Jerry of the circus before Jerry of the circus say how did you get way up on his head where's Olson you mean to say you play along with this great big elephant and I am so glad to see him well come down come down on the ground something may happen to you now look how that beast throws his trunk about no listen to him he sounds as if he were getting mad oh no no no he's good friend and now I go but I shall come back poor thing he does not understand but I shall teach him English miss common could you would you what he did major well I was just wondering if you could well would you take a walk with me well we might go out for lunch I would not be asking too much oh no of course not major but you see well my brothers I must rehearse with them so if you will excuse me my good friend I must leave you and El Mundo too Olson he will come back you stay here till El Mundo is taken care of yes well well of course miss common anything for you anything oh thank you sir I go goodbye sweet lady El Mundo she leaves us and you love her so too how tragic to feel so strongly not to have that love return but she called us our good friends we can always remember that can't wait not so loud she'll think something is wrong we don't want to worry her common common what a lovely name hello there major oh oh so is so it's Jerry well young man you're quite stopping me sorry it didn't mean to say I'm looking for Carmen you haven't seen her have you she has just left she's going to rehearse with her brothers oh thanks then they'll be in the big top she said she and her brothers have been having some kind of trouble Carmen has been getting threatening notes not signed someone is threatening to kill her no kill that sweet creature once they even threatened to put acid on the wire which would surely kill all three of them that's why they check it over before each performance oh how awful who could be so cruel well I don't know but I think I've got a clue that's what I want to see her about you have a clue tell me young man perhaps maybe I could help well well all right I'll tell you but promise you won't do anything until we're real sure yes yes of course I promise I was a young man well it's like this we were out here this morning with Olson and the new elephant when rags came running up with a piece of paper in his mouth yes but what is that to do with when I took it from him I saw there had been some candy in it because there were some crumbs left go on go on well Tom and I went back with rags to see who had given him the candy and sure enough we found a piece of candy and then this seems to be quite beside the point no it isn't because suddenly we saw that that piece of paper was the same kind of paper that the notes to Carmen have been written on oh was there something strange about it oh here it is see how thin it is it's rice paper who gave rags a candy well that's what's worrying me you see rags led us to the bearded ladies wagon the bearded lady huh that passed she wasn't there so I don't know if she gave him the candy but she probably did the amount of candy that woman consumed is a sin but major this is what I can't figure out how could she happen they have the same kind of paper that those notes were written on of course we're not sure she gave rags a candy no but she's a meddling lovesick woman and I wouldn't put it beyond it I do just such a silly thing well I hate to say anything to the bandinis until I'm sure at least sure she gave rags the candy you know how fiery those brothers can get when they're mad well I've heard they can despite the fact that they always seem so gay and carefree I need to have them go to the bearded lady if she really hasn't had anything to do with all this huh I don't think I think you come just to the right person Jerry now I'll tell you what I'll do what well I'll go to a wagon and look around inside while she's gone and see if she has any more paper like this oh I thought of that but I was scared well I guess I can look through her things after the way she took my watch and caused me all that trouble yeah I remember and then if I find she's got more paper like this we'll make her explain about giving rags a candy if she confesses about that we'll next ask her about those threatening notes sounds easy now oh handling temperamental woman is never easy of course well after all I want miss common to realize that I'm a man she can depend on oh of course well after I find out about the notes I guess she'll appreciate the kind of stuff I made up I'm sure she will here give me that paper well don't lose it I won't and I'll be right back my hope okay well alamundo did you hear all that yeah I forgot you can't understand I got something you'll understand though here here's some peanuts that's the ticket here take some there you are though you're eating at last uh golly Olson I'll sure be glad to hear that hey what you doing with my new elephant Olson gee I didn't notice you hey look he's eating I'll say yes I kind of thought he would you did sure after seeing Carmen and finding out what's wrong and he'll be all right from now on but I won't be what do you mean is something happen no but it's going to just look at all the trouble I'm going to have to learn Spanish gee that's true you won't be able to work alamundo until you learn the right command and I never could learn any language even English oh it won't be so bad hey I'll tell you what I'll learn the commands too so if you get stuck sometime you can just call on me I may take you up on that Jerry honest your thing see I got an idea yeah what well look if I learn some Spanish well couldn't I learn to work alamundo well I don't know about that Jerry who's going to work him in the ring I don't know yet we haven't discussed it with Mr Randall of course the trainer will handle all the commands but probably we'll use one of the pretty girls to do the stunts with alamundo oh gee I wish I could call it I'd work like 60 I bet you'd be good too Jerry well can I then I don't know Jerry I don't have the say about such things like that if Mr Randall let me who's the boss boy I'm in for his wagon see if he'd only let me well I'd be in the show regular then count on it too much Jerry well I won't but you can bet I'll try why I'll be back and let you know what he says good luck well thanks oh gee I only good where do you go so fast oh low Carmen say I just got this wellest idea yes and what is it I'm gonna ask Mr Randall if he'll let me work with alamundo no sure the kind of things you used to do with him when you were little oh nice Jerry of course I don't know yet whether or let me but maybe you could show me some of the same tricks you used to do I like that very much very very much do you want to be fun just like the old days oh say Jerry yeah here come the major I don't want him to see me so soon I go this way he not notice me goodbye okay now I wonder how the major got through so soon oh hi major oh there you are Jerry well I had a bit of luck you have what happened well I had scarcely left you when who should I see but our friend to be at it lady no yes sorry so I ups and says to her I says did you give rags some candy this morning what'd she say well she kind of hemmed and hawed a bit but when I showed her the paper it was wrapped up in she admitted she did said she didn't think it would hurt him any say what about the paper I'm not so fast young man then I began quizzing her about that unusual paper and what it was made of and all that yeah and she began bragging about it she got it when she was abroad someplace some foreign country it's very special paper this piece got messed up so she just put the candy in it hmm sure looks suspicious but honest major I can't believe she'd do a thing like that well why not well why should she have anything against Carmen it's simple enough when you understand the ways of women you see I've been showering attentions on that lovely little Spanish lady yes but jealousy my boy jealousy hmm see if she thought that she would make me ridiculous you know she'd go to any length oh what do we do next major go to any length huh so that's it what so she decided to make that bouquet for Carmen what bouquet that one with all the vegetables in it the one that Tom presented to her at dinner in the mess tent oh no the bearded lady didn't have anything to do with that oh but don't tell me here comes mr. Randall I'm too mad to talk to him I'll go and plot my revenge but remember not a word of this to anyone you understand yeah but well major he don't go I got explained oh hello there Jerry you have trouble with a major no only well he gets so excited he won't listen he thinks oh well never mind well don't let him get in your hair son he means well but you know after all he's he's pretty peppery yeah say mr. Randall yeah you know about that new elephant about Carmen knowing him and all yeah sure I know all about that well you're going to have him work in the ring aren't you well yeah sure and you know Carmen used to work with him yeah well come on come on out with a Jerry well would you let me work with him like Carmen used to she said she'd show me the old tricks she used to do with him and Olson had worked with me and I'd work hard and I'd oh I just know I'd be good mr. Randall now that that's off your chest I'll tell you Jerry you know Randall's brother circus there's a rule I think it's better to have a pretty girl work with elephants she will occurs mr. Randall but in this case I've got a good mind to give you a try oh mr.


Well welcome to Investory Intel at PDAC 2018. I'm lucky enough today to be joined by Byron King. Byron's a very well-known to many of our viewers as a letter writer. Byron, you've got two quotes that I want to ask you about. First of all, I hear you've said the mining industry doesn't make sense. Tell me more. I haven't said that. Here we are at PDAC, which is the world's largest mining convention surrounded by mining companies that the lights and air being paid for by the mining industry, and we're in the midst of an industry that makes no sense. A couple reasons. First of all, the mining industry has done a terrible job of telling its story of how necessary it is to the world. People generally do not like the mining industry. They see movies about evil miners, whether it's science fiction like Avatar or whether it's other movies that show what bad guys they are. At the same time, while people are belly aching about mining, they drive around in their cars that are made of metal. They live in their house, which is made of everything that came from a mine. They talk with each other on their cell phones and smart phones. Your iPhone has something like 63 of the 92 elements on the periodic table in it. None of them are there by accident. The mining industry has done a terrible job of explaining why it's important to the world. Another thing is more internal to the mining industry. That is because the mining industry has a destructive business model. You discover something. You create value in the sense that you drill it up and identify minerals and ores and elements that are of value there. Then you destroy it.  Something goes someplace. The value stream goes someplace. You're left with a big hole in the ground in the end. That's the tradition of the mining industry. A wasting sort of an asset. This morning I gave a talk. I said, what if Boeing, the big airplane builder, built airplanes using the mining business model? If you know anything about Boeing, you know that they designed their airplanes down to the last screw in the last wire bundle and the colors of the seats. If they used the mining model, they would design about 30% of their airplane. Then they would build a construction shed and they'd hire a bunch of people to come in and they'd start banging it together and they'd put together this odd looking bird at the end of the production line. It would be overweight, overpriced. It would crash. The first couple of airplanes would crash. Finally they'd get it right and they'd sell about 15 or 20 airplanes that were actually good airplanes.  A very strange business model for a company like Boeing. It sounds more like software actually. That's the mining industry. We could get into software too but the mining industry, they build a mine, they dig it out, they destroy the asset, they make some money along the way. The trick to investing in it though is you need to understand this idea that it is a wasting, destructive asset. You have to get in at the right time when value starts to be created.  No, it's not a gain unless you get out at the right time. There are cycles. There are exploration cycles, followed by development cycles, followed by production cycles. As you look at mining companies, that's one of the things you want to keep in mind. One of the things that we do in the newsletter, the Records Gold Speculator newsletter, which I write. We're focused right now on gold silver and we get into copper or copper lead zinc, base metals, but things that are associated with gold silver. We do think that the precious metals and those other metals are where the value is right now. Well, PDAC every year, we're just getting kicked off again. Every year the flavor is different. Every year the feel is different. This year is different again and it's kind of strange and almost seems a little quiet to me. What are you seeing out there? Great question. Wonderful question. Let's do a little history. Three years ago, it was the PDAC mausoleum. This building was a tomb. In 2015, people were glum. A lot of empty booths, people didn't show up.  Some of these companies had had double and triple and quadruple share price gains. Even big companies, big guys, tech mining or tech resources was booming. It was just the sense of euphoria two years ago. Then last year, we had our euphoric 2016. We were into that 2017. People were, oh, we're confident. We've raised our money and we're going to be doing our thing. Now this year, we're in it. We're about eight months into a bit of a slide here. A lot of people are tight lipped about it. There are a lot of good companies. They've raised money. They've done great things. If they're explorers, they've got good handle on their exploration. They've got a good asset. The geologists have gotten smarter. We've paid a lot of tuition as shareholders. We have paid a lot of tuition to send geologists and management teams to school in the last two years to learn about what it is that the next great thing, the next great project that's coming down the line. We've paid that tuition. Right now, it's certainly not somber. It's not tomb like three years ago with the mausoleum PDAC that we had. People are looking forward saying, what is going on? What's going on? The big stock market is way up in the sky. There's all these weird things going on. All this money flowing into marijuana. All this money flowing into cryptos. I mean, even the mathematicians don't understand what cryptos is. There are people who are making immense amount of money on crypto who don't have the first slightest clue what it is. I mean, it violates Warren Buffett's first rule of understanding what you invest in, which is why he owns Dairy Queen. I mean, you understand ice cream cones. Nobody understands crypto. Give me a break. I mean, blockchain crypto. I mean, you can talk about it, but show me the math. Here's a blackboard. Here's a piece of chalk. People can't do that. Very, very, very few people can do it. But they think they're going to be smart investors by going into it. At least on my side, at least I can sleep at night thinking, well, I understand gold and silver and copper and lead. I understand mining. And if we play our cards right, we are in the beginning of the next upswing of the commodity cycle. The world needs stuff. Seven and a half billion people in this world, and they want more stuff. I mean, maybe you've got enough stuff here in North America, and you're not worried about it. But the other six and a half billion people in the world, they want more. They want cars. They want air conditioners. They want refrigerators. They want a roof over their house. So we can make some money there. Well, thank you very much, Byron. I'm sure I can sit here and talk to you for an hour on this, and a lot of our listeners would be interested in it. But it's just a pleasure to get your thoughts on it. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure to be here. I write for Gore Financial, and we're on the newsletter circle. The Rickards Gold Speculator with Byron King. Jim Rickards is my partner international economist who has a forecast for much higher gold prices. And I slipstream behind him talking about the kind of gold and silver companies that ought to do well. Well, thanks, Byron. We'll see you again soon. Thank you. It's great to be here.


Hello, and welcome back to the craft box. My name is Brent and today we're in episode 68 If there was a 101 death walkthrough last episode we collected obsidian chests and made it in here And we made it into the crystal grove We found crystals and things and now we're freeing Malacca. I know it's ironic a Crystal cutter trapped in a web of crystals. Thank you so much for freeing me Yay, live up on to make a head for your dragonrider staff I assume you've come to me for that reason not too many other reasons to visit this place It's too hectic around here.   I wasn't expecting that Wasn't expecting that at all. Oh my god, okay Yeah, we're running out of our monstrous. I'm gonna have to get some more Okay, I am back that took a while. I also got some more monstrous tc's so we hopefully should be good So yeah, let us talk to Michaela Or Malacca. You've done quite a bit, but it's clear that there are just too many crystal spiders around here We can't take the chance of a spider barging in on us while we're cutting the head of the staff How about if we work somewhere else? Meet me back at the house in the first crystal grove Okay, um, where are we going? All the way back there Okay Okay, let us go back down there. We are actually gonna be going to the teleporter. I think It will be probably quicker Yeah, we'll go this way. Why not see the sites dragon spire? Okay, um There's so many cracks in the road around here that's weird. I don't like it. I don't like it man. I don't like it Where was the teleporter? Up here somewhere. Oh, there it is.  Yep This way. I don't even know where we're going. Oh just yeah. Hello hello here we go hello going there we go okay this is very small tower like really really small super small man let's see hello there you are thanks again for getting me out of trouble back there so about that crystal you need cut I can do it here but I'll have to rough it that means I'll need your help getting set up I'll need a few odds and ends that I just can't do this out first off I need some crystal spinnerettes spiders use those to create and mold crystal the bad news is that they're not going to just hand them to you okay I'll be back once I have these spinnerettes this is gonna be a really short episode just because I hate defeating clicks okay I am back good ones there these will do nicely I'm afraid I still can't start I'm going to need my tools so good news is that they're easy to find the bad news is that the Titan army was going to take them away and pack them up in crates the Titan army got chased away by the crystal spiders so those crates are scattered everywhere throughout the crystal grove okay let us go and find the crane don't know where they'll be we will find out I suppose they're on the map yeah they are yeah we will go this way and go to the teleporter yeah those spider thingies that we had to get those crystal thingies kind of weird I got one on the first battle and then I got two on the last one which was slightly annoying we need to go over to Cronus's tower and we will try and find out oh there's one of them don't get pulled that would be bad did we get it no we didn't know we need to get it so let's just try again we go got one of them and we get to me to get two of them there we go that was lucky and then we're gonna switch rooms and you know what we're gonna go to this race my favorite realm I'm usually in Wraith I don't know why I'm not in Wraith maybe I want to change who knows I'm like if you ever want to find me nine times out of ten I'm in Wraith yeah also because I don't really like going on like four worlds because I mean it is a solo walkthrough so where I can where I want to solo I try to solo and I can't do that if people just randomly get into your battle you know so yeah you know okay let's head back to Michaela Malacca actually such a weird name I'm just gonna call it Michaela I think I've done that all my all the time I've played this game as well it's just Michaela I don't care about it name really she's so irrelevant in the end we've only got two two more stone roses to get I can't get them until we're at the end of the game at the end of the world so yeah it's really good Malacca wrong button that's all of them you need a job I could use an assistant now that you've gotten me my tools I'm going to need my jewel Crafters table it's essential to my work I'm afraid it's not going to be easy cronious of the Titan army took it back to his tower you're going to have to go there and bring it back of course he took it to me let's mark and we'll get on over to the teleporter and go to Cronus which is the same teleporter as we were just at so yeah let us give you date and go and do that hello poop which where you you are over here to do it it's a very destroyed tower I mean you would hope that it would look destroyed on the inside my guess is it isn't and it's a gauntlet probably correct yes no let's find out in 10 seconds 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 let's find out is it a gauntlet or is Cronus just straight there they said all the humans were slaying I welcome this distraction it has been too long since I have destroyed a wizard okay I mean yeah we should be fine a wait do we have element of blades we do let's just put another one in just in case yeah should be good let's go he is fire and so is the minion how much health that have one five thousand okay one thousand for the minion oh yeah let's double blade and hit don't do no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no I should probably also say sorry for having no video tomorrow yesterday that was awkward should always turn your phone on vibrate before you record it gets really awkward if you don't yeah sorry about that I got a bit busy recently I've been doing a lot of things and I didn't quite have enough time to actually it was this episode that I was meant to finish I might be quite good enough time to finish this off yeah so that's slightly awkward but it's fine I'll make it up to you and have two videos one time soon that isn't meant to be too I mean I've I've meant to have two videos like recently on like a Monday Wednesday and Friday and I only kept that up for one week and then I'm like nope not doing that anymore so you know that's that's cool good job Brent you did well yeah thanks I know I did see that was awkward but when I get slightly more time doesn't need to be much I'll probably continue doing that again just because it was really fun yeah but I'm back into school now so it's slightly harder to record videos then it was my third other day because it's the holidays so I could like record whatever I wanted but nope I can't do that anymore because school is fun haha always do school kids even if it seems dumb and it is kind of dumb but just always do school they don't don't don't know okay I mean we're not getting what we need but that's cool we'll just hit anyway what's sure you want a middle I'm Toad let's see if this kills hopefully that's I should do enough correct Yes, it did. Sweet. That's perfect. Perfect! Yes! There we go! Hello, nearly full health again. Yay! Okay, we will double blade and then hit the boss, and hopefully we would do a lot of damage. Ah, because we've got a faint on, so I mean, yeah. Let's see what this does. This is a weakness, eh?   I've already destroyed the minion. That's rude. Well, you know what? We're just going to try and do as much as possible with the weakness. We've got some vampires, that's always nice. We're not getting a blade, which is what we really need. But you know what? That's fine! You know, not getting blade isn't the end of the world. We're going to get a powerpup, and we're still not going to have a blade. Oh well, that's fine. We'll just go another round, that's fine.  He can't. Yeah, that was the worst he could do, and that does, like, what, 200? Yeah, not much at all. Okay. Hmm, there's another blade. Perfect. Dun, dun, dun. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Boop. And let's see how much this does. This isn't going to do... I'm going to guess it's going to do 2,800. Let's find out. Actually, yeah, we'll say 2,800. 1,800. I was so optimistic that that would actually do damage. Rip. Rip. Rip. Can we get a rip and chat please? Okay, let's try again. This time I'll hopefully not get a weakness. Oh, he fizzled, that's unlucky. Dun, dun, dun, dun. Um, okay, one blade. We're going to hopefully get an elemental blade. Not an elemental blade, a spirit blade. We didn't. So, we are not going to faint yet. We are going to... Actually, you know what? We're going to faint. Just so we know, we've got it. Yeah, oh, look, another ice shield. Oh, two ice shields. Man, you're really protected against ice, aren't you? It's as if you boost or something, jeez. Um, okay. And what do we get? We get a powerpip. Of course we get a powerpip. You know what? Let us just got a heal because yolo. And we will enchant our wraith and we will hit. And we will see how much this does. Actually, this does a lot. And it's only four perps. This is actually a really good spell. Like, seriously. It's pretty good. Oh, yeah. 569 did more damage than the media. Boop, boop. And a boop. Kapow. That did nearly as much damage as the other one. Wow, okay. Game, I see how it is. I think that did exactly the same amount of damage as the other one. That weakness really killed us. Um, you know what? We're going to find out how much it did because we're going to do a... Do we have another wraith? I think we do. I think we pick four. We're going to use three. If we don't, then that's unfortunate. No, we do, yeah. We're going to see how much it did. He's going to... Oh, he's not going to... I shoot again. Fireblade. Fireblade. Fireblade. Okay, we're going to see how much it would have done if we didn't have a weakness. Hopefully this time we don't get a weakness.  But we're going to try. Okay, good. I was like, really panicking for a second. Oh, look. What's this? Fire Shark. Oh my God. 539. That did a lot. Um, we're going to discard you. We are going to draw you. We've got too many monsters now, so I'm not worried about wasting them. Um, yeah, let's see how much it would have done. What's this? Fire Elf? Oh, good. Um, please get Power Pups. Game, you're not helping. Please get a Power Pup. Thank you for fizzling. It makes my game even quicker. Um, okay. I don't know why I want to do this experiment, but you know what? We're doing it. Let's go. Um, there we go. Oh, 2,500. I was going to be close. I was going to be close. I'd be 300 off. Um, yeah, that's cool. There we go. Doop, doop. Um, and Crafter's Table. Hello. Whoa, look at that. Whoa, look at that. Amazing, and back to Milakka, Mikayla. Person, Thing, Thing number one. Da-da-da-da-da-da da-da-da-da-da-da. Hello, let us go in 10, nine, eight, seven. We're actually nearly finished with this area, which is great. It's fantastic. one boop and into load, load, load, load, load, load, load, load. Thank you. Wow! You got it! And this outer scratch! Now I can get to work! Now that you've gotten me everything I need, I'll create for you the best crystal head for your staff I've ever made. You've done so much for me. It's an honor to make this for you. As you watch, she carves the flawless raw crystal into an exquisite dragon-shaped head for your dragon rider staff. The light scatters as it shines through the crystal, and it scintillates with power and majesty. Here you go. Now you need to reassemble the staff. For that, you'll need to take it to Ashley, the firetree. Okay, let us head over back to Ashley, and I think we'll finish off the episode there possibly. Possibly, I'm not sure. Actually, you know what? Maybe we're not because I think the next bit's where we actually like fully create stuff, which is kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's cool. Let's go and do that. Sounds fun. Gee, I do want to make this stuff because it's cool stuff. It's really cool stuff. Yeah, we also get some decent XP. We'll live a lowy 46 still. I need to do some more side quests. That will be returning soon. I'm also going to do crafting soon. So yeah, let's talk to Ashley. Hey there. I sent something in your possession. You're carrying the pieces of the last dragonrider staff. Now that you've got all the pieces of the staff and a new crystal head, you can create your own dragonrider staff.  In there, you can use the fire forge to assemble the pieces of the staff and forge your own dragonrider staff. Okay, let's do this. Oh, look at that. This reminds me of Wisteria. Yup, it does. Definitely. On the hot metal of the fire forge, you assemble the staff. You then attach the crystal head to the staff. Okay, that's cool. Yay, yay, yay, yay, yay. Let us, you direct to Ashley, and then we'll end off the episode, I think. You've done it. That's the finest dragonrider staff I've ever seen, to be certain. I can't believe that another dragonrider has risen from the academy, especially an outsider like you. The dragonmaster down at the hatchery may be able to help you if he can. Please, go speak with him. So the dragonrider staff is basically a cheap version of the Sky Iron Haster. So yeah, I would highly suggest you do Mount Olympus at least once, just to get the Sky Iron Haster, because it is a guaranteed drop, so you only need to do it once. But it's actually so good that team damage is actually fantastic. But anyway, next episode we will head into the Idrake back over to the drake hatchery to get a drake. And basically from then we need to make armor for it, and then we fly up to the dragon's roost, and we defeat Malastir. So yeah, anyway, thank you for watching. Remember to leave a like and subscribe. And if you're very subscribed, press the little bell to know exactly when I post another video. And remember, craft, outside the box.


A teenager from Randall has died in a one vehicle crash that happened Saturday night north of Little Falls. Morrison County Sheriff Sean Larson says 15-year-old Riley Baloo was traveling east on Forrest Road when the vehicle he was driving left the roadway and struck a tree. Baloo was pronounced dead at the scene. Two passengers were injured in the crash. 15-year-old Harley Gangle of Little Falls was airlifted to the St. Cloud Hospital. 16-year-old Derrick Andres of Randall was taken by ambulance to the St. Cloud Hospital. The extent of their injuries is unknown at this time.


Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's Product School webinar. Thanks for joining us today. Just in case you didn't know, Product School teaches product management, coding, data analytics, digital marketing, and blockchain courses online and at our 15 campuses worldwide. On top of that, every week we offer some amazing local product management events and host online webinars, live streams, and ask me anything sessions. Head over to productschool.com after this webinar to check them out. Hi. My name is Dan Mascola, founder of Musico, which is the simplest way to learn guitar on the Internet. Today, I'm going to talk about how to take a good idea and bring it to reality. And I'm going to use a company that I started and I'm continuing to work at called Musico to talk through some examples and key learnings that I've had.  They see a product or a strategy and claim as if they had ownership of it. They kind of get very protective about it. I have this kind of theory and it's not really grounded in any data or survey or anything, but I think if a thousand people had the same good idea, out of those thousand people, only 10 people would actually try it and maybe only one to three would be successful. So my point being is that having good ideas is the easy part. Knowing if they were going to work and executing them is the really hard part and this is the reason why I have good idea in quotes. So as an aspiring product manager or an existing product manager in a company, you're kind of sitting at the center of this world. So your job is to figure out what good ideas are going to work and execute upon them. You're going to have good ideas. Your co-worker is going to have good ideas or CEO will have good ideas and you have to figure out if they're actually going to work. And as an entrepreneur, it's even harder because in a company context, you kind of have a background, you have some guidepost, you have a history of success with a product and customers in a market. But as an entrepreneur, you have no history of no precedent and you have no track record to lean on. So you're really starting from scratch and just kind of going out into the wild. And so today I'm going to be talking about my good idea and the process of how I went through to figure out if it's going to work and kind of continuing to go through and what I've learned along the way. And I kind of hope that this is a mini case study that will shine some light into how you can take your ideas and turn them into reality. So three high takeaways for today. Kind of once you have your good idea, what's the very next thing that you need to do? What's your first step after the good idea? Then the next thing is learn, learn, learn. Kind of after that first step, how to expand to kind of a non-sustainable testing ground and learn as much as you can. And then based on those learnings, picking a niche or picking an early market and early customer base and going from there. So some background about my good idea. So when I was a kid, my mom wanted me to take piano lessons. And it was with a private instructor. We had to drive about 20 minutes to the instructor's house. I didn't like it at all. We played boring exercises. We played songs that I didn't like. It was kind of in this house that wasn't the most comfortable. Actually, my favorite part of the piano lesson was getting Burger King after. So that was probably when I was seven or eight. And I did it for a year and then stopped taking music lessons. And it wasn't until college when my roommate had a spare guitar that I kind of picked up and I just taught myself a couple of songs on YouTube. And this took me a couple months to kind of really learn the basic parts of the guitar, basic chords. But I really kind of fell in love with playing music and kind of writing my own music and being a musician after that. And since then, I've really learned a bunch of other different instruments. So I learned the harmonica, where I remember I went to a music store, I bought a harmonica and I'm like, OK, where do I start here? And I went to the music book section. And of course, there's like hundreds of books. You know, I don't even know which one to pick. The ones you do pick are just kind of, again, boring exercises. I learned the banjo and kind of had a similar problem, where me and my friends like to play music together. And we often play wagon wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show. So I wanted to learn the banjo to play wagon wheel. So I bought the banjo. And I was kind of like, I just want someone to tell me how to play wagon wheel. Like, what's the first thing I need to do to play wagon wheel? And so there was a kind of a pattern, as I was learning all these instruments, of like, I don't even know where to start. Private instruction was too pricey, especially when I was in college and too inconvenient. YouTube was free, which is nice, but it was kind of confusing. And I didn't know which videos were good and which videos were bad. There were so many options at the music store. And kind of what I developed is, you know, I just want a step-by-step instruction on how to play my favorite song. I just want someone to tell me what's the first step I should do after I do that, what's the second step I should do. And that was kind of the problem that I personally felt and I wanted to solve for. And so this was my good idea. So the first thing I did was I kind of created a basis for my good idea. And I kind of had these kind of core functional principles that I wanted to solve specifically to hopefully alleviate some of my pain. So the first was accessible. I wanted to make something obviously online that was accessible to a lot of different people. The second thing was not boring. A lot of the online video instructions, YouTube, it's a lot of talking. And when you're listening to a video, you're not playing an instrument. You're not learning how to play an instrument. So I wanted it to be kind of very specific on a specific song so that a user and myself could have an emotional attachment to what they were learning and hopefully, you know, it'd be fun. Simple, simple, simple. So this is something that, you know, is really, really frustrating. Looking at videos, listening to instruction is just everything seems so complex. But when I think about back learning the guitar, you know, you put your hand into this position and then you put your hand into another position. We all use smartphones every day and we all know how to text, which is a lot more complex than playing the guitar. And so it's very similar to kind of Rosetta Stone or Duolingo, if you've ever used these language learning softwares, where you start simple. They don't start you with a paragraph of text. They start with man and woman. And then they introduce Apple and then they do woman eats Apple. And so you start simple and you kind of build on top of it. I want to take that same approach with learning and instrument. The next thing, effective. So one of the things that I kind of was continually frustrated with, with online video instruction was listening to video was not helping me practice. It wasn't telling me how to practice and learn the guitar. So I kind of have a flat out rule, no video instruction and focus on practicing. And focus on practicing because if you can practice correctly, you can learn very quickly. And then finally, kind of, you know, this goes with making it accessible and easy is make it visual and make it extremely simple. So those were kind of my core ideas of this new product. So how do I test this? How do I see if this is actually effective? So at the time I was living in New Haven, Connecticut, it was like, okay, I just got to find one customer.  And I wanted to test out this new methodology. And someone from Yale, a student, a med student actually from Yale reached out to me. It was like, hey, I want to learn sweet home Alabama. And so I'm like, okay. So I whipped up kind of the method that I had always dreamed about in PowerPoint, went over to her dorm room and walked her through the lesson, kind of gave her the lesson. I didn't provide any instruction on how to play the guitar. I just said kind of like, this is a new methodology. I'm trying to want to see if it works.  I said, you know, in a couple of days, send me what you have. I can come over and provide additional tips if you need it. Well, the next morning she sent back an audio file and it was kind of, it was like a perfect rendition of Sweet Home Alabama. And that was kind of my aha moment, like, oh my God, this could actually work. So once I validated with one customer, I was like, okay, well, is this just a really kind of smart and fast learner here? Or can this be used with many more people? So what I went out to do was create a kind of repeatable, non-scalable product. And this is really getting into kind of the learning aspect of creating, you know, starting a new idea. So I created about 30 lessons using PowerPoint. I reached out to all my friends and family, asked what songs they wanted to learn on the guitar and kind of sent them the PowerPoint. And I said, you know, here's a lesson. Just open it up on slide one and start and go through the whole lesson. Call if you have any questions. I provide lots of one-on-one instruction where necessary. And kind of with each user, I kind of got feedback. They were confused on this part. They didn't understand the nomenclature. They didn't know how to tune their guitar. And kind of each aeration, I would add kind of more detail and more refinement into each lesson. So this whole process took about two or three years. And I learned a lot of different things. So the first thing was I learned that people have lots of excuses for not wanting to learn the guitar. My hands are too big. My hands are too small. I'm not musical. I'm not strong enough. And this was a really kind of key insight into not necessarily a product question, but more of a market question, that if I wanted to roll this out, I'm going to have to overcome some of these mental barriers that people have. I learned a lot of mechanical mistakes that people made and worked that into the product. Kind of tuning and getting the guitar set up is really important. It's not super straightforward. You have to kind of adjust pieces on the guitar. And so kind of thinking through how to make that really, really easy was a big piece of it. Surprisingly, a lot of interest from women. And I don't exactly know why this is the case. My hunch is that there are a lot of resources for learning the guitar for men and not a lot for women. If you think of kind of all the websites out there, they're all targeted for the male rocker. So guys with long hair, the websites are like black and red and yellow color palettes. And they're all kind of hard rock, electric guitar, loud music type of instruction. And maybe a lot of women don't want to learn heavy metal and hard rock. So another kind of interesting, maybe a gap in the market. That I could target and kind of tailor the product to help a group of people that doesn't have a lot of resources today. And then the other kind of big thing I learned was that competitors are not the things that I've been talking about. It's not YouTube. It's not other music learning apps. It's actually just lack of time and distraction. So things like Netflix and Facebook and Instagram. That's what's preventing people from learning the guitar. And so whatever method that I need to kind of work into the product to overcome that main competition is something that I've spent a lot of that. So two or three years, I learned a whole bunch of stuff, tested it with a lot of different users. And I think kind of this point in time is when you really need to know if your original good idea is working or not. And I think it's really important to say that a lot of times a perfectly good result is that your good idea is not working. But if you really have done a thorough job testing it, going to users and getting feedback, you're going to learn why it's not working for X number of reasons. And I guarantee you that if you do your due diligence and do that correctly, you will uncover probably dozens of much better ideas than you even had in the first place. So after all these learnings, now it's kind of actually time to really go to market. You might use the term MVP here, minimum viable product. You know, I don't like that term. I think it's often used as the cheapest product, which is defeats the whole kind of purpose of the acronym. But basically to bring the product together that meets those core initial assumptions that I had. So it was a web-based product, online lessons. And I really wanted to kind of test engagement here. So measuring everything from website visits to product page visits, who are signing up, who's using the product and using it a second or third time. I'm starting to get into a lot of user interviews and really understanding kind of the reasons why. And for me personally kind of in my career as a product leader, I've really harnessed the jobs to be done theory. If you look up just jobs to be done, Clayton Christensen is a kind of an innovation academic who founded this kind of theory and promotes it. And it kind of talks about a product isn't just the functional components, but it's also the social and emotional aspects as well. And so what I'm the kind of stage I'm at right now with Musico is to understand those components and kind of bring everything together in a holistic product that solves a user needs in a delightful way. One of the ways, so now I've kind of like built a product that I can launch to market and kind of getting into like, okay, who is the niche market? Where do I actually go and test this initial product? And one of the things that I have come up with and like to use is what I call the airplane test. So it works like this, if you've got an idea or you've got a product, as you board an airplane and you're walking down the aisle to your seat, look at each person that you pass and imagine them using your product. I mean like really internalizing. And ask yourself, are they all using your product the same way? And you're going to see people from all walks of life and it's going to force you to think about how your customers use your product from their perspective. So in this photo here, you can see that we've got men and women of all different ages. There's probably people with more money, people with less money. There's people with different backgrounds and different races. They're going to be in various jobs. Is the accountant using your product the same way that the construction worker is? Probably not. There's going to be mothers and fathers with children. You can see on the left, there's a woman with a neck brace and on the right, there's a man with sitting with headphones. Are they using your product the same way? You know again, probably not. So this is going to force you to think about who will use your product and why and who won't be using your product and why. And this is really the mental path that you need to go down to hone in on that initial niche and go into really targeting and getting traction with your initial customer base. So this is that third step of picking a niche and go. So again, building from the learnings and the reasons why. Again, I'm going to stress you want to understand the functional parts of your product, the emotional parts of your product, and the social parts of the product. And if you can understand those things, you can piece together what really matters in your customer's lives and how you can improve their journey and the problems that they're trying to solve. So for Musico, what I learned through this process is like kind of our initial test market. And like I said before, one of the biggest things was distractions. And so people who had full-time jobs were kind of professionals working through their careers. It's going to be really hard for them to learn a guitar. Maybe they would pick it up for a couple of minutes and maybe they'd learn a couple of songs, but then it would kind of die off as they would get distracted. And so those aren't the kind of easiest customers that I could acquire. So okay, who should I target then? That's not that. Well, it's kind of people in life who are before their professional years and after their professional years. High school students, college students and retirees. And those are kind of the initial three markets that I'm going to test with Musiko in the coming months. The other thing I discovered was a lot of people wanted to learn guitar because they wanted to write poetry. They wanted to create music. They wanted to be their own band. And so I thought, well, kind of to be one person bander to kind of start a music career, you need an instrument and you need to be able to sing usually. So acapella singers are already halfway there. And so if I can target them, help them learn the guitar, they can combine a beautiful voice with a songwriting capability and hopefully become the musician that they've always wanted to be. So after you kind of identify these initial test markets, how do you go test them? There's a whole bunch of different ways to do this. You can get very creative. I often think creative ideas here on how to test is usually the best. Oftentimes you don't need to have a lot of money to test these ideas. If you can kind of get creative and think about how can I just get to these initial test markets. For me, because I have an online product, ads is very easy. I can do that relatively low cost through Facebook ads, Facebook groups and industry groups and try to kind of push out a digital strategy kind of initially. And then again, continuing to learn and iterate. And I'm just starting this process now. So as I start to target these markets through these channels, I'm going to learn a ton and we'll definitely be have to kind of improving and iterating on the product. So if you have any questions, feel free to email me dan at musico.com. If you're interested in learning the guitar, I encourage you to check out musico. Here's a couple screenshots. Just kind of highlighting, you're learning Brown Eyed Girl. It's very visual and kind of straightforward. And then we provide a song sheet so you can play and sing along after you've learned the guitar. So please get back to me with any questions about the product or the presentation. And kind of just to recap, after your first good idea, just find one customer and ask yourself, did it work? If it did work, create a non-scalable product to test with 50 more customers. And again, learn, learn, learn. Kind of continually asking yourself, is this working? Do the airplane test so you can help identify which niche and potential customers are a better fit for your product and which aren't? Kind of then build that product together, go to market with that specific niche. I think you're off and running and kind of in a good place to succeed. So thank you. Thanks Product School for having me host here. And again, reach out if you have any questions. Bye.


Hello everybody. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a great pleasure to be here. Absolutely great pleasure. I need to see if I can get my eyes wonderful. I can get my cursor over here if I want to. This is really sophisticated. So thank you so much again. So my topic is our planet scene from space and I am actually a PhD candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and I moved to Fairbanks in 2011. But in a previous life, I worked for a software company with marketing software, and then something attracted me to Alaska or someone attracted me to Alaska and I stuck there. Really people either stick there or don't and I really fell in love with the North. There's so much going on there and people don't know about it. I monitor wildfires with satellite imagery. And there are a few people who give me money so that I can do that. So I should give a shout out to NASA and several organizations. There was not very much seen from space in the in the title slide earlier. So I put in a space photo. We see a lot of space, pictures from space. This is from the International Space Station. It shows the Aurora Borealis, the green northern light that we had a lot of in where I live in the winter. And the premise of my talk is a really simple question. The question is there is so much web mapping there. There is no one here in the audience who will bog at me saying projection or something like that, even if you work in a different field. But hardly anybody uses raster imagery, satellite imagery, even though there's a lot of it there. We send students all the time out to get like GIS vector data from, for example, a local government and then put it on a map as an exercise. This is very common to do, but we very rarely give them some satellite imagery and tell them put it on a map and do something with it. For those who are unfamiliar, the differences are quite quite stark. So for vector data, you have files that could be proprietary like the SV shape file or GeoJSON, which is open, or it could be a simple flat CSV file. It's basically a database table where each record has a geometry associated with it. Could be a point, a polygon, a line, and some variations on it. First, a raster image, however, is just an image, like it comes out of your digital camera. So it is an array where each cell has a value. And I've been wondering why is everybody going for vector and no one works, not no one, but very few work with raster. I've been wondering is there something, has it something to do with vector data being sort of an abstraction and then you do something concrete, you make a concrete representation of it and for raster imagery, it's kind of the other way around, right? You already start with a representation and then you analyze it and extract something to omit. I'm not sure. Maybe this is just a speculation. This is, however, a data visualization conference, not an image analysis conference. You see it's kind of one in the one direction, the other in the other direction, but maybe who knows. But both are just data. We can deal with data, right?  You know, no one gave me a stamp. I can deal with data. You know, I can deal with data. Vector tables, there is geolocation data associated with it and metadata. Metadata is extremely important because it tells you what's in your data. Raster data is 2D arrays stacked. Sometimes you get really 5D things that have time and height and all sorts of dimensions associated with it with geolocation data and metadata. So we can deal with this, but should we? Question is, should we care that there are so, like, oodles of free satellite data available? Well, obviously I wouldn't be here if I didn't think we should care, but I think we should kind of really give it some thought. And, for example, here, let me just start with something. You will recognize this as a satellite image of some sort. I actually downloaded it from scratch. I got it from the archive and made this with it just to show you. And what is this? Oh, let's just see if that actually works from this speaker view. So you can see it's something, huh? Yes, it does. It does not work. So I have to change this over. I'm sorry. I apologize for this. All right, do it like this. Ha! This will work. If I find this, there's a marker here and it's fairing. This is where I live. So I can zoom into this. If I find it, I can zoom into it like this. Right. So I can zoom into it. I can go around in it. I can see there is a river. There is something weird going on over here and this is that there was a fire. This image was from 2013 July and we had a huge fire here. I don't live in Fairbanks. I live here. So a 30 miles outside Fairbanks. We had to evacuate. So I might actually want to know these things and know what is out there at imagery that tells us about them. If I go for the south, something interesting happens, I will see glaciers. There are big glaciers here. You see that these glaciers, once they went up to all the way here, now they're here. And I can do even more. I can go over here and I can switch this imagery over and suddenly this is a bit dark. We saw this earlier. I'm sorry. But this glacier actually, this is an image from 1987. I also got this one. Put it all together and the glacier is a little bit further ahead in 1987 than it is now. These glaciers retreat really fast. So this sort of thing is not unfamiliar to people who live where I live and we want to work with this. And you might want to too.  You might have a mine outside your town that might have a problem somewhere. For example, this mine in 2014 is in Canada. On the left, it was July 29th and there is a tailing pond. You see it there in the south. And the right August 5th, the tailing pond is gone because it drained into this system here through a little creek that then became a huge mud bath. So you might actually want to have images of this and follow through what's going on in your environment. And some people have now started to do this professionally. One of the motivations I had for giving a talk about is what seeing this in journalistic investigation. It's a piece by ProPublica that was widely published over a year ago about the disappearing coastline of Louisiana losing ground. And I heard an interview on NPR with one of the developers who works with this team and he basically said he had never learned how to deal with satellite data. They went and got this Landsat data and made this visualization. They're wonderful. Google it, find it. And that tells me that we, as a science educator and communicator, of course we use science imagery, but not just us. There might be citizen scientists around. There might be people who want to monitor their urban or rural environment, their town, their city, their state, industrial development, agricultural development. Does my city get more parks? Will they disappear? What's actually going on? Is it growing? Is it shrinking? And of course some of us help planning for disasters. I happen to work with the fire service and they also need to understand this better. So this brings me to my third question. What data and tool kits do we actually have to do this? And if you think of this image I had from the Louisiana investigation in the bottom right corner, there was this little thing there, this little map telling you where New Orleans is. And it says source NASA USGS Landsat. So that tells you where you could go. But we should know a little bit more about satellite imagery. What satellites are we talking about? We're talking about something called polar orbiting satellites. There are others. We heard earlier from someone who was tracking satellite overpasses and these were communication satellites. They have very different orbits. You also have certainly heard of geostationary satellites. Geostationary satellites just look at the same part of the earth all the time and they are very far away from the earth because they orbit with the earth. They are about 10% all the way to the moon, which is really far. Whereas the polar orbiting satellites are just about 800, 700 kilometers above us. The International Space Station is even lower. So they actually get a pretty good image of the earth. And as you can see, well, this one here has orbited itself out. Let's start it again. Oh, well, I don't know where the orbit went. Anyhow, as you can see still here is that it will acquire the image in a band that goes around and at the poles, those bands overlap more. Which is why at the poles you put down or close to the poles in the high latitudes, you put down receiving stations that get the data by radio link. At my institutions in Alaska in Fairbanks, we actually have two that are operated by the university. One belongs to NASA or I mean we operated for NASA. And the other one just uses their software, which actually is also open source. If you have a thing like that, you can also download it. You don't need any permission for it. It can be a smaller one. But yes, institutions can actually do that. You know, and some do it commercially. We also have downloading stations by NOAA. That's the National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Organization that does weather service. So they have satellites and run it there. And then we also sometimes see a dish like this in the woods. And if we dig a little deeper, it turns out it's a private company that runs satellites. So as I said, the easiest satellite data to use by far actually is Landsat. The nice thing is it's all free. Spatial resolution is 30 meters. Like each pixel is pretty much a square 30 by 30 meters, which is good enough for many things. Good enough for what I said earlier, the images I showed were Landsat. Not good enough for monitoring your house. But anything a little bit bigger, yeah. It has a data archive. It goes back to the 70s, which is great. And the data is published in a format called the GeoTIFF, which is basically a TIFF image with geo information. Sometimes there is a bit more to it, but we'll come to that. If you want satellite data, you need to work with data portals. And this is, I think, one of the biggest obstacles because data portals are written by scientists, for scientists, and that's not always a good thing. But the people who run these data portals have become a lot more aware of questions of usability. There are now organizations who talk about data usability, discoverability, metadata standardization, and things like that. I think this is a great development. Some of the easier-to-use portals are actually not hard to use. This one has a lot of public data, not just from Landsat but from other satellites, including also non-satellite data like aerial imagery, historical aerial imagery from coastal surveys that they did in the 50s, a lot of really interesting stuff. And the use is really get an account, simple registration. You don't have to belong to any particular, you just have to have an email address. And then you do a selection by location, you have a relatively easy-to-use, well, that's a Google map, clearly, right? And then, well, just leave open everything you don't understand, and this one actually still works. Others don't, how to say. But this one is really good. And when you go there, you can make your selection and hear the images for some reason they have disappeared. But when you want to download it, you get some offers. And you see there are something called Landsat look images and they are about a few megabytes. So if you just want to illustrate something, they're good. If you want to do geospatial mapping, you need something slightly better. Well, the Landsat look with a geographic reference comes with a little file that is called a world file, which is also already better than nothing. Many applications do work with that. But if you want the full thing, you get the level one product. And I recommend do it. For the older data, the older Landsat had a lower pixel depth, so it's about 150 megabytes for one scene. The newest one's about 900 megabytes, which unzips to 2 gigabytes. So we'll go back here. So you have to be able to do with this amount of data, but it's still quite manageable. Alternatives, there is a similar satellite. I will go deeper about what they are from the European Space Agency, Sentinel missions. And the Europeans, until recently, had, like the Japanese and others, have more of the philosophy that, yes, the data should be available, but for registered users in a well-recognized institution. But I think there was really a good influence of the United States, who has always this idea that public produced data should be public. And I think this is one of the really good principles here. They have really, that has made some headway. And ISA data, Sentinel data, is now also available, which is great. It's in a format called JPEG 2000, which is a bit like a geotip, except that it's based on a JPEG. And I have less experience with it, but it's kind of, it works workable. And then if you want to map the whole world, if you wanted to climate mapping, you need something like modus of years, just search for them. But you may have to deal with slightly more arduous data formats. But the tools we have do work with them. So I'm really happy to say that if you try to sign up for a Sentinel account, it says Sentinel data access is free and open to all, which I think is really wonderful. It used to be not like this. And Sentinel data is going to be 10, they just started with the newest one. They're still going to be 10 to 20 meters resolution, which is extremely nice. There are a few more, one called Spot is a French one. These are not free, but for example MyState, the state of Alaska, has bought this data that they have for MyState. So that might be the case for your state or for your country too. So check, just check and look. A good source is also NASA worldview, where you can, well, it's a very rich interface where you can overlay all sorts of layers and download directly from there. But as you can see, the download names are really complicated and the format is called HDF. So there's something learning to be done here. So what is a satellite image? That image is actually, as I said, not very different from any kind of RGB image that you have, except that it may have a lot of channels. The current land set has 11 channels. The older one had seven. Modus has 36. There are even some satellites that have satellite sensors that have 120 channels. You do spectroscopy with those, but you can use some if you want there too. Some have just four. What you can then do is you select some and make a false color RGB image from them. And depending on what you select, you will get different results. So here's what you get from land set.  Wonderful. Band 1, band 10, band 11, well, okay. Of course, it sorts it in this order. And down to band 9. And then there is a quality band. You can forget about that. And the MTL file has the metadata. A library I will talk about in a moment will actually help you read that metadata, but it's a completely human readable file. It's not even XML. It's really quite nice. Well, it's not nice to parse, but it's okay to read. So then, depending on which of those channels you combine here, I've got a fire I worked on. I worked on wildfires. This was last year. We had a lot of them. We're going to be having a lot of them this year. This was in a town called Willow, which is there under the smoke. There is a beautiful river to the left. This is Sydney River. You can see this is a color combination that is most close to our eyes. So this is a natural color image. The river is a glacial river. It has a lot of silt, which is why it looks so gray. And you can't see the fire because there's smoke there. There is a road, which we don't have many in Alaska. But if you take the bands that are in the near and shortwave infrared, which is, if you know micrometers, it's about one to two micrometers, and combine those with visible bands. You don't know, just think near infrared is good for looking through smoke. You get actually an image of where the fire front is at that moment, and most of the smoke has disappeared because it has a capacity of looking through the smoke. This landsat also has a thermal band, which works at even a higher wavelength, which is real thermal radiation emitted by the fire. And you can plot this too. In this case, I just open it in a free image processing software and added a color ramp. We could do it with a command line too. That's what I did here. So, the question is now, what can we do with this? How do we get that far anyway? And what is our infrastructure here? So, I'm a Python person. You have similar things in R, and many of those underlying libraries, like Proge4 and Geos and GDAL, they are at C libraries or C++ libraries that have bindings in R. They have bindings in Python, they have bindings in other languages. NumPy is, of course, Python specific. You have also special libraries there to either plot or to read these IGDF files if you need them. You don't need those for landsat. And PyGARs is my library. I will tweet a link to my... It makes just the opening of the files quite a bit easier. But there are others. Sean Gillies is someone who has contributed enormously in making this easier with his tools Shapely, Piona and either Rasterio or Rasterio. I never know. And these are built on the underlying libraries. They need them installed, but you don't have to deal with the pretty awkward interface and API, have a much nicer API. So, to come together, in order to get just these images I just showed you, what you need is these GDAL, it's a big library, it comes with command line utilities. And these command line utilities allow you to just take in those band files I showed you earlier, combine them into RGBs, cut them to the size you want. You will need the project approach for library to figure out where your corner should be because you may know the latitude and longitude, but landsat does not come in a latitude longitude. It comes in a projection. And if you have several landsat scenes and you want to kind of be in between and want all of them together, you can use GDAL merge.py to very easily mosaic stuff together and then combine all these. And frankly, shell scripting is your best guess here. I do think it's a good skill, you don't need much more than just kind of associating commands, but I have a few tools, just a basic knowledge of shell scripting is a good idea here. Now you have these things, what do you want to do with them? You've downloaded your landsat data and now have RGB composites in all sorts of combinations that you want. You can actually kind of do all of them. Sometimes you see something really interesting by using a combination that no one told you to do. There is a lot of pretty artistic stuff that comes out of this. Vegetation has different color from sand. Forest has different colors from pasture or grass. You will see a lot of things there. But now we want to put stuff towards an audience. We want to make it usable. I want to make something with it. I'm following kind of two approaches here. One is more like you want to put stuff on the web. Well, you have HTML, you have CSS, you have more than HTML5 and all these things that you probably know a lot better than I do. I know you do. But what you can do is, for example, I have pictures of my file that I had earlier. Now I have a before, a during and an after picture. I did what I did before here. I took this. This is the during picture and I have a before and an after. And I combined them using nothing more fancy than... Well, I transformed them into PNGs and then I combined them into a sprite using image magic. And then with HTML5, I can do a keyframe animation just to show the before, during and after, just to make change visible. So change detection is a really great thing. And one way of... It's very simply doing this is this. There are more complex ones. Obviously, you have a very large number of libraries that use before, after sliders. And here I do have... Ah, I can get it. Try to get it. So this was a situation where we had a flood. The Yukon River each year freezes, of course. It's Alaska. It's cold. And then we have a moment in time that's called ice out or snow melt. And the ice out can lead to horrible ice jams, which then can lead to horrible flooding. And last two years ago was that. The town of Galina, which you see in the middle, shown here in 2012 in a completely normal situation in May 2012, was victim of a flood because of an ice jam. So I can slide over and can make visible how much flooding there was a year later. It was 2013 then. Yes, 2013 happened. So as you can see, this... Here's a little scale here. I did not process this. These were processed by the Earth Observatory. But this is... What is it, 20 km? So this is 10 km. This is like six miles of just water. It's a small town, but it was pretty much wiped out. People had to fly out. And one thing you don't see here is roads. There is no roads going there. So you travel on the river or you travel by train here. So this is an example of what you want to use. Or, of course, the example I had earlier. I need to get back. My leaflet map, as you see, this is nothing more than a regular map made with leaflet, the leaflet library. I could use open layers just as well. So I took my things here, and Gidal has even a little helper that will make tiles. It's one command line, one line, Gdel to tiles. I get tiles and I just have to figure out how to get them into leaflet. And then I can use all the tools I have from leaflet, including where is my thing here. The roads visible. So as you can see, you can just make a normal web map like this. But the before and the after slide is I had earlier. So this is one thing I would like to put towards you to think doing with satellite maps. But not everybody wants to do all that much. Well, this is the recapitulation. So satellite mapping with HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, you can use Gdel to tiles to make tiles. You can use leaflet or open layer, or whatever else. There are others, of course. You can use image magic if you just want to manipulate the image. And you can have your favorite libraries, favorite plugins to make sliders. You can use canvases, whatever. You just have the images there. And as long as you have preserved the projection and the geo information before you ended up going towards PNG images, you have perfectly aligned images. And very well aligned images, really. And even over, the processing of these agencies is so good that even if you compare some things from the 1970s to now, they overlap. You saw it here. 1987 and 2015, 2013, 25 years in between, and I had a near-perfect overlap. But this was really easy and not quite gratifying. So, things that I, however, do more often is to analyze the data a little bit more, to get them inside some software, inside a script, manipulate them, and then use libraries in the script to plot them on maps, or wherever I want them. And maybe to animate them, make movies out of them. So, the toolkit for this one, I call it toolkit 2B, is a little bit less webby. And you can do this in Python, you can do it in R or Matlab or whatever you like. You use NumPy, because then you have Rusters. You use Matplip for plotting, Basemaps, again, GDAL. And you can use FFMPag to show you, to finish this up, an example about what I did, or some examples of what I do, and one of the examples has a little bit of code. So, an example of what I do without code right now is something called the burn index, or actually the differential normalized burn index. But it means, basically, you take a before image and an after image and you look what certain band combinations are typical for freshly burned soil. So, you need maybe an intern who knows a little bit about that, but it's really, really not much. We teach that in introductory remote sensing. The burn index, before and after, if I compare it, in Brown for the fire I had earlier, the most intensely, most severely burned places. Then I also have low resolution data that I personally transformed into a GIS polygon dataset, but you could get this polygon dataset from someone else, or a point dataset that tells you fire detections, where was fire detected by satellites that fly over more often, but with a lower resolution. So, I can overlay those with Python and plot them, and then the more red things are more detections, and then I can compare, does it agree with where there's more burning, and I can take it from here. This is just one example. It might be something entirely different, maybe you have demographic data that you want to overlay over a map and see, for example, how does a demographic make up of my city coincide with green spaces. You detect the green spaces from a Landsat image, and you have demographic data that is in polygon form, for example. And now for my other, my more worked example, there is something I really have a very fondness for. It's the National Snow and Ice Data Center. They are doing, I think, the best job that I have ever seen for distributing data. They have good documentation that is actually readable, that tells you in words that you can understand what does a pixel mean and so on and so forth. So, they deal with many datasets. One is the one that I have the page here, sea ice concentration from, well, from some satellite or other, which happens to be someone that looks at microwave radiation coming up from the Earth. And microwave radiation shows you a lot about cold things, because microwave radiation is actually relatively cold compared to light or the near infrared. So, we have ice in the North and it's shrinking. So, they have the best datasets about sea ice concentration around the North Pole. And if I take one of these images I don't have this. So, the concentration goes up to 100%. I don't have anything right at the pole, which is typical for a polar orbiting satellite because it actually orbits slightly next to the pole, always around the pole. And we had sea ice all the way halfway around Greenland, along the northern Canadian coast, along the Bering Strait, down to the Aleutians and Alaska. This is some data that I forget. So, if I want to, however, want to combine a lot of a long time series of sea ice concentration to a visualization, what do I need to do? So, I need to open this thing in Python. I need to import NumPy so that I can manipulate rasters. I take it from my library of PyGars just to show how easy it is. You can do the same with GDAL or RasterIO. It takes maybe a few more lines. I just have to say Raster.geotiff of my filename and I have a data property that has the data in it. And in this case, reading the documentation, I know that I have to divide it by 2.5 because 250 data value is 100%. I have to normalize it to 2%. And then I can do a little bit about where it's my... I have to say, where should my center be? Where would I actually... I don't want to see the whole North Pole. I have a particular area that I'm interested in. In this case, it's north of the Aleutian Islands. I will show you that. So, I give it latitude and longitude of that. I get the coordinate transformation, which is a function that I can use to transform coordinates from latitude and longitude in the coordinate system of my data. And I can do a few tests about which IJ coordinate of my Raster corresponds to which XY coordinate of my projected data. And then there we go. I can use the base map toolkit from Matplotlib, get a figure. You may not be familiar with this syntax, but you've probably seen similar things, right? Even if you never use this one, you define a map which has some variables in there. You give it a latitude and longitude of your center. And then you say, okay, there's a scatterplot in there. We'll see what it's for. Give me coastlines. Give me rivers. And then you put it all together. You get a lot of data for each scene. And then I use the FFM pack to make a movie out of it. And I get this. So here is the coast of Alaska, the Aleutians. I always happen to be interested in this yellow and the red spot, which are the Pribilove Islands. Someone I know was doing research on foxes that are there, and he wanted to know how much sea ice was there during these years. So I made a video for him. See, the sea ice doesn't really usually reach those Pribilove Islands, George and St. Paul, but you can see how it develops, how it retreats, etc. So this was not very much lines of code to get to a really nice thing. And with this observation I'm drawing to the end of my talk. I hope I've been giving you something to think about and some inspiration maybe to take the problems that you have and that people you work with have and think about not just is there a government agency or a business or a citizen signs outfit or a sensor out there that would give me some point data but maybe is there a satellite that is up there in the air in the space looking down on us that would give me some images that I can use to do something with it and then combine it and mash it up. I think that term has become a little bit out of fashion, but it just came up to me. It's kind of a mash-up of things that seem to be people specialized in one or the other, right? So I thank you very much for your attention I believe we have some time for questions, right? Any questions? Well the US has the tendency to open data eventually so a lot of interesting data that used to be closed, the data that is closed from the US is all, typically that's what's classified and data does get declassified. So for the stuff that is classified currently no one actually knows what it is and people who work with it. So for the US I can't really answer. Canada has a lot of radar data and they monetize it so the radar sat data is most that would be really nice, a lot of that would be free because we don't actually have good radar satellites. I did not talk about radar at all it's harder to deal with because you need a little bit of knowledge beforehand to interpret a radar data set. And the Europeans are on the way I think there are a lot of sensors that would be really nice to have integrated data sets of all the sensors that are available and for example I say boulders and veers. Europe has similar satellites but this data is only available if you're a member of a European research organization or I think that is kind of the condition it's not very obvious but most people aren't, right? So there's no short answer for you but I would really like to see the Canadian for the radar data and the Japanese and Europeans for the data that is comparable mostly to the MODIS data because it would be nice to have a longer time series there and go back further and fill the gaps start from behind and then here the dot density do you have this in your roster? Actually they do this quite a bit by treatment and my resolution as grid cells it's sort of pretty straight I would just go ahead and play with these scatter capabilities of the libraries in Python it's I think not that hard you might have to calculate the densities yourself, yeah by hand. But people have sometimes similar problems when they have LiDAR data because LiDAR gives you point clouds, it basically shoots down a very thin beam and reflects it so you have to basically have very thick scatter plots that you need to deal with and think about that. Well I working on one actually I'm working on one but there is a lot out there actually I know some that are more exciting than what I do that the applications go deep into for example coastal monitoring monitoring of the density of algae there because you can see it in the ocean color it's a whole field in itself so do you have experience with ocean color? I don't but the more bands you have the better because then you have a whole spectrum and it gets extremely rich and you can use you can throw so I could learn at it which I'm doing for kind of not exactly this application yes so it's a very very lively field and I think which will grow yeah I fight against you know not against the user interface at all but institutions tend to have site licenses for something that someone was convinced they should need and ArcGIS is of course a big you know big gorilla in that field. I do use ArcGIS I use grass I actually started out doing more with it I use it specifically I think it's most but by far the most useful thing it is to define polygons of areas of interest so you can prioritize something by hand so that you can then easily export your result and then use it further because you can just you have it there and you can click and it tells you exactly where you are and it will assemble those points into whatever kind of shape you want points or line or polygon and then you can use it further however you get very quickly to the point where you would like to process something and I tend to even if these all these tools are scriptable I tend to kind of think that having a command line script tends to be faster and more efficient in the end so I do use them but I use them for these specific things and I admit I use ArcGIS if I need a publication for the final map with like a nicely formatted legend and a beautiful little arrow at exactly the location I need but that's like the last, last, last step awesome thank you so much thank you