I think that we are in a very unique moment in the history of healthcare, at least in this country. That's what every generation thinks. Well, let me give you some data points, maybe I can convince you. But what I mean by that is even those of us who may really feel quite attached to the current medical model to really look at that in a new way simply because it's not working. And it's not working in a lot of significant ways. It's not working financially. I mean, the statistics in this audience probably knows them well. The amount of money this country is spending in high-tech medical interventions exceeds any, by far, exceeds any other country around the globe, and yet our health outcomes are worse. The interesting now that I live in the Veterans Administration and I interface quite a bit with the Department of Defense, a statistic I was in a meeting not very long ago and someone from the Department of Defense said, do you know this health in this country is an issue of national security? And I thought for a minute, like, what is he talking about, right? Because 80% of people that walk into a recruitment office for the armed services doesn't even qualify to be considered for service. 80% because of their health status. So the dominant medical paradigm is what you are describing, which is we have a disease that we have to fight. And it's revealed in the language that we use. You know, antibiotics, antipsychotics, anti-anti-anti. The concept that disease sits over there and the job of medicine is to fight that battle and win. So this whole concept and this approach to modern medicine has come because you need to understand when they thought of medicine, when they thought of developing some kind of medicine and a system of medical treatment, their problem was only with infectious diseases and contagious diseases. How to treat the plague, how to treat the smallpox, how to treat this. Nobody ever thought of a diabetes or a hypertension or a cardiac problem. They never even considered those things that did not exist in their radar. In their radar only infectious diseases did exist. That has to be handled in a war footing. No question about that because it is a war. An infection means it's an invasion from another organism upon our own system and you have to use chemical weapons. You can't shoot them. So this whole medical system evolved from the need to handle infectious diseases, contagious diseases which were taking a huge toll on populations in those times. But today we have come to a place where people are on self-help. That is they manufacture their own diseases. They don't wait for any infection to happen to them. Because now they are on self-help. They need another system of medicine, another way to approach it completely. Which is the shift we are struggling to make right now? Well, now where we are of course is that the sciences have advanced. We have complexity theory and systems biology and quantum physics. But the medical model, the dominant medical model, again I'm making gross generalizations, but the dominant medical model is still designed, our core competency is still designed on the find it, fix it approach, which is clearly failing. I mean even in the chronic conditions in this country, we're not even holding our own. I don't know if you're aware of those statistics, but diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, they are all the percentage of our population, obesity, the list goes on. Every single one of them across the board and our veterans and in our civilian population are increasing every year. So we're failing and I believe that uncoupling and removing the boundary shall we say between medicine that has been held over here and health and spirituality and whatever labels we want to put on this over here. You know, one response right now in this country is even with Affordable Care Act well we have to focus more on health. So one response is well medicine will keep doing disease management over here and then we can pay a little more attention and hopefully reimburse a little more for health optimization over here. I personally think and then I want your thoughts on this, that's better than not including this but the real opportunity is to remove the boundaries. These are not separate things. The mind and the body are not separate things. In western medicine we are taught to diagnose and treat the diseases of the body, the diseases of the mind, but we have missed that the doorway to the health and healing of the body and mind is really in my opinion the heart and the soul. So how do we re-envision a future of healthcare where there aren't those boundaries? See the ideal, the ideal is one thing and what we can do today is a different thing, okay? The ideal would be that we look at human well-being, not human health. If you consider human well-being as a composite subject and an approach, then you would consider what makes a human being complete and approach all of them together. That is the best way to do it. But today what can we do if that's a question? We can only talk about, you know, somewhere having a little... We can't marry them yet. We can only have a date. I kind of like to jump right in. The situation is not ready to simply get them together. No, because lot more work has to be done. It's not going to happen in a short span of time. But we can start interfacing here and there. It is possible that hospitals can have a meditation center going within them. And it is possible meditations can... Meditation centers already generally have, but we can make sure that there's a little bit of health center out there. We can start having a little bit of a skirmish right now. Right now they're not ready for total union because in both the sides there are too many opinions about each other. Largely people are not looking at the whole health as such. They are trying to impart what they have studied or what they have grasped. It doesn't matter whether it addresses the whole humanity or the whole human being or not. So that attitudinal change is not going to happen just like that. Till a day comes when medical education includes all these things, which may make it even longer than the way it is right now. And I would like to see a day when doctors before they touch another patient first fix themselves internally before they touch somebody else because this is all important. When I say this is all important. For example, we were talking about Bhuta Shuddhi or handling the elements. Today sufficient research has gone particularly into water, scientific research. And what these scientists are saying is water has memory. If you give it a thought, it remembers. If you give it an emotion, it remembers. If you give it a touch, it remembers. So if elements have that kind of memory outside, you can change the quality of water just by touching it or with a thought or an emotion or a hand. The beautiful experiment conducted by a twelve-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy in India. What they did was they read about this somewhere on the internet and they came home and they set up two glass pots of water. One room, same water in two glass pots. One room they go and express very loving emotions. They touch it, they kiss it, they hug it every day for ten minutes. Another room they go and abuse it and do… express all kinds of negativity. Mother was… their mother was very concerned. I can't believe they have so much negative emotion in them. They're expressing it to the water. In ten days' time, this water for which they were abusing and expressing negative emotion, it turned dark. The other water remained just like that. They posted it on the YouTube, you must see it. So this is something we have always known. In India, in part of our life, nobody in traditional Indian home ever drinks water from a tap. It doesn't matter whether it's potable or not potable. Even if it is say… if it's said potable, it is not. What we do is we take a copper vessel or a… see here they could… otherwise always next to me there's a copper vessel or a brass vessel and they will take it, they'll wash it with turmeric and tamarin and everything in the night, put water in it, they will apply something, some… you know what is considered sacred symbols on it, they worship this and then only tomorrow morning it is given to your family because water has memory. They're saying if the water is pumped through the pipe, these… if pumped through the pipe and it's taking fifty bends by the time it comes to your house, by the time it comes to your house, sixty percent of it, the molecular change in it is such that it is literally turned into poison. But if you take it in your glass and hold it for about twenty minutes, it will undo itself. But just the forceful pumping, not contamination, just the forceful pumping is making the water in molecular structure in such a way that it's harmful to human health. So if you're doing that to the water, if you're treating this with all kinds of emotions and negativities and you know, all kinds of abuse to yourself and to others, the water here also behaves the same way. This is not new. Always every human being who lived on this planet with a certain connection with nature around him always knew this. So one of the things that we can do, particularly for people who are going to war and coming back, whatever, war is the most extreme situation that human beings can create by themselves. For other things you need nature's help. You know, people who have been put through this ringer, if they're coming in broken states, one of the best things you could do is all of them compulsorily should go through at least one month of living in a farm, being connected to the soil and water and air around them, putting their bare hands into the land and doing something simple. Just being connected, I must tell you this experience. We had a yogic hospital in our yoga center in India. We called it yogic hospital. We did not want it to grow too much because we don't want to turn into a hospital full-time. We are a spiritual center. So we're keeping it low-key. Once I came here, I spoke and a few doctors, American doctors who were interested, they traveled to India. They came and stayed there for three days and after three days one of the volunteers came and told me all the medical doctors are up in arms. They want to leave. I said, what happened? They said it's best that you meet them. They are just off. Then I said, okay, and I went to meet them. Then I said, what's the problem? They said, you said there is a hospital. Where is a hospital? There is no hospital here. I said right now there are about sixty and odd patients. I said, where is it? Their idea for hospital is that there must be beds. You must treat sick well and everybody should be… If you treat them so well, they will not want to become healthy. Where are the patients? I said, they're all in the garden. I put them to work. We give them the treatment and therapies and medication, but rest of the time I put them to work. Whatever they can do, they must do. Above all, they must sit and work barefoot and bare hands in… with the soil. Just being in touch with the planet because you're just a drop of this planet. You're forgetting that. What you call as my body is just a piece of the planet, isn't it? If you lose connection with the source, will you not get disorganized? There are specific scientific ways of doing that. If you cannot do any of those things, at least just let them walk in a farm, barefoot, work, do something, you will see at least sixty, seventy percent of them will just come out of their problems, just like that. Just being in touch with this.


statistics and excel height statistical inference data excel practice problem get ready taking a deep breath holding it in for 10 seconds looking forward to a smooth soothing excel here we are in excel if you don't have access to this workbook that's okay because we'll basically build this from a blank worksheet so you can just open a blank worksheet but if you do have access to this workbook three tabs down below example practice a blank example in essence answer key practice tab having pre-formatted cells so you can focus on the heart of the practice problem the link tab only having the data so we can practice formatting the cells in excel as we work through the practice problem let's go to the example tab to see where we are headed noting that we have the data on the left hand side related to heights and inches pretty long data set that we will be working with we are up


Okay, hello. This was a surprise to most of us, by the way, so we started getting our heads together. So here's a question. We talk about business agility a lot and we talk about the challenges that organizations face. The question is in an Indian context, in a cultural diverse country like India, what are the cultural challenges? Well, what are the cultural challenges that we face by adopting any sort of business agility? From your experience. Doesn't even have to be India. It could be America. Cultural challenges. I think Todd wants to say something. I don't really want to say anything, but I'll start. I've been working in the Indian culture for quite a number of years. And one of the things I think the biggest challenge that I've had working with teams, we have the standard remote challenges and all of that. But I think the biggest challenge I've had is the one, there is a cultural element of not wanting to disagree with when someone says something. And that's probably the biggest thing I've challenged with working with Indian teams compared to working with teams from Eastern Europe or elsewhere, is that I expect challenges from everyone. And when I don't get that, when everything is a yes, yes, yes, yes, and then things don't get followed through, then that's a big challenge. So that's one of the biggest challenges is that engagement and the challenge. That's really how we build collaboration. That's really how we build business agility across the board. We have to have an engagement across the organizations and working as partners. And that's probably the biggest challenge I've had working with teams in India. So the million dollar question, how do you shift a cultural behavior, organizational culture or societal culture? Yeah, and what I have found is that the only way I've been able to, so what I've found is I have to work individually. I find them willing to challenge all the time. It's sort of this business relationship where it starts to be worked differently. And so you have to change that rigid business relationship towards more of an individual relationship. And then I start seeing that change. So that's how it's worked for me. So he's saying small steps and that's how you would change anything. You'd change a culture, an organization, a team, a country. You would say, yeah, let's do small things. And if you want to see behavior change in individuals, you'd begin by modeling it and rewarding it. So I'm leaving. Because you had a question for me. The rash has something to disagree with. What a surprise. I had a counterpoint to Todd. And hence I thought I should take the stage. I think, again, this is a classic stereotyping saying that I have worked with Indians and hence all Indians are like this. The problem is that often a lot of people outside India have worked mostly with services companies. And in services company, this is the way you make business. You're told not to say no. But if you work with the product companies here, they're very different. We have fist fight and we have real fights and people disagree all the time. So I think the point I'm trying to make is company culture actually supersedes the original culture. And so if you're in a setup like a services company, then that culture is basically which encourages people not to disagree. But a product company or a startup company, there is a very strong culture of disagreeing. So that was only my point. So sit back down. So if you have an existing company culture, how do you shift it? So if you have an existing company culture, how do you shift it? What is the reason for shifting? That's a good question. You don't have to ask me questions. I'm going to be asking you questions. In general, because an organization decides they want to have more agility and perhaps it's mandated, perhaps it's decided through a retrospective or some other communal mechanism. But the culture of an organization is generally not necessarily the one that is needed in the future and there has to be an evolution. So the reason I asked you why it's required is because if you see as an industry, we have thrived the IT industry here. And the reason we've thrived is because we are very adaptable. Agile came along. We said, great, we will be agile. Whether you're actually or not doesn't matter. But there is very adaptive. Before that was CMM, CMMI. We went through that craze. So I think people here in my experience are very adaptive and they thrive on that. And that's why if you see last 20 years, the industry has grown significantly. So the question was like, why do we need to change? We're already thriving. Was your question a general question? How you shift company culture or was it related to India now? No, it's a general question. How do you shift company culture? For me, the most system-relevant people in a company usually are the leaders in a company. And the leadership behavior will manifest itself in the company culture much more than the behavior of an individual person. So in my experience at least such a shift needs to come from the leaders. It needs to be lived by the leaders. So that's at least for me one part, a very important part of shifting a company culture. I'd like to challenge your first question before I respond to the second. I think that culture is not our main challenge. I think it very often is used as an excuse. I think the main challenge here is the whole management industry out there. And the business schools and the universities that has produced these kind of mindsets over so many years and all the people that they have in the organizations around now. That is our main challenge, the mindsets. And when it comes to changing company culture, I think that you need to look at the interplay between management processes and culture. You can change your culture by changing your management processes in the right direction and in the wrong direction. And too often, I mean, this is seen as kind of two separate things. Well, culture is over here and that's HR. Management processes is over here. That's finance. And no wonder it goes wrong. So I would like to challenge that part of when Naresh said that we are adaptive. I feel that based on my experience with some of the team members, it's like, you know, if you have thought of one idea, then you are so stick to that that you feel that, you know, this is right. And even whosoever, you know, gives reciprocating or anything which is even making sense. But then still people say, yeah, this is good, but then my idea is the best one. So I feel that the still people have that kind of, you know, non-adaptive nature. A fixed mindset. Yeah. But that's not an Indian problem. It's a universal thing. And I liked what you said. And then we think, actually, human beings are taking very similarly. And of course we have cultural small differences, but overall we are driven by very similar things. So you talked about changing management. And one of the viewpoints I have is changing structure, which is not necessarily management, but changing structure can influence the way people behave. And you can call that as the culture of the company now. But if you change the structure, then it can lead to changes in the way people behave. But is the structure shaping the culture or is culture shaping the structure? So this is a bit of a hen in an egg thing, I think. And sometimes the thinking, the mindset of people will result in different structures. But can you change mindset by changing a structure? Maybe. But it needs to be a clever move then. They do say that structure reflects process. That's a bit oversimplified considering the complex adaptive nature of our organizations. Making a single intrusive change structure, any single change is going to distort, but not truly enable a sustainable change. You have to make a holistic change, kind of in slices through behavior. Clearly the leaders have to demonstrate the behavior, but when you really think about it, it's the behavior of the people in the organization that's going to have the strongest influence, consistent behavior in that. So let me pause that because I want to touch. You talk about persistent change and I want to explore that slightly. In your experience, this is the question of everyone. In your experience, what have been the smallest changes that you have seen made in an organization that have had the biggest ripple effect in terms of agility and transformation? The biggest change that we've seen in large organizational transformational change is to hold all managers accountable to being agile leaders at all levels and developing an environment where everyone thrives, where the managers actually own the transformation as opposed to being sort of frozen middle type behavior and when they own it and they start to really role model, as you were saying, role modeling the right agile leadership behavior, everyone thrives at a level that's phenomenal and it's a very subtle little change. Also introducing then leadership circles to support that change, then they take on the big rocks of changing finance systems or HR or anything else. So it's a subtle change with dramatic results because it is holistic. It's not just the structure. The structures will fall away when the organizations are self-organizing and they replace them as opposed to just attacking the structure which is going to get all kinds of resistance and friction. And a bit related to what Beata sometimes says, it's always a recruitment problem. We had done experiments with just changing the recruitment criteria, especially for leaders. So looking really for can we see agile mindset in the candidate that is applying for a position makes a huge change. So the example you gave really fits nicely into why I came up here. So for me, culture is expressed by behavior and habits of everyone in the organization. And behavior and habits are driven, as I see it, by, well, on the one hand, the thing that we have talked about, structure, on the other from the strategy and the third thing is the processes, which is really a triangle. You can find also a lot of studies where they say, well, structure follows process, but there are also studies saying process follows structure and the same is true with strategies. So they are all interwoven. And as soon as you get started there somewhere, you change the behaviors and habits and your example was exactly that. So it was like starting at that, for this thing, I think it was more the process. So how the management did stuff, also your recruitment was a process thing, which changed behaviors and habits and therefore the culture. And here I would like to put forward the context, the Indian context, where we initiated this discussion. It's not about the demographic differences. I am with Naresh on that. It's based on many aspects. It can be services. It can be product development. And more on, on the top of culture is based on the structure. On top of structure is a process. On top of process is a meta process. But when we are targeting about the culture aspect of it and when we are talking the Indian context, it's more of the values and the principle on which that culture is surviving. So the change on the value and the principle is very important. And when your culture shifted from structure to process to meta process and comes into the practices, and if your values and principle are not mapped along with the culture, with the practices you are doing, it's not reflecting there. So it's all about what all practices you are following inside the organization, whether it's matching with your values and principles or whether it's getting reflected with the culture aspects of that. So root, the DNA part of it is the value and the principle. Okay, so I agree that behaviors are shaping the culture. Yes, but what is shaping behaviors really? That is the values and the needs, the basic desires of people, people personalities, right? That is shaping behaviors. So if you don't hire the people with the right values in an agile organization, it will never be agile, right? Because you can fake behaviors, but not for long. You will always hit a kind of a wall when you fake behaviors too long. So you need to have the right value structure in people from the beginning. I want to disagree. And I disagree with Chess Humboldt's words. So these are not mine, but I like them very much. So he said, if you have a broken system and you hire the right people, you will not fix the system, you will break the people. And vice versa. So I disagree with Chess. It's not enough to hire the right people. The organization's value structure needs to be agile, right? And then you need to have people who adhere to that value structure. And it's not enough to hire new people into the wrong value structure. So I just want to touch on a topic that a few of you have mentioned. And you're talking about values and one of the key values of business agility is the customer. The customer is at the heart of much of what we do. How do you, what advice or suggestions do you have to bring the customer closer into the engagement, closer into the organization and build that customer centricity that many organizations lack, I'm afraid. First and foremost, go and meet your customers. Get the people who are in the value chain to actually go and spend time in the closest point in your organization where you touch a customer. So in a software development environment, get the software engineers answering help desk calls. Just build empathy through feeling their pain. So who out here is actually sat on a help desk and listen to the customer complaints? A couple of you. I've got a great story of sending software and hardware engineers who were designing products for farmers. And we sent them out into the cow shed. And the one engineer was holding a prototype device that was intended to be used by farmers in the cow shed. And in the cow shed, in the milking shed, he was walking along and behind there was a cow's backside there. Cow lifted its tail and let go. And the device failed. It didn't survive being covered in three to five liters of cow manure. So was the programmer covered in the three to five liters of cow manure. And that really gave him empathy for what his customer is going to need to deal with and likewise what the device will have to deal with in the real world. And that was the first time he'd ever been on a farm. You're going to disagree, fantastic. So often I hear examples like this. And I think these are kind of weird one-off examples in my experience. Because you're giving an example of someone who went to a cow shed didn't have any experience of being there and accidentally happened. It may not happen to the guy who's always there because he learned the lesson. So maybe that empathy of this may not be required in the product. In this specific case, I'm just trying to highlight that. Similarly, I've worked enough for really successful startup founders and their philosophy is customers are idiots, don't listen to them. Usually the most noisiest customers are the most useless customers. And the ones who are really important are ones busy doing stuff. So I'm just trying to pray the devil's advocate saying there's the flip side of it that we need to be careful because a lot of times people go all out. So my intent, my story is build empathy, not necessarily the specific example. And yeah, the Henry Ford quote comes to mind all the time. It's a self-correcting engine, not for the Ford analogy there. But if you don't respond to your customers, you're not going to survive. And I can remember back when I was at Intel, we had a defect. It was called FDIV, if anyone has ever heard of that. FDIV as a sort of a corporate revelation because our CEO at the time said, this is something we don't need to fix. And he said this into the social media sphere back then. And it ended, every analyst came after us where we actually as a company put everyone on the support line to do the recalls. And it was several million dollars at the time of this recall. And I can remember two years ago, this was like eight years after FDIV, the paradigm shift that was created by that one defect was still floating around and everyone would go, oh, we don't want another FDIV. And people were educating this story, this myth now to most of the millennials who were in the organization, they were still perpetuating that myth that us as a company, we cannot be that again. So that also brings up process is created when someone stuffs up and the answer, let's never let that happen again, so we add more process. So I'm not saying that's what happened in this case. How do you make it such that in an organization, when a failure like that occurs, it is both a learning experience, but it is also treated as a, it does not change, it does not reduce the agility of the organization. I think it actually, the crisis actually created the agility. One of the comments I make to most people who are adopting agile is that when do you have the most speed and the most efficiency? Typically it's when you go into a task force mode and I ask especially the bigger companies, well why don't you just behave that way all the time? Treat everything with that same level of urgency that you would, if you were to go create a task force versus I can be complacent for some period of time and then other periods of time, when the crisis hits, I'm going to have to go jump around and do stuff. I think all companies are pretty good in crisis mode, at least that's something I've observed because in crisis mode usually what's happening is a lot of the constraints that are usually prohibiting the organization system to respond properly to a customer, they are gone and all of a sudden everybody can do exactly what's right. And that's why we sometimes say a bit in a joke we should be constantly in a crisis mode because we would just do what's right. But it's really not sustainable for people to be in a crisis mode all the time. That's a lot of stress I guess. So how do you get the agility of a crisis mode without the stress of a crisis mode? You make sure you've got the right feedback loops in place and ultimately you're measuring the things that matter and that is really make visible the cost of excess process to the point of really looking at value divided by that cost so that you expose it and then enable organizational teams to address it. But it's that invisibility that kills you when that process just keeps growing and growing. If you don't have those radical feedback loops in place to expose those.  I think we should always listen to the customer and communicate with the customer. It doesn't necessarily mean we do all the things that the customers also do. We need to have to be sparring partners in that sense I think in the edge of agile we are not like having a customer-supplier relationship. It's more like partnership kind of attitude that we need to develop. Co-creation. I still think we got to be careful with that because we're in business for those customers. The reason why we are in business is because they come to us and buy things. I remember back in the 19, I think it was in the 1980s I spent a lot of time in Japan and we, from our western lens we were always trying to paint this as a partnership but from their perspective is no, you are a vendor and we do have our needs and we need these needs met versus, you know, let's go into some cooperative mode to go work together. It wasn't sustainable from the aspect that we do have an entertainment between our success and their success but we live in such a competitive world today that if we're not satisfying those companies they're going to go find somebody else who will. For me, I agree partly to you and I partly disagree with you because I think that really depends on what kind of thing you are talking about. If it's a bit of a legacy product or a commodity thing I'm absolutely with you. When it comes to innovation and when you have a lot of uncertainty involved then co-creation I think is the much stronger concept. Alright, so we're almost out of time and I think dinner is going to be outside fairly shortly so let me ask one question of each of you. If there was one change that you would recommend to a mindset, a specific mindset that someone needed or for that matter a specific activity that they would need to do to help develop business agility, just one thing what would be that one piece of advice that you would give them? Shane, do you want to start? I'm going to go with customer empathy. Meet people where they are. I'm going to go with building a deeper self-awareness of how your own mental models and cognitive biases might be getting in your way and really hold yourself accountable for that deepening awareness so that you can actually start acting in a more agile way, kind of believing. I think it just comes down to you need to deeply understand the value of what you're delivering. It's not the speed, it's not the efficiencies, it's directly the value that's being produced by the business. Okay, and then I would say that psychological safety would be the most important thing of everything to create that safe space for people to be able to feel good and perform well in our organizations that will create all the difference where the leaders have to go first and show that they can make mistakes and be fallible. Last but not least. Other than recruitment. And related to that, I think we need to work on the system, not the people. All right, both. Thank you very, oh, hang on, yep. You can. Thank you. Hello. Yeah, my question is, we always stress on values a lot that what value we are giving out of the system, out of any framework which we are using. From your experiences, what all different aspects of values you consider are important. Like one example could be business value, what business value we are giving to our customer. Another could be knowledge, knowledge, another value that out of the system, that what value is coming out of that. In that terms, what are the other aspects which you feel are part of values? What is value? Value is going to be in the eye of the beholder. And if you look at its stakeholder management and the ability to do effective sense making within the scope of your ecosystem, you really need to dig in and understand what are those people who are attracted to your business? What are the personas? What problems are they trying to solve? And are we a part of that, helping them to be able to get that stuff done? Immediate value is also different than brand value. Brand value is if I deliver it consistently, it'll be like Apple when they say, if you go by an Apple store and there's people waiting in line, you ask them why you're waiting in line, it's just because they might release something new. They've produced enough value to the point where people trust that whatever that next thing is going to be, I'm going to go wait in that line. I'd say that values are extremely personal and very individual, and everybody has a different value structure and it comes from your basic needs.  So it could be power, it could be independence, it could be that you value tranquility or any such thing that is deeply personal to a certain person. And there's a value and values are somewhat different. Value for the customer, for the stakeholders, and it's sustainable value for the organization and for the customers and for the planet and the environment at one level, and then the values that the organization espouses and that the people in that organization exhibit. All right, let's stop there. I want to say thank you to the panelists and everyone who came up onto the stage.


Hoi hoi and welcome to the video. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to go over the dankest meme from the dank memes from site 19 subreddit. Let's get started. So that concludes my colleague's research on pataphysics. You're saying we're fictional characters for a writing project of some kind? Did you not listen to a word he said? Hmm, makes sense. You know, this is a zeal meme, but there's a good question to be had here is like, okay, so if pataphysics exists in universe and they know that they're fictional characters, but to what level does the fiction go? Because there's fiction. And so now it's fiction inside of fiction, right? Because obviously they're not characters and they are characters in a writing project. But in a sense, the overarching writing project doesn't have to be ours, right? Or in this case, where people make memes about pataphysics, now you're adding a second or third layer to your pataphysical discussions to the point where it's starting to get impossible to determine what is and isn't real. Unlike pataphysics as a concept, I feel like it's overdone. I think a lot of people came to that conclusion after a time. I really do feel like it's overdone, though. Too much focus on the science of it has sort of rendered it less interesting to me. Now, that is to say, I've certainly written, speak to the audience as a fictional character articles before because this has given me the opportunity to do that as a concept that I didn't come up with this as a concept. This is what Gears' proposal that's like, everyone, there are, God is a horror writer. But I mean, again, I think there's too much of this on the SCP Wiki. And interestingly, it kind of has fallen by the wayside over time. So I'm sure other people have decided the same thing. But it is still an incredibly interesting concept. I think there's a lot of individual stories that can be told about it. Less as a sort of system or as part of an organizational trope with regards to the SCP Foundation. Me trying to look at images on SCP Wiki, when Wiki.decides to have a Wiki.moment, reaction underscore image.png, I have, this is a shoulder meme, by the way. I have so many articles on the SCP Wiki that require images or the first thing, but then there's audio files. There's one of mine, SCP 245, is a full on RPG maker video game you have to download. And every once in a while, I'll look in the comments and someone will be like, well, I can't download this game. It doesn't exist on the server. And I'm like, it does exist. It's just that Wiki. at the time that person was looking at it was having a Wiki. And at some point, maybe, you know, tomorrow or tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, but we're going to move the SCP Wiki to its own independent website when that actually happens. I have no idea because the SCP Wiki, the SCP Wiki has been about to move in a year or a month or a day to a new website for about 10 to 14 years. What is it 2023? I mean, 15 years. They've been talking about moving off ever since the very first post. So and it's just never fully come about because it's some volunteers. You're asking volunteers to come up with a sophisticated professional website during their off time, which can happen, but the problem is, is it takes so long that none of the people you have working on it get finished with it before they lose interest in the SCP Wiki and move on. The only way you're going to be able to keep their interest is by, you know, paying them. I personally believe that. I mean, eventually they'll get it right regardless, but if you want to get it in a timely manner, you probably need to pay someone. And they're never going to do that. So because there is no mechanism in the SCP Wiki to pick up money. But the other half of this is actually, if we're going to go less from the technical standpoint and more from like a fictional standpoint, we can go back to the previous meme where we're talking about pedophysics or in the SCP Wiki is actually a writing project and all the characters exist inside. What happens when the images in the SCP Wiki goes away? What happens then, Dave? It's an interesting thought. I mean, I should write something along those lines one of these days. Axolotl lover, hardest swallow pills, SCP 999 doesn't have eyes. Strictly speaking, I don't think that's true. So and you'll be like, yeah, it doesn't say it in the, yeah, it doesn't say it in the article. But the lack, it doesn't say in the article that SCP 999 doesn't have eyes. It simply doesn't say in the article that SCP 999 has eyes. It is possible that that detail was left out. It's unlikely. But there's certainly an interpretation where that's just left out because having eyes makes it far easier for you to identify with your friendly neighborhood blob. Or I'm sorry, your friendly neighborhood cuddle blob, I guess it's hard to. Gosh, I should title an article, not an article, but it's a tale that your friendly neighborhood cuddle blob and write about SCP 999. Oh, man. But yeah, no, I mean, it could have eyes. You don't know the world is about to end, but at least it's beautiful outside. SCP 001, the world's gun beautiful. SCP 001, one day break. So this meme is by Lily was taken. I would like to say that the world's gun beautiful is actually worse objectively. And you might be like, how is that entirely possible? Well, first of all, in the world's gun beautiful, the world will end. Period.  There will be no more tomorrows, no children born, no laughs made, no one will no one will enjoy anything ever again. The end of the world has happened. In when day breaks, while it is more visceral, there is an invasive sort of end of the world happening. It is happening not absolutely has happened or is, you know, going to happen and end. When day breaks exists, people are still alive. Their their lives are not great, but they're still there. And I feel like the world's gun beautiful. Personally, when I read it, I thought the world's gun beautiful was significantly worse than when day breaks. When they when the world, I think the world's gun beautiful came first, maybe. But regardless, when I read them, I remember thinking, why would anyone prefer this because at least when day breaks, you have a shot. I'd rather have a chance. Yeah, so I'm saying what if North Korea stopped existing today in the entire CP foundation? This is very broken masquerade.  So it's no more longer than a minute by the meme is by Mr. Muda himself, version three or v three specifically. But yeah, no, it's it's interesting that this video is only a minute long. So it can't be that much stuff that would go wrong. If I guess if North Korea stopped existing, it depends on how you define stop existing, does the physical location stop existing? So does South Korea now just have a coast on their northern border? If so, that would be probably catastrophic for a variety of reasons. But from South Korea. Or does it just stop existing as a political entity? I mean, I'm assuming this is probably more realistic. I'm going to guess. I don't I haven't watched the video. Let me guess this little YouTube shorts probably more realistic and more like, what if the regime of North Korea collapsed or could not could be the other thing? I don't know. But it very much depends. But the entire SCP foundation, having its problem of being like, Oh, no, the brass parade is broke. I mean, maybe I'm never really particularly like broken masquerades premise. I mean, let me split this way. I don't mind the broken masquerade as a concept. The premise that North Korea disappears and that's what triggers everything. It doesn't work for me because I feel like that's the best way to put this. The idea that a singular event could drive and I'm sure there is more detail in the actual article itself. But the idea that a singular event can drive the full on unveiling of the anomalous doesn't really work. Because you could totally sell it as a one off event. Something weird happened. Magic isn't real. Physics may need to adjust itself a little bit, but something there's a rule for it, right?  In this case, that's the thing. There's one public singular event, then you can explain it away because there's a rule for that one thing that happened. But anyway, new researcher gets assigned to a poorly understood SCP. They perform the standard test. They notice something unusual about the SCP and try to investigate it. They end up dead. New researcher gets assigned to a poorly understood SCP. Pivot OB's meme. Oh, it's got the little bottom mark in the middle. Good for you. Yeah, the problem with the series one-ish style articles that do this is that it doesn't really work from a logical standpoint. I mean, okay. An individual story about researchers being thrown into a meat grinder works. But when there are 150 stories ostensibly set in the same-ish universe, there is no canon, so each individual article is its own. But a lot of them reference each other. You start to lose that sense of believability because eventually you're going to run out of experts and by experts, people who have gone to be educated in these particular fields. You're going to run out of researchers. We talk about D-Class. You're going to run out of D-Class too eventually. I mean, there's not an infinite number of people in the world who fulfill very, very narrow requirements that you need in order to do these things. And that's the problem. There's a lot of problems with the, not problem problem, because it's a problem in as much as the, oh gosh, what's the best way to put this? So the SCP Wiki as a collaborative fiction site allows for a lot of stories, a lot of different stories. Problematically though, because it's an amateur writing site, a lot of the stories aren't different. They're just the same because someone reads a story, likes it, and wants to write something like it, and so they write it, likes something like it, and so on and so forth. This is a little bit like the Gamers Against Weed Little Mistress problem. The Little Mistress being filled, being a list filled out and everything, was its own little gimmick, and everybody got addicted to the idea of trying to fill out the list. And then the Gamers Against Weed came out with their very first sort of a joke Little Mistress thing. And the satire was, isn't it ridiculous that, or at least to me, it felt like. I mean, I can't speak to what the author was intending, but to me the satire was that isn't it ridiculous that there's this list of things that people think that they have to fill out. And then over the next couple of years people filled that list out too. So the entirety of the satire was lost because people always want to get in, they want to be involved in a thing. And that comes from this too. You read a story, a well-written one, about a new researcher being assigned to a poorly understood SCP, dying, and then watching the SCP foundation run them through like a meat grinder. And there's good reflections on what that means for the SCP foundation, or what it means for society, that we're that callous, or that we find it entertaining. It's just a good say, well, a fictional story.  But let's say there's a good story about this. So someone reads it, and they're not as good a writer, and then they write one. And it's fine. It's not bad. It's upvote worthy for some people, and it's enough to stay on the site. And then somebody else reads that one, and then they want to write it again. And they're not a great writer. And it's not great. But somehow it stays on the site. And then someone reads that, and they're like, oh, this is interesting too. And it's so on and so forth. You get this degradation. And even when you don't get degradation, you get 150 very samey stories. I just, it's a whole, that is the problem with collaborative fiction in the amateur writing sphere. And there's really no solution to it, because these people are just writing to get better. But it's making the overall canon, even though there isn't, again, an overall canon, but there is a sense of like a general idea of a certain number of things that are definitely true. And this is one of them. The SCP foundation just throws people at problems. Anyway, I've gone into that way too long. This one is by Super Donut 725. Google Samir, my brain, Samir. Ian, Ian, Dr. Samarian, Dr. Cinnamon. Yeah, I was talking to somebody on Discord recently, and they were insisting that it was pronounced Camarian. That is a potential possible pronunciation, but it is not the accepted pronunciation of the word. And more importantly, people just love to call me Dr. Cinnamon for some reason. It's not a huge deal to me. I've just started to basically ignore it at this point. But I always like when people are trying to figure out how to pronounce my name, I say, think of the word Sumerian, like the Sumerian culture in the Mesopotamian, or along the Euphrates and the Tigris. And again, that might be a little bit too, it's like, to make it easier on you, think of this ancient culture and their name. No, but it's the only, it's the closest word I can come up with. But think of the Sumerians, and then just change the U into an I. And it's Sumerian. You're good. In fact, you could probably say Sumerian, and I probably would only barely notice the difference. It's that close of pronunciation. But yeah, that's the easy way to do it. Is this the last one? Of course it's the last one. Perfect. The last one is about me. That makes it the best one. Thank you very much for watching. Again, thank you Super Donut725 for making a meme about me. And thank you all for watching the videos. I know I've been a little inconsistent recently. It's being come, I've realized now that I've got everything settled. I feel really terrible all the time, but that's not really here or there. But now that I've got everything settled, it's, it's gotten really difficult to get back into a posting rhythm and I've got to do it. I've just got to go back to Tuesdays and Thursdays. So with any luck, we will have a video out next Tuesday.  I'm going to start saying that at the end of the video because I have a very strong opinion about like breaking your word. So maybe that'll do it. I promise you, Tuesday you will have a video for me. Not, not, not, not knowing this wishy washy stuff.  That's it. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos. And then head on over to patreon.com forward slash decimarian and pledge at any level, like everybody here on the screen already has, including Sinjeriki who has pledged it $100. It is nice to know that I'm not alone out here and I will see you all again on Tuesday. Promise.


From being treated as mere commodities, treated as possessions fit only to bear children for the menfolk, economic independence has been among the core initiatives taken to give Indian women a life of dignity. Gandhi said, as long as the women of India do not take part in public life, there can be no salvation for the country. I would have no use for that kind of swaraj to which women have not made their full contribution. The economic empowerment of women is that they should be the earners, but she is still also the wife, the mother, the cleaner, the cook, the bedmaid, the unpaid labour in the fields whenever that need is there. So in a way, she has an additional burden. So you may have empowered her economically, but you haven't actually empowered her socially or intellectually. During the past 50 years, statistics have been proof of the chasm that still needs to be covered to give all Indian women a life of self-respect. Proof that an uphill battle still needs to be fought for women to get their rightful place in Indian society. We have some of the finest legislation in the world. What we need to do is to really concentrate on organizing women and attacking the implementation machineries. In 1991, it was found that over 60% of the female population in the country, over 7 years old, was illiterate. The gender bias makes the plight of the girl child in Indian society a painful reality. Despite government initiatives, the social barriers erected by an obscurantist mindset ensures that the girl child remains one of India's most neglected segment. Women comprise the largest section of the country's population living in absolute poverty. They represent the poorest of the poor. Lack of education aggravates their deprivation. Empowerment has often been described as the catalyst that can hasten the process of development. An empowerment of the Indian woman is seen as a cure for many of the problems confronting the country's female gender. The argument being, if women are given opportunity for decision-making, they would be in control of their own destiny. Empowerment of anybody, I would imagine, would be giving them or letting them realize their own potential as people. Empowerment means being able to make choices, being able to make decisions and not necessarily having this bestowed on you by someone else, but being able to flower to that potential yourself. Over the years, although the battle for equality has been fought by the menfolk, at times dramatic social changes have come from women themselves. While the rural hinterland and even the urban slums swell with graphic examples of dispossessed and marginalized women, the last 50 years abounds with inspirational success stories as well. Stories of women who have surmounted discrimination to succeed in areas traditionally dominated by men. It is the success stories of the countless million anonymous women who work in the towns and the cities, who run non-governmental organizations, many of whom supplement family incomes with their efforts, which encapsulates the saga of the making of this nation.


So, welkom. This is the behavioral session. I am Jandrgoz Parkidna. I work at the Institute of Pharmacology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow. I'm the head of the department of molecular neuropharmacology. So, what am I doing here?  And this became popular already in the 30s and has only further developed since. In the last decade or maybe two decades, it became possible to monitor the behavior of animals, but also when test-performing humans to monitor their behavior with a resolution that was unthinkable before. We can collect essentially any amount of data from the experiments and then we ended up with a problem we don't know how to analyze it. And this is the reason I am here and I will have the pleasure to introduce people who are solving this problem of how to extract from a large data set of behavioral data useful information. And we have the distinct pleasure to have as our first speaker Professor Raphał Bogacz, who is the head of the Models and Brain Decision Networks Laboratory at the National Department of Clinical Neurosciences of the University of Oxford. And I will not be taking further time. Please, Raphał. Good morning. So, I would like to first thank the organizers for invitations. We are here to be here. So, I would like to start this session with discussing simple behavior for which the new informatics challenges connected with data analysis have been already a subject of work for several years. In particular, I will focus on choice processes, which are common element of many different experimental paradigms. To understand the choice behavior, computational models have been developed, which describe the decision process. And automatic tools based on these models help to automatically analyze and bring insight from behavioral data. Furthermore, these models can also form a bridge between behavioral data and neurobiology. So, I will start with a brief review of neural basis of decision making. And then I will present the most influential model of choice process called the diffusion model. Next, I will highlight the importance the software tools played in making the diffusion model widely used and accessible, present two applications, two recent applications of this model and if there is some time discussed challenges. So, the neural basis of choice processes have been established in a paradigm in which a monkey is presented with a stimulus consisting of a cloud of moving dots. In the stimulus, fraction of dots moves coherently right on some tries and left on other trials and other dots are moving randomly. And the task of the animal is to make an eye movement in the direction of the majority of the dots. But because of the noise in the stimulus, this task is not trivial and requires looking at the stimulus for some time. Neural activity has been recorded during this task from several brain regions. And for example, this graph shows the activity of a sample neuron in area MT, which is part of the visual cortex. In area MT, neurons are selective for a particular direction of motion and this graph shows activity of neuron preferring motion to the right. And the dark line shows the activity on the trials when the majority of dots is moving to the right while the light line when the majority of the dots is moving to the left. The dark line is above the light line so this neuron provides some information which could be used to solve this task. But this activity pattern is very noisy because the stimulus itself is very noisy. So let us now think how the rest of the brain can make a decision on the base of the activity of this MT neuron. So imagine that these are the empty neurons selected for left-port motion and these are the empty neurons selected for right-port motions. Both populations produce spikes that are generated as votes for these two alternatives. So the brain needs to choose an option which gets more votes or has a higher mean firing rate. But please note that the brain cannot just measure mean firing rate instantaneously. It just listens to the spikes. So it has to listen to the spikes for a period of time, integrate evidence until reach a certain level of confidence that neural correlates of such integration processes have been observed in this task in lateral intraparietal area or LIP. So the LIP is involved in controlling eye movements and the neurons in LIP have preferred directions of eye movements. And this graph shows activity of a sample neuron preferring eye movements to the right. The solid lines shows activity on trials in ki eventually makes eye movement to the right. And you can notice that these lines gradually increase with time, which suggest that this neuron integrate evidence over time so essentially count the votes for right during this decision process. The idea that these neurons integrate evidence is also consistent with the fact that the slope of these lines depend on the amount of information in the stimulus. The highest for the easiest trials when there is a large fraction of dots moving coherently and on these trials there is a lot of information which can be quickly integrated over time. Additional insights on the decision process can be brought by presenting the same data but locked to the moment of response. So first if you look at these traces they look very similar for all conditions which suggest that these neurons integrate information until it reaches certain threshold and when the threshold is reached the choice is being triggered. Secondly, the dashed lines show activity on trials when the monkey makes eye movement to the left so it chooses the option which competes with the option for which the neuron is selected for. And this traces decay with time which suggest that when the neuron loses competition during the decision process they actually decrease their activity. So this suggest that these neurons do not simply count votes for its corresponding option because if this were the case, these neurons would also increase activity but rather these neurons represent the difference or the relative evidence for one option versus another. To account for this data several models have been proposed and one of the simplest model as shown here. So it includes two populations of sensory neurons selected for direction of motions and two populations of these integrator neurons selected for different choices. In this graph arose the node excitatory connection and lines ending with circles denote inhibitory connections. So these neurons integrate the difference between the evidence supporting the two options over time. So let us denote the mean activities of the sensory neurons by mu1 and mu2 and current activities of these integrator neurons by x1 and x2. So we can describe the dynamics in this model mathematically. So the model assumes that at the start of the choice process we initialize both integrators to a level which is halfway from baseline to the decision threshold so that I will denote decision threshold by a and during the choice process the dynamics of these integrators are defined by these differential equations so it changes proportionally to the difference in the mean activity of the inputs and is also disturbed by noise which I denote by epsilon and the choice is made whenever activity of any of the two populations reaches a threshold a. So let me now describe how this model can be reduced to a canonical model of decision making so this graph shows simulation of the model from the previous slide and the activities of two integrator population over time as shown in green and red so you can notice that these two integrators evolve in opposite way because they just get opposite inputs and whenever one of the population reaches the threshold the other must decrease to zero because they start half the way to the threshold therefore to describe this decision process you really don't need to keep track of both of these integrators but it's sufficient to just keep track of one of them and indeed in this diffusion model which is the canonical model for decision making you consider only a single integrator which integrates the difference between evidence for the two option and the choice is made when the value of this integrator evidence hits one or the other threshold and this model is called diffusion because this particle evolves in time as the particle diffusing in the water with current so let me describe this model formally so in the diffusion model we denote by x the integrated input for the option which is correct on the given trial and this integration is driven by the equation so the integrated evidence increases with a certain rate which is called the drift rate denoted by v and there is some noise the diffusion model also assumes that there is a delay between the onset of the stimulus and the time the information reaches the new integrator which is denoted by T0 so the activity of this integrator new is set to the baseline until this time and the integrated value reaches one of the two thresholds so this graph shows simulation of the diffusion model on three trials and in this simulation the drift is positive so on majority of the trials the model reaches the upper boundary which corresponds to the correct choice but on some trials due to noise it may reach the bottom boundary which corresponds to an error so in summary drift, threshold and non-decision time and this version is known as pure or easy diffusion to distinguish it from slightly more complex version with more parameters which are also being used so it's often of great interest to estimate the parameters of this model from behavioral data because they kind of provide the insight on the underlying decision process so for example the drift rate tells you how much information receives per unit of time which can be used in decision making while the threshold parameter informs how carefully participants consider their information before committing to a choice and these parameters can be extracted from behavioral data describing the accuracy which is the fraction of the correct responses and the reaction time across trials so this is a picture of a typical reaction time distribution from human participants and these parameters of the diffusion model can be identified from these behavioral measures because different parameters have different effects on their behavioral measures so let me illustrate these differential effects with this slide so here you can each display illustrates simulation of a diffusion model where you can see trajectories of different trials and then resulting reaction time distribution for the correct and for error trials and each column corresponds to change in a different parameters so let me just go from the right side so here you can see what happens when you increase the non-decision time so this just shifts the distribution of reaction time but doesn't change their shape or the fraction of the correct choices increasing the decision threshold reduces the number of errors the distribution diminishes but reaction time becomes longer and more variable reducing drift also makes reaction time longer and more variable but it actually increases the number of errors so in summary these changes in these different parameters have distinct effects on these different measures and therefore the parameters so the diffusion model could be viewed as a tool which essentially converts row behavior on measures into parameters describing underlying decision process to extract these parameters we need to have a method and many of such methods have been developed let me just tell a few words about them so when you develop such a method you have to ask several questions so the first question is in this objective function you want to optimize so you can for example reduce the difference between behavioral measures and your model behavior you can increase the probability of your behavioral data given the model so you can use some kind of probabilistic method and this different objective function have been compared through parameter recovery so you can simulate data from the models then use these optimization procedures and you can see which procedures give the closest match between your true parameters from which you generated the data and recovered values and also we have to consider what optimization procedure to employ before describing the methods currently available I cannot stop myself from telling you how the parameters were extracted when I started work on models of decision making in 2001 so at this time they were essentially found by hand so a researcher simulated a model for large number of trials and observed the produce behavior for the model and then compared this behavior with the data and gradually adjusted parameters until the two matched so when I started my postdoc I suggested to my mentor John Cohen that maybe I could write a software which would automatize this procedure and find this parameter automatic however John was not initially convinced because he felt that to find this parameter you need to have this human insight on the relationship between these parameters and resulting behavioral measures but he was open to the idea that maybe you can find these parameters automatically and he decided to test it experimentally so he chose particular data set he chose particular model this model was slightly more complicated but it was important he let me develop my automated software tool and he also asked undergraduate student to do his final project on finding the parameters manually so this poor guy spent four months of his life just simulating this model and tuning parameters gradually until the model matches the data and in the end after four months he actually produced better parameters than my automated tool but on the other hand he was able to find parameters for any model which was described by a MATLAB function to match with any behavioral data so the tool which we developed was kind of useful first step however the real change in the applicability of this decision making models was brought by software tools which were very easy to use so first such tool FastDM by Voss and Voss is really easy to use indeed in the parameters of the diffusion model and this software tool allowed diffusion model to be used by people without the background in computer simulations since then many other tools have been developed and my favorite is the hierarchical drift diffusion model from the lab of Michael Frank and it assumes that the parameters of the diffusion model for individual participants come from distributions with certain mean and variances and this toolbox extract this kind of group level parameters and because of this it's particularly useful in situation where there is few transport participants and to illustrate the impact this software tools had I'm showing here the number of citations of the paper introducing diffusion model so nowadays is cited almost daily but actually for many years since its publication had very little impact and I would like to illustrate that the number of citations of this paper was dramatically increasing after the tools have been developed and these tools not only increase the accessibility of this model but also increase the reproducibility of the analysis so initially the diffusion model was used in purely behavioral studies but with time the neuroscientist started to employ it to understand the neural basis of decision making and there are two main approaches of linking this model with neurobiological data the first approach is to look how the parameters of diffusion model change by various manipulations such as electrical stimulation pharmacological manipulations or how the parameters correlate with various features of the brain such as anatomical features disease state or genetic variations and more recently another approach have been developed which tries to understand the dependence on the parameters of neural activity so let me describe two studies which use these two approaches so recently I had pleasure to help fit the diffusion model in an experiment investigating decision making in insects so my colleague Garo Misenbach developed this really cool paradigm allowing to look at the decision processes in the fruit fly so the fruit fly is placed in a tube where the two ends are filled with different concentration of odor which have been previously associated with electric shock and when the fly enters this kind of intermediate decision zone when there is a gradient of odor it has to decide where to go so you can get behavioral measures so you can get an accuracy whether the fly actually went in the direction with a smaller concentration of this odor and you can measure reaction time which is the time from entering to exiting this decision zone furthermore similarly as in the moving dots task you can parametrically manipulate difficulty by changing the relative concentration of odor in the two ends of the tube and so here you can see the behavioral data from the fruit flies which show the same patterns which you usually see in humans so in particular as you make the task more difficult by making the concentrations more similar and the accuracy of the choice decreases and the reaction time increases and in this study Lukas Groszner compared the behavior of control flies in the mutants who had mutation in Fox P genes which are shown in purple and these mutants had the same accuracy but they had increased reaction times on difficult trends so we analyzed this behavior data with the diffusion model so we used slightly more complicated version than the one which I described and one of the parameters which was different between the mutants and controls was the drift rate so how can we understand where this small drift rate comes from so Lukas also managed to investigate the neural basis of decision making in this task and he found that there are neurons which also represent the integrated evidence in the fruit fly brain however here these neurons do not represent the integrated evidence in their firing rate but in the membrane potential and furthermore his data suggest that when the membrane potential of these neurons reaches a threshold then the fruit fly starts to move in the corresponding direction so due to reduced size of the fruit fly brain the whole choice machinery is compressed to a size of a single cell now Lukas also noticed that the mutants had higher concentration of leak channels and to understand the role of these leak channels you can kind of compare the evidence integration during choice process to a butter which is being filled with water where the water corresponds to the evidence and then different leak channels would correspond to essentially hole in the bucket so you can imagine that if you make more holes in the buckets then the rate of accumulation of water in this bucket will increase which is basically consistent with a reduced drift rate observed in these mutants so in summary in this study the diffusion model allowed to link subcellular properties of single neurons with the choice behavior of the entire animal so in this previous study we used a classical way of employing this diffusion model where we checked how the parameters differ between different conditions but there is also a new exciting approach which was developed in this toolbox which allowed to look how the parameters depend on neural activity so let me explain this method on the base of the Treskocin so you can measure some neural activity for a particular part of the brain and you can look if this neural activity correlates across trials with a parameter of the diffusion model such as Treskocin so you would then assume that Treskocin is a linear function of the neural activity on a particular trial and then instead of finding the Treskoc parameter itself you find this coefficients a and b for which the choice behavior on individual trials is best predicted by neural activity and we used this approach in a study investigating the neural mechanism of setting the decision Treskocin in the brain and this was done in collaboration with a group of my colleague Peter Brown Previous research has suggested that decision Treskocin one of the parts of the brain involves in control of the height of the decision Treskocin is the subthalamic nucleus or STM so my colleague Diamond Hertz recorded activity of STM from patients with Parkinson's disease implanted into STM for clinical reasons and in this task the patients were asked to perform the moving dots task and to further manipulate the decision Treskocin on some trials they were asked to be accurate while on other trials they were asked to be fast and then we can now look what are the candidate neural signatures of these changes in the decision Treskocin so we can compare the frequency of different oscillations in the local speed potential recorded from subthalamic nucleus in the speed and accuracy condition and we observe that indeed there is a difference in the low frequency oscillations so then we fitted a diffusion model in which we assume that the Treskocin on a given trial is a linear function and then we fitted a model which instead of having Treskocin parameters had a parameter describing the kind of intercept and slope of this relationship for the two conditions and then on the base of this we can estimate the relationship between the neural activity and the Treskocin which is shown here so our analysis suggests that indeed the Treskocin depends on this low frequency oscillation in the subthalamic nucleus and then when the participants were asked to be accurate but not when they were asked to be fast so this is kind of mechanism which is specific only to trying to be accurate but not to trying to be fast so let me just say a few words about the challenges connected with data analysis so when we use more complex versions of the diffusion model which have additional parameters which can describe other aspects of the choice process it's no longer so easy to identify them uniquely furthermore, diffusion model is only one of the models proposed for decision making, there are other models which fit the data equally well so on the base of the behavioral data alone it's not always possible to identify the underlying decision processes and looking in the brain is really necessary so in this talk we are focused on tasks which are highly practiced but a lot of interest in behavioral research and computational neuroscience is on learning and for learning task the models or the automatic tools are not as developed as for the choice processes and I think that one of the reasons is that there is a larger variety of different models which are suitable for different tasks so the models are not as standardized but I still think that it's really important direction to develop these tools for fitting reinforcement learning models as well and to integrate reinforcement learning with diffusion model so let me summarize the talk so I presented the diffusion model which is a tool which translates behavioral data to parameters describing the underlying choice process and it also allows identifying neural correlates of these processes so I want to say that this work was done together with Jonathan Cohen from Princeton and my collaborators from Oxford and finally I would like to advertise the data sharing platform from our institute in Oxford where you can download various data sets brain atlas and different tools for data analysis thank you Eva Gudovska your talk provoked me a little bit because you talked about the diffusion model and I would like to ask you what do you know about the noise which you incorporate into the model because I think the noise is crucial your model is not the diffusion model it's a continuous time random work known in mathematics so the noise is really interesting so let me just go back to the equation and explain it's a great question so in this standard version of the diffusion model people add noise which is a Gaussian noise with unit variance and one could say that actually this noise could be parameterized in different trials you have different amounts of noise however people in standard diffusion model don't include these additional parameters so if you include a parameter here then it's no longer possible to uniquely identify this noise parameter drift rate and the threshold and the reason for this is that if you scale all these three parameters by a constant the choice behavior will not change so if you scale the threshold drift rate and noise is just like corresponds to stretching this picture so the reaction time distribution the noise to a constant however people sometimes use those in fact in this study with the food flies for simplicity just describe just one of the parameters but if you try to fit a standard diffusion model to this data you cannot fit this data just with changes in drift you need to change drift and threshold but we knew from the neurobiology that changing threshold because they initiate the movements when the spiking threshold is rich and the spiking threshold is the same in the mutants so we looked for other parameters and in fact we found that we can explain this data by changing the drift and the noise and essentially the mutants have smaller drift and smaller noise and that's why the accuracy doesn't change this is the property of the diffusion model that if you rescaled drift and noise by the same amount then the accuracy will not change and then we can look at the traces of the membrane potential as a function of time and indeed we found that the variability of these traces was reduced in the food flies so we could see changes in the noise level in the neural recordings as well so I'm afraid this is the point we have to cut the discussion short although I hope there would be more questions I would like to thank again our speaker Rafał Bogar


I don't have 4 or 4. I don't want to call one thing. I returned it and it's it says 31 31 Call the meeting order Appreciate everybody So we could have a quorum This is everybody. This is us except for Calvary the chair Recruiting what three more three. Yes I think So we want to remember to Check our own Circles and see if there's any as I mentioned last week see if there's any buddy. Did you think we'd make a good board member? Music Public invited to be heard anybody have anything to say she She's our public today We missed you last week There's somewhere I can't remember Was it Eric? I think this is me. Yeah Yeah, yeah Everybody have a chance to look at the minutes As usual Anybody want to make a motion to accept the minutes Thank you Anybody opposed No, no exceptions this month Which will make somebody by the name of mark I think he's a volunteer at the Oh, yeah, this mark is nice next to him at the volunteer reception and he said Do you always have to approve? Because he keeps I don't know he does like catalogs or something like that So do you ever reject anything? We do we either a lot that that you don't uh, you don't ever see things for us that You know don't relate to a lot at all. Anyway mark. We happy this But yes when he's catching up when we between the transition we we got pretty far backlogged on cataloging So the mark is having to deal with some of that All right, now the session so let's go into our reports and the first one is there's board over here. All right, so Um, I'll get a few highlights if you haven't taken a look out our windows the steward family courtyard is Yeah in process. Well, there's all kinds of dirt being moved right now Um, if you were here earlier in the day, you might have felt the building shake a little bit because they've been doing a lot of compacting of this oil Uh all in order to give us a nice flat courtyard with hopefully a great drainage and and a much more usable facility from most of the year About that As you can see they totally dismantled all of the the old pavilion that was there and there's a big hole in the ground where the new performance We are right now. I think the latest completion date is Somewhere mid may that's already shifted a couple weeks as they've had some snow to deal with We are not planning on using the grassy area this this summer chance to root down and fully established And opening it this fall So you won't have the concerts there this summer concert will be out in uh parks around the city for three People know hey, you know, which parks um I don't think justin has chosen them yet. I know kinomoto park was one that was Um, it seems like a good possibility He's working with the folks in parks to find ones that Have the right sort of infrastructure for a working crowd And we should be announcing those in a couple weeks I will also mention uh under administration that uh, we're starting to work on a code of ethics for a museum So this is something you'll see coming back To you in a couple of months That's one of the kind of standard documents that museums should have According to the american alliance of museums We've never had one so We're gonna start the process and then bring it to you all for some further discussion And I guess the bribery is we'll have to start that that is one of the elements is, you know, bruce This picture will be Public enemy Exhibits we have uh, jerry thompson here with us our curator of exhibits So if you have any questions about any of the elements of your exhibits, please ask him If not, uh, I'll highlight, uh, we have already opened registration for summer camps seems hard to believe under education Um Before we know it we will have our summer camps They're going to be using a fenced in area out in front of the museum this summer as the courtyard gets established But we're still going to have a full array of our And a lot of them this year will be talked by museum staff Rather than contracting out our camps, which is basically a No net gain to our bottom line. We're able to bring in staff and so actually hopefully be able to Uh, make some money on our on our camps this year So you'll enjoy it. It'll be teacher We've got uh, uh, some great new folks, uh, henry anderson, uh, julie benoit our new staff So ann and lee are what the city calls permanent or Uh, benefited staff and then, uh, henry and julie are both part-time non-benefit So I'll be bringing them on as needed for classes and so forth. And so they'll be pretty much full time in the summer We'll skip on down to art and public places I wanted to give you all a heads up because This is one of those things that you never know. It may pass completely under the radar or it may become a big issue So the safety and justice center, um, which is basically a third in kimbark street Was built in 1993 and is undergoing a massive renovation They actually When they did an assessment a couple of years ago, there's a sort of Front rotunda on that and they said this is just about to fail So, um, there's major work that that building will be undergoing and unfortunately There is a very large mosaic mural that is mounted Or basically integral to the clock tower on the safety and justice building and the clock tower is coming down and unfortunately cannot salvage the mural so, um That has been deaccessioned by the art and public places commission They will be putting in the new artwork of conclusion of the project, but Sadly one of the first pieces of public tire in the city is It's going to have to be Removed that they looked at really hard Is there any way to salvage it and because it is basically integral to the building as it stands now There's no way for it to be salvaged. So, um You know, certainly something we will be working with the city's communications team to let folks know about it We don't want this to be, you know swept under the rug or anything, but Certainly something that could come up if anyone does Have any questions feel free to refer them to myself or the angel of braille or public places Administrator, I would assume that somebody will be taking some kind of Photographs We'll be very well documented We've reached out to the artists Let them know They actually have the right if they wanted to try to salvage it on their own and they have not responded so Multiple attempts by multiple channels to If you Walk Into the front doors of the safety and justice building You'll walk It's it's basically Right at the front, but it is kind of enclosed. There's a big arc of Concrete ribs that come out of the building and it is Inside those ribs. So if you're just standing looking at the building, it's easy to miss But as you kind of walk up to the front of that, you'll see there's a um, your old tripe below the The clock that hasn't worked for many years and We'll be coming down as part of the whole project I just wanted you all to be aware of that since It is something that There could be you know, uh public concern over Probably be at least one letter to the newspaper At least Are they expanding the building or they just uh, Mostly renovation, but some expansion as I understand So, I mean, you know, there's a lot more cops and public safety And when the building was built in 1993, so I guess we need more space Are you talking about the public safety? Um, yeah, just talking about the the accession You were talking about that the the building needs to accommodate more auto thieves There's some of that but a lot of it is the foundations of the building was It's in bad I've been in the public safety Looking and just the foundation the The cracks In like key parts. So like if you have a supporting being And you look along the floor Where the concrete would absorb the rug. It's just all well. It sounds like we're always constructed Yeah, it's like the city city center too. Yeah You can't carry a lot of weight So like some of the public or aren't public places The essential, you know, some of the artworks that they have in there if they put in anything too heavy it can Crash down So so now lightweight Lightweight lightweight The new whatever new artwork. Yes. Yes. I'll be much lighter People move animals Moving on Saturday June 22nd March your calendars for a fundraiser at the museum It is called touch a truck. So we are going to be working With a number of different city departments.  So We will be filling the museum lot with all of these vehicles and then parking folks in the rec center lot and probably have shovels from the innovation center down the road To be a very popular event And I already mentioned Stats on our visitor services Going on with marketing and then under volunteer and evaluation coordination and retreat Volunteer appreciation from valentine's day event Last week We're able to be here appreciate coming out Meet up with other volunteers and see what folks are doing for the museum And more more about long line through the oh god. Yeah, they're truly trivia Is a team effort Any questions on the director's report Okay, thanks Um For the chair, I don't think Hallie had anything that she wanted to bring forward Unfinished business Don't I was looking through the minutes. I don't think there's anything that we More aware of any of the vision statement was heard last month New business We need to designate the official posting places dates and times of the museum advisory Brand to mind me is here at the museum civic center online. Correct And just um, we should have done this last month, but your secretary I do it So and the and just designate that your meetings are held on the third Wednesday of each month or 30 p.m At the long run museum, so everyone wants to look at motion Anybody like to move Catherine second I'm second I've moved Yes, okay Our meeting times will be posted online at the civic center and here everybody Agree with that say I The opposition Wanted to post in many more places Okay, the motion passes Any more comments about any topics or groups No Well, I'm sure I apologize for that They're always good comments, I think Makes us think about some things I appreciate those I'd like to Do Hopefully when it snows or it rains the water won't back up into the museum Yeah, in a while since we had that particular problem problem, but uh, certainly the the swamp that that Central area of the courtyard becomes and Not great for any kind of event. Yeah, so it must be regraded So they're actually going to put all of the drainage underground right now the townspouts all go basically onto that and onto what was a grassy area Just pipe it directly into underground pipes and then What have been kind of a grassy area closest to the museum will become hard escape. So it would be much flatter much used For a longer period of time deal with Anything else Where We are at 85 percent of our goal And January was kind of a quiet period For the campaign we actually just met this week with our couple campaign committee Um, so our two big fundraisers This year one will be the touch of truck event and then the other on september 7th will be uh gala that will hopefully wrap up the campaign Megan also just sent in a letter to the petra foundation in denver That's kind of the first step of a multi-step process to apply for a grant That's here and then We're planning a couple of smaller events Farmed at table dinner at holand farms as a fundraiser and probably an event here at the museum that May be similar if any of you came to the walkthrough event we have Back in november where we're kind of touring you through Um, where the expansion will be you know now we've got an opportunity to show folks, you know, here's Here's the first phase. Um, you can also look at the Offices which are now completed moved into And so those those will be kind of some of the Fundraiser events and you know continuing to contact folks reach out And we expect we'll be doing that all the way and hopefully We And what's the date of that? september 7 Oh, that's great Yeah, we've had great support. Uh, in fact, um, our consultants, uh, prismatic Consulting that kind of laid out what they thought We could get from individuals corporate Foundations, uh, they thought we could get about a hundred thousand from individuals and they've already well surpassed that Just as a reminder, I remember our former board member dale had suggested um And encouraged It was the end because probably already has occurred That would be good if each board member contributed something There's no minimum or maximum And it's I know from my experience in the healthcare industry, it's always good to be able to say When people ask, you know, who's your board or has someone's opinion you're able to see Oh, yeah, we have a hundred percent Have contributed so We're not expecting But that would be a foundation would not be rejected. Absolutely One of the things they ask is has a hundred percent of your board So it's very helpful Does anybody have anything else they would like to bring up before we move to adjourn and move into our featured presentation and see me And somebody like to move and we adjourn I move that we adjourn Well, there we go And that is about I can't see I have four fifty four All right, well we have I'm sure it'll be an interesting presentation by Jared And I'm having gone through several of the exhibits since I've been on the board They're all amazing I don't know how they get so creative And I'm sure it just happens Right, yeah, bring you guys through the process and I'll show you some of the policies


Today's world is dominated by technology. When the students live their lives on their smartphones, testing amazing near friends on Facebook, sending pictures of good times, and the not so good ones, communication is getting easier and faster. And when students are writing to their teachers, they sometimes forget that there are things they need to consider. Here, Joey is writing email to her instructor, Peter Bramley. She's been sick and missed a class, and she doesn't want her attendance record affected. She also doesn't want to miss out on anything important. Let's see how she gets on. Now, let me attend to some of my emails. You're student. I am sorry that I wasn't in class last week. I was ill, and I can prove it. Please tell me the content of the lesson. ASAP. I am so worried. Thank you. As you can see, Mr Bramley is confused and irritated by the email. He doesn't know who is from, the content is unclear, and the tone is rude. All in all, it is a very ineffective email that neither achieves his intention nor leaves Mr Bramley with a good impression. There are a number of simple things that you need to consider when writing emails to faculty members. Let's take a look. First of all, consider your email address. The email address you use will create an impression. If you're writing to a faculty member, you are advised to use your Polly U account. Second, pay attention to the greeting. In general, use DEA, followed by the family name of the person you're writing to, plus the correct title. If your teacher is a lady and you don't know her marital status, usually we use professor only if the recipient holds that title. So check this first. Thirdly, make sure your subject is clear. Teachers receive lots of emails every day. Condense the main idea of your email into a succinct subject and use a noun phrase where possible. For example, if you're writing to ask for some ideas for an essay title, you might write request for assistance in typing my essay. Fourthly, consider the content of your email. Establish some goodwill. Remember that your teacher is a fellow human. It might be appropriate to write I hope this email finds you well or thank you for teaching us this semester. The key is to be sincere. Be clear and concise. Avoid mentioning details you think are unnecessary. If you're sick and writing to explain your absence, it might not be necessary to explain your symptoms. However, it might be appropriate to mention what the sickness is. Refer to any attachments. Readers often may not notice that an email has something attached, so in the email you should refer them to the attachment. Attaching the file before you type in anything is also a good way to ensure that you have attached what you intended. Avoid excessive punctuation. Exclamation marks, smiley faces, etc. are best avoided since sending an email to your teacher requires a relatively formal tone. Avoid typing your message in capital letters. This can appear like you're shouting and is considered very disrespectful. Consider an ending to establish goodwill. You want to finish on a positive and pleasant note. I look forward to seeing you soon. Would often be appropriate if a future class is coming. Finally, include an appropriate ending. You can use best regards or kind regards here. Sincerely would be best reserved for longer or more formal emails. Include the following at the end. Your full name and English name are applicable. Your course code. Your class day and time, e.g. Monday 2.30 to 4.30. When you've finished your email, remember to proofread it before you send. You will be judged on your email, so try to spot any mistakes you have made and check attachments before you send. It's also a good idea not to send an email when you're angry or emotional, but to wait until you've calmed down. So let's put these rules into action with Mr. Bramley's student. Dear Mr. Branny, I hope this email finds you well. I'm writing to explain my absence from class on March 2 which was due to an upper respiratory tract infection. I have attached a medical certificate with this email. I will find out from my classmates what I have missed and ensure that I studied. I look forward to seeing you next class. Kind regards, Joey Chan. So how's Joey's email this time? Clear, precise, polite and effective. Her attendance record will remain intact and she will leave a good impression. By following these simple practices next time you email a teacher, you can ensure that you get your message across and sharpen your communication skills for success both at university and in your future workplace.