I'm going to talk to you today a bit about Irish corporation tax policy, and I intend to cover three things. One is where did Irish corporation tax policy come from, where is it at today, and how has it perceived by business, and has it perceived internationally, and then where might it be going, and what are the challenges in the future. I suppose to start off with where did it come from, well I guess you have to go back to the late 1950s, as most of you know, which is when the current Irish corporation tax regime was really set. What was the context at that time? In the late 1950s Ireland would have been one of the poorest countries in Europe. I think Sean McBride used to say that the Irish economy or the Irish country was the only country in Europe that had been systematically colonised, in the sense that you'd had almost genocide of the population at times, you'd have mass appropriation of the wealth of the native population, etc. And you had a deliberate policy by the colonial power to ensure that Ireland was not allowed to develop an industrial base, that was a deliberate policy directly leading to the famine. And I suppose you might say it's a bit longer to be talking about the famine, but I mean just put that in context, in 1957 when we commenced our current corporation tax policy, my grandfather would have been alive, and he was born in 1880 and in his childhood he would have spoken to unknown survivors of the famine, so that generation was only one degree of separation away from the famine, and the population decline that set in during the famine was still continuing in the late 1950s, we'd had a population decline since the famine right through until the early 60s, and Ireland had a population of I think between eight and ten million, depending on who you believe in the 1840s, Britain had a population of 19 million, by the time you got to the late 50s the population of this state was 2.8 million or 4 million on the island and the British population was 50 million, and as we know there are six and a half million people on this island, but almost 50 million people who claim to be Irish Americans, so the despoilation and the depopulation in the country had been massive and quite unprecedented in European terms. You also had a country that had a disadvantage in being a peripheral location, I mean we're geographically in the same position compared to Europe as the Ireland Islands are to Ireland. That's not a small disadvantage. I think as with Commissioner Fihili, I have the honour of having been born in the great city of Limerick, but we're both working in Dublin, and we know that large centres tend to attract investment, they attract people, they attract wealth, it's almost inexorable, and I think peripheral locations have a distinct disadvantage. We're also a country that doesn't have a lot of natural resources. Natural resources within the EU are generally not shared, we don't share German steel or coal or we don't share Norwegian oil. In fact I think the only thing that is shared are fishing grounds, most of which are Irish, they seem to be the only natural resource that's shared within the EU. So Ireland started in the late 50s from a position of quite a lot of disadvantage, and I think when we talk about fairness and taxation policy and so on, that's important to remember, and I think that Irish corporation tax policy was designed to redress some of the natural disadvantages that the country suffered from, and I think in that regard it's been very successful. I think throughout that period it's important to point out that unlike many other countries, the Irish corporation tax regime has been very, very transparent, it's been very open, it's not based on secret rulings, it's not based on special deals. If you want to know what the deal for taxation is in Ireland, you just open the tax legislation and that will tell you what it is. There have been a number of studies carried out, the Department of Finance did one, we did one at KPMG, and I see PWC did one recently, all of which confirmed that the effect of rate of corporation tax in Ireland is very similar to the nominal rate of 12.5%, and again that's not the case in every other country. So I think we've operated in an open and transparent way, we've developed a system which is attractive to business, we've complied with the EU law, and the system has been pretty successful, and that population that bottomed out at 2.8 million in around 1962 or 63 is at around 4.6 million I think now, 4.7 million, and I don't think it's a coincidence by the way that the economy and the population started to recover at a time when we started to be sensible about having a taxation regime that was attractive to business and attractive to bring investment into the country. I think Irish policy makers have been clever throughout that period, we started off as you know with export sales relief, when EU law meant that we had to change that, we brought in manufacturing relief, and when EU law meant to change that we moved to having a general low rate of corporation tax which was a very significant decision at the time, there would have been a lot of concerns about extending a low rate of corporation tax to things like supermarkets and domestic banks and so on, but a brave decision was taken and I think the country benefited. I think policy makers have done an excellent job throughout the recession in protecting that 12.5% tax rate because I think at various times including during the bailout and so on, that tax rate would have been under pressure and I think Irish policy makers can be proud of the fact that they've managed to retain that low rate of corporation tax in the face of quite a degree of pressure over the years and it's something which has I think enhanced Ireland's reputation internationally that despite the pressure that the country was under, we managed to retain a regime that was attractive to business. In recent years, one of the threats that we would have identified maybe three or four years ago to Ireland's position would have been the increase in competitiveness of the UK in particular and we saw the UK for example introduced a patent box regime at a 10% rate of corporation tax and a number of other measures in the UK and it's interesting to see that I think in the budget this year I think Ireland responded very well to that. The announcement of the knowledge box which I think we can anticipate will be competitive with the UK regime is very, very welcome. I think it should mean that Ireland will remain ahead of the UK in terms of its corporation tax offering. That's important because the UK is a fairly obvious alternative choice to Ireland. We speak the same language as geographically close and so on. The move to remove the base here for R&D tax credits was also very important because again that redressed a potential competitive disadvantage for the UK and some of the moves on the SARP, that's the special tax relief for assignees coming to Ireland in particular the removal of the cap on the relief is again very important because it gave us a position where we could undercut the UK competitively. If you add together those three measures combined it's really very positive in terms of inward investment for the country. KPMG UK do a survey of business asks them what country do they think is the most attractive for inward investment every year and I think last year Ireland was sixth and the UK was first and the survey results are just out this week and those positions have been more or less reversed so Ireland is now in that survey back to the number one position which is great to see. In terms of challenges going forward I just mentioned maybe three or four things. One is the obviously it's interesting news in the press this morning if it's true and I presume it is that there may be a 12.5% corporation tax rate or perhaps even lower across the border in Northern Ireland in the near future. That will be an interesting challenge. You'll have a strong competitor for business with the south of Ireland going forward. I think the BEPS project most of the BEPS project I don't believe is a danger to Ireland. There's a lot of stuff in it which actually could be good for Ireland because a lot of the project is designed to align the allocation of profits with where there is substance and inward investment in Ireland tends to have substance and I don't think as a country we're particularly interested in attracting inward investment that doesn't have substance so that could be good for Ireland. One feature of it is that it's likely to align the allocation of profits globally with where key decision makers are made and that will mean it will be important to ensure that we continue to have a tax regime that makes it attractive for key decision makers to locate in Ireland and that's one area where we would say in the future for the work might have to be done. I think the area within BEPS that is the biggest threat to Ireland is the area the proposals on tax treaties. The proposals that's currently framed in our view are pretty dangerous to small countries in fact I'd go so far as to say I think they're quite discriminatory against small countries that may not be deliberate and certainly we will be making submissions to the OECD and so on the detail of that I won't bore you with the detail here or I'd be here for a very long time and the final thing I'd say in terms of our policy going forward we have done a very good job over many decades for foreign direct investment. I think that our tax regime that's available to domestic entrepreneurs isn't as competitive as it might be particularly when you compare to our nearest neighbour and particularly the 10% rate of capital gains tax entrepreneurs from the UK is very attractive. You will now potentially have across the border in Northern Ireland a 12 and a half percent rate of corporate tax combined with a 10% rate of capital gains tax so 33% our rate of capital gains tax I think is pretty uncompetitive with that. But overall the message I'd leave you with this that I think Ireland has evolved and developed a tax regime for business that it's fair it's transparent it's competitive and it's now according to our latest survey the most attractive in the world for immigrant investment. Thank you.


Our next speaker is Dr. Alex Langerman. Alex is assistant professor of surgery and a junior faculty scholar at the Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence here at the University of Chicago. Alex is an otolaryngologist trained in head and neck surgical oncology and microvascular reconstruction. His ethics related research surrounds decision making for head and neck cancer, surgeon communication with patients and families and colleagues. Dr. Langerman completed both medical school and his surgical residency here at the University of Chicago. I have to say I have known Alex for many years. Back before he ever went to medical school he was a research assistant who did some work with me and we published a paper in 2000 that he probably doesn't even remember but I found on my CV that is opinions and use of advanced directors by physicians at a tertiary care hospital. So Dr. Langerman's been interested in these topics for a very long time and has really developed a tremendously creative area of research. So Alex. Peter, thank you. And that was actually my first academic publication and in academics as in love you never forget your first time. Thanks everyone for being here this morning. I appreciate it and to the McLean family, the center, Mark, Peter, everyone for getting up early this morning. Thank you for being here. So let's see if this works. Great. So the operating room. Fun place to study. It's sort of unique in that there's a highly technical component to it. There's lots of expensive technology and the assistance we use, you know the very cutting edge of medical knowledge but at the same time it's fundamentally a manual skill and so there's some interesting dichotomy there. So the surgeon meets the patient in clinic or in the ER, wherever they are, and then they shepherd them through the operative sort of life cycle into the operating room and out. And because they're the one that sort of the patient has created this compact with, I believe, is really the fundamental reason why surgeons have a certain primacy in the operating room as far as decision-making goes.  Looking at our surgeons here performing one particular complex operation called a Whipple Procedure or Pancreaticode Duodenectomy, you can see that here's the textbook up top and then A, B, and C are three different surgeons all ostensibly doing the same operation here at the University of Chicago and all of them do it differently. Different orders, different steps, some include some things, some include other things. And so you say, well, gosh, maybe a Whipple isn't a Whipple, isn't a Whipple. And so all of those studies saying, well, and patients in arm A got a Whipple and arm B got chemo-radiation or something along those lines might not be getting the same intervention. What do we have as a record of those interventions? Well, we have the operative report and the operative report is inherently subjective so they're often incomplete and poor quality. They will often not have a high sensitivity or specificity for certain important events in the operating room. And in fact, if you combine observers in the operating room and then look at the operative report, well, sometimes they gloss over some important issues or maybe some complications. So maybe that isn't what we should be relying on as our only record of what goes on in the operating room. We looked at just neck to section operative reports and found that there was often information missing that would even affect a patient's downstream care as far as the medical or the actual surgical intervention. And we're in good company. Plenty of studies have done this as well. Of course, the surgical, you know, what you're sort of the narrative of the surgical operation isn't the only thing that affects patient care in the operating room. There's all sorts of other factors that go into it. Communication, competing tasks, the experience, whether or not someone's coming in and out of the room, whether there's a phone call, whether it's a hard part of the surgery, whether someone's exhausted when they do that and all that actually affects patient care and theoretically could be measured. This is a wonderful landmark study and this is the third component, which is sort of the actual skill of the operator. So in the Michigan Bariatric Surgery Collaborative, this is a longitudinal study of patients undergoing bariatric surgery and they follow them out afterwards and look at their complication rates and they have over 5,000 cases in this. And so some of the participating surgeons were asked to send in a video of what they felt was a representative video of one of their bariatric surgery cases. And then these videos were edited down to be kind of short in particular steps and then they were rated by an expert panel to say who's gentle, who has a better economy of motion, who has better exposure. And they rated these surgeons basically as like really good surgeons and not so good surgeons. And what they found is that there's a really clear correlation here between surgical skill and complication rate. It goes down as you get a better surgeon. So actually that's surgical skill, complication rate. There we go. This is a video I took in fellowship of my mentor and one of the residents he was operating with. It just sort of gives you a visual thing and this is one of the things. Putting this into sort of numbers is kind of hard because our eyes and brains can see it and I hope you'll be able to see that in this video here. So this would be the novice. It seems like everything they touch sort of bleeds and doesn't quite, you know, it's hesitant. You get the idea, okay. So that's, you know, that's that. And then here's the master surgeon, my fellowship mentor.   And you can see the flow of this operation just naturally to our eyes is better. And you wonder how you might be able to capture this. So this is important information, information about how good people are at operating, information about, you know, the communication in the team or how it works or other factors that may go into patient care. It's important. It's a national healthcare priority to find information to make healthcare better and actually getting this data in some way out of the OR, therefore, I would say is a national healthcare priority. So how do other industries collect data for quality improvement, air prevention? Molly nicely set this up. Of course, we have the aviation flight recorder, which has two components. There's the flight data recorder. So these are all the technical things about the plane as well as some sensor data, gyroscopes, wind, speed. And, you know, they keep that for a long time. That's actually just a lot of numbers. So it's sort of not that hard to save. And then the cockpit voice recorder, you could certainly record more of it, but, you know, after some negotiations, it was decided through by pilots that, you know, well, they'd be comfortable having the last half hour, you know, recorded. And it's a continuous loop and it eats its tail. And the idea is if there's a crash, okay, you have the last half hour before that. The essence of that, all their personal conversations, you know, go into the ether. But there's no opt out. It's always on. It's always being recorded. The two ways that this data is used, so pilots, if they have a near miss or airline companies, if they notice that there's a problem, can voluntarily submit data to analyze by the FAA. If there's a crash, the National Transportation Safety Board takes over and, you know, no one gets to negotiate that data is automatically taken out. There's actually another potential analogy. I think that those of us who've been following the news know that there's all sorts of fuss about police uses of force and efforts to try to curtail that and police are now wearing cameras. And they've been doing that for a few years now, but it's increasing. And actually, it's mostly for the police officer's protection. It can ensure that, you know, despite any complaints of an arrestee that the, you know, arrest was conducted appropriately. These are officer control, though. So they choose when to turn them on and turn them off sort of as it stands right now, although there's plenty of debate about that. And then there's the duration of retention. How long do you keep this? And interestingly, you know, the ACLU, who would normally say no more cameras, you know, and I'm sort of paraphrasing, actually say, well, maybe some cameras if we can prevent the use of excessive force. And so there's definitely some tension in this world about wanting to have privacy and security and protection. So we can do this in the operating room. This is David Song, one of my colleagues, and we did some experiments just using GoPros and several of the other competitors in the operating room to see how they work. And it's really fun and great, and they take awesome videos and it's easy to use. You can actually do things with these videos. So this was a GoPros sitting up on a tripod and the heat map that you see overlaid is actually all of the staff activity as they were setting up a room. This is really preliminary data, but the point is we can sort of track where are people, what are people doing around the operating room and begin to sort of look at how you can make it more efficient. Now one of the problems with this data, of course, is this is like HD video. You know, this is like tons and tons of gigabytes to get even a single case. And I mentioned the police officers, well, they're spending, you know, communities are spending millions and millions of dollars just for storage of these videos, you know. It's expensive now. It gets cheaper, keeps getting cheaper, but nevertheless, millions and millions of dollars, even for an individual, medium-sized community. So then we say, well, can we ratchet down that data, sort of get more like the cockpit or the flight data recorder? Just numbers. And so we can use things like the Microsoft Connect, you guys may be familiar with it.  And so we've been trying this out in the operating room. What you see is you go from HD video to a point cloud which is sort of this colored image which doesn't have a lot of detail but gives you some sense of people moving around and is also a little de-identified, which might be nice. And then you go down to a skeleton and you really, you know, not have much data at all that you need, but it's still XYZ coordinates so you can tell when people are moving their arms. I'm not sure what the usefulness of this is yet, but I think that there could be. You just have to do some correlational studies. So we're still working on this technology. You can also just look at audio. You can parse out audio, figure out when instruments are being used, when the door opens, when something drops on the floor, or when people are talking and even remove the content of the voices and just hear, and get some sense of people talking or communicating to each other. So there's lots of opportunities there. And then you can also do myographic recordings and I guess the only question I would ask is, which surgeon do you want operating on you? A or B? And so you get some idea of the data that we might be able to collect. So what can we do with this? You could create better surgical techniques. You could train people to be better surgeons. You could actually investigate when some complication happens or some terrible things happen. You could go back and really get some rich data, not just a recollection of what happened, but actually what happened. You could use that to create early warning systems.  You seem a little too stressed out. Let's slow it back. You know, everyone calm down or like let's stop the disruptions in this room.  We're gonna stop people from coming in and out. We're gonna keep calm right now because this is a high risk moment. And then you could also use this to generate automated medical records. So there's some big questions and in true exploratory ethics format I will not answer any of these today. But I wanna talk a little bit about them. And also there's some other questions I should point out off to the side here. I don't even address, but are also quite your main to this. We don't have all day. So can the surgical team opt out? So this was a somewhat controversial framework to talk about how we can kind of balance the research QI dichotomy. This came out in the Hastings Center report. And one of their arguments, this group of authors was that physicians have the duty to provide the best care. That's sort of acceptable to everybody I think. They're the only ones in the position to improve care. Maybe controversial, maybe true. So therefore they're obligated to participate in programs that improve care. And so you could make that argument. I'm not necessarily gonna go into all that today, but you one could make that argument that physicians should participate this some way. Flight teams can't, oh, sorry. Flight teams can't opt out, so we know that already. And it sounds like police might not be able to opt out either. This is a very recent ruling in Albuquerque. The Justice Department said they're required to wear body cameras to record their encounters. It used to be sort of an optional thing for department up by department. And now we might see that all police officers are gonna be required to wear this. Maxineau, all physicians are gonna be required to wear this. That's entirely theoretically possible. So should patients participate in this? Well, there's an argument again from these authors that they benefit from the common good. If we made the healthcare system better, then everyone benefits. Therefore they should be willing to have this sort of minor data about their vitals or what's going on in the case available. Did we give patients the choice to opt out to not have that monitoring? Or is it their data anyways? Is it really their data? And so the two arguments on both sides of that are, well, if it's a patient's data, it's about their procedure, much like if you had a CT scan or the narrative operative report, that's data about what happened to them. So therefore it's their medical records, their data. And then if it's surgical teams data, it's because it's about their performance in the operating room. It's not really about the patient per se. It's about what everyone was doing in that room and it's about those human beings. So it probably gets a little bit more complex than that. If you have the raw data coming out of the operating room, you can imagine that there's some data about team activity, communication, performance, sort of the things I was showing earlier. This includes, and I separate this out intentionally, but procedural images and video, that's like the richest stuff to collect. You can tell a lot from it. And then there's clearly the patient data stuff. So vitals, procedural data, implants. And so we can see that you might split some of that rich data up in two camps. And how is this regulated? Well, starting in the center there, depending on what the video is, is it identifiable? What's the purpose for it? You could sort of put it in either camp. But team data may be protected under sort of the peer review process. And then patient data, well, that's HIPAA, that's healthcare record standards. Now we could say, well, let's just do this. Let's just take the team data, and we're gonna ship that over to some regulatory body to determine if actions are happening or how to make things better. That's a great way to handle it. Well, the problem is that patient data is actually incredibly germane to team performance. Whether they're operating on a morbidly obese patient or someone who's a Jehovah's Witness and hypo-coagulable might change dynamics and performance in a way that should appropriately sort of risk adjust whatever they're doing. So I'd like to propose today sort of four models of thinking about this, and I hope I, yeah, I got time, good. Four models of thinking about this. So the first is the aggregate model. So we could theoretically take this data in sort of de-identified format and just report it to somebody and they could call through all that data and they could say, okay, well, you know, teams that talk, have better communication or surgeons that are gentler and much like that bariatric study, they simply have better outcomes. And that's a great thing and I'd love to actually do that. I think that's wonderful. Now one of the problems is it doesn't let you go back then and intervene, it just sort of allows you to make broad statements about what you're doing. So something like flights that take off too fast, crash or something, but not going back and telling pilots that are maybe flying a little too fast that they need to change their behavior. Second is a peer review model. So you just simply keep it in the hospital or in the state level or whatever and you report all the data and you say, well, it's a peer review process so we'll allow all that data to go in there and there's nothing wrong with that except it's incredibly effortful and it's also subject to the bias of when you decide to report it. There's a live record model. So that could be everything you collect just becomes part of the patient's record and one could make an argument. Yeah, you like that. So one could make an argument that everything in the operating room is essentially part of the patient's record. But then you gotta think about those of you who don't operate maybe you're in clinic with a patient and the entire recording of all your clinic, everything you're thinking and writing and the conversations you have out in the hallway about them and all that goes into the record might be a tough way to practice but an interesting thought. And then there's this parsed record model which I'm gonna explain a little more and I think this may be an opportunity to move forward. So Alex Pentland is a data scientist at MIT, the IDEA Lab. He spun off all these amazing products and concepts and designs and he created this idea of a personal data store. So what we probably don't think about all the time but probably know happens is that anytime you turn on this multi-sensor apparatus that is our smartphone, it starts sending all sorts of data about us up to our service providers, up to our data companies and that's how they can tell things about us. So for instance, those of you who use the Google Maps function and actually look at the traffic, the traffic is all the other users of those phones, they're sending data continuously up in their service prior and they aggregate that and they say, oh, these phones are moving slower than these phones so therefore there's a traffic jam here. And so that's how that all works. Well, they can also use the rich data that they collect about what stores we're walking into, where we're geographically, what we're paying for, who we're calling, who we're talking to to learn a lot about our behavior and really for their own purposes. And I guess I don't have too much problem with that but maybe I should, maybe I should have a problem with that and people get very worried about the NSA, that's certainly a national topic right now but the reality is plenty of people are monitoring our behavior all the time. So Pentland's idea was to create a digital barrier on these devices that we carry. Essentially you could decide what information goes to who but more importantly in the part that I think really is relevant to what we're thinking about in the operating room is you can create a system so that instead of sending all of the raw rich data out it actually sends only the specific information you need for the question that you're asking of the service. So if you're asking, how do I get from here to here it would send just a brief snapshot of your present GPS location. If you wanted it to tell you, follow you along and you could send it more continuously but it's not gonna track what stores you're walking into or who you're calling or the pictures that you're taking at that time like it otherwise might. So could we create a system where the data coming out of the operating room is actually parsed in a way so that we could ask very specific questions about team behavior, about surgeon performance, about the patient's likely outcomes and that could be sent to a regulatory body or even placed into the patient's medical record in a way that would allow us to analyze this without trying to scoop absolutely everything especially when there's gonna be a lot of data that early on is completely meaningless to people. It's hard to tell what it means when someone barks at somebody or the significance of a sound of something dropping and that could easily be teased at through afterwards if there was an adverse event but if you don't really know if there's a true correlation then it's just gonna muddy the system. Additionally, this kind of parsed data would also require much less storage capacity and thinking about it from a technical standpoint that's an important reality check to this. You can't just keep videos of every single procedure we run out of space very quickly. So a few conclusions. I believe that collecting rich surgical data is a good thing in some way or another. I hope that maybe I've demonstrated that to you today. I think that we need to stay ahead or keep up with the advance of technology because the things that I describe are, many are just a year old and that means that next year there's gonna be something even more amazing. Protections do need to be in place to maintain an annuity but still allow quality improvement. If we just take it all in aggregate, we're not gonna be able to get the same kind of quality improvement that we could if we can look at sort of individual instances or particular adverse events. And then finally, we need to create a system that would encourage physicians and patients to be willing to sort of not opt out that it would be something that everyone would accept as, this is okay if we just run this in the background all the time, because that's the way we're gonna get the best data. So thanks very much, I appreciate it. Hi, thanks for your talk. I'm Steve Sherson from the University of Chicago. I think that I have the privilege of working in an environment right now which may be the only one in the hospital where we currently have 24-hour data collection. We have videos in the NICU trained on the patient and anyone taking care of the patient at all times. And I think this is more of a comment but I think there are some things we've learned or some things to think about with that sort of 24-hour no opt-out recording. And there was a case actually in the last year where a nurse was fired as a result of review of the video from the care that she had provided. So it's an up in the air issue right now, still ongoing but there's no audio, just video. But anytime any procedure is done, including when surgeries are done at the bedside they're recorded. So usually we use the data if something bad happens but it's happening all the time. So I think it's... That's wonderful. Yeah, very similar also to codes, they'll record the codes and our audio goes on and what they do with that data is another question but I'd love to talk afterwards about your experiences if that's okay with you, that'd be great, yeah. Giuliano. Testa from Baylor Dallas, Alex that was a great talk. I have a comment, one is the analogy that we draw all the time between pilots and flying and surgeons, I think it's the wrong one. It's always been wrong from the get go. The pilot that goes from Dallas to Chicago knows exactly the route, knows which altitude is gonna fly and has all the data in front of him and has to follow a path. I would say the analogy would be better with a war pilot as a target name but doesn't know how to get there or if he knows, he doesn't know what is gonna happen when he gets there. I think that's a better analogy for surgery because we do have a route but we don't know what we're gonna find when we open that abdomen or when you open your neck. I think that's a little bit. And the second thing is the pilot, the co-pilot is somebody who's already finished his training. It's not somebody that is trained to become a pilot. That's a big difference with the kind of intercourse or relationship at the cockpit that may occur but to more pertinent to your talk, how it may influence the training of the surgeons in terms of the action that we as the people who train these surgeons should act upon when we notice that these guys are now up to the task because reality is when you really put this to the extreme many people go to pilot school or whatever that's called and we never graduate because it's clear they cannot perform the task and in our job, unfortunately or fortunately for the people who know how to operate you need to know how to operate. You need to know how to use your hands. So how would you implement then knowing that five of the 10 that you are training would should now finish their training while in reality we finish almost everybody? All right, that's a really great question. That's a huge tension in surgery and I was actually talking with a new Milani, I don't know if he's here, but the other night at a reception about this very topic.  And the thing is that is something that I know you personally experience, I personally experience when you fred over it when you have trainees and you're like, wow, kind of bad hands. I don't know what's safe or what's right as far as graduating this person. And what do I wonder is, well, is there a way to do this operation that would be easier for that particular person with those particular bad hands or maybe another question is looking at all those Whipple surgeons. They all do it differently. Maybe that performs best in each of those hands and if they had to switch and do it a different way even with practice or training, it wouldn't happen even though they're awesome surgeons. And so I think that you hit it at a concern that we all have, but I think we also ultimately only have our individual perceptions of that person working with us or it might be a personality clash. And also we don't have a way of sort of adjusting surgical procedures that might fit better in certain people's hands than others. We only have our own way of teaching it. And so I think that there's a lot of fruit for that investigation. And it's so great. I love the pilot point is dead on and thanks. Thank you. Thank you.


Hello and welcome to day 50 of the mindfulness challenge. 50 days we've been doing this. This is the fifth, the first time that I've put something together. So it's amazing. Congratulations. Well done. Give yourself a pat on your back. Today is VE day, which is victory in Europe, which is being celebrated all across Europe, particularly in the UK, and there's a huge amount of things that are going on, but we have to do it all from our doorsteps. We can't go out. We can't mingle, but it's okay. It is what it is, and we are where we are. And we're very fortunate to be in a position to be able to do that. But ideally what we're looking to do today as well is through VE day, is just give our thoughts to people who have made and paid the ultimate sacrifice, which was their lives. And for all the years going forward, all the AM services, et cetera, but now the key line, frontline workers, those people who have passed away on the frontline, you know, who are putting their lives at risk to save others. And that is just a special thing. And when you think about that, just think about that love inside you and that compassion and that empathy for other people who are out there today, giving their lives so others can live. It's phenomenal. It's the ultimate sacrifice. So that's how lucky we are to be alive. That's how lucky we are to have our breath from moment to moment. That's how lucky we are to be able to watch this video right here, right now. So today isn't about meditations.  So today's meditation is simple once this is stopped. You can press stop anytime you want. Just close your eyes and take five very deep breaths in. But every time you breathe in, you appreciate the support and love that you've been given by others to allow you to live your life today. Just thank people for their support and those people have paid the ultimate sacrifice. So day 50 is very quick. It's very simple. It's just we grow compassion, empathy, love and kindness for those people who allow us to live our lives today. So thank you to all of those people and thank you to you for watching and staying with us from day 50. Day 51 is going to be very different. But day 50 today is a time where we just have those moments of reflection for those people who paid the ultimate sacrifice. Thank you for watching. God bless, be love and give love and don't forget when you wake up in the morning you put your hand on your heart and you say, good morning Julian, I love you. But what about good morning everybody and good morning to those people who have paid the ultimate sacrifice which was their lives for me to be able to do this video right here, right now. Thank you very much for watching day 50. It's short and it's sweet. It's a bit like me. Thanks for watching. Have a lovely day and just remember those people who have paid the ultimate sacrifice. Thank you.


What is going on guys, welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here. Today I want to discuss a few points brought up over the past few days regarding Destiny 2 and why it's basically in its current state. Destiny 2 is pretty much in the slumps at the moment and it shouldn't be the case three months after release. So under Destiny Tracker's podcast we saw what's been a super reliable source known as Jason Shryer, the guy who is the new director at Kotaku. Basically drop a little bit of information of why Destiny 2 could be in its current state. So this is what Jason said and it's an actual serious subject. Destiny 2 was rebooted back in 2016 and if that is the case there really wasn't much time point into what would have been a fresh reboot. This is exactly what Jason said although if you do want to hear the full podcast you'll find it linked within the video description via Destiny Tracker's YouTube channel. So Jason said this. I think that it Destiny 2 was made in a relatively short period of time. There was a big reboot of Destiny 2 at some point of early 2016. There had been a previous director who was directing the game before Luke Smith who is the current director took it over. This guy who was directing before Luke Smith was put aside for Luke Smith to take over. I believe that was in April of 2016 but I might be misremembering so don't hold me to that exact line. So if you think about it that way then they really didn't have a ton of time. It had been a 16 month period between a reboot and when the game finally shipped. Hearing this actually makes a lot of sense considering Destiny 2 and how it's been and progressed and it ain't progressed very far. Destiny 2 does indeed feel like a rushed and pushed out game. A game which is a fraction of what the first game ended to offer. The basis of Destiny 1 just after the release of Rise of Iron was in a great place. Not perfect but a great place. A time where much of the community were really happy. That DLC brought to the game so much including the whole new raid, story although the story probably weren't the best part. It still offered many other things including Arkham's Forge, exotic weapon quests and so much more. The basis of where Destiny 1 left off was great and it was a core which many of us thought Destiny 2 would come offering but that certainly was not the case. Destiny 2 released as what many people including myself were saying was basically a reboot. Luke Smith supposedly took over at around April of 2016 giving him and the team at Bungie under 16 months to reboot a game which had known that had already been worked on for some time. It makes you wonder the game we would have got if it wasn't rebooted. Not that in my opinion it would have been more like the game we saw Destiny 1 finish off its life cycle as. So Luke Smith took over on Destiny 2 on April 2016. This after he was the lead director undertaking King DLC which came out around September 2015. The Rise of Iron then was released at September 20th 2016 which finished off the life cycle of Destiny 1 and it was a strong, strong feature. Because of this we all expected something great with Destiny 2. Now this is actually what I think happened here. Luke Smith rebooted Destiny 2 and this was the start of the downfall. What he did in my opinion was try and reboot the franchise while keeping us happy by not actually stating their reboot in the franchise when it comes to the core story etc and what we expect from a sequel. His ideas no doubt were in us losing everything including weapons, armour, light and so forth. This was the start of the reboot and it felt like everything we played for within Destiny 1 was taken away from us and this was a part of the plan in my opinion. A reboot but not an actual reboot and now you are understanding me. Think of it like this, Destiny 2 isn't really a follow-up. It isn't really a sequel. We as a player here are starting a fresh game. So his idea of rebooting us, why and where did this come from in my opinion came not long after the taking King DLC. Actually the idea of this and thought process towards it no doubt came way before the DLC. Destiny 1 if you remember upon release and not long after received so much negativity. It was half the game we were promised after in half the story and not much else. For sure the core mechanics offered more than D2 at release but the game wasn't fulfilled. We wasn't happy as a community and this was going on way after taking King was released. Everything they dropped DLC wise just didn't really meet our expectations. I feel Luke Smith had this in mind and with this in mind thinking a fresh reboot of the franchise would be a good idea. Any DLC that dropped for Destiny 1 would always serve the same outcome of an unhappy community. But this wasn't the case with The Rise of Iron but once we actually saw and received something great and it was the start of what many thought would be things to come within the future. By this time the plans to reboot Destiny with Destiny 2 were no doubt already in the works. It was a set in stone placement. Destiny 2 stories as guardians rekindle all our old abilities with no doubt changes for the better or the simpler. The base story of Destiny 2 although I believe wasn't as long as Destiny 1's it still gave us more story on what was actually going on. The balance of the game and the changes we experienced were those of a company fixing or trying to fix issues they thought were causing many problems with the original first game. If we were to compare everything Destiny 1 offered and we compare that to what Destiny 2 offers we will find that almost in every single case everything is done down within Destiny 2. It's been given a short route. It's been made simple and this has no doubt come from a company trying to fix mistakes they've made within the past and keep things balanced across the board with a short time limit to do so. 16 months or below isn't very long at all but what they actually did was take away everything we loved about Destiny 1 and gave us an empty shell and now they're finding themselves basically trying to deliver us stuff that Destiny 1 already featured. Destiny 1 as an end product was an amazing starting point. A reboot in my opinion was a bad idea especially 16 months before it was released. Whether at the time they thought they had more time to do so we don't know but at the end of the day the outcome and the end product is that of a product which actually feels like a product built on 60 months of reused and reimagined features it makes sense of why Destiny 2 is in its current state. Now I won't ever say it's too late for Destiny as we have been in similar roles in the past but a few patches and DLCs later we are happy but the moment it feels like it's going to be a real long road but hey it's a new year hopefully as we know Bungie have said they're listening we will hear soon their thoughts and the changes they will bring to the franchise big changes are needed not impossible changes either with time and effort from both us and Bungie this game could be great again and I'm that note guys I am out. What do you think about Destiny 2 being rebooted 16 months before release was it a real bad idea? Note that the reasoning behind the current state of Destiny 2 let me know but thanks as always for stopping by if you enjoyed the video leave a like it really does help me out if you're new around here and enjoy daily Destiny videos be sure to subscribe and hopefully people I will see you on that next one.


Hi guys, happy new year, first of all, my name is Sahil Chiranamani, I came here to attend the Hasgeek hack, I've had a lovely time today and I just want to talk about my motivation behind coming here and what I intended to build but I didn't end up doing it. Anyways, actually I'm a huge fan of artificial intelligence and things like that, my interest lies in natural language processing and algorithms in that. So today's hack actually I wanted to actually get some in depth experience working in this field and so what I decided to build for today was actually a text prediction engine. I wanted to, like how SwiftKey or something works, like on your phone when you type and you get like lovely prediction and they are all context specific. So I wanted to build an app which does this thing but it's not an easy task to build an AI engine in less than 6-7 hours. So what I ended up doing was learning a lot about this thing that go behind artificial intelligence and how to build your corpus and things like that. Things I actually took away from this experience was that you should actually learn a lot about what you're trying to build and set goals and stuff. It doesn't have to be like only for one night and things like that, you can actually expand on whatever you're building so if you're building something just do it for long term rather than short term. That's all I would like to say. Thanks.


Hi, I'm Dan Cohen, and this is my colleague, Joan Forgezi-Toriano. We're excited to be here to present our project on a different take on scholarly communication. I found the last session we went to also intriguing and I think which had some other models for open access publishing and we'll leave ample time I think at the end to talk about maybe differences in models of publishing. But where we want to start today is with a little bit about where this project came from, why we decided to try a different take on publishing. And as you can see here we talk about it as being scholarship and publication the web way. We wanted to sort of think about scholarly communication starting with the web rather than with a print model. And so a lot of what we'll talk about today is differences in web-first publishing versus traditional academic journal publishing where you submit an article to be reviewed, it goes through some process. We tried to take our inspiration in the Pressword Project from what was going out on the web, how the web reviews, aggregates, curates, validates material, and we'll show you some examples from that. So what we want to start out is Joan and I both come out of I guess digital history or digital humanities more broadly and one of the things that we've noticed over the past few years in digital humanities is that there's a lot of us who are already publishing I guess in air quotes on the web. People who have blogs, this is a very promising grad student, Ben Schmidt, who's a Princeton grad student working in digital history. He has a terrific blog called Sapping Attention and he writes very long, thorough, article-sized pieces on his blog. Recently he's been working with ship's logs and tracking ships and also doing some text mining relating to that. And so there are lots of people like Ben out there I guess in the DH community producing scholarship, stuff that looks like scholarship but isn't in a journal, and also that would have a very hard time being in a traditional print journal. So he often has videos of his visualizations on his site. He has multimedia and things that would have to be flattened out to get into a print journal. He's working in a web first way to put his scholarship up there. There are other genres. My colleague Steve Barnes, who's a Russian historian, has a group blog with other Russian historians where they have different kinds of genres than you normally see in a regular academic journal. So when new books come out they have a very rapid conversation emerging around those new scholarly works on the blog. Here's one about Gulag Boss, which is a Soviet memoir, that they were able to have a kind of real-time discussion right on the blog about. They've also done analyses of old Soviet videos that they pull from YouTube and discuss in depth. Really kind of wonderful use, pedagogical use, and also scholarly use for this kind of web first publishing. There are terrific collaborative non-digital history kinds of things going on now. Frog in a Well, which is a terrific blog, a collaborative web blog of about 20 scholars in East Asian history. It's written in four languages, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and English, and has really deep scholarship and discussion. And web first just on a blog without the intervention of an academic journal. There are institutional sites that span many different places and disciplines like niche, which is the network in Canadian history and environment where you see geologists and climate scientists working with historians in a kind of interdisciplinary fashion to craft new forms of scholarship. Again, something you normally wouldn't see in a sort of generally siloed view of the academic and kind of Balkanized view where different disciplines like history and climate science would never kind of publish together or rarely talk to each other. This is a good example of a kind of web first place that these scholars can go and discuss relevant issues and sort of create scholarship. It includes things like podcasts and new media that, again, is hard to find in a print journal or cannot exist in a print journal. There's new kinds of publications, sort of incipient publications, Ant Spider B, which is also an environmental and digital publication, which has incredible, rich visualizations, in this case, an article on San Francisco Bay's Forgotten Past where a scholar has taken satellite imagery and walked through how things have changed in the bay over time. Full color, interactive, includes conversation. Again, organically arising out of these fields of discussion into these new forms of publication. We focused here on history and maybe digital humanities, but I would say, as Cliff Lynch pointed out in the plenary, the opening plenary, of course in the sciences there's all kinds of new forms, and indeed for far longer than in history there have been forms of web first publication, archive.org, maybe more recently, plus one, lots of stuff being pushed out onto the web. But there is this real question of how do we validate, review this kind of material. And so that's where Joan and I began this project. How do we think about material that's published openly on the web but providing a kind of layer over that, a layer on top of that that validates, that finds important material and disseminates it to communities of interest, which has always been, of course, the function of the academic journal. How can we re-envision that in a kind of web first way? Well, you look around the web and there indeed are models like this. In technology news there's sites like TechMeme that do their best to kind of algorithmically and now TechMeme more recently has also brought in a kind of human hand to pull out the most important stories of the day. So you can't keep track of the hypercaffeinated tech news every day. On the TechMeme at the end of the day you'll see the eight or ten important stories. And that's a model that's been very effective for them to sort of aggregate and curate this material. There's all human models like the browser, which is started by one person in London, to find high quality, long form writing. It's a very popular site, gets lots of visitors and again pulls things from open venues of writing, puts them up on one site, again sort of validates it as high quality work. Food Press, not often talked about in academia, although we are foodies I guess. So a site like Food Press is really interesting. It takes recipes found in WordPress.com blogs. WordPress.com is now hosting tens of millions of blogs and there's lots of foodies there and they're putting up recipes. And Food Press, which is actually produced by the WordPress folks, again pulls the best stuff, best onion dip recipes from the giant sea of all those blogs and creates a kind of vetted high quality location for finding all the posts on vegetarian food that you'd like to get. Again narrows it down, whittles it down and I think we've seen this again and again on the web and I think we're actually in a moment right now where lots of people are talking about this real need to kind of anthologize and cut down on the vast sea of material that's up there on the web for communities of interest. There are sites that do this, again, based on your particular interest like Paper Lee, Tweeted Times, a lot of these are social network based where they read through your Twitter stream and tries to pull out links that are being retweeted a lot and puts that forward into a kind of daily newspaper just for you. But of course the problem here is that we don't get that kind of validation and this finds things are important to you but of course in academia we care what is important or valid for all of us and we need that sense that we're all kind of reading the same things. One of the things that academic journals do really well is that we know that the handful of articles that come out in a particular journal, the American Historical Review, that most of us in our profession will at least leaf through that and get a sense of what's there and find important work. So thinking about that we put together this project Press Forward, pressforward.org where we, as we say in our motto, sort of bring together the best scholarship from across the web, the open web to produce vital open publications scholarly communities can gather around. Our idea is that there's high quality material out there, it just needs to be organized in some fashion and validated and then sent out to an awaiting community that doesn't want to wade through hundreds of blogs or thousands of websites. So this is our model which is a very different model than the, again, submit model that you get for an academic journal where you send in your Word document or PDF, you wait six months or a year, you get some thumbs up or thumbs down or revise and resubmit and then you wait another couple of years for your piece to come out. We try to work a little bit more rapidly but also in a kind of layered fashion and our feeling is that there's always been layered review in academia. It just hasn't been that apparent because we have this binary world of the journal where something is accepted or rejected. It can only be published in one place which is very un-web-like in the way that we link to good things from multiple different locations. So we are trying to find things out there on the open web and slowly go through a process over time of vetting that into what looks like a journal at the end. So we start again with that open web. So for instance in Digital Humanities and Joan will talk about this in greater depth in just a second. There are hundreds of blogs in Digital Humanities, hundreds of institutional places, centers like the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media where we put out new projects and new software tools and all kinds of things that are part of DH. Lots of things out there on the open web. Every day Joan and I and a wide variety of other editors will sift through this and again Joan is going to get into this in more depth in just a second to find important new material for that day. We also have a kind of daily relevant content section. We also have a kind of editor's choices where we actually go through and do another layer beyond just what's being retweeted the most. Go through and assess content for quality, new projects for their quality and we'll make editor's choices that will push out to these subscribers. And then every 90 days we actually have a journal which is the best of the best. So we might start with 15,000 blog posts at the bottom of that pyramid. We might narrow that down every day to 8 to 10 just like tech meme of sort of hey this is neat. We'll get to editor's choices which is a narrowing of that. And then to the quarterly journal it might be only 10 or 12 articles, projects, other things that we've identified on the open web that are really worthy of greater engagement and validation that will end up in the quarterly journal. And again we haven't come up with a better term for this. But we do view it as a journal and indeed it will look like a journal when we go through that. So I think I'm going to hand it off to Joan and she'll walk through the process a bit more. So Digital Humanities Now is this sort of now publication, the weekly publication. Since November 2011, so just over a year we've been working in version 2.0. And version 2.0 as Dan mentioned includes an in-house editorial team of Dan, myself and the two graduate students Jerry Waringa and Sasha Huffman. And so what we did as a group is we developed some criteria for what we thought would be useful in ways to identify content for the editor's choice category. And previous iterations of this had been Dan as a single editor in version 1.5, very time consuming job and in the version 1.0 was fully automated publishing. So we decided it was worth a try having a little bit more editorial control over this. So for the first seven months we published five days a week and since June we have published two times a week. Thinking that that is about all the tension our readers have for new content and also it allows us to be a little bit more selective in our choices. So since November 2011 we've published over 1200 posts, over 1,200 pieces. And what we publish are editor's choice, you can see that in the left column there. These are pieces that we've identified as moving the field forward in some way. They are reports of research and progress, they are comments on the shape of the field, they are really about scholarship. What we do is we select an excerpt from those pieces, we select an image, and then we provide a link back to the original. And so in the editor's choice category we're trying to sort of take the pulse on the latest work in the field. And we only have usually one or two editor's choice pieces a day, so only up to about four a week. If you really want to know the most latest work going on in digital humanities we'll pick the four things for you to pay attention to on any given week. So that means that we can identify conversations and trends that are happening in the digital humanities field. And it helps inform our selection of content for the Journal of Digital Humanities, which I'll talk about next. And sometimes what happens is there's a decent amount of conversation about a particular topic, and then we'll do something called a roundup, where we'll select excerpts from maybe three or four pieces that are all kind of on the same topic and group them together. So we just had one roundup post, we call them on December 4th, so last week, and we've already had 475 unique views of that. And what we do in that roundup is we provide an excerpt and a link back to the original for four individuals, in this case individuals, who are writing about the same topic of text mining. So we're trying to surface and redistribute good work, call attention to the good work we see out there. And then we also provide, and you'll see in the second central column, news, information for practitioners and scholars, things that everyone would like to know about, such as jobs, calls for papers and participation, new reports that come out we think would be valuable. And in these cases, we provide just a sentence or two with basic information and a link back to the original. So our goal here is to send visitors back to the original source. We're trying to give the authors and creators of this content full credit. We're just trying to help draw attention. We're trying to aggregate the attention on these scholars and on these activities. Okay, so this is a very basic model of how we do this. We aggregate content related to digital humanities. That's digital humanities on the web. You see a big funnel there. We collect content from the open web, the most open web using Google Alerts. We also have registry of self-identified practitioners of digital humanities. So people who have volunteered their name and their, you know, affiliation as working in digital humanities. And we have over a thousand folks in the registry. And then from those, from that registry, we have about 600 feeds off of people's, or either their personal or their institutional blogs or websites. We have about 600 that we subscribe to and we call that our compendium. So these are self-identified and then also we do a little bit of searching around, too, to add people when we see new projects and new work. So we follow over 2,000 people on Twitter also, which actually is a very large number given that we have over 6,000 followers. So we're trying to build up our follow list on anyone who looks like they do work in digital humanities. We're going to be following back and we're going back through our records to increase that. So all of this coming into this big funnel results in approximately 1,000 posts per week of which we publish about 20. So, you know, something on the order of four editors' choice pieces and then maybe 16 items of news. So that's actually a lot to filter through and obviously not all 1,000 posts are relevant. They're not always related to digital humanities scholarship. Many people use their blogs for many other purposes. But there is a decent amount to filter through. So we're trying out a few different methods of how to filter through this. We're using free services here. Of course, there are services you could pay for like Fever or Percolate or two. But we have customized Yahoo Pipes filter, actually, where we're playing around with keywords and different ways to do that. We also use Tweeted Times, which identifies the content that's most shared from your Twitter, among the people you follow on Twitter. And we're currently developing a prediction and recommendation system with some computer science faculty at George Mason. So we're working on a more customizable algorithmically, more obvious open algorithmic filtering that is something we intend to make available as part of the project deliverables, which I'll mention a little bit at the end. And at the moment, the most useful way of filtering through all this content that we have is we have a lot of volunteers. And this is something we began in June. We have weekly volunteers. We call them our editors at large. We have approximately 70 that have signed up so far. So every week there's about four to six people. We ask them to commit to about an hour a day of looking through the content coming in. And so you'll see that they are receiving the aggregated feeds, just like the editors-in-chief. And then they actually do the first round of filtering through. They do the first round of review of the content. And then they suggest items that they think would be valuable to redistribute. And this works very well. We did, for a number of weeks, look at everything in addition to what the editors at large were selecting. And I think in only one instance found something that had sort of slipped through the cracks. So we found that our editors at large are very good at what they do. They know the field, they're volunteering their time, and they're providing a great service for us. Because when it was just the in-house editorial board and we were publishing five days a week, that took about 15 to 20 hours a week. So that's not necessarily a sustainable or replicable model for most other fields. So with the editors at large and the scaling back to two times a week, now it takes only about four hours a week to publish. And then we have an additional hour or two for the managing the editors at large and managing the feeds and things like that. So that's a much more realistic amount of time for someone else in another field if they wanted to begin their own publication to take on. So that's how we get the content into the site. And then the main way we reach our audience is actually through Twitter. We have over 6,500 followers on Twitter. We also offer RSS feeds out. So we have a lot of subscribers to our own RSS output. And then you can also sign up to have the content emailed to you as well. And every time what we're sending out, again, is a link back to the original, sending the reader to the source and to the producer of that content rather than to us. It's not about us, it's about surfacing everyone else's work. So we've had a lot of visitors to our site. In addition, we had over 41,000 unique visitors so far in 2012, which is, I think, pretty significant if you consider the range and the reach of other kinds of print-based publications. So we're doing this using WordPress, which this is a little bit light, this image, but basically this is a view of the publishing side, the backend of WordPress, where you can see each post is identified, has a separate spot for it in the database. The interface is very easy to use. It's meant to allow you to easily publish on the web, and so we use it for that reason. And also it's open source and extensible. So this is something that anyone could use. And in developing our method, we're basically going to be developing a platform to help others do this work as well, and that's going to take the form of a plugin for WordPress. So it'll be a way to improve the already free platform. We're going to offer a free plugin to then continue that improvement. So going back to the pyramid, that is how we go from the open web to the relevant content to a field. That's the compendium and the radar following our followers and things such like that. And then how we select our weekly items, the now items. And then what happens at the end of the quarter is that we review what we published in the previous quarter, and we're on a very quick turnaround time, in fact, because we publish the best of the previous quarter by the end of the next. So we have a three month turnaround time to identify the best content, get in touch with the authors, prepare the final versions, and then release. So it's definitely a quicker turnaround than traditional publishing. So this is an example of our altmetrics spreadsheet we've got here. So we review all the editor's choice pieces from the quarter. We identify topics and conversations and trends from that period. We use traditional editorial criteria. What was used an interesting methodology, had interesting results, was the most polished, had the most interesting results. Anybody using new sources, things like that. And we also consider what will have the most lasting value. What is the content that someone is going to want to assign to a class, or something that someone is going to want to be able to come back to, if that individual scholar's blog no longer offers that particular piece, the Journal of Digital Humanities can offer a home for that. And what will we want to be able to reference in the future? That's what we have in mind when we're selecting our content. And then we also do some basic altmetrics here. We think about the number of views on a particular post, how many times it was clicked or retweeted. We also pay attention to the number of comments on pieces. This is part of the goal of sending people back to the original, is to encourage a conversation on the site of the author and the producer. So we pay attention to how many comments have been written since we featured the site. And so after we identify the content we'd like to reproduce, we've tried several different things in terms of getting the content from the original format into the journal. Sometimes for our first issue we tried an open peer review, or you might say continued open peer review, because they were already published on the open web and open for comment. And then we work with authors individually to revise their work as well. Another thing that we do is we solicit reviews of tools and projects and exhibits. Those have been the topics for the first three issues. And like I said, we publish one quarter later. So July and August and September quarter will be out by the 21st of December. So we work on that kind of turnaround time. So the next slide is an example of the interface for editing a single post. And you can see at the bottom we use a plugin called Edit Flow, which will also be improving and returning back to the community as a way to communicate with authors. The comments live here. They also can be emailed to the author, so you have different ways of communicating. And then we do the normal WordPress items like select the category and choose which pages it should appear on, et cetera. And then we end up with this front page, which is a scrollable page. So the other thing that we do is we prepare versions of this for download, so versions that are portable. And we produce EPUB using the anthologize plugin, which is very easy. It takes about a minute to do. And we produce an iBooks version and the PDF from the iBooks, from iBooks author, because we wanted to have a little bit more control over what the end products look like, and that was the best way to do that. So these are a couple pages from the second, our second issue. You can see we can include images and we can format them. We have a nice two-column page view. We can include as many images as we want. On the site themselves, you can open them up to see more detail. The other thing that we've been able to do is for the HTML version that's accessible through the website, we can host multimedia. So in our first issue, we had some podcasts and we had videos as well. And that's something that was not reproducible in the EPUB or iBooks or PDF, but still exists online. So our first issue was particularly large. We had 125 two-column pages in addition to about four hours of podcasts and two videos. Our second and third issues have been roughly 80, 85 two-column pages. So we're talking about a lot of content that was produced on the open web. It was available there and we helped to identify it and then give it a larger audience in the hopes that it would be seen as a valuable thing to do to put your work out. So the journal so far, our first issue was released in March. We've had almost 31,000 unique visitors and already 1,000 unique visitors for the month of December and we haven't published, we haven't released an issue since October. So again, this is a large number for a journal, particularly a brand new journal. So we have another prototype that is being worked on sort of within George Mason, Global Perspectives in Digital History. This topic is big enough to warrant a separate publication from Digital Humanities Now. What's interesting about Global Perspectives in Digital History, one of their challenges is that this is multilingual. And so there's, at the moment, German, French, and English and there's Italian and Spanish editors being brought into the loop as we speak. So you can see we have a Google Translate option up at the top and so one of the challenges of this is not only the translation of the material but also working with a distributed editorial board that is monitoring this work in multiple conversations. We also are helping others outside of George Mason work on this problem. We were approached by my co-vandagraph to a librarian at Florida State who was interested in having a similar publication for open access materials and he contacted us about six weeks later. He had open access now and he's running on the same model that Digital Humanities Now is. We helped him understand how to collect the feeds and how to evaluate the content and then helps obviously build the site looks very similar to Digital Humanities Now. So what we're looking to do next, in addition to continue to refine our methods with Digital Humanities Now and the Journal of Digital Humanities is aim to write up some of the best practices for others who want to do this work. We're also developing a software platform that I mentioned, the plugin for WordPress, to offer an easier method to do this. So at the moment we're doing much of our editorial review of the aggregated material within Google services and we'd like to make that something that we host and control ourselves because a free system is never a long lasting system. So what we're planning to do is build a dashboard that's viewable within WordPress. So all the reviewing, editorial conversation and publishing is all done from within WordPress. Currently we have to go back to the original in order to select the excerpt and the content we want to reproduce. If we're drawing it into WordPress right away, we could just move it from one category, basically the review category, into the publishing dashboard without having to go outside. All the content is brought in, we're saved to step and that's actually a pretty time consuming step. So right now we have a functioning dashboard and we're going to be reworking the interface and the styling later this month and in the next couple months, but we're planning to release an alpha functioning version early next year. So what you have here is a screenshot of the reader page. This is just styled by Twitter Bootstrap so it might look familiar to you, but not the long term look. So this would be the interface for reviewing the aggregated content. We'd have editors and editors at large sort of in our model would be able to access this and nominate content. Then there would be a separate page just for the editorial review. As I mentioned, there would be able to draft, move posts into draft mode in the regular WordPress dashboard right away so that would reduce the time for publishing. So we're planning to release an alpha version that we use in our own prototypes in January and then revise for beta release later in 2013 and spend 2013 and 2014 the academic year on helping others who are interested in using this platform or working on aggregating and valuing publishing on the open web in the future. So I'm going to close with a few lessons learned and I think Dan will probably supplement these as well. One thing that we were very pleased to find out is that there are volunteers out there and that they will help you. They're part of the community and are interested in what's going on. A lot of the feedback that we get from the volunteers is that they enjoy reading widely. They're basically assigned to survey the field for a week or to watch it closely for a week and they enjoy that experience and they've learned so much. We get a lot of feedback like that. Also it reduces the amount of labor that we have to put into publishing which we appreciate and if this is going to be something that other fields and communities want to do it's great to be able to say if you have enough volunteers you can do this in four hours a week. That seems like a manageable amount of time for rotating editorial responsibilities. However when you're publishing a journal editorial work review remains. You're not going to get rid of that just because something has been on the open web and received comments before. We do work with authors although we try very hard because of our compressed timeline to not encourage total revision but we're open to it if someone would like to but we're thinking that time to publication is important and this is something that we are experimenting with. It's worth trying. Another thing that I was actually a bit surprised at is that people and groups even the digital humanities field don't publish as much about their work in progress as I anticipated. I think it certainly ebbs and flows. The semester schedule certainly affects this. Summer was pretty productive not surprisingly but I think a lot of people are either hesitant or not thinking it's worth their time to write about works in progress and we'd I think like to disagree. And then the last thing is that there's a lot of work being done collaboratively as thought about as a project maybe a little bit less than the intellectual independent work of what we might call scholarship and I think that it's maybe time to think about redefining what scholarship is. Particularly in humanities this is a little bit more something we struggle with versus sole authorship versus collaborative work in the digital humanities field it's very difficult to do much of the work that is so impressive on your own and yet it requires intellectual knowledge and methods and labor. So we'd like to suggest that maybe it's time to redefine projects as scholarship and encourage people to share their experience and their work in progress because waiting three years until the project is done just so it can be announced doesn't get out to the rest of the community about the development of the practice. So that's a few lessons learned. I think that was a terrific summary. I'll just add that we're going to do several things at one time. We are open access proponents and so we're trying to think about an environment that is kind of a virtuous circle for publishing openly and so if scholars and I think this has really been true in just our first year of the Journal of Digital Humanities scholars are really excited to get into digital humanities now and to JDH just because they get a huge audience for their work and they get it fairly immediately and we're hoping that that encourages more people to publish openly but we will admit I think in a moment of self-criticism this is an open question of whether we can encourage in this kind of model more people to publish their work let's say work in progress or other kinds of new media work in a fashion that we can actually pluck out you've won the lottery you've been one out of 15,000 blog posts that make it into the Journal of Digital Humanities but we do want to encourage that and we also want to encourage different genres to be acceptable in digital humanities and this has been talked about in prior CNI meetings but there is this problem that you have to flatten your work out into straight narrative textual material to get credit for it and so we want to actually credit the material in its original environment as it lives on the web and so being HTML first being on the web first and accepting it as it is as interactive map interactive maps and video audio all these things I think is a healthy thing for us to kind of encourage in this way the other point I would make is as Joan pointed out we're also in the process of trying to think about what a leaner publishing operation would look like so we have had I think rather spirited debates at the Center for History and New Media about things like should we have a house styles for the Journal of Digital Humanities and most journals have a house style and they enforce some specific citation style and so forth and we've really carefully weighed whether it's worth us going through the real time which is our in kind labor and faculty staff etc in kind labor to polish everything up into an in house style so if you look at Journal of Digital Humanities you will see that we have left some material in a kind of I wouldn't call it informal but there's a variety of styles within the journal and we're sort of testing the waters on that because I certainly know from publishing in a traditional fashion that you can get back notes from an editor or from a peer reviewer that really come down to kind of word choice substitutions that really aren't worth anyone's time and leads to an expansion of cost from the supply side so we're thinking hard about that we're also thinking about this question of democratizing the editorial board and so moving from four people in house to 40 or 400 worldwide who have this one week exercise what we found actually is that it creates and sort of reinforces this community spirit that digital humanities now and journal digital humanities are not this sort of external thing that are published by a commercial publisher and you're lucky to get into it there's this feeling that it is sourced out of the community that there are lots of people involved with validating and making decisions about what gets in there everyone else knows that their comments on the blogs and by Twitter are being assessed in a kind of ambient way and so they feel kind of participatory and very democratic spirit is part of that and I think that that helps to reduce the cost because you're not getting that sort of grudging peer review labor that you would get from reviewing let's say for commercial journal fun though I would say we are working to enhance the demand side and Joan talked about a lot of these numbers but we think use is really important we don't want this to just sit on virtual or real shelves we want people to feel that this is important stuff and so the fact that we're getting I think a real exponential increase in RSS subscribers, twitter followers et cetera it really means that you're going to tell an author you're going to get 10,000 views of that new project you launched if we link to you and people feel that as something valid and so then we need to get into the process of how do we then explain that to promotion and tenure committees and all these other bodies that are sort of important to scholars but I think we've made some steps toward that in this first year and I hope that in the platform that we release next year and in helping that we'll test other parts of this model and see where it's weak and strong and make some strides forward for everyone to kind of have an open access system that works in this very different way maybe we'll stop there and we'd love to have a spirited discussion right here