Welcome. I'm Rick Ferrante. I'm with the Smithsonian Station Archives. I'm in charge of the digital services division, which includes digitization, revenue media outreach, and the electronic records program, which is focused on born digital material. My co-presenter, Rusty Russell. I'm the program director for collections and informatics, collections being actual dead plants in our reference collection at the Department of Botany at the Natural History Museum. And before we get underway, we want to talk or we want to ask a couple of different things. One is please tweet away, but if you have your volume turned up, if you could put your phones on vibrate, they're recording, we don't want fast and come up.   Let's do it a little bit more quickly. Let me try this. It was one of my library, the metadata made in the Smithsonian, who was interested in what the makeup of this audience would be, because the subject matter maybe is just a little bit non-mainstream. How many would qualify themselves as an IT person? And how many would qualify yourself as a library slash archives type? And then any faculty type roles? So we're here to talk about a project that we've been involved in, which is having the effect of extending the life cycle of quite old material, which was not only analog but handwritten or drawn, and so it's been hard to access. So we like to think of this as buried treasure. So these materials, a lot of which we have in our collections, date back to the early 19th century, and are therefore hard to get at, even more so if you don't know what you have. If they haven't been catalogued, if you don't know quite which corner they're in, makes it relatively impossible, unless you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, to include that material in your research. So that is part of what we wanted to address. We wanted to create access to get past that issue. If we can do it in a way that makes it machine accessible, then all of a sudden it becomes incredibly useful for people who are working with today's tools. Until that happens, the information life cycle is pretty limited. So this is a wonderful graphic to simplify what it is that we have buried treasure somewhere underneath the sidewalk. So what I just described is that the amount of access that something has, particularly analog, a couple of centuries old, limits the value that it has. So in 2008, Rusty and Ann Van Kamp, the director of the institution archives, kicked off a project to identify this material, to locate it and to provide access through an online catalog with initial funding from Clear. So they broke ground, so to speak, and we've made a lot of headway. Since then we've identified, located and identified and cataloged 9,000 fieldbooks to date. We're using mods, EAC, CPF, and natural collections description, another standard to make this information, not only accessible, but interoperable. Along with that, we've begun to digitize, made much faster progress cataloging than we have digitization. On average, this material is 100 to 200 pages in length. So it's not like photographs, it takes a little bit more time. But we want to go somewhere else from there, we don't want that to be the end point. And so we teamed up with the Smithsonian Institution Libraries in 2013, kind of expanded the group. Because of how we made these things initially available, we've been able to expand access through aggregators like Digital Public Library of America and most recently the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which is really good. And that's kind of a new set of collections for them in that it's primary source material as opposed to published material. So many hands make for light work and new depths. So we have online catalog, we have digital material available, we have access through aggregators. We wanted to get inside the material. That's what people were asking us for. They didn't want to just see it online. They were glad that they were, they now knew that it existed, but how do they bring their tools to bear? Transcription solves that problem. We don't have the staff to transcribe 9,000 fieldbooks and we're still cataloging, so that will continue to grow. So we got in when the Smithsonian was starting to build a transcription center, a crowdsource transcription center. And we've been able to take advantage of that. The crowd is coming and looking at these fieldbooks, developing relationships with this material, and has done an amazing level of work for us. So what this allows us to do once we identify the quality of the material that we're getting from them, the transcriptions, is to get full text indexing off of this material. Allow it to not only be searched at the catalog record level, but material insight of that, that can be made available as XML based data sets. Then you can bring tools to bear with that. Rusty will talk a little bit more about how these are used. This is an example of a record being searched. And then I searched for Mill Canyon, and it's one of multiple fieldbooks, but it's showing the pages where that, actually, that locale is identified. And you can click on one of those and it jumps and takes you directly to that transcription. So it is a great way to not only get inside one particular object, but to identify multiple objects that are dealing with that locale. And as you add additional terms, you get more granularity. So as you can imagine, it creates all kinds of opportunities. Just because we can do something doesn't mean it's worth doing. And the concept behind the fieldbook project wasn't simply an exercise in finding fieldbooks in the institution, which it was, because we had no idea what we had, for the most part. And yet, these are the original sources of information that are attached to the collections that we maintain. It wasn't either about making them digitally available. It was about answering the questions, so what? And I'll get to that in a little bit. As a field biologist, I'm feeling a little bit like a fish out of water here. One of the things that we're used to is doing the fieldwork that we do. It seems a little bit romantic at times. But the words that I think are most powerful for so many people is explore and discover. And this is the beginning of the acquisition of data. In the past, expeditions sailed around the world looking for natural history collections. You know about the U.S. Exploring Expedition, the Challenger, Captain Cook, and so forth. Also, Lewis and Clark, a fairly famous story for North Americans. And Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace, and Livingston went out on these romantic explorations to discover. But as a field biologist, you spend the time afterwards investigating the objects, observing, surveying. I had nice backgrounds here, by the way, but he kind of stole them. And ultimately, to document what you have, and then even more ultimately, to record for posterity. This ends up, for the most part, in the field books that, as field biologists went into the field, they recorded it. The last 20 years or so, we've seen a move towards digital acquisition of data in the field. But the vast majority of information like this is locked up in analog objects. I started a project to find all of the relevant material from the U.S. Exploring Expedition, which was a government-sponsored expedition four year round the world voyage, collecting natural history objects along the way. And ended up visiting more than 16 institutions, libraries, archives, historical societies, and so forth. And still haven't found everything. And it occurred to me that, now, you can build a silo of information. But there are other silos of information. There's a lot of connected material that are relevant to one another. And at the moment, all we were doing was building silos. So another longer-range plan for the field book project was to begin to communicate between these silos of information about field books. And to be able to answer questions like, well, do you have so-and-so's field books? Well, you might have three, they might have two, and so forth. This is one of the journals from the U.S. Exploring Expedition. And here's where the rubber hits the road. The specimen that is referred to on this page is one that has information that includes only the name, the locality, Oregon, and the number 848. Oregon's a big place. That's a big dot on the map, knowing more precisely where that is. And knowing when that specimen was collected helps us create information that, I'll get to in a minute, I call the three dimensions of biodiversity. So there's a lot of this kind of content. And we're finding it, we're digitally imaging it, we're transcribing it, we're making all this available, but so what? I started using this concept called the three dimensions of biodiversity when I introduce visitors to the herbarium.  It's a reference collection. Each one is a record of that thing being collected at that time in that place. It's a point in the three dimensions of biodiversity. So that thing, that species, in another place starts to create dimension. And the five million specimens that we have with all the localities and all the dates create this incredibly rich model of biodiversity worldwide and over time. But the 120 million of them just in the United States would create an even greater picture. And the hundreds of millions around the world, you can see where we're going with this. The problem is that none of it is digitized. So I talk about the organism being in a particular place at a particular time. Unfortunately, that kind of information isn't always present with the specimens, especially with the older ones. So having access to the original field books in which most of the data was never extracted to join the specimen or even to find its way into publication is really critical. Let's look at it in a different way. This is a field book, again, from the U.S. Exploring Expedition, one of the theologists. And in there, if that were a botanical field book and it's not, there would be a reference to a plant specimen that was collected. Ultimately, information like that finds its way to the literature. Now, as a scientist, I'm interested in all of these things. But my entry point could be any of the three. I might have a specimen in hand and I'd like to know where the field book is that reports the acquisition of that specimen. Or I might be looking up a publication and want to go back to the actual specimen that is referred to there. I need to know where it is and all of that. So back to the beginning when I was using different words to describe what we do, field books are about exploring and documenting. Specimens are the acquisition of collections in the field and preserving them for posterity. And finally, publication is the report, the study. So there are different ways to look at this but you see that this issue of what we call connecting content is really critical. So that regardless of your entry point, you have access to all of these things which are inherently related. So a big part of the field book project then, the next level of the vision had to do with not simply having our silos talk to one another about field books. It was about connecting to other kinds of content like the published literature through DPLA, Biodiversity Heritage Library and others. And also to collections at natural history museums, universities, other institutes all over the world. Most of which have not been digitally imaged. Most of which have not had the data collected from that particular specimen. But as we start to create that, again we're creating silos of collections, silos of publication data. But here's where it gets really dimensionally interesting. And that is in this field book, which could be a simple listing or it could be a journal type of field book, there's other kinds of information that don't fall into this really simple model of biodiversity. There's other information that would be very likely interesting to a social scientist or to a meteorologist or to other forms of study because as individuals were going, they were recombining on their surroundings. They were referring to information that they were observing that had nothing to do with why they were there and yet they were still recording this. And that kind of information being extracted from these field books through word searchability became that much more important and the biggest part of the vision. So the problem was we could get a digital image. Could we get it to the point where we could transcribe it, mark it up and make it available so that people in all disciplines, people in all endeavors of study would be able to have access to that. There's information in these field books that I've read regarding the behavior, the behavior of animals they were collecting. The symbiotic relationship between various organisms that they observed in the field, the names, and this is primarily the names of the organisms which we have a habit of changing over time as our concepts of species limits change, information about ethnobiology, how the plants and animals were being used by local cultures, the images that are present in field books through sketches and illustrations and that sort of thing. The traits, the characters of collections that are made, the DNA sequences that ultimately result from the testing of individual specimens, that information relates back to the individual specimen and gets connected to everything else where those connections are possible. So, within a particular field book like this one, we have the what, where, and when. We have the simple three dimensions of biodiversity. But again, we'll have all of these different data present. Junius Henderson was a paleobiologist at the University of Colorado whose field books were transcribed a number of years ago and the marking up of that and the making all that information available was actually funded by NOAA because of the weather implications he was very good at recording weather data. So there's this plight that most scientists complain about and that is there's never enough data. You could have all you can have, there's just never enough data. You always crave that much more. So the kind of information we have here and generally the results, the analyses that you produce in most studies are based on a subset of available material and it may not probably isn't a complete subset or complete set. So this concept that we'll never have enough is a problem but one of the things we're attempting to do with the field book project is to satisfy that in the areas where we know there's information, we know how broadly it is, how broadly useful it is. The Taxonomic Databases Working Group is a very old organization that began as a botanical study group back in 1986 and since then has become an organization called Biodiversity Information Standards and still meets on an annual basis and has a really brilliant combination of traditional field biologists and high tech information savvy individuals. And two of the things which at the last meeting in Jantroping, Sweden, I just learned how to pronounce that, that we're really going to begin focusing on is to accelerate data acquisition. We can't go fast enough. There is so much that if we plot along at the rate that we are, we're getting behind because we're creating data faster than we're making it available and to facilitate content delivery. So again, through the field book project, one of our goals was to do exactly that. So at this point in time, we wanted to allow for plenty of time to have the next step, the conversation. One, how does our experience inform your ambitions? How does your experience help us refine arms? And what are the possibilities that we will identify through the course of the conversation? Well, no, I take that back. You have to have the capacity to read handwriting. And trust me, that's a skill set that slowly, maybe too rapidly, we're going to begin losing. There are a lot of nuances in these field books that are difficult to get your head around, a lot of abbreviation of things that once you know it, it makes sense, but not knowing it initially creates confusion. But a lot of our transcribers, most of whom are anonymous from all over the world because we can track their machines, are doing it from... We don't know if they're professional. I love going on there being OCD, going in there and you start transcribing things and you can't stop. But really, we are putting it out there for the community at large. And those that we do know, those that we have identified, tend to be those people who are really interested in the subject, but have never had an opportunity to contribute, to give back to what they think and as a result, they tend to be in the later years of life too. So we've done a little bit more. I've had a couple of fellows work on the community management side of things. The way the transcription center is designed is you can transcribe without identifying yourself. You can do part of a page. You can do multiple pages. You can mark it as ready for review. If you register, if you tell us your email address and create a name for yourself, then we give you the privileges to review. So you can review what other people have done and tell us whether or not it's ready for the institution to review. So there's that three-level process. There's no algorithmic back-end to it. We're working through that process. And what we're finding is that we are getting incredibly high quality that people who are doing the review really care about this. We think that there's some brand affiliation and the ones that we've been able to have conversations with have told us we like contributing to the Smithsonian and knowing that we are helping the Smithsonian do its job. They have also said that they like bouncing around. They will come and they'll start to work on a particular project and kind of get full of that experience but not want to stop. So they bounce to another project. So we have botany specimens. We have field books. We have bumblebees. So they're helping us create new digital catalog records for some of this material. And they'll bounce back and forth. And they really enjoy that. We originally thought that it would be professionals with special areas of expertise that would be the only ones to really engage. We found that there is another constituency, if you will, who came for the novelty, discovered a passion, stuck with it and then through their social media presence have encouraged their network to come and participate. So we've really seen this develop in a lot of different ways. Another one of our transcription strategies for the botanical collections that are up there because I also have a foot in that place as well is coordinating with professors in different places to do content that is germane to that individual's research and then they have their students do the transcription and that adds a lot of depth to the, it provides the data to the individual researcher but it creates an additional bonding between the students and the professor. The completed projects are available in a number of different ways. There's that learning experience. One of the other questions. We have, Cleo Calderon was a botanist who worked closely with Tom Soderstrom, particularly on bamboo-related species in Brazil and northern South America. And she wrote for herself as people do. And she was multilingual so depending we think on who she was talking to last, her notes were in Portuguese or English, sometimes on the same page. And that took a little bit longer but we were able to call out and say, hey if you speak and read Portuguese we'd love your help with this particular project. What's interesting about that, Cleo, I collected in Brazil with both Cleo and Tom and she was Argentinian so her first language was Spanish. She was extremely good at English but she was especially good at Portuguese and all three of those languages show up in her field books very randomly sometimes. Also an interesting story that she recollected a species that had not been seen in the wild for more than 100 years. We were actually out there looking for that and it was her team, not ours, that ended up finding that and her record of this, it was called Anomacloa, her record of this was very understating. I went back to look for it because I thought well this would be really interesting. I want to see what Cleo said about it while she was there looking at this thing. Found it or whatever, I forget exactly what she said but it was very matter of fact. And that was kind of interesting to me because she was otherwise a crazy hot-blooded Argentinian. I had to say a question about the translation. So this started in 2013, the collaboration between the Smithsonian and the field of policy projects? The Natural History Museum, Department of Botany and the Institution of Archives embarked on this in 2008. That's when we got the initial clear funding. It's continued since then. In 2013, the institution libraries came on board. They're a separate group as well so additional resources, additional avenues and we've been able to really kind of explode the ways into this material since then. It also provided stability because Ann and I were constantly looking for funding to keep it going and having it under the umbrella of the libraries and BHL made it more sustainable. We're over 9,000 now and because we've found all the low-hanging fruit, you have to understand that natural history curators are the archivists of the person who preceded them. So they're hanging on to this because they're responsible for protecting it and their descendant will do the same for theirs. So there's a lot of content still in people's offices. There's a lot of objects in boxes somewhere. So as we find them, as we locate them, we're working on it. My guess is that we've probably got another 3,000 to 4,000 to locate within the institution. Yeah, we have an ambition at this point in time to, over the next couple of years, digitize another 2,600 field books while simultaneously cataloging 2,000 to 3,000 as quickly as they can be digitized. The appetite of the crowd to transcribe more than satisfies that. So the transcription center has been around for a year. We are halfway through our backlog of digitized material in terms of the transcription center. We do have to exercise some judgment. Some of the material doesn't have enough contrast. The pencils were too light in the field or the ink is faded too much to actually really be a successful experience for somebody from the crowd. Grad students or scientists are going to be much more interested in making headway with that than somebody who's there for fun. But the large bulk of what we have is appropriate for the transcription center. While it won't keep pace, we've gotten through 16,000 images today in the year and six months that the transcription center has been available. The field book documents the acquisition of these, whether we have them or not is a different issue. We may have 20 plus contributors for a single page. Until it's marked ready for review, anybody who comes to that page, there's an editing lock on it so while somebody's working on it and somebody else can't, but they can go back and forth. The whole idea of simply saving it and not marking it for review is, I'm not confident or I didn't finish the whole page, I have questions. There's instructions we give them to identify where they have questions and an area where they can write notes to each other. Back and forth and we do see people who've found great sources for specimen names or Chinese translations, we've seen them do wonderful things there. When things are marked ready for review, the registered users are able to go in. They really care about accuracy and sometimes they will go back and before we have a chance as staff to go in and review their review, one of the other reviewers will say, no, this was marked ready for approval before it was actually complete and they will ask us to reopen it for editing. We have had different units approach the Smithsonian level approval different ways. In some cases where they're working inside a journal or a diary or a set of letters, one particular unit had fellows who as part of their research did that Smithsonian level approval. In other cases, we have particularly the people who are documenting the specimen records and they need a higher level of accuracy. Something that's 99% is not good enough, particularly because of where this information is going to get used. It's a lot more intensive on their part. How they source that is much more difficult and it's definitely a resource issue because you're creating records so much faster than you normally have staff allocated for which is a juggling effort that Rusty could probably speak to better than all. Because I don't actually engage in that, all I can tell you is that those individuals in the department that we have reviewing content are fully engaged in that and we're struggling keeping our head above water. But Jennifer, you touched on one of two basic strategies for doing that. If you have ever heard of Zooniverse, it's a crowdsourcing facilitator and their strategy is to have multiple people do the very same thing and then match them using various comparisons or algorithms to see what the final product is going to be but then it still needs to be reviewed. We're doing it a slightly different way by having as many people as want to contribute to this particular record do that and basically do what people are very good at doing and that is catch you at making a mistake. So somebody didn't get this right, somebody else corrects it and you just go through these iterations until you get to the point where somebody finally marks it, then our reviewers are the first level of review that takes the onus off us at least at that level. So you have two options like that and there are others but both of them have a different approach to addressing the ultimate goal and that is get it right, have it completely accurate the first time. Then this is harder to do often times with plants or with actual specimens because you've got, although it's true also in field books, a lot of scientific terminology, words that you're not familiar with, Latin and Greek, for example, in the nomenclature and abbreviations of that, PAPH, Pathiopidillum, the orchid, which is PAPH, nobody would understand that until after a while you've actually seen that in that particular field. So there's a lot of that we have to struggle through. The idea that out of sometimes 20 people working on a single record, one person is going to know what that abbreviation means and so finally it gets to the reviewer in pretty darn good shape. Some of the other examples of issues are geopolitical, right? Think of China in the 19th century. Those place names don't exist in many cases, completely different. Country boundaries have changed and so what's actually in the old material would find some of that resources in order to address those issues within the material. Multiple units approach the transcription center differently. We do. We try and identify when something is particularly easy or particularly difficult. I have mischaracterized a project and quickly heard back that it was more difficult than I had led them to believe. We've also found that the people who develop the passion for transcription will talk to each other, particularly in Twitter. They call themselves volume peers and they will tell each other whether or not something is particularly easy, whether or not something is a good project for people who want to develop review skills to work on. They will actually ask people who have foreign language specialties to engage in a particular project. They're calling each other and calling for specific skills to a project even when we haven't quite done that on the front end. It's a great relationship but yes, we found that that's very helpful and the easy ones go really quickly. Another thing that we do to attract interest in some of these where since we do have five million plants to do, just doing them all and throwing them up there in some random fashion doesn't attract the attention necessarily. So we will put things up in packages. Like we did with the Malvase, we did it as hibiscus. The Tiliaceae, we did it as basswood. We're putting together little packages to attract people in that fashion. One of the things that we're talking about is doing massive digitization and then filtering out various ones. For example, all those with a Cyrillic language on the label get ferreted out to that kind of content. A lot of the printed labels are going through OCR right now and then that gets thrown up as just needing to be edited. Initially we hired a project manager, we hired a cataloger and we hired a cataloging coordinator and we hired a cataloger. The first grant was half a million dollars to work for about three years pulling all that together. Our original goal of also creating an online application that would achieve our vision for world domination which was an international field book registry didn't quite make it to that point. We had subsequent grants to do digitization, to do conservation which by the way I think we need to point out we're talking about fairly fragile old objects here and of course those people who are librarians and archivists appreciate the unique value of these things as opposed to being one of many but also the fragile nature of them and many of them need to go through some form of conservation or object remediation before they can even be held and cataloged. So that wasn't money we had in the original half million. So we were getting additional grants like that. We struggled through another couple of years and then our conversations with the libraries and BHL brought us to the point of having a more sustainable model for continuing this thing forward. We're in the process we're waiting on, forever waiting on the next grant that has been promised to us and that is paying our new project manager, Julia Blaise, sitting back here. And the staffing is pretty much the same. We have a cataloging capacity through the archives. We have conservation and digitization imaging, digital imaging being done. So those are basically the various groupings of functions that need to be performed. So with regards to conservation and digitization we found as we were going through the cataloging process that if we were going to proceed any further roughly one out of four field books needed conservation. Some very significant interventions and others and not so much before they were stable enough to be digitized. And so the additional grants that we were able to provide one from Save America's Treasures allowed us to bring in pre-doctoral fellows and some cases some post docs to work under the auspices of our paper conservators on that material. I allocated a portion of my digitization staff to do digitization because as soon as people were aware of it they wanted to see it but they couldn't get to DC and supplemented that with interns and volunteers. QA process was always paid staff with regards to the transcription center. We rolled into our overall workflow. So we're digitizing as a matter of preservation and it's part of our ordinary operations. We take the output of that. Our endpoint for that is structured in a way so that we have just a little bit more workflow to do in order to put it into the transcription center. Roughly we're able to keep pace with that plus doing metrics with roughly six to eight hours a week of effort in that. Approval would be another couple of days worth of effort if we were going to be doing that. That goes a lot slower because we don't have the additional staff for that. As I've heard in lots of other presentations we as a community have the obligation to advocate the value of what we're doing and why it is appropriate to invest additional resources but we're definitely seeing that happen here and as more and more researchers are accessing and using the material they're becoming advocates as well. One of the things I want to mention too is the use of social media in integrating social media into the fieldbook project. In the very early months, Carolyn, Senoi, Leslie had come on board. Senoi came to me and said, we would like you to contribute a blog, blog post for the blog and I said, we have a blog. They had gone ahead being the 20-somethings that they are and created the most amazing blog on fieldbooks and our content and the stories that they're telling. It didn't have as much to do with science as it had to do with people and stories and personal issues and they were so good at bringing stories to light on anniversaries of various sorts. Edgar Mearns took his son into the field and we posted that on Father's Day. All of that, there was a poem, a love poem, that somebody wrote that went up on Valentine's Day but you read this and it's the most, it's the one thing that more people will comment on that, oh, I really enjoyed your blog. Oh, by the way, you're doing 9,000 fieldbooks. That's great, but I really liked your blog. The stories are compelling. Some of them are life and death and there's lots of imagery and that sort of thing. So that gave us a fair amount of visibility in ways that was one story about that. We got a contact from the son of a Kenai elder in Kodiak Island in Alaska who noticed the story that we had put up about William Fisher who retired in the late 19th century and found a Russian wife on Kodiak and lived there but he was really interested in ethnobiology, did a lot of collecting. We have some of his plant and animal specimens and he had just seen this story on William Fisher and he also saw that we had at that point digitally imaged a number of his collections and he said he shared this with his mother because by the way, Fisher also collected Russian names for that plant, Kenai names and well, English names. Common names. Well, common names too. But she was willing to look at these things and give us the appropriate updated pronunciation and spelling for these plant specimens that we had and they were really excited about that to be able to contribute in that way. The blog was a very serendipitous thing that was out there that he saw and created a really interesting, so we blogged about it, but a really interesting contact. Some of the things that surfaced out of this are relationships between scientists that aren't necessarily captured in the individual objects but as they tell their story about this, Frederick Coville doing his work in Death Valley in 1891 turns out that he went on a number of expeditions with a guy named Vernon Bailey and Seahart Marion and Seahart's sister Florence was an ornithologist as well and seemed to tag along on some of these and Florence and Vernon hit it off and later became an item. And in the course of this we are finding some of the people who have come to the transcription center go in and look for secondary contributors that aren't necessarily in the published media or in the case of early or 19th century are referred to by their husbands' names. Mrs. Sidney Blake actually turns out to be Doris Holmes Blake a collector, but how the convention worked then doesn't necessarily bring that to the surface. So we're seeing a whole another set of authorities come out of this material. One of the things I clamored for at the very, very beginning was we need more information, more keywords about each object because, sorry, but an archival finding guide is not helping me. There are field books in those RU units that nobody knows about because it's just not described quite that way. So I wanted information about the people, information about the localities, information about the content. And so that created the data model that we initially created incorporated a lot of that. And part of the cataloging practice we're using multiple thesauri with regards to that but to stress the keywords because of the search engines that we now know people go to those keywords and embedding them as meta tags is really important because we have quite a number of field books that were field notes 1891. Because they weren't thinking about what somebody else might want to look at that. And the only way to narrow that set of material for what you're interested in is in that set of keywords. Google is going to look to that information not necessarily dig into what is in your subject index terms and so on. Right, exactly. Finding A is actually as Rusty was describing is less useful than an item level catalog record because you only have that object or that folder description and that doesn't give you the rich access points that you would get from keywords. We found a watercolor book in a unit that was described simply as OF Cook in Liberia that was done by one of his protégés, Frederick Straub, who died as a 27-year-old collecting in Liberia. Beautiful watercolors of plants and next to each one was a little number which it turns out linked back to plant specimens that we had in the herbarium. He collected with that number. Of course, if you know anything about pressed plant specimens they're not very colorful sometimes. And to have these illustrations adjacent to the actual specimen was, and finding it though, we found it. You bump into those sorts of things. They're not clear in the original finding. If I could kind of shift a little bit and talk about the community that's come to help us do this. We give back to them. We've done a number of Google Hangouts giving them a virtual behind the scenes. Talking to people like Rusty and other curators about an aspect of the material that may be available in the transcription center. And it's really, really well-received. We encourage them to help us complete a project in order to get access to a contributing connect session. We have seven-day review challenges and then we've taken to recently a monthly, we call it MyTC Discovery, where they share with each other through social media the discoveries that they make. Which helps us make connections that we wouldn't ordinarily make. So everybody benefits from that. But that's, again, a way of... We're not... It's easy to think of crowdsourcing transcription as a way to get free labor. We want to think of it more as a way to, as a partnership, create new knowledge. And they really receive that well as being part of the group that's creating this new knowledge. It means that we have to demonstrate a respect for what they're contributing and the intelligence that they bring to the process. We try hard to do that. There is an effort associated with that. If you Google the fieldbook project, that'll be your first hit. You can read all about it. And you'll see the other e-mails or websites up here. If you just Google Rusty and the Smithsonian, you'll find mine, too, somewhere. It's pretty much... And I'm happy to hear from anybody with additional questions if you think about them later. Thanks for coming. Thank you.


overview of cotton policies. When we talk about cotton policies, the objective of the cotton policies is to support farmers, provide raw material to the domestic textile industry, and promote exports of both cotton and cotton lint and textile. So there are various combinations of export restrictions, export taxes, and domestic procurement have been used for the cotton policy. If we discuss this cotton policy with reference to a time period from 1975 to 1995, the government basically maintained a sport price for the cotton lint and seed cotton, and government procured cotton lint from the ginners. And whatever government procured, here you say there is a cotton export corporation that has a monopoly in the lint export from 1974 to 1986. And because of this export of cotton lint by cotton export corporation, it results in an increase in domestic prices too. And at the same time, cotton farmers also get benefit from the import tax on the vegetable oil during this time period. Because of the import tax on the vegetable oil, it results in increasing cotton seed and cotton seed oil prices. When we discuss with reference to a time period from 1986 to 1993, so then there is an export tax on the cotton lint. And because of that export tax on the cotton lint, it insulated the domestic market from movement in the international prices. And at the same time, it results in a significant loss for the cotton farmers. But since 1994, demand for lint in the textile sector exceeded the domestic supply, so Pakistan becomes a net importer of cotton. And gross imports averaged 259,000 tons per year from 2002 to 2004. By 2013, Pakistan was importing about one-third of its cotton requirement. But here, the duties on exports and imports were reduced in mid-1990s. And domestic procurement and direct market intervention becomes minimal. Since the mid-1990s, domestic prices of the seed cotton were determined by the world prices of the cotton and the domestic price of the cotton seed. After 2005, in fact, there is no trade policy distortions for the lint. But because of import tariff on the vegetable oils, it helps to increase the price of cotton seed oil. And that import tariff for the time period 2002-2009 is about 30%. But in 2013, it was approximately 2%. Now, for the last 13 years, we are reporting the last column as the sport price for seed cotton. The government usually did not make an announcement about the sport price for seed cotton. But for some years, there is an announcement of the sport price for the seed cotton. 2022-23 major sport price, that is Rs. 8,500 per 40 kg. And here, we are reporting the production of cotton for the last 13 years. And if we look at the column here about cotton production, we can observe a significant decline in the cotton production. For example, in 2010-11, production of cotton bales is about 11 million tonnes, which was in 2022-23, about 4.9 million tonnes. So, there is a significant decline in cotton production in Pakistan. Now, if we summarize all this with reference to the fiscal year 2020-23, then we can observe that in this fiscal year, cotton contributed about 0.3% in GDP. And the production here was about 4.910 million bales, that is approximately 50% less than the previous year production. And this drastic reduction of the production of cotton played a role in the climate change. Basically, the floods in 2022 swept away the whole crop in Sindh and Blochistan.


This is the SF Productions podcast network TV signals in Kansas seven four-year time Remember some old 2d shows of course. I was before President Turner put that of false colorization law through in the 20s Don't be so sure about that. There were some great shows back then See back before all the video was put directly into computer memory in the com net people used to tape shows Let me see There's a tape already in here. Let me let me hook this up here. Let me see what we got back with us to the 60s and 70s dwelling place of the lost generation an era whose heroes Role models and very lives were molded and formed by weekly installments the favorite television programs Welcome to the place your parents didn't understand welcome to the vast wasteland. Welcome home Exciting episode of vast wasteland. I'm your host Mark Smigar along with Wilbert Neal and Marty Wiley And we're here to talk about 60s and 70s television tonight. It's cult shows But before we get into the big cult show phenomena Or whatever we just want to tell you we're on Tuesdays at 6 Wednesdays at 10 and Thursdays at 3 p.m Here on a ctv cable 21 and also if you'd want to write into us And I'm not really sure why you want to do that but just You have nothing else better to do Yeah, pick up a pencil Write something tell us how you like the show or get involved in our big swap meat Video swap meat. Oh, it's big It's Roland. We're just boom. We're zipping along on it They can't control it's like a just a huge onslaught and Basically, if there's a show that you would love to get a videotape of or find out where you can get Just right into us and we'll announce it on the air and see if anyone in our vast Audience of five or six people actually watch the show if one of them might have it and then we'll get you together Mr. Brady meant is probably our biggest fan. That's right. So So just you'll want to write into box 15 14 11 Columbus, Ohio 43 215 and So let's get on to the the big topic tonight There are always shows that were the big hits and then there were the shows that Never big demographically and never big in the audience measurements and the Nielsen's but They were shows that just have this fanatical following Seem to just can't be killed and I suppose we should start off with With exactly what is a cult show or what's your definition of a cult show Wilbur? You might have watched you you could you could remember watching it Was on you can remember the fact that you actually liked watching it I can't say it was me, so Yeah, it was me Get specific you might remember one or two characters maybe the main characters some of the wacky things they did right something like that, but as far as any particular show any a particular episode, maybe you'll remember one, but No, and if you find somebody else that has watched that show, it's like I But well at least to me it seems like There are a lot of shows that they People like to call call shows But they're not really shows that were on the air for especially if they were on the network for like more than a season You know that to me means it was fairly was too darn too darn accepted So Well, let's just we're just going to go through various shows and see One show that I did that currently you can actually see this is amazing. I mean until recently cult shows were like Shows that were on you know, they had their original airings and you've never seen them again because they're not correct for syndication They just you can't You can't get them out there because it's just not enough episodes, but Networks such as A&E and network such as What is it comedy channel slash CTV slash comedy central Basically, yeah, because they're really cheap because the the studios that own the rights to them are like well Yeah, they're gathering dust with we are selling to you than nothing but you know, we can't charge it a lot and From there it's straight to video Big area now, but rid originally you just couldn't get out of cult shows were shows that if you didn't catch them when they were on Forget it. You just couldn't catch them at all. That's right We're no vcrs. They're there were no videotapes. They were the old store. There was no dozens of cable channels They were that are desperate. It was they're showing amazing Amazing discoveries 23 hours a day and then this show the other hour so Well at one show I certainly want to bring up first and is now you can now see it on Comedy central is is quark Now this this show almost nobody remembers From truly a cult show very much like I flipped it on and right. It was like Buck Henry created this of course the creator of get smart and Captain nice and right and Decided I'm going to satirize a science fiction series mostly Star Trek, but lots of other stuff and so he created this series called quark, which is about an interstellar garbage collector and his Star Wars crew and a Lot of when people here are especially people who are into science fiction a lot of them think oh that was because Star Wars was big Well in a way But what actually happened was the first episode aired the month that like three weeks before Star Wars hit the big screen with like like three weeks same month and It's It was something that they put out there and they thought oh this is going to be a big hit and it never really went anywhere And then suddenly the network saw Star Wars and saw a huge box officer seats and Delved into anything they possibly had that was even remotely involved with science fiction We want episodes so they did Eight eight more episodes and put them out there by about the next Like by 78 likes winter of 78 and they went out there. They didn't do very well and they were gone But it was still a really interesting show It's too to sci-fi fans It's really interesting because each episode is is a definite takeoff of some specific Not just genre, but series and in some cases even episode of a series There were about two that were direct takeoffs of Star Trek original Star Trek episodes There was one that was a Buck Rogers parody, you know, there was there was one that's a there was one Star Wars parody the and It was just it was just in concept for a show, but it was such an incredibly limited audience because it was like, you know science fiction fans Who were this at that point really just starting to get going because there hadn't been anything out there right Of course that the big the big influence of that was really Was really a track because you had your your first officer who was a unemotional plant and Let's see then you had you had the the robot the lost in space type robot except he just was pretty much Right, and the yeah, the Betty What yeah, these twins and one of them was a clone and neither of them would admit which that Was the corner who wasn't and they were basically there to to the the archetype Damsel and distress in in scanning will they both know that secret crush on commander quark, right Trying desperately to be a captain Kirk type, but never really making it He's just just a little bit too nebulous to really make it Right, yeah Richard Benjamin for those you know, it was it was the star of the series Now that that kind of brings me in mind of another cult show I guess I'll call it a cult show one of he was on some years ago Gee now was it good morning world or was it he and she and she Because he and she weren't well he was he and Paul print is right and we're actually married. Yes, and they Um, he wasn't that's the one where he was the cartooner cartoonist. No, I think good morning. No, well, good morning. We're gonna find out Thinking up is Let me see. I'll say it's he and she I think he and she is the one with the with the he's he's the cartooners and he had this character called jet man and Did Jetman right it was real neat, you know real neat costume That's that's why I'm calling it's a cult show because I can remember them I can remember jet man and but what the show is I just remember the fact that it was on that's right Okay, he and she did Hollister a successful cartoonist whose creation jet man has been turned into a TV show Starring Oscar north in the title role Oscar was a bit of the I'm the arrogant smug It goes egocentric side and was constantly disagreeing with dick about the proper interpretation of jet man But anyway, yeah, well, I think a cult shows I think my favorite is hotel Baltimore because nobody thought that me Remember hotel Baltimore a lot of a lot of great Was it a normal air show there was just a lot of people that had been on his shows Showed up I'm not sure Was one of the most controversial here. Yeah, it was really controversial for doors by Norman Lear. Yes. Yes And I remember it was on Friday evenings because I baby sat quite a bit 9930 rock sexual innuendo and racy dialogue to the home screen I mean wasn't it about a couple prostitutes that living in an old hotel a couple of the characters. Yeah, that's the Death's clerk and his love April harried manager Clifford Philosophical Charles Susie Martha rocket the Colombian prostitute and Millie and unemployed waitress Jackie Detombo What do you call it ensemble shows? ensemble cast that Kind of like a Bernie Miller feel to it in the way Because it wasn't just like well, I'm going to do my bed and then I'll leave Here's the scene with me and then we'll be the scene with you You see there's only like one episode. I can remember on that the one where the Japanese Japanese salesman came to town and they were trying to talk to him and all I could do was rattle off. Oh Panasonic And it was it was a funny show though Well, you were talking about About animation and that puts me in mind this actually is it has an asterisk is an 80s show Duck Factory Now that this was an interesting concept again more of a Kind of an ensemble type thing. I'm remembering I remember a lamp a little bit a little bit like WKRP Where it was like wacky characters put together In a work group situation kind of like this like a group of animators. Yes, that's exactly a lamp that looked like a duck Well, that was their main character That was that was the Dippy duck was there that was the main character and this This Walt Disney type but it was not nearly successful died and In here and and Throughout most of the series. I believe there was it was all in probate who was going to own it but his his young wife widow Teresa Gansel was Basically trying to run the place and she had pretty much at least the beginning no real business sense and places basically running into the ground and Just the Right here. That's yeah, just like it's back there with the calyx Which I don't even remember when it was on but I remember watching it and eating McClurg was in it The calyx I do this wonderful word horse devils It was about a guy with a gas station It's it's all I remember calyx It was funny in the hopes of finding his fortune out West Jasper T calyx Had moved his family from their native Appalachia We'd worked as a coal miner to the small town of nowhere, California Inherited a small two-pump gas station there and figured that as his own boss He would improve his lot and then we had Jasper calicac and Venus calicac eating McClurg Bonnie Ebson, I'm assuming maybe some relation to buddy Yeah, Bobby Lou calicac With the with the song that ever remembers beat the system by Stanley Ralph Ross sung by Roy Clark And what a hit that was So how many episodes was that all those five or six? Oh, it looks like about four August 3rd August 31st Yeah, Bonnie Bonnie Ebson's father buddy had spent most of the 1960s is dead clamp I think they really have pillbillies which is an American institution on television Well, what else we got here, well, let me see. I was just remembering one the fruits of Southampton That's that was just a fun one This is just going back this might not necessarily be a cult show But it's one of those that I I just put in the definition of cult shows at least in my own tiny mind Because it's one that I just remember being on but yet I couldn't tell you a darn thing about it Oh It had a funny had a funny little theme and everything about how they Really didn't have any money yet They were pretending to have money because they lived in Southampton and so they were just pretending that they had all this money And it was just um, okay, let's see. She was a down on their luck Long Island Society family The fruits could live Life on the hill to their 60 room Southampton mansion to fact despite the fact that they were 10 million dollars in debt to the government So as long as they kept their secret Okay, I kind of remember that one and it was just um, I don't know. It was funny Of course though now if we're gonna talk cult shows one that I we just cannot get out of here without mentioning is probably what I would consider the I don't know. I think I know what you're gonna talk about ultimate Cult show the fact that it was it only had six episodes right and it was just It was on Thursday nights at 8 p.m. It is right there by golly police Even though this one it goes outside of our Little and it also goes out because this this is an example of something that started as a cult But now is of course this big money maker that the naked gun two and a half coming out Yeah, well, they but the time that this was truly a cult series because it was just a just a bizarre Thing most usually satire shows tend to end up being cult shows Started out. Yeah the cult show you were everybody knew you were cool and hip and stayed up late because you knew what? That show was about right cool And this well, it was just after airplane had come out and we see Kentucky Fried movie had been out before then so It was the same as craters of airplanes, of course Yeah But the fact that they just they just satirized everything in the beginning at the beginning of the thing It was had a guest star And then though the one there's one that was a special guest star John Belushi was a special guest star And he was thrown out of a car and he was rolled along and now on the video we get that when somebody else is in there They don't have John Belushi on there anymore So if you could like get that episode that would be the episode to have oh yeah cult show Not anymore, but you could have on beta That would be the thing that would be the one day But but there were only six episodes of it one thing I always remembered from that series was that every time That Drebben would stop his car at the scene of a crime There'd be they started with one garbage can and he'd hit the garbage can as he stopped in each episode There would be more and more like one more garbage can not near the end of like a big stack of garbage cans and he'd hit those Johnny the shoe sign guy there was always a we could answer any question in the world Yeah, the cop would ask him questions and the cop would leave and then like one like Dick Clark It came to us that I'll need some more of that youth cream Any question in the world was great About the first thing Jeff Goldblum was on that's the first thing I remember Jeff Goldblum He was on and it seems like it was just But I I'd be hard pressed to tell you what it was But it was the fact that he was just so tall and lanky and Ben Vareen was just so cool and hip This was the odd couple of detective work Yeah, the the dapper guy Who was Goldblum and Ben Vareen as 10 speed like the The really flashy guy and he would always dress up and they'd are you know be a different character He's a con man and all that and it was it was just really an interesting little show, but it never really that was a It must have been a summer replay. Well, not a summer replacement. I have season mid-season replacement for something else and In fact was one of the early Stephen Jay canal shows. Oh, yeah before a team and all those other ones Well, we we certainly can't We certainly can't get to can't talk about cult shows without talking about when things were rotten Which ought to be somebody ought to pull it out. It's available. It's available It's on again. I don't want to make this sound like an ad but it's on comedy central Saturday Yes when things were rotten Mel Brooks decided I'm gonna do television as Buck Henry did well. Well, of course he did he did television for years But it's like a different Buck Henry's like really really funny. Well, see that's why I really like Mel Brooks But this one was really funny This was before Mel got into his into the thing which I think destroyed him in the movies the fact that he had to Star in him. Yeah, exactly Right, but this was this was a comic retelling of the whole Robin Hood thing which see if if I Was like a big-time producer I would be playing up this series now that the Robin Hood movies coming out This is the kind of thing that like and another great example of not really cult shows Is Nick at night really doing a great promotional type stuff? You know, it's like when when Dick Tracy came out last year They showed all the Warren Beatty episodes of Doby Gillis, you know that kind of thing Considered a cult show I caught it after I caught it when it after it hits indication because it was like ended in 63 to which I was just like Attaining consciousness or something So it was like I caught it later And I noticed people my age seem to catch seem to have caught it I caught it before Nick started showing it someone else was showing it Cable wise or something It I think I think that's a very much overlooked show. I think the thing yeah I agree with that about cult shows though is once it You can't find it and people really want it That's where the cult thing comes in but yet when it when it when they bring it back and it's like you can see it all The time it's like Oh We can see it there's no problem Really when you really think about it a cult show is something that that is better in the memory than that is then is actually on the air Remember it like like I remember when things were right being a being a great show and then when I actually saw it It's like it's okay, but it's not something that really we should be like wow, you know It's it's like it's like childhood You childhood is better in the memory Nice place to visit but Well, let's see another one of course there's we could go on and on about British shows Because just because of their inaccessibility they become a lot of them become cult shows But I just want to just pick one out and that's hitchhikers guy to the guy that guy didn't galaxy only only seven episodes That's about all it's right Basically, it was a retelling of the book but only I've only seen it once when it ran and You know, it's just I think I think that's one of the best things British TV ever sent over here Hmm. I saw it's a lot of British shows When I could get them. Yeah Solo good neighbors things like this right which can't get anymore would love to see them again No way Oh, well, there we are Brainless size of a planet You can't you can't get a reading of that. Oh, yeah the guy that did that robot right does the reading on I've got the I've got the other tape of a restaurant in the universe. Yeah Yeah, anyways, what are the better ways to do those books, believe me Now they are fun to read though Well, uh, he's heard to be listened to though We're Well, there's a lot of the shows we could talk about but we only have half an hour So we got to we got to start wrapping the thing up I just want to mention in our big video swap meet Um, someone had written in I don't remember the name who had talked about Um, uh, Johnny Sacco and his flying robot. Yeah, well, they didn't know the name of the series, but we supplied that Um, again, I don't want to give an ad but I did see it at a science fiction convention So you could buy tapes of it. So next time a sci-fi convention comes through you may want to drop by Uh, and see if they might have something like that So that's that could be a possible source for for that person out there wanted to to know about that I don't have his name on me. Yeah, the Johnny Sacco guy So anyways, uh next time on vast wasteland We'll be talking about all the filmation series and no, no, it wasn't a guy. It was a production company It wasn't like Perry's smarter older brother Filmation they were an animation But you'll hear more about that next time for all of us here at vast wasteland. We'll see you next time. Good night everybody


This research has developed a new material that can be used in micro-electronic packaging applications. It is composed of a vertically aligned silicon carbide nanowires slash boron nitride network, which allows for high thermal conductivity in both vertical and horizontal directions. This material also has excellent electromagnetic wave absorption properties and electrical insulation. This article was authored by Duopan, Guiyang, Hala Mabodif and others.


Mr. President, the Ambassador of Sudan. Mr. Ambassador, you are going to change your hair in our country, I know, in your service in the U.N. And Mrs. Sudan, she is here. Nice to see you. And daughter, Dina. Hello there, nice to see you. And son, Mr. President. Thank you. How do you do it?  Thank you. Even though civil war, it is our result, so... You are to be able to know that the mission of being completely inspected. Well, we respect very much the goals of your government, the progress that you have made between us. Mr. President, well, great pleasure to welcome you. My pleasure, Mr. President. How are you? Mr. President. Mrs. Hamami. This is my wife. Hello there. Nice to see you. Nice to see you too. And that's my daughter, Dina. Hello there. Nice to see you.  Okay. The relationship we've had for so long with your country, and please be with us, and please be with us, and please be with us. Thank you very much, Mr. President. I sure that you will do that. I pass on the move, and Mr. President, it is best about you to seek peace in the Middle East. We look forward to that, Mr. President. Peace live on justice for everyone. Yes. I will keep trying. We will indeed. Now, I think maybe the ladies go between you. Yes, that's right. Actually, I think so. Thank you. You'll be very happy. Thank you. The Ambassador of Nepal. Mr. Ambassador. Mr. President. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. See you later. Excuse me. And Mrs. Sanjou? Nice to see you. Nice to see you.  Very sorrow and regret over August. That's very difficult. Earthquake. In your country? Well, and over that, several years ago, through the White House. He still remembers, he's very well, and he sends his best personal regards. And we have been very much encouraged with the words of the consolation, even in the days of difficulties such as Earthquake time. She gets between us, Mr. The Ambassador of Honduras. Mr. Ambassador, welcome. Mr. President, once again. Thank you, sir. Good to see you and have you here. Thank you so much. This is Hernandez. Hello there. Nice to see you. My daughter, Morela? What are you doing here? And my son, Alejandro. How do you do?  Mr. President, you know that we are very much appreciative of everything you have done for peace and democracy in the Central American region. And our Darius office is very interested in continuing to support all these efforts in that direction. We're very grateful for all of your help. Well, I know that we're grateful for the support you have given and things that we've been attempting to do. Mr. President, warm greetings from our President. Holy, please give him the best of whiteness in the middle of the world. Maybe the children could be in front of us. Pleased to have all of you here. Thank you, Mr. President. Oh, he's so well ahead of me. He's one of the children. Thank you, Mr. President. Yes, I'm John Bet. Hi. How are you? I get a family picture, please. Oh, this would be great. This is great. Yeah, I'm glad you won't let your clothes on. I just welcomed a number of ambassadors. Oh, really? And one of them came in here. Bear the way. Oh, my goodness. And then I just understood somebody said something on it. This was their ceremonial. I guess it doesn't differ, but this was a ceremonial. A ceremonial. So you should be honored that he was there to the waist. Here he is, some kind of a skin, leopard skin or something. One of the speeches I gave while working with you. It's not one of those Washington books. This is a book about our children. No, it's a wonderful book. Oh, thank you very much. I highly recommend it. I assure you. This is a letter. This is a poem that an 11-year-old boy wrote. He's the only conservative in his school. His mother, he says. That's right. Yeah, we all want him. Look at the name. And he sent it to him one time to a poem. It's something that he wrote, and I think it's very good. This is in Haas-Tedler, 4100 Wests. W Street. That's a W. W Street. That could have been why he didn't get a risk, because it looks kind of odd. What is that? That's Northwest, Room 302. Washington, D.C. His mother is a teacher assistant at Johns Nursery School. And they're so excited about it. He's the only conservative so-and-so about it. Well, he... I should respond to it by sending a picture. Oh, he would be just fine. Well, now I have a little something to take care of before we... What did he say? What did he say? He put a vote on it. It's very shy. Can we show the president the back? Yes, we want to... Just so you know. It's Dumbo, but it's an Elephant. Yes, we have him. This is a young Republican here. Well, I think we better take you into your guest there. About two years or so ago, February 6th, my birthday, sir, he checked in as Secretary of Education. And I think you all know without my telling you that up until then, I was trying to get rid of the Department of Education. Didn't think the federal government should be in that business. Since then, I found out if you have the right person running it, it's just fine. And we had the right person running it. But I know this isn't the nature of a farewell, so I don't know why I'm acting so cheery. I don't feel dead either. Not even lame. Well, I couldn't resist coming in here. And as you can see, you're going to get kind of a luscious send off here. You can see I need it too. Yes, ma'am. Well, I just want to tell you, I don't know of anyone that has served as nobly or done the job that he has done at Education all over America. And I know that many of you were of help in all of this, that Education all over America is a lot better for his having been in the job that he was in. So I know it's goodbye, but I hope so. God bless you. And thank you. Mr. President, it has been an honor, pleasure and privilege to serve under you, to work for you.  We've done the best we could, and I'm pretty pleased with what we've done. We have tried to follow what you wanted to do. When you gave me the job, you said I want you to try to represent the good sense of the American people. And that's what we've tried to do. And if I could say, Mr. President, what I've been saying to people all over this country, I know the President talks now in the last months about his greatest achievements. And to my mind, your greatest achievement is who you are. Because in you, the American people have their own common sense and their own good common values personified. And that's why they love you, and that's why I love you, and that's why we were proud to serve you. Thank you very much. Out of the way, sir, you can eat, drink, and be married. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Oh, that's great. There you are, Mr. President. You're looking great. Well, listen, Congress has done a good job with the appropriations bill that I've received so far. And it'll be an achievement, I think, of which we can all be proud if all 13 individual appropriations bills are here and signed before the fiscal year begins. I've been told that Congress hasn't done that since 1948, the last time that that's happened. And I think we've got to keep within the last year's budget summit agreement. Congress finishes up the last seven appropriations bills because we don't want to trigger that ground-run on the things, on the dramatic growth of the new cuts. So if we place top priority on getting those seven bills down here within the budget agreement without unnecessary baggage, I think we can have 13 appropriations bills in long until the first known sequestration. As you know, I've stated I won't sign another one of those big omnibus continuing resolutions, so maybe we can avoid one this year. Floor's open. Well, I'll make you breathe. That's my secret, too.


Welcome to class 28 of topics in power electronics and distributed generation. We have been looking at the common mode and differential mode analysis of power converter and the differential mode signals are quite important because they are primarily responsible for power transfer. So, the basic purpose for operating the power converter is power transfer. So, the study of the differential mode operation of it is important part. The common mode signals are important when you are looking at other perspectives such as circulating possibility for circulating currents in the converter possibility or the EMI characteristics EMI perspective of the power converter. The other thing we saw in the last class is that the common mode and differential mode analysis can be performed on a on using both the switching model and the averaging model average model and if you look at a single phase inverter. So, this is a single phase two leg converter earlier we had looked at a single phase center tap capacitor converter. So, you could look at it from the common mode and differential mode analysis and look at what how the these circuits would behave. In particular for the two leg converter we looked at a modulation method where you are switching both legs of the power converter because now you have two legs there are a lot of possibilities for the way in which you could now have PWM on the two legs. The method that we looked at the modulation method one where we had the duty cycle for leg A and duty cycle for leg B to be symmetric around 0.5 and if you look at the DA and DB essentially they are symmetric around 0.5 and the characteristics that we saw is effectively the output frequency is doubled. So, you have two pulses coming in the output for during every switching period you also have the polarity of the output pulses being in the polarity of the commanded voltage that you would like. So, we called as unipolar modulation if you have pulses of both polarity coming during the operation that would be a bipolar modulation. We look at a couple of other possibilities for the way in which you could modulate the power converter here both legs are switching. One possible method for modulating the power converter could be that you could switch say leg A at high frequencies when you want to get a positive output voltage you could say you could you could turn on say this particular device. So, if this particular device is on leg B would be connected to the negative DC bus. So, using VDC you could synthesize a positive voltage. If you want to synthesize a negative voltage you could turn on this particular leg and switch the leg A. So, because now leg B is connected to positive you have minus VDC and by appropriately switching leg A you could synthesize a negative polarity output voltage. So, you could do this by considering signals. So, we will consider a modulation method too. So, if your leg B is modulated at the fundamental frequency which is 50 hertz in our case and if our desired output voltage has was of the form A V cos omega t then essentially what we would have is D B could be a signal which would be 0 if V o star is positive and 1 if V o star is negative. So, if you look at the switching signals the switching functions for leg B your S B plus would be a signal of the form 1 if V o star is less than 0 and 0 otherwise. So, essentially your leg B is switching at fundamental frequency and leg A is switching at the carrier frequency. So, if you look at the duty cycle signals that are being applied for leg A we have D A is equal to and 1 plus A V by V DC cos omega t otherwise. Again your leg B the D B was going between 0 and plus 1 with not taking any values in between whereas now D A is having a value which goes between depending on the polarity of your output voltage that you would like to synthesize it takes on signals.  If you look at V A B on a differential mode essentially the output signals will have if you look at your D B D B is now switching at the fundamental frequency. So, this is time in milliseconds.  So, if you then zoom in to some region of your PWM operation say in this particular between 15 and say 20 milliseconds you would have waveforms that look like this S B plus is now just staying low your S A plus would now be switching between 0 and plus 1 depending on the amplitude of this D A signal and you can see that your effective output frequency is now FSW. So, you lose the advantage of 2 FSW that you had in the previous modulation case you have now your effective output switching frequency which is at FSW rather than 2 FSW. If you so if you can actually write an expression for V differential mode of your output is V DC into S A plus minus S B plus. So, you can see that despite the slightly more complex shape of S A plus and S B plus your effective output voltage would be the desired sinusoid. If you look at your common mode signals that we had we wrote an expression for V common mode of your input which was V DC into half minus S B plus. So, you can see that now because your S B plus has a shape it is 0 in the regions say 0 to 5 seconds it would be high between 5 and 15 your S B plus function is now switching at the fundamental frequency. So, if you look at your common mode signal that is coming in your output you are jumping between plus V DC by 2 and minus V DC by 2 at your fundamental frequency which is much lower than your switching frequency which means that your high frequency transitions which would cause spikes of current to flow into the ground is occurring at a much lower repetition rate. So, your expected problems of EMI with this particular modulation method could be lower than with the modulation method one that we previously saw discussed. So, it could be easier to build a EMI filter. So, the EMI issues is not just about the topology it is also related to how you are actually conducting the switching operations. So, if you now look at the option that we had looked at we were switching leg B at the fundamental frequency and we switched leg A at high frequency. We could also do take a different alternative approach where we switch leg B at the switching frequency and we could switch leg A at the fundamental frequency. So, we will call that modulation method 3 where da is 1 if vo star is positive. So, this would correspond to SA plus being equal to 1 and 0 otherwise and your db for the other leg would be 1 minus av by v dc cos omega t if vo star positive or minus av. Again you can see because your vo output voltage is v dc into da minus db you get the same differential mode output signal in all the three modulation methods. So, the differential mode signals would not change if you look at the shape of the waveforms in the modulation method 3 you can see that now da is now switching at the fundamental frequency and db is now having a value which lies in between 0 and plus 1 which means that db will be switching at higher frequencies. So, SB plus is the one which is switching and SA plus is now staying at 0. So, if you are looking at may be a zoomed in region around there it would correspond to waveforms that has been drawn below. If you look at your common mode signal in this particular case we can we have vcm of your input is v dc into half minus SB plus in this case we can see that your input would see high frequency on the common mode. So, we have problems with the high frequency on your input side you also have now only fsw as your output equivalent switching frequency which means that we lost the advantage of 2 fsw. So, we can see that this so your differential mode signals v dm out is still the same v dc into SA plus minus SB plus. So, your output switching frequency is still at fsw. So, modulation method 3 is poor from both the input and output perspective. So, you by not being careful about which leg you are switching at the appropriate rate you could end up with exacerbating the problems that you are facing in your power converter without getting any advantage either at the input or at the output. So, one thing that also to keep in mind is that we were looking at it at the operation of this power converter from the input and output voltage waveform basis. Another important factor to keep in mind is how these legs of the power converter would operate on a thermal basis if you are switching say one leg at fsw at the carrier frequency and the other leg at fundamental frequency it means that one leg is having higher losses and the other leg is having lower losses. So, from a thermal loading perspective the temperature rise on one leg would be more and the compared to the other leg. So, if you are using a H bridge module you may not be fully utilizing your semiconductors. So, you will have to look at all the factors in mind depend to look at what are the advantages and disadvantages of one particular topology or one particular method of operating your switches in a power converter. So, now that we have looked at this two leg power converter we could ask a similar question as we did for our center tapped capacitor topology of what would be the design issues behind the DC bus capacitor for this particular topology how does it compare with the center tapped capacitor topology. So, we will look at this design with the same example as what we looked at in for a center tapped capacitor. So, we will consider a 2 kilowatt 230 volt unity power factor power converter, but now with a single phase two leg inverter topology modulating with method one ok. And we will assume that your switching frequency is 10 kilohertz your carrier frequency is 10 kilohertz. So, your effective switching frequency is seen by your filters would be at 20 kilohertz. The ambient temperature and the operation of the power converter is kept the same. So, we know that from our average model for the power converter VAB is dA minus dB times VDC and dA is half plus m cos omega t by 2 dB is again symmetric about the 0.5 point. So, VAB can be written as m VDC cos omega t and if we are trying to synthesize a 230 volt AC output you are talking about VDC of the order of 325 volt for V o this 230 volts RMS. Again we have to consider factors such as the grid voltage variation, dead band on state drops in the devices etcetera. So, we will consider 5 percent for VAC variation and dead band effects and 10 percent drop for filtered. So, the actual DC bus voltage that we might need to use would be higher. So, it would be of the order of 400 volts rather than 325 volts with ideally. So, again for the selection of the capacitors we are talking about capacitors which are rated at 4 higher than 400 volts may be 450 volts would be a suitable choice. So, we will consider we will. So, for our analysis we could do a similar analysis for the power converter. We could match the power flow between the input and output of the power converter. So, if we take a single leg converter we looked at your P out and we looked at the power flow N to evaluate the DC current and the 100 hertz ripple that would be seen by the DC bus capacitors. We could do a similar analysis to evaluate what would be the 100 hertz ripple on the DC bus. So, we have V DC times I P of T which is the positive DC bus current we will call it I DC P. So, we know the AC voltage is 230 volts we know the power is 2 kilowatts. So, we know what our A I is. So, you could calculate I DC P. So, this DC current that flows through at which has a value of A V A I by 2 V DC and there is a 100 hertz component that is flowing through which would have a RMS value of A V A I by 2 root 2 V DC. So, the next component that we would like to evaluate for this particular power converter is due to the switching operation what is the high frequency components that now flow through the DC bus capacitor and you could evaluate the high frequency components by looking again at the switching functions. So, if you have SA plus to have a shape such as this and SB plus to have a shape such as this and you have your I out when SA plus is wider than SB plus then this particular point this region in between the width of this region would be equal to dA times T s and the width of this particular duration is dB times T SW T SW and then you could calculate what is the average of this particular DC bus positive current and what is the RMS value your average current would then be equal to is I out to dA minus dB again depending on the polarity of I out it could be positive or negative your RMS quantity on a per switching cycle basis would be magnitude of I out into square root of the magnitude of dA minus dB. So, again this is this gives the RMS value on per switching duration per T SW you could then sum it over all the switching durations and one fundamental cycle to calculate your high frequency RMS currents for a switching frequency of 10 kilohertz and your T SW is 100 microseconds and your fundamental frequency is 50 hertz. So, we have number of points per fundamental is 20 milliseconds by this 100 microseconds so that would give you 200 points. So, your high frequency current so this is I out of N T s the whole thing under square root will give you your RMS currents. So, essentially you are summing up the RMS over all the switching T SW s. So, we could then ask a similar question as what we did for our DC bus capacitor midpoint topology of what is the RMS currents what would be the voltage ripple what would be the power dissipation temperature rise the number of capacitors you need to place in parallel and we could then for the particular this particular example will consider the same capacitor as what we considered for the previous topology. So, we will assume a 450 volt 150 micro farad capacitor with the given ESR of 0.8 ohms at 100 kilohertz. We will assume the data to be is the same as what we had the previous time. We will assume that the high frequency current multiplier is 1.4 RMS even at 20 kilohertz we had taken 1.4 RMS at 10 kilohertz we will assume that it stays flat even at 20 kilohertz. And the data is same as what we considered for the DC bus capacitor midpoint topology. So, essentially the current multipliers as we saw gives information about the ESR of the capacitor as a function of frequency. So, if in this particular topology we know that it is 0.8 ohms ESR at 100 hertz and your current at 100 hertz is 1 amp. So, I square R is 1 square into 0.8. So, the ESR at 20 kilohertz into 1.4 amp square one would be able to calculate the ESR which. So, this turns out to have a value of 0.41 ohms. So, for this particular power converter it is 2 kilo watts 230 volts. So, your current rating IAC is 2 kilo watts 230 volts. So, this corresponds to 8.7 amps RMS or 12.3 amps peak. In this topology because the output is not connected to the capacitor through any midpoints there will be no 50 hertz component. So, the low frequency component is the 100 hertz component. So, your IDCP of t is now 1 by 400 which is your DC bus voltage into 230 root 2 cos omega t into 12.3 which is the current cos omega t assuming unity power factor of operation. So, your IDCP IDC average DC current is 5 amps and your IDC p at 100 hertz is 5 amps peak which would correspond to 3.54 amps RMS. So, to evaluate your high frequency component of the current we will we can calculate it in a similar manner as what we have just discussed. We know our I out of at NTSW is 12.3 cos and we are using modulation method 1. So, DA of NTS is 0.5 plus your output voltage is having a peak value of 230 root 2. So, this is 325. So, you have your duty cycles and your currents based on which you could now calculate what is your high frequency current flowing in your DC bus and that current now would be 2 pulses per TSW. So, you are having your DC bus current also now at 20 kilohertz and its side bands and harmonics. So, based on the expression that we had just written previously you could calculate your ICDC at 20 kilohertz is 3.83 amps. So, if you look at your total RMS current flowing through the capacitor it would now be your 100 hertz component plus your 20 kilohertz component. So, you have about 5.2 amps flowing through the DC bus capacitor and this so a single capacitor would obviously not be sufficient and we would have to connect multiple capacitors in parallel. So, if you look at the ESR numbers the ESR at 100 hertz and at 20 kilohertz is 0.41 ohms and based on the calculations from our previous example we saw that the cap capacitor which was specified for 3000 hours of life would correspond to a core temperature T core of 94.8 degree centigrade and it had a thermal impedance from core to ambient of 12.3 degree centigrade per watt. So, this is from the previous example. So, using this ESR numbers we could calculate what is the effective 100 hertz current that is flowing through the capacitor. So, effective 100 hertz current so 3.54 is the 100 hertz ripple plus 3.83 is the switching frequency ripple. So, your I 100 is 4.47 amps. So, from a thermal perspective we had seen again from the data sheet that if we have about 2 amps per capacitor and it is operating at an ambient of 55 degree centigrade you can expect about 3000 hours of life. So, if we can make use of this number by taking the 2 amps per capacitor as a design guideline we would need we need. So, we are talking about roughly 3 capacitors. So, last time we did an in the previous example an analysis with both 3 and 4 capacitors we will consider say for 4 capacitors in this case as being used in the design. So, select 4 capacitors. So, if we could then calculate the power loss per capacitor. So, this is 0.8 into so it is about 1 watt loss per capacitor. So, 4 capacitors in parallel we are talking about 4 watts loss in the bank. Your core temperature for the capacitor is 50 into 50 plus 50 is the ambient within the cabinet plus 1 watt loss per capacitor into 12.3 which is a thermal impedance degrees per watt. So, you have a core temperature of 62.3 degree centigrade and again assuming the simple thermal lifetime model you are considering 3000 into. So, you are talking about 9.8 years compared to about 4 and a half years for the other in the previous example. We could also calculate the voltage ripple. So, your capacitor bank is 4 capacitors in parallel 150 microfarads. So, this is 600 microfarads. So, your 100 hertz ripple is so you have about 13.3 volts as your 100 hertz ripple and then you could look at what is the ripple at 20 kilohertz. So, we had 3.83 amps again we will assume that this it is actually square pulses, but assuming it is a sinusoid you will have 3.83 times root 2. These are all simplifications to get an estimate of what the ripple is. So, it is about 70 millivolts. So, it is almost negligible the ripple at 20 kilohertz. This is a capacitive ripple. If you look at the ripple because of the ESR you are talking about 3.83 root 2 into 0.41 is the ESR at 20 kilohertz and there are 4 capacitors in parallel. So, you are talking about 0.55 volts. So, you can see at the switching frequency your capacitor bank is now acting more resistive than capacitive. So, you have the same concerns that you have had in the previous topology you need to if you have strain ductances you need you will have strain ductances and you need to put a snubber capacitors film capacitors in parallel. So, as to account for the rapid transitions that would be there in the current waveforms due to the switching of the transistors. So, we could look at then a comparison of the two leg inverted topology with the center tapped capacitor topology and if you look at the center tapped capacitor topology one thing is you need lesser semiconductor because you have only one leg whereas, in the two leg case you would have two legs. So, you have an additional leg semiconductors to consider. But one thing is the semiconductors are rated in this particular case for 1200 volts or other case the semiconductors might be rated for 600 volts. So, the voltage rating is not identical. In the center tapped case you have more capacitors that you would need in your capacitor bank. So, depending on the cost of your capacitors versus cost of a additional leg of semiconductor you would have different initial costs. In this particular case you have fewer DC bus capacitors, but it is not just the semiconductor leg you need to consider you need to also consider gate drives etcetera that you would need for the leg. If you look at the path for the current flow in the center tapped topology your current would be flowing through one semiconductor device be it a transistor or a diode then the return path is through the capacitor. So, you have losses due to the drops in those paths which could be the conduction drop and the drops in the ESR of the capacitor whereas, if you look at the losses in the case of the two leg converter you have the drops in two semiconductor devices and the capacitor. So, you will have to look at from a overall perspective whether the losses would be more in one case or the other it depends to a large extent on how much more dominant the capacitor ESR values are compared to the on state drops of semiconductor devices. However, the low voltage rating of the semiconductors mean that the semiconductor drops over here would not be identical to the semiconductor drops over in the center tapped topology. If you take a semiconductor device when you would go up in voltage rating the on state resistance will go up for a given current level. So, a 1200 volt device would have a higher R conduction compared to a 600 volt device. You can also consider the effect of say in modulation method one we saw that the effective output frequency is twice the switching frequency. So, your ripple current in the output filter would be lower because of the higher equivalent frequency which means that potentially you could look at whether there is some energy savings because of reduced ripple current in your output filter. From a reliability perspective the center tapped topology has fewer semiconductors switches and gate drives. So, if your reliability issues are more with semiconductor devices then one with fewer devices would be of advantage. Whereas the two leg inverter has fewer capacitors and the voltage rating is reduced. So, your clearance requirement etcetera is actually reduced. So, depending on again which is the item of concern you have different reliability implications of these two topologies. Also other factors performance factors we also we saw that in one case you have bipolar PWM in one case you have unipolar PWM also the switching frequency is effectively doubled in modulation method one. We also saw that in the center tapped topology you have low frequency essentially DC input common mode voltage whereas in modulation method one we saw that there is high frequency and the common mode input. So, you might need more EMI filtering. So, you could actually now on an overall system basis look at what it takes to actually do a comparison. Now, we have looked at essentially single phase two options for single phase power conversion, but we could see that even in this simple example we could do a very exhaustive analysis of what the implications of each design choice is. So, to take this further we more detailed analysis we need to actually look at what the implications are when you are looking at it closely from a semiconductor perspective and also from a AC filter design perspective which we will discuss later. Thank you.


I want to start a condition and say that somewhere in between you can fall, so if it is, please close as I close.


Brilliant side on the inside from Dahl, that inside gate. Great shot back from Buley. He's in two second place.  Lebedev's going for the big blast around the outside. Dahl on the inside, here comes Lebedev charging on. Oh, three impressors are going to the first corner. Where did Yunovsky come from? Dahl's been beaten up there. Lebedev's now once again hits the front. Superbs be way on the opening lap. Returns three and four. Terrific ride from him. Really did charge to the front. Excellent stuff from him. What's up, we're underway. They go roaring into the first corner and it's Lebedev's initially up the banking, trying to go for the line there, but Freddie Lingwin, that's a smart move. They dive in down the inside. Lebedev's dive bombs into turn number three, forcing Freddie Lingwin wide, allowing Leo Madsen of the inside. Oh, that's tight. So tight, where did Leo Madsen come from? Brilliant stuff from him. Can't believe he was able to do that, but he did. Leo Madsen has responded brilliantly after failing to score last time. Eat number nine, Madsen wins, moves on to six points. Madsen's made a great start on the inside, hugs the inside, Dahl coming up the inside of Dudeck, forces his way, oh! Oh! Oh, tough crash. It's reasonably simple. I don't think Dudeck has stopped. He's taken off the bike. Equally, Jason Dahl hasn't moved over, but I do think Jason will go for it. Yeah, so just make sure that Patrick Dudeck is okay. There will be a delay as well because I've got to repair the air fence, so there won't be a rush to get heat 17 under way. This is the key moment there. I think Jason just moves there. The bike straightens up a fraction there. Yeah, not a lot. I mean, you could argue that Dudeck is trying to stop his run up the inside. Through in the second place, Lebedev's in third, but Lingwin now, pushing on wide and high in the bottom corner, trying to come around the outside. Has he done it? Lingwin, one last chance. Not gonna get the first semifinal, and the finalists tonight from this semifinal are Martin Vashalik and Leo Madsen. Here comes Leo Madsen, rushing through into third place with you're not getting out the back. Leo Madsen, how on earth did he move out the way there? In the final, 20-22, what a way to finish a season. Congratulations to him. Bartos Marzliet back in second place. The world champion just could not do anything about Vashalik and Leo Madsen and Jenovsky battling hard, Jenovsky.


Time-resolved electron diffraction is used to study energy relaxation in thin-bismuth films after optical excitation, revealing distinct changes in the energy transfer dynamics due to decreasing device dimensions and cross-interfacial coupling with the substrate. This article was authored by K. Sokulaski-Tinton, A. K. Lee, A. H. Reed and others.


Are there any other learnings that you take back from your experiences as a jury member and also from the campaigns that you've seen that you believe can be translated into, say, future work in India? Yes. I think we underestimate the amount of understanding that the case is giving. I feel that we should explain cultural nuances better because when I have done international juries before, but when I was sitting in the room, people were not getting, like there were some Brazilian pieces that we've over-ordered and there were some Brazilian people in the jury and they actually made us realize the cultural nuance. Now we live in it, so we don't think that we need to explain that much as we should ideally do and that's what I realized, like we had to, every cultural, if you're coming from a cultural nuance, then it needs to be explained really well or it just goes somewhere.