I'm sure there's not much love in that chat box today, so as soon as the show is coming, we are slowly creeping up to 200 participants. And welcome back to everyone. Thank you for joining us. As you know, this is our last webinar in the course, Risk Evaluation, First Step in Disaster Planning. And you also know by now that the course is part of a larger series called Caring for Yesterday's Treasures Today. And it's been made possible by our Bush 21st century librarian grant program from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And we're happy to have Hope on board and the rest of the Learning Times team to help us produce these webinars and also support our website. So this is it, guys. The last webinar, and it's a great one. And we know you'll get a lot of great information from it. It's titled As Simple as 123, Ranking the Risk to Your Collections. And while I have your undivided attention, I will go through the certificate requirements one more time. So to earn a certificate, everything has to be turned in by February 21st by the close of business, which for us is 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And here's what we're going to look at when we are pulling people for the certificate. We are going to look and see if you're registered. That means you show up in our database and we have your email and mailing address so we can actually send you that certificate. We're going to check to see if your permission form is turned in. And last but not least, we're going to check to make sure you've completed all for homework assignments. Now, all those homework assignments will be found on the course page along with those great PowerPoints and handouts and other resources that are mentioned. And I'm still working on getting all the great resources you guys mentioned in our last webinar. So what's next after this? So, either today or early tomorrow, we should all get an email from Heritage Preservation with links to all the homework assignments and a link to all the webinar recordings. Again, everything is due on the 21st, I almost said 22nd, but everything is due on the 21st. On the 22nd, since the course will now have concluded, we'll post all those webinar recording links on the course page so that everybody can have access to them. And then we will also start mailing out those certificates. You will be notified when your certificate is in the mail. We'll make sure to send you an email notification so you know it's on its way to you. And then you're done, at least with this course. We encourage you to contact us down the road with stories on how you're using this information. And we just really would love to hear from you and let us know what you're up to and if this has helped you. You're welcome, of course, to join the online community if you haven't done so already. And you can continue some of these great conversations on the discussion board. And, of course, there's still time to register for our next course. Our next course is the Julie Page and it's Protecting Your Collections, Writing a Disaster Response Plan. And it will go over how to write one of the four facets of a comprehensive disaster plan, which is response. So we hope you guys will sign up and join us. You've got a fantastic foundation for that next course. And without further ado, we'll get started on this last webinar. I'm going to go ahead and move over this chat box. And you will see a moderated chat. And that's something we will approve all your comments. And so when you post something, you'll see it once. And when I approve it, you'll see it again. But don't worry, you're not double posting. You only see yours twice. And throughout the presentation, please feel free to ask questions. And I will store them away and post them to Alex as soon as we have time to. All right, Alex, I'm going to move this out of the way and move your presentation. Thank you, Jenny. That looks pretty cool. It's even large on my screen. I'm just so impressed with this technology. And welcome, everybody. Happy Valentine's Day. I hope there's love in the air and I hope there's at least spring around the corners. From my point of view, we're still recovering from a little friendly blizzard Nemo here. So let's get on with the class today because I guess with this class, we're rolling towards the conclusion of risk evaluation of your collection. In the past three risk evaluation classes, you learned about man-made and natural hazards, as well as about the collection hazards. They all, as you now know, can affect your building and your collection. You've also heard about the term risk management and how by ranking the probability and the effect of a hazard on your institution, you can begin to make a reasoned decision about where to start to reduce your vulnerabilities to hazards in the face of limited resources. And we all have limited resources, I think. And also in this webinar, you'll learn how to prioritize them and prepare to take next steps. Let's see now. Remember this slide on the four faces of the emergency management? Remember, too, that emergency management is a dynamic cyclical process that gathers momentum by moving through the four faces that you see here around the ball, sort of like a snowball rolling downhill. I'm going to give you a push in this webinar to give your emergency management ball rolling by helping you move from preparedness to mitigation. So today, I'm going to show you two useful tools. The first tool is named the risk prioritization worksheet. It's a more sophisticated means of conducting the probability and effect charting that you did for the man-made and natural hazards in webinars two and three. The worksheet, as you fill it out, will numerically prioritize your risk to specific man-made and natural hazards. And for those of you who don't like math or are visual learners, it even does the math for you and makes a color-coded visual. Pretty cool. A second tool we'll look at from the Heritage Preservation Risk Evaluation and Planning program is the Walkthrough Checklist. This checklist of questions guides you to look for vulnerabilities within and around your site and facility. These are items that you really have a lot more control over. As I go through examples of the questions on the checklist, I'll also share some tips and ideas for simple and economical mitigation measures that you can put into practice at your own institutions. The tips will help you step up fire protection, protect collections, and ensure a safe evacuation. Whether you can implement one or many, they all will help you to further strengthen the steps you've already taken to identify and lower the risk of hazards that can impact your collections and your building and your site. Now all the tools, plus other tips for mitigation and planning, are free downloadable resources at the Heritage Preservation website through their Risk Evaluation and Planning program. This is the web address and the home page that you see on the screen here. The worksheets we're going to be using today are PDF files and they're available in the resource packet. But I also thought I'd like to walk you through the process of getting to all these resources offered by Heritage Preservation. You'll use it in this class and you'll use it if you sign up for Julie's class, and there are a lot of really wonderful resources just about protecting your collections in all different facets. So there are so many that they have here. Don't overlook any of these hidden gems as you keep expanding your plan, okay? So once you get to the home page that you see here, click on the Disaster Planning and Responses resources in the blue box on the left. It's circled in red. I hope you can see it. And that will bring you to this page where you have some choices. To find planning resources, click the heading for Disaster Planning and Response Resources that's the one that I've circled in red. You'll probably go to Response and Recovery Resources if you take Julie Page's course on Writing a Disaster Plan. Anyway, you can also, for our needs, click on Planning and Prepared Resources in the blue box on the left. Either one will bring you to the next page or the next slide. Let me get that up. Here you go. So you'll arrive at this page that contains information and tools to help your institution plan and prepare for emergencies. You'll see a lot of headings. Each heading has a drop-down box with available resources. Many, and I mean a lot, of resources are available as free downloads at the site, and not just the ones we'll be looking for today. When you click on the different headings individually, you will find drop-down boxes with resources for different topics. You can also click on the Open All Tabs button that you see in the upper right, and they will open all at once. All of the headings will open all at once. So you can become more familiar with emergency planning and funding resources, training staff and volunteers, a little bit on getting to know your local emergency responders. There's even a drop-down box on making a case for emergency preparedness. I think one of our participants was struggling with that topic earlier on. So I really recommend you explore all the other boxes and resources on your own. But for today, I will just click on the Know Your RIF heading. That's the one at the top there. So our worksheets are found there. You can see where the drop-down box opens when you click on it, and you can see that you have a couple of different resources there. You have a couple of documents from which to choose. You can see the resource in the box that's called Natural Hazards Gateway. That resource was in your resource packet for the webinar on natural hazards. I hope you've already explored it, but if not, be sure to try it out. And this webinar, as I said, will use the risk evaluation and planning program Tools and Tips that I've circled in black there. So click on that. Click on the Risk Evaluation and Planning Program Tools and Tips. And you'll come to another page that sort of looks like this. So you can access all of your tools from here. Then you can access them in a PDF format. And you can save them to your file. We've also placed these PDFs in the resource list for this webinar that you can go to directly. I've recommended two worksheets and you can use both worksheets by yourself or as an exercise with your planning team or even better in collaboration with your area first responders and emergency managers. You may want to, if you're a little uncomfortable thinking about that, working with them right directly, you could try to fill it out yourself and then go and ask them to review it and ask them to go over some of the issues that you don't know the answers to or you'd like to learn more about. Now let's take a look at the first worksheet, the one on risk prioritization. It looks like this. It's the one that identifies natural hazards. This worksheet is a tool to help rate the hazards based on the likelihood of occurrence and the severity of potential damage. It's a more sophisticated version of the probability and effect chart you filled out as you were doing your homework in webinar two and three. The hazards evaluation worksheet's coming in with an easy to understand instruction sheet on how to rank those hazards just in case you forget the process later on. And again, as with all worksheets, we suggest that you use it in collaboration from your local emergency management agency or your fire department. But if you find you need to do it alone or as an exercise with your planning team, you will still raise your own level awareness and make good progress towards gathering important information. Now in this image, you can see there's also a section on man-made hazards. The list of hazards along the left column should look a bit more familiar to you now. It may even give you some hazards you haven't considered or you may have something to add to the other box. Does anybody have anything to add to the other box? You should also be able to see along the top heading there are boxes to fill out for likelihood of occurrence and severity of damage. Likelihood of occurrence corresponds to probability and the severity of damage corresponds to effect in the chart you used in the previous webinars. Now the next slide helps explain how to fill it out. So let's try going through that. Okay, for each hazard, I want you to rate the likelihood of occurrence using a scale of one to five with one being not likely and five being very likely. Just go down that list and just put in your numbers. We've already put in numbers here but for you, your columns will be blank. Then in the column to the right of that after the multiplication sign, you'll see the severity of damage using a scale of one to five again with one being no damage and five being high damage. By multiplying the values of the likelihood of occurrence and the severity of damage columns, you get the risk rating on the risk prioritization worksheet. If you use this version that's available online, the Excel file is set up to perform this calculation automatically using the color code to sell based with the resulting value. That's what's been used here, so you can see there are red boxes and the green boxes and the yellow boxes. Now the red ratings, which are the numbers 16 to 25, receive top priority for mitigation and planning. The yellow ratings, those are numbers six to 15, can be addressed after the red. And then the green ratings as the numbers one to five have a chance of occurring in the region and are low on the priority list for mitigation and planning. That doesn't mean you should ignore them. It just means you don't have to give them the priority that you're giving to the red and the yellow areas. So let me try to explain this a bit more. Let's go over. Let's look at the one for volcanic activity. It's way down on the bottom, third from the bottom. If you go over, I guess we must be someplace that has no volcanoes. So I'm going to say we're in Rhode Island where I am and I know we have no volcanoes. So I'm going to put one because we have almost no likelihood of occurrence. And then I'm going to go over to the severity of damage and because we have no volcanoes here, I'm going to put a number one there. And then if you multiply those out and it goes all the way over to the risk rating, you get a number one, which is a green. That means I don't have much to do, at least in terms of prioritizing it. But if I go to the column right below it, which says wind damage from flying debris. Well, where I'm living, I must be in a wind tunnel because my likelihood of occurrence is going to be a number five. I have put that down. I'm in a very windy area and maybe we get a lot of tornadoes here. So I'm going to put a five there and then I'm going to move over to the severity of damage and in that column I'm going to put a four. So when I multiply that out, I get a 20. And that's all part of that red rating because the red ratings fall between 16 and 25. So go through these. Just put in your numbers. Do your multiplication or use the one online and it'll multiply it automatically for you. Prioritizing your hazards this way, it's really part of risk management approach to building an emergency disaster plan. It shows you where to first focus your resources for the best use of your resources. So Jenny, can you come back online? Maybe there's a poll question and let's see if anybody has any questions about the worksheet. We do. We have two great questions. But let me start by asking you guys a question. I'm going to turn the tables. We are just curious if you know how long it would take for a first responder to arrive on your site once they receive a call. You've got a couple options here. One to five, six to nine, ten to twelve. And then of course you're not sure. Which is not unusual. It makes a really good phone call to your first responder. By the way, how long would it take for you to get here? Right. So I'm seeing a lot of people saying one to five, which is fantastic. And then six to nine. And then a few people just don't know, which is fine. That's a good question. It's one of your questions in your worksheet. So going forward in your checklist. I'm going to go ahead and hide this. And then Alex, we have a few questions from the audience about the worksheet. Dennis has a question. Where do you get an idea of the severity of damage? He says I would think that volcanoes would be highly damaging. Yes, but if you don't have them in your area, then you can write a one. If you have volcanoes, say you're in Hawaii. Well, they have lots of volcanic activity, but most of the volcanic activity is only on the big island. So if you lived on Oahu or you lived on Maui, your volcanic activity may not be as affected by it. Maybe without volcano you may be getting earthquake, but that's something to ask your first responders. Okay. I hope that helps. Let's see. And this might be a follow-up. Kim is curious, doesn't severity of damage reflect how severe your collections would be impacted if the hazard occurred? Yes, it does. Okay. We have another question. Let's see. From Bryce in Portland, he says, if an event occurs rarely, but it's very likely inevitable like an earthquake. So it's a rare occurrence, but it could happen. How does it rate on the likelihood of a current scale? Well, it doesn't occur very often. So I would look into your ratings and see how often you have seismic activity, and you might put it somewhere, say a 2. It depends how many you get and how often you get them. Maybe it's a 1 or a 2. And then you would have to look and see historically what the quake level is. How strong a quake do you have? For instance, here in Rhode Island, we don't have many that are over 3.5 or 4, which means our severity of damage is really pretty low. It's really more in a... Our likelihood of occurrence is about a 1, and our severity of damage is really in the range of 1 or 2. But if you have... Of course, we just had that one on the east coast where there were some problems. So if you know that you've had a history of earthquakes and there are epicenters in your area, take that into consideration. So in Virginia, for instance, they might say the severity of damage is about a 3. Okay. So another question from Robert, who is curious, who could he potentially consult if they want to get a better measure of the severity of damage? I would ask your first responders or I would go to the seismic charts in the United States Geological Survey. I think that's the natural hazards section that we have. You can click on right in this Know Your Risk box, and you should be able to find your state information there.  You'll be able to get some charts and pictures of your state to see where the earthquakes are and how often they occur and how strong they are. And then you can look at historical records to see how many buildings have fallen down. Part of the likelihood, the severity of damage is understanding how structurally secure your building is and how your collections are. Have you strapped your collections to the wall, the shelving to the wall? Is your building constructed with a code for seismic shakes the way they are in California? You need to think about those things when you think about severity of damage. What are the other aspects that will influence how much impact this might have on the collections themselves? Great. I think it's great you pointed out structure too. I remember in Utah we had, you know, there's a lot of unreinforced concrete, I think was the name of it, and that made a huge impact on how a building would be affected by an earthquake. So great to keep in mind. Look what happened to Haiti. They're building codes. They don't have any building codes. So it really falls down like a deck of cards. So we have another question. One from Joan who's curious if you can add the bottom of this list. Oh, yes, you can. Okay. And then Tricia had a follow-up question on this conversation. So if you have a low likelihood of occurrence, you should take that into account when the severity of damage, is that correct? You rate them separately. So you have a low likelihood of occurrence, and you go one to five. It sort of happens or it doesn't happen. Like for us, we don't have earthquakes very often here. We do have them, so I'd rate it maybe a one or a two. The severity of damage, for me, when the earthquakes do happen in Rhode Island, they are very low, and there is minimal damage here. So I would put the severity of damage reflecting on the historical impact of what has happened here on the low end also, I'd probably say two. So taking into account what has happened in the past into your severity rating. Yes. Great. All right, that's it, Alex, if you want to move on. All right. Well, we'll move on to the other worksheet, which I'd like you to use. I hope you'll find this fun, because now that you've seen the Risk Prioritization Worksheet and how it works, I want to introduce you to this tool that I really believe is helpful in very practical ways. So the second tool for this webinar is the Walkthrough Checklist. It is meant to be used in conjunction with the first tool, the Risk Prioritization Worksheet. And this work through Walkthrough Checklist will empower you and your planning team to identify a variety of vulnerable conditions on your site or in your building that may exasperate your institution's susceptibility, excuse me, it's that cold, to fire security and water hazards. By answering these questions with a no, you will find deficiencies or vulnerabilities within your institution. Many of the vulnerabilities, or you can call them hazards too, can be addressed through low-cost or no-cost measures. So this checklist offers simple ways to nibble away at improving safety and lowering your risk to those man-made and natural hazards. Keep in mind that prevention is always the best defense. Thus, as you address them, you can really gain confidence by showing that you are strengthening your overall emergency management plan. So this Walkthrough Checklist is divided into sections on policies and practices with questions that address your grounds, your first responder relationships, insurance and construction projects, other sections target questions on staff responsibilities and training, and institutional policies and best practices. There's a big second section in the Walkthrough Checklist that prompts discussion on the building exterior and the interior, collection storage and exhibit areas, and general fire and water risks. These questions all will raise your awareness of often overlooked conditions that contribute to your overall institution's vulnerability. So I'm just going to give you some examples from this particular one. So let's look at this first one. It says, is the site reachable by fire trucks and other emergency response equipment? We already asked you if you know the response time. And then there's a question here. Are the fire hydrants visible, accessible, and operable? So let me give you some examples in the next slide here. Here we go. So as I said, in the section on emergency response access and relationships, the questions ask if the site is reachable by fire trucks on all sides. Are there any impediments that would keep them from driving right next to your building? Look around your building and see. Do you have fences or do you have hedges or are there telephone poles or what's there that could keep them from getting close?  Are they operable? And is there enough pressure to sustain fire fighting efforts? Where, by the way, are the alarm panels? And do first responders have keys to a master box, master key box, or a knocks box, which is positioned near their preferred entrance? So answering these questions and finding the answers to the unknown answers that you have to these questions will make for a timely and more effective response by your first responders. So in these images, alarm panels that would tell firemen which alarm or sprinkle head has been activated is located inside the basement door here. Let me see if I can... Hey, look at this. I got it. So the basement door is in here. It's through the screening in the left-hand image. So the firemen have to actually pull the screening off to get there, to get to the door that's under that porch. This gives them access to the panels, but it's in a really cramped and narrow basement. In order to combat a fire or a water incident, the firemen would then need to navigate in single file with all their equipment on, the basement corridors, and then they'd have to climb these narrow wooden stairs to get to the first floor. Firemen, when consulted, said, hmm, we'd really prefer our entry point to be to the main portion of the building and that the alarm panels be more easily accessed and nearer to the main door. This would allow them to make a better strategic entry into the building because the front door empty would give them the opportunity to quickly divide up the team, allowing some to go in either direction, some upstairs, or to descend to the basement. And so that was something they pointed out. And in the other image, when the fire hydrant was new, they found it was new and it was properly sized, but in reality the water pressure in this area of town is often too low for sustained efforts. So knowing that allows firemen to come with additional pumping equipment. And because the front door, this is a historic house, because the front door was historic, firemen also suggested a NOx box be installed discreetly to the side. That's a specialty security box. It's tamper proof into which the building keys can be kept and only the fire department hold the keys to the box. With the keys in hand, the firemen can open the front door rather than chop through the door. So it's a way for them to access your house or your building really quickly, not having to wait around for somebody to hand over keys or having to do something destructive to actually get into the building. Now here's another section of questions on overall fire safety. These are some questions that would be of interest to both staff in your institution and emergency responders. Let's look at some examples concerning sprinklers. So how often are the extinguishers checked, by the way? Many places check annually, but a best practice is monthly. If you have a fire hose cabinet, is it inspected and orderly on a regular schedule? Are flashlights in strategic places for you? I find that placing them with the fire extinguishers can be a helpful reminder of where the extinguishers are and makes it easier for whomever is responsible for ensuring the batteries are fresh. That's just my tip. But if you have a sprinkler system, is the sprinkler system operable and accessible? Do you know that? How often is it checked? Are there any placed and seldom visited areas of the building like the attic or the ends of the building where the mechanical or maintenance shops are commonly tucked? Does more than one head go off at a time? Or are the sprinkler heads individually activated? This would give you a clue as to how much water would impact those areas.  If one went off accidentally and you happened to be there, if you knew what to do and you had the little chalk there, you could actually get up there and stop it. But you need somebody to show you how to do it. And in a related query, are sprinkler heads a minimum of 18 inches from the nearest collection item? In the image on the right, the sprinkler heads were 14 inches away, which is technically not up to code, and it will definitely impact how well they deliver the source of water. By the way, the purpose of those top shelves is to help protect the items from the force of the water. Those top shelves are really not meant to store items on. A series of questions will raise your awareness on fire prevention initiatives too, including evacuation concerns such as stairwell accessibility, emergency lighting units, fire doors, and automatic door closings that may be programmed into the alarm system. Asking advice from your first responder is a great way to educate yourself and your plan is recommended. They've always been a little mysterious to me. But for example, the door on the left, the left-hand image, is kept open with a magnet. When the alarm goes off, the magnet is released automatically closing that door, and that's a protocol that helps contain the fire. A simple protocol, if you don't have such high-tech systems, is to train staff to close the doors as they evacuate the building. This training you can do in collaboration with your first responders. And we've seen the hand-checking, the Exit Light Backup Battery before, but ensuring the battery is fully charged will definitely ensure a safe evacuation. Quite often, those batteries run low, and it's a good idea for even you to know how to check them and inspect them. Now, another series of questions can help with best practices and maybe sensitive information, because often overlooked in risk-to-evaluations for disasters are security risks. And these include risks from physical break-ins and risks to your database collection management information. So here's a question for you to consider. How well-inventoryed are your collections? If you don't know what's in your collection, how can you account for it during a disaster, triage, and recovery process? So when was the last time an inventory was undertaken? And do any of you do spot-checks, spot-inventory checks? So on a related issue, do you back up your collection management database and keep it off-site? This is a really good practice that ensures your collection information is always current and available in a response to an incident. Some of you may have sophisticated backup systems, but if you're a smaller institution with a portable external backup drive, that is a good solution that is often under $100. Just don't forget to have two so you can rotate them between the off-site storage space and your desktop. And very small institutions, I've seen those who have successfully used a flash drive or a memory stick for small collections until they gather the funds for the external backup drive. Now, in relation also to this, evaluation of your internet access protocols, the location of passwords, and your ability to access collection management information from off-site are tasks you can outline as part of your planning. And that will enable you to be prepared to respond to an incident. Remember, too, that if the electricity and your internet provider goes down in your area or your region, access to cloud-based storage will not be feasible. This happened in New England with the blizzard this past weekend, so a number of institutions could not access their collection management files for, oh, well, some of them still are out, so it's been almost a week at this point. Now, for those of you with paper-based records, putting them in a two-hour fireproof cabinet or even throwing a fire blanket over them on your way out during an evacuation is my mitigation tip for the day or for today right now. I should probably move that. There we go. All right, and we'll move to the next slide. Other questions in the checklist will draw your attention to how effective your pest management program is. Pests and rodents aren't simply a nuisance. They can severely affect your health and the health of your collection. As you learned in the basics of collection care, rodents and pests, both multi-legged and two-legged types, can physically damage your collection while seeking food, shelter, or even moisture. They can also eat through your electrical wires and cause fires that way. So a good practice in the walkthrough is to look for signs of pests and signs of entry. Tracking down the entry points are all part of your mitigation initiatives. Now, most museums make perfect resorts for pests. They provide food, water, and shelter in ample quantities and, frankly, especially in storage areas with little disturbance. So to keep pests at bay, pest-proof your building as carefully as you child-proof your house. So while referring to the walkthrough checklist, see if your door sweeps provide type seals. Is there a practice to close the dumpster lids? If you use firewood, be sure to store it at least 20 feet away and 5 inches off the ground. Another low-cost mitigation tip is to seal cracks and holes, including entry points for utilities and pipes. You can use the cotton wool. Instead of the soap pads that are going to be made of iron and rust, use the cotton wool scrubby pads that you can get. And then you can also seal them with one of those expandable foams.  Do you remove it from the building daily, including your recyclables?  And is your dumpster lid always kept closed, or is it open providing a menu of choices for rodents and birds? So if you're interested in other steps to building an integrated pest management plan to complement your emergency plan, more information is available at this... excuse me... this website called museumpest.com. Now, a second component in the walk-through checklist examines the building exterior for security and intrusion detection and then provides questions to assess the building envelope to detect deficiencies that you can probably repair pretty easily. So here you can see the questions are, how's your drainage system? How's the caulking? What's the roof? Is it flatter? Is it pitched? Are there locks on all your windows and doors? So I have just some examples here that might fall under this particular section. Assessing the landscaping hazards and preparing a defensive landscape is part of mitigating sites' risks due to flooding, high winds, or even fire. So the checklist questions can guide you to consider your plant selection, the spacing of them, and land formation features that can capture water from snow and rainfall. For instance, those of you with the luxury of grass, keeping a 12- to 15-inch stone splash guard and maintaining a downspout provides a significant deterrent against both water erosion at the foundation and pest finding entry into the building. Overhanging trees and overgrown shrubbery present risks to the building envelope. Trees can fall into buildings, and shrubbery that is too close to the foundation can invade the foundation or clog perimeter drains. In dry climates, too, consider the plantings around the foundation for disease and their resistance to fire. Now, when you do an exterior check, be sure to check the gutters and the windows. Even your air conditioners can present a risk of leaking. They can seep in through the windowsill or erode mortar in the wall below and then seek in those spaces to the interior wall. And while you might not see them from the ground, if your roofs are flat, they can present a big risk to water infiltration into the collections, either through leaks or through backups. So do you have a seasonal maintenance plan to check the drains and scuppers? Check and see with your checklist is the roof material beginning to crack and need replacement? Is there a practice to shovel snow off the flat roofs to reduce the risk of them collapsing? That was something that our state warned us to do with NEMO, so we would have no collapsing buildings, which fortunately we didn't. As the rain came, it made the snow very, very heavy. So these are all low-cost mitigation tips that are in your control. They're mostly muscle and a little bit of labor here and not a lot of money. So Jenny, I clearly need to take something to drink. Could you do maybe let's do a poll on the Knox boxes and see if there are more questions? Of course. I have another question for you guys. Alex talked about Knox boxes. Now, does your institution have a Knox box or a process to provide master keys to first responders in your absence? Yes, no, or you're not sure. And I'll give you a second to fill that out. I'm pretty even mixed between yes, no, and not sure. Wow, that's interesting. So the Knox boxes, I think they run about $200. You can talk to your first responders about them. You can ask them if they would recommend them. And do make sure, if you decide to do it, that you collaborate with them as to where you want them to be put. I did do a site assessment for a university library and the Knox box was inside the value, which really didn't give the first responders any access because the building is always locked, even the vestibules. So they asked for them to relocate it, which they did. Question, Jenny? Everyone has a burning question, and I'm going to just toggle back really quick. What is this man so proud of that he has caught? Everyone wants to know. What are these animals? Well, we have rats there. We have a badger. I think we have two badgers and a whole bunch of rats. Oh, goodness. So a lot of people were correct. A lot of people were saying badgers and rats. So great pest identification. All right. We do have some other questions besides pests.  All right. A fire blanket is going to be a blanket has a special coating on it. Sometimes they're just also packing blankets. So there's something that will have a fire resistant coating on them. Okay. And just a follow-up question about the Knoxbox. Iona says, is it a product name or a make? I think you can get other versions that aren't Knoxbox. That's a brand name, correct? That is a brand name because it's a registered trade name. Okay. I believe there may be other versions of them. Okay. But they are tamper-proof. So you can put them on the side of your building. They're usually black. You can put them in a discreet place. And your set of keys only goes inside there and then there's a key for the first responder. What you need to do, however, is whenever you change the locks or the keys in your building is to remember to change the keys in the lockbox. Okay. We did have some questions when we were going over response access. Betty pointed out this seems like a lot of information for first responders to retain. And a few people noted that they have submitted information of their institution to first responders and it's kept on file. Can you talk a little more about getting that information to first responders? Someone even mentioned that they have a database. Their first responders have a database for this information. We in Rhode Island actually have a database for all of our institutions. So our state level emergency management agency actually has that access. Our local first responders can key into that if they are aware of it. But not all of them always is aware of that. If you're comfortable, you can give them your plan and they can go over it with you and it may have contact numbers for them. What I think most important is that you go over and walk through with them once a year to check your fire extinguishers at least once a year and then refresh them as to where the keys are, where your priority collections are, and bring them just to refresh their memory. Because the more they have ownership of your site while they are public servants and they are to pay attention to everybody, but it is their responsibility to know what happens in all of these buildings. So I hope that answered the question. Just keep talking to them. It is a lot of information but it's what they're trained and it's what their paid responsibilities are all about. Kim noted and a few other people noted that they're in a federal facility or another facility and they've been told they're not allowed to turn off or manipulate alarms or water feeds. That's not so much a question as I read it and we saw it and that makes sense. That's very true.  And that's all part of reaching out to your safety officers and your emergency managers to see who's responsible for what and what do they want you to do and what do they not want you to do. So that's all that kind of information that actually goes in your plan. Okay. Alex, I'm not sure if you're going to be able to answer this question but Janine is curious if there's an equivalent piece of equipment to a fire hydrant in rural areas. She followed up by saying that first responders do come with specialized water trucks and pump from a distant stream. Is there any other alternative that you know of? No. The only thing I know of is they come with their own pumping machines. Okay. And then we had a question from Robert and I think he got a lot of answers but I'll ask you Alex, how frequently should scuppers and gutters be inspected? Well, a best practice is to do it seasonally. So that's four times a year. A best practice is to do a maintenance inspection, walk around definitely in the spring, definitely in the fall. It's always a good idea in January when we have some severe weather you want to check it out. So we try to schedule it four times a year but at least definitely in the spring and definitely in the fall. Great. And then Maria had a fantastic question. Are there, is there a museum first responder network like other local museums who can pitch in if there is a disaster? Well, it will depend on your area. Different areas are working on developing buddy systems, a buddy institution. So you could, I don't know where your area is but you can reach out if you have a regional museum association or library association. You can check there. And you can also pick up the phone and talk to an organization just down the street and ask if they would like to have some sort of memorandum of agreement so you could work together. And how does AIC start with that play a role? If you, excuse me, if you have a severe incident and you aren't quite sure what to do or how to start, you can use the AIC hotline and the professionals on the other end will talk you through your first steps and provide information on where to help you find some resources. On very large, for very large incidents on occasion we're able to find funding to bring an assessment team out. They will not do a triage or recovery for you but they will help by doing a one or two or three day usually triage to help you get going and sort through what your priorities and what your steps should be. Because it is a volunteer organization. Okay, perfect. Well, those are all the questions we have for now, Alex. All right, so let me see. And here we are, okay. We're going to move on to, here's some more questions to get you looking at other things. From the outside of the building, the checklist will take you inside for closer work, look hopefully from a different perspective of your storage and exhibit spaces. It will also guide you to identify good maintenance practices, the lower risks, and in turn aid in a timely response. So here are some questions that, or here are some situations that the checklist will draw your attention to and you can answer them depending on what your situation is in your own institution. So here one of the questions is, are priority collections stored away from windows? Now this simple tip lowers the risks of pest infestation because pest adult insects commonly fly to the windows and then they're going to land on those collections and say, oh, light and dinner, this is pretty cool. And it also lowers the risks of collections getting wet if the window leaks or condensation occurs on the glass. And then not to mention it lowers the risk to light damage. That agent of deterioration you learned about in the basic collection care risk. Another question that will be prompted is, is the bottom shelf of collection storage raised off the floor? Raising the shelving provides access for good housekeeping that removes the buildup of grime and those dust bunnies that we all seem to grow. And in turn, again, it lowers the risk of pest colonization. Higher shelves also reduce your vulnerability to a leak, a burst pipe, or a flooding event because usually you find your leak within a couple of inches of water on the floor and if you have a water alarm, it'll alert you even sooner. So this is to show the image on the right that even the best of storage environments and who can beat those cushy anti-tip and anti-rolling supports for all our ceramics, even the best of storage environments can be tweaked to find risk lowering improvements if you keep an open eye and mind. These shelves need to be raised but they were also secured to the walls and lower the seismic risk that would challenge the shelving stability. So even they could make some improvement here. Storage accessibility. Oh, well, that's always a problem, I think, for most of us because intermixed and overcrowded storage rooms are a common problem as we all become overwhelmed with clutter creep and expanding collections. This checklist section will pose some questions for you about storage accessibility. Lots of overcrowding presents a fire risk and inhibits the fireman from quickly gaining control over the fire. It also inhibits a quick retrieval of priority collections. Gaining physical control over collections can seem intimidating but is important to moving your disaster plan forward. And besides providing enormous benefits to reduce all these vulnerabilities, organizing, and culling are free activities that you can implement yourself as your own mitigation efforts. Here are some checklist questions directed at facility infrastructure protocols. Is all your hard equipment plugged directly into the wall or do you use electrical extension cords? Multiple extension cords off a single plug are not compliant with electrical codes and all equipment hardware like your computers, dehumidifiers, and your copying machines should have dedicated wall plugs. So if you can get that to happen and take them off even a single extension cord you'll be moving forward. So the checklist, it helps you know also know more about the risks from the pipes that run through your storage and exhibit spaces. Are your pipes clearly labeled so you know what runs through them? Do you know if it is hot water, cold water, or sewage? Labeling them too is time efficient if you need to track down the sources of a leak. So there are some pretty straightforward tips that you can probably work on with your facility manager. Now we know water and floods have a high effect if they do occur and if they get two collections. One section of the walkthrough prompts you to think about other types of water threats in your building. Here we have some questions on are the appropriate dehumidifiers available? Are your pipes and plumbing free of leaks? Do you have water alarms or detectors in place? That's always a good mitigation tip. So for example, questions will have you inspect your heating and cooling units to see where the overflow pipe really overflows. Are there signs of any leaking or corrosion? Are there any water alarms and collection storage or sensitive areas that are prone to leaking? All of these tips provide a defensive protection that alerts you early on to some water before it gets out of control. Here are two examples in the image or the image is online here. In the left image, the overhead pipes in the storage area were corroding at a joint indicating a low level leak that was undetected because there wasn't a notable puddle on the floor. Nobody noticed it because they hadn't looked up and they hadn't seen any wet spots. But once they did look up as a result of going through with the checklist, they found that replacing the connector was simple and inexpensive and it frankly saved collections from a sudden burst pipe that was slowly corroding. On the right, the drip pan under the heating and ventilation, the air conditioning unit had regularly exceeded capacity, but no one really knew why or when because nobody had actually seen it happen and there was no alarm alert. It took four years for the collection managers to connect the maintenance process when the unit was being annually flushed with a mysterious patch of recurring flaking plaster two stories down in collection storage. They tracked it back and found the leak. They tracked it back as a result of actually looking at their calendars and the overflow pipe just needed cleaning and what happened when they did do the annual cleaning of this, they tilted the pan for some reason and they didn't realize that all the water was spilling over and that it was actually going to a crack in the floor that was a little about three feet away and then slipping down in between the wall. So eventually, the overflow pipe was cleaned and the pan was replaced with a deeper fiberglass one and now the facility staff coordinate their annual cleaning task with the collection management staff. So the staff are on alert to look for more wall damage. So that was an interesting way of connecting two different functions and coordinating calendars with those maintenance inspections and maintenance checks. Now bathrooms and plumbing are also hazards to evaluate during your walkthrough and there'll be a number of questions that will prompt you to look for certain things. Age plumbing is vulnerable to corroding pipes. They can spring pinhole leaks and seals over time, dry and crack. Slow running or backed up toilets, they can create cleanup methods that present not just water risks but also health and safety risks. Check to see if your bathrooms or any bathroom pipes are over sensitive collection areas. Here in Rhode Island, our public bathrooms were over one of our ethnographic storage rooms and one late afternoon some school kids plugged the toilets and they ran over for almost the entire night and flooded the entire basement below. So look and see, are they the source of leaks or do the cold water pipes in your bathrooms form condensation that causes mold growth or attracts pests? Dehumidifiers too need to be automatically drained to block the risk of overflowing collection tanks. If you use dehumidifiers, are those drainage tubes securely in the drain hole? All these are hazards that often take time to become evident but they can have far reaching effects into other areas of the building before the source of the water is located. So an annual site assessment using this checklist, not just one time but every year, will help identify any new hazards or hazards that are popping up as new facets that weren't there last year. Plus, take heart that the repairs qualify as mitigation tasks in your emergency disaster plan so you can indeed say you're making progress. So with more water problems, how well is your building sealed against water penetrating from either the outside or coming up through underground sources? Are there signs of flaking paint or plaster anywhere downstairs or upstairs? Is mold a recurrent suspicious problem anywhere that you just don't understand why it's there? Can you track down the source of moisture? Is there a backflow protection, a special kind of valve against sewage or water where it connects with public utilities? When there's a flooding in town, you really don't want the water from your town municipal pipes also backing up and emptying into your basement. So look to see if you have a backflow valve. Is there a plug for that water drain? Where else can you look for places water or sewage can flow into your facility? So put on your detective hat and look for these and other clues in your walk around. If you have questions, they will help prompt some questions for you. That's why having actually a planning team with a variety of people on it, try to include your facility manager, include your curator, include your director, include of course your collection management staff because everybody will have a different perspective and a different understanding of what you're looking at and you'll learn a lot from each other and really learn how to work as a team. So in addition to collection storage and exhibit spaces, there are many other areas in your building that can hide hazards. What sort of chemical hazards might you have? Remember in the last webinar, I mentioned inexpensive mercury spill kits and how to use them. They come in small boxes with all the supplies you need including instructions for mitigation and disposal. But what kind of spillage protocols do you have and is anyone trained to carry them out? If you don't need to address heavy metal hazards, how do you keep your solvents, paints, or gasoline for some of your gas-powered equipment? What do your maintenance areas look like? Are the cans of solvents and paints and varnishes contained in a fire and explosion-proof cabinet? Are open or partially used containers casually left around workspaces? If you have welding in your site, are the safety storage protocols for the cylinders followed? As a best practice, do you have a safety program that teaches the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or the OSHA practices to all staff that handle hazardous materials? Do you have your MSDS sheets on file so people actually know what the hazards they could be handling involve? Do any of your storage areas look like this one? The gas containers here in the left-hand image are kept within a woodworking shop and near heaters. As a result, they really increase the risk of fire. A mitigation tip is to remove them from the workspace for storage to a separate location away from the building. A better practice is to keep all flammables in a combustion-proof approved cabinet. If you have one, is it vented to the outside often that's overlooked. If you are interested in how to get a cabinet, the combustion-proof cabinets in different sizes can be purchased new through safety companies or you can get them used through surplus industrial shelving or surplus suppliers. Now, mechanicals for heating present one of the greater risks of fire. Keeping the area clear of clutter creep and flammables is really part of your fire code. The image on the left leaves clear instruction on the burner to keep the area clean. Now, that's a simple and free mitigation tip. The mower and open shelves of cans of paint on the right from another institution are stored adjacent to their oil burner and mixed again with wood supplies for the facility shop and all the paints that you can see in the background. The walk-through checklist helped this organization recognize the hazard and now they have a flammable cabinet for paints and varnishes and keeps the mower and its gas in a shed outside of the building. In other areas, you may identify a lack of compliance with electrical codes. These are especially dangerous in wood shop and maintenance facility rooms that are crowded and not well maintained. These images show an electrical bomb that is unlabeled and does not comply due to empty breaker spaces. That is a pretty easy and cheap fix. In the image on the right, however, note the not fully engaged electrical plug. It is an explosive accident waiting to happen. A fireball ignited by the dust is a high risk if the electricity shorts due to the exposed prongs or if a spark is emitted when the plug is pulled out. The reason this is potentially such a risk, especially in maintenance facilities, is quite often they overload the plugs. They overload the sockets. The chance of sparks is especially high when you've exceeded your capacity and you're really pushing the limit. What else heightens the risk of fire? How are your circuits and your other spaces? How old, by the way, are your electrical holiday decorations? These old holiday lights are one such example. They've been donated over a number of years. They burn hot, and they need a hazardous number of extension cords, each plugged into each other, which exceeds the capacity of old circuitry. I'm not sure of the fire code, but I believe you aren't allowed. You're not outside of the code to plug more than two electrical cords end-to-end. Now, as an additional note, as you do your walkthrough, check for the potential for old building materials. Be aware of lead paint, old ceiling tiles, transformers that may be in old elevators, fluorescent light ballast, and even plastic coatings, insulating old electrical wires. Being aware of old building materials can help you in response to an incident as they can release toxic substances. You'll want to have sources to test your soot in your disaster plan. If something does burn, you can just have the soot analyzed for any hazardous material, as well as for its pH. So, okay. Here we are at the end of the webinar, but yet here we are back again at the phases of the emergency management. We started with the preparedness phase, and we've come around the wheel to mitigation. You've learned that before disaster strikes is the time for assessment. You've taken a closer look at your institution and its current situation, both the collection and the building. You've recognized the threats to your site whose causes are out of your hands, such as the natural disasters and man-made disasters, but you've begun to consider the nature of these threats and imagine possible scenarios, what would or what could your staff do in these situations. And today, you've learned how to prioritize hazards within your institution and what you do to help mitigate the probability of them happening to you. You've also learned some mitigation tips to help you begin to protect your site to move your wheel of emergency management forward. So, what really are your next steps? From my perspective, the next step is to continue to build upon your efforts and to add to your planning initiatives. The material developed during your planning and preparation time will have identified various steps to be taken. If it's a storm warning, do you have to evacuate all visitors and staff? Do you need to get to the institution to make sure all the defense is against flooding or in place? If there's an internal fire, the plan will show where the fire extinguishers and exits are, right? And the priority list of objects will detail which objects should be saved, if possible, in the order of significance. If this part of your plan in the preparedness phase is thoroughly researched and prepared but also kept simple, it may well prevent a minor disaster from becoming a major one. But what about when a disaster happens? Response is putting all of these preparedness plans into action. All that preparation is about to pay off. It commonly is the first 72 hours of an incident. So, a small leak has been discovered in the object storage room.  You can learn more about how to respond to an incident with Julie Page's webinar on responding to disasters in March. So, my ending advice is to keep that emergency management wheel turning by fleshing out your plans with the help of your planning team and take the next course on protecting your collections, writing a disaster response plan. So, sign up to learn how to write a disaster plan. Sign up to learn how to fill out that pocket response plan and how to organize and structure an effective response. So, now I really need some water to drink here. Jenny, is there a poll? And I'd be glad to take any remaining questions from anybody concerning any of the past webinars in case there's any burning questions.  We do have a poll question. Alex, I'm going to pull over your last slide, which has your email address. Is it okay for folks to contact you if they have questions? Absolutely. All right. Well, let's get your water. We have a poll, so we have one more question for our audience. How far off the floor is your lowest storage shelf? Zero inches, two inches, four inches, six inches, or more? And then I do have a few questions. Nice job, you guys. Does anybody have one of those iRobot sweepers that is like a little automatic robot vacuum cleaner? It goes on by itself at night. It's one of the things I love to use. It has a rechargeable, so it has a station, a little lighthouse it backs into, so it never gets lost. It knows when it's supposed to, it knows when the battery's going down. So it memorizes your space. It goes under the shelf. So make sure your shelves are tall enough for it to go under. And it really minimizes your need for constant housekeeping. You can turn it on. You can schedule it to go on when you aren't there. All right. Let me go ahead and get to some questions. We have a Roomba. We like to call it DJ Roomba. It's a lifesaver. All right. I'm going to hide this so you have that email. We had a question earlier on when you were talking about electrical code violations. Betty was curious about power strips. Where are some of the regulations related to power strips? You'd have to find your electrical code where you live. If you have a power strip, it all depends on the kind of electrical courting you have in your building. You can use those power strips, but if you overload your plug to the wall, you can also short things out by having too much on there. Okay. We had a question from Robert, and we might have someone in the audience who knows a bit about this. He's curious how effective can thermal imaging be as a proactive measure for either disaster preparedness or for long-term preservation? He says by that he means interpreting problems within the building's fabric, and how expensive is that? I don't know. I know as a revenant we can hear in Rhode Island. We just call our Rhode Island Energy Company, and they have a federal program that they come out with an imaging gun, so they can see where your heat is leaking. It probably might help work if you were to have a burst pipe because there might be a differential between the temperature there. It will definitely show where heat is leaking out of the building. That's what I think of for thermal imaging. Okay. Let's see. Adrienne Burney had a question. She's curious, is the backflow valve system expensive to have installed throughout a building? Well, normally you put it right at the connection with your municipal water supply or where it enters your building, so there's usually only one of them, and you would have to speak to your plumber. It is not inexpensive. I do know that, and it also depends on what your loop is for your heating system. In New England we have a lot of colonial houses which have a continual loop for the heating, but it's a question to bring to your plumber, and it's also a question to bring to your insurance agent. Sometimes they actually support it. They will give you a discount. Okay. We have a question from Rebecca. She is curious, are there any sort of systems that can be keyed into environmental software with sensors that can be placed in rooms on the floor level to alert for standing water? And a few people had mentioned that they have water bugs, but of course the issue is if you're not around you don't hear the alert. Do you have any recommendations, something that might send a text or an email? I am not familiar with that. That's a technical issue that I would again ask your plumber or I would also cast it out as a question online in the Connecting to Collections community. Okay. Let's see. Because I know there are ones that automatically clued in. You know, they're automatically wired in. But whether they actually send a text message, I don't know. Okay. We have a question that we touched on earlier. I think Katherine is curious on the back of that prioritization worksheet. How should we fill it out for a disaster that would have a negative effect if it did happen but is really unlikely, so much so that it's not something you worry about? Then I'd say one for the likelihood of it happening. And then you could say, if it does happen, it would be a true disaster, then you'd put five. But if you multiply that out, one times five is five, which means it's still a very low level risk to you. Okay. I'm going to move over the homework assignment for today. We have about 10 more minutes left. So this is the final homework assignment. And you will notice that it is actually the final evaluation for this course. We did want to give you the option to provide feedback anonymously. So if you're more comfortable being completely honest without your name attached, you'll notice on the last question of this homework assignment, there's a link to an anonymous form. So make sure to do that. And I also apparently put the wrong link on that last email I sent you for homework three. So I'll put it here. And it's been fixed on the website. So you'll have that. And you'll also have the email we send out today. I'm also going to pull over our group login. So this is for folks who are watching with the group. So only one person logged in. If that group leader could go ahead and type in the names of everyone else who's joining them. And if you logged in and you're just by yourself, you don't need to tell us, it's okay. We got you. We got you marked down. So I'm going to pull that over. Let's see. So those were all the questions that we had based on this webinar. So I'm going to leave the floor open for a little bit. Does anyone have any questions about this entire course, anything that we covered in the last four webinars? And I'll just pause to let you guys type. And it looks like there may be no questions, Alex. You have done such a stellar job. No, it's because of Valentine's Day and everybody feels love in the air and they got to go get those tulips. Everyone's got a date. Okay, let's see. I have a question from Jennifer who says, she says, I don't know if this has been covered yet, but we are located within 15 miles of a nuclear plant. She says she's not found many resources on nuclear disasters. Do you know of any? Well, there have been a number of them, but they're usually low level and they've been contained, like the Three Mile Island one in Pennsylvania. There are three or four of them where they've been deactivated. Basically, if you have, you just need to find out what the, well, you need to realize that your collections potentially will be, you will not be able to touch them or you will, and you will need to have the Nuclear Regulation Commission come in before you can even enter your building to see that it's safe. Okay. Another question from Nicole in Colorado. Let's see if you're upwind or downwind. That's a good thing. That's a good question. Yeah. I've seen Nicole in Colorado is curious, for acetate film, how reliable are AD test strips? They're really great. So you can get those from Image Permanence Institute, and they are very reliable and very good. Okay. And we have a couple people who are posting some examples of water detectors, which is great. And since I don't have any more questions, I'll go ahead and just make some final announcements. Again, all the homework assignments are on the website. And our timeline is, of course, the deadline to turn everything is in the 21st. On the 22nd, we hope to have all the webinar recording links posted on the course page so everyone can watch them. And then we'll start turning out certificates. And you will get an email notification as to when that has been sent so you'll know it's coming. Alex, thank you so much for hanging in there for four whole webinars. And thank you to everyone who's been showing up every day and turning in homework assignments.  Feel free to email us at Heritage Preservation. It's infoatheritagepreservation.org if you have any questions. And Alex's email will also be available. And then just keep an eye on the website, the course page. I'll post the links that we mentioned on Tuesday and then also today. So thank you guys. Have a fantastic afternoon.


But a better title or a more descriptive title might be this I'm gonna talk about brush fire, which is a library that I've been working on at Stripe for distributed generic decision-tree learning And right now using Hadoop as the underlying platform I haven't been sourced it yet. I will over the next month or so so You know, everyone knows that that talks about Hadoop are really about counting things Inevitably tutorials about Hadoop are also counting things But I believe that that that they're also Often it's it's more useful to think about them as as adding things So so we're gonna talk about counting, but we're really gonna talk about adding and and in particular we're gonna talk about trees and We're gonna talk about decision trees so The point of a decision tree the first thing that you need to know about a decision tree Is that it's for making predictions? And so the the sort of basic interface to a tree in brush fire But just sort of conceptually is that you need to be able to give it a A bunch of features a vector of features a map In this case from from strings which represent names of features People also call these properties attributes, whatever Two values And sort of generically here. We're just gonna think of the values being you know some type B And you get back a prediction sort of based on these features based on these things You're telling me about I'm gonna give you back this prediction, which is of type T So it'll help a little bit if we make us a little bit more concrete So let's say that we are trying to predict Do you like cookies? So you might have you know a number of Observations here that you've made of sets of features here is something which is blue and furry and about yeah Hi, and does it like cookies and here is something which is small and green and does it like cookies and so on and you want a prediction back so You know you might have a very simple tree like this Initially to answer this question and so you know when you're evaluating so this is primarily a talk about about learning these trees and building these trees But first just to talk about how you evaluate these these observations when you get them using the trees It looks like this. So let's say that you have some observation Cookie monster and you want to know does it like trees does it like cookies? So you start in the root And every node in the tree is going to have some kind of predicate that it operates on these features, right? So in this case, let's take out the color feature and let's say is it blue Right and if it is blue we'll walk the tree this way and if it isn't blue we'll walk the tree that way so Cookie monster is blue and so we'll go into that node and now we're in a leaf node and And the predictions are in the leaves and so we look at what is the prediction in this particular leaf node and and yes You know a cookie monster does like cookies. Okay, you know, it could go the other way. We could have gone down the other path And that might not have been a leaf node there might have actually been more to the tree And so we were curse right we have some other question that we ask You know do you wear stripes and you know if you do go this way if you don't go that way and then again We come to new leaves and and those leaves might have additional predictions, right? and And so we said before that those predictions are are of type T this kind of generic type T people also call the predictions targets, which is why I use T and And let's let's talk for a little bit about what type we actually what concrete types we might use there, right? And so there's different kinds of predictions We might want to make and so you might think about different kinds of predictions like a like a it's called a binary classifier That this is what we've been talking about, you know tries to answer questions like do you like cookies, right? You might also think about a regression Something that tries to answer questions like how many cookies will you eat, right? So in the binary classifier case, you might have a Boolean as your prediction type in a regression You might have an integer or a double or something like that as your as your prediction type Sometimes you have what are called multi-class classifiers, right where there might be a number of different discrete answers So like what is your favorite kind of cookie and you might imagine having a string or something else like that as your prediction type And in this is what I mean when I say that that brush fire is is a generic decision-free learning framework so typically if you look at at the code that's out there for Doing decision trees, you know There are a huge number of variations a huge numbers of types of decision trees And they tend to sort of pick one, right? So, you know you have these questions like you do you split one, you know just into two or do you have multi-way splits? You know How many trees do you actually use to make your predictions and combine and how do you combine them? And how do you allocate, you know your training data to those trees to decide how to make them? And so on and and usually you kind of pick one point in that space and say like this is my implementation This is random forests, which implies a whole set of choices around here And the design goal with brush fire is rather than to make any particular choice to try to kind of abstract away a Generic way of thinking about this and so, you know kind of each of these choices Gets represented by some type some trait some type parameter That that lets us kind of build up whatever we want in this space of ways of doing decision trees, right? So okay, so back to the Target variable so so we said that you know you might think of a binary classifier Using a Boolean target and that's actually a pretty naive binary classifier You could do that certainly but in general people don't just want back true or false They want back a probability, right? How likely is it that cookie monster likes cookies? How likely is it the Kermit likes cookies? Whatever and so then you might think? Okay, so we don't have a Boolean in there. We we have a double You know some value between zero and one and and that would be reasonable But we have an additional design constraint on brush fire Which is that we wanted to be able to operate in a distributed way And so that additional design constraint ends up putting this additional sort of type constraint on on T Which is that we want our predictions to be something that we can sum up We want our predictions to be something that we can Build a sort of small piece of on each of a number of nodes and then combine And so you know we use the the algebra library underneath, but scholars E also has this type class There's a monoid type class, which just means something that can be summed right something that is commutative has a zero has a plus operation and And so that lets us operate better in a distributed context and so So our T needs to be a monoid and so in the case of a binary classifier There's a very simple representation that we can use we can just use a map With account for truths and account for falses and that will work that will give us Probabilities out because we can just look at the ratio But but it is something that can be summed and so really you can think of this not as being just a prediction a single label a single answer But a distribution of answers and our binary You know the classifier a distribution is a very simple thing. It's just two numbers You know in a in a regression your distribution might be something more complicated, right? And this has some other night properties For example if we have these these predictions in the leaves that can be summed up and we want to prune the tree We want to get rid of some of the leaves Then we can just sum up the leaves and now we have a prediction for the interior node that that's our new leaf Another way to think about this by the way is is from kind of a Bayesian perspective that we want predictions that are Updatable right we want to be able to turn the crank say this was our old prediction Here is our new information coming in and we want to update our prior and get a new a new probability Distribution here right and so from that point of view you might think of the the the simple map with a count of true and a count of Falses is representing like a gamma distribution And you might also want a Gaussian distribution, which is also some of all and so on right okay So I said I have this design constraint that it be distributed in and why is that important? Why do I even care that it be distributed in and one reason is that because I already wanted it to be generic? It's very difficult to to do a generic learner that is fast that is well optimized on a single node Right you're paying a cost for the generous Generosity a lot of the reason that people don't typically do this is because they want to pick exactly one approach and really Optimize it right and so if it's not going to be particularly fast on a single node Then you want to be able to throw a lot of compute power at it so that at least you're not waiting forever for your models Right another reason is just one of scale right these these models tend to be better If you can throw a large amount of data at them to to infer these trees And it's worth making the point that this isn't just about throwing a large number of observations Although that's useful, but also having a very large number of features in those observations, right? So you don't just want a lot of rows, you know tens of millions hundreds of millions of rows Whatever you maybe want a million columns And it's very difficult to do that kind of thing on a single note And the third reason is sort of this like you know, we were our banks because the money is there You know Why do you want to distribute a decision for your learner because the data is there because in practice a lot of us have You know huge amounts of training data sitting in a Hadoop cluster somewhere sitting on HDFS And it's easier to bring the computation to the data than bring the data to the computation And so what does this look like? concretely And so this is a a simple example Of using scalding which which is a framework for doing Hadoop stuff and Scala To to train one of these trees and just very quickly walking through this The first thing that we want to do is read our training data And parse it into brush fire expects these instance objects, okay? And parse it into instance objects that represent the training data And training data that the way that you learn one of these trees is by having a bunch of training data That has both the features and the prediction, right? And so you're trying to generalize from that to be able to make predictions later When you have features and no prediction, right? And so you have both the v and the t here both the the math of feature values and the prediction And we construct a trainer object with the training data and we ask it to expand the tree, okay? and and and You know I note here that this is 11 passes through the data We're trying to expand the tree 10 times and 21 map reduce steps So that's because this is a recursive process and it's a recursive process where each pass Through the data through the entirety of the data Expands our tree by one level, right? So let's say you start off with this simple tree, right? the recursive process takes each leaf in the tree and Produces new children for each of those leaves and so you would go from here to there in one pass to map reduce steps One pass through the data and from there to here and so on And we'll get to how that works in a moment, but but first we need the base case We need to be able just to construct And and that's the simplest thing and so it's a nice thing to start with so You know let's let's talk about Our training data, right? So our training data has both the features These maps from string to some value type And the targets and and this is kind of a degenerate case of the distribution, right? The training data has a distribution of labels But in fact generally that's like a map from like true to one or false to one in this case of a binary classifier Now that might not be true, right? You might want to wait some observations more and and do that by having some different kind of distribution But really the point here is we want to be kind of in this distribution space, but it really represents one observation So these these kind of get more interesting as you sum them up, right? And summing them up is exactly what we're going to do to produce our root node, right? If we want a root node just has the contains the overall distribution for the entirety of the training set And so we just want to sum these all up And in the distributed context in the map reduce context what that looks like is this right? We have a number of instances and I'm kind of using these dotted lines to show Separations between nodes right each of them is on a different node of this cluster And from each of them we can extract this this t this distribution And on each node locally we can sum them up to get a single subtotal for that node Right, and then we have the shuffle and reduce step where we send each of the individual subtotals To a single reducer and there we add them all up and now we have our root node Okay, not super exciting not a very interesting tree not a very useful thing to predict with yet But but a necessary starting point so Then what do we do with that the next thing that we need to do and we need to kind of recursively do Is choose what's the best way to split from there? What's the best first decision to make and and this is a greedy algorithm, right? And so it's always going to choose, you know, it can't look multiple steps ahead It's always just going to choose what what looks like the best split here The thing that's going to gain you the most information For for a later prediction So, you know, this might be we want to look at color and is the color blue or not This might be we want to look at color and is the color yellow or not This might be we don't want to look at color at all We want to look at some completely different feature like is the height greater in the fiber is the height less than five or whatever Right and and so we need to sort of look at all of the possibilities there all of the reasonable possibilities And then make a choice for which for the best one is I'm going to simplify this a little bit at first and and assume that we're only looking at a single feature, right? So we're not going to try to decide between features We're just going to decide, you know for a single feature. Let's say color. What's the best question to ask about it? What's the best sort of way to split back? And so that simplifies our our sort of notion of our training data right now We don't have this map of features. We've just got a single value Which in this case we now know as a string and again, we've we've still got these these targets, right? And how do we decide what the best way is? Well, we're going to need to assemble kind of all in one place everything that we know about this one feature and In one way to think about that I talked about the the t type the target type as being a distribution And now what we want is to assemble a joint distribution We want to know what the joint distribution is of values and labels or of values and predictions, right? And so we need a type for that and I'm going to call this type s and In this case in this very simple case where we have a small discreet number of values We can again use a very simple type to represent that joint distribution Which is just a map from value to prediction, right? And so what we want to do is we want to assemble in one place a single map which has the Distribution summed up for all of the observations that had say yellow and the Distribution summed up for all of the observations that had blue and so on right And we're going to do that again in this distributed context by first creating these these Tiny joint distributions just for a single observation, right? So we'll take blue and we'll take our target for blue and we'll create a map from blue to the target for blue and so on We'll do that individually for each row And then we want to sum them all up right kind of conceptually sum up And you can think of these by the way I mean in showing you these as maps if you think in in sort of linear algebra You can also think of these as sparse matrices, right? We're building a sparse matrix for each observation and then we're summing up the sparse matrices So again, what does that look like in a distributed context? Well the first step looks almost exactly like what I showed before, right? So for each instance, we're kind of constructing this this s this this joint distribution We're summing them locally on each node to get you know that the subtotal for for that s And then we're summing them all up and sending that to a single reducer that now has In memory, you know one object representing the joint distribution for that feature Okay Again, I mentioned this is like a very simple case where we have a small number of discrete values We might have a large number of discrete values and so we might choose An approximate data structure like a count min sketch to to represent that this joint distribution We might have you know a continuous variable in which case again We probably need some kind of approximation or binning or something of that distribution We use the algebra library which has a lot of these Approximate data structures are a lot of these things that they can represent kind of a a large joint distribution in a fixed amount of space Right and and do that distributed But for now it's as simple as just to think in the sort of about the simple like matrix or math case, right? So so that's what you know you have that And now once you have all of this information in one place now you need to decide what are the possible ways We could split this tree with it, right? and And so this is is the the splitter the responsibility of the splitter trade And so, you know What we are trying to produce is a bunch of candidate splits and a split looks like this You know you you have your node You're trying to split and you want to have a number of edges In each of those edges is a predicate on the value type V You know do I go down this edge or not? Do I go down this passive path of the tree or not and then a prediction? You know if I go down this path then this is this is the prediction This is the you know and this is just learned from looking at my training data, right? Everything that did go down this path so far, you know if I sum up the predictions for all of them This is what I get, right? So I want to be able to produce a number from a joint distribution I want to produce sort of some large number of candidate splits And so a splitter needs to have a type s which represents this joint distribution It needs to be able to sort of initialize that joint distribution from a single observations value and target It needs to have a semi-group which is to say it needs to be able to sum these up And then it needs to be able to split them and so given this joint distribution And it also gets the distribution in the parent which is sometimes useful Produce a whole bunch of splits and it's worth just pointing out sort of as a side note that there's nothing Enforcing that there be two paths, right? We can have a multi-way split here You know if you write your splitter that way the splitters that are currently rooted and brush fired don't they're all binary trees But there's no, you know, no restriction particularly for that. So You know that the particular binary splitter I've been showing you here has is type s just this map from v to t It's create is very religious creates a map. It's split is a little more complicated I'm not going to show it, but you know just to sort of show you what that looks like So okay, so Have your splitter your splitter on the reduce node takes this Takes this joint distribution and and produces a bunch of splits and now we need to pick one, right? We need to pick one of these splits And that's the responsibility of the very simple trait this evaluator trait Which just needs to take in a single split and produce a score And for simplicity, we just say that score is always a double, right? and and so for example Use and brush and brush fire a chi-squared evaluator, which just runs the chi-squared statistical test on you know, it assumes that your Your predictions are going to look something, you know, like a vector of some sort, right? So so discrete values, right? This wouldn't work for a regression, but it works for either a binary or multi-class classifier And you're going to have you know some number of splits And so now you have a matrix, which is like a contingency matrix Which you can run a chi-squared statistical test on to see whether or not you know each row in the matrix is in fact sort of Different in a statistical sense And and you get back a score from that right and get back a p-value saying you can use that as your score And you just pick the Pick the split that gives you the best score The other interesting thing about evaluators is is that they're composable Which is to say that if you have other things you want to do to influence the scores You can build up a more complicated evaluator And so this is an example of a min weight evaluator where you might want to have the restriction that not only Does this matrix, you know have good kind of statistical separation? But also it's not like that it just represents three or four observations, right that that there's enough there that That we think it's interesting and so this becomes like a stopping criteria, right? and And so you can wrap that around and it will you know take the base kind of you know p-value or whatever But then say we also want this hard cut off where it's like, you know I never want to see splits down that they get me down to just like a couple of observations or something like that and so Yeah, so so that that lets you build up these sort of more complex behaviors from from individual parts So, okay Remember there, you know, I said we're going to start with with a single feature But in fact these instances do have multiple features and every time we're trying to decide how to split this tree We do want to consider multiple features and so that all happens in parallel So we have this one path where we're spitting off these joint distributions for this one feature But at the same time, we're also creating these joint distributions for each other feature in each observation each instance And and those are all separately going to be totaled And then sent to say a different reduce node Which is going to have a splitter of its own Which is going to split that feature into a bunch of candidate splits And then what we want to do is look at all of the candidate splits Produced across all of the nodes for all of the features and pick the best one, right? Okay, except that so, you know, this this is what it would look like if we were only at the root node But remember that that we're adding a whole level at a time And so we are actually doing this in parallel at every leaf node in the general case, right? And so not only is each feature Being evaluated in parallel, but this is happening for each leaf in the tree in parallel And so as our stream of instances comes in the first thing we need to do is basically come up with the prediction Sort of from the tree as we currently have it, right? We walk the tree with the instance to the node it would currently leaf node it would currently go to and then we use that instance in Constructing these joint distributions and coming up with these splits for that, right? And so that's all happening in parallel Except that in practice in production you very rarely want to build models that are a single tree, right? Models that are a single tree tend to sort of make too much of particular coincidences It's found in the data we call this overfitting And it's generally much better to construct a large number of trees from random Subsamples of the data maybe random subsamples of the features and then average out all of their predictions later on And so actually even this is happening many many times in parallel Where each instance is getting assigned to one or more trees But probably not all of them and then it is getting walked down through the tree to find you know The single leaf and then that leaf has multiple features and so on and so there's a huge amount of parallelism going on here so that we can build things like random forests out of this and And the trees which tree something goes to is controlled by this sampler trait And so the sampler trait says how many trees we want it also says for a given instance And for a given tree how many times we want to include that tree that instance in the training for that tree And it's how many times because for example for random forests you're doing a bootstrap Sampling and a bootstrap can is sampling with replacement and so can actually include the same instance multiple times You know it might be zero it might be three times whatever in the same tree and to allow us to Stably make these assignments from instance to tree over these multiple passes in a distributed context We need some kind of unique ID that we can hash on or whatever In the instance and so you can see the instance case class down at the bottom or at least I hope you can It has the feature map. It has the target. It also has an ID and it also has a time stamp and In the time stamps in there because it's very very common that in deciding In particular whether to use something at all in your training set or whether to hold it out and and use it later For validation of these models to look at time and something like out-of-time validation and and so this leaves again to a Desire to have these kind of samplers be composable You might have a simple sampling strategy like K fold cross validation. I won't go into the details But but then you might want to wrap that in an out-of-time sampler That has a time threshold and then it will just have a hard cutoff where it says anything whose time stamp is greater than this I'm not going to use it all in the training, but then I am going to use later on in the validation So you can kind of again build up these more complex behaviors And so to get back to a somewhat more slightly refined idea of what the job would look like When we're constructing the trainer we in fact not only give it the training data We also have to give it a sampler And then the call to expand. Oh, this is really faint. I don't know if you can even see it But there's a comment there pointing out they're actually implicit parameters there for a splitter and for an evaluator And there's defaults for, you know common types of value that you might want to use common types of predictor that you might want to use Or you can explicitly construct your own splitter your own evaluator and pass those in and And there's really just one more thing that I wanted to mention and This is something that that maybe has been bothering people maybe hasn't But what is the value type when you look at something like this where you actually don't have you know a homogenous map, right? You I've got both numbers and strings in there And yet I keep talking about this single value type V. What's going on there? Well, I mean you can resolve that however you want the framework, you know Doesn't doesn't care at some sense about what this is But it's useful to give you a kind of default way of dealing with this and so brush fire includes this dispatch type Which is kind of like an either but in like an extended either with with four possibilities And those four possibilities are for the four kind of common types of features that you use in machine learning an ordinal type Which is to say, you know a numeric type or or at least ordered but with a discrete number of values a nominal type where There is no ordering and again There's kind of a discrete number of values a continuous type if you're using like a real number or something a double And a sparse type which I use to flag it's it's nominal But there's like a sort of an infinite number of values or a very large number of values like IP address or something like this, right? And often you want different strategies different spitters basically for each of these right? And and so this is you know Your instance ends up looking like this where you have a map not directly to the value But sort of wrapped in these this dispatch type various kind of Subtrates or subclasses of this dispatch type And then you have and this is sort of a ridiculous piece of code But you can have a dispatch splitter, right? And so the dispatch splitter wraps up a separate splitter for each of these sub types And appropriately dispatches with pattern thing, you know the incoming data And then it would have also for separate joint distribution types Which it will wrap into a dispatched object on those four separate this joint distribution types and so on And so this lets you have you know multiple different strategies for for how we deal with with splitting All kind of coexisting in the same path through the data and lets you have these multiple different types of features in your data So so yeah, that's that's that's it and I think I'm I'm running a long time I wanted to reference the the planet paper out of Google Which was the sort of initial inspiration for a bunch of this work. They talk about a particular not a generic but a particular Way of doing using map reduce to learn decision trees Which which is similar to the way that I do it scalding an algebra algebra bird out of Twitter are You know libraries that this makes heavy use of And this isn't yet up on stripes get hub repo But it will be and if people are especially interested and they want to contact me about getting early access to it That's cool. Thank you very much