between politicians across the world who are quite happy to say we've defeated ISIS. We heard that earlier today as well. And that was, of course, the headline statement, which does speak to the loss of the territorial dimension of this group but doesn't speak to its other aspects of its identity, which is that it remains an insurgency that is active in parts of Syria and Iraq. And, of course, it remains a potent terrorist organization as well, which again retains a capacity and capability to act both regionally but also internationally as well. And what's particularly striking now is we are essentially repeating many of the errors that were made in Iraq after 2003, where we gathered lots of really serious guides from Al-Qaeda and put them together in Camp Buka and then did nothing about it and later released these individuals who returned more or less immediately to their activities and went on to create ISIS. And so there's some really interesting research which shows and has been built upon interviews of people who were held in Camp Buka who at some point said, you know, it was really difficult for us all to get together on the outside. But once we were in prison, the Americans brought us together, essentially. Right? We created the spaces in which these individuals were able to socialize, to attack plan. And actually really building on David's point here is really important. There is no off-ramp, right? You are creating avenues for people to say, you know, I'm 24, I'm 25. I have to be a career terrorist at this point, a career foreign fighter. And as that slide showed, that was really interesting. There were numbers of people you could see who arrived into Syria, who were in leadership positions, precisely because they had fought in other theaters before. And a lot of the work we did at ICSR back in London was actually looking at this idea of what's your sort of progression if you are a foreign fighter arriving into theater in 2013, 2014. For example, well, firstly, you are most likely to stick within your linguistic cluster, right? So if you're an English speaker from the UK, you're hung out with English speakers. If you were a French speaker, you hung out with French speakers and so on and so forth. And given that a lot of these individuals were arriving with no combat experience, they occupied lower level, foot soldier, front line kind of positions. But the ones who broke free of those strictures were individuals who had precisely that kind of prior combat experience. They came in knowing what to do. They generally had learned the language as well, were able to speak Arabic and therefore were able to progress and get on through the movement. So we're seeing a very clear repeat of this. And whilst there's a lot of divergence within the academic community in terms of how we might best tackle this, I think everyone's agreed on the fact that what's being done right now is a repetition of the failures of the past. And so we're kind of heading, I think, in this rather slow motion disaster to what we've seen previously occur. I'm a happy note, I'll pass over to my colleague. So if you don't mind, if you could take us maybe outside of the ISIS context and especially since we're talking about repeating mistakes and talk about maybe where we could learn from other contexts. Okay, I'll do that, but I'm gonna start actually in Iraq pre-ISIS. And that was in 2006, I wanna tell two stories, one in Iraq, one Afghanistan. In 2006, I worked with Iraqi peace-building organizations who had a methodology that I think prevented their own young people from joining ISIS later. And their methodology was this, they would go into a community and it was very much participatory action research where the community would determine its development priorities, whether it wanted education, water, healthcare, et cetera. And then the community would really do the hard work of building cross boundary relationships between Sunni Shia, between Kurdish and Arab. And as the community stitched that together, they were taking conflict resolution courses and really starting to manage and lead their own community in a governing way that was inclusive of all the different stakeholders in that community. And what they later found is these communities with this governance structure did not have young people joining ISIS. So that's the first story. The second story is from Afghanistan. From 2009 to 2012, I was working in Kabul with a variety of different Afghan peace-building organizations and these people had had two decades of work mediating land conflicts, water conflicts within tribal regions. So they brought a lot of experience to the table. And they were very critical of the DDR model that was being used by ISAF at that point, which involved some small payments to entice people to leave the Taliban and reintegrate into their communities. And what Afghan peace-builders were saying and the model that they were working on was, and I was part of the training team for teaching all of these leaders how to do mediation about local grievances. So as people were leaving the Taliban, they were actually being part of a community gathering where there was a trained mediator, representatives from the government, different tribal groups, and they were trying to deal with the local drivers and grievances that were fueling why people were entering the Taliban in the first place because the same Afghan peace-building organizations had done extensive research on why fence sitters were joining the Taliban. If they were sitting in between government and Taliban, why were they joining the Taliban? And the main theories of change by the international donors at that point was extremist religion and unemployment. So you saw most of the money being channeled to counter-narratives, religious education, and employment generation. But what they found is those were not the main drivers of people joining the Taliban. The main drivers were very local grievances having to do with corruption and governance, often having a tribal ethnic dimension because many of us know about the government Taliban conflict but underneath that there is a whole history of ethnic tensions that hasn't really been dealt with through any of the peace processes. So those are driving people to join. But then the second was of course what we now know because it's been replicated by the Global Terrorism Index and many other research centers that the sense of humiliation and the sense that foreign forces were humiliating the dignity and the identity of the country and the region and the people and the religion, that sense of humiliation of foreign forces was the other key driver. So much of the programming wasn't going into addressing those drivers and that's why many would say the DDR programs weren't working. It was sort of buying people off was more like short-term rental and they went back into the system. So I think those two stories and many other of my experiences working in East Africa, working in Sri Lanka and Indonesia and many other places that are facing the challenge of violent extremism and terrorism helped me develop this model in the book that we mentioned earlier, the ecology of violent extremism where the peace building approach is trying to sort of back up to that context to those local grievances. So requiring an in-depth stakeholder consultation to outline what the drivers are. And really that peace building isn't so much competing with PCVE or counter-terrorism because they each are working within a different timeframe. So the very short-term immediate threat would be a counter-terrorism response. The midterm targeted trying to reduce and the vulnerability or support the resilience of vulnerable communities is PCVE and peace building is looking at the kinds of factors that actually create civil war, suicide, violent extremism. There are a lot of things emerging from societies where there's not social cohesion and there's a weak state society relationship. So this model and then this next diagram just shows from a conflict resolution or a peace building approach sees this necessity that we've talked about a lot today of a multidisciplinary approach that deals with the individual, the identity issues, the community grievance issues, the national ideological and the global network exchange. So really a multi-tiered, multi-perspective approach which we call peace building is necessary to address these many different drivers. Thanks, Lucia. I wanna pick up one idea you said about understanding the reasons people join as being part of the calculus and figuring out why they disengage and actually ask the panel that question. If understanding the dynamics around radicalization of joining or being recruited translates into what you need to understand around disengagement and rehabilitation and if they have any reflections on that because what we want to get to here is a conversation about how and why people are leaving these movements. So could I open that up to the speakers, please? All right, well, I'll grasp the nettle first. I think based on what we've heard earlier today as well and I think everyone in the room would agree there are multiple pathways into radicalization, people's motivations are extremely varied and the primary thing that's keeping them involved is we'll also, A, vary but also it's likely to evolve over time. Again, if I use the conflict I know most about in Syria and Iraq, you could see greater in theater radicalization changes in the sort of self-narrative these individual telling themselves about why they were there, what they were hoping to achieve. So you could see earlier on a lot of humanitarian narrative and that sort of notion that we've come here to help, we've come to respond to what we've seen as a humanitarian Christ and then that evolution into we're not here to serve people, we're here to serve God. And so even that story that individual were telling themselves was evolving very, very quickly but also dramatically. And I think a lot of that is reflected in what we see in terms of some of the more prominent, I wouldn't say successful, but certainly prominent in the ones that you're able to access deradicalization or disengagement programs that operate in the Middle East. So if I take the example of the Saudi rehabilitation center which I've been to now three times I think there's some people in this room who've definitely been because I've seen you there. You know, you can see different, I should say as visitors not as sort of inmates. You see very different things. So there is a clear financial imperative for people to leave and it's a very open path of the program. You are financially incentivized to leave but not just you but your community as well. So your tribal connections are sort of pulled upon and it's really brought into a broader sort of social investment of everyone around you has an interest in you not going back to what it was you were up to. But coupled alongside that are also very dense and weighty theological discussions and we've seen again the Egyptians or the Libyan Islamic fighting group as well have these large recantation initiatives which are focused much more on the theological aspect than the Sharia sort of reasons of why you want to not do something so on. So I think we're at the same point of divergence with de-radicalization and or disengagement as we are with radicalization in that it will most likely be a case by case basis and I'll stop with this. And I think that's a point we've seen in the UK at least in the way that its flagship program Prevent has evolved over the best part of a decade going from everything that we heard about earlier don't have large sort of national programs that are fairly generic versus now which is in essence the sort of front foot of channel taking the personal individual and trying to work out what it is about them that has led them to start to embrace or embrace extremist ideas and then to tailor a specific intervention around them which has input from a number of agencies in the UK in order to have a sort of specific program for that individual. And it does operate in the shadows quite a bit we've asked for a lot more access to data but it does seem to have a relative degree of success and it doesn't just operate with jihadis but with the far right as well. Let me just add on to that because I wanted to talk about trauma and the Saudi center for reintegration actually really does focus on trauma recovery trauma healing whatever you wanna call it through art therapy, through counseling, music therapy very creative ways actually. And what's interesting about this is the trauma narrative of understanding how early childhood trauma or even more recent trauma is affecting young white nationalist young men who shoot down people with guns in this country. Often there is a trauma analysis which is interesting and kind of conserving because some of the other analysis of where that's coming from is often missing but that trauma analysis has rarely been used in the international center and certainly I think the Saudis have really been clear that addressing trauma is part of the reintegration process. So I think that a lot of, well, we've heard today that we still don't know how to identify who is going to radicalize. We can look at pathways. It's, I think it's a similar concern about de-radicalization and disengagement but there's no one way out. There's been focus and Shraza just mentioned on narratives, on ideological justifications. I think there's a focus as well on this individual efficacy that matters and Lisa was just talking about this in terms of not just in trauma but some of the things we were mentioning earlier about programs, community level grievances. I think one thing that we should look at is that there are a lot of narratives in the world but we don't think that they all necessarily apply to us. We all see stories about people in need, people hurting and we don't say it's my responsibility to do something about this. And what extremist groups of different stripes do and especially using J.M. Berger's definition of extremism with focused on group identity is that they make the focus on this is your prey, you know, your level of identity that matters. This is the one that requires action. Reducing the pole of those types of identities and whether you wanna use different social science terms like cross-cutting cleavages or intersectionality. The fact is that everyone has different levels of identity. Everyone has different responsibilities, different roles to different facets of their identities, different groups. And so by giving people a sense of efficacy perhaps or giving the sense of responsibility whether it's at the family level or the community level that they can have an impact I think would go a long way towards addressing some of these issues. Let's go back to this topic of trauma because we heard about this earlier today too and how exposure to war trauma is something that contributes to vulnerability to radicalization and it's something that is featuring in this particular demographic that we're talking about coming out of Iraq and Syria. So thank you for putting that on the table, Alisa. Could I ask the other speakers to reflect a little bit more about how this issue of PTSD or experience of trauma is informing some of the responses towards rehabilitation or disengagement or perhaps some of the choices around disengagement and motivations towards it if they are? I think there's a long way to go in this regard. I was actually at a great resolve event on Monday here looking at some of the work that's being done on the Balkans about previous work on childhood traumas from war experience and the impact of that. So I think we need more studies showing that. In the case of Western countries people going off and becoming FTFs which has been the counter-terrorism pre-eminent concern I think in the last few years, it's less trackable. It's less obvious without getting a sense of individual profiles after somebody has already gone and traveled. I think there are certain risk factors. We've talked about developing types of, if not profiles of individuals, at least categories for examining pathways into radicalization. The work, as I understand it, is still pretty rudimentary at this point. It's not something I've worked with people directly in the field about, but Lisa maybe you can. I think it's important to realize that there may be some kind of correlation between trauma and vulnerability to violent extremism. I also think that it's not everybody. So there's many different pathways and when we were working in East Africa several years ago and then I participated with Department of Defense conflict analysis of what was driving young people in East Africa to join El Shabaab, the thing that came out that correlated within that context is that there were so few pathways for advance for these young men and it was the most ambitious, the most entrepreneurial, actually in some sense the least traumatized or the ones with the most capacity were the ones who were becoming enticed with the idea of leading an El Shabaab segment. So I think it's important to look at trauma and also to realize in some contexts it's really quite different and I think for reintegration then you're also thinking about some communities lost their most talented young people. They're young people with the greatest leadership skills who left the community and went to join and lead violent extremist groups and carry out terrorism. So there's actually a huge potential in thinking about channeling that kind of leadership in a different direction. But so there's like sensitivity to trauma is necessary but also kind of seeing the real capacity that exists with some of these groups. I'll just make two very, very quick points. Glad you actually, I should have mentioned the point when Saudi about the therapy and the rehabilitation. If you're unfamiliar with this, I would just go online and look at it. There's an art therapy element to it and it's surreal. I mean it is really surreal because you have these hardened individuals who are fought in foreign conflicts who are now painting pictures about their feelings. And crying. It's just worth watching. There's videos of it floating around the internet so I encourage you to take some time. I'll talk again just about one other aspect of this which we haven't really touched upon but it is a latent problem. It is a huge problem again bringing it back to Syria and Iraq which is the sheer number of children who are now again not just in those communities but who have actively been raised by fighters, by competence who are again being held in pretty squalid and insecure conditions. And so adding to the trauma is this further sense of humiliation and is the further sense of insecurity and it's basic human insecurity. Winter is coming. These are not comfortable tents to live in at the best of times. The conditions are very, very trying and challenging as it is and on top of that you have associated impacts of whether it's PTSD or other mental health issues that are related to this. So the prospect of encouraging a new generation to walk this path is of course very, very high and again there is not particularly sort of significant political will to challenge this issue head on but it does require a pretty swift intervention. We actually have a huge stack of questions and but I think enough time to get through some of them so I'm gonna turn to the audience questions now. Thank you for the opening reflections. The first one actually is specifically for you Shiraz. It's regarding the camp and the role that it played in bringing together militants and extremists and allowing them to organize and mobilize after their release. And the question is given the conditions in Iraq and Syria today versus that of 2004 to 2011 given the different population of today's camps such as the Hawaii which has women and children in residence as well. How might the threat trajectory differ today is the question and let me see if there's a it's an anonymous question. Okay, that's a great question. I think the threat is a lot more cute in many senses today. All of the underlying structural issues that we would have spoken about in relation to Iraq post 2003 in Syria pre 2011 have been exacerbated. So that broader aspect I was talking about just basic human security. If I were a Sunni taxi driver living in Mosul or in Raqqa life today is a lot worse than it was even under Islamic State just a few years ago. The as I say exposure to vulnerability the exposure to a political class either in Damascus or Baghdad is making me sort of uncertain about my future. But as you say it's a huge number now of women who have been very active and conscious and playing their own roles within these organizations now again in a more pronounced way that they haven't done in the past. And then children which are a new dynamic here again in quite significant numbers who are again they've either been exposed to indoctrination by these groups. If you follow the Islamic State propaganda you will have seen lots of videos in which children were used as executioners or any children who are just growing up now and sort of coming into their consciousness in these camps who are being fed this narrative. What is very interesting and we haven't been to the camps inside Syria yet but you can see it in Iraq to a lesser extent as well is that the women at least are much more open in terms of their ongoing support and commitment to Islamic State. And again there's a lot of a reportage which talks about this and the sort of brazenness of that campaign the men will come and get us out, Baghdadi will return, we will revive the caliphate once again and so on and so forth. There's a lot more open dogmatism then. I'm not sure why that is the case if you've seen again the interviews with male detainees particularly of Western men there's a lot of denial of what was really happening. You would think ISIS was a dining club based on what most of them are claiming to have done just being chefs and cooks and whatnot. So there's a lot of denial going on because I think they're worried much more about being turned over to local custody and of course no one wants to end up in Syrian State custody in particular. So I think there's a lot of denial going on there but all of those underlying issues to my mind are worse today and so this is something that I've been really going on about a lot and various audiences such as to say there needs to be political will to start to look at how we collectively deal with this and it's worth saying there's huge division even between very close allies Britain and the United States are in wild disagreement about what should happen about these detainees, the United States has repeatedly and rightly in my opinion criticized the British government for its approach which has been to completely wash its hands of those who are in detention in a lot of cases to strip those individuals of their British citizenship to precisely force them down the road that David was talking about becoming career terrorists and so we are displacing this problem but essentially elongating it because these are individuals who now if they get the opportunity to leave their current detention have no prospect but to go back to the fight and to come back even stronger and harder than they did before so I'm afraid my outlook isn't particularly optimistic. This next question is asking is a follow on David I think to your description of career foreign fighters and the related recidivism rates and the question is how does the experience of FTF differ from that of more traditional mercenaries and I think the question is specifically in terms of repeat experiences and recidivism. Well labels are always a tricky thing whether it's terrorism or whether it's whether it's foreign fighters or mercenaries. I would just say that we have historically if you look beyond just jihadis look just beyond the formally designated FTFs we have hundreds of thousands of people who have been foreign fighters for what you think of as extremist causes whether they're ideological groups, ethnic groups they were probably the biggest one would have been the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and after that was over the League of Nations actually arranged to send people back home and gave them pocket money to help ease their way back. I guess if you're going to look at people in similar movements what has happened with ISIS is not necessarily unprecedented. You had revolutionary Russia and China encouraged people to come from the west to be doctors, to be teachers offered women special status in shopping districts recruited some from the Canadian Parliament from the Manhattan Project to come teach and be farmers and things like that. They raised children and most of them not all ended up returning to Western countries and not making a big splash afterwards. I don't say that everybody takes an off ramp when they're given it but most people probably do and I think that's been our experience with FTFs throughout time. So here's a question that really asks about the nature of de-radicalization programming and its relevance to conflict resolution. Lisa say if you mind I might throw this one your direction. It says in addition to conflict resolution classes what other methods could be recommended for addressing the grievances that are found that might be relevant to de-radicalization and does this apply as a de-radicalization program? So I also wanted to get out of the Middle East context and talk about white nationalism which I'm grateful that many people today have already mentioned this. So as I look at my community in rural Virginia there's a lot of white nationalism. We have one of the largest white nationalist radio TV programs that shows around the world and this thought of how are we going to address this and reintegrate or I mean it's when the scale is these are not fringe group. This is the mainstream of society. It becomes a bit of a challenge then. So what does reintegration actually mean within American society? But I think the issue that we haven't spent very much time today talking about is social cohesion which is really the focus of a lot of peace building work. So what is driving young people to join white nationalist groups in rural Virginia is similar to, they certainly look a lot like the Taliban. They drive trucks and they have flags out the back so my street in Rockingham County looks very similar to the street that I lived on in Kabul in terms of the sense of threat and there's a lot of guns everywhere. But I think it's less of a question about their relationship with the state and more about the fragmentation of American society and of course social media has exacerbated that but is not completely responsible for that. We have a long history of polarization and racial injustice and racial tension that needs to be addressed. So that issue of social cohesion though I think is a main lens to look at reintegration in every place where it exists in Myanmar with the Buddhist Muslim in Israel, Palestine with the radical Jewish groups and their approach to Palestinians. Sort of everywhere you look if you look through a social cohesion lens you can see work that needs to be done to re-stitch how people view each other, how they perceive their own identity and whether there's a potential of work to be done that gets to some of the conversation earlier today where the perception is that an identity can exist without a death threat from another group or the sort of other group. So how fear is dealt with in the society and what kind of programs are stitching people together. So. So Kyle from Equal Access is asking us to give some specific examples of lessons from programs that create off-ramps for those associated with violent extremist groups. And he has an interesting question here about whether it's possible to replicate or scale or build these programs in a way that's humanizing and empowering and that is tied to social healing. So that's a good next question to your comment about social cohesion. Would anyone like to talk about specific programs and some of the learning that's come out of them? Hi Kyle. So when I first started looking at, well we're not talking only about FTFs but in terms of building alternative identities so the particular holds of groups with extremist calls would be mitigated by saying you have other obligations, you have other interests. I've been thinking about this in terms of national identity that there are national service institutions whether it's military or something else that would give people a sense of tie to their country. You know the political reality these days in a lot of countries is it's harder to build sort of a pluralistic civic nationalism. So I think perhaps an emphasis can be on civil society groups on giving people alternatives. I know that the UK in particular has some sport-based programs these days, my extremism and some others. They're in some ways very similar to crime prevention programs in this country with Midnight Basketball Leagues in the 1990s and there's very limited research on how effective those were but what studies there have been show that the cities that had them, everybody's crime rates fell in the 90s but those cities fell most fastest. So I can easily imagine if somebody wants to feel like they are making a difference in the world if somebody wants to save people whether it's just sort of paramedic work or other types of community service programs you know there's opportunities like that that could be invested in. I think the most important factor for this you know in the first instance is the sort of ability to get people off that ramp without criminalizing them so prevent does this quite a lot in the UK as mentioned through through channel as an intervention aimed at the individual and a lot of that is also saying it's not just challenging them from what they're doing but it's saying if you continue down this path is likely you will fall foul of legislation which talks about X or Y this could lead to custodial sentencing and so on it's kind of fronting you up to show you where your life could be headed packaged in and around some of that broader engagement work that we're talking about and actually the slide that's still up contextual factors again shows the sort of plethora of different ways then in which you will attempt to pull on that individual but that D-Ride also takes place or disengagement stuff still takes place with those in the criminal justice system as well so those who are serving custodial sentences so it is a broader aspect to that. I think the scalability of it or like creating these things outside of their regions wouldn't work so I've spent a lot of time as I've mentioned already looking at the ones in the Middle East the Saudi one is the most well developed but there are similar ones in the UAE, Kuwait, Egypt and so on. But what's interesting about it is you could never replicate those outside the region you just simply couldn't I mean the idea of giving financial inducements to individuals to get them to move away from it which will clearly not fly in any western state but what's also really interesting is that it plays upon the reality of the relationship between the individual and the state in those countries. So we have the social contract and a particularly sort of different kind of relationship with our governments in the west versus the kind of relationship that you have in the Middle East so in Saudi Arabia it's very much spoken about and talked about to this notion that the ruling classes are the sort of parents and you're the children. And so in the DRAT Center they say we are being forgiven in the way that you might tell your child off if they do something wrong but you don't necessarily ground them for a week because you just say look just stop it and that's your right essentially to decide how you're going to engage with your child and so others are also saying look that's okay. You know, our brother here fell on hard times and the government has chosen to support him and to do various things. So it works very much within the particular confines and I think it does enjoy relative success within the confines of the environment in which it works but are there broader lessons for us living in democratic societies in the west? No, not really. One thing that we haven't talked about yet is that much of the research correlates reintegration or leaving de-radicalization with a former fighter being the one to invite somebody to leave. So whether that's in Indonesian prisons with foreign fighters doing the work to help de-radicalize within the prison setting to here again in North America if we look at groups like Life Beyond Hate which is completely made up of former white nationalists and their work is to engage directly with white nationalist groups and young people and to invite them out in a without shaming and without the heaviness that so many groups talk about. So I think that that realization that former's, former whatever, former ISIS, former white nationalists are really key to the strategy for de-radicalization and inviting people to leave and supporting their voices more. We have a number of overlapping questions so I'm gonna bundle them a little bit. There are a couple of people who would like to hear you talk about religion and disengagement and de-radicalization and Shiraz you mentioned religious discourse being a component of some of the programs you'd studied. I'm also aware that that's a very controversial aspect of some of the programs as well for a number of reasons and at least of which is sort of the human rights piece of it around freedom of belief and whether that actually is an effective way to de-radicalize. So I'm wondering if you have some reflections on the issue of religion and disengagement and de-radicalization to share with the audience. Okay, again, it's a very contested space, right? In terms of what a particular individual's going to believe as his correct, I put that in inverted commons, interpretation of a particular concept or idea to drive forward their desire to be a member of ISIS or Al Qaeda or anything else in that context. Again, that debate happens more freely and with greater confidence by the state understandably in the Gulf, right? The Saudi state believes it has the right to intervene in that debate and to say your understanding of the religion is wrong, ours is right, here's what we think, they have a unit within the Ministry of Interior called the Ideological Security Unit, right? And it's, I don't know, I don't know. Its whole purpose is to go to these individuals not just within the prison system but elsewhere as well and say, you think this is a correct understanding for how you should have a relationship with the government. That's wrong, this is what it should be. You think this is a correct interpretation of Jihad just to use as a broad term. Well, you're wrong, here's what our understanding of it is. Here's what we think the terms of engagement should be and so on and so forth. And so even at various times, early on for example in the Syrian conflict in 2012, when lots of individual sort of celebrity scholars in Saudi Arabia began to fundraise for example for Syrian refugees and for Syrians who had been displaced and so the government worrying about what might happen stepped in and took control of those and said it's a really good idea that you're raising funds to send up but we'll take control of this. So it feels it has the right to do that. Again, no Western state could really intervene in quite that same way into some of those debates but the other point I'll make in relation to this and I think it's slightly, I wrote a book on the belief system and sort of intellectual trajectory of the Jihadist movement but I'll contradict myself a bit by saying the average person who goes into the group doesn't know those ideas particularly well. We tend to have this notion of individuals who join highly ideological movements that they are themselves highly ideological and that they've read all the books and understood the key concepts and therefore they decide to become a member of group A instead of group B or C or D. In actual fact, what tends to happen is people join highly ideological movements all the time without ever really understanding what's going on and what happens is that there's a leadership at the top which understands those ideas which has really imbibed them and which then gives direction to your actions and then your actions are invested with that broader political significance which might distinguish you from an ordinary criminal so the criminal might shoot somebody to steal from them but someone else might shoot them in the name of a broader cause, right? This is revenge for X and therefore the same act takes on a different meaning. So in that context, it's a really good way, this is not my example about you when Jay was talking earlier about the Nazis, I'd read this somewhere before and it really is a great way to think of it. If you think of the prison guards at Auschwitz, they hadn't read necessarily in Minecraft, not every single one of them had but their actions were given purpose and direction by leadership that had a plan and a vision. So you have an ideological, every individual necessarily understanding within it what is happening or we see that with Islamic State as well as this revival of slavery for example and things like that. The final point I'll make on this is that having now been repeatedly, as I said to the Saudi program over 10 years, anecdotally what's very evident is the ones who are most susceptible to breaking down easily of course are the ones who are not of that leadership ideological level. The ones who are there tend not to make it to that rehab center because they are doing much lengthier jail sentences and really funny the second time I went we met an individual and a colleague and I on the flight home were talking about him and we said he really didn't seem very repentant, he seemed clearly ideological and sort of on that path. Three years later, four years later I was talking to a British foreign fighter in Rucka, we were communicating over Skype and he said to me, you'll never believe it, I met this great brother earlier today from Saudi and it was the guy that we'd met a few years early and he'd returned to the course. There are a couple other questions too that are overlapping. A number of people would like to hear you talk more about this vivid parallel you drew between rural Virginia and Afghanistan and so I'm wondering if the speakers would like to talk a little bit more about some of the commonalities that exist in extreme right wing groups and these other militant groups we're talking about when it comes to processes of de-raclization and disengagement, if there are any reflections on that I think the audience would like to hear them. I think the work of defining what is a violent extremist belief system is really important work and we did a little bit of it this morning but one of the things that was touched on maybe not clearly is the purity narrative that all of the groups have. They want societies that are either ethnically or religiously pure. So in Myanmar, the Buddhist state is looking for that pure Buddhist state. The white nationalists are looking for a pure white state in ISIS, we can go on to all the different groups around the world but that purity narrative I think really requires a different type of intervention than intervening with other armed movements so there would be many violent movements around the world that don't have this purity narrative. They have a difficult state-society relationship. They have ideological grievances and frameworks but people who have built their worldview on fear of another and the sense of I'm gonna die unless I fight and kill them. That is a really dangerous part of the worldview that makes people particularly vulnerable to extreme gruesome violence because the other groups have been so dehumanized and they can't even imagine this multicultural democratic society which you see most clearly actually within ISIS and white nationalism, the real anti-democratic, anti-multicultural framework and of course that came out in Norway with the attack and the ideological statement also then borrowed for the New Zealand massacre of Muslims in the mosque. This idea that it's almost friends for non-ish. So the purification of violence, it's only through violence. There can be no political process that achieves the perfect outcome. It's only through gruesome violence do we establish this pure state. So I think we need to do more wrestling with that. It has to do with identity. It has to do with the sort of psychology and trauma and fear. It's a package that needs more work. I guess I would just add that one thing that, whether it's white nationalists and ISIS, but really I think a lot of these groups, there's this zero-sum sense of competition with others but of losing out in particular to others. It's the sense that you have to take aggressive action now because your group, whoever they might be, will be in far worse position if you don't. It justifies the costs. You have a duty to people in your group. There's a lot of gendering, except for incel. There's a lot of gendering used about why it's necessary to fight, to defend innocent women and children and things like that. So again, it's changing I think somehow the calculus about who are we that makes people think I have to fight for us. So since resolve is all about bridging research with policy and practice, I think we'll wrap up a final round of reflections perhaps on how some of these ideas can inform policy and practice. So why don't we go in the same order we started in and see what recommendations you might have on that level? Brilliant new ideas. Well, I mean, I do think we've covered a lot of the ground today on the panel indeed at the whole conference. You see individuals who join extremist groups who are willing to engage in violence because they feel marginalized in some broader context, because they feel a sense of insecurity because some group is offering them, if not direct security at least, a sense of purpose. We see messaging that your own life is debased, that you can come be a warrior for a cause, that you'll be celebrated as a hero, that you can perhaps engage in antisocial violence you really want to do anyway, but this time you'll be celebrated for it. So, what I think it's really about is connecting individuals to a broader sense of society where they perhaps don't feel under siege, but also don't feel the same incentives to fight for a particular marginalized group because they see that as just one strand of their identity. So building broader whether it's ties through other civil society groups or whether it's ties to the broader civic polity, creating these, recreating the sense of linkages that people seem to lose. I think that builds on this notion of what we've been discussing all day and on this panel. There's a broader pattern of disorder taking place here, which is feeding into whether it's jihadist violence, extreme right-wing violence, or indeed as some of the other conversations we've heard about in Myanmar, up in Kashmir, in China as well and stuff. And this is all feeding off a broader sense of a breakdown in trust in political institutions, in experts and expertise and so on and so forth. And so actually reviving some of that confidence in what have been sort of traditional anchors of the state will go some way towards addressing, as I say, this broader pattern of global disorder, which is really quite remarkable in the pace that it's taking, but it is fundamentally asserting itself as a process of othering, as a process of trying to return nostalgically to some imagined glory, which in reality doesn't exist. And of course, the most recent manifestation of someone trying to do that was Islamic State to say we will return glory to Muslims, right, by addressing perceived injustices or slights and so on and so forth. Well, that slogan isn't too different from other ones employed by the political leaders. I wanna go back to this diagram and also really focus on the work of US Institute of Peace in making this research policy practice, building those bridges, because this is the space where I think it's happening most clearly, anywhere that I know of in the world. And that is because USIP put out a new report last spring, which is being passed out on violent extremism and the day that I was watching that live webinar of Senator Lindsey Graham talking about what a fantastic report this is and did you know there's groups of people that study conflict analysis and that they do peace building and for Lindsey Graham to be saying this, I felt like was a tremendous victory of thinking really all of the research we've done is making its way into the hands of policymakers who are now looking at some of the data that we've put together on evidence-based approaches to addressing violent extremism. And I wanna thank USIP, Georgia, you laid the groundwork for this, just incredible work, because I think it's really significant that we have spaces where people from the three communities, counter-terrorism, CVE, and peace building can all come together. Earlier today, someone mentioned that violent extremism needs to become a field, I agree, but I think the field of peace building, which has existed now for 40 years and has focused on conflict analysis and social cohesion and polarization issues, we have so much to give the field of violent extremism in terms of how do we get to the root causes and how do we deal with governance and polarization and many of the issues that are driving violent extremism. Please join me in thanking our panelists this afternoon. Thank you.


So I'm here at the ID Ticket Show and I'm at the booth of Sensoria and you won an award yesterday as well. Yes, thank you so much. So you're developing smart socks, what's the application, why does someone want the socks? We develop not only smart socks but a set of smart clothing. The sock has textile pressure and force sensors in the plant area. Everything is textile under percent and as you can see better here. These are the irons? Yes, under percent here. And basically what it does is transmit information to a smart phone app that tells you in real time how, where you run. So where's the transmitter element on that sock? So the transmitter is here. You simply snap and the transmitter has a Bluetooth module, battery of course, storage and accelerometer. So can this be washed? Everything is washable. Over 70. Washing cycles, right? And what sort of data can you learn from that? We weren't able to get before. So why is it a value to people? So foot landing, so how your foot lands on the ground. Cadence, very accurate cadence, pace, distance, carry burn, accurate step counting. But also the time that your foot spins on the ground that has correlation with injury prevention. It looks like it stretches quite a lot as well. So what's the level of stretch that it can withstand? It's a normal sock, so good enough to wear different sizes. For instance, this one cover three or four foot sizes. So from like 42, 28 to 11. Is this a product that's on sale now? Yes. All the products are available in the market. They've been launched in May 2015. Right. How much would a set cost? So the socks cost $25 a pair. And the first set comes with two pairs of socks and the electronic with the charger. And it's $199. So I've also seen this one this time. Can you tell us a bit about what's going on here? Yes. The t-shirt comes with cardiac sensors. Right. And it's able to connect simultaneously with the sock to this mobile app to provide heart rate information, heart rate variability. It's so hard. What's the most difficult thing you had when developing so much? What's the biggest challenges you faced? Well, for sure, have them work together. So as you can imagine, there are different parts moving. There is the garment, there is the hardware and there is the software. So everything has to work together and provide acceptable research experience. Right. So for sure that was a challenge. Great. Thanks very much. Thank you. I appreciate it.


Artificial intelligence, AI, has emerged as a transformative force in various sectors, including medicine and healthcare. Large language models like ChatGPT showcase AI's potential by generating human-like texts through prompts. ChatGPT's adaptability holds promise for reshaping medical practices, improving patient care, and enhancing interactions among healthcare professionals, patients, and data. In pandemic management, ChatGPT rapidly disseminates vital information. It serves as a virtual assistant in surgical consultations, aids dental practices, simplifies medical education, and aids in disease diagnosis. A systematic literature review using the Prisma approach explored AI's transformative potential in healthcare, highlighting ChatGPT's versatile applications, limitations, motivation, and challenges. In conclusion, ChatGPT's diverse medical applications demonstrate its potential for innovation, serving as a valuable resource for students, academics, and researchers in healthcare. This article was authored by Hussein A. Unis, Taisir Abdallah Al-Fadil-Isa, Magad Nasser, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Next speaker is Matilde Mekang, who will tell us about the homogeneous spaces in characteristic two and three. Thanks very much. Yeah, sorry for the start. So I'm a second year PhD student and thanks for the invitation. I work with Mathieu Romani in Rennes and Michel Brion in Grenoble. So we're going to talk about in this 20 minutes, we're going to talk about homogeneous spaces in characteristic two and three. So we're going to focus on some notation, which everyone is probably used to, and then a little bit what happens in prime characteristic and why we should be careful, then what is known. So stating some results that are already known, then the questions that we asked ourselves, and then I'll give one results and if time permits a couple of ideas on how to prove it. So first of all, we fix K, an algebraic leaf closed field. For now, we don't fix any characteristic. And we fix G, B and T, a semi-simple algebraic group, a Burrell subgroup contained in it and a maximum torus. And we want to study parabolic subgroups. So subgroups that are in between a Burrell subgroup and the group G, the notation and then when we consider the Lie algebra and the T action on it by conjugation, we have the following, the composition. So we're going to denote as G gamma, the root spaces, and phi is going to be our root system. I'm going to denote as gamma any root and as alpha, a simple positive root. So delta is going to be a basis and alpha is going to denote in everything that follows a simple root. The aim is to study projective varieties, which are homogeneous spaces under G action. This translates on the other side into the study of parabolic subgroups. And since each parabolic is conjugate to a parabolic containing B, we can fix the Burrell subgroup and just study the parabolic that contain B. So this is what we're going to do. So something about prime characteristic, the behavior is not going to be the same as the one that we're used to oversee. This is mostly because of the Frobenius homomorphism. So this is something that we can see as a map from G to itself, which is a homomorphism of group schemes. So it is the identity as a topological map. And on functions, we can see it as something that sends a function to its B power. So here we fix P as prime number, which is the characteristic of our field. And so we introduce the notation of G1 and more generally Gm as being the kernel of this morphism. This is something that cannot happen in characteristic zero, meaning that we have a normal subgroup whose support topologically is trivial. It is an infinitalimal subgroup, but it is not trivial as a group. It has no trivial functions. And also something which is also very weird is that its Lie algebra is the same as the Lie algebra of G. And you can see a sort of proof, the easiest way I have found to see it on the right. So the Lie algebra is the tangent vector at the identity that belonged to the Frobenius kernel. But if you develop the condition of being in a Frobenius kernel, we get a trivial condition. So this is satisfied for any tangent vector because we see epsilon squared as equal to zero. So epsilon to the pth power is going to be equal to zero. And the Lie algebra is going to be the same. So one example which explains pretty much everything that happens next, the knot, I think it's a bit sloppy. It means notation. So we fix alpha as simple root and we associate to alpha, p alpha, which is a maximum parabolic subgroup, maximum reduced because we have seen that we can have the Frobenius kernel is an example of a non-reduced group scheme. So in characteristic p, we might have no reduced group schemes. And this is seen as the reduced parabolic subgroup, which has this levy subgroup, the one having root system delta without alpha. So this is an example on the right where we fix the group is SLN. And we fix alpha M as a simple root and then we take the drawing on the right represents the parabolic subgroup which is associated to that root. And we can see an example if we are in prime characteristic, this is an example of a parabolic subgroup whose reduced parabolic subgroup is the one associated to alpha 2, so the second root, which is not reduced. And how do we get the non-reduced mass we multiply by a Frobenius kernel? So that's by adding the condition on the two coefficients g and h to the p power r equal to zero. And this is now reduced and its reduced subgroup is p alpha 2. So what do we know about general parabolic subgroups in characteristic p? First of all, what do we know about reduced ones? So all of them if we are working over c. All parabolic subgroups over c are of the form so we fix a subset of delta and we intersect all of the parabolic subgroups which are associated to those roots and we get all possible parabolic subgroups this way. Then we pass on to positive characteristic. So from now until the rest of the talk, we're going to fix p, a prime integer and it's going to be the characteristic of our field, we're not going to work in over c anymore. The result is the one from Wenzel. He proved that if we have the following condition, so either p is at least equal to 5 or the group is simply laced which means that if we look at the Dinkin diagram, it does not have any multiple edges so it's going to be type a, d or e. So under this assumptions then any parabolic subgroup, it's going to be of the form so we fix again i as a subset of delta and we just add a little bit of non-reducedness so as we have seen in the previous example in this slide, we just modify this by a little bit our parabolic, we multiply by a Frobenius kernel of some height so we fix integers m, alpha and then we multiply this by p, alpha and we intersect this over delta minus i and he proved that any parabolic subgroup is of this form under this assumptions. So this is what was known and we asked ourselves if we do not assume if we take the other cases so either p is equal to 2 or p is equal to 3 and also our group is not simply laced so it's one of the diagrams on the right so it's either of type b, c, f, 4 or g2. The first natural question would be are we able to classify all parabolic subgroups and this is not been done yet, I still don't know how to do it and then an easier question would be can we classify at least all parabolic subgroups whose reduced subgroup is a maximal one so this we have done it, it's not being published yet, it's still work in progress but we know how to do it, I am not going to talk about it, we can talk about it later I think we'll have some time because it involves other tools and other definitions which we don't have time to explore and another even easier question would be to classify all quotients so homogeneous projective spaces of this form g over p such that their picar group is a rank one and this is what we're going to talk about in a few next slides, why is this question related to the previous one because if the reduced subgroup of p is given by the intersection of the ones associated to alpha 1 and alpha m for some simple roots alpha 1 to alpha m then using Brouhat cells and Brouhat the composition we can see that this picar group is a rank m so studying the parabolic subgroups which is reduced is maximal are exactly the one which give as a quotient a variety which has picar isomorphic to z so and the third question is a little bit easier than the first one because we might be able to express x, x in two different ways as a quotient so classifying varieties is easier a priori than classifying parabolic so this is what we're going to talk about now the the main result the main theorem is that so we fix a projective variety which is how much you use under a faithful g action the faithfulness assumption does not impact the classification of varieties if the action is not faithful which is replaced g by its image in the automorphism group and then we assume that the picar group is isomorphic to z then we can show that the variety is isomorphic to g over p with g a maximal reduced parabolic here I have not put any assumption on the characteristic so in characteristic zero it is trivial because any the reducedness is trivial because any parabolic is smooth by Wenzel's theorem we just add a Frobenius kernel so there is an isomorphism of variety with with a parabolic subgroup which is reduced as a stabilizer and so the non-travel part is to prove this when we are in very small characteristic I just give an example to understand how this works in type A if g is SLN and we take just a quotient of g by a parabolic subgroup without assuming that the action is faithful and we assume that the picar group is isomorphic to z this is equivalent to asking that the reduced subgroup is p alpha for some root which is by Wenzel's theorem equivalent to saying that p is a Frobenius kernel of order some m multiplied by p alpha so we get this action so it's just g the variety is isomorphic isomorphic isomorphic as a variety to g over p alpha it's just that the action is twisted by the mth power of the Frobenius morphism but this shows why the result is true at least for SLN are there any questions so far if not I can take a few minutes to give an idea of the proof so there are mainly two steps the first one consists in showing that so we take x negation of g by p and we have the assumption on the parabolic subgroup if p is non-reduced then we can show that the Lie algebra of p is either or the entire Lie algebra of g which I recall is equal to the Lie algebra of the Frobenius kernel or some other condition which we cannot explore today because I have no time to define it it's just there is a similar reasoning for this condition so n is going to be a subgroup which is smaller than the Frobenius kernel it's normal and we can show that the other case is that the Lie algebra n is contained in the Lie algebra of p and the subgroup does not exist in all cases so there are some more hypotheses in half of the case it exists and the other half it does not and then how do we conclude from this we use the equivalence of categories between p Lie subalgebra of the Lie algebra of g on one side and then on the other side the subgroups of the Frobenius kernel so which are called the subgroups of height one of g and if we restrict that on one side ideals and on the other side to normal subgroups this stays a bijection and we have that under this equivalence of categories on one side we have the Lie algebra of g and on the other side we have the Frobenius kernel so using this result we know that the Lie algebra of p is equal to the Lie algebra of g if and only if the Frobenius kernel is contained in p however we assume that the beginning and the statement of the theorem that the action was faithful so the stabilizer cannot contain a normal non-trivial subgroup inside of it so this gives us a contradiction which means going back to what we assumed that p must be a reduced subgroup actually so a few words to say how do we prove step one so this is what we aim to prove first we consider the levy subgroup of the alpha and then this acts on the vector space given by the quotient of the Lie algebra of g by the Lie algebra of p alpha and inside of it we have some module which is given by the quotient of Lie p by Lie of its reduced subgroup and we know that this last sub vector space is not trivial because we assume that p is non-reduced and so we studied this representation we can ask I mean if this is already under reducible representation then we are done but it's not always the case but it's very concrete so it's a matrix action on some vector space and we can calculate it. Five minutes. Okay thanks and then so the second step consists in using this lemma on roots which is due to Chevalet if we consider two roots gamma and delta whose sum is also roots a root so in particular we take delta which is different from plus and minus gamma and then we consider the delta string which goes through gamma and we denote as gamma minus r delta the last root so if we go to r plus 1 then it's not going to be a root anymore and on the other side the same thing so if we go to q plus 1 plus 1 then it's not going to be root anymore then the lemma says that when we do the bracket of the corresponding root spaces we're going to get the structure constant it's going to be plus or minus r plus 1 and if these numbers are integers and they go from 1 to 4 so in this step we see where the characteristic comes into play because if the characteristic is 2 or 3 then some of those coefficients might vanish so if we try to use this lemma then we need to be really careful because in some cases this might not give what we want because it might vanish so we need some additional arguments and so on so thank you for your attention and do you have any questions or things I should go over again? Yeah very nice talk, any questions?


So do you want to learn how to read more books? In fact, do you want to learn how last year in 2019 I was able to read over 50 books and then 2020 I'm on base to reach over a hundred. Let's get into it. All right guys, what is going on? Welcome to another episode of the TMJ show and the MD journey.  And today I wanted to talk about one of my favorite topics, which is simply reading books. How can you read more books? How can you find more time? And it seems counterintuitive when you're in busy medical school and residency and as a pre-med, a finding time to do something as luxurious and hobby like as reading. But in this video, I'm going to go ahead and bring you the tips as well as the resources that I use that even despite a busy schedule, you can be on your way to read 50 plus books, 100 plus books, whatever your goal is. But before we get to the tips as always, if you enjoy the content, go ahead and hit that like button to help and support this channel and this video, if you haven't subscribed, then go ahead and join for getting two videos just like this on a weekly basis. I don't want to make you guys wait any longer. So let's get into it. I really wanted to start with three strategies that I use right now currently as a busy medical resident to try to read on average about one book a week. And sometimes I'm able to maybe get to two to three more, but I'll show you guys how. So the first thing that I do to be able to read more books at medical school is I go ahead and set at least 10 minutes, if not 30 minutes a day designed for reading. Now, this can be, you know, wherever in the day that you would want based off of your schedule. For me, I like to do about 10 to 20 minutes at night, 10 before I'm going to sleep, because it's a nice way to wind down instead of spending time with my phone or watching TV. I like to go ahead and just find a nice book that I've been wanting to read at my bedside or on my iPad or my phone and go ahead and start reading about 10 to 20 minutes. And if you don't think you can go ahead and find the energy to read for 10 to 30 minutes before bed and try to go ahead and segment your reading throughout the day, you know, you can probably find five minute time blocks throughout your day, whether it's lunch, waiting for random things, you know, eating your breakfast that you can go ahead and quickly pop open a book or some kind of reading material and read throughout the day. And some other examples that I loved using, especially when I was a student, was things like going to the gym, walking on the treadmill and then opening up my favorite book on the treadmill or on my iPad and starting the process there. And 10 to 30 minutes may seem like too much or too little, depending on who you are and how busy your schedule is. But if you're able to take just even 10 minutes into your day and do it throughout a week, you know, that's over an hour of reading time that you've set for yourself, the amount of progress that you're going to be able to make depending on what you're reading is going to be huge. The second thing that I do to be able to read more books at medical school and residency is kind of what my call my secret weapon, but at this point it's becoming more and more popular and that is reading audio books and making them your friend. I usually have about two to three downloaded on my phone and I'll share some of the resource that I use at the end of the video and I use them kind of throughout different parts of the day. So my drive to work right now is about 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the traffic and the time of day. And that's back and forth. So you can imagine 40 minutes of commute time. That doesn't account for time to have to walk my car, the garage, into the hospital conference room. And so it accounts to about, you know, 60 minutes of walking time throughout the day that I'm not essentially doing anything else to accelerate the process even more as kind of like a bonus tip. I love using the element of speed listing. You know, I've actually made a video about this that you guys can check out, but basically how to train your brain to be able to understand the same amount of information when you're listening at two, 2.5 or 3x. I listened to a lot of my audiobooks at 2.5, sometimes 3x. And if you can imagine, if you're listening to 40 minutes of content through my commute on a daily basis and go ahead and extrapolate that for about like a four hour average of a typical audio book somewhere longer, somewhere shorter, that equates to me being able to read a book every two and a half to three days. You can understand how I'm able to quickly turn through really high quality audiobooks with simply just going through my commute and adding a very high valuable activity during that time. And the next tip to be able to read more books is really something that's able to keep motivated. Sometimes it's not really the lack of time for guards to wear you on your journey. It's just the inability to make yourself wanting to read a book when free time is sometimes kind of a luxury. You know, we want to be able to use that time and watch TV or enjoy Netflix or be on social media. You know, why would I want to read a book? But instead of what I like to do is I want to make myself read about nonfiction topics in areas that I'm pretty weak on. So a good example of this is as I started my YouTube channel, things that I like to read about now are things like public speaking, you know, how to present yourself, how to do marketing, how to record videos and how to gather people's attention, how to do things like Photoshop to be able to make the thumbnails that we do as well as how to run a business, how to manage finances. These are all things you definitely don't learn about medical school and residency. And so you have to be able to find that education on the side. As I continue to create a list of curiosity and things that I'm weak on, I can go ahead and find the top books in that sector. If I read, you know, five or 10 of them, I immediately start to become, you know, above average in my knowledge base in that topic. There's a saying that in the year, if you're able to read, you know, 40 to 50 books in a specific category, you essentially have the equivalent of a PhD because that's the amount of information and books that a PhD candidate will go through when they're preparing their dissertation. So imagine being able to go year through year mastering different topics over the time, essentially having your own personal PhD in that topic. So that concept right there always keeps motivated. I need to learn more. I need to keep moving because learning medicine is super important and I'm going to become a doctor and I'm going to continue to learn in that aspect of my life. There's going to be so many elements of opportunities I have to learn other things. And if I don't take it, if I don't take the time to read, educate myself on missing out. So next, guys, I wanted to talk about some of my favorite resources to be able to read as many books as I do in medical school and now in residency. And I'll start with a free resource. My favorite resource that I used to use as a student when I was tied on a budget is an app called overdrive.com. Now overdrive essentially works hand in hand with your local library. So all you need is really a local community library card, some kind of number. Once you have this, you're able to register with an overdrive account and it basically links, you know, the app that you have on your phone, your iPad to your local library. And you have access to all of their ebooks as well as audio books. Now it's still kind of a checking out process. If somebody else is listening to an audio book that you want, you can go ahead and just add yourself to the wait list. And as soon as it's ready, it'll inform you and you can go ahead and download it. So it's a really nice kind of tool to have access to numerous amounts of audio books, which can otherwise be kind of expensive and still give you the functionality of being able to speed it up, download it, as well as be able to read ebooks at moments of notice. And all of the resources that I mentioned will be linked down below. So you guys can check that out. Now the next two resources that are both under the same company, and these are the resources of Kindle Unlimited as well as Audible.com. Now these are both under the umbrella of Amazon.com, as you guys know. And they're both really amazing resources. My wife actually particularly loves using Kindle Unlimited because it just gives her access to so many books at her disposal. And she's literally turning through fiction book after fiction book. Those are the kinds of books that she loves to read and literally at like twice if not triple the base that I'm able to do that. So she's completely a monster when it comes to reading. She loves using Kindle Unlimited because it gives her such a variety of books to read, both in the nonfiction as well as the fiction category. And if you guys are interested in wanting to try out a 30 day free trial, then go ahead and check the link down below. Now transitioning into talking about Audible.com, it's such a nice interface for those of us that love audiobooks. The one of the biggest pros to me is that they're always bringing out a new stuff. And usually it's from high quality authors where some of the other resources that I may mention or have mentioned may take some time before, you know, the book you really want to read gets on their platform. In addition to a nice library of audiobooks, it also just allows you to have nice functionality, including be able to speed up your content, being able to download it. And if you're not happy with the audiobook that you have, then go ahead and exchange it for another book that you may be interested in. As a fair warning, Audible.com does have a tendency of being a little bit pricier than other resources that we're talking about. But if you're interested in learning more or want access to two free audiobooks, you can go ahead and check out the link down below in the description to see if it works for you. Now I honestly left my favorite resource to the very end, because this is what I'm currently using to go ahead and turn through as many books that I want. And this is Cribed.com. And this is actually a website that was made and existed when I was a college student. And that student was mainly made for people to like share notes and be able to pay for notes and like downloadable content. But now they've kind of gotten into the book game. And so they have ebooks, they have audiobooks, and it's for a nice small flat fee that's cheaper than some of the other resources I mentioned. And I literally use it every single day. There's no limit to how many books I can download, how many audiobooks I can have on my phone and download. And they also are now starting getting into podcast games. You can go ahead and essentially have all your ebooks, your podcasts, as well as other downloadable content. So if you're a med student trying to look at other people's notes for a specific topic, you can likely just go ahead and search Cribed.com. And so you have books, your notes, audiobooks, as well as access to podcasts that are out. It's a fantastic app that I love using. And if you guys are interested, you can check out the link down below in the description. And as a bonus, if you want to go ahead and support my love for reading, this is a selfless plug, the link down below is simply a referral link that gives me access to another free month of Cribed.com. And you guys can also check it out for yourself. Hopefully you guys found this video helpful. Let me know in the comment section down below as well as your favorite tips to read more books that you probably are using. And before we leave this video, I want to talk about something new that we're doing at the end of the video. So if you check out in the description down below, there'll be a link to a survey that'll basically give you the option of recommending any future video topics or things that you want me to talk about on this channel, the podcast, the blog. That way I can get ideas of what kind of things you guys want. And as a bonus, the survey is completely anonymous. I can still give you the resources and the aids you want without you having to drop a comment or send a private message. So that link will be in every single video from this point on. So again, if you guys are interested, check that link out. That's basically it for this episode. Thank you guys so much for tuning into the TMJ show as well as a YouTube channel. Make sure if you are watching the video, then go ahead and hit the like and subscribe button as well as the notification bell. And if you're listening to this on a podcast, go ahead and consider subscribing as well as dropping an honest review on iTunes to be able to support the channel and get us in front of more and more people. Thank you guys so much as always for tuning in. Hopefully I've been a little help to you guys on your journey. Thanks for being a part of mine. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.