A visual literacy is really about slowing your students down and asking them to articulate why they are making the assumptions they are. What do they see that makes them say that? We're very quick to say, oh, that's a school. Well, why does it look like a school? What about it makes it look like a school? It's about looking closer and longer and further. Drawing is one way that you can do that. It's also important to ask questions that bring you to more questions and more ideas, and it's also important to get your kids to ask questions too. There was hand out over there called 50 Ways to Look at a Big Mac Box. These are good questions to use about anything. You can use them about a Coke bottle, you can use them about a building. You can use this as a reference. I'm going to give each group two pictures of buildings you may not be familiar with. You can either work on them together. You can pick one to work on as a group or you can split up into two smaller groups. I would like you to use those questions and look really closely at the details to see if you can figure out more information about this building. Okay? Does that make sense to everybody? Yeah? Okay. That's the entrance. Are these windows? Ah, they could be. Or ventilation. Or ventilation. So describe the show. Yeah, that's it. I was going to be like a wreck, like a wreck. We noticed the landscapes in this one, we noticed the intentional barriers, parking, park area, kind of, you know, it's set up to where you can enjoy the view of the building and set up to where you may want to just go and just take a walk. I think they have like trees with a shade when it's like sunny, you can do a picnic underneath it. And I think that's juxtaposed with symmetrical, almost like present to me, like structure. It's straight, like the windows are tiny and narrow and dark. So we're going to go around and like, I'd like everybody, each group to tell a little bit about what they think about these buildings. What did you, what do you think about this one? Okay. The design is different. And when you looked inside of it, it looks kind of like the chandelier, the crystal things hanging down. The top looks very translucent and we're kind of thinking of this like a memorial-type thing. There's a variety of materials because like the bottom level is like these pillars, but glass in the front and in the back. And then there's this marble layer. And then we can't really tell what exactly materials are at the top, but it's like this mesh. It's like a metal sort of mesh, glittery, something like that. Okay. And when you look up through the center of the building, you can see it kind of blows a little bit, almost like it's open. So like there's like offices or some functioning room up top. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. So this is one proposed design for the National Museum of African American Culture and Heritage. You guys were absolutely on target when you were thinking about what the different parts mean. So the design was supposed to look like a crown, this idea of a crown, it was supposed to look like it glows. I mean, you guys were able to get a lot of information out of this just by looking at it. See what the people are wearing. Can you see what the people are wearing or doing?


Okay, welcome back. Everyone here live at IBM Pulse in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of IBM Pulse. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the event, Extracted Significant Noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. My co-host here at theCUBE is Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibond.org. One of the things we love going out to do is extract the Significant Noise and getting great guests, comedians, columnists, celebrities, our next guest is one of the, all three of those, David Pogue, now with Yahoo! tech news formerly of the New York Times. Welcome to theCUBE. Why thank you. This theCUBE is where we just kind of shoot the breeze, talk about tech, not only talk about flash memory, speeds and feeds, but we're here at IBM Pulse. You gave kind of emcee the keynote this morning. I mean, pretty splashy event. They have a band out there. Bungie Jumpers. Bungie Jumpers, yeah.  What's your take of one of the tech scene here with an IBM? And compared to the tech scene that we're living now, WhatsApp sold for $19 billion. Everyone's shaking their head. People are like going crazy in Silicon Valley. VCs are getting richer, you know? IBM still. It's the dawn of a new bubble, I guess. It's the return to a good economy where stuff gets funded and money flows. I mean, you can't possibly argue that Facebook buying WhatsApp for $19 billion was because it's a profit play. I mean, they're never gonna get that money back. The service costs a dollar a year, and Mark Zuckerberg said, we're not going to advertise on WhatsApp. So it's not to make money, right? At least not directly. It's sort of, they bought cache. You know, it's kind of like, why did Google buy the Nest thermostats?  They're gonna know when we're home. I don't think so. I don't think that's Google's aim in buying this cool, hot company. I think Google bought Nest thermostats because they're a hot, flashy, rising, genius technology. The same way Google is doing self-driving cars and robots and rockets, because it's cool. Feels right. What has Apple done that's cool lately? Do you have any other questions? I mean, Apple's the cool of the darling of the cool. Certainly, profit-wise, they're doing well, but I mean, they don't have that driving car. Facebook doesn't have the driving car.  I mean, the Apple problem is that Steve Jobs was, as we know, unique in the universe because he was both the CEO and the inventor. I mean, there's no other company, really, where the head of the company is the guy who's the designer and says, I want this button to be moved three pixels over and I want these corners rounded. That was the amazing thing about Steve Jobs and he was the guy who came up with the iPhone and the iPad and the iMac. I mean, who is the idea guy? I mean, Tim Cook's a brilliant management guy, but he wouldn't say that he's the product idea designer. Okay, speaking of inventors and CEOs, Bill Gates has gone out of Microsoft. He's quote back, dotted line as advisor to the new CEO, but they have Nokia now, so they're golden, right? What's your name on Microsoft? You know, the great thing about there being a new CEO is that it might occur to him that the theme of this IBM Pulse conference is bold moves, bold thinking, and it's a totally hackneyed cliche, but it is totally the answer. You will never become the next big whatever if you keep doing the stuff you've been doing for 20 years. Microsoft is Windows Office Xbox, Windows Office Xbox. Here's a new year. What do you got? Windows Office Xbox. No, do something new. Try something bold. Well, they dropped their price. Oh, that's bold. They dropped their price 10%. That's bold. As you know, and this is gonna sound hackneyed too, as you know I left The New York Times in November to join Yahoo, and that is primarily why, because every single person at this company of 14,000 people, and I've met a lot of them, are thinking, every conversation runs around, what can we build? What can we grow? What should we start up? I mean, they're thinking, every single person thinks this every day, and it's just, it's rare, and I guess it's something you can afford to do only when you're the underdog, right? People kicked Yahoo for a long time because they lost their way. They went through five CEOs in a weekend. And so, the only way out of that is to invent. Let's talk about journalism. The future of journalism, everyone debates that. I mean, we're doing our share, trying to break the rules. The high priests of journalism, they don't like certain things, and you said you left The New York Times. Will they die those high priests of journalism, graduated from 1902 from the Columbia School of Journalism? I mean, it's a new era now. You're at Yahoo. You've got some new stuff going on there. You've got a clean sheet of paper, raves over there, rave needlemen. Came from The New York Times. The bastion of old technology, old standards, still do a great job. They do certainly good reporting. They still have a paper, they print it still. What is the future of journalism, and what are you doing at Yahoo to break the rules? I mean, what I'm doing at Yahoo is the same journalism I've been doing at The New York Times. And we've hired 10 just absolutely amazing writers from the top old media. We've hired people from The Washington Post and The New York Times and more people from The New York Times. And they're still the great journalists. So, really the only thing that's changing and will continue to change is the printed on paper portion.  I don't know. It doesn't happen. So, I mean, that trend line can only go one way. But I gotta believe, and I do believe that there will always be a New York Times, that there will always be journalism. There has to be somebody who does the reporting and curates it and posts it. It might not be on paper, but it'll be electronic and it'll still be there. So, journalism's not dead, obviously.  So, talk about the genesis of that site. What was the spark that created that site? Well, I mean, if you look at my career, my shtick has always been explaining things to laymen. So, I do Nova shows for PBS, explaining science. I used to write, blah, blah, blah, for dummies books. I did seven of those yellow books for beginners. So, I have come to believe that it's an enormous audience. It's most of the world. Most of the world is right now feeling overwhelmed by technology, by the complexity, and by the pace. So, my feeling was this is a perfect opportunity to create a website for precisely those people. We don't cover funding announcements. We don't do, you know, management changeovers. It's about what to buy and how to use it once you got it. So, that was my dream and also, it's gotta be funny. Every single article on this site will give you a couple of chuckles. So, you hire a journalist and humorist. That's precisely right, yeah, journalist and humorist. And most of the journalists are really funny as well. And they have, now they have a, they don't have to be limited by space on paper. They can just go all in online. There's no lineage problem, right? That's a huge thing. When we were describing the site, I said there should be long form articles, 3,000 words long. There should be one line articles, like a tweet, like an observation or a one liner. Why create an artificial 1280 word chunk? No, articles should be as long as it takes to tell the story and no longer. And there should be video and audio and pictures right in the middle of the sentence. It's electronic. It's electronic storytelling. It is, why is every tech site in the world a video at the top of the page and then an article that says the same thing? No, have a paragraph and then say, here's how you attach the power connector in this strange way, video. It should be intermixed. It should be experimental. It should use the digital bits in any way that's necessary. So I, speaking of old school journalism in new school, I'm looking at your site, this article by Rob Pegararo on TV everywhere. I had the same experience with, with trying to watch the Sochi Olympics. I'm on vacation, US playing in Russia. I go to sign it.  I just said, I'm calling my wife. What's the password? 10 years ago, you made it up. So I got 20 minutes of free and then missed the rest of the game, right? So that mindset, don't you think it has to change? Why won't old media eventually morph? I mean, the pain will be so great and then it'll hit bottom and then they'll sort of replicate. I was just thinking, you know, the thing Steve Jobs used to do so well is he would look at some field or some area and immediately see what's wrong with it. Something that we've all accepted as Sucky, but we do it every day. And here's one of them. Why do we enter our whole name, address and credit card information over and over and over on every website where we ever buy anything? Why do you put in your name and password on every website you ever use? Why isn't there some kind of solution to online identity? So everywhere we go, the site and the computer recognize each other and oh, it's you. I mean, it seems like that should be solvable and it seems like the whole world would welcome it and even pay for it. Well, your discussion this morning around phone mails was classic, right? John, you don't have a long phone mails, right? Your service provider lets you bypass it, but we in Massachusetts have a different challenge but David gave a great discussion this morning about how long it takes to actually leave a message and you explained why. Yeah, the carriers put the 15 minute recording of instructions, you know, you maybe begin speaking at the tone when you've finished recording, you may hang up and we've had answering machines for 45 years. We don't need instructions on how to leave a message.  It's 15 seconds twice a day. I said this morning that if you do the math times 120 million Verizon customers, that's three quarters of a billion dollars a year. The Verizon rakes in by making us sit there hostage to those instructions. That's innovation, people.  Yeah. So you mentioned kids don't read the paper when they get out of college or they, you know, when they go to college. And so that's more of a dynamic. They don't email. They don't email. They don't need to leave. They don't know how to, they don't even, my kids don't even turn on their voicemail like that's so old, voicemail. My son has, they don't set up their voicemail. So I want to ask you, the state of the consumer, you talk about consumer, you appear for consumerization. What is the state of the consumer right now? Social interaction, we're all connected on mobile devices. What's your observation of the state of the consumer? Are they idiots? Are they digital natives born in the digital age? Are they getting, are they smarter than us? What's your take of this new generation? Well, I think you put your finger on it. There are endless debates on every issue because there's two groups of people we're talking about. The younger generation, the ones who entered college last fall were never alive in a world without the internet. And the ones in high school right now were never alive without using phones with no cord on them. So the younger generation has a very different take on everything from their parents. The privacy discussions that we're all having, is it okay for Google and Samsung and Microsoft and Apple to harvest our data in order to give us free, cool services? Well, young people say, sure, it's anonymous, it's aggregated, it's not me, they're personally, they're tracking, and their parents are like, what, that's an invasion of privacy? No, they'll never see eye to eye. Things are changing as the younger generation becomes the majority, but right now there's this big black line between the older and younger audiences, I think. What's your take of IBM here at this conference, a big company, big blue, you know, mainframe kind of DNA, would you think they have it in them to go the consumer or what? I mean, the little secret is that I'm not a B2B guy. I don't understand platform as a service. Go ahead, make a quick time movie that make fun of me. I don't understand it. I'm a consumer technology guy. But what I will say is that IBM's story, as I've watched it from afar, is amazing. The way they shed consumer technology, said we're going to get full time into being a services and information consulting company, and now it seems like they're doing the same thing with this enormous emphasis on stuff moving to the cloud. The smarter plan is pretty brilliant though. From a camp marketing standpoint, that's pretty rock solid. That's true, and you can see at this conference all the announcements they're making that they're deadly serious about becoming the cloud expert. They're requiring companies, they're integrating stuff in cool ways, so I'm impressed. What about Netflix? Obviously, House of Cards season two is upon us. Do you review the Netflix kind of stuff or is it mostly devices? Oh no, absolutely. The broadband thing is pretty controversial, this whole Comcast thing. Some people say, hey, net neutrality's dead, some say we don't need it, the truth.  You look at those issues, do you have a clue? Yeah, no, no, absolutely. What's your take on all that? So I think I'm a fan of net neutrality. I think it needs to get reinstated. Right now, we're living without it. And this whole thing about Netflix announcing that they're going to pay Comcast for smoother transmission is confusing to me, because that was what we feared would happen if there was no net neutrality. And now here's Netflix doing it voluntarily. The consumers like to say, I love Comcast, I haven't met anyone who says I love Comcast. It's the most hated company in America. It's true. I happen to live in Connecticut where we have CableVision, which is year after year the most adored cable company in America. They have 10,000 subscribers. It's so huge.  They were the original, weren't they? But I've had a chance to see Netflix, to see Comcast firsthand. My wife actually lives in San Francisco for very complicated reasons. So I've gotten to see what it's like as a Comcast customer. All she wanted was a DVR. So they sent her a box. We couldn't figure, I couldn't figure out how to set it to a cut up. They sent a technician with a replacement box and said, that isn't even a DVR. They sent you another cable box. It has no hard drive in it. It's just like, oh my God, how hard is it? So yeah, I'm highly suspicious of the cable companies and the cell phone companies. And so this whole thing, I think there's going to be some journalist who figures out the real story behind this Netflix-Comcast deal. Who strong-armed whom? And what was at stake? And when did it happen? I think there's a story in that. There's definitely a story in there. We're working on this whole, who pays, who impeaches, it's not Comcast, it's Verizon, there's other carriers and they share packets and they block the P2P networks for a long time. If you remember those days. Yeah, exactly. I want to ask you about your take on, just in general, what surprised you in the past two years? Two, three years in consumer tech. But you didn't see coming that was like, wow, that was game changing or that's took me by surprise, good or bad. The great thing is you can never predict the future of consumer technology, right? Every time you, I mean, every time we have CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, we try to, we see what electronics companies think is coming and for 15 years in a row, it was you're going to watch the web on your TV and nobody has ever wanted it and nobody still wants it. This year it was curved television screens. Really? No, no. So everything that becomes a hit is surprising because nobody predicted it. The rise of the health bands is surprising and I think delightful that you're, for the first thing, you know, the up band, the FitBest, for the first time, you can see into that one third of your life, the time when you're sleeping, suddenly you know what happened during that night. That's fascinating. Turns out that more and more people are listening to music in a way I would never have predicted. You know, Apple originally said, you're going to pay a dollar a song and you're going to own it. And there were these little upstarts that said, no, no, you're going to pay a subscription. And Apple said, no, no, people will never pay for a monthly subscription to music that leaves them with no music when you stop paying. Nobody saw the rise of the free unlimited, you know, the Spotify's and the iTunes radios and the Pandora's. Those are immensely popular and nobody thought that's where it would go when compared with the ability to buy the music and play the exact song you want at the exact time. So that's kind of a shocker. And of course, the rise of Netflix and now Amazon as TV producers, that's a shocker. What about the Android debate and how you see that shaking out Samsung? How that just came out of nowhere. I mean, Apple had the lock on that. Did you see it accelerating that fast? Did you see Samsung coming out of the woodwork? No, nobody could have seen that. The Android play is very much, you know, like the old Internet Explorer play. So Google said, we'll write this operating system and we'll give it away. So, and we'll let other companies make the phones that run it. That's the old Windows ploy. And that's how, you know, Internet Explorer became a force for a while because it was free. So that's not so surprising that that playbook worked again. What about Twitter? They had their first earnings call and I think I was the only one live tweeting their earnings call. I mean, no one was tweeting their earnings calls. Their first earnings calls of public company, they kind of had a shortfall. And do you follow Twitter and some of the consumer aspects of that service? I follow the consumer elements intensely. I don't really cover the business case. You think it's ready for consumer? I mean, everyone's using it at some level, but is it dying? I mean, it's just people don't know how to use it. What's your take on Twitter? I obviously don't think it's dying. It's growing. To this day, I'm not sure how it's ever going to become a money maker in a big way. But lots of companies started out that way. I mean, Amazon lost money for its first decade or whatever. Still losing money. Still losing money? Depends on which balance sheet you look at. We cover Amazon websites. No, she's good. No, she's good. Income statement, not so much. Really? Yeah, we like it. I mean, we love Twitter. Profitist business, mom. That's amazing. We like Twitter. Final word, just for you, just to share the audience. Just give a quick plug on the Yahoo Tech. Just your vision, the team, the update. Share with the folks what's happening. Sure. I just believe that most people, not technologists, probably not your audience, but most people are feeling flooded and frustrated by the pace and the complexity of technology.  It's the same thing I always do at the times, what you should buy. But then we don't stop there. It's tips and tricks. It's the underlying stuff that you don't know. Always in terms of the consumer. The consumer, the consumer's consumer. The people who use this stuff, what's in it for you? That's our goal. Do you feel entertainment's a big part of it being entertaining? And entertainment is a huge part of it. Did I forget to say that? Yes, the sites are very, very, the articles are very funny. And we're making videos every week. And they're also whether or not. Can you share the Marissa story about when you guys first talked for the first time about doing this project? Yeah. This all started last summer when Marissa and her head of news and finance, Rob Barrett, had a meeting with me and said, we want to talk about your coming to Yahoo. And I'm like, well, what is it that you have in mind? I mean, this is a guy who's written 1,280 words every Thursday for 13 years for the New York time. So I wanted to know what they had in mind. I'm like, you're saying you want me to write a column? Every day? Well, yeah, we have a column. They're like, yeah. Or do you have in mind a whole website? They're like, yeah.  Absolutely. Is there an app involved? Yes, just whatever I said. They're like, yes, and we'll fund it and we'll build it for you. And I'm fundamentally a creative guy. I was a Broadway theater conductor for 10 years out of college. This kind of let's build it. Let's grow. It's just intoxicating to me. And they've totally delivered so far. Yeah, I want to applaud you. It's a great effort. We really are big fans of what you're doing. Love the entertaining. Love the controversy leaving the times. Your email or whatever your blog post was kind of entertaining. Certainly got all the high priests of the journalism community tossing and turning. But hey, creative, be entertaining, and do it in ways that people want. And that's mobile and kind of new journalism. So congratulations. David Polk here on theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of IBM Pulse. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back after this short break.


The question was about the idea that was heard that of me saying something about a person on the path shouldn't have a job. It's really when the mind falls asleep and forgets oneness and heaven and nirvana, it seems to be now existing in a very limited condition. We'll call it the human condition on planet Earth. And so part of the human condition is that you have needs and desires and wants and those needs and wants and a sense of lack are often met and overcome by doing things, working for things, attaining things, achieving things. There could be physical needs, seemingly psychological needs, just a sense of being incomplete and needing to do things to satisfy those senses of lack, even if it's temporary, like eating when you're hungry or drinking when you're thirsty and so on and so forth. So I would say my approach is not so much like a cookie cutter approach that's one thing for everybody. It's very much like Abraham Maslow's pyramid, his hierarchy of needs, that as long as the mind is quite invested in this belief system and lack, then working at a job or having a career or whatever, those are very practical things to meet needs as they're perceived. So that's what I mean by practical spirituality. So in my case, early on back in 1986, when I was tuning into the spirit, I basically had student loans and some of the things we talked about, lack and debt and so forth, and you just can't abdicate on responsibilities, duties, obligations. Even if they were set up by the ego, it's like they still have to be unwound out of them. So for most people on the path, most people are given a slowly evolving curriculum in which the spirit is very, very practical and meets the mind right where it believes it is. If it believes it's a human being on planet Earth with these different wants and needs and so forth and obligations and duties, the spirit's guidance will come through and meet the mind in that way. So in my case, I was guided to a job and a series of jobs that not only helped in paying off the debts that I had, but it also was starting to unwind me from pride, from the sense of being in control and opening me to clearer and clearer guidance. Now the one quote that sometimes gets attributed to me and a question will come in sometime is, can you be a CEO and be enlightened? And my answer is always no. You can't be a CEO and be enlightened. Enlightenment is a state of transcending concepts, just like the Buddha talked about emptying the mind of all the contents of consciousness. And everything that seems to involve planet Earth including jobs and roles and all different kinds of identities are all concepts. So the mind is simply identified with a false set of self concepts that God did not create and God really knows nothing about. And that's where the guilt's coming in. If God created us perfect and we misidentify with a bunch of tiny little roles and concepts that weren't given to us in our creation, that generates guilt and fear and sadness, loneliness, all different kinds of upset.    You have a full experience of what is actually there, of who you really are when you're emptied from all of these pseudo self concepts. So ultimately the question when people ask about, can you be enlightened and be a CEO? A CEO, a chief executive officer of a company, has concerns like debits and credits and profits and quarterly profits and investments and stock market fluctuations and factors. There's a lot that goes on to being a CEO that is really plugged into the world and yet as you move along, you empty your mind more and more and more of these concepts. You realize that you are not sustained by money. You are not sustained by food or all the typical things that were believed in before, but you have a divine providence. You are sustained by the presence of love in your mind. It's taken me about 25 years to really feel the full impact of that divine presence. It really hasn't been a sense of sacrifice for me. I feel like I went through education, I went through business, I went through acting and interacting and believing in the ways of the world. And then it's like been a rinse cycle. The spirit's been rinsing my mind and rinsing my mind for many years. And then you get to a point where everything is taken care of without any kind of sense of effort, efforting or striving or planning. Things just have a gentle ease and flow to them that's in alignment with this spiritual flow. So I don't really have a stance on jobs per se. I think that when you get much, much deeper into authentic spirituality, the trust level goes much higher.  It just comes a day when that little wagon gets left in the front yard. It just is unnecessary at that point. And as you continue on deepening on the spiritual journey, jobs as well as many other things will just kind of fall by the wayside and gradually just fade away until they're no longer necessary. Some people have said to me, they said, don't you feel that you work anymore? And I said, well, you could just look at it both ways. You could say I'm working all the time in a sense of the spiritual connection. It's a spiritual work. Or you could say I'm on vacation all the time, which it does feel like that because there's not the typical constraints of work. There's no beginning time and end time. You don't have to punch a time clock for this kind of work. You have tremendous fringe benefits. You could use the same lingo, everything that seems to go along with the benefits of working in the world. But it's just, it's more, it's an experience of the mind and it's experience of the spirit, not seeing that things come from outside. It feels like it all comes from a wellspring within. So I'm not really into like saying that it has to be this way for everyone and so on and so forth because there's so many steps along the spiritual journey and it's more like you stay with something as long as it's practical and beneficial and as long as it's needed. And then when something is no longer needed, then it's not like you have to rip it away. It just kind of falls away in a very natural way.


Last Saturday there were three state caucuses held. We won Washington with 72% of the vote. Alaska with 82% of the vote. And Hawaii with 70% of the vote. We have won six out of the last seven elections, often by landslide victories. That's Paul Momentum. In the last two weeks we have caught Hillary Clinton's pledged delicate lead by one-third. And what Momentum is about is that since we began this campaign and have been drawing just incredible turnouts, we have spoken to close to one million people in states throughout this country. And what Momentum is about is seeing young people by the millions getting involved in the political process. You know, we have been told by the establishment and by the corporate media that young people really are not very interested in politics or in government or about the future of this country. That is not what I am seeing. I am seeing young people by the millions beginning to stand up and understand that they are the future of this country and they are determined to help shape that future. And what Momentum is about is that in poll after poll we are defeating Donald Trump by double digit numbers. The last CNN poll had us ahead of them by 20 points and state polls have us ahead of them by equally large numbers all over this country. Now we are doing in this campaign defying all of the expectations. You know, when we began we were at about 3 percent in the polls, 60, 70 points behind Hillary Clinton. Last National Poll had us one point ahead of Hillary Clinton.


Kia ora koutou, no ote potia ho, ko ana toku noa nami hinui kia koutou. Since I'm the only person that hasn't spoken yet up on stage, it got decided that I would facilitate this conversation. But I'm really excited because these are two of the most inspiring women in New Zealand. Not most, there's so many inspiring women, but these two women are really walking the talk around how we can make a difference where we are with what we have. So I think the plan is I'm going to do an introduction first around crowdfunding and then we're going to move over to Lani who's going to talk about philanthropy and then Lisa's going to share her personal experiences raising funding within Aotearoa. So my name is Anna Gunther. I'm the co-founder and chief bubbleblower of a crowdfunding platform here in Aotearoa in Australia called Pledge Me. Who here knows Pledge Me? So Pledge Me started around seven years ago. It was actually my master's thesis. I was really frustrated with my job that I had in the government. Sorry for my government friends that are here. But I realized that I wasn't having the impact that I wanted to have. And then in order to do that, I'd probably have to either go out and go into academia or work for a private company. And I accidentally did both. So I did my master's and started Pledge Me as my thesis. So what we do is we run a crowdfunding platform here in New Zealand. And we started before Kickstarter made it to our shores. But we also run an equity crowdfunding platform. We were the first licensed platform here in Aotearoa and actually the world. So New Zealand was the first country in the world to change its legislation to allow equity crowdfunding. It was already happening in the UK. They managed to get around their securities laws. Great job. But we were the first licensed platform here and we've recently been licensed over in Australia. So do you know what equity crowdfunding is? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Camilla knows she is currently running an equity crowdfunding campaign. Equity crowdfunding is the idea that instead of going out to your crowd and offering them rewards, you actually offer them shares in your company. Previously, in order to do that, you'd have to go through a public listing or a prospectus process, which is very expensive. So it's very exclusionary. It's only the people that have money that can make more money by going out to their crowds. So the idea with equity crowdfunding was it was supposed to democratize capital. And specifically in Aotearoa and Australia, they came out thinking that would be something for startups. What we've learned is it's not something for startups. It's actually what we've seen at least is it's for companies that already have a crowd that love what they do. And it's a chance for them to go out to their crowd and raise the money they need to go to the next level. So instead of using this tool to replace community, it's actually enhancing community. It's giving people that care about your outcomes the opportunity to buy into them and then go out there and sell what you do because they own a piece of you. What we believe is it's moving beyond this sort of pure focus on profit maximization. Because that's the only reason you're investing in someone. That's the only thing you're going to care about. But if you already love what the company is doing, you probably love what's going to happen with your money and where they're going to go. And you're going to support them along the way in quite a different way. So that's crowdfunding and equity crowdfunding and who I am. I'd like to pass over to Lani to talk about philanthropy. Kia ora again. So I just wanted to give a little bit of an overview of what philanthropy looks like in Aotearoa and some of the challenges that we have in this space as well. So philanthropy in New Zealand, we give away about $2.8 billion a year, which to me sounds like a lot. But to contextualize that, the Gates Foundation gives away $4.8 billion a year. So it's actually not that much when you think about a global context. Only three percent of those funds are donated by business. Forty two percent are donated by trusts and foundations. And the rest of it is personal philanthropy. So people like you and me jumping on platforms or giving to someone on the street or however we choose to do that. So philanthropy looks very different in New Zealand than it does in lots of other places in the world. But we are, by contrast, every year, the most generous nation in the world or in the top three, usually tied with Australia, which is great for me. I was born in Australia, so I feel like I get both sides of this. Yeah, but it's a challenging space. So in terms of how that money gets parceled out, about $300 million of that comes from the gaming and licensing trusts. So when you put money in the poker machines, they have to give back a portion of that. And that's about $300 million of our philanthropy every year. About $265 million of that is from family trusts and from energy trusts. And then another $230 million is from the Lottery Community Grants. So we have it parceled out into different parts of philanthropy and they all behave in quite different ways from each other. In terms of where the money goes, about 24% of where our philanthropy goes in New Zealand goes to social services. And a lot of that is kind of picking up some of the gaps left by government. 23% goes to health and medical research and only 3% goes to our environment. So we have some work to do in terms of thinking what our collective cultural and national priorities might be. I think the role of philanthropy is to be the risk-takers and the innovators. I think our job is to be really at one radical end of what it means to create change in New Zealand. I think we should be mobilising movements. I think we should be convening conversations and definitely being at that radical end as often as we possibly can. We can do things that other people can't do. We're not business. We're not constrained by the things that business is constrained by. We're not government. We're not constrained by the things that government is constrained by. But we're not taking full advantage of that opportunity. And there's a few reasons for that. One is that demand exceeds supply. So in New Zealand, we have about 27,000 registered charities, which is one for every 180 people. And I don't know exactly how many people are in this room, but there's probably two charities that could represent us as a group. We also do tend to pick up government shortfalls, particularly with things like educational facilities. So helping to build new buildings, helping to repair buildings, helping to pick up the shortfalls in our education system is something that we do a lot of. And it's probably not where we're best utilised. We're not effectively partnering with Iwi. And we're also a little bit conservative. So we tend to have people sitting on the boards of philanthropic trusts who are quite conservative and who are risk-averse. And all of these things together mean that as a sector, and as part of a wider ecosystem, we're not really pushing the boundaries of change and being the risk takers and innovators that we could be. And I think the other piece that's good to know for New Zealand context is that we haven't really decided where we sit on social enterprise yet. Should we be funding it? Should we not be funding it? We haven't made a decision about that yet. We haven't really had that conversation as openly as we could, which is why we need to have people like Anna, for many reasons, doing the work that she's doing, to supplement some of the shortcomings of philanthropy in New Zealand. Hi, as I mentioned before, to eat my lunch is a limited liability company. And we started it in my house, as all good startups do. And after kind of three months, we really were outgrowing my home kitchen and we needed some money. Now being a company, but even though we're doing social good, we couldn't get any grants. We couldn't get funding. There were people trying to offer us money, but because we weren't a registered charity, we couldn't accept that money. So the first protocol was we went and did a crowdfunding campaign on Pledge Me for a project. And we raised $130,000 to move out of my home into a commercial kitchen. Six months later, we wanted to open a kitchen in Wellington, again, trying to figure out where we were going to get this capital from. And at the time, Pledge Me just launched their debt lending platform. And we were the first New Zealand company to run a debt lending, debt crowd lending campaign. And we raised around $830,000 through that. So that's different from equity. We actually borrowed money from the New Zealand public. And for every $1,000 that someone lent us, we gave them 6% interest in return. And another 6%, they could choose whether they wanted that as a lunch donated to kids. So it was a part, almost like a social bond in a way. And we also gave people the choice whether they wanted to forego their interest altogether and give two lunches every month to kids. It was an interesting social experiment. And we had about 24% of our lenders actually forego their own interest to give more lunches. In 2017, the business grew again very quickly and we needed more capital, particularly around infrastructure and IT. What is interesting to note is that impact investment funds didn't exist in New Zealand that we were aware of about three years ago. And even two years ago when we were looking for more capital, that wasn't really an option for us. And so we went to private investors. And we eventually had Foodstuffs North Island, who owns half the supermarkets in New Zealand, invest in us. And so they came on and took about 26% of the business. Right now, we are in the middle of another capital raise. And now it's to fund further growth and also for us to look at potentially franchising the model overseas. What's been interesting going through this round is that there are now impact investment funds available. That there's still really early days. And some of the ones that we've spoken to, what's been interesting is that they have an incredibly high internal rate of return that they're expecting from a social business. So that makes it very difficult for a business like ours to meet those financial targets. So I think there's still a bit of work to do there. Some foundations that traditionally have only funded charities or not-for-profits have also started opening up to actually invest in social businesses, either through debt or equity. So that's been another interesting kind of option. But again, it's still really new and they're not quite sure what they want. What we're also now exploring is actually doing an equity crowdfunding campaign. Because as Anna said, we've got three and a half years behind us, we've got a strong crowd, a really great brand out there, and we think we could raise the money pretty quickly at a higher valuation than private investors and without the restrictions of private investment around governance, that the direction they wanna take the business and control. So yeah, that's where we're at at the moment. Kia ora. Thanks. So we have around nine minutes left and I think that what would be really interesting is to maybe hear maybe your biggest learning or your favorite story from the work that you're doing, favorite example of things that you've seen in your space that you'd like to share might be interesting. And I'll start with one of my favorite stories or from one of my favorite campaigns.  But one of our recent campaigns was, last year was in Dunedin. In Dunedin is where my family is from, some of my family. And what it was was, I don't know if many of you know but you probably do being New Zealanders, that Cadbury's decided to stop making chocolate in Dunedin. And Dunedin has a history of over 100 years of making chocolate. And when Cadbury said that they would make more of a profit if they took their production back to Australia, some Dunedin city councilors got really pissed off. And they were like, we're not okay with this. We're gonna go out to our community and we're gonna raise the money to buy by the Cadbury's factory. And then they realized that the Cadbury's factory was worth $20 million.  And so they went to the crowd and had $5 million pre-pledge to their campaign before they even had a company they could buy. And then when they went out to their crowd, they managed to raise $2 million in 32 hours to buy the chocolate company and fund its expansion. And the beautiful thing with what they did was, they said, we don't want people to have to invest, you know, $10,000 or $5,000. The minimum investment is $100. Anyone in the community who would like to, we'd like to give them the opportunity to own this.   And the first newsletter they sent out to their database for their investors, which was over 3,000 people, they sold out of chocolate. And so I think that shows the power of actually owning companies in our community again. I have eaten my investment in chocolate. I have eaten my investment in chocolate. A couple of times over now. I think one of the really great examples from the work that I do with the Vodafone Foundation is a Christchurch-based organization called Cultivate. And we started working with them about five years ago through purely grant funding. And at one point we said, okay, well there's lots of people that we're funding individually for their individual projects. What would happen if we gave you some money and said, collaborate? And what came out of that was Cultivate. Cultivate is an organization that works with young people, primarily with young people who have had more difficult lives and uses work on the land in their urban farm to help those young people think about lots of different parts of their life, learn some skills, communicate with each other and build community. They've been working in a social enterprise model for quite some time now and they've been selling the produce that the young people create to lots of local restaurants in Christchurch and they're just about to take over the farmer's market in Christchurch as well. And it's come from a philanthropic model but it's been a philanthropic model and a philanthropic grant-making model that's supporting these people to create a sustainable long-term intervention for young people in their community. And it's one that I'm incredibly proud of. If you're in Christchurch, please go and visit them. I think as everyone here would know, raising capital is hard work. Whether it's crowdfunding or privately is a lot of work. And what I've found is that because of our strong social mission, actually the public are such a great source of that funding.  And it just made total sense for us to do it through the public and it gives you such great public awareness. Generates a lot of goodwill. And for us as well, we always wanted to bring everyone along and be a part of solving this issue that we have in New Zealand. And so I think crowdfunding is a really great way of doing that and very innovative way, now having three different options to crowdfund, not just through equity, which can be really scary when you first start up, you don't want to give away a massive chunk of your company. But now isn't the right time for us to do that and have people, the New Zealand public, own parts of Eat My Lunch. I just want to jump in for a second. So with my other hat on, the social enterprise that I helped to run, Thank You Payroll, we did an equity crowdfunding raise about almost two years ago now. And up until less than 12 months ago, we didn't have any marketing budget. All of our client acquisition came entirely from word of mouth. It came from organic growth because people love what we do. And the people who became our shareholders have really amplified that. So yeah, it's got many, many positives. So one thing that I'd like to ask both of you is if you could change something around the funding state in New Zealand, specifically for social enterprises or philanthropy, like what's the thing that you would change? Like what's the, what will help make Aotearoa more inclusive and better for social enterprise? I think because we have this real view here around charities versus business. And we, as a business, while there's many advantages, we are also disadvantaged versus a charity. So we can't get any funding. We've had some really wonderful partners that've been quite creative. So for example, the Goodman Field of Trust, when we moved into commercial kitchen, wanted to help us, but they, in their constitution, they couldn't because we went to charity. So they bought a $25,000 oven and they've rented it to us for life, basically. And so there are some creative ways of getting around it, but there's definitely a lot of opportunities we've missed out on, despite the fact that we do do this social good. So I think that charity versus business status needs to change and social enterprise needs to be recognized legally in some way. Yeah, I agree. I think at the moment, organizations like mine, the Vodafone Foundation, we can't really support social enterprises that are set up as a business. And that's for good reason. The money that we have to give out to community belongs to community. It belongs to all of us. It belongs to New Zealand. And so to put that into a venture that was potentially earning money for private individuals, it's an ethically complicated place to go. Whereas if we had some sort of legal structure that helped to identify social enterprises, that would be an easier conversation for us to have.   But I'm slowly coming across to your side. Yeah. So yeah, just to wrap up, I think, is there any final thoughts on funding or anything that you'd like to say, while we have a crowd of people that seem to be listening intently? Are you okay with what we're doing right now? Yeah, okay. Any other final thoughts? New Zealand is a small place. Everyone knows everyone. And I remember we hosted some breakfasts when we were doing the debt lending campaign to have people like Malcolm turn up and all these amazing New Zealanders come to kind of find out about what we were doing was really incredible. And I think when you reach out, I'm generally overwhelmed by the response. Yeah, New Zealanders are incredibly generous, but the funding landscape here is also very competitive. And if anyone in the room, and I know there's a few of you, our philanthropists, let's push things towards the more radical end. Let's fund activism. Let's fund systems change and social change. I really can't say anything better than what Lani just said, but I totally agree. I think that in order to create an Altearoa that includes everyone to create a space where we can work together, we need to think radically differently about how we fund and what we expect out of the other end. I don't think we can keep on expecting extractive profit over planet and over people. So I think that we just like to leave you thinking that you can be a little bit more activist in your work. You're probably already really activist, but let's get radical on this and let's actually change how we think about funding. Kia ora. Thank you.


And we hear the ID TechX show. Hi. So who are you? I'm Rob Merriman. I'm Operations with UAV Sensors. We're a developer of Air Quality Sensors. Targeted at all aspects of air quality, everything from particle monitoring to CO2 monitoring. We do chemical monitoring. That's VOCs, that's a volatile organic compound. And we do kind of an all-in-one product that's used for offices. That's combined with an airborne pathogen monitoring. So this would be targeted at hospitals, that type of area. All of our products are awareness in that they have either a ZigBee or Wi-Fi chip. The ZigBee units have a chip in them to talk back to a gateway. And then they connect online to our cloud-based software. Is this a special machine, this one? This one is the... So what does it do? This one here is the airborne pathogen detection system. So that one is designed to detect the presence of bacteria, yeast and mold in the air. So the particles come in there? What does it do? So basically, are you familiar with PetriDish? So PetriDish that we use in the lab. So we're kind of taking that approach, putting the PetriDish into a different format. So this is the format that we use. It's like a cartridge. The cartridge goes inside the device and the cartridge will run for two weeks. There's a cartridge? Yeah, so the cartridge will run inside the device. This one actually is in there? Yeah, so there's a cartridge inside the device that will run for two weeks. And across that two-week time frame, air will get pulled into the device. If there's bacteria in the air and it settles into the cartridge, it will start to grow. There's basically food for the bacteria in there that will encourage them to grow. So we're then using an optical monitoring system to detect changes in growth. So if it starts to grow... Changes in what? In growth. So as the bacteria start to grow, we see that using an optical system. We're looking at light scattering patterns that we can kind of map and say, this is a particular pathogen. Is this the one? This is the one here. So I'll give you this one here. And so this is real product? This is a real product. Yeah, we're selling that today. This one is aimed at Legionella monitoring. So that's a bacteria that gets into water and then sometimes it can turn into a mist. When the mist gets airborne, that's when it's dangerous. So it's basically people can get sick. This one is a mold. So it's an aspergillus mold. So that would be aimed at certain parts of the hospital that would have to be very clean, where you can't have respiratory issues at all. So we typically work in conjunction with companies that are providing a service already to these facilities. It could be a decatamination service, chemical cleaning. So we're the monitoring product and they're the companies that take action. So how did they take action? They just cleaned the walls? Chemical cleaning. It could be UV. So a light, a very strong light that will kill bacteria. There's filters as well that will spraying a bunch of stuff. Yeah, yeah, in some cases, yeah, kill everything. Yeah. In water, it's it'd be a closed system. It's not something that we're going to drink, but it could be a system that is a closed water system using air conditioning and sometimes water. Yeah, so they can basically get very concentrated. So Legionella can get very concentrated in this water and it becomes aerosolized. So is this already existing in the hospitals or is this very new? It's quite new. We are in hospitals already. So in real hospitals, yes. Yeah, like since when? In about the last year, really, is when we've been developing this for quite a long time. So we've been we've been doing trials and pilots and so on. And the Legionella is not a good thing. Legionella is not a good thing, no. That's only detects that? No, it'll detect a range of different pathogens aspergillus. Legionella, it would also detect we have a cartridge that's designed for a broad range of of pathogens. That's very useful if you just want to see what's out what's in the in the area in the first place. And then you can have a cartridge that will be tailored for something that you're interested in. It's important to note that each cartridge is tailored for a particular pathogen at the same time. Hospitals are a pretty good place to go to get sick, right? That's usually there's like stuff in the air. Yeah. So it's very important to check everything or you're just checking some things. We're just checking the air, but the infection control staff in the hospitals will have a contamination control regime. So that could be testing the surfaces to make sure that there's not contamination on the surface. We specialize in air, so that's our. But they didn't have solutions before this? They have a hospital doing so far. They have an approach. Yes, it's the traditional approach would be they would have a petri dish, so they would leave the petri dish out and that would then get sent off to a lab. It would be incubated, which means it's basically kept at a temperature for a certain amount of time. And then that's analyzed and there is a report done. So it's quite complicated. It's complicated. It takes time. It's expensive. You need skilled laborers and they've all been doing this all the hospitals. Yes. That's it's a traditional approach. So we're trying to automate as much as the petri dish. Yes, exactly. And the lab and everything. Yes, there's an RFID tag inside this. So when you load this, it identifies what part of it is and registers it online. So from a user point of view, they don't need access to the software. It means it could be managed quite easily on site by staff that know how to load it. There's something bad in the air. Does it get spread out all over the room? Is that how it works? Don't you need to have several of these? Maybe spread around. Yeah, you do need to have several of these. We would recommend that these are put in high risk areas. So in a hospital, that could be a six bed ward, for example. But in a larger space, you would need more of them. And it's really down to kind of a risk assessment about the size of the area, the air flow and if there's high risk areas. But it sounds like it takes several days for it to detect something. It depends. It's not instant. It's not instant. It will run on a two week cycle. So I'll give you an example. So if it's running on a two week cycle and during that time, it's sampling air all the time through the device that's monitoring it. And let's say on day 10, it picks up a bacteria that you're interested in and starts to grow in the cartridge. It takes about from six to eight hours right up to about two days. So it's quite rapid. If you were growing this in the lab, it would be barely visible. So you're getting a very rapid confirmation that something is there. It's just that it takes time to grow. There's no way to do all this without growing stuff and stuff. Can't you just like see that it's there? There is alternative approaches. One would be called bioluminescence and that's where you use a light source to shine a light on bacteria in the air and they bioluminesce. So they shine a light back, they glow. There's issues with that in that it's difficult to be selective. It's also hard to distinguish between live and dead bacteria. So if you're doing cleaning, you're not sure if it's been effective. So there is alternative approaches but the approach that we're using is kind of taking the traditional method which is the Petri dish and combining it with technology and cloud connected software to automate it as much as possible. So it's new but the underlying science has been around for a long time. And now everybody wants to know how much CO2 there is. Yeah. So is this like a big market? Are you selling these? Yes, we're selling these. This is pretty new because we sell a range of air quality sensors and a lot of the time they're used to kind of troubleshoot the air. So CO2 is great because it's kind of a very simple indicator of if your ventilation system is working. And the theory is if your ventilation system is working you're diluting the contaminants in the air. It's not the best solution because it's not troubleshooting the source but it is at least making sure that if you have good quality air you should have low levels of contaminants in the air. Does air purifiers help a lot in hospitals and everywhere? Do you use air purifier? Just absorbs all this bad stuff also? It's very, very important. So hospitals will have a filtering system known as a HEPA filtering system. So that's a very, very... That's what I have in my room. Yeah, exactly. So you can even have a consumer grade one. It's great for allergic people. Yeah, if you have allergies, asthmatic, it's very important that you may need one of those if your allergy is dust, for example. There's still stuff in the air. It's not enough just to have an air purifier. It depends. So if you're somebody with asthma you should probably have a kind of an asthma action plan and that's basically looking at everything so it's making sure that maybe you need to change the carpets or you need to kind of check the bed linen. Yeah, clean once in a while. Yeah, exactly. So the air purifier is a good addition to that. So it's really helping. But overall, there's a whole list of things that you can do. Throw the cat out. Yeah, so some people just live with the cat and sneeze every so often. Yeah, that's what I did for a couple years. Yeah, cool. All right, so thanks a lot. So are you a startup or? We've been around for about four years now and we've been kind of, we've had these products in the market for a while. This product has been, this is where we started out. It's quite a complex product. There's a lot going on. So we've been developing it for quite a while. There's like a whole bunch of stuff in there. There's CPU, PCB, everything? Yeah. What's the CPU? Is it secret? No, it's not a, let's say an arm. An arm? Yeah, it's a microprocessor. Microcontroller. Yeah, so it wouldn't be, it's doing, it's kind of similar to what would be running in your camera, that type of level. So it's powerful enough because it... It's not running Linux. No, it's not running Linux. It's running Embed. Yeah, Embed. Embed software. Embed software, yeah, exactly. An RTAS. Yeah. All right, so in your team you have guys doing this, are you doing it? We do everything. So we do everything from the hardware. How much does it cost? This would start at 3,000 euros depending on the model that you would go for. And they sell like hotcakes? Oh, it's cool. They're selling good, yeah. The Legionella one in particular is selling pretty fast because it's becoming more and more regulated and people have to be, our companies have to be shown to be doing everything that's possible in that area. It's starting to come into the US in New York and other countries around the world. So it's a real hot topic for us at the minute. But indoor air quality in general is becoming more and more, people are becoming more aware of it. So yeah, absolutely. I'm sure Trump has one in his flat. Oh, he absolutely does. He was one of our first customers. Oh, sorry, it's a bad joke. Yeah, cool. All right, thanks for that. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, all right, thanks.


A very good evening aspirants. The results for the third test of current affairs test series 2020 is out. The top performers in June current affairs test that is the third test are Mr. Anand Rawat, Mr. Afrid Ali Khan and Ms. Karunia. Congratulations winners and all the best for your prelims examination. The topos will receive a confirmation email within two to three working days and they will be given reimbursement of Rs 1000. And aspirants who have not yet registered note that the registrations for current affairs test series 2020 are open till 4th October 2020. For more details and for registration visit the link given in the description box and comment section. With this let us move on to the hindi news analysis by Shankara Ace Academy for the date 15th September 2020. The list of news articles along with the page numbers from different editions of hindi newspaper are given here for your reference. Let's move on to the first discussion for today. This discussion is based on this news article which talks about the recent development in the Middle East. And as you can remember in the recent days we are seeing many political developments happening in the Middle East or in the West Asia. One such development was the UAE Israel peace deal and now we have the Bahrain Israel peace agreement. So today let us try to understand these recent developments and its significance. The syllabus relevant to this discussion is given here for your reference. Since the recent development is with respect to Israel it becomes important for us to discuss about the Israel-Palestinian issue and Israel's strained relations with the Arab countries even though we have discussed it very recently. All of us know about the persecution and fleeing of Jews from Europe and then the formation of Israel by Jews in an Arab Muslim dominated region. This led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and after this war the holy land was divided into three parts which is the state of Israel then the West Bank and then the Gaza Strip. Then after this another war happened in 1967 in this Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. It also captured the East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan and it captured the Golan Heights from Syria. So because of this Arab countries passed the Khartoum resolution of the famous three no's which are the no peace with Israel no talks with Israel and no recognition of Israel. But as we can see this position has been changing over the years and particularly in the recent times. It first changed when Israel and Egypt concluded their peace treaty in the year 1979. As part of this peace treaty Israel withdrew from Sinai and Egypt gave recognition to Israel and then after a decade another peace treaty was signed but it was between Jordan and Israel in the year 1994. So in this Jordan agreed for Israel's recognition and in return Israel agreed to the formation of Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. And now after a two and a half decades recently last month another peace deal was signed. This peace deal was negotiated by USA it was between UAE and Israel. This peace deal is also known as the Abraham Accord and we have discussed this peace deal in detail on our 20th August analysis and in the same lines within a month another deal has been announced with Israel. This deal was announced by US President. He has announced that Bahrain would establish full diplomatic relations with Israel. Here just know that Bahrain is a small Arab state which is situated in a bay on the southwest coast of the Persian Gulf. As you can see this is the southwestern coast of Persian Gulf and Bahrain is an archipelago. When we say archipelago it means it is a stretch of water which has many islands or simply an extensive group of islands is known as archipelago. So this Bahrain is an archipelago it consists of the Bahrain island and some 30 smaller islands. So we can see that the situation is changing from the Arab countries boycotting Israel to normalizing relations with Israel. So what does it mean? Experts believe that these agreements could be signaling a strategic realignment of ties in the Middle East. See when we say strategy in international relations it means gaining an overall long-term advantage such as a military advantage. So these deals with Israel means that there could be a strategic realignment of ties in the Middle Eastern region. And experts also speculate that even other countries in the region like Morocco, Sudan and Oman they may also follow these footsteps of UAE and Bahrain. And here just note that this is where Morocco is and Sudan is. Morocco and Sudan are African countries and Oman is here. If this speculation of experts come true then we might be able to see a more peaceful and prosperous Middle East in the coming years. But what about the Palestinians? Now when we talk about the Israel-Palestinian issue we should remember the Arab peace initiative because the recent Arab position on Israel was based on this Arab peace initiative only. This initiative was proposed by Saudi Arabia and it was endorsed by the Arab League in 2002. Here just note that Arab League is a regional organization of Arab states in the Middle East and parts of Africa. It was formed in 1945. Now this Arab peace initiative is endorsed by Arab League and this initiative it basically outlined the comprehensive steps for ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Here as a part of this initiative what Arab leaders offered was the collectively offered recognition for Israel and also normalization of diplomatic ties with Israel in exchange for Israel's complete withdrawal from the Arab Islands which it captured since 1967. And under this initiative it is also proposed for a just settlement for the Palestinians and it would be done by establishing an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. But the recent initiatives by UAE and Bahrain would weaken this initiative. It is because on one hand Israel gets what it wants such as recognition and diplomatic ties with the countries but on the other hand the agreements don't mention much about Palestinian crisis. And this is why the Palestine Liberation Organization which is an umbrella political organization that claims to represent the world's Palestinians it has called for the rejection of both the agreements with Israel. This organization also asked the Arab League and the organization of Islamic cooperation that is OIC to reject these agreements. Partially we can also agree with the Palestine Liberation Organization because here the situation is really worrying for Palestinians as they have received nothing in return for these agreements. We can also say that since these deals are being silent on Israeli occupation of Palestine this means the deals actually endorsed the military occupation on Palestinians. So this leaves the Palestinians more isolated and that is why experts say that a deal without resolving the issues of ongoing Israeli annexation of the territories the future of Palestinians and their demand for an independent state is unlikely to succeed. So let us wait and see how the events unfold in the future. With this we come to the end of this discussion there is quick practice questions will be discussed in the last session. Now this discussion is based on this opiate article which talks about the flaws or shortcomings of the doing business report of World Bank. So in this discussion first we'll see about this doing business report and also the shortcomings as mentioned by the author. The syllabus relevant to this discussion is given here for your reference. First know that the doing business project of World Bank was launched in 2002 and it is published annually and the World Bank's famous ease of doing business index is actually published under this doing business project report only. Now coming to its mandate this doing business project provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 190 economies and selected cities at the sub national and regional levels. So in this regard World Bank looks at domestic small and medium-sized companies and it measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle. It also compares business regulation environments across economies and it encourages economies to compete towards more efficient regulation and through this it offers measurable benchmark for reform and the latest report is the doing business 2020 report. This is the 17th report of World Bank and it has covered 11 indicators and 190 economies and from exam perspective indicators are important. So know that the doing business project covers 12 areas of business regulation and 10 of these areas are included in the ease of doing business core and ease of doing business ranking and these 10 include starting a business dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency. And the other two areas which are not included in the ease of doing business core and ranking are the employing workers and contracting with the government. Now based on the 2020 report you should note that India has been noted as one among the economies with the most notable improvement in doing business 2020 and the ease of doing business ranking for India is 63 with the doing business core of 71 whereas if you see China was ranked at 31st position and it has a score of 77.9. So now why this report is in news? It is because recently there was a news that World Bank has decided to pause the publication of this report. This was due to a perceived number of irregularities regarding the changes to the data in the previous reports. So based on this author of this editorial has listed some of the shortcomings in the index. The first shortcoming is that there is a lack of transparency and objectivity in the scoring. Here author has taken the example of Russia because many have raised questions on Russia's improved ranking from 2012 to 2015 because in 2012 it was ranked at 120th position and in 2015 it suddenly showed a lot of improvement and it improved to the 62nd rank. So the scoring in this index has raised some questions. Now the second flaw is that the survey excludes the informal sector from its purview and as you know if you consider our country itself informal sector plays a greater role in generating employment. So an important area is left out from this survey. Now the third flaw is that the index don't give importance to the societal costs of uncontrolled pollution, worker safety and health risks. In this regard author has also opined that the rankings actually encourages countries to compete even by cutting vital regulations on health and environment. Here we can take the example of China and India itself. In the recent years both these countries have improved their scores especially in 2019 and 2020 and this has happened even though they are the world's first and third largest emitters of carbon. While we are blaming China and India we should also take note of USA because this index has ranked USA at the sixth position even though it has increased its fossil fuel consumption considerably. And as you know last year in November US began the year long process to pull out of the Paris Agreement of 2015 and for this it has sent a formal notification to the United Nations. So by the next month that is by 4th of November which is the next day to the presidential election of USA, USA would formally withdraw from the Paris Agreement of 2015. So that means USA will no more be obligated to cut down its emissions but even then it has been ranked at sixth position by this index. Then the next flaw is regarding the factory regulations. According to the author several indicators of this survey presume that less regulation is better and they ignore the impact on health, worker protection and right to information. And because of this countries have started easing their factory regulations in order to compete with others and get a better ranking in the index. With respect to this author crucially notes the example of Bangladesh. If you remember in 2013 in Dhaka a garment factory collapsed because of low building and construction standards. So in this regard if the index encourages less regulation then such kind of incidents will increase in the future also. So these are the flaws noted by the author in this index and as a conclusion author has suggested for the revamping of this survey and index and it should be revamped in a way that it will reward investments in workers skills, health, safety and it will also reward low polluting activities and climate resilience. So that ease of doing business does not contribute to compromising health and rights of workers and compromising the environment. That is all about this discussion. The displayed practice question will be discussed in the last session. Let's move on to the next discussion. Now this discussion is based on this editorial which is about the importance of urban employment in India in the background of the issues surrounding the lockdown imposed by the pandemic and authors of this editorial focuses on high unemployment and vulnerable employment in the urban areas. So we will discuss these aspects in this discussion and also the solutions given by the authors to overcome these issues. The syllabus relevant to this discussion is given here for your reference. First authors discuss about the unemployment. Recently if you remember the National Statistical Office has released the GDP estimates for the first quarter of financial year 2020 to 2021 and as you can see in this table majority of the sectors have been affected the most and they have shown a high negative growth rate. The highlight here is that these are the sectors that create the maximum new jobs. They create both direct jobs and also allied informal jobs in the economy. Hence the heavy contraction of these sectors is likely to lead to a decline in employment and also a subsequent rise in unemployment in our country. And one of the reasons given by the authors for the contraction of these sectors is the mass reverse migration of the migrant workers from urban to rural areas post lockdown announcement. This is still a prevailing issue because it is doubtful that whether the migrated population would return to their places of work in the near future or not. The next authors focus on the concept of vulnerable employment. First let us see the definition of this term vulnerable employment. As per international labour organizations definition vulnerable employment means own account workers and contributing family workers as a proportion of total employment. See own account workers are those who hold the type of jobs which is defined as a self employment jobs that is jobs where the remuneration is directly dependent upon the profits derived from the goods and services produced and the own account workers also do not engage any employees to work for them on a continuous basis. And next is the contributing family workers. These are the workers who hold self employment jobs as own account workers in a market oriented establishment which is operated by a related person living in the same household such as a younger member of the family working in a market oriented establishment of the father. So these two types of workers as a proportion of the total employment is what is called as the vulnerable employment. So what is these status of vulnerable employment in India? See with respect to India the vulnerable employment if you see it is characterized by inadequate earnings low productivity and also difficult conditions of work that undermine the basic rights of workers. So they are more likely to be informally employed and they also lack effective representation by trade unions. In this regard authors have quoted the 2018 World Employment and Social Outlook Report of International Labour Organization. This report highlights that poor quality jobs and high informality in the jobs have led to a high level of working poor in India. Here working poor refers to those who are living on incomes of less than 198 rupees in a day. That means these are the persons who work but still they are categorized as poor. Thus the authors tell that despite high economic growth in recent years working poverty in the country is also high which means inequalities in the income exist in our country. See here just note that authors have used the 2018 report data because in the latest 2020 World Employment and Social Outlook Report ILO has mentioned that the periodic labour force survey of India is insufficient in determining the status of employment in India. So far from the discussion so you can say that the focus of this editorial is the high unemployment and vulnerable employment in the urban areas. Why there is high unemployment in urban areas because we saw in the beginning that reverse migration happened due to the lockdown and now why vulnerable employment is high in urban areas it is because the nature of the structural transformation process in India that is new job opportunities are created every now and then but they are of poor quality. So what happens is that the capital and the labour keep moving in the low value added activities from one sector to another but they do not move on to higher value added activities and this ultimately leads to a high incidence of informal employment due to which the prospects of reducing working poverty becomes comparatively low. Already these issues existed in the country and the abrupt announcement of the lockdown has exposed such severe vulnerabilities of urban low and informal jobs. So by quoting the ILO data which we saw and based on the current economic status where there is contraction and lack of demand authors note that there would be a significant dip in the urban employment generation further in the future which directly signifies that the unemployment rates in the country will increase. So what is the solution to this problem? As a first solution authors demand two policy interventions to secure the livelihoods of workers in the urban areas. One intervention is needed to generate more jobs and second intervention is needed to reduce vulnerabilities by providing decent wages and some form of job security. Then secondly authors list out certain measures to generate urban employment like involving the local governments and mobilizing resources for them to generate employment. Then the next suggestion is to design and implement employment incentive investment policies where the focus should be given on the private investment enterprise formation and focus should also be given to small and micro enterprises so that all this would help in generating urban employment. In the recent years our government is focusing on enhancing these small and micro enterprises which play a major role in generating urban employment. Then the next solution is prioritizing urban infrastructure and for this infrastructure investment is needed so that it would spur employment it would generate earnings and it will also contribute to small enterprise formations. For example there can be a construction of low-cost housing using labor intensive methods so at the end infrastructure will be created and at the same time urban employment will also be generated. So authors also suggest to immediately launch an urban employment scheme which is oriented towards building large-scale medical infrastructure health and sanitation infrastructure in the cities and towns across India. In this regard if you remember a few days back while we were discussing about youth empowerment in our country we saw the suggestions of other authors where they suggested that India should come up with Indian Youth Guarantee Program similar to the European Union Youth Guarantee Program. In this European Union Youth Guarantee Program the European Union member states are committed to guarantee that all young people under the age of 25 they will receive a good quality work offer to match their skills and experience or the chance to continue their studies or undertake an apprenticeship or professional traineeship and all this is guaranteed within four months of becoming unemployed or living formal education and the authors suggested a similar Indian Youth Guarantee Initiative in our country. If such an initiative is launched then all the solutions of the authors can be incorporated in that and particularly when we talk about employment generation we think about the MG Narega Program but it would also be a problem in the current scenario as the authors have noted that MG Narega would not be able to accommodate the entire reverse migration population. So there are large number of workers who need to be provided with alternative sources of employment hence the conclusion is that generating decent urban jobs is the only possible solution for the high unemployment scenario in the country. So that is all about this discussion. The displayed practice question will be discussed in the last session. Let's move on to the next discussion. Now this next discussion is based on this article which talks about a report asked by Madras High Court about the quantum of red sanders seized and about the number of persons arrested for illegal filling of red sanders. So you often red sanders in news for its illegal filling. So in this context it becomes important from exam perspective to know about red sanders. It is a tree species whose botanical name is Terocarpus Santillinus. It is an endemic and endangered tree species in the southern eastern guards and it is found in tropical dry deciduous forests in India. See the natural habitat of red sanders is a hilly region with hot dry climate and this species is a strong light demander and it does not tolerate overhead shade and cannot withstand waterlogged conditions and the preferred soil for the species is calcareous that is the soil should contain calcium carbonate and the soil should be shallow with sandstones. It should have a hard substratum and quartzite rocks and preferred rainfall for the species is about 752,000 millimeter per annum. Now with respect to its geographical distribution you should note that Terocarpus species is distributed in peninsular India and in Sri Lanka and as we already saw it is found in southern eastern guards and it is a predominant species in the Sesachalam hills of western guards in Andhra Pradesh where it forms a gregarious red sanders bearing forest. Apart from this some wild growth is also seen in some contiguous patches in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and the specialty of the species is that red sanders yield a hard fragrant timber and in the recent years the population has been declining at an alarming rate and the main reasons for this is the illegal filling and restriction of the species to a tiny geographical area. See these red sanders are known for its rich hue that is color and therapeutic properties so it is high in demand across Asia particularly in China and Japan. It is also used in cosmetics, medicinal products and for making furniture, woodcraft and musical instruments. It is so popular that a ton of red sanders costs between 50 lakh rupees to 1 crore rupees in the international market. So because of this red sanders is illegally filled and to conserve this species it is listed in appendix 2 of convention on international trade of endangered species of wild fauna and flora that is sites and it was listed as endangered by the icing red list but it has been reclassified as near threatened. But we saw that this species has a good economic value but still its trade was restricted under the foreign trade policy of India but this ban along with its high demand made the illegal trade of red sanders very rampant in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. So the export policy of red sanders was revised in 2019 by the director general of foreign trade which is an agency of ministry of commerce and industry. So now the export of red sanders is permitted if it is obtained from a cultivated land. So these are the information that you should know with respect to red sanders. The displayed questions will be discussed in the last session. Let's move on to the next discussion. Now this next discussion is based on this news article which talks about homosexuality in India. The news article mentions that union government is not in favor of same sex marriages. As we all know not just in India but also across the world people are fighting both for and also against the homosexual relations and in this context from exam perspective it becomes important to know about the supreme court judgment which decriminalize the homosexual relations among consenting adults. Here supreme court decriminalized the section 377 of IPC and this was done in the Navtej Singhs Johar case of 2018 and before this section was decriminalized this section punished people involving in sexual activity against the order of nature and according to IPC the order of nature recognizes sexual activity only between opposite genders and this section offered punishment such as imprisonment even for 10 years and also fine but this provision which criminalizes the consenting homosexual activity was struck down by supreme court. It is because this section was against equality under article 14 it was against personal liberty under article 21 and it was promoting discrimination so it is against article 15 and also it was against the freedom of expression under article 19. While delivering this judgment the supreme court even took reference from the Yogyakarta principles of sexual orientation. See in 2006 a distinguished group of international human rights experts they met in Yogyakarta of Indonesia they met to outline a set of international principles relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. These principles promise a different future where all people born free and equal in dignity and rights can fulfill that precious birthright. So from exam perspective just remember that the Yogyakarta principles are about the international principles relating to sexual orientation and gender identity.  This is because there is no legislation to register the marriages of homosexual adults and today's news is that the central government has opposed before the Delhi High Court when the court was discerning a petition seeking the recognition of same sex marriages. So from the side of central government the solicitor general has said that our legal system society and values they do not recognize marriages between same sex couples. He also added that in 2018 the supreme court judgment just decriminalizes homosexuality or lesbianism nothing more nothing less. So the homosexual relations are not punished there is no enabling legislation to register their marriages. So because of a lack of a legislation even today the homosexual couples are still facing injustice and discrimination and today's news is very unfortunate because instead of bringing a progressive legislation government is taking a step in the backward direction and one of the reason for this is that government fears backlash from the conservative society of our country but we live in a country which glorifies equality and prohibits discrimination. So if we want to keep up with these principles then the government should immediately formulate a legislation which will enable the homosexual adults to register their marriages. That is all about this discussion that split practice question will be discussed in the last session. Now we have come to the last session the practice questions discussion session. This first question is a previous year question asked in 2016. This question is about red sanders the question asks with reference to red sanders sometimes seen in the news consider the following statements. The first statement is it is the tree species found in a part of South India. This statement is correct during discussion we saw that it is found in eastern guards in Andhra Pradesh and some parts of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka also. So statement one is correct. Now statement two is it is one of the most important trees in tropical rainforest areas of South India. Now the statement is incorrect because we saw that in India these trees are found in the dry deciduous forest. Now your question asks for the correct statements so the correct answer is option A one only. Now this is a practice question on red sanders. The first statement is its export is not permitted in India. This statement is incorrect because we saw that the export is permitted if it is obtained from cultivated land. Statement one is incorrect because it is a generic statement. Now the second statement is recently red sanders has been reclassified as critically endangered in IUCN Red List. Now this statement is incorrect because previously it was classified as endangered but now it has been reclassified as near threatened and here the question asks for the correct statements but both these statements are incorrect. So the correct answer is option D neither one nor two. Now let us take another previous question which was asked in 2015. This question is with respect to Golan Heights. The question asks the area known as Golan Heights sometimes appears in the news in the context of the events related to option A Central Asia option B Middle East option C Southeast Asia option D Central Africa and as we know the correct option is option B Middle East and this is in news with respect to the affairs of Israel and Syria as Israel captured Golan Heights from Syria after the 1967 war. Now this is another previous question which was asked in 2015. The question asks which one of the following countries of the southwest Asia does not open out to the Mediterranean Sea option A Syria option B Jordan option C Lebanon option D Israel now in this map you can see that Syria opens to Mediterranean Sea Israel also shares border with Mediterranean Sea so does Lebanon but Jordan it does not share border with Mediterranean Sea but if you ask whether Jordan is a landlocked country it is not because as you can see here it opens to the Gulf of Acaba which is the northeastern arm of Red Sea so Jordan is not a landlocked country. Now these two previous questions are given so that you will know how questions are asked in prelims examination from the international relations. Now this is a practice question. The question asks the Abraham Accord often seen in the news was signed to normalize the relations between option A China and Singapore option B Iran and the United States option C Saudi Arabia and Iran option D Israel and UAE. Now the correct answer is option D Israel and UAE this Abraham Accord was signed in August 2020 and it was negotiated by USA and under this Accord the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu and then the Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed who is the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and the Deputy Supreme Commander of UAE has agreed to the full normalization of relations between Israel and UAE. Now this agreement has been given the name Abraham because Abraham was the father of all three great faiths he is referred to as Abraham in Christian faith he is referred to as Abraham in Muslim faith and he is referred to as Abraham in Jewish faith so the name of the Accord symbolizes the potential for unity among all these three great faiths. Now this next question asks world employment and social outlook is published by which of the following option A international monetary fund option B United Nations conference on trade and development option C international labor organization option D world bank now the correct answer is option C international labor organization and some of the other flagship reports of ILO are global wage report then world social protection report. Now this next question asks Yogya Kartha principles often seen in news are related to option A sexual orientation and gender identity option B gender equality and women's empowerment option C human trafficking and child labor option D international peace and security.  Now remember that option B gender equality and women's empowerment is related to the Beijing platform for action. Now this next question is about the doing business 2020 report first statement is it is published annually by international monetary fund. Now this statement is incorrect because it is released by world bank. Now the second statement is in 2020 report India is among the countries with most notable improvements. Now this statement is correct the other economies with the most notable improvements are Saudi Arabia Jordan then our neighbors Pakistan China also then Nigeria Tajikistan etc etc. Now here the question asks for the incorrect statements so the correct answer is option A one only. Now let us take main questions there are two questions this is from GS paper 3 and this is from GS paper 2. Now this question asks the pandemic imposed lockdown and the subsequent reverse migration has exposed the vulnerabilities of informal sector in India analyze. This next question asks the recent peace agreements of Israel with the UAE and Bahrain indicates a strategic realignment in the Middle East politics its successful implementation depends on addressing the concerns of all stakeholders especially Palestinians elaborate. Both of these questions are 10 mark questions so answer in 150 words write your answer and post it in the comment section we'll review it and the appropriate suggestion will be provided within a reasonable time frame. With this we come to the end of today's Hindi news analysis if you like the video don't forget to like comment and share and do subscribe to Shankar Ayesh Academy YouTube channel for more updates related to civil service examination preparation.


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