Welcome back to another session of Domain's 21. I'm Jim Groom with Reclaim Hosting, and I have a special privilege of introducing to you two old dear friends who I spent time with in the trenches at the City University of New York, the Graduate Center, and they're here today to talk about some of their work linked to the City University of New York at the Graduate Center but also with Cast Iron Coating and this is Zach Davis from Cast Iron Coating and Matt Gold from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Welcome to you both. Thank you so much. We're here to talk about an application that you all have kind of worked together as a kind of university and a development house in Portland to build called Manifold. Can you tell us a little bit about the application Manifold and how it got started and why? Sure, maybe Zach, I'll take a shot at this. First of all, I want to say that our our third partner is the University of Minnesota Press and Manifold is a result of this collaboration between the University Press, Digital Humane Center at CUNY Grad Center, and Development Agency Cast Iron Coating. We really began, the story of Manifold kind of begins in 2012 when Debates in the Digital Humanities was published as a printed text with the University of Minnesota Press and at the time the press very generously agreed to publish a text open access and it was kind of unclear what that what it would look like when we publish it open access then at the time you know I had ambitions not just to you know put up a PDF and the press was willing to support that and they were excited about it and CUNY Grad Center was also excited about it and willing to support it so my team worked with with Zach at Cast Iron Coating to create an interactive website reading platform basically for the Debates book and it was cool when people liked it and used it and had you know thousands of annotations and comments on it and we would often get queries people asking like well can I publish my own book on it and unfortunately you know although it was open source it was not a platform that anyone could use there was no you know dashboard or no user interface that people could really explore and in I think 2015 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation put out a call to University Presses asking them for grant proposals related to the future of the digital scholarly monograph and at that time Minnesota and the CUNY Grad Center and Cast Iron Coating put in this proposal to create Manifold to turn that debate site into a platform and our initial thought was that we would really aim the platform towards academic publishers that was our one of the first things we did was sort of think about who's the audience for this who's going to use it and our answer primarily was was University Presses and publishers and we've had a really great kind of track record of success so far and getting publishers involved but one of the most interesting things over the course of the five or so years we've been developing Manifold is that it's expanded in many ways and in ways we didn't initially expect primarily recently through the growth of OER Publishing through Manifold which has brought a whole new set of kind of questions and issues to Manifold. You started very focused on University Presses and the idea of creating a monograph how did the actual applications start to kind of move beyond say the single monograph to an anthology using Manifold bringing in various texts into their English I think 302 course and so like how did it evolve from a single text for a publishing house to in some ways a reusable tool which obviously makes the jump to open educational resources. One of the kind of key concepts in the the grant proposal that we wrote for Mellon was this idea of the iterative monograph so we wanted to while we were building this platform for you know University Presses to publish books one of the things we wanted to accomplish was to make it so that an author could show kind of the process of authoring the book or potentially augment the book with additional content that couldn't make it into the print edition so like from the beginning we had this concept where at the or we had this idea where the heart of Manifold wasn't the book but the project or the book project itself and the project could have many texts and many resources and different kinds of content attached to it so because we had that kind of like show your work iterative idea built into Manifold I think it was pretty easy to make the transition to OER use cases where you know we already had this container of the project that could could include different different texts different kinds of content. You know if you if you think about the model of a University Press and the model the way we're using it at CUNY the way you're using Manifold at CUNY it's just very different for University Press they're focused on quality you know they have quality controls they're basically the people using the platform turns out to be the staff of the press because they want to make sure that what they're publishing on the press reflects the the standard of quality that they are publishing in their printed books and so you know it's a much more circumscribed kind of use of the platform and just a different kind of model whereas at CUNY when we created an instance of Manifold for CUNY we kind of threw the doors wide open to students and faculty and invited the kind of the the the mass of CUNY faculty and grad students to and undergrad students to start playing with it so that kind of in some ways changed the very model of what happens to the platform in part because we invited so many different people into the back end that it became more of a community platform and people started and one of the things that happens when you do that as you know you both know from working with open platforms is people start using it and they start surprising you with their use of it so you know we we kind of had expected I think the first use case we imagined was okay someone's gonna want to teach a class and ingest a text into Manifold and you know have students comment on it during the semester maybe they teach a public domain text or something like that and that was kind of what we expected and that's happening and that's been amazing we have examples of faculty collaborating across multiple institutions with their students kind of meeting in the in the text on a shared text and that's been great but we've also seen some use cases emerge that we didn't expect like faculty using Manifold as a kind of home for student-generated publications so maybe instead of writing a final paper for the course the students engage in a kind of collaborative publishing experiment and put that together as what ends up being a kind of final course project. I'll tell you one of the one of the examples of that that I saw yesterday that I was blown away by was Kathy Davidson's recipe book that students created recipes and then they built that as part of their experience. Okay so this is we eat a student-centered cookbook and this emerged from a class at the at the grad center and you can see that this is by the way what a Manifold project looks and this is this is one of the nice things about using Manifold for like a student publication is that you know this looks like a professional publication and it was really kind of a class project and it you can see here under the under the home hero section it can pull in tweets and other related content related to the project so really one aspect of Manifold is that it really embeds the text within the larger social media landscape and then you can kind of go through and you know read read the text and when you when you jump into the text you can you can see that this is a class offered by Kathy Davidson and Eduardo Viana and you know you can start annotating it so one of the nice things about Manifold is how interactive it is how easy it is to kind of change the way it looks and feels and you know this is all because we want the text to be responsive to the to the browser and what's just so cool for for students is that they're able to kind of pull something like this together where they're pulling together stories and ingredients and into a professional looking publication that that is can can involve sound files audio files and it's all kind of responsive in the in the browser I think this like you know Matt's point about trying things out at CUNY is a really good one because you get to kind of see it at scale how people use the platform and I and that's been hugely useful for thinking about Manifold as an OER platform I also just want to like kind of touch briefly on how generative this partnership like the tension in this partnership between like you know Matt's team and their kind of focus on OER and classroom use cases for Manifold and then this you know respected academic press you write a publisher and their focus on you know publisher use cases and just like I mean there's always this tension in this project because we're trying to build a tool for both of these audiences that don't always have the same motivations but I think it gets us to like a really kind of a special place like we end up building a publishing platform it kind of keeps us from turning it into like an LMS of some kind you know and puts the focus on like presenting you know coming up with like a beautiful presentation of student faculty work but it also like the OER side kind of keeps us on our feet and keeps us creative as a publishing platform like keeping things open and keeping things iterative I think that's a really special quality of this project I agree and interesting one of the things I really doing a deep dive into the interface because as you may or may not know you can install this app on Reclaim Cloud using a guide we have and I think that's a sign that it's an open source project it's freely available for folks to play with and one of the cool things I realize is just how many different how would we say objects almost you can so you do have the book as one and you have the annotation and then you start to have things like reading groups around that and that's super interesting I'd love to hear more about that but then you also have resources you know embeddable videos stuff linking out to LibriVox or other resources and so the actual the the book almost becomes a microsite of a relationship a group of people might have with a text and really captures that and I love the way in which it it it focuses on the book but then it brings the web in to almost surround that shared object of desire so talk a little bit about your thinking around that and then I'm because of who I am I'm very interested on the tech that got you there and how and actually you kind of enabled this to happen and what the development process has been like and where are you and where you're going yeah I mean you know we I think from my perspective as we kind of conceived and architected the system I tend to think about it in terms of of building blocks right so like we have the project as this content container and then we provide building blocks like content blocks or text or chapters of text different kinds of resources etc that that people can combine or users can combine in you know flexible and creative ways to to support a bunch of different kinds of projects so we try not to dictate what you can do on manifold so much as provide the pieces so people can be creative and so you know we've seen it used for anthologies or essentially like a class reader we've seen people put journals on it and sometimes we'll see cases where like the building blocks aren't quite sufficient I think journals is a good example they have some specific structure and metadata requirements so we'll we'll grow the platform to support that and you know also in terms that kind of concept of building blocks comes into play in terms of what you can ingest into manifold so you know while we started with the e-pub because we thought we were building this you know publishing platform primarily for academic presses who all had e-pubs and in fact we found out many of them don't you know that that led us to like build new ingestion strategies to ingest other kinds of content so you know mark down or google docs or word docs or html or different combinations of these things and so you know we just keep trying to stay in a place I think where we're not dictating the shape of the content too much that people put on manifold and just to talk a little bit about reading groups I think that's one of the most exciting features that we've added you know it kind of allows a group of people to have a collective reading experience that can be public or private and it sort of you know it shows the evolution of the platform as well you know we recently received a grant from the national endowment for the humanities office of digital humanities which is enabling us to add all sorts of new OER related features and one of the things that we're doing there is kind of creating a space within manifold that allows people to build a kind of course space where it's built through the kind of reading group interface so you you invite a collection a collection of people to the reading group and then you kind of add text to it that may be present on the platform and then the students can kind of read with each other and stuff like that so one of the things too as you're talking about that that I'm pretty interested in around manifold is that ingestion process like one of the things is I saw yesterday I was looking at some of the beautiful EPUBs that were on the site that was called standard standard ebooks standard ebooks right which where they came in and they really did look like a penguin edition where you would pull it in and it was just but then also that it can grab all the Gutenberg texts right like so if you go to the old school uva site I think that's where it began it's kind of one of the earliest kind of moments of open education which I like about that and links back to them and I'm sure it has issues given its its age but the fact is you can pull in like Melville's Bartleby or Benito Serino or if you're doing an early American lit class a lot of those texts can really be pulled together pretty seamlessly as an anthology and kind of shown that like your students are doing a lot of the work on the actual text site or the microsite as manifold and so do you have universities using that to kind of start imagining like here's one platform for teaching and rather than saying it has to be within the LMS or we're going to embed it within the LMS like I can imagine manifold be a place where a whole class might teach a whole literature class for example might teach their work. Yeah I mean we've it's been one of the coolest things about manifold I think is that it opens up this possibility of kind of collective reading experiences so one of the things that has happened at CUNY and also at the University of Washington is that you know at CUNY we have something called CUNY student additions which is a graduate student created project created by Paul Hebert Jason Nielsen and Christina Catapodis where what they've done is they've taken standard ebooks and then edited them and sort of created rich editions of these texts and then shared them on the CUNY instance so that multiple classes can can use them so we definitely have faculty across the system pulling in existing e-pubs and existing creative commons license texts and teaching them openly but we also have people doing kind of interesting creating basically critical editions so you know edited and commented editions that can be used across classes. You don't necessarily like have to start with an e-pub too I mean I suspect for example that cookbook probably was like a collection of Google Docs or Word Docs that where you know the someone in the class made a YAML manifest file which is essentially like a YAML table of contents that pulls in all these documents that people are editing as individuals into this like you know whole anthology that can be published on manifold so we tried to give like low technical entry points into manifold too. One of the things you're pointing to there is everybody does their own work on Google Docs which you know is accessible to most folks this isn't a tool you have to learn or teach too much you learn you do it there you come up with a list that someone edits right well you know call it a YAML file call it just a table of contents pull it in yeah and then there you have your anthology and I would be really blown away about the way that manifold actually imports ingests as you call it. Yeah it's one of the parts of manifold that I'm kind of proudest of from a development standpoint I mean there's a whole like I won't go into too much technical detail but there it's got this ingestion service in it and we've created what we call strategies for ingestion and so it's kind of this extensible foundation in manifold and you know we write a strategy for EPUBs or for the manifest file or whatever and we could you know anybody who wants to kind of like get get into manifold and contribute could also write additional strategies so we've looked at like you know can we or how much would it take to ingest you know like a TEI document or latex or some of these other formats that that scholars are working in and like we have we have such a good foundation to add those additional strategies to manifold and then essentially what manifold does is it takes that content and puts it through the strategy and then normalizes it and stores it locally so it can be presented in the manifold reader and annotated and importantly so that it can be output as an EPUB on the other side so whatever format it comes in it all gets normalized in manifold and then can be written to EPUB. Yeah and one thing I love is like when you have that situation that you described Jim where it's like you know a bunch of Google docs or you could mix up you know Google docs and Word files or whatever manifold just like nits everything together and it winds up looking you know like just a beautiful publication with a nice table of contents and that could immediately be annotated and and have resources added to it so Zach has done an incredible job and one of the things I love about the ingestion is that when it sort of shows the processes running so like when you ingest an EPUB you're watching for like you know 10 seconds as like it runs all the events and then bam you've got you've got a publication out there on the web so it's super quick and easy to go from like an EPUB file or Google doc into a manifold publication. No I was I haven't read are you taking recommendations because I have one. He's really cool given the whole ingestion thing if you like you had a like a visualization of the text going into someone's mouth and the text made it going down into the esophagus and then the stomach everything's happening but we won't finish that. I often don't associate the OER with a certain amount of kind of like consistency of aesthetic and like really that sense that you know a lot of us who kind of you know we're born on the book right have that sense of the type setting have that sense of the aesthetic and one of the things I really did about manifold is it kind of brings that back and I guess that has a lot to do with you both starting out as a pub with publishing houses and then moving to more general academic course based or let's say reader group based and then OER that kind of almost helped you because the aesthetic came first and now the functionality can be built on for just about any group of community is that is that fair? It's kind of I mean yeah I think it's more our process for development here than than the fact that we started with you know press publication use cases I mean the the problem I mean this I'm gonna not rant here so the the issue is that a lot of academic software projects in my view don't take design both user experience design and visual design and marketing and branding as as seriously as they ought to so on manifold we like we threw real resources at this part of the project and we're you know from day one we were doing you know like thinking about like what's our elevator pitch for manifold like how do we get this down to a sentence what's our brand look like you know what what is like how do we design a reading experience it's going to make people want to actually read something on the web you know we're competing with like the the physical book this wonderful artifact that that is a pleasure to interact with like how do we get as close to that as we can in the browser and so we spend a lot of money on on UX design and visual design and we do at every point like design kind of leads the whole process before we start developing a feature you know we're not just like shoehorning it into what we already have in manifold we're doing you know three to five rounds of of design and review and feedback cycles with stakeholders yeah I mean I I feel so lucky to be working with both the University of Minnesota Press and with with cast iron coating on this project Zach's team does incredible work you know Lail Tyler our lead designer does incredible design for us and you know it's as Zach says we take it seriously from the beginning and you know the aesthetics of the platform I do think kind of set it apart and the other thing is that we're we're focused on the aesthetics but we're also thinking about say you know issues of accessibility we've been working very closely with the University of Washington on their accessible with their library and accessible IT groups to test manifold both manual testing and then automated testing that cast iron does in its design process so it's it's there are many stages to our work and you know we've really in addition to the design process that Zach stated you know we've also been trying to be open about our development process all the way through so you know we're we're constantly you know posting stuff to GitHub where we're trying increasingly to do our work and share designs at earlier and earlier stages and you know I do I do feel really gratified that the the platform kind of looks good and that because you want you want it to look good if people are gonna want to read books on a platform it has to kind of look and feel nice to use mission accomplished I really do I think it's a gorgeous platform and I really do hope other folks play with it I'm gonna include a link here before we go just so people go to the site I heard and I don't know if this is true or if I'm giving anything away but I heard there's a redesign of the site coming so yeah looking forward to that I might have even gotten a sneak peek and I was so listen I want to thank you both for coming to domains 21 and to sharing with us your work with me which I think is inspirational and just I look forward to the reading rooms I think something really hit for me when you started to think about it not trying to reproduce the LMS the course-based idea but the idea of the shared experience around the text where that leads I think it's it's a nice distinction yeah well that's that's to be honest that's a lesson I learned from you Jim you know early on I mean the we started the CUNY Academic Commons at the grad center based in part on the work you were doing at UMW on UMW blogs and you know the thing I noticed about and this goes back to the time the three of us were kind of all together as grad students it's like thinking about these spaces not just as you know publishing platforms but as community spaces these are these are places where people gather whether it's to read whether it's to share to publish and you have to think about like the people there and that's you know that's a lesson kind of CUNY has taught me and also that you know I've learned from you as well. Words of wisdom Lloyd. Words of wisdom and with that we have to stop. Bye bye everybody. Thanks Jim. Bye thank you.


Okay. So yeah, welcome back everyone for the second session here on the introduction of the Book of Acts and I hope you're all enjoying it. We have looked at how the work of God was, you know, how it expanded and touched many lives as we see in the Book of Acts. So we have looked at the overview and covered a couple of headings under which we have seen all the things that are going on in the Book of Acts. So we stopped at the fact that, you know, this gospel went across to many communities and a powerful work was done. And the Lord Jesus was the main person who was preached by the apostles and also, you know, some of the teachings that existed during the events of the Book of Acts. Now, towards the end of our class, we said church and revival is a good, it's a good theme or topic to describe the Book of Acts. And one of us posted on the chat a little later saying the same works which the apostles did by the power of the Holy Spirit, aren't they happening even now? So that's a good comment. That's true. So the work of the Holy Spirit, it is seen in a very powerful way in the Book of Acts, but you don't see an end to it. We are not told that, you know, those works ended at Acts chapter 28. So there are a lot of writings and sermons on Acts 29. Acts 29 doesn't exist in the Bible, but basically what Acts 29 refers to is our lives and the supernatural work of God through the lives of the believers who came after the Book of Acts. So Acts 29 is the life that we live for God on the earth today, continuing to impact the world for the glory of God. So it's true that God's work continues. So let me go forward from there. And the next subject that I want to discuss about is that the Book of Acts is very supernatural. In the Gospels, you find the Lord Jesus performing many miracles by the power of the Holy Spirit. That was one individual. Jesus who became fully, is fully God and fully man, but he was demonstrating the kingdom and you see the kingdom primarily being demonstrated through the Lord Jesus. But in the Book of Acts, you know, you have apostles, you also have believers, right? You would notice that people in the church who did not yet have a certain position of influence, even through their lives, the power of the Holy Spirit was being revealed. One of the examples would be people like Stephen. Stephen was a volunteer in the church at that point in Acts 6. Seven volunteers had chosen to distribute food to the widows. Stephen is one of them. But when you read about Stephen, we are told that he was a man full of faith, but also power. He demonstrated the power of God. So the apostles, the believers, right? And every community that was touched by the Gospel and received the Gospel, you would see the power of God being demonstrated through them. And the supernatural works of God are seen. So there are lots of miracles, healings that are recorded, lots of deliverances that are recorded in the Book of Acts. And in fact, regions are transformed once these miraculous works take place, you know, particularly in Ephesus. Ephesus, you would see that God's work took place so powerfully when the power of God was demonstrated in Philippi. When a demon possessed girl, she was set free. People actually, you know, heard the Gospel. They took notice. It got their attention and then the Gospel spread. So a lot of supernatural works you would see in the Book of Acts. And in another way of putting it is that the Holy Spirit was at work. So the Book of Acts in many ways, it is the direction of the Holy Spirit. He directs the people. Now we will notice how Paul in his missionary journeys, whenever he had to choose a certain place to minister, he would depend on the Holy Spirit.  So you observe the work of the Holy Spirit in leading, empowering and, you know, releasing the mighty works of God through the apostles, through the believers in the Book of Acts. So the supernatural power of God is something that we just cannot miss. And as we mentioned earlier, it continues today. We are those people who must carry on these supernatural demonstrations of the power of God. Now, a couple of other things that we see in the Book of Acts is, as the Gospel spreads to various communities in Acts 15, you know, you read about the Jerusalem Council. Okay, the Jerusalem Council, where by then you move from just a few leaders in the church to a good number of leaders in the church who are part of the decision making process. And there is an issue that comes up where the Gentiles are forced to follow Jewish traditions, right? The Gentiles who accept Christ, the Jewish believers, you know, they, some of them insist that even the Gentiles must follow traditions like circumcision and all of that. But the Jerusalem Council decides that it is not necessary, right? What is important? The important thing is for them to be born again, not to follow man's tradition. So you also notice in the Book of Acts that the emphasis is on faith in Jesus and to let go of unnecessary Jewish traditions. The Gentiles are told to follow a couple of things that are useful for them, but they are not forced to follow traditions, right? So the emphasis for the communities that are being saved is to have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and to let go of their wrong way of living, if at all they have some sinful lifestyle. So these are all things that you observe in the Book of Acts. Now I want to talk a little bit about the church in the Book of Acts and to do that, I want to share an image with us and it will clarify many things. So once again, let me share my screen. Okay, I will share my entire screen. Then go to that page. Okay, here you have it and I hope you can see it. So the Book of Acts is the place where you have the church taking birth and when did this happen? When do you think the church was birthed in the Book of Acts? Anyone? You can just take a while guess. When was the church birthed? Okay, I don't hear anybody. Okay, great. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Thomas. I think that's Thomas. So yeah, Thomas, it was birthed in Acts chapter 2 and the Holy Spirit was poured on the people. So if you can see this image, I like it and the place from where I've taken it, you know, that's also mentioned. But I like this chart here because it talks about the birth and the growth and the expansion of the church. So in Acts chapter 2 and the Holy Spirit was poured upon the believers, Peter preached his first sermon and 3000 people were added to the church. So that was the day the church was birthed and then you see them sharing all things in common, devoting themselves to the apostles' teachings, breaking bread, going from house to house. So that's a community. It's become a community of believers whom we call as the church. They begin to give witness to the gospel in Jerusalem. So the church is birthed in Acts chapter 2 and till about Acts chapter 6, you notice that the church and what's going on in the church and how the apostles are giving leadership to the church, all that we would see. And slowly what we observe is the church begins to enlarge itself and move out. So you have people from within the Jerusalem church who are being sent out. So I already mentioned to you, Philip, who goes to Samaria and he does the ministry over there. And then eventually you have others, Acts chapter 13, Paul and Barnabas, who expand further. The enlarging is happening and then the expansion goes on touching all those regions that we saw earlier. Another beautiful thing that you notice is that as people step out to new cities, churches are formed in those cities. What is a church? It's a community of believers. So you would read about other churches, Ephesus church in Galatia, a church in Philippi or another very interesting and important sister church that we will learn about is the church of Antioch where Paul ministered during his initial ministry. So there are many, many churches that rise up. So when we say that the church is birthed, yes, the Jerusalem church was birthed in the second chapter of Acts, but as you go forward that church grows and there is the birth of very many local churches. But all these churches spiritually are in one body of Christ and they have the same vision, they have the same mission for the Gospel. Then of course you see the expansion of the church moving into different regions at that time. So there are many lives that are changed. There are several miracles that take place. You see the spread and multiplication of the people of God. Now a couple of other things you observe is that the communities that are being touched, they also increase in numbers. So it's not just the Jews anymore, but you have the Gentiles, you have different other communities of people who become part of the believers. So we will notice this transition the church makes from being that small, if you would say a baby, maturing into an adult throughout the book of Acts. Now when I say maturing, there are several things. If we look at the church, we can observe so many different things. We will see that initially there are a few leaders, then many leaders start coming into the scene. Like I told you by Acts 15, you have the Jerusalem Council, there are so many leaders who are able to make a decision. Then you observe that it's not just the apostles who are preaching and doing the miracles, but also the believers. So believers have become strong in the teachings, believers have become strong in the work of the Holy Spirit and they are going ahead and serving people and miracles are taking place through them. And that's a strong church, right? The church is really growing up. You will see a praying church initially when opposition comes to the apostles, you find them striving. But they come back to the people of God and they say, okay, you pray, right? You pray. So the people of God are praying. Even in Acts chapter 12, when Peter is in prison, you will find that church is actually in somebody's home meeting to pray and intercede for the release of Peter. So the church is growing in different aspects in the structure, in the leadership, in their faith, in the demonstration of the supernatural power of God. And also, I just told you in prayer, right? In prayer, also courage when opposition comes their way, they're no longer afraid. We will read at some point that because of persecution, the Church of Jerusalem, right? It could not continue and keep growing larger, but people had to move away from Jerusalem. And what happened when people went to different parts of their region? They went ahead and planted churches. So when you read about the book of Antioch, you will observe that it's not started by any notable apostle, but it is some believers who started this important church. So the believers had actually spread across, but wherever they were going, they were planting churches, they were doing the work of the ministry. So the church continued to become stronger and stronger and stronger and you see this throughout the book of Acts. And then as you move towards the last chapters, you see the missionary work of the church. The church is no longer only for themselves, but they think about impact and they want to move forward to impact new territories and conquer new frontiers for the gospel. And this is the journey that the church makes. This is the impact that the church has and that is also very interesting to see and study in the book of Acts. So in this image that I have put for us, there's also another observation. You find evangelism, which initially is city-wide. We look at Jerusalem. A lot of people in Jerusalem get saved. So city-wide evangelism is happening and then it spreads across. So it spreads across to that particular region and it becomes national for the Jews and for their communities. But eventually you would find Paul trying to enter into Asia, trying to enter into new countries. So it becomes cross-cultural. The spread of the gospel moves from being city-wide to nationwide to then becoming cross-cultural. So all these things we will observe in the book of Acts and it's really a very, very fascinating journey for us to make through this book. So I have touched upon several themes that we will study in detail in this course. Now a couple of other things for us. When we observe the book of Acts, I told you that we will touch on the life of Apostle Paul. Now the exact timelines and the exact missionary journeys, we will look at it later. But I want you to have a glimpse of it right away. I was telling you that we will not go into the details of Paul's missionary journey. But I would like to show you at least an image of the places where Paul has been. And that will help you see how far and wide he travelled to spread the gospel. So the missionary work, that's where the term missionary comes in. Where you have Paul going and winning in front of people for the gospel. So I hope you can see my screen. Can you see it now? Yes. Okay, wonderful. So if you can just see, all these points over here, these are all various cities and stops where Paul went and he spoke to believers who lived in those places. So you just observe so many points, so many stops, so many cities across regions. So the travels of Paul covering different cities and churches. So you would observe that he generally he would go initially preach the Messiah to them and give them an invitation to repent. And then when people respond to the gospel, a church will be established. And in the way that he ministered, he would usually strengthen the leaders in that place. He would have some leaders and then instruct them. And whenever he went past that region again, excuse me, he would strengthen the believers once again. So you read that many times, he would go back, for example, if he went to Iconium and Lystra and Dabi. Now if he is going back from Dabi to Iconium, he will go to Lystra. He will go to Iconium and again spend time with the believers. So strengthening the believers, imparting the truth to the believers and establishing them in the things of God, in the kingdom of God, that was very, very important to Paul. So you see that he had touched so many different cities. So you can only imagine how many believers were in all these cities. And let's also remember that it was not just Paul who was planting churches at that time. There were ordinary believers whose names we do not know in the book of Acts who were also serving the Lord. So these are the regions that Paul touched. But we are sure that the work of God which was done had a greater extent than this map that we are seeing. And of course, the work of Paul will be covered under the missionary journeys. And each missionary journey took a couple of years.  And the purpose of each missionary journey also was unique, like to find new territory, then later on to just strengthen the existing churches, so on and so forth. And towards the end of Paul's life, he was captured, he was imprisoned and he had to be taken to Rome. So you would notice here, over here, he did his work and then later when he was captured, he had to be taken to Rome, okay? Rome is at the extreme left of this map. And even there, when Paul was imprisoned, you would see that he was preaching the gospel to the people who were taking care of his case, right? And they got to hear about Jesus the Messiah and he gave them an opportunity to give their lives to Christ. So such was the ministry of Apostle Paul and such was the impact of Apostle Paul and we will learn more about it in the future. So I think now we have a good idea of different things that are going on in the book of Acts, yeah? So any thoughts at this time, any questions before we continue? Yeah ma'am, I got some idea about Paul's and how the Holy Spirit working and spreading the gospel to so many places. Yes, yes, that's right, that's right. Yeah. So from whatever I have shared so far, what is it about this early church that really inspires you? Ma'am, Holy Spirit lead through Holy Spirit, they obey the Holy Spirit, the commandments and leading and they step out and they work, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, thanks Kiran. Yeah, that's true. You know the leading of the Holy Spirit and the obedience of the people. Anything else that stands out for you? Because we are also a church, right, of today's day and age. So when you observe the early church in comparison to us, is there anything that you feel, wow, we too should have that in us? Okay, this is dependency on the Holy Spirit and the work of the Spirit, that's great. Manu, Holy Spirit doing work and strengthen the believers, true, yeah, and the believers in acts are obedient. Okay, so obedience is what Kiran says. Yeah, what else inspires us? Yes, stop us. As you said, not only Paul and many people established the church, still you didn't touch that portion. In Antioch, we can see the people, those persecuted and scattered, the scattered people wherever, when they established the church there. That's the powerful thing where the believers are so strong in the time that they can go and minister to the people. That's how every church should grow in this time. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, definitely Thomas. So it was a strong church, strong church, and it's only a strong church which can make an impact. Yeah, so we cannot stop but be inspired by the book of Acts and how God was unfolding his plan and purpose initially through the church. And we must continue in that same kind of fire. We must continue in that same kind of obedience. We must continue in that same kind of dependence on the Holy Spirit and that's what God wants for each and every one of us. So as we study through the book of Acts, this is the expectation that I want to set for us. We will look at the events, we will look at the incidents that took place and not just looking at it from a historical viewpoint, but we can take lessons from there for ourselves at this point and really seek the Lord and say, God, can we be those same believers who have the fire of the Holy Spirit and who have such a passion to move to regions where people don't know the gospel and to share the pure gospel? I told you the message of the book of Acts is the Messiah and those who ministered the gospel they were very clear about what gospel was and not only that, they ministered with the power of the Holy Spirit and as people were healed, as people were delivered, as signs and wonders were performed among communities, there was a great response. There was a great response and you notice cities, entire cities turning to the Lord. You notice regions turning to the Lord and that's sort of an impact today. We do see that to some extent, but our prayer is that we will see so much more of it even as we wait for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ. So, just a couple of things before we wrap up for today, a little bit more on the timelines. Now, we understood about the missionary journey and the work of Apostle Paul. Now, how does the timeline look in the book of Acts? I would also encourage us, I will maybe put a link, but you can actually study an APC publication called Revivals, Visitations and Moves of God. And in that publication, Pastor has mentioned about revival in a very systematic way in the book of Acts. So, that will also help you understand the timeline of the book of Acts better. So, I would encourage the main material for us in this semester is the Bible. So, if you have an NKJV version, you know, you could read up and come a couple of chapters for every class. So, I will go over it like a story and explain to you the different events. For additional study, you can look at David Gozik, right? David Gozik has elaborated commentaries on books of the Bible, EnduringWord.com. EnduringWord.com has commentary for the book of Acts. And primarily, we will use that to mention to that what I mentioned just now, Pastor Ashish's publication on Revivals, Visitions and Moves of God. So, the timeline which is covered in Acts chapter 2 to Acts chapter 8 is a span of about eight years. So, the first eight years is from Acts 2 to 8. What did we see there? We saw that the church was born and the church became stronger. And that was the initial stepping out of the church. Then from Acts chapter 8 to Acts chapter 13, which is again the next few years of the church.  In that time, you see all these sister churches, right? Sister churches, church of Samalia, eventually you have Antioch. And then Paul comes onto the scene, God is going to the Gentiles. And then the missionary journey of parts of after Acts 13. So, by now, roughly two decades of already on the last decade, right? From Acts 30 onwards, the last decade till Acts 28 is where we observe the journeys of Apostles. That he goes to cities and he spends a lot of time in different places. In Tesla, he spends 18 months, okay? In Ephesus, probably three years in Ephesus. So, you'll find spending different periods of time in different cities and, you know, with the work of God. And towards the last four years is where we will read the Bible. He's been tried. He does not stop encouraging the churches.  That's the epistles that Paul wrote. There are names of so many co-workers that, you know, Paul brings out. So, the impact is on regions, is on people, it's on liars who are identified and groomed over the years. And a lot of work actually happens in this, in these 30 years, right? Through the church and particularly through the work of Apostle Paul. So, this ingest is all the main things that you need to know about the book of Acts. And from the next class, we will go chapter by chapter. So, next class, I would encourage you to read up Acts chapter 1 and also to read up Acts chapter 2, okay? Acts chapter 1 and 2. And if possible, there is an APC publication on Holy Spirit baptism. Holy Spirit baptism. So, that is also highly recommended. You can read that up and then, you know, come for class. And as we study whatever is in those chapters, we will try and relate it to, you know, the content on the Holy Spirit baptism as well. So, once again, at this point, I just want to leave this time open to ask you what your expectation is. You know, as you study the book of Acts, what is it that you want to take back with you at the end of this course? Revival. Revival, okay. That's great, Kiran. How about the others? What would you like to take with you? Passion. Okay, Manu says passion. Wow, nice words that capture Acts. Passion, revival. I'll use the word expansion. Okay. And Dave says eating Holy Spirit. Yes. Yes. Yes. I want to take back. Okay. So, if you haven't thought about it yet, I encourage you to think about it. Okay. And please do post it on the stream page of our Google Meet so that we all look forward to certain things that we will receive from this course. Okay. So, here is a very, very general outline. We will delve into the depths of the book of Acts from next week onwards. Okay. Siddharth here adds, he says, just get to know more of church and Holy Spirit and personally for me to be led by the spirit in work or ministry. Okay. Wow. Thanks Siddharth. Thank you for mentioning that. Yes. So, we are looking forward to all of these things. And I would encourage someone to please pray as we close today's class and just pray that we will gain all this, whatever we talked about in addition to that, you know, much more from our course on the book of Acts. So, can I request Dave to pray please? Can you lead us in the word of prayer? Yes. Amen. The Father, I thank you Lord. I thank you that you have given us this time that we could learn from the word of Jesus that we could see and we could learn the works that you did to the early churches or churches, how you lean to all the disciples and all the churches or churches, how you teach your work through the life of Jesus. As we go through this book Lord Jesus, let us understand and let us relate ourselves to Lord Jesus so that we can not just only learn Lord Jesus, but we can apply it in our life and in our ministry so it is whatever we are expecting from you Lord Jesus so that we can have it more than what we expect from Lord Jesus. Thank you for mentioning that. Amen. Thank you. Thank you that we all can come together and learn Lord Jesus. Thank you once again and we bless you in the mighty name of Jesus. I pray. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you. Thank you Dave. And yes, so take care class and we will connect back next week. Please do read up next chapter one and two and also the APC publication Holy Spirit baptism and you know we will take it from there. God bless. Bye for now. Thank you. Thank you ma'am. Bye. Thank you ma'am. Thank you.


Thank you for inviting me here to speak today about demonstrating leadership and corporate social responsibility in annual reports Quick overview of the presentation today first I'll speak a little bit about the history of annual report disclosures on work health and safety and Then give you some insights that we've found in our research at Macquarie University into current practices of Reporting on work health and safety Some examples of what's been done. Well some examples of things that haven't been done so well and That gives us some insights into how we can actually improve Work health and safety reporting in annual reports So why the annual report the annual report is an excellent vehicle for reporting on work health and safety It's the main medium that we use to communicate with our external stakeholders And it's increasingly being seen as a vehicle for investors to find out about the way Organisations manage risk not just the financial information, but the non-financial information such as work health and safety In the research that we've conducted Stakeholders see the annual report as a particularly credible source of information for reporting on work health and safety more so than sustainability reports and more so than websites and other forms of corporate media There's actually quite a long history of reporting work health and safety information in annual reports For example, I did spend some time down at a library in Canberra looking at the 1820s annual reports From the Australian agricultural and pastoral company where they talked about people that had been off work due to sickness and ill in injury and illness and This is 1823 to 1825 now even back then although there was some reporting it was very sporadic and there was the occasional mention of gases in mines and those sorts of things but it was really about trying to highlight where companies had lost money due to illness and injury or due to working conditions In the 1980s 70s 80s and 90s. We started to see a real move towards corporate social responsibility And with that there was an explosion in the number of companies that were reporting on health and safety in annual reports and There was increasing attention, but it's really become mainstream in the last 10 to 15 years And it's not only the companies that are now reporting on health and safety, but the public has come to expect it So the issue is the quality the quality of that information in general is quite poor In terms of the early research when we first started looking and this is particularly in the accounting discipline When we first started looking at annual report information on work health and safety in the 1970s and 80s There was a lot of focus on is the information there. So do companies report on health and safety? Yes, or no We started counting pages and sentences and numbers of words because that gave an indication of how much focus or how much Importance the company's placed on those particular disclosures and on that information Then attention started to turn towards the quality of information. So not just interested in was it there? But what sort of information was being provided and so organizations? Reports were being assessed and analysed in terms of was the information just qualitative or quantitative Was it full of motherhood statements and claims about you know, we're best practice or were they actually providing information? So they were looking at is there positive news as well as negative news. Is there a balance? Is there quantitative information as well as quantitative? More recently that investigation of quality and quantity has become more targeted and focused The examination is really looking now at the quality of content in terms of is that information Relevant to the users that's intended for is it reliable? Is it verified? So no longer are those motherhood statements about we look after the work health and safety of our workers Enough we now have to go beyond that and we're looking for evidence one of the interesting issues around that is the issue of Verifiability independent assurance I'll talk in a few moments about some of the studies we've been doing But one of the interesting things that we noticed in some of the reports is we have seen reports where they say We're going to link executive bonuses to work health and safety performance And we're doing that because that information is able to be measured objectively and It's easily verified Yet in other reports we looked at They had independent assurance of all of the social and environmental information But health and safety was explicitly excluded from the scope of those audit reports And so that's been a really interesting issue to look at in terms of why is that information being excluded? The current research that we're doing at the moment We have two projects going looking at work health and safety evaluation and reporting sponsored by Safe Work Australia Both are being conducted with the Safety Institute of Australia and we also have the Institute of Chartered Accountants and CPA Australia involved in those projects and This work is informed by prior research and the prior research has looked at two aspects one What do stakeholders want to see in reports? What's important to the different stakeholder groups and secondly What a company is actually providing and the examples I'll present today come from two studies that you can see there One is a study of mining and energy firm disclosures over a period of ten years in annual and sustainability reports the other study is a study of work health and safety disclosures from a whole range of different industries and They were large companies in the ASX top 50 What we found looking at both of those content analysis studies is that in general there's increasing evidence of reporting on work health and safety in annual reports Although there's a wide variation in the quality of that data And there is a substantial gap between what the stakeholders are expecting to see and what companies are actually reporting And so these are the issues that we'd really like to talk about today In terms of demonstrating governance Upfront this is the most important The first thing we should be looking at does the company value work health and safety and how does it express that? When we looked at annual reports Most of the firm stated a commitment to work health and safety They had a statement in there that talked about their vision for example We've got an example there from an annual report number one Nothing is more important to your directors than ensuring the safety and security of our employees Now we saw a lot of statements like that. They became increasingly prevalent However, while they were important and they need to be there They're also very easy to write so They're important, but they are not sufficient They need to be backed up by evidence and you can see an example We have there from another report where which talks about the committee reports to the board And it talks about the structures how that governance is enacted the auditors perform reviews There's written reports and it starts to give you some evidence for how governance is actually practiced within the organization so Adding that level of evidence is important Similarly with reports on strategy some of the organizations were very vague We continue to reinforce our steadfast belief that we must never take the health safety of our people for granted and The pursuit of zero harm reminds remains our overriding goal Aside from the arguments about whether zero harm we're not going to get into whether it's a goal a vision or or an objective But the idea that we don't want to hurt people is obviously very important. We need to see that we need to know the company believes it However again some evidence to justify to explain that to show how they go about Meeting that objective is really important. And so some of the examples we had there And you can see Talking about what's explained elsewhere in the annual report how they actually demonstrate what they're doing about meeting that goal Continuous improvement projects talking about some of their risks talking about some of the management strategies These are all very important things for investors and other stakeholders to see So the key there is providing evidence Now as we move from the early 90s to the mid 90s We started to get out of the motherhood statements and back it up with a little bit of qualitative evidence More recently we've seen companies start to try and look at leading indicators And that's a really important way of providing evidence as to the effectiveness of the processes and Projects and initiatives that have been put in place to manage health and safety In terms of leading and lagging indicators. We see a lot of reports that talk about Injury rates, but there's very few that focus on the front end there The leading and lagging indicators of the critical processes used to manage health and safety So for example consultation a leading indicator of consultation might be how many of staff we have consulted About health and safety issues a lagging indicator or an effectiveness indicator Would be saying something about how many suggestions ish offered by those staff have actually been adopted In the annual reports we tend to see a focus on auditing so the number of audits conducted We see a lot of evidence around training conducted We see very little in terms of the effectiveness of audits or training And there's certainly a lot of room for improvement there and we look forward to seeing that happen in the future Unfortunately where a lot of the reports do seem to be stuck and this has continued over nearly 20 years now We've seen an increasing number of firms reporting primarily on injury and illness rates Certainly not saying that's not important. We need to see that information However, there's a lot of focus on fatality and lost time injury rates and unfortunately that's not terribly helpful We've seen a lot of new companies coming into the realm of reporting on work health and safety Look around and say what's everyone else reporting on lost time injury so they join that That sort of flock of lost time injury advocates, which has been a bit of a shame because it's not a useful measure for reporting in Annual reports and I'll just talk a little bit about why Lost time injury rates don't measure safety and they certainly don't measure health and safety Safety is about the absence of risk of injury and illness So the injury rates will tell you if there has been an injury But they won't tell you anything about the risk that's been there particularly if injury rates are low As well as that lost time injury rates There are only a subset of injuries and illnesses They fail to capture most incidents They don't capture illnesses very well at all and they fail to capture all the work related injuries So they're not a valid measure of frequency They don't capture all of those injuries for a whole range of reasons whether it's under reporting or whether it's that the injuries are Captured in different categories such as medical treatment injury They're also too aggregated to inform about the consequences of injury a lot of people will say and we see it in annual reports all the time We measure lost time injury rates They say because it tells us about our serious injuries But that's not necessarily true because we could have a permanent hearing loss for example, which is a serious injury and Yet if that person hasn't had to take an entire day off work Due to that hearing loss it won't be captured as a lost time injury It will be captured as medical treatment, which is perceived by many managers to be a more minor classification Similarly with musculoskeletal injuries Sometimes you can have injuries where people will be affected for months years even whole of life due to say a back injury or a shoulder injury and yet they may not be captured as a lost time injury So they're viewed as a more minor category of injury So in terms of those measures lost time injuries if they're not capturing illnesses, they're not capturing severity or frequency very well We then thought we'd have a look and see does that actually work on a larger scale Can we show demonstrate that that actually is the case that they don't capture? severity very well So in one study that we've completed fairly recently we took all of the data from New South Wales workers compensation Over a period of 10 years and we graphed the injuries we graphed fatalities and we graphed lost time injuries And you can see there both of those are trending down And so that demonstrates that New South Wales has been very successful in reducing fatalities and lost time injuries over that period And that's what we want to see We then took exactly the same injuries and we reclass them we classified them as either permanently Disabling or temporarily disabling and what we found was the temporarily disabling injuries Went down quite severely, but the permanent disabilities almost doubled in that period and That data was completely hidden if we were just looking at lost time injury rates And so this is the problem that we have in industry most managers get lost time injury and fatality data And this is also the information that is most commonly produced in annual reports to investors and other stakeholders So as a result the users of those reports aren't able to see the information that could really tell them about the consequences of Work health and safety outcomes If we look at the traditional way that we would view categories of injury and illness Heinrich's triangle birds triangle those kinds of traditional triangle models that tell us that we have First aid treatment, which is the most minor. We've got medical treatment restricted duties and then lost time injuries with fatalities at the top What we see from that is that lost time injury rate aggregates a whole range of different categories of injury and illness and a range of different severities By placing the triangle that way up It looks as though the focus and it does direct the focus to the bottom of the triangle the most frequent injury and illnesses and so in a sense, we're trying to capture the low-hanging fruit We're trying to prevent the short-term absences and the moderate absences This is a very production or work focused perspective because those categories Really reflect what the business does does it offer first aid does it offer medical treatment? Does it give the person time off and It fails to focus on the outcomes the consequences both socially The consequences for the employees and to a large extent the consequences financially for the organization because if we look at the costs the costs of fatalities and permanent disabilities are significantly higher than the costs of short-term absences and you're talking about differences of Over 80,000 for the disabilities down to less than a thousand for this for the minor injuries So we've been looking at this alternate model and this is a model developed by Jeff McDonald Many years ago. It's been used around Australia in a number of organizations and it's really looking at reframing the way We view injury and illness It turns the triangle upside down and it puts the focus on the injuries that are the highest consequence Irrespective of how much time the person has had off work. It's about time to recovery not time back to work So class one are those most debilitating injuries and illnesses that cause a permanent disability or a fatality Or that have a long-term impact on the individual class two are the temporary Impairments and class three of those that really don't have any sort of life altering difference more of an inconvenience really And so if we turn the triangle that way and we start looking at severity by saying, okay We've got these total class one plus class two Essentially if you add them together, it's going to be something very close to a trifle total recordable injury rate Because you've captured all of those injuries that are really everything over for first aid and We then can separate out class one so we can identify which of those injuries that are going to have the most significant impact That takes a human perspective When we were looking at annual reporting studies in the early 90s and mid 90s We did see a number of organizations that were reporting class one They didn't call it that but they were reporting on not only fatalities, but permanently Disabling injuries and also those that caused long-term impairment However We then saw this move towards lost time injuries and a lot of that permanent disability and serious injury reporting has disappeared We saw some other issues in the reporting which are worth mentioning I think in terms of injury and illness data quality and that was around reliability and comparability issues For example different firms reported on different measures Some would report lost time injuries. Some would report medical treatment. Some would report total recordables Some would report an all injury rate. So you really couldn't compare where they stood Make any sort of meaningful comparisons between the organizations But it actually went further than that The measures were very unstable and by that I mean an organization would produce a report that said our lost time Injury rates are 0.7 and that's favorable compared to last year, which was 0.9 Then the next year they'd say our lost time injury rate is 0.6, which is better than last year, which was 0.7 And then the next year you wouldn't see anything and suddenly they'd produced something different Oh, this year we're talking about all injury and after a few years they come back to reporting on lost time injury and show a trend graph and you realize that the Year that they actually stopped reporting on it was a poor result it had gone up and So there was all this sort of manipulation in the way that the data was presented that they'd changed from one to the other when it Didn't present them in a favorable light So that was a bit of an issue in terms of understanding and interpreting the measures that was also a bit of an issue because Organizations would use the same name for two different types of measures. So they would say our LTI FR is this Someone else LTI FR is that but when you look at the definitions that they used they're measuring different things They're measuring it differently Some would say we have to have our Insurance company accept it before it counts as a lost time injury rate Some would say it includes illnesses others would say it wouldn't some would say could be a Period of time off work any time after the injury others would say it has to be the very next day So there's a whole lot of different definitions being applied to the same indicator And then we had the curious case of the same definition with different names Which happened as well Lost time incident versus lost time injury. Are they the same thing is an incident also capturing illnesses or not? Sometimes injuries captured illnesses. Sometimes they didn't so it all got very messy when you're trying to understand what was actually being reported and Many organizations didn't even provide a definition which made it even more difficult to tell what they were measuring So the use of a glossary in an annual report is absolutely critical to say what it is that You're actually trying to communicate to your readers Here's a couple of examples So this is one study that we had done we looked at annual reports and these are all the different definitions just for lost time injury rates That were produced in those reports and the interesting thing is some of the companies changed the definition they used You'll see the one that has the most 25 different companies reported lost time injury rates in those selected periods But if you add the numbers of reporters across they do they won't add up to 25 Which means that you actually had people using different definitions from the same company over the different years Which just goes to show how tricky it all gets some of the other issues that we found and This is just things to ensure that the quality of your data is being produced to a high standard Checking that the numbers add up Sometimes we had different results reported in an annual report and a sustainability report for the same year So they would issue the two reports at the same time and one would say our lost time injury rate is you know point four And the other one would say it's point five and it's for the same period Now there may have been a reason for that it may be that they're looking at slightly different time periods But that sort of thing needs an explanation if you're going to do that We even had examples where they had two different rates in the same report and one example with two different rates on the same page And I think this is where we can really see Examples of companies that cut and paste exactly the same information from year to year and just try and do a edit replace on the numbers and It it's a very good Advertisement for actually thinking through your disclosures and not just doing that cut and paste because that that really does show out with these sorts of things One of the other problems that we saw and again it could be a genuine problem It's not necessarily a manipulation, but it doesn't instill confidence in a reader is when the reports would say This year our results are point seven compared to last year, which was point nine And you would go and look at last year's and last year's was point six There was one company in particular that we looked at that had that kind of thing happen every single year The only year they didn't do that was the one and only year that the data was independently verified and In that year it actually agreed with what was said the year before Which does two things really it tells us about the value of independent verification and It also tells us that we need to be a little bit critical where the data that's coming out doesn't Really make sense the other thing that we did notice was sometimes The narratives around the injuries and the illness data was a little bit Interesting an increase in injury rates in one report was described as results plateaued Another report said an increase in lost time injury rates was a slight improvement Which was a concern So I think If health and safety information is going in the reports We do need to make sure that the health and safety people get to have a good look at it before it goes out because We can see those sorts of issues there could be picked up by people with a little bit more knowledge I think about health and safety itself In terms of the completeness Consistency is also really important fatalities for example companies were reporting fatalities when they weren't on and then saying we Had none this year compared to one last year, but last year there wasn't one reported Contractors and this is I think an important issue that's come out with the new work health and safety act and the idea of a PCBU In the previous reports particularly around the late 90s in the early 2000s companies would report employee and contractor injury data separately When the contractors were worse than them and they would report them together when the employees were Had poorer injury performance than the contractors and I think the fact that now we have the PCBU concept It's a way of demonstrating the need to View the co-op the contractors as part of the organization and take that level of responsibility a bit higher So I think that's a really useful thing And I've already mentioned about permanent and temporary disability data sometimes being there and then not Little bit of an example about graphs Here's two graphs from two consecutive annual reports Interesting to look at O3 and O4 in the two the scales are aligned, but you wouldn't think that O4 Is actually the same performance in the two graphs because of the way they've been presented Consistency in the way the data is presented would be good little numbers on top to tell us exactly what you mean Would be even better and it wasn't until I think about 2008 that we got Information about the actual numbers of those injury rates when we ask stakeholders What sort of financial information they wanted to see on work health and safety that produced a really interesting result? Stakeholders were very clear that they wanted to see information about the financial costs of work health and safety failure They wanted to know about fines and penalties. They wanted to know about the legal costs Some wanted to know about workers compensation not quite so much But they were very clear that they didn't want most of them didn't want reporting on Costs to do with prevention and there was a genuine fear I think coming through in the research that if companies started reporting how much money they were spending on prevention two things would happen one there'd be a focus on are we spending too much and secondly that there would be a whole Exercise of trying to tease out health and safety costs from other cost categories, which would be really not very useful in terms of Adding value to the organization And so I think the focus there for costs is really around the failure costs and that's important for a number of reasons we saw With the BP deepwater horizon Response from investors the year after the oil well explosion the investors at the annual general meeting was saying Why aren't we getting the information we need on work health and safety? Why didn't we know the state that this organization was in in terms of its health and safety performance? And so I think that's really important to keep in mind in terms of lost productivity Lost time injury rate if anything, it's a productivity measure. It's certainly not a safety measure It's not really a good injury measure more than anything. It's a productivity measure But it's only a partial productivity measure because it tells you how many injuries were reported That actually cost lost productivity It doesn't tell you how much was lost So if you are going to report it as a productivity measure it needs to be matched with a measure of lost work days It's like producing financial statements. You have a balance sheet and an income statement telling you about two different perspectives on your financial performance Same with lost time injury rates You would need to know the number the frequency and also the severity better still OSHA in the United States has a measure called the dart rate, which is days away restricted and transferred And so that gives a more complete holistic measure of lost time And it avoids some of the issues that we see with manipulation of things being treated as a restricted day when it should be a lost day or those sorts of temptations In terms of comparability Over time as we looked at the annual reports trends over time one of the key conclusions that I think came out of it is There's a real desire for organised among organisations to be comparable, to be able to benchmark, to provide information that's consistent And I think that's genuine and I think it's a useful thing However what we've seen is the comparability and consistency has really come out in a reduction in standards to look at a lost time injury rate And that's where the comparability has ended up and I think that's a shame So instead of reporting a range of things that are specific to different organisations We now see a real focus on lost time injury and fatality measures There is an increasing focus on just in the last few years on a total recordable measure instead of lost time injuries And I think that's a good move It is a more aggregated measure so it does need severity data to accompany it And that's really important that the two of those come together Without that what we end up with is measures that hide the human and social impact And don't tell us anything about the effectiveness of work health and safety systems And I think that last point is the real opportunity for the future It's really about trying to develop ways of reporting that are able to communicate the work health and safety systems The effectiveness of those systems, the actions that are being taken There's very few firms that are doing that well, there are some But there's very few that are doing that well at the moment So demonstrating leadership, coming back to our topic Demonstrating leadership and corporate social responsibility First of all I think it's important to recognise who are the users of the report We need to recognise that investors are important users Employees, we often have students and people in our workshops that have told us over and again That when they're looking for new jobs, they're looking to move Before they will move they look at the annual report of the organisation That they're looking to work for And they look at things like the work health and safety reporting To see what the company's like as a potential employer Customers and suppliers particularly in terms of contracting It's important for them to see work health and safety information Companies also need to consider their own needs and priorities Consider the needs and priorities of those users of the reports And I think in terms of the investors In the last three years in particular we've seen a significant change In the way investors are viewing health and safety information in annual reports They're very keen to see that information They understand that companies that manage health and safety well Are more likely to manage risk well, business risk And I think that's an important point to recognise In terms of demonstrating leadership through an annual report It's not just about leading safely, safety it's about leading safely So it's about showing that you can integrate work health and safety Into the business operations, into decision making So that the aim of the activity, the leadership aim Is to really have safe, healthy and productive work Corporate social responsibility being open and honest about the impact And this is where the severity reporting comes in Companies that are reluctant to talk about the severity of their injuries Are really hiding the impact of their health and safety systems And particularly the impact on the human side The employees, the families and also the broader social impact Through the externalities that they cause So just in summary, work health and safety information in annual reports If we're to demonstrate leadership and corporate social responsibility This requires a number of things It requires an articulation of the mission What it is the company is really trying to achieve The companies, the organisations also need to recognise What their critical risks are and be prepared to say This is the critical risks that we face in our organisation We know what sort of risks different industries face It's not like it's a surprise to the users of the report The fact that companies don't often want to talk to, talk about them Is something that will then raise more questions than answers Once they talk about the risks, it's really important That they outline how they're managing them Doesn't have to go into a lot of detail But if companies can say this is our approach to managing risk Giving the reader some assurance that they've thought about it That they have a plan and a strategy And then acknowledging the consequences The injuries and illnesses, not only the frequency But also the severity To some extent, the costs, the failure costs were relevant And then finally, where there have been a serious injury or illness Providing some information about what happened, what was the cause What did you find out about why that injury or illness happened And then what's been done to prevent it happening again Doesn't have to be long, needs to be there Thank you very much


We developed a novel method for reverse genetics in human cells, allowing us to study the effect of genetic mutations on signalling pathways. This method can be used to identify unknown effects of genetic mutations on human diseases, as well as to better understand the function of genes that are still poorly characterized. This article was authored by Bianca V. Gap, Tomasz Konopka, Tomasz Penz, and others.


I've lost my boy. I'm a bit of a boy, so I literally can't handle it.  Welcome back to my channel, actually new here. Hi, hello, my name's Lydia and today's video is sponsored by a Carmen Blanket who are Australia's leading weighted Blanket company. So here's the tenlats in me unboxing it. Long story short, I actually lost my voice on the day that I was going to film this. So I had to postpone it way about a week but I mean I've had a week to test out the product and now I can give you a full comprehensive review and share my thoughts and feelings about weighted Blankets in general. So yeah, let's go on the video. So yeah, I got the Quartz, I think I got the 12-kilogram one. I wanted to try out something because I actually already have a weighted Blanket that I've had for over a year now and it's the right weight for my PMI etc. You know, all that complicated math stuff. So I wanted to try and get a slightly heavier one because I feel more relaxed when I have pressure applied. For me it's a literal security blanket. Like I feel more secure feeling like I'm bundled up into something and I know for some people that causes anxiety. For me it is the literal opposite. Kind of blanket was very client and they sent me a free weighted Blanket and you know what, I wouldn't have done this without a really cool hookup for you buyers. I arranged a £60 off code that is off all their weighted Blanket products and I think it's just an amazing offer because these products are so expensive right normally and believe me I know that. So if you use code Lydia60, you get £60 off the weighted Blanket and I don't know what you guys think of these products. So I've been using this product for a week now. Anyone who doesn't know I have issues with sleep but because I've been going through stressful time I haven't had sleep as much. So I literally got to test out how calming they were because I've been going through a really stressful time and one thing I learned is they definitely relaxed me and I didn't have any extra weight on. It helped me relax even more. The product quality is amazing and I'm comparing this to a Blanket that I got a year ago and if you didn't know I did a video literally a year ago talking about my first weighted Blanket and I've used that Blanket no kidding literally every day since I got it and I'm using this one and the quality is amazing. I wouldn't sit here and promote something that isn't great. I'm not getting paid to make this video. I got free product yes. I got a cool code but if I thought the product was crap I'd tell you guys and let me tell you. I move around a lot normally my sleep. Like it's amazing when I don't fall off my bed. Like after anyone who knows me I follow everything. I fall out of bed. I'm literally ID3RstonBubbera. This Blanket is so calming and I found that while I've been really stressed that we're having editing we're having trying to relax and focus I found it actually quite grounding and they are recommended for grounding techniques and also like I said this video isn't just me promoting a product and getting paid for it you know I'm not getting paid to make this video. The product that I've been using I don't have anything bad to say about it. The size is what I expected it to be. The weight that I asked for the shipping was incredible especially the based on the fact that I arranged this around like Christmas-y time. It came within like a week and amazing checking. Real talk for a moment. I've used weight blankets now for a long time and I was watching YouTube at the other day who actually mentioned that the use of them in hospital settings and I was kind of confused because I was amazed that one it's very rare to take blankets in hospital like the ones I take in are like they have to save you to check everything so the fact that you there's a lot of weight blanket in hospital amazed me that I thought about it no makes sense. The person who read this video saw this one PTSD and I was getting restrained constantly just trying to ground her from the flashbacks and if she is gonna blanket you will help me with my flashbacks and I'm not gonna say it gets rid of it because it doesn't. They're not magic but it definitely does ground you and keep you in the moment rather than going into a full-on flashback where it takes you back to that moment where you were actually in the flashback like back at the time when it happened. Using the weight blanket for me was very grounding and I don't know I want to throw it in there because that whole story interested me. If I can find the video again I'll link it down below. I know I'm not allowed when I say this. Using a weight blanket is so beneficial to a lot of us within the mental health community. I know a lot of my friends have them. Becca has one, my friend Jamma has one. I'll link both Becca and Jamma's Instagrams in the description down below. They both talk about mental health in there. People who I know that don't have mental health problems got what they're and fell into helplessly. You have to find what it's for you but I would strongly recommend if you have anxiety, PTSD, issues sleeping, dissociative issues or even just looking at more a way of improving your sleep quality. Maybe looking to get a white blanket. Like I said it is an investment. It's not cheap but I'm glad to offer you a 60 pound discount which you're welcome. It's on screen right now and I'll leave it in the description down below. Thank you to Carmen Blanket for sponsoring this video and thank you to reach me. It was like I got the email I was like oh my god a company actually reached out to me to do a sponsorship not the other way around. It was a very strange thing and they were like oh but your rates and I'm like I don't charge to do videos. They sent me a free product and I wanted to put this video out as soon as I could. You can probably just still hear it.  I've been ill for a week but I wanted to get this video out so I hope you guys understand and big shout out to Carmen Blanket. Like I said 60 pound off, covered, let it at 60 and I'll see you guys soon with a new video. Peace.


Hello, I'm Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School in the city of New York, and I'm thrilled to be joining many of my colleagues on December 7th in Doha, where I've never been before, so I'm excited to be doing that. We'll be speaking at the ITU Telecom World 2014's special conference for the UN. And the topics I'm going to be talking about have to do with some research I've been doing on how organizations can adapt to the situation in which competitive advantages and therefore stability of systems becomes shorter and shorter. I see control of information technology to be one of the most critical issues in this new and emerging economy. As we move to the cloud, as we think about new kinds of technologies, as we think about what big data mean and what new kinds of personalization schemes mean, as we also confront the specter of cyber crime, various kinds of criminal activities, the issues of privacy, there'll be a lot to discuss. So I'm looking forward to the future summit December 7th, 2014 in Doha. Thank you.


Yeah sure, let's go to find a restaurant. Let's go. Let's go.