I take a great notion to jump in river range, my man. I'm not sure if you know. Well, you can handle any of those. Sometimes she wears pajamas. Sometimes she wears a lap. Thank you, Leadbelly. Good afternoon. My name is Matthew Cowell. Thanks, Rachel, for having me out.  We call them gapers, because the mountains are so pretty. And I've been like that here with the apples and the trees. And in September, it's a beautiful place you live. Thanks, Vakdarn, for having me. I'm an emergency preparedness consultant for Performing Arts Readiness. I'm in Denver. The Office of Arts and Venues hosts me there for Performing Arts Readiness. There's a city owns Red Rocks and Coliseum, and the money from that pays for our cultural programming. And I learned about the Performing Arts Readiness Grant, and I have a one-year, 18-month term in Denver. And then, hopefully, there's a three-year grant to do this Art of Mass Gatherings concept that I'm going to tell you about today that I got inspired about along my journey as being an event producer. I'm a musician, and I'm glad to have a role in recovery and healing, resilience, and innovation through the arts, like Sarah Lee spoke about. I learned about American history and social justice through the songs of Woody Guthrie and Elizabeth Cotton, Bob Dylan, that our dad would sing us as bedtime stories. And I'll share some songs like that tonight. A little about my journey. Has anybody heard of New Belgium Brewery or Fat Tire Beer out west? Yeah. The brewery was employee-owned and born on a bicycle and had this concept that we could take the show on the road and mostly put bikes in the picture, and then we could add the Fat Tire Beer and stuff like that. And it took off. We'd have 25,000 people per city. That's me in the hat there. That guy just traded his car for a bicycle in front of 25,000 people. I hired a band. They came and sang, this little bike of mine. I want to take a ride. Those guys in the gold vest back there singing, and then they would go through a tunnel of love where the audience would make a tunnel, and they'd be welcome to their car-free lifestyle. We came up with that idea on a bike ride on the Willamette River. My event producer partner and I, and we thought about the Guns for Cash program. We thought, well, what if we did a car for bike trade? 110 people traded their car around the country. Over the 10 years I was there, we raised $5 million by throwing free bike parties in the park. We'd have hundreds of volunteers per event. And I learned a little bit of something about event producing. So we had cool art, weird bicycles. This is the beautiful dream that would come true. In cities around the country, it's thousands of people who rode their bicycles and something kind of like a critical mass, but a lot friendlier. We got the Golden Halo Award for content, or sorry, cause marketing. Sort of an idea of saying, let's put this cause first and then see what happens for the event rather than the brand first. So we owned our own stages, power systems. We're the largest solar powered system. 10 years ago, we started three-stream recycling around the country in a network. And this is our, you can see the silk screening. We call that the Born Again Boutique. We would collect thrift store articles that were cool around the country and have hundreds of things people could silk screen things onto rather than buying new shirts. It was kind of cool. So, yeah, I learned about brands are sort of like can be a container for people's identity project, which I think is interesting and sometimes weird and I'll talk about that in a minute. Lots of amazing artists like Maya and this local community of circus folks. I know a lot of them. I had probably one of the biggest touring variety shows in the country for a time. So, towards the end of 2016, I was pushing for even more bicycle-fronted content at all of our events. Just at the same time as Craft Brewing was getting pretty soft for the big companies like New Belgium and Sierra Nevada as lots of new companies came up. And we were a woman-led company, employee owned, but Kim Jordan left. And sort of in that vacuum, the marketing folks who came were like, he was from Guinness and he said, at Guinness we had a harp on the side of the label. Doesn't mean we need to talk about it. So my bicycle community project festival ran out of road. So in 2016 the festival changed. The company stumbled as it changed leadership and hired a big agency out of LA to do 30 shows instead of 15 and send it in containers around the country.  And my money that I'd spend on great performers all went to these millennial friendly bands that just didn't really work out. And this was the audience that they had in some of their cities. It was just sad. And my heart was kind of broken. And I couldn't hang. And I went to Standing Rock with my wife. And I learned a lot and what it looks like to have women and elders in youth and leadership and how delicate a community can be when it's facing floods and other hazards. Thought about what my role could be. We spent a week there in the cold, went out thinking I'd cook and do whatever. But really started to see that the things I'd learned as an event producer, I produced 120 events around the country, mostly around 10,000 people.  And I didn't really know what I was gonna do with that because I was like, I don't like this perpetuation of fame worship that most festivals are. It seems like we end up electing people who are famous for being famous. Where's this all leading? You know, I didn't really wanna go there anymore.  That little amp I'm holding on my shoulder, we would use instead of megaphone to some of these demonstrations. And it changed the entire tenor of everything. It made things more connected and it didn't feel like we're here protesting. It felt like we're here talking. And so that's sort of where majestic collaborations got its start. And I helped figure out these temporary electrical systems while we were there. I realized that I knew a lot more about refugee camps and power damaged cities than I might have thought. There we are fixing some stuff that people, we had giant generators that were not connected. I'm doing something tomorrow if you wanna come learn more about the details. So anybody here like to cook? I know Rachel does. I got this great dinner last night. There's this new book called Salt Fat Acid Heat. She's an amazing chef and she has this idea about balancing flavors as being the kind of way that delicious food gets made. And I love these sort of, have you read it? No, okay, I get it. This is really about the journey, not the destination. And then you kinda practice.  All right, layering. Here's these flavors. Try this stuff. This made a lot of sense to me. And so what I've developed as we started this company is this kind of four main flavors of making a successful event. Their safety, sustainability, community relationships and accessibility. So you can throw a festival that might have two of those three things going on really well, but it may not have accessibility figured out. It may not have very good community relations, but if you wanna kind of get some excellence going, then these are the pillars for a successful event. So I took this idea on a trip to DC. I met Jack Stiluka and Michael Orlov at the National Endowment for the Arts. And I said, I think event producers could be really instrumental in emergency preparedness. We make temporary cities all the time. And they said, this is a great idea. Why don't you poke around? And I took a course on community resilience with performing arts readiness that Jan works with. And afterwards I talked to Tom and told him the idea and I got a home. So Arts and Venues is hosting me there. I have a grant from performing arts readiness to work on this. And they've allowed me to kind of specialize a bit more in this art of mass gatherings idea. So as an experiential learner, I was a teacher. I really think adults learn best from doing stuff. And so PowerPoints are fun and all, but really doing it in person is what we wanna do to share the skills that event producers have. So this art of mass gatherings, let me see how much, I have this is the first time I've given the presentation. All right. And I want questions at the end. So here, I'll go ahead and give you the whole spiel. Back up a little for me, Seth. And majestic collaborations, we believe in the immense power of the gathering, the communal coming together of large groups of people to share, celebrate, debate, rally, sing, dance to thrive. Because to us, the beauty and power of a mass gathering is to bring together communities around mutual passions in a successful, safe and sustainable way. It's a critical part of the human experience. So we help organizations that produce events from civic and community organizations to government, private event producers and corporations to understand the underlying dynamics of events and discover ways to integrate core aspects of successful mass gatherings into their planning and operations. Here's where it gets interesting. To a large extent, a lot of these skills already exist in your community, but you may not have met each other. So what we're doing is taking these temporary cities, and we took an excellent one in Denver, we took the Pride Fest, it is a 500,000 person event. They have the best safety plan of any event in Colorado. They're generous enough to make it available for other people to read. And we went and studied their waste, water, power, crowd control measures, and we brought event producers and city planners and Office of Emergency Management and the fire chief was there for Denver and the head of paramedics was there, the environmental health was there, and we said, this is the place to examine, because usually a city, all of the power and water systems are under the streets or in the walls, but if we look at this festival, we can see how the generators, water and waste systems work.  So we chose Pride Fest and they hosted it, and this was our first group. We were all wearing those cool vests and we went around Pride Fest, and it was timely, our Office of Emergency Management and our Denver Office of Special Events are instituting 2020, all public events have to have an emergency medical plan submitted before they get their permit, and that was kind of fresh. You'd think in a city as big as Denver, they would have already had that stuff, but this 2020 is when they come online, so they were excited for this Artemis Gatherings, because they were like, this is how we can share the information of the best, the 500,000 festival can share with the 50,000 festival and cities like Chicago have 200 festivals per summer. So how do those people kind of all get a chance to learn, that's what we're looking at. And skipping ahead a little bit, I will tell you that my larger idea for this comes from visiting Lafayette, Louisiana, where they took in 50,000 refugees from Katrina the first couple of months. They were buying a lot of guns and a lot of ammo and they were expecting that all of these people from New Orleans were gonna wreck their town. They wouldn't tell you that now, they would tell you now that they were proud to take them, 15,000 people stayed in Lafayette and it's transformed that town and there wasn't the violence they expected and things ended up going well and they practiced something that I'm calling radical hospitality, right? And Einstein's theory of relativity was you spend an hour with a pretty girl and it feels like a minute, you spend a minute sitting on a hot stove, it feels like an hour. So our towns have to kind of go through this experience, this experiment of swelling and taking in people because the Dust Bowl was just our first example of human caused climate change migration and we'll get back to that in a minute but I really think that these festivals can prepare us for our best days and celebration in the park and also serve as a chance for us to practice all those pieces we're gonna need to use to some extent, hopefully not a big extent, hopefully music and art will help fortify our science and share good ideas and we won't have terrible things to deal with but this is the first Art of Mask gatherings, I've got the notebook in the back, you can take a look at what it was. These are all the things we taught about, you can't see it, it's too pixelated. If we get the grant, we'll be able to come back to a few areas in the next three years. I really think Vermont seems like an opportune place to kind of explore the urban and rural and you can kind of thread the needle here, I think it's wonderful, Rachel, and the work that she's doing with historic mapping and all of you folks, I think it seems like a pretty good fit and there's money for it so I'm not here asking. All right, so four things, what are they again? Safety, sustainability, community relations, accessibility, start with safety. Now this would be kind of fun watching the middle here. So emergency plans, that includes stuff like fire, medical emergencies, crowd control, ingress, egress, contingency, venues, wastewater food, active threats. State of repair, that's a kind of neat, one of my wife's a civil engineer and this is sort of the thought of what happens over time. So yes, you made great plans once but are the fire extinguishers still charged? Are the alarms tested? Did mice eat your food? These sort of things can change. We were ready before, is it still ready? And then what's your backup plan for maintaining safety and extreme weather, power loss, stuff like that? So there's a lot to remember, right? That sounds crazy. That's what the Artemis gatherings is for. We spend time in an actual well-run event to help get this information titrated into adults who learn by doing. So we have symposiums, Artemis Gathering Symposium followed up by seminars in topic areas. We're doing one on event power in a few weeks in Denver and we've done one on harm reduction. We are kind of guided by the local requests. Here's some of the stuff I've gone through, a stage contractor, I had to show 2,000 hours of experience to get a license to erect stages and it was an EMT and we do these FEMA courses and crowd management stuff, a lot of you've done and I would encourage you to understand what the incident command system is. I guess another thing I would say is that FEMA's not gonna be there for a lot of emergencies. We'll have to take care of each other and if we do have a highly federal presence in our communities, it might not feel like we want it to. You know, it might feel more militarized and those sort of things. So if we're ready, then uh-oh. Storm alert or something's happening. That's a pager, I haven't seen one of those in years. You guys remember the codes like for hello and millennials are like, don't know what I'm talking about. VHS, Betamax. What? So here's kind of a fun picture. That's one of my festivals. On the left, that person's having a ball. The crowd's all really encouraging it. Here's what it looks like and then on the right, there's what I'm seeing and thinking where's the electric cords, where's the, you know. So here's one of our Art of Mass gatherings that's talking about the stage of Pride Fest and how the ballasting works. And even if you aren't the person who's responsible for setting up the stage as the event producer, you have to understand whether they're set up correctly, if people are taking shortcuts, that sort of stuff. So that's just a picture from our Art of Mass gathering symposium in Denver. There's Tom Clairis in our buddy. There's somebody from Mojo Barrier talking about crowd control techniques. The woman there is our keynote from San Francisco, Elliot, who produces Bottle Rock and hardly strictly bluegrass. And she's talking, she talked at her keynote about finding meaning as an event producer and kind of understanding how valuable it is. This is a workshop on harm reduction. How am I doing for time? Dude, it's going fast. We have time for songs. Here, we have one coming up in just a minute. There's our chief of paramedics and one of our, they were talking about the new medical plans that all Denver event producers need to do. There's a class on power workshop. Safe temporary power. And again, to make the point, those generators and distribution that we're setting up for these giant three day festivals are the same things you'd use in a power damage city post disaster. So seeing the stuff and touching it is a good idea before it gets critical. All right, so this'll get a little bit interesting. I wrote my first for a musical a few months ago and this will be fun for some of the conversations around cultural placekeeping and using archives as a muse for content. I was approached by this theater to help write for this fire in the streets plays commemorating the 50th anniversary of the West High School walkouts. West High School in Denver had a Latino students who were being told they couldn't speak Spanish and that they were gonna be stupid for eating beans and treated like really rough and they walked out of the high school and Denver police department had purchased riot gear recently that they wanted to try out. And so this play went for a couple months in March and it was a children were the or high schoolers were the actors and there was a band and singing and I wrote a triptych of songs. One of them was about safety and kind of feeling like you should as a kid at school and the another one was about West Side Pride and the third one was about police brutality. And there are some cheery songs but the first one you're gonna get is about the police in that moment. DPD have to try out their new riot gear when you're a hammer don't the whole world notice like a nail and the hammer came down jack boots on the ground the crusade for justice met abuse of power through the scope of a cops rifle and a school tower the children look like ants in the schoolyard down below the cops eyes were blazed as the riot was waged. You can come to Denver, it's happening again in November and you can hear the less depressing songs. Isn't it neat how music and food and those sort of things cross the conversations that'd be so much more difficult to have. Glad for it, the art, that's what it's performing arts are for, right? So clicker did safety, what's next of the four? Love you guys. All right, way systems. I'm just giving you the overview. Come to one of these and we'll get deeper. Way systems are challenging the dominance of single use models for special events, multi-stream reuse and diversion that can happen. There's a great chance for city planners to look at multimodal transportation opportunities when they have these large events. Let's try out some new idea for our transportation infrastructure and let's practice our resilience backup plans for maintaining sustainability even during extreme weather and power loss. Sustainability becomes very important during emergency situations. Is that generator running a 25% duty cycle or 100% duty cycle? Cause there's batteries in front of it. That's gonna make a really big difference. That's how much fuel you have on an island. Sustainability isn't just about feeling, swaging your white guilt. It's about whether you have enough fuel to keep that hospital running for a while. Sustainability is very real in those circumstances. By the way, I think, is there anybody here who works with parks in our city? In our cities? There's a good opportunity, I think, for infrastructure when it gets built to include three phase power and potable water in parks so that during the special events they don't have to rent generators or do bottled water. But if that park needs to turn into temporary housing and emergency, you have the infrastructure buried under the ground and it's less susceptible for getting blown over. So here's a water tree. Seems simple. This can reduce thousands of bottles of water just cause people can refuel. But you gotta have the potable water available in your park. That's some of the stuff we already talked about. Solar, biodiesel, temporary making your own art. Here's something we did on stage. I had a song about this. We divide our waste in two, three streams. We got compost trash and recycling. Make some noise if you compost at home. That's for real. Make some noise if you compost at home. Today at the Tour de Fat, we have 21 pounds of recycling, 17 pounds of landfill, 222 pounds of compost. Good job everybody, you did that. You collected all that stuff. Thanks for all the volunteers from Illinois Recycling. They're the ones diverting it and we'd give honorarians to the university's environmental health. They would generally bring out 20 volunteers to our special events and they would run these three stream recycling stations. And you could get a 20,000 person festival. We'd cover three stream by giving a thousand dollar honorarium to the university cause the kids wanted to come out. They also got a free beer. They do an hour service in a compost sorting. But just ways to leverage community to help make that happen. Okay, I'm taking you down to depths a little bit here. We talked about this before that the Dust Bowl, I grew up listening to these songs from my dad. He was an old Woody Guthrie fan and second generation Quaker peace activist guy and when it would get time for bed, you see you get one more. And we'd ask for the ballad of Tom Jode cause it was like 12 versus long. Who knows where that song, what it's based on. Grapes and Raps. John Steinbeck heard Woody sing it in a coffee shop and he told Woody, I think I like your song better than my book cause it's shorter and more to the point. I need to get a few words cause I'm all 12. Tom Jode, killing charge. Tom Jode, come walking down the road. Tom Jode, come walking down the road. Woody went on down to the neighbors farm. He found his family and it took three, took Casey and he loaded in a truck. His mama said we gotta get away. Tom, mama said we gotta get away. Well, it's well. And he said I'm staying with this farm until I die. He said I'm staying with this farm until I die. If that coffee and sparrows and soothing syrup's Grandpa Joe did die. They bear a gram on the side of the California side. They bear a gram on the California side. He stood on a mountain. He looked off to the west and looked just like a prong. He fired a little Saturday night. He shot a woman and took him off to jail. But then he words he didn't say, these few words he didn't say. He said I've reached my mother's door. He got a chance if he don't. Vigilante, now when mama's get down, let's get to the empire. Tom Jode, his mama was asleep. He woke her up out of bed and kissed goodbye to the mother that he loved. And he said what preacher case he said. He said what preacher case he said. He said mama, just one big soul, sometimes it looks bad. What's the third one? It's easy. It's a patient. It comes from the open dialogues that can change the course of your event or plan design. You're not collaborating if you've gone into the conversation with the community and you already know how it's going to go. You have to go in and let it change what your event is going to be. Learn to thrive in that instead of avoid it. Involvement and buying is dynamic and requires attention and care. Here's what you get. If you can muster hundreds of volunteers at your event, you have a force magnifier for your programs. That's eyes and ears.  And if you want to make a more sustainable event or have accessibility stuff happen, you can't hire all of that stuff. If you can find the volunteers, then you're in the right thing. Here's what you also know. Colorado has had a whole bunch of festivals come and go. I get asked when I'm consulting about new events, like, hey, what would work here? Could we do a pro-cycle challenge or these sort of things? And my advice is just don't leave the room until you figure out something that's bigger than yourself, that's bigger than just the music, until you figure out something the community truly wants. And then those people who are coming will organically share with each other that this is a cool event. And right now, Facebook got everybody hooked. And now you can hardly reach anybody with advertisements. It's very difficult to pay to reach other folks. But organic share still works. So this is kind of a... This is a good sell to your event producers to say, keep working until this is really resonant with the community because it's hard to find audiences sometimes. And think ahead, what's your backup plan for community and media communications for extreme weather, power loss, stuff like that? So give your good day plan for community relations and your bad day plan. One of my ones that went well, anybody heard of the Moth Story project? I had some friends there and we put together a national call for bicycle stories and we got some great ones and we recorded some at our event. You can hear Malik's one on there about... Oh, I can't do it justice in a short time, but it's really worth hearing. But how did I put this? If you have a synergistic relationship with local people who will come out socially motivated and then if you can find national media that wants your story, you can reach 3 million people or more with this. What happened with the Moth for this bicycle concept? And that's one time I did it. This one's sort of funny. There's a DC show. We had a thematic stuff where... Maya, you guys might know some of these performers. Those are the handsome little devils. So during the car for bike trade, we had these aliens come down to Earth and they were sent on this mission by their overlord to take us out because we weren't respecting the planet. And they said, would anybody here trade their car for a bicycle? And then the person who had been selected was like, I'll trade my car. And they were like, all right, we'll let the planet live another 10 years, but we're going to need to send a picture back to our boss that we wiped you all out so everybody played dead. So everybody laid down. They're like, all right, and car for bike trade. This is the eighth year you've got to do stuff to keep it interesting, right? This was another thing we did for one another year. The bike is right. This one was fun. This is going very far off of a joke. What are the mistaken lyrics? My sister used to sing one was The Rolling Stones. She'd be like, I never leave your pizza burning. And then what's the common one for Elton Johns?  Hold me closer, Tony Danza. So we drew up this thing on a cocktail napkin. And we said, we want to give the audience a hug in the box. What if we built this and came through the stage with Fogg and a two-wheel crazy dirt bike lady. Put down your kickstand. He's an actor. And hold me closer, Tony Danza.  Oh my God. And it was, I don't know, it was a hug in a box. That's what that community engagement. Here's one of our power projects. I work at McNichols, Civic Center Park downtown. There's 20 food trucks with all of these generators running every day right in our park by the Capitol. And I talked to Ms. Pamela's crew. I said, do you guys want to learn how to run temporary power? I'll teach you. So we went, there's three-phase power under the Greek Theater and we ran distro to all these trucks. And it was silent. We did three-phase power and three-stream recycling and the park was transformed. And now those guys know how to do it. We got the power. This portion is about native land recognition. Has anybody heard of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture? It's not a real department, it's a non-profit and they have a handbook for incorporating land acknowledgments before your events. It's worth looking into. I will say one of the things I feel good about sharing is that you should always invite a culture bearer or an elder to do it rather than just adding a obligatory language to your event before it starts. Invite them to be part of this. And it's an ongoing reconciliation and community building that's not just saying words. I grew some tobacco and shared with these guys and found an honorarium. Some friends knew them. They host a run from Sand Creek Massacre every year east of Denver and we're good friends now. And they surprised me. Remember when we did the first Art of Mass gatherings in Denver? It was at Pride Fest. They came out to speak and had a lot of wonderful things to share about Two-Spirit, the history of the multiplicity of sexualities and being less binary about these sort of things. It was really well, it was wonderful to have them do it. All right, I have another song. This is from a bicycle celebration days about the celebration of the bicycle. Now remember, this isn't best done with a PowerPoint presentation. This stuff is best done in a real environment where it's going on really well. Or even if it's not, you can at least look at it and say, all right, those cable ramps are the old style and they're this tall and if you're in a wheelchair you can't get over it. You know, where are they going to find the new type of cable ramps where people can get over it and those sort of things. So I'll just throw out some of the highlights of things I've figured out and they say an expert is somebody who's done everything wrong once and remembered what they did, you know, right, Jan? Here's one, this is a visual map. Good part is if you don't speak English you know how to find your way around the place. Bad thing is we put it low and people could come and mess with it. So note to self, put it higher next time. If you can use words, maybe funny is good. Here's some of our tricks with compost office, beer tokens of affection, wristband camp, diversity of leadership and artists. You have to affirmatively seek out people for your team and it's not enough to just say you're non-discriminatory in your hiring practices. If you're a talent buyer, if you're trying to put together a team you have to seek out youth, people of color, older folks. This is not something that will just come to you. You'll just be fishing in your own pond. So it's upon all of us who have budgets to hire people to go and find a diverse pool of potential candidates. Meet Steven, a sign language interpreter. He taught me about how great it is for interpreters to meet with the artist beforehand and ask questions like when you said, I forget some of the funny things, when you said this, did you mean that or this and at any rate it's really great for the sign language interpreters to have time with their folks. Sensory friendly concerts are starting to blossom. That's a wonderful thing. Eagle Stadium has a sensory friendly room for people who are suffering memory problems or have on the spectrum and able to enjoy the game in a way that isn't over-stimulating and their family can kind of go.  All right, so this song is about what we can do together. I already told you about Lafayette, Louisiana. I was going to talk about that a little more. Remember relativity, what a city can feel like if they want to be radically hospitable. That's something I think I would love to see these Artemisque gatherings do, is not just to make our events safer but really make our cities more prepared for change. And I'll be ready for some questions after this song. This is one that I wrote and you can... I brought some records, I'll give away. Fall into you with no reservation because you got this mass communication with utter honesty and I'm too tired gotta let it go it seems like my patient for so long, for so long. So I want to thank my wife Molly for live streaming this. I just love you and thanks for watching, kids. I think now would be a good time for some of the love from Rachel and all the people who put this on. I had a feeling about getting on your feet going down that aisle over there and Rachel would take a little walk through there for all the good work she's done. She deserves it, right? When you showed a slide of people standing on a sidewalk it had to do with crowd control kind of and there was a stainless steel bracket. What was that? That stuff is called Mojo Barrier and it's sort of like Kleenex where it gets named after the company but then there's other people that make it but basically because you're standing on that L plate it doesn't tip and so they can put it in front of giant crowds and it creates a barrier between the audience and the front of the stage and then they'll usually have a pit there where security can kind of move, take people over the top. So Mojo, come on, there's crazier ones than that. Thank you for... This is the first time I've shared this. I really appreciate an opportunity to talk about it and the Artemis Gatherings book is out front, my card. Performing Arts Readiness, thanks for having me out and everybody else. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Actually, since we have just a moment I'd like to invite Karen Dillon from the Chandler just to come down here for one minute and say hello. We want to thank you for all the... Your staff, Seth, and for the use of the space. Really, thank you. Hi, I just want to say a quick hello. I'm Karen Dillon. I'm the new executive director here at the Chandler. Thanks for coming. We love having the Vermont Arts Council here and thanks to Seth Stoddard, my staff, who's taking good care of you today, I think. Before you go today, please check out our programming. We have some exciting new programming coming up, including the fretless this Friday. We have Darling Side next week on the 20th. We're also doing lots of art classes, workshops. We have a new Writers Literary series that's kicking off on the 26th of this month. What else do we have going on? We have a new film society that's starting this Sunday. We're doing Singing in the Rain on this beautiful screen. How often do you get to see a movie that big? So please check out what we're doing at the Chandler. I think it's exciting and thank you all for being here. Thank you so much. This is just a great spot for this. We really appreciate being here.


Hey, everybody. What's up? It's Rob. Welcome back to day two of the Chrome Dev Summit. I'm here on the floor We're actually in the main venue getting ready to start the second half of day two. I'm joined with Patrick Kettner Patrick is a program manager on the Microsoft Edge team So Patrick you're gonna be speaking today about progressive web apps and and I wanted to know first of all Just like what inspired you to come do a session on PWA is here totally So everybody at Microsoft is really really excited about progressive web apps We think it's the future of the web and one thing when talking to a lot of our partners that build websites there We're sort of like yeah, but we might wait until you guys support it or something like that And we're like no no no don't just ship it today With proper feature detection and then it's automatically done like you can we don't want people to wait to ship features We want them to start shipping them earlier to get feedback before Sooner and just to build stuff faster and we want to be a big part of that We want to encourage people to do that and not wait for other browsers to implement stuff Just get it done today right on and so I'm sure this is what Many of the folks out there are wondering is like when is edge gonna have some of these features? Absolutely We have a team actively working on all of these features. We're hoping to get it out there early next year It's definitely dependent on timing and budgets and everything else But it's definitely definitely top priority for our team and something you can check out the status of on the edge status Website online where we keep track of all the different features We're adding all our ES7 progress and everything else like that. So it's yeah, it's coming soon. I'm looking forward to it All right, it looks like the house lights are going down. So we're gonna wrap it up Patrick Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you so much for watching. Stay tuned for more day two. See ya


This study, correlating chicken consumption with weight gain, was performed in just one country, and about 4,000 people. This study included four other countries, including 89,000 people. Animal protein intake was associated with long-term weight gain, and again, poultry was the worst, associated with 40% more weight gain than red meat or processed meat. Why poultry? Yes, they're so fatty these days, because of the way we've genetically manipulated them. Up to 10 times more fat and calories than they used to have, but one bizarre theory is that it might be due to an obesity-causing chicken virus, to which 1 in 5 obese humans test positive, and those with exposure to the chicken virus weighed 33 pounds heavier than those testing negative. This chicken virus was the first to be associated with human obesity, but not the last. It's similar to chicken embryo lethal orphan virus, which is common among poultry in the US. The original obesity-causing chicken virus was able to effectively transmit obesity from one chicken to another when caged together, similar to adenovirus number 36. A human obesity-associated virus first reported to cause obesity in chickens and mice, spreading quickly from one chicken to another via nasal, oral, or fecal excretion and contamination. This, of course, raises serious concerns about transmissibility in people. The easiest way to test this is just experimentally infect humans with the virus, see how fat they get. Alas, ethical reasons preclude experimental infection of humans, and so the evidence will have to remain indirect. In absence of direct experimental data, we have to rely on population studies, like how they nailed smoking and lung cancer.  Similarly, about 15% of Americans, 15% of Americans are already infected with this virus, so let's just follow them out and see what happens. 1,400 Hispanic men and women were fall for a decade, and not only were those exposed to the virus fatter than those who were not, but over 10 years those with a history infection had a greater percentage of body fat over time. Most studies done to date on adults have found a connection between exposure to this virus and obesity, and all the studies done so far on childhood obesity show increase in prevalence of infection in obese compared to non-obese children. Now, we're up to more than a thousand children studied with similar findings. Obese children who tested positive for the virus weighed 35 pounds more than children who tested negative. The virus appears to increase the number of fat cells by mobilizing fat cell precursor stem cells, and then may increase the accumulation of fat within those cells.  Just like adenovirus 36 infection can be transmitted horizontally from one infected chicken to another in the same cage, and then they subsequently became obese, the same virus is also easily transmitted among humans. This raises the question as to whether at least some cases of childhood obesity can be considered an infectious disease. They speculate that this animal adenovirus may have mutated to become a human adenovirus capable of infecting humans and causing obesity.


Great. It's awesome. I'm Kyra Villanueva and I'm a software engineer intern at AgriList. AgriList is a startup that focuses on indoor farmers. So we're basically aggregating their data and creating predictive models for better yields. I'm also a research assistant at the Lamont-Darrity Earth Observatory where I'm creating a database for their seeds. That laboratory focuses on climate change and extracting cores. And I'm a computer science major at Columbia University. So today I'll be talking about web scraping using Scrapy. So basically what is web scraping? Web scraping is a technique to extract information from the websites and it's usually translating unstructured data into structured data. So unstructured data would be in the form of HTML and then turning it into structured dataset which is which can be later used and saved in spreadsheets or databases. Some examples of web scraping people have probably done this before is just physically copying and pasting anything from the web like from Wikipedia page like right click copy and paste. You can use like Unix Scrap with regular expressions. That's one way to copy stuff from the web. Either way to copy things is through using Scrapy, that software, or you can use a computer web visual analyzers. So these are just some examples of what web scraping can actually do. So like let's say that you're looking for a video game or you want to get like the best bang out of your buck. So I like horror games so it'll behoove me if I go to GameSpot, IGN, etc. All these like game websites and kind of like add that in and Scrapy and kind of like extract all the prices from there and I can create my own like little application that gives me like the best price for that instead of like you know browsing through Steam sales or you can even go through Steam and add that into their website and like aggregate all that prices in. What are data for the week? Let's say that you're researching climate or your variable requires like climate and you don't have any sensors so you can pinpoint the coordinates for that specific region and grab data from that using NOAA, National Ocean Atmospheric Association where they have a bunch of like data sets for data and for today we'll be going through a list of conifers so we're extracting just pine trees just like a simple table. This is like just like straight up HTML. For installing Scrapy there are a couple of requirements that you need so it's currently unstable with Python 3. It's very stable with Python 2.7 with Python comes pip, LXML comes with most Linux distribution and OpenSSL comes with most software systems except Windows so once you have all of this then you can move forward with like installing Scrapy. This you can just like open up your terminal install Scrapy so I'm going to go to my terminal. I already have Scrapy installed as you can tell. I'll just show a bunch of commands. It's already running in my computer so before we get to Scraping what exactly is Scrapy? So verbatimally like word for word for from like Scrapy document because I guess they worded it like pretty well. Scrapy is an application framework for crawling website and extracting structured data which can be used for a wide range of useful applications like data mining, information processing or historical archival. You can find out more through Scrapy.org and if you want to see a list of global commands that Scrapy have you can type up in your terminal this so let's say I want to know what start project is or what it does. I can just say Scrapy start project dot dash h so it will give you what it does. This is how you're going to start a Scrapy project, Scrapy start project in your project name. You can add whatever project name but it'll be good if it's like relevant to what you're doing and then it tells you what it does, great new project and these are other things that you can do with it. So yeah we're gonna this is basically just like the structure of Scrapy so like the first is like the root folder that's we're going to be running your your crawl bots.  Okay so um all right so we're gonna build the bot now so go to whichever directory you feel comfortable in. I'm just gonna go on my desktop and to start a project you basically say Scrapy start project. I'm gonna title it conifers because we're gonna be scraping conifers or pine trees. So right here it's telling me okay great you have your Scrapy project started you can cd into your conifers or your Scrapy project and start creating your bot. So I have sublime in my I use sublime so I'm just gonna use sublime to open up that.  What I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna clone the webpage for uh the list of plants so the list of plants is right here so this is what I want so this is what I'm gonna be scraping. Basically all like the genus and species and the common names of like the conifers like all of these stuff. Like one thing about this is I like I guess like one awesome thing about like scraping is that once you have like a lot of information or a lot of things instead of like like I could copy and paste all of this but like what if like this kept scrolling all the way down to the bottom or just it's just endless uh that's where scraping really comes in handy because you all have you have a lot of this data that you can just say hey I want all these plants so I'm gonna import scraping. I'm gonna create a class called conifers spider. I'm gonna name I bought conifers and then allow domain for that is I believe it's great. Okay so that's where like the source domain will be and then my start URL you can add as much start URL as you want but since we're only working with one webpage I'm gonna only add this one so right now we're basically cloning this whole HTML page. I'm gonna create a function of parts passing self and response and then for here I'm gonna create a file name and I'm just basically saying that like I want this thing right here this file name well let's split I'm gonna split that based on the back slashes I only want by plant type then we're gonna add an extension file called dot HTML you want to open that file so a file name and then we want to write to it write to it as response to that body so what this does is it basically clones the web page this clones the web page um so if I go back to my terminal and I change the directory into the root directory and I say scrappy crawl conifers all right I'm just gonna reference oh yeah oh right right yes so you have all this so it basically copied the whole web page um and then I can look that up open this up and that's basically it you have like the whole web page right there so that clones the whole web page now if you want to start looking into let's say like I want to take in all this data so like what like the definition of web scraping for is like it's one thing to like clone the whole web page but what if you just like want that raw raw data right so uh you want to look at the fields so I'm gonna create fields here so I want the common name so scrappy that field and I want the genus I also want species so this is just creating fields properties for like our conifer items so we go back to the conifers here comment that out save that and I'm just gonna create like the same function same name um and then for every item in this table I'm gonna create uh a conifer item with the properties of genus species and their common names so for cell in response dot x path so it's using it x html to grab like the data from it um it's like so one thing to do this is like you really have to look at or like be really specific about um what you're extracting so let's say this is the body so like this is where I'm starting at the body of um the body of like this table so it's t body and then we want all we want all the rows so that's all the rows then from there I can say items equals conifers items but first we have to go back here and import the conifer's items so from conifers that items import conifer's item so it is importing this right here um okay cool all right so now that we have that um so it's basically just gonna loop around in this body and like extract all of this so we're gonna first look at the name select that x path um I'm just gonna put this here so if we want the name so we're gonna look at the name right here you can see that it has uh it's basically a column with a class of common names so you want to add that into your x path right so it doesn't stop there because we don't have the text yet so this one right here so basically like the a link has a text so we have to say a and then scrapey if you say dash text it will extract a text from that a link so that's the name right there um and then if we want the genus we do the same thing you just have to like reference the web page that you're looking at and keep looking through it so it's a column with a class called plant name so so when you're like referencing classes or ids you have to use this with the brackets within that it's like the the column has like stuff nested inside it so like we can't get to um so this has the class plant name and then below that you have like an a link so inside the a link you have like another span class called um avis or uh avis is the content and then the class name is genus so you have to extract that um so we have an a link and then a span and then the span has a class called genus yep and so i thought you can extract that i'm just gonna copy and paste this the same thing i think the species the only yep so like they're within like the same like level so i can just like change genus to species diddy class name span class name all right cool i'm just gonna show you so once you have all the stuff that you want to extract or specifically the context or the text you can yield the item all right okay cool so i'm saving that um all right i have confers all right i'm gonna go back to my terminal um in the root directory again i'm gonna tell them to scrapey crawl confers that's the name of your bot dash oh um is basically turning that data and um asking it for a file so if you want to turn something into a file so let's say i'm gonna grab this and i want it as a json file right so sometimes like items you'd have to sublime kind of like gives me errors so i have to type it again indentation problems all right so when you get like a blank screen sometimes like you have to look into um into the way you're writing like the x-path because like like all the stuff that you're looking into that can like create for a bunch of errors so i'm like right here let's see i'm gonna like look back and goes inside okay cool so now you have all that there so that's one way of like extracting information that you have so this is basically a whole json file of the stuff that i've just like extracted um you then like you can use this for your application etc um let's say i want that in a csv file i can do the same thing scraping crawl conifers oh so trees csv dot csv and then it'll show up in your root folder and there you go like i have all of like the genus of each of the stuff name and then the species of the conifer plants um all this stuff is available online um uh and um yeah thank you


Locating children's literature and young adult literature in the western libraries. I'm here on the library homepage. I'm going to start by going to the box in the middle of the homepage one search and I'm going to start on advanced search because that's going to give me multiple options for navigating my search and building it. If I have a particular author or illustrator in mind, I could go ahead and change the field to author illustrator and type in Jack Preletsky or Chris Roshka or Lainey Taylor, anyone that in particular that I'm looking for.  I know that is not very intuitive, but if you type in juvenile materials, you're going to cast a wide net for materials in our children's and young adult collections. You could type in picture books, if you'd like, you could type in young adult, if you'd like, but that's going to make your results a little bit messier. I'm also going to click Western Washington University, so I would like to limit my search to materials that are here at our libraries. You can see that a reading and writing studio help box has popped up. Any time you are on the library website, no matter where you are, this box will often appear and you can chat live with someone who is willing to and eager to help you navigate the page. I'm going to click no thanks for now. So now that I'm on the results page, I can scroll through my results. I can see that there are print books coming up that are in our children's collections. This grade out means that this book is currently checked out. If you click on this, you can request options for interlibrary loan or you can request when it's turned in to get the book. But you can see children's collections. You can see that the seed, the Center for Equity, Education and Diversity is actually folded into our collections here. You can see that there are children's books. You can see that there are novels, all kinds of, there's poetry, lots of different materials in our collections on a variety of topics. And clicking on the link itself will take you to the library record. You can learn a little bit more about what is in the book. There will be summaries and contents. You can also see other subject terms that you might use to search our collections, as well as the record itself with the complete author and the location Library of Congress not Dewey Decimal. And then I can just close it out and keep browsing. So that's a very simple way to locate materials in our children's and young adult literature collections. Thank you.