Good morning to the first session of this winter conference. I will just introduce to you Kirstie Cooley from the University of Nottingham and I think she'll take it from there. Okay, thank you. I'll just share my screen. It's slow, it'll get there. Okay, can everyone see my screen? Okay. Yep, can you see my screen, Johnny? Right, okay, so I'll make a start. Right, so I'm going to talk to you today about everything really that we're all familiar with I think and it's really about the digital lockdown, what we've learned and the post pandemic practice that comes after that. I'm Kirstie Cooley and I'm a digital learning manager from the health and learning media team in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham. I've got a padlet and hopefully Johnny can pop that into the chat as well. It's just the link but I'd quite like you to you know put things in it sort of during the presentation but I do have some sort of questions and prompts at the end that I'd like us to perhaps reflect upon. Right, so okay this is March 2020. This is kind of where we were. Apologies for the sort of cheesy kind of meme but here we are looking on as COVID's about to absolutely smash the hell out of our practice and what we do and the academics having to keep the show running for the students as well and these are the kind of things I expect a lot of us were doing so we were training people, writing guides, getting IT kit ready as well in some cases, installing teams and lecture capture and the other kinds of software that people actually needed to put on their laptops and take home. I suspect everyone got totally screencasted out. There's so much to do wasn't there and there was phone support and then we also became kind of IT support at home as well so our roles kind of changed in that time too. So we're going back to March 2020 and this is at the University of Nottingham the same I expect as where you are as well is we kind of replaced the the lecture with asynchronous recordings and it was a kind of a bit of a like for like sort of thing and where we had more interactive sessions then quite soon as teachers got confident they switched from the kind of live seminar environment to live sessions with chat and the teaching role kind of became more of a facilitation role as well and in our particular school as well as some of the other schools in the faculty we had clinical skills and lab teaching and we've done a number of e-learning faculty kind of events in our faculty called Felthig and we had quite a few numerous creative solutions pop up for example we had some medical lecturers who actually set up a live stream studio green screen in in their house as well and use kind of household items around the house to simulate clinical learning episodes that was quite interesting and we had some interesting life sciences courses as well who sent microscopes home and got people to look at things in their ponds and all sorts of stuff so people have been very creative we also had the reality of what it was like and I think in the midst of this all we worked and lived at home some of some of our staff and students were volunteering we had student nurses who joined the front line they actually graduated early and joined the workforce and we've had people volunteering at the vaccine centres and all kinds of things and as we know I'm sick to think for those with you know younger children as well and caring responsibilities it was fraught with a lot of difficulties and stresses you know looking after ourselves and looking after our families so we've got we've got all that to contend with as well so I'll talk a little bit about what we did within the mid and free department so during the period of lockdown I developed two surveys with Rachel Best who's the undergraduate midwifery lead the first was with students who had to undergo the pivot with us so they they knew the staff you know they knew the systems already and we evaluated some of the changes that we'd made to make our systems like Moodle teams and Echo Lecture Capture more accessible more seamless for the students and then the second survey was with in June 21 and this was with brand new students that year who were actually inducted in lockdown at distance so they joined us essentially as distance learning cohort they didn't know any of the systems we had to induct them all online and we had the opportunity to evaluate kind of fresh if you like some of the changes further and refine them and present them back to colleagues and also at the time in the midwifery department they were developing new brand new curriculum which started just in September so that was something that had been ongoing before the pandemic but was launched as well to these new students so it's quite quite a challenging time I'd say okay so I'll just get back to the stream yard so just as a sort of background this is the kind of thing we already had at Nottingham so this is sort of where we were starting from is our Moodle system sits in the middle and we link out to everything so everything hangs off the sort of coat hanger of Moodle and we were quite lucky as well we've got a lot of e-learning objects existing our reusable learning objects all that kind of thing and I'm sure you'll recognise some of these as well so in using Moodle as the centre but we also had other systems being introduced I think the main one really was teams so we're looking at where we are and we weren't in a bad place from that point of view but also something obviously it's going to be a theme today is accessibility and this is this is something that as learning technologists we we know a lot about and we do take it very seriously but obviously when there's a lot of things going on around it some of these kind of principles might be might be getting lost within the sort of creation of content and delivering content to these students at a distance so again this is something that it's it's a kind of training issue I would guess and also what we had already was sort of five years of data on about 100 learning packages so this was ongoing survey data that I built into existing blended learning resources and they'd kind of just sit in the background it was very very light touch but it would give us a sort of idea of other learning packages the right length what do students like what they don't like and they they rated them so I picked obviously the best ones to put on this slide that they really like but actually this is absolute gold what they've put in to this and it's kind of fed into the sorts of changes that I've made but the challenge I think is getting that kind of learning out and about to people as well so that's kind of where we were we also had a lot of media content within Midwifery and we had a YouTube channel we have a YouTube channel I'll just go back sorry we've got quite a few bits and bobs and the latest ones we put on there are actually hand washing which was quite convenient really and that was about January or February of 2020 and just to show you some of the stats they've gone through the roof really you can see in March these have been used worldwide and actually about half of our you know our users are from India as well so you can see it went went mad there about March and actually October and that was a period of lockdown I think as well and you can see it creeping up again so it's it's something we had already and that we had open to the community as well and what Rachel Best and I decided to call this what we were doing we call it the agile improvement cycle so we drew a kind of map to say this is where we pivoted here this was all the pre-lockdown stuff going into this so we're using our existing knowledge and content and then we're making changes to Moodle and Teams here because obviously we had emergency timetables things were going straight onto Teams things were going on to Akko and all this kind of thing so the first survey and focus groups were here we implemented these new changes for the existing and the new students who came the September of 2020 this first cohort and then we surveyed them earlier in the year here and then again implementing these recommendations and they were just in time as well to put into some of the new curriculum stuff and there's a project going on at Nottingham as well within our school to look at more Moodle standardization so hopefully this will be able to feed into that as well just just the sort of interest thing really these are some of the things that we were either doing already and we wanted to keep and consolidate or you know there's some things perhaps weren't working but these are the kind of principles that we keep within Moodle the main problem they had was navigation between lots of different systems and they don't always join up sometimes they do sometimes they don't so we need to keep it kind of as seamless as we can again using Moodle as this kind of central service to hang everything from and that included the kind of timetable format as well and having consistent course layouts for the program which is we were kind of doing anyway but within each module I included a lot more e-learning digital system support as well so there's consistent information about where the teams are how to get the teams you know that kind of thing the teams recordings as well and keeping a weekly format and collapsible topics which we already had but what we didn't have was a shed deal of activities so instead of just topics we actually replicated some of the timetable within there and it was a bit of a you know a bit more long winded to do but actually students appreciated it a lot and the teachers did as well because they could see exactly where we were like week by week as we came through that lockdown also just above that as you know you might already you know you can link out directly to a teams channel which I'll talk about teams in a minute and also we already had these kind of digital sort of avatar markers for kind of different types of activities so we updated those to include the new activities that we've got and also putting in like a lot of more inline help and support so little screencasts using teams as a you know central place for the students to give them more support as well and that's those that was for staff too so this is just a couple of screenshots from one of one of the modules so you can see we've got collapsible topics with quite a clear timetable info and these little avatars there and the self-directed learning if we've got that and this is just a standard support page as well and again this is something we were doing already but it comes back to accessibility is having different options so they'll have captions which are automatic now although they're not fantastic and also let them download audio if there's already recorded presentation which I think actually our lecture capture system allows you to do now so some of them can listen to it offline if they haven't got fantastic connections so teams was a big deal for us and that's something that people hadn't really used before so we had to think of a good way to use it with our cohorts and this what we did actually emerged out of our teaching staff and a couple of things they did that we managed to get kind of consistent across the program and I think this is important so they don't have to think too hard about the technology but they can just go in and dive in they already know where things are going to be so what we did was had a team per cohort per course and use a kind of again a visual a visual sign to have got colors for different years and we've got the staff member on the team's tile as well so they can sort of see at a glance who they've got and numbering the topic channel so they represent the same order that's in the timetable as well and using zero one so they actually appear in the right order on teams and then within each of these the staff will add their session as a team's meeting within each channel so we link directly to that channel from Moodle so if they're in I don't know doing the fetal skull for example on Moodle they'll have a link for fetal skull teams channel and that means they can directly see that until exactly where they are and that's worked really well another thing came out of some of our surveys were students wanting to see the face of the teacher which is makes sense really but the teachers perhaps hadn't considered that in the kind of massive rush to go online so after that we kind of put the the undergraduate Lee Rachel put in place a stipulation say actually can you can you make sure you record yourself as well when you're talking and we've got one teacher who's very very hands on and she actually sat there with her own flipchart at home writing things on it as well and students really like that kind of that approach so things did evolve as we went on and we found a sort of balance within the surveys so I think you wouldn't be unsurprised here people liked teams for some things people liked engaged which is the lecture capture system for other things what they liked I think was a bit of a balance and they appreciated the ability to sort of stop star a clean echo recording and to bear in mind too that when you've got an hour recording or half an hour recording they're probably going to spend twice as much on it when they're engaging with it which is writing notes and stopping it thinking about it and if you've got some prompts as well for them to consider within the video then obviously they're going to be engaging with it for a bit longer so it was important not to just dump lots of stuff onto them I think I think we know that as learning technologists not to kind of put too much into the learning here's another thing to read I was going to take you another hour you know you've got to bear that in mind and students were at home the same as we were probably getting very fatigued by tool also this is one I did on the second survey and I wish I'd done it on the first one as well but I was just interested to see what sort of devices people were using for what kind of activity and obviously it helps you when you're designing activities to know what people are using so it looks like we've got a tablet user a consistent maybe not totally consistent tablet user but the majority are using a laptop or PC which is obviously probably the best tool for the kind of most of the sessions but then when they have the teams chats they would come in using more mobile devices obviously it's not a huge sample but it was interesting for that course and when I've previously done I've done kind of hands-up surveys with first years they'll pretty much always say that they mainly use a laptop or PC or Mac for their main activities and we also had general recommendations so this was built up over the surveys from the last few years and there's just a few key points I wanted to put in about that so vary the digital learning activities I think with with lockdown obviously we had quite prescriptive right we're going to have these systems being used because it was easier for the university to be able to support those but actually you know in reality there's a bit of reading a bit of video some quizzes something like that so it's varied and it suits students in different ways and they've got choice of how to access things I think that's something that's a general recommendation but I'm keen that we we kind of don't lose that and again don't overload the e-learning because that's when students will say this took me far too long and those those surveys were useful that asked them what sort of time was it taking the time expected and we also make sure in the blended learning content that we have a time set for each activity so they can see all right you want me to read that but you only want me to spend half an hour on it or they'll prescribe the sort of reading to do you know if they just want you to be aware of it or if they wanted to actually read it properly and make comments and regular consolidation of learning they do respond well to that I think especially being at a distance is having that kind of regular feedback that they're on track is important and we've had quite a lot of good use of Microsoft forms coming out particularly in our vet school who are using Microsoft forms as you might use a Kahoot or Socrative as a kind of student engagement tool during the session as well and I think that's that kind of those kind of techniques to keep students engaged during those team sessions have evolved and we've had some really good practice coming out as well just to make sure students are kind of paying attention and they're still there and also try and incorporate some tracking feedback into the design obviously about five years ago I put that feedback into the design of the blended learning and actually it's really paid off so having that that kind of knowledge and information obviously we didn't know there was going to be a pandemic but it does pay off just to have an idea of where you're at all the time and you can also give kind of quite direct improvements to students as well I've always thought well if we can offer audio as well as video and subtitles just offer them an mp3 that they can pop on while they're doing the ironing or say driving the car probably on the bus would be better and offering the sort of bite-sized video of a high quality what lockdown meant was everyone went home and recorded on their laptops using other powerpoint or the echo personalized capture software and there were there were good recordings that they were doing and we'd already done some of those within the blended learning and I think that's something the students have kind of got used to but they're not necessarily going to get when they're back in the classroom they might get a recording of the classroom which is often quite variable with the sound and also just giving them short intro videos to topics and courses making it personal having the person's face on there just to make them feel like they're more connected to the learning community I've got some links on there I'm not sure if they're accessible but I think if you're interested then just let me know okay so we're going to fast forward a little bit now so it's December 2021 obviously we've got Omicron as well which is a bit dubious isn't it we're mostly back in the classroom or we were anyway and recording lectures in the classroom teams are still being used so we are continuing to have that kind of blended approach particularly for tutorials and you know actually means the students time is perhaps better used so they don't have to travel in just for an hour and also we're building upon the sort of good practice on the virtual learning environment enhancements and the new collaboration engagement tools the MS forms the kind of padlets that sort of thing so this is I think where we are at the moment but I think what I'm interested in is where have we pivoted to so we were kind of thrown in the air spun about and then landed somewhere but I'm interested to kind of know where we are really where you are where we are as a sector and what we can do from from now on so I'm going to just put a few questions down and if you could go into the padlet link and just have a think about where you are as well and put some comments in that be really good and then we'll review that in about five minutes as well so these are the kind of things I've been thinking about and this is really in discussion with colleagues what is back to normal so we've got new skill sets versus maybe a very much online fatigue particularly when you consider the kind of what you know what else we've had to contend with we've also is online learning now just a replication of normal so is online learning just a now a lecture capture or a team session perhaps we could ever think about that there's years and years there's decades of e-learning pedagogy that's it's well researched it's well evidence but a lot of this I think was new to some people as well and it's it's almost as learning technologies you're saying yeah we've done this we know this we know how to do it but was it falling perhaps by the wayside in some ways and do we have a voice to be able to to say actually we've kind of already got this knowledge how can we make sure everyone else has got this knowledge this kind of relates to the other point is it online lectures I think when I first started working on I think flip learning a few years ago the kind of assumption was you watch an hour lecture before you come in and then you come in and do seminar but there's so much more to digital learning than that and I really hope that our colleagues as well can see the potential of online digital learning as more a lot more than just replicating what they were doing in the classroom and I was thinking as well you know instructional design all that kind of thing is it there still are we still making the most of what our skills are and is it still going on you know and how we ensure that we don't throw the baby out with the bath water that we keep all of the good stuff that's been learned all the new skill sets a good practice and maintain the kind of enthusiasm or you know try and infuse colleagues to extend their digital learning and practice into new areas that's kind of key I think that's maybe where the crossroads is that we're at now and I think I've already said that we've got new skill sets too I think not just taking calls about it but we're we've also learned a lot I think and I remember trying to teach people teams and distance learning kind of these kind of collaborative things before but now everyone has had to do that and this is something that came out of a discussion with colleagues is is the attitude to online learning in any way tainted by negative lockdown experience and all the stress around that so online working study and teaching and that's for I think for all of us but particularly for students and maybe for some academics as well is how do we separate those two and actually go back in with you know doing the things that work best and that's a point I thought it's worth exploring and also have well why am I asking you I'd like you to go and have a look at the Padlet but also put any questions into the chat and we've got about I think six seven minutes I'll open up the Padlet and we can have a look at that as well so hopefully you've got the link in the chat I haven't got the stream yard up so I'll just go back into the Padlet and have a look Kirsty if you wouldn't mind posting that if you wouldn't mind sharing me the link to the Padlet and I can put that in in the comments oh okay I'll put it I think I've put it in before you join us yeah there you go okay I'll just see if anyone managed to get the link before not yet so I won't share it just yet because there's nothing on it but is there any questions that have come that have come out so far questions or comments we had quite a lot of comment around the the perception of the workload increase the normalization of all that extra workload something we were talking about before we had to comment Daniel's comment at 17 was around a question around did you find that student engagement was higher on these longer recordings across all cohorts or just the midwifery courses and it would seem quite exceptional to have such consistent engagement across all courses no I don't think I think it was yeah we didn't get everybody's response to the survey so yeah the ones that did say that they enjoyed the recorded lecture engagement and it took me two hours or the ones who said they did but I think for some there are some issues around general kind of engagement and making sure people the students have kind of done engaged with the work totally I think there have been a few a few issues like that I'm not sure across the university they did some other kind of survey work across the university which you know would be interesting to sort of have a look at that so yeah I think it's variable but it's just worth bearing that in mind if you're making recordings is how people kind of access to it yeah following on from that very point Catherine was saying about lack of a personal use device is something that some of her students have struggled with as well so yeah yeah digital divide and yeah we had a policy of helping students with that and also with wi-fi dongles as well so there was kind of hardship policies in place but obviously not everyone's got the same space to work very conscious of that I mean you know we've a lot of us it's variable with all of us isn't it yeah and a theme that kept coming through was summed up by by Matthew Moran was that the concept of a pivot he said that he found it to be unhelpful in general because that implies a kind of considered strategic here and change in direction for a defined purpose whereas in fact a lot of this was just you know struggling to yeah it was playing around no I agree I agree with that yeah and pivots the word that's always been used I don't know if it's been used in your institutions as well but it's always been the sort of pivot to online learning isn't it I did actually google pivot before I did the presentation just see what came up first and it's kind of seesaw that kind of thing so it felt more like a roundabout isn't it really and then you end up sort of whizzing out the other side feeling a bit dizzy so yeah I agree with the terminology yeah yeah exactly and um I didn't make the point again um well the question really around the you know obviously we've all noticed that video has been much more you know used much more frequently now and whether or not that there's an over focus on that to the detriment of what actually makes you know good learning from all the you know previous pedagogy that if we just throwing that out the window we're just watching loads of videos now that's yeah worries me a bit that um yeah I don't know it's it's just kind of getting people to the headspace where they've got some time to actually think about this stuff more deeply I think everyone's been working on you know on on gas really haven't they maybe the dust needs to settle a bit as well I don't know what other people loads of stuff coming up and have it fantastic I don't think I have time to look through it but yeah it's really that's really interesting I was going to do this session something similar actually this week with our faculty but we got cancelled because of Omicron and that kind of thing so you know if that's okay I'd really like to be able to use some of this learning as well an experience yeah Jen asks a very pertinent question just recently around getting a picture around students expectations of what they want a need from this this post pandemic learning experience because yeah often often the focus has been on how it's kind of not delivered you know you know what I mean how you know it's been delivered and maybe not quite so much on you know how how uh yeah I mean this is something I was thinking about the other day because obviously we've got a little bit there's a few comments on here about high flex hybrid teaching and we've had for example we've got one module where there's a set of students from the Netherlands who were supposed to come but they couldn't make it over in the end because it didn't get time to sort it out so they they've had to go in and do hybrid with teams where you're sort of teaching through teams and recording it that way and we've got some guidelines for that as well but it's it depends on the classroom and what sort of technology you're in there but you know I I can imagine students actually quite like in that approach you know is that something that universities should offer a bit more actually get the classrooms up to scratch that kind of thing I mean I can imagine in terms of inclusion and all sorts of things it would be really really attractive I think personally but you know obviously from a teaching point of view there's that engagement factor isn't there making sure that everybody's properly engaged and they've got the same kind of experience as the classroom students well I think that's us coming just about up to time and lots and lots of comments there so yeah thank you very much for all your comments yeah I will have a read through really interesting okay well thank you very much Kirsty thank you much I hope everyone enjoyed that as much as we did here and we'll just say goodbye for now okay thank you then bye


Poets also are recorders of what is happening around us. It's the oldest literary art form. And it's been documenting our lives since antiquity. George Perkin March was a Vermonter. And he was the first person to give the clarion call of what man is doing to the environment. So he pretty much became our first environmentalist. This is song as a bridge thesis of George Perkin's March's Man in Nature. The pendulous branches of the Norway spruce slowly move as though approving our gentle walk and woodstock. And the oak leaves yellowing this morning fall in the parking lot of Marsh Billings Rockefeller. We hear beneath our feet their susirous as the churning of wonder found to in the eyes of a child who has just sprinted toward a paddock of Jersey cows. The fate of the land is the fate of man. Some have never fallen in love with a river of grass or rested in the dignity of the great blue heron standing alone, saint-like in a marshland, nor envied the painted turtle sunning on a log, nor think, as I have, the bobcat for modeling how to navigate dynasties of snow. For he survives in both forests and imaginations, away from the dark hands of developers and myths of prophets. The fate of the land is the fate of man.


Dear students, the managing board and the academic senate reaffirm the commitment of the University of Siena in building for its students and with its students an ideal educational environment based on the daily interaction among students and between students and professors, an environment in which places, spaces and experiences are shared, and ideas, glimpses and emotions are continuously exchanged. Therefore, the University of Siena declares that all teaching activities of the next academic year will be delivered in presence, provided that the local and national epidemiological situation will not worsen. The governing bodies and the technical structures of the university are organizing and will be implementing all necessary instruments to allow the regular carrying out of teaching, respecting all measures enforced at the time for preventing the spread of the COVID-19 infection. Classrooms will be periodically sanitized and the physical distancing of students will be guaranteed. Individual protection equipment will be made available for students and court schedules will be redesigned on six days in order to use all time and spaces available. At the same time, and as long as it is needed, the university will continue to enforce a remote teaching as well as many other services in order to allow those students who will not be able to come to Siena, including international students, to follow their classes regularly. Every course and module of the first semester will be delivered digitally in synchronous or asynchronous manner, and classrooms will be duly equipped for that. The University of Siena is ready to welcome its students, old and new, at the beginning of the next academic year, in an appropriate setting. A university of long tradition and national and international reputation, offering first class services to the students located in a wonderful territory from the environment, the historical and the artistic point of view, and are able to provide an ideal context for a complete and safe educational experience.


Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chitchat Across the Pond. This is episode number 770 for June 22nd, 2023, and I'm your host, Alison Sheridan. If you're a fan of the Big Bang Theory, you may remember when Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler became only the fourth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. While that fictional show aired in 2019, in 2020, a fourth woman in real life actually was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. I have the great pleasure of introducing you to Steven, my friend, Dr. Andrea Gez, as our guest today on Chitchat Across the Pond. Welcome to the show, Andrea. Thanks, Alison. It's a pleasure to be here. I've been dreaming about this so long that last night I dreamt I won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Awesome. I was marching around telling me about Nobel Laureate here, Nobel Laureate here. So Steven, I've been lucky enough to hear Andrea give lectures about her work four times, once in Iceland and once in Antarctica, both while traveling through UCLA alumni. Go UCLA. Anyway, Andrea is currently a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA. And I'm really excited to talk about your work, but I want to start us off with kind of a softball question that I asked you on one of the trips. What's the difference between an astronomer and an astrophysicist? Snob appeal. Well, when I was in graduate school, I used to say it's the difference on an airplane between a short conversation with your neighbor and a long conversation. And in fact, you could ask between physics, astronomy and astrophysics. So the shortest would be physics. The longest is astronomy, and astrophysics is somewhere in the middle. So everybody thinks they understand what astronomy is. They've looked at the stars. All science. I like it. Well, in rereading your bio, I saw that your field is observational astrophysics. Now I've heard of experimental physicists, and I've heard of theoretical physicists. But what's an observational physicist? How do the three of those play together? Well, in studying the universe, we can't do controlled experiments. So in many fields, astronomy, call it astronomy and astrophysics, you can pick your flavor or geology, you can only observe the natural world. So that's why we call it observational astronomy. You can design your experiment, so you can talk about experiments, but they're not experiments in the traditional way in which you get to control and change the variables. So you do it by looking at different places. So that's what we call observation or an observer. So time and planets, you just hold still for a minute while I go to this other one. Exactly. Okay, that's interesting. I hadn't actually caught that. Now you were awarded the Nobel Prize for providing evidence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Is that a correct statement? Yes. Although if you'd be look at the citation, it's very carefully worded. It's for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy. And I think it's always interesting to see how the Nobel Prize is described and curated. And I think it's a nod to the fact that while we've improved the evidence for these supermassive black holes by a huge amount, like a factor of 10 million, there's still room to get even better evidence. So many people make that assumption and make that leap, which is you should interpret it as the discovery of a supermassive black hole, because it is the best evidence that we have to date. But the citation really does leave an opportunity for more recognition. Oh, that's kind of cool. I like that. Well, science, if nothing else, should be specific, right? It should be. Yeah, it is. Very. So now my audience is pretty nerdy. I've run a more complex version of chitchat across the pond. This is the light version, where we just discuss astrophysics.  And why is that important to us, the difference? So what is a black hole? You can start off with a really simple definition, which it's an object whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it, not even light. So that's actually the definition. And then we're going to talk about supermassive ones, and as you might imagine, they're really massive. And the reason we use that as the descriptor is that people thought about the idea of black holes that came from the evolution of stars. So they're roughly 10 times the mass of the sun. And the ones that we're talking about are almost a million to a billion times larger than that, and hence the supermassive. The origin is quite different, at least we think it's quite different. So we think those kind of black holes reside at the center of a galaxy, one supermassive black hole per galaxy. So it's not like there's a continuum of sizes of black holes, and at some point you cut it off and say, from here up. It's because they are formed at the center of the galaxy or vice versa, depending on your perspective. Right? Yeah. I mean, there's a gap. And in fact, people talk about the mysterious or elusive intermediate mass black holes, because there's a big gap between those two. And today, it's a big debate, but yeah, there's a huge gap in terms of the masses. So is the debate that we haven't developed experiments that can have observed them? Yes. So we can't prove they exist, but that does mean not existing? Right. So it turns out, we haven't found one. So that's a true statement. And the question is, is that because they don't exist or because they're hard to find? That the techniques that people are using, oddly enough, are insensitive in this regime, because actually kind of coming back to your original question about observational astrophysics, you have to look for the system that will reveal that kind of object. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Well, speaking of that, so there were theories that there were supermassive black holes or a theory that there was one at the center of our galaxy before you started looking or there wasn't? Oh, there were hints that these things might exist, but I would say the theories were not clear. So there was the notion that maybe these supermassive black holes do exist at the center of galaxies. There are some supermassive black holes that light up because matter's falling onto them. So remember, black holes themselves can't emit light. How do you detect them? So you see it go away? Well, you see it get this material that's very energetic right outside where light can escape. So there's this endemic phenomena that led people to think about these supermassive black holes. And these galaxies are called active galactic nuclei because their nuclei or centers are very active. And people started to talk about them. And there was a wide variety of ideas about how they might form in the sense that there was a debate about whether or not, if you're going to talk about supermassive black holes, did they form before the galaxy and seed the galaxy? Or did the galaxy form first and drive the formation of the black hole? And that was interesting. It's kind of like a chicken or the egg question. But today, we understand that that's actually not even the right framework. So most theory... It's a wrong question. It's a wrong question. Today, we see that the mass of these supermassive black holes seem incredibly well correlated with the mass of the central part of the galaxy over a large range of masses, so from a million to a billion, and over a large range of timescales, so the earliest galaxies in the universe to galaxies that are much closer to us. So we're looking at the more recent history of the universe. And that suggests that there has to be whatever formed one form the other. There's a synergy. And there has to be some feedback mechanism to keep that in lockstep. So to come back to your question about was there a theory? There was a theory that they might exist, but there wasn't clarity about how you would get them to form. OK, OK. Now, when you set out to do this, you set out a very long time ago to start figuring it out, and I believe you were told it can't be done. Lovely word, no.  Of course. I've been told no a lot in my life and I've been up learning to ignore it. So it like can't escape a black hole, supermassive or not. And I'm pretty sure electromagnetic energy of any kind can't escape either, correct? Correct. OK, so nothing escapes. So now here's the wide open question. How are you able to observe the existence of this theorized supermassive black hole? Actually, the way we've kind of gotten to this question is nice, because one thing that's different about our galaxy is it's not one of these active galactic nuclei. So there's no evidence from activity in the middle that pointed the way. But so in asking this, you know, in looking, we're looking to make sure that we understand these supermassive black holes exist and in all kinds of galaxies, because there's nothing particularly special about ours. And the way we've done this is to look at the gravitational influence from the black hole on the things around it, and in particular the stars. So gravity is going to force these stars to orbit, whatever mass is inside its orbit. So very much like the planets orbiting the sun, you can weigh the mass of the sun by measuring the motion or measuring the orbit in particular of these planets. So you do the same thing. Basically, that's what we're after. And in the beginning, we did it how many people think about these experiments, which is just to look at the speeds of stars. You look for things moving faster, closer to the center of the galaxy. And then you look for the evidence of the fall off of speed as you get further and further away in a very specific way. But we're inside the Milky Way, which makes it a little tricky, because we're looking at the Milky Way edge on, right? So you got to look through everything in the Milky Way towards the center of the galaxy. Right. It's a little tricky. Yeah, it's a little tricky. So it's in our backyard, but our backyard is messy. So we're in this galaxy, the Milky Way. So it's a flattened disk-like structure. The sun and our solar system is about halfway out from the center. And so we're trying to look towards the center of the galaxy. So in that plane, so not only are there a lot of stars in the plane, but there's a lot of dust. I like to say I'm in Los Angeles. I get the effect of dust. It's like smog. It's really good at blocking optical light because optical light has a wavelength that's roughly the size of the dust particles. So it just reflects off right off of an optical. Reflects or absorbs. I mean, those are the two mechanisms, but both things are actually happening. And what our trick is, is to go to the infrared. So to look at light that has a longer wavelength. So it's larger, roughly, than the size of the dust particles. And therefore can penetrate through all this dust that's in the plane of the galaxy. So having technology that allows us to perceive infrared radiation or light is super important. And that's a technology that's really undergone a huge advancements over the last 30 or 40 years. In terms of instrumentation that we have today. Yeah. Yeah. And night vision goggles. Those are actually taking pictures in the infrared. You glow at infrared wavelengths. One of my favorite things in one of your lectures was when you talked about being in the area of where all the aerospace engineers are and having been an engineer in the aerospace industry who worked on a helicopter night vision system. I'm like, yeah, that's it. That's right. I wanted to be at UCLA because UCLA really understood. Well, actually, let me back up for a sec. In part of the technology of how we did this is we're doing this with really big telescopes. And when I started my faculty job, the reason I wanted to be at UCLA was twofold, really. One is it gave me access to the largest telescope in the world, which is really what I wanted more than anything else. But it's co-owned by the University of California in Caltech. And what UCLA did, which is a campus of the University of California, they looked to invest in an area that was emerging right at the beginning when this telescope was opening up. This is Keck Observatory, it's out in Hawaii. And UCLA recognized that they're in the middle of Los Angeles, like the aerospace industry. So there's lots of investment in infrared technology here. So they hired a bunch of faculty interested in the science and technology associated with infrared work. So I'm part of that effort. I was the third hire. And I feel super lucky because that strategy means you have colleagues that you want to talk to. And it's both the people part and the technology part that has really enabled this project to be so, so successful. So let's talk about the Keck telescope itself. You said it's the largest telescope in the world. And you're including anything we put in space has to be smaller on account of you gotta lift it and everything, right? That's one of the stumbling blocks so far until we fix that gravity issue. So how big is the Keck telescope? So we talk about the size of telescopes by describing the diameter of the primary mirror, which is the element that collects all the light. So the diameter of the mirror for the Keck telescope is 10 meters, which is like the width of a tennis court, just to give you a sense of scale. Okay, so like the sensor on a digital camera, the bigger it is, the more light it can collect.  It's like a big opening. So the bigger the opening, the more light you're gonna collect or rain that you're gonna collect. So, yeah. And in this case, we're talking about infrared energy, but... Right, but that's actually not why, from my work, the Keck is so valuable. So there's two reasons that big telescopes help the business of studying the universe. First is this idea of being a light bucket. So it makes you very sensitive to faint things. But the second aspect is it helps your ability to see fine detail. So the larger your telescope, the finer the detail that you can see. So the analogy I'd like to give is, if you think about that technique, the painting technique of pointillism, where you paint rocks, and if you walk closer to the painting, you see the individual dots. So having a big telescope is like walking closer to the painting. Okay, okay. So you've got this giant telescope, we're doing infrared so we can see through the dust, but there's still problems since the telescope is on Earth. We've got to see through the atmosphere. And we're out in Hawaii, so we're up high on a volcano, and maybe not a lot of smog in Hawaii. Also plus. Still got atmosphere to deal with. Oh yeah, so the atmosphere makes that second attribute of seeing fine detail, not so easy to achieve, it's the atmosphere distorts our images. So rather than being nice and crisp, they're blurry. There are two ways of thinking about this. The atmosphere is like a river that's moving over across the telescope. And that's like a river of water when you're trying to see a pebble at the bottom. A lot of my work is focused on how do you undo the blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere so you can get back to that promised resolution of these really big telescopes. Now one of my, as a mechanical engineer, who worked with voice coil actuators to move mirrors, and I worked for Hughes Aircraft Company, and I'm pretty sure this is a correct statement. I think we invented the laser. Wow. Your next part of explaining of how you compensate for this waviness of the atmosphere with lasers just warms my little mechanical engineer's heart. I can see why it's so much fun to talk to you, Allison. We resonate on so many levels. Yeah, so the technology like the infrared detectors has evolved a lot in terms of how can you do this correction business? And so when I started, we used a very simple technique which was much more software intensive. So you took lots of short exposures and then you, through data analysis and clever code, you could figure out what the atmosphere was doing versus what the underlying object is. But today. That's just kind of an estimate, right? It's no, it's predictive. The process is called deconvolution and we would be the analogy or good analogy. You take thousands of frames. So one, this is not totally accurate. So this is a total cheat, but I'm gonna use it anyway. You know the underlying object is constant, but the atmosphere is always changing. So by taking thousands, you can figure out what the atmosphere, I mean, all these things are estimates. Actually, that's fair. Actually, Alison, you're totally right. Let me just back up and say, yes, it's an estimate. You try to model what the atmosphere is doing versus and take it out. But today, there's all this advancement with hardware. So mechanical engineers and then the laser, as you put, are really key here. So the technique is called adaptive optics. So it's a way of putting a mirror that's segmented in the path of the light coming in from hitting your primary mirror between that and your detector.  It deforms in a way that's trying to counteract the effects of the atmosphere. The mental picture I like to have here is if you think about a circus funhouse mirror that makes you look all warpy, that you're trying to put a second mirror that has the opposite shape or the conjugates shape so that you look flat again. But that first warp is changing a thousand times a second. So you got to keep up and figure, well, first of all, figure out what the atmosphere is doing and then continually update it. So as you mentioned, this laser business was the trick because you got to look at something bright. And it turns out there's not that many things that are bright enough in the sky to do this trick. So you look at something you understand through the atmosphere and then you use that to say, I know how to make that deformable mirror move. Think it's like 1% of the sky has a natural star that's bright enough to do this game. So you, I mean, this is an incredible fluke of nature that up at 90 kilometers, there's a very thin layer of sodium atoms from all the meteorites. So when people like going on camping and see the shooting stars and we say, make a wish, I'm thinking, thank goodness, that's re-supplying my laser. A sodium layer? My sodium layer. So you shine a sodium laser that's tuned to a transition of these little atoms and you make those atoms shine like an artificial, well, it is an artificial star that you can then look at and correct. And it's a star right where you want it to be. Right where you want it to be. Not having to point towards the 1%, which isn't maybe where you need to look. Like 1%, that's just too little. I want to look at the center of the galaxy and there's no, and it doesn't work there very well. So that was transformative when that technology became scientifically mature, is I guess how I would put it. And that happened in roughly 2005 at Keck Observatory. That was the first big telescope for which this really worked well. That is, I love everything about that. That is absolutely terrific. The steering mirror that I worked on was on this helicopter night vision system and it was called the Image Motion Compensation Mirror. So it was four little voice coil actuators like what's pushing on your mirror. But I was simply rotating a mirror to take out the vibration of the helicopter. Wow, that's so cool. We were destined to have this conversation. It's so similar. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, now let's talk about what you've found. You look at the center of the galaxy, you can see clearly. I can see clearly now. And now, what did you see? We saw stars. And in terms of not getting the initial telescope time, there were three critiques. One is that the technique wouldn't work. So it did. And then the second is you wouldn't see stars and you wouldn't see the move. So three. So it just was so exciting when we first went to the telescope and got our first images. It was clear that things worked and there were so many stars. And then by year two, because you'd basically would go back once a year in the beginning years, and these stars were hauling. I mean, these stars were moving a small fraction of the speed of light. And anytime you can talk in those units, we're moving pretty fast. And that's important because you can watch them for a long enough time to see are they going around something? Well, in the beginning, we only proposed to do a three year project. This is the project that was turned down to begin with because we were only looking for speeds. So you don't know how long the orbits would be because that depends on whether or not there is a black hole and how massive it is. So the beginning thing is, let's just see if you can see fast moving stars in some part of the area and then a fall off of those speeds away from that location. So where the black hole is, it's gonna peak. So you don't know exactly where the black hole is.  And what's so exciting is it was so clear. I mean, it could not have been clear that things were moving incredibly fast and the speeds fell off with the exact relationship. And it's very simple relationship that goes one over the square root of the distance. So in other words, further slower. Okay. And at that point, you can estimate how massive the black hole is. Already at that point. Already from that, in a statistical way. So you had to make assumptions about the kinds of orbits that these stars are on. And the great thing about science, I mean, I love this, I mean, you have to love this aspect of science. It's negatively constructed in the sense that people, our job is to be cynical. So what else could it be? And so the minute we put out this paper, people started pushing back and saying, well, it could be this or it could be that or this other force could make these things move fast. And of course, what do you do as an observer or an experimentalist? You say, we got to do more. We got to go to the next thing. And freshman physics or first year college physics will tell you the next thing that's gonna happen is these things are gonna go from moving on straight lines because you're just measuring a small segment of the orbit to accelerating. So velocity turns into acceleration. So you say, let's see those accelerations. And sure enough, that was the first three years we got the velocities, two more years we get accelerations. So that's because you were able to observe them longer. Longer. So we basically just asked for more telescope time.  And at that point, already with the velocities, the evidence for the existence of supermassive black holes, if you believe that that's what we were seeing had gone up by a factor of a thousand compared to any other evidence for a black hole anywhere, supermassive black hole, anywhere in the universe. So that was the late nineties. And then the accelerations told us that the orbits could be as short as 10 years. Now you're talking human lifetime for orbits. Because in the beginning you don't know. And just like, I mean, there's a reason why people wouldn't have accepted the idea of orbits to begin with. Our sun takes 200 million years to go all the way around. Like, you're not gonna watch that. We don't live long enough. You're never gonna get past that straight line segment. Exactly. We're on straight lines here. So it was super exciting to realize that this was a reasonable experiment to propose. And so we kept going. And indeed made that next leap of making those measurements and measuring the stars. And now we have thousands of them, but it's the closest ones, those speedsters that are really gonna drive your knowledge. Me, you need everything, it turns out. They all play together. Everybody has to act like a team to get everything registered. But the power of the experiment comes from the really fast-moving stars that are on the shortest orbit. So those things go hand in hand. And my favorite star, as you know, S02, goes around every... Do you have a T-shirt that says S02 on it? I need a T-shirt. I don't have a T-shirt. I'd like that, like no other explanation. But if somebody knows, they know. S02, are you in the know? Of course, it's also sulfur dioxide and a massive group of a group. But that's the point. And then you'll get all those nerds. So what is special about S02 then? Well, it goes around every 16 years and it tells you that there's 4 million times the mass of the sun inside a region that's the size of our solar system. And that... Wait, wait, say that again. 4 million times the mass of our sun inside something the size of our solar system? Yeah. And that's amazing. If you think about like our own solar system where the mass of that is one. And so in this region of the space, it's a million times higher or 4 million times higher. And in fact, if you think about density, that's really enhanced the inferred, what I'm going to call dark matter density. Okay. Up by a factor of 10 million. And that's why we say the evidence for a supermassive black hole goes up by a factor of 10 million. So the first factor of 1,000 came when we got the velocities and the next factor of 10,000 comes from orbits. And the thing I do like to say, like just to, I mean, that's a huge number. Like think about anything in your life that you'd like more of. I mean, I don't know. Free time, salary. And if you could multiply it by a factor of 10,000, you would notice. Okay, 10 million. 10 million. 10 to the 7, 10 million, yeah. And that change was in what length of time that you found that? Well, 1995 was the beginning of the experiment. And you could sort of say step one, the velocities took the first three years. And then the next step got announced in the early 2000s. And then of course it just keeps getting better and better. So we kept going. This time next year. Well, the way I like to think about it today is that every time you go through what I call a turning point, which is like the closest approach and the furthest approach or half the orbit, you get a chance to go deeper into the physics. So now we're in the business of testing how gravity works near a supermassive black hole. And kind of while, like if it really is a black hole, you should be able to see those kinds of effect. And in 2018, those became, the first ones of those things became visible. And now we're kind of on the next stretch. And again, things are emerging and emerging in a way we could not have anticipated. I think one of the things that you talked about that just really struck me was how delighted you were when you found out what we were wrong about. Oh, yeah. About the age of the stars orbiting around this supermassive black hole. That to find out you're wrong is like, ooh, yay, new puzzles. Yeah, it's like being a kid in a candy shop. There's so much more to do. And I guess it's one of the things I love about technology advancements is that it gives you a new opportunity to see, well, to derive new information that you didn't have before. So in this case, as we were talking about at the beginning of our conversation, we were in that early technique where it was sort of make your computer do all the work. You could only take images, which means you didn't know what kind of stars you were looking at. They were just bright spots. So the other thing about the more advanced technology of adaptive optics, which allows you to integrate for more than a 10th of a second, you can take spectra, so you can break up, look at the components of the light, which is what allows you to figure out, well, what kinds of stars are we looking at? What's the temperature of these stars? And that's what allows us to figure out from, I mean, it is from models to compare to models, how old they are. And it was just so striking how much those early observations upset the apple cart. I mean, things just did not make any sense. Never dawned on me that this idea that I like mysteries, that scientists in general like mysteries is a surprise. I was talking to some reporter who just said, you seem most happy when you're confused. Yes, because otherwise I have nothing to do. It is absolutely true. I mean, it is fun to solve the mystery, but it's also the process of figuring it out. And in some sense, the hardest part of the work is figuring out what is an interesting question. Oh, okay. So having observations that say things aren't working points you to your next step, to your next endeavor. And figuring out what that question should be so that you can figure out what experiments to do next, what observations to make. What to do, yeah. I mean, how do you, exactly, how do you advance the frontier of knowledge? I mean, you can be very deliberate. Like I need something and therefore I'm gonna try to develop it, but so much of basic research. You're just trying to understand how things work. And many times people say, well, why should we care? I mean, I get that question all the time, but there's lots of examples. Like if you look at your cell phone, almost all the technologies in there started as basic research where people were saying, why should we care? Like this is a good time. Right, satellites, GPS. Yeah, for a few. Electricity. Some of those things. Now, Steve asked me to ask you a question that might require a lot more background than we have time to cover, but he did wanna know whether any of your observations have advanced our understanding of dark matter. Now, you bleakly referred to dark matter density, but...  The definition is really simple. What it is is not. The definition of dark matter is that it's matter. And matter just means it interacts gravitationally, masses of track. And dark means it emits low light. So dark matter simply means you have matter and it's not gonna emit any light. So black hole is an example. In other words, we can't find it. Well, you can if you were just a graph.  Okay. With a camera, like an infrared camera, an optical camera, you pick your favorite kind of light x-rays, gamma rays, you're not gonna see it. So the stuff that's emerging right now that I just alluded to, if we're right, and of course we could be totally, we could be making a mistake. I mean, that's always the interesting thing about discovery when things don't work or something's emerging that you didn't expect, it's either a discovery or a mistake. And you have to work really hard to convince yourself which one. And that's part of the discipline of science. And in our case, I'm still nervous, but I'm kind of excited as well because we can't make this result go away. So the shape of the orbit over time, the orientation of these orbits should shift. Okay. It affects both of how gravity works near a black hole, like how Einstein predicts it as opposed to Newton, as well as if there's extended dark matter. And you expect that, actually. There are theories that say the black hole should be surrounded by little smaller things that also don't emit light. And there's two possibilities, but the orbit going the other direction would be a detection or discovery of dark matter around the black hole. So we're excited about it. We may be sensing it. And that's what we're working super, super, super hard on. So you're saying right now, early observations that are emerging is that the orbits are orienting themselves in the opposite direction of what you would expect if there was no dark matter. Yeah, around the black hole. Yeah, exactly.  So you've got little hairs tickling on the back of your neck thinking about it. Absolutely. And in terms of where this conversation is gone, closest approach happened last in 2018. And so you expect the signal to start emerging post-2018 and to become strongest or your sensitivity to it is gonna be sort of optimized in 2026. Because that's eight years. I can do math and talk at the same time. So that's where we are today in 2023 is that climbing out to see, and we're kind of right where we expect to be in terms of the sort of the next stage or the evolution of this kind of work. Oh, that is so exciting. This is really, really cool. I love this. I'm gonna switch gears on us a little bit.  You still teach undergraduate astronomy, is that correct? That's right. And why do you do that? Well, for a couple of reasons. Well, when I started teaching at UCLA, I was really, you know, very few women around in my field. And I really felt strongly that one of the most effective things that one can do as a woman doing science is to be a role model, because I think role models are so important. And I'm not an expert in this or topic. So the most effective thing I could do is just teach at the undergrad level, at the introductory under- To be seen. To be seen, to be just somebody who doesn't look like what we think of as a scientist. And I think that's healthy, both for the young men and the young women and anybody who's not part of the mainstream demographics where you are. So that's sort of how I got into teaching at the introductory level. And I also discovered I love it. I mean, it's really fun to teach the undergrads. Today, my favorite class to teach is the Introductory Astronomy and Astrophysics for majors, because you're kind of hitting them early on and you have the opportunity to encourage them into the research world, to not only teach them the disciplinary stuff, like how, you know, another tool is the homework, but also to encourage them to get this opportunity that they have at a research university. So that's, you know, it's part of the wonderful thing about doing research in a university setting. You know, our job is to create new knowledge by our research, but it's also to create new knowledge through creating new scientists. So you work in the farm team is what you're saying. Yes, I guess I am. And, you know, I always try to recruit some of the students from the class into the team. And that, you know, that's it. Wait, wait, you didn't do this all single-handedly? Oh yeah, no, absolutely not. There's been a big group working with me and there's a huge team. Right now, you know, we started with a team of three. Now we're about two dozen core members and because they're students, they keep graduating. So since this project, we've had roughly 70 people who have been involved in a meaningful way over the 29 years that we've been going at this. How exciting for all of them. Now, there's so many stories about actually getting the Nobel Prize, but one of my favorites was your description of, you got a call from another woman when you won another woman who had won the Nobel Prize in physics. Yes, I did. That was one of my favorite communications with somebody that day. So this is Donna who won it in 2018. And she said, welcome to the club. Now it's a club of two, which is the number of women who won the physics Nobel Prize who are alive. That is just so sad. Yeah, it is sad, but it's also amazing. But it doubled. It doubled. I mean, in terms of the number of women who have received the Nobel Prize in physics, we're now at 2%, but I have to say, boy, the standards were high with Marie Curie winning the first one. I mean, she won two and her daughter also won one.  Oh, well, I would consider you're a rock star as well. I think one of my favorite things is that you are so young that you have so much runway coming to delight us with science. And that really excites me.  I think it's just amazing. Thanks, Allison. I'm super excited about the future. And I look forward to what's in store. Now I've put a link in the show notes to the UCLA Galactic Center Group. That's where people should go if they wanna go learn more about the science, more about the technology. There's even a really cool animation of SO2 going around. And you can download it for your own so it can be your desktop screensaver if you want. That's true, lots of other pictures, yes. Yeah, very, very cool. Andrea, thank you so much for spending your time with us. Like I said, been looking forward to this for a long time and it was even more fun than I'd hoped. No, well, for me too. Thanks, Allison. It's a pleasure talking to you. Wow, was that the interview of a lifetime or what? I gotta tell you, I am on such a high from this. Andrea's just so great at explaining such complex things and I love how much she enjoys her work. She was this much fun all of the time we were in Iceland and all of the time we were in Antarctica with her and I can't stop grinning at how much fun that was. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Chinchat Across the Pon Light. Did you notice there weren't any ads in the show? That's because this show is not ad supported. It's supported by you. If you learned something, or maybe you were just entertained, consider contributing to the PodFeed podcast. You can do that by going over to podfeed.com and look for the big red button that says support the show. When you click that button, you're gonna find different ways to contribute. If you'd like to do a one-time donation, you can click the PayPal button. If you wanna make a recurring contribution, click the weekly Patreon button. You're only charged when I publish an episode of the NoCillicast, which let's face it, it's every single week, so I don't charge Patreon for Chinchat Across the Pon Light or programming by stealth episodes. Another way to contribute is to record a listener contribution. It's a great way to help the NoCillicast ways learn from you and takes a little bit of the load off of me doing all the work. If you wanna contact me for any reason, you can email me at alison at podfeed.com and I really encourage you to follow me on mastodon at podfeed at chaos.social. 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Let's talk about complex division. We've learned how to do additions, attraction, multiplication of complex numbers. How does one do division? Well, before we can introduce division, we're gonna introduce something we call the complex conjugate of a complex number. So let's say that we have some complex numbers, z equals a plus bi, then we define its conjugate to be the complex number where you switch the sign of the imaginary part. So plus goes to minus and minus goes to plus. And you'll have to denote this by drawing a bar over the complex number. So as you can see here, if I take two plus three i, its complex conjugate is just two minus three i. You switch the imaginary part. And then the complex conjugate of negative six minus two i would be negative six plus two i. You just switch the sign of the complex conjugate, of the imaginary number. Positive goes to negative, negative goes to positive. When you calculate the conjugate, you ignore the sign of the real part. If the real part's positive, it stays positive. If the real part's negative, it stays negative.  And why do we care about this? Well, this is gonna be helpful as we do complex division here because of the following property. If you take a complex number and you multiply by its conjugate, this is actually equal to a sum of squares of its real imaginary parts. And you can see this very quickly. If you take z times z bar, let me switch to a different color here, you're gonna take a plus bi and you multiply by its conjugate a minus bi. If we foiled this out by the rules of complex multiplication, you're gonna get a squared minus a bi.  And you'll notice that there's a negative a bi and a plus a bi, they're gonna cancel out. And so this then gives you a squared minus bi squared. But as we recall, i is the squared of negative one, which means i squared is equal to negative one. And so then this expression becomes a squared minus a negative b, a negative b squared there, which then becomes the a squared plus b squared like we wanted to. So when you multiply a complex number by its conjugate, you always get a sum of real numbers, a sum of squares. And so let me show you how you can use this to compute complex quotients. If you have a fraction, a complex fraction, like one over three plus four i, the strategy that we're gonna employ is you're gonna take the denominator, which in this case is three plus four i, and you're gonna multiply the top and bottom of the fraction by its complex conjugate. So you get, you're gonna multiply top and bottom by three minus four i. Notice how I switched the sign right here. Then you're gonna multiply the top and bottom using this complex conjugate. One times anything will just be that number. So we get three minus four i. And then in the denominator, since you're multiplying a complex number by its conjugate like we saw before, you're gonna get the real part squared plus the imaginary part squared, three squared plus four squared. So you get three minus four i. Then this will be over nine and 16, which adds together to be 25. So we get three minus four i, and this will sit above 25 just right there, which we couldn't break this up into a complex number. This looks like three over 25 minus four over 25 i. And so this then would be the reciprocal of the complex numbers. And I'll leave it up to you to check if you take three plus four i, and you multiply it by three over 25 minus four over 25 i. This product is equal to one, thus showing that we did find the reciprocal of the complex number. Let's do a few more examples of this. If you had one plus four i over five minus 12 i, the idea would be multiply the top by the conjugate, which in this case should be five plus 12 i. You don't really have to worry about the denominator because the denominator, when you pull it out, you'll always get the real part squared plus the imaginary part squared. That's always what it's gonna be. In the numerator, it will take a little bit more effort as we foil this.  Combining like terms now in the top, you're going to get five minus 48, which is a negative 43. 12 i plus 20 i is a 32 i. In the denominator, we get 25 plus 144. And so always writing these in its real and imaginary part, you're gonna get negative 43 over 169, and then you're gonna get 32 over 169 i. When you're working with complex numbers, it's always our goal to write this as a real part and an imaginary part. Now let's do another example. Take two minus three i divided by four minus three i. So we're gonna multiply the top and bottom by the conjugate of the denominator, four plus three i. The numerator, you'll foil it out. So two times four is eight. Two times three i is a six i. Negative three i times four is a negative 12 i. And then you're gonna get negative three i times three i. Three times three is nine. i squared is a negative one, and since there's already negative, it becomes a plus right here. In the denominator, you're gonna get a sum of squares, four squared, which is 16, plus three squared, which is nine, like so. Combining like terms, eight and nine are gonna give us a 17. 16 plus nine is a 25 for the denominator. And then six minus 12 is gonna give us a negative six over 25 i. So it's not so bad. And then maybe we do one more example just to really send it home for us, right? If you wanna divide by five plus two i, you're gonna times top and bottom by the conjugate, which would be five minus two i. Foil out the numerator. So you get two times five, which is 10. Two times negative two i, which is a negative four i. Negative three i times five, which is a negative 15 i. And then this next one, you're gonna get negative three times negative two, which is a six, and then i squared is negative one still. And then this will sit above five squared, which is 25, plus two squared, which is four. And so combining like terms, 10 take away six is a four. This will sit above 29. And then negative four minus 15 is a negative 19 sitting above 29, and then you times that by i, which then gives us the quotient right here. And so it's always our goal to write this as a real part plus an imaginary part. Every complex number can be written as a plus bi. And so we're gonna break up the fraction when we do division, spread the denominator across the real part and the imaginary part, like we've been doing in these examples here.


What's going on everybody, Astos here and in today's video, we're going to be doing an M1 Finance portfolio update. This is actually the third episode to the M1 Finance portfolio series and for those of you guys that don't know what I'm doing, well I'm building a portfolio from absolute scratch showing you guys all my trades, all of my activity, all the buys, all of the sells and the reasoning behind it so you can understand how I personally build portfolios from scratch and how I maintain them and rebalance them, you know, just from my personal perspective. So if you're new to the channel and you want to keep along with this particular series and with other content that I produce, feel free to go down below, subscribe to the channel, hit that like button and let's get right into it. Alrighty guys, so here we are in my M1 Finance portfolio and the total value of the invested money right now is $208.06. And if you look up here, I have $85 sitting in cash waiting for opportunities to buy more stock and that's bringing my total account value right now to about $290 to about $295. And since the inception of this portfolio, you guys can see July 2nd is the first day that I started buying stocks in this portfolio. The total gain is $3.36 and the portfolio is up 2.16% and hypothetically if I got this return every single month, which is very unrealistic because the stock market is unpredictable, but let's say I got this return every month over a 12 month span, that's a 24% return. But again, that's hypothetical that is not going to happen because one month the market can be up 5%, the next month it can be down 2% and it's really like a roller coaster, right? But I figured I'd just say that a quick little hypothetical scenario and since the second episode of this series, there's actually been some activity in this portfolio that I want to share with you all, but before we do get to that, let's take a look at my holdings very quickly for all of you that don't know what I'm currently holding in this portfolio. So we can see 3M is my number one position right now at a cost basis at $50, that's how much I have in 3M and by the way, you can actually have partial shares with M1 Finance. You can see here, the only company that I own a full share of is AT&T at 1.03 shares, but after 3M, I actually bought Johnson & Johnson this past week and the past two weeks I believe and we'll talk about that here in a couple of minutes. We have Altria here, ticker symbol MO at 0.72 shares, AT&T again at 1.03 shares and Alibaba and VEA, the Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets Fund. Those are my bottom two positions right now and if we go back to the portfolio actually so we can see this pie, you guys can see the pie that I personally have here that I personally created. You can see the target goals here are 20% for 3M, 20% for Altria, 20% for AT&T, 15% Alibaba, 15% Johnson & Johnson and 10% FTSE Developed Markets and to be completely honest with you all, I kind of want to alter this a bit, bring Altria a bit down a little bit less in the portfolio, maybe 10% and I kind of want to bring Johnson & Johnson up a bit, maybe 20% and then maybe bump up AT&T a little bit more as well or 3M because I do actually think 3M is still at a pretty good value point right now. But if we go back you can see the order here and the targets and what the percentage in the portfolio actually is for each individual holding here. You can see the actual stake of MMM right now is 24.6%, Johnson & Johnson is 21%, Altria is 17%, AT&T 17% and BABA and VA are around 10% and honestly I want both of these roughly at about 10% so over the past couple of weeks since I've started this portfolio I've slowly been starting to structure it and build it to a percentage value that I kind of want for each of these stocks and for those of you guys that don't know it takes a long time to build a portfolio, it doesn't just happen overnight, it doesn't even happen in a couple of weeks or a couple of months, it takes years because if you're looking at particular stocks and they're overvalued you're not just going to buy them because you want them in your portfolio, you're going to wait until they dip and then you'll start adding into them, you'll shave off some percentage off of other stocks and then you'll add into the new position and that's kind of what I've been doing right. In the past couple of weeks we saw Johnson & Johnson take a big dip and I've been wanting to add money into Johnson & Johnson and let's just get into that portion of the video. Let's talk about Johnson & Johnson and if we go to my activity you guys can see here I believe this is the first day that I bought Johnson & Johnson or no this is when I bought a bit more AT&T $15 of AT&T that's one of the moves that I made but I started buying Johnson & Johnson on the 16th I believe I put $20 in, yep $20 Johnson & Johnson on July 16th and then if we go to the next day here or rather the next trade on the 24th of July I bought $25 more of Johnson & Johnson and you can see the $25 purchase was at around $129 I bought about .19 shares of J&J and the previous purchase was at about $20 again and I bought around let's see what price I think it was in the 130s if I'm not mistaken yeah you can see here was at about $133.03 I bought .15 shares of Johnson & Johnson and again guys I'm buying these stocks when I think they're approaching a pretty good value and right now Johnson & Johnson is facing a lot of litigation and if we just go to their stock here and go to the think or swim you know platform and look at their stock you can see ever since you know the middle of July they went from 141 down to about $128 and won the stock dipped and for those of you guys that don't know when a stock dips their dividend yield goes up so their dividend yield was at around a 3% starting out and I find that very very attractive because in my opinion Johnson & Johnson is one of the safest dividend paying companies out there right there their payout ratio right now is about you know 45% 40% they've been growing their dividend for so many years it's ridiculous you know my personal stake in this company is really to be a long-term cash cow position where the dividend is being reinvested compounded and honestly I want to one day live off the cash flow right that's the ideology behind this particular investment and I view this as a company that's going to be around for many many years and the further it dips down guys I have that $85 in cash as you guys saw I'm going to be buying more and more of Johnson & Johnson so if we're going back to Safari and very quickly let me just spill out some news for those of you guys that don't even know why Johnson & Johnson fell because obviously it's due to a negative catalyst and I have some notes here Johnson & Johnson again it's currently under litigation criminal investigation for allegedly concealing cancer risks of baby powder investigation is being done to determine whether or not Johnson & Johnson lied to the public about the baby powder's cancer risks there are several civil lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson from customers claiming their talcum baby powder caused their ovarian cancer Johnson & Johnson has been sued more than 13,000 times for failing to inform customers that it's talcum powder contained asbestos which causes a form of cancer called mesothelioma so right now that is the negative news surrounding Johnson & Johnson and that ended up tanking the stock and do you guys remember a couple of months ago the same similar news about asbestos came out the stock dropped and ultimately it recovered right so that's kind of how I'm viewing this you know the stock dropped it opened up that short-term buying opportunity as the media has you know negative lights on Johnson & Johnson and I believe you know obviously the litigation it's still going to affect the company no doubt about it but I believe in a couple of weeks a couple of months Johnson & Johnson it's going to slowly recover as the media you know puts attention elsewhere you know as people start you know just kind of forgetting about the the news but again the litigation it's still going to be there which can come back and affect Johnson & Johnson stock in the next couple of months right it can very well drop the stock 5-10 percent again and if it does I'll be viewing that as another buying opportunity right that's kind of how this goes guys you have to be patient with your cash when when opportunities come about you start buying in and that's what I ended up doing so at this point guys my main focus with this portfolio is to focus on the value that I personally see out there in the markets and the value that I see right now is in pretty much the stocks that I own here especially in my top four I see a lot of value in 3M a lot of value in Johnson & Johnson right now and a lot of value in MO and AT&T and these are holdings that I plan on holding for a long time so compound interest can kick in and the dividend can really just continue to grow and beat inflation and just really skyrocket my returns over the next couple of decades and years guys and I'm sure a lot of you all are thinking like why don't you have any growth stocks why don't you have any tech companies in your portfolio like like pure tech companies and honestly guys a lot of the stocks that are in the tech sector that I really like they're pretty overvalued right now in my opinion I'm not going to be going out there and just buying these tech stocks just to have them in my portfolio I kind of want to get them at a discount right I kind of want to get them at a 10-15-20% dip right if we get another you know December of 2018 where their markets were down 20% from their peaks you know if we get that again I will be buying more tech stocks guys trust me and you'll see it in these portfolio updates but until then you know until the markets take a dip right now the S&Ps at 30-27 guys that's an all-time high you know until these markets take a sizable dip until these tech stocks you know you know like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google until some of these come down 5-10-15% I'm going to be focusing on ones that are down 20-25% and although their businesses might not be growing as fast they have a strong and steady dividend and those companies are the ones that I have here in my top four right 3M, J&J, Altria and AT&T and obviously Baba is growth too that's a huge growth stock and that's about 10% so you can't really say I have zero exposure to growth right now I do 10% and Baba and VEA has some growth in there as well in some of the stocks it invests in but that's pretty much it guys for this portfolio update for the third episode let me know down below in the comment section what you thought about this M1 Finance update and if you guys want to join M1 Finance it's a discount broker you don't pay each time you buy each time you sell you can have fractional shares so you can own Amazon Google if you only have $100 to invest and you can rebalance your portfolio and pretty much have this pie the way you set it you know invest automatically for you if you want it to I personally have auto invest off but if you want to auto invest all your cash M1 would automatically invest my entire cash balance you can do that if you want to but me personally I want to be more hands-on but for the people out there that want to be more passive that is what you can do and if you want to sign up for M1 Finance guys the link is down below and you do get 20 bucks for signing up and once you fund the account so I hope you all enjoyed the video leave a like subscribe join the discord group chat and the facebook group and follow me on twitter and instagram I'll catch you all in the next video thanks again for watching it means a lot to me peace out


On the topic of social media, have you ever slid into someone's DMs? Yeah, I direct message Oshay Jackson Jr. to get him to do this movie. Really? Yeah, that's how we cast him on Twitter through DM. So that was some kind of weird art imitates life, imitates art kind of moment. That's amazing. Yeah, that's how I got into contact with him. That seems way too simple. I know, but sometimes people respond. And he just said, like, yeah, sure. I mean, he actually ended up, I gave him my number. And then a few days later, he texted me, yo, what's up? It's Batman. And he hadn't even read the script. So it was all meant to be. How perfect. I know. What is your most used emoji? I would say the knife emoji, the dagger. I tend to throw a couple of those, like three in a row. If someone says something I don't like, or if someone's late, I'll just throw three daggers at them. Oh my god. Yeah, it sends a really strong message. You have a really good Twitter handle in your bag.  I have. My first AOL screen name ever when I was in seventh grade was Rad Beaver. Didn't know what that meant at the time. I just was a really big animal lover. So that didn't go down well in the chat rooms. I would have thought it would have been really popular. I was really popular, but not for the right reason. It was traumatizing.