Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats to welcome the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, and the founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab. Immediately following this session, we ask you to kindly remain seated for the following session, which will be the global economic outlook. Thank you. Mr. President, you have been so warmly received yesterday here in Davos. It is now my great pleasure to officially welcome the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, to the closing session of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting 2018. Mr. President, you cannot imagine how much we are looking forward to your speech. Not just the 3,000 leaders assembled here in Davos, but also the millions joining us globally, thanks to the presence of key media from around the world. Mr. President, on behalf of the business leaders here in the room, let me particularly congratulate you for the historic tax reform package passed last month, greatly reducing the tax burden of U.S. companies, fostering job creation, as well as stimulating economic growth in the United States, but also providing a tremendous boost to the global economy. Davos is the place where leaders of states and industry come and work together in the pursuit of global peace and prosperity. We live in an interdependent world, where decisions made by one nation, particularly by the United States, impact all other countries. I believe that today we need to strike the right balance between the necessary rebuilding of national social contacts, and at the same time strengthening our multilateral system to address critical issues such as trade, investment, terrorism, and migration to name just a few. Mr. President, the role of the United States and your personal leadership is absolutely essential. For this reason, your message here has tremendous relevance. Of course, I am aware that your strong leadership is open to misconceptions and biased interpretations. Therefore, it is so essential for us in the room to listen directly to you. This forum, as it has done for nearly five decades, should create a base for dialogue and global cooperation, and I quote you, Mr. President, strong, sovereign nations with different values, different cultures, and different dreams do not just coexist, but work side by side on the basis of mutual respect. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, to the stage. Thank you, class, very much. It's a privilege to be here at this forum where leaders in business science, art, diplomacy, and world affairs have gathered for many, many years to discuss how we can advance prosperity, security, and peace. I'm here today to represent the interests of the American people and to affirm America's friendship and partnership in building a better world. Like all nations represented at this great forum, America hopes for a future in which everyone can prosper, and every child can grow up free from violence, poverty, and fear. Over the past year, we have made extraordinary strides in the U.S. We're lifting up forgotten communities, creating exciting new opportunities, and helping every American find their path to the American dream, the dream of a great job, a safe home, and a better life for their children. After years of stagnation, the United States is once again experiencing strong economic growth. The stock market is smashing one record after another and has added more than $7 trillion in new wealth since my election. Consumer confidence, business confidence, and manufacturing confidence are the highest they have been in many decades. Since my election, we've created 2.4 million jobs, and that number is going up. Very, very substantially. Small business optimism is at an all-time high. New unemployment claims are near the lowest we've seen in almost half a century. African-American unemployment has reached the lowest rate ever recorded in the United States, and so has unemployment among Hispanic Americans. The world is witnessing the resurgence of a strong and prosperous America. I'm here to deliver a simple message. There has never been a better time to hire, to build, to invest, and to grow in the United States. America is open for business, and we are competitive once again. The American economy is by far the largest in the world, and we've just enacted the most significant tax cuts and reform in American history. We've massively cut taxes for the middle class and small businesses to let working families keep more of their hard-earned money. We lowered our corporate tax rate from 35 percent all the way down to 21 percent. As a result, millions of workers have received tax cut bonuses from their employers in amounts as large as $3,000. The tax cut bill is expected to raise the average American's household income by more than $4,000. The world's largest company, Apple, announced it plans to bring $245 billion in overseas profits home to America. Their total investment into the United States economy will be more than $350 billion over the next five years. Now is the perfect time to bring your business, your jobs, and your investments to the United States. This is especially true because we have undertaken the most extensive regulatory reduction ever conceived. Regulation is stealth taxation. The U.S., like many other countries, unelected bureaucrats. And we have, believe me, we have them all over the place. And they've imposed crushing and anti-business and anti-worker regulations on our citizens with no vote, no legislative debate, and no real accountability. In America, those days are over. I pledged to eliminate two unnecessary regulations for every one new regulation. We have succeeded beyond our highest expectations. Instead of two for one, we have cut 22 burdensome regulations for every one new rule. We are freeing our businesses and workers so they can thrive and flourish as never before. We are creating an environment that attracts capital, invites investment, and rewards production. America is the place to do business. So come to America where you can innovate, create, and build. I believe in America. As President of the United States, I will always put America first, just like the leaders of other countries, should put their country first also. But America first does not mean America alone. When the United States grows, so does the world. American prosperity has created countless jobs all around the globe. And the drive for excellence, creativity, and innovation in the U.S. has led to important discoveries that help people everywhere live more prosperous and far healthier lives. As the United States pursues domestic reforms to unleash jobs and growth, we are also working to reform the international trading system so that it promotes broadly shared prosperity and rewards to those who play by the rules. We cannot have free and open trade if some countries exploit the system at the expense of others. We support free trade, but it needs to be fair and it needs to be reciprocal, because in the end, unfair trade undermines us all. The United States will no longer turn a blind eye to unfair economic practices, including massive intellectual property theft, industrial subsidies, and pervasive state-led economic planning. These and other predatory behaviors are distorting the global markets and harming businesses and workers not just in the U.S., but around the globe. Just like we expect the leaders of other countries to protect their interests, as President of the United States, I will always protect the interests of our country, our companies, and our workers. We will enforce our trade laws and restore integrity to our trading system. Only by insisting on fair and reciprocal trade can we create a system that works not just for the U.S., but for all nations. As I have said, the United States is prepared to negotiate mutually beneficial bilateral trade agreements with all countries. This will include the countries in TPP, which are very important. We have agreements with several of them already. We would consider negotiating with the rest, either individually or perhaps as a group, if it is in the interests of all. My administration is also taking swift action in other ways to restore American confidence and independence. We are lifting self-imposed restrictions on energy production to provide affordable power to our citizens and businesses, and to promote energy security for our friends all around the world. No country should be held hostage to a single provider of energy. America is roaring back, and now is the time to invest in the future of America. We have dramatically cut taxes to make America competitive. We are eliminating burdensome regulations at a record pace. We are reforming the bureaucracy to make it lean, responsive, and accountable, and we are ensuring our laws are enforced fairly. We have the best colleges and universities in the world, and we have the best workers in the world. Energy is abundant and affordable. There has never been a better time to do business in America. We are also making historic investments in the American military because we cannot have prosperity without security. To make the world safer from rogue regimes, terrorism, and revisionist pouts, we are asking our friends and allies to invest in their own defenses and to meet their financial obligations. Our common security requires everyone to contribute their fair share. My administration is proud to have led historic efforts at the United Nations Security Council and all around the world to unite all civilized nations in our campaign of maximum pressure to denuke the Korean Peninsula. We continue to call on partners to confront Iran's support for terrorists and block Iran's path to a nuclear weapon. We are also working with allies and partners to destroy jihadist terrorist organizations such as ISIS, and very successfully so. The United States is leading a very broad coalition to deny terrorist control of their territory and populations, to cut off their funding, and to discredit their wicked ideology. I am pleased to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has retaken almost 100 percent of the territory once held by these killers in Iraq and Syria. There is still more fighting and work to be done and to consolidate our gains.  I want to thank those nations represented here today that have joined in these crucial efforts. You are not just securing your own citizens but saving lives and restoring hope for millions and millions of people. When it comes to terrorism, we will do whatever is necessary to protect our nation. We will defend our citizens and our borders. We are also securing our immigration system as a matter of both national and economic security. America is a cutting edge economy, but our immigration system is stuck in the past. We must replace our current system of extended family chain migration with a merit-based system of admissions that selects new arrivals based on their ability to contribute to our economy, to support themselves financially, and to strengthen our country. In rebuilding America, we are also fully committed to developing our workforce. We are lifting people from dependents to independents because we know the single best anti-poverty program is a very simple and very beautiful paycheck. To be successful, it is not enough to invest in our economy. We must invest in our people. When people are forgotten, the world becomes fractured. Only by hearing and responding to the voices of the forgotten can we create a bright future that is truly shared by all. The nation's greatness is more than the sum of its production, and nation's greatness is the sum of its citizens, the values, pride, love, devotion, and character of the people who call that nation home. From my first international G7 summit, to the G20, to the UN General Assembly, to APEC, to the World Trade Organization, and today at the World Economic Forum, my administration has not only been present, but has driven our message that we are all stronger, when free, sovereign nations cooperate toward shared goals, and they cooperate toward shared dreams. Represented in this room are some of the remarkable citizens from all over the world. You are national leaders, business titans, industry giants, and many of the brightest minds in many fields. Each of you has the power to change hearts, transform lives, and shape your country's destinies. With this power comes an obligation, however, a duty of loyalty to the people, workers, and customers who have made you who you are. So together, let us resolve to use our power, our resources, and our voices, not just for ourselves, but for our people to lift their burdens, to raise their hopes, and to empower their dreams, to protect their families, their communities, their histories, and their futures. That's what we're doing in America, and the results are totally unmistakable. It's why new businesses and investment are flooding in. It's why our unemployment rate is the lowest it's been in so many decades. It's why America's future has never been brighter. Today I am inviting all of you to become part of this incredible future we are building together. Thank you to our hosts. Thank you to the leaders and innovators in the audience, but most importantly, thank you to all of the hardworking men and women who do their duty each and every day, making this a better world for everyone. Together, let us send our love and our gratitude to make them, because they really make our countries run. They make our countries great. Thank you, and God bless you all. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. President, for this inspiring speech. As it is tradition at the Forum, I will ask you one or two questions, and my first question is, why is the tax reform, why has it been of such a high priority for your administration? Well, first of all, I want to congratulate you. This is an incredible group of people. We had dinner last night with about 15 leaders of industry, none of whom I knew, but all of whom I've read about for years, and it was truly an incredible group. But I think I have 15 new friends, so this has been really great what you've done in putting it together, the economic forum. The tax reform was a dream of a lot of people over many years, but they weren't able to get it done. Many people tried. And Ronald Reagan was really the last to make a meaningful cut in reform, and ours is cutting and reforming. We emphasize cut, but the reform is probably almost as important. We've wanted to do it. It is very tough politically to do it, hard to believe that would be, but it is very, very tough. That's why it hasn't been done in close to 40 years. And once we got it going, it was going. And the big, and I wouldn't say a total surprise, but one of the big things that happened and took place is AT&T and some others came out very early and they said they were going to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to people that work for their companies. And you have 300,000, 400,000, 500,000 people working for these companies. And all of a sudden it became like a big waterfall, a big beautiful waterfall where so many companies are doing it. And even today they just announced many more, but every day they announced more and more. And now it's a fight for who's going to give the most. It started at 1,000. Now we have them up to 3,000. This is something that we didn't anticipate. Oftentimes in business, things happen that you don't anticipate. Usually that's a bad thing, but this was a good thing. This came out of nowhere. Nobody ever thought of this as a possibility even. It wasn't in the equation. We waited, we said wait until February 1st when the checks start coming in and people, Klaus, have a lot more money on their paycheck because it's not just a little money. There's a lot of money for people making a living doing whatever they may be doing. And we really thought February 1st it was going to kick in and everybody was going to be, well, we haven't even gotten there yet and it's kicked in. And it's had an incredible impact on the stock market and the stock prices. We've set 84 records since my election, record stock market prices, meaning we hit new highs 84 different times out of a one-year period. And that's a great thing. And in all fairness that was done before we passed the tax cuts and tax reform. So what happened is really something special. Then as you know and as I just said, Apple came in with $350 billion. And I tell you, I spoke with Tim Cook. I said, Tim, I will never consider this whole great run that we've made complete until you start building plants in the U.S. And I will tell you this moved up very substantially. But when I heard 350, I thought he was talking, I thought they were talking $350 million. And by the way, that's a nice size plant, not the greatest but not bad. And they said, no, sir, it's $350 billion. I said, that is something. Well, we have tremendous amounts of money, including my new found friends from last night, great companies. They're all investing when one of the gentlemen said he's putting in $2 billion because of the tax cuts. I said to myself, wow, he's actually the cheap one in the group because they're putting in massive numbers of billions of dollars. So I think you have a brand new United States. You have a United States where people from all over the world are looking to come in and invest. And there's just nothing like what's happening. And I just want to finish by I have a group of people that have been so out to have a whole lot of them. So I won't introduce because then I'll insult at least half of them. But I've had a group of people that work so hard on this and other things. And we're really doing, we had a great first year, so successful in so many different ways. And there's a tremendous spirit when you look at all of the different charts and polls and you see, as an example, African American unemployment at the historic low. It's never had a period of time like this. Same with Hispanic women at a 17 year low. It's very heartwarming to see, but there's a tremendous spirit in the United States. I would say it's a spirit like I have never witnessed before. I've been here for a while. I have never witnessed the spirit that our country has right now. So I just want to thank you all and all of those that are pouring billions of dollars into our country or $10 into our country. We thank you very much. Thank you. Mr. President, I will ask you maybe a personal question, but before doing so, sounds very interesting. I didn't know about this one. I would like to acknowledge the strong residents of your Cabinet members who tremendously contributed to the discussions. Good. I would like to do that. That's very good. Now, Steven, Wilbur, Gary, Robert, even my general and my various other generals, you know, we're making our military protection a little bit better for us too. So thank you very much. Does everybody understand that? I think so. Thank you all for being. Now, my maybe personal question would be what experience from your past have been most useful in preparing you for the presidency? Well, being a businessman has been a great experience for me. I've loved it. I've always loved business. I've always been good at building things, and I've always been very successful at making money. I'd buy things that would fail, that would be failures, and I'd turn them around and try and get them for the right price, and then I'd turn them around, make them successful. And I've been good at it, and that takes a certain ability. And historically, I guess there's never really been a businessman or business person elected president. It's always been a general or a politician throughout history. It's always been a general. You had to be a general, but mostly it was politicians. You never have a businessman. And then in all fairness, I was saying to Klaus last night, had the opposing party to me won, some of whom you backed, some of the people in the room, instead of being up almost 50 percent, the stock market is up since my election, almost 50 percent. Rather than that, I believe the stock market from that level, the initial level, would have been down close to 50 percent. That's where we were heading. I really believe that, because they were going to put on massive new regulations. You couldn't breathe. It was choking our country to death. And I was able to see that, Klaus, as a business person. The other thing is, I've always seemed to get, for whatever reason, a disproportionate amount of press or media. And throughout my whole life, somebody will explain someday why, but I've always gotten a lot. And as a businessman, I was always treated really well by the press. You know, the numbers speak and things happen. But I've always really had a very good press. And it wasn't until I became a politician that I realized how nasty, how mean, how vicious, and how fake the press can be, as the cameras start going off in the back. But overall, I mean, the bottom line, somebody said, well, they couldn't have been that bad because here we are, we're president. And I think we're doing a really great job with my team. I have a team of just tremendous people. And I think we're doing a very special job. And I really believe it was time. And it was time to do that job, because I don't think the United States would have done very well if it went through four or eight more years of regulation, and really a very anti-business group of people. We have a very pro-business group. We have regulations cut to a level. In the history of our country class, this was reported recently. In one year, we've cut more regulations in my administration than any other administration in four, eight, or 16 years in the one case. We've cut more regulations in one year. And we have a ways to go. I mean, we're probably 50 percent done. And we're going to have regulation. There's nothing wrong with rules and regulations. You need them. But we've cut more than any administration ever in the history of our country, and we still have a ways to go. So I think between that and the tremendous tax cuts, we've really done something. And one other thing I said, and I saw it last night with some of the leaders and the business people, I think I've been a cheerleader for our country. And everybody representing a company or a country has to be a cheerleader. Or no matter what you do, it's just not going to work. And the reason I'm a cheerleader is because it's easy, because I love our country. And I think we're just doing really well. And we look forward to seeing you in America, special place, and where you are is a special place also. Thank you all very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. President, for being with us. The World Economic Forum community who is assembled here will be certainly, and I quote you from the last piece of your remarks, will be certainly among the hardworking men and women who do their duty each and every day, making this world a better place for everyone. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you.


Welcome everyone, I am Yashastani Basupoena, junior resident of department of radio diagnosis, studying in KSAG Medical Academy and I'm here to present my paper on the topic of CT pulmonary angiography and well score evaluation of pulmonary embolism. Coming to the aim of the study, it is to correlate pulmonary angiography findings with well score in predicting the pulmonary embolism. Pulmonary embolism is the third leading cause of cardiovascular related deaths with the prevalence of pulmonary embolism in the hospitalized individuals is 15 to 26%. Phenically the patients might present with dyspnea, chest pain, syncope, shock or hypertension and the clinical diagnosis is difficult. And there is a wealth criteria which helps us to assess the risk stratification based on the clinical symptoms in patients probably with acute pulmonary embolism and for which history and examination is necessary. Diagnosis of pulmonary embolism includes ventilation, perfusion scanning, contrast enhanced CT arteriography, MR imaging and standard pulmonary arteriography. The multi detector CT arteriography is the immediate modality of the choice and has the highest sensitivity and specificity for detecting embola in the main, low bar and segmental pulmonary arteries. In addition, this can also detect pulmonary arterial hypertension and abnormalities of perfusion as well. Methods, we have conducted a retrospective study on 41 patients who had clinical suspicion of pulmonary embolism and all the patients had CT pulmonary angiography done in KSI Medical Academy. Coming to the CT protocol, it was done in GE revolution, evolution machine 128 slice and plane and RTDL phase was done with 1.2 mm angiosection taken through a Pisces of the lung to the lower part of the liver and multi planar reformats were obtained. MIP and VR images were also obtained for pulmonary artery and iota. Coming to well score, based on the clinical features, all the patients were assigned well score and were classified into low, intermediate and high risk. Low risk was a patient with 0 to 2 points, intermediate was a patient with 3 to 6 points and high risk is more than 6 points. Coming to the results, among the total patients, 39 patients had a high clinical suspicion of CT pulmonary angiography and 2 were having less clinical suspicion of CT pulmonary embolism. The age group of the patients who had clinical features were ranging from 25 to 78 years and the frequency of pulmonary angiography in pulmonary embolism in our study was 25 people had pulmonary embolism which was corresponding to 61% while 16 patients did not have embolism which was corresponding to 39%. Out of these patients who had pulmonary embolism, 15 patients were male and 60% of them were male and 40% were females. Among the patients who had pulmonary embolism, 56% of the patients had acute embolism and 44% of the patients had chronic embolism. Here, we can see a 54-year-old male patient who had presented with history of DVT whose CT axial images show a chronic thrombus noted in the left intolobar artery. Coming to the second image, there is a 53-year-old female who presented with sudden onset of breathlessness whose CT axial images show an eccentric thrombus which is seen in the right and left pulmonary arteries and this thrombus has seen extending into the segmental arteries as well. Coming to the correlation with the well score, the well score was given as three. Three patients had a well score of low risk, 18 patients had the well score of intermediate or high risk and 20 patients had high risk. On CT pulmonary and joe, the patients who had low risk did not have any embolism whereas among the 18 patients, 50% of the patients with intermediate risk had pulmonary embolism and among 20% of the patients, 15 patients had embolism and high risk category. The most common clinical presentation was disney or breathlessness which was seen in 30 patients out of 44 amongst which 73% of the patients had embolism. 14 patients in our study had deep vein thrombosis or had a previous history of DVT but of which only 9 patients had embolism. Coming to DVT and its correlation with pulmonary embolism, patients who had DVT and having pulmonary embolism was 36% of the patients and 64% of the patients who had pulmonary embolism did not have DVT. Based on the location, the most common site for embolism in our study was the segmental arteries followed by right and left pulmonary arteries. 58% of the patients had thrombosis in the segmental arteries. Also multiple central segmental and subsegmental arteries were seen in 12% of the patients. Coming to the secondary features or other associated features which were observed in our study in patients who had embolism was right ventricular hypertrophy, mosaic attenuation, pulmonary arterial hypertension and pleural effusion. Among which 65% of the patients with pulmonary embolism had right ventricular hypertrophy and pulmonary arterial hypertension. Coming to the imaging findings of CTP, pulmonary embolism or CTPA in our study where one was poloment sign. Poloment sign is nothing but a central filling defect with peripheral contrast yielding a poloment sign. These are the images showing the poloment sign. Coming to the second image on the left side, there is a 64-year-old male who had a clinical suspicion of pulmonary embolism. Most CT axial images show a central filling defect with peripheral contrast in the upper left segmental artery giving to the poloment appearance.


This is Witchspace news for Friday the 23rd of April 2021. I'm CMDR Buur. In this weeks news, Sagittarius Eye is back in print. Phase 4 of the Alpha is next week. Odyssey on PC gets a release date and there's a special Odyssey livestream next week. The print edition of the Elite Dangerous Magazine Sagittarius Eye returns to virtual shelves everywhere today as the text edition of the magazine is making a return after taking a break from full time production last year. If you're relatively new to Elite Dangerous then chances are that the print version of Sagittarius Eye maybe isn't unknown to you. Whilst fan created journals documenting virtual life in and around a video game are not necessarily that unique, what is unique about Sagittarius Eye is the quality of that journal. Sagittarius Eye has the quality and feel of a professionally produced magazine with glossy image laden pages with well written and formatted text that includes reviews, opinion pieces, editorials, guides and interviews. Whilst the print edition of the magazine has been unavailable for some time now the podcast edition has continued but now with the flagship magazine returning to a monthly cycle once again the two products will sit nicely complimenting each other. Sagittarius Eye in all its flavours is completely free to download to take a look you'll find a link in the description below. By the time you watch this video and hear my voice saying these words the snapshot for the final stage of the Odyssey Alpha test will have been taken. Late yesterday Frontier announced that the snapshot of the main game state that will be used in stage 4 of the Odyssey Alpha test would be happening at 8am UTC today and that whatever ship your character was in at the time of the snapshot will be the only ship that your character takes across to the Alpha test's final stage. The company also announced that fleet carriers will not be copied across to the Alpha but that a fleet carrier vendor may be made available at some point during the final stage. Arthur said in the live stream that will be restricted to the 50 light year bubble around Nervy still but Frontier have said in the last few minutes that they're not yet ready to comment fully on where in the galaxy will be restricted to in phase 4 so we don't yet know whether it'll be the 50 light year bubble or whether we'll have free reign to explore or something in between. Time will tell there. So here's how it's planned that phase 4 will play out. Once the snapshot is taken the next step is to bring the Alpha test servers down on Monday the 26th of April. The Alpha test will then be rebuilt with your main game commander and chosen ship in play on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week that's the 28th of April at the latest. The Alpha test itself is currently officially posted as having an end date of the 30th of April but there is a chance that it will carry on a little past that day but we'd suggest that you don't make any plans for it to be available and just take it as a bonus if it is. It's worth reiterating again as I think it often gets lost in the noise the Alpha test is not the full Odyssey experience it's just a few key features that are being tested out. The full new planetary tech for example is not in the game yet and there's going to be a ton of things that we just don't know about that will be in the full release. Frontier having stated on several occasions that they're very keen not to spoil things. Frontier actually stated on their live stream last night that what we're seeing in the Alpha test is just one small slice of what Odyssey is and that development of the main product has been continuing alongside this little slice of what we've been seeing in the Alpha. And whilst we're discussing the full release Frontier also announced yesterday the release date of the PC version of Elite Dangerous Odyssey and it is the 19th of May that's less than four weeks away as we record this. The team also reiterated last night that console development of Odyssey continues and it is still scheduled for release in the autumn and alongside the announcement of the release date yesterday Frontier also updated the Elite Dangerous website to better reflect the Odyssey era of the game you'll find that linked below. And finally this week on the live stream last night it was announced that next Tuesday's afternoon live stream will be a somewhat special occasion with game director Piers Jackson making an appearance on the stream to talk about Odyssey's full tutorial experience which is not something we've really heard mentioned of before. Arthur also promised that Piers will be talking about engineering in Odyssey and the team will also be showing off the finalized version of the new planetary technology for the first time. Twitch drops will be enabled for the stream which will mean another chance to pick up the purple flight suit if you haven't got it already. To enable the twitch drops on your account then go to the website linked in the description below link your Frontier and twitch accounts and then tune in live on Tuesday for the stream to earn the flight suit for your in-game character. We've not had it definitely confirmed yet but the live stream on Tuesday usually happens at 1630 UTC. If you're on PC what ship are you bringing into the final phase of the alpha did you get time to choose that ship or did you perhaps get caught short by surprise in a ship that you might not have chosen. If you're on console what are your plans for the start of the Odyssey era are you going to learn everything you can about the expansion before you get access to it or are you planning on avoiding spoilers before the expansion ships to your platform of choice let us know in the comments below. That's it for now thanks very much for watching we'll be back later this week with more videos until then oh seven commanders follow the greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack we very much look forward to seeing you next time


Thanks. So I hope everybody had a good lunch. I'll try to keep you awake from your food coma. I wanted to talk today about the work that I've done at Carbon 5 to mix lean user experience. And when I say that, I mean design thinking and lean startup with agile development. So a bit about myself. I'm a tech lead at Carbon 5, which is a bit of a weird title, but essentially what that means is I'm a developer. But I'm a developer that works closely with the client and with their designers to ensure that we're building a product with a process that's going to be effective and efficient. We don't really have project managers or product managers at Carbon 5. We really like everyone to be contributing in some way to the product. So I'll go a little bit more into that later, but everyone on the team is really engaged for the duration of the projects that we do. I've been doing this since like 99, which honestly isn't a ton of time, but it's enough time to have seen things change so fast. So the pace of technology today is just moving at astounding speed. You know, we don't do traditional software application anymore. We aren't doing six month cycles, everything. Are the traditional applications we used to create for personal computing? We just don't do that anymore. Everything's in the cloud and the web is ubiquitous. We take it everywhere we go. It's mobile and it's incredibly social as well. So we're not just connecting pages to one another in HTML. We're connecting people and we're connecting experiences. So something that I see happening now is that we're not just doing software development. We're creating products and we're creating the companies that surround those products. We're crafting experiences and we're having to understand the services that are going to support those experiences. So this is very different from what we used to do, where you'd have all these people working effectively in silos from one another and kind of tossing things over the wall to each other to implement. We're understanding now that because of the way and the pace that things are moving, we have to efficiently work differently. So these silos are breaking down. And what you're seeing is that in today's world, designers are oftentimes getting way more interested in development because it's way more accessible, right? They can start to develop in browsers and they can see what that looks like and they can have more confidence to do it. And then you're also seeing developers that are getting more keen on what user interfaces can do because it's just interesting. The technology in browsers now is just really deep and it does so much. And then you see product managers also that want to be able to span those gaps. So these silos are really quickly breaking down and they're breaking down because of the emergent technology. So the browsers that we see a lot of our applications created for are expanding rapidly. So you've got just for like Chrome and Firefox, there's 1,500 people working on each one of those. And over the course of their lives, that's about 2,000 years worth of development. It's more than that. So you can imagine it's things that are getting released in these browsers, the type of capabilities that you can harness in your applications every single month, every single day that's changing. So the open-source software projects is one of the coolest parts about my job. This idea that people are committing code really every single second of every day to places like GitHub. And you can harness that and you can also contribute it. So it's this total community of people that are standing on each other's shoulders to create better and better technology moving forward. So this is one of my favorite websites. It's the evolution of the web. And this thing goes all the way further on the left. So I'm just showing you kind of the snippet of the most recent. So you can see there's kind of these nice lines that flow into this just like crush of waves. And this is really just the amplification of development that's happening in browsers today. So super cool technology from Audio, HTML5, CSS3. I mean, that's just like touching the surface. The things that are created now in browsers that we can use in our products, it's just overwhelming. And it can be overwhelming. You're kind of like, how do I keep up with all that? You know, as a designer, you want to ensure that you're designing things that are harnessing the capabilities of the browser. And then as a technologist, you got to figure there's this stack of technologies that you have to keep up with from the back into the front end, you know. And like where do you put your efforts?   And then as a product owner, you have to think about wanting to be at the cutting edge. You want to put things out there that people are going to be excited to use because they're new in their novel and they're harnessing the browsers in ways that they've never seen before. So there's this kind of overplayed notion of like a unicorn or a ninja or a rockstar developer. And I'm not here to say that that doesn't exist. I've had the pleasure of working with some incredibly talented folks. But honestly, if your product rests upon this one person, you're kind of going to be dead in the water. If your product is anchored by one person, let's just say that talent is fickle. And if they leave, you're done. So what we found at Carbon 5 is what you want to do is you want to create a culture of people that are working with one another, that are solving problems collectively and developing a process to capture their solutions so that you can put that towards your product and move forward. So we like to think that you get by with a little help from your friends. And honestly, if it takes a village to raise a kid, it sometimes feels like it takes the city to build a product. So I wanted to talk a bit about some stories of some clients that we've had the pleasure of working with that have helped us come to a process and a cadence that allows us to do effective product development. So I've been talking a bunch about this, we. So I'm going to tell you a bit about Carbon 5. We've been around since 2000. We do software development, mostly web and mobile. And we have about 35 people right now, probably 80% of which are developers, 15% maybe designers and then the rest are some operations people that keep us all sane and fed. We've worked with a variety of clients. So we do startups. We work with growth companies. We work with enterprise companies a lot of the time if they have Skunkwork projects. And what we're really looking for in our clients is for people that are interested in working with us in the way that I'm about to describe. So people that understand that you need to have a culture of flexibility, of innovation, of creativity and collaboration. And so, honestly, we've been very fortunate in some of these clients that we've had. Our basic team is this. It's the product team that you hear a lot about. It's the developer, the designer, the product owner. And these roles can kind of flex in the number of people in each one of the roles. So oftentimes, particularly at Carbon 5, you're going to see more developers. But this is the basic triage that you want. And I've mentioned this before. We don't have managers. And the reason is it's kind of this idea that you want everyone in the Fox hall, everyone working together in order to commit to the product and to be invested in the product. And I think that ends up creating this culture where because people have had their say heard by the product team and they actually see their input in the product that they're developing, they're consistently invested and they're consistently excited to see this thing succeed. So it's really important for us that everyone's participating. And it's really this larger lesson that there's this increasing complexity. Whoa, this is not working. Can you guys hear me okay? Okay, sorry about that. There's an increasing complexity to human knowledge today. And in order for us to tackle that, the escalating difficulty of those problems means that we're either collaborating with one another or we're failing alone. And something that I love to kind of associate this to is there was this great building that was created at MIT during World War II. And it was this building that was erected really slip-shot. So super quickly. And everyone thought, oh, we're just going to throw this up now because we need a lot of this faculty. We need to house them. They need office space. We're just going to throw this up. We're going to tell everyone that it's pretty temporary. It's going to come down at some time. And so they put nuclear scientists in it. They put the linguistics department in there. Noam Chomsky was there. They had piano repair people. So it was this idea of a structure that was housing a diverse variety of really curious and intellectual people. And because they knew it was temporary, some of these people completely recreated their offices. They actually would turn like a one-story office into two-stories because they wanted to build this crazy thing. And then they would run into each other in the hallways. And so they'd come up with these kind of crazy conversations that would inspire them and they'd go back to their work, having had kind of this different viewpoint that they had heard and they could have a different take on what they were working on. And what they found was that this building was, it was responsible for a stunning list of breakthroughs. And they ended up keeping it around longer, way longer than they thought that they would. And it's credited as being the magical incubator of MIT because of so many breakthroughs coming out of it. And people really believe it had everything to do with this variety of people that was in there that could collaborate with one another. Steve Jobs was actually very interested in this idea and when he was overseeing the development of the Pixar offices, he really took this to heart. And so he became really involved in the layout of the offices and he started doing things like switching around where the bathrooms were, switching around where the mailboxes were to ensure that the computer scientists, the designers, the content folks, the janitors, whoever was running into each other as much as possible so that they could be inspired and could collaborate in unique ways. So what we've found at Carbon 5 was that we wanted to put in place a way where the designers and the developers and the product owners on staff could have a process to collaborate and a flexibility in order for those collaborations to be captured and put towards the product development and have it run in an iterative way. So we developed this kind of idea of a cadence and we realized that one thing that Agile development really gets you is the reduction of risk. It's one of the great things about Agile. And Lean Design and Lean Startup has so much to teach us and we wanted to bring those two things in concert in order to reduce risk and to maximize the creativity that you could put into a product. So I'm going to talk about a couple of techniques. And something to keep in mind is that these aren't prescriptive. These are things that you can use with your teams. You might not use all of them. You might use none of them. But the idea is that these are things that you can pull in during your cadence that can potentially help to make the collaboration easier and to capture the effects of that collaboration. So we like to run things as experiments. So we do our iterative sprints as experiments. And what that means is that the entire team is coming together and they're agreeing upon something that they're going to test out with users every iteration. And for us, our iterations were weeks. And at the beginning of the week, what we would set off to do was try to figure out what the highest risk, highest reward feature was. And this is really not the highest reward feature that your Rockstar developer is excited to look into. And it's also not the feature that you think the designer is really excited to put out there into the open. This is the thing that is going to have the most reward to your users and potentially has the highest risk for the overall product. So this can be a tricky one to figure out. How do you really know what your highest risk, highest reward feature is?  So the biggest bangs, top left, the smallest ones are kind of in your bottom quadrant. And then you can have the designers and the developers sitting right there and saying, all right, this one's going to cost this much. This one is a huge overhead. And what you're looking to get, obviously, is the biggest bang for the buck. Another thing is getting your story straight. So this is something that will happen every single week.  What you want to have come out of those conversations is really three things. You want actionable stories. So do your developers and your designers know how to work against those stories? Then also, does the whole team really agree that those stories are the next most important thing to meet the objective that you said, highest risk, highest value? And then also, if your product were to completely end, your product development end on that Friday, do you have a whole deliverable that could potentially live on its own? If you can aim for that, it really keeps people kind of understanding and having cohesion around your objective for that sprint. So this deliverable whole idea is pretty tricky, but it's something that's really important. If people feel like they're just slopping on a bunch of features onto something, it's going to be A, difficult to test, and B, it's going to be difficult for people to really get behind that idea and both develop and design for it. So always having that deliverable whole that you're working incrementally towards, it's a great thing to do if you have a huge design that you need to kind of split out into chunks, or if you're doing a big refactor. So the idea of design, this question always comes up, right? Where does design fit in? Traditionally, you had designers that would step away and do a lot of upfront work to kind of get the overall visual voice for the product. Something to keep in mind when you're doing Lean Startup is that when you're putting things against users every iteration and those users are giving you feedback and you're starting to realize that your product market fit might be slightly different than what you originally had intended, if you've done a bunch of design work and you've come up with your visual voice for this product and all of a sudden the personas that you see that you're aiming for are subtly different, you're going to have to go back and completely redesign that. So we like to run with this idea of just-in-time design and what that means is that you want things to look good, you want things to look cohesive, but you also don't want to overthink things too much or overdesign them because there's a high likelihood that you're going to have to rethink that along the way. So if you can get yourself to have a lot of conversations that will start to steer where you need your visual voice to be and then slowly increment that design and then taking points throughout the product development process to step back and be like, okay, we're ready to do another pass-on design at this point because we feel like we've got a good product-market-fit idea. Having that kind of just-in-time design to get you to that point will really save you in the end. Another thing at the very beginning of a project that is extremely helpful to do seriously just for empathy with the team is to have everyone sit in a room and have these question cards and it's really these really scary assumptions or fears that you might have in addition to kind of your hopes for the product and people writing those down on these big cards and putting them up on the wall and just talking about them, getting kind of all of that open and out into the air. And so this can be something that's as overwhelming as what if we build the most expensive X and it completely fails, right? Even just putting that out there almost like sets the bar where everyone's like, all right, we get it, like it could go that bad and we've talked about it and we're ready to move forward. So this is something that's just like a good thing to run at the very beginning of our project. So I'm going to jump into the case studies. So these are two clients that we're just exceptional to work with. They're both great clients and also just the projects were really fun because of the process that we did. So BookRunner has a wonderful objective. They are looking to make education more affordable for students, mostly by tackling the issue of purchasing textbooks. So they brought us on to develop a web and SMS app that would allow students to go to their university bookstores and really see a cost comparison between their options for purchasing textbooks from Amazon from the bookstore or renting them through BookRunner. And ShareThrough is a company that is, it's really looking to the future of advertising by doing embedded brand content. And we worked on a product for them called Nibley. So they have this idea of an embedded video. And what we were trying to do was track how this video was being shared once it kind of went out into the wild. So it's both the shares and the views and how long people viewed it. It's a lot of data that would come in from this network of videos that was being sent out. And we needed a way to really visualize that data so that brand managers could understand what the impact of their videos were. So for both of these products, this is what a week at a glance looked like. And just to keep in mind, this week is, again, it's not boilerplate. This isn't completely strict. You're definitely going to be flexing on your week. But at a glance, this is Mondays. We would reflect and define for the week. On Tuesdays we would specify. And then on Wednesdays, sorry, this thing keeps getting, we would build and refine. And Thursdays also we would be building and refining. And then on Fridays, that's when we would go out and we would get our customer feedback. So again, I want to reiterate that this schedule, a lot of people come back and they're like, seriously, you're talking and designing for three out of the five days. And the reality is you're not. So at the beginning of the project, when you're kicking off, it's going to look a lot more design side of things and a lot more discussions. And then as you move through your product development cycle, you're going to see that there's a lot more development happening. This is a flexible schedule and that both the roles and their time spent in these different endeavors are going to change and flex as time goes on. So Mondays, you had your user reviews on Friday. And Mondays is where you get to sit down and really talk about that. And it's nice to have the weekend to digest some of that stuff and to really come in fresh with ideas. Sometimes it was painful what you saw happen on Friday. Sometimes it was inspiring. But regardless Monday, you kind of have this fresh moment to sit and really have the team get together and reflect on what happened. So this is where you start to kind of ideate and you can do design shreds at this time. So we found that some of the design thinking exercises such as like six up sketches, doing personas, there's a variety of ways that you can kind of facilitate pulling out design from what happened on your Friday sessions and having the whole team in their developers and designers. This is where you get these very natural conversations to happen and really you get that empathy moment where people are talking, they're agreeing on things, they're putting them out in the open and then you're going broad. You're allowing people to really have that expansion of ideas, right? So like your technologist can be talking to your designers about new ways that they've seen that they could potentially handle some issues that they saw with the users on Friday. So the retrospective, I had a problem recently on a project where I skipped a couple retrospectives and I can't tell you how much of a difference that that made. It is imperative to run this. It's even if you have it just be 15 minutes but the opportunity for your developers, your designers and your product owner to sit down at a table and basically talk about how things went, how things should go and things that you want to change. So we run this with, I wish, which is kind of things that didn't go great the last week and then an I will component of how you'd like to change things and then, actually I'm totally forgetting, and then an I like. So great things that happened last week that you want to bring over to the next week. So it's a conversation that can happen quickly and it's a facilitation exercise that maybe can be only 15 minutes but it keeps your team in collaboration with one another, empathetic with one another and understanding kind of what the pain points are. So the next thing we would usually jump into was talking about the customer feedback. So the way that we would do it is we like to capture our customer feedback and what we used was stickies and we used them virtually. So we actually created this application that we have called somewhere between boardroom and stickies but it's a virtual way of capturing sticky notes and so people that weren't present for the session for the user testing could actually add their ideas to this board over the weekend or if they were watching it through a video. But in some manner, shape, form you need to capture feedback from your users. So we would sit down and we would talk about the learnings that we had and do a facilitation exercise and that inevitably led to someone coming up with ideas and so they would jump up and they would get onto the white board and start wireframing. So we would do this kind of ad hoc wireframing. This is actually the product owner from Bookrunner and we were doing mobile in line with SMS so we had to really look at those two pathways in tandem to figure out the most efficient way to address both of them. So he would oftentimes, on Monday mornings after we had gotten this user feedback he'd jump up and be like, okay, I think this is the way we need to approach it. He could just get the wireframe out, we could discuss it, ideas could be generated and then you were really just capturing these things with photos. So this is where the team really gets to sit down and do hypothesis definition and it's getting everyone behind the hypothesis that you want to test that Friday with users and really writing that down. Writing down what it is, what outcome you're hoping to see from users on that Friday. So again, you're always trying to prioritize to a full deliverable there so that what you're testing against feels like a set of features that have cohesion. And then at the end of Mondays another thing that happens during user testing that's kind of awesome as a developer is that you're seeing people use your application and you're seeing the bugs and so this is your opportunity to go back and do your refactoring and clean up and prep and also for the designers to go back and kind of clean up what they want to see happen in the interface. So Tuesday you've gone broad, now you need to really dive deeper. This is where you start to do your story writing and there is a total art to story writing. We have started to use some templates for it to really just bring back some discipline to it and what a story is is it's really, they call it the placeholder for the conversation and if you can have a template that captures that conversation efficiently when people are going back and looking at this stories they have a clear understanding of what the intent of the story is and what the acceptance criteria is. So this template is actually straight from Dan North's BDD template that he created and BDD stands for behavior driven design. So you'll see kind of that bottom scenario here. This is straight from Cucumber which is a testing framework. So this is really requires a lot of discipline to have every story look like this but it allows you to have a very clear path moving forward so it's good to be disciplined. So then you're going to have more conversations, you're going to do story breakdown, you're going to need to estimate and prioritize. Something that always comes out of this is you end up doing a lot of pair sketching. So this is again an opportunity for designers and developers to sit together and sketch things real time with one another instead of having these huge blocks of PSDs that they have to create that the developers are waiting on. They're really like understanding things that you can work on right then and there. And then you'll end up at some point in your project with a ton of stories. So there's the ones that didn't get into your sprint and they're sitting there in the backlog or the icebox. Something that's really good to do over time is to have that meta view to step back and do a story map. So pulling out your epics and understanding really what the bigger picture is and where you're headed in the long term so that you don't feel like you're constrained to these week by week by week cycles. So Wednesday and Thursday, this is when the work gets done. This is when the conversations have already been had and also the ability to have those additional conversations has been put into place. So you'll see that the culture of the team at this point is such that if they come up to an issue if the developers are stuck, they can grab a designer, jump up and do some more whiteboard wireframing. And then the other thing that we have implemented at Carbon 5 is we've started to have these living style guide and visual assets that the developers have as kind of a kit. And so this is again something that you can do the just-in-time design, right? So at the initiation of a project, what this probably will look like is Bootstrap, right? And then as the designers start to deliver more of the visual design, Bootstrap starts to morph into these assets looking more and more like the final visual voice of the product. So if developers have this kit to work from, they can then start in on a story that maybe doesn't have complete design. And then what they can do once they're done with the story before it's done-done is they can pull in a designer. The two of them can sit together and they can really pair, right? So you can pull up the inspector in Chrome and you can start to do your pixel tweaking right then and there. So you don't need the pixel-perfect PSD. You have your designer right there going through the interactive site, seeing the hover state, seeing all of the interaction. And they're able to say, do this, do that. And the developer real-time can sit down. We used to put in chores. We used to put in snippets of time on Thursday where the developer and the designer would sit down and pair and get things ready for the user testing on Friday. So story acceptance. The one thing I want to say about this is if you're a product owner, this is so critical. It shows the team that you are critically looking at every story. And honestly, sometimes getting rejection is better than acceptance because you know that your product owner has looked at this, has tested it, so Friday comes. So this is basically how did we do? How is our hypothesis? So first, you kind of want to do some prep. You want to understand what it is that you're testing. You have your hypothesis, but what's the manner in which you're going to capture this feedback? And just having a brief narrative or outline or plan on how you're going to run the user test and how you're going to get feedback from the users is really critical before you jump into it. So we had a webinar because we wanted to test people in the physical space of a bookstore. What we would do is we could go and grab five students and we'd bring them into the bookrunner office and we wanted to test both the store tags as well as the app that we were creating for those store tags.  And we'd have them walk around the stores with their SMS phones. Someone would come in with their WebKit phones and we'd have them kind of cruise around and we would just listen to them and get their feedback and ask questions. And it gave us such great insight into how we needed to change the app in order to meet their needs. One thing that was hugely helpful with the Nibley project was this thing was incredibly hard to understand how we should do the data visualization, right? We wanted brand managers to be able to really quickly look at this graph. And be able to see how much that video was viewed how often it was shared which networks it was shared on and who the influencers in those networks were. So obviously that's a lot of data to show someone and we wanted to make sure that they understood what they were seeing. So we had many different iterations on this and if we had to wait every week for a new iteration to test this stuff out it would have taken way more time than we wanted to. So what we ended up doing, this is Rob Fan, our product owner is that we would take the same iconography and kind of visual language that we were using for the working interface and we'd first test them on the working interface and we would take our notes and then we would say, okay, well how about if we did this and we would print out these icons with stickies on the back of them we'd throw them up on a big white board and we'd start to just draw different interface possibilities and have them go up there with their finger and start to pretend their finger was a mouse and see how they understood it if it was implemented in that way. So this saved us so much development time and it's kind of along that type of rapid prototyping that we all talk about but with a component of physical interface that they had seen working. So this was our way of capturing customer feedback and try to make sure that your team is watching. If you have to capture it with video, great, but ensure that people are watching this. So this is something that I have to constantly remind myself. This whole process does feel weighty. It feels like it takes a lot of effort but once you get into it you actually realize that the cadence kind of takes care of itself but you need to maintain discipline. And then the real lesson here and what this cadence and this culture is trying to instill is that you're going to get conflict in your team but that conflict is actually really, really good as long as you have a pathway to resolution and a way to capture that. So this is kind of our working agreement, the foundations of the way that our teams work. We want to make sure that there's conversations, that you're surrounded by talent, make sure that you can have that talent work collaboratively together and capture those learnings. And that you have this culture of cross-collaboration that people are comfortable with one another to go up and grab each other and talk. There's no aversion to wanting to have to grab a developer. That developer, you've already talked with them like 90 times every Monday, right? So you can go and you can grab them and talk with them. And then finally, it's the cadence, right? So once you start running this, it runs itself. You've got your meeting scheduled up, you understand how your week is going to go, and it's very comfortable for everyone. So I wanted to maybe save time for questions, which I totally didn't, but thank you. If you have any questions, come grab me. You can tweet me, you can email me. I would love to hear feedback. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you very much, Courtney.