So I am Bill Turner and I'll tell you a little bit about myself and then you can introduce yourself after I Show a particular slide and I started with this slide someone said oh, it's beautiful and the answer is I've received various blessings in my life and one of them is I now get to teach a four-day course in the Tetons for these folks on Moisture management and historic structures and new assemblies And I get to do that because I stuck my nose in a project four years ago as a volunteer and said I think there's a better way to do this and they said you're right come and teach for us so So I volunteering has been a wonderful treat in my life I got my first job because I volunteered to measure carbon monoxide and hockey rings in Boston back in the 70s when we had Zamboni's running around without Catalytic converters on them and the kids were in below the boards in the ice and they shut the ventilation off because of the energy crunch and And we were saying like these kids are being exposed like they were smokers when it comes to carbon monoxide So and then so I got stolen at that point by Harvard and got to work on a health study for ten years So so that's the background my intent after Talking with norm was to try to weave together climate change energy use and into air quality and explain to you How I think they're all related so I called 150 slides down to something less lots of them are photos and and Feel free to ask questions as we go So I actually set up some learn learning objectives, but I want you to know You know your son you said is an engineer in training I was an engineer in training But I learned best by doing because I grew up on a Sunoco gas station and from age 12 on I was fixing cards and But I started out cleaning toilets on Saturdays and in my history in engineering is fascinating because Back before Cambodia was invaded. I was like on academic probation and I sort of had a choice when I graduated go do nuclear power or go build weapons for Vietnam and So the fascinating thing for me was I saw this sign it and that MIT posted on a clean non-polluting car competition put together a design team and Enter it so I went into my academic Advisor who I knew quite well at that point because they were like if you don't change you're getting kicked out of here And I said can we do this and he said yeah, you're the leader And I put together a team and for the next the rest of my career at Northeast and I was on dean's list Because all of a sudden I had something that I could apply engineering to that that was real to me so Of course, I blew my parents away because I quit school the next year for a year and worked as a Youth worker for high school kids for the Lutheran Church doing planning process. What do you got for a youth group? What do you want to have? Are you going to get there kind of thing then I went back to engineering school and it was great to actually see projects I could do do measurable results on because when you're working with high school kids You're not always measuring the results. So that's my background So what I figured I'd do with you this this lunchtime is share my personal experience which actually measuring climate change a Summary of building science fundamentals, which you all need to understand if you're going to save energy in buildings I'll talk about indoor air quality and what we know about that And I'll talk about the real some real simple guidelines for new construction and adaptive reuse that could be adapted Because Maine currently has an antique energy code Maine goes by the 2009 energy code Which is a complete antique it lets you do things that are not real smart for a building is going to be in existence for the next 50 years and there's some easy ways to improve that all of the rest of New England has adopted the 2012 code or 2015 code or the 2018 code as people have moved forward for energy Efficiency but not the state of Maine which is very sad to be a resident of a state that's Doesn't have in my opinion the best energy and environmental leadership at the moment This is the engineers map of the United States that tells you this is climate zone 7 Or it gets real real cold, and this is climate zone 6 where it's often cold And this is climate zone 5 where it's sometimes cold Engineers have to design a building to meet a certain climate zone. So it matters What's your expectation of your ownership in your building as to how it should be designed and And and what criteria are you going to design it to now that said there's a lot of folks right now? criticizing ashray for your map is the historic 15 year climate zones We have no clue what the next five year Climate data looks like for any part of this country we can guess It's back to what do they say about stocks past history is no predictor of Future performance or something and there's some real concerns about what's our climate is arisen doing that you folks probably understand better than I So let's let's talk about climate change at the moment in my own personal experiences with any of it The data clearly shows that most glacier lies is melting doesn't come to it as a surprise to me Because I've stood on a bunch of glaciers for the past 40 years That's my historic mountaineering buddy, and that's he and I on Denali in 85 and If I'm gonna go climb Denali I'm also gonna take a carbon monoxide meter with me And we published the paper in in Alaska medicine on how to not die in a snow cave or tent because the minute you put a pot of Snow on top of a camp stove to make water You just created the best carbon monoxide generator you could because that snow is quenching the flame It's the same issue car engines face of you need the engine running hot enough to not produce the yo But has to be cool enough to not melt the pistons So so that was my initial experience the bad news is this guy And I tend to do a trip each year on the continental divide with the next Denali Ranger in the next Yellowstone Ranger and on the map you look at well Should I bring some crampons because I might be crossing a glacier and you get to the glacier and it ain't there anymore You're in mud You might have a snow field left, but the continental glaciers in the United States are drastically melting and changing So let's talk about carbon dioxide probably one of the significant actors and all that Why do I know anything about measuring carbon dioxide? Well for 40 years We've always had to measure the outside Concentration of carbon dioxide to compare it to the inside concentration in the building Because it's a surrogate for how much you're diluting the breathing ear that you're emitting into the building So I actually brought a carbon dioxide monitor with me. It's now reading 983 which tells me if you really want to be healthy in this room by the time we're done You open a window and let more fresh air in because the standard for indoor buildings is if you go above 1100 Pots per million you're not providing enough Dilution air from outside now the alarming thing to me this morning at 8 o'clock as I plug this instrument in outside my office To see if it was going to read 400 which is typically what outside is it read 500 this morning I went down and got another instrument and plugged it in and it read 500 now I didn't go get the calibration gas and try to calibrate the instrument because I was running short on time So you never make Decisions, but with 129 dollar instrument which what's that is I wouldn't got a $600 instrument and plugged it in it read the same thing So I have no clue whether this morning's co2 outdoor levels were really that high Or the instruments need better calibration back when I started doing environmental measurements 50 years ago You had to calibrate the instrument twice a day to get data that was dependable Typically today's instruments those are infrared you calibrate that once a year to get In Harrison and it's the woods and and I'm not running a wood stove these days So so if you were near the main turnpike or downtown Portland So someone said to me I had to realize the wind direction has changed right now It's from the northeast that means we're getting air that came from New York and has gone around and is coming back on land again So there's some fascinating Climate stuff going on so so that's my experience with co2 The ice is melting no question about that the data We have says we've got the smallest ice pack on the planet at the moment You say well have you been somewhere to measure it and my answer is no But the guy I hike with all the time has been to both the Arctic and Antarctic and done work in both places What we hope is that the that fresh That melted seawater doesn't get underneath the ice cap and the Antarctic or we're gonna have lots of problems on the planet Because ice floats which is good, but because it lets our climate work But if you get melt water underneath a piece of ice it tends to melt a lot faster So the real interesting things going on Talk about ocean levels. This is data that in my opinion is not disputable The oceans are rising. I actually heard that there's an excellent woman on NPR last week who said hey You know you don't have to believe in gravity to see the effects And her comment was you don't have to believe in climate change to see the effects But clearly the effects are happening. It's like duh. Yeah, the oceans have risen a foot in 10 years That's New York City. I actually got to teach in New Zealand two years ago You got farmers losing their fields to the ocean that's rising around the planet never mind people losing their housing Throughout the planet, so I don't consider ocean rise in any way Disputable it's happening. Yeah, you got to do is look at the main coast Or any place else and it's like You know this is going on so we have got data we've got great satellite data that says the global temperatures rising And the answer would be well that ain't anything compared to the the temperatures that are rising in the oceans And when you warm up water what happens to it? It expands so we think at least half of their increase in and sea rise Changes from water expanding in addition to the extra water you're putting into it And then there's the Gulf of Maine climate data, which says hey something serious is going on in the Gulf of Maine and It's not On the planet. There's only two other places that look like they're rising faster than the Gulf of Maine So so my slides all have references on them wherever I get this stuff Which you folks are welcome to track down if you want so I'm gonna switch gears Because right now other than some of the committees you all are on which I find real exciting because I don't know a lot about them yet Voting and education is the best thing. I know I can do about climate change at the moment So I'm gonna talk about buildings and then their air quality, which is what I've done for 40 years as a profession, so Let's focus on buildings The good and bad news is buildings in the USA use and waste a lot of energy compared to the rest of the planet The good news is so this is commercial and residential buildings and energy use This is the the energy flow of the United States. Okay, this is industry Most people think us injuries some of the most efficient industry on the planet in terms of how they use energy In transportation energy as long as you don't mess with the transportation standards too much It's gradually drastically changing, you know, I have a Baby diesel powered pickup that I go traveling in that gets 25 miles per gallon all the time Which you know 10 years ago would have been 12 miles per gallon. I just bought a clarity plug-in To change my footprint clarity behind the clarity plug-in I'll do 40 miles on a battery charge And then there's an engine that turns on you can put them both on if you want to play sports car So transportation sort of taking care of itself if you don't mess with that you and industries Doing a pretty good job of being energy efficient What's left is is buildings and you say well, why does this matter?  This is not good stuff what we going on or Those tall chimneys on coal-fired power plant is what give us acid rain We've been dealing with acid rain in New England in New York for the 30 years. I've been aware of it and We know the Osage Oceans are dealing with acidification from both co2 in the sulfur that we throw into the air So so get to get to a positive note. There's a lot of great stuff. We could be doing on buildings So I'm gonna quickly go through what building science is you have to understand building science If you don't want your building to fall apart from rot We started doing energy conservation in buildings 35 years ago without training the staff that do it Adequately and we ended up with some problems in buildings So the Department of Energy went back and researched all that and actually started training crews to do energy conservation Appropriately so you don't make someone sick in a building. So my learning experience in this whole field started in 81 This is what I live in in Harrison. I Bought it when my neighbor said you don't own anything yet. Why don't you tackle this thing? So that was a summer only house on the shores of Long Lake and Harrison and Had never been lived in in the winter time. So I six months later owned it and Proceeded to learn a lot from it and the lessons were somewhat painful and I'll go through some of those at the end The end result is I know a lot about what to and what not to do in buildings this day So I renovated it because someone told me don't make it too tight. It has to breathe because we aren't perforated, right? We have controlled apertures to breathe through My house did not have controlled apertures to be through after in it had 270,000 BTU wood stoves And I rented it to a young lady who was a elementary school teacher who called me up and said I can't eat this place I'm freezing get yourself up here and figure it out. And I'm like, what do you mean? I can't read it I just spent 20 grand money putting insulation in it, but I didn't make it tight So I actually hired David Hargy and Gautam Dutt who were at Princeton at the time developing the first house doctor methods and we figured out that I had created a leaky sieve of Of a building even though I'd put five and a half inches of fiberglass And all the walls under my feet to twelve inches of fiberglass in the attic when it got cold The air just flowed through the building it in great quantities and I couldn't heat it So so let's do the basics of building science building science is real simple heat moves from more to less You can't stop that from happening. You can slow it down with what we call insulation You can redirect it Maybe with what we call insulation, but you can't stop it from happening That means in main area the other place you heat a building air would like to get out the top and come in the bottom Can't stop that from happening other than the wind blowing 30 miles an hour making it go the cold air come in one side and go out the other Instead of coming in the bottom and going out the top well in the summertime the attic gets hot And it still goes out the top because the minute the Sun beats on a roof that surface temperature about 140 degrees which then heats up the attic which then makes air leave which is actually what keeps roofs in Maine dry a Good part of the year All of that sucks in radon from the earth and if radon was valuable We'd all be retired because Maine has like 400 to 4,000 pico curies of radon gas per liter in the soil underneath all our homes The good news is if you simply put a small fan in create a tiny suction underneath your concrete floor You'll make the air go down and out and take the radon with it as opposed to it coming in for your home So for most part for $1,500 or so you can stop from breathing radon In a house that has a concrete floor if you could do it yourself You would you're paying $200 for a fan that lasts for 30 years and some plastic pipe as opposed to paying a Contractor to do it Maine has all kinds of laws that govern who can do radon if it's a rental property or something you're selling That's pretty good. So The control a high performance building you need to control the wind not let the wind blow through it Need to control the air leakage so all the heat isn't going out the top and you need to make sure the air then goes where you Want it to go so you don't end up Downdrafting a combustion appliance and sucking your wood stove fumes into your living room because you turned on the exhaust fan in the kitchen because you were going to cook and We'll go through some of those quickly so Here's the rules of moisture I mean you just switch from air to moisture. Yeah, I did because moisture in this climate becomes real important Water drains down. That's why we put drains around buildings except for when it wicks up. How high can it wick up? anybody How high is the highest redwood tree? So you put a concrete wall of a house in a wet Earth because it rains a lot in Maine and you don't do something as a capillary break to stop Capillary suction you now have a wet wall in a basement even though you didn't want that So builders have to learn and relearn anytime you're going to finish a basement How do you not have damp concrete behind your wall rowing stuff because water wicks up concrete? The other thing that's interesting is the sun drives moisture from more to less So if it rained out the night before and your clapboards got soaked from Wind-driven rain and the sun comes out and hits it it just drove the moisture into the wall and if you happen to have oriented strand board in there and not a good drainage plane and and Drain plane in between that water and your oriented strand board It now turns to mush and your rot your wall rots away So we now know about enough about this to train builders to do it right And in fact that I'm in the middle of teaching a four-day Residential construction series training with a Maine on to our quality council on how to build healthy new energy efficient housing Because we know how to do that these days I I have one handout for you. It's it's one page if you didn't get one pick one up later It tells you how to do 40% better than the antique Maine energy code It's free to you to download off of this website I've highlighted at the bottom and in the arrows I put on the back tell you what it does better than which is a 2009 code that Maine has in place because the 2009 code is the absolute minimum You could possibly build in a house to think about heating it in the state of Maine There's all kinds of guidance on how to do a lot better in simplistic terms It also will tell you how to manage moisture So the the rules of moisture looks something like this You got to drain the water away or you end up with a problem in your basement and If the winds blowing wind driven rain at your house and there's holes in your house The water will get past the outside and wet your wall and you need to think about how the wall is going to dry out And there's all kinds of ways to build that and this gets even more challenging in the climate of Maine Because this is not Utah where I own another property. This is 60 plus inches of rain a year not ten inches of rain a year But there's all kinds of guidance a lot of it from Building Science Corp on how to do this and build a wall That'll last in any climate In simplistic terms Drain the water off the building and away from your foundation Simple as things is kick out flashing with this roof engages this wall kick the water out Away from the building because if it runs down the building this wall will eventually Rot away, but there are people still not doing that Drain the water away from your building if you got a hill above your building you need to swale Before between the hill and your building you need to pitch all around your building five percent away and even for ten feet on the Uphill side you need to pitch it away That's a real basic thing that not all your builders are doing plus the water The the earth around a building tends to sink in the first year because you didn't compact it real hard So you actually have to build it higher than the five percent grade so by the time it sinks down it still Drain's away from the building and what's the lesson in this slide? I mean we build buildings in and crazy places that that maybe You need to do something different if you're going to build it there. This is the ninth Ward two years after the flood of New Orleans and You know, they're now they put parking under these homes So the next time it floods in the water gets up to here Everything in your house is still above the water line and once the water goes back down you put things back together and go forward And lots of folks are saying hey the flood maps now say When it rains a lot when we get the hundred-year flood every ten years You need to think about rebuilding differently. Are you going to waste a lot of somebody's money? You don't need infrared Thermography or a lot of knowledge to know that that building has air leaks You would never have that much melting off the roof if there wasn't air Leaking into the attic carrying heat with it So in addition to needing replace the glass because the ice is breaking it Somebody before the next year needs to figure out where the air leaks are and fix them There's a building's going to continue to attempt to heat the outdoors, which is what's going on when the building leaks heat It's attempting to heat the outdoors, which isn't a very productive thing to do So this is an infrared thermograph taken of the outside of a building Where this X is it says it's 19 degrees there. So this is a two-story building or more. It's dark They actually did a great job of insulating it See these wispy light bright spots there is where the heat's leaking out of the building And and this this has taken I got a couple of ten thousand dollar cameras But in the advent of of stuff, this is this is now This is an infrared camera That will plug into your Smartphone For 300 bucks. So you don't need a ten thousand dollar camera anymore to figure out where heat's leaking out of a building This was bought from my galaxy four and it worked great I had to put an adapter on it to make it work on my galaxy eight, but it it still works So but now you've gone from something this prohibitive for someone to own that Hey, if you've got if you aren't on fixed income, just billy vakin at 300 bucks is a manageable expense To be able to figure out Where is this building leaking heat that I can do something about it? So Pretty amazing. So so we now have hundred and twenty dollar carbon dioxide monitors We have 300 dollar infrared cameras We actually have $300 instantaneous radon monitor so you can put this in the house in in 24 hours figure out whether the radon's at acceptable level or not none of this technology existed five years ago So the knowledge that's available for having good indoor air quality And comfort is incredible and you can go to any auto parts store and for 50 bucks buy an infrared thermometer That tells me that wall is at 70 degrees f Um, so you don't even have to buy an infrared camera if you just want to know the temperature And this is my last show and tell toy This is what I teach the course and the t-tons with this is a 45 dollar available from Lowe's or home depot moisture meter And it will tell me if i'm alive Um because it it measures moisture content and as long as i'm alive It'll tell me how you're wet. This is what any painter would have To make sure the wood's dry enough to paint But this is what you need to figure out if a building needs to be dried out so it doesn't grow mold Um And so the advent of equipment is pretty phenomenal compared to what we had 10 years ago If your attic looks like this Someone sold somebody Something that didn't work very well if you go into your attic and you see something that looks like Cotton candy And they tell you oh, it's an r35 attic Well, not really because if it's cotton candy the cold sinks down into the Insulation and it doesn't work very well if that's two feet of cellulose as long as you keep it dry You don't have a leaky roof. It's a wonderful insulating system But the rv the rated r value of this is the same as the rated r value of cellulose But they don't work the same they don't perform the same when it's especially when it's 20 below zero What is it it's fluffy fiberglass? Yeah, it it could be mineral, but it it's not uh mineral will actually would pack down better So it's blown fiber it's it's blown fiberglass It's blown old fiberglass some of the newest fiberglasses can be blown tight But this is when it looks like cotton candy it Performs like cotton candy cold air just sinks down into it So the the rest of this building stuff is you got to plan the air flows in a building You don't want the kitchen exhaust fan Downdrafting the chimney and it coming out the fireplaces So you tighten the building up and you plan for Not having radon come in and not having leaks in the ductwork And in fact, you don't put the equipment here unless you put the insulation up here We have this terrible habit of putting hvac equipment in Unconditioned attics, which is the worst place you could think about putting them other than maybe in your garage Um, which is they actually do in the pacific northwest because the climate's not as brutal So equipment should always be put in that in the Thermal envelope of the building So let's talk about indoor air quality This is what i've been doing since 1975 grad school. I got stolen to work for harvard Um, I got to work in the harvard city study I got to measure tobacco smoke in homes and gas cooking in homes and nitrogen oxide in homes And after 10 years of doing that I left to move to main to start consulting work And that data all got used to help understand. How do we make healthy housing? Including how do we not have tobacco smoke in the house because I think one of the conclusions was The respiratory disease for children before the age of six doubled if there was a smoker in the home norm you may know other salient facts of of that research When we started out doing the research we didn't have microwave oven So all of a sudden people who were making tea on a gas flame were not making it by the time we ended up finishing the research So you took a combustion appliance Out of the buildings there has never been a a mandatory requirement for kitchen exhaust fans The 2018 code says you shall put a kitchen exhaust fan Over all cooking appliances because when when you burn something really bad, it's not much better than water cow dung or Tobacco that you burn. It's it's nasty stuff. That's probably carcinogenic so We don't want to live in houses this way. We don't want to live outside this way My wife's about to embark upon a trip to china and she's taking a mask with her Pardon, no No, not one that's that good But the good news is for those of you that play with Hobbies you can now buy an n95 dust mask and Walmart home depot napa etc For like four dollars and it will protect you from most of the tiny particles you would get doing a hobby And you can buy it with a bleed breathe valve in it So when you exhale it it doesn't fill up with moisture inside and none of that existed to the public 20 years ago and you can buy it in any hardware store now. So we've come a long way in personal protective equipment for hobbies There's 1500 miles of passageways in here. It's why people breathe stuff in when they do drugs There's what's the what's the space between the air passageway and your blood anyone know it's one cell with So anything you put in your lungs if it's worse if it gets stuck in there It's even worse like asbestos which behaves like a needle So it's really important not to have people breathing nasty stuff So it's important also because we spend 90 of our time indoors And uh OSHA by the way assumes hey, yeah, you can be allowed. It's an it's an it's not an it's The economic burden of of work allows you to be exposed for this The economic burden and health risk allows you to be exposed for this for eight hours And then we assume you go home and out gas for The rest of the time well if you don't go home and out gas for the rest of the time Your exposure is actually very Different so it's important to have both workspaces and houses not be sources of major pollutant exposure And so we have this guidance on ventilation. So this is Don't pass out in the ship. You should pump in five cubic feet a minute of fresh air This is Florence doing some fascinating work in which war At Crimea war saying soldiers that are in a hospital with operable windows get better faster than if you have the windows closed This is work in boston and other places that said that these transmission rate in schools Is lower if we pump air through the school or have operable windows and what happened here This is uh, you can go back to don't pass out in the ship because Oil and costs so much compared to what it used to cost oil right now is actually With the cost of inflation is cheaper than it used to be like 40 years ago And this is by the way, and you have nasty stuff in the air You need to dilute the heck out of it and it's still not safe And after the the running mean like out of all of this is still somewhere like around 18 or 15 So most folks today would say ought to have 15 cfm of outside air in a building to dilute the bio effluence that we all either exhale or omit from from sweating or from Bio effluence in other parts of your body and as long as you're less than a thousand 1100 we're at a thousand so the vent the ventilation in here actually isn't that bad compared to some places I teach So there's all kinds of guidance on how much do you dilute air in buildings? There's all kinds of inexpensive equipment now for how do you measure that to keep people safe? This is actually in a log building in britchton that we renovated And the solution there is it's a manually controlled ventilation system And when you put 40 people in the conference room you watch this gauge And as as it goes past 700 to turn the fan on the low speed and suck some of the bio effluence of the people out And as as it goes past 900 to turn the high speed on and open the windows in the conference room It's a manually controlled ventilation system with variable apertures. We call those windows I already alluded to the fact that the codes recommend a minimum of Ventilation in a kitchen and if you've got a nice efficient flame like this You also have a carbon monoxide generator when you put a cold pot on it.  You just can't see it very well Plug ins I had to convince my daughter Once she was on her own or in a house that I don't like smelling the dogs We'll turn up the air to air heat exchanger because Plug ins aren't plug ins make your nose sort of dead. So you don't smell other things Plus then the question is what else do they put in the air? If you want to if you want to convince your now 31 year old daughter Ask her to google health effects of something and And maybe she'll listen to you more than she would listen to her dad But we're doing pretty well And the last one I put here is summer humidity and you say well summer humidity is a health effect Well, yeah, sort of summer humidity is what drives mold growth In Maine and we know enough about human health and mold that that stuff growing in your house Isn't probably a good idea stuff growing in your garden is part of the natural process of growing a garden And we we have to have decomposition of leaves and all that whole cycle and it's all natural But that shouldn't be going on inside your house if you're at all sensitive to mold So if your clothes look like this This is not good if your door looks like this It's not good. Um, how bad is it depends on whether you're allergic to what's growing or not If you aren't allergic to it, maybe you'll develop an allergy to it So for the most part there's all kinds of guidance on don't let mold grow in your house We say well, why would mold grow in Maine? It's because we get Orlando air In Maine sometimes we get 75 degree dew point air It's the same as what they're dealing with in Orlando. They turn on an air conditioner and dry it We may or may not have a dehumidifier air conditioner to dry it Um And so if you were to look at the climate map for Maine for four months of the summer the dew point Tends to be above 60 degrees in the winter time the air is so dry that we walk around with with problems with Contacts and eyes drying out spring and fall just open a window right and you get Nice air so so your challenge In Maine housing is this is the miracle that keeps plants alive In in our climate and many other climates that when that happens in your house It's not good. This is because someone said you need a dehumidifier, but open the windows Now you need to close the windows in july and august and run a dehumidifier But you need a a cold temperature dehumidifier not one that was designed to run at 85 degrees And i'll show you one of those later the bad news is this is like 250 bucks and a cold temperature dehumidifier is like a thousand bucks So this not not till they've had a moisture problem in their basement and found some money to buy a thousand dollar dehumidifier Most people don't own it if you'd like to make it worse Put carpet down on your concrete floor in your basement and let it hide the moisture And then grow stuff Yeah, so we learn what not to do now Efficiency main will actually help you buy A heat pump water heater the byproduct of a heat pump water heater is it actually drives the air And one of my engineers put a heat pump water heater in his house And actually managed to turn off the dehumidifier and still have a dry basement in the winter Because he had three people taking showers so one person taking showers I'm not sure you'd dry the air enough but in a normally occupied house with a full-sized basement Closing the windows and letting this thing dry the air meant he's he got his electric he shut off his boiler and his electric bill was no different Than running the dehumidifier so he eliminated his oil bill and had a dry basement And what's the rebate anyone knows that 500 bucks or more now From efficiency main for putting so if you need to do hot water heater in your house and it's electric think about putting in a heat pump water heater If you got a stone basement in an old house and you can afford to do it I don't particularly like two-part spray foam, but it's the best thing you can do to a rock Basement you'd cover from the sills down to about two feet off the floor With two-part spray foam with the ignition buried over and you go from a damp and dingy Basement to a dry and warm basement. You just cut your fuel bill by a third You can even carry it onto the floor if you put in a drainage system I'll show you that in a crawl space in a minute So there's some amazing technology and tools available for making old homes healthy This is what underneath my house looked like the first time I tried to insulate it It's not what you want to do in a crawl space There's a couple of things wrong with it, but I'll show you how I fixed it That would be a good thing to do in a crawl space Insulate the walls and the floor with two inches of spray foam Put a drainage system under it and take the insulation above your head out So now you've got a warm and dry crawl space along with a warm and dry home Again, I don't love two-part spray foam, but for some things it's an amazing effective material That's your standard crawl space dehumidifier goes for like 900 bucks or 1,000 depending where you find it on the internet I actually believe there's a couple of folks in Maine now stalking these That removes like 100 pints a day of water where the little thing that sort of might work before it turns to a block of ice is like 30 pints a day So in this case you get what you pay for And you got to block up those windows in a basement or crawl space in July and August Or the area letting in on most days is just soaking the crawl space or basement People eventually figure that out This is what under my house looks like now it it was built in 1925 They dug down to the hard pan put in granite blocks and then put six by sixes On top of the granite block. So I dug it down a foot by hand back when I was much younger And and this black e pdm roofing on the earth to keep the moisture from evaporating And above my head there's either three or six inches of bluer pink foam Screwed up to the bottom of the floor joist And it's not the place to go in August Why But do I find it this time of year it'd be a nice time to crawl around and they're accepted to dusty What's it like in there when in in august? It's soaked Because the outside air is coming in hitting dew point on the plastic not causing any damage to the plastic And then dripping down onto The floor so you crawl around in mud In august now that's completely isolated from the breathing air of the building So under here it smells musty in the building you never smell it because it's completely air sealed meticulously by your personally Both inside and outside Because making it dry and warm was not feasible It's like four feet deep on one end and six inches deep on the other end And the the water tables like sitchens is down on this end and It was much better to isolate it than make it try to make it warm and dry So mold is pretty straightforward all kinds of guidance on how do you get rid of it? It's not kill it. It's get rid of it remove it under containment. Don't make a mess All kinds of guidance available on on how to do it And if you got a lot of it you probably had to provide a higher A trained professional to deal with it They know that real well because they've learned on asbestos And the the principles are all the same So let let's wrap up and talk about high performance homes Department of energy is now having great success marketing net zero ready home Build a home like this when you can afford it stick pv panels on the roof It's a net zero house This is not new Okay, it's new marketing In simplistic terms if you want to have a net zero ready house You put an r60 cap on the attic or roof You make walls that are r35 plus and you make the earth contact ground at r20, which is four layers of foam Make it tight You're done This was first done by my colleague in teaching 1982 finished in 1983 in gore main Dave johnson and company. Dave has been teaching with me since I met him in 82 This is not rocket science. There's all kinds of ways to do this But if you're only building the minimum code no one's Doing it there's lots of people who will sell you proprietary systems for doing it on the web or by their creation But the it's it's relatively simple to do The old code that main has it's an antique says that house shall leak less than seven air chains to per hour at 50 past skels My retrofits down a little bit below this the new codes say by the way you need to be less than half that Otherwise you still have too much air going through it when it's 20 below zero And you're going to complain about your energy building Doubling for the month that it's 20 below zero compared to 20 above because Air movement through a building is not linear It's exponential difference. So when you guys start to get below zero I burnt more wood. You know, I'm only burning a cord this year I burnt more wood in the two weeks of we had below zero every night Then I burnt all the rest of the winter Because of the driving force of that temperature difference And there's all kinds of guidance on commercial buildings now and part of my staff makes its living Testing commercial buildings as they're built to see how much they're going to leak because most universities know they don't want Our schools don't want their building to leak when it's finished This is my office in Harrison built in 93 with the same technology as 83 You can see in the summertime there's good shading here So we aren't getting a lot of solar gain in the summer and in the winter of the sun The guys have to actually close blinds to be able to see their Computers, but we're still getting heat in that window cavity And in Five years ago. I added some pv to the roof I have a simple mantra as long as the code guys don't make you do otherwise Put on as much as you could possibly think about affording because you can never have too much electricity Which is now why I bought a plug-in Um, that's my brother's home Same technology from 82 applied to his house the pv's on his garage And this is a hot water system. That's actually a solar-assisted Geothermal heating and cooling system It's net zero has been since he built it in 2013 and he loves it Those are websites where you could find all you ever wanted to know about that house But in simplistic terms Whatever you're going to do should have two feet of cellulose on top of it So this is a trust system with two feet of cellulose. It's what david's house has it's what my office has It's what my daughter's house now has it's what my brother's house has Why do you bother with r 60 in the attic or roof because it's cheap It it leaks the same heat out everywhere it can by conduction So you do an r 35 in a wall because making an r 60 wall is hard to do and expensive Making an r 60 attic or roof is easy to do And not that expensive and making an r 20 earth contact with Forges a home is the foam is easy to do Basements are fairly simple anytime you're going to put down foam put down two layers stagger the seams So you don't end up when it shrinks a little bit losing your insulation value So that's why that seam is staggered And and if you're going to build a wall system it needs to have drainage It needs to have some kind of drainage paper It needs to have flashing above the window flashing below the window The one thing you don't want is a leaky attic catch You don't want breathing air going into your attic Lots of folks would sell you now various devices to put if you have one of those spool down staircases Lots of folks will sell you some kind of device to seal that And passive house tightness requirements are real stringent You can actually buy now a pull down ladder that meets the passive house standard for building tightness and energy efficient But it cost you a thousand bucks But it does give you access via stairs to an upper level Most folks would say oh don't even do that figure out how to get into it from some other place besides cutting a hole in your ceiling But the the fire folks would like to be able to get up there And require some kind of opening to get to in case there's a fire up there Ventilation pretty straightforward. This is an air to air heat exchanger Which many people are putting in new construction. That's a through the wall unit This is courtesy of a new air. I forgot to put the credit up there And yeah, that stuff's going to add a couple of thousand bucks to the cost of new construction But it gives you planned ventilation all the time With the right amount of air and you don't have to wonder whether you're getting enough outside air to meet Requirements. We're now switching to high performance retrofits Um if you want to know how to do high performance retrofits literally google the thousand home challenge I became aware of it through linda wiggington who started it who norm knows real well at this point linda was my inspiration for Hey, I've been building a house for 30 years. Can I actually Reduce the energy used by 80 percent And I now have three entrances in that And my answer back a few years ago after I met linda was I think I know how to do this now After 30 years of learning this stuff. I think I know how to do this so This is that lake center and bridged in main But we took a log cabin a breezeway and a garage and turned it into a lake research center This is six inches of rigid foam being added to the existing log cabin roof This is the finished product. This roof is our 40. This roof's our 40. That one's our 40 That one's our 40. These walls are now our 40 This is still logs And this is a laboratory and training area for kids This is a reception area. This is housing for three people. This is a conference room So this is inside the conference room upstairs This is a heat pump a radon mitigation system And it has a renew air energy recovery unit. That's 80 efficient So whatever you're throwing out that you don't want in the building anymore You get 80 of the heat back or in the summertime you get 80 of the air conditioning back That's a mini split Which will give you heating and cooling and that's a condensing propane fired boiler for heating the basement of the log cabin building that picture earlier was The co2 meter in the conference room of this building used to to tell people when to go turn on the ventilation By the way, the first year of the building we're like, oh, we don't need that thing And I I did data logging in the conference room and it went up to like 3000 one day and they're like Well, I guess we do need an exhaust fan. So we retrofitted a two speed exhaust fan into the building This is another one of my learning experiences I bought this in 2008 Because my son needed a place to live in utah when he was going to the university of utah And it was the cheapest thing I could find it's a log cabin It had a dirt floor basement and water ran inside one of the basement and out the other And I figured hey my son and I can rebuild this. So the next summer he and I spent two months Changing it so it worked better. We added four and a half inches of foam to the roof again with staggered seams we Excavation by armstrong in the basement. He had a summer job Wheelbarrow pick and shovel he excavated the dirt down And went the upper end of the bill and we put in rigid foam and concrete The only thing I do different is there's only an inch of foam here. I should have picked two inches of foam It's nice and cool in the summertime, but it's still a little cool in the wintertime I should have put more foam in it at the time We had a disagreement on how far this was supposed to be shoveled down by the time I got there We didn't have enough time to shovel it down another two inches It's clay that you you literally rented jackhammer And jackhammer away at the clay to get it to break up Above your head we took out the fiberglass and we put two-part spray foam on the end of the band joist So this is the finished Basement after we renovated it. This is what it started out looking at Okay, so it went from an unusable space with two washing machines and a dryer parked in it What we call the tv room By the time I was done it still is it's below that seven because making an existing building tight That's logs is a challenge But it it's reduced the energy use by like 70 percent or 60 percent I haven't quite met the thousand home challenge yet, but it's close Part of the problem is I have a hot tub on the porch that's used in electricity And although I've buried it in eight inches of foam It's still wrecking my energy budget, but The great news is it went from a building that would be 70 here 85 in the loft and barely Manageable in the basement to a building that's comfortable throughout and this is now a storage area So drastic change in comfort and use by insulating the basement and the attic and air sealing the logs This is a museum in concord new hampshire. Anyone ever been there? It's a great great building We got involved a couple of years ago and gorge is building Historic structures, so you got to figure out what can I do to this building to make it energy efficient without changing the looks The one thing we agreed upon is all those skylights Are now covered and insulated and this is led lighting So the skylights still look like skylights except that dropped the heat leakage from the upper area of the building by 50 percent eliminating those skylights So major difference in heat leakage. We put in new boilers and an air handling system So these are condensing gas-fired boilers Drop the energy use in half The cost by 80 percent The electric is 20 percent lower. So you asked about renovation The the only real challenge I see with renovation is someone coming up with the money To do it the technology is there. This is a hanaford store in vermont I saw an excellent presentation in vermont last year. You can notice it actually has doors on the refrigeration section So this isn't the frozen section. This is the refrigeration section So instead of the cold air all falling down on your feet and you be it in there going I can't wait to get out of here people now like hang around Figuring out what they want to buy and then open the door and get it and it's got all led lighting Making the food look attractive and you can see the quality of what you're about to buy Um, so this is the store hanaford store They by making the energy efficiency changes It went from the worst performing store energy wise to the best performing store And the sales went up and they had a 70 a seven percent increase in customers coming into the building So the real challenge is how do you find the money to do that? They will look at it. Could we justify it on sales increases alone? By modernizing this stone by efficiency vermont gave them some money to put into it This is work in boston where they simply went in and changed from old boilers to gas fired condensing boilers So you go from a building efficiency of 50 percent percent of your fuel the rest is going up the chimney To less than six or nine percent of your fuel is going up the chimney Um, they drastically reduced their energy bills by like 30 percent just from change in the boilers They put in variable frequency drives on the pumps where if you slow a pump down by 20 percent You cut the electric use by 50 percent So so that that's all utility I don't know what the agency is called in massachusetts But for section eight housing they completely fund all that work because it's a gas and electric utility doing it So let's close. This is the thing I bought in 81 Um, all the ones I've showed you we've done full papers on and presentations at conference This was a thousand home challenge candidate in 2015 and then I started plugging away at it So this is back in 81 where we were tearing out windows This is infrared thermography of after my first round of dense packing with cellulose So we put two feet of cellulose on the attic. I built ramps down the two Attacks so I could still get to stuff if I wanted to and we filled it with cellulose And this wall has all been dense packed with cellulose. You can see there's actually a cast iron vent that goes up through here, which is why you got some heat leakage This is a an r of 35 roof. You can see it's cold, but you can see the wall roof interface Is not cold. So I said I want to make this place so I can live here another 15 years or 20 years if my body will let me do that So let's go full bore We took the fiberglass walls Cut holes in them in dense packed of fiberglass bats With cellulose to try to tighten the house up. So this wasn't just that insulation It was dense packed cellulose To tighten the house up and when you dense pack a wall, you could actually take the wall down and the stuff stays there That's how dense you put it in And this is dense packing the space between the second floor and first floor, which we never got to in the first round of of work And so this is a fiberglass insulated wall that again, we're dense packing with cellulose To to tighten the building up. So that leakage went away when we did that We did we addressed lead pain at the same time So the our value of my retrofit now is our 60 attic Someway between r 35 and 40 and all the other surfaces R 30 with that foam screwed up in the basement Now when I heat the living room to 72 degrees, it's 68 on this There's no heat on the second floor of this building The kitchen is a little cooler of all the heats in the living room I fixed that and and this this is a valve pit to get sewer and water in and out And it typically stays around 60 in there.  That's my wife's hiking boots So you're still stuck with july and august you need to dry the air that's moving through your building So I now have two mini splits We moved the little one I put in the living room first to the north side of the chimney Which I now have a back hall. It's no longer freezing cold when it's cold And I put a bigger unit in the living room in january and I turned it on the week of the The second week of the 20 below I can now heat my house at 20 below without firing up the wood stove or the backup boiler So that that's how good these low temperature Heat pumps are Compared to what was around 10 years ago So I've gone from 12 cords of wood back when she said you can't heat this place Down to one cord of wood, which means I've drastically changed the amount of work I have to do Or or my neighborhood air quality It now meets the option b requirement in the thousand home challenge, which you could go there and figure out I've reduced the energy use in that house by 80 percent And my folk my kids and my wife have lived through this experiment So I thank them for that If you want to some idea, how would I do this you can actually go to the thousand home challenge websites And there's 10 steps to reducing your energy if Your energy use and improving your health on that website Which is basically plug away at figuring out what you need and once you've done it verify that it's working And once you've done that you need to figure out how to Document it especially if you're burning you have to weigh the wood if you want to meet the thousand home challenge criteria So in summary, I only see two issues with this Somebody's got to come up with the money to make these kind of renovations Landlords could do it, especially if they were paying the heating bills because then there's incentive to do it homeowners This this like no my tax deduction for improving my energy efficiency Was sort of a joke for a while. It doesn't does it eat now anyone know? I think it ran out in 2016 I don't know but but let's just let's assume you need somewhere between 10 and 50 grand to cut the energy use in a house by 80 You really want to do that figure out a way to come up with the money through the tax system You know Do you really want to give the 1% another tax break if you could be changing how much energy we use? That's not my decision But it's certainly a decision that could be made You could give landlords all kinds of incentives for reducing energy use in and rental property You probably still need to think about resilience People being prepared for climate change Whether it's putting a hand pump on their drilled well, which actually exists as a company I think they're in Maine, but you can google that company They make a hand pump to go on your drilled well So you can get water if you don't have electricity And you need to think about planning for how am I going to take care of my family If we don't have power for 10 days I've lived without power three times for 10 days To make a long story short If you think that you've exhausted all possibilities Rethink it so so here's the deal. Oh, by the way, mi aqc has a great conference coming up in may on energy This is my next endeavor, which you guys asked me to mention something about The deal I made with my wife is I'm going on a 10-week bike trip This summer from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine Raising funds for the Fuller Center For housing, which are the folks who started Habitat And the deal I made with my wife is twofold. You're going to be gone for 10 weeks I want backup power So I went about buying a propane fire generator and it's all set up and it actually worked Last month and the power went out at 10 o'clock at night it kicked on and my wife's there. Thank you, Lord So I've tapped that part of the bargain The rest of the bargain I have with her is after I've gone for 10 weeks riding a bike with a group of great people We get to go camping for a couple of months So she gets her time and and I get mine So that's my last slide. Thank you. I went a little over. Sorry


Greenwashing is a propaganda tactic used on birthright trips to Israel. This is boycott birthright and other free trips to Israel. Today we're going to be talking about a form of propaganda called greenwashing, which Israel is no stranger to. If you don't know what greenwashing is, it's when a corporation, government, or other entity puts forth misleading green initiatives in order to distract from the actual harm and destruction they cause the environment. We have a lot to talk about so let's get into it and look at today's itinerary from the Taglet Birthright website. As we can see, birthright goers are visiting Ben Gurion's home and learning about his radical vision to transform a barren landscape into a thriving oasis and they'll also see Israel's unmatched agricultural prowess in the flesh. The greenwashing is evident in just this language alone. Don't get me wrong, I believe that Ben Gurion has a radical vision to transform the landscape of Palestine, but it's not because he has some new green initiative that's going to do that. It's because he's going to ethnically cleanse Palestinians in order to make it happen.


That is how Super Castlevania IV opens. This is an example of a game where the simplicity of the 16-bit era plays in a game's favor. If this game were made today, no doubt you'd have state-of-the-art fancy-ass 3D cutscenes with stylish-looking characters posing for the camera, but in 1991 we got one single still shot of a tombstone that gets struck by lightning. Dracula is released, the music plays, and the fog slowly rolls in as the story is introduced. It's efficient, it's effective, and it's brilliant. This game first and foremost is all about presentation, setting a mood and creating an atmosphere. Games like Mario or Star Fox or Contra are your classic pick-up-and-play style games, where the substance is mostly in the gameplay. Super Castlevania IV is different. It's a game that creates a world where you just want to hang out for a while because, thanks to the music and the art style, it's just so absorbing and captivating. And let's be honest, it's just plain frickin' cool. Super Metroid is kinda like that too, but there's a certain weight to the Castlevania universe, a certain heaviness to it. This game is like a song you only listen to when the mood strikes. You don't listen to it all the time, but when the time is right on a rainy day, you just gotta hear it. Now, under the gameplay itself, Super Castlevania IV is a tough game to rate objectively when it comes to that, because when it comes down to the controls, you either love them or hate them. The game is either uniquely challenging or unfair and frustrating, and that, beyond all the bells and whistles, is what's gonna shape your opinion of this game. Super Castlevania IV is a platformer, so the immediate temptation is to rock it right through each level as quickly as possible with no regard for anything. If this is your approach to this game, then yes, it's almost a guarantee you will hate the controls, but if you're patient and careful as this game demands you to be, you'll probably get along just fine.  Many people have a bone to pick with this quirk, and it's hard to fault them at times, but I can't hate on the game for that. There's an easy solution, obviously. Don't get hit.  And that's because the game is so well balanced, and by balanced I mean everything has an equal pace. The level design fits Simon's range of motion well, and believe me, his range of motion is a lot. He can whip in eight directions, and even do kind of a grade school spaz attack with the whip too, which is always amusing. You also get an additional weapon, and you can even control Simon when he's in the air. The criticism that's a little tougher to address is the fact that the later levels of this game are just a remake of the first Castlevania game. I guess that's both pretty cool and kind of a letdown at the same time. I get why somebody would be bummed out at that. Seems like a missed opportunity. Anyway, one thing I can comfortably say objectively is that Super Castlevania IV has such great music. I know I say that about a lot of Super Nintendo games, but between Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI, and Super Metroid, I think the Super Castlevania IV soundtrack is just as good, if not better, than all of those games. It really is that good. One level after another, the music is beautiful, creepy, chilling, inspiring. I could go on and on. Even the piece of music that plays between levels is really cool. So yeah, does Super Castlevania IV live up to its reputation? It absolutely does, because it's a game that's not only capable of creating such a rich, detailed atmosphere, it creates a world where you just want to hang out and experience. Every level looks and feels totally different from the library, to the torture chamber, to the treasure room, to this weird, creepy ballroom where these dancing ghosts hang out. Put all the pieces together, the atmosphere, the art style, the music, the backgrounds, the uniqueness of each level, and the amount of control. And Super Castlevania IV is one of the 10 best games on the Super Nintendo.


The Maliwen event has been here for some time now, and today I want to bring you guys my Top 5 Legendaries so far acquired from this event. How's it going guys? My name's DPJ and today I bring you another Borderlands 3 video. If you guys enjoy it, leaving a like really helps out and subscribe if you want to see more. Unscrew the legacy my weekly giveaway along with last week's winner. To be in with a chance of winning this yourself, follow the instructions on screen now and good luck. Now these are just my top 5 legendaries, my favourites, and no doubt yours will differ. So tell me down below the very best item you've had so far from this event which suits your build, which you have built an amazing build around, whatever it is, let me know down below. Ok so let's get into it and my top 5 legendaries from this takedown at the Maliwen Blacksite event. So at 5 we have the antifreeze class mod for Zayn. Now this class mod for me is something I feel many Zayn users have been waiting for, for a long while. It offers many aspects which in turn result in us being able to build a few different builds to the best of their ability adding that link that they were missing. So the antifreeze class mod offers, whilst sliding, or airborne, Zayn gains plus 40% weapon damage and a plus 20% damage reduction and whilst slowed, Zayn gains plus 25% movement speed. So my Zayn mains out there will understand and realise seeing this while it allows us to create with Zayn. A little demo I included in my review of this item, a while back where this class mod is being paired with a couple of perks which turn speed into damage, stacking them with this allows us to get damage out of Zayn rarely seen. This antifreeze is obtained by the way from the Arbalest of Discipline and Walton.  And that's why it is at my number 5 spot, it's a great great class mod, one unique and one I say Zayn mains out there must have. At 4 we have the Tiggs Boom Shotgun. Now the Tiggs Boom Shotgun is at the moment, well broke. Not really in a good way either, in a way which limits what we actually see this thing do and what it's capable of. Now firstly I have many variants of this weapon and it does come up through in all elements but my favourite at the bunch is this recently acquired Trial version. And 92 Zayn, after swapping places with your Digiclone, weapon damage is increased by 130% for a short time. Now I have a build already stored which makes the most out of the Digiclone along with Zayn's Sub-Zero build. This Tiggs Boom is perfect for pairing up with that.  Much like the Storm. Problem is depending on your elevation these meteors can be nowhere to be seen. That's because they seem to be locked at a certain elevation upon spawning which means if you are above that certain point they spawn under the map, if you are below it they spawn way above you. There are certain places across many planets where it does work as intended though and it's within these places you realise this thing's true potential. It is in my opinion upon it being fixed it will be one of the best shotguns in this game. Now the Tiggs Boom is an exclusive drop from Walton people and it's actually one of his more popular drops. Okay so at three we have the Moonfire Pistol. This is another weapon which as far as I know only drops at Walton the Invincible. Now this pistol I have made a review on like all weapons covered today which you'll find linked within the video description. So this variant, this Moonfire which I picked over many others, much like the Tiggs Boom this one offers that Crile which in relationship with my version of the Sub-Zero build with Zane this gets to work guys.  This weapon is just great and I honestly don't even like that many pistols if I'm to tell you the truth but this is one of the ones I do like and there's a few others but to be honest this is near the top of the list of the ones I do actually enjoy using. So the Moonfire guys is a great great pistol one you can get from Walton and one I suggest you try to get if you haven't got it already. So at two we have the Kibbs Worth. Again the Kibbs Worth is a weapon exclusive to Walton the Invincible. Now the Kibbs Worth is I believe the first weapon I covered after this event started and it was the first weapon I tried out and because of that a lot of weapons that followed this had a lot to live up to. Now this weapon is one I believed and mentioned within a video I reviewed it as being in reference to Destiny and the Warglass raid. Now I won't get into that here that video you'll find linked within the video description if you do want to check it out. So the Kibbs Worth is a Mali-1 SMG. Some of the best SMGs the game offers and this one is no different. This variant is a three times but three times variants do exist and they come offering two of all elements in the game. My favorite though when you can see on the screen now switches between radiation and corrosive. What I love about this is the fact it frees up a spot within my loader just so the fact it can switch between two elements.  Also an action skill end weapon damage is increased by 100% for a short time. So all this Mali-1 SMG it works a lot like a mixture of the Cotsman and the devoted. Very powerful indeed but it's part of the trick is what makes this thing stand out from the other Mali-1 SMGs. Fallen enemies spawn a healing aura once every 10 seconds. This healing aura is an amazing addition and in my opinion it's one of the more unique traits we see from legendos within the game. This healing aura by the way people if you haven't seen it is super effective and with these those harder modes much like mayhem 3 and 4 this thing is super super helpful and a lot of the time it does make the difference. So yes the keeps worth an amazing SMG and one I almost put at that number one spot. So people at number one and my favorite legendo from this takedown at the Mali-1 event is the Redistributor. Now this SMG if you haven't seen my review isn't actually like a new weapon to the game. It was first a side mission reward which was a part of the base game. Thing is it was only a rare back then. With my review of this legendary variant I made it clear that I hadn't actually used that rare version. So I didn't know why it was brought back as a legendary. But after the review video and I fully tested this thing out I fully understood why they brought it back. The weapon is absolutely incredible. Now there are many variants available but this one you can see on screen now is my favorite I've got so far. After in that corrosive damage which is highly effective versus armor every 7 minutes shot is amped and those amped shots chain to nearby enemies. Now I reviewed this in depth and like all items I reviewed I do test them to their limits. The reviews to all items featured today you'll find a link to the video description if you're interested to see them people. But yeah I always said that marijuana offer the best SMGs in this game. I actually have to use in this take that back. This in my opinion is my new go to SMG. It's super powerful. It's capable of taking out groups of ads and although its stats don't really give it that much of a justice this thing definitely offers SMG wise a top tier DPS. I mean it shoots so quick it lays down so much damage and that 7th shot being amped as well which chains to other enemies makes this thing a force to be reckoned with. Now this redistributor is a weapon you can get from the Valkyrie squad as well as Walton. I highly recommend you seeking it out if you don't have it already people. The redistributor is my favorite new legendary add to this take down at the Malouan Black Sight event. And this along with the other 4 on my top 5 legendos this event offers. Tell me down below in that comment section what's the best legendary you've got so far from this event. Why it's the best, why it fits your build, why it fits your playstyle, whatever it is, let me know. But on that note we have come to the end of the video people. If you enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out. If you're new around here and want to see more bored land videos be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video or upload a can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button. But guys thanks as always for stopping by. Hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one.


Thank you very much, Andrea, for the generous introduction, and thank you for the committee for selecting me for this award. It's a huge honor, and I'm very excited to be here with you today to tell you about my work and fearing gene function, and discuss some of the opportunities and challenges that I think we as a field need to address. So, characterizing gene function is important to understand the behavior of biological systems from cells to organs and organisms. It can help us identify potential mechanisms of diseases and lead us to find genes that we can target for therapy. However, despite the tremendous advances in our experimental technologies and the large amount of data we are acquiring on genomics, we still don't know the function of so many genes. And even for the genes that we know their function, our knowledge is far from complete. So, for example, the gene ontology database provides one of the best representation of gene functions and the notations of gene functions by representing functions as a hierarchy where more general function at the top and more specific one at the bottom. However, in general, gene ontology doesn't provide us with cell type specific or tissue specific gene function. So, this is a huge limitation because we need to interpret our data based on reference databases. And basically, when we are interpreting our data not based on context specific annotation, this means that we are very limited. So, I really believe we need to do a lot more in order to evolve these ontologies and databases in parallel of acquiring more and more data in order to make that system grow more dynamically. And, of course, characterizing gene function can be challenging for many reasons. So, for example, the redundancy in gene, like accounting for each other or because of the blue tropic nature of gene functions. But I truly believe that challenges in data analysis is a major obstacle. So, with developing better bioinformatics tools, we would be able to gain much more and learn much more about gene functions from existing data and using existing experimental tools than we currently have. So, one powerful way to learn about gene function is based on genetic screen. So, by inducing gene loss and observing how the cells will change after losing the gene. So, for example, here you see epithelial cell like, and when we knock down a gene, if the cells become more spindle-shaped, then we can infer that the gene have a role in epithelial to mesenchymal transition. If we knock down another gene and we see that the cells become larger, we can infer a role in cell size. Or if the gene knocked down affected cell-to-cell contacts, we can infer that the gene regulates cell adhesion. So, fantastic news that for more of our decade now, we are able to generate these data sets in high-throughput fashion. So, what I've shown here is a multi-weather plate where cells in each square will be grown independently and we can induce different gene knockdown. So, using automated microscopy, then we can image different locations in these wells and for each of these images, we can have between 100 to 2,000 cells. If we image four image locations for two to five markers and for 20,000 gene knockdowns, you can imagine this result in huge amount of single cell data, millions and millions of single cell data that allow us to understand the heterogeneity and gene effects in different functions in different cellular populations. So, to analyze these data sets first thing, we need to develop automated image analysis pipeline to separate cells from their background. Then, we can extract various features from each cell. So, for example, the length of the cell, the area, the context of the cells, so are the cells are crowded or are they more sparse, et cetera. And this can give us tens of features for every single cell. So, current analysis pipeline has not developed a lot in the last few years, so basically for every gene knockdown, we have measurements from hundreds of cells and we simplify this by taking the average of each gene per to patient and then we apply dimensionality reduction just to reduce the number of features and then use clustering to group genes that have similar phenotype, which we assume that then they will have similar function. So then to interpret what the cluster means or what are the functions associated with each cluster, we can use functional enrichment analysis. It turns out that this pipeline doesn't work very well in a practice. So, in reality, we find it very, very difficult to interpret the resulting clusters and this problem I faced myself during my PhD studies. So, what happened that is really difficult to understand what this cluster means in terms of function, so most scientists will go back and focus on one or two features that we really understand what they mean, do a head analysis and discard the rest of the data. So, 99% of the data in these screens are often discarded and we are not learning from it. So, I really wanted to solve this problem because I feel there is huge potential. We have the tools to do these screens in very high throughput and having the efficient tool is very important to learn from these data sets. So, there is many limitations with the pipeline I showed you but I will focus on one major limitation or what I think is the major limitation. So, let's say there is a gene A that regulates function one and function two. If we knock down this gene what we can observe that in sub-population of cells features associated with function one will change while in another sub-population of cells genes features associated with function two change. So, then when we look at the gene profile we will see features representing function one and features representing function two. Now, if we consider all the genes and all the different gene profiles representing multitude of functions then when we apply clustering it become really difficult because these gene profiles are very noisy. They represent different functions and it's really difficult when it is so like clustered together that we understand what these clusters represent. So, what I think we really need to do is to discover phenotypic signatures associated with each function in order to be able to better interpret this phenotypic data. So, for example, find the features or the phenotypic signature associated with function one then find the phenotypic signature associated with function two and et cetera. So, of course the question is how we can do that. So, after thinking about this for a long time I came with this idea is to use our prior knowledge to guide the phenotypic discovery. So, for example we can use gene ontology what we know about genes involved in cell division for example and use this to find what feature is affected by cell division genes and then train a classifier that separates cell division genes from a random set of genes. This classifier can give us functional phenotypic signature that then we can use and apply to see what other genes resulted in a similar phenotype and then we can predict that it has these genes have similar function. I call this approach knowledge and context-driven machine learning or KCML. So, knowledge is driven because it's driven by our prior knowledge but also context-driven because when we apply it in context of certain data type that in certain cell type then we assume that the predictions are more specific to that context. Of course this idea is very simple but it turns out the implementation of such classification framework is very challenging. So, as you might already guess gene ontology is provide very noisy labels. It's not perfect, it's based on so many studies from so many systems and it's also not context-dependent. Another problem that I faced is that I chose the gene ontology terms or functions that have between 100 and 500 genes. So, it's not very specific, not very general but still like with this amount of genes the negative class is huge. So, we have the rest of the genome which is around 18,000 genes. To make long story short what I found to help in this classification framework is to use effective sampling strategy where we take multiple samples from the negative class to try to distinguish the positive class from that. I also found that support vector machines seem to perform better than other approaches and it's more opposed to overfitting and reducing false discovery rate. So, with this then what we can do is train a classifier for each function independently. So, for example cell division as I said and then run the genes that based on their phenotypic similarity for their involvement in cell division. Of course not all gene functions will be present in one data set. No data set is complete in terms of what we measuring. So, we set a threshold for what we consider successful classifier. So, if it doesn't give good performance we don't include it. And by doing this for so many functions then what we have at the end is multiple ranking for each gene what are the functions or the different functions it's involved in. And of course we can have the confidence of these predictions based on the phenotypic similarity. So, to test this approach I collaborated with Lucas Pilkman's lab at the University of Zurich where I had access to a genome-wide sirenase screen where 18,000 gene nookdowns were performed. What was interesting from this data set is that the entire well was captured. So, on average we have around 6,000 cells per gene nookdown which give us a lot of information about heterogeneity and bilitropic gene functions. In that study they imaged two markers DAPI for the nucleus in blue and the rotavirus infection is marked with viral protein 6 in green. And the original study just looked what genes increase or decrease rotavirus infection. And I really wanted to do some more comprehensive analysis on this specifically focusing on multi-cellular organization. So, as I said before we can extract many features describing the shape, the local cell density and the various intensity measurements. So, this resulted in around 160 features per cell. So, basically I benchmark KCML in different ways and what I found that actually it can learn much more functional information from phenotypic screening data. So, you see here clustering-based approach like KMS and self-organizing map. If we consider the area under the rock care it's almost random, it's 50%. So, that's why we can't interpret these clustering results because it's the very poor performance while KCML on the other hand perform much better. So, the challenge was okay, what about the new predictions? Are they any good? And what I've done to validate that is basically over the period of developing the method there was a new annotations added to the UniPro database. So, there was thousands of those. So, what I've done is to compare KCML predictions to the new gene ontology annotations. And what I found that actually significant number of KCML predictions were added independently to the gene ontology database now, so 15%. Which means that KCML can predict novel gene functions and give us hope in the future that similar approaches can help us to start defining context-specific gene functions. So, the paper was published in molecular systems biology last year and we identified as under yesterday interesting role for olfactory receptor in cellular organization. So, please have a look and there is some also interesting discussion of how to handle single cell data and represent that. So, in summary, KCML predicts multiple functions for each gene based on phenotypic similarity. What the main purpose was to allow much more comprehensive analysis of genetic screen than what was possible before. It can importantly be applied to any type of phenotypic data. So, I discussed image based screen data but I also applied it to transcriptional data. So, looking down genes and measuring gene transcription as well as CRISPR screens measuring viability across different cell lines. So, it's quite generalizable framework that we can use it to learn from any phenotypic data. There is so many interesting future directions for this work but the most aspect that I'm excited about is now to apply this to screens performed in different cell types using similar markers and start comparing what are the differences in gene functions across these different cell types. So, I'm collaborating with AstraZeneca to look at various arrayed CRISPR screens to study that and have like build a portal of context specific gene functions. Also, like this framework is not only limited to predicting gene function. You can imagine with any data you have if you have prior knowledge, a good amount of prior knowledge, you can implement similar things. So, for example, if we have a drug screen where we know a lot of drugs mechanisms of actions, we can also apply similar framework like driven by our knowledge. So, at the end I would like to thank you for listening. There is also another interesting visualization tool that I developed for bio-imaging data. It's called Shabography.com. So, please have a look and let us know if you have any feedback. And I'm very happy to have your questions. Thank you.


On these cold wintery days, when you come inside with rosy cheeks and chilly fingers after shoveling the driveway and the sidewalk, there's nothing like warming up with a nice hot creamy cup of chocolate, hot chocolate. And you notice I'm calling this hot chocolate rather than hot cocoa because cocoa tends to be much sweeter and thinner and this is really chocolaty and nice and creamy. Now I'll show you how easy it is to make one cup of hot chocolate. I'm going to start by putting two tablespoons of semi-sweet chocolate morsels into a small sauce pot along with one tablespoon of unsweetened cocoa. So this is not cocoa mix that's pre-sweetened. This is baking cocoa and one tablespoon of sugar and then just a pinch of salt. I'll put those into the sauce pot and just mix it up a little bit and then I'm going, I've got one cup of milk ready to go but I'm just going to add about a quarter cup of this and mix it up before I put it over the heat. Then just put it over probably a medium low heat and add another quarter cup of milk and then I'm going to start heating it up and I'll just keep stirring it until all of the chocolate morsels melt and it just becomes nice smooth liquid. Once all the chocolate morsels have melted and the liquid is nice and smooth then you can add the remaining milk and just continue to heat until that chocolate is really nice and hot. Just before I pour my hot chocolate into my mug I'm going to add a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract just mix that in and that brings out all the flavor gets everything nice and balanced and then I will carefully pour this into my mug. There we go. Mmm that smells so good. Now if you really want to smile when you drink your hot chocolate you can add a little marshmallow snowman to your mug. Just set them right on top and let those marshmallows start melting into the hot chocolate or you can top it with whipped cream too. So treat yourself to a cup of hot chocolate. I'm Sue Dodin sharing Good Food for Good Life 365.