If you want to see this, you can see it up here. It's up here. It's a portrait. Stop doing that. Ted, I don't know if this is what it is. What's that? This is the USA.


Hello and welcome to International Day Roundup by People's Dispatch, where we bring you major newsday elements from across the world, our headlines. The US imposes new sanctions on Syria under the controversial Cesar Act, Bolivian march in the capital demanding the release of political prisoners, former police officer accused in Atlanta killing to be charged with murder, aboriginal group sues Australian state government for loss over mining contracts, and over 9 million people were displaced in 2019, says UNHCR annual report. We begin with the United States announcing a new set of political and economic sanctions against Syria on Wednesday. The sanctions are passed under the sections of the controversial Cesar Act that were included as part of the National Defense Authorization Act 2020. The Cesar Act seeks to prevent the government of Syria and its allies, Russia and Iran, from retaking territories captured by rebel forces supported by Turkey. The Syrian government has rejected this act, saying that it cannot allow such a division of the country. The sanctions issued by the U.S. State Department include travel restrictions and isolation from the U.S. financial system for foreign persons who are partied to the conflict in Syria. Syria is already reeling under several sanctions by the U.S. and the European Union. The fresh sanctions will cause further economic deterioration to the war-average country. The decade-long war has virtually halted all of Syria's trade with the outside world. The country has seen a massive rise in unemployment and poverty. The U.N. Special Envoy to Syria, Gair Pettison, stated earlier this week that these sanctions have been primarily responsible for the economic collapse of the country. In anticipation of the sanctions on Tuesday, Syria devalued its currency to Syrian pound by 44 percent. The Syrian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Wednesday calling the sanctions to be in violation of international law and an example of the thuggish behavior of the U.S. The Syrian government has previously called the U.S. sanctions economic terrorism and insisted that the so-called Caesar Act is based on lies and fabrication. In our next story on Wednesday, a large group of women and citizens demonstrated in Bolivia's capital, La Paz. They demanded freedom for the 13 women political prisoners who were victims of political persecution in the country. The protesters insisted that they were arrested under false charges by the far-right coup-installed government, Jeanine Arnais. In addition to the liberation of innocent captives, the protesters called for immediate general elections in the country. The political prisoners for whom the protest was held include Elena Flores, an Afro-Bolivian union leader, Patricia Hermosa, lawyer to the coup-deposed president Eva Morales, and Maria Eugenia Choke-Crispe, the former president of the National Electoral Body or the TSE. Elena Flores was imprisoned on charges of robbery, harming public property and preventing the state from exercising its services. Patricia Hermosa was arrested for trying to register Morales as a candidate for the Senate in the upcoming elections, and Maria Eugenia was accused by the coup regime of committing alleged fraud in the general elections of October 2019. The claims of such fraud have been debunked by a number of studies, including a recent one from the US. Now next story, the former Atlanta police officer accused in the killing of Rayshard Brooks has been charged with murder by the county administration. Garrett Rolf, the police officer who was seen shooting Brooks with live rounds, will face 11 criminal charges including murder. District Attorney Paul Howard, a Fulton country, announced the charges against Rolf. Howard also stated that the lesser charge of aggravated assault will be pursued against the second police officer, David Brosnan. Brosnan, who has been demoted to a desk job as reportedly testified against Rolf, supporting the charges against him. The murder of Rayshard Brooks intensified the protests against police violence that are taking place across the US. The police had tried to apprehend Brooks over a complaint from the Wendy's outlet of him's fear of falling asleep in his car. One of the officers shot Brooks in the back while he resisted arrest and tried to escape. The county medical examiner had ruled earlier this week that the killing was a homicide which supports the prosecution's case. An aboriginal group in Australia has filed cases against the Western Australia State government over loss of land for mining and other activities. According to ABC News, two cases were filed by members of the Zewall type tribe in Western Australia for cultural damage and loss of access to land in the Goldfields region. Among the activities listed as reasons behind the loss of land includes licenses granted to mining companies like the BHP Group and a highway development project among others. The case is reportedly inspired by the legal victory of the Timber Creek tribe in the Northern Territory last year in March. In the Timber Creek case, the aboriginal land title holders were compensated up to $2.5 million for spiritual losses incurred because of the mining activities. The Zewall Aboriginal Cooperation, which is the complainant in this case, claims nearly over 7,800 square kilometers as part of their aboriginal title, which includes a town in several cultural sites dating as far as 10,000 years or more. Recently, the state government led by a conservative party has been under scrutiny for land grants to several mining companies like the BHP Group and the Rio Tinto Group. This was especially exacerbated after the destruction of a thousands of year old rock shelter, which was a major aboriginal cultural site by Rio Tinto. And finally, in its annual Global Trends Report released on Thursday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees stated that 2019 saw record growth in the number of displaced people. The number rose by 9 million around the world last year. Though most of them are internally displaced, the number of people who are forced out of their countries is also rising. According to Thursday's report, there were around 26 million refugees in the world by the end of 2019. Of these 26 million, 5.6 million are Palestinian refugees displaced in successive events since 1948. Apart from formal refugees, there are around 3.9 million stateless people who were denied citizenship rights by their countries. Half of the refugee population is below the age of 18. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has created renewed concern for the safety and well-being of refugees who mostly live in squalid and inhuman conditions. Refugees around the world have also been the targets of attack by people in their host countries, especially during the pandemic. In the run-up to World Refugee Day, which will be observed on June 20th, the report is a sobering reminder of the enormously unfinished work of rehabilitation and reconciliation. That's all we have in this episode of the International Daily Roundup. To know more about these stories, visit our website peoplesdispatch.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Thanks for watching. Thank you. Bye.


Diolch yn ddifach. Fel Gwylodraeth, ac ydych i'n gallu'n ffordd ar y cyhoedd. Yna, fel Gwylodraeth wedi ddod, dyma'n pan yw'r CEO yr Eire. Oes bydda'n gyfnod o'ch bod yr ffordd i'r llunio ar y Lleidwyr. Ond ystodd, mae'n gweithio'n llunio y ddweud a'r gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Diolch yn ddod, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mor Oscon fydd yn llwys 12 oes.  Mae'r Mor Oscon yr 2012, yn meddwl am hollach eich briffallwn 35 oes, 35 nes snake.wr i fy mod i'w gwych yn rhoi'r iawn, fel yn o fwrdd ychydig i'w hanes i'w gwybod y tactin i'w ddechrau 10 ym 5 ysgrifennu. Farae, eu gynllun o'r tuwwch, yw yw ysgrifennu'r ei gwaith mylion i'w hoffa, a gwybod yw'r hoffa'i gwyddo. Oni'r hoffa, yn och chi'n i'n moffa, ond mae'r hoffa'i gyda chi. Ond nowai, Ond o'r hoffa'i ngryf ddweud, 25, 21, ond weithio'r cymdeithas. Mae'n gweithio'r cymdeithas, 10 ym fydd yw, 21 o 35, ond weithio'r cymdeithas. 9, tu'n gwybod yn fwy o gydau. Rwy'n gwybod nesaf, ond mae'n gwybod yn gwneud o'r gydag. Maen nhw'n fwy o gydag. Oedda 5, ond felly nid oedd yn fwy o'r cymdeithas. Nid yw'r cymdeithas ymateb yma yma, 10 yw'r cymdeithas ac Maithcon 2012. One of them, tip number 21, was to pay your freelance writers to guest post for you on other websites and link back to you. I may as well have stood there and just said buy links. I've got no idea how I got away with that 10 years ago at Moscom. One of the ideas, I even removed it on the public version of the deck because it was so bad I couldn't even put it online. And I cannot remember what that tip was, but it must have been pretty bad if one of the tips was to buy links, and I've removed the tip later on, so I've got no idea what that one was. The reason I'm sharing this, though, is because 21 out of 35 tips are still relevant today. Quite happy with that, it's quite good. But it's not because I could see into the future or I'm terribly smart or an expert or anything like that. It's actually because the fundamentals of our industry don't really change that often. And back at this point in 2012, this was in July of 2012, a big, big change in the industry had just happened. And it was in April 2012. Anyone remember what that change was? Penguin, you're just as old as I am. Like some people will remember this. And this was painful. So those of you younger than myself and Hannah, the update in 2012 that Google rolled out was explicitly targeted at spammy SEO techniques, in particular link building techniques. So things like mass directory submissions, article syndication, press releases, all that kind of stuff. Google explicitly targeted all of those techniques and said, no. Not only do they not work anymore, we're going to actively penalise websites who use these techniques. And this was a big change, a huge, huge change. And it changed fundamentally the way that link building was carried out by the industry. But these changes are actually quite rare. Of course, hundreds of times a year, Google roll out small updates. A few times a year, they roll out algorithm updates that are core to the algorithm. Those are quite big. They do shake things up. But it's quite rare for them to fundamentally change how we actually carry out SEO, in this case, link building. And the Penguin update forced the industry to become what it is today. And it forced us to grow up because all of a sudden, essentially, Google did this to the industry. And was like, we're not going to let you get away with this anymore. It was just too much. Just once more. There we go. I actually discovered this gift 10 years ago at Moscon 2012 as well, because Will Reynolds put it in his slide deck. And I've used it hundreds of times since then. So thanks, Will, if you're out there. But it was a good change. It had to happen. Deep down, SEOs knew these techniques. They weren't high quality, but they worked. They were effective. So we used them. That's what SEOs do. We optimise. And ultimately, it was something that had to happen, and it was a good change. But this brings me on to part of the title of this talk, which is, what got us here won't get us there. Because those techniques up until 2012 had been very effective, had worked really well. They weren't going to keep working. And what got us to that point wasn't going to get us for the next 10 years up until today. So what's the last 10 years look like? Well, what's got us to this point? There's a few key trends that we've seen. Firstly, the rise of content marketing. This is a Google Trends graph for content marketing as a topic. Now, of course, not all of this is just the link building. Content marketing is a big area. But a lot of this was driven by Google taking away all those tactics and content becoming something we could use and leverage to get links. And it led to some really great content pieces. This is one of my favourites that we did back at Distilled. Hunars, who is speaking tomorrow, actually played a big part in this piece as well. The team at Neumann did this gift which I actually love and a series of these gifts for Expedia. The team at Aera did this piece which is scary, but called at the same time, which showed Jeff Bezos' net worth as GDP. Turns out he was worth about four years ago, 193 of the GDP of the United States, which was pretty scary and pretty amazing at the same time. Content marketing has led to some really cool campaigns and led to lots of links for lots of different websites. Other tactics are still popular. It's not just content marketing. We ran the state of link building survey a few months ago and lots of tactics are still very popular with SEOs. This was three out of about 20 or so that people still use. We've got this combination of the rise of content marketing, but other tactics are still being used, still popular and still getting results. Where's the problem? A few of you are probably thinking right now, that's fine. We're producing content, we're getting links. We've got other tactics as well. Why change? Why try something different? I want to talk about why change is needed and why those things that we've seen in the last 10 years won't get us to where we need to be. I think that we may be sleepwalking into a few problems as an industry if we don't evolve and we don't address these issues. I'm going to share four trends that I've seen over the last 10 years or so that to me mean that we may be sleepwalking into a few issues if we don't evolve what we do. Let's start with the first one, which is probably the one that I wasn't sure about including today, but screw it, it's an uncomfortable truth that we need to talk about as an industry. Asking for links of what is known as outreach, it's not really sustainable. It's not really something that we need to keep relying upon as a way of getting links. I want to explain some of the thinking here. Most tactics that we all use, including content marketing, require us to ask for every single link that we get. But the return on investment of asking for every single link that you get for a domain, it just isn't viable. Again, the State of Link boiling report we ran a few months ago showed us that over half of SEOs took between one and five hours to build a single link.  That's 30,000 hours of time just to catch up with them. That's assuming they don't keep accelerating and keep building links. That's just to catch up with them. 100 dollars an hour, in terms of what you may charge for that, $3 million worth of time just to catch up with your competitor on link building. I know it's very simplistic, but that's essentially what we're looking at. Even if you do that, it doesn't mean that you're going to outrank those competitors because SERPs, at the moment, they're all over the place. There's a website here ranking fourth with nine linking domains. With a website two positions above, with over 600. It's not just a case of catching up, and that means you're going to get to number one. SERPs do not work like that anymore, as Andy talked about this morning. Not to mention, if you stop the outreach, the link stop, it's a bit like paid media. If you turn the budget off, your traffic's going to dry up. If you stop sending the outreach in your mouse, you're going to stop getting links. This is the big one for me. The results are limited by the amount of time that we can invest. The more time you've got, the more outreach you can do, the more links you're going to get. The less time you've got, the less outreach you can do, the fewer links you're going to get. It's not really good enough. That's not really what we want from SEO. We want the results to go beyond that. Because over time, link building should become easier, not harder, and at the moment, at best, it probably stays about the same in terms of how hard it is, and I think we can do better. The second trend I've seen over the last 10 years is a topic that SEO has loved to debate, and that's relevance. I think that a focus on link volume, so building as many links as we can, has led to activities and actions where we push relevance to one side. It makes it very easy to forget about relevance if you're under pressure to deliver hundreds of links. I think it's a balance between relevance and volume. Do you want more links, or do you want fewer links? Because if you go wild with your topics and themes, compared to your product or service, you'll get more links, but you have to go wider with those topics. If you want to stay really focused on what you do in your service in terms of the content you create, that's absolutely fine. In reality, you're probably going to get fewer links. Most agencies and in-house teams sit here at the moment. I believe Google wants us a bit more over here. I don't think they want us to be creating content that is on a massive tangent to what the website is about, just to get more links. It really comes down to this for me. Does Google really want to reward irrelevant campaigns just for the purpose of getting links? My first boss in SEO over 15 years ago now once said to me, what would you do if you were Google? That's what he stuck with me in terms of thinking about SEO. Because if I was Google, no, I wouldn't want to reward irrelevant campaigns that have clearly been done just for links, but this is something that keeps happening in our industry. Speaking of campaigns, I think we've started to rely upon them a little bit too much when it comes to link building. Now, don't get me wrong, we've built hundreds of campaigns over the years at error. They're a great way to drive links. We talk about them on stages like this. We talk about these big, shiny, interactive core campaigns. They get talked about a lot at conferences, in blog posts, and on Twitter. It's led to a focus on delivering virality, volume of links over delivering business impact. It's always about, oh, we've got 100 links, we've got 200 links. You've got into this newspaper, that publication. It's never about the impact on the business. Not to mention, nearly a third of SEOs admitted they've launched campaigns that have got zero links. That's about 200 of you have launched campaigns that have got zero links. That's a lot of us. That's a lot of campaigns. And we've done it. We're not a mean for me, either. But despite that and despite the risks, we want to show anything. We want these big, glitzy, glamorous campaigns. No, not champagne campaigns. We want champagne as well. This is a piece of feedback we got from a client where we pitched them a few months ago. There's five agencies. We came second. Fine. But this is the feedback. We pitched them a strategy that had campaigns as one strand of it and then three other strands of activity to help get links and get them traffic and results. The agency that won pitched them just campaigns. And this is the feedback we got from them. They're like, we just want campaigns. They locked our strategy. They said, yeah, we get it. It makes sense. But they just wanted campaigns. And I was like, I get it. Don't agree, but I get it. See you in six months. It's fine. So if you stop launching campaigns, you stop getting links, which is our point. So you want other levels of activity active. So you're not putting all your eggs in one basket for campaigns. So if you stop launching them, you're not going to get links. Because only 25% of SEOs said that they continue to average campaigns over and over again. So 75% launch a campaign, they're outreach, get links and then move on to the next one. They get forgotten about. Not to mention, a hero style campaigns are harder than ever to execute. Part of the reason for that is because of the news cycle and how it's changed over the last few years. Probably the last five or six years, really, because we've got all of these topics that are hugely important and things that need to be talked about in the news. It feels like it's happening all the time. There's always news, there's always a cycle of news coming out that make it very, very, very hard to insert our pre-planned complex detailed campaigns. Because, of course, if there's real stuff going on in the world that's really, really important, of course our campaign is going to get pushed to one side. Of course we get feedback like this from journalists where they like the campaign. But as of that moment, they're not going to publish it or talk about it because other stuff is going on in the world and that's completely fair. And this means that results are far less predictable than they used to be. Which means that these campaigns can't be the bedrock of our strategy because they're far riskier. Who wants to bet on things that are really risky? Fourth trend and I hate to study this one because we think we're getting better. But 10 years later, I'm still not seeing link building being as integrated with the rest of the business as it should be. And that integration is becoming more and more important. I've even seen SEO teams sat inside client businesses separate to the link building of this shop PR team. And that just doesn't make sense, but it still happens. Those teams still develop separately. And right now, businesses are being squeezed. They've come out of a rough couple of years thanks to COVID. We're now looking at a possible recession, particularly in the UK, maybe in the US as well. What happens when they get squeezed? SEO gets cut and you haven't got the integration. You haven't got that value being added across the company. Of course, it's easy to cut. I don't see the value. So that's the first thing that goes. And it makes our job far, far easier, sorry, far, far harder to get done when it's a lack of integration. So the four things I've seen over the last 10 years or so that I think will continue to happen and the things we need to adapt to and evolve from. So the question becomes, where are we trying to get to? We've talked about what got us to this point. Where is there? Where is it we're trying to get to next? Well, firstly, it's a sustainable link building strategy that outlasts us. That means that when you execute, maybe for a couple of years, you then move away from that client, move on to another one. Your work still lasts. You still keep getting links. No question of relevance, where you can launch campaigns, put content live. No one will question the relevance of that content. That's where you want to get to. And true integration that makes our job not just easier, but far more effective. That's where we need to get to. So, how to get there? It's a transition. I've used the word transition there very, very deliberately because we're on this journey ourselves at the moment at error. We have been for a little while now. This won't happen overnight. These are things that have been around for a long time, formed the culture of our industry a little bit. So you can't just flick a switch and fix this stuff overnight. However, I am going to talk through four concrete changes that you can start making today to start making this transition. Thursday after mosque on. Don't do it today. It's fine. I'll forgive you. But four things you can do from Thursday. So, number one, use the customer journey to generate link building ideas. And I believe we need to reframe links as being a consequence of an effective content strategy. And this is the question that I don't think we asked ourselves enough, which is, why do we even create content? The usual answer to clean one's SEOs is one of these four outputs or several of these in one go. So, traffic, of course you want to rank more, want to get more traffic to the website, maybe conversions through case delays, prologue pages, testimonials, that kind of stuff, of course links as we all know, or building the brand, building credibility, building authority, that kind of stuff. I don't think, though, you need content. Yes, you need a base level of content, of course, but you don't need an all singing or dancing content strategy to achieve those. Look at them again. I'm an SEO, so I hate saying this, but throwing a paid media spend and above the line spent business, you'll get those. That will happen. Be expensive, and I'm not saying you should do it, but you could do it without a big level of content. So, what do we really create content? Well, it's to connect with the customer on their journey. There's different methods of showing that journey, an error we use, awareness, consideration, and decision, but you create content to try and touch people on this journey, and that journey could be quite complex. It's normally not linear.  Google calls this the messy middle, where someone starts their journey and finishes it, in the middle, stuff happens, people go around in loops and take their time to actually convert into a customer. I just call it messy. I think that's what most people do when they're trying to make a decision on something that's certainly what I do. But as SEOs and marketers, we're trying to put content in front of them during this journey. We'll get to this in a sec. The content strategy, it focuses on real customers. Link building strategy focuses on who can link to you, and they're very different things. Your target customers and your link prospects, yes, they may cross over.  I mean, yeah, it might. It's not going to cross over anywhere near as much as you may think, yet we convince ourselves that that's how we get in front of our target customers. Because we've been trained to think about bloggers and journalists, I've stood on stages like this and said to do that when you've come up with link building ideas, think about who's going to link to you. Not to mention, as we've discussed earlier, we've started to believe that success means going viral. Genghisme links as you can to a piece of content. So what you do, that's the goal. You create a big pool of link targets to average to, because you want more links, you've got to send more average emails and find as many people as possible. This is a root cause of irrelevant campaigns. We move too far away from the customer, and we move too far towards bloggers and journalists coming up with link building and campaign ideas. That creates that irrelevant. So I'm going to share one of the ways we try on other companies at error. It's the framework that we use when coming up with content ideas. It's got four pillars to it. The first one is the audience. So who is it that the client is actually targeting with their products and their services? What are their pain points as I relate to the product or the service? What are the triggers that make them think, oh yeah, I'm going to go and search for whatever the client does. What does the client do to solve those problems and pain points for that audience? Their products, their services, also content? Do they have a blog? Do they have an email newsletter? Do they have a white paper? Do they have case studies? Do they have an email download? Whatever it is, what do they have that solves those pain points for the audience? Finally, what are the keywords that tie all these together? What are the things that we try and influence in the first place? We go through all these at error and we list them out. This is actually the example that that pitch that I told you we lost earlier, so we came second to that. So if anyone in this industry wants to take a close look at this, give me a shout. But the point is that we string these together. We string together all four columns and use these to come up with ideas that are very relevant to what the client does. And also we put together what format those ideas may take. It's not just hero campaigns. We're active PR. It could be a guide. It could be a number of things. But this forces that content relevance. It's hard, but it forces that relevance by sticking to those four pillars and not even worrying about bloggers, journalists and people who can link to us. And we did this for a pension company in the UK called Pension Bee, where we produced a piece of content targeted just a people looking to retire, given information about the future, what they could get in their retirement. My pharmacy, where we talked about the medicines that that pharmacy sold online, so perfectly connected to the products that they sold. Both of them often got links. It's harder, but that's kind of the point. We're trying to strike that balance far, far better between relevance and virality. Now, I'll be honest, those two examples I just gave, probably could have got a lot more links if we'd gone wider with the topics. But we didn't want to. We wanted to create content that was clearly relevant to the customer and goes beyond link building. Second thing we can do, second change we can start to make, is to move beyond campaigns. So we talked earlier about as an industry of fun in love with these big, glamorous, viral campaigns I've stood here and actually talked about them in the past, so I'm not guilt-free here. But content isn't just about one-off campaigns. It goes beyond that and there's far more ways to produce content to get links than just big, shiny campaigns. One way we can do that is to try and focus on ideas that are reusable and evergreen. Because when we come and go with campaign ideas, our instinct is to create something new, right? You want to create a campaign for a client or your brand, you try and think of something brand new. Whereas actually if you can do stuff that's reusable and evergreen, like this piece that Rover did, I know Rover here in Seattle, if you happen to be here, please update his content. I love this content, I go to it all the time. Kind of annoying green 2022. But they update it every single year and they can outreach this and get links to it all the time. It's always relevant. It's evergreen. It's always interesting to this kind of audience. We can also look for existing link-worthy content. So as we said, the temptation is to try and create brand new ideas every single time. Look at the website itself that you're working on. Is there any link-worthy content already on that website? The farmers I mentioned earlier, this was a piece that existed when we started working with them that the previous agency that actually created. We picked it up and just got some links to it just while doing some outreach. So whilst we were creating new campaigns as well, we were picking up their existing content and getting links to this. The nice thing about this, if you're an agency, is it removes the pressure because you're getting links whilst the new campaign is being created. You're not having to wait for this big splash and campaign to launch before you can get links. Simplify your execution again. Things don't have to be big, shiny, interactive, four-page takeovers. This is a blog posted for a client who do electric car leasing in the UK. Just a few tips around driving in the summer if you have an electric car. This got about six or seven links. Took a couple of hours to create. It's not a bad return. Six or seven links for a couple of hours' work is actually pretty good compared to these big, shiny, interactive campaigns, which we're also doing, but we're not gambling on just those alone. Number three, aim for the links that you didn't ask for. This comes back to the point around reducing our reliance upon outreach and having to use outreach for every single link that you get. Because where you want to get to is links that you didn't ask for. It feels weird saying it's in the room full of SEOs, but the way you do that is to create content that ranks. Because content that ranks for the right kinds of keywords will get links. For example, this piece from HubSpot that ultimately is the marketing statistics ranks for hundreds of keywords related to marketing statistics. They've got another 10,000 links to this page. I know for a fact that I did not ask for all of those 10,000 links. So I did for some of them, I did outreach, but most of those links have come because it ranks. This isn't just about marketing. This is a piece we did for a client a few years ago around one of the most dry topics you can think of, crack your cables. You're probably all using it at some point in the back of your TVs or your monitors. This piece will often have 80 links on its own that we did not ask for. And all it was was a long-form guide that is very techy, very informational, but there's a lot of people that talk about the technicalities of this product. And because it ranks, it gets links on its own. Which is kind of annoying when we were launching campaigns separately and they were struggling. We were like this thing when I often got 80 links and it's one of the driest topics we've ever read about. And it's still getting links today because it ranks really well. I love this one because it's quite meta. Our own state of link-bun report. It's got 200 links. I asked for a couple of them, but it ranks with statistics, with numbers, with faxing information that people are looking to reference when they're writing their own content. So the journalist or blogger is writing about link building in 2022. This is what they're going to find and what they're going to reference. It works in most industries, the state of women in construction in 2022. This is a piece that Siege did and it gets links on its own because of the nature of the content. Fourth area, star integration sooner. So we talked about how integration needs to improve. Now a lot of us, when we talk about integration, all we get asked about it, the answer is normally, oh, we have a meeting with the PR team or we have a meeting with the brand team. Or we have an SEO checklist. We need to get better than that. So let's take the standard process for content-led link building.  So at the start, you may get some brand approval on the ideas themselves. You may then get some copywriters to help you with the copy and editing and grammar and typos and stuff like that. You may get the SEO team to do a checklist before you go live to make sure you've got meta tags, schemers, stuff like that in place.  All of these things happen far too late. And these are problems like this where we've no SEO integration. This is your website or your nice layered structures and tiers of pages. Guess where our content goes? It's kind of tagged on, kind of on the end somewhere where someone is never ever going to find it. That's what happens with no SEO input. Whereas, ideally, you want it to actually be integrated with the rest of the website. When you leave integration in the PR team so late, your outreach list goes from 200 prospects down to 25. But guess what? The KPR remains the same. So if you've got to build 20 links and you've only got 25 prospects, you're probably going to struggle. So that alignment needs to start from before the time the project's even kicked off during the sales process. So, actually, there's another step here that's really, really important, which is that sales flies when you're speaking to a potential client. Because, actually, at least these ones should live during that process, where you ask a bit to the brand team, you ask a bit to the digital PR team, and start to understand, are they going to be blockers to you getting things done? If they are, you need to figure that out now rather than getting free to six months into the process and stressing out your team and not being able to deliver results. If you start this earlier, you will understand what's going to happen later on far, far better rather than being blindsided further down the line. And we're in a fortunate position where you've been able to say, no to certain clients, because we can foresee the problems we're going to have. If we can't even speak to the brand team at this point or at least know how they work, we're going to struggle later on. So, it's a wrap-up, and Debbie's going to be up next talking about link building as well. So, don't want to get off that fast, do you? So, we got here today with an approach that focused on outreach and content-led link building. Now, I'm not saying we should forget that completely. I do not want to go on Twitter in a few minutes and say that someone said, Pally Moogan says, don't do outreach. I'm not saying that. I'm definitely not saying that. However, we shouldn't be sleepwalking into another penguin because next time, Google won't make it as obvious that they've done this. Don't shout about it. Google doesn't do that anymore. They don't tell us exactly what they've done. So, it will happen and we won't know about it. We need to make links a consequence of an effective content strategy by putting customers at the heart of our Rodea generation. Yes, it's harder. Yes, you won't get as many links, but that's that balance when you just write far, far better. Reduce your reliance on outreach again. Don't stop it. Don't turn it off completely, but reduce your reliance upon it so that every single link you get isn't being driven just by having an email that you can send. In Bracer integration, start from day minus one when you're speaking to a new client during the sales process, ask those questions up front and get the information you need and be prepared to ask those questions and potentially walk away if you're able to do so. And if we can do all of those things and bring them all together, eventually we'll get there and I might come back in ten years, Tom, and talk about it all over again. But that's me done on Pally Moogan. I'll be around for the next couple of days. You want to chat about link building and thank you so much for listening. Cheers.


Self-aware people don't override internal values to meet external needs. If you value authenticity, then you don't try to fit in anymore.


My name is David Kaganowski and I'm the Global CTO for WaveMaker. I'm excited to speak to you at the Exchange for Media E-Tech Munch 2021. There are so many amazing technologies that can engage consumers, but to do so successfully is critical that brands and marketers develop a plan for technology investments, more than ever simply buying point solutions without regard to the overall technology architecture. The technology plan, it is not acceptable, so we will discuss how to develop a technology roadmap and how to build the critical internal and external partnerships that bring that plan to life. I look forward to it. Thank you.


Welcome to the show. It's me JP. It's time for JP's product pick of the week and I am so excited to have everyone here Thanks for joining us over in the YouTube chat as well as the discord and if you're watching elsewhere You want to join in on the chat then? Head to our discord. It's at adafruit i t slash discord jump into the live broadcast chat channel That's where things are going on right here right now So let's see what have we got going on here today The you know what the first thing I want to do is send you on over to the product page for this week's product pick You can watch this show from inside there. It's broadcast from inside the page. This is the URL for it So head to product 4600 or you can use the QR code there if you like to use those sorts of things and go check it out We have a 50% off discount this week on the product pick and you can get up to 10 of them So if you really want to Go go wild with these. This is a great one to do it on super useful helpful Fun little product. So before I say any more about it What I'm gonna do is jump back just a couple years to the product introduction with Lady Aida So take it away Lady Aida Star the show tonight besides the community customers aren't there. Our adafruit team is Qt pie Qt pie. So this is I you know, it's a little bit like a trinket. It's smaller than itsy bitsy It's kind of it's a cute board and it can run pythons. That's why it's called the Qt pie. It also has a stem and Qt connector It's one of our first little boards that has that and that makes it great for plug-and-play projects That use any of our stem and Qt boards and it can also connect to Grove sensors with an adapter cable it can connect to any spark from quick boards as well It's perfect. It's the perfect size because like no other connector would fit on a board this small. So it's a samd 21 e18, you know, the thing is like usbc stemma Neopixel Kessellated pads reset button Kessellated pads. So it's got usbc So you can plug it any which way you want and it's got a samd 21 So it's like for our dweenos projects. It's amazing. It's got great support We've gotten we've written so many tutorials and projects and libraries for the samd 21 It's got 256k at flash and 32k of ram. So you know compared to like an Arduino Uno It's got eight times as much of everything There's a regulator that can supply 500 milliamps of current. There's a neopixel led here So it's got full color and you can turn off the neopixel with a power pin It's got a reset button so you can get to the boot loader or you can reset your project very easily And you don't have to worry about it. You don't even solder it like there's no soldering required to build Most projects you can just plug and play with any of our iSquad C boards and You'd be surprised like a lot of sensors and devices are iSquad C now So you get a lot of pins you get analog output on a0 and log in on a1 and log in on a2 and a3 iSquad C you got uart which also do analog spi These can all do pwm You can do i2s You've got you know one of each iSquad to ur spi hardware support So it's very easy to interface with like any hardware you like Yeah, you can play little audio clips in Arduino. You can control displays You can just have sensor data output serial and then you can just plug into your computer and then either use it within processing or Unity or or what have you so I think it's you know, I wanted to have a Trinket like board with a qt connector and this just was the perfect size It's based off of the seed. We know shall which is the same pin out so you can use the same accessories It's got the same chip But it's a little bit different because this one of course has a reset button neopixel And qt plugs. That's why it layouts a little bit different. That is cutie pie. Yay. It is cute It runs python if you want one pick it up now Yes, that's right. If you want one pick it up now, uh here it is look at It is back. It is our best little friend the cutie pie samd 21 As as you probably know, these have been these at samd 21 chips the m0s They've been really hard to get for the last couple years due to the global parts Shortage and we've gotten a ton of them in so we have these available. You can pick them up today half price Just head Right on over there. Uh, and and you can you can go and get them half price Let's uh, let's talk about this. So That's my product pick of the week this week. It is the return of the cutie pie samd 21 It's a cortex m0 board. It is in the form factor of the seed. We know xiao And as you know in the last couple years since these first came out We've made a handful of different boards in this Size in this form factor with different chips on them. This is the original the the original one right here And the cortex m0 is fantastic We have so many projects that you can build if you look in the learn guides, you'll see there's a ton of stuff You can deal with the samd 21 m0 based projects Some of the things I love about it one usb-c Two the fact that it is usb Hid compliant all the way through so you can do midi projects with it keyboard projects with it mouse projects with it serial stuff All available over usb So it makes it great for those types of projects also because of the stem acute port on there You can plug in the many many many many i squared c peripherals that are available out there And especially the ones that have that stem acute port. It makes it plug and play for example, here's one I was messing around with this stuff again recently. Uh, we've got a little little plug right there. I'm going to plug that in this is a We chuck adapter lets you use various nintendo accessories And a little OLED display so you can see no soldering just plugging and playing and you can get a project up and running You can do your projects in arduino. You can do your projects in circuit python And i'll show you actually one.  Uh, so here you can see here's an example of a project where I have A really large number of neopixel leds being driven by Our little friend the m zero. Let me get that. Sorry. Let me get that board stable there And in this case i've soldered some wires to it. So you could do the sort of thing over stem acute In this case. I just went for direct soldering to the data in and ground To the board. I have a data out pin. I don't really need to use that one. Uh, the Board in this case is is a bazillion led. So that's being powered over its own separate connection But you can use five volt and three volt power We have both of those out. So if you need stuff directly off of the usb power you can do that with this board Some other stuff. I'll leave I'll leave this pretty Pretty graphic up here if it'll stay stay put some other interesting facts about the The cutie pie here we've got 11 gpio pins on here. So if you look here's one that's not plugged in so I feel a little safer poking around on it You've got 14 of these pins with castellated pads on them, which means you can surface mount it And this board is Surface mountable because it's got nothing on the bottom. Now you can go ahead if you want to Goose it a bit you can solder on a little extra two megabyte flash chip if you want to But in this in this form it can be soldered straight onto a board surface mount style So we've got three pins up here that deal with power But then the rest of these pins the the 11 pins are usable for all sorts of gpio Digital ins we've got nine analog inputs. We've got One true analog output. You can pwm. I think nine of the pins We've got hardware i2c over the stem of qt port. We also have spi urt i2s for digital audio And six of the pins are cap touch capable so you can do capacitive touch projects with this as well Let's see. What else is there to say? Let me check in with the uh, let me check in with the chats over here Actually, I'll bring up the the discord Where'd you go discord? There you are Excuse me Can you use any inputs for capacitive touch? Yes six of them and I had a project, uh, excuse me Got so excited. I forgot how to breathe I had done a project at one point where I just attached some little sort of spring steel To six pads and I was able to touch those to do capacitive touch input Which makes for really nice wearable projects interactive art types of projects Yeah, dj devin 3 says I like it for small led projects These are great for doing your development on a little plug-and-play board if you want to use that for led stuff for neopixel stuff And they are so darn small They're great for wearables. So dj devin 3 mentioned doing halloween projects stuffing them inside of a mask They're just so tiny. Look at look at this. It's a It's basically Thumb-sized I can't hold my thumb that way under this camera without breaking my wrist, but there you can see Look at that.  What else have I Mentioned um, oh, yeah for usb. You also can use it for storage That's another besides the keyboard mouse midi serial There's also storage so you can save files on to it if you need to It's a 48 megahertz chip and it's got 256 k of flash built on like I said, you can add More if you want we have an a different cut of the circuit python that you can put on called hackspress If you put the two megs on and we've got 32 k of ram on there as well and It is Such a modular system. Thanks to the stemma qt. You can plug and play all sorts of Sensors just endless numbers of sensors and inputs, but we've also got if I let me zoom out here a second and get myself a little more Space to show stuff Zoom way out here. Let me fix that focus again. You can see we have These add-ons That go right on top of or on the actually on the belly of the cutie pie so just like that I've got them in the bags here, but you can see we've got a Neopixel Bff we call them bfs best friends for others so you can hook that on to be a nice neopixel driver board We've got the lipoly. It gives you power and battery and battery charging. We have the Neo key that gives you a key switch mechanical key switch that just bolts right on there And we also have a micro sd card if you have a project that you need to Pull files off a sd card. You can do that as well. And then maybe you're plugged into a display or something else like that So super super versatile board and and a really convenient Board for your projects and really inexpensive normally there's $7.50 today if you head Right here To that url that you see you're going to get them for $3.75 For this board you can't do better than that. That's that's outrageous to have a at samd 21 based Development microcontroller with all of those peripherals all of those add-ons for $3.75 Fantastic Let's see. What else have I oh, yeah, I'll let me jump over here. This is Over in the learn system if you just type in cutie pie You'll see we've got the main Guide for cutie pie can head there. You can also see there are a lot of projects that use the cutie pie here was my my green screen retro reflective led Project we've got a neopixel guide for using with cutie pie activity timer some Other led projects some lighting with lego projects and on and on And if you click on that main Guide right there that'll get you started that'll give you the info you need to update the uf2 bootloader if you need to to put Your version of circuit python that you want on there How to run it in arduino. We've also got the pin out here. Let me show you what all those Uh pins are usable for it's a little small right there But you can see all the a lot of those pins have multiple uses you can set them up And use them the way you want give you a little info about powering it And uh, then example code to run in arduino and in circuit python to get you started So That I think is going to do it. Um, you know, I'll check sometimes I check these a little late So i'm just going to check over in our youtube And Discord to see if there's any other questions or thoughts people have Uh, jim edgar says bought a bunch of these love them. Awesome. That's great to hear Uh let's see dj7 3 one of the most underrated features is the 5 volt out for neopixels at full power You don't get that with most feathers 5 volt makes the neopixels a little bit brighter Uh They ought to say dang it. What else do I need to get? Uh, you can't go wrong with the bffs There there are a lot of fun to have those little uh, plugables as well It's maybe some uh, some of the header pins to to plug those into Uh, you can uh, if you want to Do development on one kind of use it as your development board You can of course solder the pins on it and plug it into a little breadboard Maybe get a half-sized breadboard You can also put a little capton tape underneath the bottom just so that none of those pads Short anything. Uh, and then you can solder it flat right onto a perma proto Maybe like a quarter size or the mint tin one so it makes a really if you need a really really flat Uh pcb for a project that's kind of a nice A little combo there are some of the insulating capton tape and one of the perma proto boards Uh, really nice to make tiny little projects that you can tuck away um Yeah, and like mr. Certainly says it's it is so small compared to a feather And then if you do say hey, you know what there's a feature of the feather I really want let's say it's the battery charging and the jst plug for for the lipo Then you can get get one of these get this, uh Lipoly bff there plug that onto there and you'll you'll get an on off switch And you'll get the charging circuit and the the plug for the battery so Really really versatile all right uh I think Oh, so uh In is this discord is the username asks can you talk a bit about power consumption? Uh, I don't actually I don't know a ton about the power consumption on this the best bet if you look back here at the learn guide Uh is head to the last page says downloads Um, this will give you the datasheet for the chip So you can find out at least that much about it It also give you the the board files and schematics if you look at, um Might be on the pinout sheet Let's see This talks about what you can draw. Uh, so over the three volt line. You can draw 500 milliamps The five volt line is is often tied to your usb. So I think you can get 500 milliamps peak one But i'm actually not sure about power consumption on the board. That's a that's a good question If anyone has any info about that, please Add that to the chat. Um, we also have various um Methods of putting the board to sleep when it's not in use. So then you have a much lower quiescent power on it Uh, rufus said what was the insulating tape called? I couldn't quite get the name. Uh, the the brand name for it is Capton with a k k a p t o n. Uh, it's also called poly polyamide tape. Let me see if I let me jump back to my, uh Chrome browser here Do we have it as capton? Oh, that's the sorry i'm in the learn guide. Here we go. Uh, yeah high temperature polyamide tape, uh, right here Commercial name is capton but known as polyamide tape um Any other questions that looks like it's it All right Well, hey, thank you again so much for stopping by. Uh, there's the site Jump back a couple pages Uh, looks like do we still have them in stock? Yes, looks like we're still in stock with these So you can get that until the show is over.  You can, uh, get that pricing without a coupon code Just throw it in your cart right now during the show There's also some suggestions for some add-ons there like the if you're wondering about that two meg flash Chip that you can solder to the bottom to use it in hack express mode that's there No coupon code necessary the price is good during the show. It'll drop back To the full price 750 after the show So you'll want to you want to put that through through your cart and into the system before the time is up and With that I will say thank you so much for stopping by today That is my product pick of the week this week. It is the cutie pie sam d 21 cortex m zero Thanks everyone for eight of fruit industries. I'm john park. This has been jp's Product pick of the week. Bye. Bye


Turns out it's not too difficult to take a look inside the through-hole variety using a Dremel cutoff wheel, though I can imagine more delicate methods exist out there.


Antibiotic resistance genes, ARJs, have accelerated microbial threats to human health. Here, Zhong et al. analyze 4,572 metagenomic samples to illustrate the global patterns of ARG distribution in diverse habitats. They quantitatively evaluate the health risk to humans of 2,561 ARJs by integrating human accessibility, mobility, pathogenicity, and clinical availability. With the machine learning, they map the antibiotic-resistant threats in global marine habitats. This article was authored by Sinyin Zhong, Qi Zhong, Ting Zhong Wang, and others.


Hey, I'm Todd Merritt from Daily Tech News Show. Here are five things to know about Risk Five. [♪ Music Plays.♪ ?] A growing number of you know about the chips called Risk Five, and that's why some of you just insta-corrected me that Risk Five is not a chip. It's an instruction set for chips. You're right. That may ring a bell for some more of you who are like, wait, that sounds like arm. Not this kind of arm. The chip arm. And the answer is yes, arm is also an instruction set for chips used by Apple, Google, Qualcomm, a whole lot of others to make their own chips, as opposed to Intel and AMD, who use the X86 family of instruction sets and don't let anyone else make them. Except with arm, you have to pay the company arm if you want to use the arm instruction set, whereas Risk Five is open. You don't have to pay anybody, which is why it's growing. Here are the top five things to know about Risk Five. Number five, Risk is spelled R-I-S-C. It stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing, and to way oversimplify, it's a design philosophy that focuses on removing rarely used instructions in order to speed up performance. Coming into number four, there weren't really five previous risks before Risk Five, but also there kind of were. David Patterson worked on the Cal Berkeley Risk Project in the early 1980s, and when he helped out advising the Risk Five project in 2010, he considered it the fifth time he himself had worked on a big risk type project. So they called it Risk Five in his honor, which was very nice of him. Up to number three, Risk Five started as a summer project. Cal Berkeley's Krista Asanovich was trying to satisfy his research requirement to develop an open source computer system, and when the aforementioned Dave Patterson jumped into help, it sort of became much bigger than a summer project. Hiding into number two, it's administered by Risk Five International. That is a non-profit foundation based in Switzerland, which maintains the rights and keeps them open. So that anybody can use it while also coordinating the project so it has stable development. At number one, companies are building on it. In August 2023, Risk Foundation members Qualcomm, NXP, Nordic Semiconductor, Infineon and Robert Bosch set up a company, joint company in Germany to commercialize Risk Five based products. We're just now getting serious development behind Risk Five, so it might be 2024 or later before you see it in major chips for cars or other platforms, but it's coming, and you, my friend, are ahead of the game knowing about it. If you want to be ahead of more great tech news games, subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash daily tech news show and get the podcast, dailytechnewshow.com. If you can help support us, do so. Head on over to patreon.com slash dtns and keep us in business. I'll see you there.


It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast and for everybody's benefit I just thought if you could start by giving us a bit about your background and sort of explaining the context to what you do. Thanks Jake, great to be here. Well I suppose the very quick background, I started life not as a behavioural person at all, I started as a very traditional economist with a little bit of philosophy thrown in for Spice. Didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up so I became a management consultant for a while. So it seemed the least committal career path I could choose. And then it got to the point I did a lot of work there in financial services and you know that raised my interest in financial decision making but it got to the point where I wanted to go back to academia and do a PhD and I started looking for something to focus in and my plan was actually to go towards philosophy and away from economics and to study the bit of philosophy that's almost the link between the two which is the philosophy of rationality. Economics assumes this that everyone's always rational. I thought that's really fascinating philosophers have said a lot about this over the years and as I was reading to put together my PhD proposal I stumbled across this field of behavioural economics and of course the subfield below that of behavioural finance and it just absolutely caught my attention from the first moment. It was this wonderful mix of deep theory but applied practice of economics, of maths, of philosophy but also psychology which up to that point I had not studied at all and I just completely swung my entire PhD after that in a sort of fit of complete self-indulgence. Spent three years studying it and really had no plans for that to be a career because this was in sort of early 2000s the field was still relatively unknown out of outside academia in fact even inside academia it was very much considered to be the lunatic fringe of the economics faculty at that time and so I yeah I was very lucky because I started my PhD and I think 18 months later Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for economics which was a neat trick given that he wasn't an economist and this whole field of behavioural economics just really shot into prominence so I finished my PhD I spent a bit of time one foot in academia one foot in consultancy and then in 2006 I joined Barclays to set up what was the world's first dedicated team of behavioural finance specialists inside a bank and I led that team plus the quant team for Barclays wealth globally for 10 years I now run a small FinTech we are a spin out of Oxford University Oxford risk and we build software to help people make better financial decisions so again a combination of data analytics behavioural science digital technology quantitative finance all coming together to really try to guide people more comfortably through the decisions that they make yeah no that that sounds fantastic and I think yeah finance is such an interesting topic not just investing but also personal finance and I know we spoke briefly before about your your passion for sort of educating people and I think with investing it's particularly hard because it can seem like a very sort of mysterious art to sort of get into but actually it's probably easy in some ways than people realize but there's this lovely quote that I came across doing research from Benjamin Graham who I think was Warren Buffett's mentor and he once said that the investors chief problem and even his worst enemy is likely to be himself would you say that's that's a fair statement based on your your understanding yeah absolutely and I think there's two important things there you mentioned the complexity you know investing is full of numbers and jargon and complexity and it really makes people very daunted about having a go so one of the ways in which investors worse enemies themselves is they are they think they have to get it perfectly right in order to start at all and that is completely wrong because you can get started in a very simple way without having to know very much as long as you keep it really simple but people find that emotionally uncomfortable to do so they sit on the sidelines with it you know they're hard-earned cash earning nothing in a savings account in fact you know now particularly with inflation ticking up earning negative right sitting in savings gap and being too emotionally scared to invest that money then the other one which is probably more what Benjamin Graham was after is once you are an investor once you've put money into account honestly for most people the rules of investing are extremely simple figure out what money you need to keep aside as a safety buffer put the rest to work diversify and leave it alone now those things are not complex rules but it is really very difficult again emotionally difficult for investors to follow them particularly the leave it alone one which is really what Benjamin Graham was was referring to because when we see markets go up and down and we read the newspapers about you know this stock or Apple does this and Tesla does this and we constantly think we need to be doing something and honestly doing something is just most of the time complete gambling and you're gambling events millions of other people who are also you know gambling many of whom are doing it professionally are unequipped with far more data far more information far more expertise than you are so for most investors really if you buy a diversified portfolio and leave it alone that's the best that's what you should do and yet we don't we really constantly think this is action bias I need to be doing something right right yeah we're prone to taking action when we don't need to in in the case of investing long-term it's possibly the worst thing to be action action bias just one point because one thing is interesting the thing the reason why people are daunted sitting on the side is often we're told that investing is a casino and in the short term that is true I mean it's a casino in the sense that none of us can really predict what's going to go up or down when right in the long term it is a casino but the other way around so the reason people are afraid of afraid of casinos quite reasonably is the odds are in the house's favor right so if you ready casino again and again and again you are going to lose over time now this is this the difference between short and long term is very important then in in both casinos and in investing but investing the important thing is by investing you are the house over long periods of time if you stay invested in a diversified portfolio you're playing with the casino not against it and so actually the risky thing to do is leaving your money doing nothing in a bank account and yet people are averse to it because I think all investing is a casino it is but it's a casino where you're in where you're the house right no I mean that's so true and I guess when we talk about long term we're talking you know five ten fifteen twenty years and longer but the temptation especially news obviously if there's a story if there's a narrative that sounds interesting or exciting or even makes us feel fearful we might take action that you know we shouldn't think we saw a lot of that it's kind of during the pandemic you know there was a lot of them they talked about these sort of meme stocks which which I you know you probably know all about and why why do people get sucked into those those stories do you think well well many reasons one so in all financial decisions the broad problem is that there is a gap between the sensible thing to do or the right thing to do and the thing that feels emotionally comfortable to do in the moment so we all deviate from good behavior in the pursuit of short-term emotional comfort now one of the things that gives us emotional comfort of taking on a risky investment is familiarity so meme stocks by the very fact that they are memes and the names are everywhere they become very familiar to people and therefore they start to seem emotionally comfortable to people and so people chase it in recent times particularly you know in the pandemic there was another element to this that I think was really important I mean what there are many other elements one is a lot of people had a lot of time on their hands during the pandemic and indeed many people had cash balances that were going up because they weren't traveling they weren't going out etc and so they were saving money so there's more money time these familiar stocks but I think also the other thing that makes people really really comfortable doing things is knowing that lots of other people are doing that thing so the social angle to those meme stocks became really really important and it gave people rationales for getting into them that often wasn't even a financial one anymore it was you know it was that by buying this we're sticking it to the you know to those in charge so there was a social angle there's a whole social media influencer angle around that all of these things that gave people just that one more reason to get involved in this and they were reasons that had very little to do with what economists would tell you is a right you know is it is a rational way of choosing a stock which is think about the long-term risk return trade-off this was a social pressure and emotional pressure familiarity all of these things come together yeah no that makes a lot of sense and in the little reading I have done about investing and I read this fantastic book I'm sure you've you've come across it by a guy called William Green I think it came out last year or something and richer wiser happier I think the title of the book was but it was he'd interviewed some of the world's most famous successful investors on you know how their approach to investing and sort of what came through was that they all seem to have a quite a common personality type they're very full of very rational very seem to be able to very good keeping their emotions in check and they have a sort of plan that they've created in advance and I guess that's sort of to stop them from reacting to it to news or whatever it is in the moment completely so that even if you're not that sort of person if you can devolve your decision-making to a plan or a structure or a set of rules that you've set up that means you you can be the calm collected person because you've effectively taken a large part of your emotional responses out of out of the system and I do exactly the same I have a I call it my investing my investing constitution I have a set of rules that governs what I'm allowed to do and not allowed to do yeah and I'll just give you one example I for example in my own investing never ever allow myself to make any decisions during the week because during the week I simply don't have the time or the context it's not my job to follow the markets day-to-day I don't have the time or the context to come at a reasoned thoughtful decision and yet if I allowed myself to do that I guarantee you I would be tempted to because I would see something coming in and the financial media or whatever and I just came to the conclusion years ago that on balance you know occasionally I might miss out on some great opportunity but I've also written a rule that you know I don't chase single opportunities like that either so on balance if I only make investing decisions on the weekend I can do so while the markets are closed when I can sit down with you know my spreadsheet and the whole portfolio in front of me I can see where the gaps are I can spend time on it and crucially when I when I make a decision and I put the trade into the you know to the system to the trading system it doesn't go live until Monday morning so I've got an automatic pause point and I've got this emotional break between deciding and the decision going alive which is you know the it's the equivalent of sleeping on the decision very seldom do I have to reverse it but it is really important if you want to make good decisions to build pause points and friction into into your decision process there's this common thought that you know to get people to do something you need to have make it as few clicks as possible and make it as easy as possible that's true if you're trying to sell someone something you you want to get them from from here to to the money in your account as quickly as possible yeah if you're trying to help people make better decisions you actually need to slow them down at various points and have these pause points yeah I mean it's critical isn't it for any big decision not just financial that I think they sometimes call it the you know the pause between stimulus and response you know if you're able to take that beat before you make the decision to sort of reflect on what what you've made as a choice is very very powerful I just wanted to go back to your time at Barclays and sort of over that 10 years what what did you learn about behavioral investing in that period that maybe sort of surprised you from from the initial start or your opinion changed oh yeah quite a lot of things I think firstly when we got in no one really knew what a behavioral finance team was going to do including us so there was a lot of experimentation over that time and you know we were we were building things testing them and the experimentation wasn't even so much on what we were delivering to clients it was what will the organization accept from this new idea you're dealing with a bunch of bankers who quite traditional like dealing with numbers like all the jargon and here you come these odd psychologist people who are coming in trying to get them to make a behavioral overlay onto this so simply getting internal acceptance of these ideas was quite tricky initially then we had the financial crisis of 0809 so I started the team in late 2006 we had about 18 months of you know yeah good times the end of the good times and then and then this massive crisis and the only reason I think we weren't the first team to be fired when they started cutting jobs because you can imagine some senior manager going right I need I need to cut headcount by 20% what are these odd people do you know behavioral psychology first out the door is because we had decided that what we were going to do is is not just deliver behavioral finance into the organization by PowerPoint but actually build tools and we were in the middle of a rollout of a software based financial personality assessment tool which bought us six months of leeways they couldn't fire us immediately and the really interesting thing and we see this again in COVID is in times of crisis and in times of emergency the focus that people have on behavioral science and on emotion and psychology just goes up so by the end of the crisis we were in a much stronger position as a team into inside the bank than we were before I think though I think the main thing that I learned by the end and I've mentioned we were rolling out this tool and we did we you know we built this financial personality assessment and it was it was great it was quite widely used but that were that was really the only tool we built we spent a lot of the rest of the time either if you want to change the way people do things I think you know the first thing you do is you down you sit everyone in a seminar room every six months and you download PowerPoint slides into their brains and you hope that they that they absorb it and do things differently failing that you you bake it into the rulebook you get get you may get good buddies with the compliance department you say you guys want to make this happen because it's good so we did a bit of that and thirdly you actually just bake it directly into the technology that people are using and we did far too much of the first two and not enough of the third one and I genuinely think if you go into any person's job and you come and you say I got all these new ideas that are coming from this academic field of behavioral science and they're gonna really enable you to deliver a better service for your clients etc etc and and it's great the trouble is as good as those models are you've also just made that person's life more complicated because what they're doing already as a financial advisor for example you know I've already looking at all these numbers of someone's balance sheet and their goals and their plans etc and yet I completely get that their emotional state and their personality is important but you're asking me the advisor or them the clients to do all the hard work so I think the main thing I learned from that which we now take forward at Oxford risk is if you want to bring the complexities of behavioral science into helping people make better decisions at scale yep you have to build tools that simultaneously makes people's lives easier and makes it you know they don't have to become a behavioral expert you've built it in software and you can use it and so that's really you know what we're trying to do now is behavioral finance on its own is pretty useless but when you start coupling it with data analytics with digital and technology's delivery mechanism with traditional quantitative finance you build it into IT systems etc then you can really start to make a difference right now that that that makes a lot of sense so people effectively become behavioral finance by people by proxy just by default by using the software yeah now that makes a lot of sense and then yeah I mean I think we saw so many other examples recently in the pandemic of behavioral science being applied with government messaging you know hand-washing and stuff in the UK so yeah I mean that's a really interesting point I've never considered that during those times of crisis the interest in behavioral science that it goes goes up rather than goes down and I just wanted to ask you another question on this topic of financial literacy because I know it's something you're interested in and what why do you think you know financially financial literacy is still so poorly taught in in school in the main that's an interesting question I think it's difficult to do right now I don't know if you're like I am but you know I did let's say I did biology at school right I sat through all these lessons and now I've got a few bio biological facts and figures of my fingertips but most of what I learned at school in terms of actual content is long forgotten right the stuff that isn't forgotten other techniques that you learn so rudiments of you know mathematics or all that sort of stuff and the problem with a lot of financial literacy is it's trying to equip people with knowledge for decisions that they aren't actually at the point in their lives that they're making those decisions at the moment I can teach people about mortgages till I'm blue in the face but this person probably isn't going to take out a mortgage until they're 15 years in the future so you know it's just it's just wasted it's time wasted and there's a lot of evidence looking at the efficacy of financial education you design the education of course there are better or worse ways of designing it but the evidence suggests that if you build financial education you sit people in a seminar room and you measure their knowledge going in and you measure their knowledge going out and we can demonstrate that people do in fact learn things in the course of the seminar but measure whether six months later they have changed their behavior in any way and the answer is invariably no so financial education mostly is an extremely expensive way of achieving almost nothing and here again for me the real answer is is is technology so what we could think of as just in time education where you're giving people small nuggets of education at the time at which they're making these decisions so it's relevant to what they're doing there's no 15 year gap between the information coming in what I need to do it's delivered digitally in small nuggets and that can be extremely powerful because you're enhancing the learning by doing thing and I think in financial education we need to at schools the evidence would suggest there's a certain amount we can do when people are really young but we need to think of this is about teaching them techniques not not facts about about finance and frankly basic numeracy is probably more important than financial then specifically financial numeracy if we can get people just to be more numerate that's that's going to help but and then the other thing and then later in life you know just start to build online banking with more information thrown in that can be personalized you personalize what you put in front of people at that point and then you're going to have a much stronger effect that's really interesting the technology argument I mean it makes a lot of sense now I think I think about it especially some of the financial decisions I've had to make if there been some sort of technology helping me to avoid you know some of the mistakes that I might have made that would obviously be a huge advantage but I guess there's also big ethical responsibility there on in terms of providers of that technology how I guess how do you how do you govern that in terms of if people don't know their decisions are in some way being you know influenced yeah and that's a really important point you know our raison d'etat at Oxford risk is to design things that help people make better financial decisions but then you have to have a really clear idea of what what you mean by better and of course financial services are highly regulated industry so some of what better is is defined by the regulators and that's actually very useful because it means that we can do certain things with great deal of confidence but you were talking earlier about meme stocks etc and you think about the Robin Wood things like you could use behavioral finance there just to encourage lots of people who shouldn't be doing it to catch falling knives more and it's possible to use applied behavioral science to encourage people to all sorts of things some of which are definitely not in their best interests I think the ethical side of it is absolutely vital and you know we have a whole series of things that we follow we want anything we do to be transparent we we do have these financial personality profiling tools but it's always upfront people always know about it we're transparent in how we're using it and we're very clear about what it is that we mean by better in any particular in any particular circumstance and and you know I think that is true of most people applying behavioral finance in in banks I've seen almost all of them I've seen very clear awareness of the need for an ethical code to do it but you know I'm guessing there are some out there who are going actually what's in our interest is to get this person to trade 20 times a month rather than 10 times a month and that's getting a scientist to nudge them in that direction yeah and I mean I'm obviously I don't know this for sure but I mean I know a lot of people sort of have in the media sort of highlighted that Robin Hood example that you mentioned which for the benefit everybody else I think it's a sort of essentially a stock trading app but they got into a lot of trouble because it's sort of incentivizing as you say people to trade more frequently and also very inexperienced investors to sort of speculate and use all sorts of instruments like options and things like that I mean I I've never used it the app because I think it's only US based but I imagine they were using lots of behavioral science practices wittingly or unwittingly to encourage young young people to to effectively gamble I suppose well I do know that they have a behavioral team I confess I know absolutely nothing about what that team is doing so I can't say anything about that but you know any firm that's looking at people's interactions online is probably using behavioral science somewhere in that in an intentional way you know yeah no I think that's very very fair and it's a sort of a line to that point if if somebody is sort of interested in in this topic you know investing in behavioral science and sort of wants to learn more about it but they're sort of starting out their journey would you recommend any sort of books or resources in particular as a way to get started you know assuming your your knowledge is like mine you've got some some understanding and you're interested in in maybe behind behavioral science already but you know don't have X years in in banking or finance or whatever it is yeah I don't know I mean I guess there's a lot of retail about out there around personal finance etc not necessarily all of it with an explicitly behavioral angle and it is important to realize that we can talk a lot about behavioral but some of these some of the basic principles of of personal finance have little to do with behavior and simply understanding you know the mathematics of interest rates and you know how these things work so you know there's a lot there I mean I confess I don't I don't actually know what I would recommend as the as the one go-to source for this starting investors there are a number that are potentially geared towards maybe higher net worth investors yeah I don't know a difficult question I don't I don't have a go-to book for that I'm afraid that's okay there's not always an answer for that question and and a sort of related questions it's sort of if you sort of had to pick one one message you know that you were giving to people starting out in investing based on all of your experience and how we you know actually behave as opposed to we think we're going to behave yeah what would that message be do you think if there's a single message and it doesn't you know I could give you a compound message with some components the single messages don't you don't wait yeah you know time is your favor as an individual investor the big thing you've got on your side is time you can as a professional investor you're forced to post results every 12 months etc as an individual investor you've got years and so just get in do something simple and and then work work it out from there don't sit on the sidelines and so the slightly more nuanced bit of that is is what do you get into so I just have these I mentioned them earlier that you know the four basic rules of investing one set aside an emergency buffer equivalent to let's say three months of your expenditure so that if something goes wrong you've got a buffer right emergency fund or whatever yeah exactly so don't don't invest that make you have to you have to buy yourself the ticket to invest your ticket to take risk comes from first making sure that there's a bit where you take no risk and it's it's all risk-taking is you should only take risk if you've done the work in preparation and and built your safety safety margins right and that's true whether you're you know skydiving or investing so rule one set something aside so that you can afford to withstand shocks to your life that might otherwise mean you're forced to sell at the bottom of a bad market right then you've bought yourself the time and you've bought yourself the rest of it put it to work in a diversified portfolio if you're young make it you know heavily equity-led you know take take take risk with the rest of it and then if that's all you want to do at this point leave it alone just just leave it sitting there if you want to do more at least this thing is sitting there and then you can start saying okay now how do I think about you know sure how should I rebalance this what can I learn about other things on the margin but don't don't let the best be the enemy good don't don't wait until you're an expert expertly knowledgeable about investing before investing because you're sitting outside the casino and you know and and as I said earlier you if you invest you're on the house's side yep yeah and then yeah I think I came across a study I don't you can tell me if this is apocryphal not from fidelity I think it was some famous study about they looked at who performed best in their portfolio and it turned out supposedly that the best performers were the ones that were either forgotten about their portfolio entirely or were dead so I guess that goes back to our original point of you know action bias if you're your own worst enemy if you interfere and actually what you want to do is just get started and then leave it alone for as long as possible yeah that's a lovely lovely way to end and if anyone wants to find out more about your work and what you do wants to follow you on on Twitter is there any any places the best to seek you out yeah Twitter is probably best I'm at at Greg B Davies on ES and all you can go to our website which is oxfordrisk.com and we have an Oxford risk Twitter feed as well which is more directed at financial advisors and financial professionals but there's a lot of content that we've put out on there. Brilliant and yeah it just remains for me to say thank you so much Greg for your time it's been a real pleasure having you on the podcast today thank you. Thanks Jake absolutely pleasure


Meantime, the President has written to the Senate to confirm 19 nominees as resident electoral commissioners for the Independence National Electoral Commission, INAG. The confirmation request of the upper chamber was contained in a letter dated 25th of July. The letter was read up later by the Senate President Ahmad Lawan. President Buhari in the letter said the request for the confirmation of the nominees was in accordance with the provisions of section 154 subsection 1 of the 1999 Constitution as amended. He explained that five of the resident electoral commissioners are for renewal while the other four teams are fresh appointments.