So basically we are doing research in two big projects in the Caribbean one is the nexus project Which was the biggest project was also funded the first research and then we are part of a second project The Siba project which is an acronym for stone Interchanges within the bohemian archipelago, but it's funny because this is also Siba is also the term for stone in the classic taíno dialect. So that fits pretty well and this study explores the bohemian archipelagos position within and connections to the wider Caribbean region and This study showcases how museum collections of Lucane materials Many which were asserted in the early 1900s Were not studied for over a century can contribute enormously to expand our understanding of Lucane exchange networks and connections to the wider circumparibian region so over 700 islands make up the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos which is called the Lucane Archipelago and the southern islands Comprising are comprising the Turks and Caicos islands and the Inaquas and those are some 100 miles north of the nearest greater Antilles islands of Hispaniola and Cuba Which are the proposed homelands of the initial set us settlers of this archipelago and Forays into the Turks and Caicos were initiated approximately also Sebastian pointed that out 700 AD with expansions from more than hispaniola primarily to exploit key marine resources and The Bahamas were colonized roughly at the same time by migrants from more central Cuba and also probably hispaniola and The current evidence suggests That the first settlers used these islands as seasonal outposts But it was not until after approximately 1080 that permanent settlements. I think you said something like 880 that permanent settlements were established on the main islands and populations increased and material culture diversified So within this short time frame people migrated from the much larger islands of Cuba and Hispaniola and adapted to the smaller newly colonized settings while they are retaining certain traditions of their homelands as well as maintaining wider links to facilitate access to Desirable which are not available locally as for the jade for example so What you can see here is a really simplified geological map of the greater Caribbean and It is clear that the Bahamas Turks and Caicos islands Are entirely formed out of limestone and limestone is just too soft for making useful tools So therefore all hard rocks like jade Chert and basalt which are necessary for food and plant processing had to be important important And our objective is to determine the source of these exotics This study is also quite unique because it is a synergy and it's a combination Which pitches the arts and the scientist sciences and we are all We are different researchers With specialties in petrology and iconography and geochemistry And we are using state-of-the-art isotope geochemical studies And we are aiming to explore the wider social political and economic connections between the archipelagic Oh and the wider Caribbean setting What is also quite unique is that Siva brings together close to 300 litre artifacts Which are held in eight international museum And this is the largest corpus of cocaine litric artifacts that was yet assembled in one project and These artifacts are really underutilized even so they provide potentially a highly Potential information But Over the last decade there has an explosion of research interest in the movement of materials people's and animals within and beyond the Caribbean Using groundbreaking scientific techniques, but the Bahamas have been remained largely Peripheral to this Emergent picture of such dynamic network Despite the great potential these collections are holding and this is mainly due to the fact That many of the more elaborated litric artifacts, which you can see behind me Were acquired outside a controlled archaeological context so that they that's why they have been basically forgotten They mostly entered the museum collections in the 19th century or early 20th century And they are perceived as lacking provenance Even so many are having clear associated information The National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington The Smithsonian Museums hold roughly half of the relevant collection for the Siva study in total 117 underwent initial review by portable XRF and Approximately 60 are included in the laser ablation analysis Which will then determine the isotope composition and the trace elements But we also have We also sampled artifacts from the Dominican Republic I.T. Cuba and Puerto Rico 38 of those are shortlisted for laser ablation And even so the project focuses on the Bahamas An understanding of the source material is required to better discern the position of the Lucane Archipelago in the network spanning the wider Caribbean region And hence the inclusion of those comparative materials from larger southern islands is quite crucial These selected litic artifacts many of which have been in the collection since the turn of the century Have not been part of any previous study But they offer a unique opportunity to study artifacts that are now rarely encountered in the archaeological record and In the Bahamas such artifacts were mainly deposited in caves and these were largely cleared for the Guano rich souls in the 19th centuries And then the artifacts are often dispersed locally So museum collections are therefore an integral component when looking at the wider archaeological Context for these islands without them we lose the connection to a large and important body of material that had clear value and meaning This is one of our first results So what you see here is basically the distribution of litic materials by islands in the Smithsonian collections the green is indicating Jade artifacts on the site and jaded artifacts the brown color other litologies And the size of causes indicating the amount of material that was Found in the collection and was what was really astonishing for us is that quite a big percentage of Artifacts, which are in those collections. I actually made out of Jade What was also interesting for us to see is that many of those artifacts were wrongly classified classified as serpentinite So we basically had a closer look and we could give new information about the litology of those artifacts So for us, it's really important to know how do these objects reflect the connections to other islands and do they support the current Hypothesized links based largely on diagnostic imported ceramics or do they connect in any unexpected ways? potentially even to the mainland so Our ongoing research will hopefully clarify this So by chemically finger printing those artifacts and comparing them to the database, which I presented Two talks before We will contribute to basically better understand How these former societies interacted with each other and were organized and operated But the problem is often that public and private institutions do not allow us to sample those artifacts Destructive analysis is a bad bad word when you talk to creators and restorators even so we can gain so much more information out of destructive analysis Then another yeah, sorry. I have to say that Then another thing is most of the time artifacts are not allowed to be transported So therefore what we really need is an instrument that allows us to sample those Those artifacts basically Microscopically Non-invasive and which is trans transportable So if we look at commercial available portable analytical techniques like portable XRF Which is non-destructive or portable laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, which is minimal invasive There are several limitations. So first of all, we need a calibration with matrix max Standards, then we cannot detect any isotope Compositions and we do not get the full range of trace elements So often those methods are not suited enough or sufficient enough to Discriminate between different geological sources of raw materials So what we also saw normally the best is To resolve the provenance of those geological materials is a combination of elemental Abundances and sometimes isotope compositions which might have for example this transium ratio we could use For Cuba we saw that was quite helpful So that is why I would like to present this new method that we are using what you see here is the portable The assembled part of laser-applation device which consists of an air-cold died Palm solid-state laser operating in the green light 532 nanometers The laser light is coupled into an optical fiber and is then leading the laser light into this laser-applation module there the light is basically reflected by a mirror and then Collimated and focused by two lenses on a sample surface Then we are a plating the material and then by a suction of an ambient airstream, which is generated by a membrane pump The material will be transported onto a sample holder and the sample holder has space for six filters and each filter represent basically one sample and Casper already pointed that out We might need more than one ablation because especially in Jedi's a neodymium is really low concentrated Strongsium is not such a big issue, but neodymium is really a problem and let us even worse So therefore currently we need at least 20 ablations But in my next slide I will show you that this damage is really Neglectable what I also would like to mention is that we also have the chance to handheld this Ablation module and then we are independent and we can sample basically everything independent of size and shape So again, I really would like to emphasize that the damage that we are causing is Neglectable and we are gaining so much more information out of this minimal destructive analysis So we have our sample on those small filters and then we are taking those the filters back to our Laboratories at the Frey University at Amsterdam for further geochemical analysis trace element analysis and isotope composition analysis These are really tiny tiny amounts of material so per ablation pit we are Generating a greater of approximately 100 to 130 micrometer in width and depths But still you see here the damage is neglectable. You cannot really see those Those ablation pits with the naked eye Normally what we are always aiming for is we are aiming for sampling in a broken surface But even if we have a pristine object most of the time there's a kind of label on one side So then we stick to that side and this is not on exhibition. So but even if you wouldn't see it One problem we have to face Is a blank issue? Contamination is a big issue when you're dealing with such small sample sizes. So the whole methodology is designed to Reduce and degrees the blank influence on all steps of sampling process and analysis What you couldn't see here what we are also having now is a kind of portable flow would that's basically a box Which we can put around the laser which we didn't had when we visited Caspar in Denmark at the National Museum But now we have this flow unit So basically we are pumping in ambient air So there's a lot slide over pressure and this prevents a dust to be sucked in while ablating And this is dramatically increasing the sampling bank because the samples are processed in a clean laboratory And there the plank is low anyhow, but the sampling was always a big issue and Using this metology the sampling metology we were able to convince a wide majority of conservators and museum people to give us access to their collections And they open up their collections for us and within the nexus project We went to a private collection on Grenada to sample jade artifacts mainly from the pearl site We went to visit Kaspar toffkat at the National Museum in Copenhagen to sample the artifacts from the Virgin Islands Very well known site as prosperity, which he already mentions Katarina Kuzufalki did a lot of work on the pendants and beads Then of course on our own exhibition together with the Caribbean research group in Leiden We did a lot of analysis on things from the musee del hombre dominicano musee altos de chavón in the Dominican Republic from the player grande site which Sebastian knippenberg talked about it's a really important site. We also think it's really important for jade distribution Then we also excavated in the Monte Christi area The El Mananchal site. It's also a very large site probably also very important and then garris davis He has a nice life actually because he had certain trips to the Caribbean in the last two months So he went to Puerto Rico to visit some samples and he's just back from Barbados and from for the Seabot project We had possibilities to sample really highly repetitive collections at really really nice museums American Museum of Natural History in New York where we also work together with George Harlow and Who also provided us with source rock samples from Guatemala. It's really hard to get the hands on those samples Peabody Museum of the University of Harvard Peabody Museum University of Yale Both Smithsonian Museums National Museum Natural History in Washington National Museum of American Indian But we also made trips of course to the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands to visit the museums there So you see Those two studies combined together with the soccer of study spends really a lot of artifacts These are just some pictures from our team For our trips. We had a lot of master students conducting their thesis within this project They were all happy going to the Bahamas going to the US and we are currently working on those results That's me sitting in New York in the American Museum of Natural History So to summarize the benefits of portable laser ablation sampling, we are avoiding the transport of the artifact It's quasi non-destructive because by no chance you can see the ablation pits Even if you look with a naked eye you have to search actively with the lens Then we are able to perform elemental and isotopic fingerprinting on ceramic glass pigments metal and lytic artifacts. So we are not only Reduced to one type of material now. There's a new laser at Yale who's going to be Produced he has it of it has a different wavelengths It has a UV wave length and this enables people there to Play also translucent materials something that is not Possible with our laser We do not the calibration on matrix match standards compared to portable x-ray for portable lips And the limits of detection are much lower Compared to those two methods. I Wanted to show you some provenance data This is an ongoing process Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do it. We are hard working on it but Basically preliminary results are showing that the Dominican Republic was an important source But still we cannot rule out that even in late ceramic age some artifacts may have come from Guatemala and Then I also would like to point out something from colleagues recent research So also you stated that there's a big discrepancy and how do you say? controversy going on between researchers about the occurrence of Jeddard in early ceramic side-age especially on Hispaniola we couldn't find any early ceramic side ages That is why people always say that it comes later with late ceramic age Sides, but we clearly have jades from early ceramic Jade age sites from the Virgin Islands and also from Grenada So this is going to be really interesting whether or not we can prove that there was actually Jade Present and then I also want to pinpoint what's the study conducted and published by Hallow now in 2019 on three cells from San Salvador Bahamas Well, you also said well to access relief it well to the signature of the Dominican Republic But even so he's not ruling out that there might be an unknown source and one fits very well to Cuba So this is always what we have to keep in our minds that there are probably more unknown sources Which are yet need to be discovered Thank you so much for your attention


Mmm, smell that? Hi, I'm Parker Higgins and welcome to EFF's kitchen. Today, we're making derby pie. Derby pie is a popular southern dessert, but a company called Kern's Kitchen owns a trademark on the name. For decades, it's been going after people who've been using the name, including recently websites like those posted on wordpress.com. Wordpress.com didn't take any of it and they told the websites you can keep it up as long as you change the name. So today, we're making mean-spirited censorship pie. These two pies are almost identical. The one on the left is mean-spirited censorship pie. To the one on the right, we've added one drop of extremely diluted trademark. That's derby pie. See if you can taste the difference. Mmm, delicious. Oh, I think I got some of the trademark.


Welcome to the 2015 NCHA Great American Insurance Group Summer Spectacular. It's been a great night tonight. It's the final of the five and six year old open. And I've got the winner with me, Jesse Lanix, who rode Boonsan Spoon with a 225. Well done. A career highlight for you tonight, Jesse. Oh, thank you. I just want to thank all the people responsible for getting me here. It's been a long road and a lot of people put a lot of hard work into me. I especially want to thank Alice Walton. She's really stepped in and supported me and sent me down the road and really worked with me a lot and been my eyes on the ground and helping me work these horses. And I really appreciate everything she's done and our relationship and her raising these good horses for me to ride. I want to thank Lee Francois. He's really taken me in and looked after me the whole time, my whole show career down here. Jonathan Rogers, Casey Greene and Michael Cooper, all my help. They're such good group of guys and they really hold my hand down there and I really appreciate it. None of this would happen without them. Ernesto Mandolin, he got the horse ready. He's been getting my horses ready for the last year and does an amazing job. I'm really lucky to get to ride behind him. So tell us about your game plan. The cattle were pretty tough and big tonight. What were you thinking was going to be a strategy coming into it? Well, I was excited for both mayors. I felt like I had two horses that were definitely good enough. It was just going to be which had the luck. I just wanted to make sure that I was smooth and aggressive on those cuts and didn't let those cows think they could push too hard because they came out of so hard tonight. I really just tried to go for it like it was the last time I was going to show them. Because it very well might be. And I just knew I had the horse power. I knew they'd be smart and Lee and Michael and Cooper and Jonathan Rogers and everybody and Lee and Casey. They all talked me down and slowed me down and kept me thinking smart showing and those horses just really took over for me tonight. So tell us about Boone Sand Spoon. What makes you a champion? Well, I guess it'd be a combination of how smart she is, how fast she is and how strong she is. She's a big mare. She's almost 15 hands. She's just such a strong, smart horse. I felt like the whole time I never felt like I was ever out of horse. I always felt like I could ride to the next stop just as hard. And that's a crazy feeling for that long on those tough of cows.  She's selling up and you've just given her a big high to be able to fare well industry on. How does that feel? Yeah, we've been trying for a long time and I know she's something she really wanted. She really wanted for me and for her horses and I just always really hoped I'd be able to someday give it to her. And I guess time was running out and I'm really glad it worked out this way. So tell us about the time you've spent with her because you started your only 26 now. You haven't been cutting all that long. Is it about seven years or so? Tell us your story with Alice. Yeah, what happened is Casey Green got me to move down here and then where we were working at didn't work out. And so he sent me over to Alice Walton's and Tony Pigott to be Tony's assistant and Tony's great guy. And it was a lot of fun working for him. And I remember the first night I met Alice. She cooked me some wild boar stew. I bet you never had that before. No, ma'am. I had and her and I immediately hit it off and she just has totally been behind me since. You're from Canada. I hear that you did consider a career as a professional hockey player. Do you have no regrets now?  And it's a lot of fun, really great game. But I do love this. So describe how you feel right now with the biggest win of your career. Well, I'm just relieved, I guess, and excited that it worked and just really thankful. Thankful to everyone who got me here and all my help for keeping me under control because I can get a little hard to handle in those sorts of situations. So I really owe it to them. Well, congratulations. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you.


Hey everyone today, we're going to talk about a long lever push-up. Hopefully I have enough real estate here, literally in California, and on this camera for you to see at all. It's basically a normal push-up, but I'm scooting my arms and my hands, or my feet and my hands, away from each other to make my lever on my abs a lot longer. So this is different mechanics of the shoulder, and it is a longer challenge, or a greater challenge, for my abdominal muscles. So let's see. Let me scoot my feet back. Yeah, there we go. So we're going to start here. I got to tuck my hips. I got to walk my hands forward like this. Hey, that works. And I'm going to try to let my heels sag down, right? I don't want to put too much pressure on my toe by pressing away. So heels are sagging down like this, and make sure I got my outer lower abs, and I come down and up. It's very hard to talk through these. I didn't really think through this. So with the longer lever, it's okay to flare your elbows a little bit with the mechanics of the shoulder. You need the elbow to flare as it contorts while it flexes up, while it lifts your arms up overhead. So a little bit of elbow flare there is okay, whereas if I'm doing a normal push-up, I don't want a lot of elbow flare, because it puts extra stress on the upper part of my shoulder. Big challenge here, though. This is really taking... If you saw my last video, we talked about the push-up being a moving plank. It's an ab exercise, right? This is very important when we lengthen the lever like we're doing here, because I'm making that lever, making the moment arm. Let's use a different word. The moment arm on my abs a lot longer. So even though I don't weigh anymore and gravity is the same pulling me down, I'm going to feel it more because I'm putting my body in a disadvantaged position. So try that one out, especially towards the end of workouts. This can be very challenging, so keep that in mind. But it's a nice one to end with if you still have the strength left, because it allows your body to relax at the end of the workout and gives your position or your midsection position a way that allows your shoulders and your hips to move really well for the rest of the day.


Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for joining today's session, The Art of Conducting Customer Interviews. To introduce myself, I'm Neerau Patel, work with Microsoft as product lead for last more than six years, have over 20 years of industry experience, managing and developing and implementing enterprise-grade B2B as well as B2C products. Over the years, I worked with customers across the geographies, and that helped me leveraging and receiving a lot of experiences, conducting customer interviews as well as understanding their behavior. So let's get into today's session. Let's see what are the topics today. So today, we will start with understanding the types of customer interviews, then we will understand how to identify right audience for our interviews. The next topic is how you balance what and how sides in the interviews. Then we will move to the untold stories of customers. Following that, we will cover some tips, the to-dos to conduct successful interviews. We will look at don'ts to avoid failure, and then we will get into a quick framework that you can leverage to conduct interviews in future. That's the framework that I developed based on my learning. I call it diaper. Don't laugh. Okay, so let's get into it. To start with types of customer interviews, and the first type of interview would be during market research and analysis. So when you are doing market analysis at the start of the product initial phase, that's when you go to customer to conduct the interviews. This is the time when most of the time you will find customer little confused. So why? Because they may not know the product, they may not know the feature, or they might not know what to respond and how to respond. So prepare your questionnaire accordingly. The second type of interviews could be possible right after the pilot of your product, or right after the soft launch of your product. This is the time when customer would have received part of the product, might not be very happy because there might be some defects, they might be expecting more. So prepare your questionnaire accordingly. The third type of interviews might be possible during the regular run and growth phase of your product. Now, this is the phase when most of the time customer stakeholders might be busy with their day-to-day work. Many may not be interested even to sit with you and answer you, right? So prepare your questionnaire accordingly, keep it simple, quick, right? And then let's go to the next part of the interview. The another kind of interviews could be possible when in future you may want to launch or you may want to analyze a large new upcoming feature. This is something when you reach out to customer with, they might be really exciting to discuss about it, but the important thing is that you reach out to right customer stakeholders who might be interested in that kind of features, yeah? So these are the types of interviews to prepare accordingly. Next topic is how you identify right audience for your interviews. And we will talk about the types of users or customers possible. You have to ensure that you select or focus on right type of users for your interview. So let's see what all kinds of users might be possible. The regular users or end users, subject matter expert, SME level users, managerial users or leadership level users. So when you approach regular users, if you want to talk about operational cases, simple regular use cases or when you want to talk about efficiency related points, these are the right topics when you reach out to regular end user customers. In case you want to discuss and learn about special scenarios and how to handle them, if you want to explore more options to do the same type of work in a different way, these are the topics and candidates when you reach out to subject matter expert level users. If you want to focus more about the productivity, cost or time improvements, or if you want to focus about the aspects of product that focuses on the quality improvement, these are the topics when managerial users are more interested. So for this topic, plan to go to managerial users. And if you have some features that might impact higher level employee morale or it impacts directly on the competition or the long term goals, these are the specific topics when you may want to approach leadership level or senior leadership level users, because they are really interested to talk about this kind of topics. Moving to next topic, again, part of the identifying ride audience, but here we will talk about the known user audience and stranger. What I mean by that known is the user about whom you know, the skill set of the user that you know, or you might have good working relationship with the person. So when you know the user, you know the skill set of the user, you have working relationship with the user. These are the kind of users who when you approach them, keep your questions very precise because you know the person, you know how they might respond, or you might have good tuning. You can bring a very detailed questionnaire to them because you can leverage your relationship there. And you can have a recurring questionnaire as well with them on ongoing basis to further detail out your questions in future. So leverage your relationship and your knowledge of particular user when those are known. In case the users are stranger, you are planning to approach them for the first time. In this kind of scenarios, keep your possible interviews brief and try to cover more wider topics, but still keep them brief. Also possibly go to them one time because you don't know, they might change their mindset in the second round. So possibly keep it one time. Moving to the next topic, this is about what and how. So you might be thinking what is what and how here, right? So this is about when you are building the product or when you are planning to launch new features, the thoughts or ideas related to what side of the product, what I mean that, what you want to build, what new features you want to build, what validations you want to add. Those kind of thoughts should come from your side based on your market research. But how do you want to implement? That side should be focused in the interviews. Let's take example, you want to add recommendation inside your product. Now, you have already decided the what side of it, that you want to add recommendations. But how you should implement? That's the part that should come based on customer interviews. What I mean by that, for example, where should you display the recommendations? On the right-hand side, bottom, during the product browsing, or after the order is placed, or when user logins, right? All those kind of stuff you can cover in your interviews with customer, capture their thoughts, and then you can decide how part of that, how you will implement particular feature later on. Yeah, I'm pretty sure this will help. Please be very careful about how you select your questioner. It should focus to find out how side of your products and features. Moving to next topic, how you identify or recognize some of the untold stories. When you interact with customers, there will be number of things that they may not speak up, but you may still want to find it out. So let's check a couple of points here. You may want to find out what motivates your customer to use that particular product or feature. They may not speak out, but plan your questions accordingly to find that out. Another part could be that does your product or feature cover the basic jobs to be done for the customer? You might focus on just particular functionality or activity, but until and unless you figure out that how it covers overall jobs to be done for the customer, they may not speak up, but it's your job to find out, and you may want to build in the missing functionalities in future. Another part is you may want to find out the kind of problems that customer face on day-to-day basis while using the particular product or while doing their work. You may want to learn about their struggling moments. That is very important because that will give you very good insight into what you should be build and how you should be building. Another point is that you should focus on learning how particular functionalities might be used differently or how the same functionality can be achieved differently via different routes. This will help you to find out the simple most route and how or when you should be prioritizing that particular route. Another part is that is learning about customer habits. This is also very important. Many times customer do not speak about how they use the particular feature or at times they don't recognize, they fail to talk about how they use. So it is a good idea to see how customer does particular type of work or functionality. Maybe sit with them and see them. You may want to find out the buying barriers. At times the barriers could be budget constraints or they might have some another product from market and the licenses that is going to expire after six months. So this is the frame when they may not want to buy your product. So you may want to indirectly find out if there are any barriers to use your product or buy your product. Another item could be any barriers from seasonality front or some product might not be that will help useful around end of the year or start of the year or middle of the year or in particular weather specific season or something else. So try to find it out. That will definitely help you. So moving next, in this topic we will take and talk about some tips in terms of how you can make your interview successful to do. The first topic is roughly how many customers you should interview. I'm pretty sure many of you might be thinking about it. So I would say that generally you should be interviewing five to six customers in each category or persona. That is a good number. Do not go more than 10 because my experience says that after 10 most probably you will fetch repetitive outcome. So roughly five to six max 10. Another important point during conducting interviews is that you must try hard and work hard to bring the consistency in conducting interviews for the same topic. This is very, very important. Why? Because it always helps you to stay focused on your desired outcome while driving the interviews efficiently. There is another benefit. It will also help you to uncover some of the specific user patents or trends if that exists. So make it consistent when you meet multiple users for same category or same persona. Some more tips on to do. So another thing is how you approach your interviews to make it successful. Let's see a couple of points. Start with easy and fact-based questions in your interviews. Keep your interviews casual and relaxed. Don't make it tense and stressed. Yes, always make it face to face. That's the way to go. If not possible in this COVID days, make it video call. Include some broader questions. That always helps you to identify some patents and understand user behavior well. Yes, this is some different topic you might not have think of. So ensure that you have genuine interest to understand what customer explains. Your goal is to understand the particular point from user's point of view. So show genuine interest when you take the interviews. And yes, ask probing questions. Because it helps you to refine the thoughts and it helps you to fetch better insights of particular topic. Let us look at a couple of points in terms of what helps you to make the interviews more effective. There are a couple of points here. So there are times when you might not know the users and I think that's one of the minor drawbacks. So what I suggest is that set up your interviews in advance and then by the time you get into the interview ensure that you build some rapport with customer in advance. It always helps. So work upon building rapport before you go and meet customer in the interview. Practice effective listening. What is effective listening? Well, that's the technique that helps you to isolate the noise during the conversation because your goal is to stay focused about the learning of your particular topic. Another important point is that focus on the questions that you prepared well in advance and your goal is to validate your understanding using that particular question for the same problem statement that you had it in your mind before coming inside interview. So stay focused on your questions and what you want to understand. One more point is keep cross-checking your understanding as a part of the interview process because there is a very much possibility of creating some confusion or understanding something incorrectly. It also helps you to be on the same page when you practice reflective listening and you cross-checking your understanding with customer. So we covered some good points on to-dos. Now also look at something what you should not be doing or to avoid any failures in the interviews. So a thumb rule or no presentations or no product demos. Do not bundle the large presentations or practical demos of your product in your interviews. Don't ask leading questions. What that means is that you should not be asking the questions such as you put the answer in customer's mouth. So no leading questions, please. Another tip is don't get into why when customer responds something because as soon as you get into why side of it, it triggers rational mindset when customer might stop sharing his or her thought process and they will hesitate further to share their thoughts with you down the line in the interview. So no wise place. Don't keep asking a lot of questions. Your goal is to ask some questions and listen customer in detail. Your goal is to understand their side of it. So instead of asking a lot of questions, flooding a lot of questions, focus on understanding customer. Another tip is that do not demonstrate strong reactions to what customer responds. This is also very important. Otherwise it will trigger customer in particular direction. No positive reactions, no negative reactions, no serious reactions. So control it. Another tip, don't reflect negativity in your tone. So there are times when you might know that for particular topic customer might be negative, but do not reflect it in the question that you prepare for your interview. Or don't give hint of negativity in your question itself. Another part is don't be defensive when customer comes back with the negative response about something that you ask. That is also very important because if you be defensive, customer will stop sharing his or her thought process. So those were a couple of good points that you must practice to avoid some of that negativity or say failure in your response. Failure in your interviews. Well, over the years, I gain all of these experiences and try to put it into some framework. Well, the name is funny diaper. It is just to remember how you remember it. So I came across this small simple framework that you may want to use it to prepare for your future interviews and to conduct your interviews. Let's go. Let's check it. So it's a six phase framework, define, identify, arrange, prepare, execute and review. So for interviews, you start with defining your interview scope and desired outcome. Once you have defined scope, you need to identify the right customer audience to conduct your interviews. Once you identified your audience, you need to arrange the interviews and then start building rapport with the customer. Then once the interview is set up, you need to start preparing for your interviews that how you will conduct it. So that is the part when you prepare for what side of it as well as questioner that will be used to conduct your interviews in future. The next phase is to execute the interview as per the plan and the questioner that you prepared earlier. Stay result oriented. And once you conduct the interview, the next part is or the final phase is to review the interview outcome. Here you also go and clarify some of the answers that you captured from customer as well as you go ahead and consolidate the interview outcome. Based on multiple interviews, you might have conducted for same category or same persona. So it's a quick, simple framework. Define, identify, arrange, prepare, execute and review. To remember it quickly, you can call it diaper the way I said. I hope it helps you out. Okay, so that's what we had for today's session. If you have any specific questions for this topic, please put it in the chat window or you can send it to me via email as well. My email is listed on the last slide. Yeah, and I'll try to reply back as soon as possible. Well, I also look forward to some of your feedback. You can, it will just take a minute or so. Here is the link and here is the QR code in case you want to scan it quickly. But please take a minute to share your feedback for this session. I also want you to prepare for your future customer interviews using the points that we have covered today. So use this framework and then try to practice your interview before you get into actual interview. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you want to. The LinkedIn details is also available on the last slide. Yeah, so let's go to my contact. So here is my contact, my LinkedIn email as well as the profile details on the product school. So thank you very much for attending today's session. It has been a pleasure to talk to you and I am, I hope that today's session help you to conduct your future user or customer interviews in a successful way. Thank you very much and have a great day. Bye-bye.


The central government has promulgated an ordinance to demolish or abolish the UGC and to come up with a new setup called as Higher Education Council of India. Will this again degrade the education system in India? It is a draft bill, draft Higher Education Commission of India bill that is to abolish the UGC and bring in that place Higher Education Commission. What is UGC University Grant Commission? What is the importance of that setup? The middle word G, Grant. This grant is for two people. One is for an individual, other one is for the institution. They give institutional grant and they also give an individual grant for fellowship and other things. Now once you take away the grant, who will give grant in what type they will grant? Will it be a loan or will it be a scholarship? Nobody can say. And when UGC goes away, when Higher Education Commission comes, it is not going to fix pay and all. So what type of salary the teachers will get? What type of independence the teachers will get? What type of facilities the research scholars will get? All becomes a question. So there was an uproar entire India against the draft Higher Education Commission bill. The 16th Lok Sabha ended. The draft bill did not become a bill. We hope that such a bill will not come in future. And there is another bill which was a pending bill that elapsed with the 16th Lok Sabha. What is that National Medical Commission bill? What is the National Medical Commission bill is going to do? It is going to demolish the Medical Council of India. When the Medical Council of India is demolished, the federal character goes away. The state's representation, all the state is having a representation with the Medical Council of India. But in the new setup, there will be only 6 representatives at a time. That means out of 29 states, you will have a representative only for 6 states at a time. That means 23 states and 7 union territories will go under-represented at any point of time. So it is against the federal concept. And the bill says there will be a need at the entrance and there will be a next at the exit. For example taking Tamil Nadu, Dr. MGR Medical University will conduct the first year exam, second year exam, third year exam, fourth year exam and they will evaluate, they will give you marks sheet. And after passing all the 4 years, the candidate comes for the 50 year. 50 year exam, Tamil Nadu, Dr. MGR Medical University will not conduct the, cannot conduct the exam, who will conduct an exam, somebody like National Testing Agency. And if you pass that, you get a degree. If you don't pass, you don't get a degree. Take about the poor people, if they are admitted in a private college, after spending crores of rupees, the child doesn't become a doctor. Doesn't get a degree. What will be the position of the family? Take about the people who are studying in a government college. They study all the 5 years but still they cannot practice as a doctor. Two things you have to look at it. One, medical course is something linked with the health policy of a state government. The questions that you ask in a medical paper, go and ask any doctor who is an evaluator, who is a professor, you go and ask any doctor in any university, it is directly related to the health policy of the state government and the medical requirements of the people. India is such a vast country which has got different topography, landforms, different climatic conditions, so they have different food habits. And because of this, there are different types of diseases are there. Different types of insects are there, so many issues are there. So one question paper cannot address all the medical issues. So how can there be a common question paper in a medical profession? The next thing that you have to see is that someone is going to conduct an examination. How do you expect Dr. MGR Medical University, Tamil Nadu Dr. MGR Medical University to give you a degree? I conduct an exam, I evaluate and I give you a degree.  So thereby again you say there need not be an institution called university. If you say that there need not be an institution called university, you hand over the education and health to the market, then there won't be any research for the people, of the people, by the people. It not for the development of this country, this society, so it will create a lot of social issues. Like this in the entire higher education sector, right from UGC, MCI and other areas, they are trying to demolish all the constitutional institutions, constitutional bodies that has come out because of the aspirations of the freedom fighters. That has come out because of the freedom fighters dreams that the first generation leaders of this nation thought it should be in place. Now that legacy is being demolished and you are trying to replace totally a market concept. That comes right from Nithyaayum. That is why we demand the planning commission should be brought back and there should be a developmental agenda and the developmental agenda must come from the people, from the participation of all states. Only such a kind of setup will try to save the higher education.