So, the next presentation is about efficient public key cryptography with bounded leakage and temporary resilience. This is by Antonio Faunio and from Ahros University, Denmark, and Daniela Venturi from University of Trento, Italy. And the work would be presented by Antonio. Hi everyone. Thanks Oliver. So, this is a probably secure cryptography before physical attack. Everything was very well shaped if it's working. Now? Okay. Thanks. Okay. Probably security before physical attack, everything was very well defined. So there was a player P1, a player P2, they were interacting, doing some kind of cryptographic primitives and there was the adversary, the adversary could interact with player P1 and P2. They were very well defined way to define how the attacker was doing his attack. So he could corrupt P1, he could interact with P2, he could see the transcript and so on. Nothing. That's how it was. Instead with physical attacks, things really look more messy. As you can see, now there is no very well nicely shaped black box, but instead player P1 and player P2 will be implemented on very old, rusty computers. And these very old, rusty computers will make some noise, which more often will be correlated to the secret material that they use. So the adversary, which is marked, could leak this information. And for example, there is the very famous attack of timing attack of culture in the 1996, which showed that you could infer some extra information and break the protocol. You could be even more smart. In fact, one year after, they showed that Bonet et al showed that you can do some active attack. You can inject fault in the computation and you can break cryptographic system. So the things here are much more messy than before. So we are interested mostly in tamper resilience. So let's give you some minimal related work. So when you want to do tamper resilience, the first thing that you want to think is which kind of tamper resilience you want to get on the circuitry, the circuitry of the cryptographic protocol, or the memory that contains the secret state. So in the case of circuit, there is this very famous work of Ishaï et al. Then in the case of memory, there is this seminal work of Jenar et al. He gave some impossibility result. But more importantly, they gave some impossibility result. The impossibility result say that if the adversary can tamper with an unrestricted way in the sense that the tampering function is any polynomial bounded function, and he can tamper for an unbounded time of time so he can apply many tampering functions, then there is no way to achieve many cryptographic tasks. So how to avoid this impossibility result? Let's consider the restricted sense. So you restrict the kind of function that can be applied on the secret state. And there is this work of Zembowski et al. On normal level code, or for example, there's this work of Belar et al. On related K attack. So another way to avoid this impossibility result is to consider instead bounded amount of tampering. Here, the assumption is that you have this smart card, you are throwing a laser on this smart card, you do it once, you do it twice. At some point, this smart card will just break down. And you won't be able to do more than a bounded amount of tampering. So in this setting, there is this work of Damgard, Faust, Mukheri, Venturi in 2013. They gave a definition of bounded tamper and leakage resilience. They show an identification scheme and a signature scheme in the random oracle model. And that's what they propose, CCA secure public encryption. OK, so our contribution are two. The first contribution is a signature scheme in the standard model. Why we care about the standard model? Well, a part of it's always nice to have something in the standard model. But that's because the impossibility result of general et al. does not hold in the random oracle model, which means that somehow the random oracle model methodology in this setting is not very sound. The second contribution is that there is a CCA public encryption. So the public encryption of the paper of Damgard et al. was based on Naor Young, which means that it wasn't very efficient. You had to use very inefficient zero-knowledge proof, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof. So we just thought, can we do it with Kameshup? Kameshup is much more efficient. And the answer, of course, yes. So for matter of time, I'm going to present you only the CCA public encryption. So this is CCA public encryption generically. So you have this adversary. The adversary can interact with the oracle. This is a decryption oracle. So the adversary can go to the oracle and ask for cyber text, and we receive the message back. At some point, the adversary outputs two messages, M0 and M1. The challenger chooses a bit and encrypts one of the two messages. And the goal of the adversary is to understand which message was encrypted. So now we want to enhance this setting to a more general setting of tamper and ligature sealants. So what we do is that we give to the adversary much more powerful by giving him some extra oracle. So the first oracle that we give is a leakage oracle, which means that the adversary can leak some information about the secret key. And then we say to the adversary that the adversary can instantiate up to the decryption oracle, which we call tampered decryption oracle. Basically the adversary can go to the challenger with a tampering function. The challenger will apply the tampering function on the secret key, and he will instantiate a new decryption oracle with this tampered secret key. And the adversary can talk for an amount of time with this tampered decryption oracle. There is something that we need to notice. So the first thing is that both the leakage and the sensation of the challenge need to be done before you see the challenge, the sensation of the tampering oracle, sorry, need to be done before you see the challenge. This is because otherwise there is an impossibility result. If you can leak one bit, you can always break CCA security. And leakage and tampering, at least, I love you to leak this one bit, the chosen bit. Then another thing that is important to notice is that, as you can see, here the adversary get some public parameter from the sky. And this public parameter, we assume that they are tampered free. So you cannot tamper with this public parameter. The idea is that this public parameter are going to be completely independent from the secret key. So you first set the public parameter, and then you pick your secret key. And the idea of this public parameter generally should be the description of the group, the description of an hash function, something that we fixed there once. And the thing is that we need this thing, otherwise it's very hard to make construction in general. This is not an assumption that only us need. And it seemed very hard, otherwise, to do cryptography without. Okay, so when we started with this project, we wanted to do CCA security. We wanted to do this Kramerschup kind of paradigm. We knew that we needed to have some leakage resilience because tampering resilience itself is a form of leakage resilience. So we went to see the literature, which was the most efficient public encryption scheme out there, which was also leakage resilience. It used Kramerschup. It happened to be this work of QE-LIN, 2013 in Asia Crypt. So what are the building blocks? The first building block, of course, is an hash proof system. Since we use Kramerschup paradigm. And okay, so we already saw in the last talk what is an hash proof system. But let me recall you. So an hash proof system is made by my projective hash function, a keyed hash function, which is projective. In the sense that you can define a public key given the secret key. And thanks to this, this hash function can be evaluated in two way. The first way is like the secret way, which can evaluate the hash function in all the domain. Otherwise, you can evaluate the hash function in a public way using the projective key. And the thing is that you can evaluate the hash function in the public way only for a subset of the domain, which we call the set of the valid ciphertext for the hash proof system. And yes, since it's a proof system, it's complete in the sense that if you evaluate it with, if you take a valid ciphertext, you evaluate it either in the public way or in the secret way, you will get the same hash value and it's sound. So as you can see, there are many ways to define soundness. We hope for this definition that use the min entropy because it's the one that somehow it's much better with the legal resident setting. Here, the idea is that outside of the valid ciphertext, if you take an invalid ciphertext and you use the hash function, the key that you will get is something which looks really, really random. What I mean with that is that even given the projective key, the min entropy of the hashed key for a ciphertext, which is outside of the valid, it's an invalid ciphertext, will have enough min entropy. The amount of min entropy will be minus log epsilon. Of course, the smaller epsilon it is, the better it is for us. And then there is the last property of an hash proof system which is called that it has to have a set membership problem. Basically, it's hard to distinguish when an element belongs here or here. Then the second building block is an extractor. So an extractor is a function that take a source and take a seed and output a string. And the idea is that when the source has enough min entropy in the sense that, once again, since here we are in the setting of leakage resilience, the best way to define the min entropy of a source is to think of a source which might be like a uniformly random string, but then you can get some side channeling information about the string and you want that even given the side channeling information, you have at least enough min entropy. So you have delta min entropy. And if this hypothesis is satisfied, then the output of the extractor will look like a uniformly random string, even given all the side information, including the seed. Then the third building block is a one-time lossy filter. Lossy filter is a key function which has a domain attack, domain X, and a domain, a co-domain Y. And the idea is that you have two different ways to sample tag, so there is a red way to sample a tag. And now if you fix this tag, this function that goes from X to Y is an injective function. Then there is another way to sample tags, which is the blue way. And in this setting, instead, the function will be non-injective. So what do we want to have from this one-time lossy filter is that, first of all, it's lossy, in the sense that in the blue way, then given a point in the image, the pre-image of this point will be a set which is pretty big. It has at least two to the L different point for a parameter L for the lossy filter. The second property that you want is that there is indistinguishability between the tags. So it's indistinguishable to see if a tag is blue or if a tag is red. This is implied that in particular, this lossy filter is a trapdoor function. And actually, the structure of the tag is a kind of particular structure. So the first part, so that you can divide the tag in two pieces. The first tag is the auxiliary part, which is just a string. You can imagine a string of some size. And then there is the core part, which is the important part of the tag. Then there is the third property that this lossy filter have is called evasiveness. And this is probably the most interesting property that they have. The idea is that I give to you a lossy tag and now you need to produce another lossy tag. And an adversary that doesn't know the trapdoor shouldn't be able to do that. So it's hard to find a lossy tag even given another lossy tag. Okay, so now let's give the construction. So the construction basically works as follows. So you have this ciphertext C. So the first thing that you do is that this is a ciphertext C for the hash proof system. And the first thing that you do is that you hash the ciphertext using this hash proof system. And then you get this key. Now this key will have some min entropy. So what we do, we extract all the min entropy and we get a uniformly random pad. Now we use this uniformly random pad to pad the message in a one time fashion. And we get this phi, that's the, yeah, that's phi. Now we take all this part of the ciphertext and this will make the first part of the tag. In this way we kind of bind together the two part of the ciphertext. Then we can sample a tag, which will be an injective tag. And we can instantiate the lossy filter. Now we take the key and we pass the key through the lossy filter. The idea is that since this thing is injective, since this thing is traptor, this element phi will be a kind of pi, will be an authenticator. Some form of authentication offer key. Okay, so out of the grip, well the obvious way, instead of using the public evaluation, we use the secret evaluation of the hash, you get the key, you can extract the message. Now before opening the message, we output the message if only if, if you take the key and you hash it through the, you pass it through the lossy filter and you get the value pi. So as you can see, this is like, I'm authenticating this ciphertext using this pi. Why this thing is secure? Well, you can show very easily that this is CPS secure. So for CPS security, if you consider only this part of the ciphertext, basically what you get is the construction of Naur and Segev. The idea is that we are really using the fact that the soundness of the hash proof system is a statistical soundness. So during the reduction, the ciphertext c, which we chosen to be invalid. So since it's invalid, what happens here is that this key will have a lot of min entry even given the public key. Well, there is some leakage because we are considered leakage resilience. But if we set the parameter correctly, then even given leakage, these keys, we still have some non-trivial min entropy. Therefore, we can extract this min entropy and get a uniformly random path. Queen and you show that so that the scheme is CCA. Basically, the idea is that all the ciphertexts made by the adversary will be injective so the authentication will work as it's supposed to be. But for the challenge, we will set the lossy filter to work in the lossy mode. In this way, the amount of information of key that will be lost will be not so much. So we will lose fact L bits of information about the key. And therefore, if the extractor is good enough and this min entropy will be enough to extract a uniformly random path. And then again, we have security. So the only thing that we needed to manage is how to get tamper resilience. So to get tamper resilience, basically we use this idea which is recurrent in a lot of work on tamper resilience starting from the work of Vishay et al. That tampering can be reduced to some form of leakage. Maybe you cannot do it in a black box way but somehow a tampering is a form of leakage. So we want to simulate the decryption oracle, the tampered decryption oracles, meaning the decryption oracle is insulated with this tampered secret key. The idea is to come out with a new oracle which we need to define in our simulation which behave more or less like the decryption oracle. But in order to do that, we necessarily need to leak some information about the secret key. This is because otherwise we will go against the impossibility result. So the idea is that if we can minimize the amount of leakage that we need to simulate this oracle, then we can instantiate a lot of tampering oracle. So the key point here is that while the decryption oracle can give an abundant amount of information, abundant amount of bits about the secret key, we want to restrict the amount of information that it can possibly give. So if we can find such a kind of thing, then an decryption oracle cannot give more information than the size of the auxiliary information that we used to simulate it. So let's try to do that. So one nice thing to notice about the scheme of Queen Elu is that the only key material is the Ashbrough system. So the only thing that we need to protect against tampering is the Ashbrough system itself. Only the other thing are some publicly evaluable functions. So okay, this is a good observation. So we have this tampered secret key. So now we want somehow to simulate this decryption oracle, how can we do? So let's try to leak the projective key associated to this tampered secret key. So remember that the ciphertext is of this form, but the most important part of this ciphertext is the ciphertext of the Ashbrough system C. So there are two cases. So the ciphertext is a valid ciphertext. Then, at least in an information theoretical sense, the tuple C projective key of the tampered secret key fully define the key itself. So now if we can brute force the key itself, then we can execute the decryption oracle as it is. This is good. So this is the easy part. Then the hard part is when the ciphertext is an invalid ciphertext. Now the projective key doesn't tell you anything about the ciphertext. So what can we do? Well, here the idea is that we try to use the same analysis that was used by Kramerschup to prove CCH security. Basically, the idea is that we analyze this value. So this is the mean entropy of the Ashbrough key for an invalid ciphertext given the view of the adversary. Then there are two cases. If this mean entropy is a lot, so this value is big, then this thing will be, this key will be kind of pretty random. So it will be very hard to guess the authenticator. And so the most probable answer is both. So the simulation will just say both. Then there's the other case that can happen is that this mean entropy is small. And the idea here is that if the Ash value has low mean entropy, then since this is a function of the tamper-secret key, we can prove that also the tamper-secret key has low mean entropy. Which means that gives very low information about the, okay, thanks. Very small information about the secret key, the original secret key itself. So you know what? It doesn't tell you a lot about the secret key. So just let's leak it all of it. So basically now we can leak the tamper-secret key itself. And once we have this tamper-secret key, then we can simulate the tampering oracle kind of straightforwardly. So yeah, but what do big and small even mean? So this is basically the hard part of the technical, our technical part of this proof is try to understand what small and big mean. I don't have a lot of time here to tell you about, so I will just say you a couple of words about. So basically during the simulation, we set a threshold and this threshold will go down, up and down, depending on how the adversary behaves. So we follow the adversary during his attack and we will set what big and small will mean. Well, as I told you, I don't have enough time to tell you about. Actually I did, but I don't have this light. So after some step of mathematics, what you get is that as I told you, the important part of this encryption scheme is that you rely on the hash proof system that you use. We can show that we can find for some parameters of the hash proof system, which we would call alpha and beta, we can have a low, an number of possible tampering oracle which is equal to alpha plus beta, well S, which is the size of the secret key divided by alpha plus beta. So what is this alpha and beta? Alpha is the size of the projection key of the hash proof system and beta is the difference between the size of the secret key and the amount of mean entropy that the hash key has in the case of invalid ciphertext. So say that in another way, we need to pay alpha plus beta bits of leakage for each tampering oracle that we want to instantiate. Actually we had kind of our time to find a hash proof system that had this value. So as you can see, this value need to be very small. We had a hard time to find a hash proof system that had this property. So we found, eventually, a hash proof system based on the refined subgroup indistinguishability assumption. So there are a couple of open problem. First problem is that, so the tampering rate that we get, meaning the number of tampering that we can do divided by the size of the secret key is one over key where key is the security parameter. While we don't know if this thing is inherent of our strategy or if we can get it better. And another thing which would be very interesting to see if we can find better hash proof system, better assumption, faster, whatever. Okay, thanks. Thank you. So we have almost no time for a short question or a comment. All right, thank you. Speak here again.


My name is uni and first of all, thank you for investing your time and being with me basically. This is probably the only time in history that this group is together in the same place isn't it? I'm going to talk about. Sona systems. I know that you all guys you probably use LiDAR systems much more than Sona systems, but let's get to it formula one. Red Bull, they're probably and most arguably the most successful formula one team at the moment. Well, in being in Germany, there are other other brands and other car manufacturers as well. But at the moment, it's probably Red Bull. But Red Bull, they are not only known for formula one and the formula one team. They're also known for all sorts of other strange sports. They support a lot of a lot of sports and they take something that is relatively normal and put it a little bit to the extreme. So they take jumping into water and then move it 38 meters up in the air and suddenly it's a Red Bull sport. It's a Red Bull thing. So they take events that we can all do. You and I, there are professionals in the middle and then there are the crazy people doing Red Bull stuff out on the on the left on the right. Sorry. And we sort of see ourselves Norbit as the Red Bull of the multi beam industry. We see the commodity. We see a lot of professionals really, really good manufacturers. And then we have us and we see ourselves as the ones who pushes the limit a little bit, who makes smaller systems more power efficient systems. But I know that I work in subsea. I work in underwater construction and I work for the Sona manufacturer. I know that most of you guys, you work with probably terrestrial lasers, static lasers and all that stuff. So this is maybe a little bit outside our combined comfort zone. But let's not make that into any sort of problem. This is what you're used to seeing and this is what I'm used to seeing. And I'm going to use a lot of pretty pictures combined with a special technique to sort of push you guys into selecting Norbit when you move from onshore surveying to near shore and offshore surveying. All right. So what can we use a Sona system for when we talk about offshore, sorry, when we talk about constructions and and monitoring.  We see underwater features that we've never seen before. Sometimes I use the analogy that when you go from being onshore to go offshore and use multi beam systems. It's like it's like going from a swim hole, the normal swim hole and then take your goggles out to the Solomon Islands, dip your head into the water and suddenly you see a completely different world. You see fish that you've never seen before. Here we see underwater constructions and underwater features that we never seen before. And that's what we're going to see a number of different very nice images of right in front of this fortress. You can see you can see dredge marks, you can see scour marks from from a dredger very often used they very often use multi beam systems.  So when you suddenly think about going offshore or near shore Norbit is that that's my takeaway from today. I hope you're right with that. It's not it's not hypnosis. Not really. All right. Here we see a key wall, a steel sheet piling key wall that has been mapped with a multi beam system. Perfectly fine. Everything looks good. But if it doesn't look good, it looks something like this. So this is a bulbous from a container ship that penetrated into a steel sheet piling. This is the kind of the kind of damages you can see. And this is actually from a German harbour. A very big German harbour. I'm not going to say which one, but a very big one, probably the biggest. And this will map with a with a Norbit system. So how do we do this? So we take our sensors and we basically show everything and make everything available in real time. We take our multi beam sensor, we take our GPS slash inertial navigation system and we take our and we feed everything into a data acquisition software. That data acquisition software display everything in real time in 3D. Obviously we can process data afterwards. We just heard about some velocity profilers. There could be navigation improvements. All that can be done post. But in real time you see everything like this. This is an example from a real time image. We went to Paris. We did some mapping of the Sen in Paris together with a partner SBG systems. And these are some of the very pretty pictures from the Sen. And suddenly we see rocky outcrops showing that we never thought it was there. I mean, I personally just thought it was a sandy riverbed, but it's obviously rocky outcrops. We can even see some man-made structures down on the lower right here. So this is the Sen river in a small video clip. Beautiful data. So all these things, they have been sort of harbor, river, relatively shallow water. And the closer you are to your features, the easier it is to see details. So I'm guessing the Sen was probably 8 to 12 meters of water, maybe a little bit shallow or some places. This is in about 30 meters of water, 25 to 30 meters of water. And we still get a really incredible level of detail if we've set everything up nicely and correctly. And so this is a wreck of Scotland in 30 meters of water. And I hope you agree with me that we see an amazing level of details. So this is two runs, one run on either side, and then it's just put together. Obviously processed a little bit, but basically a raw dataset. So a couple of examples from customers. Here we have a collapsed key wall. And you can see that the key wall has collapsed, but you can also see the sediment and the debris in the water. We wouldn't be able to see that. So now with a multi-beam system passed by once, and you can estimate or you can also calculate how much you need to take away. Half of this could have been taken away by the current and moved to other places. But now we know what the world looks like underwater. Another example of customers using our systems for scour protection. Well, not scour protection, but finding out where do we need to put rocks so we don't see scouring around bridge piles. And you can see that this example we have scouring happening after this pile. We don't typically see a lot of structure, so the pilings themselves being mapped with our systems. It does happen, but it's especially the features around the piles. Another example of something going on, Subsea, a key wall piles.  I don't know why it happened, but we can certainly see there's something that doesn't look right. So the last couple of examples is pipelines. Pipelines are widely mapped in the offshore industry using both our and our competitor systems. And the level of detail, this is in about six meters of water. The level of detail of six meter flying height. The level of detail is amazing. So this is from a lake in Amsterdam where we have two pipelines. But unlike normal pipelines, these two, they actually cross over, so someone didn't do that job right. But we can certainly identify the mistake here. It's an old pipeline, it's not being used anymore, I've been told, but nonetheless. And in fact, actually, they made that mistake twice, so they cross over and then cross back. So that's a little bit unusual, but it looks super nice when we both in real time and in post. So this is the last slide. This is a couple of cars we mapped during the demonstration during Oceanology International over in London. So inside the docks of London, we found these two cars. They're not there anymore. The top one is a Fort Taunus and the other one is a BMW. And we know that because one of our customers recently used his Norbit system to find out where they were and then they've been recovered. So this may be the last or last but one survey of these two cars, so that's a shame. But this is the level of detail you will see from a high-quality multi-beam system. And with that, I'm not going to try to pick your brains anymore with Norbit information. But I think I am at 11 minutes, so I still have time for a few questions if there are any.


Thank you all for coming today. I have a special guest joining me, and I'm just gonna set everything up for him And he's gonna deliver the actual money presentation here that this is Sean mark. He is a nutrition PhD in nutrition epidemiology, but don't hate him He's the good kind of nutrition epidemiologist he looks at the problem of nutrition and nutrition information from systems perspective which is the inspiration for the talk that we're gonna talk about so he's he's taking that wider view So it's not just about telling people what to eat But looking at how information interacts with a health care system and has created the problem Problems that we're dealing with so a lot of us here including me I spent a lot of time wondering how we can fix the dietary guidelines. We know things aren't working We know that people continue to experience health To experience poor health in relation to all of the operations that are related to and reinforce the dietary guidelines institutions practices programs textbooks lectures education Websites labels experts on the internet. I could go on and on and this is exactly the point What I have failed to appreciate up until recently and what we'll be talking about today is the extent to which the dietary guidelines are far More than a policy that needs changing in fact They are and function as a capital s system Approaching the dietary guidelines from a systems perspective doesn't make them Unfortunately any easier to deal with systems are notoriously Obstraparous it does however give us the opportunity to think outside of the system because one of the things that systems are really good at are Keeping us from doing that So because it's central to any system I'm going to start by addressing why the communication and information production that motivates the dietary guidelines is central to the problem that we're looking at and Then I'll look at Ways that we might try to fix the system But that probably aren't going to work and this is why we need to suck it up and learn to live with the dietary guidelines And then finally Sean's going to come up here and he's going to present a way to jump out of this system by Disrupting rather than trying to fix it and show how this approach Benefits three of the major stakeholders in the current system the individuals who are affected the health care providers and clinicians who work with them And then the nutrition researchers who actually benefit a great deal from this system right here If we're going to look at the dietary guidelines of the system We're going to start at the beginning the fundamental systems theorem is that new systems mean new problems This can be read two ways first of all a new system implies that there's a new problem That we need to deal with with the system human systems are typically created in order to address what is perceived as a new problem Of course new systems means new problems can be can also mean that once there's a new system Then there are new problems created by the system, which is exactly what seems to have happened with the dietary guidelines So if we're This is what seems to have happened with the dietary guidelines. This is a Google engram if you haven't played around with Google engram So lots of fun What this does is it gives a rough picture of the use of a phrase in popular and scientific literature So in other words it gives us a sense of how much people are talking about something over time So this is how we were talking about the phrase obesity epidemic over time And you'll notice this little bump in the middle where in 1975 we started talking about it a lot And then we stopped talking about it. Well, apparently what happened is we interpreted this slight rise in the obesity as a Problem that needed fixing and let me just point out in And relate this to the conversation that happened earlier about the state of paleo is this problem was fixated specifically in a problem population women were women rates of obesity and women were increasing faster than rates of obesity and Men men weren't actually had much obesity in their demographic section black women in particular were a problem population and that's Part of what stimulated this Which is the first government dietary guidance for the prevention of obesity and chronic disease? Now you all know what happens next right well first of all Let me point out to you that we thought we fixed the problem. Why because we stopped talking about it So you see this drop-off in discourse where we stopped talking about it until about 1993-94 where we noticed rises in rates of obesity so in true true to form we fixed our efforts to fix the obesity epidemic resulted in Creating a new problem in the second sense of the word which is the true obesity epidemic We caused the obesity epidemic by attempting to prevent it from a systems perspective However, this is actually to be expected because the thing that systems are best at doing is not doing What they're supposed to do? This is the natural state of a complex human system. You're familiar with the acronym snafu, right? Situation normal all fudged up right normal. That's the normal state of a system So central to the malfunctioning of the system and I'm gonna have to go back here because he's a little out of order is The communication information that takes place early systems theory actually proposed that all systems failure Stem from failures of communication information a system is no better than its sensory organs and the sensory organs of dietary guidance Have been in question from the start So this is how we collect information nutrition epidemiology has long relied on this process of extracting information from individuals Using tools like the Harvard FFQ or food fantasy questionnaires.  Just try Getting information out of the Harvard data set even though it's collected using some public funds The information belongs to institutions and experts not the individuals from whence it came However after it's filtered through obscure modeling and statistical methods and distilled into dietary guidance by experts Burdened with ideological and institutional allegiances It's projected back on these individuals and they're treated as if everyone is is a statistical average of everyone else This has been called the platonic backhand after Plato's ideal forms This is where simplified abstractions or ideal forms are extracted from a complex in very world There's not a this is not a problem in and of itself because this is what we also call inductive thinking It's a fundamental scientific approach Where we derive theories from patterns that we see in nature the problem comes when we begin to assume that the abstraction that figure in the middle Is the reality? We treat that as as what is rather than acknowledging the original source of the information When this happens these ideal forms become the real reality and complex and variety and individuals appear as failed Outcomes of the system because they don't match that ideal form The more information the system collects the worse the problem that they were supposed to fix by collecting the information gets or As my husband likes to put it nutrition epidemiology studies are strongly associated with a rise in obesity The system creates its own epidemic of information to match the rising rates of obesity Because the real world is whatever is communicated to the system What the system has determined is bad for you turns out to be Hello bad for you We can explain this phenomenon through a simple principle from physics the act of observing a system Changes it our dietary guidance treats information as if it's collected in a vacuum Disregarding the fact that the information that the system generates affects the behavior of the people Invested in the system again part of the conversation that we were having next door the result is a self-perpetuation of Consensus of findings people with the social and cultural capital to be concerned about dietary health are the ones that eat a healthy diet a healthy diet is the ones that those people eat for example in the United States a Consumption which is bad for you Is associated with an increased risk of diabetes in other countries and the countries in this analysis so on the Right side of the screen Spain Japan Finland and France where eggs are not considered bad for you There is no association between eggs and diabetes How did that happen so currently right now and I'm sure that you all this has come through your Facebook feed the US mainstream nutrition is dealing with the pure study because they seem to contradict the US dietary guidance Because eating meat is bad for you in America if you live in America It's bad for you But if you live elsewhere in the world where meat is a valuable source of nutrition guess what it's not actually bad for you so in order to deal with these anomalies between the reality of real people and the reality of the system the system has identified a new Set of problems because new system equals new problems right in terms of information Gathering we have a problem that didn't exist before called misreporting This is when the information collected by the system shows that people who follow dietary guidance But don't get the outcomes that the system expects to see must be of course lying about it The reverse of this problem, which also didn't exist before is called non-compliance This is when the people who don't appear to follow the dietary guidance that is generated from the information That the ostensibly misreported in the first place do get the results that the system gets But they get them because they didn't follow the guidelines So here's the system in its awful horrible Simplicity it's a closed loop of winners and losers the winners are the policymakers and the bureaucrats They keep their jobs by appearing to do something about the problem that they help create while placing Responsibility for the problem on people that they don't know exist the health care industry wins Because the system is set up to generate the problem It was meant to fix ensuring that there will be plenty of customers who need to be treated for a problem They didn't have 40 years ago and the nutrition academic research industry really wins Mark Hegsted who was one of the folks who helped develop the dietary guidelines in the first place suggested way back in 1990 that nutrition research was rescued his term by obesity and that certainly seems to be the case last year the NIH Alone spent nearly a billion dollars on obesity research and the losers are the individuals who should be the central focus of the system They're shut out of it Providers are the on the other hand are locked into the system forced to treat their patients as statistics instead of individuals One of the problems with systems is that it's difficult to see past them as we've heard from conversations already here Systems become givens and even thinking that opposes a system Nevertheless opposes it on the terms that the system has set up One of the terms set up by the dietary guidelines is that there needs to be an overarching nutrition policy that directs the eating habits of Americans Those of us who understand how misguided The specifics of this policy are still buy into the idea sometimes that such a policy is needed We just need to fix it and give Americans better dietary guidelines, but Systems theory thinking again a complex system cannot be made to work In fact pushing on the system makes things worse We already know that systems don't work as they should we saw this with the low fat low carb dietary guidance So this data right here is from what we eat in America a different and it shows that when we gave people low low low fat guidance Fat level stayed the same and carbon take went up There's a different set from the what we eat in America that shows the same pattern except that it shows that fat intake actually increased We have no way of knowing Really which one is right and what the reality really is and it hardly matters because the system doesn't deal with reality It justifies this grass by suggesting that Americans have misreported what's going on and it would justify a different graph By pointing to non-compliance So this means that changing the guidance would not necessarily produce the outcomes that we would predict or expect or hope for Why because complicated systems produce complicated outcomes? So if low-fat dietary guidance did not really reduce our intake of dietary fat consumption and May have even produced according to whatever dataset you look at an increase if Higher fat lower cop carb guidance produces the same pattern Then we'd have the same problem But only more so fat is energy dense and the impact on calories would more than double And I know that there's a lot of but but but satiety, but but we don't know what's gonna happen with the system when our new Improved in system fails to deliver. What are we gonna blame it on misreporting or non-compliance? I've been a fan of the anarchist approach get rid of the system But as I've come to understand the dietary guidance I've come to realization that this may be possibly impossible once established a system serves its own goals No matter how external circumstances change whether the pony is tied to a tree or a plastic chair The system continues to operate and the most fundamental goal of any system is to continue to exist as a system So what are we going to do? And this is what my co-host Sean is Here to explain and hopefully provide us with some insights that don't leave us in this closely Thank you very much everyone for having me here. I do have a conflict of interest I am a founder of a for-profit organization Looking at developing a system to disrupt the current guidelines system and I'll get into that in a little bit here So an alternative instead of You know, I think we're now at a stage with technology and information technology and in an awareness We see the way social media operates through societies Where we don't if we don't like a particular system we can develop an alternative system And I think I use the word system in full Recognition that what Adele just mentioned new systems will create new problems. So even though We know the previous problems with the dietary guidelines system We believe there is a better way of doing what the dietary guidelines have Set out to do So this is really a nested problem you have the issue of science down there at R2-D2 and within or you have the issue of the guidelines and then like Adele was mentioning you have the issue of the science and The then you have issues of accessing datasets that Adele referenced if you try to go access say the women's health initiative data Well, you better have the right pedigree. You better have the right questions And even if you get into that data set and you find something that goes against the dogma good luck publishing that and and that's kind of Kind of cloaked knowledge from within the nutrition field we just Getting access to some of this data can be really really difficult and you know when we get up to towards Chewbacca This system You know the guidelines system runs into economic Interests and so obviously keeping people unwell. There's a lot more money in that keeping people Medicated there's a lot more money and then trying to keep people healthy So at its very basic level we have individuals and their experiences with diet and or with food and health and each of those blocks of Lego are more or less an individuals experience on Any particular diet as we've talked about a bit before everyone's Experience can be different either physiologically individuals can have diabetes or pre diabetes or There can be ethnic traditions Cultures and whatnot where people have certain food preferences Again when we look at how data is organized in the health system a lot of the time A lot of the data sets that could really help us move things forward to produce better guidelines are kept in closely guarded data Repositories now this situation exists Some of it obviously is important that we have Protection around data for for privacy purposes and whatnot, but beyond that there is data is is a Lot of the time is about Empire building and that's been our experience So that is situation exists both in the research realm and it also exists If we look at health organizations as well in the health system data tends to be quite closely guarded to build careers So a top level view Another way of looking at Data for an individual on diet and health is a very you know a lot of a big mess of different pieces The data is all very unstructured and and it's difficult to make heads or tails from it if you can find a way to Put those pieces together in a certain configuration You could build a death star and blast the current dietary guidelines system or if you're having a good day, you could build a mermaid castle and You're feeling all rainbow and unicorns so I make this kind of jokingly a little bit, but I think the potential to You know gather data and and organize it. These are not expensive technologies anymore cloud computing is is really Very affordable now and so what we've been busy building up in Western Canada is a data platform and you'll have to excuse the Very kind of extractive nature of this photograph, but when I was looking for a platform photograph I didn't have too many choices, but it illustrates the fact that platforms tend to be difficult to build and That goes the same with data platforms as well The difficulty with data platforms is not the technology It's more just getting people to kind of trust a particular platform and to buy into it So current platforms that we're all familiar with obviously Google search is a platform Obviously very extractive platform Amazon is another platform obviously very extractive as well and We're getting into these Chewbacca level issues when we talk about platforms and that data is kind of sucked up through the internet and Is used in ways to sell you more things and kind of program you to be a good consumer So that's kind of the ecosystem for data platforms in this day and age One last thing about platforms platforms are Incredible learning machines. So if we can actually create a platform the platform we're looking to create The capacity for learning on nutrition and health will be unprecedented Both in terms of velocity of data the flow of data through systems It'll be just absolutely Incredible, but they're difficult to build Okay, so Importance of being diagnostic. I think something I've been in the nutrition realm for Good chunk of time. I had more hair when I started my studies in nutrition Science and I've been kind of more affiliate with a low carb high fat movement and what I've observed over the years is just Nutrition science unfortunately is is really kind of a battle royal And I think it's a huge disservice to the to the discipline and I you know, frankly, I find it very sad So whatever we build with our platform, we have to operate in a diet agnostic fashion So which is to say if there's low fat vegans out there and they're having great health outcomes with their diets Then we're happy to work with that population to show the health benefits for that subset of individuals The diet agnostic piece comes largely inspired by this piece of work in rural Canada Northern British Columbia and it was the experience of working with some practitioners That began using lifestyle interventions in their practices with pre-diabetics and diabetics And these folks that were the practitioners in this context were Not very savvy when it came to nutrition. In fact, they had little to no nutrition training Excuse me, but the thing that was fascinating was they started using small quality improvement trials small non-randomized trials in their practices And the kind of stuff they were figuring out was just fascinating with absolutely little to no infrastructure so this is really a model of grassroots science that was very powerful and they This model for lifestyle interventions went on to be replicated without any resources for at five other practice sites in different parts of the province What was really interesting about this is when we tried to talk to health administrators in Canada We have a publicly funded health system We were saying hey look look at these health improvements. These people are shedding all sorts of medications They feel amazing and this this model is replicating all over the province and I literally spent years Trying to get the attention of health system administrators with no luck and I also co-wrote a million dollar grant to look at the kind of health economic implications of this lifestyle intervention and because of the data Empires in in Canada in that area We the project went off the rails so what the take-home message is that grassroots science is powerful and That we can't rely on bureaucracies for either funding or for sourcing data this is What we've built so far or this is kind of our second attempt our first attempt at building an app kind of crashed and burned miserably and so we kind of came came around to working with about 1,700 Physicians in Canada who are unhappy with the current dietary guidelines and they came to us or you know We kind of got in conversation and they're saying well, we'd like to find a way to aggregate our data and so That was something that we had been kind of thinking about and working on and we said okay We'll take that problem on and so we kind of looked into or have been looking into How do we pull data from a lot of different places like for? Physician context you have electronic medical records And whatnot so we've really been Specializing and are really looking into how do you pull data together and this is what we've come up with Some other of all wellness databases and it's really darn simple. It's not too complicated But this is just kind of phase one. It's Phase one will be with Canadian physicians will be piloting a diet agnostic data collection tool and then we're in the process developing an individualized nutrition app that will also be diet agnostic and Deploy that with hopefully with the physician community and actually save them time in their clinical encounters This is what we're all about Universal and individualized nutrition guidance the beauty of today's technology tools They do not take too much money to operate And we're a kind of a startup on a on a boots or on a shoestring budget bootstrapping But already we've come very far in in towards this Obviously scaling will require funding and we're in the process of looking at different options and I'll end with this slide Throwing rocks at the Google bus. We really have to question the dominant economic paradigm here We don't want to be one of those death star platforms where we extract data from individuals through app use or through your search histories and whatnot and Use that data to program you to become a better consumer Thank you very much for your attention. Happy to take any questions There's a microphone over there if anyone wants any questions. I can hear you What is wrong with extracting the data from the consumer? if you can If the consumer knows that they're Uploading that data to the cloud and they're There they're there's an exchange of data and in exchange for their data being compared against Hundreds and thousands of other people and being able to get something back from it Is that better than their health practitioner owning their data and Them not having access to it when they need it And that's a great question. I think what you're speaking about is individuals owning their own data and having custodianship of it There's a lot of frustration in kind of the data realm about you know lack of access to your own health records It also needs to be said, you know Google health or Microsoft vaults or health excuse me health vaults have Tried to run data patient driven data repositories, and they more or less failed So patient entered or patient data is is a huge It's kind of like a new frontier, but the big money in that area hasn't necessarily succeeded Well, I used to work with health Canada the organization that produces the guidelines and I came a little bit radicalized and and to this day that carbohydrate expert in Health Canada is just drives me crazy like not often do people drive me crazy But he kind of drives me crazy in a bad way and and so a lot of this is you know, there's a You know these bureaucracies are not going to solve this problem This is really a problem that we need to solve kind of at the grassroots level and and build a system That will be imperfect it will have flaws But hopefully the more open nature of that system will create a better way of giving guidelines that's individualized So I am thinking from my own prejudice and perspective of certain industries That might have been marginalized by the system up until now who might be interested in Having their own members Take advantage of something like this is this to a point where this is now Deployable to oh, I don't know say the beef industry Well, you've seen our data collection tool that's kind of where we're at it's a pretty basic thing for capturing data, I think we do have to be careful with this the said beef industry I love eating beef, but I Think the diagnostic piece needs to be something we operationalize So if if we go beef industry or partner with them, then we should partner with the almond industry or the tofu industry or you know So it the diagnostic piece is not trivial and and so that would be my concern concern with that I think within a few months are our second crack at the app should be coming online and I think will be past kind of this stage of Yeah, we should have an individualized nutrition app in a few months. I Eagerly, sorry. Yes. Yes. I eagerly await that I tried through some formal organization to get some traction on this and Basically because of their degree of funding to as you say address the problem But based on their perspective of how that solution would look They weren't interested in collecting Diet agnostic data from individuals that would mesh with health outcome to see what works and what doesn't There their their attitude is already we know what works So don't confuse us with trying to find out what works. So keep at it looking forward to it. Thanks, Peter Thank you very much. If there's no more questions any questions for Adele And I ask you a question John can I do that? So can you can you tell a nice crowd what you told me about? About near neighbor populations and about about clinicians using this Well as we've talked about this he's explained this to me in a lot of different ways because I'm a little thick when it comes to Technology But I remember you telling me about nearest neighbors and a way of understanding how to Guide people through nutrition and lifestyle changes using that principle Sure. Well, I think You know, I do have a secret agenda here. I do want to see nutritional epidemiology rise from the ashes So I really do believe in the science of nutrition and it really does sadden me that it's such a mess right now At first will be limited by sample size So we'll be looking at say pre minute like more course kind of Individualization say pre menopausal perimenopausal post menopausal women and the kind of data We're looking to collect is particularly around individuals who are Metabolically unwell and who are initiating a therapeutic diet with their health practitioner So if we were just to collect a lot of information say on Individuals like yourselves that are generally healthy and eating a paleo an ancestral health diet Where a diet consistent and ancestral health principles, we would just have an observational data set. So we're looking to kind of aggregate some of the intervention data and Like Adele says start doing subgroups looking at subgroups and see if Say pre menopausal women respond differently to different diets than say post menopausal women And whatnot so at first it'll be quite these smaller divisions and the more data we get again This comes to the point about the platform The bigger it gets and the more established the more you can accelerate the learning on it so the more data we have we can start looking at smaller and smaller subgroups and you know from a method logic point of view there's a lot of That that's a bit kind of something that big pharma does to to pull out results from their trials looking at subgroups So there are methodologic considerations and looking at a lot of subgroups. You have to adjust for that


As you probably know, pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that studies the use of language and its effects. This unit introduces three aspects of pragmatic analysis. It will be shown how words or phrases can relate an utterance to time, space or persons, what speakers do with their utterances and how speakers organize conversations. In the virtual session, which contains an e-lecture and several microteaching videos, we will look at the interpretation of utterances, we will discuss the cooperative principle and we will find out how conversation can be organized. In the question sheet you find the respective hyperlinks and video links for guidance. The mastery worksheet is a multiple choice task with two levels, but it should be easy to pass after going through the virtual session. And the practical? Well, the practical is basically a data sheet with data ranging from simple utterances to complex dialogues, all ready for analysis. So, good luck with this unit.


Hello everyone and welcome to our History Taster Day session. I'm Ann Harrod and I'll be the host for today. So today we'll hear from Dr Lars Laman, who is a senior lecturer in the history of China, and Dr Andrea Yangu, head of history. And they'll be talking about epidemics in history. And we'll also have Daniel Sabir, who is a current history student at SOAS. So if you have any questions about what's it like studying here, then you can ask that in the chat and that will be answered for you. Okay, so if you can hear me, that's fine. I just have the impression nobody could hear me. So if you can, I just go with what I wanted to introduce to you. So the second slide, if it appears on your screen, as I said, I just would like to welcome you and briefly introduce the departments. All the photos of colleagues together so that you can get an idea of who you will meet, should you decide to come to SOAS to study history. So this is maybe just to highlight, I've been a bit unfair to some colleagues. So you have Roy Fishel, who has his email address there, who is a historian of early modern South Asia and the reason why I highlight him, he's the convener of the BA History Program. So if you have any questions about the program in particular, I would like to get in touch with somebody. Roy might be the person to ask, apart from Lars, my colleague who you've already met, who is our recruitment officer. Or you can also get in touch with me. So this is the three people for which you have email contacts on these slides and if the slides, obviously you can also find them on the home page anyway. I did ask on the second slide, where are you joining us from? I've already seen your answers in the chat, so maybe we can skip that one. So that I'll leave some time for Lars later on. I'm really happy to see that you're coming from so many different places. That's absolutely fantastic. And I wanted to say two words about the kind of history that we teach and study at SELAS, because we've often had people say, why don't you do a program in global history? Because that's what you do. And our answer is that's not quite what we do, even though we're looking at many different places in the world that maybe a regular history program at other universities won't necessarily cover in that kind of detail. So we are looking at all kinds of places across the globe, but not from a Western perspective, but all the colleagues of whom you saw photos at the beginning are studying particular regions outside of Europe and America and the Western world. So the thing we are really proud of is that we do actually understand and study the cultures and the languages of the places whose history we're looking at. And one of the key points of interest in a way, and one of the obviously the areas that's become increasingly important and relevant today is to look at global encounters from perspectives that are not Western and trying to understand how different cultures and people met each other. So it's understanding the world from different perspectives really, and you can see that from some of the work that colleagues have produced. So the next slide is about introducing a couple of books that have been published in the last couple of years by colleagues in the department. So it's obviously topics such as slavery in the Atlantic slave trade, colonial rule in Africa, but also looking at pre-colonial, non-European countries, pre-colonial South Asia, which is the area that Roy Fish is particularly interested in, or if you want to more fur on about the Hindu family, the emergence of modern India in a more recent period where you have all these tensions and ambiguities that emerge from those cultural encounters that I mentioned earlier. So the point is to emphasize these different perspectives and try to understand a variety of different opinions on views about what is happening in the world, and today even, and how this came about in the course of a longer history. So the next slide gives you, so the next part of what I want to say just in a few minutes is to talk a bit about the history program that we teach. Obviously you have in the first year, this kind of introductions to the discipline and historical approaches that you probably find in any history program, and some of the things that we've added to the program since about, I think, two years ago, that's when my colleague, Eleanor, began to start teaching this module called Colonial Curricular Empire and Education at SOAS and beyond. And I've highlighted this because, in a way, it kind of stands for what is different about SOAS and what is a particular challenge, I think, for us as SOAS as you might be aware is an institution that emerged from, I mean, is part of the history of empire, very much so, and you can see that in the coat of arms that you can still find in the school, that, I mean, knowledge is power, right? So this is really an institution that was meant to train people to work for Britain in its imperial enterprise, basically. But on the other hand, you see that there were a lot of people who came from the colonised countries who were studying and teaching at SOAS and you have from the beginning a very diverse group of people that come together and bring views and opinions to this debate that are quite different from a purely colonial perspective on what is happening in the world. And this is obviously a debate that's very relevant today, it's very active, very lively, and it's very much pushed also by SOAS students in many different bodies at the school. And this is one of the reasons why we now have integrated this module that looks at SOAS history, the history of education generally throughout the last century mainly. And it's kind of, I think, a very good basis to engage in a critical study of the history of the world and how it became the way it is today. And maybe also encourage thinking about what we can do to change it in ways that we think might make it a better place. So I've just kind of randomly added some other titles of modules that we'll be running next year, such as South African apartheid, nationalism identity in South Asia, political Islam.  We are also trying to go a bit beyond the narrow confines, I guess, of the teaching curriculum and started before the disaster with the pandemic started last, the year before last, to launch a project called, which was meant as the beginning of a series of projects that then got interrupted unfortunately by the pandemic, what we hope to be able to pick up on this next year. Decolonizing history where we invite invited young playwrights from very diverse backgrounds to join us, to join our classes and seminars, and engage with students and in that dialogue develop audio plays about the histories that we study at SOAS and the way we study history at SOAS of these two perspectives and the result of that was five short audio plays that we then, where we had kind of gathered listenings, kind of a new invention of a public event by the artistic director of the theater company that cooperated with us in this project. So we try to kind of add more of these kinds of elements where we engage with communities beyond the university to bring the history that we studied to other audiences and to show why it's important to do so. Okay, so we hope that that we can continue these activities and then pick up again where we left it basically not entirely it's not that we had didn't do anything through during the last year but it was a bit more difficult generally as it was for everybody, I guess. So what is in there for you. Obviously, studying histories about studying history so you want to learn about the past, I guess, and the ways in which it is relevant for the present.  After you've completed your studies at university. So apart from the contents of the histories that we teach. A very important part of the program is also to to train you in these skills and and maybe to in a nutshell the point of it is really to to learn to ask questions and to find ways to answer them. So this is why I'm studying history exploring archives collecting knowledge, talking to people, weighing opinions against each other find ways to support arguments that you want to make. I mean all of these things are really quite quite crucial. And maybe looking at the time I just the next three slides are kind of an overview of the structure of the program and I think I don't really want to go into this detail now. If you can get the slides later on have a look at it and if you have questions about this in more detail. You can maybe ask via email so the point is really that you always have one part that talks about the skills that I just mentioned and and then we cover kind of areas in global history and then particular histories of regions you might have specific in and obviously the big emphasis is on allowing you to to learn how to do your own research and how to create your own work in the process, which then ends in the final year with with your dissertation or other subjects. Maybe I'll leave it at that. And think about your questions keep them in mind. I would like to pass on to my colleague last lemon to give you more kind of interesting and more engaging insight into what a history class might look like before we come to questions and answers at the end I would suggest. Thank you very much Andrea. It's always a pleasure to listen to your explanations about the purpose of studying history at so as and of course, if in the towards the end of the session today. We have concrete questions concerning the uses of studying history, then this will both relate to the structure of what we're doing, and the courses that we teach. So one, if there's any one topic that dominated our lives last year, then it must have been pandemic because there is simply no other event in my lifetime, and I have an uncle who's going to turn 103. And in his words, there's nothing, not even the Second World War, which was as influential in his life than the period of seclusion and not being able to see loved ones and going about the, you know, one's life as it has been from birth to you. Now I somehow lost the slides one second to you who have in essence been brought up by your parents and then perhaps lived in various places on your own. And this is certainly also a very important event, and this event is something that is actually experienced by all of us as being incredibly restrictive, and this, these restrictions come from come in many ways and I hope you can see the PowerPoint right now. I entitled it black death in China but strictly speaking it's not the black death it's not the bubonic plague. It's the pneumonic plague pneumonic plague it's the plague that affects the lungs and this occurred 110 years ago in so 1910 to 1912 roughly, and in the northeastern parts of China. That part is generally known as Manchuria because it's also the cradle of Manchu civilization but in historical terms, this was the time when China was in the transition from being an empire ruled over by a dynasty of emperors stretching back more or less 2000 years. It's not the same dynasty but the system had been in place for more than 2000 years at that point to a republic. And so in other words it's the beginning of China's modern era. And my question here, that's what Andrea of course referred to in the end, what do you get out of studying history anywhere on earth, anybody's history, and then also the history of specific places such as China, because you do so, because you can follow patterns in the developments in the historical developments but then also how people react and especially how societies react. We need to start not with people but with a little animal, which was, which looked very cute, and it's one of the original inhabitants of Manchuria, of northeastern China, of southern Siberia, the Harabagan, that's the Manchu word, Jumara is the Mongolian word. It's simply known as the Marmot in English but you would confuse it with Marmite if you grew up here because there are no Marmots where we live usually. This is something that is very much in demand. The animals fur is very much in demand in places in the northern hemisphere, and therefore the Siberian Manchurian fur trade is something that had come to, to characterize the economic life of this region. Why am I mentioning this cute little animal? Essentially, because it acted as a host for fleas, and these fleas, if you, I mean since it's recorded, you can enlarge it then, or I could maybe enlarge it, let's see what that works. If it does not work, you're entitled to kill me. Does it work? It works in class. I've learned a few things during the pandemic, for example, to run classes from my computer at work. Today I'm in my computer in our kitchen, which is freezing cold, but it's, so I hope you're all nicely wrapped up. But this is a historic picture of a flea, call it a historic flea, because this flea is infected by a virus known as Yersinia pestis, and this pestis of course refers to the bubonic plague. But in this case, the plague was the pneumonic plague, so it was the lung plague, and the gentleman who you can see here investigating the marmots, which they had caught, are in essence, are in essence, or let me go back, in the top you can see a modern flea, a more modern flea in colour, and everything that is black in the centre is essentially the virus. And if you have a flea that is infected in the same way, then they can transmit diseases, and in this case it is the type of subtype of the plague. And why is this important? Because like all the predecessors of the plague, it spreads like wildfire, it spreads like the plague, and it spreads along the sea routes. And here you have especially the southern coastal ports that are important, connecting China with other parts of Southeast Asia, with India, and thus with the Middle East and the Mediterranean, on the other side of the Pacific also with the Californian sequels. So, but the historic plagues, they travelled along the Silk Route, and the Silk Route takes you all along north of the Tibetan mountains through the Takla Mahan, into the western parts of Asia, and then all the way towards the Mediterranean. And you can see that, actually, if you travel along the Siberian routes in the north, this distance is shorter, and this was another route for the plague to develop, for example, when the Mongols moved westwards. So, this is the historic picture, so in other words, any local epidemic can very easily turn into a pandemic, simply by travelling along the trade routes, and by the time of the end of the Qing period, so 1910. Manchuria would be up here, that's the region, and historic Manchuria also includes this part which is the Primorsky cry, which is the province belonging to Russia, which was annexed in 1858, and still belongs to the Russian Federation. Vladivostok is one of the, is the principal port here. So, in this region, you have a high concentration of traders who interact with the rest of the world, and if you have a plague that originates here, it can very easily spread into Korea, to Japan, but then also along the trade routes into Central Asia and into Russia and further on. This was the main threat which the, the virologists, you could say, saw, and they began to make a comparison between, or they started looking at the lifestyles of the people who worked as settlers, as hunters, and as also as agrarians. And they found out that these people lived in very crowded conditions. And this is something that you will remember from the, all the government information that you get on COVID that you should leave at least two meters distance always air your rooms and so on and so on. And this is something that for the first time was actually being turned into applied science, and this science is medical science. And I'm going to, so here you can see the sleeping quarters and eating quarters of the people involved. The people who worked in these, as medics in these conditions were more or less volunteers, of course they got paid, but they were prepared to sacrifice their lives. And here we have the principal plague fighter. That's an epithet that he later got. He goes under different names because he's, his family is originally from China south. So in Chaozhou, and in Cantonese, you can, you can get these other renderings. Yandere is a different type of romanization of the Chinese characters that you can see who is the family name so with a surname if you like. Yandere is his personal name. And he lived. I can move this. No, I can't. Oh, so he lived from the end of the Qing period, right into the republican era. And the perhaps surprising thing is that he decided to work for his country, although he was actually the national of a different country, namely he was he was Malaysian. Malaysia, at that very point was administered by the British colonial enterprise. Although in the area you always have the Dutch who controlled most of the southern parts of the of the Indochinese so called Indochinese islands, namely Indonesia. Importantly, we have a, a system that is based on family networks that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years at that point roughly 1000 years and William is part of this network of Chinese traders, and he feels the outbreak of this of this illness as a personal and as a national challenge, educated, it was educated in modern scientific medicine in Cambridge at that time one of the leading centers of medicine in in the world. The medical science, keep that in mind was less than a generation old, also in the West. So this is the cutting edge of medical science and this patriotic and adventurous young man goes northwards in order to try to help the American patriots in Manchuria. So what does he try to do. First of all he's trying to intercept the hosts, and the hosts are these cute little marmots that you see in the beginning by means by very traditional means these are traps, and the traps, you can also use for boxes for, not for bears but for for smaller rat type creatures that also have a beautiful furs and on its minx, and, and all of these are perfect hosts for viruses means they also came up in the context of COVID, if you remember. And this is so if these are the tools that trappers use down here you have the boxes in which the, the marmots are being stored and keep in mind that this is, although it's fairly cold territory at the same time in the summer, it can be for a few weeks it can be really really hot. So what you get here is a very, well, I don't know how well you can see it but it's these are black and white pictures of one living and one dead marmot and these are basically specimen, and these are being I investigated for medical research, and now something happens, namely, he decides that this disease is being transmitted in little globules, namely in drops. So what is his solution, essentially, to wear a mask and to get everybody who is in the vicinity of these marmots to wear face masks, so that they can transmit these drops. So the cold job, the face mask which we are all familiar with by now. That was quite different about a year ago. This goes back to the public use during epidemics goes back to the Manchurian plague of 1910. So you can see Manchuria at the crossroads down at the bottom you have the traditional traditional your, let me see, let me try to enlarge this. This is the accommodation which the temporary accommodation because it's always temporary these are nomadic populations who use them, usually Mongols. And one of the beauties of so is is that you never really sure where in the world you are. And so, one of the features that you get in the summer is that all of a sudden your peers out of nowhere, and is being established in the field on a little grass plane opposite so as usually, and you can look at that you can go inside. I don't actually know who owns the yacht but it's always there and then you have other public weeks, devoted to animals of transport, beasts of burden like donkeys and camel so being at so as is an unpredictable experience. Up here you have the bearers of modernity, namely modern science these are the scientists who come as part of an expedition. This time it's a Russian expedition and the, these Russian scientists so you can see that they arrived on the trans Siberian railway on the trans Manchurian extension. In other words, these are very much at the forefront of the investigation into the diseases 1911 July so this is in the dying days of the of the Qing Empire. So if you study politics, of course, it's a little reminder that the, that we're in the age of imperialism, and that at no point in time, people were safe from in China, people were safe from the grasp of France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia, because there was always the idea that they could extend their empires by carving out small pieces of China. So, this is one of the last pictures. It just shows to goes to show how closely related how closely linked the area where you had the outbreak of the Manchurian plague pointed in yellow. So it was to the trade routes of the time and here on the right you can see a waterborne trade route, namely the one of the ports of the Amur River, and on the left. I don't know how clearly you can see that you can enlarge it later if, since this is recorded, you have China here, you have Mongolia over here you have Russian territories over here already at that time so Vladivostok goes down all the way down and then the Manchuria, sorry, Korea, developing, sorry, extending south eastwards further down. So, this is all connected through river transport but also through train transport so very easily have William and his, his people not managed to contain this contain and fight this epidemic, it could have turned into another epidemic, seven years before the so called Spanish plane, Spanish plate. So, the Amur River, if you're interested in Northeast Asian minorities, I can help you with that. There are so as is one of the few places on earth, where you can study Manchu, for example. I think the last picture. And so, not just could this disease have spread throughout the, along the trade routes throughout Asia, but also into China and of course this is a picture of a map of Beijing in 1911. Last year when it was the capital of the Chinese Empire, the Qing Empire. He divided into two parts the Chinese city and the, the so called Chinese city and the so called Tata city so it's the, the Manchu Mongolian precincts of the city with the, with the forbidden city in the center. It had the disease spread throughout China with its then already enormous population, you would have seen a disaster without any comparison because the mnemonic plague would have needed to be restricted in the same way as in sparsely populated Syria, but that was really not possible at the time. Also, because China was not governed effectively by any government after 1911, and, at least until the communists come in 1949. So, in other words, if I were to sum up the, the essence of today's lecture is that epidemics, if they're not contained by courageous people who make use of the latest science spread with an ease that easily reveals that of COVID-19, even in times when travel was not as widespread. And so, follow the science, follow the historical evidence that we have, and come to so as and study history with us because it would be a great pleasure to introduce you to some of the things that we have done research in and that we take great pleasure in teaching. Thank you very much. Lars and Andrea. We've now got time for a Q&A. So if anyone wants to ask a question, either in person or via the Q&A button at the bottom, please go ahead. Yeah. Opening the floor. Oh, Andrea. Okay. Thank you. In normal times it's one of the obvious places. Yes, that's true. So, let me just see. I go into the chat. Sorry, I realised I'd send it to the wrong address again. So if you, Lars, if you look at the bottom on the Q&A section, we've already had two questions. Yes, I'm trying to look up here. So, how are the lessons taught is the first one? Semina, so tutorials, that's a really great question because at the moment there are people thinking about how the current experience with online teaching might have an impact on how university teaching will be done in the future. The standard format is probably, it's actually not a straightforward answer because in the core module for the first year, for example, this is entirely small group seminar teaching in groups of around 15 to 20 students at most. But most other modules would normally be taught in one hour lecture plus smaller tutorial groups of where you have another hour to discuss the material that was covered. Lars, would you want to move on? I don't want to monoblade. I can see that you're referring to a comment, but I can't see it. Could you just read out the comment that you see? Oh, I see. Okay. Okay, the second question, if I see that correctly, is how does historic knowledge positively impact society? And I think that's a fantastic question really. And it's exactly one of the things that we're working on in terms of, I mean, this is why I say we try to connect to communities outside the university and try to bring other groups into the university to have this conversation going really. And I mean, at the moment, the thing that is most at the heart of this is probably, I mean, this year was tremendous in that respect. Obviously, you had the Black Lives Matter movement that's very much at the core of what many of our colleagues are doing. So it's a big question that is very hard to give a very brief answer to, but it's one of the things that is at the core of the interest of, I think so as an institution really, and history is part of that. Yes. Yes, so I just want to just reiterate what Andrea said right now, I mean, we live for that, you know, this is our, it's not just a job, this is actually our mission if you like. Whenever there is a new event, whenever there's a new movement, whenever you have historic changes that take place, we try to bring the context closer to our students and not just our students. I mean, one thing that we should actually, I mean that became clear when Andrea put the titles of the books that our colleagues published here. And one thing that became clear is that our teaching actually is directly derived from our research. And what we do day and night and in places that are far away from us and in our own archives. What we come up with that is actually what we teach and in sometimes indirectly sometimes extremely directly just straight up with our movements. So this is one way of connecting with history if you like, so where life and history interconnect. Yes. So there was another question Lars about year abroad. Are students able to go on a year abroad if they're only studying history or is it only if you're doing a joint degree. No, you have to do a joint degree with a language. And only then is it actually integrated into the into the program. I mean there is the possibility of normally I would have said Erasmus but that's just been asked by becoming political now but it's yes that's not possible at the moment. So there are bilateral exchange programs that you can subscribe to but then you would have to organize it yourself. We can help you with that but it's, it's definitely something that you would have to take a year out and then rejoin the program. So it's not part of your, your history course as such. And this will probably have to be our final question because we need to wrap up fairly soon so the next session can get going. So the first example is the course and can you decide what areas you're interested in. Actually start just started typing an answer to that. There are core modules it for each year that you have to take and there are compulsory modules where you have to take one or two from a particular list of modules. There's a bit of flexibility in this core part, but it's not entirely flexible but then in each year you have the opportunity to take up to 30 credits which would mean one more. Oh, it seems we've lost. Andrea could too long list of open options from other departments. So they're open options. I think you cut out the crucial point with the open options. So there is. I'm sorry. Yes, if you look at the list which Andrea produced it becomes sometimes it says it's like a compulsory course. But then you also have a list of optional courses within a compulsory mix, it depends which year you're in. And so, and then third year is very interesting because that's where you write your dissertation and the dissertation is, you're completely free to agree on a topic with your, with your supervisor supervisor who you choose. Daniel if you just answer our final question. What is the workload like so as for history and what's the work like. Yeah, I was just typing the answer for that but generally the workload is well spread and what you'll find is that obviously throughout the course there'll be essays I need handed on time, but it won't be, it won't be too much pressure like it can be quite flexible and the only thing is that there is a fair bit of reading, but usually it's well spread out and the work is, it can be interesting. I mean if you pick modules that you're interested in then obviously you're going to enjoy it. Yeah, I enjoy a lot so yeah, it's great. Good student. Thank you. Thank you very much, Lars Andrea and Daniel. If we didn't get to answer your question. We might be able to do some sort of email, maybe with some history staff so we can get those questions answered. And we will circulate the recording if you want to watch anything again. So thank you everyone for attending and thank you very much to our speakers.


Happy Hanukkah! It's time for yet another mini video game storytime advent calendar video, as we count our way through the bleep midwinter on this, the first evening of the Jewish holiday. Once upon a time, Link from the Legend of Zelda was portrayed as being left-handed. This changed with Twilight Princess and the Wii's motion controls, as approximately 90% of the players used their right hand for swinging swords. With Breath of the Wild though, there's no need to build the game around players' most dominant hand, so why is Link still right-handed? According to Ijiya Numa, in terms of right-handedness of things, when we think about which hand Link is going to use, we think about the control scheme. With the gamepad, the buttons you'll be using to swing this order on the right side, and thus, he's right-handed. So presumably in Breath of the Wild 2, Link will hop everywhere on his left foot, because the directional stick is on the left side of the Nintendo Switch. See you tomorrow for the next tiny advent video.


SEGA DRUNK Hello and welcome to my new series, SNES Drunks.  The games that belong in this category so far include Contra 3, Intrusion 2, Gigantic Army, and now Gunstar Heroes. Here's the part where I highly recommend you stop wasting time watching this video and go play Gunstar Heroes right now! Because I mean, what is the point of a review of something like this? What can you say about this game? Well, I've got some time to fill here, so I'll talk about it anyway. Gunstar Heroes is freaking spectacular in every aspect. Visually, it looks incredible. The soundtrack fits perfectly, the controls are flawless, the weapons are a lot of fun, the level design fits your numerous capabilities perfectly, the bosses are just awe-inspiring. I mean, look at this thing. I get distracted just watching how freaking cool this boss is and then dying once or twice. Oh, and did I mention you can make lots of stuff go boom? Because you can make lots of stuff go boom. And it's also two players. How can you beat that? The weapon system is especially fun, because you can grab two out of a possible four weapons. Laser, flamethrower, homing, and rapid fire. You can hold two at a time, toggle one from another, and you can also play with combinations. So you essentially have 14 total weapons. My favorite is the homing flame. So freaking cool. This isn't your only method of dishing out punishment, though. You can also throw enemies into one another, just like a beat-em-up game. To start the game, you get four stages to choose from, Mega Man style. And these stages are long that range all over the place in all sorts of environments. This stage employs the metal store mechanic of flipping from the ceiling to the floor as you're swarmed with enemies from all directions. This boss fight has you fighting on a plane, mid-flight, and there's even a shoot-em-up level that's well done. Another thing that helps set Gunstar Heroes apart from other run-and-gun games is that this isn't a one-hit death kind of a deal like Contra. Your life meter is represented in numbers. Hit zero and you're dead, and you have to start at the beginning of the level. That's fair, especially since there's unlimited continues. Anyway, why are you still watching this video? Go play Gunstar Heroes. It's available on Sega Genesis, the Wii Virtual Console, PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, and all sorts of other platforms. This is easily a top five Genesis game, and I dare say it's better than Contra 3. Go play it.


The president of the Royal Transport Employers Association of Nigeria, Al-Haji Musa Mohamed, has vowed to sustain the cardio relationship between the association and journalists in Nigeria. He said there's during a visit by the leadership and members of the Nigeria Union of Journalists Correspondents Chapel FCT Council. The visit is the aftermath of the three-day football tournament organized by the chapel for organizations, associations and government agencies in the FCT during which the association's president attended as a special guest of honor. I'm glad to receive all of you today, in collaboration and in person, for presenting those good things to the leaders. Well, it's not going to be a surprise to me, the leaders. The way we look at ourselves, assume the public did not know us. They only know us in the garage, but in a special place like the NUJ, for them to recognize the leaders and present the cough, the certificate to us as one of their best partners. I'm so grateful to appreciate what you do to reach us. It will interest you to know that RTEN will be formally invited to participate in the next year of second edition of our tournament. And we can't wait to see the president of RTEN to lead the team. Sir, we are also here to seek your hand in marriage. I said we are here to seek your hand in marriage. I mean, I mean strategic partnership, collaboration, particularly in some of our activities that are coming up.