We shouldn't think about the Kusnetz Curve, but I thought about it anyway because it seems like the poor country's inequality is going up, but the three million countries are sort of peaked or maybe going down. So isn't that process like structural change, homogenization of the labor market, earning education, is more equalized, sucking up over the surplus labor that is out there? Aren't that forces that help explain what's going on and might continue driving inequality down? Or what is your prediction, is it going to go up again or what? There was a question in the back, Ricardo. Thank you. Ricardo Santos from WANU Wider, I'm going to direct it to Neri, please, on Brazil. We conducted a study, it's also published as a WANU Wider paper with Nala Kibir, and we looked into a group inequalities. One of the things that we noticed compared to the beginning of Lula's mandate and the end of Mid-Dilma's was that there was a reduction in group inequality intersecting them, but there was a story on the labor market because there wasn't change in how the labor market was segmented, so there was still a concentration of least off groups, or less better off groups in the less paid occupations. What happened was that those less paid occupations got a boost because the minimum wage got higher, because of formalization of the labor market, and that kind of pinpointed that there was a limit to the reduction of inequality, a structural limit to the reduction of inequality in Brazil, and we had the hope that intergenerationally there would be something, some hope. Unfortunately, I don't think the hope was, with your information, the hope is not that obvious. So the question is, is there a floor in Brazil, or how can we break it? Okay, Luiz up here, and then one question here, and then... Hi, this is a superb session. Congratulations, Finn, and all the presenters. I have a quick question about gender inequality. There was a mixed treatment of it in the presentation. India and South Africa in particular seemed to leave it out. Pete, it would seem to me that your data set in particular could allow you to look very much at household and individual inequality and tease out some of the gender inequality, and certainly Murray, your focus on labor income, might help. And I found your focus on demographics interesting and could benefit from a gender story as well. If you have comments on, if you found something, just let, you can let me know. Let us know now, or you can tell me afterwards. Thanks, we'll take Andrea first to just finish off here. Oh, okay, you can go back there, don't worry. Which one is not? Yeah, thank you very much. My name is Bola Woutide in Nigeria, but I work in Mali with the World Vegetable Center. I want to ask a question on the presentation of Shili, basically on China. It's very interesting to me to know that, because to my own understanding, I know that poverty and income inequality are closely related and highly correlated, particularly with respect to Africa. So it's very interesting to me to know how China was able to achieve a reduction in poverty in the midst of high inequality. Thank you. Likewise, a very, very interesting session. Now, I want to start from Murray. Now, the labor market in South Africa probably is an equalizing because of the structure of the economy. The people working in the mining sector are highly paid, and the people working in the other sectors. And this, I don't know, unless the structure of the economy won't change. I mean, this is an hypothesis. Then this will stay with you forever. Now, the second question, which is... This is very optimistic. Well, I mean, I don't know. Everything happens. Now, the other thing is that there were all these corrections for tax returns. Now, I raised the question yesterday. Now, in India, there are the non-resident Indians, and they don't pay taxes in India. And in Brazil, the story of Verdi that I mentioned yesterday, according to him, the incomes of the people who hold assets abroad, it's not that they don't pay taxes in Brazil, and they don't come up in the survey. They don't pay, they don't even appear in the national income. So that's our larger day because if this is taken into account, then Zoukman and Dikumana and others have done all these efforts. And in Africa, for instance, the Nikumana says that the total assets held abroad by the Africans are equal to the total public debt of Africa. So it's a large amount of sources. And these are very unequally distributed. So if the levels of inequality in the giants may be higher. And the last point is an observation for what the Pangyol issue, may my friend issue, because in South Africa, transfers and in Brazil transfers are highly redistributed. In China, they are regressive. So there is a large, large degree of policy improvement there, I think. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Other questions? Other questions? Okay. And we'll turn to the panelists. Take them in the same order as the presentation. So Pete first, Nishi, Marcelo and then Murray. Yes, sir. Thanks, Louise. I have to apologize for not having put up a slide on gender issues, because that's clearly a critical group as well across which we can look at differences. And the evidence that we have is kind of a mixed picture. I mean, at the national level, what you're seeing is, you know, there are improvements, for example, in education outcomes and so on, the gaps between men and women are declining. But one very worrying development that's observable in the data as well is that labor force participation of women is actually declining over time in India. And this picture of a kind of, this kind of mixed picture is not just something that occurs at the aggregate level from the secondary data sources, but then there's also, there's a nuanced and very mixed picture that occurs at the very micro level as well. So it's an important dimension of inequality. It's evolving, but it doesn't seem to be diminishing as such. And the question of the non-resident Indians and the wealth that's held abroad, I guess I don't really know exactly how we should treat non-resident Indians, whether they should be part of the Indian population or they should be part of the population where they are resident. But if it's a question of the wealth that's held by Indians, that's held abroad, I mean, that I recognize is obviously something that would potentially be a big factor. And I also see how that wouldn't be captured by these tax records data. So that would remain an important omission. It might be reflected to some extent in this exercise that we haven't, I wasn't able to report on when we're looking at trying to fill in this top incomes gap by looking not at tax returns, but looking at sort of house price data and try to see if we can get a handle on sort of wealth of the very top end by looking at the house prices at the very top end of the house price distribution. So we're doing some work on that at the moment. Building on an exercise that is done along similar lines in Egypt that revealed actually a very considerable, was actually in some sense able to replicate this top end inequality component coming out of tax records, but then through house price data instead of tax records data. So possibly that might capture an element of what you're describing. I think those are the questions that were directed at me. Okay, is she? I have three questions. Yeah, first of all, Ani, you mentioned that whether what will be changed in the income equality in the future, whether we can use cost-efficient processes to predict that. You see, yeah, to answer your questions, we should look at what kinds of equalizing elements and disequalizing elements, something like that already happened in recent years. So if you just look at equalizing elements, like the migration will be continued, something like that, and there will be more and more migrants will be integrated into this urban community, something like that. Also, the government will issue small disability policies and there will be set up social network for all the population, include the rural population, something like that. So I think that will be equalized income equality in the future. Also, the government put great effort in finding the poverty in rural area, give a lot of transfer to the poor household. Yeah, I think that is positive impact on reducing the income equality. Also, we should realize some disequalizing elements, something like that. I just mentioned that it's very difficult to predict what will be happened in economic transition and political transition, something like that. You see, even a scholar proposed to reducing the government innovation in the economic activity, something like that. But it seems, you see, the government just gets stronger and stronger and more and more innovation in economic activity indeed. So corruption will be there and some red-seeking activity will be there. Also some monopoly of SOE will be there, something like that. That will have some disequalizing on the income equality, something like that. So it's hard to predict, you see, whether the income equality will decline or increase. So conservatively, I say, okay, perhaps in the next five or ten years, income equality will remain the high levels, will be, you see, quite stable, something like that. So the second question is that, you see, even China has rising income equality, also China has achieved a great process in the poverty reductions, you see. So as I mentioned that, if you just look at income growth curve, that is, even in the difference period, you will find even the lower income group still have some positive income growth. Yeah, sometimes you see the growth rate is lower than the high income group, still have maybe 4%, 3%, you see, income growth. Of course, that is for the poor household, the lower income group really benefit from income growth, just less than the high income group. So also the Chinese government put a great effort in reducing the poverty, particularly in rural areas, because the poverty is more concentrated in rural areas. So I think most important, the policy is that try to create more employment opportunity for the poor people. Also try to put more resources in the area, that is the poor people more concentrated in something like that. Just try to reduce the poverty through regional development, something like that. I think, yeah, so that is the poverty reductions take place with rising income equality. That's why. So come to third question from Angel. So yeah, if you just look at the impact of transfers on the income equality, just look at after the transfer income, something like that. It's progressive. Why? Just because most part of transfers are the urban pension, urban retired people just get very high pension indeed. So before they get pension, they are lower income group. After they get pension, they become high income group. So pension is so important. Make a big difference between income distribution before transfer income after transfer income, that is. Ok, Marcelo. So starting just a brief comment about the Kuznetz curve. Milanovic talked about the Kuznetz waves. And I think Brazil is entering maybe in a second wave. It's going up, so Brazilian are good surfers now these days. Just a small thing related with that. Interesting part between what's happening in China in the last 20 years, what happened in Brazil during the economic miracle. I think we can learn a lot about. Then going to, sorry, about informality, minimum wage. The Brazilian case, if you get all the productive attributes, not only formality, but also education, technical core, size of the firm, everything that's correlated positively with earnings. The Brazilian case when inequality was going down, there are two parts of the story. The first part is that people are moving to the better attributes, becoming more formal, getting better education from very low level, but that's part. And the second is that the big jump in earnings happen without those attributes. Not only returns of education falling, but also the informal, formal sector differential falling, etc. A key point, minimum wage explains a lot in Brazil, but also explains a lot from the fiscal problem we have now. Because in Brazil, minimum wage affects the labor market, affects the informal labor market, even more than the formal labor market. So the illegal workers, quote, unquote, follow the law. But all the pension system and employment insurance, everything follows the minimum wage. So the minimum wage is not the floor, it basically is in the medium of the distribution. It's really in the floor, is both of a media and things. So going to Andrea's point, overall, Brazil like South Africa, we have a huge transfer system, has a huge fiscal cost, but you have everything there. You have very well-target, not so well-target, very pro-rich type of transfers. And we didn't make this choice of separating the good from the not-so-good transfers. Second point with respect to, I think, your question about this money abroad, I think illustrates well a point I was raising there. So Brazil in 2015 created the opportunity of those people who have money abroad to bring it back. So you have to pay tax, I don't want to know what's the origin of those resources. So how this will impact measures of top incomes. So this change in the institutional framework may, and I think this is happening the whole time, we cannot take it face value, especially when you are looking at the change. Because something like that is going to say, well, the wealth in Brazil just exploded in the middle of a recession. Not exactly. So it's really very difficult. Just one last point on the gender issue. I think there is some work by Cecilia Machado using the same data, the impact of mother's leave on an employee of wage difference showed by gender gap. And I think that perhaps, you know, I think there is an analysis that is not only related with gender, but with the motherhood, you know, like a boss of family who give money to mothers to take advantage of altruism and to empower. So I think there is really a line of research. It was mentioned yesterday, not treat males and females as perfect substitutes in a way. And I think there are quite nice experiments to test this. Marie? So a few comments in. So the point about gender is completely right. It's not absent from our studies. It was absent from my presentation. But I think we could do much better in the stock take as a very, very interesting lens of a South Africa where we've had very low growth rates. One little brief period of nudging towards 5% from 2002 to 2008. And the impact of that with masses of females coming into the labor market, finding themselves in the informal sector, which is in our data, we've got full earnings, if you like. And so we can tell that story. And then we've got the top end of the income distribution as well through some of these matching things. So we've got a very rich way of saying how disadvantage comes through by females finding themselves in precarious work, et cetera, et cetera. Coming to Giovanni's point about the structure of the economy. Yeah, but the earnings data also show that the top end of the South African earnings distribution, you argue that their wages are set internationally. Well, it turns out that their wages are way higher than the international comparatives. So there is some sort of, there is a structural issue in South Africa. But mining has declined dramatically. Lawrence knows the story super well. He's the South African champion on this stuff. And services have increased a lot. And we've terribly worried about the skills twist, which pitches up in the earnings functions because it gets mapped onto what's been going on in the economy about the increased demand for skilled labor. And the falling away in the demand for unskilled labor at the very same time as we've got a huge unemployment problem. So it's not just an employment problem. It's an unemployment problem. And so you're right that the structure of the economy is a very important part of the story. But it's got its own particular South African manifestation, I think.


Mae'r ffordd ystafell am y bydd yma yn Llywodraeth Tangle. Mae'n bobl yw'r ffordd yma yn ymolod yn lle'r ffordd ar y bwyr. Mae'r ffordd yw'r ymddangod eich amser i'r byw ymddangod. Gwyrdyn ni'n gwybod ar y bwyr, mae'n modd i'r bwyr i'ch gweinio a gwirio ar eu bwyr yma, a'r gwirio ar y bwyr i'n gweinio a chydigio i gydigio i gydigio i gydigio i gydigio. Yn y ddweud rywch yn ei gwybod, yn ddangorol. Chwyddech chi'n gweithio o gweithio gwybod, ac mae'r ddrygiadau yn cyfrifiadau o'r sgwyl yn y dyfodol ymennol. Mae'r ddweud o'r hir, ymraith, neu'r llwyf, mae'r ddweud o'r llwyf, ac mae'n rhaid i'w ddweud o'r tas. Yn y ddweud, mae'n ddangorol yn y ddweud ac mae'n ddweud o'r ddweud.  You can't actually function. If it gets really so tangled, you have to snap it. It's really, really important that we work on this. Thank you for your question. Do you remember the first ever time that you used WordPress? What about the first click? The first post? The first time you learn how to use tags or you learn how to use categories, what about the discovery of how to add a theme or how to add an option or a plug-in or just some really simple things that you take for granted now? Well, likely you can't remember the year unless you have a really good memory or you can't remember where you were, what you were exactly doing. You might have that vague memory and it depends on how long ago that you did this, but that experience is going to be faded. There is something about looking back, so when you do that, there's these rose-tinted glasses of simplicity. Everything just seems easier and, in a way, it probably was. If you look at early WordPress, it was easier because, well, you could actually do less, so by that it was easier. And if you were starting to think about how you do a simple task such as write a post, after all, our roots are in vlogging, so that should be fairly easy, right? But if you think of the path to just write a post, the long route, the way that you have to know things, this is kind of a problem because how many presumed things are there along the way? How are you going to know that you have to publish? How are you going to know where to go for that post? How are you going to know about tags? What assumptions are we making with the product? To start thinking about really how we can simplify and get entangled, there needs to be a bit of consideration of what the daily activities are going to be, and how has WordPress really been used so that it can then be improved? What are our issues? What lurked in that tangled ball of yarn? How complicated is the experience of WordPress? Now, there's going to be some good news. We can all improve things, but we have to be realistic and we have to admit how tangled our yarn is. There's almost a point term by use by many, and I know that I've used it myself in the past. We talk of the WordPress way, and we use that term, as if it's an unspoken but known rulebook and that it's going to be okay. This is one of the foundation issues. There is an awful lot of presumed knowledge within our product. From the words we use to the past and interactions we expect to just make sense to someone, which in nobody's surprise doesn't actually make sense unless you know the WordPress way. For example, think about the multiple places for menus and widgets. Why can't we just have one place where we do these things? Simplest also, we have to be careful, doesn't mean easiest. If we have this presumed knowledge, we both expect someone to use it, but we might be judging what the simplest and easiest route is. If we know what is in the kitchen drawer, for example, we're going to be able to find the tea strainer, but if we actually don't know where the drawer is and we actually don't know where the kitchen is, we're probably not going to have much success finding a tea strainer. One bigger problem is what even is WordPress. How many people actually interact with it and they think it's their theme or their plug-ins that they're using? Which it is to them, that is WordPress to them. However, when we talk about things like call and we use those terms, we don't include those. We don't think about those modified and completely different experiences often. The experience is far from just WordPress admin. It's that tangled, it's layered. The bones are lost under a completely different surface with so many that interact on a daily basis. Never mind adding in headless or any other combinations or things or even the simplest thing of an admin color way. It really is added confusion. In a world where you can combine anything, the basic experience just isn't the same for everyone. The result is often the confusing, often precarious experience. A big problem of that sensibility is opening to inconsistency by allowing different buttons, different toggles and different styling. This creates a patchwork and a confusing interface that befuddles and demuses even the most experienced users. How do you start when everything is changing or different?  It's like trying to use a product whose experience is constantly morthing and nobody likes unexpected experiences. You shouldn't need a map to actually write a post. As I noted earlier, a large issue is simply the passage of time and how long WordPress has been around. This comes in many forms from it being built for desktop first to backwards compatibility trying to keep supporting what once was. The experience is web, but more and more it's needing to be app-like. It exists in that kind of messy middle, static, little bit stuck. There are ways to do things and multiple ways to do things and this really, really confuses. This means that that learning curve is fast and mountainous to start off using. So in all our options, we've created something called a paradox of choice, which is simply you just can't choose because there's too many options. It's a space for those wishing to move are stuck and everything is always on. We've surfaced so many of the options were actually overloaded by the sheer number of them. Too many places are available to do the same thing. What might have been thought of as helpful by just surfacing it often confuses. For example, this shows how many different ways there are to get to media. There's quite a few. There are some foundational problems with the interface itself that we really can't ignore as a problem. One of the biggest of these is there's no clear start, no obvious way. We have a lot of repeating interfaces, the same elements used over and over again, even on the same page which creates a seize of components. There are simply too many ways to do the same thing. Beyond that, you have to hunt for what you need and it's not where you need it. Users quite frankly often lost. So one of the great examples and experience that I often refer to is supermarket. I know that doesn't sound very exciting but bear with me a little bit. If you think of the supermarket, there is a plan, a flow that you get carried along and pretty much that applies to any supermarket that you go to. This isn't, of course, a mistake. It's actually by design. The way that finding works and you can go there at the supermarket so you know what to expect. It's soothing. You know where the hours are and you know the flow. You don't have to learn new models of moving around that space. You know where to go. The paths are pretty much the same, even across different worlds as well. Similar products are grouped so easily that you get what you need. You flow through the experience and you end up then checking out. But the end, signs clearly mark the way above and if you need anything, it's pretty clear what you're going to get. But if we were to look at the amounts of clicks and moves and the walks around WordPress and if we were to think of these as miles or an activity loop, we would really have reached our walking target pretty quickly just trying to do the simplest of tasks. Because we hide so many things, we make so many long interface journeys, really bringing things closer, that's where what we really, the assents of need to do. It's kind of tiring how much we have to navigate around to get even the simplest of tasks done at this point. I'm going to go into some kind of design exercises. You don't have to be designed to do this. Of how we can really start thinking about and tangling the experience you are, because it's really, really worth on tangling. And we can start to maybe think about things a little bit differently. So, really simple task. What if we removed all colour from the admin experience and not suggesting we do it and we ship it in a release? By doing this, we get to see everything. What does it look like? When you do this, you get to see the hierarchy or the lack of. You get to see what is the predominant focus. And it's a really great way to start considering what is important. What could matter? And where are our paths? And what do we want to be at our paths? So if you take this dashboard screen, it's a lot if you take this hello away. Where do I go from here? The primary action is to customise my site or save a draft. But is that the thing that we want to do the first thing that one does? The screen has a kind of lots of directions, but no particularly clear direction, no hierarchy. It's a lot of the same. What about this? That publish button is really calling to me. You can see it quite faint on this screen, but it's there and it sounds out. But there's a lot of the sameness and everything is kind of the same level. By taking the color away, we start to think about what we are doing with our hierarchy here. Maps also help us to see the flows where things are joined and how they connect. By charding our experience, we can begin to see where our sea monsters and our shipwrecks are. This is a media flow. This is a media flow about a few months ago. But this is still, and it's very faint on the screen, I do apologise, but this is really intense as a flow. You can really see the complexity of it when you start mapping out and you start seeing everything. Story arcs are probably one of the simplest forms. I would encourage you all to start exploring these. There is a link here of Donna Litchhouse book. So what they are, if you think about a movie or you think about it, it's literally where you go up. You have the expedition, the exciting incident and then you have a crisis and then you go down to the end. Really starting to think about these and think about these in terms of the product and the experience. I think it's actually the story because we're telling a story as people are interacting and using it. If we think of the story arcs in WordPress, there's a need to plot these and just start thinking of that experience, both to know how people are using it and also so we can change the interface as well. One thing I'd like to know when you're thinking about story arcs is that the crisis is really, really important. If you think of all the good movies and all the good stories, they all have a crisis, you know, they have a all they want they moment, are they going to survive? That is really, really important to this. So having a tension within an interface is something to explore. A really easy exercise to do is look at a screen and think about what can be distilled, what can be taken away and you do not have to be designed to do this. I call these flanker marks which is basically just sticking things together and then seeing what happens. What is extra and how far back can you actually take it? Here's a dashboard. Now what is actually needed on this dashboard? What is going to be the first action? Now I've experienced some different things here but you can do lots more of these. What are these links is or isn't needed? What could be surfacing? What could we change? Could we move things around so we have editing at the top maybe? Another point to consider is what state has someone reached this screen? Is all of this important to everyone at the same time on their journey? Along with looking at distilling the navigation and distilling dashboards and all these kind of things that we're considering, we need to think about our settings. Here are the amounts of pages you have to move around to just interact with settings. Is all of this needed? By thinking about what is needed we can think about what we really want to surface. Perhaps we just have one settings page and a lot of these things are advanced. That's sort of hiding things in a drawer though, right? I would argue we need to look at this further. What can we truly remove and take the strain of understanding from those that's coming to this experience? To truly be experienced first, we need to be aware and think of mental models. To ensure a mental model is the way that we think. Common illustrations are if you're walking through a corridor and all the doors open in the same way and the last door doesn't, you hit your nose. That's a mental model changing. But if we think about the experience of a supermarket who has gone into a supermarket thinking they know the aisle, that the biscuits are on and they go to the aisle, the biscuits are on and it turns out there's no biscuits there and they've moved the biscuits. I know that's happened to me quite a lot. When that happens, that's a broken mental model.  It's the experience. We don't know that though.  Beyond looking at specific techniques and I would encourage everyone to start really thinking about this distilling and these paths and these stories that we're telling with our product. As a project we need to collectively look beyond where we are really today. But how do we do that though? The first thing we need to be thought about is, is it fit for the purpose? The fit could be for the human using it and that's making it accessible or culturally fitting and right for their situation. It also is about making it work for the right purpose. In the past this has been about someone consciously changing or interacting with an interface. Over having it run, this is about creating an experience that adapts. It's one point not really fully explored yet and starting to dabble in this. But a contextual interface avoids a lot of the issues of everything on and a paradox of choice. So I'm going to add as a note, the blunt end of this is often what adapts is adapting experiences. I have a bad name and that's a giant list of options for a setting to age.  That's really a kind of friction in your mental model. What I am suggesting is an adaption and that's natural without having to consider. The experience would be aware of the person, the situation and of the purpose. This probably sounds a little bit magical for a Saturday morning, but it really is possible. And it really is possible with the tools that we have. After all, we walk into different rooms with specific purposes and our experiences should be just like that. Those using the experience don't have to be conscious about what things are. They are there for them. The tools are right by them when they need them. They aren't unexpected. They also aren't scarily overthinking because nobody likes an overly clever, freaky interface. That's kind of like if you think about Goldilocks, that's the middle-bare porridge. That's just right experience. The perfect experience dance is really, really possible for us to create. Taking it even a step further to the device you are experiencing on might in the future. Over the same mobile first, this is about really being experienced first, which for the purpose is the device that you are using this on. Well, it just works on any device you happen to be interacting with. It isn't about squashing the desktop experience. It adapts and it distills and applies to fit the device that it's really being used on. Different needs need different experiences, not limited reduced ghosts of interfaces. If we all looked, if we looked at many, many screens that people use most of the time, it's likely not everything in Wordpress. This goes back to those stories, the pathways, the arcs. By focusing on tasks, we can reduce that always on multiple flows. And focus on the best ones, the fine, and ensure you get what you need when you need it. As I've mentioned, there's multiple ways to do things, and this just leads to confusion. We're designing for everything at all the same time. This means the learning curve is fast. For example, do we need to start on the dashboard? We need to ask these questions. Is there a better start? Do we need to have the amount of things that we do in the cyber? Maybe at the start you choose what you're going to use this for and it adapts, fits for the purpose. Maybe there's no sidebar at all. These are ideas that we need to start exploring beyond our love of sidebars and accordions. And the Wordpress kind of do like those as well. As a long-standing project, part of our practice really needs to be triad. This is where we can clear the channels and see those flows. Beyond this looking honestly, critically, and with an open heart at our functionality and what we need. Do we really need everything today that we have? What is getting in the way? What could be done better? What truly is something that needs iteration? And part of this has been okay with its sensibility. If the baseline experience is solid, we have those roots of its sensibility. Beyond this, let's take a look at what we can refine and distill in its distinct interface. What isn't serving as well? What can we do today better? And what can we iterate? These are all questions we should be asking. The company I would suggest we don't really have a welcome mat in the Wordpress experience. By starting to take a journey and focus on the work that we do and that experience-first mindset, it's really something that we can do. We can have that welcome mat that includes everyone. One of these experiments was tips within the editor and also we have like an onboarding in the editor. So we have a couple of these different things going now, but these are just a couple of little approaches. Because a welcome isn't just a guide. A wizard isn't a welcome alone. It's kind of a shiny user's gesture if it's not backed up with real magic. Wizards that don't do magic are just not great wizards, are they? We need to be able to see and try before committing and really explore the interface and know what we are going to be doing. For example, a tiny little way of doing this is you can preview a block in the editor so you can see what you might be able to use. This reveals what we will be able to pick. It removes that fog of surprise in the interface because when it comes to an interface, nobody likes surprises.  As I wrap up, I want to take a little moment to consider and really to think about putting experience back at the heart of everything we do. Because this isn't just the designers and this isn't just the talk that will only be for them and it isn't just about design. This is about performance. It's about function. It's about every aspect of the WordPress product. We need to build for the future, not just for today. This will involve considering what we do support, what we push forward and what we have graceful and gentle and respectful pullbacks for. If the experience is truly adaptive, that means we should consider pushing forward whilst adapting to that which we support. By skating to the park of interfaces and technologies, experimentation can lead to pushing beyond what we actually have today. There was so many things possible in an experience that a few years ago was just a dream. The plug-ins are great and things are absolutely wonderful, but they shouldn't be a requirement for good experience. Out of the box, WordPress should have a warm welcome, a natural flow that leads someone through their first post, their first few weeks, and then if they want, into the world of extending to truly create their own WordPress world. By offering consistent tools, potentially even a design system, those extending can keep that consistent experience. They can go beyond it and not against it and not have to create these conflicting interfaces because there just isn't any tools or anything available for them to do this with. Everyone benefits here and not the use of using it who don't have to play guess what this component does or guess what's going to happen when I click this. Those of us creating, those of us who've been around a little bit of time within WordPress, we really need to check ourselves because this is probably not creating a majority of this for ourselves. We need to remember that first experience or try and hold back. Whenever we start a new feature, we need to start simple, release often, and then the WordPress has actually been founded on iteration. Let's start embracing that again. Surface is the thing you need, right where you need it and bring the experience simpler and to those who need it. In kind of knitting terms, we need to remember that first time we made our first row or the time we made our first piece and that excitement. What is true that over time products get handled doesn't mean that we should accept that and raise to add new features, fix the most bugs and build more higher, more complex. This is an honesty, a point of reflection that's needed to recognise that handled wall with experienced yarn. Well, natural, it does need improving. The process is beginning across WordPress and I would encourage us all to just start continuing to do that, to create truly a product for the years ahead. A product that puts experience at the heart and entangles its yarn. Thank you. Okay, so now's your chance to ask me all the difficult questions. Thank you very much. Has anyone got a question they would like to ask? We've got ten minutes or something. Neil, thank you for that talk. You work for Automatic, and what I was wondering is, I completely agree with you, but to what extent are these changes going to happen through qualitative testing versus quantitative analysis? I mean, I've got a lot of data about how people use things. I'm just curious about how that actually gets put into practice. Yeah, so it's observing, right? The foundation is we can't create for that, but we don't know. It doesn't matter what company I work for, for that, right? Like it's about all of us. I think it's very easy. I use this term headspace, which is basically, it's very hard to design outside the space that we're in. We're in the body in the head, right? But we do it. So there is usability testing that goes on at the moment, and we need to do more of that. We need to work out in Europe. There's been testing tables. We need to do more and more of that. We need to listen. We need to look at the support forums. They're a goldmine of information. Every single contributor team is a goldmine of information. So it's about that. Going beyond just even the countries in and our language is incredibly important. We are building a product that is global, and we sometimes forget that when we're doing it. We make it for maybe our closest word count, or maybe the clients that we work for. So it's a very rambling answer I'm giving you, but I am so... I agree we need to look at any feedback that we get, any story to do this, and we just still do that as part of it. It's a slower process doing that, but that's a really important process. And sometimes what that involves is putting something out there and seeing what happens with it. So we have this amazing feature and core feature plug-ins, so doing things like that. The design team, I can speak about team, we have an awesome experiments plug-in. So things like that are great because they're just a way of going, I have this idea. I think it's kind of based on some research, but what happens if, oh, yay, right? There's something more of that, and I think that's something we do as a community, and that's something that different companies can give back, hosting companies can give information. So it's about us collectively as a project all doing that. Incredibly rambling answer, but I hope that helps. Very interesting and very annoying. I'm doing, improving lecture. I just wanted to, no question, but I just wanted to thank you that my day is made. I am in the right place because say one month ago I didn't know anything about WordPress, and I found it equally confusing, and everybody's telling me that you don't need to do WordPress because the plug-ins will go away and things will stop, your site will stop working, but I'm so glad that I'm here. I'm going to make most out of it. So your story is the story we should all be listening to. Because you're so close to it. I had a business plan. I'm from India. I talked to so many people on Upwork, but everybody's telling me a different story altogether. I finally ended up creating my own site to whatever extent it is. It has products, newcomers, and I am not sure whether whatever I have done is correct or wrong, and that is what I'm here to learn for you. I don't know one plug-in tells me you can do this. Another one also tells me you can do this. I invented a kind of word on Wikipedia and they deleted my post because that was not the correct approach. I didn't even know what visual editing is and what, you know. So it is confusing and I think it's a very, very, very nice start thing. There are so many people who are going to be coming into our gym and we can hopefully help you and listen to you. Anybody else? I apologise if this question is kind of outside the realms of what you do, but I'm interested in your opinion on this. So if we want to extend these ideas out to themes and parts of plug-ins and things like this, at the moment I would say a lot of the criticism that WordPress comes in for security issues and just looking generally for some things like that comes from what is mainly plug-ins. At the moment, not a huge amount happens to trying to enforce these themes and plug-ins to follow us that the standardised design that the core puts into place even at the moment. I'm thinking if we're simplifying and putering it as you suggest, do you think we should be pushing more towards plug-ins and themes following that design as well? So I've reacted strongly to the word enforced, but that's me and that's the person of the word. But I think everybody does and I think why the reaction to that is because I'm going to use an analogy like we're in an art space, right? So I'm going to use an analogy. If you have an art box and you have everything in it to create everything, you don't need to go to an art store. This is a Saturday morning analogy, right? And the thing is, I think at the moment we don't really have that good kit, so how can we expect some consistency when we have inconsistency in the base product itself? So by having that consistency and by offering more tools and more awesome things that people confuse, a consistent component styling, and this is something that is happening at the moment, refining things like maybe the colour text or refining things like the range control and having these things available that you can put in your theme or your plug-in, that by the nature improves. It's like a cascade effect itself, CSS in that sense, right? So I think that happens and it's about collectively looking at that. I don't think we should necessarily pause everything, spend four years on a design system and then we're good to go because a design system isn't a solve that solves everything unless we look at we have to audit and we have to have a foundation that we build up. I think we're on the path to doing that but we can't expect someone, if you're a new plug-in developer or a theme developer, you have to learn the way that we do themes or plug-ins. So there's all this kind of, we need to sort out a house first and the core before we can do that. And I think it's happening but it's a cascade, also a very kind of roundabout way of saying it, but I think we will, by the nature of having better in the core product and more assignment in the core product, that will happen. Okay, thank you everybody and thank you Tammy very much.  If anyone wants to come and find me, I'll be here all day and I love talking to people. Please do, that's why we're here and that's why it's such a great event and chance to actually talk to people after. So Tammy, thank you very much indeed.


Hej, everyone. Du såg mig dog. Jag trodde att jag var... Jag behövde att bringa något från Sverige till dig, så det var min dog i början. Det kanske vi kan se igen. Han är probably back home sleeping while I'm here trying to save the world from boring PowerPoint presentations and boring Word documents. So I will try to give you a resume of our journey going from basically an idea to become the number one add in in Microsoft PowerPoints ecosystem. That means that I will tell you our journey and our journey starts with my wingmate Mathias and myself. We share two things. One is the haircut. And the other thing is that we love to do big stuff as big as possible. Matias for me and we're totally different. So Matias is the sandstorm in the horizon where I kind of in the back, in the back tried to pick things up and organize that in some way. Going back five years ago, we saw this amazing opportunity. We saw millions of people uploading images online. We also saw millions of people starting to use images to communicate. And today we communicate with images in so many different ways. For instance to impress to convince to explain and to some sometimes also to entertain of course. So when we started this startup in Sweden, we saw this. We saw everyone was biting the apple. But we couldn't find the loose and in that wooden, wooden ball that we saw as the Google environment or the Google ecosystem. So we couldn't really find our spot because we wanted to reach the mass with a lot of images that people were sharing, uploading. And we wanted to reach the mass where they needed the image. Exactly at that point where they needed the image. And it was hard for us to find a way. But one day my friend Matias, he reached out to me and said, hey Henry, do you know that there are 400 PowerPoints made every second? And then we went quiet like entrepreneurs starting to calculate that into numbers. That's 11.5 billion PowerPoints made every year. Probably a lot of those PowerPoints are containing images and probably those images are not legally cleared so to speak. So what we did was reaching out for Microsoft as this idea.  And our learning is that if you want to find a way in, you need to find that way through the people with the biggest problem that you are trying to solve. For us, that was the legal guys. So the legal guys were constantly sitting with piracy issues in PowerPoints. And we told them this story. You sit in PowerPoint and you're frustrated because you can't find the right photos. Nevertheless, the legal ones. So you decide to go online and steal something or drag or drop from somewhere, but don't get surprised if someone comes knocking at your door. It's the police. They drag you into court and they sue you for lifetime. Okay, but what if there was a solution for that? What if PowerPoint actually had images inside PowerPoint? And we said, pick it. Is that solution? This is where you can actually get access to millions of images. No hassle, no fuss. You just ace your presentation. And of course, this is a little bit of an over the top story. But the fact is that 85% of all images that we use online are in some way not really the ones that we can use or should use the way we use it. So we have a problem and if you narrow that down to PowerPoints, it's probably a higher number. Okay, we told them another story.  You want that image but you can't find it anywhere. It doesn't exist, not even on Google. Are you the one that should take that image yourself? Probably not. It's not a good solution. But what if you could reach out to people when you sit in PowerPoint and get access to other creative people that want to help you solve that problem? Pick it is that place where you can actually hit that don't panic button, get access to thousands of people that are ready to help you create that specific image or video that you need for your presentation. Okay, so the journey begun and this is some tips for you guys who wants to reach out to Microsoft. Spend a lot of nights at crappy hotels because what's really important to know with a company like Microsoft or whatever company is that it's full of human beings and human beings are in need of relations. So you cannot Skype yourself to a good relation. You need to meet up. So what Matias and I did after those stories and some push and help from the legal guy was to travel the world basically. We went to every crappy hotel, low fare rates on every plane, spend a lot of nights on places like this just to meet up with people and what we also invented. I don't know if you have tried this guys, but if you have a meeting in London, in Tokyo, whatever and it's one meeting, you make sure to book a couple of days and then you start networking in their receptions. Okay, so you just sit there because all of a sudden people will come up to you and ask why are you sitting here and if you have some names to drop you can say yeah, we thought we had a meeting with this guy. Aha, then you shouldn't be this guy and that guy and that that person and then it becomes a network and the network grows. So for us it's been very important just to sit like Matias does in the reception for days. Sometimes we went to their coffee shop of course to reach out to them and that place. The biggest and most important things like always is of course timing. Timing is the number one and when we were at that point around five years ago reaching out to Microsoft, they also understood that they were a little bit behind when you talk about being open to startups, having an ecosystem where a startup actually can start. So we were at the right time with something that is quite simple to understand as well, an image solution for those 1.2 billion people that are out there on a daily basis working with PowerPoint. Talking about timing, this is another opportunity or another. It's like it's 2015, it's the build conference and the guy to the left is Sacha Nadella and he's the CEO of Microsoft. I was at the dinner with a partner in London when my phone went totally bananas. So how about we get started by talking about how we are moving from office from us to office with partners. Let's talk about making a presentation. When I'm doing this, I of course want a constant source of high quality professional photographs that I can integrate into my slide deck. Pick It Me is a relatively new company that is building just such a service and has provided an add in here that lets me search through the photos in those service and paste them directly within PowerPoint. You saw the other company after us, it's called Uber. So what happened there? Sacha actually talked about Pick It as a partner and for us that was like two years after we started this idea and that was an amazing milestone and the reason why he actually talked about us was that he knew that he needed to present something new but also we've been relationship building stuff around him and we were in contact with people constantly around Sacha so he knew about us. For you guys because I want to share a couple of mistakes. For you guys you saw probably saw that our name was Pick Hit Me and for me that was not a big thing but when we hired our CMO he said we need to change name because no one is understanding that name and I said okay let's try and actually when we said Pick Hit people went home trying to find our webpage and they spelled it like this Pick It so when we changed and we bought a URL the top domain for Pick It dot com our traffic just increased amazingly so that was a mistake from my side. I thought it wasn't that important but it was another thing Another kind of small and big mistake is this. I don't know if you guys see it but it's a Windows phone. I don't know if you know about that but it's probably the market share that they had what we did as a first thing the first mobile app we ever built wasn't a Windows phone app and the people in Sweden our startup friends they were just hello guys. What are you doing? Why are you building a Windows phone app? But for us we knew that of course it's a mistake in some way but it was also a way for us to really show that we could connect people that produce content with people that needs content. So we could actually connect Windows phone with office. So when you were in office you got images from people in the Windows phone environment and you could ask them to help you. So this was actually it was a conscious mistake so to speak. We knew that but it was of the cost of a of a of a Windows phone app but that was okay. So we needed to prove ourselves a little bit and we didn't we didn't have to do it that big. We just needed to do something. The third mistake that I want to share talking about Microsoft and also being a tech company because we are not just an image provider. This is Roger we call him Roger. This is the machine learning system that we have in our system and to impress Microsoft. Of course we wanted to connect a lot of machine learning and AI back in the days. The thing is that Roger was quite immature but we said let's put him on every single image we have. Let's run every image through Roger. So he saw an image like this and he thought it was a couple of elephants that are in the rain.  Another version is this that is a large pile of bananas. I don't know if you see that it's not a large pile of bananas. So we just added this automatic tagging keywording description machine that totally messed up our image bank. So when people were searching for bananas they got this image for example. Okay so what do we do now? Now times flying we're another kind of company now. We have a lot of users in PowerPoint. We constantly search the world of content to bring that up to our users, make it useful, make it easy to access. We work a lot with curated collections that means that we put images in front of their eyes. We are exactly at your fingertips. We are in PowerPoint. We can even at some points also see what you're writing and on that based on that also suggest content for you. The reason why we've been quite successful with Microsoft because there is competition is that we see productivity versus creativity as something that we work with. It doesn't mean that there are paradox in this but for us we work with people that has productivity as a focus when they work. They mean that they have a shorter deadline. They often need other people to guarantee that the images that they are using are pretty good images. We are not working with these 100 millions creative professional people because they have a lot of good services. So we target our audience with things that are really fast and easy to use. For us, we are constantly going back to this picture talking about productivity. This is a no brainer for us. Of course, office is the by far the largest ecosystem we could ever be in. It doesn't mean that we have to be exclusive to that, but we are focusing on office as our core target audience. One and a half years ago, we also got this investment from Microsoft Ventures. This is Nagraj, who is the head of Microsoft Ventures.  So it was kind of a no brainer for them as well being a part of us. So we work very actively with them today. We also work extremely active with our end users of course. So we constantly measure and check how our users are, what they feel about us, if they feel that we must have a need to have. And you can actually do that in the Microsoft environment today. It's quite easy, but you couldn't do that like a year ago. It was really hard because you couldn't put anything. And get any kind of stats. But today we can measure everything in a split second. We also get access to a lot of companies of course, because they use PowerPoint, they use office on a daily basis. These are companies that we know have a Pikitt density. That means that they have a plus 500 users that are active on Pikitt. And of course we have business solutions as well that we can work with. The team is at this picture 20 people like in that in the Baltic sea that island that was mentioned called Gotland. We are a team of 30 people today. And basically we're doing everything and we've been that we've been that size for a couple of years. But we are in a phase where we are about to grow pretty fast. So now things are happening and that that has been also important for us to just follow that journey with Microsoft. And it's been a it's been a journey when where you are kind of in the backseat because we cannot push them and they need to mature in their ecosystem. So for us it's about being persistent. Make sure that we are there all the time. And the last picture. Yes, we have clip arts. We have plenty of clip art. So we are we have an image bank that is basically covering everything from illustrations crowd sourced images stock photos. Also animations videos are coming as well. So we have plenty of different different kind of content that we work with and it will probably grow. So that's my last picture. So thanks for being here. And I just arrived 10 minutes before I went here. So I will probably be here as much as I can this afternoon. Thank you.


I am Deepak Phatak. I am a teacher of computer science here. I have been with the institute for about 40 years. Let me also welcome Prasagayatunde. Many of you might have attended his previous course on thermodynamics and some other courses. So, welcome Prasagayatunde. He is the coordinator for this as well as the subsequent workshop. To you all, good morning. I am pleased to introduce my colleagues and co-coordinators of this course, Professor Upendra Bhandarkar and Professor Bhailchandra Puranik, both of mechanical engineer. They are pedigrees like this. Professor Bhandarkar was my student way back between 1991 and 95. He did his mechanical engineering from here, worked with me for a project and I seem to have impressed him enough. He decided to, you know, make a career in mechanical engineering in thermal engineering in particular. I am happy he did that and is back as my colleague for the last eight years, nine years, something like that. He teaches thermodynamics, almost anything in thermal engineering at the undergraduate and postgraduate level and has helped me and others in conducting similar courses in earlier. The first course last year was for something called the earlier edition of this called Thermodynamics in Mechanical Engineering. He was a coordinator with me at that time. Professor Puranik is an alumnus of the College of Engineering Pune. And then after doing his PhD, he is back with us on the faculty member. Expertise again generally in fluid mechanics, CFD, thermal engineering and other aspects. And he has taught not in the earlier thermodynamics course, but I think he has been a part of the fluid mechanics and CFD course and maybe also of the heat transfer course. I am not so sure. Anyway, we are all able to take part in many of these courses. And although Professor Bhandarkar was part of the earlier thermodynamics, here also he will be a part. But since in the second edition, what is now called engineering thermodynamics, we plan to extend the scope by having some additional topics. And these people are very conversant in teaching many of those additional topics. So, that is why they are here. Do you want to say something? Thank you, Professor Gaitande. As you said, I have done this before, but it is not something that I do very often. So, I hope I can manage to teach you the two or three topics that Professor Gaitande has requested me to teach you in as good a fashion that he does. So, I hope I can meet your expectations on that. Thank you. Yeah, similar comments here. I do not really teach thermodynamics per se. I think what I plan to do is in case there is sufficient interest from your side to look at compressible flows. That is something that I routinely teach here at IIT Bombay. And primarily, that is the topic that I will be handling in case there is sufficient interest for it. Additionally, perhaps something more simple from the list of topics is probably what I will do. So, welcome all and hopefully, we will have a good interaction over the next three days. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Pandarakar. Thank you, Professor Puranik. Thank you, Professor Gaitande. As some of you would know, we try to keep these inaugural sessions very brief because the main task ahead needs to be completed in just three days. How many of you have participated either as participating teachers or coordinators or whichever way? In any one of the workshops that we have conducted in the past, wrong question. How many of you are not aware of these workshop schedule and have not participated? Several people. That is good news. So, for some of you, what I will say will be a repetition, although there are a few new things which I would like to add. All of you are aware through our pamphlets and web pages and so on that we conduct these teacher's trainings workshops. We started it around year 2000 when I started the distance education program in the then school of IT. We used V-SATS then and we could reach out to just three or four remote centers. I think our first one was VRC, Nagpur, Indore, Nanded, COEP and so on. Subsequently, we expanded our reach and we offered our CEP courses and some QIP courses were offered. Tyfaq supported a project to try and test whether this methodology can be used to train teachers. So, we did some early training for teachers then. About three years ago, government of India liked the scheme and sponsored a project to train 1000 teachers at a time. To train 1000 teachers at a time was considered near impossible. But the methodology that we use is that we have remote centers such as yours. We have each remote center in charge of a faculty member who has taught that subject for some time. That workshop coordinator handles anywhere between 30, 40, 50, 60 teachers who assemble at that remote center for the main workshop. This way we are able to open about 1000 teachers and engage them for a two week IST program. We have a special memorandum understanding with IST to permit us to give IST certificates even when we conduct the program in distance. In fact, the then IST president as well as the current president has acknowledged that our courses are as effective as face-to-face courses if not more effective primarily because of the expertise that we gather not only in terms of the faculty members from IIT and other places but also dedicated faculty colleagues who take charge of activities at each remote center. The model is that the lectures are delivered interactively in the morning using a view on internet and in the afternoon the tutorials, lab assignments, etcetera, etcetera are conducted at each remote center. That way we are able to maintain the notion of a classroom even at each remote center because there is a group of people over. More importantly, we release all the recorded lectures, videos, tutorials and even the submissions made by participants in open source so that a much larger body of teachers and students could benefit. So, this 10,000 teacher program we did some pilots and we conducted about 10 workshops. We trained about 11,000 teachers in the process. When the ministry asked us whether we can scale it up further because as you are aware there are more than 4,000 engineering colleges and the number of teachers and the number of subjects that they teach. So, if you pair teacher subject extraordinarily large number of people are waiting for some guidance, some suggestions and so on. Very recently the government has approved a new project which I have proposed which attempts to train 10,000 teachers at a time. We call it a T10KT program, trained 10,000 teachers. This is part of our talk to a teacher program. One of the important things that we try to ensure in this subject specific workshops is that rather than imposing upon all the teachers the syllabus and the methodology of teaching that we adopt at IIT, we do believe that it has plus points. But instead of just doing that which is what has been attempted for example through NPTEL courses and so on and one of the reasons I found out through my interaction with teachers as to why they do not use NPTEL courses in their normal teaching is because they find that those courses are not exactly aligned to the syllabus and the exam system followed in the individual colleges. We believe that that system needs to be changed. We believe that the university evaluation system needs to undergo drastic changes. We believe that every college, every teacher should be an autonomous while teaching a subject but that will happen over a period of time. It is not going to happen overnight. Consequently, all of you and your colleagues whom you will teach over the next two week program will be forced to teach as per the normal standard syllabus of the university and will be forced to set question papers and conduct evaluation exactly as per the university norms. That cannot be reached away. That is the reason why we conduct this program with the coordinators. I suppose you would have all brought with you the knowledge of your own syllabus and your own exam systems and so on and so forth which you will share with my colleagues here. Additionally, my colleagues will share with you the plus points of the way subjects are taught in IIT. And what we would like to give to the 10,000 teachers who come to the workshop is a blend of both. So, they should find something very useful and concrete to be used by them while teaching the courses including question bags that we will create and so on. And additionally, we would like to introduce some pedagogical elements which over 50 years IIT has refined and refined and refined. It essentially centers around asking hard questions. It essentially centers around creating interest and enthusiasm in the minds of students, making them apply their mind because that is what is learning. I would also like to mention that increasingly with the web and internet permitting you access to top quality material, the conventional paradigm of teaching and learning is going to change very drastically. Those of you who participate in the Akash project would remember that I am uploading a team assignment where I am asking teams of teachers to think about how things will change and how in specific Akash tablet could be used to contribute to that change positively. But that is a separate issue. The point I am making is today you have the best teachers in any subject. Their lectures are available online. Consequently, contents and delivery which used to be the most important contribution of each individual teacher so far in teaching is going to take a back seat. Does it mean that teachers have no rule? Absolutely not. On the contrary, teachers will have a greater role. Some of my colleagues have started examining the possibility of inverting the classroom and home assignment. For example, Professor Kandan gave a course last year where he said that my lectures are online recorded from the previous year. There will be no lecture tomorrow. You are instead supposed to listen to that lecture or this weekend and come prepared to answer questions on that lecture. The whole classroom now is converted into a tutorial kind of engagement where you ask students some problems, solve those problems, you interact with them because after all problem solving is where students apply their mind. So, all of this will take effect into the educational system over a period of time. But practically a new history is being written now as we speak in terms of these changes and you will be at the forefront of making these changes possible in a more effective way. So, you all have a greater responsibility than just coordinating this workshop for two weeks in your places. You also have to engage the participating teachers, share with them the changes that are happening, request them to think of how differently they could do their teaching learning process in their own colleges. So, this is the backdrop. We have some funding from the government for these workshops. The funding has been drastically reduced on a per workshop basis. For the obvious reasons that when we had promised government that we will train about 12,000 teachers, we ended up training 19,000 teachers because we ran a program on introduction to research methodologies which was attended by many people including some of your centers. That was very popular and the government was convinced that we can actually train 10,000 teachers at a time. That is why this new project has been approved. The contours of this project are we have IIT Kharagpur as a partner. So, IIT Kharagpur will conduct six workshops over the next three years. We will be conducting nine workshops. A total of 15 workshops in 15 chosen subjects. Each one engaging 10,000 teachers at a time. This way we expect to train about 1,50,000 teachers. It is a very honorous task. Such a thing has never been attempted anywhere in the world. In fact, training 10,000 teachers at a time itself, I believe is a global person and you are all part of creation of that. Now, when we train such large numbers, there are some additional problems. When you scale up from 100 teachers to 1,000 teachers, we have some problems which we resolve. When you scale up from 1,000 teachers to 10,000 teachers, there are more problems. Consider this. Some of you who would have attended some co-ordinators workshop earlier would recall that there would be 30 or 50 teachers at a time and then interaction would be very intense. When you have 200 teachers at a time for the co-ordinators, it is extremely difficult to relate to each one of them. We have therefore introduced a concept of nodal centers. We will be establishing up to 10 nodal centers over the next six months. Each of the nodal centers will be requested to take charge of basic interaction with about 30 to 50 identified remote centers. So, obviously these will be in different regions. Some colleges have been identified for that purpose. We will soon be having a meeting. I did not want to delay the conduct of the first workshop till next June by which time we would have put in place all these arrangements. And that is why we are doing it now. And I had to request Professor Gaiton and his colleagues to interact with 175 or so teachers. Although it is very, very difficult to have a one-on-one interaction during this time. So, the model is that we will continue our workshop training program exactly as it was earlier, except that the co-ordinators' workshops which used to happen always at IIT, Bombay for 30, 40, 50, 70 teachers would now happen at four or five places. But the co-ordinator workshop will be conducted from here. And what we would like to try and ensure is that if the co-ordinators' workshop happens at five places or four places, then at each of those four or five places, at least one of the faculty members related is present physically, whereas the co-ordinators' workshop will also be done on here. Obviously, the nodal centers have to be stronger institutions. We are looking keenly towards institutions like NITs and institutions like COEP, for example, or some good institutions will be shortly selected. The second problem that we have tried to resolve is we have requested for and got some additional funding for each remote center. You will appreciate that today all the basic arrangements of providing a server at your place, providing video, audio equipment, everything is done by your college. Almost all colleges have tried their best to provide the best equipment. However, at many places there are problems about audio reception, there are problems about video reception, there are problems about server not working and so on. So, I requested specifically and the government has granted about three lakh rupees to be given to each remote center to set up the basic equipment. We are working out the details of the equipment that you should have. Of course, you need not duplicate anything. If you already have some equipment of that kind, you can use this money for something else. In fact, the ministry I remember was quite pleased to see that IIT Bombay is trying to support establishment of good infrastructure at each of the remote centers. Very similarly, we have a relatively larger equipment set up to be granted from the project at the nodal centers. The details we will share with you in due course of time. Of course, none of that will work for the December workshop because the time is too little for acquisition and that is why in the December workshop you will have to go back and ensure that your basic infrastructure works very well. At the end of this workshop, I would expect the following to be achieved. My colleagues here should then be fully conversant at that time as to what exactly is done in the name of thermodynamics in your respective colleges and universities. You should also be familiar by then of what we do in engineering thermodynamics. I had a long debate with Professor Gaitonde by the way on thermodynamics and engineering thermodynamics. He insists that because thermodynamics I now understand is like an elephant. As an electrical engineering student when I studied thermodynamics in 1966-67 sometimes at Indore, I had no clue either about thermo or about dynamics. But in those days, the engineering education used to be of five years duration. Some of you would have undergone that education and those who have undergone that education would recall that the basic engineering subjects were taught far more vigorously to the engineering students. The four year program has diluted significantly the contents of the basic courses in engineering. When we were students, we were told that mechanical engineering is the mother of all engineering. In fact, there was no engineering at one time. There were alchemists and then scientists and then when engineering began by implicit understanding it was mechanical engineering which contained civil engineering as a part if you recall the history of it. But from mechanical engineering then other engineering disciplines came and then we have succeeded in chopping off portions of knowledge saying this is mechanical engineering this is electrical engineering this is civil engineering and so on. Courses like thermodynamics are fundamental courses to the understanding of many natural phenomena. They are transcendent engineering actually. They emanate from physics. They get into engineering. It is very, very important therefore for all of us to tell our 10,000 teacher colleagues how important it is to ensure that these basic concepts are well understood by our students. Today it is fashionable for students to say I am a computer science student so I will have nothing to do with thermodynamics which is nonsense. I mean it does not matter which branch of engineering or science you are studying the basic concepts of engineering and science must be understood by them. And one of our endeavors is to jointly propagate that viewpoint across to the teaching community which will be part of it. There are several details there are more details about the exact financing provisions etc. We usually have a short session if somebody my finance minister Jaya is missing unfortunately she is only but we have Dr. Mukta Atre who many of you would have interacted and Kalpana who is the in charge of our contents both of them are standing. Can you raise your hand so that they can see you. They will be interacting with you telling you the details about the official processes and procedures that we follow. But primarily the dates have been I think frozen as 11th December to 21st December. Although we call it a two week program we have to run it for 10 full days to 10 full working days so we provide for just one holiday in between so that we can cover it because many teachers would like to enjoy part of their vacation before they start with their regular semester so we try to compress it. So it is fashionable to have an introduction session here when we have 30 to 50 people that takes around 10 to 12 minutes but with 175 people that itself will eat up a large portion of this course. So what I propose is that during the validity session then we will distribute the certificates perhaps we will have an occasion to know each person by name at least I will have an occasion to know. Of course my colleagues here will be interacting with you and they will be knowing more about it. We still have about 5 minutes so are there any quick questions or comments by anybody? Sir my name is Kishan Naik I am from University BDT College Dhawan Gere. So our college is a constant college of BTO Belgium sir. So here my question is with the and we are also belongs under the tech cube. So earlier so we have the many different history of our college I will not share with you right now because the time per limits. So here when it comes to a constant this constant college autonomous what we call but I have seen many colleges in my limit so here whatever the contents of the course has been diluted according to the requirement of the faculty. In many autonomous colleges I will not point out the name I have seen literally this is my big question and this is in your limits see how this can be and when you are teaching the all faculty together so I am an autonomous I want to teach only take example of thermodynamics 0th law first line second law that is all I do not want to go for the entropy also. So it is happening in many autonomous colleges so how to overcome all this? Okay. Yeah please. I am from government engineering college Goa sir. So I request the team of this thermodynamics course to look into one small aspect that how to develop learning aptitude in the students with the help of thermodynamics. That is a tall question. I have certain ideas about that we would like to share those ideas. Because that aptitude is very important sir everything is there wonderful syllabus is there Goa university syllabus VTU syllabus and Bombay IIT Mumbai syllabus everything is there but most important thing is missing that is how to develop learning aptitude in the students community that is the biggest challenge even to the intellect very high intellect class of body like IIT I think country is also expecting that way and we can hand over any type of high tech gadgets to the students and all if it is abused and misused I personally believe that it is detrimental to the planet so in view of this I would request I think thermodynamics will definitely because it is natural loss so natural loss means you can call anything by almighty or by supreme power whatever it is so with the help of that notional extension we can always imbibe that is the best etiquette amongst the students how to develop learning aptitude thank you sir I think I will just take these two questions because they are only three minutes both of them are generic questions both of them are relevant questions first of all you talked about developing learning aptitude I would like to suggest that an aptitude is largely a natural component of every human being you can please let me speak you can enhance a particular aptitude by adding certain indications to that but very importantly often the aptitude of a person is also defined by the attitude that person takes if the person is not interested in learning something no matter how good is your syllabus no matter what knowledge you try to give the learning cannot be forced see learning is not delivery of contents learning is application of one smile when I speak people listen but only those people who apply their mind and think then the knowledge is created knowledge is never transferred from one person to another you remember the basic law again when you transfer something the quantity reduces at one end and increases at the other end by this token if I have been transferring knowledge for 40 years I should be a certified moron today but I am still reasonably intelligent that is because knowledge is never transferred knowledge is always created in the minds our job is to ensure mechanisms of helping these tools to create that knowledge aptitude as he rightly said is one of the aspects but more important is attitude just as we are worried about attitude of the students I think we also need to worry about attitude of teachers like us you observe that many places the course is diluted I would submit that the syllabus is not diluted if you take the printed syllabus you will hardly find a difference between the syllabus of most of the subjects at IIT most of the places I will take a course of which I am familiar database course which my colleague professor Sudarshan teaches when professor Sudarshan teaches from his own book which has written over 10 years with various things he is able to teach with a different level of understanding he is able to frankly tell you that there is a mistake in this book because I made that mistake if I teach that course in Indore using that book as a textbook I have studied under Sudarshan so I might do some job but I will not be able to do as good a job as he does if a third person at some small college in Jharsugudda teaches that course who has never studied databases formally we will do a shoddy job the syllabus is same at all the places the point I am trying to make is that we blame university system affiliation syllabus and so on what prevents a teacher from doing such college what prevents me from saying that look those who are interested in solving hard problems are welcome on every Sunday morning does my college refuse permission to do that do all students run away I will tell you wherever this has been attempted in small places this has been attempted 10 to 15 interested students come even on Sunday and do the work but that requires teachers to work something extra if I expect my students to work for 18 hours a day I must work minimally for 20 hours a day if I do not set that example I have no right to expect any better work from it so I would agree with you that there is something tremendously wrong with the system there is something wrong with the affiliated process there is something wrong with the dilution that happens etc etc but should we not concentrate on what we can correct and the easiest thing to correct is ourselves we are autonomous as individuals we are autonomous believe me one of the reasons why IIT have the name that they have got is because this autonomy of a teacher which is guaranteed by the institute nurtured by the institute but is used by the teacher in the positive we set our own papers question papers we evaluate the papers what we teach is the syllabus and yet in 50 years there has not been a single instance of somebody saying that the grading was wrong not a single instance what does it mean we are also human beings but we have learned to live with that responsibility now what I am saying is within the limits of the system why is it that we cannot take extra responsibility I would like you to take this message to the collective about these simple problems and difficult problems I have only one word to say you know solving 10 simple problems correctly gives you a lot of satisfaction lot of marks in the exam but no additional knowledge attempting to solve 10 difficult problems without success in any problem will leave you a lot of frustrated person but you will learn a lot if there is a difference between IIT system of teaching learning and other places this is the difference you will not find any paper in IIT system which consists of simple Dana question not a single question there are no choices there are 5 questions there are 6 you have to solve also and they are hard problem that is where you apply your mind what prevents our teachers from giving these problems if not in the final exam because the university system says so what prevents me from doing it in my internal care I submit that many of our teacher colleagues do not apply their mind to these possibilities how many of us repeat questions in the question paper if I teach a course three times and if a single question is repeated at any one time my own colleagues will haul me up over cold it requires enormous amount of time to set questions it is not easy but do we have time of course we have genuine problems we are busy in so many classes the load is more etc etc I am saying under all circumstances under all constraints it is possible for us teachers to do something extra and all that I am suggesting is let us together work out what is that extra thing that we can communicate to our colleague remember our task is if we want to ignite the minds of our students then we have to ignite the minds of our teachers and I think that is one of my ambitions in conducting this co-ordinators workshop here I will not take more of your time you have a very very long session we have reduced this program from five days to three days all the best thank you