when you are watching theCUBE live in New York City for special presentation, Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. Again, live in New York City, 100 yards away from the Javits Center where Strada had Dupas going on in conjunction with Big Data NYC, our event here. We're getting all the action covered in all the event. Our next guests are from IBM, Rob Thomas, Vice President of Product Development, Analytics, and Joel Horowitz, VP of Marketing Analytics. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you guys. John, great to see you. Thanks. IBM's all over in the news. Obviously we saw the big announcement last week. AI, Watson's the flagship. You know, everyone relates to the Jeopardy. I always roll my eyes, yeah, there's the Jeopardy, you know, but that's common. People can relate to that. Analytics is huge, right? Obviously you guys know that. We've talked about that. Hadoop is under the hood. There's some action going on that are powering the future of analytics, which what we talked about in our intro is the key to value, which is the decisions. They're asking the right questions. Automation. These are things that we've talked about in the past. So what is the big thing going on this year under the hood in the ecosystem from a technology perspective? Rob, I'll first shoot up to you. What is the key enabler now? Is it more confusing? Is it consolidating? Are people going to be spun off out of the ecosystem? Will people die from acquisitions? Give us the data. So my view, when I go talk to clients, I talk about a big data maturity curve that kind of says, look at what we've been doing for the last five years. Many clients started with, we're looking at data, and it's just about reducing the cost of storage. And then they started saying, can we extend our warehouse? And now we're kind of at the inflection point where now it's about line of business analytics and applications. And then taking that a step further, how do you start to build business models around data? So it's been a major change and we've slowly moved along that curve. So what does that mean in terms of technology? Hadoop is commoditizing. It's becoming the storage layer. That's pretty evident. The reason we've made such a significant bet on Spark while Hadoop is about storage, and that's an important part of the architecture, Spark is about analytics. So Spark moves you faster along that maturity curve. So when we get to talking about clients, like we talked about Independence Blue Cross, who's working with us on Spark, totally changing the way they do it, analytics of patients, of who is at risk to return to the hospital as an example. Spark is what enables that analytics. It's not about just storing the data. So I've got to ask you, should they just call this Spark World? I mean, they changed the name of the show from Hadoop World to Strata Hadoop. Strata being O'Reilly Media's show. But in reality, the conversations are not just Hadoop, it's beyond Hadoop at this point. I mean, did you agree to that? So I think they should change the name of it, but when the main sponsors are Hadoop-only companies, then sometimes you end up with that name. But yeah, certainly if it was an industry conference, it would probably be focused on Spark or analytics at this point, because Hadoop is, it's a key part. Less than 30% of companies have adopted Hadoop. So it's a great way to store data, but there's a lot of data in other places. So it's just a fraction of the picture. We're of age, we just put out some data just on Twitter, just saying the adoption trends are increasing pilots, but slow production growth. Are you guys seeing that, Joel? What are you seeing out in the field? I mean, that's essentially a gesture from Merv saying look at the data just as a support, rapid production at the scale people thought in terms of the TAM to Rob's point about the Hadoop vendors dominating the event. The reality is different. Yeah, I mean Rob's point is accurate. Hadoop is kind of becoming more of a storage environment. Although people sometimes miss name, how they call Hadoop, it's actually a much broader ecosystem as we all know. It's not simply a file system, it's actually a full community of a lot of different capabilities. And so I think what I'm seeing is that Spark is accelerating actually Hadoop and actually bringing a lot of the other data capabilities along with it like other NoSQL databases like CloudIn, DashDB that we have on Bluemix, a number of other key data services that are coming into the scene because of Spark's pull. So I think you brought up the fact that we opened Watson in the Valley and I think that's telling. I think you're seeing a lot of innovation happening there. It's the epicenter of Spark in my opinion, which is why we opened up the Spark Technology Center there. So it's exciting and I'm really excited because of what Spark is enabling not just the developers to do, but a much broader community. Rob, I want to ask you a question because I've been putting out this conversation thesis kind of out in the open, public kind of open source way as, you know, mutually exclusive notion of horizontally scalable versus scale up versus scale out or vertically integrated. There is a huge trend for diversity where the demand from the customer base is, hey, I want scale out because it gives me good price performance and I have our large scale systems to run stuff but I also want vertically integrated or scale up point solutions, whether it's engineered or not. They don't want to get into the nuances of the religion of scale up, scale out. So I got to ask you, when you talk to customers, how do you lead that conversation with the big data holistic picture and how does that relate to this thesis that we're kind of kicking around as, does it really matter scale up or scale out? Is that just going to be an integrated model? I mean, what's your view on that and what's the customer reality? So I don't know that that really matters from a customer perspective because where we take the dialogue, think back about the maturity curve I described. The value in line of business analytics and in creating new business models comes from machine learning, which is why we contributed system ML to open source. We're working with Databricks on that is because the analytics is ultimately about machine learning. What are you actually doing with the data? Scale up, scale out is, it's probably really interesting for the guy running the cloud environment but it doesn't necessarily change the outcome or the insight that a client's getting. Our focus is much more on how do we start to get to distinct outcomes? Joel talked about the announcements last week with Watson West. I mean, Watson is the preeminent cognitive system where you can start to glean insights. You bring human features, add that to machine learning. You can deliver totally different outcomes. And so I think that's where the discussion should shift to more than what's the architecture for the environment. That's important for us as we support clients but that's not the discussion I see clients wanting to have. Yeah, and the other observation we're seeing here is that Hadoop ecosystem over the past six years, we've been covering it. It just seems to be puttering along. I haven't seen a real game changing move from the Hadoop vendors now. You said it's more of an integrated solution with Spark. You're seeing that accelerated but now it's other things that are going on around Hadoop. So I have to ask you, one of them is machine learning, right? So everyone's bolting on machine learning into their announcements these days. So as a customer, how do I figure out who's got the real deal for machine learning? Rob, you're a technologist, so if I'm machine learning washing, just throwing machine learning onto my platform, say, hey, we've got machine learning, we're good. We're going to have neural networks, we're going to have all this cognitive science. So you guys have been there for a while. I mean, I'll see IBM has that. How does a customer decide who's got what? What's real, what's not? So you have to make it very easy for clients to get on board that train. So just this month, we announced that we've released a set of SPSS analytic algorithms that now run directly on Spark. And so what we take is thousands of data scientists that know SPSS really well, they can now run those algorithms on Spark, which opens up a whole different corpus of data for them to go after. That is machine learning, that is advanced analytics, but it's helping them take steps in that direction. Now Joel's leading some work for us, I'll let him comment around really a three day camp that we call Data Palooza, which will be about training the next set of data scientists. Joel, do you want to talk about that for a minute? Is there music involved in this? Oh yeah, there is. Okay, good. I think that my email, look at my spam folder, hold on, let me check. No, you're going to love it. We actually hired the band called Big Data, I don't know if you've heard of these guys, but they're awesome. And they'll be joining us on November 10th through the 12th at Galvanize, where we made our Spark announcement earlier this year. We have a full three day session with a full three day event. Where's that going to be? Galvanize in San Francisco. We have like 20 sessions signed up. It's a community event, it's not just IBM. You know, we have AMP Lab involved. We have, you know, TypeSafe involved. We have a lot of really great people who are joining us. And that's a certification or just self-training? Is it going to be teacher led, instructor led? Yeah, it's a little bit of both. So we are taking up the whole space of Galvanize, as you know, it's a big space. So we have the first two floors that are just going to be led by the professionals and the experts in the field talking about various topics in this analytics area. Let's talk about the strat. We were, we covered the Spark announcements huge. Yeah. Great event. How is that going and can compare and contrast or add up to that conversation in the streaming conversation? Because now software is all integrated Rob is teasing about machine learning. You got streaming, you got big data with Spark, you got the Hadoop for the storage layer. How is it all coming together? Give us the update. Rob, do you want to give an update on that one? So I'd mention one thing. So we're making a couple of big announcements this week with some new products. One is called Big Integrate. And there is big quality. And the idea is these are data ingestion engines that really change how you get the right data into Hadoop. And to your point, there hasn't been a lot of evolution in the ecosystem. It's true. We see clients struggle with this forever in terms of how they're building out data lakes. And so what we found is most data lakes are turning into data swamps, which is now there's a huge corpus of unusable data. And so Big Integrate and the big quality are about how you ingest data faster and how you ingest data in a known structure. So you actually know what's there. And it's in a form that it's usable. And so I see different pieces starting to come together.  It effectively is. If you think about what Splunk has had success with, with the log files, that's catapulted their business.  Essentially machine log data is hard to cut through. I like that. Big Integrate and big quality equals big cleanup. It is though. Because that's where people are running into trouble along the maturity curve is they do it because they feel like it's the right thing. But then suddenly it becomes unusable and you hand that to a data scientist that we've trained through some of my data Palooza and they don't even know what to do with it. And so this is about really streamlining how you ingest data, how you work with data. You know, one of the roles we talked about when we did the Spark launch was not only are app developers and data scientists, but there's data engineers. These are the people that make sure the data is in the right place at the right time. It's an important role in companies that we see. Because we always want to get the competitive angle. How do you guys view yourselves vis-a-vis the competition? Again, how you mentioned briefly Splunk, there's a variety of others out there putting out big solutions. What do you guys bring to the table and how do you guys differentiate versus the competition? Well, we're number one in Spark. Nobody's made it an investment that even touches what we're doing in Spark. And in terms of the traction that we have with clients, it's enormous.  It's nice to see some other people that have joined the Spark bandwagon recently. At SAP, some made some announcements, which was good. Cloudera made some announcements. But I think we're still the only company that has a holistic view around Spark, which is not just about running on Hadoop. It's about a unifying force to access data. So we think we have a pretty unique point of view. Contributions, we've made an open source are unique and the investment is untouched by anybody. I'd like to get you guys both your takes on a comment I heard from our opening. If you're not inside the tornado, you're going to be spun out, talking about some of the vendors that aren't getting profitable and or might not have the right product market fit for that as the big data analytics markets and clouds exploding into. So the question is, is that you guys have been kind of interesting.  Same time you've been doing a lot of work in the trenches with developers, the AMP lab you mentioned with Spark. So you're kind of seeing the ecosystem in the trenches, developer community. What is that new formula in the ecosystem? What do people need to think about from a vendor standpoint, whether you're a startup, private company, or big guy, to solve the customer's needs?  I mean, that's my words, but I'm just paraphrasing what I'm seeing, which is, guys, go faster, pedal faster. Integrated, I don't want to have a religious architectural argument. I need solutions, I need a platform that's going to scale up and scale out. Yeah, it's hard. I mean, I think for people who are selling point solutions or they're focused on a very narrow slice of the overall big data pie, I think it's very challenging. And I think you see a number of vendors partnering up to get traction, right? Because doing it on your own is really challenging. I think what I've seen, I was at a client just the other day where they were actually working with Spark to make data access a lot better and then complimenting that with some of our Watson APIs on BlueMakes. And so you see this kind of gap that exists between kind of the data engineering piece and then the application building piece. And I think in general, it's really hard to bridge that gap. And I think where our focus is, is making really strong contributions and investments into the development community and the open source community. But at the same time, continuing to work hand in hand with our installed base, right, with our clients. Rob, I want to get your take specifically on the question around what does IBM offer a startup or growing company in terms of a Lego block architecture? Some IP. I mean, we saw at one of the HP events where columnar store stuff from Vertica, you have venture backed companies, companies getting venture backed by OEMing their kind of engine. You never would have saw that 10 years ago. Whoa, you can't OEM someone's technology. But in a Lego block architecture, their value shifts on top of that. So that brings up the notion of there is a now collaborative model from a technology perspective. What are you guys offering out to the community that people can build on? So we've been investing for about a year in a new division called Cloud Data Services. And the whole idea is how do we take all of the data capabilities we have and start to stitch those together as a set of composable services. So any application can be built on top of that and can use a NoSQL data store or can use Hadoop or can use Spark or can use a traditional MPP data warehouse. There's not many companies that can do that at scale. And we started opening that up to the open source community. We've had over a thousand people come use our Spark service since we launched it. This is called Spark service? Yeah, that's Spark service on Bluemix. And it's been, it's still in beta. It's incredible uptake. But I think the value people see is not only is it a stable service, but you can integrate it with things like an MPP warehouse. You can integrate it with Hadoop. You can integrate it with something like Cloudant.  So that's what we're doing for those types of companies is bringing them a level of scale and capability that they could, that they could really never get on. Of course you're doing the stuff with open source in Spark. But this teases out the new developer model. I mean, this is not like just write pure code. This is a mix and match. This is an integration game. Yes. Which is an engineering game. Not so much just a systems integration, but like real engineering. And we want to take over that integration heavy lifting. I mean, the other piece of the puzzle here is what we're doing with Watson analytics as an example. People that use Watson analytics spend a lot of their time right now just trying to get the data together. And if we can provide this fluid data layer, which we're doing, it makes getting started with something like Watson analytics that much quicker. So you're looking at as enabling platform. Yes. You look at your role and your group as to enable solutions on top of it without lock in. Yes. I mean, some lock in I guess, but it's a hard and top. Well, the idea is these are composable services. So if there's another service that you want to use, which may be from a third party, this is open to anybody, then that's fine with us. But our point is, if you bring it to a place, it's the company that really knows data. Explain that use of user composable services. Explain that notion to the folks out there. So think about it this way. Today or in traditional world, if you want an MPP database, you've got to go buy hardware, install an MPP database, ETL data in. So what if instead that capability was just available as a service on the cloud? So you don't need hardware. You don't need to provision anything. You don't need to move data. It's just there. It's a callable API and you can use it. It totally changes the nature of how you do analytics. And so what we're doing with cloud data services, we're saying we're going to take all of that off your plate as the small company or as the client and let you focus on how you're going to get value out of your data. And then you start to bring in things like machine learning and algorithms that they can pick out of a library. It becomes very powerful. Joel, I want to get your perspective Rob can chime in to Andy Jassy from Amazon. I had dinner with him last month at the Linux conference and he said Redshift is a fast growing service on his cloud. And that's essentially just commoditizing the data warehouse business. And his whole point is that they're lowering it down to a price point that's huge gap from where the existing incumbents were. So how do you guys see that market for IBM? Because everyone we talked to is like that is just the low hanging fruit from a disruption standpoint. Are customers looking for a new cloud way to do data warehousing? Is that the easiest path? Are you seeing something similar to that with your business? Yeah, I think what Rob just pointed out is exactly right. I think it's a symptom, it's not necessarily the cause when I hear comments like that. I think what we're after is really about reaching new communities. And if you look at where the emerging communities and the emerging interest is coming from, areas like IoT is really big. So you're watching, where is the new data coming from? Then I think that's a really big place, which is why we've made a huge investment there as well. So I think part of the thing that Amazon did early was getting in with the developer crowd way early on, and that's leading to other adjacent interests. Well that flexibility, they have a flexibility, I've always loved the flexibility store. That resident, I love this idea of service, use of composable services. That gives you flexibility. But the price points are so ridiculously level. I mean, you talk about MPP database. It's true, but you also get what you pay for, right? I mean, our data warehouse business is growing very well. And that's because there's a class of workloads that, you know, Park Cell was not a successful company, right? So we all know why that is. So they put up a nice service, but if you think about first class workloads in a retailer, or a bank, or an insurance company, that's not going to redshift, because you need a level of performance that you can't get there. You need a level of reliability in the system. So there's clearly a market there, and we're participating there. And we're seeing system Z with Linux now. I mean, you're seeing a shift. Now, nothing's going away really. At the end of the day, it's all going to be use case driven, right? It's all, to me, it's all about the maturity curve, right? If you're, if it's as simple as I want to reduce costs for this type of workload, something like, you know, a cloud warehouse that you describe is really good for that. But we're bringing, you know, what we do on the enterprise level, we're bringing that to the cloud. And that's why DashDB is the top performing data. You guys done a good job with your acquisitions and your product stuff. Congratulations on all that work. I do want to ask a point of question for the folks out there watching. What is the common thing that you see out there that's a misguided principle, or just a rumor, or just a kind of off the rails concept that people think is actually happening? So in other words, what's the reality of the market? What are people, what a couple things out that's happening in this world that people are reading about in the press, that isn't real? And this market is very hot, we know that. Big data analytics. What are some of the myths that are out there that need to be debunked? I have just one short comment. I think there's a myth that all machine learning is created equal. I think that, you know, there are a ton of new machine learning entrants coming onto the market that are basically either, A, developing like really low level custom solutions, or they're, you know, selling their version of a machine learning library. I think what we're going to see is a convergence, like we saw in the early days of SQL. And I think to me, that harkens back to what we did with system L. That to me is a big myth right now. And people are propagating this myth that our machine learning is better than that person's machine learning. When in fact, we need a standard kind of foundation. So they're building on machine learning into their messaging. Kind of say, hey, we're actually learning. Yeah, exactly. So I see that as kind of a big kind of thing going on. Rob, what's your take on myths out there that the customers are buying into that may or may not be true, or just kind of directionally not on the right track? I think adoption of new technologies is a bit of a myth right now. So certainly there's a set of companies where technology is being adopted like crazy. Ours is one of those. Then you've got the long tail of companies who claim we're growing 30, 40%. I mean, they're growing from $1,000 to $1,400. We double the market share from one to 2%. So adoption is not happening as fast as people think. The reason for that is there's a skills gap in organizations. There's a big skills gap. And it's about, most enterprises have a lot of IT skills. The problem is that solving the data problem is not necessarily about IT skills. It's about data science skills that we've talked about a bit. So until that skill gap closes, which is a big part of why we decided we were going to go educate a million data scientists, adoption is going to be slow. We want adoption to be fast. It's not as fast as the media perceives right now. Well, good luck, guys. Great job. Any quick update on what's happening as data pollution coming up? What's the highlights for you guys this next quarter, next six months? Sure. So data pollution is in November, but it's actually a world tour. So then we hit 12 or 13 different cities over the next six months. So that will be big. We've got Spark Summit coming up in Amsterdam. We'll have some interesting stuff to talk about there as well as our insight conference in October. So we've got some big news coming soon. We also have a bunch of stuff going on right here at Stratus. So if you happen to be in the New York area for Stratus Hadoop World, come on over. We're doing a couple keynotes. We have a ton of sessions. So come stop by the booth. Final, final question for you, Rob. Biggest learning over the past year in your efforts that you gleaned from your open source, IBM, analytics, it's certainly been a moving train from a product standpoint.  Starting a company is hard, is my learning. So we're in a big company, but what we've done with Spark is we've really built a new company inside of IBM. We've done everything like a standalone company would do in terms of website, hiring, media, you name it. Building a company is hard. I've always heard that, but I've never done it. So it's hard. That's been a big one. I feel like a startup for a big company is also hard as well. It is, yeah. That's an added dimension. Rob Thomas, Vice President of Product Analytics, Jill Horowitz, VP of Marketing here at IBM. We'll be right back with more live in New York for special big data NYC as part of Stratus Hadoop. We'll be right back after this short break.


Myself, Sudhakar Barbade, Assistant Professor, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Walsh and Historic Technology, SolarPort. Today, we will discuss image sharpening operation using spatial filtering. As we know, image enhancement can be done using two different ways, that is, spatial filtering and frequency domain filtering. But today, we will see the spatial filtering, how we can apply for image sharpening used in image enhancement. Learning outcome, at the end of this session, students will be able to apply sharpening algorithms in spatial domain for image enhancement. In this session, we will discuss basics of sharpening filters and there are different types of sharpening filters. Out of that, we will see the first derivative filter, that is, Sobel filter in today's class. Now, let us see the basics of sharpening filters. Sharpening special filters seek to highlight fine detail. That means, to highlight the finite details in the input image, sharpening filters are used and the method used for sharpening is spatial domain filtering, which remove blurring from the images. That is, sharpening operation removes the blurring and highlights edges. Sharpening filters are based on spatial differentiation. So, let us see how we can see the spatial differentiation. Example, this is what the input image and let us see how we can find out the spatial difference of the pixels. So, differentiation measures the rate of change of a function. Let us consider a simple one-dimensional example. So for that, what we need is, we should consider this line between point A and B and let us go from point A to B, that is, from left to right and we observe that the gray level from A to B is changing along this line. For example, here at the leftmost side, the gray level is bright. As we go towards this right side up to this point, the gray level is decreasing and here it has become black. It remains black up to this point. There is a white spot here. Then again it remains black. Then there is a vertical line here that is white. Again it is dark and from this point onwards the gray value of the pixels along this line is white. So we observe that there is a rate of change of pixel intensity from A to B that is represented by this gray level profile. If you assume this pixel is represented by using three bits, that means it has got eight different gray levels that is represented by this 0 to 7. If you look at this image strip, we observe that here pixel value is 5. Then next is also 5. Then 4, 3, 2, 1, it is decreasing. As we go after 1, it has become 0, 0 means it has become now dark and after some length the white spot is coming that is why it has increased to 6. Again this white spot is over then again it remains dark. So that is why it is 0, 0, 0, 0 dark for more number of times. Again here this white line is coming that is why it is increasing that is 1, 3, 1. Again it remains dark that is 0, 0, 0 and after that it is completely white that is 7. So this is what the gray level pattern of the pixels if I move from point A to B that is from left to right. So this is called differentiation. So let us see the first derivative filters. The formula for the first derivative of a function in x direction is as follows. So there are different ways that means different directions we can find out the difference and this is a difference of image pixels in x direction. Image direction means horizontally. So this is a dow f by dow x that means derivative of function f with respect to x, x is a direction which is equal to f of x plus 1 minus f of x that means the first pixel that is f of x is subtracted from the next pixel along the horizontal line that is f of x plus 1. So f of x plus 1 is the position of the pixel in the horizontal direction. So it is just the difference between subsequent values and measures the rate of change of the function. Now let us have a question what will be an expression for first derivative in y direction. You pause the video and answer the question. So if you know the first derivative in x direction similarly we can find out very easily the x that means first derivative in y direction by observing this equation. So this is in x direction. So what we have to do is dow f by dow y that is partial derivative of function f with respect to y is equal to f of y plus 1 minus f of y. So because it is in y direction. So this is what the answer. Then we will see the how to implement the first derivative filters. The first derivative filters are for a function f of x y that is a image the gradient of f at coordinates x y is given as this is gradient. This dow f is actually a gradient of function f which is approximately given as absolute value of gradient in x direction plus absolute value of gradient in y direction. So if you consider this sub image of size 3 by 3 which are named with pixels z1, z2, z3 up to z9 and how we can find out this gradient in x direction here how it is done just we see. So gradient in f that means dow f is equal to absolute value of g of x. x direction means like this z7 minus z1. Then here 2 z8 because the weight associated with the center pixels that means pixels which are nearest to the center are more. So the weight associated to z2 then z4, z6 and z8 are very that is 2 whereas weight associated with z1, z3, z7 and z9 are 1 that is why here 2 z8 minus 2 z2 just you look at this is z7 minus z1, 2 z8 minus 2 z2 and z9 minus z3. This is gradient in x direction and again plus the gradient in y direction means we subtract like this that is z3 minus z1, 2 z6 minus z4, 2 z4, z9 minus 2 z7. So this is what the first derivative filter. If you look at this is the Sovel first derivative filter based on the previous equation we can derive the Sovel operator like this. For example, if this is a x direction if you want to get a derivative in x direction then we use this filter. If you want derivative in y direction we use this filter to filter an image it is filtered using both operators that is in x direction as well as in y direction and the result of which are added together. So if you look at this image input image we get by adding the processed image with gradient in x direction and gradient in y direction and we get this image which is an image of a contact lens which is enhanced in order to make defects more obvious. So the Sovel filters are typically used for edge detection. Here some first derivative filters are this is a pre-wet then just it is here in Sovel the weight associated with nearest pixels are 2 but in pre-wet the weight associated is 1 then this is a Roberts which gives you the gradient in diagonal direction and this is what the nomenclature given to every pixel in a 3 by 3 image. So this book I referred for preparing these slides that is Digital Image Processing by R. F. L. C. Gonzalez and Richard E. Woods by Tata McGraw-Hill Education. Thank you very much.


Welcome to Healthy Planet, the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet on the ThinkTech Livestreaming Network series. I'm your host, Dr. Grace O'Neill. Joining me today is Winston Welch, Executive Director of the Outdoor Circle. Today we're gonna talk about keeping Hawaii clean and green. Welcome, Winston. Tell us about how you got involved in the outdoor circle. Well, actually, it's interesting because my first encounter with the outdoor circle, I was working for a company that I had mentioned about doing some advertising. I was new to the islands relatively. It was decades ago and my boss said, oh, no, no, no, you can't do that. You can't have advertising outside because the outdoor circle. And I said, what's the other circle? Why can't we have ads? But then as I've come to realize and many, many people have told me over the years is right, the outdoor circle is the reason why we have this beautiful pristine environment that is unencumbered by billboards and offsite advertising and blighting our visual environment. So this is a really rare thing that we have here that it's not obvious what you don't have in something like that until you go to the mainland or you're driving down the road and the high desert or anywhere and you see these giant billboards to eat this product or shop here and it's just marring the landscape. We don't have that in Hawaii and that's exactly because of the outdoor circle. So in addition to the billboards, what kind of other missions does the outdoor circle have? Well, the mission is pretty simple and pretty broad. So it started in 1912 by a group of women who just was, we're looking at the city and saying, okay, we can make this better. It comes out of a city beautiful movement after they had traveled and seen what other cities and countries had been doing, they said, we need that in Honolulu. We need trees to beautify the dusty landscape to reinforce the denuded hills of caused by grazing and chopping down native trees. So our mission is very simple. It's to keep Hawaii clean, green and beautiful by preserving, protecting and enhancing our environment. What that means is, of course, we have a, that's a pretty broad mission statement, but essentially it's looking and seeing what's a visual blight, especially in our environment and how do we remove that and replace it with something beautiful? So it's very much a, all of the founders, of course, this is 1910. So this is a very strong community organization with supported by our, the life force of any organization as its members and we have branches on all of the islands. So the branches are very local and concerned about what's important to them in their neighborhood. And they run the gamut of, like on the North Shore of Oahu. Oh, they do things like protecting the view planes from the road or the bike path up there to lots of planting and beautification. Oh, wonderful. Mm-hmm. And every branch has its own thing that they focus on, but as they all come together, we look at the branches like a branches of a tree and then the trunk is coordinated by, or stabilized by the central office, which is the 501C3. So I saw that you guys also had a tree giveaway recently. Actually, I did get a tree.  So we received a kakui nut tree and it's in our backyard now. How did you guys obtain these trees and what kind of, do you have any other ideas for other tree giveaways? I think this is great for the community. Okay, we'll tell me, where did you get your tree? In Manoa. In Manoa, okay. So you probably got that from our Manoa branch of the outdoor circle. What we did this last Arbor Day in Hawaii and Arbor Day in Hawaii is the, let's see, it's the first Saturday following the first Friday in November. We're a little bit different here because of the Makahiki season. It's a good time to plant trees here in the winter as the rains start to come. So what we did this year, a little bit more special than normal was because it was our 110th anniversary in 2022 and also the 100th anniversary of the Honolulu Shade Tree Commission which the outdoor circle was instrumental in forming. We did an all branch activity where we gave away trees at all of our branches that was supported by different grants especially one from Arbor Day. And so we just looked to bring the community together because this is not just about, trees and beautifying our environment but it's also about community. It's about bringing people together and realizing that each person has an impact on what they can do that's positive in their community even just for their own home but that tree that you planted in a few years will become a beautiful place of shade and something else for your neighbors to look at and places for birds to come and nest in. So it's drawing everybody together in this great event and we generally do this every year in Manoa. They, that branch specifically does do their tree give away and that's a tradition that they've had. We do it in our other branches as well just depending on what the desires of the branches are but most branches, this is a core activity of the outdoor circle is giving away and planting trees such that basically every large tree in the state that you've seen that's been planted was either planted by the outdoor circle or advocated by the outdoor circle, not 100% but we've had a major impact in the state in parks, roads, schools, shopping centers, everything. So Winston, I saw on the website that Kona actually had a project where the women there planted a bunch of trees and I don't know if, I saw that on the website I thought that was pretty cool and I'm supposing that all the branches like you said had, like you said the North Shore plants and trees on the trails is it mostly around the trails or on the side of the road? I think Kona was on the side of the road that they planted the trees. They had beautification projects also coming out of the airports and those sorts of things so it's not just trees but it might have been the beautiful Boogambees you might see on the highway or encouraging people to plant in their own yards because actually, while we have this great history of planting trees and not just the trails we actually did an interesting thing with Google Trekker where we mapped all of these incredible trails with a 360 degree view carrying this machine so you can virtually visit all kinds of trails and places in Hawaii. You can check that out on the website outdoorcircle.org but the organization has just focused originally sort of on a cityscape which was putting in sidewalks and advocating for those getting the commission for parks and to plant more trees in the public sphere as well as encouraging things like on the military basis or in our schools. So the reach has been broad and deep and it just continues and it's planted one tree at a time it wasn't as if we planted a million trees in a day it takes over a century to do this so it's a collective response that is necessary to uphold and maintain and we're always looking for new members to contribute and join this really powerful organization in the history of Hawaii that's unique to Hawaii. And what do members do? How do you become a member and do the members just do any money or do they volunteer for the tree giveaways, plant trees, I'm assuming? Well, you know, membership is different things to different people essentially what members do when you think about what you might be a member of you're a member because you want to support the organization fundamentally you may not have the wherewithal or the time or the ability to get out and plant trees but you appreciate and respect what the organization does. You know, the Elder Circle does a lot more than just planting trees and protecting scenic view planes it's advocating all over the place and I recommend people go to our policy positions on the website to see more about what we focus on because it is a lot but if you want to join you go to the website just click on membership and join we have essentially pay what you like model and that allows you to join any or all branches as well so when you're joining you're joining the Elder Circle but most people choose to also join a branch and that's where their focus will be so you're in Manoa and that branch would be concerned with things in Manoa and keeping that area clean green and beautiful so you may want to be getting involved in tree planting you might want to adopt a park as part of what your mission is you may want to write testimony you may want to help in cataloging our history we have a recent agreement with the state archives where we're cataloging tens of thousands of documents so that researchers can go back in the past and find out how this organization has had so many impacts from everything from the women's movement to environmental to lawsuits involving protecting the scenic view plane there's all types of information there so we need helpers and volunteers for all kinds of areas and if you see a need then bring it to our attention because chances are if like any organization it's about people getting involved we have a tiny staff at the headquarters this is a volunteer run and led and organization so it's all about members, volunteers caring about their community and stepping up to the plate making a difference so how did you specifically I know you told me about how you learned about the organization but how did you end up getting involved you just were interested because you heard about them and then you I had experience and I was managing a couple of other organizations before this and the actually the job listing came up and I was just submitted my resume to the board and went in and talked to them and looked at what this organization was and where it might go and what its needs were and we found that it was a good match since that was about eight years ago oh nice, nice I was also looking at some of the things you have on your website and I saw there's something called the exceptional tree program can you tell us about that so we have spearheaded a program the exceptional tree act in 1975 this gives a heightened level of recognition and protection for trees that are deemed exceptional the counties administer this through the arborist advisory committees but the outer circle I believe is the only place where you can find all exceptional trees where we have all kinds of metrics on these trees their height, their crown spread why they were nominated to this list and it's a pretty stringent qualifications we'd like to see a secondary list come out of trees that maybe don't meet that threshold of exceptional trees but that are certainly worthy of stronger protections and recognition so that's something we'll be looking forward to in the future but the exceptional trees map that we have you can go on our website and download that or the app and we have walks where you can the little blue dot follows you around Kapilani Park or many different places and shows you okay here's this tree here's its history and we're looking at also adding different layers on there which might include different stories or specific histories about maybe who planted this tree or maybe the whole grove when it was planted and what would the impetus behind that so the exceptional trees program is a really important and fundamental characteristic of our state's desire to protect trees and we hope that it just expands greatly from here again they can find that on our website if our viewers are interested and they should be because we've got a lot of really magnificent trees here that deserve to be celebrated and what kind of qualities do can people look for if they want to nominate an exceptional tree because you said some trees don't quite make the qualifications for exceptional so what kind of trees would be exceptional are they really big trees, certain species? It's a good question in Oahu it can be on private land where the property owner has to sign up or anyone can nominate a tree on public land of course the state has to take care of that it's age, size, rarity, historic and cultural value aesthetic value, endemic status and location so those are the qualifications that we have and the counties could be more stringent or have some more qualifications for that but those forms are available on our website so if people are interested they can and should nominate trees for exceptional status and we are unique as far as I know in the world for people that have an exceptional tree they actually get to write off the cost of caring for that tree on their taxes if you build out your taxes you see on there it says like give a dollar for the election fund but then it's also do you have an exceptional tree it's one of the very few lines on there so it helps people So you can nominate it on your property that's great Absolutely because your tree is going to require care it's just like any being and so we want to acknowledge that as a state and we do and say hey if you got this tree and it's an exceptional tree you're going to get a tax break because we appreciate you taking care of that That's wonderful so are these exceptional trees are they marked so people know not to cut them down suppose when you buy a property I mean you're a new home owner and you're from out of state you don't know anything about this exceptional tree program is it going to be I suppose they could write it in the disclosures but I mean I'm just worried that these exceptional trees will be cut down I think if you have an exceptional tree on your property you're pretty much going to let any buyer know this is a really key feature the trees are protected by law so you actually have to seek any permit to change anything and we would hope that nobody would do that I haven't heard of anything like that so we are actually looking at how do we write this into getting it into an MLS or on the property transfer forms but whatever those are to say yes if you have this like it is a disclosure and the same for developers if they're coming in and changing putting up a different building or new building that that's automatically flagged in the department of planning and permitting that says hey you've got an exceptional tree here you need to take exceptional care so that's something that we're exactly working on right at this time as these sort of systems make it a little bit easier to do that and nothing falls through the cracks so theoretically you could nominate a tree on somebody else's property but they would have to sign off on it that's true you could I mean essentially it will be under his or their name that are signing the form so that person would be the one actually you could put this sample on the envelope but essentially yeah you could bring that up with somebody and say hey Mrs. Tanaka you have an exceptional tree here I'm going to download this form I'm going to fill out all the information that I can and then I'm going to send it in under your name is that okay I think that's the way to look at it so yeah you could facilitate a nomination for an exceptional tree I mean because I see some kind of really sad things happen that's why I ask because you know sometimes I take a lot of walks with my dog and then I noticed that there was a huge mango tree on the corners providing a lot of shade and then I saw somebody new had moved in the house and they cut the thing down you know I mean I don't know if that would even qualify as an exceptional tree because it's a fruit tree and you know it's a great question that's why I mentioned we need other levels of protection for our trees because even on my street where I live I have a tree but it's a space has been made for it in the driveway to literally a cut out but there's almost no other trees on my street because most we've been losing canopy coverage every year for decades and this is not mostly on public land it's on private lands so those trees that mango tree that you once saw it was a big beautiful mango tree that sort of anchored the neighborhood and now there's nothing there because people cut it down for whatever reasons but what we really need to focus on at this point as much as public space is great to focus on our Department of Urban Forestry does a pretty good job of keeping up the hundreds of thousands of trees they have to maintain what we need to focus on now is private landowners private individuals encouraging them not to cut down the big trees especially but for others also to plant trees the right tree in the right place with the right care so that it's not gonna hit the power lines and those sorts of things we can do this it's just a matter of collective will and maybe it's also involves some legislation that would provide some other sort of financial benefits even though that would be a really a secondary reason to do that but whatever we can do helps but the trees don't have to be labeled or anything they are some of them are noted I know that but others are not especially if you've got a tree on a private piece of property you may not want people traipsing in to see it so there's no requirement that they allow people on to see those trees that the important thing is that they're there and that they're protected Yeah, I mean I've seen some in Alamoana Park that are labeled I'm wondering if they're exceptional or just because it's a city park that somebody is taking care of it like an arborist and they think it's a nice tree and they just put a nice little label on it because they have some really nice big trees there Yeah, it might be both it might be just to educate the public on what kind of the trees are what kind of trees they are or it may also have an exceptional listing next to it and if it does it'll certainly say it's an exceptional tree of Foster Garden has a number of exceptional trees which the ladies staffed that visitor center 364 days a year 363 days a year for many, many decades so I encourage you to go down like you said Alamoana Park we have a great walking Capulani, Capulani has beautiful trees We have great guides just to walk down there and learn more about those trees so I encourage people to use that and create their own maps as well I mean take your kids down there and talk about trees if you don't know what it is there's great apps where you can point a picture at a leaf and it'll tell you what kind of tree it is so great opportunities out there well I say yeah you could use your app for that just go sit under the tree you don't need an app to enjoy the tree and we got to remind ourselves that every tree that you're sitting under today every tree without exception was planted by somebody who cared about people in the future sitting under these trees they may be a hundred years old they may be older than that but they were planted deliberately by somebody who was saying we need this now and in the future and just had to imagine the beauty of you and your cakey sitting under those trees and having a picnic and all the benefits they provide the cooling streets which makes a huge difference obviously if you're walking on a street with shade or without shade the birds that are able to chirp in them you know it's just the physical beauty looking at the tree it's proven to have economic benefits health benefits and so many other benefits so we got to get out there plant the trees encourage your neighbors nominate exceptional trees and do all that you can mm-hmm I also saw on your website there's something that you guys have called the carbon neutrality challenge can you tell us more about that? This is just a it's one of the many great programs that we have designed to calculate how much carbon sequestration is occurring from different trees so you could put in that you know what type of tree you have and then how big it is and how much carbon that it's storing so this is one of those benefits that we talk about and some people really love those sorts of things like how much stormwater it might save or how much carbon sequestration it gives or you know how much energy and dollars you're gonna save by having a shade tree keeping your house cool however people look at the value of trees it's not an either or it's a both and so while you may love the aesthetics or the cooling benefits other people might be much more interested in carbon sequestration and stormwater runoff so all of those metrics are useful and valuable Yeah absolutely and there's something else called the Kailua the citizen forester program as well for the Kailua branch I'm assuming Yes that's a program where we train citizen foresters is the term that we have used and it's basically going out and finding out where all the trees are so even though the city has a great program and robust and they're always short staffed and underfunded that's a zero question about that they do as good of a job as they possibly can but they don't always know 100% where all their trees are so what we do is we go out and we map those trees where are they inside of the city in the public rights of way and so to develop a database and say okay you've got 10 monkey pods on this street between here and here and they're geo located they're measured as to the size, the crown spread different metrics that we collect there and then through that we can identify the pucas where maybe a tree was cut down or fell down trees have natural lifespan so we need to replace those trees and we can identify the pucas through that so the citizen forester initiatives are getting off that's it's expanded over and we work with our partners as well and this on that one I believe is a smart tree specific and we go out into the community and teach people how to get these metrics how to upload them how to verify them with each other so you always have partners on that another great way to get involved it's expanded I believe to Manoa and to Kalihi and we'll be expanding that more as we look at our city and say how do we increase canopy coverage where we are losing coverage all the time and solutions for the street seem to be a little bit easier but you know how parking is in this city it's tough and so people are like well that tree is where I parked my car yes it may be but yeah that's also a public right of way the issues are not easy at the time but we can do the best that we can with what we've got and I think we can always do more and always look at how do we increase our canopy coverage and provide a good environment for trees to thrive in well even the amount of concrete we have because I see a lot of people what they're doing is that it's exactly the problem where there's a lot of people extended families which is not necessarily their fault it's just that we don't have that much housing here and so a small house with a lot of land will be expanded into a huge monster home and then it'll be converted into a complete concrete setting so even all the grass is gone and all the little shrubs are gone and those make a difference too for climate change and also for a runoff for instance right so that's happening a lot and I don't know if you guys are doing any work for that like the problem we're having with you know people converting their land into concrete I guess it's very hard to do anything for that in general you know and then having huge monster homes on top of a small lot well certainly our branches have become involved in that because if it's clean green beautiful sustainable and livable how do you have a livable street with no trees and no green it's stark it's bleak it's hot and like you said it's runoff and so the organization has always taken a position against encroachment on preservation land conservation land agricultural lands but also these variances to zoning that are really egregious going into neighborhoods and we understand people need places to live there's ways we can do this it's not an either or we can have quality places for people to live of all income levels without destroying our green infrastructure and we need to plan for that green infrastructure so we do testify on these things all the time sometimes we're successful and sometimes we're not it's up to all of us to decide what kind of environment do we wanna live on do we wanna live on a street with no trees can we not allow or require that the space be given to trees despite all of the other competing interests that we have exactly what you said total concrete where does that water go it goes down the street into our storm drains and it just creates a hot and bleaks streets so of course those structures we know that there's been issues in those that we don't need to get into here but essentially it's making choices collectively and individually that are gonna make the difference so we are out of time so we have to wrap it up I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill this is Healthy Planet on the ThinkTech Live Streaming Network series we've been talking with Winston Welch Executive Director of the Outdoor Circle thank you so much for being on the show and thanks to Michael our broadcast engineer and the rest of the crew at ThinkTech for hosting our show and thanks to you our listeners for listening I'll see you on February 17th for more of Healthy Planet on ThinkTech the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet my special guest will be Lolita Ayala, Executive Director of the Aloha Animal Sanctuary


As many of you know, I have spent the majority of my adult life researching nutrition, health, wellness, and sharing that with you guys through my YouTube channel. I have no words for this. My book is finally finished. Happy, ecstatic, genuine, whatever it may be. And as much as I want to say this is a gift for you guys, this is more of a gift to myself. Finally, relief that these seven years I've spent exploring nutrition, all these anecdotes, helping all of these people have been put in the confidence of this book that I truly believe people will succeed on. The ancestral indigenous diet achieving native health in a modern world is a whole foods meat based diet based upon the forgotten wisdom of our carnivorous past. It teaches us a traditional way of eating and nutrition principles that naturally allow us to achieve weight loss, longevity, overall health, everything everyone wants. But most importantly, happiness. Happiness guys. Ancestral relating to what we as humans have done for thousands and thousands of years. Indigenous referring to our natural habitat, whole foods meat based diet is a stab at the whole foods plant based nonsense as animal foods need to comprise the majority of an optimal human diet. And some of you guys might be thinking, Frank, are you rebranding the Paleo diet? Is this about the WAPF stuff? Unfortunately, both of those movements have fallen short for one reason or another. Otherwise, Frankie Boy wouldn't need to be here. High quality animal foods are the foundation of it all. Similarly to a carnivore diet, we prize grass fed beef, free range chicken, eggs, pasture raised pork, wild caught fish, raw grass fed dairy. High quality plant foods, prepared in a traditional way, are also a welcome addition to this diet. Although for many, this diet can fall under carnivore requirements. The predominant focus is the abundance of these quality animal foods in your diet. Plant foods serve an important purpose and we need to replicate them in some way, but modern plant foods are not the solution. When you incorporate these foods and adopt native eating habits, you will overcome all of the health food misconceptions and industry lies. We've been fed for decades. No more chicken, rice and broccoli dinners. No more kale smoothies after the gym. No more sprinkling chia seeds on your oatmeal in the morning. You know who I'm talking to. No more endless hours of cardio on the treadmill. Who wants to do that? And no more taking every supplement under the sun to sleep. For many of you, this will be the first step in coming across the right concept. People spend their entire lives bouncing from diet to diet, trying to fix their health issues to no avail. Because they don't realize the single most important thing. The nutrients we need to build our bodies. All it takes is the willingness to unlearn conventional wisdom, prioritize essential nutrients and embrace our ancestral history. This book will be your guide. And the result will be a new lifestyle that puts natural health above everything else. You'll learn everything I have over these past years. The importance of these nutrients. The downsides of anti-nutrients that plague modern plant foods. How much of these nutrients you need. What foods to get them from. Where to source them. As well as how to prepare them. And of course, plenty of stories and background to understand. As well as stay entertained. Whether it's me turning orange from eating too many sweet potatoes. Or almost choking to death on a goat's eyeball. You guys are going to have a bit of fun along the way. If you guys would like to support me in my vision of improving the health of every single person on this planet. The book is available on the Amazon link in the description down below guys. In both paperback and ebook form. Thank you guys so much for these past two years in supporting me. I couldn't do it without you guys. Even just reading through all the Christmas wishes and how kind you guys have been to me. Especially through the holidays and really showing your appreciation. It means a lot to me. I'm going to give away at least, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 copies of this book. So definitely leave a comment down below. I don't know, try to make me laugh, try to be funny, try to be nice, whatever it may be. And I will reach out to you guys for your contact information. So that I can either give you the book or the money to buy the book.