So our next speaker is Shagun Sodhani, who will be talking about how to log in ML experiments. What do you Shagun? Everyone, thank you for coming to this talk on logging machine learning experiments. I am Shagun. I am a research engineer at Facebook AI. And as a research engineer, I have to run a lot of experiments. So this talk is a condensed version of my experience and learnings with logging ML experiments. In this talk, we will be talking about many things. We will talk about why we should log experiments, who are the potential target users of our logs, what should we be logging, how we should be logging. I'll spend some time talking about the logging practices that I use, where we should be logging things and when we should start worrying about logging. And I'll leave some time in the end for questions and answers. The key message of this talk is that logging ML experiments is a holistic exercise. It is not limited to tracking just the performance metrics like accuracy or loss. It goes beyond that. We can think of experimentation as a way to answer questions or to test ideas. For example, a question could be, how do I improve the performance of my NLP model? And the different experiments I run or different ideas that I try out, they are a way to answer this question. So from this perspective, logging is a way to capture the lifecycle of these ideas or the lifecycle of these different hypotheses that we are testing. So let's say we try out 10 different things to improve our model. Logging is the process of cracking these efforts and improving over it. There are several other essential ideas and items when it comes to applied ML. For example, ML ops, managing the lifecycle of our model, things like feature engineering, model design and so on. These are all important areas to be aware of. But for the purpose of this talk, we would not be focusing on these areas. Just to reiterate the disclaimers once again, I mentioned that the talk is a condensed version of my experience with logging ML experiments. So the presentation is also going to reflect my experiences. I prefer certain workflows over other workflows, but that by no means mean that my workflow is the best possible workflow. There's no reason to believe that my workflow would work the best for everyone. So please pick up and use whatever things make sense to you and discard the other things. With that disclaimer, let's jump into the talk. The first item is why should we log ML experiments? And the short answer to the question is, well, we should log because logs are an interface to the experiment. If we look at the standard ML workflow, we run an experiment. The experiment gets over and then we have questions about the experiment. For example, we may want to know how good the train model is or how much is the validation accuracy or how much time the model takes to train and so on. So to answer any of these questions, we need logs. And apart from the questions about the performance alone, we may have questions like, why did we run this experiment? Or even questions like, did we ever run this experiment? And some of these questions on the slide, they may sound a bit unlikely. I mean, who forgets if they have run an experiment or not? But it does happen and it happens way more often than you would expect. And the reasoning goes like this. When we are doing ML experiments, we have some idea or hypothesis or question in our mind. So this question or this hypothesis could be as simple as, you know, does decreasing the learning rate help with the convergence of the model? So we run an experiment. We observe the results and based on the results, we come up with a new hypothesis. So maybe we need to use a lower gain ratio or probably we need to use a wider network or a deeper network. So essentially what we are doing is we are iterating over these hypotheses. And when we iterate over the hypothesis, two things happen. One is that our original hypothesis has changed now. So maybe the new hypothesis is that lowering the learning rate with a wider network would improve the performance. So we need to explicitly track this. We need to explicitly track and remind ourselves that the hypothesis that we are testing now is the new hypothesis and it's not the old hypothesis. And this is important because if the model does not work, then we need to remember that the hypothesis that we are refuting is that a lower learning rate with a wider network is better. That's the hypothesis that is refuted. Maybe the original hypothesis that a lower learning rate is good, that might still be a good hypothesis. We don't know. But that is not the hypothesis that we are refuting. So it is important to track why we are running an experiment. It's important to track the hypothesis or the question that we are trying to answer with an experiment because it helps to cut down on the search space. The second thing to take into account here is all these new hypotheses that we come up with when we run these experiments and all the follow-up experiments that we come up with, generally it's not possible to run all of them. We cannot run each and every experiment or we cannot try each and every idea that we have in mind. We have to do some kind of prioritization and we have to keep track of the ideas or the hypothesis that we are going to test and the ones that we are not going to test. And these choices, the number of these ideas or these hypotheses, they increase exponentially. So logging helps us in two ways. One, it helps us to keep track of choices. It helps us in two ways. One, it helps us to keep track of choices. It helps us to remember which experiments or which ideas we have tried and which we haven't. And secondly, it helps us to narrow down between the choices. So maybe we have consistently seen in our previous experiments that wider network is a better architecture when it comes to convergence. So this observation might nudge us towards trying a wider network with a lower learning rate. But for this, we need to know if wider networks have indeed been better in the past and for that, we need logging so that we can answer the question of what other experiments we have run in the past, how many of these experiments have used wider networks and which of or how many of these experiments actually work better in the past. So logging helps us to track the hypothesis and to choose between different competing hypotheses. The second item on the agenda is who are the users of our logs or who needs these logs. And this is an important question because it helps us to choose what all information or what all metrics or what all metadata do we want to track. So there are different personas and the first persona that uses the logs is the persona of people designing the experiments. The people who are coming up with the hypothesis, this could be domain experts, this could be data scientists, people who have these questions which need to be answered. So they need the logs to verify or refute the hypothesis and based on the observations come up with new hypothesis. The second persona that cares about logging is the persona or the people implementing the experiments. This could include the engineers or the people who are coding these experiments. They need logs to verify that their implementation is correct or their code works. And a common example of that is we take the model and we overfit it to a single batch of data and we look at the accuracy or the other metrics and see whether those are converging or not. So that's the example of second persona that cares about logging. The third persona that cares about logging is the people who are actually running the experiment. So a way of thinking about it is let's say you start with an open source code and you start using it for running your own experiments. So in that case you are not the one who is implementing the experiment but you are the one who is running the experiment and who cares about that. So this persona uses the logs to verify that the experiment actually ran. It did not crash or it did not terminate in between. The fourth persona is the people who are interpreting the experiments and who are drawing some conclusions from them. This could include analysts and domain experts and people who are trying to make sense of models or trying to decide whether the model should be used or not. A fifth persona is people who are making some business decisions based on these experiments. So this generally includes people in the executive order or people who are going to make business decisions. And a sixth persona is the person who will be running the experiments either to reproduce your results or to build on top of your work. And interestingly this persona could also include your own future self. So let's say you worked on this project for six months and then you take a break and you work on something else and then you come back. So when you come back to this model or this problem you do not want to start all the exploration and all the work from scratch. You want to resume from where you left and then the logs that you have that's a useful point. There are two things to note here. First this list of personas is obviously not an exhaustive list. There are different other use cases of personas who may be interested in your logs. And second there is a good deal of overlap between these personas. The important thing is not that they are the six personas that have listed. The important thing or the key takeaway here is you are not the only one who needs the logs from your experiments. So when you are thinking about logging, think of logging as a more holistic exercise and not something that you do to cater your own needs. This naturally leads to the next question of what we should log. And the answer to this question is we should log anything and everything that we think that we or any of the personas that we talked about earlier. Anything and everything that we or any of these personas may need to answer questions about the experiments. Often we narrowly define everything to mean every possible metric. But as we saw earlier, that is not enough. Metrics are necessary but they are not sufficient. So another way of motivating the question of what to log is with a hypothetical scenario. Let's say you are running an experiment, you are training a model and the only thing that you care about in this experiment is the validation accuracy. So that's the only metric that you track.  There could be many reasons for that. Maybe the learning rate is too low or maybe the gradients are too small or maybe the gradients are too high. So there are many possibilities. So how do you test this or how do you test these possibilities or debug the model? Well, you can start logging additional metrics and you can read on this experiment. But relearning the experiment is going to take time and it's going to use more compute resources. An alternative could be that you plan well ahead of time and track all the additional information that you think you may need, even if that is not strictly the information that you care about. So for example, while learning the model for the first time, you could have tracked the norm of the gradient parameters, norm of the gradients. Now there is a tradeoff to be made. You can obviously log as much information as you want, but that information could be totally irrelevant for the experiment that you are trying to run or the questions that you might potentially want to answer, in which case it would become more of noise and less of information. There is a balance that is needed in terms of logging more information versus logging all possible things. So alongside tracking the metrics, also keep a track of why did you run an experiment. So log the reason of running an experiment. This is an example entry. Actually, this is an experiment config which I generally write as part of the logging process. Here I am tracking a couple of things. So there's an experiment that I am running. This experiment has got a short description. I have a tag in the config and then I have an issue which is basically a GitHub issue. So I prefer logging the description or sort of the reason for running an experiment as GitHub issues. And then I put a short description into the config. Using GitHub issues for logging this, you know, why you run this experiment part, it has certain benefits like the experiment or the reason of running the experiment lives near the code. But it also has downsides like you have to switch between tooling and your collaborators or your team. Others may just prefer docs or Wiki or some other medium. It doesn't really matter how you do it. You can do it in config or metadata as well. It doesn't really matter. What is important is that you do this, that you track the reason for running this experiment. Another important thing to log and to keep track of is how to run an experiment. Think of this, how to run an experiment as all the information that a stranger would need to read on your experiment and reproduce your results without talking to you. So things that come under this category include things like metadata, config, the code that was used to run this experiment. And this code can generally be tracked by the Git commits, the version of the datasets or the features, the version of different softwares that you are using. Even things like environment flags, the commands, the documentation, all these things which a person would need to reproduce your results without talking to you, you should consider tracking that. Another important thing to track is the metadata for the experiment. And this includes things like the config of the device on which you are running this experiment or the name of the cluster or the config of the cluster where you are running this experiment. Tracking things like GPU CPU usage, tracking when the experiment started, when was it scheduled, when did it end and so on.  So let's say you are using PyTorch and you are going from 1.8 to 1.9 or something. You can use this information to do basic regression testing and make sure that the updated version does not introduce any performance related issues. As we discussed earlier, it is also important to track what experiments you have run so far or what experiments are you running right now. It's important because when you are iterating over these hypotheses, it is very possible that you would come back to the same question multiple times. And unless it's an easy way for you to search what things you have tried or what ideas you have experimented with, you would probably end up re-learning those experiments which takes time, resources and so on. And this becomes even more useful and important when you have multiple people running experiments for the same project because now there needs to be a way for people to be able to communicate what experiments they are running and how does their results look like. The next question is what tools we could use for logging. And interestingly, there are a lot of useful tools available now and they come in different kind of flavors. So some of the tools are cloud hosted, some of the tools are cloud hosted but have on-prem versions. Some of these tools are framework agnostic, some are specific to the frameworks and so on. This is sort of a non-small, this is a small non-exhaustive list. I would not go into the details of these tools. These are all excellent tools. You can find their documentation and tutorials online. I do not have a strong preference for one versus the other. The important thing is you do the logging and it's less important as to how do you do the logging. The choice of the tool that you would end up using would probably also depend on the kind of setup that you are working in, the kind of questions you care about your collaborators and so on. Now, I want to spend some time on how I do logging to illustrate some of the things that we have been talking about so far and to show how I apply those things in practice. I will be focusing more on the details about logging metrics because that's something that we have to do a lot of times within an experiment and so it has some more challenges and nuances. Things like logging metadata, config, these are obviously part of the logging process but since they are done once per experiment, I am not going to talk about that aspect in this subsection. In terms of logging and parsing, my stack is basically Python. So I use file system for tracking the logs and for saving the logs and Jupyter notebooks with usual tools and libraries like pandas, numpy, matplotlib, highplot. I use these tools for analysis. A couple of things that I keep in mind when I'm writing logs are I write logs as I generate them. It is okay to buffer logs for some time to do a batch write on the file system but I do not carry around a list of logs throughout the experiments. Part of the reason is if for whatever reason my experiment terminates in between because of a machine failure or something, I should not lose the logs that I have generated so far. So generate the log and write it to the file system so that it's persisted there. Secondly, I prefer to make each log entry a stateful or a standalone entry. So if you give me the i-th row of your logs, I should be able to interpret the different numbers or the different metrics that you are tracking as part of that particular log. This is a concrete example of what I mean. I have a dictionary based log which has got keys for the name of the metrics and values as the metric values. So for example, in this case, I have a key called as episode or a key called as batch reward or critic loss. And corresponding to these keys, I have the metric values. The good thing is this log entry tells me everything about all the metric values. I do not need a header or some other file or some other piece of information to interpret the values of different metrics. And this is very different than the case of the CSV logs where you have a top-level CSV headers and then you have to refer back to that top-level row to interpret the metrics. This style obviously leads to redundancy because you are writing the same set of keys in all the different logs. So there's a lot of repetition and there's a lot of redundancy. The benefit is when I'm writing the metric, I can log whatever metric I want, wherever I want, whenever I want. So I prefer logging dictionaries because of the flexibility it provides. As I said, the downside is there is a lot of redundancy, but I think this redundancy is useful and we will talk about the benefits in a minute. The logging format is also quite verbose, so it can take up a lot of space. So my solution generally is to compress the logs after the experiment. So when I'm analyzing the results, I'll learn a job in the background that would compress the logs. Another thing I do is to track the logs at different levels. So there would be the debug logs or the full experiment logs, which can be pretty large. And they might be tracking a lot of metrics, say at the batch level. And then there are the general logs or the base logs or the essential logs, which are probably the key logs that I care about. So the idea with the debug logs is I would need them only for debugging and probably 90 to 95% of the time I would not even care about them. So as long as my experiment behaves the way I expect it to behave, I would not probably care about the debug logs. Whereas if I want to debug something, I want to answer these additional questions like how does the gradient of the model look like? Or how do other metrics look like, which I generally do not care about? I would be putting them in the debug logs. So I will be tracking the logs at these two levels. And debug logs are generally, if the experiment goes well and it turns out that I do not need the debug logs, I can just go ahead and delete them. To give you an idea, the debug logs I'm tracking are three orders of magnitude bigger than the logs I strictly need. And this goes back to this earlier discussion we have where we said that if I run an experiment and I have a question about the experiment after the experiment has gotten over, unless there is a metric or a log that I tracked for that, there's no way for me to answer the experiment other than to rerun the experiment. So the tradeoff that I'm making is the high cost of this temporary storage versus the cost of rerunning the experiment and waiting for the experiment to run the time as well as the computer source cost. So if the experiment works well, I don't care about the debug logs, I can go ahead and delete them. If it doesn't, then I can deep dive into the detailed logs and use them. To save on the space, I generally convert my logs into pandas data frames and then I serialize those data frames on the file system. Another problem you may encounter when you are tracking these logs specifically for the debug logs is that the debug logs may take too much time to pass. And in that case, the standard approach is pass multiple log files in parallel. Now in our case, since the way the logs are tracked is every log entry is standalone or complete in its own sense, you can actually pass the different rows in a file in parallel. So the benefit of all that additional redundancy that we had earlier is that you have all the keys and values that you care about within the log. So you can write whatever arbitrary filters and transformations you want without having to take any sort of joins and you can process each line in parallel. So that redundancy becomes useful now. So the TLDR is I prefer logging debts. It has downsides like it's it has downsides like it is very verbose. But on the flip side, debts are a lot more easier to handle. Dicts are first class citizens in Python. There's a lot of support for JSON to debt conversion. And there are plenty of libraries which support very fast passing of JSON into Python dictionaries. For the last two questions, I want to reiterate that logging is holistic process. It is not limited to tracking the performance metrics like loss or accuracy. Sure, performance metrics are an important part, but that's not the complete picture. Think of logging as a way to capture the life cycle of a hypothesis or the life cycle of an idea. So we start with some idea or some hypothesis. We run experiments to verify it refuted and based on the experiments we change it. Keeping in mind that logging is this sort of a multifaceted process. We may want to use multiple tools for logging. Now, GitHub is one good place to put some of the wise and house questions when you are running experiments. Partly because this is where the code also lives. So you are already interacting with GitHub for saving your code. So it can also be used for keeping track of the experiments. Another place that you may use or consider using is documents or wikis. Especially when you want to have a snapshot view or a bird's eye view of the different things that you applied. Or to have a summarized view of the different experiments that you applied. So docs and wikis are very useful to keep track of the progress that you have made over different kind of experiments. When it comes to writing the metric logs, you can use file system. You can use some hosted tools or whatever logger you prefer. And any combination of these tools is good. So there is no perfect answer. Choose what works for you. Choose whatever combination of tools works for you. Just make sure that the tools you are using are reliable. They are easy to use and the entries or the logs that you are creating, they are easy to share across people. For example, do not use a random piece of paper you see lying nearby. Do not use that for logging. That's not easy to share. That's not reliable. The last question is when is it a good time to think about logging? And the answer is probably sooner the better. For example, you should know what metrics you care about and what metrics are going to log before you run an experiment. Or probably even before you write the code. And since logging is about the life cycle of the idea and not just some numbers, you should start logging or writing down the idea when you first think of an idea and you update this every time you discuss the idea with others. I picked up this habit quite late, but this has made a lot of difference in the quality of my work. The luxury of going back to the start of an idea and challenging the initial assumptions and seeing how your assumptions evolved over time and basically redeveloping the idea in a different way that's a very useful tool. But at the same time, it requires you to be way more diligent when you start working on an idea and it requires you to think about logging from day one. With that, I will wrap up my talk. To reiterate the key message once again, logging ML experiments is a holistic exercise. It's not limited to tracking the performance. Experiments are a way to test the hypothesis and logging is a way to capture the life cycle of these hypotheses. With that, I wrap up my talk. Thank you once again for coming to the talk.


The form may not be in your old mind. Have you ever heard of something called Chapter Black? No? I'd thought so. It's a persistent name mentioned only among the most hardcore of VHS collectors and retro-laving nerds. While only a rumor, it's been kind of an urban legend in the video world that's been known since the 1980s. The legend goes like this. Chapter Black is a VHS cassette tape said to have originated out of East Asia, presumably Japan or Taiwan. It's mysteriously always in pristine condition, with many different witness appearances to it. Some have said that the cassette is a simple yet strange no-brand cassette, with a white label written on it in Chinese letters in black ink, Chapter Black. Another goes that the cassette is a slight blue-svhs cassette, with a customized narrowed square label space, with the label being a sticker with a red seal crested with a pair of laurels, apparently for a very important professional organization. All of the tapes have their reels set at the max 240-minute mark. What's got into the technical details again? Sorry about that. The main point is that Chapter Black is a very elusive videotape. Strangely, it always usually finds itself in a thrift store or second-hand store or another. Despite someone claiming to have it, it mysteriously disappears under some strange circumstance later in the week. The owners who were able to correspond back usually have found their places ransacked in some way, but it's always Chapter Black that goes missing. Other former owners haven't shown up back to the collection scene since. If there's one thing I forgot to mention, when I mean hardcore, I mean like, into what isn't really what you'd call legal. Not like porn you can't rent out because the star girl lied about her age when they shot the film. I mean like the kind of stuff the feds would slam you with an extended prison sentence just for owning, because it's politically confidential contraband. Ever watched that episode of The Simpsons, where the comic book guy hires out Bart and Millhouse to take over his shot for a night when he's out dating, and they come across his collection of extremely illegal videotapes that cover stuff from Mr. Rogers being drunk on set to sensitive Cold War military procedures, and they show it to the rest of the kids in the neighborhood. It's that kind of illegal. In fact, if you're not the one for gut-churning details, I best recommend you back out now. Not for the faint of heart at this point. Chapter Black has gotten its infamy for being what is probably the world's longest running snuff film. Everything on it is horrifically detailed and uncut. Despite the tape being at the maximum 240-minute mark, former owners who watched the tape have said that the thing goes well past 240 minutes. This also makes it kind of really hard to rewind. Those who have said that it's almost like a timeline of re-enactments of humanity's worst moments on film. No one knows who made it. The seal on the slight blue version of the tape, no one has correlated it successfully with any existing organization, other than with some study on esoteric Buddhist knowledge that it's a word that relates to the judge of the damned.  Because of it disappearing so often and so soon upon acquiring, it's hard to prove anything on its hardware specs. What has been proven is that some have had the gall to record what was on Chapter Black and released it on the deepest bowels of the internet. As said before, everything on Chapter Black is graphic and uncut. Despite its age of supposed origin, its footage has always been strangely upscaled to HD on tape, even before the release of the tech into the consumer market. Because of it not being even NC-17 or even X-rated material, many torrenting and media hosts have taken it off of their sights because of complaints by users, making footage rare to acquire. What has been acquired though, many have regretted ever downloading it since. Eyewitness accounts have told some grim things, horrible things they've seen out of Chapter Black. Their confessions correlate that there is a motif to the film, the worst moments of humanity documented down to each and every second. One got a section dedicated to Vlad the Impaler, or as he is popularly known, Count Dracula. Some have come across footage of the slavery trade, with different parts about different eras of time and parts of the world, from Africa, Europe, and Asia. Some have come across footage of modern-day serial killers in action, from John Wayne Gassie, Ted Bungley, and Henry Leotis. There's sections covering major world wars and the stories of the battles behind the stories and legends in history, the real story, so to speak. Some parts supposedly showing even the most celebrated heroes contradicting themselves with horrendous acts of cruelty. If you name any atrocity off the top of your head, chances are you will find it in Chapter Black, it's said. There is wanton killing and bloodshed. There is cannibalism, on all sorts of people.  There is betrayal and abuse. Just about any genocide in history you can think of, you will probably find it. There's parts where you can see criminals go to their lowest and outright get away with it. Just about any witness of Chapter Black, even for a few minutes, was enough to change its viewers. A lot of them who had minute viewings were the ones that wished to never want to watch it again. Some were heard to have gone crazy, being evaluated for mental insanity at nearby psyche wards or mental hospitals. Some even for domestic disturbances, some heard to be murder. Then there are the ones who have never returned. They were the ones who likely jumped off the cliff into the abyss to watch Chapter Black as long as they could probably thought they could take it. No one knows where they went. God only knows what they are doing now. Even after what has been confirmed to be the footage of what is supposedly mankind's worst, uncut and infall, there are still questions left unanswered. Who keeps ransacking owners just to take this tape? What on earth is this made for? Who made Chapter Black? And even then, the stories around this thing have only kept coming. Just last week at the time of this writing, it's been on the radar that a police station was somehow broken into for having the tape in jurisdiction. Be careful if you find it.


Confidence in network meta-analysis, CINEMA, is a new methodology for evaluating the credibility of results from network meta-analyses. It takes into account six key factors within study bias, reporting bias, indirectness, imprecision, heterogeneity, and incoherence to determine whether the results from a network meta-analysis should be trusted or not. This methodology is particularly useful when multiple interventions are being compared as it allows for more accurate assessment of the reliability of the results. This article was authored by Adriene Nicolacopola, Julian P. T. Higgins, Theodoros Papakonstantinou, and others.


May God bless the DAV, and may God bless America. Thank you. The start of our 95th year last August began with your selection of our national officers, highlighted by the election of National Commander Moses McIntosh. The Air Force and Army veteran of Desert Shield and Desert Storm has brought that necessary blend of strength and charisma to this position, leading our organization throughout what turned into a challenging year for veterans' advocacy. A man of the people, Commander McIntosh has worked tirelessly to rally our membership's grassroots support around our top legislative priorities and to bring veterans' causes to the forefront of the American conscience. During February's midwinter conference, DAV and DAV auxiliary members reignited the flame of Operation Keep the Promise by meeting with lawmakers and working aggressively to protect our benefits and ensure the continued strength of our organization. National Commander McIntosh then delivered his testimony before the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committees calling for a properly funded, robust VA healthcare system in the face of calls to dismantle the VA. While we know that many problems still exist in VA, this system is our greatest hope of keeping our promise to care for those who serve and their families. Despite the continuing challenges facing VA, DAV had another productive year advocating for improved healthcare services and benefits for ill and injured veterans. Our framework for healthcare reform released last November would improve access to VA care while creating new opportunities for veterans who would otherwise have to wait too long or travel too far. VA, Congress and most recently the Commission on Care have adopted many of DAV's ideas and recommendations and we are confident, thanks to the continued support of our members around the country, the debate over the future of veterans' healthcare is moving in the right direction. Our fully developed appeals legislation past the House in February was approved by the Senate Committee in May and could be signed into law before the end of the year. Our legislation to expand caregiver assistance to veterans of all eras was approved by the Senate Committee in May and the Female Veterans Suicide Prevention Act based on a recommendation from our landmark Women Veterans Report was signed into law in July. Despite the deteriorating political climate in Washington, our legislative team continues looking for opportunities to pass legislation that keeps the promise to the men and women who serve. DAV's service department continues to live up to the legacy of being the best in the business. Our mobile service offices visited 879 sites in 2015 and interviewed more than 17,000 claimants. Our transition service officers filed more than 18,000 claims last year and helped ensure nearly 34,000 transitioning veterans were aware of their earned benefits. Between all 3,920 county, chapter, department, transition and national service officers, DAV health veterans and family members obtained more than $4 billion in new and retroactive benefits. Additionally, we've adopted a new state-of-the-art interactive training platform to keep our national service officers up to date on all things related to benefits and compensation. The service department also continued making an impact with this disaster relief program by supplying nearly 800 drafts and supply kits totaling more than $330,000. This year, natural disasters once again devastated communities from Georgia to California and Alabama to Michigan. The dedicated DAV members were there to step in and aid their fellow veterans on the ground. Our membership department has once again made tremendous strides in meeting recruiting goals set forth for the year by reaching a new landmark. DAV now has a sustained membership of 1.3 million voices representing our cause. As we again exceeded our national objectives, it's clear our members and service officers have been aggressively working to ensure continued strength for our organization. For 2015, DAV devoted $44.5 million to various voluntary service initiatives. This year, DAV's Transportation Network volunteers traveled more than 24.7 million miles providing more than 700,000 free rides and donated nearly $1.7 million. A value of taxpayers that is equivalent to more than $38 million. DAV's newest initiative, our National Employment Program, has more than doubled in scale since it was established in June 2014. In a short time, DAV has become one of, if not the most prolific charity in terms of connecting veterans with employers through this initiative. The department is executing a busy schedule of more than 60 all veteran career fairs across the nation this year, offering military personnel, veterans and spouses the opportunity to directly engage with employers who know the value of hiring those who served. Since this initiative began two years ago, our career fairs have drawn in nearly 50,000 job seekers with an average of 60 exhibitors per event and most impressively, roughly 130 job offers per event. Additionally, DAV is creating an opportunity for veterans to connect with employers through virtual career fairs. DAV will facilitate 10 virtual career fairs this year with four of the events being devoted exclusively to disabled veterans. DAV has also launched the 10K DAV Hiring Challenge to ensure at least 10,000 disabled veterans attain meaningful employment by the end of 2018. The DAV Charitable Service Trust supports dozens of unique organizations that provide injured and ill veterans things like rehabilitative and emotional therapy, transition assistance, employment support, as well as emergency relief funding. In 2015, the trust issued more than $6.3 million in grants to support these kinds of programs and services. DAV again co-hosted the National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic in Snowmass, Colorado. This year, 15 of the presenting sponsors were DAV entities. Among the participants, our 2016 DAV Freedom Award recipient, Army Veteran Mariela Maylan, stood out as a shining example of how adaptive winter sports can make a difference in the lives and recoveries of participants. Mariela suffered a traumatic brain injury, collapsed lung, severed liver, and dislocated hip after being struck by a hit-and-run vehicle in Kuwait. The clinic has been a life-changing experience for Mariela, and she plans on returning in the years to come with the same positive outlook, unbeatable spirit, and determination to succeed. We were very excited to launch our inaugural DAV 5K event in Atlanta this year. We had a wonderful turnout with over 1,500 participants. The DAV 5K initiative is ramping up for this coming Veterans Day weekend by expanding to three new locations. This year, in addition to races in downtown Cincinnati and Atlanta, DAV will be hosting our Run to Honor veterans in Boston, Newport News, and Tulsa. With additional support from the DAV departments of Massachusetts, Virginia, and Oklahoma, we're anticipating a phenomenal turnout for the series, giving DAV significant outreach opportunities and a chance to raise awareness about our services to veterans. DAV has continued expanding its presence in the social sphere, topping 1.3 million fans on Facebook, and expanding our name and message across social media platforms like Twitter and Periscope. Leading up to Veterans Day, DAV relaunched its online Thank a Vet digital campaign that helped thousands create customized videos honoring the veterans in their lives, and, thanks in part, to some help from country superstar Reba McIntyre, reached millions of people through social networks. And don't forget to share it on social media using the hashtag Thank a Vet. DAV's continued partnership with the History Channel helped in this endeavor as well, as the network donated a dollar to DAV for each Veterans Day tweet sent using the Think a Vet hashtag. Mike Wolf and the rest of the network's American Pickers crew even produced a series of shareable videos highlighting the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial and the mission of DAV. DAV helps more than one million veterans every year in life-changing ways. The work that they're doing is not only inspirational to veterans, but to everyone in this country. We cannot forget about those who served and their stories are important to tell. I want to thank you guys both for your service and for being here today and for the work that you guys are doing for DAV. Our pleasure. Well, Mike, we appreciate the opportunity to be part of this on the app of DAV. It was an honor for both of us to be here today. To learn more about how DAV helps veterans, go to DAV.org. Also leading up to Veterans Day, DAV released the very intense and detailed DAV Veterans Pulse Survey. The survey is the largest, most comprehensive assessment ever taken to reveal how generations of veterans from World War II through post-911 view their military experience, benefits, and overall quality of life. DAV again partnered with Phoenix International Raceway during Veterans Day weekend for the DAV 200, honoring America's veterans. In partnership with NASCAR, DAV delivered our message of service and support for veterans and their families to a television audience of nearly 1.9 million viewers. DAV's programs and services gained further public attention at various other sporting events this year. DAV members and representatives were honored during halftime events at the Big Ten Men's and Women's Basketball tournaments, as well as the Quick-Glane Bowl at Ford Field in Detroit. These partnerships helped shine a brighter spotlight on our organization for those in need of our services. DAV also sponsored the Spartan Weekend, an event aimed at eliminating veteran suicide through peer intervention. Outstanding disabled veteran of the year, Bobby Boddy attended the kickoff in the Shadows of the World Trade Center while past national commander Bobby Barrera took to the microphone at Fort Belvoir, Virginia to share his own experiences in the battle to not become one of the 20. The weekend culminated with veterans taking the Spartan Pledge at the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial in Washington, where past national commander and president of the Disabled Veterans Life Memorial Foundation, Dennis Joiner, also shared his experiences and recognized survivors. The Pledge is a promise from one veteran to another to not take their life without reaching out to another veteran for help. As always, our friends and allies in the DAV Auxiliary have had a busy year under the guidance of Commander Linda Steak and National Agent at Pat Kemper. The Auxiliary has not only helped raise funds for youth scholarships, service support programs, Camp Corral, and the National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic, but they have continued their unmatched, dedicated service to local community veterans. DAV has continued to gain momentum throughout the last year with a dedicated network of members, volunteers, and supporters working ever-vigilantly to keep our organization invigorated with new ideas and fresh opportunities to engage. I'm proud of all we've accomplished over the past year. I'm exceptionally proud of our tremendous DAV and Auxiliary community, and I look forward to another year serving side-by-side with you, working together to keep our promises to America's veterans and their families.


Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's National Design Week. My name is Kimmerblatt-Odiga. I'm here to welcome the human experience and built environment panel. Before we get started, I wanted to go ahead and tell you that National Design Week was started in 2006 and it's part of a week-long celebration celebrating our National Design Award winners. And during the week, the Education Department offers free programming throughout the week. This week, this program day actually encaps our programming celebrating the work and the vision of our winners. But none of this could be possible without the support of our funders. So National Design Award programming is made possible by generous support from Targets. Additional support is provided by Adobe. Funding is also provided by Design Within Reach, Altman Foundation, Facebook, Edward and Helen Hintz, and Siegel Family Endowment. I want to welcome my colleague Matilda McQuade, who is Deputy Curatorial Director, who will introduce our National Design Award winners on the panel today. Thanks, Kim, and welcome to everyone in this wonderful exhibition space. I hope you've all had a chance to see senses or will after this conversation. But I'm thrilled to be here with four National Design Award winners. They each, I think, have their partners who aren't here. They were limited to one person on this panel, so they had to fight for it. To my left is John Costacos, and he represents Blue Dot, and he's the National Design Award winner for product design. Blue Dot was founded in 1997 with Maurice Blanks and Charlie Laser, and it's based in Minneapolis. Blue Dot designs and manufactures furniture that is useful, affordable, and brings good design to as many people as possible. Anne Spurn is the recipient of the 2018 National Design Award for Design Mind. She's an award-winning author, landscape architect, photographer, and the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And then Michael Manfredi represents Weissman-Freddy, and he and Marian Weiss, his partner, are the 2018 National Design Award winner for architecture design. Weissman-Freddy expands the territory of architecture by connecting landscape, art, infrastructure, and architecture seamlessly fusing architecture and nature. And finally, last but not least, Chad Oppenheim represents Oppenheim Architecture and Design, and they are the 2018 National Design Award winner for interior design. They were founded in 1999, and they do architecture planning and interior design firms specializing in hospitality, commercial mixed-juice, retail, and residential buildings worldwide. So that gives a little brief intro, and I think they'll get more into what they do and their ideas as we begin our discussion. And so I'm going to begin it with a question, and we're going to hopefully go in lots of different, along different paths, and we can change the topic entirely. You're free to ask questions of one another, but because the panel is about the human experience, I want to find out from you all, as people who deal with people as users, what is the creative process that you go through when you are designing something for human experience, whether it's a building, whether it's a landscape, whether it's a piece of furniture. What is the first thing you might think about, or sort of begin to research, and then what leads you into kind of design development? And anyone can answer. Ann. First. So I write books and try to reach a large general audience with my books, but I'm not an armchair theorist. I have to practice in order to generate theory and to test theory. So I am working with, in general, for the past 30 years with people in inner city communities, in poor communities, primarily African American, in West Philadelphia. And my process in working with them is a process of co-creation, of mutual learning. I learn from them, they learn from me, and together we come up with something that I wouldn't think of alone. Can you guys hear me? Yeah. Just to build on, I think, the comment that Ann made, you have to start with a certain level of humility. Much of our work is in, even if it's institutional, it's in the public realm. And Mary and I, and the folks in our office, try to start with kind of an attitude of knowing nothing, which sounds a little, in a way, contradictory. But we try to immerse ourselves with as much knowledge as we can, as quickly as we can, and hopefully at the rate of a child. And then much of the interaction early on does happen with a community, and it's amazing how sophisticated folks who seemingly are unsophisticated actually are. And I think we're always surprised that there's always some little germ of an idea or concept that happens to come in from left field, which really triggers a larger idea. To build on that, I was just talking about this morning, the idea of childhood wonder and approaching things with kind of innocence. Because we do so many different types of projects in so many different places, I find that it's interesting to be an outsider that we're able to see things with fresh eyes and engage. And like an archeologist would sort of uncover an idea of how life was lived. So this idea of, and I think we could all probably speak about that, but it's a very arduous process that we put ourselves through, perhaps not necessarily. But we feel that if we don't do through this very cathartic learning period that we might have missed something and we don't want to leave anything on the table. It's the same thing in terms of trying a lot of design ideas. Even if we have the right idea the first time, we have to try 100 others just to make sure that there's nothing better that we can think of. So it's definitely a painful but rewarding process. I might add that we're a little different in the sense that you are responding to clients' needs in a client's program. And as product designers we're a little unique in the sense that we decided to start our business along with designing. So we are kind of our own client. So the hardest thing for us sometimes is deciding what to work on. Deciding what to make and what to add to our collection. So that's sort of step one. And then from there it's really a matter of optimizing and it's fun. It's like problem solving, optimizing various constraints, whether it be function or really function. Is it easy to use? Is it easy to make? Is it sellable? Do people want it? Is it beautiful? And trying to sort of like a multi-variable equation, trying to get the most out of each of those things. And sometimes we're more successful than others. And how do you in terms of determining what we need? I mean I know with Anne I think when we were talking briefly last week you know there's a lot of observation that goes with your research. And I'm wondering for each of you if that same kind of thing happens. Are you looking at how people use design? Are you looking at other examples that you know whether they're popular or have some kind of special characteristic. Are you, how are you determining what we as consumers need? What is that based on? Sometimes we're inspired by sort of tried and true DIY pieces of design. So it's sort of this, and the best example I can think of now is bookcases that we all had maybe in our college dorm rooms that were made out of plastic milk crates and planks. You know that just stack them up and the flexibility of that and just unbelievable directness of that. So I mean that's in terms of observing, yes you see something like that out in the world that you know just works fundamentally. And that might be a jumping off point for, it has been the jumping off point for actually a few of our designs. And in terms of observation, I mean just, I know the camera plays an important part in your research too. For me photography is a way of thinking and the camera is an instrument of thought. So I'm not going click, click, click, click and I'm really using the frame to zoom in to find significance. And to understand a place, every place is in the process of becoming. So I'm not coming to look for how to reveal the invisible through photography first and then through planning and design. For example like buried rivers, you know in cities we're walking on buried rivers all the time.  But in fact they're shaping the city and shaping lives. So for me it's important not only through photography but through design to reveal these invisible forces that either undermine or that support human life in cities in particular. In our case, you know architecture is kind of a funny art form in the sense that it often relies on clients and we got a little frustrated with that. So we entered a number of competitions, two of which we were fortunate enough to win but there was a social agenda to both of them. One was low cost housing here in New York and the other was to rethink schools. And even though they were projects that never went ahead, I think part of it was something we discovered which is the art of architecture, the art of design whether it's landscape planning does have a very profound effect on a larger population. And often we spend a lot of time talking to each other. But we realized that this kind of potential was empowering and it made us really excited about trying to find work either through competitions or clients, searching out clients that had a strong social and public agenda. And I think it's crucial for design to kind of find the right conversation to engage in and sometimes you have to initiate that yourself. So in terms of like your Hunter's Point project which just the phase two was just completed recently. Right. So who in terms of what was the what was the challenge there? What was or what was the agenda kind of the criteria that you had to kind of you know kind of adhere to? Yeah. That's a great question Matilda. So this is a park on the East River opposite Roosevelt Island. Actually the first phase we started design 10 years ago. So these large urban projects as Anne will attest take a long time which is both a challenge but also I think an incredible opportunity. There the parks department had very low standards. They wanted to create open space. I think that's pretty noble. But we were very interested in bringing a kind of a more resilient narrative to the project. And at the time we had this conversation earlier. It was surprising. This is 10 years ago no one talked about potential life threatening storms. And everyone would say at the parks department and at city planning a 100 year storm a 200 year storm will never hit. And halfway through or we'll nearly finish with construction phase one that Sandy came and as many of you know in this room the devastation was quite extraordinary. The park survived. There are a number of measures there that were seen as radical. So I think the idea there getting back to your question Matilda was to bring an agenda of resilience which now I think everybody should be talking about but often they don't to a project. So you always have to bring something I think whether it's creating an object creating a book something beyond the very specific narrative that you're asked to do. Well I want to go back a little bit to photography because I'm in the midst of reading your book your ebook. And so it's sort of it's sticking with me. But I'm also when I looked at some of your work Chad and how your architecture frames the landscape and you talk about sort of how that's important in framing certain views. And so we can get into the topic of nature now which everyone I know know wanted to talk about. So how does that impact what you think about nature. What is why are you framing nature in that kind of way. Glad we got to the nature subject. You know I was just at a site the other day in Telluride Colorado and I strangely enough did my thesis project at Cornell in Telluride. And as I often do when I go to a site. And in the 70s we were designing ecologically sensitive resorts and new towns. And here I was living in Philadelphia looking at the city crumble around me. And so I decided to write my first book The Granite Garden Urban Nature and Human Design to persuade people that the city is part of the natural world natural processes don't stop operating at city limits. And that if we just thought of the city as part of the natural world how differently we would design it. And so that was my first book it came out in 1984. And I think in terms of nature as processes physical chemical geological processes that sustain human life. And that interact with human social economic political and economic processes cultural processes. So for me these processes interacting together create landscape. And for me also landscape includes buildings. But so a lot of my work is aimed at not only rebuilding inner city neighborhoods where we have many in Philadelphia thousands of acres of vacant land. In ways that not only sustain human life and rebuild human communities but also improve and restore the natural environment. And through my photography and through design proposals that I described in words in my books. I aim to give people a sense of feeling as well as seeing natural processes and the interplay between natural processes and human processes and the human built world. There is this I think unfortunate bifurcation now that I hope is changing between the natural world and what is perceived as the artificial world. The fact of the matter is there isn't an acre on this earth that hasn't been touched in some capacity or another. My partner and I Marion and I were trained as architects. The first competition we won that was actually allowed us to establish a practice was a park. It was a very modest community park outside of Chicago that was often inundated when there were storms. So we realized the role of architecture and the role of landscape were unfortunately administratively divided in ways that precluded real opportunities of either social engagement or ecological engagement. And I think that kind of bifurcation is starting to shift. But for us it was never a question of saying oh is it natural or is it artificial. I think the world now is so intertwined that we have to recognize natural processes and artificial processes are completely synchronized. And that's the only way to start some of the kind of ecological challenges that we seem to be incapable of addressing. And I'm curious in terms of as you've kind of you know with with the work that you do and if kind of this interaction whether you're an architect interaction with with nature or you know has brought about sort of certain types of collaborations. As you I mean Michael your practice is architecture you don't want to marginalize any one particular profession. So how have the collaborations gone. Have you found yourselves in interesting collaborations that probably if you had not allowed yourself to expand a little bit. You wouldn't have experienced. Talk about some of those. Yeah collaborations are always fraught. But when you have a group of people who mutually respect each other and understand each other's strengths because I think the other danger is to sort of say well I'm such a generalist that I can't do anything. I think you want to assemble a team and work with folks who really have a body of knowledge. There's a handful of ecologists that we've worked with over the last 10 15 years. There's a handful of structural engineers that we've worked with civil engineers. And you try I think in a way to work with the folks that you a love staying up late at night with and and you know agonizing together about how to make a better better place. But you also realize that they bring something that you don't and it's both humbling but also inspiring. So I can think of someone like Steve Handel who's an ecologist who is always pushing us to think beyond a kind of limits of a site to see larger patterns. I think you probably know Steve or there are structural engineers who always remind us that materials do have limits. And we make models with very very thin surfaces that somehow will span 50 60 feet. But there's something very beautiful and I think actually comes back to your work. Sometimes those kinds of experts enrich our life by making a kind of a bring us closer to the material presence that we have to deal with. You know I think what's interesting is that you know people think like your name is on the door our names on the door that it's an individual working at their desk somehow. But it's there's so much collaboration and I always think that it's very much a team sport. So there's not only like the collaboration outside the office but the team that goes into I mean you're talking about the embassy how many people working on the project. There's so many people that go into working on a project and some of them are in your office and others around even today with visualization. We work with companies all over like we're working on one project right now where we have three different visualization companies like all throughout Europe who are helping us. It's just the size of this project. But you know the engineers everything has become so specialized and even on like a small project like a house we might have 15 different consultants from acoustical consultants to landscape architects to you know mechanical engineering and lighting consultant. I mean everything has become so specialized that you need to be an expert to be engaged in all this. And I think this is very interesting to me. I'm like the vortex of sound. There we go. So you know just the idea that it is so involved and so complex and you just need a team to even organize all the consultants. And it's really when you're not in the field it's kind of hard to fathom how much it takes to actually do even the simplest smallest project. And you know it's kind of daunting from our side. Just I actually want to add one thought and I know and might comment on it. Strongest voices are often often the community and they aren't engineers or ecologists but they have a body of knowledge that's always surprising. And they're the kind of hidden client that we all must we must respond to. I would say I've been enriched by admitting admitting is not the welcoming of the people I work with into my research. Because ultimately what I'm doing is design experiments on and my ultimate product is a book. But it's also a product that products that along the way I produce with people in these neighborhoods that I've been working in for 30 years. And so these folks some of my collaborators I have literally been working with for 20 or 30 years. And over time I've learned a tremendous amount from them. But I don't want to forget my research assistants because my project my 30 year action research project the West Philadelphia landscape project has been shaped by my research assistants. I we have had since 1995 we put our first website together and that was because I had a research assistant who introduced me to the web. And and he was coding HTML at that point I said I want one of those I saw his website I want one of those for the West Philadelphia landscape project. Every research assistant who comes on the job had something of themselves their own passions and interests. I try to match their passions interests and skills to some direction that because of their participation. The project can move in that direction because by myself I can't I can't I can't move it. And I've had the I just had the fortune to have some wonderful web developers working on the project over time. And that's just one example. I mean there there are various different expertise that might are at my research assistants bring to the project so I don't want to forget them. But there are discoveries I have made on the ground that I never would have made if I hadn't been collaborating with people in in the neighborhood. And I'll give you an example that's really wonderful. So I you may guess from my previous comment I'm interested in I discovered a correlation between vacant urban land in inner city neighborhoods and and buried streams. The former flood plains of buried streams that are now encased in sewers. And so I started working with this group the Mill Creek Coalition in West Philly. And this was my entree into basements to actually be able to test to to research my my theory was that as you got further down into the valley bottom you'd find more flooding in the basements. But how would I ever get to go into the basements in this low income virtually all African-American community. And so I I partnered with the Mill Creek Coalition no problem they leafleted the area we decided we were how we were going to do this pilot research study. And the president of the Mill Creek Coalition said we have to do my block it's on the buried flood plain and I said well no it's not. And she said yes it is I know it is because we have terrible flooding problems and I'm thinking well no it's not it's actually upland. But I said OK we'll we'll do your block and I was thinking myself control block right the control. Well where do you think we found the most damage from water on her block. And it wasn't from a buried river it was from problems with site drainage and roof drainage. And I discovered in the process of going on her block and talking to people that actually this is a problem that is prevalent across the city in lower income neighborhoods where. Home maintenance you know how the maintenance of the house just hasn't been there and where the original development wasn't well done in terms of site drainage. And last week I was in Philly in the same kind of situation helping somebody look at their drainage problem because they were on an upland they weren't they thought they were on the Mill Creek and they weren't. And I said well let's go take a look because this was this other project was 20 years ago I said but you know I found in the past that it's often due to site drainage. Well guess what the city had come and through a program of helping seniors low income seniors with home repair had repaired her roof. But they taken the downspout disconnected it from the sewer intake and had let the downspout come right to the corner of her foundation. And so she was getting all the water from the roof right down into her basement. So this is an example of a discovery I made only through my collaboration with the neighborhood. And what I've learned through 30 years of working in these neighborhoods in West Philly is no neighbor no community however seemingly poor financially is without resources. Every community has a wealth of resources and you just have to find them as a designer and collaborate with them and they will lead you to new insights and new realizations and to better design. Collaboration. Well you know our our blue that was we started as a collaborative really three founders are three designers and and you know from our earliest designs we we rolled a long sheet of butcher paper out over a table and and and sat there and and sketched basically and and you know drew over each each other's ideas and designed as a group. Some ideas might have started in my sketchbook or Maurice's sketchbook but by the end they were it was hard to identify sometimes whose design they were. So just for that reason we never put our individual names on any of our any of our designs from from the earliest days and we still don't even though our design team now is is bigger. There's a there's still Maurice and I kind of leading that effort but we have five other designers and they're you know coming from various fields. Some from specifically furniture design some from industrial design some from architecture. My background was a sculptor so I had no formal design training but so yeah it's been a collaboration and extends outside of the office as well. It's a collaboration with our suppliers so we might think something is makeable and discover that it's not makeable but you know sort of working through that process with with the manufacturing partners we sometimes will often hopefully come out with a better solution in the end is but it can be painful process to get there. I want to before I throw it open to the audience I wanted to just talk about one thing that Michael and and I talked about a little bit which is and you and you are beginning to get to it Michael about this about the community garden which and talked about in terms of kind of looking at something really small whether it's you know kind of piece of furniture or a community garden in your instance and how that can be kind of a model in a in a small way for something much larger for a much larger discussion. So like the community garden you talked about was probably the biggest lesson for you in terms of urban design and and I'm just curious. I want you to kind of elaborate a little bit on that and if there are other examples that you've come across in your own work where that kind of small what you thought humble kind of project really kind of opened up to something to a larger kind of conversation with you know whether it's with outside people with yourself. So I started working. Is this working. Yes. I started working with communities in West Philadelphia in 1987 working on community designing community gardens. And as you said seemingly humble task but it brought us into contact into contact with the most incredible people. Most of them senior seniors in these in these neighborhoods and one of the we were doing designs for community gardens not only is with my research assistance but also with my studios I would use a two week sketch problem short problem to design the community garden as an introduction to the neighborhood and the people in the neighborhood in order to go on then and do grander visions. And this one project that my studio did in 1988 for Aspen Farms Community Garden a community garden that had been founded in 1976 a community garden of 50 gardeners already existing but they wanted and had won many prizes at the annual harvest show for Pennsylvania Horticultural Society but they wanted a meeting place. And how do you this is an urban design problem right. How do you take an existing community and insert a new use in an area where it is fully occupied. Right. The gardens divided up into 50 plots. So my students took on this project and as I would say not typical designers but as beginning designers they had the precedence in mind of a meeting place like a plaza piazza circle or a square and in the center. And of course they all but one put that right in the center either circle or square one student put a circle at the corner of street so that people could look in from the street and see it. And but one of my students actually took his design out to the gardeners two days before the final review and showed that his design to the gardeners and they said they looked at and they said well this is all very nice but actually your design is a disaster. You have totally destroyed Mrs. Williams group. Right. So it turned out that this lovely community we all thought about was actually a community of warring factions is probably too strong a word but let's say factions differences different groups some of whom didn't really speak to each other and we had idealized this community. So the students had basically all destroyed Mrs. Williams group. Mrs. Williams was the founder of one of the founders of the garden. John Widrick this student thought went home and thought OK well he'd been working with me as a research assistant on my book The Language of Landscape and he thought a little bit further about decoding a meeting place. He said well a path is also a meeting place and there's currently a main path down the center of the garden that's slightly wider. What if I just shaved off a few couple feet from each side of the main path so that a whole bunch of plots lost a little bit and then created he had gotten them to identify where the different groups were and then designed planter boxes and gateways to each of these groups off the main path so that to solve the problem of the tragedy of the commons who cares for the common space using their competitiveness to see who would have the best looking planter boxes outside their groups territory. Well in this process they all learned and I learned that communities are quite complex and as the president Hayward Ford said this garden is a town. We have everything but a penal colony. We have the garbage. We have the compost pile. We have the infrastructure. We have the paths and streets. We have the irrigation system. The water lines. So we're really like a town and this was turned out to be the perfect introduction to then scaling up and thinking about a larger neighborhood and how to design within a larger neighborhood. Hayward Ford also said we have 50 different gardeners and 50 different ways of doing things and seeing things. It's not all a bed of roses. It's 50 beds of roses. So yeah so things that may seem humble are actually can be quite extraordinary places of learning where you can take the insights and apply them to much grander scale. I'm sure you probably find that also the work you guys did. No no I think it's no well no I'm just in terms of you know you know the kinds of you know whether it's just kind of how furniture is assembled or packed or it can it can lead to kind of bigger discussions about you know how we you know how how furniture should be designed how it should be transported. I mean it's all about economics that kind of so I don't know. I mean it's it could be I think there are a lot of ways that it could be interpreted in terms of you know that kind of humble Maybe I'm sorry. Do I have your microphone chat? I mean I'm not sure this is relevant but I can tell the story of how this sort of inspiration for one of our maybe more well known designs which is called the real good chair which packs flat and in sort of an oversized pizza carton and that's really an economic you know it's an economic decision because our mission was to try and make good design more affordable. Which for us starts at the very you know with the very first sketch and works its way all through you know throughout the entire system. So we were sitting around and trying to figure out how could we how could we make a three dimensional object out of steel that could that could ship flat and be put together by a consumer and we were eating pizza and late at night and pizza boxes that you know obviously they ship flat and then they're folded together and there the edges are perforated little dashes to make the folding easy so we started thinking what if you know could we do that with steel could you perforate steel and leave little little rectangular perforations and leave little connective tissue so that they could ship flat be folded but still be stiff enough to you know hold you up and that was the beginning of experimenting with that until we got kind of the right pattern so that it would be so do both of those things and actually it started not with the chair so much it started even sooner with some little desk accessories and smaller objects which were when you make them traditionally out of many parts with fasteners and you're putting them together for us by the time we did that and price them out and then put on the retailers markup they ended up being too expensive so like is there a simpler way to do this with one material and so yeah sort of a humble pizza box yeah can I can I just build on this because I think that what you're doing is really important which to me is who gets who gets the products of design you know who benefits from design and you're reaching out your your ambition is to bring design with good good design high quality design within reach of ordinary people and I think that that's a major challenge to us as designers is how do we bring good design into the homes the communities of people who can't might not can't can't afford high design maybe or don't think they can or don't even know that they need design or that it can help them in any way and there's also I think Chad mentioned this but I think the capacity of design to remind ourselves about our bodies our bodies in space what we touch what we feel good about and particularly in this increased digitized world the kind of haptic realm is something that we really need to recover I'll just tell one short story and then we can pass it on I think speaking of the power of design and who the constituency is I had mentioned this story to Matilda and on our hunter's point project we had a number of community meetings many community meetings and presented designs and at one point we were presenting design we were talking about the the Olmsteady and landscape and then we were talking about flows and recovering lost ecologies and the multiple histories and and it was really interesting conversation you can just look out in the audience where everybody was falling asleep it was late at night and and then we started to describe the project we said well in addition to all the things we've heard we understand that you guys are really interested in a dog run which we thought was like the least important thing after these incredible concepts of democracy and socialization everybody perked up and we quickly discovered talk about kind of community engagement that it was one group one end of the room that were small dog lovers small dog owners you probably know this there was another group that were large dog owners and it was a third group that were like well we are it's not about size it's about temperament and our dogs are gentle so somehow we had through design and this is where everybody perked up and it was an epiphany we came back with a series of models and drawings to show how this dog run could help resolve these inseparable differences in the community and I'm particularly proud of the fact that everybody enters one gate big dogs small dogs sweet dogs aggressive dogs and then they all go into their own precincts which they they their own territories which they are jealous about and in a way it was humbling because if those dogs are happy their owners are happy and we're happy anybody else want to yeah go ahead John I was just thinking about the idea of the community garden and we we brought a project to fruition where Audi was actually coming to Miami to celebrate what they do for the city and they asked us if they can do an event at one of our projects and we said yes but we want you guys to actually do something for the city so we worked with the mayor of Miami and got Audi to actually donate an entire park and we had done all our work pro bono and what was fascinating was the mayor was like hey there's this piece of land that's actually the only native habitat left in the city of Miami and it was a little park that was abandoned and it's kind of strange to think like this little you know 500 by 500 feet swath of land is the last remaining piece of the native ecosystem and it was a closed park so we're able to have that raise all the money and finance the project with Audi to reinhabit this this park and we designed an incredible gateway but speaking about municipalities I was just drove by the other day and the whole park is like abandoned it was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars that we raised and the city just let it go down so one of the things that we think a lot about is the maintenance and it wasn't really a land it was a native hammock like an oak hammock and but it's fascinating like when you do build these parks and I'm sure you deal with it and someone was just talking to me about getting involved in this underlined project which is kind of like the highline but in Miami it's under the railroad elevated railroad and I was saying like they raised all this money but I'm like I hope you have a lot of money for the maintenance of these types of urban projects because it really it's almost more money goes into the maintenance of it than the actual construction maintenance needs to be part of the design I make that when I teach studio and the students are doing landscape design the idea is that the design starts with building support for the project how it gets built which is goes to your point and your points and then how it gets maintained over time that if designers don't think about maintenance particularly landscape architects were in trouble it's also true for architecture and we all think that architecture is permanent it's not it's being changed every day by people who move furniture who turn lights on and off and the kind of flux is something that is crucial and if someone doesn't love what we help them with whether it's a park or a chair then I think we really failed I think we've run out of time we have a time for maybe a couple of questions anyone have any questions in the audience now we're talking about community and we're talking about the importance of nature and educating young people I think is particularly important I'm wondering if that is lost art have we not continued that concept is it gone do you know what I'm talking about in Berkeley California it's a growing movement it's not gone at all I would say yeah she started something and it's it's going strong are you doing it in Philadelphia? yes excellent I'm interested from all of you how do you address the needs for inclusive design especially for people with disabilities into the work that you're doing with the built environment because I know especially for landscaping that can be quite challenging it's absolutely crucial and I think almost everything we touch now by law has to but I think there's a point we have to go farther we're doing a very small project a crate myrtle garden for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and it actually turns out that there's a large constituent parents who are also pushing strollers who suddenly realize getting from point A to point B has to be both doable but pleasurable and I think that's what we tend to forget when we look at legislation it's not just the letter of the law but making it a really a pleasurable experience so there isn't a distinction all right well thank you very much to all of you I really appreciate it thank you for coming


What's going on YouTube right now? It is About to be four o'clock Tuesday August 13th. It's been a long time since I've made a video. I've actually done any trading I was a busy last couple weeks for me August 3rd. I got married and we moved so just a lot of moving and You know actually didn't even pay attention to the markets man on the day actually got married the market Took a dump. I've been a really good time to trade but anyways. I'm happy. I'm married and It's all over now. I could get back to reality and back into trading. So Here we are Let's go On the daily Okay, so daily looks like we were in an uptrend And it broke this little smoothing uptrend through the downside. This was Yep, this is when I was getting prep to get married And yeah, it's like a three four-day thing. So that was just pretty crazy. I had no time to even look at the market This big move down. It's like it's gonna slowly high high low. It's actually make a higher high So that's my take on a daily. This is the four-hour chart So I was looking at this today Downtrend broke the downtrend. Hi. Hi. Hello. Hi. Hello. Looks like it's trying to make a higher high There's a really strong resistance here. So if it breaks past here, I think this could go for pretty long long run And I'm hoping that's what it's gonna do. I'm actually in a trade right now because I was watching this today I'll go over that as well hourly chart So here's the chairman right now and it looks like It's starting to break. So this is the 10 minute chart. Here's a credit earlier today And I'll kind of go over that as well Now I'm trading on micro if I knock I'm just trying to get back into Trading really so let me go over what I see here. I see a pretty good a pennant Really big candle an hourly and you got this Consolidation and I'm hoping that if it could break past this resistance It'll go for a really long time. So I'm just gonna trail that if it could break through it Then so I played this trade earlier today This was seven points. The reason why I played that actually I mean it worked out So I thought when I saw this that this was a EECD E and then it was gonna break out to the upside But it looks like these points didn't actually touch on the trend line So I'm thinking now it's a b c d e and that's why I should place this trade here a little late But it may just looks like it's just gonna hopefully bounce off the trend line retest it and then And then try and take off from there, so I'm hoping for so that's a 10 minute hourly The bigger time frame. This is a really strong resistance zone So it could just completely go the opposite way and it could actually break out to the downside But that is why you have a stop in place. So if it goes against me, I'll get stopped out Hopefully it'll keep going with me and It'll break through this resistance very strong on the hourly chart Howly chart, this is a really strong Resistance it took a big candle to get through Held it for a bit a big candle to get through You got this long wick Then allow this on the downside you get a Doji and then it gap down when he gets into the zone. That's Really strong long wick long wick long wick. So we'll see hopefully all the sellers up here are exhausted and This little consolidation will work in my favor and break out to the upside I may move my stop a little bit further down just under these candles here just to play a little safe and hopefully when the China market opens It'll be going up and I'll make this trade So nope that was how I would or I'm going to play the market obviously I'm playing the market right now. So That's my take on it I try and post this video as soon as I can and hopefully I'll get back to posting videos, you know once a week twice a week Going over What I think It's going to happen He this will take off That way or it'll go against me and I'll get stopped out. So but it's a very high risk to risk reward ratio on the reason why I picked this area is because After it breaks that resistance It's the kind of little room to go I didn't 1960 ish So we'll see and that's it


Education is a right. It is a civil right. So stand up for it. Fight for it. Speak up for it. Founded in 1866 for the education of freed slaves, Fisk University is the oldest institution of higher education in Nashville. Fisk, dedication to liberal arts education at the turn of the century, distinguished it and earned its reputation as one of the premier black universities in the country. Fisk was at the center of the civil rights movement dating back to 1960, when Fisk students joined other black leaders in the Nashville sit-ins. Fisk students John Lewis and Diane Nash were leaders during the nonviolent protest against segregation, which led to Nashville becoming the first major city in the South to desegregate launch counters. The two became early leaders of the national student nonviolent coordinating committee. Many Fisk alumni have gone on to brilliant careers in public service, education, social activism, and the arts, just to name a few. Today, Fisk continues to produce graduates from diverse backgrounds, with the integrity and intellect required for substantive contributions through society. Today, the Titans are proud to celebrate the men and women of Fisk University as our 12th Titan sword of honoree. If I hadn't been for Fisk University, I don't know what would have happened to me.


and going to the Middle East and just bombing anywhere. And it seems like the government's not being very cautious about what's going on. And it's basically how I feel about it. Because I don't think two wrongs make a right, basically. Long story short. Do you support the war on terror? Yes, I do, actually. And do you want to know why? Or, well, I'm sort of a Republican. I'm kind of like a more liberal Republican. But I don't think that what's been happening to our country, I know that we have been, you know, our hands are in lots of different areas in the world. And we are partially to blame for this. But I think that something needs to be done about it. And so I support the war for it. Well, somewhat. Well, just because I just wanted them to do pretty much whatever it takes to protect us. But then again, a lot of innocent people are dying over it. So it's kind of, I'm kind of in between. So. I feel that everyone should have equal, oh, to the camera, should have an equal opportunity just living wherever they want. Why do I support it? Well, I can't really think of any good reasons right now. But I know them. Maybe just because I don't think that people will stop doing the suicide bombings and the terrorist acts unless we do something about it ourselves, I don't think no action is going to stop them. So that's why I support it. I think it's really important to stand up for our country and what we believe in. But I don't think the way we're going about it right now is the best way to go. I'm not really sure the best thing to do, I think maybe compromising and look at the source of the problems and what exactly happened and trying to fix it that way would be the best thing to do. I feel that if we're going to address the issue of terrorism or fight a war against terrorism, we will begin right here in our own country. So that's basically my opinion on the war of quote unquote terrorism. I think that the war that President Bush is trying to do or whatever is a whole bunch of silliness and I think it shouldn't go on. Well, I don't know really because in the beginning, first they never really said Osama bin Laden was the real culprit. They just said, yeah, they suspect him. Yes, you should get him because they didn't do it before. He was guilty of the bombings in Kenya, the US emissaries. And all they did was send cruise missiles there. But I guess they should have gone to him before. But yeah, probably as an American, I would support it because you don't want them. I mean, yeah, terror is just a bad thing and you don't want them going around. I think people, I think, but OK, sorry about that. But OK, we have to look at more deeply. I think people acted on their emotions after 9-11. It was more, yeah, let's go get them. Like I remember seeing on television, one guy, they asked, they didn't really like this old man. And he was like, you know what, a nuclear bomb should be going right there to Afghanistan. So I think we do have reason, but there's also reasons not to. OK, actually, I probably wouldn't know those reasons that well. But I think for the general public, I think more of the Americans are probably acting, are thinking through emotions, just the thoughts. I don't think they probably know the whole story or the whole big picture. They're just like, OK, we got bombed and OK, we got terrorized. Let's go get them. They probably don't even know the motives or what the US has been doing around the country. I don't necessarily support any particular war. I don't think there's really a reason to have violence, you know, fighting violence. Fighting violence with violence, I just think that's wrong in particular. I haven't really followed all of the events, but I'm kind of hesitant to support the particular war on terrorism, knowing the history behind America's involvement with its international issues and also just issues here, domestic issues too. So in general, I haven't followed all of the events and the things that led up to before the war and the war on terrorism. But I generally do not support it, though. Yes, I support the war on terror because these people that are committing suicide to kill a lot of other people, there's no way to stop them except to get rid of them. They don't communicate. I don't think they have any morals.  And I don't think that these people are really aware of what is going to happen to them after they die. I mean, if they knew that, I don't think they would be doing this. But anyway, I think that they should be stopped forcefully because there's no other way. If I support the war on terror. Well, the thing is, though, is that America, they kind of put themselves out where they weren't supposed to. I mean, they didn't want them there. And they imposed themselves in other countries where they didn't really want them there. So I believe that, in a way, we shouldn't, well, yeah, I'm kind of on a here and there basis because I believe that America did do their wrongs, but it doesn't take two wrongs. Doesn't make a right. Like, since they bombed us, we shouldn't bomb them.  So I think pretty much America, war sucks. Stop the war. Violence is bad. Two wrongs don't make a right. That's true, isn't it? No, I don't support the war on terrorism. I don't support George Bush either. I don't know. It's probably not part of the question. But I don't believe that anything will come good from a war-type situation. There's a lot of things that need to be fixed, I think. But acts of violence isn't going to help anything. I don't think war is the exact answer. However, I feel that something should be done because of the acts on New York. And being from New York, they hit really close to home. And it's a frightening thing. And I've never been a supporter of war before. But I feel that something must be done to prevent this from happening again. I would say, yes, I support the war on terrorism. But no, I may not support the way the US handles the war on terrorism because I spent the last quarter in Copenhagen. And I think that had a lot to do with the way I think about it now because I realize the way other countries view the US policies. And I've had a lot, a greater insight on that. And so I think that terrorism is a really bad thing. And it shouldn't happen to anyone, including the US or any other country. And I also think that the US could do other, better things to support other people who are experiencing the same types of terrorism in their countries. Nicole? I don't support the war on terrorism. And the reason why I don't is because I feel that this war is reactionary and that we are not using enough diplomacy in order to further the global good. Like we're just thinking of the United States as this island when really we're part of a world and we have to negotiate with people. We can't just bomb them when we don't like what they're saying and what their politics are. Yeah, I think this war on terror is definitely spreading to other countries now. Like Israel and other places are using our war on terror to back up their war on terror. Supposedly, I don't really think that any of it's coming to any good. And it's just building on itself, definitely. Absolutely not. I think it is useless to kill humans for apparently no good reason. I think that there is no reason to fight over any religion. One person should believe whatever makes him happy. And yeah, it's about it. Yeah, hi. How's it going? I'm a little skeptical about the war on terrorism to tell you the truth. I don't actually believe that it's getting a lot solved. And I think we're actually realizing that internationally it's creating some new wars. And it's really looking like it's going to be a huge problem for all of us, especially as more localized stuff gets brought into the United States. Because you'll obviously see more response from the US government. And that's what's basically been creating all these other problems. So well, yeah, that's about it. No, I don't. Because actually, I believe there's other ways to take care of the war. Then instead of fighting and killing people, I think that we should probably try to negotiate something. I don't know. Bush is all up on killing people right away. So he just jumps on that. I don't support the war on terror because I think that everyone should get along. And I think there's a way for all of us to treat each other equally. I do not support Bush's war on terrorism because many AISM people are dying. And I believe that war creates more terrorism. I really don't have an opinion because I don't care. I do support a lot of the security measures that are being put into place to make especially airports and airplanes safer. I wish, however, that the war on terrorism were not being, in my opinion, used in certain ways to push through certain programs of the Bush administration. And I also wish that the United States would make a stronger effort to put pressure on the Israeli government to withdraw from the occupied territories. And I think that would be the best way to relieve tension in the Middle East and reduce terrorism. So I wish war emphasis were being placed in those areas. I don't support war in any form, in any place, for any reason. Well, the murderous acts that were committed, I think we had to do some retaliation for terrorism. And it's unfortunate, but it seems that things are boiling up in that Middle Eastern area that we shouldn't have taken care of when he had the Gulf War. And we didn't finish. So I guess we have to do it now. Yeah, because I don't think that the terrorists are right because they're dumbasses. I don't feel right with what they do. And if they're going to continue to do stuff that is going to affect other people in ways like that, then I'm against it. Yeah, I suppose it has to be the way it is. But it's kind of sad. And there's lots of innocent people. And I think that America could go about it a different way. Not just America, but the whole thing could be managed differently. I do. There we go.


First, let's discuss the exterior characteristics to consider when evaluating your eggs. Hins will occasionally lay calcium deposits, tiny mistakes in shell structure. These eggs have calcium deposits or calcifications. They can range from very small, sandy surface deposits to very large ones. You, as the flock manager, cannot control the size or frequency of calcifications. A large deposit can downgrade an egg to grade B on exterior grading. How do you know if a deposit is too large?  This egg has a small deposit that does not detract from the exterior grade. It would be graded AA or A. This egg has a slightly larger deposit but is not large enough for the egg to be downgraded to grade B. You do not want to enter grade B eggs or sell grade B eggs to your customers.