The topic I thought to talk about is a little bit related to what goes on and all the publicities about it, about our predictability of the climate system, can we predict the future? And I would like to talk a little bit about some of the extremes that I deal with. I have to pin the hydrologists of Waterman and today I brought you rain, so you can't complain for that. I'd like to talk about droughts, floods, and other extreme events, and here we go. The first thing I'd like to do, if it works, okay, all right, here it is. I'd like to, even though it's early morning, I'd like to take a journey with you. We're going to take off right from the center of the Amazon forest. We're going to climb up and see how the earth looks, and I hope it works. Yes, it does. And so it would be a wonderful trip. It will be very fast because I'm not given that much time. And as you see that the features of the earth are incredible. As you try to look at it, we take it for granted, but it's just a remarkable environment that we live in. And we go into about 30,000 kilometers above the earth, and then we see the planets, we see the oceans, we see the clouds. And I assume that people who visited the moon, they have even better view of the things that we only can get from a satellite here. So what it is, it's a planet that is blessed with having, being a blue planet. It's got water, it's got land, it's got weather. It also gets tectonics and unfortunately causes earthquakes and other things. So we'd like to really compare our planet earth with some of the others. I'm not a planetary scientist, but at least to the extent that I think it's useful to know, I compare the earth with two other planets, the Mars, which we always talk about, and also in this case Venus. In terms of the weather and the climate, the earth climate has about 70 or the atmosphere has about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen. Without it, we wouldn't be breathing, I guess, and 1% other gases. And the key thing is that in terms of the CO2 or carbon content, we have only 300th of a percent is what's in the earth. And one of the big controversies is whether that number is growing and getting bigger. If you compare that to Mars, which pretty much has no CO2 in the atmosphere, everything is in the ground, it has a very thin atmosphere. That means it's very much exposed and the temperature there is about minus 50 degrees. It's pretty cold, okay? And it's compared to Venus, where it has a very thick atmosphere, because it actually has 96% of its total atmosphere to be carbon dioxide, CO2. And that's the big issue.  So this is really the reason that our planet happens to be able to sustain life as we are sitting here. And I'm probably getting bored with my talk for the next 40 minutes or so. What influences our climate, and I'd like to take a little quick journey through this one, is that definitely the earth itself and its composition, the planet itself, energy and heat that is supplied to us, and also weather and winds, and last but not least, my favorite subject, water. These things combined is what work together in order to shape our climate system. Let me just start first talking a little bit about the earth structure. And again, sorry again for taking you through a journey, this one would be longer in time, but in a few seconds, okay? We start from some 700 million years ago and see how the planet earth has shaped itself. So please pay attention because it's going to go fast, and I don't want you to miss anything. I'll run it through it twice. So this is the way the composition of the land and the oceans was, and I press the button and there is this little red thing goes up all the way to get us to zero, which is present time. You see, this is the way the planet was shaped. So planets came together, separated from each other, this is 200 million years ago, 100 million years ago, and so on. So I'm going twice through this thing, okay? So you see that it's pretty much fluid in terms of how it's composed and how it shapes itself. When we come to the present condition, which is really here, as compared to 240 million years ago, how the continents were aligned later on, 60 million years ago, and at the present time. That means it's pretty much a dynamic thing, maybe about 50 million years from now God knows which continent is going to be positioned where. So it's really important to realize that. These lines that you see are known as the tectonic lines. This is where the movements do take place, and so tectonic science in geoscience is an important one, and unfortunately along these lines are where most of the earthquakes happen. And my next slide, hopefully it works, yes, shows the locations where most of the earthquakes in recent times have occurred. So all the red dots that you see represent areas where earthquakes happen, and of course in our region you see that we are not necessarily in a situation not to get earthquakes. We do get them as well. The second part that I'd like to talk about is energy and heat. Very important for us. If you look at the earth itself, it's still pretty hot at its core, okay? And this is the thickness of the earth. If you look at the radius of the earth, it's about almost 6,000 kilometer. At the very core of the earth, the temperature is about, I don't know what temperature you like. In centigrade it's almost 3700 centigrade and 6,650 in terms of Fahrenheit. 100 degrees centigrade is when water starts boiling and you don't want to put your hand or finger or anything in it, right? Because it burns you. So imagine how hot is the core of the earth. But through this process, and I don't get into too much detail, we have various activities and some of that energy is sometimes released. Volcanoes are, for instance, one example of sometimes how the earth functions itself. And in fact, the gases and the ashes that come from volcanoes have an interesting impact on the climate as it cools the climate, okay? So, in fact, ideas have been that, well, who cares about whether the globe is warming, let's not worry about it. All we do is we get a fleet of maybe 70747s and just get sulfuric compounds and just spook them all over the atmosphere and we'll cool the earth. Okay, good for boiling, but I'm not so sure whether it's good for us as a whole. Nature, you can't really mess with nature that much. But that's called geoengineering. So, you know, it's really remarkable that volcanic activities are going on all the time and they do have an impact on the climate. That's what I wanted to say. The second one is sun. Okay, it's important to realize that the surface of the sun, the temperature is about 6000 degrees centigrade, almost 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and at the core, which is the center of the sun, it's 15 million degrees. You don't even want to think about it how hot it is, right? So, what does sun do for us? It provides the sunlight and the heat that the earth actually receives most of it. And if my animation works, this is exactly when we have solar winds or we have solar sunspots, much of that heat and radiation travels through the earth and thanks to the Van Allen Belt, which is around the earth and of course the earth atmosphere, we are blessed not to be necessarily exposed too much, even though they tell us not to sit or sleep on the beach for long because we get exposed to radiation. But the bottom line is that it is, in fact, this what we call the electromagnetic or the radiation belt of the earth that actually protects us from too much of that plasma that is passing by. Okay, so our planet in a way has a unique feature in the planetary system that actually allows us to survive and receive the right amount of heat in order to let vegetation and everything else function. Okay, which the other planets, at least to the extent that is known, are not having that. All right, what's next in my thing? So we get the earth, the radiation that comes from the sun. If you want to get an idea of what the radiation balance is, about 50%, 51% of the radiation that earth receives, the planet, is absorbed by earth. Okay, every day we walk, it's hitting the earth and it's absorbed by earth. About some fraction of it, 4% is reflected back into the space. About 20% of it is scattered and reflected by clouds. When you're flying over an area, you see clouds, clouds do play a role. They essentially let the rays go back. And some of it is scattered in the atmosphere. About 19% of it absorbed by atmosphere and clouds. And these are the balances that are known. And if these balances start changing, then we say that the earth climate is likely to be affected by these. The next issue that I want to talk about is weather and winds. Okay, because again, weather is what really shapes the daily way of our lives, etc. And as most of you know, the weather pattern around the earth is much of the heating the sun is given at the equatorial levels and towards the north and the south, depending upon, it's our winter here, we get less sun, southern hemisphere I was in Argentina two weeks ago and in Calafati at about 11.30 at night, still you have a little sunlight there which was nice. But anyhow, in the northern hemisphere, the winds go from west to east. That's why it takes a shorter time to get to London from Los Angeles. When you come back, it's a little longer and these are the prevailing winds and in the southern hemisphere, it's just the opposite and these are known as the Coriolis effect. We don't want to get into the science of it. But if you want to do a little experiment, fill the sink with water and take the plug off and see what the way the water starts spiraling and going down. In the northern hemisphere, it goes counterclockwise. If you were in the southern hemisphere, it would go in the clockwise direction. Okay, so that's the way the winds and everything is shaped and usually the wind travels from the heated area, gets cooled, goes here and then cooled towards the north pole, gets heavier, drops and starts traveling downward and that's why in these regions, the northern southern part, the winds are pretty bad because everything is, it's a traffic jam and they've got to escape somehow and that's why they start moving much faster. All right, the other thing that is important is about one third of the earth is arid or semi-arid and how you define arid, semi-arid, is California arid or semi-arid? Of course we are. If you get less than 400 millimeters of rain per year on the average, that region is considered to be arid or semi-arid. Okay, and if these, it is a beautiful view from one of the recent instruments on NASA's satellite. You see these regions that are yellowish color are about what regions of the arid, semi-arid regions are. They're usually positioned about one third from the equator north and one third from the equator south. Why? Because those are the regions where the air also gets crowded. It's pushed down, that's why California usually has very fair weather. It's nice because we have high pressure systems always dominating our weather. Okay, and those are the life of the regions that are arid, semi-arid regions. As you start traveling from the surface of the earth in the balloon, the average temperature of the earth is 15 degrees centigrade. And this is the big debate. In the past 100 years we've gone up about what? Half a degree to one degree centigrade. And this is the whole argument about the global warming. But as if you take off in a plane, you get to level where the planes cruise about 35,000 feet. If you look at the little screens these days that give you a map, the temperature is always what? Minus 50 degrees, minus 60 degrees. This is in the troposphere and eventually you get to tropopause and then you get to stratosphere. Each one of these layers of the atmosphere play a key role in terms of how again our climate is shaped. But we personally and collectively are mostly affected with the lower levels of the atmosphere because that's where most of the weather happens. All the clouds are formed and water vapor moves and so on. Let me now take you through the water world, okay? In the water world it's interesting to know that all the waters in the world are planet. If you put them in one of the big water bottles that we are familiar with, it's all salty except for one teaspoon. Okay, so I'm trying to give you a relative sense of what's the amount of fresh water on Earth vis-a-vis all the salty water in the ocean, okay, which we cannot drink unless we desalinate it. Okay, so this little spoon is what keeps life and what keeps on the tables that we drink and we have to of course conserve and all that good stuff. So totally about 97% of the water on Earth is ocean water. Of that little amount, 2.5% which is fresh water, about 68% of it is ice. Glaciers in the north or the south or inland glaciers. Greenland is another one that has a lot of that ice. And the big controversy or argument is how fast is it melting and therefore we might be losing the proportion that amount of that. The biggest chunk after the glaciers are in the groundwater and then a little bit of it left for the fresh waters that we see in our rivers, lakes and in our atmosphere, okay, very, very small fractions. Ocean water and ocean circulation plays an extremely critical role in shaping our climate. This is the engine. So if you look at this, the reddish colors are the upper parts of the ocean and the blue lines are the deeper parts of the ocean and these are humongous rivers of water within the ocean that travel this path. Okay, and sometimes it takes about 30 to 50,000 years for deep waters to come to the surface, be evaporated and go through what we call the hydrologic cycle. Okay, so it's important to realize and one of the big issues scientifically has been when this circulation slows down, climate in many regions changes. Okay, the little ice age that has happened is because in the upper northern Atlantic they say that the circulation slowed down, okay. All right, this is again taking you through a tour of what we teach in our classes, hydrologic cycle from the ocean surface with the heat that we get. We evaporate the water from the plants. Plants also evaporate the water through transpiration, through the mechanism of photosynthesis. They go up, they cool down thanks to mountains sometimes, it pushes that moist air up and then we get precipitation, sometimes in the form of snow, sometimes in the form of rain, right. Eventually all that water has to go someplace, starts running off from the surface in our rivers and lakes, some of it infiltrates into the soil and becomes part of the groundwater system, all right. And this is how the water in the earth is constant in its amount, but its circulation depends upon time, location, et cetera. All right, so this is a little tour of the hydrologic cycle for you. Since Luis has given me a very limited time, a better rush, part of that weather that we have or water that we have is in the atmosphere, very minute fraction of it. The residence time, and usually it goes up, forms clouds, precipitation occurs and this cycle keeps continuing. The average time water stays in the atmosphere is about 10 days. So it's not, it's the shortest life for the water in the hydrologic cycle. This is a beautiful view from Tucson. I used to live there until five years ago at the University of Arizona. It's just above my house. And in the summers you get these convective clouds and it's beautiful. The other parts of it is, of course, I have water in the form of ice. There are wonderful glaciers that you see and, of course, Greenland itself. And the Arctic and Arctic, you see icebergs sometimes floating in the ocean. I'm sure some of you have seen. Snow is the one that, of course, we care most because that falls on our mountains and we got to, this is a helicopter when we were in Arizona going making a measurement of how deep the snow is and how would it fill the reservoirs. And we in the Americas, whether we are North America or the South America, we are blessed. We happen to have the largest amount of all the freshwater that exists on the planet Earth. The Great Lakes perhaps is almost 50% of the total freshwater that is available.  Amazon Basin is the other one that has a large amount of water. But there are different rivers, different places and different shapes. This is in Madagascar. And these sediments that are flowing into the ocean also play a critical role. So one of the arguments when you dam a river, you don't allow the sediments to go, then you have beach erosion and all the other problems that accompany it. Well, again, we don't have necessarily Amazon River, but we have Colorado River. And probably the water you're drinking part of it comes from there. And this is perhaps one of the most regulated rivers on Earth, well managed. Of course, we fight with each other. When I was in Arizona, I considered you guys the enemy. Now I'm in California and I don't know exactly which side to take. But we always have these arguments. This is one of the last dams built on the system. Lake Powell or Grand Canyon Dam. It's marvelous that that system provides water for so much that goes on in the western United States. If I compare Hoover Dam to another controversial dam, you've heard of Three Gorges Dam right in China. There are humans whether it was right to build it or not, but the bottom line is it was built. If you look at the total volume of how much water it holds, it's equal to pretty much what Lake Mead or Hoover Dam holds. The big difference is there are two different rivers. So the amount of flow that we get through the Colorado River is not necessarily what we get through the Yangtze River. So if the dams were built today and we start plugging them to fill them up, I have put a question as a quiz of how long do you think it would take to fill the Three Gorges Dam from start to as compared to the Lake Mead? Well, I'm sure you all know the answer, but I can't wait that long. It's about 32 days for the Three Gorges Lake to fill because of the magnitude of the water. For our little river here, it takes two and a half years before we fill that reservoir. Okay, so we have enough resilience in the system, but when we have sustained droughts every year after every year after a year, it becomes a problem. The big question as to whether our planet is warming up and the hydrologic cycle is intensifying has been addressed by a recent report and I've heard of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That was the core recipient of the Nobel Prize and I'm proud to say that nine of us at UC Irvine were part of the team that wrote that report, so we are kind of Nobel laureates, but we didn't get any penny out of it. Okay, so it has been addressed and if you look at the temperatures both in the north hemisphere and southern hemisphere, they are actually going up, so nobody's arguing about that. The question is what's causing it? Is it natural or is it human induced? If you look at just the glaciers and at the various parts of the world, you will see they have receded from 1909 to 2000, so these are evidences that in fact something has happened. It's melting, so it must be warming if somebody argues. If you look at last year, 2007, the redder the color, the hotter it is as compared to a 30-year average. So as you see last year, 2007 in the northern hemisphere, was perhaps one of the hottest years on record that has been accumulated. On the southern hemisphere, it wasn't as bad. So in fact, it compared with 1998 as the second warmest year. Okay, well, now predictable this climate, this year I'm not so sure. If you look at Central Asia or East Asia, in the past four or five weeks, they've been going through an incredibly cold spell, and that wasn't the case the past few years. So it tells you that nature is very complex, hard to understand, so you cannot necessarily predict it that well. And the other thing is that the fact that we get one winter that is very cold does not mean that the global warming is not happening, because you have to look at the long-term records. As you see, Earth has four billion years of life, okay? So here we go, climate and water resources, because at the end of the day for us and my students and my colleagues here, we worry about how do these affect the availability of water, all right? Because that's what sustains an economy and the growth of a region. Can we predict the future changes? And what is being done to study the climate? Let me take you through a little course in physics, and that's pretty simple. You probably read it some years ago in kindergarten, maybe. So the bottom line is that as we provide heat or temperature, as the temperature goes up, one thing happens is that water evaporates. You can experiment that with the teak pot, and you will see what I'm talking about. As you warm up the Earth and the atmosphere, the water holding capacity of the atmosphere increases. If you think of this particular amount of space in the air, and if I increase the temperature by 20 degrees Fahrenheit, I can pack in twice as much water molecules in this bottle as I have now, okay? So that means with warming, the appetite of the atmosphere to receive water increases. So if you have more water in the atmosphere, and I said it only can hang around there for 10 days, what goes up must come down. As a result of that, we say that the hydrologic cycle intensifies. We get more precipitation. All right, so that's what I said. And then water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas, and that's important to realize. As this warming happens, this consequence of this is that we are now noticing more intense weather situations, more extreme droughts, more extreme floods, and every day if you open the newspaper or listen to CNN or any of them, some part of the world is what, suffering through major floods or droughts. And if you look at the U.S., by the way, the past 100 years, this data is very accurate, about 7% increase in rainfall over the United States. But what's remarkable is that the incidence of heavy rainfall has increased by 20%. We see more severe storms happening, okay, particularly in the tornado valley, et cetera. This is one of the big things about global warming, that it may not rain all the time, but when it rains, well, you better be out of the way, because this is exactly what is happening. We see major floods happening, and the good thing is in the U.S. we have a wonderful warning system. People are alerted. If you go to places such as Tana Valley in Kenya, the rains could happen about 100 kilometers away, and poor villagers don't know anything, and suddenly a flood wave comes, and that's been really ruining a lot of lives and property. And some of the work that my center does is try to see how we can bring easy ways for these people to know what's going to be coming their way, and through cell phones and things like that. Do you think we have not had major floods in our area? This is downtown Los Angeles in 1955. There was a major storm. So incidents of heavy rainfall and extremes are always there, but the big thing is that it's happening more and more as we get into the future. Hurricanes are becoming much more intense. When they do occur, this is Catarina, and we know what devastation that brought to that region. Drought is the other thing that we worry about, and that's lack of rainfall, and that's, of course, something that we found that in the United States over the millennia, we've had periods where we've had multiple, multiple years of drought. Okay? This chart is interesting because it takes sediments from the bottom of the lakes. Lois, I see a 15-minute one. So I better rush. Anything above the line means that we had more than average rainfall. And this is in central Redbasket of the United States near Nebraska and from a salt that they took from a lake and analyzed. It's almost a 2,000-year record of the climate in that region. Anything below this line represents periods when we didn't have enough rainfall and drought. You see there were periods where 100 years of drought continued on, okay? Way back 1,500 years ago. If you come to the recent years, we always talk about the dust bowl. Dust bowl was nothing as compared to what has happened in the past. So you have to always look at things and you can't get too excited because Earth itself has a history of how it does things the way it does. And we've had severe droughts in the past. So challenges of predicting the future of climate while we have scientists are trying to understand these things, it is not that easy. Okay, let me give you some examples. We use gigantic computers. We have climate models. There are different groups at different parts of the world working on them and trying to improve our ability to predict the climate better. These are predictions of climate and rainfall for the next 25 years by two different models, climate models. If you look, they look pretty much similar. Anything that is bluish, that means more rain. Anything below yellow and reddish are regions that are expected in the next 25 years to get what, drier, okay? Interestingly enough, you look at the areas that I circled, different models say different things. If you look at our region, one model says that we're going to get wetter in the next 25 years, the other one said we're going to get drier. So those are the difficulties and challenges we face in terms of predicting the future because Mother Nature is very complex. It doesn't matter how smart the scientists are and try to be, but we are making some headways in these areas. Let me show you the US. These are some assessments done by the US to see how arch. If you look at the western United States again, we are showing, as I showed before, one model says we're going to get wetter, the other one said get drier. The model that says we're getting better is the Canadian model, which is a good model, but I think they did that purposely because they always know that we are after their water. They said, don't worry about it. We are in good shape, so you don't have to worry about it. Lake Powell, Colorado River, normal year, and here is 2004 where the water had dropped because we didn't have enough snowpack.  You see that the level of the water in the normal year would have been there. We are about 30 meters down, okay? And California, how we are experiencing. This is a satellite view of measuring rainfall from space. As these colors change, if you remember January 2005, we had one week that rains kept coming and coming and coming. In fact, we got total amount of rain equal to what we would get in one year, in one week. Okay, that was 2005. What happened in 2007? Just the opposite. Last year, we got almost a trickle of rainfall. And if you look at, for instance, Riverside County, they had only one inches of rainfall. And as a result of that, we had dryness. We had all the fires that took place, et cetera. And what is the impact of these things is really on the forest. Long-term droughts make the trees to be weak, susceptible to bark beetles that chew through the core, make the trees die. And when a camper is careless, we get, of course, forest fires, and it changes the conditions of the earth. We don't have enough vegetation cover, not enough friction on the surface when it burns. And we get sediments moving, and that's why they're always worried about after a fire. If you have intense rain, what is we going to have? Mudslides and landslides, et cetera. The $1 million question, getting, hopefully, close to that, who is responsible for the warming? Is nature or us? I'll leave that to you to decide, but the bottom line... The bottom line is that, much of that is that we, as humans, are being blamed for is the emissions, the CO2, because that causes... It's a very simple thing. When the trees are healthy and photosynthesis happens, it takes the CO2, oceans take the CO2, and it goes through the seasonal changes, and when these things fall apart and start burning, it, in fact, what? Adds more CO2. That's the natural part of the system. Then we have all the cars, and all the other things that cause things that happen. So I better rush, and I got the 10-minute notice, and forest and wildfires do happen. Forest management in the U.S. has been very effective. The problem is that the more you protect the forest and don't let nature do what it's supposed to do, you build fuel, and when it happens, it goes in a raging way, and we get these incredible forest fires that unfortunately do damage. So this picture is from satellite, shows regions of the Earth in one snapshot, who actually are burning. In fact, they put a nice thing they've done. They put a history of two years, and as I'm going through this from 2001 to 2002, for 24 months, you see which parts of the Earth actually are either wildfires, brush fires, or forest fires. So much of that is the natural process, and of course, natural if it's due to a lightning. But if I'm a careless person and cause a fire, unfortunately, that is something that we as humans do. All right. Let me see one. So we've known all of that has resulted in what we see at the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going out, thanks to Keeling, who was at Scripps and set up a station here some years ago. He passed away a couple of years ago. He left a legacy that will live forever, and that's where we became very much aware that we may be as humans are causing some of these to go up. And the question is how far it goes up and causes problems. And in a way, this is what I showed before, but it changes the balance of the radiative transfer of the Earth. So when we have this shield created, which is like a greenhouse, warming happens. I won't get into it too much. Challenge is ahead. We are trying to do better observation of the Earth. We better try to do better models. We have a lot of satellite missions. So support NASA. Make sure that they do things for planet Earth, because I'm an earthy guy. There are people who like to study other planets, which is important. But we have to pay attention to our own planet. So these are the range of different satellites that are flying around the Earth and providing information to us. What is a satellite do? This is what our eyes see in this range in the electromagnetic spectrum. Satellites can see things that we cannot. That's why it's so important to have these. We pick up these signals. We know the difference between a healthy plant and a sick plant from almost a thousand miles above the Earth. We have some remarkable satellites that have been put in space. We can measure rainfall. This is one of the satellites. We have other satellites that have been launched under the Earth observation system. This one has about 10 different instruments on it. It's almost the size of a bus. Two of these have been launched. Each of these instruments does its own thing, studying and measuring everything from the top of the atmosphere to the surface of the ocean or even a couple of feet under the ocean and soil moisture on the ground, etc. So much of that information is relayed down to Earth and we take it and try to make sense of what's happening. All right. Let me see where I'm next. This is, again, one of those satellites. In fact, it all does what a tomography does or a cat scan does to a human body. Some of these satellites can actually cut through the storms and see exactly what is the genesis and how much rainfall we get out of these systems. We can actually zoom in very effectively in a very minute. These are, of course, the satellites that are available to the public, but I can tell you a spy satellite probably can see a lot better than we can imagine. And these are some features of the Earth that are incredible. This is Kabir Lut in the desert region of Iran. It's almost like a painting. And these are what you can see from space. Finally, a brief review of global water resources, which brings me close to the five minutes. Will we be running out of water? Because I guess that's always the question. These red dots represent mega cities. And these are cities that have populations of over $10 million, not dollar. We always think of dollar. 10 million people or more. You see Asia is going to be having most of those cities. In our region, we do actually have quite a few of them in the Western United States. And the interesting thing you have to notice is the global urban population in 1970 or so was about 37% of the earth population of what it was. Now it's going to grow to 8.3 billion people. By 2010, almost more than 50% of people moved to the cities. And don't think of California and others, but go to poorer countries where this influx of people coming from villages puts additional burdens on the water supply, sanitation and whatnot. If you look at the amount of flow in the Yellow River of China, if you look from 1972 to 1998, these are the number of days that there was no water making it to the ocean. What is that water going? Being used up within the path. So by 1998, there were 280 days there was no water making it into the ocean through the Yellow River. Groundwater. San Joaquin Valley, California. You know what this is? This is a telephone pole, of course. In 1925, the land, the earth used to be up there because they pumped so much water out, the land subsided and settled to where it was in 1975. The good thing is it's all uniform sand. You don't notice it even though your house is going down. I reached my five minutes. And it happens in many parts of the world because we're over-pumping the groundwater and mechanical pumps have caused this. How about the water resources situation in California? We are blessed. All these yellow, red and green lines represent all the aqueduct systems. It's a remarkable system. It's a model for the world and we should be very proud of it. It takes water from point A to point B when it's needed. We get nearly 75% of our water rainfall in the northern part of the state. But interestingly enough, almost 65% of the use is in the southern part of the state. So that's why sometimes folks in San Francisco or others don't like us. So I don't know what we can do about it, but that's life. If you look at it, just take California. The green areas represent how much water is used in the agricultural sector. The yellow represents how much is domestic and the blue represents in the industry. So as you see, agriculture is the biggest user of the water. So that's the elephant. We are the tail of the elephant, if you wish. In terms of the water consumption, most of the western U.S. you see it's the same thing. What we've done, we've built incredible engineering structures to store the water and to send it to places where it's need. This shows the history of dams in the United States from back from 1800. As you see the number of dots, it represents how many dams and reservoirs are in the United States. It's 70,000 of them. So if you think we have too many, China has about 80,000. And they're still building. Coming to the end of my talk, we have much to be thankful for. Honestly. We're a rich country as much as we complain, but you just look at washing laundry in a creek in Ivory Coast. So these are the water that probably goes down and provides the water supply for some other community. You look at places that people have to line up to get water. We just take it for granted, open the tap and we get the water. We've come up with incredible technologies. We can go from pretty bad water to pretty good water. Orange County, every day is now taking the sewer water about 80 million gallons of it and purifying it to a point where it's so pure that if they put it in a pipe, it's going to corrode the pipe. They have to add salt to it in order to make it less corrosive. And so this is how we are trying to do things and if you have the money, you can do a lot. I come to thank my group of scientists. This is UC Irvine. I guess we are some place around here. I don't know where we are, but anyhow. These are some of the folks that have worked with me over the past six years from University of Arizona where I came from and some of my current people in my group. And my center here and the one that I founded at the University of Arizona was the Water Prize Winners for 2007 in an award ceremony. It's the beautiful Parliament building in Budapest in last November. And with that I want to give you a couple of websites. If anybody is interested in water information, one of them is Sahro which is the center that was established at the University of Arizona before I came. It has remarkable information about water issues. You can google and say Sahro. Sahro in Persian means Seminary Desert. In fact, that's the focus of that center. And don't tell me how easy it was or difficult it was to come up with a name for the center that would have an acronym Sahro. And my center here at the University of California Irvine and we do mostly satellite-based information for many parts of the world and thank you very much. And this is one glacier that shows no recession. This is the Moreno not watershed glacier in Argentina that is extremely stable and there is no sign of global warming there and I was there three weeks ago and took this picture. Thank you very much.


Alright, hello everybody. Thank you for being here on our disassembly required panel in Des Moines, Iowa. We just finished watching a panel that had Josh Playlock which has been a big part of us being making books. So, does everybody here in the audience, does everybody know about us after X report? Do I need to explain the books or anything? Does everybody know? Okay, so we're going to skip that part. And that's what we want to do quick. Now we'll skip it. Alright, so we'll introduce ourselves. So I'm Josh, this is Roger Taft and we are the main co-authors of all this action report stuff that we got going on. In 2020 he called me and says, hey you want to do a project, it'll take a year. It's 2023 and now we're at four books. Well, one book took a year. One book took a year. We got four books. And I'll let Roger talk a little bit, but this is Greg Augustine. He's helping us and making a book that he started 10 years ago called Command Piles. It's a G.I. Joe character guidebook and this is the first printing proof. That's what happens. So to my left is Park Sanders of Rising Sun Publishing, who's been helping us a lot with getting these books made a tremendous amount.  Talk about how you're the cheerleader of our crowd. What was I really supposed to talk about? So my joke with him is that now he has to have pom-poms and he has to go, A-Raw, A-Raw, A-Raw, R-Raw, R-Raw. Not going to happen. I got last in the audience. I got last in the audience. Okay. You're going to do something. I'm Roger Taft. I came up with this idea like in 1999, but didn't have the ability to do it because I wanted to do an all-inclusive book of everything G.I. Joe. They kept making G.I. Joe at that point, so it wasn't going to happen. So in the meantime, a bunch of other guidebooks came out. A bunch of friends made guidebooks and none of them had made anything about comics and I thought, well, if they can do it, then why don't I do it? So here we are. Now we've made five books and we're working on the next one. Hey, Greg. Greg, my turn. How I got into Command Piles as Josh was saying. I saw there was a kind of a void in terms of G.I. Joe Encyclopedia out there. I don't think there was anything published officially since, like, 2008. So I wanted to do a guidebook. I mean, there's stuff from Star Wars and Avengers and X-Men had these guidebooks out there for characters. And I, for myself, just for my personal kind of entertainment, I decided to design files that represented Encyclopedia entries for G.I. Joe characters. The first one I did was like Gunpo in 2013. And I just started posting them on Instagram, on, like, his tank and sharing them out on a Facebook group. So I started to amass a bunch of character designs over the years. And I am amassed over, like, 10 years, like, 200 ones. Joe's, Cobra's, et cetera. And one after one day in July, I posted something in the Facebook group was just some sample pages. I did it in a mock, like, digital book on a Facebook group to get some kind of feedback on it. And one of the people, Josh, who's in there and says, hey, that's a book that we're all waiting for, we want. So he tagged a lot of authors of current G.I. Joe books from, like, the toys and kind of how to make Joe's and said, you know, that's, like, the missing thing in terms of all these publications. And so we got to talking. And by the time 2023 came around, February, and almost the day that I posted my first profile, 10 years later, we kickstarted the project. It was like, it was pretty successful, most received. I mean, we funded his May, June timeframe.  And so here we are a year later at AR 2023. This is technically the printer book. This is our printer proof. So, I mean, I literally just saw this yesterday in my hand and I'm going through this. I can't believe my, like, pretty impassioned project was here in my hands. Thank you to the Joe fans that they invited me that they wanted something like this. And they saw that, literally, this is something that all-encompassing. So, the basis of this is basically the file card. So, when we bought our toys back then, and we needed a story about the, like, Rock and Roll or Flash or Charlotte, the background, that was everything that we, that bounced off of, you know, what we on the layer on the road, the file card. But that was like the launching pad for the cartoon for the comics and all the other kind of iterations. So, I wanted to capture that in that book. So, over the 40 years of Joe history, what you'll have here is the baseline file card story. But I'll also have a presentation of what Duke looked like in Sunbug, what he looked like in the Resolute miniseries, correct the miniseries of the deep version and all the other, even Sigma-6's in here. So, I wanted to do a little nod and almost a thank you to the fandom. And also the creators of the G.I. Joe War and the mythology all in one book. So, that's what this is represents. It's volume one. There's three more coming. Yeah, as I said, I have like over 200 characters and the page count for action, after action report books is like 144. So, I had to split in the middle and say, I'm going to put half the characters volume one, half the characters volume two. But when I realized working on volume one, I had so much information, so much research that I did to put this book together, we actually, even though we promised Kickstarter backers, we'd have 144 page book. We ended up with 180 books. 180 pages. 180 pages. 40 pages. 40 more content. 30 pages. Not even that too. Remember, I worked on this for like over 10 years and created these graphics. When we went to actually putting it together, the actual book, we found that some of the graphic assets and some of the things I made were really low res. So, we decided at the tail, once we're putting this together, to reach out to some new artists to commission new, brand new artwork. So, there's like over 30 pieces of brand new artwork, character, artwork we care about in here. We've reached out to Brian Atkins, Robert Atkins, Mark Pennington, the toy designer of the late 80s for the Joe Figures, Mrs. Oh, Josh Coelac has one. He drew the fridge in this one just to let you know, which is really cool. We even have Adam Rich's drop of piece in there as well. So, I'm really kind of feeling blessed and really humbled that I got all these names, joke creators that, you know, I didn't know like last year actually participating in this book and getting their blessing on that. So, it's pretty cool. So, that's Command Files. We also have two other books. We'll get to Hawk here in a second that we need to talk about. So, Volume 3, which was kickstarted last year is, as you can see, we have it here. We're calling this the Special Edition. These are the ones that came to us rather quickly. The other ones are somewhere on the boat. So, that's Volume 3, which is 2010 to 2022. We also have the Newsstand Edition. Now, if everybody understands Newsstand, we're calling we're now calling the original version that we sold in 2020, this one here, the Direct Market Version, because it doesn't have a UPC code. Now we have a UPC code. So, and it corrected a lot of errors. Of course, it has workbook makers back in 2020. So, this has, it doesn't have any new content, but it has a lot of corrections and a new, a slightly new cover and a UPC code.  Isn't that cool? Okay. So, Hawk has updates on what's happening with all these other books. And then we will get to what's coming next. I want to, can I talk a little bit about this? Yeah, yeah, of course. Which one? Let me have Command Files. Command Files. Let's talk about Command Files. What do you guys think of these articles in these books? Have you all read them? Awesome. Yeah? Yeah. That's pretty, pretty amazing, I think, the articles and some of the deep dives that they were taking back into that. I was going to pull out some artwork and just roughly talk about some of the artwork that we had redone in this book. Freefall. So how many times have you seen freefall in a character design sketch? I know we talked a lot about, about not doing something that was there before. So usually when everyone draws freefall, he's, well, freefalling. And there's a song that usually plays right behind him. But what I thought was really interesting is, when we commissioned these art pieces, we were able to get some new artworks with different poses and different stuff. And it got some really unique art pieces that came out of that, you know, for it. So if you haven't seen Command Files, please swing by. I also want to say this is, this is one hell of a group to work with. These guys are awesome. Like, you know, this team right here just absolutely rocks. They got it all together. All right. Thank you. You're welcome. Now I know how you guys can see, but I'm going to hold up the file, card history page that's in this book. Yeah, so that was an added thing late. I had all this information in terms of researching this and noticed that along the way, in terms of the release of the toys, you notice the back of the designs of the fog parts changed. And again, the content changed. So I actually have a little history timeline of what changed year over year which toy release kind of noted that. Because I don't think that's ever been done before. I just wanted to lay it out. About the only place you could find it was on Yo-Jo and you had to go from character to character to see the different file card styles. So the question is, where's all this goodness, right? That's what everyone wants to know. And what is it that we have up here on the screen? So these are pictures and proof samples that were coming from China about where we're at in the process. You can see volume three up there. Second printing you can see, as well as all of the Kickstarter campaign stuff that was coming through. This is probably the first time you guys have seen this stuff or seen it in color. So you're probably wondering, whoa, okay, what is that? And we can talk a little bit more about that. I'm also going to play a couple videos and the reason why I'm playing this is we switch factories in printing. And I want to talk about that just very briefly. Stuff's coming in. We did switch factories and we had a couple of hiccups in switching factories. As you can see, stuff's printed. We just have to identify when it's getting to us and that kind of falls upon me. I want to show you a couple videos as they thumb through some of this product that you guys can take a look at. Here is... So this is kind of what this factory does. Every factory is a little bit different and they're sending me a proof copy to show that, you know, hey, here's a prototype. This is what this is looking like or here's what it is. Same thing that he's doing here. So it can be a little challenging to make some decisions off of that. But you can see that this is what we get. And, you know, they kind of show some of the process and some of the problems that they think are going on in those pages. Giving you a little bit of peeling though. The layers off the onion to show how this is done. Like any good project, and I will say this, it's always done in revision. The more revision, usually you catch more things. Typos are like dust. Hard to get rid of. Which is why we actually did the second printing. Yeah, that's right. For volume one, which is about us, yeah. This, what you're seeing right here, second printing, they've resolved a lot of those typos and issues like that. Plus we also did, thank you to all your supporters with the first volume one direct market we sold out, almost sold out. We're going to archive a bunch of them and then we're going to sell the news stand exclusively. So if you're here and you want to get it online, you should order on the website. Because once we get the news stand in hand, we will retire the direct market version.  One more thing I want to see. And everyone wonders, what's this thing? So if you don't know this, this was part of the Kickstarter campaign. For command files. For command files, this is Joe vs. the Spy balloon, written by Roger Taft, done by Ryan and done labbing. If you don't know, you did a lot of ITW covers and it's a little bit of a political satire piece going on. So where are they at now? Well, my last communication with them, they were printed and supposedly sitting on the dock. So I'm waiting on updates for when they're actually getting to us, us. And that is completely on me, so hopefully we'll get them and get an update soon about them. But they are coming and you will receive them and they will be wonderful books for you to ponder and read and get ready for what's coming next. Right, and so just to clarify, that's volume three and second printing. Command files has not been printed. It is only the printer proof that we're showing here, so that will probably likely be January or February before it gets printed or something. We just literally got it, like Greg said, like two days ago, so we have to go through it and look at it. But it looks pretty good. It didn't seem like there's a whole lot. Yeah, if we didn't correct anything, I think it would be okay to go to print. Good news. And we do have these little ash cans. Everybody here can get one. Okay. You ready to talk about what's next? I get to parade this around like one of those models in a round set. So I started to dub after action report like the MCU. We just finished phase one. The Avengers movie has happened. This is the books that you see here. So now we're moving into phase two. So we actually kind of talked about this originally in volume one, and we put it in the back of Future, but now it's serious. So we have volumes four and five, and everybody's like, well, why, you know, what's four and five? So four and five, four is international comics year. We got a whole team of people. I got a big collection.  And volume five is international edition. Also, it's called North South America plus Asia, and we'll have battle action force in there. So we're going to sneak that in. Europe has so many international comics that we can't fit it all. So we bump in battle action force to one and five. And then we're starting another chain of books called Live the Adventure. It's a G.I. Joe merchandise guy, and that's probably what, two or three? Probably going to be at least two, maybe three volumes. That'll be the Halloween costumes and the sleeping bags and games. So that's like what he likes to collect. When you go and look at his collection, he's got like sleeping bags. I'm like pillow cases and toothbrushes.   You know, comics and toys and stuff. So that's where we're going to build those guys, which again, is not really out there. And Greg, you are going with Command Files 2? Yeah, Volume 2, as I mentioned earlier, you had to split to two books. So the first half of this, basically what I call the A teams. The second half would be, Volume 2 is more of the pilots and the drivers and special sub teams like DF and Eco Warriors and so forth. And then there's a third volume. Don't forget about Cobra. So through that 10 years I've been working on this, I did do some Cobra files, so that's on its way. So Volume 3, I'll have that going too. So next, 2025. So yes, maybe by 2025 we will have what, 10? Maybe we can get 10 after action reports in four years? We've been busy. And it all happens because of the kick starters. You guys have done a fantastic job of supporting us with kick starters. And then we sell the books on the website and we come to the conventions. You know, that helps us keep going. We're not making any money on this, but we are able to pay for all the stuff, the printings and everything like that. So thank you all for your support. Is that our 20 minutes? On the button? I don't see the assembly required to blame you. So let's ask some questions. Any questions? Okay. I would like to know, Jenna Jo's lore is so encompassing that it goes into animation, it goes into other publishing areas, novels, books. Phil, is there an opportunity for this expanded universe of command files in the future if the first three volumes do well? Well, clearly a cartoon guidebook is missing in our community. We are maybe going to do that. I can't confirm because the author who's doing that is... He's debating. He's not committed. He's debating. He did help out with this book, so that will help. That will help. He's already got a lot of it built for the cartoon. Now, regarding the novels that you just asked, they are actually intermixed in some of these books. Like the Live the Adventure, Finding the Faith books are in volume one. Some of the coloring guidebooks are these. There's characters in those novels that nobody knows about. Every single novel has a different character. No one's probably ever seen it unless you've read those novels. Maybe we can get to that. Another thought everybody always asks us is the IDW continuity with the Hasbro Mountain University with the Rom and Transformers and Unicron eating everybody at the end and ending multiple continuities and stuff like that. That had been running for years. Again, you have to choose what we want to make. We are humans with jobs and other things, life's going on.  Let's give him a big yo-jo. That kind of stuff keeps us getting in the way. We keep pushing through and Hawks helped out a lot. Everybody's helping out. In order to get to the IDW continuity, probably in 2025, we'll probably get there at some point. It also is still relatively new. It's only like six years ago. Fifteen. Does that answer your question, David? I think the IDW liked the number of different series they did and the restarting things and the sheer volume of varying covers. I don't think we need to do a less than two volumes. At 144 p.m. We've been debating that at the table. How do we get through this starting to eyeball it and figure out what that's going to take? Yeah. Like I just said, we'll depend on demand if enough people want it. These people want it. This group. Everybody here wants it. You want the IDW continuity starting in 2008. They ended in 2019. You want that whole series? All those cover books. All those cover books. We can talk about this last night, but if you all were to do an omnibus, what would be in it? What would you cover? What era is it? Clearly, Carson set the standards for that. A huge book. Obviously, the amount of numbers that he got well beyond his regular books that he got. We're kind of in the same category with Dan Kay and Carson on the small books.  It is amazing. I don't know if you guys have seen any of the stuff he's posted lately, but that book is unbelievable. To do that, I don't know if we have the skills. Maybe we can hire Carson. Or at least we can get him to do it. I would think that somewhere along the line we could probably do omnibus. Any guys get the ideas? My overall feeling is that we'll probably reach 10 after action reports, not command files, because that's a separate thing. That's a separate thing. But I like the comic guides. If that reaches 10, a volume of 10, I think we can do two omnibuses, the first five and the second five, with a little bit more content in each of them and some updates as we go along. Because even after we finish books, we occasionally still find more information. So we did correct that. And some of it's redundant because it appears in more than one book because it fits and we would eliminate that so it would be just in the one book, in there one time for that volume. So it'd be that kind of thing.  But more than likely no more than five books per omnibus. I would like to do it all in one but have it on a luggage cart and handle so you can just kind of tilt right into the ground. Yes, wheels and all. Let me show you my chicken and Joe collection. Look at all these check marks I've acquired. My collection is full. I mean, is that like, because something like that then is you're probably price point wise talking, you know, what, $80, $90, $100 minimum. It would probably be like a $150 range. Yes, some of it would be redundant if you had the soft covers. But we, you know, we could mix it in there.  After-action report, the history of comics. And of course, you can always go to our website and buy the books. Now, Greg has also been handling our website. So this is one of a new announcement that we're going to do. In volume one and in volume three, we, between that we spent more than nine pages talking about number 21 silent interlude second printing. Nine pages for one comic that is like a total big mystery and this actually, Roger and I started this in 2020 before we even did these books and a hunt for to try to find out this, figure out this mystery. So, whoa. Greg and I are going to do is take all this new information that we found and we kind of figured out and I actually Tommy Hazleton who has written an article and is kind of like a number 21 second printing expert found some. So we actually have some in a bag. I have one in my collection now and Roger has one in his collection that kind of helped prove this and then we're going to put it on the website and we're going to build these pages and we're going to be, after-action report we're going to be the definitive place to go to find number 21 second printing information because nobody knows and we've been able to piece it together over the last four years now and we're going to put it up there. So that's like a new announcement there for everybody. And if you're on Facebook and any GeoComic group every two weeks somebody asks that question. Where's the second printing? What is the second printing? Why is there a third printing? We're going to build this page hopefully in the next month or two and put that up there so that will, obviously it's on a website so it's not going to be in the books but much, much of this information is already kind of in our books first. Yeah, it will be correlated into something you can link to. And then you can link and be like, I know what to answer to the biggest mystery in G.I. Joe Commons. What happened to that second printing? I don't know. I personally think the biggest mystery is who's the best you want. He's just standing there. You never see him again. Alright, there we go. Who's going to investigate that? Mark? Alright. We'll put that in command files before. Write a song about it. That was actually a toilet library. He infiltrated the base. He was a little addressed for the toilet library. That's right. Any more questions? Seems as if the next panel probably could get ready or something. Oh, hopefully they didn't call my number. Alright, absolutely. Come to our table and ask more questions. Thank you. Oh, come up and meet your free stuff. Yes.


Hi, and welcome to the session. Let us discuss the following question. The question says, reduce the following equations into slope-intercept form and find their slopes and y intersect. Second part is 6x plus 3y minus 5 is equal to 0. Before solving this question, we should know that equation of straight line in slope-intercept form is given by y is equal to nx plus c, where n is the slope, b is the y-intercept. So always remember that equation of straight line in slope-intercept form is y is equal to nx plus c, where m is the slope, and c is the y-intercept. Let's now begin with the solution. Given equation s plus 3y minus 5 is equal to 0, now 6x plus 3y minus 5 is equal to 0 implies 3y is equal to minus 6 plus 5 is equal to minus 6 by 3 into x plus 5 by 3, and this implies y is equal to minus 2x plus 5 by 3. Equation is of the form x plus c. So this is the slope-intercept form of the given equation. Let's name this equation as equation number 1. Now we will find it slope and y-intercept. On comparing with y is equal to, we find that y-intercept is equal to 5 by 3 in slope-intercept, and it's y-interceptization by intake care.


Hi everyone. Rob Reiner here with some fantastic news. This Saturday night, March 3rd, I'm inviting you to watch live as we make history. For the first time ever we are live streaming an amazing new play called Eight. It's about marriage equality and the Proposition Eight trial and it was written by my friend Dustin Lance Black.  The Prop Eight proponents are still trying to hide what happened at the trial. So we're going to do the exact opposite. We're going to broadcast it to the entire world. I hope you'll join me, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Martin Sheen, Kevin Bacon, John C. Riley, Jamie Lee Curtis, Christine Lottie, Jane Lynch, Matthew Morrison, Chris Kulfer, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson. You see, we had a problem. We couldn't find any famous people to be in the play. So please log on to either youtube.com or afer.org. That's afer.org. This Saturday night, 7.30 Pacific time and see why marriage equality is the last leg of the civil rights fight and why everyone should be allowed to marry the person they love. Thank you.


I'm very excited to present our next speaker, who is a research professor for information visualization at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Motivated by the design opportunities and research challenges arising from growing information spaces, he's particularly interested in the potential of visual interfaces to support exploratory information practices. Please give a warm welcome to Marian Dirk. Alright, thank you. So I think this talk will depart a bit from the last two presentations. I'm, as Arina was already mentioning, I'm really interested in using visualization to support exploratory information practices for not just quantitative data sets, but rich collections of data that may include text, imagery, maybe video. And this talk is going, kind of, promoting, so it's kind of, here and there, there might be a tone of antagonism, so hopefully this will not offend you. But promoting a slightly different mode of using visualization to explore rich data spaces. So before I do that, a little, sort of, premise. So if you go along, I'm going to use the analogy of the city and how we are engaging with the city to talk about how we engage with data. So if this is not too cheesy or too cliche, please let me proceed with that. The reasons are also that, actually, there's lots of commonality between cities and rich data sets. In the past, and still so in certain regions of the world, cities are growing in size, they are culturally significant, they have become the cultural backdrop for everything that we do, and they are also struggled in these places. And we can say the same about data today. We have growing data sets, they are becoming sort of the, especially with social media, they are becoming the backdrop for everything that we do, and there are also conflicts in terms of access to data and data poverty and so forth. Now to think about how visualization works and comparing it to the city, I feel that most visualizations, most data visualizations take an overview approach, a bird's eye perspective on the phenomena that we want to explore. And I think that's fine. I think we have seen wonderful work during this conference starting with a billion dots on maps to wonderful stuff today by the New York Public Library. So I have nothing negative to say about this, but I would suggest, and I would try to argue over the next minutes, that this primacy and that sort of overview first dogma is maybe problematic for certain types of experiences and for certain types of data collections. So for example, well actually, first before I go into maybe the alternative, there are many examples I'm going to go into these now, but for example, the Angram Viewer by Google allows us to compare how certain certain words are used differently or have been used differently in books over the last decades and centuries. And so I've plotted here the varying use of micro versus macro. If you pay close attention, micro has been catching up recently, but these types of tools are very useful, very powerful, and they are sort of promoted and they're promoted to sort of allow us to grapple with big data challenges in the sense that they allow us to provide big picture perspectives on these data sets to find patterns and relationships across time, across space, and so it's great stuff. But when we deal with data visualization in contexts, in more cultural, maybe literary contexts, when we are visualizing text collections, image collections, then I think there are some limitations with these reduced abstract views. So some concepts that have been thrown around like distant reading by Franco Moretti, sort of a literary, sort of a macro approach to literary history, or cultural analytics promoted by Lev Manovich. So this idea that you can apply data analytics to cultural collections, I think these initiatives and these concepts are very useful, but I think especially in the cultural sphere, when we're trying to make sense of our cultural legacy and trying to make sense what it means to be human, I think they make a promise implicitly, and I think that's also the promise that visualization is making here and there, that we can see everything from nowhere. And here I'm citing Donna Haraway, she was using that phrase in the late 80s, sort of criticizing objectivist, positivist science, where she was arguing actually, in many cases, the more situated, more partial knowledges, the more partial perspectives might be the more powerful insights to gain. Now picking up on that idea of partial situated perspectives, I would argue that if we want to understand a phenomenon, maybe we actually have to get closer to the phenomenon. So here a few sort of scenes from Paris, the first image was also from Paris, if we actually go onto the street level of a city, we will probably engage more closely with the phenomenon that we are trying to understand, what maybe in this case city life is about. And this sort of notion of situated views is also implicitly also advocates movement. So you're actually moving between these views and that the changes that we experience as we move through a rich data set is also part of the analytical process. Yeah. So, and to actually make sense of that and inform visualization design, interface design, I found the cultural figure of the flaneur to be quite instructive. So it was sort of promoted by Walter Benjamin and picked up by loads of researchers in cultural studies. The flaneur has been sort of characterized as this urban character who is roaming the streets and squares of Paris in the middle of the 19th century. He so is actually a masculine persona, so that's something to be closely looked at. But his attitude towards the city I think is quite interesting. He is wandering around, not really with the clear destination, but with a very expressed goal to make sense of what city life is about to, and actually, so the flaneur has been sort of framed from different angles, but I want to take three character traits, which I think are very useful when we talk about visualization. The first, the flaneur as a curious explorer who has a great sense of interest in both maybe the shop windows, but also the side streets, the alleyways, and he's being pulled in by his different senses, smells, sights, sounds, and he's open to actually change his path along the way. As he moves in that sort of non-goal directed or this sort of more open-minded way, he also develops his own pace, his own privileged perspective on the city that maybe everyone around him who is just running from A to B might not actually have. And by doing so, he's also portrayed as a critical spectator who outlines or who actually states where the issues are. So when the flaneur was coming up as a sort of urban figure, there was really the alienation in the city, mechanization, and sort of, yeah, negative side effects of capitalism that were sort of happening around him. And he was pointing these things out and as a third character trait, he is sort of working around these issues as a poet, as a painter. He's a creative person who tries to reimagine what city life could be. So in a way, he's quite paradoxical. He's quite excited about the city, but he's also taking issue with quite a few problems that are arising. Now, that's a big detour maybe. I don't know, I'm excited about cities, so I can talk about that for a while. But let's come back to data and information spaces. So to me, how the flaneur relates to the city can be, we can use that to think of our users, the viewers of our visualizations, not around deficits, that they may not have a stats background, that they may not have, or that they have information needs or knowledge gaps and so forth, but rather as people sort of in a sort of optimistic and idealistic sense as people that we treat as information flaneurs that can be curious, they're pursuing diverse paths through our data sets, through our interfaces. They're critical, they question the visual representations, maybe also the stuff that is left out. We had a great talk yesterday by Andy about the sort of visualizing the blank, the missing values, but this notion, this persona, this idealistic notion of the information flaneur would also be a creative person, so she would actually contribute new types of content, new representations, new visualizations. So maybe I'm setting the bar quite high, but if we design our tools for that kind of person, I think we can go much further in sort of the reach and the impact that we can have with our tools. Okay, so let's see, I'm not sure if I have convinced everyone that this is a good idea, but I will try to break it down a bit more to sort of what this could mean for interface design, for visualization design. So basically, what I'm interested in is negotiating and sort of improving how people relate to information spaces. And for that, I find explorability a very useful sort of umbrella term, and it's in a way, I would position that next to usability. While usability is about the sort of fine-grained mechanics of the interface, the sort of user-facing interface, I would say explorability negotiates the relationship between the searcher or the viewer and the information space or the data set. And the three, and this is not an exhaustive list, but the three principles that I find very useful in my design work, and I'm going to get to some of these visualizations in a bit. I think I'm doing quite well with time, maybe I'm rushing a bit. But the three principles that I find really useful are orientation, continuity, and serendipity. So orientation, this, and again, that relates back to how a planero might walk through a city. By knowing where I am and by sort of having a certain confidence that I would find my way back home, more or less, I can actually be quite exploratory. So if we design visualizations in a way that gives our users, our viewers, the confidence in trying things out and actually making invitations to navigate, to look around, we might trigger their curiosity. As we change things in the visualization as viewers, as we change parameters, as we navigate, oftentimes these changes are abrupt. In search interfaces, it's actually still the case as you enter a search query and change it, the list will update very rapidly and you don't have a sense what you have looked at already, unless you click on it so it will get highlighted. The same is true just for browsing. If I go from one link to the next, I go from the start page from New York Times to an article, there might be an overlap. The title might still be the same, but just perceptually, it's very abrupt. So in our visualizations, what I'm promoting is actually have more continuous experiences. So there's this perceptual notion of visual momentum. So if we have display state changes, can we actually connect these display states that we're moving from if there's some kind of overlap? It's actually fairly easy to do. And then the third one, to be honest, it's quite hard to design for serendipity. These fortitious discoveries when we deal with data and information, then when people sort of encounter bits that they haven't looked for, but once they found them, it actually was quite useful or inspiring for their own work or their life. And how can we support that in our visualizations so that people might actually move more laterally and not just target or try to answer a very specific question? OK, so now I'm going to actually move from this sort of conceptual, philosophical preamble that hopefully didn't bore you too much to demo mode, which should be exciting for all of us because demos are always a risk. So let's see how this works. So I'm going to start. Actually, I'm going to start now take that back, cut that from the video. I'm actually going to introduce that project a bit before I show it in action. PivotPass is a visualization project. I've done it in Microsoft Research. And the motivation here was very tightly linked to that notion of the information planner strolling through data. And so we had the goal to help the sort of information planner relate the resources. In this case, the resources will be publications, academic publications and the facets that are related to them and encourage a gradual movement, a gradual pivoting through a very large database of publications. We started out with just trying to understand the basics of that information space, the tripartite information space that has resources at the middle that can reference each other. Then there are people involved that are the authors. And we have concepts such as keywords that actually portray the aboutness or topicality of these resources. We designed sort of very basic elements for these different entity types that have some basic interactive capabilities. We arrange that, we give them different sort of visual states, depending on how you interact with them. We arrange them in a sort of three-band layout and connect. So the resources are in the middle. And now I'm actually going to demo mode so it becomes more obvious. So the resources, in this case, the publications. So you probably can't read the text, but that's OK. But there is text. That's important. So what's happening here is on the left, we have Mary Shavinsky. She's a Microsoft researcher. And at this moment, at this time in the interface, she's the anchor for that view. So her most cited papers are selected. And they're arranged in the middle diagonally in green. And the point here, I mentioned in terms of orientation, actually making invitations to go around. So everything that is on the display, before I tell you how things are arranged, everything can be clicked on and you can navigate around these elements. So the papers are arranged by a number of citations. Something, for some reason, academics care about. But above that, you have the authors of these papers. So her co-authors. And they are arranged horizontally based on where the publications are. And that will become interesting in other layouts in a second. But they are also sort of ordered vertically based on their degree. So as you see, for example, here George Robertson, he's on the top because he's actually connected with quite a few papers. So he's a very active co-author of hers. And the same, we can look at the sort of larger. I also adjusted the font size slightly. The larger keywords on the bottom, user study, information visualization. So these are important research topics for Mary Shavinsky. Now the point of this interface is that it encourages you to stroll around. So I can click, for example, on George. And as I clicked on George, the interface takes me along, makes a state transition. And I see, OK, that's easy. I can move on. OK, who else is doing interesting things? I can check out what George is about, look at his keywords, who is he working with. I see, OK, here's an interesting paper, cone trees. I can actually click on the paper as well. Then we have a sort of bifurcated view that arranges references that are mentioned in the paper on the left. So that's sort of the before part of the display. And on the right, you have publications that are actually citing that one. So you're sort of taking that paper as a pivot point. And you see in a sort of micro fashion how the field has developed. So you see that cone trees has taken sort of inspiration or influence from papers on input devices, inverted indices, case studies. And on the other hand, it has been picked up by researchers working in the information visualization field. What is also interesting is that the main of the three authors that are shown here are citing themselves as well. So they have been influenced for their own work. So that's something that's common, but it's also interesting to actually see that this is exposed here, that there are some self-citation happening. Now, this is a web-based tool. So actually, there's not much graphics happening, to be honest. I mean, it's text. I moved text around with CSS transitions. I have as much graphics that I have as really only the curves that I don't know if you can actually see them. They're really subtle so that it's actually not a very complex. It's not very overloaded. So it was intentional to keep all the curves fairly subdued until you hover over something and you actually see how they're connected. But so this is web-based. So I'm actually using the back button. And I can use it. So I go back to Mary Shavinsky. And I want to show you a third layout that this prototype supports, the comparison layout. So here we now have the most cited papers that Mary and George have written together in the center. So kind of like a Venn diagram. And then a selection of papers on the left and right side that they have authored without the respective other. There's a caveat to this. I come to this in a second. A huge caveat, actually. But what is interesting here, so we now actually see, or we can see how the sort of social network on the top around these papers that they have written together or apart actually unfolds. Who's writing with whom? And are there maybe people that they work only apart from each other? So that's one thing that you can explore with that. But you also see on the bottom that there might be a certain weighting of interest, of research interest between these two people. So user study is positioned slightly towards the left because Mary has also been writing user study papers on her own. But George hasn't, at least based on the sample that we have on display here. On the other hand, we have user interface on the right. So slightly moved more towards George's side. And it suggests that George maybe has been more involved with creating user interfaces. And this actually confirms what we know about these two people. Mary Shavinsky is a cognitive psychologist and George Robertson is a software engineer. So they were actually sort of a dream team for several years at Microsoft Research. She was doing the studies. She was creating really with bank interfaces and they were making stellar research. And that sort of role allocation actually comes out in the arrangement of the keywords of the papers below here. Okay, so taking a breath. So basically that's pivot path is a prototype that sort of illustrates this notion of strolling through a rich collection. We deployed that for a couple of weeks within Microsoft and there was largely positive feedback. So mainly focusing on sort of aesthetics on the movements that are happening. There was some confusion or sort of false expectations because people were quite used to the typical search and refine model where you enter a keyword and you try to just arrive at maybe one paper or something. So that tool didn't really support that that well. Something else that didn't really come up so much in the feedback but that we really grappled with throughout that project was that we're actually cutting a lot. So when I select Mary, I haven't selected a keyword and I did that purposefully. We're only showing the most in this case that based on the screen resolution we're showing the top-sighted papers of hers. 26 of in this database I think it's a little bit under 100 papers. So we're cutting a lot of papers and we don't actually give presence to these papers in that interface. So that was something we were sort of dealing with. We didn't really find a solution within that timeframe but I will come back to that in a different project where we try to address that to some degree. Okay, so that's pivot paths. It requires a fairly well-structured database but I wanna show you another project that takes some of these ideas of sort of moving around, of strolling, taking anchors for one view actually from the data and then sort of piggybacking from one view to the next. I wanna apply that to an unstructured type of data which is text which you could argue whether it's unstructured or not but so the previous project was at Microsoft Research. This now has been done by myself and Corpus Linguist at Newcastle University in the UK and we wanted to sort of bring playfulness and sort of exploratory playfulness to sort of Corpus Linguist visualizations to invite non-experts, non-techies, non-linguists to play with their data and so this is an early prototype to manage your expectation. So this is what happens, what it looks like when we visualize the English text of Hansel and Gretel, one of the famous fairy tales of the Grimm's collection. So it just starts out as a fairly mundane tech cloud but it's an interactive tech cloud that allows you to actually navigate between different words. So we can see how words correlate with each other. So when I just hover over a word like little, I can see that little Hansel is actually often used in that tail because it's highlighted in bright pink. So I can then click on little and it becomes a pivot point just as we had pivot points in the previous project but now I'm actually operating on the words used in that tail in this case. I can see how they are used, whether they are used more before or after that word. I don't do collision detection. I think we had collision detection mentioned by Mike yesterday, not doing anything here. So you see some, not so fancy overlaps but they're positioned based on whether they are used more before or after and you can also see a sample of the words used below the visualization so I can see that Hansel is often used more or less before a little and you can also interact with these words below and sort of move through that text word by word. I wanted to show you an example so there's also a little search included and I've shown you two anchor views in PivotPass and we've done something similar here where we can compare how the text corpus which is a fairly small corpus here just a short fairy tale but how the words that are used in that fairy tale how they associate with two anchor words. So we have now children and forest so they are sort of taking actually data elements as my sort of dimensions or as my poles and I'm saying show me all the words that correlate with that and position them based on how much they actually are attracted to one or the other. The font size now is just the combined sort of correlation but the positioning shows sort of a weighting. So we see for example that the word woman is used more often in relationship to children whereas wood and thickest and Hansel and animals are used more often with forest. So you can get a sort of long sense of how certain words are used together. Okay, so there's a bunch of options so we actually have some NLP, some language processing behind that so we can actually focus on certain word types if you're interested in that. Actually what is maybe interesting when you're looking at Hansel and Gratle that Hansel and Gratle are actually sort of overpowering the visualization so you can throw out these words. If I can spell. So we released this for several months and we have a little feedback mechanism in the tool and we got actually loads of feedback from teachers, from language teachers and they were interested in using such a tool in the context of language teaching where pupils have a hard time understanding how certain words are used in which context and how they could use them themselves and they were thinking that such a tool here could be useful when we want to look at how to use a certain word on the street, in the supermarket, at a conference with their friends. So we want to explore that further how this could be used in the context of language learning. Okay, so that's word wanderer, it's online, it's not yet on GitHub but you can play around with it, encourage you and send us feedback and now I'm getting to the last and I'm running out of time to the last case study to illustrate so this idea of moving between partial situated views, the more bottom up approach to data. So this is a monadic exploration, this is the title of that project, also a project at Newcastle University and we collaborated for that project with the book team, the team of editors and also tech people behind Beautiful Trouble. Beautiful Trouble is sort of a recipe book for creative forms of non-violent action, sort of protest and civic engagement pretty cool book, I encourage you to check it out, maybe through that visualization. So the book is from a data standpoint, it's really interesting because you flip through it, they send me a copy and there are quite a few books like that on the margins you see these sort of see also references. So immediately as a visualization person, oh, I'm holding a network in my hand, it's actually a network data set, we could do something with that. So what we want to explore though in that visualization, to negotiate sort of the individual chapter, so individual element of a collection and the whole collection. So, but in a way that doesn't end up in sort of only abstract shapes that give you sort of the macro view or only the individual pages of an individual chapter. So what we did here is we create that circular arrangement with a search box in the middle, so I can actually start with a search if I want. So considering protest, oftentimes this happens in the streets, so I can actually enter street. You have to trust me that I'm entering this right now because I think it's tiny on the screen. And as I enter that, the relevance, the search relevance actually then used for the displacement around the circle. So I see for example, billionaires for Bush, apparently did some street actions, reclaim the streets, streets into gardens. So I'm selecting one of these because I'm interested in maybe reclaim the streets has been around for a few years now and now selecting a node replaces the search that I've done before and now the other elements of the collection are arranged based on their attraction, based on their sort of affinity within the network. So the direct neighbors in the network are highlighted in with these sort of dark dots and then there are sort of indirect neighbors that have certain neighbors in common and they are also shown with their label but in a more subdued and a brighter color. So we can get a sense, they have some kind of affinity but they're actually not mentioned by the editors as directly related. So this idea of having a more nuanced sense of how one element relates to the whole collection is what we were interested in this project. And now I mentioned movement earlier what was important here as well was that you can actually click on any element now in the collection, even something that hasn't been identified as a neighbor sort of and navigate around. So I can now move to balance art and message. I can look at theater of the oppressed. So I can sort of let my interest in that collection drive my navigation. And if I, for example, actually want to depart from that path so that path right now might look like it's all about similarity. Similar items are popped up. No, I can actually say I'm explicitly moving to the periphery of that visualization that may have nothing to do or very little to do with the selection. So in an attempt to maybe avoid the sort of filter bubble effect. So that type of visualization will allow us to give the viewer or the searcher that ability to actually depart from that path. Okay, we have a legend here so you can actually filter out or add different types. And we had that also online for several months. Actually in collaboration with the team behind the book. And the feedback from the book team was very positive. We actually worked closely with them. We try to also, I can actually bring up one page here if I'm online. So actually try to use some of the aesthetics of that collection, the color choice, the icons in the visualization. So it actually links to the content that is being represented. And so their feedback was, this is like a wonderful new way of showing a table of contents. They called it a living table of contents. And the feedback from sort of passersby, I don't really know sort of what their background was, was an interesting mix of being excited about the content and being excited about the arrangement, the type of visualization that we were sort of offering. And in a way, to me, that was actually quite nice to see that the sort of richness and the sort of interconnectedness that the editors and the authors have put together into this book actually shines through in that visualization. I think that's a good thing to strive for. Okay, I have one and a half minutes left to get to wrap that up. Okay, we have that. Okay, I've showed you three case studies. And I wanna sort of bring that together and argue for that visualization doesn't always need to start with an overview. We can start at the bottom with individual elements. And I think a navigational approach to data can have some merit and allow us to engage more closely with the data and the collection items that we are interested in. I mentioned earlier three principles, orientation. In these tools that I've shown you, I actually used the data elements. I used facet values and words and the titles of the chapters to actually engage with the data. Actually, I didn't show you much GUI. Most of what you've seen were actually data elements and labels and they are used to then pivot through the data. The display state changes were animated and especially in the last project, these animations are meaningful. They're loaded to portray the difference between different perspectives. When I go from one case study to a principle, actually the way things move in and out portray the difference in relationship. So it's not just a sort of a tweening, but it's actually meant to help you understand the differences between the elements. And serendipity in all these views, there are sort of these tangential ways that help you to explore different aspects of a data set and hopefully positively get lost and find your way back if you choose so. So in one sentence, so the plea or the battle cry that I would try to sort of convey here was, let's take data visualization to the streets. Let's look eye to eye with our data elements. Let's not remove ourselves too far all the time with tiny dots and abstract shapes. I think there's lots of insight to be gained on the streets. Thank you.


And so I want to encourage everyone to come from a place of compassion, not necessarily crossing boundaries, okay? Not being a doormat, being compassion to recognize that wounded people hurt people, not intentionally most often. See, when we operate from a place of gratitude, we become more of a magnetic attractor for those who are in a place to appreciate who we are as people. But coming back to, when we focus on what we do want, instead of focusing on what we don't want, see, we'll actually become more of an attractor to those experiences. It's kind of the difference between Tigger and Eor from Winnie the Pooh.  And versus Tigger was bouncy, bouncy, bounce, bounce.


Studies using effective measurement tools have revealed a strong link between fear, avoidance of pain, and the suffering and disability associated with chronic pain. This article was offered by Lance M. McCracken and Lara Dhingra.