Welcome to this session on confronting the challenges of catastrophic outbreaks. And just for those who needed the simultaneous translation, English, French, because the president of Guinea will give his remarks in French. I'm Peter Piot, and I'm the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. And we have a most distinguished and experienced panel this afternoon, and let me briefly introduce them. Starting here on my left is Dr. Paul Stoffels, who is the chief scientific officer and worldwide chairman pharmaceuticals of Johnson & Johnson. And Paul is, I would say, a serial entrepreneur and unique among pharma executives the fact that he has worked on the ground in sub-Saharan Africa. We have Dr. Margaret Chan, no need to introduce, but director general of WHO after a distinguished career in public health in Hong Kong and globally. Then we have President Alpha Condé, who is a political scientist and the first democratically elected president of his country of Guinea. And as you know, one of the three most affected countries by the Ebola epidemic. We have Seth Berkeley. You could hear him this afternoon when he spoke in the plenary on the 15th birthday of Gavi, the Gavi Alliance, of which he is the CEO. But he was also the founding CEO of IAVI, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. And last but not least, we have Tony Elumelu, entrepreneur and philanthropist from Nigeria and founder of the Tony Elumelu Foundation. The objective of this session is to briefly review the Ebola epidemic that's still going on, but particularly to look forward and to answer the question, what critical questions and lessons have we learned and to debate how to respond to similar outbreaks. So I would say let's make this into a forward-looking panel. We have about one hour. The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has been really a black swan event, I would say, together now with the Swiss Frank revaluation. And because there have been 25 outbreaks and before this one in West Africa. And they were all very, very different from the current one. They were occurring in Central Africa. They, you know, and now we have this first outbreak in West Africa affecting entire nations, capital cities, it's been going on for more than a year in the case of Guinea. And whereas definitely there's some good news, the number of cases is going down everywhere, it's not over by any means and we'll hear about what the priorities are. And it will only be over when the last person, whether Ebola is either dead or recovered without having infected other people. So that's quite a daunting task. Now predicting the future as we all know is very difficult, but one thing is sure, there will be other Ebola outbreaks and there will be other epidemics, not the least of influenza. So let's start the conversation. Monsieur le Président, you have been very active in this fight against the Ebola epidemic. What lessons do you think one can draw from your experience in Guinea as well as in other parts? Well, thank you very much for that question. There are other questions that should be put as well. The speed at which Ebola has spread surprised the world, which was not at all prepared to fight Ebola. Ebola existed in Central Africa in a very restricted area, but Ebola was spread in a very surprising way so that it was impossible to control it and it was a little understanding of the mechanism. One didn't explain to the patients that Ebola is a very, very serious epidemic, but that one can be cured from Ebola. International communication was disastrous because it was more panic-creating than anything else. International mobilization only really took place as of September last year, but now we know exactly what has to be done to fight against Ebola and we know what it is. There are three countries in particular, so we have to cut the chain of contamination so that one country does not contaminate or infect another. Secondly, how can we reach the patients early enough because if we can't treat a patient early enough, there's a great chance of recovering. And thirdly, how to keep the patients from having any contact with anyone else for 21 days. So, Ebola itself causes less danger than behavior. If you close the borders, then you only isolate Ebola but not what happens within a country. In Guinea, there are all sorts of organizations that come in when there is a case and there are many people or organizations who are used to dealing with refugees, with migrating people, but the organizations have not really understood that Ebola is a different kind of fight and that one has to give up the old methods and adopt new ones. And this has taken a long time, this learning curve, also coordination. One has to understand that Ebola is now able to reach out to anyone in the world. The world has become very small, so we have to have these new methods of fighting, of combating Ebola. So we need to think of new structures with which we can contend with Ebola. Our countries don't have the same kind of health systems as others do. We've taken time to detect the organism. We had to send the virus to the Pasteur Institute for analysis and we have to have a better health system in our countries if we want to control Ebola and eradicate it. We need to be able to detect all these different viruses ourselves and not always have to rely on aid from the outside. Now it's Ebola, but it could be any other kind of disease or new disease. But the world is simply not able to, or not at present, able to fight against such a widespread epidemic. Medicine Francia was very, very helpful. But there are many failings to actually deal and cope with such an enormous epidemic. Another lesson to learn is that this epidemic has caused a lot of panic and fear. And that has immense consequences on the financial and economic situation of a country. Tourism in human terms, very many of those who have died have left children behind, orphans to now look after. And then there are all the customs. We have a certain way of burial and all these things have to be changed because of the danger of contamination. So first of all, one should not give in to panic. Even though the communication is such that it does cause a lot of panic, many tourists don't even want to go to Central Africa or Kenya anymore because they feel that they are at risk. Africans also have to understand that Africa is like one single country. We need solidarity between the African countries. The problem in Africa is that there's a lack of solidarity. If there's a problem in Nigeria, it's not the whole of Africa that will become mobilized to help Nigeria, for example. So we have to coordinate better this fight against any other epidemic, strengthen our health systems, public health systems. Everyone has to become mobilized in order to cancel out the debt that the countries have, the ones who have been affected by Ebola. And countries have to, and organizations have to give up their old methods and adopt new ones to see to it that Ebola has dealt within a new way, with new methods. We have to give up our habits. However, these organizations are rooted in their habits, their customs, their traditions, and it's difficult for them to turn to new ways. And there are also interests that the states, the countries have, for example. My country needs a laboratory or laboratories that can detect things very rapidly. We would need transit centers as well, in which we would know within 15 minutes whether a person is positive and needs to be treated or isolated or not. We need a lot of discussion, understanding. We need medicine. We need treatments. We feel that the medication should be on the spot. The doctors should not have to wait for so long to get the necessary medication. There's a lot that we can learn from this epidemic. It has shown us that the whole world needs a new early warning system to treat all these diseases and patients. A new way of communication, France 24 and CNN, could help us rather than spreading panic. And we need more solidarity between the African countries, whether it be with regard to Boko Haram, the war in Mali, Ebola, or any other problem or the problem in Namibia. We have to find new answers to these new situations, if that's what I could say at this point. Thank you very much, Mr. President. A good list for discussion. Margaret, you've been really also at the forefront. And this week, on Sunday, there will be a special session of your executive board, so how you see things for the future and what to do to prepare also for the next epidemics. Thank you, Peter. I think President Alpha Condi has given you the complexity of this Ebola outbreak in 2014. Clearly, I fully agree with him, the comment that the world is unprepared. And that conclusion was actually drawn in 2011. There was an independent expert group of people who reviewed the Global Health Collective Defense System after the 2010 pandemic, H1N1. The conclusion at that time was the world is ill-prepared for severe and sustained severe disease. And this, unfortunately, that conclusion was borne out by the Ebola outbreak that we are seeing, particularly in the three countries, the most affected. Now, Ebola 2014 is truly unprecedented in terms of the highest number of people affected, and so many of them die. It is truly a tragedy. And also, it is unprecedented in terms of its geographical spread. If I tell you, nine countries in three continents were affected, or reporting cases to David Cho. And of course, this is also an outbreak that is lasting the longest period, as we are speaking, we're still managing the outbreak. But I would like to thank the three governments, in particular, for their truly commitment at the highest political level. We are seeing the downward trend in the cases in these three countries. So keep up with your good work, Mr. President. And we would like to continue to see total control of Ebola. Now, for David Cho, you're right. On the 25th of January, there will be a special session where member states of the organization, David Cho is an organization with 195 countries who are members, come around to learn lessons from the Ebola, and how to better prepare the world. And this time, I think the world's leaders would take heed of the lessons that were drawn in 2011 that I refer to. So basically, let me summarize on the three important areas that I would see that needs to be strengthened. Number one, President Alpha Condi mentioned about it, the health system capacity and preparedness. Do they have the people, the infrastructure, and the system to detect disease early? As we all know, Ebola was undetected, spreading undetected for three months in Guinea. The first case happened in December 2013, and it was not detected or tested until March 2014. And in a highly mobile community where young people go around different countries to seek employment, the disease is spread. It is important for us to realize that for those of us who travel, we need a visa. But for virus, virus do not need visas to get across the borders. So we do need to support countries to build very strong health system to have the capability to sound early warning. Second point, and I also agree with President Alpha Condi's observation, the international response need to be much better coordinated and in order to support the countries to do the right thing. And last but not the least, Ebola has been around for 40 years and yet we are empty-handed in terms of vaccine, drugs, diagnostic to help us to make the diagnosis sooner, to isolate patients and treat them well and at the same time do the proper contact tracing to stop the transmission of the diseases. So I would expect member states in Dabit Cho would look at these important gaps and how to plug those gaps. And of course, inside Dabit Cho, we also need to look at is Dabit Cho well-capacitated to do the kind of work that it is mandated to do? I know countries of the world have a lot of expectation for Dabit Cho and we do need to have a very good discussion on what is Dabit Cho and what is not Dabit Cho. People expect us to be a first responder. People expect us to be the fire brigade and people also expect us to do a lot of things. So we also need to do a better job in terms of communication, explaining to people what we are and what we are not. And how can we, Dabit Cho, as an organization, going forward is better prepared and also with the capacity to coordinate actors in the international community, in the UN system, in others, to respond faster to nip the outbreak in the bud. Thank you very much, Margaret. Big task ahead, but I think that like every crisis, this is an opportunity to get things right. Now, Tony, we've heard perspective on government to national organizations. So from where you are, both as a business person, a philanthropist and building perhaps also on Nigeria's a successful containment of cases. How do you see things? I think it's good to say that the private sector should have been involved earlier on in the response to Ebola. And listening to the speakers also, I ask myself, this kind of conversation is actually interesting so that we begin to know that there's a lot of privacy that can do in helping not necessarily to contend per se, but making sure that we rehabilitate the affected communities as fast as possible as a deterrent for future occurrence in these places. In West Africa, we've had certain responses by the private sector, albeit a bit late. We've seen responses by the EU engaging with the private sector in Africa. We've seen responses by the African Development Band, the President, the Nicaragua is here. We also, in our own group, both at my foundation have put a million dollars to support the initiative and beyond that, we also at the bank level, one of our businesses, interestingly, I have business in all the three countries. But good to note, we did not close shops in any of these places because these communities need hope. And if you close shop, you key the hope. So we have banking infrastructure and banks in these places, and we're operating during the period. And up to now, we never closed for one day and yet we protected the lives of our staff that no staff got contaminated at all during the period. But to me, moving forward is what I think we can spend a little more time on because post Ebola, how do we have to rebuild these communities so that we bring economic hope back and opportunities back to the communities and also we make sure that the poverty level that to a large extent predispose these communities to Ebola outbreak will not occur again. So I'd like to, at our level, we're engaging. We're trying to see engaging with the countries. I spoke, I've engaged with presidents to see how we can help mobilize international community, African Africans, African private sector so that we make some investments in these countries and those of us already operating in this country. Let's see how we can expand our economic activities in these countries so that we have to rebuild the communities. I think that the longer sustainability approach to curing these Ebola lies in the private sector's engagement here. Thank you, Tony, and thank you also for continuing to do business because as President Alpha Konde said, some of the measures have been as damaging in a sense as the virus for societies and economies. President Konde said also we need innovation, we need new tools, so on, and some of them have to come from the pharmaceutical industry. So Paul, what is industry doing and how do you see the future of your engagement? Well, industry has done a lot of efforts probably also too late because the epidemic which was in very small focused areas in Africa, 25 outbreaks, something like 1700 patients or deaths until now, until this outbreak and suddenly it shows up as a big problem in the world. The reason the industry and three companies, Mark, JSK and J&J, we are active on vaccines and the reason we are active in vaccines is that at a certain time in 2008, the US started an activity on bioterrorism and Ebola was one of the viruses which was a bioterrorist agent and therefore NIH started research and that's the reason why we now can accelerate the, hopefully I can accelerate the availability of a vaccine. What also was lacking is the platforms and the technologies to do this type of vaccines and there I consider industry and the academic world one and the same. We have to do more research in new platforms to be able to bring new vaccines and for example, the Adeno Vectors in our group with Crusallians and J&J came through a collaboration with the vaccine work on IAVI where we were working on HIV vaccine and that's why we developed the vectors. Other vectors were developed because of the bioterror and in parallel production activities need to be done because these new vectors need very special, and for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about these vectors are viruses. What we do is we use a cold virus which we make replication deficient. We add a piece of Ebola in that, trick the body in fact with the cold virus and have it make also antibodies against Ebola. The same with MVA which is what is called a boosting vector, exactly the same. It's a pox virus, you make it replication deficient, you put a piece of Ebola in and you can inject that in the patient. In the meantime what happened, massive amount of work. I think each of the companies, Merck, GSK and ourselves we are working on a timeframe of 12 months where we are upscaling, doing preclinical work and also doing the clinical work, phase one, phase two, phase three and hopefully within the next six to nine months there will be vaccines available. Same is happening in drugs. The challenge on doing drug research was that Ebola you can't work on in the lab. So to find the drug you need to be able to handle the virus and it took so long to do that. The same with diagnostics was not simple to do that. The industry has massively invested now. In the meantime we have produced more than 400,000 vaccines both vectors prime and boost. The same is happening at GSK and Newling. A massive acceleration of clinical trials and I must very much thank all the regulators, all the healthcare officials in each of the countries including the affected countries as well as the US and Europe and many others on their collaboration on accelerating. Today we have unprecedented review timings. Normally we need to wait two, three, four months. Today it's happening in 24, 48 hours. Everyone who is collaborating in Ebola is unprecedented collaboration happening between the companies, between the regulators and between all the organizations. And I trust that looking forward we'll continue to go forward with the vaccine even if Ebola will hopefully eradicate it faster than there is a vaccine. I truly hope that that's done. We'll still will do it because Ebola will be back and then we should be ready with vaccines and you have our commitment as an industry and also from I think from the other partners all the partners in industry that will make sure new vaccines and new drugs will be available that next time nobody should die anymore from Ebola. Thanks Paul. So let's hope that this will be the last epidemic where all we have is isolation, quarantine, safe barriers. And also I think that both in terms of review of grants not only by regulators but also for research grants we now have the empirical evidence that you can do that in a very, very short time. And so I think for the future there's no excuse for when it comes to other drug and vaccine development to go back to the business as usual. So if I may, Peter I want to add one more point is that also the funding has been unprecedented through to the different governments in the world. They have absolutely supported massively including the US government, the European government, the European Commission. Everyone is contributing to accelerating the fund. On the issues to welcome trust. Welcome trust case foundation. Everyone is doing what they are supposed to do is help this type of disease to be solved. Great. So Seth, you know, Gavi is the main funder of immunization programs in the world. So how do you fit in hoping that soon we'll have a vaccine and because I know you've been thinking about it and also working on it. Thank you Peter. And let me just make a couple of comments before I answer your question. One is, you know, the panic that occurred in the rest of the world was a lot of the reason that we got those resources. And as Paul has already said, you know, this was a vaccine. These were vaccines that got worked on because of bioterrorism. They were not worked on because of Africa and we still today have a market failure. So one of the goals that we have to come up with are new public private ways to support the important research going on against antigens that don't have a natural marketplace. And so Paul talked about in my previous like at IAVI, we were using public money to fund work on AIDS vaccines and moving forward a range of candidates and not just the one that Paul talked about but all three lead candidates were invested in by IAVI and ARIS which is a TB vaccine program and others and having that type of funding available is important. It often is the first thing that gets cut when money gets tough but we need research and as the president said, what we need is research also occurring in every one of these countries. We need capacity in those countries. We need a scientific community who can help with this and I think that's been some of the successes in some of the countries. So in terms of your question, Peter, we work in all of the Ebola affected countries at least in the developing world and when it was clear that people were working towards a vaccine, the board asked us to look at what we could do and we then put together a program of the board has agreed that we would purchase up to 12 million doses of vaccine. Now that number comes from the combined adult populations of the three most affected countries but knowing that they may not be needed in all those three countries or in fact we could have outbreaks in other places and important in that is we must get to zero. You can't emphasize that enough. A few cases is not good enough. We have to get to zero. So purchasing the vaccines, the second thing the board asked us to do is to prepare for the rollout of those vaccines and we don't yet know what WHO is gonna recommend. Is this gonna be ring vaccination at that point? Is it gonna be whole country vaccination, just health workers or maybe no vaccination depending upon where we are. So we have some preparation work to do. There's special characteristics around this vaccine, social mobilization, et cetera. The third point is to have a stockpile. So there will be other outbreaks as you've already heard and we need to have a stockpile of these vaccines if they work. Now this is against one strain. These are monovalent but we also need to work with the pharmaceutical industry and put incentives in place because they shouldn't do all this as a lost leader. We need to put incentives in place for them to create stockpiles of a second generation Ebola vaccine that would cover not just Ebola Zaire but Ebola Sudan, perhaps Marburg, perhaps Lhasa. The idea would be to try to have vaccines that would work across different places and also optimize them for temperature, for shelf life, for the other things you'd want in a stockpile and make sure that is regularly refreshed. And the last thing the board asked us to do was to work with the countries and help strengthen their immunization systems again and in particular also to help catch up with the things have been completely shut down and the truth is it's an unbelievable tragedy. We have to get to zero 8,000 cases but the destruction of the health system in these countries have killed far more people and far more people are dying of the diseases that exist in these countries, the malaria's, the measles, other diseases and so we've got to rebuild those systems and not just rebuild them but build them to a better place. And so these are some of the priorities that we're doing moving forward. Last thing I'd say is that looking forward we have to think and this is where we'll talk next but we have to think about how we're going to have better ability to diagnose and then to react institutionally but this other part of how do we think about which products are next and what we're going to need and it's a real challenge because the future is very hard to predict but that being said, we need to do our best. We have to have platforms ready that we can drop antigens into. We have to have the ability to scale up quickly and these are some of the things that should be discussed and maybe the silver lining in this cloud. No, thanks, Seth. Thanks for reminding us about the vaccine. I just wanted to make a comment regarding vaccines. I don't think that laboratories can find the vaccine just as the president of the World Bank cannot find the solutions. When we speak about vaccines, we are speaking about having a large clientele and this is not the case for Ebola. Ebola is affecting poor people so we need to get more and more mobilization to ensure that it is laboratories who are carrying out the research because otherwise we see that the market is a weak market.  If Ebola was a disease of the developed countries then we would have found a vaccine by now and that is not the case. I think that if we just leave laboratories up to the task of finding the vaccine, we will never find a vaccine. We will never find the vaccine if we leave it in the hands of laboratories because everyone who is developing vaccines is not necessarily a philanthropist. They are also looking to make a profit. Thank you very much. Just said, and that is that funding for treatment, for vaccines, not only for Ebola but for other potential epidemics and rare or nearly unpredictable epidemics must be considered as a global public good and therefore there is a place and a need for public-private investments together because it's companies that make the vaccine. So that is, I think, one of the lessons in establishing such fund could be really good. And said, I think also very important to remind us that the impact of the Ebola epidemic goes way beyond the figures we see of people who died directly from Ebola. I mean, there probably, as you said, more people who died from treatable and vaccine-preventable diseases because with the dwindling immunization levels for, you know, regular childhood immunizations, we can probably expect some epidemics of measles and so on. So let's now open the conversation and then we'll come back to the panel. Who would like to contribute? Gary, please, can you identify yourself and then... Do I need a microphone or not? I think for the translation you probably need, yes. So President Kande, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting with you at the U.S. Department of State in August. And it was a time there was really no mobilization of support for what was happening in your country or the other two affected countries. Then mobilization started to happen afterwards, as you said. And I know that the Centers for Disease Control Prevention started to deploy people and set up emergency operation centers and start to do the type of contact tracing and other work that needed to be done to help get the virus under control. How important is it to establish those types of public health capabilities in your country? And do you feel you're getting the support, if it is important, to establish those so that in the future you'll have the ability to be able to do that type of work, or, of course, still supported by international organizations? Okay, Monsieur le Président, vous avez... President, you have the floor. Yes, we have to focus on this. What we are trying to do is establish a CDC in Guinea so that we can have a CDC that is able to identify all the viruses. But the problem that we have nowadays is that a lot of people came to us to help us establish a center to combat Ebola. However, at this time we had about 15 cases or something. So the problem that we face now is not so much a question of building these centers. It is putting an end to Ebola immediately. And we have to also establish these transit centers. So the most important for us today is to try and build community health care centers. These community health centers will allow communities to have health care, for example, for mothers in maternity wards. And we need to ensure that local communities have access to health care and doctors. We need these community centers, which will be in the different areas. But we also need to reinforce the health care centers that we have. The fight against Ebola is very important. But we also have to take into consideration that we are training our own populations on how to counter this disease. We have to realize that Ebola is a very important and a very important issue to tackle. And we need to end it. And it is as from this moment that we need to start building health care centers. Because currently, Ebola is now going on the downward trend. And we also have problems, for example, with cholera, because we have less chlorine, we have less typhoid fever and less cholera. But despite this, we have to focus our attention on fighting Ebola by building these health care centers in Guinea. Because as soon as we have done that, we know that we will be responding. We cannot wait from now until the next 30 years to respond, President. That means that we are entering a new phase in the fight against Ebola. Yeah, I want to add on what the President said, because he talked about the health systems and the health care side. But we do need a strong public health system as well. And what's important about that is that this is often getting ignored. The research side, having codders of public health workers, having professionally trained post-doctorates. And look at some of the other countries and what happened. We've seen control in Mali. They're doing vaccine trials there and doing them well. At IAVI, we did trials across Africa with faster enrollment times than in Europe. We've seen in Uganda control of the disease over and over again with trained public health workers and DRC. So the point is that you need to have the health care facilities to deal with the patients to take care of them and do isolation. But you also need people who are trained to go out and look for cases and do the contact tracing and the follow-up and the epidemiology that's necessary. And this in the development field hasn't been the most trendy stuff to invest in. And yet this also is a global public good, these networks of people with the labs associated with them. Yeah, if we agree, Margaret, please. Peter, I think it is important for 2015, what are the priorities? First and foremost, we must get to zero, support these countries. What I'm afraid is the complacency are setting in in these countries. So we need to guard against that. And the second point is we must not have what we call fatigue, the development partners. And I have to thank banks, Donald, World Bank and other countries. The outpouring of generosity have helped us to bend the curve, to prevent Ebola to go in an exponential manner. So that's the good news. Please guard against donor fatigue. As we are speaking, we focus our attention to get to zero in these three countries. But if I tell you, 129 countries in the world have very weak public health systems to even to prepare themselves for importation of Ebola or other equally severe diseases. So we also not to forget supporting those countries to build a public health system that Gary you were referring to. Now that brings me to the important point about health system recovery. Seth put his finger on the most important point. We often talk about disease specific approach to the way we build a system. No country in this world can afford to have a health system for HIV, a health system for TB, and one for maternal and child health and then one for public health. So WTO has been advocating for universal health coverage based on primary health care to make sure an integrated approach, a system approach to deal with the common diseases, the important MDG diseases, as well as public health. And that's the only way the world can afford. And you don't have to be rich to start thinking about universal health coverage. And so this is a very important message for the development community. And if I see some development ministers here, MDG support is extremely important. Commodities are important, but those are low hanging fruits. I commend you, Seth. You are responsible for vaccine, but you talk about the importance of health system. Without health system, vaccines do not fly to the arms of children. Without coaching, without human resources, without infrastructure, delivery of services would not happen. And if you look at Nigeria, Senegal and Mali, these countries, they have some health system, but they also have political commitment, political leadership and engagement, full engagement of the community and communication right at the beginning. And I know for a fact, Nigeria, they were able to control the so many chains of transmission in Port Harcourt. It's because the private sector provided the logistics support in a big way. And WTO was using our polio asset on the ground to do CDC surveillance. So and CDC, MSF and all partners were coming together. So again, let me go back. There is plenty of resources in the world to help countries who are not capable to deal with the outbreak yet, but we need transparency. We need countries to sound the alert and the international community would come around to support countries who do not have the means to do so yet because it is in our collective interest to have a very strong defense system against all these very serious pathogens. Great, thank you. Donald, please. So microphone here please, Professor. Thank you, thank you Peter. Let me first of all say that I want to express my thanks to everybody in this room and all governments and organizations who have in the last few months, through everything they have to address this issue. At the beginning, we may have got it wrong, but I think towards the end, we come together and we're having this result. The beginning, it was a disaster. As all of us will have to pull back and look carefully where could we have done things differently. But now I have a question for all of you here. Now that you know that, if today there was an outbreak of Ebola in South Sudan, in the Central African Republic, or in a place like that, are we able to act differently? Thanks, that's a challenge to all of us I think who would like to respond to that. I mean, it's really while we're building the system what if something would happen now, what can we do? And I think let's hope we learn from history because we've had reports as Margaret said that we're then, for whatever reason, not implement. I think Donald asked an excellent question. When it is small, I mean the outbreak, when it is small in size or even medium size, we have the capability to deal with it. Dabik Cho has been in existence for 60 years. Every year, we have 700 disasters, humanitarian crisis, and outbreaks. And the world did not hear about that. Now that means when they are small, when they are medium size, we have the capability to deal with it. So that's why it goes back to the important point about transparency and the capability to detect early. And then once we know that we can parachute people in with partners, of course, with the commitment and agreement of the country and to nib it in the bud. As I said earlier, the circumstances allow this disease to spread undetected for three months before it was diagnosed, that added to the challenge. And President Alvacondi was correct. We did not really pay attention to the culture enough. We need to learn going forward for the communities. It is important to respect their tradition. How the Muslim community bury their loved ones. This is something we really need to learn lessons. How can we do dignified, safe burial that are acceptable to the community? Color of the body bag makes a difference. Black or white? White is acceptable, black is not.  And of course, good-hearted NGOs who go in in space suit and that created suspicion. So these are some of the lessons we really need to learn going forward. We must look at what is the cultural context and also what is the social economic context to facilitate or to drive the disease? Yeah, I think that the early detection is going to be a problem in some of these areas. And also you only can find what you're looking for. Like nobody thought that Ebola was happening and circulating in West Africa. Although we know today that it has been there for a while. But I think that maybe the biggest lesson is that act very promptly immediately and at the risk of being accused of overreacting. And I think, for example, that WHO was unfairly criticized for reacting a few years ago for the pandemic flu. And I would rather be accused of being overacting than not. So, but Donald, so you've been at the forefront also with engaging the African Development Bank. I think it was also a very, very important element of the African response that President Alpha Konde alluded to. Thanks. Any other comments? Yes, please. I'm blinded by the spots. In the back, please. Yes. Not the back. In the middle of the back, yes. Sorry, perhaps I should have stood up. My name's Grenville Beifert, I'm a writer. I wonder if you could comment on what makes Ebola such a dangerous virus and how common are those characteristics amongst other viruses? Shall I say a few words about that? Yes, you're one of the discoverers. Yes, yes, even, yeah, there was a newspaper in Hong Kong, the front page, it called me the father of Ebola. So, but that's, no, it depends what your question is, whether it creates an epidemic or the intrinsic biological characteristics. But what I think, what we've been seeing in West Africa was what I called, in editorial science, a perfect storm. It's not that the virus is, per se, very different. Of course, it mutates, but there is no evidence that it is spreading faster. It is spreading in a different way than the classic limited outbreaks. That may happen at some point, but there's no evidence at the moment. And it is really a combination of slow response, of the cultural factors, the traditions of defunct health systems, that all brought together high mobility. When you take the outbreaks in DRC in Congo, it's actually not so easy to go from one place to another. Whereas in the areas of the three countries, I saw it myself, I mean, the roads are quite good and people are moving and there's trans-border traffic and all that. That's not only good for trade, but commerce, but also for spreading viruses. At the biological side, the virus and disinfection really needs more study, because up to now, the outbreaks were usually in very isolated places. We don't have really all the information we need, but in theory, it should be very easy to contain, because the spread of a virus depends on the risk of infection, of transmission to another person. Here you need really immediate body contact. It's not like measles, where for every case, you have 20 or more people become infected. It depends on the duration of infectiousness, since people in general die within a week or two. There are not that many who are exposed, and the number of contacts, and with the exception of some funerals, I mean, that's also limited. So in theory, it should all be simple, but in practice, it turned out not to be the case. Thank you. But Peter, can I, at one point, you talk about funeral, just for your information. Now we did a retrospective study and look at all the cases. 60 to 70% of the initial cases were due to participation in traditional burial. So when people come into contact with disease patients and very close contact, and even now, with all the communication, community mobilization anthropologists helping us to engage the community, we're still seeing about 20% of the cases still related to attendance in funeral. So we need to continue to really engage local chiefs, religious leaders, woman group, and youth group, and get their support that for this very important period, perhaps we can find a way of dignified and respectful burial that are safe. Yes, please. Thank you so much. My name is Mariam Jam. I'm one of the young global leaders here at the World Economic Forum. Where are you from, please? I'm originally from Senegal, and I'm one of the young global leaders here at the World Economic Forum. One of the things that really, I also blog and write quite a lot on African issues, the new narratives in Africa. One other thing that struck us, as the youth of Africa, the new leaders of Africa, what really struck us is, our leaders gave $28 million for the Ebola crisis. We didn't hear that. We just heard the WHO really praising themselves for what they've done wrong and what they've done right. How can we learn from this now to give the voice to the young women in Africa? We have so many deaths. So many people are suffering in Africa because of Ebola in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia. What can we do as leaders to learn from this next time there's not much suffering? And then we really give credit to our leaders who are giving money rather than waiting for the West to do it for us. Any thoughts, Tony? Would you like to, and then Seth? The point here is very interesting. The Ebola pandemic that occurred in West Africa again, let me go back a bit. I agree with the President of the World Health Organization that transparency is key. You need to understand, know that there's a problem. Raise a lamp early enough, take measures, don't protect or hide it, conceal it, and the whole world will help. In Nigeria, communication actually helped a lot because the literacy level has gone quite high now until people were easily mobilized and everyone understood what they needed to do or not do in the area. And I also think that the entire system was, I think the private sector worked very well with government. It was a national mobilization factor. It brought everyone together and we worked with the government to provide solution. And talking about the local support, I saw during that period initially, initially I think the national community did not either dimension well or appreciate what was going on in West Africa at the time. When my foundation sent some support to Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, and Nigeria also at the time, I think we were the first, even the President could confirm this, to make such a regional support to people. But later the national community came into the same and I think the pocket got deeper and really helped. So my take here is, one, Ebola is a problem, but two, maybe we should dwell in my viewpoint less about the problem we've had and less learn from it and see how to prevent it going forward. And also let us see how the road, the private sector can play to help these fragile economies that have been affected by Ebola to rebuild advance back quickly. Otherwise, these cultural issues to talk about have a correlation with poverty. And so they will go back again to the same place or it can spread in all that parts of the world. Thanks Tony, and Seth. If I can just compliment what Tony said and I think young people could advocate, the leaders of Africa have said in the Abuja Declaration that we should put 15% of our resources into health. And one of the challenges for finance ministers is they see health as an expense and not yet necessarily an investment. Hopefully, eyes have been woken up because it is really important. You keep people healthy and they are productive, they go on to productive lives, they spend less out of their pocket, there's less people tipped into poverty and this is really an important point. So in addition to the private sector work and specific money on this, we do have to raise the level of local investment in health if we are going to build the type of resilient health and public health systems we need. Very good, yes, any other questions? Yes, please. Second one. How to manage the tension between transparency and stigmatization? Because sometimes countries are afraid to declare that they have Ebola or a pandemic. So, and this is a big question. Yeah, it's a big issue. Can you also introduce yourself please? Because the point you raised about stigma is really important. It's mine of President Kondé. Okay, thank you very much, sir. Can I attempt to start here? I think if you look at your question spotter, by the way, and this is being transparent also with our question, the truth is if you look at the case of Nigeria, Nigeria, when Nigerian government decided, and I comment highly, President Jonathan's political will and the audacity to do what they did at the time, when they announced that there was Ebola in Nigeria, some even within Nigeria, some people didn't like the fact that we are like stigmatizing the country. But we went about the transparency and at the end of the day, World Health Organization came certified and Nigeria was not Ebola free. I think it gained respect for the country. So instead of a country being stigmatized, I actually think it helped to raise the level of international respect for that country. And in fact, even the citizenry begin to have more confidence in their own government. Because by announcing this, it caught a lot of poor habits, a lot of habits and cultural practices that could have led to more of this. There was massive education in the country. And in fact, the hygiene level in Nigeria today has never been as high as it is today. So I think honestly, you know, it's cartoon too, but countries should move towards disclosure, early disclosure. And you know, I like the fact that almost on the weekly basis in Nigeria at the time there was communication. The health minister will come out and announce today we have 22 out of 22. This number have come back home. The following people died. So there was transparency and it created a lot of confidence that ourselves. So let's go for disclosure. It helps. Yeah, Margaret please. I like to reinforce what Tony says. I mean, I've been in public health for 40 years and I have managed many unusual and new diseases outbreak. Across the board, all countries are very afraid to report outbreaks because number one, they think this may be a loss of face. Number two, they are also about stigmatization. There may be political reasons and economic reasons not to report. Experience in the past is that the sooner you report and being transparent, you would get all the support you need. You may suffer a little bit at the beginning, but the price you pay for not reporting earlier is way higher. And that's the experience in many big outbreaks. SARS in 2003 and now we are dealing with Ebola. I think this is a lesson we must take home for all of us. And I'm not saying it's just the poor countries who are not reporting. I have to tell you, rich countries, middle-income countries, low-income countries, they are anxiety. We must provide incentives for governments to recognize that it is in their interest to report early. Thank you. Thank you, Margaret. And I think that goes even for businesses. I mean, you know, because you could be stigmatized because you continue the business. I discussed this with like one of the few airlines that are still flying from Europe. Well, actually only one. So those airlines, in the beginning, they were stigmatized and they said, you know, people wanted to avoid them. Now they're kind of nearly heroes because they continue to do it. So, and I think that goes at all levels. Time is up and thank you very much for all the interventions. And I think that the first statement we should make is that everybody said it's not over and that we have to be very, very careful that complacency doesn't set in because that's a recipe for, you know, a reignition of the epidemic. So that's the first priority to end it. And then even if the world is ill-prepared, I think this is an opportunity not to be missed this crisis, to make ourselves all better, be better prepared in some way or another. I won't go into all the details, but we have very concrete ideas and suggestions and I hope we will follow up on that. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.


I'm joined today by our relatively new director of our cybersecurity and privacy program, Joe Pontianet. Welcome, Joe. Nice to be here, John. Thank you. Clearly, keeping up with cybersecurity changes is a challenge. And, you know, you're running to keep up and it's arguably impossible to keep up because the bad actors have a very narrow scope of the badness they need to do. And, meanwhile, you're trying to protect, we all know that the challenges are significant. So how do you keep up as a leader of a program? We can't keep doing the same things and expecting different results. So where do you want to take the cybersecurity and privacy program in the years ahead? Well, I think the first part was just a few years ago, the name of our conference was the Cybersecurity Professionals Conference. But now it is the Cybersecurity Privacy and Professionals Conference. We've actually added privacy to the title, and I don't think that's just for window dressing. We're understanding that privacy is a distinct and separate field and that it is no less important than security, but it's different. So as far as the direction of the program goes, I really want to have both privacy and security on equal footing. They need to be seen as correlated fields, but there are professionals in each area and they're not the same, but they work in tandem to protect everyone. So how in the world do you serve this sprawling, in a good way, community with one program? Really, it is finding the connections between the two. So we can help the underserved institutions by leveraging what the larger institutions have learned through their own development, and they can use to shepherd them into the next level of their development. And also, all boats rise. So if many of those students that are going to maybe start out at a community college might end up at a four-year institution at some point in their career. So anything that the larger schools can do to help the students at all those other institutions is going to help the community at large. So really, it is making sure that they're not in their own echo chambers, making sure that our ones are just talking to our ones and community college folks are just talking to community college folks. They all need to be talking together and build that sense of community and help each other find those solutions.


This white paper outlines the current state of research on the psychology of space exploration with particular focus on the impending human missions to the Moon and Mars. It identifies key areas of research that need to be addressed before these missions can take place, such as adaptation, pre-dash, during-dash, and post-mission experiences and potential countermeasures. The paper also serves as a guide for researchers who wish to conduct research in support of future space exploration efforts. This article was authored by Francesco Pagnini, Dietrich Manzi, Elizabeth Rosnett, and others.


Stevenson fall in the UCHC quarterfinals to Manhattan bill tonight for one I'm Christian Taylor with head coach Dominic Dawes after this one Manhattanville started with three early goals in this game What caused you guys to fall short tonight? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a credit to them. I mean they came out and Took it to us in the first ten minutes and that was the that was the difference. Yeah, I mean I I Think we battled back. I think we stayed with it. I think we had a ton of opportunities Obviously, we didn't we didn't finish They beat us and they beat us they started on time and got after us and You know, that was the that was the difference put us on our put us on our heels a little bit and Credit credit to them a finally coach I mean this season as a whole saw some big things Of course that nine game win streak as his team was battling adversity Ryan Patrick was brilliant Another home game in the postseason a lot of good stuff this year What are some of your biggest takeaways that you take from this year perhaps heading into future seasons? I mean I just said those I've said on this a couple times in last week just the three guys and what they've been able to do here You know and what they've been able to help build and contribute. So for those guys, I mean again I can't say enough. I don't have enough words to You know thank them in terms of what they've been able to do and I hope the younger guys can learn from that I mean we've had we had a good year we won 18 games, but it wasn't good enough and I think they They know that and it was it was a tough stretch here. I mean again, we played 11 games in 22 days We've got a lot of guys banged up. We've had some guys missing with injuries and and whatnot, but We definitely weren't disciplined enough in all year and that's been a big thing for us and maturity's been a big thing for us And we're not young anymore. I mean 25 freshmen and sophomores now are no longer 25 freshmen sophomores moving forward We all know what it what it's gonna take now. So We got to grow up. We got to do the work. We got to put the work in we got to get healthy and But I'm excited about what we've you know The guys are in the locker room and what we can you know what we do moving forward coach. Thank you very much Thank you coach Dawes. I'm Christian Taylor and go must-danks sports calm


Hi, I'm Jaswink Mullen and this is the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Arfontein. Welcome to a two-weekly burst of inspiration where you get to learn what some of the world's best service designers are currently doing. We talk about the current state of the industry, the trends that are influencing it, and the challenges that lie up ahead. The Service Design Show is all about helping you to become a better service designer so you can make a bigger impact on the world around us. We bring you a new episode every two weeks on Thursday. So, if you don't want to miss anything, be sure to subscribe to the channel. My guest in this show is Jaswink Mullen. Jaswink is the founder of the Center for Citizen Experience and Citus Strategy, and a consultancy dedicated to transforming service delivery and policymaking through design innovation. For the next 30 minutes or so, we'll be talking about topics like the commodification of design, about business fluency, and finally about how to prototype policy. If you want to fast-forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description, or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. So, let's jump right in. Welcome to the show, Jaswink. Hey, thanks, Mark. Jas, we've just talked before the show, and you told me that you've been interested in service design for quite a long time. Do you actually remember the very first time you got in touch with service design? That's an interesting question. I started in digital doing web things in 1996 and ran into... Like everyone. Yeah, it ran into Jacob Nielsen and Human Center Design that year. And the following year, in 1997, there were some conversations in the United States around something called Advanced for Design that Clement Mock and some other people started up to talk about experience design in a very similar way to what we would talk about service design today, where the idea was, how do we organize multiple touchpoints and channels and people's experience over time in having that thing, whether it's at a hotel or an amusement park or with a business. And so that was really formative in my career to be part of those conversations. I didn't ever get to attend the events themselves, but there was a mailing list and got to be part of that. Actually, running into the term service design, is around the time that we started up the Information Architecture Institute in 2003. I helped out with that with Lou Rosenfeld and Christina Woodkey and a bunch of other friends. And so just surveying what the design world was doing at the time and starting to see that people were sort of realizing that aspiration to do that holistic experience design and starting to see some of the firms coming out through there. And did you see a clear moment where service design for you started to really become a discipline or did it go more gradually? Definitely more gradually as an extension of design. So people who are designing things, whether they were products or whether they were digital, would start to run into places where those things needed to connect for somebody to have a better experience. And so as soon as you got into that opportunity where a client or if you're in-house, the business would say, oh, we need you to look at this too, then you started to see people having to develop that practice, whether or not they called it service design. And of course, services have been designed for forever, but the intentionality around it and bringing a design lens to it, as opposed to say some of the marketing stuff that was really from the 80s. And for me, my biggest moment was in 2005, Peter Mehrholtz, who was an adaptive path at the time, and I were both on the IA Institute board. And we saw some work that Maya Design was doing in Pittsburgh with the Carnegie Library where Aratnagal and Paul, I'm sorry, I forget Paul's last name, had worked with an architecture firm and the library and they had reconsidered the journey of different library patrons through different channels. And so that they had mapped out those journeys. They'd done field research. They'd reconciled things like the signage between the website and the actual space. And they'd done testing on some of those terms so that things like, instead of having a sign that said reference desk, they had a sign that said ask a librarian. And so Peter reached out and said, would you like to do a workshop? And that will sponsor this workshop. And so that was a conversation that really started this convergence of physical face-to-face services and digital and space and how all of those things come together. And I remember talking to him about it and said, I don't know if I could ever do that. We had a user experience consultancy. I'm not sure the market will buy it from here in Canada. And he said, well, why not? And you should go for it. And so from that moment, I started to think of it more even as my own practice and starting to look for opportunities with clients where we could do that. Well, awesome. I don't know if a lot of people know this story. So thanks for sharing. Jess, you've gave me three very interesting topics and I gave you a few question starters and we'll combine those two to make up interesting questions that we can talk about, right? So let's jump right in. And I'll pick the first topic you gave me and I'm always struggling with this word. So let's see if it works. It's commodification of design. Yeah, commodification of design. Well, let's see. We'll say how much. How much? Yeah. What is the question? So I'll make the question. How much will design be commodified? Interesting. So can design be commodified? Can design be commodified? Well, absolutely. Design can be commodified. We are seeing that more and more so. There's a lot of anxiety a couple of years ago on the death of the design firm. As we saw design go more and more in-house and things like the acquisition of Adaptive Path as well as Lunar later that year, later the next year by McKinsey. But that's not necessarily commodification of design. That's recognizing its value. We also see things like 99 Designs where you can go and get design work done for very, very low cost. And some of it is incredible rubbish. But some of it is actually not bad. And so there's this... I think there's a whole ethical question around are we taking advantage of people through platforms like that? And I think the answer is yes, we are. I'm not recognizing the value of it. But if we try to make a moral argument in the market, we're often going to fail. And so we see those pressures where design becomes less of a specialist discipline and more in common. And a large part of that is because of the recognition of the value of design. As design has become recognized, then people say, oh, we need more of that, or I want to do it. And so we have more and more people interested in the field, people who, let's say, they are previously doing the front-end coding for digital products. And they're like, well, I can figure out the interaction design of how something works. I think service design in and of itself is more insulated from that because it's further upstream in the process, but that there's still a lot of those same pressures across the spectrum of design. We see things like... Here's another story that we don't talk about a lot in the community. In 2011, Oracle acquired a firm in Boulder, Colorado called Right Now. And Right Now had some software products that Oracle wanted, but along with the software products, they got a design team led by a guy named John Campbell. And John started to evangelize customer experience and service design within Oracle and with Oracle's customers. So they've set up a website called designingcx.com and have all these great tools for doing customer journey mapping and a facilitation guide for doing your own customer journey sessions and inside an organization just as a sort of a preliminary understanding of the journey, not doing research, but saying we're going to use this as a workshop tool. And in fact, if Oracle thinks you're a customer or a potential customer, John or somebody from that team will come and do that workshop with you. In fact, I got offered a few years ago somebody who is an Oracle salesperson in the UK and reached out and asked if I wanted to run a three-day citizen experience design workshop that they would facilitate for me because I was talking about citizen experience and the public sector and some of the work that one of my clients had done. And so that was interesting and the most interesting part is that all of those workshops that those teams do from my understanding are free. It's like a sales tool. Exactly, it's a way to come in and to help understand the customer, provide value to the customer, but ultimately to sell them on Oracle products and so design becomes a loss leader rather than something that is seen as intrinsic value. And that's actually been historical on the ad agency side, right? Is that the creative aspects of a campaign were tossed in for free and agencies made their money on large commissions on media buys. That model's kind of gone by the wayside in agency land for the most part. But certainly that notion that design is an add-on is there. There's also been that continuum that we were talking about just a little bit earlier of people taking on more design roles closer to delivery of the actual product or service. So I think of design on a spectrum from direction to delivery. And a lot of user experience and service design is kind of peaked in the middle. It's kind of a bridge between, oh, we've got the business strategy and the direction from that. And we need to understand customers and users in order to define a product and a service or connecting a set of products so that people can use it and have a good experience. And the trend I think we're seeing is that those are being split. So rather than there being a peak in the middle, we have some people going upstream and some people going more into the production and delivery side of things. So we have design really embedded in agile sprints and things like that now where before that didn't happen as much. And similarly, there's more designers who are hoping to work at a strategic level. And so where is this heading if we fast forward this three or five years? I think those polarizations will continue where we'll have that middle get thinner and thinner and that you'll either need to work more on the strategic side or more embedded in delivery. And I think one of the risks there is that we're going to potentially lose the bridge between those things. We need to consider how we can keep that bridge in place in our own ambitions to either ship things or to be working on strategic things. The other thing is I think we're going to have more and more people just adopting design as a tool set rather than as a title. And so that you'll have people who use design methods and design tools and design thinking or design attitudes and logic who don't necessarily self-identify as a designer. And that certainly, like even in my own career with SITU, SITU is a management consultancy and that's how I explain it to potential clients is that I'm a management consultant and I can help you deliver better services and better customer experience. So I think you're already moving into a second topic. Just let's tap straight into that and it is the topic of business fluency so when we're talking about management consultants I guess this has to be related somehow. And a question started. I'll say how can we develop business fluency? Let's start by understanding what you mean with business fluency. Well, it's just like fluency in any other language. So you're in the Netherlands and have you ever traveled to a country where you didn't speak the language? It has happened quite a few times. And then comparing that to when you've traveled somewhere and you do speak the language, what's the difference? I guess you feel much more comfortable. You feel much more connected with the people around you. And business fluency is exactly the same where there are conceptual and cultural factors that if you understand them you're able to work with the business much more comfortably. And if you don't understand them then you're going to stumble and to struggle that way. Especially for service designers service design is inherently transformative in the organization. It's kind of a Trojan horse for some pretty big shifts in most organizations. If you say, well, we need to design a new way of delivering a service, that has a lot of ripple effects. And so being able to understand how a business functions and how it operates and the different priorities of that business is really essential if you want to see that service realize the way that you intended it to be. Otherwise you just sort of are handing it off and hoping and that's not very satisfying sometimes. So how do we, because I can imagine for one you have to recognize that you are not fluent enough with the business language. And second thing is how do we educate ourselves? So I think there's two levels of that. One of them is there's conceptual fluency knowing the ideas and the concepts and things like that. So what does somebody actually mean by return on investment? And there's a formula that you can actually say, well, what was the money we put in and what's the money we get out? And that can be hard to track sometimes especially if like me you're working mostly with public sector clients. But it's also challenging when you're working on something like brand or marketing material and not something that actually is a direct revenue generator. But even if you get those numbers there's also a cultural aspect to it. And it's like, well, why did somebody ask for ROI numbers? And it's often like, yes, we need to demonstrate the value but it can often be say a trigger for somebody not being confident in the direction or the process and needing more confidence. Or they're trying to decide between different options and they're looking for some other factors to accommodate that. So of course return on investment being a good thing to determine but can often be a cultural indicator of something else. And so we need to have both the conceptual concepts as well as those cultural things of being able to understand people. So for educating ourselves there's lots of good business books and more and more workshops. And I actually just taught a workshop at the Global Service Design Conference that happened last year in Amsterdam called Learn Speak CEO that provides a framework for folks to triangulate where their work is at and with strategic and executive priorities. I think the other thing, especially on the cultural side is that designers have maybe an advantage over other disciplines where really what we need to do is we need to use our same skills that we use to understand customers or understand users of a service and use them to understand our colleagues within business whether that's in the executive suite or whether it's somewhere else in the organization in operations or product or other things like that. That we need to have empathy. Brandon Schauer who's at Adaptive Path Capital One talks about business empathy of having empathy for the business and understanding those people just like we would get frustrated if we're talking with an engineering team and they kind of dismissed the experience of users and said, oh, we're just going to train them. And we said, no, no, we need to understand them and know what they're doing and what their motivations are. We have to take all those same skills and apply them internally in the organizations that we work with. What do the executives care about? How do they talk about it? What are their priorities? What does success look like for them? Just as much as what does success look like for a customer. Do you think that the need for more business fluency is related to the fact that design is being commoditized? I think the need for business fluency has always been there. I started a blog which has been defunct since 2009, but from 2005 to 2009 I had a blog called B plus D, business plus design. And the reason I started it is because the design thinking conversation was just really kicking into gear in 2004, 2005 with Rotman and IDO and Stanford and Business Week. And just seeing so many designers assert these kind of ridiculous claims of silver bullet solution like if you just did design thinking we would solve this. And so many designers feeling overconfident that if they were just in charge they would be able to fix this. And of course these poor business people just do not have the same insights and the same level of awareness and obvious brilliance that we do as designers. And we still sometimes run into that. I know I'm guilty of that sometimes myself. But that I started to think, well okay that's great that we bring these things but we need to understand business if we're going to change business. But that is even more important today as we see that shift. If you want to become a strategic designer if you want to work in transformation and if you want to actually change the organizations build their capability and their capacity and their culture so that they can sustain new service innovations then you have to have business fluency to be successful. So there's a ton of designers who are ambitious and aspire to do strategic work but are maybe dismissive or maybe don't even understand all the other or recognize the complexity and the skill that other people have in other parts of the business. And so being able to work well in that context is important if you have that ambition to do more strategic work. All right. Yes, let's move on to your third topic that probably less to do with business and more with a topic that is also dear to your heart I guess the public sector and this topic is called prototyping policy. Sure. And I will come back to how can we... One of the favorites, of course. How can we prototype policy? I think this applies in the private sector as well. Policy doesn't have as strong an implication or it's not talked about as much in the private sector but policy is still a really important part of all organizations. It's part of the decision DNA of the institution. How do you decide something? How should we act when we have this kind of situation? So inherently, policy is something that is about behavior. It's about having people act in a particular way. And so the challenge, of course, is getting them to really act in the way that you wanted to. Not just putting in a paper, yeah. Just because you wrote the policy doesn't mean that it's actually the case. And even if you wrote the policy, is it actually getting the kind of outcome that you intended? And so that's a real challenge with policy in both the public and private sectors. Is this actually doing what we want it to do? And so there's a couple things in developing policy. It's like, do you actually understand how the policy impacts the people that are at the other end of it? And sometimes the answer is no. That policy making is, as practiced in most institutions, is carried out by experts who are hired as experts. So to say, okay, you're a policy analyst and you have a set of tools to understand what's going on and then to recommend policies that you think are the best thing. And we can sometimes see organizations and individuals fall into that trap of expertise. I'm being hired as an expert, therefore I should know the answer and not going out into the world to find out what that might look like. So there's definitely a role for things like field research informing it. And I think that one, for me, is easy to see. The trickier thing is once you have a set of insights, how do you actually start to prototype that? Because policy works at a different scale, both in breadth and in time than most of the work that we do as service designers. So a couple of things that I've been working on, one of them is having teams do things like tabletop prototyping but for policy or regulatory context to say, well, show me how you think the system works and giving them, I have a set of cards that stand up on stands and I will sometimes do a custom run of them for that particular client. I was working earlier last year and the year before on food standards and how can we have safer food and so I did cards that had a bunch of different food related things. And then we had people come from government and industry and say how should the system work and what are the places where you're going to have policy impact in the experience that people have. So how does it play out in front of us? Yeah, and so to actually build the system and to be able to talk through where policy and how policy is playing in that system. So that's something that's been fairly successful. The challenge... Why was that successful? Oh, the success is because anytime we engage in that kind of co-design activity, we provide a touchstone or a boundary object that provides a bridge between different perspectives. So instead of just arguing or advocating for different ways of how things work, we can see it in the model or the prototype or the sketch or whatever and you can point to it and say, oh, I don't quite see it that way. And especially when you're doing something lo-fi with tabletop paper level prototyping, you can kind of reach over and say, well, what if we did this instead? It's very fluid and easy for everybody to contribute to but also to have a shared and common understanding that emerges from it. And so that's, I think, where the success comes from is that it's provided that touchstone that has brought a bunch of different perspectives together to find some common ground. So yeah, I think that's why that's been successful in those contexts. The other challenge, though, is how do you go beyond something like that and that's something that I'm still working on. Do I have a few thoughts? Well, of course, we are curious about that and I'm also curious, what's the largest scale prototype you've seen of policy? Well, so policy people don't use the word prototyping but they will use the word pilot. And so that is generally what we are looking at if you start to work on policy, it's like, where could you pilot this or how could you pilot this? And so generally a policy pilot is going to be applied to some sort of subset of whatever you're dealing with. So it might be a regional test, I was working with a government in 2015 and running an innovation bootcamp with a bunch of different ministries and one of the ministries came up with a concept around work zone safety and so there'd be some policy changes there but also some implementation changes and so because they had, in that jurisdiction they'd had some fatalities where people had been speeding through work zones and their initial response had been to put up a bunch of signs and that didn't actually slow people down that much so the insight that people had was, well, signage isn't sufficient because when you're driving you're not engaging like you would be reading something kind of on autopilot so what else could we do? And so the ideas that they came out with they did a tabletop prototype and they're going to look at trying it out just on a section of road and then they're going to do it in a particular region to say, okay, we're going to try it out here. The other thing is to have it be in sort of data to say we're going to have an alternative stream for doing something where there's a different way of tackling something and so we'll put the policy in place for a limited time or for a limited segment of people maybe we'll just do it for, let's say in a social services context we'll only do this with single mothers who have three or more children and then we would look at it for more families later. So what are some of the good resources when people want to learn more about this topic? For looking at policy there is a large conversation globally in policy innovation and design in the public service in particular. There's some hashtags on Twitter around policy innovation and PSI. Which one's your favorite? Well, one of them is just hashtag policy innovation, hashtag PSI Labs and hashtag design for the number four policy. Lucy Kimball, who's in the UK actually wrote a short summary about design and policy. Christian Besson, who's in Denmark as the CEO of the Danish Design Council now but was in government in a place called MindLab edited a book called Design for Policy. I wrote a chapter in 2011 for a book that came out in 2012 the book's usability and government systems but my chapter was on design for policy. And there's actually been an issue of the SDN touch point journal on design and policy. So all those are great resources. That's more than enough to start with, I'd say. Yes, we're running at the end of the interview and I have a final question for you. And the question is basically what is the biggest question that's currently on your mind? What is the thing that keeps you awake? Well, the biggest question on my mind is actually how do we shift both in my own practice and as a discipline to become truly strategic designers? So we have, I think, that ambition. We even have moments when we are but I don't know that it's become expected or common thing yet where a CEO has a challenging innovation problem and they think I should bring in a designer. I don't know that we're at that point yet. Certainly, or the range of problems where the CEO will think that is fairly narrow that you don't get permission to work on those transformational level things sometimes when the expectation is that you're going to come in and work at, say, the surface of a problem. So your question is what do we need as a community to make that transition ourselves? Yeah, so how can we ask bigger questions and how can we solve maybe better problems? That's a good one to end the show with, Jess. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on. What are your thoughts about the topics we just discussed with Jess? What is needed for service design to become more strategic? Let us know down below in the comments. This show is all about helping you to become a better service designer by sharing real-life stories of people that are currently shaping the field. If this is your first time here and you'd like to see more interviews, be sure to check out some of the best episodes and click that subscribe button. For now, thanks for watching and I'll see you in two weeks' time.


As of Monday 27 September 2021, a total of 45,245 first doses and 31,522nd doses of the COVID-19 vaccines have been administered. This is inclusive of both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. 17.4% of the population have received the complete regime of the vaccine. Over the last month, there have been a noted increase in the uptake of the vaccines. This response is very encouraging, particularly at a time when we see reports of steady rising of COVID-19 cases and associated deaths. This demonstrates an appreciation for the health benefit of the vaccine by our citizens, as well as the need to take personal responsibility to protect self and loved ones. As the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs strengthens its community outreach to ensure that vaccines are accessible to all, we continue to engage external partners such as the commercial sector and other health facilities to offer vaccines. COVID-19 vaccines are available at all wellness centers on selected days. Citizens are encouraged to contact the nearest wellness centers to access the vaccine. COVID-19 has no respect of person, gender, age or socioeconomic status. It can affect anyone and in different ways. We know that people with underlying chronic non-communicable diseases are particularly vulnerable to severe and fatal COVID-19 infection. A special appeal is being made to persons living with chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and respiratory disease. The COVID-19 vaccines are effective in reducing risk of severe form of the disease, hospitalization and death. While the vaccine provides protection against the severe complications of the virus, you are reminded of the healthy habits necessary for immune system boosting. This includes a healthy and well-balanced diet, being well hydrated, adequate exercise and rest. A healthy immune system is necessary and further helps the vaccine to prime your body to fight the vaccine if you become infected. In addition to being vaccinated, it is essential to keep practicing infection control and prevention protocols. Wear your mask, keep your distance and wash your hands regularly. We can win this COVID fight together. Let us all play our part. Vaccinate for you, for yours and for us. Further COVID-19 vaccination updates will be provided next week.


The translational integrator, TI, was developed at Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine to help bridge the gap between research and clinical translation. The TI assists investigators with navigating the increasingly complex regulatory landscape, providing education and guidance on FDA standards and regulatory pathways. Additionally, the TI helps identify the appropriate translational readiness criteria, project management, and subject matter expertise required for each project. This allows for a more efficient and effective transition of products from bench to bedside. This article was offered by Alexander Joel Greenberg, Nathan P. Staff, and Anthony Weintbank.


During the next few minutes, our goal is to convince you to improve your safety by doing one small thing. This does not involve attending a training class. It does not involve extensive training programs. We don't even have to modify mining procedures. All we want you to do is wear your reflective clothing. At the beginning of each shift, you change from your street clothes to your work clothes. The one small thing that you can do to improve your chances of being seen by others, especially equipment operators, is to make reflective material a part of your personal protective equipment. This will enhance your visibility and it could prevent a serious accident. There have been numerous accidents where a miner has been struck or ran over by underground mobile equipment. The accident investigations revealed that visibility of the miners could have been a factor in the accidents. Interviews with some of the mobile equipment operators produced statements such as, I never saw him or her. I didn't know where they were and by the time I saw them, I couldn't stop. While performing my duties, I've learned quite a bit about mine safety. A few weeks ago, I was asked by the safety department to help make a training video for reflective clothing. It's always been my way to helping any way I could, but I didn't really see any benefit of reflective clothing. During the filming, I was the miner who didn't wear reflective material. As I watched the filming of the people wearing reflective coveralls, I quickly saw the benefit. It's a no-brainer. You know, it will take some getting used to, but in the end, if we prevent one accident, it will be well worth it. If giving up some of my individuality means I can return home safely each day to my three favorite girls in the world, then it's worth everything I can do. Over the years, the mining industry has made tremendous strides in the area of coal mine safety. Today's mining equipment is designed with safety features to protect the miner. Miners are provided with personal protective equipment, and much progress has been made to improve the mining environment. We all know the difficulties of adjusting from the light of day to the darkness in an underground mine. But the miners, the ones who work in the darkness day after day, can make the choice to improve their own personal safety by wearing reflective material on their clothing. This is a simple change that is easy and inexpensive. Wearing reflective clothing will make the miners more visible and allow them to be seen by mobile equipment operators and other miners working underground. When people are walking in an entry with the size of equipment that we now utilize in the mining industry, also the speed of the equipment, the shuttle cars that are loaded with coal, makes it very difficult for the operators to see people. If someone were to slip and fall in the roadway or someone would come out suddenly from a cross cut, if this person does not have reflective material on and say the area was not rock dusted well, it would be very possible not to see them and run over them. With the reflective material basically from head to toe, it makes this person stick out like a sore thumb so to speak. That's what we want. We want our people to be very visible equipment operators to see them and ultimately what our goal is is to get our people in and out of the coal mine every day and send them back home to their family in the same condition that they left. The light you see approaching is quickly determined to be a miner. The reflective material provides the mobile equipment operator with a quicker reaction time to avoid an accident. I started my mining career in 1967 while I was a student at Penn State University. I learned very quickly that the health and safety of people was the most important aspect of my job. Over the years, many of the accident investigation reports that I've read contained one alarming statement. Repeatedly, when an investigator asked an equipment operator what had caused a miner to be struck by or run over by a piece of equipment, the equipment operator stated, I just did not see him. With this thought in mind, I asked our safety manager to explore the idea of outfitting our employees with reflective clothing. If this one thing meant we could prevent a single injury, it would be well worth the investment. I encourage all of you, regardless of who you work for or what your job is, to strongly consider wearing reflective clothing for your own personal safety. We want all miners to return home from work to their families safely every day. The choice is yours. Here we see two miners working beside the track. It's easy to see who is more visible and better protected. As they walk toward you, Ryan, on the right, is visible and easy to see. Jim is not. The chances of Ryan being run over or struck by mobile equipment are greatly reduced because you can see him. The guys you get dressed to go to work every day. It don't take much effort to put on reflective material. So if we can get you more visible inside the coal mines, the operators put this big equipment in the city sooner and maybe we can prevent any more accidents from half the work. Our coal miners are getting run over by mobile equipment. You know, when we first put out safety glasses, everybody said, Dad, make me look different. I don't want to wear them. Everybody keeps them on the same thing with their hearing protection. It's a change by wearing reflective material. You might say, well, it makes me look different. It makes me feel different. But as we know, it will make a difference if you wear reflective material. Wear your protective clothing in the mines. Your loved ones need you. But the choice is yours.


Hi, we're the fall 2021 econ peer advisors. My name is Arianna I'm a sophomore and I'm from India. I'm majoring in economics and finance. My name is Emily I'm from Gloucester mass. I'm a econ and calm double major and I'm a senior. My name is Tammy I'm from Malden mass, and I am a public health and econ double major. Hi, I'm Sean I'm from shoes very mass. I'm an econ major with minors and math and Chinese and I'm a sophomore. So what has been your economics journey into the major. My journey with economics began in high school when I chose it as one of my classes. It was one of the only classes that I actually found interesting and look forward to. And as the time went on, I began to really enjoy the content and found it very relevant to the real world. My economics journey also began in high school, I took it my senior year, and then I ended up transferring to you mass at the start of my sophomore year and when I was choosing a new major. I just kind of settled back into it because it was kind of exactly what I was looking for broad and you could focus on different topics. I also took econ in high school and I really liked it but it didn't start as an econ major when I started at UMass and added it the second semester of my freshman year. It was kind of always in the back part of my mind but I did still really like it since I've taken it in high school. I also took it in high school. Yeah, I started out just taking one class and then I ended up doing a lot of like outside reading about economics and just fell in love with it. And then by the time I figured out I was going to UMass I knew they had a really good econ department. So I was excited to study economics here. Then your favorite classes in the econ major and your favorite economics program experiences. Yeah, so my favorite class that I took was intro to international political economy with Professor Kevin young. It was a really cool class that was and it was about an area of study that I didn't really know existed before I took it. It basically looked at how the global economy was governed. We studied like the IMF and the UN and how they all play a part in the global economy so it was really interesting. What are other things that you do outside of the econ major. I'm also a member of the women in business club through Eisenberg and I'm also a member of the whips community service committee, which we spent our time outside of campus life just volunteering and local organizations to kind of give back to the community. Also a member of the UMass key and board club which is the largest club on campus, and we get to take some super fun ski trips during the winter time, and then I'm on an intramural field hockey team with my roommates. I'm part this isn't really outside of economics but I'm part of the UMass undergraduate economics club, and we meet every week and we talk about different economic issues and we have debates, we talk about like picking classes at UMass. And yeah just kind of life as an economic student at UMass and it's a great way to meet people who are also interested in economics and it's a lot of fun. Do you have any advice for other students considering the econ major. My advice would be that is to just try it out. Many of the core classes, micro and macro. They have great professors and they have very engaging content. You might not even know it how useful economics can be to you in the real world. So, even if you don't end up liking it, at least you've learned something helpful. Well, thank you for your time.


Hello, I'm James Randi, founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation. In my books and in presentations all over the world, I've used demonstrations to show audiences the importance of thinking skeptically about pseudoscience. One demonstration I've done many times consists of downing an entire package of 32 homeopathic sleeping pills. The recommended dosage, by the way, is two to three tablets, just to show that these scam medications have no effects. Now there's a warning on the box saying to call your local poison control center in case of an overdose. But that's a joke. Most homeopathic remedies have no active ingredients whatsoever. Even though they're sold by major pharmacies, right alongside real medicine, every reputable medical study of these fake drugs has shown them to have no more effect than sugar pills or pure water. Homeopathy is one of the biggest health scams in America and it's a problem around the globe. That's why today, hundreds of consumer advocates in more than 25 countries and more than a dozen U.S. cities are joining forces in an effort called the 1023 Challenge. They're taking public actions and doing overdose demonstrations, just like the one I've been doing for years. Together, we're telling the public the truth about homeopathy. There's nothing in it. Preveyors of homeopathy say that these demonstrations prove that homeopathy is safe. Nonsense. What we're demonstrating is not that homeopathy is safe, but that homeopathic preparations are not medicine and they have no effects, good or bad, except to flatten your wallet and ignore real medical assistance. If you're healthy, then taking no medicine at all is just fine, but people count on real medicine to heal illness or to immunize them against contagious disease. Taking homeopathic water or sugar pills instead of real medicine can be deadly. And it's not just the manufacturers of these products or to blame. Pharmacies like Walgreens, Rite Aid, CVS, and a lot of other major retailers are silent accomplices in this scam, profiting by keeping unsuspecting customers in the dark. They sell these fake pills right alongside real medicines with no warning or information about the bogus ideas behind homeopathy. They simply don't care. When consumers know the facts about homeopathic products, they can avoid them, but every day parents of sick children are coming home from their pharmacy with fake medicine and leaving their children in distress because these manufacturers and these stores don't want consumers to know the truth. Here's the truth about the bad ideas homeopathy is based on. The first idea is that illness can be treated by a substance that actually causes the symptoms you want to get rid of. So to treat fevers, for example, they often use cayenne pepper, since that can produce a sweat. The second idea is that diluting a substance, making it weaker, makes it more effective. So they mix a tiny amount of the substance in a huge amount of water, shake it up, and dilute the mixture in the same way again and again until they've thrown out all the original substance and there's not a single atom or molecule of it left. This plain water is then dripped into vials or dropped onto sugar cubes and sold to parents who are led to believe it will relieve their children's fever or other problems. Many people think the word homeopathy just means herbal or natural medicine and they're shocked to learn what it really means. Well, it should be a crime for pharmaceutical corporations to profit by denying the public this critical information about the products on their shelves.  This has to stop. Today, the James Randi Educational Foundation is issuing a challenge to the manufacturers and a challenge to the retail stores who make money hawking these products. First, to the manufacturers and practitioners of homeopathy, we challenge you to prove your claims. Prove the scientific studies are wrong. Win back your reputation and while you're at it, win $1 million for you or the charity of your choice. Submit your product for a double-blind, scientifically controlled test and show that a so-called high-potency homeopathic remedy diluted in water until there's no more of the active ingredient present is any better at treating any health problem than just plain water that it's based on. The experimental protocol will be designed by you and supervised by reputable scientists, all of which you approve of, and if you can prove that your remedy works according to homeopathic principles, the James Randi Educational Foundation will give you $1 million. In spite of the fact that such tests have already been done and homeopathy has always failed, we're willing to do it again. What are you afraid of? Come on, prove us wrong. Second, to the pharmacies and retail stores like CVS Walgreens, Rite Aid, Target, and Walmart, we challenge you to label it for what it really is. Your consumers have the right to know what they're buying. No customer of yours should ever walk out the door with a homeopathic product without knowing these basic facts. 1. There is no evidence that this product does what it says it does. 2. It's not one bit, not a single atom of the claimed active ingredient in this package and 3. No U.S. health agency has ever tested or approved this product. Last, I encourage everyone to visit the 1023 Challenge website at 1023.org.uk and visit our website, Randy.org, that's Randy with an I. Get the facts about homeopathy to share with your friends and family. Our government doesn't adequately regulate these products and the pharmacies don't give you the facts. So you've got to think critically and protect yourself from scams and charlatans. This is James Randy with the James Randy Educational Foundation. I've overdosed on homeopathic sleeping bells many times and my eyes are still open, see? You keep your eyes open too, okay? For more of James Randy and the Educational Foundation, make sure you visit Randy.org.