Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. Today I had the amazing Mel Crate from We Are Luminate come back in and we had a really cool conversation about the recent plus size Nike mannequin that they put next to their super thin ones in the Oxford Street store in London in the UK. So many things to speak about around that and social media was going crazy around that time as well. And Cancer Research in the UK have recently done an advertising campaign on obesity and again caused a bit of an upstir so me and Mel spoke about the issues surrounding those two things and really great conversation. Hope you enjoy it. Hey, it's Lewis. Welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. Cool, I'm alive. Mel, thank you very much. Come back again. Thank you for having me again. It's a pleasure. No problem, no problem. How's it all been going? It's been going good, very good. Busy, but in a good way. So yeah, all very interesting, exciting stuff. Awesome. Next, a few weeks ago, the Nike mannequin and like social media went crazy. It did, yeah. It got, I felt the conversation also diverted all these different things, pro fat shaming and all of these things. So let's talk about all of that. But for those that don't know, Nike and their store in London, they have a plus size range which they introduced in 2017. And then they put a plus size mannequin in their store next to like the traditional thin body type for females that they do. And it caused a little bit of an outcry. Yes, it did indeed. So what do you think about that? Yeah, it was very interesting when it happened. I think the reaction to it was extremely interesting and wasn't necessarily what I would have predicted it would be, but there was a lot of journalists or fitness bloggers or fitness or health experts coming out to criticize that move of putting a plus size mannequin there of saying it's encouraging obesity. It makes people feel like it's okay to be that size. That actually that size is unhealthy and we shouldn't promote it as something to kind of aspire to or something to even accept in our society. Which I personally think that's a very damaging view. I think it's hugely unhelpful on a number of levels. But firstly in that, we're trying to work towards a society that is more inclusive. So that includes inclusivity of everybody, not one demographic. And I feel like those attitudes are really unhelpful and very uninclusive. And particularly, I think the fitness world or the exercise world can be seen as very elitist. If you don't have the right leggings and the right gear and you can't run up a treadmill at 20 kilometers an hour then you're not included in this world. And actually it's not for you, which is not what we want because we want people to be moving more or whatever that movement looks like for them. True. The end goal is to get people moving their bodies more, which is what we were designed to do. So when you're telling people, actually we're not making workout gear for you or we're making it, but we're not gonna display it openly in the store because that's not really what we want people to look like or that's not what we think fitness looks like. It feels to them that, you know, we're not part of that elitist world. And I think it puts people off exercise even more. It's interesting, yeah. When I first saw it and I was speaking to some friends about it, all those different points came up. But if you just boil it down, it's just a really good marketing. Yes, absolutely. And lots of people have commented on that as well. Yeah, because really it was just marketing. And so I think it was size 14. It was bigger than that, I think. Was it bigger? It was supposedly a 16 to 18. Oh, okay, fine. Which is I think what people have- Is that the average? Isn't it like 14 or something? The average, yeah, fluctuates. I think it's between a 14 and a 16. Okay. Plus size, traditionally, or in the last couple of decades, has more been really- That's plenty of size. No, much, much slimmer than that. So a plus size model is somebody that could be a size 10 or 12. But that's considered plus size in the modelling world. Right, right. Because most models have been, you know, a six or an eight or even smaller at times. So actually, I think the problem that a lot of people had was, well, if you put a size, a mannequin that was a size 14 would be okay with that. But as this one's verging on a size 18, actually, that's too big for what we consider is acceptable within the plus size world. But they obviously thought that there was a, there are a lot of women who want to buy clothes at that size. And therefore, you know, when you see this mannequin, you're like, I'll call, I want to be like her and I can wear these clothes and stuff. Yeah, I think, you know, the way people have lashed out at it, I think is quite a simplistic view as well. People come in all shapes and sizes, as we know. And actually, it's just giving them fitness gear to wear that feels accessible to them and that they can see on a mannequin. I don't think it encourages obesity any more than saying, you know, having an LGBT plus LGBTQ plus group within a workplace encourages homosexuality.  So why not put it on a mannequin for people to see? Yeah, but social media, it just brings out the worst in people. And you have these extreme, because really you have quite extreme views on either side. Yeah, of course, you'll always get that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the people that are kind of like fat-shaming, let's say, inverted commas. I mean, their views seem to be, you know, we shouldn't encourage people to look like this.  You know, it probably may go to the gym and work harder. You know, it doesn't work that way, I don't think. I think it's a few that if we say it's OK to be that size and everybody's going to go out and put on more weight, I just don't think it works like that. I think for Nike, they need to be representative of the country or whoever their customers are. Absolutely. Yeah, which, you know, they say exercises for everyone, but unless we demonstrate that by providing clothing for everybody and clothing that people want to wear as well, not all plus-sized women want to shop in specialist shops. They want Nike gear. They want, you know, the gear that everybody else is wearing. And why not? No, that's true. That's true. Interesting. And so what do you think, like, healthy is then? Because then the topic then moved away from like this called Nike advert mannequins to what is healthy and... Absolutely.  There is so many different measures of health. And I think part of the problem was in that debate is, you know, it was obviously people on social media who were lashing out talking about it, but there were also people in our national newspapers writing about it, you know, supposedly qualified journalists. But when you look at that, you think, OK, that's your opinion on it, but you're not a doctor or a medical professional or a nutritionist. So who are you to judge whether that is healthy or not? I think, again, we look at health quite simplistically in that some... When it's something we can see, we feel more comfortable to judge it. But we know with health. Obviously, we've spoken about mental health before in particular. And that's an area of interest for me. That isn't something you can see or judge. So we have a very different view of that. And health, you know, there are so many different things to take into view there rather than just body fat, which is what we tend to focus on because it's something we can see and something that feels tangible to us. But, you know, there are all different things going on from mental health, obviously, even looking at... There's so many different things within that cardiovascular health. There's dental health. There's so many different elements that we just never really think of. And there isn't the same stigma attached to in the same way that there is, I think, when we look at body fat as a whole. So it could be one marker of health, of course, but it is certainly, by no means, the only one. And we know there are lots of women who will be a size 18 who do exercise and will probably have better cardiovascular health than somebody who might be a size eight but never exercises. No, 100%. I went to my CrossFit gym, I think it was like a couple of years ago, and I walked in, and there was people of all different body shapes. Yeah, and I had this in my mind. I looked at one of the guys and he was really, really big.  That was the first thought that went on my mind. I mean, the guy was an animal. Really? His cardio was just insane. He was super strong. I mean, you never know. You know, you look at Serena Williams. Yeah, she's brilliant. You know, her body type is big. She's one of the best female tennis player. Yeah, we've seen. Absolutely. And I think, you know, you've got on London Marathon Day and see the same thing. Yeah, that's true. There are lots of people whose BMI would be categorized as overweight or even obese, but, you know, they can run over 27 miles, which I think is pretty impressive. No, it's true. But there's still this thing around obesity and diabetes are the biggest costs to the NHS. And we do have a huge problem. Absolutely. And there's... No, no, so it's thinking about how to encourage people to eat better, to reduce their weight if it's a weight problem. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's no denying that it's a problem. And I think it's not being naive in saying it's not a problem and we shouldn't address it. Because, of course, it is. It's a big burden on our NHS and along with many other health issues, I'm sure. But it is something that, of course, needs to be addressed. But we're not so great at preventative measures, I think, with our healthcare or the way we view health in our Western world. And I think we very much look at a plaster solution afterwards. And people get obese for a variety of different reasons, which perhaps we'll talk about. But we then kind of look at them, point the finger and go, well, you're obese, you're costing our healthcare system money and you need to lose weight. But we know that way of attacking the problem doesn't help. It actually often makes it worse. So there's a really interesting study that looked at kind of weight loss promoting campaigns versus kind of weight neutral campaigns around health. And they expose them to people of kind of in different weight categories. What would be like a weight neutral? So something that doesn't... So when we think about health, we want to try and promote people moving their bodies and all your intuitive eating, things like that. Rather than going, you know, you're overweight, you need to lose weight, it's dangerous, you know, it leads to cancer, things like that, which I'm sure will come on to. And so they found the results from the study that actually the campaigns that focused and promoted weight loss specifically were either ineffective or had a detrimental effect to people's weight when they followed it over a period of time. And you can imagine the same thing if someone kind of points their finger at you and calls you a name. It doesn't really encourage you to change or to try and live a healthier lifestyle. No, but you've got, there's a few different areas. I think like we can talk about the kids and education and stuff, which is, I think like the really thing you need to tackle. But then people who are currently overweight and obese, we need to think about how they can start re-engineering their diets and their lives to start to become a healthy. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can imagine it's like a massive, massive hurdle to get over mentally just to. It's very hard, and we're asking them to do that in an environment that doesn't really support that way of living. And we're often asking them to rely on kind of willpower alone to do that.  And it's very difficult to resist that. We weren't designed as humans to live in this culture of abundance, of having so much of everything all of the time available to us. We were, you know, we evolved to be hunter-gatherers to hunt for our food and to not have it so readily available, and that's causing problems. But I actually think we need to go way back beyond, you know, not to say there's, of course, these people can't lose weight and become healthier, but actually it's looking at going back to what's causing that. And I think that's, again, where we tend to look at very plaster solutions or surface solutions when actually looking at the root cause of the problem. And we know through various very long-scale studies now that people who've experienced childhood trauma or neglect are much more likely to become obese in later life than those who haven't. So there are emotional reasons around why people are becoming obese. It isn't because they're lazy or lack willpower, which is often the perception, I think, of our society and which is so damaging. And what causes that stigma. So it can't be a coincidence that if you experience trauma, actually it changes the wiring of your brain. Experiencing trauma, particularly in early life, so between the ages of one to four where your brain is developing. If you experience neglect or trauma in any way or what they call ACE, adverse childhood experiences, your likelihood of becoming obese in adult life and also experiencing mental health illnesses jumps up significantly. Interesting. But then also we have these bad choices you can make because back in the day when we were hunter-gatherers, if you had that mental illness or traumatic experience when you were younger, you wouldn't have had the opportunity to go and eat processed carbs and sugars. But we know that something doesn't look to be changing any time soon. But I remember at school, I mean, luckily I played a lot of sport, but the food choices were awful. Like there used to be pizza, burgers, chips. I never got any education on what health eating is. Yeah, that's important too. I think that that's been lacking in our education system generally. And we went through the kind of fast food culture, the microwave ready meals. When I was growing up, ready meals were quite trendy because it meant you had a microwave which meant you were more affluent. So we didn't have the same level of awareness. And I think it's improving, but I think it just will take a lot more than just education around what health eating is or means for people. I'd also find that lower socioeconomic areas tend to eat worse. Yes, absolutely. And also the food's cheaper. Yes, absolutely. It's not as healthy. I mean, health eating's quite expensive. It can be really expensive. It's not accessible to everyone. And again, I think that's something to recognize in that struggling financially. If you do what is easiest and what is cheapest and what is accessible to you, it's not always, not everyone can unfortunately shop in Whole Foods or Planet Organic. And that's again something to recognize.  There's loads of the little fruit and veg shops along the street where it's like a pound for a bag of fresh vegetables or fruit. So you can do it. Oh, totally, of course. I think, yeah, absolutely. It's a choice that people still make at the end of the day. But I think the reason why those choices are made are complex. Definitely, yeah. And not something that I think is that easily fixed. And certainly we're not able to fix it by the kind of campaigns that we're seeing now with cancer research. Yeah, let's talk about that, yeah. Yeah, highly criticized as well. So what was the campaign? So the campaign was about obesity. And it basically, they launched a campaign to say obesity is also a cause of cancer. But it's in a style of a kind of cigarette packet to say we've obviously focused for so long at how smoking can cause cancer or many cancers. But did you know that also obesity causes cancer? And there has been a big uproar against that as people feel it is fat-shaming. It does the opposite of what it's intended to do. And again, that study I referenced, there have been other similar ones to show that actually that kind of advertising or health promotion doesn't work. So why are we still doing it? And we need to actually, and again, particularly when we know there is a very significant link between trauma and as a child in obesity, I think it's actually just quite cruel to be pointing the finger in that way. And I think it puts all the emphasis on the individual of saying, you know, you're obese, you need to lose weight because you could get cancer. It doesn't look at the system as a whole that I think is broken in our society, which has an influence. But then are you saying that everyone who's obese has had some trauma? No, of course not. Of course not everybody. But it's very common. It is very common. And we know there's also a bi-directional link between depression and obesity as well. If you're depressed, you're more likely to become obese and vice versa. So there are lots of different things at play and it's often a much deeper psychology than we ever acknowledge. And I think that's the problem. Traumas, obviously there is one significant link there that I do think needs to be recognized. But of course that won't be the only problem or the only influence I think in that world. Because I guess the tobacco campaigns worked. Because I think a lot less people are smoking. That's true. But I think for a long time, smoking was very trendy, wasn't it? You see these kind of sleek women in the 50s adverts holding a cigarette. Like a jazz club. Yeah. Whereas I don't think we've ever felt that way about obesity. No, no. For us, we have a very narrow view of what looks good, particularly as a woman I think. It's a very slim figure or a slim and curvy figure. It isn't what we think of as obesity as something that is desirable or we want to move towards. It's true. But I mentioned actually, I watched it up to the picture of the Colombian mannequin and seeing Colombia. There's my colleagues there at the moment. It's big boobs in a big bum. Yes. It's very, very curvy. Yeah, really, really curvy. And never waist, yeah. And it's just quite interesting.  That's true. And in certain cultures, I think it still is. I remember once we had a lovely guy who was from, I can't remember where in Africa, but he was a security guard in our building. And I walked in after having a break over Easter. He yelled across the foyer, oh, Melissa, you've put on weight. But it was a really positive thing. Like it was a compliment. And I was like, okay, that's what 10 packs of mini-exercise would do for you. But in their culture, he didn't see that as an insult or as something negative. But he saw often it's viewed as having abundance, having wealth, things like that. And they see it more as healthy than the opposite. So definitely culturally, it varies, I think. Yeah, yeah, it's quite interesting. But just to, because I mean, I think it's agreed that we do have an obesity problem. Yes. And it's just thinking about how to tackle it in the right way, which is quite interesting. And I think it has to be a very long-term strategy. And I think that's something that tends to be lacking in our thinking overall with health is kind of, how can we look at this over the next 50 years, not just the next five to, how can we really change it? But another really interesting initiative I've read about was in one of the Scandinavian countries. They introduced an initiative where they had nurses call in on new mothers periodically over the first couple of years of them raising their first child. And they measured the effects of this. So it was a very long-term study as when those children grew up and went on to find work or whatever that might be. And they measured that the families that had the visits from the nurses, their children were less likely to end up in prison and more likely to hold down long-term work than the families that didn't have the visits from a similar social economic background. So it starts right at that early stage I think as well. I think it's not just about educating, it's often about support as well for new mothers who don't feel equipped to deal with that single mothers as well who don't necessarily have the social support that they need. I think it's going back that early and saying what can we do at that stage to make sure that people are well-educated around this kind of thing but also have the right social support and not subject to abuse or neglect. And teach mothers how to parent in a way that it's not something we get taught. And I can't say from a personal experience but I know many people have found it very challenging becoming a new mother and trying to do all of the right things but not knowing if you're getting it all right. And particularly if your own upbringing wasn't great or your own model of parenting wasn't great that's obviously going to influence how you parent yourself. True, but I think it's not just the mum. I think it's like the whole family unit or friendship unit or social circle. Yes, absolutely. Because you do find, you know, let's say that the parents could be healthy, the grandparents might not be.  Because your parents could be unhealthy too. Yeah, but I mean, so my kids' school, they're doing quite a lot on healthy eating. And then so that the school meals are like relatively healthy. Yeah. But they have like a different things on the menu, chicken, fish, stuff like vegetables. So I think if you do, cause you know. That's really important I think. And that's something that's certainly been lacking for a long time in schools. And I think that is so essential. The study I referenced was less, I think it was less kind of healthy eating focus but more about this is how not to neglect your child. This is how to create a bond with your child. This is what your child needs at this stage of life. And you know, things that might sound quite simple to us but I'm sure aren't. And actually people need support on that. And of course not just mothers also fathers too. This particular study was done quite a while ago in order to follow those, the families into their adult life. And so it focused on mothers but now obviously father inclusive. But it's just helping out people who perhaps didn't have the best start or parenting themselves. Helping them become more proficient parents so that abuse and neglect doesn't happen and better education overall, better care for those kids. Definitely. The other thing is, so there's three kind of pillars to like good health. It's like nutrition, exercise and sleep. And we always forget about the sleep. Sleep is so important. Like just really quality sleep. Yeah, there's again a big link between being under slept and being overweight. Because if you're tired then you're like, maybe you'll snack more. Absolutely. When you're tired you go into survival mode which just means like your instincts, your natural human instincts of going for food, your willpower's lower generally. Yet you feel more tired so you're more likely to go for a kind of sugary snack to give you a short energy boost. Yeah, sleep's a big one. You need good solid sleep. They say like eight hours but also it doesn't have to be in chunks. It's in one big chunk. So you could be in a get a little nap, a lunch time. Yeah, I've read that when they've studied like humans a long, long time ago, again, hunt together a time that we slept in two phases. So we did have essentially an afternoon nap which sounds great to me. You're always accessible, but if you can, amazing. No, it's important. I'm actually doing a podcast with a guy called Nick Littlehaels. He's a sports sleep coach. I know of him. He wrote a great book about sleep. Yeah, it's the R90 technique. It's like 90 minute sleep cycle. So I can't remember what the actual terminology is but humans aren't born to sleep in one chunk.  Yeah, which often doesn't happen, right? It doesn't happen, yeah. And then you rush to put them into their own room really quickly because that's kind of what you do. Certainly in like Western society. And yeah, then you get all these sleep problems.  And the kids just get addicted to like sucking their bunnies because the parents just... Comfort blanket. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really interesting. But if you get all of that right, then, you know, the mental health issues I think are tackled. You feel more comfortable because kids just need good love, attention, care. Yeah, absolutely. The only problem is if you didn't have that in early life, you might need a stronger intervention to feel mentally and physically healthy as well. And that might mean talking therapy for some. It might mean medication for some. But absolutely, I mean, if you can get those three things right, you've got a pretty good chance of feeling good health. So I think for me, like the schools are just vital in doing that. Because if your parents don't know anything about that stuff, you've got to get it from school. But then you get into these things. So the cancer research campaigns. Because the other thing is we do need to educate people. Yeah, we do. Absolutely. But maybe people don't know that obesity causes cancer. They don't necessarily link it in their mind. Maybe. And so, you know, I guess people take these adverts in different ways. And so I'm definitely for education. Yeah, so am I. I think it's just being careful how we do that and being mindful of the language that is used in particular. I think for most people, if they are overweight or obese, they will likely know that that's not great for their health. I'm sure in a variety of different ways. I don't think it comes from ignorance personally. And I might be wrong. And there might be some cases, of course, where that awareness isn't there. I think the way in which we educate and communicate. And I think our health education in schools, like you said, needs to be much, much better. We learn about so many different things that we never go on to use in everyday life, but actually looking after yourself and your health is so crucial. Why is it not taught in schools in a more comprehensive way? But also an inclusive way, which is important. I remember going back to tobacco. It started out, I think, a little softly-softly tobacco because of cancer. Suddenly then you have the photos of your heart with the black and all the tar and everything. Absolutely, yeah. So I think it's... That has, you're right. And it has reduced smoking. Well, almost completely, yeah. I don't think my kids will smoke. It's not cool to smoke anymore. It's often seen as quite anti-social. Anti-social. You even get people in the pubs on Saturday night. I overhead.  How can people smoke? And it was like really shaming them. Yeah, I think that does happen a lot. And I think there's definitely, from my perspective, definitely less people I know that smoke now than used to. So that is definitely reducing. And I'm sure, again, awareness around that has helped, of course, people know it's... But there are also a lot of people still smoking, despite knowing, yes, there are links to cancer, other illnesses as well, generally bad for your health. But it's not always as easy as saying to someone, don't do that because it's bad for your health. Okay, yeah, I'll stop eating, I'll stop smoking. Unfortunately, it's not always that straightforward. No, definitely, definitely. But then something needs to happen. So I think with the school stuff, that's important. I think the mass advertising, which I guess this is important, maybe it's just thinking about how to do it in the right way. In the right way, absolutely. I mean, using language that doesn't feel it's kind of finger pointing at one demographic or group of individuals, which is gonna make them feel more kind of shame or stigma around their current state, which they probably already feel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can imagine, probably already feel a bit outcast from society. So I think that just worsens that feeling and doesn't necessarily help find a solution. Yeah, and maybe the government needs to do something because I mean, with let's say the plastic bag stuff, I mean, the minute they started to charge for plastic bags, I think they've done a sugar tax. Yes, they have done a sugar tax, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I think the government, we need to understand that ultimately all of this stems from people trying to sell us stuff. It's all of the advertising around it as well, which draws us in. And there is, I think a lot of different things at play, but I think the government could be doing more. And I think particularly looking at early interventions. And the problem often comes down to resource and cash, but that study I mentioned with the home visits for the first time mothers, they also tracked the saving of that and they looked at how much it cost to do that. But then what they saved through, obviously people not being in prison and people contributing to the economy in a positive way, it was quite a big saving overall, but obviously you've got to put the funds in up front, which is what I think we struggle with. No, that's true. We look at fixing rather than, okay, what can we do to prevent people getting to that stage in the first place? No, it's true. Whoever gets into power, Boris or whoever it might be, they need to put a long term strategy in place. Because I think what we're currently doing clearly isn't working in many ways. And that we know that obesity levels have gone up. So we know that the current way of trying to tackle that of saying, look, obesity is bad for your health in all of these different ways. It's clearly not working very well. So it's looking at, yeah, what else can we do there that it's gonna have a long-term effect and trying to get a better understanding of the psychology behind it and the root causes, which I think is where any kind of intervention should start. True, true. But then these last two things, so the Nike Mannequin and the Cancer Research Campaign, it feels like these are the two big things that hasn't been much prior. You see a lot of like, it's all the social media.   Yeah, there have been some campaigns, I think, that have been run both by the NHS and we know also that lots of kind of health, not just health food, but when you think about companies, even like Weight Watchers and Slimming World, all of these diets and based companies, that again, it's a big money making industry, diet, the whole diet industry. And that's very much been pushed for a long time. There was the, do you remember the Bikini body ready advert in the tube that people also kicked off about that, which I can't remember, one or two years ago now, people saying, well, I am bikini body ready. You know, there was this idea that again, there's a way you have to look like that, if you're gonna wear a bikini, otherwise it's not acceptable. And I think all of that side of things have been pushed for a while and I think diet culture has been very prevalent. And a big part of, I think, again, what shapes our view around what health is in that, it has to come in a very slim package with zero body fat, which isn't realistic. I'd like to move away from diet to healthy lifestyle, healthy mind, healthy body. And again, I think the trend is going that way of looking at a kind of more holistic view of things like intuitive eating, of trying to listen to your body and what it needs and wants, rather than, I'm on another diet. Which I think, again, was quite fashionable in the 80s, where, I think, when Weight Watchers became quite big. And I think, hopefully, things are slowly moving away from that, but it's still a very big industry. And you think of diets like the Atkins, the Duke, and have these celebrity endorsements, which, again, imply that that's the way that we should be living. It's a minefield. Yeah, it is. Because if you Google healthy eating, there's so much stuff that comes up. Oh, God, you'll be there all day. Yeah, it's very confusing. And we get so many conflicting messages and not just the mainstream media now, but things like social media. So you've got the health and fitness bloggers. Many of you aren't really qualified to be talking about nutrition, but still offering advice on it. I think that makes it very confusing for people in terms of what actually is healthy eating anymore. Yeah, true. I try and use the motto. If it has a label at the back of the pack, it's probably not healthy. And you just want to go for fresh stuff, fresh vegetables, fruit. Absolutely. The closer it looks to something that grew out the ground or is natural. And then, yeah, absolutely. I try and live by that rule too, mostly. Yeah, awesome. Great to speak to you on that. You too. Very interesting subject. So I'm sure we could talk for hours. No, definitely, definitely. Let's circle back and see, like, how it's developed and what's been going on. Absolutely. Yeah, that would be very interesting to see. Awesome. Thank you for having me. Pleasure. See ya. Hey, folks. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe in all the usual places.


And in fact, I was so happy that I'm also very happy to come back now on the second part, again with George Papani Koulaou. So he couldn't make it to be here today, but he will arrive in two weeks. And this corresponds, in fact, to a recent evolution of IHS. Since this chair is dedicated, more or less, to Upline Mathematics, so here I have just taken a citation from the website of the IHS The aim of the chair is described. And as it is written, the purpose is to conduct research in exchanges of views on theoretical topics arising from problems encountered in technical domains, or which could result in new applications in this area. And in fact, I have built this talk to try to follow this citation. That is to say, I will first describe a practical problem, a technological problem in imaging. I will try to describe what the main problems and when limitations are about this problem. And then I will introduce the new ideas that we had with George Papani Koulaou to try to tackle this problem. So both of us, George and me, are working in wave propagation in random media. So what does it mean? It means that we consider wave propagation in complex media. So what is the complex medium? It can be the human body, it can be the earth, it can be the atmosphere. It's a natural medium that we don't know. So we will model it as a realization of a random process, hence the term random media. And in the point of view of applications, there are two main types of applications, say, for the direct problem and the inverse problem. So for direct problems, I've been working a lot in wireless communications or communications through optical fibers. That's one possible application of this field. And for, let's say, 8, 8, the optical fibers, it says. The defects of the optical fibers are considered as problematic, and in fact, they are problematic. So you may have to work a lot to understand how to propagate far in an optical fiber. So you may use nonlinear effects to compensate for random effects, stuff like that. But today I will speak about imaging. That is to say the inverse problem. So here I have written what is the purpose of sensor array imaging. So now the idea is not to propagate far into a medium. It's to probe a medium to extract information about a medium from the waves that you can send through the medium. So you have an array of sources which emits waves. You have an array of receivers which record the transmitted or the reflected waves depending on the situation. And from this data that you record, you want to extract information about the medium. So that's the purpose of imaging. So I will first give you more or less the state of the art. So first, a simple imaging situation. So since this is a Schoenberg chair, I try to put it in the geophysics context. So you may imagine that at the surface of the earth, you have an array of sources and receivers. So these are the circles and the triangles. And somewhere in the sub-surface, you have a reflector that you want to image, that you want to detect and characterize, I say. So the first part of imaging is to collect data. So that's something that people know how to do. Nowadays, they collect a lot of data. So they put a big array of sources, a big array of receivers. And they collect all the signals that you can record in time at all the receiver's positions when you use all your point sources that you may have. So a mathematical model for this data set is, for instance, this one, the simplest one, scalar wave equation. So you can see the source term here, a point source at excess emits, let's say a short pulse f of t. You have the scalar wave equation in the left-hand side. And in the left-hand side, you can see what I'm interested in. So you have more or less a homogeneous medium with velocity, speed of propagation, C0. And you have a local perturbation of the zero city that is centered around some point y that you don't know, that has a shape, b ref that you don't know, and that has a contrast, c ref that you don't know. So the purpose of imaging is, given the major data, you want to recover the reflector, location, shape, and contrast. That is to say, what you want to do in practice is to build what the practitioners call an imaging function. That is to say, a function of the search point, say, that will look like exactly what you are looking after. So here, just a reflector buried into the medium. So this is what you want to do. Given the major data, you want to build an image of your medium that will show what you are looking after. So that's a simple imaging problem. So what is done in practice? So I've tried to summarize more or less what is done in the industry. So it can be in medical imaging, in ultrasonic acoustics. It can be in seismic imaging for the imaging of the Earth. More or less the main method is least squares imaging. What does it mean? It means that you will collect your data. So you have your major data on your one hand. And then you will try to match this major data with synthetic data that you generate with a computer model of the medium. So you have a candidate, for instance, a candidate for the reflector location, wide test for the shape B for the contrast C. You solve the wave equation with this candidate. So you generate synthetic data. And now you compare your major data with your synthetic data and you try to match them by a least square minimization procedure. So it's a minimization problem. It's an inverse problem that is usually very ill-posed. So at many levels, it can be very bad in the sense that it's not convex. There is not a unique minimizer. There is, I mean, it can be a terrible mess. But sometimes you may have some positive results about the existence of a global minimizer. And then the problem is to find this global minimizer. OK. In fact, in practice, nobody does that because practitioners consider it's too complicated. So they simplify the least square inverse problem. And to simplify it, they do something that looks like a very strong approximation. They will enforce a linearization of the forward problem. So they will try to linearize the forward problem so that now the least square imaging problem becomes quadratic. And then any engineer can minimize the quadratic function. So this is what is done in practice. And in fact, this is what they do. So when you linearize your forward problem using born approximation, there is a series of approximations that you can do to linearize the problem. You obtain a quadratic minimization problem. You can solve it. And you discover that the global minimizer for this linearized problem is quite simple. You can obtain it by solving one-way recursion with, as a source, the time reversed measured data. So you take your measured data, you time-reversed them. And now you use that as a source and you solve the wave equation in time. And what you will get is refocusing exactly at the reflector location. So this is what is called reverse time imaging. OK, for practitioners, it's even too complicated. So what they do, in fact, is that they simplify. They don't want to solve the fuel wave equation because three-dimensional elastic wave equation is quite complex to solve for them. So they simplify even more the situation. And they do, in fact, what is called Kirchhoff migration. So more or less, they will do a kind of high frequency asymptotics for the wave equation, a geometric optics-type approximation of the wave equation. And they will simply backpropagate with travel times. So it's not even geometric optics. In geometric optics, you have an equation for the phase, for the travel times, and an equation for the amplitude. They just consider the equation for the travel times, for the amplitude. And they don't pay attention to the amplitude. And that's what is done in practice. When you look at an ecographic image of your kid, for instance, or when you look at what is done in seismic imaging, this is Kirchhoff that is done. So it's more or less the state of the art. So no, I'm lying a little bit. Now in seismic imaging, a lot of effort is put to implement reverse time imaging. So let's be fair. Now they are at the level of reverse time imaging. So what is Kirchhoff? In fact, Kirchhoff is very simple. It's this formula. So that's why practitioners like it. It's so simple to implement it. So you take your data, u of t of xr, xs, the signal recording time, add the receiver, xr, when xs is used as a point source. And simply for each search point, ys, you will evaluate this data on the sum of travel times from the source point and from the receiver point. So it's the sum of travel times. It's the time it takes, more or less, to go from the source to the search point and back to the receiver. So that's the origin of this formula. So that's very easy to implement. You can imagine that's why it's so attractive. And in fact, it's not so bad. I mean, you have seen pictures of your baby, I guess. And it's not so bad. It's particular. It has good, more or less, good resolution properties. I mean, the details that you can find can be quite fine. It has a very good point is that it's robust to measurement noise. So that's not surprising because it comes from least-square imaging. And least-square imaging is precisely designed to be robust with respect to measurement noise. But it has a problem. It's very sensitive to what the practitioners call clutter noise. So what is clutter noise? It's the fact that, in fact, your medium, the background medium, is not completely homogeneous. It has a lot of very small inhomogeneities that are responsible for wave scattering. And when you look at your data, you see that even if your measurement device is perfect, even if there is no measurement noise, you can see fluctuations, wave fluctuations. And in fact, people consider that it is noise, but it's not noise. These are really waves that you record. These are waves that have propagated through the medium, that have interacted with the medium, and that you record on your receiver. And then, if you have clutter noise, then Kirchhoff migration completely fails. As soon as you have a little bit of scattering, it's over. You can already see it in ultrasound ecographic. You see a little bit of speckled noise on your image. That's typically what comes from clutter noise. You have just a little bit of wave scattering in the medium, and that's enough to generate this speckled noise in the image. In seismic imaging, this is a big problem, because the earth is really heterogeneous, and that's the main limitation in this business. So now the problem is what can we do? So first, let me describe you a simple model for clutter noise. Now you have to imagine that your medium is not only a constant background, say, one of C0 squared, but it has also small scale, small amplitude fluctuations. And since you don't know them, you don't know exactly the medium that you are looking after, you can model it as a realization of, let's say, zero mean random process. So here, that could be a possible realization of the medium in which the wave propagates. So now a model for the data is this one. Again, the scalar wave equation, a point source, the big reflector, the reflector after which you are looking after, plus this background medium now that consists of a constant plus small fluctuations. And now the problem is that when you have such a medium, the measured data are very noisy in the sense that the main reflection from the reflector is completely buried in the superposition of all the tiny reflections from all the tiny fluctuations in the medium. So that's the problem that most practitioners face in this imaging business. So now comes the interesting part, mathematics. So it is possible to analyze such an equation, that is to say, a wave equation in a random medium. So George Papani Kolaou has worked a lot on that. In fact, before I was born. So, and in fact, George has developed a very, very deep analysis of this kind of problem using limit theorems and separation of scale techniques. In this type of problem, in fact, you have many different scales present. You have the wavelength, the propagation distance, the correlation length of the medium. You may have also other characteristic length scales. But you have many different length scales present in the medium. And some of them are very different from one to each other. For instance, typically in a high frequency regime, the wavelength is much smaller than the propagation distance. In such a case, you can develop an asymptotic analysis to understand better what happens and what is the structure of your wave of your data set. And in particular, so you may have different regimes. So I just cited a high frequency regime. There are other regimes. And for each regime, for each distinguished limit, in some sense, you can simplify the problem and go from this wave equation with random coefficients to a stochastic partial differential equation. So typically, that can be a Nieto-Schrodinger equation. What does it mean? It means that you face now a PD, a partial differential equation, in which the noise appears in the form of a Bronyan, maybe not Bronyan motion, but Bronyan field. So why is it good? It is good because now, as soon as you have a Bronyan motion or a Bronyan field, you know that you have Ito stochastic calculus. So you have tools to analyze the equations.  And from this knowledge, you will be able to design new imaging functions. So what can you do first, once you have understood that, is that you can analyze in some sense any imaging function. So for instance, the Kirchhoff imaging function, but any other type of imaging function that you may propose. So first thing that you can do, the level 0 there, is to compute the mean and the variance. That's the basic statistical analysis. You can do something more clever, but let's say, it's already good for. See that this mean is nothing to change for the solving the equation. Sure, sure, sure. Yes, the way you go from the statistics to the medium to the statistics of your data is highly non-linear. So there is no way you can exchange the expectation. So you can analyze, let's say, the expectation of this imaging function. So that's good, because that allows to do what is called the resolution analysis. That allows you to say what is the finest detail that you can find in the image. Let's say you have two reflectors that are close to each other. What is the critical distance beyond which you will distinguish that there are two reflectors and not a big reflector? So that's the resolution analysis. What is also very important is to compute the variance or a higher order moment, because you want to characterize what we call the statistical stability or an engineer would say the signal to noise ratio. That is to say, is the image stable or not? The data are very noisy, but you want to build an image that is clear. So that's the purpose of this statistical stability analysis. And again, to have these limit theorems and effective stochastic partial differential equation, we'll allow you to address this kind of problem. So I told you, give me any imaging function, I can do the analysis. Now the more interesting problem is I want to design an imaging function that has good resolution and good statistical property. But how much you gain by this kind of data? You will see. Answer very soon. So a few results of the multi-scale analysis, first to show you that indeed Kirchhoff will not work, and second to indicate what you should do. When you analyze wave propagation in random media, you have more or less two main results. The first result is at the expectation of the wave. The mean wave will decay to zero. I mean, the more scattering you have, the more you average the wave, and it becomes of mean zero. So physicists will speak about loss of coherence. And in fact, that explains why Kirchhoff migration fails. Because Kirchhoff migrations, in fact, it tries to exploit exactly this piece of the recorded data, the trend, the mean wave. And since in the scattering media, the mean wave goes to zero, you try to image with zero. So you will not get a lot. So that's the idea of this first point. But in fact, if you have no absorption, let's assume you have no absorption, wave energy has to go somewhere. So it goes into wave fluctuations. So in fact, what you record is just noise. It looks like a very, very noisy signal. And in fact, you should consider that as noise. Why? Because these wave fluctuations have mean zero. But the correlations of these, the correlation structures of these fluctuations contain the information. When you look at the correlations at nearby points, at nearby receiver points or at nearby frequencies, you exhibit that these fluctuations are correlated and that these correlations contain a lot of information about the medium. And in fact, now we have a new point of view. Don't try to image with the mean. But exploit the wave fluctuations, the correlation structure of the wave fluctuations. And this is what we want to use to build the image. So it's a complete change of point of view. Forget about the mean. Look at the fluctuations. Look, in fact, at the clutter noise. Don't get rid of the clutter noise. Keep it, exploit it, and build an image with it. So it's completely new because now you will image with correlations, cross correlations, that are quadratic in the data. So it's something new. So just as an application, I've taken that from a geophysics journal. That's a typical situation that is encountered is oil prospecting, say. So that's the situation. So people in the industry want to monitor very carefully noise reservoir and their exploitation. They want to follow exactly how the fluids are migrating. It's very important to extract the most of it. So the idea is the following. Those people put receivers everywhere. They want to collect as much data as possible. And so they collect a lot of data. And after they collect the data, they wonder what they can do with this data. So here is a typical problem that they face. They can put receivers and sources at the surface. No problem. As many receivers and sources at the surface, they have wells in the reservoir. And they can put receivers in the wells, but they cannot put sources in the well because sources are in fact explosions.  So this is a problem they face. They may have sources at the surface, receivers in the well. And the question is how to exploit as best as possible this data set. So here is a little bit of the geophysics jargon. In the earth, in fact, the top layers are really the problem. This is what they call the overburden. This is where the scattering happens. In fact, most of the scattering happens over the first few kilometers. After the medium becomes a few kilometers. Let's say this horizontal line is two kilometers or something like that. Is one kilometer vertical? Yes, yes, vertical, one kilometer, and a few 10 kilometers in a cross range. So this is typically the situation. And they are looking after something even deeper. So this is for deep oil prospecting. So the question, what can they do with that? So they try to do what they know. That is to say Kirchhoff. So I repeat exactly the same arguments. You have sources of the surface, receivers. Let's say a reflector, but I don't care. This is the Kirchhoff migration function. So let's try to do it. Okay, here is a numerical simulation. These are not real data. I don't have real data for this problem. So on the left, you have the configuration, the sources, the scattering medium, the receivers, and the reflector that you want to image. And on the right, I will apply Kirchhoff migration and I will plot the image of this region. I mean a big square around the location of the reflector. So I would like to have a nice image of this square. So obviously that doesn't work. So this is typically the kind of image that they get.  There is nowhere from this image you can know where is the reflector. Okay, now let's try to apply this idea that in fact you should look at the correlations rather than the data themselves. And here I do the simplest level zero application of this idea. I will apply Kirchhoff to the cross correlation of the data. So here are the cross correlation of the data. So for each point source, I look at the data at two receivers, XR, XR prime, and I compute the cross correlation in time of this pair of data. And at the end I sum over the sources. So I get the cross correlation of the signal recorded at XR and XR prime of the function of the time lag tau. And I will image with that. Here is the image. So you go from pure garbage to an image that is crystal clear. Because here in fact, we have put a lot of scattering. It's a highly scattering medium. So in that case, the mean wave is almost zero. That's why your Kirchhoff completely fails to just have fluctuations. But since you have fluctuations and we know now how to use the fluctuations, good. You have this image. So again, this is not image processing. There is no way from this image you can go here. You have to go back to the data and process the data in a completely different way. You adopt a new point of view on the way to build image from this kind of data. So that was an example just to show you the idea. Okay, so of course you can do analysis. Here it was just an application with easy numerical, not so easy numerical simulations. You can do the analysis. So again, you adopt this separation of scale techniques. You can do the analysis in different regimes. So it turns out that if you are in geophysics, usually you are in the random layer. It requires more data compared to Kirchhoff. No, I use exactly the same amount of data. I use exactly the same data on the left and on the right. Kirchhoff works probably quite less than that. Yes, exact. Kirchhoff, I mean here you can increase amount of data, Kirchhoff will never fail. But here indeed you need a lot of data because to compute this correlation you need to average. You need more data. Right. But the good point of seismic imaging is that the medium does not move. So you have a little bit of time to record the data. Which is not the case for instance with medical imaging where the patient is moving. But okay. Each domain has a... Yes. Okay, so... How much time computing is this? How much? In fact, at the Kirchhoff level it's extremely fast because you do that by FFT. The migration is extremely fast. In fact, here these are synthetic data. Here the pain is to generate the data. But once you have the data to compute this imaging function is very fast and even for seismic imaging where you know they collect teraocte of data, this is doable to do that. So you can do it. Amount of data is not a problem in seismic imaging. They have a lot of data. Okay, so just if you do the theoretical analysis developing this asymptotic analysis in different regimes. Okay, you will find general results and some detailed results. And the general results for practitioners are really surprising because they are counter-intuitive. What we find is that the resolution, let's say let's start with the resolution, is independent of the size of the array. And that's for people doing imaging is not understandable because for all these people, when you build a microscope, a telescope, the bigger the mirror, the better the resolution. That's something everybody has in mind. This is back to Lord Rayleigh, Rayleigh Resolution 4. Yes, yes, yes, but even the receiver array. In fact, the correlation radius is more important. It doesn't mean that the size of the source array or receiver array doesn't play no role. They play a role, they play a role for the stability. You need larger arrays to have enough averaging so that your correlations are well-stabilized. Yes, I will go back to that later. But indeed, here the data are required by the standard seismic survey procedure one source at a time. I will go back to that just in the next slide. So these are the main general results that are quite surprising from the imaging point of view. But again, we have a different point of view. We don't look at the mean wave, we look at the fluctuations. And the information about the medium is encoded in a completely different way. So that's not surprising that the resolution and stability are quite different. Detailed results, that's something, when I say clarify the role of scattering, it's a little bit optimistic. We are still working on it because in fact, when you look at the results in detail, you find some regimes in which the image becomes better and better as the medium becomes more scattering. Again, remember, we are imaging the clutter noise. So the clutter noise comes from the scattering with random fluctuations of the medium. So in fact, it's not so surprising that indeed the more scattering, the better it is. But again, for practitioners, to tell them that the more noise I have, the better it is, that's a little bit counter-intuitive. Unfortunately, that depends on the scattering regime. In a randomly layered regime, this is not true. At some point, you will lose a little bit of efficiency in the way of scattering because in a layered regime, you lack of diversity. You have scattering by layers, so you don't change the angles. So scattering is not so efficient than in a three-dimensional, randomly isotropic medium. So we are working on it as soon as George... Let's say 0.4 hours of random fluctuations that are isotropic as the pictures I have shown you. When you have random layers, it's not as good. So we are working on it. So when I say clarify, we are in the process of... It means that they say one corner to each one corner.  And also, creation is... Yes, exactly. And in that case, scattering is not so good. So unfortunately, this is the case, more or less, in geophysics. So that's unfortunate, but we have to be careful. So we are very optimistic, but we have to be careful. But you have the same information, it doesn't disappear. Is the question how to collect? No? No, it's not about how to collect. It's really that you... You're automatically how to extract it. Information is there, no? Yes, the information, more or less, is there. But for a given source aperture and receiver aperture, you will need a much, much broader, for instance, source aperture. Here, you have three-dimensional scattering. So even with a relatively narrow source aperture, by multi-passing in the medium, the reflector will be illuminated with a very, very wide aperture. In a scattering medium, no way. With a layer medium, no way. It comes from a cone that is fixed by the sorcerer. And to have a wide aperture, you really need a very wide source aperture. So, okay, that's... But we are working on it. So when I say clarify, I should be careful. We are working on it. Okay, further results before I conclude. So of course, here, I have just shown you... Yes, your wavelengths are actually compared to the size of the object. How do they relate? Ah, here, the object is larger than the wavelengths. It's a reasonably big object compared to the wavelengths. Here, I have shown you level zero Kirchhoff migration for the cross-correlation. Of course, you can propose more evolved imaging function, but again, based on cross-correlations or sometimes on Wigner functions, which are just Fourier transform of the correlation, but it contains the same information and it is the same idea. More interesting, you had this remark that, okay, you have one source that you shot one at a time. In fact, we don't need that. This is a standard procedure, but we don't care, in fact, about the sources. We need sources. We need signals, but that can be ambient noise sources. And in seismic imaging, I mean, in geophysics, you have a background seismic noise. So you can use... You don't need these active sources. Just record the ambient noise on your array of seismometers, compute the cross-correlations, and that's just in us. You can build the same images. You need even more time to average, but you don't care, you have time. Let's say you have one day or several days, that's in us. So you can really... That's really new, this idea that you don't... You can do imaging without sources. So again, when you talk with practitioners, that becomes difficult for them. But in fact, we had a good piece of news. We had one particularly striking application of that for volcano monitoring. So that was just during my last visit, and we gave a warning for the Piton de la Fornée with three weeks in advance. And this happened just during our visit to Shanghai. That was October 14th. So I do remember that Jean-François was taking pictures of me in Shanghai, and I was always with my smartphone to monitor the volcano because the eruption was happening just during the conference. So that was a demonstration that in practice it works. You can do imaging of the earth without waiting for an earthquake. You don't need these strong sources to image this big region. You can just use the ambient noise. You can do passive reflector imaging with these ideas, that you don't need active sources, so I will show you a result. And of course, you can also use higher order correlations. So that depends. Let's imagine that you show that the wave fluctuations are Gaussian distributed. Then it's over. You have shown that it means zero. You have extracted the second order correlation. It's over. You have extracted all the possible information. It turns out that this is not true. The wave fluctuations are not Gaussian. So there is still some information in higher order correlations. So again, we are working on that on correlations of code of tails of correlations. Again, this is under progress, but there is some more information encoded in the wave fluctuations. So this is this idea that you don't need active sources. So you have to turn your head by 90 degrees, but this is the same situation. You have the sources, the receivers, one reflector. But here, these guys are ambient noise sources. So they emit stationary random signals. So they emit pure noise. And this is typically what you record on each receiver. You emit noise, you record noise. That's very nice. But in the correlation, you have information. So again, you compute the correlations between these signals. And in fact, you write here I have 300. In fact, I need to go to 10,000 to compute the correlations with quite high accuracy. And with that, I apply again Kirchhoff and I get this image. So I can localize the reflector with just ambient noise sources. Okay, conclusion. So that's the end. So the main idea is that in scattering media, you should try to use correlation of the data rather than the data themselves. You have to consider these correlations because otherwise you will not make it. These new ideas that you can use on the other sources. Sometimes scattering can help. So this is very good for us, George and me, who are experts in wave propagation in random media. I mean, we are happy to be able to claim such a statement. And you have very counter-intuitive results. For practitioners, sometimes they have a hard time. So just in 30 seconds, this is an application that George has in mind. So now you have to turn your head by 190 degrees, 180. So everything is upside down. Sources are here, receivers are in the middle, the target is at the top and the medium is random just here. So this is the same picture as this one, but completely reversed. And this is for a completely different application. This is for the space surveillance program in the US. They want to get very nice image of the satellites. So it's not to image the earth from a satellite, it's to image the satellite from the earth. And they have problems because of the turbulent atmosphere. So what you can do is to put high-frequency radars on the earth. But because of the turbulent atmosphere, you will get this noisy image. An idea would be to put the radar on a flying platform at high altitude of 15 kilometers. That would be okay, but a radar is quite heavy. It requires a lot of power. So to have a permanent monitoring on a balloon or something like that, it's not very easy. But with this idea, you don't need to put the whole radar on the flying platform. You can let the sources on the ground, just put an antenna on the top, that's light, just a receiver. And with that, you should be able to do that kind of imaging. So that's exactly the same problem, but with different waves, different settings, different types of fluctuations. This is a random paraxial regime here in that case. But again, this should work. So hopefully, we will find a way to implement that in the next few months. And I thank you for your attention. Thank you for your care. Do you have any other questions? You've never talked about the sonars, have you? Ah, sonar. Problem with the sonar is that the sea is moving. The heterogeneity, the small-scale fluctuations in the sea are moving. And that's the main problem, because here, as I've said and as was remarked, you need some time. You need a lot of data in order to be able to average and to extract your cross-correlation. If your medium is moving while you record the data, that's not good. So we still have problems with that. I think that some people try to do that in Scripps Institute in San Diego. So they have measured more or less the correlation time of the medium. By how much time do you have to do that? And you don't have a lot of time. You just have a few minutes. After a few minutes, the medium has changed. And it's over. So that's a problem for underwater acoustics. Medium is changing in that case. Problem of non-sipar. Is it a problem also from the atmosphere? Ah, for the atmosphere, yes. That could be a problem, indeed. But here, in underwater acoustics, in seismic imaging, you use acoustic or elastic waves. So you need, let's say, a few hours. Here, you use electromagnetic waves. That's not the same time scale. Here, you don't need one hour. Here, it's very fast, in fact. Another question. Could you use this method for astronomical observations? It's the same. Oh, I don't know. For the stuff to compensate instead of adaptive optics or something else. Oh, I don't know. I have not. It's not completely obvious, because it's really optics. And here, you need to record the phases. In optics, you record the intensity. So you need a way to record. That's not completely obvious. Here, in acoustics, electromagnetism, you record the complexity. So what's the difference between electromagnetism and optics? In optics, you record the wave intensity. In electromagnetism, for radar, you record. It's radar. You record everything. So that's different. When you mentioned the higher order of fluctuations, you spoke about fourth order. So third order is the same phenomenon as the average. Yes, it's zero. Yes, indeed. If not, so we thank the speaker again. Thank you.


Coming up on DTNS, tricked into paying after a free trial, there ought to be a law and a bipartisan group of US senators want to pass one, plus another attempt at making nuclear fusion work and do we need a blockchain for our mobile phone bill? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 17th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just discussing smart assistance and whether they can help you contact ghosts and also more practical things like how to find out why they activated when you didn't need them to get that wider conversation on our expanded show. Good day. Internet become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Sony will open up a beta program for PlayStation 5 to users over the age of 18 in the US, Canada, Japan, the UK, Germany and France. Microsoft began allowing Xbox owners to test upcoming software releases in its Insider program since late 2016. Speaking of Microsoft, they announced that CEO Satya Nadella has been unanimously voted as the new chair of the company's board, replacing independent director and former semantics CEO John Thompson. Probably forgot, Thompson was even the chair. Thompson joined Microsoft's board in 2012, replaced Bill Gates as the Microsoft chair in 2014, which was the same day Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as CEO. Microsoft will also begin rolling out its Fluid framework, which allows blocks of office content to live independently across the web in Microsoft Teams this summer. It'll start with a collaborative notes app that syncs in real time with Outlook invites. Microsoft will also update its whiteboard app to serve as a canvas for fluid components. Russia's lower house of the Duma, its parliament, passed legislation that requires foreign online platforms with more than 500,000 daily users in Russia to establish local branches or a legal entity within the country. Non-compliant sites will be designated as so on search engines potentially being excluded from search and possibly even banned from advertising in Russia. Amazon launched the Amazon App Store Small Business Accelerator program, which will reduce the cut that Amazon takes from developers from 30% to 20% for those earning less than $1 million per year. Developers in the program will also receive an AWS credit equal to 10% of their revenue. All right, let's talk a little more about subscriptions. We mentioned subscriptions at the top of the show. Justin, there's some legislation being proposed. Oh, Tom, these politicians, they keep playing politics. A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators Brian Shatz, John Thune, Raphael Warnock and John Kennedy proposed a bill Wednesday called the Unsubscribe Act. Companies would be required to make terms and conditions more transparent when offering a free trial. It would also require a clear and easy way to cancel the trial subscription, including requiring a customer to be able to unsubscribe in the same way that they subscribed. Many trials let you easily subscribe online, but then require a phone call to cancel, for example. This bill would prohibit that practice. It would also require a clear notice of when the trial is ending before charging the customer and would disallow automatic transfer of a contract longer than one month. In other words, if you signed up for a monthly subscription, they can't automatically switch you to a multi-month or a year subscription to charge you. Companion legislation is also being introduced in the United States House of Representatives. First of all, it's bipartisan. It's got companion legislation. This feels like something that's probably going to end up becoming a law. It feels like it's got a chance. I'm not finding too much that I don't like about this. I think subscription obviously is becoming the new way of doing things. It's much more common. Obviously this would also apply to magazines and things that are more traditional, but you're talking about game subscriptions, video subscriptions, stuff like that. Yeah, I want it to be the rule that, hey, if you can take the subscription online, you can let me cancel it online. Don't make me jump through hoops to do that. I like the idea of saying it's only fair to let people know when the free trial is ending so they have a chance to decide. I understand that these are not great for the person running the business, but as a person who runs a business that's partly built on subscriptions, I think you do better when you treat your customers better than you do otherwise. So maybe that's an argument for not needing a law, but I don't know. I think this one's okay with me. Yeah, me too. I can't think of any specific example recently, but there are subscriptions that have free trials all over the place. I sometimes get to a certain point in the, yes, I want to try this out, free trial stage, and then I go, you know what, this is going to be weird. It's going to get weird, the unsubscription thing, and payment upfront, and they're asking too much and there are all these boxes to uncheck. And so I just back out of stuff because I know that the company is going to fight me tooth and nail to keep me subscribed. What I didn't realize was even going on was something like signing up for a monthly subscription and then getting bait and switched into something annual that you didn't sign up for. That should not be allowed. And I think that that is a very aggressive practice that is probably not as commonly seen in this world, but the reality is that this is kind of where we are headed in terms of our entire economy. Subscriptions are something that have proven tremendously popular and therefore are also going to be abused because we just kind of want things and direct debit from our accounts or credit cards have made it very, very easy to do so. Tom to your point, it's bipartisan. It's got a great chance of passing. Would that it were so simple, my friend? There's a million reasons why this can or will get either sideline or never see the light of a vote depending on various different circumstances, including just the schedule by which things are going to happen. One last thought here. So you're saying there's a chance. Sure. Yeah, there's a chance. There's a lot that needs to go on. We'll see whether or not this can make it past the gates. One last thing on this. There is a element that is directly tied to politicians and one of the reasons why this might get either watered down or not see the light of day of a vote is that small donor, small dollar donations, many of which are recurring or subscription quote unquote based through Winred and Act Blue, the officially sanctioned websites that handle small dollar donations for the Republican and Democratic Party are also going to face a lot of these questions. So what is good for the goose, be it Netflix or the Wall Street Journal will be good for the gander every single one of these politicians reelection campaign. So look for the amendment that exempts political subscriptions from this quite possibly. Yeah. Well, Gorilla mobile is launching a mobile service in Singapore in September with no contracts. $25 plan gets you 100 minutes, 100 text messages and 20 gigabytes of data. That sounds pretty normal, right? This is something that we're familiar with. No contract plans. Pretty common. Even the idea of rolling over or giving a refund for unused data or tax or minutes, not unusual. But that's not exactly what Gorilla mobile is doing. Instead, unused data is going to be converted into a cryptocurrency called Gorilla Go tokens. The non expiring tokens can be used for international direct dialing, roaming data or even shared with other members of your company, family or friends. If you're a customer of this Gorilla mobile started originally developed its blockchain system called switchback to support a travel SIM card folks that are on the go. The idea was that after a trip you could convert your unused data because that happens sometimes into tokens and then use those tokens for other things. But then a lot of people weren't traveling. So Gorilla mobile switched to focusing on the local market in Singapore. Would like to expand though. The company hopes to expand into Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Longer term looking into Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as well. Yeah, I feel like the knee jerk reaction here is to be like, oh, so they took a, you know, a rollover credit minute and slapped blockchain on it to make it popular and that very well maybe all this is. But I suspect there's something more behind the scenes that makes it easier for them to operate. Like there are some definite advantages to being able to plug in a blockchain and say, oh, you handle all that ledger stuff so we don't have to build a system to do it. And that may be all this is too. I'm not sure. It certainly is attention catching to see somebody like, yeah, our rollover credit system is going to be handled by our own internal token. I can't wait until Disney dollars are run on a blockchain. Yeah, right. I mean, that's happening. Isn't it? I mean, I think, and I think that will happen if, if what's going on here is grill mobile saying, look how much we save on like transaction stuff that the company's eating anyway, you know, for our in store credit system that we already have. The question, yeah, the question will be whether Disney feels that makes a, it helps it to make a big deal out of being blockchain or you just find out later like, oh yeah, they switched to a blockchain a long time ago. Exactly. Yeah, it's just in some Q4 earnings that tremendous savings. A magical savings. Google translate. It's a go to for people looking to find out what a word or phrase means in another language and now the information sources say Google's working on a project called Tivoli, T-I-V-O-L-I, which would put a conversational AI in Google search. So you could actually learn a foreign language by doing a search. It uses Google's Lambda or language model for dialogue application. Google demonstrated that at IO last month, if that rings a bell. That's the model that can understand conversation cues better and have a smoother conversation because of that. Right now it looks like Tivoli would just use text. So you'd be doing a search like translate this and it would be like, oh, this is the translation. Would you like to, you know, engage in a back and forth to learn something? But Google wants to, according to the information, integrate Tivoli into its voice assistant, which I could absolutely see like doing some conversational stuff or even YouTube. One example the information gave was a YouTube language quiz. You would watch the quiz and record yourself responding, giving answers, and then Tivoli would analyze the recording and give you a rating. Let you know how you did and how you're progressing. Tivoli is expected to launch sometime this year. We don't have an exact date on this, but keep an eye out by the end of the year. Google translate to me is a standard. You know, I don't think I have not been on any kind of vacation where there's a foreign language involved in which that was not a major, major, major part of it. And I think in terms of people who I know are focused on learning those languages, Duolingo is great in terms of reading comprehension, but nothing really beats being able to speak the language back and forth. This seems like it would be a reasonable facsimile. Yeah, the YouTube example stands out to me because I use Duolingo. I've been using Duolingo for years, but I kind of practice French when I when I'm in the mood or I have some spare time.  It's also repetitive in a way that an app like Duolingo is just going to have to be the desktop and the mobile versions are slightly different.   What if what if the lesson was, can Sarah understand when she's receiving bad news, that kind of stuff like that, that conversational stuff, you know, I'm kind of just spitballing here, but I would love, I would love that to be a little bit more because that just becomes that much more of a real world application where you're like this is actually really helpful because there's so much of those cues that really do exist. Yeah, just having more options for this kind of thing is important to me too. I use Duolingo pretty much every day and your mileage varies depending on what language you're learning like some of them like Spanish and French are like super like polished, but some of the languages don't get as much attention. And so I'm always looking for supplements. And this could be a great supplement. It's also Google. So this could be like Google Translate, which over the years has gotten better and better to the point that I just rely on it. It's always there and it's gotten better at understanding context and everything. Or this could be something where Google throws it in there and then it just languishes and, you know, then eventually goes away. So I'm not counting on it, but I'm very curious to see it roll out. I love that. That's my new slogan for Google. Google. Don't count on it. Maybe Google shrug. Maybe maybe it'll come but it'll be named five things before you really ever see it in practical use. That is weird. It translate never had that translate was maybe that's the signal as soon as they change a name, you know, it's over. Yeah, if it keeps its name, it's going to be fine. All next week, folks, it's accessibility week on Daily Tech News show. Every day we're going to feature a guest that will come on to talk about accessibility and technology from testing products to developing UIs to more starting next week, Monday, June 21. So mark your calendars. Tell your friends if they're into accessibility. We got some great guests lined up some great topics. We will be doing that all next week. United States Senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand has revamped the data protection actually introduced last year co-sponsored by Senator Sherrod Brown. It would establish a federal agency to oversee data privacy in the country. The new version of the bill adds a provision requiring the data protection agency to review any merger that would affect the data of 50,000 people or more. It also adds an office to monitor and possibly penalize high risk data practices like algorithms, biometric data and data from children or other vulnerable groups. This is not a bipartisan bill, however. Other proposals would add new enforcement powers regarding data to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. And a bipartisan proposal introduced last month from Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Kennedy, Joe Manchin and Richard Burr called the Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Act would put requirements on companies to give users more control over their data and let them opt out of tracking and collection. I'll look at Senator John Kennedy getting a double mention on DTNS today. Who would have thunk it? I don't have a lot of confidence that Senator Gillibrand is going to have any more luck this time around with the Data Protection Act than she did last time. Also, I'm not a big fan of, like, let's set up another agency. I could see maybe expanding the Federal Trade Commission and saying, you know, let's give them a little more oomph to be able to look at this. But I actually prefer that last one that you mentioned where you're like, no, let's just make a law. We have enforcement agencies already. Let's make a law that says you got to give people control over their data. I would love that. I would love, I think even more stringent than this, that's, you know, data portability acts and things like that. I think those are necessary and worth debating anyway. We are in a very strange time for these kinds of laws because you have some of the biggest power players, most notably Facebook, spending a tremendous amount of money, both in terms of lobbying and in terms of just retail advertising, not even just in D.C. But also on just average television shows saying, please regulate us. We're asking you for rate. Isn't it time somebody made a law peeping gold scamps like us in line, which tends to lead me to the question of how much of this is regulatory capture? How much of this is setting up unrealistic lines? And I would say something like an agency that would affect any company with the data of 50,000 or more people, which you could take to mean 50,000 total that have ever interacted with that service is a very low bar that tends to make me a little bit wary that it would favor gigantic companies that hoover a tremendous amount of data. Let's say our Facebooks, our Googles, our, you know, TikToks, blah, blah, blah, but would be very hard if there were other regulations to have newer players get into the game, which is ultimately I think what the biggest bipartisan question is, are these companies too powerful? Not necessarily is collecting data wrong or bad, but once they have so much of it, is it too much of a potential problem to bear? So I'm curious to see where these go. I agree with you that Kirsten Gillibrands is probably DOA, and I would say that the bipartisan one is something that is a little bit more of a shock. Yeah, I'm with you that it is important to remember that when Facebook says, yeah, we've come around, we need regulation, it's Facebook saying, please create regulation that leaves us as we are. Let's us do something that's easy, but stops competition from being able to rise up and easily combat us because, you know, they easily can. We take data so seriously, we think every company should put $500 million in an escrow account or they collect a single bit. Right. And we've done it already because we won't even miss it. By the way, while we're on bipartisan senators, that conversation topic that so frequently comes up a group of bipartisan US senators proposed a 25% tax credit for investments in semiconductor manufacturing as Congress works to increase US chip production. This is also a pet project of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as part of his bid to create investment to combat some of China's advantages. All right, we'll keep an eye on that as it works its way towards possibly becoming a law. Nuclear fusion. Let's talk about that instead. It's a promising idea. It would fuse atoms together rather than splitting them apart as current nuclear fission reactors do. Fusion cools quickly. So there's no risk of meltdown. Its byproduct is an inert gas helium. You know, make your voice sound funny, but otherwise it doesn't have a whole lot of implications. And also some tritium, which has a short half life and is consumed by the reactions as well. So you don't build up a lot of it. And you don't need enriched materials. So there's not a risk of nuclear proliferation either. Nuclear fusion is what makes the sun shine. A lot of people think man, nuclear fusion would solve so many things less pollution, low cost energy. How can we do it? Well, that's the trick. Canada's General Fusion, which had an infusion of some cash from Jeff Bezos, is going to build a large scale nuclear fusion demonstration plant in Cullum, Oxfordshire, England. The UK Atomic Energy Authority operates a campus there, which has multiple nuclear fusion projects underway, including the joint European Taurus or JET and the MAST upgrade. So General Fusion is going to join that campus. General Fusion, however, uses a different technology than most of these products. They use something called magnetized target fusion. It uses a superheated plasma of hydrogen, injects it into a cylinder of liquid metal, and then pneumatic pistons compress the plasma until the atoms fuse together, generating heat. The heat boils water to drive a steam turbine, and then like most ways of generating power, that steam turbine can generate electricity. General Fusion's reactor will be 70% the size of a commercial reactor, and it is only demonstration. It's not going to generate power for the grid. This is just to see if they can make it work. General Fusion hopes to have it up and running by 2025. Fusion, if you're like, well, why hasn't someone done this before? Well, they're not for lack of trying. Fusion's been 20 years away from being practical as an energy generating technology since the 1950s. That's the joke.  Hard to get it to put more energy out than you put in. That's the problem. You can make it work, but it's usually at a deficit, which is not what you want from a power plant, right? One of the highest profile examples is an international effort called ITER, I-T-E-R, being built in southern France. It's a truly international cooperative effort. China, the United States, Russia, India, the EU, South Korea, and Japan are all cooperating on ITER, but it's not expected to work effectively until after 2035. It has constant cost overruns. A lot of private companies have been hoping to get nuclear fusion working before then, and General Fusion seems to be among the people who follow this closely. One of the more likely to be able to do that if anybody can do it at all. Yeah, I mean, if you've got a target date of 2025 to say, see, look, we did it. It works. I would hope. Yeah, it's not another. And in 20 years, we'll be able to add this to a power grid somewhere and save everybody money and make the earth better. But yeah, it's promising that we'd be that much closer to a working product in under five years. Certainly so. And I think the idea of clean energy is something that or at least cleaner energy than we have now is something that is such top of mind that you're going to get a lot of money in it. I mean, if you look at the cycle of these kinds of scientific researches or trends, they tend to be dominated by gigantic infusions of cash. And right now we have not only a government friendly appetite for it, but also a lot of billionaires that really want to spend money on big gigantic ideas because big gigantic ideas. They feel kind of had their legacy. So I think it's a very curious time for where this is going.  But also Jeff Bezos would like to be known as the guy who helped make that happen, right? So if you've got a few hundred million, you can sink into General Fusion as one of those bets. That's why you're going to see folks like him doing that. And good. The more of those bets we have, the more chance that one of them pans out and becomes the thing that actually brings nuclear fusion into practicality because it has the promise. It's just trying to figure out the trick of making it generate more energy than you put into it. Once somebody solves that, then we're on our way. It's just refinements after that. Can I just say this though?  But like, I don't trust anything that has a deadline or a projection longer than a year from now. If it's 2025, it might as well be 2055 and it might as well be 5,050. I feel like once you get outside of a year, maybe two. Maybe because I guess they announce Avengers movies two years out. That's when I'm like, for real? I don't know. I don't know. I might not put it quite so so bleakly, but I think you're right to be like, yeah, once you're a couple of years out, especially with nuclear fusion. Whereas I just mentioned the joke has always been it's 20 years away. It's like, yeah, that's great. That's great. I'm glad you're excited. I will check in in 2025 and see where you're at. I was actually looking through the FAQ over at Eider.org just to, you know, what do they have to say about their project? You know, because so many countries are involved and there were more than one reference about, you know, later this century. And in the second half of the century where I'm like, okay, I'm with you. I'm with you. I might not be here, but you know, best of luck, everyone. It's it's sort of by the way, let's just hope that that was an old copy from 1970. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, another 20 years. Let's attack another 20 years. Sorry, we're a little bit behind. Leica, you may be familiar with like cameras, pretty high end stuff. Well, Leica announced its first self branded smartphone, the lights phone one exclusively on SoftBank in Japan and launching in July for 187,920 yen. It's about $1,700 US. The phone basically a rebranded sharp aqueous R6. If you remember the R6 specs, they're pretty much exactly the same, although Leica has added its own red badge and a magnetic lens cap to the devices one inch 20 megapixel rear sensor and 240 Hertz 6.6 inch OLED display. So this is a smartphone that is basically a most most beautiful camera you can buy on the market. If you're a Leica person, you might be into this. Yeah, I mean, people love a Leica, don't they? It just it has a magical brand effect on people and it's a pretty phone. It's pretty camera. I mean, what's interesting is we had a guest on here a couple of weeks ago mentioned that this is one of the new things for high end camera makers is to sell their name and trade on it. I mean, this phone actually does have a Leica designed simicron lens on it. But it's still we're going to trade on the Leica name and it's going to be a status thing. Right. This is not the first phone to have a Leica lens in it either. Exactly. Yeah. It's just a very nicely presented version of it. I mean, so it's a it's a brand play. Yeah, right? Like beautiful, beautiful brand play with real light with a real Leica lens. Yes, exactly. But like you said, that's not rare. Like that's been a selling point to for smart phones for a long time now. So it's just a if you really, really, really like cameras. But it's pretty Justin. I'm not saying it's it's evil. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying it's a it's a brand play. It's a status phone. This is not some budget feature thing. It's $1,700. Come on. I'm sure look, I'm sure it's a fine phone like by itself, right? The non rebranded version, I'm sure is very nice. But I just, all right. I just call. I may not take out a loan to buy it, but it's pretty. Yeah. No, I would take a picture of myself taking it. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. We're talking about Windows 11 and what it may bring on the show yesterday. One of those was the new startup sound and Jason wrote in and said, I like the shorter length of the startup sound. After all, a startup sound that's longer than a solid straight drive boot speed would quickly feel terrible. Cause nice and snappy. See what Jason's getting out there. Yeah. I just, it sounds a lot more like a day spa than the life. Yeah, for sure. And Jason's totally right. You would not want your startup sound to outlast your boot length and you're waiting for the startup sound to finish playing. If you have thoughts on anything we talk about on a previous show or might talk about it on a future show or questions, comments, send all of them right now. Well, not right the second, but when we're done with the show feedback and daily tech new show.com actually do it now. You can multitask. We believe in you. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, all multitaskers. We're just sure of it. Paul Thieson, Ollie Sanjabi and Andrew Bradley. Thank you very much.  Also extra special thanks to Bjorn Andre, who's in our top lifetime support list for DTNS. Bjorn has been supporting us for years. And for that we thank you. Also thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today.  Indeed. For the last seven months in secret, my production company dog and pony show audio has been working with Brian brushwood on a project. That project was released this week. It's called world greatest con. It's going to be a five episode series. The first two episodes are up now in podcast form on any and all podcasting platforms that you would like. It is a, I think an intensely personal and educational project. Brian's amazing in it. It tells the story of an audacious plan by the allies to hoax Hitler toward the, you know, middle of world war two. And I'm very, very, very proud of it. Don't take my word for it though. Go ahead and take a look at the reviews so far. It is the number three podcast in all of history podcasts on I on Apple podcasts as it is now, and it's in the middle of the top 100. So I could not be more proud of it. I would very much encourage DT and S listeners to go listen to it. And I'm sure because we have a large shared audience that many of you already haven't downloaded it. Thank you. If you have, if you haven't listened to those first two episodes, if you don't like what you hear in the first two episodes that you're probably not going to like the rest of the series, but I got a feeling that there's a great, great, great majority of you guys that will want to know why cons don't fool us because we're stupid. They fool us because we're human legendary Austin writer Andy Langer said, if you love Skull Duggery military history 007 and dislike Hitler, this is your new favorite podcast. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, an amazing list of people have kind of co-signed on this Jack Rusider of Dark Knight Diaries. The goat himself, Dan Carlin even had a positive tweet to say about it. And that is so amazing to hear as we kind of enter that genre of history and, you know, I guess true crime. I guess the crimes are hitlers, but sure. Yeah, right. But it is true. World's greatest con folks. Yeah. Greatest con podcast. Sounds intriguing. We're live Monday through Friday on this show. We're always intriguing. We like to think for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC tune in. If you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live, we are back tomorrow with Amber MacArthur and Len Peralta. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


I know that it's impossible for a model soul like me to cross whatever separates, to cross what we can see and I know it's wishful thinking and I know it cannot be and I know I'll never feel you laying close to me but can I try? can I dream? can I cross those boundaries? and I would fall to mine and I would cross in between and I know that there's no answer and I know I have no right I know that there's a darkness with every single light and please forgive me the wishes of a fool you know I'm sick of playing so can I try? can I dream? can I cross what's in between? and I would to mine and I would cross what's in between you and me