Okay, ladies and gentlemen, ambassadors. You're all very, very welcome here to the Institute for International European Affairs for this event which has been supported and co-sponsored by the Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish embassies with the support of our own defense forces, and particularly the Office of the Chief of Staff. I'd like to thank the ambassadors and their staffs for organizing the event alongside their respective defense attaches. This is a comparative analysis, a comparative look at women in the armed forces. It has a particular Nordic dimension, which is always very interesting for us in Ireland, as we see many parallels with some of our Nordic neighbors. And as Ireland redefines itself in European terms, and we move ever northwards in economic and political terms, it's always interesting to look at the Nordic streets to compare and contrast. And I know that the Chief of Staff has had his own very great priority placed in personnel development within defense forces and particularly in the recruitment of women to the defense forces. Can I also say on a personal note, this is an absolute thrill as the child of military personnel. My mother served in the U.S. Air Force for a number of years and I never forgot, remind my father, that she outranked him for the entirety of her career. So as I say, I'm delighted to welcome you all here. Just to run through the speakers very quickly, immediately to my right is Chief of Staff, Mark Mallett, who will be well-known to all of you. I'd also like to welcome, secondly Emma Möller, who's a second lieutenant or lieutenant in the Irish tradition in the Swedish Air Force. She also studied the Swedish Defense University. Next to her is Major Inka Niskanan, the Finnish Air Force, and she teaches air warfare studies at the Defense University in Finland. And finally to my far right, and I'm going to make an absolute butchery of the name and I do apologize in advance, is Director-General Shershti Klaibow of the Department of Confidence and Legal Services with the Norwegian Ministry of Defense. Each of our speakers will speak for about 10 minutes on the record, and then we'll go to Europe House Rules, effectively Chattel House Rules thereafter, so I'll ask you to respect that, and I will leave the timing of the presentations entirely in the hands of our guests, because as military personnel, I know they are absolutely prompt and precise, so there's absolutely no need for me to pose any kind of discipline from the chair. So without any further ado, I'd like to ask Admiral Mallett if he addresses. Yeah, actually, it'll be about 14 minutes, I'm sorry. And if I go and start ditching some of it now, it would be very problematic, it's your excellencies, distinguished guests, it's a great privilege to be asked to contribute to the IAA discussion on women in the armed forces. For two centuries, two features have defined the military world. Firstly, he's largely adopted a male definition of leadership, and secondly, the traditional view is that the primary measure of a military's effectiveness is its war-fighting capacity, but these are changing. To be honest, serving for decades in our male-dominated organization is not an ideal environment to gain in understanding of the importance of gender, the role of women, equality, and the significance of diversity and inclusion. That being said, understanding these themes are essential prerequisites for commenting on women in the armed forces. I'm convinced that institutionalizing a gender perspective and driving diversity and inclusion are vitally-neighburners for optimizing decision-making in a world of increasing complexity. Our defense forces is a key component of the security architecture of the state, and when all is said and done, it's part of the bedrock, which underpins our sovereignty, providing a framework for the institutions of civil society, where people are free, where the institutions of state function, and where there is protection of the vulnerable. Human security is one of many emerging paradigms for understanding state and global vulnerabilities. All over the world, we see challenges to human security and the institutions of civil society, with a growing numbers of security consumers increasing especially in Middle East and North Africa and beyond. At home, our defense forces is a security provider across three domains, land, air, and sea. At jurisdiction, which is almost three times the size of Germany, where we have sovereignty or sovereign rights. But in the international environment, where the appetite for consumption of security is insatiable, our government has authorized over 600 defense forces personnel to serve in 14 missions in 14 countries in the one sea, predominantly in peace support and humanitarian assistance type operations, and women serve in most of these missions. The nature of complexity is growing, with challenges in some cases being what have been described by Rital and Weber as wicked. These are in some cases exacerbated by vectors such as climate change and population increase, probably feeding continued migration, with the European pull factor of health, wealth, and security, contrasting with the push factors of poor health, shorter life expectancy, poverty, and insecurity elsewhere. Positive vectors include the growth in automation, robotics, technology, and explosion in data, data underpins information, driving the creation of knowledge and understanding, and three things are clear to me, that if we fail to leverage open source knowledge available to us, we increase risk. If our enemy leverages data and open source knowledge available to them, they become more formidable. And the simple reality is that new technology and new ways of doing things are being created every day with the answers to challenging problems often outside organizational boundaries. This means increasingly we are going to have to innovate. That means networking and collaborating. Darwin said that in the long history of humankind, those who collaborated are improvised most, most effectively prevailed. And every way I look, I see that militaries are shifting from siloed mentalities to ones that are open and diverse with diverse institutional arrangements for the provision of security. These arrangements are characterized by a desire for greater agility and openness to greater diversity in external networks, breaking down the walled garden that typically characterized the military. There's a growing recognition that the real strength of militaries is not so much just their capacity for war fighting, but rather their capacity for conflict resolution. Militaries are increasingly looking at the provision of security from the continuum of the heat of conflict through the phases of stabilization, institution building and restoration of civil society. Indeed, this is reflected in the prioritization of the integrated approach in the European Union. In the context of complexity, there are a few things as challenging indeed as wicked as those that are associated with conflict resolution where the effect of suboptimal decision-making can have a devastating impact. In my experience, the greater diversity in external networks, the greater the opportunity for learning and new ways of doing things. And having arrived at this position a number of years ago, that stimulated my interest in researching how we as an organization were structured to leverage our internal environment. A link between external and internal organizational diversity became apparent. In the past, militaries were often siloed, not having formal strategies for diversity and inclusion, and most of all, not having a real strategic approach to either institutionalizing a gender perspective or achieving better gender balance. And that's changing. For Ireland, the policy umbrella to address many of these issues has been provided for in our last white paper on defense with strategies in place are being developed. And when we look at innovation, we can tend to look at it primarily from the perspective of technology driven by science, technology, engineering, and maths. We don't always look at it from the perspective of institutional relationships, which are mainly people-centric and linked to the humanities and values. Theodore Zeldin asked, when will we make the same breakthroughs in the way we treat each other as we have made in technology? So in the context of today's discussion, it is on our internal environment that I want to dwell for the final few minutes. Achieving diversity in our internal environment is critical and three points are worthy of consideration. Firstly, breaking down silos, silos undermine trust, efficiency, and effectiveness. Secondly, striving for diversity and inclusion across teams such as culture, creed, age, sexual orientation, and gender is vital. And thirdly, institutionalizing a gender perspective and improving gender balance are essential. The evidence in the literature is overwhelming. Improvement in gender balance at all levels facilitates better decision-making and creative processes. Therefore, it would seem logical that having enough women in the armed forces will help ensure appropriate positive outcomes. It's not just a political issue. It's not just a market issue. It's not just a civil society issue. It's a military issue because it's a capability issue. As a military leader, your responsibilities are clear and that is to ensure your organization is fit for purpose and is optimized with capabilities that achieve the best outcomes. Getting gender right in our organizations will, I believe, lead to better outcomes, making us more formidable in areas such as conflict resolution and peacekeeping. To succeed in developing a more diverse and gender balanced workforce, military leaders must be prepared to stand up to the inevitable pushback, driving commitment and ensuring accountability, even if the initial perceptions are negative. Leaders need to do what they believe is right, not just to improve an organization's performance, but to create a better world. Studies show that the larger the gender gap is, the more likely a country is to be involved in interstate or intrastate conflict, to be the first to resort to force in such conflicts and to resort to higher levels of violence. What happens to women affects the security, stability, prosperity, corruption, health, regime type and the power of the state. It provides a portal to a link between human security and state security. It is a fact that sexual exploitation and abuse and gender-based violence are part of, if not the main effort in many conflicts. In some instances, they have been codified as war crimes, crimes against humanity and in certain instances, the most terrible of all crimes, the crime of genocide. So it's in this context and the duty of military to society and government, it's no longer good enough to treat the matters of gender, diversity and inclusion as politically correct supporting efforts, but rather to move them to the center of military's main effort, articulating their interdependence with capability development and especially in the context of conflict resolution. Quite simply, institutionalizing a gender perspective within our ministry, driving greater gender balance, strengthens us as an organization, strengthens the institutions of civil society and strengthens our nation, making us a better reflection of the society we defend, protect and serve. Ireland has embraced UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and the subsequent UN resolutions. We've nested our Defence Forces Action Plan under our National Action Plan. We've put significant effort into recruiting more women into our Defence Forces with some success. We've launched our diversity and inclusion strategy and for instance, the establishment of women's networks and for that matter, indeed, LGBT networks in all our commands. We've a number of initiatives aimed at institutionalizing a gender perspective and addressing unconscious bias. And by the way, the Defence Forces Gender Advisor is a man. Women, gender equality, diversity and inclusion in a male-dominated organization is as much about men as it is about women. The fact that our doctrine has always been nuanced towards that of conflict resolution rather than war fighting has meant that we have found it easier to make the case to have more women within our force. However, getting more women into our armed force is not just a military issue. It's a societal issue. Just as achieving greater gender balance in male-dominated organizations is a societal issue and not just a woman issue. It's also, of course, a leadership issue. Focusing on women in the armed forces, for example, must be done in a broader societal context. Studies show how women in most countries are socialized from a young age to fulfill certain stereotypical feminine roles such as caregivers and not too up for careers such as science, technology, engineering and maths and indeed, military. Conversely, the socialization of young males predisposes them to more masculine pursuits and these observations are reflected in the evidence which show women are less likely to come forward to join the military. Every time I hear a call to try and attract more women towards science, technology, engineering and maths, I say that should read STEM squared, science, technology, engineering, maths and military. There is strong evidence of various gatekeepers such as parents and career counselors not championing careers in the military for women. Leo Wilson said, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. In the context of women in the armed forces, we have all the information we need. What we lack is the wisdom. Information drives the creation of knowledge and understanding but the bridge between understanding and wisdom is values. Having an understanding without values is more likely to lead to short-termism, populism and unilateralism. Perspectives that will fail to capture the totality of the opportunity that women in the armed forces bring. Therefore, in addressing complex problems such as women in the armed forces, we should do so from a framework of values, values-based multilateralism, recognizing that no one state has all the answers. Desire for change is reflected in the codification of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals with Goal 5 specifying the attainment of gender equality and empowerment of women and girls and I'm delighted that David who is co-sponsor of this did such a remarkable achievement. National plans for the Sustainable Development Goals provide a societal framework beneath which national action plans for women, peace and security could be nested. Abuse and violence are not ameliorated by bombs and bullets and yet we see the conditions for even greater abuse and violence are set to increase as we look to the future. The philosopher Mary Parker Follett said, leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power in those who are led. The most essential role of the leader is to create more leaders. Institutionalizing the Sustainable Development Goals enhancing gender balance in our militaries and improving our understanding of security and the interplay between state and human security require strong values-based leadership, leadership that is vital for multilateralism. And my last paragraph is gone. So in short, we need to have an institutionalized, that value-based leadership, not just in the military but also in the societal institutions that drive the creation of embracing this requirement to institutionalize women in the military as being a normal factor within our countries and not just in the Irish state. Thank you very much. Technology demands that we start in the other industry. Okay. In the other end of the spectrum. My apologies, thank you very much. Thank you. Excellencies, General Admiral, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the Norwegian Minister of Defense, I'm very thankful for being given the ability opportunity to come here today and address the topic of women in the Norwegian Armed Forces. This is a topic close to my heart and I believe a very important one. So I will try to focus on two issues. Firstly, why do we need more women in the armed forces? And secondly, how should we proceed to achieve that goal? The military is a peculiar institution. It both, it inhabits an area, both integrated into society and the political sphere, but also in a way separate from the society and the political sphere. The armed forces do not exist in a vacuum. They have themselves understood that greater diversity should be a goal because they cannot afford not to. We face a traditionalist organization facing up the need for modernization. The security policy situation of today is rather gloomy. We see increased tensions between NATO and Russia due to the crisis in Ukraine. We see asymmetric threats, terrorism, we see cyber attacks from non-governmental actors as well as governmental actors and ongoing wars in the Middle East. In this situation of instability and unpredictability, we need to make sure that our armed forces deliver operational capability in order to face the security challenges around us. And to do so, we of course need to focus on military equipment, modern and updated military equipment. We need to focus on substantial exercises and training, but first and foremost, we must focus on recruiting the right personnel in order to achieve operational capability. This is a prerequisite for improving our military. So our nations all rely on searching further and wider than previously to ensure future military capability. So in the search for talent, no organization can afford to leave out 50% of the population. This is clearly demonstrated when studying Norwegian demographics and social history. The workforce is shrinking, leading to a wider search for talent. Moreover, not only are women fully integrated into the workforce and higher education, they are today in majority in the best universities and constitute the main part of the most prestigious university subjects that there is medicine, law, psychology, not just to mention some of them. This phenomenon is called feminization of society by several social scholars. And it's not only an Norwegian phenomenon, it's a phenomenon we see a lot of places all around the world. So women are also more professionally mobile than men, ceasing opportunities previously reserved for men. New female role models are emerging and gender awareness is catching out on in the face of stories of sexual harassment. The armed forces don't only need the strongest among us, the ones that can carry the heaviest backpacks and run quickest. They also need to recruit greater diversity, people with knowledge of science, technology, culture, languages, and social science. I repeat, we need the best suited and the most motivated regardless of color of the skin or sex. Conscription is a Norwegian institution, it links the armed forces to society. Moreover, it is tied with Norwegian nationhood and egalitarianism dating back to the constitution of 1814. In current practice, a conscription service is reserved for a select group of individuals through meaningful participation. It is not an add-on to the pool of professional soldiers. It is a separate entity and brand. And in our view, this has proven a recipe for effective capacity building. It is also an affirmation of the continued ties between the population and the armed forces. And not the least, it's a natural engine for talent search across genders. On October 2014, the Norwegian parliament changed the law to extend mandatory conscription to all citizens, both women and men. Universal conscription, we call it. The new law came into effect 1st of January 2015. Norway is the first country in NATO to give men and women equal rights and obligations when it comes to protecting their country's interests, values and territory. Now other countries may follow suit. Sweden is among them. It's a visible reform and perhaps even a silent revolution. I would say it's a game changer. The state no longer reserves the military profession to men. Men are no longer seen as the natural preference. In effect, it takes gender off the table when it comes to soldiering. This impacts not only the armed forces, but society and individuals. Every year, several thousand girls emerge from their military service, having learned new skills and having been tried and tested. That is bound to affect them as individuals as well as society at large and their surroundings. We do not have a goal that we should obtain 50% female soldiers. We want to recruit the best, the most motivated and the best suited. But after we introduced universal conscription, the amount of female soldiers has increased dramatically and it's increased from about 12% until now we have 24% of the female soldiers. And I am convinced that these numbers will continue to increase. So how has this gone? The military leadership reports a change in culture as a result of the shift. At the same time, Norwegian soldiers continue their training and service as usual. This is not an experiment suspending ordinary military activity. It is not a game. Our operational capability is too important to enter into such a game. We often get questions, particularly from foreign observers about public sentiments towards universal conscription. In general, there is very little controversy on this issue. Conscription is still highly regarded and it has become very popular to spend one year in service. Universal conscription is supported by the majority. On the other hand, some commentators claim that it is political correctness gone wild and that critical views are being censored. My take on this is as follows. Having given the order to conscript both genders, we now have to let the armed forces start their job. We have to allow them leeway to develop their practice in selection and training that ensures sustained operational capability. We have researchers who monitor progress and give their honest and candid feedback. And we do insist that there should be no different spheres for male and female soldiers. Or discrimination or harassment. Women must feel truly welcome. There must not exist mechanisms to keep them out or to keep them in their place. And the transition is going well. I will quote our Chief of Defence when visiting the Military Women's Network meeting in January this year. He said, I have had no reports from my units of women performing under standard. On the contrary, women conscripts are highly motivated and well suited. They are selected and they report that they enjoy the military service very well, even better than the male soldiers do. There are still myths surrounding women in the military profession. One particular stubborn one is that women in combat are said to invoke the protective instincts of their male colleagues, thus distracting these men from the war fighting tasks. It is sometimes referred to as the Israeli myth since it's supposedly based on Israeli experiences in the War of Independence in 1948. There have been very few studies to support that myth. Israeli historians refute this myth more than 20 years ago. In fact, the Israeli Defence Forces are moving towards greater gender integration in their combat forces. The international trend is more and more often that women and men fight side by side. And a number of women are receiving commendations for their bravery. Truth be told, women have served in the Norwegian Armed Forces for decades. The commitment to attract women into the armed forces is where it all starts. If determination is strong, results are more likely to follow. If dedication is half-hearted, failure is much more likely to follow. In the case of policies towards women and the armed forces, we see national cultures shining through. Gender roles are central to how a society is organized, so also in the case of the military. Therefore, one practice that works for one country may not necessarily work for other countries. We have all our own idiosyncrasies that guide our practice, and we also experience trial and error. But the clearest lessons learned is the following. Structural barriers and enablers make a big difference. I've already highlighted universal conscription. But selection practices and marketing campaigns may be other examples. For instance, in Norway, we always, in all our campaigns, in all our pamphlets, we now always show a lot of pictures of female officers and soldiers. Norway is often boosted to have some of the most general, equal policies in the world. In some areas, that's also the case. We have among the highest rates of women in the workforce. More than 60% of the students of higher education are women. Parental leaves are generous. But the military may also boost some strong accomplishments. The armed forces, the Norwegian Armed Forces, were made gender equal in 1985, when all positions became accessible to men and women. In 1992, we saw the first female fighter pilot. In 1995, the first female submarine commander. Currently, the chief of Air Force is a woman. And second in command of the army is a woman. The first female UN force commander was Major General Christine Lund in 2014, in Cyprus. She currently leads the UN true supervision in the Middle East, UNSO. These military women have made the rank after decades of dedication and no lack of persistence. The rate of service women is still too low. It's under 12%. But we are seeing a gradual increase. We are on the right path. And I'm convinced that the introduction of the universal conscription will help us and will increase the number of female service women in the years to come. So, I would like to end this note that we are on the right path. However, things will not automatically fall into place. If we are to deliver on the pledge of a reinforced gender perspective, as well as gender balancing, there needs to be a steady focus on gender problem areas. One such area is the challenge of achieving a decent work-life balance. It takes dedication and will to achieve this balance. And it should not be up to the parent. This is a concern for the leadership. Establishing flexible career paths makes sense, in which it is acceptable to occasionally move sideways instead of upwards to rest on the landing between steps. Norway is a stretched out country geographically with long distances from north to the south. Our armed forces are positioned outside the areas where the new urban generation probably want to live, far away from the major cities and towns. So beneficial commute options must be upheld. This is good family policy. Fewer international deployments have led to less pressure on the remaining parents, but we need a good system in place for periods in which deployments may become more frequent. We want our personnel to be parents and to have a full life and to be focused on their work. This is a never-ending goal. Our military has not escaped sexual harassment. In a study of 2010, negative sides of military culture were identified as one of the main causes for women leaving the military. A military psychologist recently argued that the recent military women have not joined the Me Too campaign is that they do not like to be seen as victims. The cases are there, but reporting them is an anathema to most. For any country with the ambition of increasing its rate of service women, it's imperative to really want it. To comply a concerted effort. Ask yourself and your staff what make people leave. Deal with the tough issues. Do not disregard the so-called soft issues. They may prove to be harder than you think. So I'm very happy to be here today and to listen to the experiences from my Nordic colleagues. And I think this is important arenas where we can learn from each other and hopefully we will all achieve in moving the gender balance in the right direction in our armed forces. Thank you so much. I'm thinking it's Major Niskanen who's next. Check him with the technology. When the AI comes, we'll all be taking over some computers. Ladies and gentlemen, it's a great privilege and an honor to be here today in such distinguished company. During the next few minutes, I'd like to share with you some thoughts on the Finnish perspective of women in the armed forces. My perspective is probably going to be a bit more tactical than what the previous distinguished speakers gave you. So hopefully it will give some insight on the whole picture on this issue. I'd like to begin by laying out the framework for Finnish defense. And defense is really the key word, the key term here. Finland does not have armed forces. It's all about defense and so that's why we call them defense forces. Homeland defense and ensuring the territorial sovereignty is really the main business for us. And the three first points are the key points for Finnish defense. At the same time, simultaneously, Finland is also very strongly committed to international cooperation, not just within Europe, but within also the United Nations and OSCE framework. And she is very active in participating in international peacekeeping missions and commit in international burden sharing. Concept of comprehensive security is something that we often get questions about. This is something that dates back to, this is a historical question, dates back to Finnish winter war during the Second World War. Finland at that time was really a nation in arms, so it was not just an effort for the defense only, but for the whole society. The desired end state for this concept of comprehensive security is, of course, securing vital functions of the society and guaranteeing well-being and security for Finnish citizens in any and all circumstances. It is. It would be a joint effort by the administration and business life, as well as NGOs and individual citizens. The Finns rank very high on statistical polls when asking for their will to defend their country in case of war. One of the highest in Europe going up to 92%. But it's not just a pretty concept we really do plan, prepare and train within the whole society for different types of disruptions, crisis and even scenarios where military force would be used against our country. So that's really the framework for Finnish defense. I'd like to take two minutes to present myself. I am an officer, major in the Finnish Air Force, joined the force in 1997. As a conscript, I volunteered for military service and after one year of military service decided to go for a career in the Air Force. Been trained as a fighter pilot, 15 years active in a fighter squadron in Eastern Finland and like I would said during the introductions, nowadays I teach air warfare studies at the National Defense University. During the little over 20 years that I've been in the force, I've seen the Finnish society change and I've seen the defense forces change. So the Finnish defense still relies on conscription and reserves created by the system of conscriptions. Of conscription, about 28 conscripts trained every year. Women may volunteer, but they do not get the call out. So compared with a Norwegian system of universal conscription which is different to begin with. Then again, I kind of want to stress that it's only the Finnish young men who get called. But the women volunteer enjoy equal opportunities. They have to fulfill the same requirements. There's absolutely no difference. All the requirements are the same. For example, I as a fighter pilot went through exactly the same training as my male colleagues which from my point of view makes sense because it's all about competence. It's all about military capability and generally plays no role in how well you fly your plane. From the very beginning all services branches and any type of training has been open to women. No position is excluded for women. Military service was made available for Finnish women in 1995. So a little bit later than in Norway, for example. Since then, well over 8,000 Finnish women have served. Of these women, it's about 60 to 70% who qualify for leadership training during their military service. That goes for NCOs as well as reserve officers. The percentage is quite high and we think that it's probably because they're all volunteers that they're more motivated maybe than their male colleagues. 10% qualify for officer training and I should say apply for officer training. Probably more would qualify but talking about career officer as shown here. After one year of military service people who decide to go for a career will apply for military academy which is called National Defence University. You can see the hashtag they boast to be the most disciplined university in Finland. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's really true or not. There you can see the programs on the slide. As I like to talk about myself I'll just say that I just finished a general staff officer course. This is where I am at my career at a soon 44 years of age and a rank of major. Doctoral program is something that doesn't concern each and every one. It's also on a voluntary basis. Still have a few remarks on Finnish military women and crisis management operations. As I said before it's both through United Nations, European Union, NATO and OSCE operations that will save Finnish women working towards a common goal of peacekeeping. About 25% of Finnish civil servants in these missions are women. However, the overall number including military personnel is just about 5% of the overall percentage. The gender aspect is a very important element in crisis management operations and Finland is committed to recruiting more women in operations. There's definitely similar points that the distinguished speaker from Norway touched upon during her presentation. So I'd like to conclude this very short presentation just a few remarks on where we are today. And the first one is really something that came up during both previous presentations the funds forces not in a vacuum but definitely a very important part of the society and we always say that the defense forces is a Finnish society in miniature size. And as the Finnish society is diverse and women are very active from the very top positions politically in business life so on then maybe we'll see the same development happening in the defense forces in the future. In the defense forces women are fully integrated but still few numbers. It's only been a little more than 20 years that women have been serving. And my last point and this is concerning especially the peacekeeping missions it is clear to us that more female peacekeepers are needed because there are a lot of sensitive difficult issues that need to be worked with the local populations and sometimes for depending on the culture depending on the situation any type of scenario it is probably a little bit easier for a local woman to go and take something up with a female peacekeeper instead of a male in a uniform. So with these points I'd like to present a Finnish perspective on women in defense forces actually thank you for your attention. Thank you very much Major Lieutenant, please. Thank you for letting me come here and speak today I will talk about the Swedish perspective. So I start direct and are you sure about that or can women do military service? That's questions I got before I started my basic training 2010. It wasn't from people within the armed forces it was from people outside people I met like teachers classmates friends they really had no clue my name is Emma Mölle as I was yeah and I'm a second lieutenant in the Swedish Air Force and I will tell you about my experience when I started my military career from 2010 until today I have worked both as a soldier and I'm currently working as an officer Swedish Armed Forces works together with other parts of the society the prejudices I met before I started my basic training were from people outside which means that the armed forces is not an out and on unit we're not working alone it was a question about whether women shall be or not be a part of the armed forces which also means that the armed forces is a place for everyone we have really need women in the Air Force or in the whole army or in the Marine every unit need women Sweden together with other countries do have international framework like UN Declaration of Human Rights and Women, Peace and Security these framework are the core to our national framework consisting of legislation policies programs and documents and from our national framework the armed forces has visions and steering documents one of those is gender mainstreaming it's something we work a lot with in armed forces basically the gender mainstreaming is found in political goals, legislation and steering documents and it mostly referred to the strategic level but it all comes down to every unit every unit need to have action plans what should we do how should we do implement the gender mainstreaming in our organization there are three perspectives that represent armed forces gender mainstreaming it's the rights which means that women and men alike shall have the same rights and obligations to serve in the armed forces and with equal opportunities to be effective in order to advance on equal terms we also have the recruitment and retention which means that the Swedish armed forces is a modern employer and must reflect the society which is established to protect and serve as to say the society's core values of democracy democracy, human rights and integrity of the state and the third part is the war fighting capability and it's the third perspective and that means that the war fighting capability will increase and strengthen when we recruit the most suitable soldier from a wider selection to succeed and implement the gender mainstreaming the armed forces is educating the personnel in gender mainstreaming but it doesn't matter what position you have or in what organization you work everybody gets this education everything to make it as a daily work we don't have it something you add on you should see it as any other education or any other working one of the actions taken by the Air Force to implement the gender mainstreaming and due to the action plans the Air Force do have mentors for all new officers both men and women the main purpose of that is to get a closer connection to the organization and somewhere you can talk to like if you get leadership problems or you have concerns about something you can always ask your mentor sometimes you don't want to go to your commander with the questions you have so I use my mentor for that if you're going to the statistics one part of the goal the Swedish Armed Forces has is to increase the amount of women and you might wonder how many women do the Swedish Armed Forces have the Swedish Armed Forces do have 30% women today and we have had that for almost 10 years it hasn't increased or decreased the only part is the officers it has increased but not so much the amount of soldiers has both gone up and down during the last 10 years it's still, it's steady during my first month of basic training we were 50% women and 50% men that's very unique I will probably never be in a unit like that again after my conscript service I started to work as a soldier it was a very small unit working with psychological operations for almost 2.5 years on that platoon there was never another woman there at first it surprised me because it was a very big contrast from what I had before but I got used to it I had very good colleagues they didn't care whether I was a woman or I'm a man because we all had the same mission we were there to be very good soldiers but the fact to be the only woman in that platoon could complicate things sometimes because to be able to succeed with psychological operations you sometimes need women because a woman can communicate with other people that maybe not the men can I did I didn't get that job because I was the strongest or fastest or the most accurate shooter it was because the military capability would increase I did get that job because I was a woman because I am a woman because I had something that other soldiers didn't have I had the ability to communicate with 50% of the population in Afghanistan who went there in 2012 one way to increase the amount of women in the armed forces is the gender neutral conscript service 2010 was the last year of conscript service for men since then we had a system based on recruitment and volunteer people both men and women from January this year we do now have a gender neutral conscript service it is based on voluntary personnel and conscripts and until the end of this year we are in need of 4000 recruits to fill the empty employment in armed forces last summer when I became an officer since then when I started to work I have worked in training new recruits and I will continue doing that because it is a very good job a recruit or a soldier does not only learn how to be a fast and accurate shooter the hardest part to learn a soldier according to me is when to fire and especially when not to fire these decisions must be based on the core values the military mission involves rights and obligations to the use of force we might put ours or other people's lives in danger that's why we have has to be very competent we need to be professional we need to have good or even great values the recruits do have a lot of participation during their conscript service we educate them in what is sexual harassment discrimination and how we should act around those questions we educate them in what it is and how to act if it happens because as we all know it does the development in those questions are going forward 2010 when I did my conscript service we didn't have any of that in our education and today they are having a lot from the first day since we do know it happened with sexual harassment the military or the Swedish Armed Forces was a part of the Me Too movement it spread widely on social media all over the world and as we know the military is a part of the society so the movement spread in the Armed Forces as well the movement made it clear no matter where you work or with what there is always employers that do have problems with individuals I think it's important to talk about the fact that it is individuals not the whole organization it is one or several individuals that is the problem because we do have legislation work, policies we have all the documents all we need is to talk about it the main purpose of the movement was to make the military a better place for everyone and to show that even if we are good we are not we are not finished we have to work more our Supreme Commander made it very clear that that type of behavior is not okay he said actions like that is not acceptable the employees that cannot live according to the Armed Forces core values has nothing to do in the Armed Forces so if we go back to those questions even though we have things we have to work on and we are not perfect but we do need more women in the organization just to be more equal so if I could answer those questions now or I wish I could 2010 but today I am really sure about that and women can do military service they even should do and I want to do it because it is a great job thank you


Today's session with the experts, and the moderator for this year's Q&A with the experts is my good friend and mobile heads conference team member, Ed Ray. Every time there is a very executive human resources from mobile board cooperation in 1996, we discovered the mobile heads in 2001 and he and his wife had attended their first mobile head conference in Denver in May 2004. And importantly, I am the local very coordinator for our Washington DC mobile heads conference. I live in Oregon with Jim, business and masters in organizational development. Please welcome him to the stage. I was certainly glad that now, at large, I was last year. That was my first opportunity to get up here, and so this year, I'm honored to be hosting this portion of the program. Questions that have come from the attendees here today, so I'm going to give those first track, and there's no particular order and no power here, just the way they fall on my desk. Before I do that, I want to introduce the members of the panel. He's founder of Energy Partner, the low cost investment management from all of the solutions. He's the author of six investment related books. A board of dot com columns and a Wall Street Journal expert contributed. Please welcome Rick here. Next to Rick is Bill Bernstein, who was here at the prior session. He's founder of efficient frontier advisors, author of several successful titles on finance and economic history. Please provide a real welcome to a total of my favorite, Bill Bernstein. Next to him is Alan Roth. He's the founder of Roth Logic. He's an author and an AALB economist. Please welcome Alan Roth. And last to talk to me is a colleague, copyrighted by some CPA, and the author of the blog, oblivious investor. He's offered a number of very successful digital books, including one of them, Mike Iver. He wants everyone to know. Okay, the first question here, this is from Bob Ruffin. The question is, for investors who can deal with the liquidity issues, what do you think about using private equity for a 10 to 20 percent component of a diversified investment portfolio? I'm running the private equity, put some money in private and get the same return to the small cap value index fund, or you could just buy a small cap value index fund. You know, I consider private equity to be a 2 to 20, meaning it's a 2 percent expense ratio and 20 percent of the upside. And I've never seen, in a purely efficient market, you know, one can't add an endo is, in my opinion, a private equity markets aren't perfect. This is Bob Bernstein. I had a value averaging for the last 90 years. It seemed like this technique is fully adopted. I'm feeling a bit lonely. What are your current thoughts on value averaging? It's basically nothing more and nothing less than a combination of dollar cost averaging and re-balancing. Okay, so I think it's slightly advantageous with respect to dollar cost averaging, as long as you have the liquidity to execute when it tells you to buy a whole lot of stock when the market is down. Value averaging has done pretty well over the past nine years in which you've gone to the web and market. So you've bought at fairly good prices. That's about the best case scenario, the worst case scenario for value averaging and dollar cost averaging. It's just a gradually rising market. It is almost all the time inferior to some investing, but the trick is that most people don't have that option. They're saving continuously. They don't have this enormous sum of money they only acquire in saving. So for someone who is periodically saving, who has a 401k plan, I think it's a firm in their assets. Okay, the next question is from Phil Evensson. Is it a myth that international funds need active management because global knowledge is needed for the markets that is not needed for the U.S.? There's no evidence to support that on the international side because the normally active market itself does poorly. That's hence international managers seem to. The fact is that the data over the long term doesn't show the U.S. So it would have emerging markets in there, it would have Canada, which is not in the ETH index. So I think that one of the problems is that active performance against a bad benchmark. Morningstar on the Bank of International, whether it's the ETH. You'll see that over the last five years it's performed indexing for people of average. Well, the answer, I did a little research, I'm going to write about it. Search for me, what they showed is that the average forward exposure to emerging markets and emerging markets over the last five years has been improved. Clougie, the A1 who makes that statement, says I haven't looked at the data, I haven't even looked at what the best thing internationally is. The markets might be less efficient so there are more opportunities to find stocks that are undervalued or get out of stocks that are overvalued, thanks to that nature. And so there we're talking about the efficient market hypothesis, but Jack always talks about the costs matters hypothesis, which is that the higher the costs, the higher the cost than passive funds. So by definition, after expenses, on average they're going to perform markets that's the cost matters hypothesis and it applies just as well to international as it does to US, just like moms, just like everything else. Your passive lens of attraction no longer works, we don't even need all references. Okay, so I was at an ETF conference a couple of weeks ago and Goldman Sachs announced their new series managed ETFs. So it's all this factor based investing and we can get into factor based investing questions if we have them, but here was the thing about the Goldman Sachs funds. Nine basis points. What they said was they wanted to take pricing off the table on the active versus passive debate and they were bringing these active funds and they are at indexing level so that their strategies actually outperform on a net basis. So we will see, I mean, you know, if that's the new thing, now active management is going to cost less than or equal to indexing and all things being equal, that should level the play, but it doesn't make active management outperform because it's still a zero sum game. Rick? Rick, the Goldman Sachs is going to earn nine basis points. Don't the profits completely disappear? No, because here are such good products. The value of these shares are going to explode and people are going to pile billions of dollars. Goldman Sachs only cared about their clients. Now, I'm trade mark and brilliant beta which is smarter than smart beta. Coming through to the next question, this is from an alternative. Assume that money is not needed for winning this question. Are there any strategies for receiving requirement of distribution? Is it best to burst the year into the year monthly? Generally speaking, the longer you can keep your money in a tax advantaged account, tax advantaged accounts. There are probably some cons, but a Q-LAC qualifier, what does it say on the end of the year? Well, you've got up to $125,000 and you're essentially buying longevity insurance that comes with the cost. It won't stop you from having to take RMBs. It will just make your RMBs somewhat smaller. This is exactly what Alan was getting at, saying that it has drawbacks, is that a Q-LAC can be a way to minimize your RMBs or rather reduce them. But it only makes sense if you want to buy a deferred annuity in the first place. It doesn't make sense purely as a tax planning tool if you have no use for deferred annuity. If you needed, or as Mel was saying, to pay taxes in April, will you take it in March? If you needed it before, as he was saying, Christmas presents in December, will you take it in November? But don't forget to take it when you're in trouble. So, I think from a tax perspective, whether you take it early, take it every single month, ends up being de minimis. Would you agree with that, Mike? Yes, yes, not one of the most important factors in your account. Yeah, so you just take it when it's best for you. You don't ever want to take taxes at least from me. But it would seem to me that you could almost make the opposite argument that one average return on the stock market is positive. So if you take it on the first of the year, what average would you be taking less at all at the ordinary income rate? And you would be getting that growth for even a certain year at the long-term capital gains rate. So you could make the opposite argument. You could make an opposite argument to that. And that is what depends what you do with the money. Because if you take it out at the beginning of the year, you could put it into a cashier tax. If you spend it, you're right. The opposite might actually happen. Sorry, I'm going to stick with taking anything. If you're making the argument that why just take out your R and D? Why not take out everything or a lot? Why not take out the top of your cash bracket and just do that? Why not do that? And that's because the growth, while it's in the account, even if it's the tax deferred account, you're not paying tax on the growth. It's an unusual distinction, but that's why it makes sense in the first place, really. I'm sticking with life. That's really different. It doesn't matter much. It's not one of the top thousand things in the investment. And there was a perfect example of Taylor's statement quote. Any approach to that? So the next question is from Paul Sutton. Please explain the global men's volatility fund. It appears to be a global division growth fund with currency hedging. Is this a Vanguard fund? Yes, it is. I haven't studied it, so I'm going to pass them. Have you studied this fund? I'm certainly not an expert on it, but very well. I spoke with John Emmerich yesterday over at Vanguard. I think there's some good logic to it. But when so many firms were launching the same type of fund and money flows into what has been hot, I worry about it, so I'm not a fan of it. I always worry who are my fellow shareholders? I think what is happening increasingly is that smart data is beating the dumb money. Okay, the next question is from Karen Bennett. This is for everyone if you care to share it. What is your personal asset allocation and why? What drives that allocation? The second part is do you take special security precautions with your financial accounts, i.e. you need passwords, frequency of changing passwords? Well, my asset allocation is 80% equity, 20% emergency fund, and it's mostly invested in the Vanguard total stock market. Actually, sorry, Jack. It's not because I'm at a brokerage firm, so I have to use ETFs as opposed to open-ded funds, because it's more costly to trade open-ded funds. Even Admirals shares have mutual fund companies that need ETFs, so to get the same thing, you trade it or you buy cheaper using ETFs as a commission. But anyway, as Jack was saying, it's an operational issue. And then I also have a DFA, Small Value Fund. But I'm going to get my Social Security and so forth, and my wife will get Social Security, so pretty much my expenses when I retire will be covered in Social Security, and I won't have to withdraw much money from my retirement accounts, so I can be more aggressive. So it depends on what else you have. You can't just look at the asset allocation. I would agree with that. I mean, I'm 40-60 because the 60 is what I'll need to retire for a generous margin of error. The 40% really isn't my money. I'm just running it. And, you know, I can't believe it. As you all know, in a long game, you stop. You play. Also, my forward is pretty darn aggressive. It's female or closer to my guess what it's referred to, but it's an ordinary portfolio, which I'm not as enthusiastic about as I was 10 or 20 years ago. But I still think it's a... 45-55 of my 45, 30 percentage point there in the U.S. and sorry, Jack, 15% international. My core buildings I've made mistakes, including my first S&P 500 index fund, was a driver's index fund. And of my 55% fixed income, I have an incredibly tiny pension. Roughly 70 percentage points are in CDs and the 30% in bond funds, of which total bond and inflation protected would be the core. And then I've recently started playing with a little bit of brokered CDs buying on the secondary market where a couple weeks ago you could get a 3.2% return on a CD that had maybe 3.75 years remaining. Taylor's favorite quote, there are many roads to doubling. I always like his other favorite quote, which is the majesty of simplicity. My portfolio is 100% Vanguard Life Strategy growth fund. I had the other question about security. I just tried to use a complex password and I used two-factor authentication, so... Because he's under 50? He lives a mile from me now. Okay, now these questions are coming from questions submitted on the ProTem.org. The catalyst is Vanguard introduced total international taxable bond funds, ETFs, which are currency heads. How do we hedge international bonds fit into a retirement portfolio? I would say not at all. As Jack's point out, the yields are very low. But basically, a hedged sovereign fixed income fund, foreign income fund, it goes almost identically to a U.S. market. You've got higher expenses, it's pretty much the same performance. The diversification that you get out of it is going to go, I even bother. I'm pretty agnostic about it. If you look at the four asset classes, U.S. stocks, international stocks, U.S. bonds, international bonds, it's the single largest asset class. So there's no argument to hold some of it. But when you look at the total fees between hedging and I strongly believe if you're going to own international bonds, they ought to be hedged to U.S. dollar if you live here in the U.S. not server stocks, but for bonds. So it's the extra fees. It's done incredibly well. I believe we're down to 0.99%. I think Frank Kinnery looked at that yesterday when we were talking. So I don't think it's going to make a break out of portfolio. So I would say agnostic, but the fees at 0.25%, including the hedging, are much more expensive than total bonds. I mean, one other fast thing, which is that this is very exploitative. I mean, we were having lots of harvest on the life cycle funds. That's not a reason not to own them. Yeah, they've got a reason not to own them. Yeah, but what's also on the life cycle funds are being targeted to ironing funds in spite of the fact that they have international bonds. And it's just not that much of a drag. I mean, you did agree with my own portfolio. If I was using a DIY allocation, frankly, I probably would not have included international bonds. But I'm using a life strategy fund. Banker put them in there. I mean, that would be incredibly cynical. I think that Banker put the international bond fund in the life strategy funds because they needed to fund that fund. That's my guess. I might have built, by the way, in the rest of the panel. I don't think we do need international bonds. I don't know if I ever did. But I've done the research. I don't see a purpose. It doesn't do anything to the portfolio. And it does cost more with the hedging overlap than U.S. bonds. I'm not... If you do it because you believe in it, fine. I mean, it's so de minimis again whether you have it or don't have it. It's fine, but I don't see a purpose. Okay, the next question is short and sweet. Are they still on the fat day through the summer? Short term, no. They're a risky asset.   Beats will do that, too. In the long run, I think they do provide some diversification. They've gotten to do it a little cheaper. I think their yields are not somewhere more than 4% now. So they're not bad asset asset class in terms of valuation. And they're not great. But, you know, you're hoping for periods like, you know, 2000 to 2005. They got nailed in 2002. Over that 5-year period, the return was much higher than the S&P 500. It's the true of all risky asset classes. They don't help you at all in terms of risk reduction in the short term or in the long term. They can give you a little help. I think... I own REITs, and often I recommend them. I mean, REITs did very well during the dot-com bubble, not so well. Obviously, during the real estate bubble. The stock index fund owns REITs. So, therefore, am I over-weighting the answer in relative to the stock market? Yes, but most real estate is not owned by the public market. So, you know, I have some REITs and I rebalance when they've done well on selling when they haven't done well on buying. I wrote an article, you know, called the Total Economy Portfolio. Total equal to 4% if you want to place it. And what I did was I took a look at GDP data and I said where does the economy earn money? How is money earned in the economy? And I stripped out individual pay and so forth and asked that allocation of the economy would be as opposed to the asset allocation of the industry as they make up the stock market. Because the stock market is made up of corporate board decisions. They decide whether they're going to capitalize using stocks or debt and private equity.  So, there's a lot of industries out there that capitalize using and real estate is certainly one. So, when you look at the Total Economy and you say if I created an asset allocation of industries based on the economy as opposed to the stock market then you would actually have an allocation of about 10% to a REIT index bond. And that's one argument for it. So, if you want your portfolio to look more like the economy than the stock market then you might add more REITs. And also what Bill says, in the long term the correlation between REITs and the stock market fluctuates. Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low and the correlation between REITs and the returns from bonds or interest rates also the correlation fluctuates. Sometimes it's positive, sometimes it's negative. So, there is a diversification benefit to having a slice in REITs. And you could add, I figured this out one time as I explored an article about it a couple of months ago. I thought maybe it was a year ago I'm losing perspective these days. But 10 to 15 basis points long term return to your portfolio by having a 10% slice in REITs. There are mortgage REITs, there are hybrids and then there are equity. And so, I agree with Bill that there is a long term benefit to it. There's also a benefit to it if you based on what the economy is as opposed to what the stock market is. So, I'm in agreement with REITs except for the ones I need to sell. Oh, yeah. We're going to do four more Wall Street firms now being going after by the SEC for selling private REITs. I'm pure brilliant interest and that's investing in the news. It's both of God's $3,000 shoots and no naps. And the guy who was on their front cover for doing deals just about every single week for the past year is a guy named Nick Shulch who will surely be wearing orange juice. There's a lot of private real estate business. Thank you. Next question is for Mike Piper. What do you see as the likelihood of social security means to have to be adopted? Does the potential for means testing change claiming strategies? For example, if current recipients are unlikely to be subject to any such rules is that a factor to consider in deciding to defer payment until age 70? I think that of some sort of means testing, but it's already that it's means tested in a variety of ways including the way it's taxed right now. So additional means of testing certainly doesn't seem out of the question. How that should play a role in claiming strategies is a tricky question because there would be a lot of ways to means test social security in a lot of different ways. We could just change the way it's taxed to further change the calculation of benefits in the first place. The end point formula, if you're familiar with that, it sounds like the person who asked the question is likely to be familiar with it to make it so that income was over the course of your career the less benefits you get in which case that wouldn't really change the claiming strategy. But there's a lot of ways that it could be implemented that would change the claiming strategy. So really given that we don't know what's going to happen and we don't know what means testing would look like much less whether necessarily it will happen I wouldn't make it a make-up. This is the kind of statement that only a registered developer would make. But the good news is that if you don't need the money it's probably not going to matter if it gets me tested. If you do need the money you're not... Okay, next question I'm curious if the panelists have any specific advice for long-term travelers e.g. six weeks or longer it used to be sell or may go away with the availability of around the clock around the globe internet access is there anything one still should do? Don't take your way to the result. Make sure you path forward. I also have to tell you this little card that you can get now I'll pull it out. If you're playing to Canada this is no good. I found out when I was trying to fly into Canada about three months ago to go to a conference I ended up having to fly to Detroit and drive into Canada because this car is no good if you're going... you can walk you can take a car it's called a passport car and when I got my passport I signed up for this because I said I'm in Detroit a lot and I need to go to Canada once in a while so I can just use this but I have to get to the airport and they're from Kansas City somewhere wherever I was and they said okay we need your passport and I pulled out this proud card and they said no I said what are you talking about and they said well look on the back and they helped to say this is good for talks about you can't land in Canada with this but you can get in any other way so I'm just warning you if you don't go to Canada you can't raise money what about the panel's view on factor investing what do you call it that's a great question if you're walking and you allege together if you have any factor exposure it may be a percent of extra return so you used all this you're not I mean certainly no more than you made some points extra about 20 to 30 I just started a couple of attendees what is factor investing oh I can hear you about the whole market the entire US total stock market but then within the market you can start dividing out groups like small cap versus large cap value versus growth and then you can start comparing risk and return and small versus large value versus growth and we find out that historically the value of growth now why has it outperformed growth is a different story I'll get to that or maybe Bill can talk about it because he knows and I don't but be I made you up for that one so you say well if value outperforms growth then if I put value in my portfolio then I should outperform the market and historically that has been correct so the premium by which it outperforms the market I will explain being in value stocks is actually more risky than being in growth stocks it's strange as that sounds therefore you should get paid more if you're in value stocks than being in growth stocks and the difference is a risk premium for being in value so now if you have the total market and you're going to take a value still if you really are going to put some in value the question is what is the exposure over the market and then how much of this factor this risk factor should you add to your data or total market portfolio that's really the question and the question becomes is that risk premium that you get from value going to be high enough going forward because value investing is always more expensive than data because beta is basically almost free so go ahead Bill I'll try and give you a box of operation which is that there's a value factor which is about 5% which sounds really great and it's pretty much everywhere you look every country, every time you hear it and so that's the bottom of my tractor which is value minus growth so for starters it's a long short portfolio so the best of all worlds you're going to get about half of that which is 2.5% and that's nobody else knows about it because nobody else knew about it and so what is it now that everybody and his dog Jack who jacked that for his last year is investing in it it's going to be less than 2.5% that's what's been historically marginally marketed and I think it's going to be less whether it's 0 or whether it's 1% it's certainly not going to be much better than 1% why is it there well I think it's a 2.5% which is this part of it is that value just doesn't do the quality in the United States of the world it doesn't even work so 29, 32 07, 109 value stocks did much worse than what 55% down those 55% that doesn't sound terrible but it's the difference between what we were being worth and 35 cents or 31 cents on the dollar at the bottom there's actually a year to do that for bread stocks they probably always will so I'm not as enthusiastic about it as I used to be that gets to the value portfolio which is basically all small value convertible data so we get 37 new portfolio and 30 is all small value and that's basically the market return the SMU 500 return over the past 30 or 40 years it's not going to work that well and that's the difference number one is because that 70% of the value that's been there was five year bonds, five year returns and nobody invests in those not even in DFA and it would not do that well moving forward and then the other reason is because you know the value can even be what used to be I just wrote a profile on dimensional budget visors DFA and there are core two factors small cap value and DFA is one of the good guys I just don't think they're very good when I asked them the question do they think the premium from small cap and value is a free lunch or compensation for taking on more rest they quickly replied compensation for taking on more rest so my question to them was if you were going to have let's say 60-40 portfolio of the DFA small cap value tilt wouldn't it be more efficient to buy a market cap tilt of a equivalent risk of let's say 65-35 you'd have far lower you'd have the same amount of rest far lower cost and much greater tax efficiency didn't answer that one there's a thing called factor crowding even googling factor crowding and what it simply means is there's so much money going into these strategies now it's going to diminish the bill was saying diminish the returns and you have to have this premium now that needs to be spread around many more people I was at an ETF conference a few weeks ago in Chicago and Ben Johnson the head of their ETF research put up a slide that showed that 31% of all money going into ETFs right now are going into these factor funds that's billions of dollars a year going into factor it's going to dilute it's going to dilute the returns and so as Bill was saying I don't know what the returns of being going forward is I'm guessing maybe if you put 20 or 30% of your portfolio in value or small cap value even to try to get a little more you might end up making 25 or 30 basis points extra return in your portfolio over the long term or you may not and I really don't know what the answer is yeah that's what I meant when I said the smart data is meeting the dumb money what is going to happen is the people who are sold these funds while they're more than standing broker are going to be calling that broker yelling and screaming sell during the next quarter and this asset class because of that will probably have significant negative premium which will set the bottom or higher risk base returns in the future smart data is out of that year very cynical about the entire concept decades ago when Jack and Rick were some of the first people writing about passive investing it was counter cultural almost it was most people weren't doing it these days the conventional wisdom is the passive investing is the way to go passive investing beats active that's the conventional wisdom so if you're launching a new fund you need to be able to say oh it's a passive fund but unfortunately you can't make a lot of money by trying to be vanguarded the low cost foreign index fund game they're so good at it but it's just not a way to make money so they need to come up with something that sounds like it's passive but can still make you some good money and I really get the impression that that's a large part of what's going on over the last several years with the explosion of smart data and other similarly big funds so I'm going to steal a joke that you'll hear Joe Dickson say tonight when he says it everybody goes ah we've heard that before okay but it came from Joel so he didn't hear it he said we went to a Halloween party last week and a ball of interest has index funds so when he says it tonight just go ahead and like we always discuss the stock fund for finding for retirement we'll go out for short to provide and say 10 to 15 years in a taxable money that you can grow use years before retirement I'm sorry but you it's asking what what would be a good mix for stocks bonds for shorter periods than for finding for retirement I don't know how to answer that I think you have to look at your entire life and take an asset allocation that you know maximizes the probability that you're not going to run out of money I think people are chasing income which is a mistake the same mistake that people made back in 2008-2009 but I don't look at here's a pot of money for 10 years here's a pot of money for 20 years et cetera it does kind of help mentally to one bucket of money that I'm not going to run out and you can put that but I used to think that picking the right asset allocation was the most important decision I've changed my mind sticking to whatever you pick is even more important I mean the way I do you know putting that would simply be a saving not be saving a lot of money in the future of college okay next question do buy and hold investors of funds like Vanguard Tour and that is to say investment grade core bottom funds need to worry about the emerging issues of bottom liquidity and possible runs on mutual funds and then it goes on to say these concerns seem to be real are leading the SEC to propose exit fees and their swing prices for bottom funds now Vanguard has to make a market they have to come up with a single night and those who want to get out will get out at the NAV and those who want to buy so there's no liquidity problem for within the fund itself are there going to be individual liquidity issues for some bonds individual bonds within that fund perhaps but you don't have to worry about that Vanguard they're my charter have to make a market at the end of the day between the buyers buyers and sellers and come up with a price on which you're going to sell your shares and somebody else is going to buy it and you don't have to worry about not having that we do not spend much on it but a jump bottom fund where some of the bonds of real liquid can have large spreads a total bottom fund is treasury and investment greatness spreads are typically fairly small so if there were a panic Vanguard could probably sell this bond that are relatively you know, thin, margin I actually was a little more worried about the PINCO total return because there are everything from investment great to junk and then as people build with the divorce with Bill Gross and the end of performance I actually thought their end of performance would be a little larger than it has been although I do believe over the last year it's under the form total bond you know, the other issue is municipal bonds, the median municipal bond that trades less than once per year so that the trading model is the issue of those of us who help the end of our union bonds funds which are very great through crisis saw that liquidity saw that liquidity often or significant any really falls that have nothing to do with the intrinsic debt worthy of the issuers for buyers of union bonds credit I've seen was 10.25% and the client, believe it or not was an attorney with the SEC this is a rush in of Rick and Alan with current devaluation and increasing public debt across all countries it's still safe to have all the investable assets involved safe to invest everything in U.S. company question is primarily while currency impact on assets do they increase the deficit and each country trying to lower the rates? Raise to the bottom I was like I'm going back for Bill by the way for many many years and Bill was saying I think Rick would one of the things we work for a bit about China here is that it's a communist country and there's one thing I learned that communist countries lie so we don't really know how bad things are in China right now I heard estimates that their actual GDP might be at least 2% below what they're saying it is well that affects all the other emerging markets around China and supply China and we're seeing some issues we are getting ready for another round of sovereign debt default and emerging markets which happens once in a while that's what I believe it fits into the questions per se but we were talking about a single country credit risk so I think that that is the risk in the marketplace maybe I wish the US government weren't doing such deficit spending and I blame it on the republicans democrats, independents with that said I'm not going to put everything in gold so I don't know where else to invest I diversified global portfolio I would invest in stocks and other planets if I knew how to do that I would have a solution I would have never forgotten I hope there will be some fiscal responsibility eventually now you struggle with the things that you predict all the things that are obvious now that's what history teaches us and since you can't predict the future you should diversify this is sort of in the same vein this is general foreign investing for a long term investor if foreign investors investment could be held in the native currency as opposed to the individual foreign currency would it be desirable to do so I think we answered that I would not do a currency a currency volatility that comes from owning international stocks because it may not be correlated with the US stock market the lapse of the dollar let's say you're going to get the return on currency it's not a prediction currency is going to do better it's just an extra form of diversification volatility that's not correlated is a good thing I mean there's a good quantitative work that suggests that your currency exposure should be equal in your portfolio should be equal to your stock and foreign stock exposure and the default way of doing that the way we almost all do it is we own the international stock index funds that we own that are not hedged and then our domestic bonds are hedged and foreign ones they're hedged too now if you think about it there's no reason why you couldn't do it the opposite way around if you have 20% of your portfolio with international stocks you can hedge all of that and no 20% international bonds of our image because the dollars in the end and the euros in your portfolio the English accounts in your portfolio don't know that there would stop your bonds today but that's adjustably much more difficult to do so we don't do it the way we do it by default which is these big international index funds that are not hedged and we hopefully aren't investing in unhedged international bonds Hey what's your guidance about buying municipal bonds versus CD in the tax of the workhouse? I mean the CD's obviously are better off than the tax deferred accounts and for a you don't want to own communities in your tax deferred account you know my own view I think I've said this before some of you are newer but you know meetings represent about 10% of the investment grade market bond market I wouldn't go more than let's say 2.5x and you know my big concern is with 2-3 trillion of unfunded pension liabilities and that's assuming 7.5% you know returns for the pensions themselves if Jack is right that stocks are in 4% and bonds are in 3% in 10 years with all the baby boomers retiring in this pension and health care liabilities being paid out there could be stress on the new market so I wouldn't over weight it and I am not narrative with you I don't look like narrative with you I am not conservative narrative with you I have a question for that what risk should I be aware of that your intermediate term tax and debt fund and investors share well a quick risk in a crisis so make sure you are not depending on why Allen recommends why share your taxable sooner or later and also if you want some CDs and some credit risk I would say take risks with stocks and what you want mostly to be bound by the US government I like the Vanguard intermediate term you can use it all the people that this is your long-term investment portfolio just macro municipal risk which by the way municipal bonds are different than corporate bonds corporations can go out of business states can't really go out of business cities can't really go out of business although you know we are in Detroit I know the credit quality rating of municipalities as they sell investment grades sold out of that portfolio extremely low probability that something that's investment grade and say a Vanguard municipal bond fund is going to default the next day so and again you are talking about cities here where they restructure a city just can't go out of business so it's a little different of a city school if it's a single A rating different than a single A rating of a water business or as a school water business they can restructure debt if you have stocks you have zero, if you have bonds you've got 5 cents it's exactly right that you do a great question only a very small percent of municipalities default it's not credit that's your word about this it's purely liquidity risk and you should have other means for that for a municipal bond fund that's more long term so if you need immediate liquidity you really should have an emergency fund to cover your six months or years with a living expense and that could be something else there weren't tens of millions of baby boom in retiree it's going to happen I'm saying that if stocks don't which I believe is right on that there could be some systemic stress and there are libraries that can raise taxes and people can move in the ways they depends on the law they can renegotiate what those liabilities to their employees are they can help employees increase contributions I wouldn't want to be the politician running on a platform that I want to increase taxes and decrease services even for an investor who is 100% taxable I would limit their exposure to many unions to no more than 40 or 50% of your employees if you live in a high tax state and you don't have to pay state income tax on income the next question is is there an obsession in our culture with the number as opposed to a guaranteed year income such as social security pension if so why well you know you got to buy that you know the guaranteed stream of income doesn't come for food you got to buy it you need to come you know you can make points it's a very good point that you do have a certain amount of risk between the time you acquire it and the time you buy that stream for ability for social security but that's the risk it's almost impossible for every reason there's such a focus on it is simply because our retirement system is overwhelmingly defined contribution plans these days which you look at your statement and tell you how much income that translates into it just tells you how much money is sitting there I do think it's a mistake to focus on that so much and clearly I'm always thinking about social security clearly that's one of the reasons why people have reluctant to spend down their portfolio to delay social security even in cases when it's an overwhelmingly good deal to do so is because they've focused on this number for so long and watched it go up and up and up and now the idea of watching it go down even if what you're getting is an incredibly safe very good deal of an income stream the paradigm that I like to use to display that is imagine a pair of 25 to 65 year old retiree twins one who's got $50,000 of annual income bations that is cold that is inflation adjusted where it has a million dollars among some or a gradually improved who do you think is my one of my first who do you think is going to sleep better when he or she is 78 years old for whatever reason everyone in this room was programmed to live with their needs and build up a nest egg and we're different than a lot of other people and doing so leads us to focus we've spent our whole life building up that nest egg we can't spend it down we can't concentrate too much on income and of course lots of brilliant funds like the Schwab Ultra Short safe alternative to Monfa and the Zua Volatility just a free lunch until it lost half of its value we we keep making these same mistakes again so I would focus more on what a safe spin down rate is and I think if you play a perfect game a portfolio of somewhere close to 50-50 a perfect game is 3.5% increasing with inflation which of course you have to do to keep your standard of living the same but income is the biggest threat to people's retirement plans and we are not efficient learners the same mistakes that we made in 2008 where the average bond fund lost 8% total bond fund gained 5.2% total bond fund gained 5.2% we're making again so now you figure out how to have prosperous retirement but then add your few expense check amounts yes yes we're involved in suicide tonight hahahaha hahahaha hahahaha okay then hahahaha hahahaha hahahaha let's get the panel


I'm Oluwashi Omobashala, a librarian from Nigeria working at the British Library in London on a project tag, big data and libraries. The video you're about to watch focuses on digital archiving. The aim of the video is to provide basic knowledge about digital archiving for librarians and archivists in training, especially in Africa. Digital archiving starts with digitization of archival materials which involve the use of technology, both hardware and software in managing valuable records that are born digital and those converted into digital form. Materials for digital archiving should be original, authentic, reliable and usable. Digital archiving involves planning, creation of digital objects, acquisition or injection, cataloging, preservation and storage, access for use and reuse and evaluation. However, the processes can vary depending on the type of material. To plan well for digitization one needs to spend quite a bit of time on scoping for projects and this would involve answering quite a few questions such as what are we to digitize and why is this important, who is the audience, we're digitizing this for, how are we going to achieve the digitization, what access would look like and what do we know about the collection, do we have metadata available and of course to consider what the budget will be, what the condition of the collection is and are there any rights issues with the collection. Archiving ensures preservation of valuable records for long-term use, efficient retrieval of important records for use and reuse. It prevents loss of valuable records. From an archiving point of view the main things we're worried about is web resources rot disappear very quickly so we did some studies on the stuff we've collected over the years and whether it's still on the web now and we found that even within one or two years more than half of the content we'd archived had already disappeared from the live web so the risk, so it's not just about collecting a snapshot of how the stuff looked at a given time, it's also the fact that most of this content simply disappears within a year or two of being published and we found that when you're 10 years out there's less than about 5% of content is still on the web, you know unchanged as it was 10 years ago. Archiving ensures the provision of records that can tell stories about events, individuals, people or organizations and our calver materials can be used as evidence during legal proceedings to ensure justice. During preparation for digital archiving there is the need for a careful consideration of both hardware and software that will be used to avoid digital obsolescence. When you have a book you can put a book on a shelf very safely for a long term, long time without anything happening to it but if you have a digital object and you don't check it regularly it can become inaccessible very quickly and that's because the world around it changes so quickly so the means that you needed to have in order to access it may not be available anymore but we may not be aware of it so what we need to do is we need to what we call characterize it so we need to make an inventory of all the very important properties of this digital object and then we need to keep a watch and see how the world changes and whether there's a certain risk arising that may affect this digital object so when we find out that for example file formats no longer supported or a license for a software product expires and we have no right anymore to access it then we need to think about what are the preservation actions that we need to take in order to ensure the long-term access or the continued access of this and so what we have is we have constant watchfulness and we have as I said earlier the provenance where we're going from possibly one migration to another so we keep the thing accessible or alternatively if we don't want to migrate for example we could say we emulate the platform on which the digital object was used so if I have an old computer system and this computer system is just not used anymore but there are lots of files that all use to run on it what I can do instead I can take a modern computer system and I can emulate that old system on it and that means then on the emulation platform I can still use all those digital objects hardware used for digital archiving include computers scanners cameras and storage devices the scanners the main scanners we use the small the social 1200 scanners there is kind of that has a glass platen but that platen doesn't have to be used we can scan without the glass on those machines so for more fragile items stuff that we have to be particularly careful with those machines are very good for that sort of work also the software will correct out the curvature in the pages to a to a large degree the beds are highly adjustable so regardless of the size of the item we can we can get them to sit on there nicely the larger machines like the one behind me although we can scan without the glass it's a little more restrictive on the machine like this however on these machines the beds are highly adjustable the pressure of both the glass and the bed itself can be adjusted to very high degree to make sure that there's no damage to the material but some material is sent to us and we are told you cannot touch the surface with the glass so this will dictate which machines we use for which projects as I was speaking about the collection care issues earlier also within one project we might have different types of material this is the machine we would use for any cut sheet items or loose sheet items a lot of projects that we get people sending could be anything from card files we might have material that's actually been cut so we can feed it through as individual sheets and this automatically scans both sides at the same time it cannot detect colour and black and white or grey scale and then we can output to all the different formats from this as well the operator only has to select whichever job with the predetermined job settings in so they select them it defaults to open we size the tray at the bottom it has ultrasonic sensors which detect this paper there and will also detect two sheets feeding at once as well and will give us a warning so when we're happy it's loaded okay we can then start the batch scan which I've just done and as you can see it's very fast it's I haven't actually got the auto rotate on but we can turn the auto rotate on we don't always have it on because sometimes you have images that aren't meant to be rotated we do that manually afterwards but as you can see it's captured front and back if it's identified some colour it will capture in colour if it hasn't identified colour it'll capture in the black and white or grey scale card files it's actually got ignore blank page on so it's not captured the back because there's nothing on there and it's just captured the front of the card we would then once it's finished just click on the finalised button and that actually if you can see this it's starting to process the batch and that will be creating from the job setting either we've asked it to just send a tiff or a multi-tiff to a particular folder on the network it might be creating a PDF and it might be doing the OCRing of that PDF as well and delivering it to a folder we've specified already for that job or someone to them check the work and post-process it further the dates the archival object was born should be in the ISO 601 2004 standard the ISO 8601 2004 standard formats provide a consistent method for fashion tracking over the years it is also important to state the context in which a digital object was created for an estimation of the file size for an image the formula displayed can be used for easy access either globally or locally archival materials can be deployed by adapting the open archive information system ISO standard<PHONE_NUMBER> see ICS standards for more information the key I think first step if you want people to access your information is think about who are the like the user groups that may want to come to you and where they're likely to find the information that you want to get them to access so having your own library catalog or archival catalog or sort of a page of information of the collections that you have is quite important but equally you have to make sure the other services can pick up the information so for example when you design your website it's quite important to think about how can Google and other search engines index that website and have enough information on there that sort of set up in the way that Google can find the information the keyword here is search engine optimization and there are quite a lot of websites that sort of provide basic information on how to set this up so it's effectively thinking outside the existing library catalog and say what are my users using are there social networks that are perhaps prominent in the country that you are in or are there sort of tools that are provided by publishers Digital objects DOI should be obtained for a cover material A DOI is a special persistent tag for an uncover material DOIs link the user to three things the object its metadata and the current provider's commit met statement we use as a as an overall framework met the format that was developed at the Library of Congress for maintaining information about digital objects we use that as a framework and within that we may plug in then other metadata elements relating to items like elements like preservation and description so for preservation we would use the premise standard for descriptive metadata we'd use the descriptive standard which is appropriate to the type of material so in the case of books and serials traditional material that is you that is cataloged by the library we would use something like the Mark 21 or Mark XML descriptive framework use the new RDA resource description access standard for cataloging rules for that material but for something like manuscript material we would use a different set of descriptive standards which are appropriate to that archival world so for example the ISADG standard for general materials we might in the case of doing some detailed digitization of a manuscript particular asian materials at the moment we're experimenting with the text encoding initiative metadata standard for enriching the descriptive information around the manuscript itself and also creating metadata we're holding that in our integrated archive and manuscript system and we are then exporting that to users as required with commercial material often you can use standard identifiers such as in the case of an ebook an ISBN or e-journal an ISSN to sometimes derive additional data to enhance the description but in the case of the unique manuscript and older digital material that's much harder to do due to the lack of widely available unique identifiers that type of material but one thing we are also looking at doing is where possible enhancing certain elements within the descriptive metadata itself through the addition of things like the new international standard name identifier the effective at the ISBN for authors effective a unique identifier that enables us to assign identities incredibly wide range of material to deal with a huge amount of challenge to to handle and a lot of expect expectations to to deal with as well and that's always perhaps the the greatest challenge of all because people are always seeing the most cutting-edge developments in the world I hope you've enjoyed this video and you found it both useful and informative many thanks to Shabnam British Library and British Library staff for supporting the project