Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Spark Summit East 2017, brought to you by Databricks. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. Welcome back to Boston, everybody, where it's a blizzard outside and the blizzard of content coming to you from Spark Summit East, hashtag Spark Summit. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Joel Cumming is here, he's the head of data at Kik, Kik and Butt at Kik, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, thanks for having me. So tell us about Kik, this cool mobile chat app, checked it out a little bit. Yeah, so Kik's been around since about 2010, where, as you mentioned, a mobile chat app startup based in Waterloo, Ontario. Kik really took off, really in 2010, when it got two million users in the first 22 days of its existence. So it was insanely popular, specifically with US youth, and the reason for that really is because Kik started off in a time where chatting through text costs money, text messages cost money back in 2010, and really not every kid has a phone like they do today. So if you had an iPod or an iPad, all you needed to do was sign up and you had a username and now you could text with your friend. So kids could do that just like their parents could with Kik, and that's really where we got our entrenchment with US youth. And you're the head of data, so talk a little bit about your background, what does that mean to be a head of data?  So kind of in that range, but I was there for nine years. Yeah, can I do that with real estate? Yeah, I'd love to be able to do that with real estate. But it was a great time at BlackBerry. It was very exciting to be part of that growth. When I was there, we grew from 3 million to 80 million customers from 3,000 employees to 17,000 employees. And of course, things went sideways for BlackBerry, but conveniently at the end of BlackBerry was working in BBM and leading a team of data scientists and data engineers there. And BBM, if you're not familiar with it, is a chat app as well, and across town is where Kik is headquartered. So the appeal to me of moving to Kik was a company that was very small and fast moving, but they actually weren't leveraging data at all. So when I got there, they had a pile of logs sitting in S3, waiting for someone to take advantage of them. They were good at measuring events and looking at those events and how they tracked over time, but not really combining them to understand or personalize any experience for their end customers. So they knew enough to keep the data? They knew enough to keep the data. Weren't sure what to do with it.  So the first day that I started, I was the first day I used any AWS product. So I had worked on the big data tools at the old place with Hadoop and Pig and Hive and Oracle and those kinds of things, but had never used an AWS product until I got there. And it was very much sink or swim. And on my first day, our CEO in the meeting said, okay, so you're data guy here now. I want you to tell me in a week why people leave kick. Man, we don't even have a database yet. So the first thing I did was fired up a Redshift cluster. First time I had done that, looked at the tools that were available in AWS to transform the data using EMR and Pig and those kinds of things. And I was lucky enough, fortunate enough, that they could figure that out in a week. And I didn't give him the full answer of why people left, but I was able to give him some ideas of places we could go based on some preliminary exploration. So I went from leading this team of about 40 people to being a data team of one and writing all the code myself. Super exciting, not the experience that everybody wants, but for me it was a lot of fun. So over the last three years have built up the team. Now we have three data engineers and three data scientists. And data is a lot more important to people every day at kick. What sort of impact has your team had on the product itself and the customer experience? So the beginning it was really just trying to understand the behaviors of people across kick and that took a while to really wrap our heads around and any good data analysis combines behaviors that you have to ask people their opinion on and also behaviors that we see them do. So I had an old boss that used to work at Rogers which is a telecom provider in Canada and he said if you ask people the things that they watch they tell you documentaries and the news and very important stuff. But if you see what they actually watch it's reality TV and trashy shows and so the truth is really somewhere in the middle. There's an aspirational element. So for us really understanding the data that we already had instrumenting new events and then in the last year and a half building out an A-B testing framework is something that's been instrumental in how we leverage data at kick. So we were making decisions by gut feel in the very beginning. Then we moved into this era where we were doing A-B testing and very focused on statistical significance and rigor around all of our experiments. But then stepping back and realizing maybe the bets that we have aren't big enough and so we need to maybe bet a little bit more on some bigger features that have the opportunity to move the needle. So we've been doing that recently with a few features that we've released but data is super important now both to stimulate creativity of our product managers as well as to measure the success of those features. And how do you map to the product managers who are defining the new features? Are you a central group? Are you sort of point guards within the different product groups? Because how does that, your evidence-based decisions or recommendations, but they make ultimately, presumably the decisions, what's the dynamic? So it's a great question. In my experience, it's very difficult to build a structure that's perfect. So in the purely centralized model, you've got this problem of people are coming to you to ask for something and they may get turned away because you're too busy. And then in the decentralized model, you tend to have lots of duplication and overlap and maybe not sharing all the things that you need to share. So we tried to build a hybrid of both. And so we had our data engineers centralized and we tried doing what we call tours of duty. So our data scientists would be embedded with various teams within the company. So it could be the core messenger team. It could be our platform team. It could be our anti-spam team. And they would sit with them and it's very easy for product managers or developers to ask them questions and for them to give out answers. And then we would rotate those folks through a different tour of duty after a few months and they would sit with another team. So we did that for a while and it works pretty well. But one of the major things we found was a problem was there's no good checkpoint to confirm that what they're doing is right. So in software development, you're releasing a version of software. There's QA, there's code review and there's structure in place to ensure that, yes, this number I'm providing is right. It's difficult when you've got a data scientist who's out with the team for him to come back to the team and get that peer review. So now we're kind of reevaluating that. We use an agile approach, but we have primes for each of these groups but now we all sit together. So the accountability is after the data scientist made a recommendation that the product manager agrees with, how do you ensure that it measured up to the expectation? Like sort of after the fact. Yeah, so in those cases, our AB tests are, it's nice to have that unbiased data resource on the team that's embedded with them that can step back and say, yes, this idea worked or it didn't work. So that's the approach that we're taking is having that, it's not dedicated resource, but prime resource for each of these teams. That's a subject matter expert and then it's evaluating the results in an unbiased kind of way. So you've got this relatively small, even though it's quadruple the size when you start a data team and then the application development team is sort of colleagues or how do you interact with them? Yeah, we're actually part of the engineering organization that kicked a part of R&D and in different times in my life, I've been part of different organizations, whether it's marketing or whether it's IT or whether it's R&D, and R&D really fits nicely and the reason why I think it's the best is because if there's data that you need to understand users more, there's much more direct control over getting that element instrumented within the product that you have when you're part of R&D. If you're in marketing, you're like, hey, I'd love to know how many times people tap on that red button, but no event fires when that red button's tapped. Good luck trying to get the software developers to put that in, but when there's an inherent component of R&D that's dependent on data and data has that direct path to those developers, getting that kind of thing done is much easier. So from a tooling standpoint, thinking about data scientists and data engineers, a lot of the tools that we've seen in this so-called big data world have been quite bespoke. Different interfaces, different experience. How are you addressing that? Does Spark help with that? Maybe talk about that one. Yeah, so I was fortunate enough to do a session today that sort of talked about data V1 at kick versus data V2 at kick and we drew this kind of line in the sand. So when I started, you know, it was just me, I'm trying to answer these questions very quickly on these three or five day timelines that we get from our CEO. You've been here a week, come on. Yeah, exactly. So you sacrifice data engineering and architecture when you're living like that. So you can answer questions very quickly. It worked well for a while, but then all of a sudden we come up and we have 300 data pipelines. They're a mess. They're hard to manage and control. We've got code sometimes in SQL or sometimes in Python scripts or sometimes on people's laptops. We have no real plan for Git integration and then real scalability out of Redshift. We were doing a lot of our workloads in Redshift to do transformations just because like get the data into Redshift, write some SQL and then have your results. We're running into contention problems with that. So what we decided to do is sort of stop and step back and say, okay, so how are we going to house all of this atomic data that we have in a way that's efficient? So when we started with Redshift, our database was 10 terabytes. Now it's 100, except when we get five terabytes of data per day that's new coming in. So putting that all in Redshift, it doesn't make sense. It's not all that useful. So if we call that data under supervision, we don't want to get rid of the atomic data. How do we control that data under supervision?  And now we can access that data very quickly at an atomic level, at a cleansed level and also at an aggregate level. So for us, this data V2 was the evolution of stopping doing a lot of things the way we used to do, which was lots of data pipelines, kind of code that was all over the place and then aggregations in Redshift and starting to use Spark, specifically Databricks. In Databricks we think of in two ways. One is kind of managed Spark so that we don't have to do all the configuration that we used to have to do with EMR. And then the second is notebooks that we can align with all the work that we're doing and have revision control and get up integration as well. A question to clarify, when you've put the data lake, which is the file system, and then the data in Parquet format or Parquet files. So this is where you want to have some sort of interactive experience for business intelligence. Do you need some sort of MPP server on top of that to provide interactive performance? Or, because I know a lot of customers are struggling at that point where they got all the data there and it's kind of organized, but then if they really want to munch through that huge volume, they find it flows to lower than a crawl. Yeah, it's a great point. So we're at the stage right now where our data lake, at the top layer of our data lake where we aggregate and normalize, we also push that data into Redshift. So Redshift, what we're trying to do with that is make it a read-only environment so that our analysts and developers, they know they have consistent read performance on Redshift, where before when it's a mix of batch jobs as well as read workload, they didn't have that guarantee. So you're right, and what we think will probably happen over the next year or so is the advancements in Spark will make it much more capable as a data warehousing product, and then you have to start a question, do I need both Redshift and Spark for that kind of thing? But today, I think some of the cost-based optimizations that are coming, at least the promise of them coming, I would hope that those would help Spark becoming more of a data warehouse, but we'll have to see. So to carry that thread a little bit further through, I mean, in terms of things that you'd like to see on the Spark roadmap, things that could be improved, and what's your feedback to Databricks? Yeah, we're fortunate, we work with them pretty closely. We've been a customer for about half a year, and they've been outstanding working with us. So structured streaming is a great example of something we've worked pretty closely with on, and we're really excited about. We don't have, we have certain pockets within our company that require very real-time data.  We haven't typically, if we batch every hour, that's fine in most cases, but structured streaming, when our data streams are coming in now through Kinesis Firehose, and we can process those without having to worry about checking to see if it's time we should start this, or is all the data there so we can run this batch. Structured streaming solves a lot of those, simplifies a lot of that workload for us. So that's something we've been working with them on. The other things that we're really interested in, we've got a bit of a list, but kind of the other major ones are, how do you start to leverage this data to use it for personalization back in the app? So today, you know, we think of data in two ways at kick. It's data as KPIs, so it's like the things you need to run your business, maybe it's A-B testing results, maybe it's how many active users you had yesterday, that kind of thing. And then the second is data as a product, and how do you provide personalization at an individual level based on your data sciences models back out to the app? So we do that, I should point out at kick, we don't see anybody's messages, we don't read your messages, we don't have access to those, but we have the metadata around the transactions that you have, like most companies do. So that helps us improve our products and services under our privacy policy to say, okay, who's building good relationships and who's leaving the platform and why are they doing it? But we can also surface components that are useful for personalization. So if you've chatted with three different bots on our platform, that's important for us to know if we want to recommend another bot to you. Or the classic people you may know, recommendations, we don't do that right now, but behind the scenes we have the kind of information that we can help personalize that experience for you. So those two things are very different in a lot of companies, there's an R&D element, like at BlackBerry, the app world recommendation engine was something that there was a team that ran in production, but our team was helping those guys tweak and tune their models. So it's the same kind of thing at kick where we can build, our data scientists are building models for personalization and then we need to service them back up to the rest of the company. And the process right now of taking the results of our models and then putting them into a real-time serving system isn't that clean. And so we do batches every day on things that don't need to be near real-time, so things like predicted gender. If we know your first name, we've downloaded the list of baby names from the US Social Security website and we can say the frequency of the name Pat, 80% of the time it's a male and 20% it's a female, but Joel's 99% of the time it's male and 1% of the time it's a female, so based on your tolerance for whatever you want to use this personalization for, we can give you our degrees of confidence on that. That's one example of what we surface right now in our API back to our own first-party components of our app. But in the future, with more real-time data coming in from Spark streaming, with more real-time model scoring, and then the ability to push that over into some sort of capability that can be surfaced up through an API, it gives our data team the capability of being much more flexible and fast at surfacing things that can provide personalization to the end user, as opposed to what we have now, which is all this batch processing and then loading once a day and then knowing that we can't react on the fly. So if I were to try and turn that into sort of a roadmap, a Spark roadmap, it sounds like the process of taking the analysis and doing perhaps even online training to update the models or just re-scoring if you're doing a little slightly less fresh, but then serving it up from a high-speed serving layer, that's when you can take data that's coming in from the game and send it back to improve the game in real-time. Exactly, yeah. That's what you're looking for. Yeah. You and a lot of other people. Yeah, I think so. Okay. So how's the event been for you? It's been great. There's some really smart people here. It's humbling when you go to some of these sessions and we're fortunate where we try and not have to think about a lot of the details that people are explaining here, but it's really good to understand them and know that there are smart people that are fixing these problems. As like all events, been some really good sessions and then, but the networking is amazing. So meeting lots of great people here and hearing their stories too. And you're hoping to go to the hockey game tonight? Yeah, I'd love to go to the hockey game. That would be. See if we can get through the snow. Who are the Bruins playing tonight? San Jose. Oh, good little. It could be a good game. Yeah. It'll arrive every, yeah. You guys, you guys get to the hockey game? You're in. All right, good. All right, Joel, listen, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Great segment, really appreciate your insights and sharing. Okay, thanks for having me. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. George and I will be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Spark Summit in Boston.


That's absolutely true and you think about it, you know Thanksgiving happens once a year, you know When we're talking about the holiday season, I think about this we gain weight on the holiday season That's 60 days, but there's only what Halloween Thanksgiving? Christmas New Year's that's four days. It's not those four days that caused anybody to gain right 10 or 20 pounds It's all the days between


So with this selection of ratings, Aristotle is continuing the work that we looked at with the excerpts from Book 1. As with these other philosophers, these ancient Greek philosophers, he's asking this question, what is the happy life? He says it's not, and remember if you remember from the Book 1, it's not an sensuality, it's not an honor, rather it's rather in contemplation, it's rather in developing what it means to be human. Now, let's look at some questions perhaps, but in this excerpt from Book 2, he's going to elaborate more on what he means here. Now to be clear for Aristotle, he's asking what does it mean to live this good life, and this answer is going to involve the virtues. It's going to be the habits that make one excellent, and this excellence is going to be understood in terms of the kind of thing that you are. And things it's found, when he starts out right from the beginning, found in either two main kinds of excellence for him, excellence for the intellect, and moral excellence. So, he's telling us that our happiness, the good life, is found in the habits that we develop. So what habits are important for Aristotle? What habits do you have to develop? Now Aristotle is really clear. He said that the virtues have pleasure and pain as their object, and the virtuous actions are the ones that cultivate the most pleasure. Now this might sound weird given what he just had to say about Sardinopoulos in the excerpts of Book 1, but he doesn't mean pleasure and pain just simply in terms of situality, right? That would just be for the body. If all we are were bodies, then yeah, you'll probably just go be Sardinopoulos, sure. But we're not just bodies. We're also minds, we're also emotion. So you have to develop those habits that result in the greatest, you know, that result in this pleasure, this state of well-being overall when all three, at least the three parts of you, are working well.  Okay, so how do you figure this out? Well, you know, some habits, it's not hard to see this, some habits are very much excessive, right, where they get too much of what you're aiming at. So, you know, a really great way to start thinking about this is in terms of food, right? And this is just the body, right? This is just the body. But there are other habits that deal with the mind and emotions as well. So it's really easy to think about an habit of excess of food, right? It's, you know, the all-you-can-eat buffet and staying there for six hours, right? Until somebody finally tells you, you need to go, you have eaten us out of business, right? That would be one habit that's in the excess. And not just like one instance, but like doing that all the time, that's in the excess. A deficiency, there are habits for deficiency as well, right? So we can think about not enough food or not eating at all. If you want to put this in terms of just pure caloric intake, right, just in terms of calories, right, in excess would be what? 4,000 or 6,000, right? Let's say 6,000 calories, which is actually not that hard to do with today's diet. 6,000 calories. And your deficiency would be zero calories, right? You'd die pretty quickly if you did that. Or even you might just say 1,000 calories, right? 1,000 calories. That's probably too little. Okay. Well, to find the right habit, you have to find the relative mean. Now this isn't the absolute mean. The absolute mean is, you know, what's equal distance between those two. So if we say 6,000, did we say, yeah, 6,000 or, yeah, say 6,000 calories was the excess and 1,000 calories is, you know, too little is the deficiency. Then the absolute mean would be what? 3,500 calories. That's the absolute mean. Well, that's probably not right. I think 3,500 calories is probably still too much. What you have to find is the relative mean. The relative mean is going to take practice. It's going to take experience. It's going to take a lot of thought and a lot of, you know, lack of a better word, scientific investigation. You got to take good records and know what you're doing. Okay.  And of course it matters what I have too. But, you know, we can, those are other habits as well. So, you know, the relative mean has to be found. It's this golden mean. That's what he calls this golden mean. It has to be figured out. You have to sit down and say, okay, so here's what I've done. What's the result? Is this better or worse in terms of pleasure and pain? So the habits that you have to develop are ones that you either develop through your own experiences or maybe you rely upon the experiences of others. All right. Now, virtue ethics, what Aristotle is talking about, virtue ethics is still objective. And we'll get to that in a second. But there is still some, you know, there's going to be some differences between individuals. I mean, that doesn't mean that there's just completely out of bounds, right?  No, no, that's not the case, right? Nobody can have 10,000 calories a day and be fine, right? They're probably going to keel over real fast. Nobody can have just 20 calories a day and be fine. They're probably going to keel over real fast, too. So there are always going to be limits. And the relative means there's going to be some differences, but it's also always going to be within boundaries as well. Aristotle talks about states, capacities, and feelings. I mean, feelings are pretty straightforward. That's easy to understand. Anger, sadness, joy, pleasure, right? These are your emotional reactions to what happens around you. This is neither good nor bad, right? First of all, whether you have these emotions is not in your control. You're a feeling thing. You can't stop that. You know, it's capacities. Capacities are, you know, that by which you have these feelings, right? Aristotle's day, I'm not sure what they thought was responsible for feelings, but today we look towards the brain and the chemical interactions in our brains. Our capacities are by which we even have the feelings to begin with. This is also neither good nor bad. This is also not in your control. You can't control whether you have these capacities. But there are states in addition to that. Now, states are what, you know, is by that how we react to certain situations, okay? Now, capacities allow us to have emotional reactions to what happens around us, but these states are what determines, you know, the degree of the reaction and maybe even what kind, right? Yeah, even what kind. Now, that is within your control.  I'm going to feel sad. I'm going to feel angry. No, you can't do that. How you affect these states is how you develop those habits, right? These habits determine your state, what kind of thing that you are. So, you know, I'm walking around in Stonehenge 2 right about now. And it's kind of cool. It really is, right? I'm impressed by the work that's been done here, okay? Now, you know, an excess of enthusiasm would probably be something like, oh my God, wow, this place is so cool. I'm going to move here. That's overboard. That's really overboard, right? You know, deficiency would be something like, meh, I'm going to go spray a paint of stone. That would be a deficiency of enthusiasm or care. Now, you know, the state that I am in, you know, this appropriate reaction, this mean reaction, this middle ground reaction of, wow, this is really neat. I'm enjoying the architecture. I'm enjoying this Stonehenge 2 around me. That's developed out of the habits that I've developed, right? Through time and bitter experience, I've learned that, ah, it's too much and meh, it's too little. And that takes a lot. That takes a lot of experience. It takes a mind. You have to develop your intellectual capacities in order to properly determine the mean for that reaction, right? So the state that I am in is a result of the habits that I've developed. And this is what is good or bad. This is what contributes to the pleasure of pain, the happiness or misery in my life. So this is, and this is in what the virtues lie, is developing these habits so I can develop the kind of state in what I am, which means I will lead a good life.


when this critical point crosses the real line. So Fi, these solutions, Fi, are only piecewise, piecewise continuous. The jump on the other hand is of a pretty simple kind. For example, here, if you think about it from this contour C2, the integral over this contour C2 is actually equal to the sum of the integral here and the integral over that contour. So in this case, so in this explicit case here, F1 stayed constant, but F2 jumped by, plus or minus, I'm not sure, jumped by F1. So you've got a basis of solutions. It's a nice basis of solutions with nice uniform asymptotics. This is the good news. And what you could think of as bad news is that you don't get those asymptotics from everywhere-defined continuous solutions. Rather, to get those asymptotics, the solutions have to suffer some jump somewhere. So that's sometimes known as the Stokes phenomenon. If you think about how these things can be consistent, you could get confused because on the one hand, we're saying that these things have absolutely uniform asymptotics. This asymptotic is perfectly continuous. On the other hand, we're saying the solution itself is not continuous. How can that be? Well, if you think about what happens at the moment when the thing jumps, F2 shifts by a multiple of F1. You know the asymptotics of both of them, and if you work it out, what you'll see is that the asymptotic behavior of F1 is massively subleading compared to the behavior of F2. In other words, W at X2 is bigger than W at X1. Therefore, this contribution, at the moment when the jump happens, this contribution is exponentially small, and so it doesn't prevent the asymptotic behavior from being uniform. Yeah, you could analytically continue them. Absolutely, so what Greg is saying is there's another thing I could have done. I could have insisted, so in Greg's version of the world, I would have taken this function somewhere and then analytically continued it everywhere in the complex Z plane. So then I would be happy here. The thing would be absolutely, you know, would be entire, would have no jumps, but what I would not be happy about is that then, eventually, it would fail to have the right asymptotics. When I continue it far enough, the asymptotic behavior would be messed up. So I actually, for our purposes, it'll be more convenient to be in this world of things that jump but have good asymptotics everywhere rather than to have this entire thing, which is somehow non-canonical. You have to make some arbitrary choice of where to start. Okay, so now, if you think about where this jump happens, so what I just told you is that somewhere in the Z plane, there's these canonical solutions, totally canonical solutions, but somewhere in the Z plane, they have to jump. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you would just let the contour continuously deform. It might actually be branched, by the way. I'm not so sure that that's an entire function because when you move Z, so imagine I start with the, oh no, it is entire, no, of course, there is an entire function, yes, yes, yes, sorry. Yes, absolutely, there's an entire function of Z. The equation has no singularities. Yes, forgive me. Okay, so what's the story? Well, the jumping occurs exactly when the left-shed symbol from X i runs directly into the critical point X j. That's the moment when the jumping occurs. But that's equivalent, I'm not gonna prove this for you in real time, but you can work it out. That's equivalent to saying that there exists a BPS soliton in the sense that we were talking about before. A BPS soliton connecting X one to X two, sorry, I just called it a BPS ij soliton before. BPS ij soliton with phase, the phase of the central charge, theta equals argument of h bar. So finally, the picture is like this, is there's a canonical basis, a distinguished basis, canonical basis of nabla h bar flat sections, which jumps whenever there's a soliton. In other words, so I'll call these solutions psi i of Z. The basis jumps when Z crosses, well, when a BPS soliton appears, but that's what we call the spectral network. Sn of theta, where I take theta to be equal to the argument of h bar. And this canonical basis has kind of good asymptotics, good well understood asymptotics, like the asymptotics that wrote there, as h bar goes to zero on a ray. So you fix a ray, you fix the phase, and then you ask what happens to the asymptotically as theta goes as h bar goes to zero. There's a nice basis for which you control that asymptotics, but that basis exists that basis is single-valued only in the complement, only in the complement of this picture, so like, so this picture, so for that reason, this picture actually has another name, it's called the Stokes graph. It's not in any coordinates, it's on the bundle E. It's in the bundle, yeah, sorry, so this picture is happening over C, so nabla h bar. So remember, this is a family of connections labeled by h bar and C star in the bundle E that I described for you before over C, the parameter space of field theories. So the statement is that this parameter space of field theories is carrying this canonical kind of pencil of connections. Yes, yes, Z, yeah. Absolutely, this is in the Z coordinate. Right, that's an important point actually. We use the X coordinate mainly as a kind of crutch for getting a very sort of explicit understanding of why these Stokes jumps happen. But ultimately, the statement E is just that there is this canonical basis of solutions of the equation which jump exactly at this special network. Okay, the X's are not in this picture. Were you to try to write an explicit formula for the solution of the equation? In these particular class of examples, you could write them as integrals over X. But ultimately, the equation that we're solving is an equation in the Z variable that doesn't have any X's in it. Yeah, okay. So, okay, so let me come back to this phenomenon of the changes of basis. Let's say one more thing about it. So, when the parameter Z crosses one of these walls, one of the walls of that picture, carrying the label IJ, so it carries an IJ soliton, the basis of solutions of this equation is transformed. So there's a matrix giving the change of basis. And that matrix turns out to be pretty simple. It's the identity matrix plus the elementary matrix EIJ times the soliton number mu of I and J. So remember, each of these walls represents some bunch of solitons. It has a number associated to it. We defined those numbers last time, which is the soliton number. And that soliton number is what controls the explicit change of basis here. And now in particular, I guess I'll refer you to the notes for details of this. So in particular, now you can do the following thing. You imagine a situation where three walls come together, say a wall of type one, two, wall of type one, three, one, two, one, three, and two, three, sorry, one, two, two, three, one, three. So in fact, let's do even the simpler case. Let's do just this case. This is the case that we saw explicitly in some pictures last time. And I said it was associated with the phenomenon where of wall crossing, where a soliton in this range of parameters doesn't exist, and then in this range of parameters it does exist.  Now, we can re-derive that just from the stuff we've been saying about canonical solutions of this equation, namely what you do is you consider the change of basis going this way, and the change of basis going this way, and you require that they be equal. They have to be equal because there's a distinguish basis here, there's a distinguish basis here. There's one change of basis matrix between them. You can compute it by going this way or compute it by going that way. Requiring that they're equal. In other words, just requiring that you have an actual flat connection here. Produces, tells you what this mu one three has to be. So if you consider the change of basis along two different paths, you get that you code you off a wall crossing formula. Well, maybe, but maybe, well, I mean, this is at a fixed value of, yeah, okay, so there's a wall of marginal stability that kinda looks like this. That's where the mu jumps. Okay, so there's a little calculation here. It's just an identity among three by three matrices, which you can find in the notes. Okay, but let's press on. Yeah, no, you're computing what the number mu one three is gonna be. Yeah, the fact that there's a wall here, that's just dictated by the, you know, these paths are trajectories of some differential equation that I wrote last time. And just knowing that is enough to work out the kind of local structure here that if you have a one two wall going this way and a two three wall going this way, there is some one three trajectory that emerges from here. And the only question is whether the soliton number here will be zero or not zero. You might first think it'll just be zero. There was no soliton here. There should be no soliton here. It turns out that that's wrong. And you can see that it's wrong just by considering these changes of basis. Roughly the change of basis matrix here doesn't commute with the change of basis matrix here. So multiplying them just in the opposite order won't give you the same, won't give you the same as the product here. To fix that, you have to stick in one more matrix and its coefficients are fixed by all the other coefficients. So it's just a little identity among a three by three matrices. Okay, yeah. I'll just, it is the same for, I'll just write the, I'll just write the thing. Yeah. So the two changes of basis on the two sides would look like this. On the left side, you would write this matrix. Let's see, yeah, I wrote it the same. Let's make this two three, this one two, this one two, and this two three. Now the two changes of basis matrices look like this. The one on the left is a product of two elementary matrices. So there are some, there's some mu here along this wall and some mu here along this wall. And those appear, I'm calling them mu one two and mu two three. That's the change of basis that you have on the left side. On the right side, you go through the one two wall first. And so the order of the product is backward. Oh, but the thing that's first is when you write last. So mu one two, mu two three. Now this by itself would not be an identity. These two products are just not equal. So what saves the day is to stick in a third matrix with a, I'll call it mu prime one three. So then this becomes an actual identity. And it's true exactly if mu prime one three equals the product mu one two, mu two three. So that's a special case of the wall crossing formula that I wrote last time. So that's how it comes out. So it's just some identity just multiplying three by three matrices. Okay. So now there's another aspect of this story which is gonna be important when we upgrade this thing to sort of more interesting Higgs bundles, which is the following. So there's something called TT star geometry discovered by Chikodi and Vafa. And what they said was that in addition to all the other structure, I told you that this Higgs bundle has, it carries one more thing. Well, I guess this will be the least surprising thing now. It carries a Hermitian metric. So far everything was kind of holomorphic, but now we'll do something that's not holomorphic. A Hermitian metric H, which obeys, well the TT star equation or the also called the Hitchin equation, the sort of higher dimensional Hitchin equation. And what that equation says is that the curvature of the churn connection plus the bracket of the Higgs field with Phi Dagger, Phi Dagger I mean is adjuvant with respect to this Hermitian metric is zero. So yeah, so by DH, just to write it, so DH is the churn connection in E, it's the unique connection in E that's compatible with the holomorphic structure and the Hermitian metric, so the churn connection. Phi is holomorphic, covariately holomorphic. That's implicit in, no, no, I don't have to write that separately. It was already a holomorphic section of the bundle, the churn connection is compatible with the holomorphic structure. So that says that Phi will be covariately constant. Now I want to reinterpret this equation in the following way. Well, sorry, let's say one thing first. So just to give you a concrete feeling for what kind of equation this is, in the cubic case, we could write this metric literally. In that particular case, this metric happens to be diagonal. It doesn't always happen. And in that case, the equation star, this might feel a little abstract. So here, the equation star becomes literally a scalar PDE, the Laplacian of U, del del bar U, minus E to the two U, minus E to the minus two U, absolute value of Z squared is zero. So it's just some concrete scalar PDE. Yeah, this one is actually, this is an interesting sort of model solution for studying Hitchin's equations. It's kind of the simplest example of this structure. Anyway, in general, we have some complicated PDE for our Hermitian metric in this bundle. What I want to say about it is, I would like to study that PDE in a slightly indirect way. So here's what I would like to do. So having a solution of Hitchin equation is absolutely equivalent to the following. It's equivalent to saying that the connection, the complex connection, nabla, I'll define nabla zeta, so zeta in C star, I'll define it to be the churn connection, which is unitary, plus zeta inverse times the Higgs field, plus zeta times the adjoint of the Higgs field. The statement is that that connection is flat for all zeta and C star. So having a solution of Hitchin's equations, this sort of difficult PDE, is just absolutely equivalent to having this one parameter family of flat connections that comes to you in this particular form. And now, this kind of family, we can study it in essentially the same way as I studied that family nabla H bar. If you look at the behavior at small value of zeta, it looks very similar to the small H bar behavior of the family I wrote before. And indeed, this is basically due to it's proven, I think. We can study its flat sections just as we discussed for nabla H bar. Now we won't have these kind of explicit formulas where you integrate over some contour, some explicit function. But nevertheless, they have the same Stokes graph, the spectral network, the same kind of formal asymptotics, same actual asymptotics, canonical basis with the same asymptotics and jumping behavior. And so if you had a good enough control over those, if you had a good enough control over these flat sections, which you can get just by studying this Stokes behavior, you can actually use it to reconstruct the solution of Hitchin equations. So the idea is to use this to reconstruct H. So that's the real goal why we're doing all this. We want to get a better handle on, that's one reason why we might do all this, is we want to get a better handle on the solutions of Hitchin equations. We want to understand them in a more explicit way. And the idea is that through this kind of indirect sounding business, first study this CSR family of flat connections, then control the behavior of the flat sections for these by knowing something almost just topological about their Stokes behavior. That'll be enough to let us, well, you still want to get an explicit formula, but you'll get information about H that you couldn't get easily in any other way. And so this is a program that was, this is still kind of an old story. It was basically explained by Jakodi Vafa and Dubrovn. Okay, so now in the next lecture, just the aim is gonna be to upgrade this whole story. So we'll replace these parameter spaces C by a general Riemann surface. And E by a general Higgs bundle. And that will involve somehow structures, which are very, very similar to what I've described here, but just with one new ingredient. And maybe I'll, so I had hoped to get much further, but maybe I'll show you a picture of the new ingredient, just so you get some idea what the deal is gonna be. So we're gonna draw spectral networks. Now there'll be spectral networks on the Riemann surface, whatever the Riemann surface is, but as usual, the simplest examples are the ones you can actually draw.  And we're gonna have, again, a kind of spectral network, which is counting some kind of particles. Now there'll be particles, as I'll explain in a, not just a two-dimensional theory, but a kind of coupled system, which is partly two-dimensional and partly four-dimensional. That'll be the interesting.


I'm Mellie James, host of Let's Mana Up. This show is meant to dive into stories of local product entrepreneurs and how they are growing their companies from right here in Hawaii. My guest today is Kanuailani Davis, founder of Poma Hina Designs, based on the island of Molokai. Welcome to the show, Kanuailani. Mahalo. I'm so happy to be here. Great. Well, let's start things off by sharing, you know, how did you get started with Poma Hina Designs? You know, it started off with educating our community, my hula group, my students, wanting for them and yearning for them to learn their culture, remembering the names, valuing and honoring the elements, and by doing that I was able to create designs to my graphic arts background and really allow them to feel the essence of these designs so that they could remember them. The idea for that was so it could be passed on from generation to generation. And that's basically how it started. So when did it get started? Like what was going on at the time for you? It was in 2000, 2009, it started then. We were at that point traveling to different parts of the world and aside from them trying to remember the names and honoring the elements, we needed others to do the same as well. And so I had my hulao, I taught them how to make bamboo stamps, ohe kapala, and natural dyes. And it started off with dyeing little drawstring bags with these images on it. And we would put gifts from Molokai, natural gifts, and then that's how we were able to give them away to our guests and the people that we met across in different parts of the world. So you really got started on Molokai? Yes. And everything was being made there. Is it still all being made there? Have you really cultivated this network of seamstresses and people able to help you make a lot of your clothing? It's actually evolved a lot. And so what it started off being myself and sometimes my daughters and maybe some of my students ended up being where it was just solely me getting the machines and printing and heat pressing and sewing, but the business started to grow. And so at that point I was able to contract local seamstresses on islands and even that and it consistently evolved. So then I ended up having to contract outside of the islands and it's still growing. But my main goal, I'm hoping in five to ten years is to have everything made on Molokai and creating a space where the economics fits within those economics of manufacturing. Not only for myself, but hopefully others on the whole. Yeah, no, that's really inspiration. I know with growth a lot of times you can keep it here and then you've got to go off island a little bit and then really try to bring it back and then continue to grow the industry. So I know we keep talking about what you're doing, but let's actually take a look at some of the amazing clothes. So what are we wearing today? So I think people are just going to get a sneak peek of some of the designs that's going to be on the stage in London, in London Pacific Fashion Week. The collection is called Elemental Subconscious and it's honoring the feminine qualities and the feminine elements of Hawaii. And so this is a hint of a piece that will be on the runway. This is Hawkea in representation of Puli'ahu considering that honoring Mauna Kea and all the things that are happening right now in Hawaii. And then I'm wearing Hina. And so the moon phases and not only the things that we can see, but the things that we cannot see through its essence. So these are just some of those things and I'll have Laka of the forest and I will also have Pele. Awesome. So I know you just mentioned London Fashion Week and that is one of the themes of the show today really talking about you're the first native Hawaiian designer to be invited to London Fashion Week. And can you share kind of how that happened? I know there's, are there four major fashion weeks? There are three or four? There's four. So you have New York, Paris, Milan and London. And not realizing what a prestigious and humbling experience this is going to be and what that stage means to fashion in general across the world. And so I'm really excited to be in London and representing Hawaii and really, really excited about closing the show. You're closing the show. Closing the show. Okay. So can you just share for the audience kind of what London Fashion Week is or like what are these four huge fashion weeks and like fashion mechas of the world? Oh my gosh. Yeah. So these are where all your huge designers, this is where they showcase to the world and to be invited is a big deal. It's not something that, at least in my experience, I'm not quite sure how it is for everybody else. You don't, I don't think you go in and sign up and say, hey, can I go to London Fashion Week? You have to be invited. I was invited and I was very, it's still mind boggling to understand how I was invited considering I'm on Molokai, right? And not on Oahu or Maui or one of the bigger islands. They must be searching the world very carefully. No, no, no. No, but yeah. So having to be invited is a big deal and I was invited last year to New York Fashion Week. But due to our people in Hawaii going through the flooding, going through the eruptions, it was more important for me to focus financially to help our people here in Hawaii. This year, very fortunate again that I got invited by another company to go to London and so I wanted to take this opportunity to do that. So what does that mean to fashion? It's the stepping stone to the many opportunities that are going to start coming in. Now you're being seen by the world and people from all over the world will come to New York, will go to London, will go to Milan and will go to Paris just to see what's new, just to see what's out there. And I have to believe that the reason why I was chosen or invited was not only because of the fashion or the design, but my closeness to our people, our culture and I think that's what people are looking for, that depth, that I mean that space where this can intermingle self and fashion and so yeah it's a stepping stone to hopefully really great things in the future and I've seen it happen and we've seen it happen with many other designers. Yeah so I mean I'd love to talk about what's going to happen after London Fashion Week. I have so many questions for you now but I'm going to cut off for a second and look at some images so the audience can see some of your gorgeous clothing and fashion. So we've got, what do we have here? Okay so as you can see it's the same design that Mellie is wearing right now, healthcare from the Polyahulain and this is a take on that lightness, that airiness of that chiffon and that flutter that you see when the snow graces the tops of Mauna Kea and the fluidity and how that moves. So and I have Le, feather Le, Le Hulu which will be graced upon the heads of each feminine element, main model as they walk down the stage so really bringing in not only the contemporary aspects of it but some of our more recent traditions of Le Hulu making. Beautiful. Okay next image. There's you. Oh that's yeah, so these are some of the new pieces that came out this year. The coral was the color of the year and it embraced coral blues and pinks and greens and so I always like to say that it's an expression of our reefs and climate change which is the theme of this year's London Fashion Week, Pacific Fashion Week. And so yeah I'm here on Molokai you know we don't have big buildings and we don't have beautiful parks but we have beautiful mountains and sceneries and things that we hold very close and dear to us so in this image I'm wearing our new one piece off the shoulder top and our our clutch and heels so we'll see more heels and boot and a lot of new pieces on the runway. Next image. And you know who've been following Poma Hina designs we do have swimwear and these are just some of the pieces that I have from the Kanaloa Hina collection and also leggings and leisure wear. I put that leggings with the swimsuit because they dry fast, they're versatile and we love taking them in the ocean and taking them in the mountains aside from just working out. Good for paddling too. Perfect for paddling. Your leg doesn't rub against the side of the skin. So what's gonna happen after Fashion Week like what is this you know what do you do differently at the show why are you closing and I know you know it's a big deal so what are some of the inspirations you have to just really make a big bang at the show. You know I feel like I honestly feel Poma Hina has a bigger purpose than fashion. This is allowing the voices of Molokai, this is allowing the voices of Hawaii be heard and also the way we are looked at in the entire world. And really taking away the stigma of you know grass skirts and flower lays and plastic lays and you know big flower you know aloha wear and so to really redefine who we are as a people to the world in our depth and our culture through heritage and through genealogy and honestly I hope that this opens doors to expanding Poma Hina evolving in a way that it can grow both in the fashion industry but also in a way that we can have these conversations more often. That's really important I think you touched on that earlier how did they find you and what was different and so much of your voice is through social media I'm always so impressed every day where I don't know how you do it but it is so warm and so from the heart and really kind of touches something multiple times a day and I'm just like where does this come from like how did you where does this come from. Me it's all me it's it's not in that type of way but more of well first off on Molokai many I'm recognizing that in itself is there's not many people understand the resources on our island you know we're ten we're ten miles wide we're 32 miles long we don't have malls we don't have franchises you know nothing over three stories we don't even have street lights so as a person from Molokai we've always been resourceful and so social media and e-commerce has been my go-to I can't create spaces that people we can bring people to the island but I can create spaces that we can leave the island virtually and so social media hasn't been played a big part in that and I believe that's how the London Pacific Fashion Week through Anna and even Oxford fashion who invited me to New York fashion week that's how they found me and aside from just the fashion that I put up every day I do try to do and I always tell people that's me going through some things or seeing things in a different light and then just being able to share that and the most awesome part about that is those who come back they're like thank you I'm going through that that got me through my day and I'm like no thank you because that got me through my day and this is all you know and it's just really helping each other out building together yeah it's nobody superior to anybody and nobody's better than anybody it's just like you know to keep that as real as possible is creates a very vulnerable space but it also creates a great space to grow both personally and through I think you know that is something that has been growing over the past few years that authenticity and just being able to be more open and everything's not just all good all the time and when you can allow people to come in a little bit it just makes that more of a stronger brand and the more of a stronger connection to you but I really like what you're talking about with technology and so that is really leveling the playing field for a lot of our local Hawaii companies where you've got e-commerce you've got social media you have all these channels that we never had before and you're right we can't suddenly do a shop in the middle of Moloka people aren't you know can't fly over as difficult as it is but can you share a little bit more on how you've leveraged technology I know you've done a lot of these really neat kind of Facebook events and some of those ways you've been able to get the word on really produce sales yeah it all started off with Facebook obviously and Facebook lives and at one point I wanted to be like the QVC of Hawaii and then I wanted to be you know the Oprah of Hawaii like I just wanted to like be able to get out and that was the most you know I would be in in friends stores in the middle of Kanaka Kaitao and I'm like can I use your place as a background and you know we'll draw people in for your store and then I get to be on this and have a nice background and really collaborating really working with everybody and not feeling like I had to do everything by myself and so the the tech part was really difficult because we were very limited in our services on Moloka as well as even Wi-Fi is in some places very hard to get but you make do and you find those spots and then you just you know send great mana and energy into these spots so that you can keep doing the things that you do but I feel like the e-commerce lives and all that it really works yeah I mean clearly it worked you know they've gotten a huge following how many followers do you have on your Instagram I think I have over almost yeah and just all the imagery is so incredible yeah oh yeah we're gonna take a break now okay thanks Kunoilani okay Poma Hina designs will be back in a little bit okay hello thanks to our think tech underwriters and grand tours the atherton family foundation Carol Mon Lee and the friends of thick tech the center for microbial oceanography research and education collateral analytics the cook foundation Dwayne Karisu the Hawaii community foundation the Hawaii council of associations of apartment owners Hawaii energy the Hawaii energy policy forum Hawaiian electric company integrated security technologies Galen Ho of BAE systems Kamehameha schools MW group the Shidler family foundation the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust Volo foundation Eureko J. Sugimura thanks so much to you all I'm Mellie James with let's mana up and we're back here with Kunoilani Davis from Poma Hina designs welcome back hello I think I'd love to just jump into some more of your gorgeous design so well we'll go back we'll go to the image with the with the kids okay yeah what's going on here so our models on Molokai are limited so we're calling out all models who want to come this is actually my youngest daughter and just showcasing swimwear for kids as well as leggings for kids as well so showing again just the versatility of these pieces and you know gorgeous for everybody yeah okay oh this is recent this was in the New Zealand Embassy in Washington DC with a a cultural center they did a Hawaii fashion walk and wow who was invited to that myself as the main fashion on the runway as well as Native Americans are a Native American speaker Wesley May and a Māori speaker really yeah yeah yeah right from DC now to London for London fashion week yeah it's really getting Hawaii out to the world it is and I think more people are drawn to to culture in this in this way in this fashion so to speak and people are wanting to know the stories and wanting to know especially with women native women why yeah the why and and how and you know what's the drive oh this is another Molokai Kāne man this is Bula Kamakana and I actually met him did you yeah he drove me around the island yes I remember that so Bula is he's so gracious to take photos we have a lot of shirts I will reveal that in this year's collection we will have long sleeve aloha shirts it's been something that the men have been asking for for a very long time so that will be revealed you get to see the new designs on the long sleeves but I feel like for women we just have so many things we get to pick from so the guys are always like they have nothing more designs because all they could pick from are like a lot of shirts right yeah it's funny how they asked for certain certain pieces and not even realizing men are just as picky as women and you know can you do this and can you put this here and can you think about this and it's like okay taking those things into consideration it may not happen overnight or within that year but it definitely stays with me as I grow yeah and you do a little bit of custom stuff too once in a while I do for like paddling teams and stuff like that so bigger orders yeah we like to put honoring the teams and putting their names on their club names on their their leggings or whatever pieces they want and trying to customize it to their colors their their theme and really having people be able to have a variety of things to choose from but personalize it so I know you have some collaborations here you wanted to talk about I'm really excited so in London we will have some lao hala pieces some woven pieces and my good friend P. E. Alii Hawaii he made I asked him if he could make a CAE which is for these belts that will grace the tops and the waistlines of some of my models as well as I'm chokers chokers for people to use on their necks obviously so yeah so I'm really excited to bring him up there with me in this form and when I get back from London we will be doing a Pacific Hawaii fashion show at a Kapiolani hotel on September 27th and we will be doing MAMO wearable art show in Maui in October and Oahu at the Hawaii Convention Center in in November and then I will be showcasing another good friend of mine in her artwork and her husband they do hui lao holes which is the hair picks and wooden pieces that will be jewelry for the models let's take a look at one of your fashion shows from the past okay get some video on that yeah that this is MAMO wearable art show and was this last year this was actually a two years ago this was one of the things that I tried to put on the runway first and foremost is more traditional wear the model the women pieces really honoring our culture first and foremost before we get into more contemporary and modern pieces and then I know we kind of jump into the next areas of the fashion show I kind of more trending things that are a little bit more modern yeah you went from there yeah yeah interesting enough when I was invited by London Pacific fashion week they actually kind of asked them I'm like okay are you looking for more artsy more couture more you know what kind of pieces are you looking for I was so happy to hear that they said we just want you for you and just come with what you have some of the pieces that excite them are the leggings the leisure wear the leggings the sports wear even our shoes and so I guess that's something that's not seen all over not yet through fashion yeah well I'd love to hear more of the Mo'olelo and the stories behind and the prints with some of the other images that we have just to kind of share what you were talking about earlier about the why and why it's so important to you to connect through these designs yeah oh this is a very interesting this is done again here at the New Zealand Embassy in Washington DC with our new pieces we have again the coral greens the pinks and the blues this one is the pola poli honoring the forest and they you know one of the biggest things is elements doesn't necessarily have to be rain winds and clouds you know they are we are also connected to particular plants and even stones in our land and the pola poli was featured here with the new new colors and at the end of the show I I do support Mauna Kea and keeping our sacred places sacred and so it was really nice to be able to stand next to our models and Mauna again pola poli so you can see the same design just being put in so many different pieces of clothing and that's one thing I really pride in through Poma Hina designs is you can get any design on any type of accessory or clothing that I have and this is another new piece it's a hoodie dress and so comfortable and I did it for our young you know when the kids go to school and their teachers say wear an aloha dress and they're like we don't want to wear a muumu and I'm like who says that's aloha dress like an aloha wear like you can wear these kinds of things too it's how you express yourself I believe how you stand how you share that breath with somebody else that's aloha yeah so many of your patterns you guys you were mentioning can be on any piece that you've designed what have been some of like the biggest challenges that you've had you know not only are you doing business in Hawaii you're doing business on the island of Molokai I know you went through Mauna Ups cohort too so you know what kinds of challenges have you have you encountered and how have you kind of overcome them yeah actually to be honest technology is the big thing right if my machine breaks down I have nobody to come and service them that's like you gotta like you've got to be resourceful innovative you gotta know where to go and figure things out on your own so that's probably the biggest challenge aside from that is the networking and meeting people for that growth so I'm really appreciative of Mauna Ups and being part of the cohort too because through Mauna Ups I was able to learn about more about taxes learn about importing learn about exporting you know being able to meet people who are in the in the industry whether they through whether it's through PR or through manufacturing or through different stores and outlets yeah Mauna Ups has really created a space for me to grow in that manner and to meet other people and something that I could never do from Molokai and to reach out you know hey look at me it's not like that it's I feel weird doing it so it was great to have these classes and to be put in this space we love having you yeah so I know we're about to wrap up and you got London Fashion Week coming when is that how can our local community support you so London Fashion Week is September 13th we we will be showcased at 8 8 p.m. in London which I believe is 12 hours ahead so I think it's 8 a.m. here in Hawaii KHON2 Live has the exclusive on that so I hope that people tune in and watch that and at the end of the show we will be singing Kuhua Ahio and I'm really hoping that we all from wherever we're at I hope you guys join me in singing Kuhua Ahio and for more information we will keep updating our Instagram which is Poma Hina Designs as well as our Facebook Poma Hina Designs amazing well I'm just so proud of you and just I can't wait to see what happens with Poma Hina Designs after London Fashion Week I know you said you know people come there from all over the world to see what's what's happening next and really seeing how Hawaii really is at the center point for so much of fashion these days just just really excited for you and and excited to see what's going to happen next so be sure to check you out at Poma Hina Designs and what does Poma Hina mean? Poma Hina is the the moon that shines so brightly it's the one thing that everybody in the world can see even in darkness there's that little bit of light. Well thanks Kanolani with Poma Hina Designs for joining us today mahalo meli


What comes in nursing school explained in today's video on disaster management and mass casualties? Typically in nursing or in the medical field in general, we want to attend to the patient that is the most critical or the most unstable first. However, when there is a mass casualty, when there are many victims and this can be due to any kind of disaster that might be a train that derailed. An earthquake or really most recently some hospitals also had to go into disaster management mode with the recent outbreak of COVID and the sheer number of patients that arrived in critical condition to their hospital. But typically when we talk about a mass casualty event, it's very different from normal triage where we usually attend to the most critical patients first. In disaster management, the principle of utilitarianism applies, which means that we are going to do the greatest number of good for the greatest number of people. So unfortunately, patients that are the most unstable that would usually require a high level or a high number of resources are the least priority because we have so many victims that we're dealing with. So the priorities really change and most counties have a protocol that they follow for mass casualties and there are usually drills where the county as a whole or maybe just a city practices this mass casualty response so that they are prepared in case a disaster happens. The most commonly used strategy or approach here is called START, which is simple triage and rapid treatment. And really when it comes to mass casualties, there are three parameters that are assessed in 60 seconds or less. So very quickly, we are assessing the patient's respirations, their perfusion and their mental status. So those are the only three parameters that matter. Everything else that we know about how we usually prioritize our patient care goes out the window in a mass casualty. And there are only two basic interventions that the AMS or first responders will provide and those will be direct pressure to control bleeding, so to deal with the perfusion, or basic airway opening to deal with their respirations. And then clearly we'll constantly re-vigorating and re-triaging the patients based on the available resources in the area and also the patient status because that can always change. And then there are tags, as you can see here, that are labeled red, yellow, green and black and they have a perforation where really we can just attach the tag to the patient, tear off whatever doesn't apply so that the patient now gets categorized with whatever label they've been assigned. And red always means most immediate attention, yellow means delay in care can occur, green is minor injuries that are also called the walking wounded, and then black means the patient is deceased and we're going to not put any more efforts into attempting to save their lives. Now over here there is usually in the field, as from the first responder side, there is usually an incident command center that's on the scene and somebody will be put in charge of dealing and triaging and prioritizing and allocating the resources that are available to this mass casualty. They will be closely working with the MICN, which is the radio nurse, the mobile intensive care nurse, and radio nurses undergo special training so that they are prepared to deal with these mass casualties and then of course they'll closely work together with the hospitals in the area and any other care facilities because maybe there are 500 victims but the hospitals can only take 400 so maybe a lower level of care, maybe like a skilled nursing facility, a rehab facility, maybe they can take the walking wounded and provide this emergency or first aid that is needed so really the whole area will work together to help the people that have suffered from this mass casualty. And so this start simple triage and rapid treatment really number one, all ambulatory victims are moved or they actually are asked to move themselves to a safe area because if they can move, they can usually breathe, there's no immediate threat to life and they are those walking wounded that are automatically labeled as green that can have a definite delay in care. And those will usually, if they need care, take themselves to the hospital. Number two, patients with no respirations. The intervention is to reposition the air reposition the airway like we talked about over here. If the patient is happening after repositioning the airway automatically, they get labeled as black. There is no rescue breathing. There is no CPR because it's going to require a lot of resources to save that one patient when we might be needing to save 499 other patients or victims. If after repositioning the airway, the patient breathes, then if the respiratory rate is greater than 30, so critical, can breathe for greater than two seconds, going back into the profusion here, or they are unable to follow simple commands, mental status exam, then they're categorized as red, so immediate category. And then when their breathing is controlled after repositioning their airway, but they don't fall into these categories, all other patients are in the yellow category, which are the delayed category. And then the incident command post or the incident commander will determine who goes where and again work closely with the MICN because one hospital might say, I can take three reds, five yellows and 15 greens. The next hospital might say I can take five reds, two yellows and 25 greens. So you get my drift here, it depends on the availability and so really everybody that's involved in managing this from the scene as well as the different hospitals in the area, everybody works closely together to get the greatest number of good to the greatest number of people, to save the greatest number of people from this mass casualty. So the main point here is to remember that it's very different from a basic triage where usually we attend to the most critically ill patient first when mass casualties, we don't have the luxury, we only have limited resources. And if the patient has no breathing after we repositioning the airway, automatically we consider them in the black category. So thank you for watching this video on mass casualties and disaster management. Please also watch the other video on triaging where I go into the details of assigning a patient an emergency severity index and also my ER and trauma assessment videos where I go into the details of how we assess a patient when it's not a mass casualty. Thanks for watching this video. Please follow me on Instagram. Subscribe here on YouTube. Give me a thumbs up if you enjoyed this video and I'll see you soon here on Nursing School Explained. Thanks for watching.


Okay, we're back. We're live. We're here in America. And this is Energy in America. And we have Jeff Kissel, Distinguished Fellow at EPRINC, Energy Policy Research. What is it, Jeff? Energy Policy Research? Foundation. Foundation. Okay, there's Jeff. And we're talking to him on Skype. And we love having him on our show. We love talking about energy with him. Welcome back to the show, Jeff. Thanks, Lou. I just put my paddle down here at Laguna Beach and came in from the ocean so I can talk to you. Thank you very much. Oh, my God, that's dedication. So anyway, so let's talk about, let's talk about Harvey. Everybody's talking about Harvey. We should talk about Harvey, too. We should talk about the effect of Harvey on world markets and the effect of Harvey on Hawaii. So, you know, tell us. We're talking about economics. We're talking about energy. Give us a praisey on what's going to happen now that Harvey has wrecked its havoc. Well, I think it's important for Hawaii to look at it from two perspectives. First, the immediate impact. And second, what would happen to Hawaii if a natural disaster struck closer to home? And that natural disaster, you know, may be physical in terms of storm, maybe political in terms of the current administration, it could be any. So that's what I'd like to talk about today. And that's how I'd like to kind of talk in terms of what we're going to discuss. If you put my little title slide up on the screen, it's understanding the impact of Hurricane Harvey and Hawaii's exposure to world markets. Yeah, we're looking at it now. Hawaii sits in a wonderful place and looks out on beautiful blue Pacific Ocean waves, but it really does play a huge role in and of itself in the world community. And of course, it's impacted by the world community. Whether we like it or not, we're in an interdependent relationship with a lot of places and with the world community, the world economy, certainly the world markets. So, okay, so where do you begin unpacking that, Jeff? Well, let's unpack it first by setting the stage. Hawaii is a vital part of America's defense, not just in the Pacific, but for the continental US. So Hawaii's defense establishment, rightfully, will have a priority on essential materials in the event of a significant disaster. So let's bring this down just for a moment to what's happened with Harvey and the Houston area. And if we go to my second slide, what it is is a quick analysis of what's going on with crude oil as a result of the shutdown of the refineries and the disruption to shipping on the Gulf Coast. Just a footnote to that is that Texas is one of the biggest refinery areas in the country, isn't it? About a third of the nation's refined products are produced in Texas, at the Texas refineries. And they're all close to Houston, right? They're essentially they're on what's called the Houston Ship Channel, which is a waterway that was constructed that is kind of like Route 66 of the inter-coastal waterways. It goes from the coast all the way inland and carries billions and billions of dollars of bulk cargoes, mostly oil in and out of that bay for refining and for conversion to petrochemicals, fertilizers, and other essential products for the economy. So there's got to be a significant effect because of that. It's enormous. What you're seeing here on this first slide, though, is if you look at it on the surface, you say, okay, Houston shut down for a while. That's backed up crude oil. So that lowered the price of crude oil. But what really happened was it raised the price of refining products. Now, eventually, the demand supply balance, and we're talking about a week, not months or years, is going to kind of come back. And the demand for crude oil and crude oil products and natural gas is going to return to its normal levels. And not much is going to happen. So our listeners and viewers are going to see crude oil prices remain relatively stable as the result of Harvey. That is not the time to relax. You know, this is kind of like the duck.  And you've got to look at the snippers to figure this thing out. Because it's not the crude oil, which is what the benchmark is in world markets, especially for Hawaii. It's the refined products. So let's go to the next slide. And you see my little gas pumps there. Oil is made up of crude oil is refined into a lot of different products. Gasoline supplies have been interrupted as a result of this event. You recall hearing that the colonial pipeline was shut down. That's the main artery to carry gasoline from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast. Asia then becomes a secondary supplier. Because you've got to get the products moving into the markets. If you're out of gas, you want gas today. You don't want to wait a few weeks or five weeks. Remember Hawaii is dependent on Asia for oil imports. Right. We take Indonesian oil, right? It's all over Asia. And that's where most Alaskan oil is no longer coming to Hawaii in any reasonable quantity. So it's coming from Asia. It's coming from a little bit from Saudi Arabia, not very much anymore. And some of it's coming from South America, but again, not very much anymore because of the troubles in Venezuela. More importantly, Hawaii is totally dependent on Asia for its low salt or fuel oil that it uses to make the bulk of the energy that is consumed is electricity and corn. So Hawaii's prices, if you consider what happened after Katrina, which was a similar kind of event, Hawaii's electricity prices are likely to increase. Hawaii's gasoline and transportation fuel prices are likely to increase. Yes. Jet fuel prices are likely to increase, but that shouldn't really affect Hawaii very much in this case because the airlines are flying full and people are not as price sensitive to airline ticket prices as they were before. But again, look beneath the surface. Let's look at the next slide and see what happened after Katrina. After Katrina, crude oil prices remain stable. This is 2005. It was a long time ago in our standard.  We can deal with that. Power fuel prices went up by 50%. That hits Hawaii's working population right in the wallet. And that's the cost of your electric bill, is that right? Exactly right. It hits Hawaii's small businesses very, very hard. They can't raise prices to recover that. It hits Hawaii's government institutions, schools. Any institution that is dependent on electricity for air conditioning for utilities, it hits them very, very hard. But then Hawaii is dependent on its next largest industry outside of government construction. Take a look at what happened after Katrina to Gypsum for a drywall, 150%. Wow. And that's the drywall we see incorporated in every construction project. Every construction project is underway. Construction steel, these are rebars and steel reinforcing beams and the like up 65%. Lumber up 125% for framing homes. Construction labor, because Hawaii has to import a lot of its construction labor because it lacks the specialty skills that it once had when it had other industries that were supporting these skilled people. 30% and specialty trade labor, welders, machinists, people who were master pipe fitters, 175% after Katrina. So explain to me why those last three items, that is lumber and construction labor costs, increased so much after Katrina and how that's connected to Katrina. The United States, like so many places, is part of the global economy and it doesn't continuously produce enough of these raw materials to satisfy its own needs. So if you have a massive event like Katrina that destroyed thousands and thousands of homes in New Orleans, the demand for all of this spite, the crisis spite, you take Katrina's damage to New Orleans, which is a relatively small city without a huge industrial. And you multiply that by a factor of 10, 15, or 20. That's what Houston and the surrounding area is all about. This kind of logic is very solid. It seems to me and it also seems to me that you can draw the conclusion that we're going to have a worse time following Harvey than we did Katrina and it's going to affect us in profound ways. But I guess the question I would put to you, Jeff, is when? When are we going to see these kinds of effects happening in our market here in Hawaii? It's happening right now because the shipping capacity has been diverted to Houston and the Gulf Coast. So even though we have dedicated shipping to Hawaii from the West Coast, those containers are going empty because they can't fill them with the necessary supplies. Home Depot is diverting its drywall to the Gulf Coast. Home Depot and Lowe's are diverting their lumber to the Gulf Coast. So the price of these materials is about to rise significantly as the current inventories are sold off in Hawaii. The Asian shipping that used to come directly from China to Hawaii is being diverted on a temporary basis to the Gulf Coast. The construction projects underway are bid at fixed prices because everybody thought that inflation was low and construction costs were going to remain stable. Well, the price of these materials are going way up and the contractors are getting squeezed. And if what is happening here on the West Coast happens to Hawaii, you're going to see construction contractors and financial trouble. You're going to see prices for home renovations that people thought might be $150 or $200 a square foot jumps to $350. And that's going to impact cost of living in Hawaii. Right now, people are buying water in Florida by the case lot because they cannot get it. Well, guess what? That's diverting water from markets like the West Coast where I live, bottled water, of course, and water from where Hawaii is. This is hurricane season in Hawaii. People hopefully have already laid in a supply of essential goods, including some water. So it's really important to understand this is not an event that occurred 6,000 miles away. This is an event that impacts Hawaii today just as surely as the sun and the tides and the surf do every single day in Hawaii on the shores. I don't think people realize this, Jeff. I think this is revelation, what you're talking about. It's kind of a scoop on what's going to happen in the future. And I'd be really interested if you could sort of draw, at least in words, the chart. Does this start and go straight up logarithmically? Does it start slow and reach a peak?  And I suppose also, big question is, how long do we have to live at these high prices? When is it going to come down and what factors play in there?  We're all kind of resilient in our personal lives. Somebody dents our car, we're okay, you can send it to the shop. Somebody dents both our cars. Somebody damages our house. You know, it compounds. Well, unfortunately, what's going on today is we had clarity, we've got Irene, we've got Jose, and we've got yet another storm forming out in the Atlantic, headed for the United States, Maine. We don't know what storms are in the Pacific now that might hit for a while. So the compounding effect is what could hurt us, not pass the decision. We're going to weather this storm in the classic sense. You know, maybe it'll be a month, maybe it'll be three months, maybe it'll be six months. And maybe, yeah, overall, it'll raise the cost of doing business in Hawaii five to seven percent if it's just the effects of Harvey. But if it's the effects of Harvey, Jose, Irene, and some storm in the Pacific, it's really important to remind everyone that it's time to prepare. And it's time to prepare both physically and economically. Oh yeah, that's what it sounds like. Well, let's take a short break. My head hurts from this. And I want to take a moment to, you know, for some relief. We'll come back in a minute with Jeff Kissel, a distinguished fellow at E-prink. And we'll talk some more about Harvey's effect, not only on global markets, but on Hawaii itself. Pretty scary. We'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Freedom, is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea? At Dive Heart, we believe freedom is all of these and more. Regardless of your ability, Dive Heart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and defy gravity. Since 2001, Dive Heart has helped children, adults, and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before. Dive Heart has helped them transition to their new normal. Search diveheart.org and share our mission with others. And in the process, help people of all abilities imagine the possibilities in their lives. Okay, this is Think Tech. This is energy in America, but energy in America has a distinct effect on Hawaii. And we have Jeff Kissel, who is a distinguished fellow at the E-prink Research Foundation. And he's telling us something that we didn't know. He's telling us about effects that we are going to feel that we are already feeling from the impact of Harvey and other storms. So this is really important to understand. We are not in a vacuum. We are not alone. And we are not in any way, you know, protected from the global cumulative effect of these storms here in climate change. So Jeff, back to you. We were talking about the cumulative effect. We were talking about how this all works together. Can you describe, you know, the process by which this accumulation of effects takes place? We already talked about the fact that we have the shortage of construction materials. Construction slows down. The price goes up. We have a shortage of labor. Labor slows down. The price goes up. But you know, if we have two, three, or four storms, and we get one through Hawaii, that's when the old adage that you can make, you know, the successful parachute should jump, or has to jump all 100 times perfectly. 99 times makes enough effort. So that's the issue right now. If there are problems, and those problems compound, and we're not prepared, remember three things. First, the Korean Peninsula is unscable, and Hawaii is a first line of defense against the problems of instability in Asia. Hawaii's military will have a first claim on essential resources. And that's a hard fact that everyone has to kind of understand. Remember two. And that is so whether or not there's actually a debacle. That is so in the preparation. That is so in the military buildup that I would expect to happen now with all these increased tensions and threats. So we don't have to have a war. All we have to do is have the prospect of war, and those resources are going to be drawn down by military that's right here. It's a very good point. Thank you. The second, and you will recall, of course, when the Asia Pacific Conference was in Hawaii, they stacked up container after container of essential supplies, water, powdered milk, powdered eggs, and the like. Inflated like to be a mining park. It was inconspicuous, but it was there. And if something had happened, those supplies were going to go to the delegates, not the population. Yeah, right. It's Hawaii has a very large population of people who need assistance. These are people made of Hawaiians, Micronesians, people who are disadvantaged. These people will deserve it, require essential care. And their needs must be met by a relatively small number of resident individuals in Hawaii. And the third thing to remember is that Hawaii already has an allocation formula for essential resources in the event of a severe emergency. People need to familiarize public knowledge. People need to familiarize themselves as to where they stand in the event they need help and they need to know how to get it. Well, you know, it strikes me that we have a fragile economy to start. We have a polarization of wealth. We have great disparities here. We have some people who are living on the edge from, I would say paycheck to paycheck, but sometimes it's not even a paycheck to paycheck. They're homeless and they have no money. We have people who can hardly afford to buy food. And when we start adding dramatic changes to the prices, when we start adding, you know, supply shortages as you're talking about, that's going to put all kinds of stress on our economy and our social fabric, don't you think? Well, take a look at the next slide because it's possible we don't even have a choice. Look at what, look at, and these are statistics that are published by the Hawaii state government. There was an article in today's West Hawaii Journal that talked about. So look at, look at this, the, the day's supply of food stocks on the left side of my chart. Got five, five days worth of eggs. Well, people can say I can go without eggs. Okay. 10 days worth of fresh produce. 18 to 20 days of fresh meat. 15 days of bottled water and 30 days of grains and cereal. Think about that. You know, you're in a desert. You run out of water. You've got five days to live. You may be fine through the fourth day, but in the sixth day, you're dead. You know, these, these are, these are real numbers. And there are, this is really serious, you know. And not only that, let me add this thought, that these expectations from the state government, you know, they may be not completely accurate. And they may be, if you look at it from a realistic point of view, even a pessimistic point of view, they won't even last this long. And so these, these shortages will appear very quickly after they begin to appear. That's exactly right. And you remember, it takes oil to pump water into your house. We have 20 to 25 days of fuel on the island. Once we run out of that fuel, the water stops. So even if, you know, even if you can survive the, the generation, the fuel that it proved and make that go further, less than a month after the event occurred without electricity, without pumping stations, there is no water. And, you know, there are people who are dependent on medication. Nobody knows how much prescription medication is available in the life of somebody that has, has bothered to study that seriously. But we know for sure, the FDA has already told us, there are fewer than 10 days of generic medications in Hawaii based on the, they can support consumption rate. Well, you know, you can, you can stock up on eggs and produce, you can stock up on water, but it's hard to stock up on generic medications because you may need a prescription for that. So I mean, this leads us to a discussion of what, what to do, what to do. Because not only do we have, you know, Harvey, not, and the other storms you mentioned, and what was the one that's brewing now in the Caribbean? And Jose, we have the possibility of a storm right here at home, such as, such as the ones we've had in the past, which could wreak havoc on Oahu, which they missed in the past. So when you put all of that together, what the picture you're describing could be worse.  But I don't know how, I don't know how that would work. Does Safeway have a supply now that people could use to store these critical, critical supplies at home? Well, you've got to, you've got to buy them when they're available. You know, we're way beyond filling up the tank, buying rice and toilet paper. This is, this is real serious stuff here. So that's, I mean, that's an important message coming out of a hurricane, Harvey. And if you go to my last little slide, I kind of summarized the total economic impact on, on what could occur, even if there is no disruption to Hawaii from a direct hit from a storm or some other event. So you've got to consider the cost. And that's, that's money out of Hawaii's economy. We can sit here and say, oh, crude oil prices aren't going up, but product prices certainly met. Shipping costs that rise because of the availability of cargo and competition for fuel from the Gulf Coast in our own Asian marketplaces is likely to raise the cost of electricity and transportation. So your message earlier a minute ago about keep the reserve of food and water at home is spot on check. Yeah. Well, you know, one other thing I wanted to ask you is let's assume that people in government, government officials, elected officials are listening or somehow aware of this process you're describing, these risks you're describing. What should they do? Talk to them for a minute. Will you, Jeff? Well, you know, Hawaii has one of the most caring and concerned governments I've had experience with it on a personal level, both in the utility business and elsewhere. Hawaii has a very caring and concerned government. They are making plans. They are doing the things that they are in the best interest of Hawaii. But this is a tiny little speck of land in the middle of a great big ocean. And government can't do it all. The individuals and people who live in Hawaii have to do it for themselves. And in doing it for themselves, they'll be able to help one another in the community, which is the spirit that we all have cherished, living in Hawaii and working in Hawaii and raising families there. Jeff, I think that's such an important point that, you know, when it comes down to it, and this to some extent is happening in Texas, is we've got to be working together. We've got to care about our fellow human being. We've got to, you know, we've got to have aloha, deep aloha to deal with crises like this, whether they be the storm or the aftermath of the impact of the storm. We in Hawaii, we are isolated. We have to find aloha together. We can never forget that. When we forget that, we're at much greater risk, don't you think? Absolutely, Jay. And, you know, if there's a single message that comes out of our discussion today, it's prepare not just for yourself, but for you as a part of the whole community. Yeah. Well, thank you, Jeff Kissell. It's been great talking with you. This is so important what you've said, and it's a really valuable analysis you've made. We are indebted to you for your suggestions, your thoughts, your analysis today. Greatly appreciate you coming on the show. It's been my pleasure. I hope to be back there soon to do this in person. Yes, sir. Count on it. Be well, Jeff. Aloha.