I'm Kim Doherty, one of your iSchool career specialists, and I'd like to welcome you to this career webcast with Mindy Beattie. Mindy Beattie leads the library and information services group at Pharmaceutical Company Gilead Sciences, Inc. in Foster City, California, and that's a job she's held for the past three years. The LAS group supports Gilead's users globally with research services and access to databases and journals to enable all of the Gilead colleagues to make informed decisions. Before joining Gilead, she managed teams at two other pharmaceutical companies and a chemical company. Mindy holds an MSLS from Catholic University and in her free time, Mindy enjoys tasting wine, baking, and exploring California, which sounds like a terrific combination to me. In today's webcast, Mindy's going to share information about LAS careers in the pharmaceutical industry, her own career path, and her career advice based on her own experiences. So with that, I'd like to hand it over to Mindy. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you, Kim, and I appreciate you and Kelly helping to facilitate this, and I'm excited about presenting out to San Jose students. So I'll jump right in and start with the second slide. So first, I'll introduce a little bit more about the current functions. Talk about organization design, like where do information functions fit in pharmaceutical companies? What kinds of roles and responsibilities are there for people? What kinds of tasks are involved with those jobs? What are desired skills that many companies look for? And because some people may think it's mostly that you have to have a biology degree or something, but it's very interesting because a lot of times soft skills can be more important in a role and moving you forward than necessarily the hard skills. And then also talk about how to own your career because you have to drive it, and I will talk a lot about that. I'll get started. So as Kim mentioned, my experience has been for 20 years at chemical and pharmaceutical companies, and I actually started out more on the information science side after I was graduated from library school. I actually had managed a firm in Washington, DC, where I got to start a library from scratch. So that was pretty cool. It's a government contract firm. And then I was hired at Dow Chemical and moved to Michigan to manage their corporate information center. And I did a lot of work for, you know, business development, strategic planning, things like that. I don't have a STEM degree. I started out more on the business corporate side, and I have worked with companies and with a team of people in all backgrounds, similar to what I've listed here in my current organization. At Gilead, we have six total team members, including me. I have four information scientists, some with pharmacy, some with library science, biology, chemistry. My most recent hire was somebody that came last year, and she was hired from the lab inside Gilead already, and then me as the content manager. So in many pharmaceutical companies, the library or information management function, that's usually in three different areas. Many times it's in medical affairs, and I'll explain what that is, or research and development, or IT. I've worked in companies where I've been in medical affairs, and I've been in IT. I've not worked in an organization except when I was at Dow many years ago, and when I moved over to the scientific R&D library, where I was actually under the R&D function. But in the organization that I'm involved in, called the Pharma Documentation Ring, which is a professional association of 20, I think there's 25 member pharmaceutical companies, those are the three functions that most companies are under. So most people know what research and development is, and the IT organization of course is information technology. Medical affairs is the organization that a lot of times is doing our pharmacists who are working in medical information, or they're developing standard content that would be shown to a health care practitioner such as a doctor. And so they are actually 36% of our overall number of requests, the people who are in medical affairs. And we also have the health economics and outcomes research group in medical affairs.  There's like over 500 people globally in medical affairs. Our company overall has over 9,000 employees now. And so we serve our team of six. But we've done a lot of strategic planning and outreach in the past year and really grown our business, and I'd be happy to answer any questions about that as well. So there are of course related functions to the information management function. And in many pharma companies, these can be separate, like I know at our company, the competitive intelligence function is separate. Patent searching usually falls under the legal department. And there can be records management, knowledge management, or enterprise content management, which is management of internal assets, not external content like the library group manages. So some companies, these fall, the information management function comprises a few of these, or maybe all of these functions. But I did want to list them because there's many different roles that will be in these functions, not necessarily just the ones that I'm talking about tonight during this presentation. The funding models is very different as well. And so the funding models in a pharmaceutical company is that the budget can be centralized as in it's managed under the library kind of function. And everything is the databases, the journals are all licensed and managed and funded centrally by that function. Decentralized means perhaps your group still manages it, but you are managing it on behalf of other groups and they might be paying for it. There's also what's called a charge back or cross charging environment. And some pharma companies do have this kind of organizational structure as well. So in a charge back environment, what that means is that most you can charge like charge that department for specific services. You might charge them for research services and you have to keep track of what you're doing, or at least some databases or especially article delivery, like what's called document delivery, most of the time that's charged back. Like if people order articles, it gets charged to their particular cost center or department. We are not in a charge back environment, but we do manage kind of centrally and decentrally with budgets because we manage many of the resources in the company, but not all. And we work with other departments and sometimes we share costs or they're paying for resources that we also put on our E-Library because they're enterprise accessible. So there's many different funding models in companies. So we did have a poll. Are you already working in an information center or a library? And you could say yes or no through the polling. If you'd like to answer that question, I see we have a check and a no. Of course I am. Thank you for responding. So I think that helps, you know, set the stage for where we go with the rest of the presentation. So in pharmaceutical companies and in many companies, because I'm also involved in another organization that is some pharma, but other corporations like oil and gas companies, aerospace, big companies like 3M, Dow, Chemical, Cargill, et cetera, there are almost always roles for information scientists and like the content manager, which I'll talk about. So I've listed alternative titles here. Information scientists or information specialists. And I also listed data scientists because in some companies they have completely changed the roles of their information scientists over to data scientists. So they're doing different type of work. But basically a lot of it is sometimes people say, well, I'm a searcher. I prefer a different title than a searcher. But what it means is that they're doing advanced literature searching across many different areas. Like for us it could be in the medical literature or it could be finding market research. Research they're doing for business development or corporate development. You might be using commercial databases that have forecasting information or competitive intelligence databases, but you can also be doing the medical and scientific like biology side of it. But a lot of that is about not just being reactive and doing the quick searches, but moving toward that advanced technical search kind of competency where you're not just identifying, but you're analyzing and synthesizing the information and also delivering the literature perhaps in a different way. Like using text mining tools, doing more visualization, making it more useful. And so a lot of times when people ask you to do a request for them, what they may want is something they can put into a PowerPoint slide that goes up to their manager and then up further through the company. So many of the people who are information scientists are getting more into these advanced tools and to do more visualization, do more analysis rather than just here's a literature search of the biomedical literature and you return back a list of references and citations. The other thing that's different is in moving from that sort of reactive role to the proactive role is partnering with project teams. So what that means is instead of you being kind of invited in at the beginning of a project and then they don't when they don't need anything, they don't come back to you until later when they have another request, is you actually become a core team member of the project. And that's actually where we've moved in the past 18 months after them, we've rolled out our strategic plan. So the best part about that of course is that your team members are much more embedded in the project teams and they have the knowledge that all of the team members have from the very beginning and see how their remit changes or they say, oh, what about this? We haven't talked about this. And so the information scientist is in the room, they're on the calls and they can understand the context and the direction of the research team. So they can be a much more effective information professional in the types of research that they're providing. So as I mentioned, also there are other activities that they do, of course, identifying, evaluating, acquiring and deploying tools and resources. So if we're looking at another clinical trial database, they're going to compare those tools, do a matrix of what one has versus the other. Why would we buy this one versus the other one? How much information did they find? Where were the gaps? They may also, of course, work on the deployment. So work with the vendor to do the training, communicate out to the users, target those specific groups of people or publish stories on the intranet about particular training or offerings. And then there's other, you know, sort of library operations things that they may get involved in. So these are the other duties as a sign that are in the job description. Content procurement, of course, is a key role. And you find that in most pharma companies, this is the role that is usually not done by the procurement department. And some companies that group is called strategic sourcing. Content licensing and the pricing on that and the license terms is very different than the people who do an RFP to select a new serics repair system or a new drug safety system or something like that. So a lot of times they're more than happy to have our group still be the subject matter experts. We do partner with procurement when we need to, like if you actually do need to do a request for proposal for a particular service, because let's say there are multiple companies who provide that service, then they'll help you run that request for proposal. But also, procurement departments and a lot of companies are not going to get involved unless there's quite a lot of money, you know, where they can offer their expertise. But that way they can help with, like I said, request for proposal process, help you with the weighting, as in W-E-I-G-H-T, of those specific requirements you have and help you make a decision based on all the requirements of the people involved in it. But in general, what the person who's doing content procurement is doing is managing the negotiations and the renewals for all the resources and services. And in many companies I've worked in, I've managed budgets from, you know, when I was much more junior, you know, let's say I started out with a couple of licenses that were only $50,000 and then moved into companies where I was managing 10, 20, $30 million budgets. So it depends on the size of the company, how many resources they have and how much budget you have. And also managing the budget is a big part of this job as well, which I have at the bottom of the slide. So managing copyright compliance procedures and systems is very important. Most companies in pharma have a copyright clearance center license and you have to be able to provide, you know, copyright compliant materials. There's also an interesting thing in pharma that's very different. We have specific license terms for being able to provide content for a submission to a regulatory body. So, for example, when your company is putting in a submission to the FDA of a new drug, you know, a lot of the literature that goes along with that submission can be put in the submission without having to pay an external copyright fee if it's from your licensed journals. That's a key term. And then there's also the medical information, what's called reactive use. So these are, again, our clauses that you need to have in your licenses and they're actually now covered under the CCC's annual license, but a lot of companies still have them individually. So what reactive use is, is if you are a pharmacist working in a medical information department, you get calls or requests from pharmacists, nurses, physicians, etc., what are called healthcare practitioners. In order to answer a question, many times the pharmaceutical company has standard materials that are about the efficacy of their drugs or, you know, questions like that. And they've already pre-selected certain journal articles and content that, you know, talk about those specific issues. And so if it's a New England Journal and Medicine article that's quoted in the standard response document, then they can provide that article out to the HCP without paying for a separate fee through the CCC. So copyright compliance is important, but understanding all these license terms is a whole other learning curve for a lot of people. But you find that a lot of people don't want to do content procurement because they, information professionals may not like to negotiate. I actually love this role, but, you know, it's, it's something that you have to really like. Some people don't want to do it. But I think there's great opportunities for people to work in this space. And another part of that, of course, is building productive relationships. Sometimes the relationship you have with your procurement person in your company, I've had one of them say to me, I'll be your bad cop. You can be the good cop, so you maintain that relationship with that account manager and that supplier. So, you know, that's one of the ways that you can maintain what I said here, building those productive relationships. Because you also want to know what's coming down the pike, what are the product enhancements, you have to deal with account manager changes all the time, what are the pricing models? And pricing model means like, do they license only across the enterprise? And your company maybe only needs 10 licenses, because it's a small group. But the company says, well, we're only going to license it for the entire company. Well, that doesn't really work. And you have to know when you want to walk away and when you're not. Service model changes, sometimes back, and you may know this in academia, there's what's called a concurrent user license, where you could say up to five people could have used this database at the same time. Some companies just said, we're just changing our license model so you no longer can do concurrent, so it's enterprise or nothing. So there's a lot of those things you have to understand and be flexible with and be able to negotiate with those publishers or be able to walk away if your company decides they don't want to do it. There's also managing projects to streamline the renewal process, knowing how to structure your agreement so that you're not renewing 120 contracts every year, because most former companies have similar content. And if you have a license for every public journal publisher, plus all the databases, it can be over 100. So if you structure like 25% of them or more one year, two year or three year licenses, that way you're not doing them all the same time every year, because it's a lot of work. And then I can mention managing the budget and the forecast. So some companies have a monthly forecast where you have to go in and update in the finance systems. At my current company, we just do three a year. So again, a lot of it is understanding how to run the budget and then also negotiating with the suppliers. So I'll move on to outreach and training, which for many companies has become more of a key role recently. So let's say you are spending, you know, $5 million on content. I think it's worth having a role to do this kind of job because you want to make sure that you are maximizing your return on investment in the products that you're licensing. So this training and awareness role, or some groups, some companies help marketing and training, it's a way to, usually it's a manager level role. And it's developing the strategy to deliver the training. So I just want to make sure people do understand it doesn't mean you're always delivering the training, because if it's training on a database, many times we just have the vendor do it. We do training, of course, on our own internal processes and, you know, awareness of our services. But if it's a training on, you know, trial throw database, then we have the vendor do it. But it's understanding and setting a strategy every year and being able to say, what are we focusing on? What's the most important resources that we should be looking at? Maybe the most costly ones? How do we look at the usage and see who's in what department? And maybe only 5% of the people in this department are using it. And we expect that more people should be. So that way you could better target how to offer training or find out what the barriers are for that group. Benchmarking, of course, with internal and external training experts. Working with a learning and development function in your company, if you don't have one, then looking at how do I deliver training in different ways. Sometimes people just want a two minute WebEx to get started.  Every company should have a YouTube channel to be able to click through and just listen. What's the basics to get me started on a database? Most people don't come to one-hour training anymore, unless, of course, you're feeding them and then they'll show up. So then a lot of this is, you have to do a lot of writing, because you're usually promoting their resources through email or on your intranet and writing stories that get published through public affairs. So operations can work with the content manager quite a bit and work with the other people in the department. This can be anything from managing the library website or sometimes companies have it in SharePoint, partnering with IT or the hosting company is needed to update the site. Many companies have now moved to a ticketing system for requests because there's literature search requests, which the information scientists pick up. Then there is the regular tickets of, hey, I tried to access this article and I couldn't. Can you help me with that? So we do have an operations person who handles all of those kinds of tickets and we are also trying to get people to start, you know, utilizing the resources that we've set to put them into the workflow so it links them to the licensed journals and if they're searching, for example, PubMed, which is a medical database from U.S. government, that way there's a little icon that says click to access Gilead. So if they start with our special link, it puts them in a workflow to take them to the licensed journal if we have it. But if we don't, it actually opens up an order form, populates the citation data and they can just click order to go to the document service. So, you know, there's a lot of, like I said, a lot of communication and instructions that you're sending out to people a lot of times. Or sometimes people report, hey, I can't access this journal. Is it down? Then we either look at it of if it's accessible for us, is it an issue with their IT, you know, if it's an IT issue, then we have to turn it over to IT because maybe they have an issue with their computer, you know, and access to the network. So there's a lot of those kinds of things that happen, too. So another big part of that is, of course, gathering all the usage statistics for the journals because you look at how many downloads have you had on the counter-compliance statistics versus, like, if the license fee is this much and we could order it for less money ad hoc when it's needed, then we would cancel the subscription or what we call licensing the journal and then just have people order it instead. So we look at that return on investment calculation every year. So my team member has a huge Excel spreadsheet. She is the Excel wizard. And she says, okay, this is what we're paying for this journal title. This is how many downloads from the usage. This is like the calculation. And we've actually got a very interesting metric in there because we always say if you send it, if you send people to an ordering form instead of it being licensed, I actually calculate that it would be half the number of downloads because people never order as many articles as they click on. So we kind of divide it in half. So let's say there were a thousand downloads, but it's a $23,000 journal or something or more expensive. But if you said, okay, if we send it to order and then there's only half, would it be cheaper to order it ad hoc as needed? The other thing is that's different in a lot of corporations. Once you've ordered, let's say you ordered the article because you didn't have a subscription, that goes into a repository because it's already, you've already paid the copyright and you can reuse it in your company as much as you want. So as part of our ordering workflow, if it's already in our system, it pulls it up for people so that it doesn't get ordered again and again. And you know, even if you do that with your supplier, you can negotiate a lower rate for the reordering. So you're not having to pay like the $50 copyright fee, you just pay for the transaction fee to the supplier. So there's a lot of things to manage around the journals and the database statistics too. And I mentioned document delivery service. There's a lot of linking and authentication. When I worked at another company, they called it all the chewing gum and string that has to happen, all these integrated systems to make everything work. Like I said, the linking from the subscribe content through the workflows out to the ordering form, et cetera. And then of course, you're working with different colleagues like the IT professionals to resolve these issues. So there are of course other opportunities in companies as I touched on at the beginning of this section. There's data scientist roles which can be very different, more statistics based, more looking at maybe huge data sets of real world data and doing a lot of analysis on that. My team does get involved in text mining and data mining projects. And I've got tools listed at the end that are commonly used in pharmaceutical companies, but we don't have the same role as defined as what a program would call a data scientist. So I mentioned enterprise content management. Again, this is managing more the internal assets. Patent searching, again, most of the people who work in patent searching usually chemists. They have like a PhD in chemistry and then they get patent searching expertise and like a certification and they work usually for the legal department. And I talked about CI. Also the role that's interesting that one of my colleagues in the past had migrated to, like, you know, she changed jobs. A business analyst is somebody who takes all the requirements for a system and organizes them in a way to understand what everyone needs. I mean, if you think about a reference interview, you're basically helping to reiterate and understand what somebody needs before you do work for them. And that's what a business analyst does a lot of times is takes all that information in, organizes it and works with, like, project manager to work with on an IT project, for example. So there are some people who've moved into business analyst roles as well. And then I mentioned project management. There's a lot of technology initiatives, setting up integrated portals of content and integrating content programmatically, like through data feeds, like application programming interface kind of things or RSS feeds. Some news stuff is still done via RSS, but there's a lot of opportunities on project management as well. And a lot of times as people start moving up in the organization, they're no longer really doing literature searching. They're more managing projects and managing services. So that happens quite a lot in many companies. So how many of you have a STEM degree? Raise your hand. Science, technology, engineering and math. Okay. So we'll talk about this, like, is this your requirement? Do you have to be a biologist or a chemist or something like that? So this slide says yes and no, but my answer is yes, no, and maybe. So if you are an information scientist supporting, let's say, chemistry and biology, I would say yes, because there is, as people now have so access to so many information sources, there's being able to be in that searcher role, but there's also an analysis piece of it that now happens, and you're working with colleagues who are in the patent department, in the biology department, in the bioinformatics group, et cetera, and you're working on a project team. So the expertise is usually very similar, and you're not just running a literature search in the medical literature and returning the results. It's a much different workflow and still level that's required now. But there are still people who, you know, like in hospital libraries, et cetera, who may not have to be a pharmacist to be doing biomedical literature searching in a hospital. Again, data scientists analyzing statistical data, you may need to be a mathematician or a statistician or a bioinformatician as somebody who a lot of times has a biology degree and also a computer science degree. Now these things, these roles are available in pharmaceutical companies, but in the library information services department, you can be an information scientist, but also you don't have to be a scientist as in a STEM degree if you're working in different roles. So I mentioned content management, the content procurement piece of it. Training and outreach, not a requirement. Operations, STEM is not a requirement. And if you're an information scientist supporting like business development, the corporate strategy group, those kinds of roles don't necessarily have a degree in engineering, biology, chemistry, et cetera. So what I would say, though, is that of course if you already have a biology degree, it's not going to hurt. I think it's very helpful, you know, and you can speak equally with people when they're talking about targets, drug targets. So I like to tell people about what's called the top model. So talent, organization, passion. So when you're looking at where am I going to work and what's going to make me happy, what role is best for me? The top model is the integration of these three things. So your career best is actually when your talent, the organization that you're working in and your passion all come together. And this is the best happy place for people who are in this role. And remember I talked at the beginning about, you know, finding, using those soft skills that a lot of people have. This is a great place to look at what other companies look at. So last year, there was an article in Bloomberg where they do a survey of what recruiters from big corporations, banks, et cetera, want from MBA graduates. And you could actually filter it by pharmaceutical industry. You could filter by different industries like finance or banking, et cetera. What I found fascinating about this, because I presented this out also at SLA PhD conference last year. I was fascinated by this because a lot of times you think, oh, wouldn't they think the most important or hardest to find skills would be I need people who do financial modeling. I need them to come out of school to understand, you know, laws and governance about, you know, working in finance or banking or things like that.  But actually what was so fascinating about this is that these are all soft skills. So people who are recruiters said, when they hired MBA graduates, which like I said, I know it says MBA, but I think this is so relevant for people who are coming into like any function, you know, whether it's a library science student or somebody who has like a liberal arts degree, et cetera. Communication skills were most important in the pharma. Like 73.9% of the recruiters said, we need people who have communication skills. Because, you know, there is always that kind of joke about people who are so technical that they can't talk to people. Luckily, I'm one of those extroverted librarians, so I never had that problem. But, you know, communication skills, strategic thinking, you don't have to be a vice president of a function to be a strategic thinker. Leadership skills, same thing. You know, are you leading by example? Can you take everyone's input into consideration? Creative problem solving, I thought this was just fascinating. And there's more. So there were two more, work experience, which was interesting because 54% of them said it was hardest to find. Even though I think a lot of people who get their MBA working consulting for like five years after their undergrad before they go get their MBA. So I thought that was kind of interesting that they didn't, in pharma anyway, they still needed people with pharmaceutical work experience or some kind of work experience.  And then of course, working collaboratively. I think that's so key. Basically, every project that you work on now is all a team project. Accomplishments of the group are of an individual are accomplishments for the team. And that's how you report on success as a leader. It's not I did this. It's that the team did this. So working collaboratively is so critical because, like I said, every project you do, every person usually has a role in the group, you know, and whatever, even if it's a cross functional team, like your people plus people from your accomplishments, that's what's also important as a leader. So the next slide I also have, I like to call it your superpower. So how many of you know what your superpower is? That is like, we're going to talk about your strengths. And I like to call it the superpower. So raise your hand if you know your superpower. Did you lose audio? So we'll move on to the next one. I have done some external research. I won't call this benchmarking because there's no statistical data there. Oh, good. Thank you. The what's important to people in pharmaceutical companies and as far as roles and responsibilities, things like that. There's many different aspects here for people to sort of choose, you know, like strengthening marketing and outreach, navigating organizational change, building a relationship, closer relationship with your clients. There's a lot of opportunities here for people to make contributions in their company. So where does that leave you? Where do you, how do you start doing this? And I included this visual because I wanted to say, you have to own your career. It's not a self-driving car. It's not going to happen by itself. You have to actually drive it. And I think that, you know, you have to understand how do I make my life happen? I think it's all about personal motivation. I think it's all about understanding where you want to go. And that's where we'll get into also this, you know, superpower or your strengths. We could talk about that. So look at opportunities like connecting with information professionals. Are you even involved in SLA, Special Libraries Association, or other divisions, even specific divisions of SLA? How are you meeting more people? Are you seeking out opportunities for development? There's internships. There's scholarships for conferences. There's all kinds of mentoring programs. We, in the pharmaceutical division, we have travel scholarships for the spring, what we call our spring meeting, which is actually going to be jointly located with SLA in June next year. We only have like one person, or we had two people apply. And then he said, the one we picked, he said, oh, I can't come to the spring meeting. But then we deferred it. And he came to the summer regular SLA annual meeting, which was great. But actually that meant one award went without being awarded to anyone, you know, for like the summer meeting. So a lot of people who are students could get these travel awards like a scholarship to go to these conferences and your hotel and your airfare, et cetera, is paid for. And they're not taking advantage of applying for these.  Like, are you building expertise by looking at other opportunities and thinking about a stretch goal? Another thing that I think people don't think about when they're fairly junior in their career, because this is something that companies do want to know, and it's part of what's called your talent profile in your HR systems, is knowing your mobility. So what that means is, am I willing to move? Like, not just even for your own company, but, and you wouldn't, of course, put that in your talent profile, but am I willing to move? What I want on assignment, for example, in my company outside the US, maybe a short term assignment or a long term assignment, I want to have an opportunity to work in, you know, the UK or the Netherlands, you know, speak to your manager about that. What are the opportunities that are available for you to take on another role? Look at other departments, find opportunities to do, like, a rotation or a special project, then that way you can start learning something new, and that will help you decide, oh, that was a great opportunity, but it wasn't the right fit for me, but, you know, then you still can come back to your, you know, regular job and look for other ways to expand your roles. So have you looked at any of the vendors or what we call the suppliers working with corporate information centers? There's many different companies. They would be happy to provide, you know, probably overviews of their services or their tools. And again, highlighting those soft skills, obviously very important for many companies to have employees. I mentioned a lot of these current needs, outreach training, marketing, metrics and visualization is still very important. If you don't know how to use Excel, you really have to learn. Or if you already know how to use Tableau, you're ahead of everyone else. So communication skills. Can you talk to people? Can you understand, you know, how to communicate out your idea? How to present to executive leadership?  There's a lot around communication that people still have an opportunity to learn. And I mentioned leadership and collaboration already. The most important thing, I think, is actually agility.  Do you say, yes? Or do you say, I'm not sure if I'm ready. You know, get the help that you need. Don't take on something that you think is completely beyond your capacity. But at the same time, being a very flexible agile employee will bring you future opportunities in your organization. Because companies change their organizational structures all the time in corporations. And you have to be ready. And somebody who can move very fluidly around the organization is going to be retained for a much longer period of time than someone who says, I don't want to learn that. So how do you build your knowledge? You know, what do you need to learn about? There's a lot of places, you know, that you can learn these things. Tableau, there's lots of free, you know, learning available on, you know, webinars and through their website. There's analysis and visualization pipeline pilots use quite a lot in corporations, spot fire for visualization. Stanford actually has a continuing education session for data scientists. It's not a degree program, but it would give you an introduction. There's text and data mining I've mentioned. Linguamatic site 2e is a tool that's used in a lot of pharmaceutical companies for text mining. Some companies are getting involved with IBM Watson to look at how to filter, you know, terabytes of data, you know, to make, to find the information. Cybite termite is another one if you're looking at taxonomy management or ontologies in your company or text mining. And then business, it's a very small company that's been around a long time, but they can actually take multiple data sets and combine it so it helps you harmonize and be able to present information in a different way. And I mentioned ontology management a bit as well. So I mentioned, I'll talk about additional resources. I already did mention, you know, SLA and these career and travel awards that a lot of people don't take advantage of them. So I put a link in here to be able to, you know, find out what awards are in your, in your chapter or in your specific division that you're interested in. But you don't have to be a member of that chapter or division. I might have to be a chapter member, but not maybe not that division to be able to click through and apply for an award. But you should definitely take a look at that to see, you know, what's available. Because if you can get a free travel award to go to an SLA conference to cover your hotel and your airfare, et cetera, you know, what an opportunity to network with so many people and learn. And there's a nature reviews drug discovery article that was written by the pharma documentation ring members in 2012. And it's about what key roles and responsibilities and functions there are in most corporate information centers. And as I mentioned, the pharma documentation ring is this organization of like 25 member pharmaceutical companies, their information groups. So I'm involved in that along with many others. So Merck and Pfizer and Novo Nordisk and Novartis and, you know, they have a public website. You can find out about the PDR. It's P-D-R.com. I talked about knowing your superpower. Do you know what your strengths are? There's a book called A Clifton Strengths Finder. There's a book or you can do an online assessment. But it's really an interesting exercise. And actually, the San Francisco chapter had a Strengths Finder session that as a student, you only had to pay like $25 to go. And they filled that pretty quickly, but look for these kinds of opportunities. And you could do that assessment at a much lower cost and also get the facilitated session that went along with that. So you did the assessment first and then went to this class that was in the evening or something. So that helps you sort of figure out like, well, what are my strengths and what would be a good place for me to go. So I mentioned also additional like different databases I talked about. Of course, biomedical literature. PubMed is the National Library of Medicine one. But there are Avid and ProQuest Dialogue, which is how pharma companies integrate different data sources like Medline from the National Library of Medicine along with other different databases. So I'll just leave this slide up here to have you take a look at this. But many of these companies, I'm sure, would be happy to do demonstrations or show you more about it. They're always really helpful and, you know, their websites are easily Googleable, that's word. And then, I just would like to say thank you. A lifetime of happiness lies ahead of you. This actually was a fortune that my husband got when we were out to dinner and like the week before he was going to ask me to marry him. So I thought it was a good picture to put up, but it was a different sort of outcome than a job. But a lifetime of happiness can be ahead of you. Thank you for that presentation. I have about 600 questions that I've been noting, but I think we want to open this up to Mayong. Would you like to ask a question or ask some questions or type in some questions? And Kelly, what do we need to do to make sure that Mayong can be heard or communicate? It looks like they're going to be typing. So, okay, hopefully, hopefully they can still hear us. Yeah, I know how that goes. Okay, Ben, they're done, Dad. Okay, question. Great, go ahead. Great question. Yep, that is an excellent question. And the answer to that is we did have an intern this summer. We posted it through San Jose State, but they wouldn't post it on the internship list, not that I'm talking about at school, and I'm not going to certainly make him or anything. But I guess it has to be for credit, I think, if it's posted on the internship opportunities, right? Is that what they told me? But ours was not for credit. But we actually ended up hiring someone who lived in Arizona. And let me just tell you, some of these internships pay like $30 an hour. So, it was a missed opportunity for someone to not have applied. So, I only received, I worked with San Jose State. I only got one resume from San Jose State. That was it. Oh, my gosh. Okay. So, let me check with Mayon. Which, by the way, let me just say this is one of the reasons I'm working on a resume review session with two other SLA people because the resume I did receive was not very good. It was very poor. And I would love the opportunity and we're working on a session that's a live session that people could hear what's expected and then actually have somebody do their, like, get tips on their resume at a live session. And no, I cannot hear her. She said her audio was gone. But she could type, I think. Okay. So, we're thinking that there may be poor connectivity. So, Okay.  I posted it on LinkedIn. It was on the Gilead website. I posted it many times through SLA and many different SLA connections. So, I tried to, like, spam it out to everybody as much as possible. That is amazing because to your point, that would be an incredibly valuable internship, not just financially, which is amazing and wonderful, but experience and contacts and sort of learning the environment. It would be phenomenal. Does Gilead do internships on a regular basis? Yeah. It's every summer. It's a huge program. And they have a whole separate part of the website where you can select the internship positions. It was across many, many different departments. So, we did post ours through. And it usually, I think we had to have everything posted out around March. But I'm trying to remember if I did budget for someone next year. I think I did because it was a great opportunity. I would say our first time doing it, I probably didn't do a good enough job, like with the team of saying, here's like a really cool, exciting role. And you could come in and do this fabulous thing. But, you know, we had a lot of different tasks, but we still need to, I think, design a better big project for the student. But we will definitely have that for next year. It was our first time. But she had a great time.  She was older. And like I said, she came from Arizona and lived here in the summer while she worked here. Oh my gosh. How fabulous. Okay. So, all three of us want to do that with you next summer. I have a great team. And she just integrated really well. And she was a fabulous fit. Okay. Well, that's great to know. Mayong, how about any other questions from you? Because it sounds like you have a background in sort of the STEM field. Are there other questions that you would want to ask Mindy? And I'm going to sort of volunteer this question myself. Could Mayong follow up with you, Mindy, if she's sort of combining parenting and participating? Would you feel okay about having Mayong follow up with you after the webcast? Absolutely. I'm on LinkedIn. Anybody can reach me through there. And I do respond, you know, to messages from people. So, I'd be happy to. Okay. Well, you know, I have, I'm looking at my list. I have like 12 questions here. And so, rather than one, what would a first graduate do or should do that with the general direction? I would say get involved. I know it's a big time commitment, but even just integrate, going to like a networking event through SLA or, you know, finding people through LinkedIn, I've actually just also had lunch and or coffee with people who've been interested in learning more. And they've come to the site to meet with me just to understand more about the roles that are available. And I know my team would be interested in doing that as well.  And I think you would find most information professionals are very willing to do that. So I'm having an interesting case. Mayon can't hear us. Where are you located? Okay, in San Jose. So you guys are close by then. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think this could be a great opportunity. Very, very cool. Yeah, well, we are at 6 30 Pacific time. And so I'm going to wrap this up by saying, Mindy, this has just been an amazing presentation. And I think all three of us are, are walking away with about 500 different things to think about or look at or research, follow up with you about. So I can't thank you enough on behalf of the San Jose students and iSchool for you taking the time to do this because this has been from someone who's a career advisor. This has been one of the best overviews I've ever seen. So thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the evening. And all three of us will look forward to staying in touch. With that, I'll wrap up. Well, thank you very much for the opportunity. And if anybody does want to contact me through LinkedIn, you know, feel free to do so.  Wonderful.


No man's land. That's exactly where Bitcoin decided to spend its weekend. Bitcoin continued lowered as expected, hitting a low of $33,386 over the weekend. We did, however, get a small bounce coming into today. Perhaps this was on the news of the Reserve Bank of India issuing a memo making it crystal clear that Bitcoin and crypto exchanges are not banned in India. So let's go ahead and take a look at what might be the next moves that we're expecting this week. Hey, what's up? Jay here and welcome to Bitcoin Daily bringing you guys the best tips, tutorials and ideas to help you guys become profitable and successful investors. The goal of this channel, as always, is to empower you, the people with the resources and knowledge to take you up to that next level. So guys, make sure to smash that like button for me. It helps the channel a ton, and we're almost at 10,000 followers. So if you're new here, don't forget to subscribe to the channel. Turn on the notification bell. Now let's jump right in. All right. So as you guys know, last week, we spoke about a bearish case scenario on the breakdown of this symmetrical triangle that we were seeing here followed by an impulse move up, which was a bear flag, basically, right? So we had the breakdown here on that symmetrical triangle, which led us to lower prices here, which is why we gave you the bearish case scenario on Friday. So for this case scenario, we had given you a possible target of anywhere between twenty eight thousand to thirty two thousand dollars. Now, we ended up going as low as thirty three thousand dollars. So it was pretty close and we did get a bounce up here over the last day or so. So this makes things a little bit interesting because this actually starts to develop a new pattern here that we're seeing. So now we just connect the bottom of this right here. What you start to see is possibly the formation of another symmetrical triangle here, right? So maybe something like this is currently what we're seeing. So you can see that we have a low, then we have a higher low and we have a higher low and a higher low. So we've consistently been getting and been seeing here higher lows. So that's developed a new symmetrical triangle pattern here, which could possibly be where we're trading within. So we're going to go ahead and remove this right here. This was the possible target once we broke down from that other symmetrical triangle that we're watching. So now we have a new symmetrical triangle that we're going to be watching, right? So now what's expected here? So if we look at the top of the symmetrical triangle, that's around that thirty eight thousand level. If we look at the bottom, that's going to be right around that thirty four to thirty five thousand dollar range. Now remember, symmetrical triangles tend to be kind of fifty fifty patterns. There's there's no real edge in either side. However, usually that edge goes towards the overall trend. So if the overall trend right now is bullish, it gives the bullish the upside and a little edge. It might not be much, but it's it's something, right? So we take the bottom of this symmetrical triangle, move it all the way to the top, which was it's more or less around here, right? Then we grab this and put it where we can potentially see a breakout. Now you see that it gives us a a very big projection, right? Because this is pretty it's been a pretty big been a pretty wide pattern here, as you guys can see, it's it's come all the way started when we had the low on May 19th to where we currently are today. So it's it's basically a pattern that's been in the works for the last two weeks or so. Now is when we're really seeing the development of it with the lower lows to higher higher lows, higher low, higher low. So we have a ascending support and a descending resistance price target for a breakout here could be if we put it at the climax here of the symmetrical triangle, it could lead us to it around that 48 to $50,000 range. That's where I've been saying that if we can break above 42 K, that's where I'm expected the price to go to minimum. However, remember that we don't always just go up. So we have to be prepared in the event of a breakdown of the same pattern and a breakdown here could lead us all the way as low as potentially 23 to $22,000 for Bitcoin, depending where this break happens. Now, of course, these are just projections. These are just possible targets. It doesn't mean that they will be exact. It doesn't mean that, you know, if it breaks up or down, that that's the set number that's set in stone. That's not how it works. It's just to give you an idea of the possibility of the range that we could go to in the event where we break up or we break down so that you're at least somewhat prepared for the worst and the best case scenarios. Also, remember that we're still watching and tracking this somewhat of a inverse head and shoulders pattern here. So we have the head, we have the left shoulder and the right shoulder here in the scenario that this plays out. Then we're looking at a projection price. Let's see, it would be after we break above the neckline and it gives us almost the same exact price here. Look at this, almost the same exact price target as a break up above this symmetrical triangle here. So hopefully we can get a break out of this symmetrical triangle and a break out of this inverse head and shoulders. And that can it's not going to guarantee anything, you know, and investing nothing is guaranteed, but we at least have two different scenarios, two different patterns that point to the same exact price, which is anywhere between $48,000 to $50,000 for Bitcoin. Remember that we still also have this falling wedge pattern here that we did break out of. So that's another reversal signal there, another reversal sign. And on the daily chart, we're still right at we're a bit neutral now, but we're still right on the cusp right on the edge of that oversold territory. So usually when we're when we're signaling over here, oversold prices tend to bounce up. Also, for anyone that follows the Elliott wave theory, you know that once when the trend is going up, which is five ways, then usually when there's a correction, it comes in an ABC pattern, which basically is three ways. So if you count that out, this would be A, B and C. As you guys know, this C wave here is almost always the the biggest wave down. So we've had this C here. So it would at this point, following the theory, that same theory, it would start over here and we would get we would start back at wave one, which would mean that price would need to go up in that case. If we were staying, of course, in the bullish trend. Now, if we're going into a bearish trend and obviously things change. But right now here at Bitcoin Daily, we believe that the bull run is not over and that we're still in a bullish trend. So that's why we build arguments for that makes sense around the bullish trend right now. And a lot of things that are on the chart are pointing to to that reversal eventually, even though it might not be right away. So hopefully this week, we can get a little bit more data and more answers here as the price continues to develop and we can get a better idea of which way we might be going. In Ethereum, guys, and all other outcoins, really, we haven't really been doing too many analysis on it since if you look at Ethereum and then you look back at Bitcoin, they're basically the same exact price action, right? So anything that I'm doing for Bitcoin, you can pretty much count on that same information for Ethereum. Ethereum is going to move just as Bitcoin moves. If Bitcoin goes up, Ethereum will go up, Bitcoin goes down, Ethereum will go down. Just basically, Ethereum is an exaggerated version of Bitcoin. So for example, today, Bitcoin, as you guys can see, is up 3 percent. So Ethereum is up 8 percent. When if Bitcoin was down 3 percent, Ethereum will probably be down 6 to 8 percent as well. So it's basically around doubling, you know, doubling more or less whatever Bitcoin does, so it's just an exaggerated version of what Bitcoin is doing at the current time. And then if you go through outcoins, most outcoins are going to look exactly the same as well. So that's why we have not been looking or analyzing outcoins right now while the market is like this. It just makes no sense. The only thing that makes sense to analyze at this moment is Bitcoin.  It doesn't matter. You still need to root for Bitcoin because without Bitcoin, all your outcoins will fail. All right, guys, that's pretty much it. We wanted to keep it short and sweet. We wanted to make sure to touch on the overall market, which is based on a Bitcoin and why we haven't been looking into Ethereum and other outcoins so far the last couple of weeks. As far as short-term trades, we're not currently trading anything here right now. I'm still in Bitcoin. I'm still I need to see something above 42K before I can enter any short-term trades right now. And in Ethereum, I'm probably looking above 3000. As you guys can see, it got rejected there. So I want something. And I want to see something above 3000 for me to start entering trades again on Ethereum and Bitcoin. So until then, I am not giving you guys any trade setups. Those are the only trade setups right now for the last two or three weeks for Bitcoin above 42K for Ethereum above 3000. They should probably both hit that range around the same time. So if you guys have enjoyed this video, make sure to smash that like button. In fact, let's all smash it together at the same time. Are you guys ready? Let's do it on three, one, two, three. Boom. Guys, also make sure to subscribe to the channel if you guys are new and not subscribed yet. As you guys can see here, we're at ninety four hundred subscribers. Guys, we're trying to hit that 10,000 subscriber mark this week. So guys, please go ahead and subscribe. Help us get to that next milestone. That's pretty much it, guys. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I hope you had a great weekend and hopefully we will have a great week here in the market. So I'll be with you guys again tomorrow. As always, peace and love.


Aaron Judge had two home runs today. Also, he spoke with Brian Hoke on the field after the game, but moments ago, he met the media once again, and here's what he had to say. And is this the way you'd wanna be playing going into a big series against Toronto team-wise?  But I'd just been really impressed with the guys up in another lineup, just good quality at bats. Especially Izzy, man, you know. Doesn't matter if it's a speed pitch, fastball, guys on base, not on baseman. He's been a real fire plug for us in getting this started, and it's been fun to watch. You mentioned Isaiah, that 12-pitch played appearance here in the seventh inning. Aaron said that was the bat of the game, probably. What did you, how impressed were you with that? And that's what I'm saying. I feel like in every run we scored today, he was a big part of it, you know, from that at bat, you know, RBI double. You know, it's getting on base and scoring. You know, I know on my little check swing bugged down the first baseline. But I've been really impressed with him, man. You know, having a guy like that, you know, near the bottom of the order to kinda get, turn it over and get to the top of the lineup has been huge for us. And you said you were still grinding and trying to get your swing back. What did today do for you? Oh, the same, you know. I miss a couple opportunities, you know, especially the bases loaded, you know, kind of a check swing, we get an RBI, but you know, I got to have a better at bat there. And then even my two at bats after the first one against Lynch, you know, not really, you know, just swinging the pitches out of the zone. But that's all, that's why we got a long season. Gotta keep improving. Seven home runs, oh, and eight games. Satisfied with that? It's just results, man. I'm focused on the process and what I gotta do. And results, you know, I could go four for four over four, but you know, it's about me just trying to hammer out this process and get it done. Did feel locked in, would you tell us? Maybe, we'll see. We'll see when it comes. April was the best record in baseball. What does that mean? What does it say about this team? It's big time because I know in years past, we've kind of scuffled out of the gates in April and then all of a sudden, all year, all we're doing is trying to climb back, fight back, fight back, you know. So getting, you know, an early lead like this and trying to maintain that and grow it throughout the year is gonna be big for us, especially with the type of teams we have in our division and the schedule we got, you know. So we just gotta, you know, grow this lead and keep going.


It's one o'clock on a Monday afternoon, so you must be watching think tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and today we have two guests. We have Kayla Brignac, who is an undergraduate student in the Global Environmental Studies Program at UH Manoa, and Jim Paterra, who is a specialist in the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, also at UH Manoa. So welcome to the both of you. We're going to have a fascinating discussion today. The focus is on marine plastics, and I think this is a particularly important topic for everybody who's living here in Hawaii who goes to the beach, which is everyone, of course. And so let's start off the discussion. Jim, tell us a little bit about, say, the global significance of this study. Sure, sure. So in SOAS, we do a lot of work that's ocean-related, and one of the topics that came up back in 2011 was what's going to happen to all the debris that came into the ocean because of the- And SOAS is the School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology. Sorry, that's correct. Right? Our home. And through that study, a bunch of various groups around the world became very keenly aware of this problem of debris in the ocean. And there have been small studies here and there, but the United Nations got together and decided they wanted to get a global inventory of how much plastic really was out there. And actually, there was an article in The New York Times just a few days ago that cited a paper that came out in Science that says that over 8 billion tons of plastic had been produced since the 19- Billion with a B. Billion with a B, that's right. And- That's a ton per person on the planet. That's right. Yeah. And of that, half of it has come since 2004. So we're on this sort of exponential trajectory. If you look at the cleanup efforts and the recycling efforts, the amount that's being recycled and being cleaned up off of beaches and other places is just a mere fraction of what's being produced. So there's this big question about where is all the plastic going. So our contribution was to look at ocean circulation. And we had this idea that if we could forecast where things were drifting about the ocean, we could find these areas of concentrated plastics. And one of the regions that's been getting a lot of press in the past several years is these global garbage patches. So there's a few of these in the world oceans. And there's sort of this misconception that you could go there and you'd be looking at a debris field. And actually, if you went there, we've done cruises out there. It looks like blue ocean, but if you tow an instrument through the water and collect things, you'll see a lot of plastic. So this is a global problem. It's not just in the Pacific Ocean, it's the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean as well. And it's of such importance that the United Nations have commissioned you and some colleagues to do a research study on that. That's right. And there's a lot of difficult aspects to the problem, one of which is that plastics are tremendously valuable to humankind. So we can't just say, let's eliminate plastics. And it's a question of how big a problem is this? What can we do about it? So we're really at the first steps of this and that's why. And just to finish it, you're what's called a physical oceanographer. So you study where the water goes, chemistry and temperature. So then Kayla, as an undergraduate student, what's your role in this? The United Nations presumably didn't ask you to do this. Not yet. Maybe in the future. No, so I'm doing a research study on the composition of polymer types of marine plastics throughout the Hawaiian arcuago. So I have been working with a lot of collaborators on other islands, NOAA, the Pacific Whale Foundation, Hawaii Wildlife Fund, a few others. And they've collected samples for me, so I've been analyzing them to be able to ID what kind of polymer they are. Polymos is sounds as if you might be a chemist. Is that true? Yes, a young chemist. That's my background. So most consumer goods only see them. They have that resin code labeled on the bottom one through seven. And that is an indicator of what the plastic is made out of. And so that's essentially what I've been trying to determine. Because when you see marine debris, they don't necessarily have these resin codes on them. A lot of them are just little tiny fragments, or they've just been weathered down or kind of mechanically broken down so much that we don't know what they are. And so I've been trying to determine. And your focus is predominantly on the Hawaiian islands, is that correct? And you mentioned the term called marine debris, and I think we brought along a slide. Maybe the first slide, which would actually show you go out and walk across Hawaii beaches, right? So is this what you refer to as marine debris? Yes. So this was actually in Kuzuku, one of my sampling sites on the north shore of Oahu. This beach in particular is extremely ridden with marine debris. And I believe they had actually just recently done a beach cleanup here a few days prior. So this isn't even as bad as this beach can get. And it's amazing because you can't see the magnitude of it in the picture. You see a lot of big pieces in the picture.  I mean, it's really amazing when you kind of start digging through it. And this obviously is of significance not only to people who like to sit on pristine beaches, but for the marine ecosystem. I would imagine that fish might be entangled in the bigger pieces of debris as well as the smaller pieces, which they might eat, thinking it's food. Yeah, exactly. Well, even when I'm going through my samples, it's hard to determine. Is this some kind of biology? Is this a rock? I don't know. And then I cut it open. I'm like, oh, no, that's plastic. So if it's hard for us to determine it, I mean, I can't even imagine what it would like for some kind of organism to not know that it's not food. To not eat it. But lots of us go down to like Kamana Beach or Alamoana Beach. We don't see it there. Jim, is this something that's prevalent on all Hawaiian islands that unless people are picking it up almost daily, will we see it on Waikiki Beach? Or is there some ocean circulation which? Yeah, usually the working hypothesis now is that the trade winds are blowing these things ashore. And here in Hawaii, we have what are called high islands.  And you can imagine that the trade winds are blowing. Let's say on the windward side, it's not going to pick up a bottle and blow it to the leeward side of the island. Whereas other places in the Pacific, that may well happen. You have an atoll, and trash would just blow right across it. So for the high islands, most of the time, we see accumulations on the windward side. But the interesting thing, and one of the things that Kayla's been looking at, is you might imagine that the whole windward side would be the same density of debris. And it's actually individual hot spots. And we're trying to figure out, what is it about these hot spots? Is it that there are no people there, or there are a lot of people cleaning up? So as an example, Waikiki is relatively clean, most likely because the hotels do a good job of sweeping every day. So there's a high number of people there. So you imagine a high number of debris. But in fact, it's the opposite, because of the clean up efforts. OK. And to get some better feel of the magnitude, in the second slide, I think, Kayla, you brought along an image of two of your colleagues. See the second slide. Yeah. So that's Melissa. This just looks horrendous. This was actually all collected from Midway. From Midway Island. I was able to sample or subsample these from NOAA. They provided them. I don't remember exactly when they were out there, but this was over a duration of a couple months that they were out there collecting all of this plastic. And you can see a lot of it, buoys, nets, lines. So it's a good indication that it's from ocean-based sources. All right. And as a chemist, can you actually say where some of this material comes from, if it's produced in Asia or if it's produced in North America from the chemistry of the materials? We can't necessarily track where it was manufactured. There are some samples that I have, if they're intact, that'll have Asian writing on them. So that is a good indicator. But just from the chemistry itself, not necessarily, not yet. There is something, a theory, gone around that you might be able to age the plastics based off of the form, and I'm just going to get really heavy into the chemistry, so I'm not going to talk about that. But by aging, do you mean when the plastic was manufactured or how long it's been in the water? How long it was in the environment, is what we're thinking. OK, so that you can get some idea of perhaps how rapidly it's building up on the beach or how long it was in the open ocean. Yeah, that's what we're hoping, which is something that I plan on diving into in the future. So I haven't had a chance to go quite inside yet, but. This is something that actually I think surprises a lot of people, because you're used to watching TV shows and people can radiocarbon date things down to the day, but plastic is so persistent that it's extremely difficult to age a piece of plastic. And you pull a bottle off a beach, and you have no idea if it was dropped there last week or 20 years ago, unless it has a label on it. And so that's why the work that she's doing right now is so critically important, because it fills one of the gaps in this idea of if you're tracking something in the ocean, if you don't know how old it is and you don't know where it came from, all you know is where it is now, you have no idea. Like I said, it could have been dropped off that morning, or it could come from Japan three years ago. And with no idea if a marking's on it. Although I presume, Jim, that there will be certain instances, say, like after the Fukushima tsunami, where you had on a specific day there were all this debris being put into the ocean. Is that where you can provide kale with some quantitative information? This piece of junk's been in the ocean for six years, Yes, right now, some of the bigger pieces that we found from Japan are mainly the floating debris that get driven by a combination of not all the ocean currents, but the winds, actually. So the winds are blowing these in a more direct path than the ocean currents would. And if we can identify these, having come from Japan from that prefecture, then we can say, OK, this is most likely from that event. And we can say, well, now here's a six-year-old piece of plastic or whatever. Are there other examples where you can pin down the exact date, like with a tanker sinking? Right. So there have been several cases of accidents at sea that are well documented. So one was a container full of Nike tennis shoes for trainers. And so we knew exactly when that went in the water and where, and people collect them. And those are easily identical. It's not like a plastic bottle. What started as a brand-new Nike shoe is easy to see. And you say, oh, I found this. And do we rely on citizen science? It's essentially to find these things and let us know where and when. And then we can do that. And as we said at the beginning of the show, this is a global problem, presumably. It's not just in tropical islands. It's around the US and Asian coastline and so forth. Right. I think a lot of the main plastic producers are in the West and Pacific, so Southeast Asia and China areas, confounding that they're also somewhat behind in their waste treatment. So a lot of these things are open garbage dumps, essentially. So the rubbish is not treated. Here we burn a lot of plastics. But in some of the developing countries, it's just a big pile. So the wind comes and you pile it now in the ocean and it's drifting around. Well, we're getting near the point of the show. So before the break, let me just say, hopefully, we'll be having a chance to look at some more specific examples of this breed. But also, why is it important to people not only in Hawaii, but also around the world? So let me just remind the viewers, you are watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manoa. My name is Pete McGinnis-Mark. I'm your host. And with me today, Kayla Bubeck, who is an undergraduate student at UH Manoa, and Dr. Jim Potemma, who is a specialist also at UH Manoa. And we'll be back in a few minutes. Bye. She said, what are you doing? Research says reading from birth accelerates our baby's brain development. Push! Read aloud 15 minutes. Every child, every parent, every day. Aloha and Richard conception, the host of Hispanic Hawaii. You can watch my show every other Tuesday at 2 p.m. We will bring you entertainment, educational, and also we'll tell you what is happening right here within our community. Think Tech Hawaii, Aloha. And welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark. And today, we're talking about ocean plastics with Kayla Bubeck and Jim Potemma, both from UH Manoa. And Kayla, during the mission, you reminded me that you're also working with NIST, National Institute of Standards. National Institute of Standards and Technology. And technology. Let's start off this segment. Briefly, what is NIST? NIST is a non-regulatory federal agency within the Department of Commerce. And they are responsible, essentially, for generating new standards and new methods that other scientists can then go out and use for their research. So I was really lucky, actually. And I am a recipient of their summer undergraduate research fellowship, which is how I've been able to kind of get involved in all of this marine debris work. And so they've been funding my project for the summer. And I was paired up with a wonderful mentor who I love dearly. Jennifer Lynch is amazing by far. I mean, she's great. I mean, I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for her. But NIST, why would they be interested in marine debris? Marine debris. So there's been a lot of work coming out in regards to marine debris that is using this particular analytical instrument, which is what I'm using. And we found some problems with it, or I guess not problems, but kind of discrepancies. And so it's a way for us to essentially analyze this method that's been really common in this field and just say, hey, is this right? Are these people actually doing this the right way? And can we make it better? So that's something that we're exploring a little bit more. And you brought along some examples. I did. So first of all, tell the viewers what it is we're looking at here. And then we'll see what NIST can actually do to help us. So this is marine debris that I've collected off the island of Oahu. This plastic bottle is made of peat, which is a number one resin code. And I actually found this on Waikiki, I think, out outside of Fort Deruzzi. So you can see, I mean, this is fairly intact. It doesn't really look like it was weathered too much. So it's probably kind of just dropped on the beach. That's my guess. These three samples that I have lying on the table, this buoy I found in Kuhuku. And this is actually made of PVC, polyethyl chloride, which is a number three resin code. And this is one of those bad ones that people talk about. And I'm just like, hey, you should kind of avoid it. Because it has a lot of additives, it's just not environmentally friendly. So they're good plastics and bad plastics, or bad plastics and very bad plastics? Yeah, essentially. I wouldn't say that there's any good plastics. There's some that are not as harmful necessarily as others. I don't want to say that there's some plastics, especially number three and number sevens that have a lot of additives in them. And they can be carcinogens, they could be endocrine disruptors. And that's something that we need to look more into on the toxicology side. So it's not just that a marine animal might ingest the plastic, and the stomach fills up with junk. It's also carcinogenic, or it can make them sick as well. Potentially. I mean, that's something that we definitely need to look more into. And then we've got other little goodies here. Yeah, this is an oyster spacer, which is made at a low-density polyethylene, which is not recycled here in Hawaii, by the way. So I don't actually know how these work, but I assume that they, I don't know. I don't know much about the oyster farming, but they put them in the freezer. And then this is a fragment. So you can see, when you're looking at this, you can see how leathered it is.  And it's really brittle and fragile. If I try to break this, it'll just crumble to pieces. And this is also made out of polyethylene. And then this, which I just thought was cool and interesting, is a little bread clip, which we see in our everyday lives. And these are actually made of polystyrene, which is another one of these not-so-good plastics. Maui has actually just passed a ban on polystyrene, or styrofoam, I'm actually not too sure. But yeah, so good to know. And Jim, would all of these be floating around the ocean at the same rate, or would some of them sink? Or, yeah. Yeah, it's, they would float at the surface. And something like this, for example, you'd imagine like a soccer ball or something would get blown by the wind. So this might travel a lot faster than something like this that would be submerged, and you wouldn't see. So that adds a lot of complexity to trying to track this stuff. So I mean, plastic polymers do have different densities, too. So some are going to be more likely to flow, and others are going to be more likely to sink. But even if they're, say, in the top few hundred meters of the water column, they can be transported around the ocean by these gyres, or the saturation plant. That's right. And the other component to it is the radiation from the sun breaks these things down. So Kale's absolutely right. You wouldn't see something like this in the ocean. At least it would be discolored. It would probably broken into pieces. Yellowish. Right, right. And so the ocean does a good job at breaking it up, but that also makes the problem more difficult because then it's adjustable and more widespread. So Kale, this is a fascinating topic. How does an undergraduate student get involved in a project that the UN is interested in, as well as the National Institute of Standards and Technology? What's your background? How much do you think I just get really lucky? And I mean, well, I'm from California. I'm from a little surf town in San Diego. And so we're fairly environmentally aware. And I've always been interested in kind of living more of a sustainable lifestyle, I guess. And so my interest in plastics, I think, stem from that. I was also a waitress for eight years in the restaurant industry. So pretty wasteful. But then you came to UH and discovered your passion for this kind of work? Yeah. So when I came to UH, I actually came here originally to get involved in their bioplastics lab, which was an HNEI. Which is these two? The Hawaii Natural Energy Incident. Natural Energy, OK. Things fell through with that, though. So I had to look for other means. And I was just talking to everybody that I could. All my professors, all my advisors, I'm like, who's doing research in plastics? And no one could give me a direct answer, except my chemistry advisor, Phillip Williams, and then Brian Pope, who is a biogeochemist. And both of them referred me to Jennifer Lynch, who is now my mentor. So both of them emailed her to introduce me. And I actually was able to get a little face-to-face time with her in Brian Pope's office. And then things just spiraled out. Obviously, you're getting a degree at UH. What do you do next? What's your career path for other people who are interested in this kind of problem? How do you get into it? What kind of jobs are available? Well, if you're coming at it from a research aspect, you definitely need to go on and get your PhD, which is what I plan on doing. And that'll either be an environmental toxicology, because I am interested in that side of plastics. And there's so much that is unknown in that field regards to plastics and marine debris. Or I can also go the materials chemistry route as I've dived pretty heavily in polymers. So I have some options. And Jim, why should the general public be interested in this kind of topic? What's the big picture? Well, I mean, it's such a huge issue. And like I said at the beginning, we really can't imagine a world without plastics. So it's a little bit unrealistic to think we just remove it all, or I should say eliminate the production of it. So how do we live with this? And quite frankly, the issues and the questions are so fundamental that we just, how much is in the ocean? At this point, we have an educated guess, but it's a guess nonetheless. How long does it last? What happens to this? I mean, there's a lot of work being done in Europe now that shows it's in. A lot of the shellfish there that they're eating. Another big problem is with what we call microfibers. So the clothing that we wear now, if it's made with synthetics and you wash it, then these fibers that you can't even see with a naked eye go right through the sewage treatment plants right into the ocean and the filter feeders like oysters and clams and whatnot are humiliated. And so, if you think about it, it's, well, of course it's the problem, but if you are a policymaker or in the industry, how big a problem is it? I mean, because we have a lot of problems. Let's face it, is this a big one or a small one? And so the research is still out there. And so as a faculty member, where you see Kayla actually getting involved in the toxicology or the chemistry of the plastics, is this a new direction for the research? Either of you have a client. Obviously, if you're doing a PhD, this is going to be unique for your own studies. Yeah, I mean, I think the whole field of marine debris is just kind of new and upcoming. And there's been more work so done, I think, in the physical aspect of plastics in regards to tracking it via ocean currents than there has in the chemistry and toxicology aspect. So I think there's just a lot of work that we can do in that field. And like Jim said, I mean, we're not going to be able to not have plastics. We need plastics. You know, I used to work for this other lab that tested for silicate, which is essentially glass. So we couldn't use glassware and we had to use plastic. But if we can find other means of making plastics more sustainable or environmentally friendly so they can biodegrade back into the environment or even just making wiser choices as far as manufacturing, consumerism and disposal, I think it will help. And so I just happened to pick up my plastic bottle of water, which is very useful right now. But of course, from your point of view, not a good idea, right? I should have a renewable water bottle on things like this. So very good. So a takeaway for our viewers and listeners would be to think ecologically sound in terms of consumerism as well. Just to make more informed choices. Or just be more aware of what you're buying. And I know people always think it's hard. Like, oh, I have to bring a reusable bag with me to the grocery store. I'll have to carry this water bottle around. But I mean, it's not that hard. But with eight billion people on the planet, then it's really a growing concern. Well, we're getting near the end of the show. So Kalo and Jim, I want to really thank you for bringing this topic to our viewers' attention. I mean, it's clearly, it's important not only to Hawaii, but for the survival of the planet as well. You know, our marine ecosystem is so fragile. I'm also really pleased to meet you, Kalo. And I wish you every success, both with your undergraduate career, but also as you go on to your PhD and try and get a job in this. So let me just remind the viewers, you have been watching think tech Hawaii research in Manawa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark. And our guests today have been Kayla Brubeck, who is an undergraduate student in the Global Environmental Studies program. And she's also interning for NIST. And Dr. Jim Paterra, who is a specialist at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. So thanks for watching today. And please join us again in the near future for another episode of think tech Hawaii research in Manawa. Goodbye for now.