Welcome everybody back to Siegel Talks here at the Martinie Siegel Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY in Midtown Manhattan in historic times, not only the times of Corona but it's the week before the election and the entire nation is in anticipation of what will happen and we all can explain one day why it happened and 10, 20, 30 years from now when we are in the middle of it we are so close it's hard to find out to understand what's right what's wrong and what is obvious and what was not and of course we all hope that people will go to vote and vote for forms of democracy forms of art forms of life that are good for us, for the city, for America and also for the planet and it's a very significant election and artists have been of course here on the forefront on this imagining of a new world of a new place of also creating spaces in cities so to let people share worlds and to understand the other and it is now about, Embey says that Achilles Embey we it's no longer about you know that we show solidarity and we always our own group right now what is important how can we include what is not us and to imagine it in a good way so many problems we have have our failure of imagination that people cannot imagine a present you're sharing the world the globe sharing with plants with animals with diverse groups from everywhere but people who are not the same as us and we and instead of seeing it as a as a as an advantage and that it makes our life richer like music from around the world we experience globally a nationalism that is very dangerous after all I'm from Germany and someone combined nationalism and some kind idea of a socialism just thinking about yourself it was an invitation to a movement that had devastating consequences so I we all do think this is serious so never I think the arts have been more important as places to share experiences to have an open discussion to have an agonistic a field arena as Florian Malsakow told us about the world of Chantal Mouff who says you know this is what theater is about we have to create spaces where ideas can compete there will never be an end of conflict ever we always think one day one idea wins over the other no but let's play fair with rules and show what the best ways is to have less suffering in the world and art and especially theater is a fantastic forum soon also we will have a session on political theater documentary theater theater of the real that deals with as much more but to this week again we have the second week of the prelude festival festival the seagulls end of dust in 15 years preaching academia and professional theater and new york experimental theater theater at the forefront young artists emerging artists and quite an amazing track record of the artists who have been with us very early on and again this week it is happening week number two online this year nobody would have thought of this david brun and miranda harmon put it together as curator said david is with us here today but first we want to welcome our guest today and as we say this is about listening and radical listening and i always start off with a long talk by myself so i apologize for it but with us today is a prelude artist i think someone whose voice should be heard whose voice is important and reminds us what art and theater performance and music is all about and what it can be doing so we learn more about each other and create meaning to imagine a future that is a better one and we need that if ever a time where we need that it is now so we have with us a kelsey pyro she's a brooklyn based a black and a jibway artist originally from st paul and minnesota music producer and vocalist for goodbyes which is a peer contribution to prelude you can go to w w prelude and vice u 2020 to see it has been fantastic contributions from all pieces quiet pieces reflecting pieces i think it's a fantastic lineup of of work which tries to use the site specific and the website is the site and and kelsey specializes in music composition sound art and performance her work often in in multidisciplinary genres and her experiences and stories from the african-american and native american indigenous identity of course within she has played with many many significant musicians in great places like the linkedin center and of course also the shed where she did a big production she is about the 2019 booking arts council community grants and many many other things david is with us here and we will talk a bit about his engagement he's the curator a great curator of predator young emerging curator we also see this prelude festival as a space to create new work and they all curators also have an open invitation to create a vision for a festival for the theater for the world and if it's real in the moment on that stage and that what you look at it can be real in in the real real world even so of course in the moment it is real and so everything has consequences and just by observing by doing things the world already changes so david welcome kelsey welcome how are you guys doing very well thank you so i apologize for my for my long introduction but i also think perhaps people have so much on their mind you know you need to hear something that's not so important and distracting and then you settle down and you open up to the message that is really important and kelsey so so tell us a bit about about you where do you come from well i'm born and raised in the twin cities which is st paul minneapolis minnesota and i moved here in 2011 and i've been working mostly in education with with youth in different ways for the most part as a teaching artist and arts educator and my cultural background is african-american and ojibway native american so african-american on my father's side and ojibway native american on my mother's side so and how did you connect to to producing art creating music sound how tell us a bit about your story well i've always my mother is an amazing woman and that she's always had me really involved in a a lot of the arts minneapolis st paul is a place where you know most people think of it as like fly over country but really there is a huge beautiful arts community there and a lot of free arts programming so my mother had me in a lot of arts programming from a very young age and i actually grew up with just my native family and i didn't grow up with my african-american family but my mother knew it was very important and that my reality in this country was going to be that of a black woman and so she put me in african-american dance spaces like drill team or the penumbra theater summer camp which is the i believe it's still the only african-american theater in the twin cities and maybe minnesota as a whole and then she also had this dream that one day i would become the next yo-yo ma so she had me take cello lessons so she really is the one who instilled arts in me and and really even though my mom sided the family never pursued art professionally my mom is an artist my grandmother is an artist my great grandfather i know is an artist because he made jewelry for my great grandmother so it's it's just all been really embedded in it and my mom really wanted to instill my pride in being a black woman by really infusing me into the black community as much as she could and especially the black arts community in minnesota and from there i really got into spoken word poetry and that took me a long way so i was doing poetry and theater and music i eventually got a full scholarship and undergrad to be a part of the hip hop arts program called first wave in madison wisconsin the university of Wisconsin madison of all places and that provided me with a lot of great opportunities and training and i got to learn how to produce and develop your own shows and projects in that program and we got to travel around throughout undergrad and then i guess i decided i wanted a challenge and i moved to new york city with a thousand dollars and slept on the floor for a month but i finally you know found my way after being here about nine years and really getting into the arts community here yeah and so yeah david yes kelson i'd love for you to talk a little about goodbyes um and maybe two things to think about i'd love to hear more about how your work has taken shape since you arrived in new york which feels very similar to my own story although i'm not a very good artist um and i'll just say something that really struck me about goodbyes and maranda as well my co curator you know is the way it seemed to invoke all these different timescales on the one hand there's these very long sweeps of history think about the the you know the history of the americas more broadly and the history of people from africa in the americas also your own personal history uh you know the show seems driving some part from family members from you know close kinship relationships and then also um what's what's happened with the uprisings this summer especially your connection to minneapolis and st paul it felt like all those were coming to bear on the work in these very interesting ways so i'd be curious to hear you talk a little about more goodbyes and maybe how the last year or six months have have shaped the work as you've as you've put together with your collaborator okay yeah um whoo no i know but it's my last the last six months i mean i'm sure for everybody has just been a whirlwind uh has been a very emotional time and a time of intense grow and uh my collaborator kino gal galbraith he wasn't able to make it here today um he's my partner in life and he's my partner in art which is really great he's a jamaican artist jamaican photographer and um i guess filmmaker now so we have really he has really supported me in many ways over the past six months so um goodbyes initially started five years ago as me getting back into music production and some of the songs were actually made on garage band where if you know anything about music production it's the software that just comes with your mac it's not that advanced um and then as i began to relearn music production and just grew and grew and grew into six songs which i realized were all love songs about different african-american men in my life who are no longer in my life um for various reasons two songs are about a dear friend of mine um who passed away and was a victim of suicide who was an artist in uh minneapolis minnesota who touched many lives his name is andrew thomas and went by phonetic one some of the songs are about in um my past romantic relationship where i thought that was my life partner and turned out he wasn't and then there's a song about my father and it's about um the story of why he is no longer in my life whereas he was swept up in in the 90s in the 80s in the 90 early 90s when cocaine and crack hit the black community really hard all over the country and that is how unfortunately that relationship ended with my mom and with me when i was a baby and so these songs have been coming together for a very very very long time and then when the pandemic hit everything has just been like boom boom boom boom in my life so the pandemic hit and it affected everybody and being here in new york as we know is super super intense the virus was new we were all locked down and we were taking it really seriously but then i saw you know people in minnesota weren't taking it as seriously and that was really scary and then george floyd was murdered and there was an uprising in my hometown in one of the neighborhoods in the neighborhood i was born and in the neighborhood where my mom my mother was living she's disabled and so literally she's telling me they're burning everything and i'm scared and i can't go i can't go to her there's nothing i can do and then um and then because you know unfortunately people in minnesota were not taking the virus seriously the people that she was living with were not taking it seriously and my mother caught the corona virus and spent um two months in the hospital and one month in rehab and um that was really really intense and then finally in july even though the numbers in minnesota were going up every all the numbers here were you know went down quite a bit and i was like all right it's time for me i need to go i need to go home and i need to see my mother because they finally were letting people come into to see their loved ones because the doctors were realizing like that it helps people survive when your loved one can be with you and so the doctor told me they would let me in so i was like all right and my partner is amazing he got me a flight back to minnesota and um i saw her and she got better in like a week of seeing me it was crazy but during that time i stayed in an air b and b in south minneapolis and i had no idea that the neighborhood i was born in a neighborhood that i've lived in and loved very much was still very much a wreck and i didn't feel comfortable take i could have easily taken a bus from where i was living to the hospital where my mother was but no one was wearing masks on the bus and so i decided to walk and on that walk happened to be pretty much the same stretch of where the uprising happened and literally seeing buildings that i used to go into buildings that used to there was a small theater i used to break dance that's another part of of my artistry but there was a small theater that used to hold like break dance practice it was totally burnt it was rubble um and that was all very intense because no one wants to see their home ripped up like that and um and it's just the fact that there are people in the world where that is they live in spaces like that year after year who are in civil war and that is for for me to see that just for you know maybe it'll be like that for a year i don't know how long it's going to take to rebuild everything but just the idea that that's how a lot of people live was was really hard to see but the beautiful thing is like i said before miniapolis is so artistic it's so full of life and a lot of people don't realize it because they think of new york or they think of l.a maybe chicago but you know that's where princes from you know that's lizzo actually moved to miniapolis to make her career there's a ton of art it's got the most theater seats next to new york and and the visual artists in the arts community literally came together and started making hundreds and hundreds of murals on all of the um plywood boards that the businesses put up to protect you know their shops because that neighborhood is a black neighborhood it's a native american neighborhood and it's a latino neighborhood and um there's a few white folks as well but they're fairly new and it kind of like reminded me i guess of like the broncs in the 70s where you see like those videos of the graffiti artists like doing like beautifying their neighborhood themselves so even though it was really hard to see like open spaces and piles of rubble where buildings had been there is also this resilience of the community members like taking back their community cleaning it themselves and beautifying it in their own way and sending a message with their art and it was really intense and i just on those walks to and from the hospital i just started like taking pictures and video of everything the good parts the ugly parts um there's some really interesting beautification there is one where youth were literally like planting flowers in one of the buildings that were burnt down to the ground and um i just i just love where i'm from and i love my city and i know what it's like to be black in that city and native in that city and i've had the police called on me when i was 13 when my mom moved me into a white neighborhood and you know there's why was the police called huh why was the police called oh me and my sister who is um she's adopted she's native alaskan we were listening to like cindy lapper really loud over and over again the same song but it was just like we were listening to girls just want to have fun and like washing the car or something like that so it was ridiculous um but yeah it's it's really interesting because i wasn't there obviously i was here in new york quarantine when the uprising happened but there's also you know a lot of talk i hear from my friends that the fires weren't started from people in that community that they were started by you know white protesters who really don't know how to be allies in this instance and there's videos of like white protesters smashing in windows at the auto zone that used to be standing there that's that's not anymore and so it's very complex in that we need white allies to fight with us so we don't have to fight these battles alone and sometimes you need to mess things up so that you can finally be heard but then you leave a black and brown community a complete mess and we're left to to pick it up ourselves so it's like this needed to happen what was this the right way is this how it needed to happen i don't know i think that's an ongoing talk and debate and then a black life metal movement was in a way hijacked perhaps even you know by you know some what would you say white extremists of whatever reason who then also make it more about them and then this is what became the dominant reporting about the movement but i also i mean i i read about the Minneapolis things and we saw it all but i didn't fully understand that it's almost like warlock you say so many buildings really burned and were destroyed and uh so tell us a bit i um what were the houses or people lived in or pectory buildings or what were the targets and most of the targets were more commercial institutions um and some were pawnshops and like literally people had to write on the plywood boards like you you'll see it in the video like don't burn this pawnshop because people live upstairs because because kids live upstairs and i know for a fact that um one building was burned because they thought it was a condo going up and in minneapolis a lot of the affordable housing programs and projects they look like new condos which is really good it's cool so one building that was burned where they thought it was a condo for wealthy people coming into the city was actual an affordable housing you know project that was being built and right now like on the other hand with the pandemic minneapolis and st paul is starting to look a lot like la where a lot of the homeless people are living in tents outside and so that is also really really really intense to see because of the pandemic there's not as much space in the shelters and so you have parks there are areas that it's designated or people have no choice to to set up camp and to camp out and so it is it is really rough um to to witness that right now and a lot of my friends who do social justice work are like you know what's gonna happen because it's already snowed there it's so cold yeah so it's not like here and it's not like la so i'm really praying for my hometown right now and i hope that um goodbyes which mixes my personal loss with black men that i love amongst what's happening now currently with the black lives matter movement i hope that you know it at least might bring a little attention to what is still going on in my hometown because it's not over just because those officers were arrested and charged it hasn't gone away it's still there gels you have a question you know one thank you for sharing your story and i'm also sorry to go on to you i have construction outside i don't want to interrupt but when you're filming did you imagine that this would become you know a kind of work its way into your into your art obviously a lot of us will film and do things now because we have the access to or did that impulse come later i mean and maybe one version asking his question is was was your was your art a way to kind of process and think through and maybe even find some healing in the moment or how how did that how did that interaction happen i mean i think because some of these pieces started so long ago it's kind of come to be over a long like a period of time and just the music has had so many different names itself as it was coming together and um at first it just started out like i'm going to make an ep and then it was like oh these songs are all about the same theme and let's process that and then i thought it might be cool to work with kino again because we worked at on the same piece at the shed he did some film for that piece so i asked him who'd be interested in doing some more like experimental film work around how he felt when he heard the music and he said yes and then the whole project was like paused uh when my mom got got sick so initially before she got sick and before the pandemic i had a whole bunch of plans on how i wanted like the film portion to come to light but then when the pandemic hit we had to change everything because i wanted to work with like dancers or actors and not really be in it myself um and then it's like oh if we do it we have to be in it we have to change we have to film some of this inside my studio apartment and so kind of allowed us to be a little bit more creative and kino who is really does not like to be on camera took a risk and is in two of the videos to be a part of it so that we were able to make it like the film safely and like social distance even with the other two actors that we did end up um working with it was like how do we do this and be safe and um then when i saw i was sent the opportunity for the prelude festival and i already had all of the photos and images for my trip back home in july and i applied to the prelude festival during my second trip home in august and i knew that what me and kino had was already 30 minutes long and then i realized that what we made you know connects the personal can also connect to the universal issue of what i was feeling of when i was making this work about losing these beautiful beloved black men in my personal life and what me and kino were feeling and what i feel like probably most or all of black america was feeling in losing george floyd and amod obry and brianna taylor and um everybody else and so it just felt like it made it made sense to use all those photos and videos that i took as a whim um to use them in this way to make that connection so from 2015 to today and uh and how do you how are you thinking about um i mean music just seems so central to your work it was one of the things that ran i love i love the sound um you know i spend a lot of time in your sound lab but how have you thought about over the years and then maybe since the pandemic incorporating media and performance and even you know things that are um theatrical acting you know stage design things like that how do you think about your work as performance and do you think that will change going forward or um are you still excited about the possibility of you know live multimedia performance oh yeah i'm still excited about that definitely my artistic training in first wave and undergrad and the theater and everything that i was thrown into um growing up is has made me into a very like multimedia kind of performance artist um so i'm excited to uh start doing that again in person and i'm also interested in figuring out how to do that virtually now because that is now a really big deal and at the beginning of the pandemic i actually bought the gear needed to be able to to perform virtually but with everything that happened in my personal life i haven't really been able to have the space to learn all the tech to be able to do that but now that my mother is in like a much better place i'm hoping that i can get get into that and start learning how people do performance um in a virtual space um as well as a live space um kelsey you said i i grew up in minneapolis i know what it means to be black but you chose to be an artist um tell us about that experience growing up also as an artist and compared to you know your friends others look up is there how how did that work and also why do you make art what what do you think is uh so essential for you days you say i'm going to do this as a reaction to the world around well again i feel like growing up in minneapolis there's just so much art and my mom just made it a big part of my life which is really amazing and so i was always involved in something artistic if it was dance if it was music if it was visual art it was theater and and because also my whole family is also very artistic it just felt really natural to me it just says it's fun to me it's something i can't help but do and i feel like my artist especially in recent years like sometimes i make things just to be sillier to relax but a lot of my bigger projects in recent years have been a way for me to express who i am and my cultural identity and also a form of release or therapy i feel like i'm a kind of person where i don't speak much outwardly about my emotions i'm usually pretty bubbly and happy but then sometimes i keep it inside so i feel like a lot of my art is a way for me to express what i'm saying in a different way where i feel more comfortable and um i also am really into doing things that women are the minority in so i got into break dance because i'm like i want to be one of the few women who can spin on their head and and being in a space that kind of space and i love challenging spaces like that and it's the same thing with audio engineering and music production whereas like me and my friends in high school my high school actually had a music studio in it it had a lot of great arts programming and me and my friends were some of the few girls in that space and there's something thrilling i like about it and i'm sure they like it too which is i'm here i i can learn these programs as well as any other guy and i'm going to make cool stuff and so a lot of my practice comes from like that idea of just because i'm a woman and i'm not a cis male doesn't mean i can't do these things and challenge myself in that way and then learning music production just led to me recording my own poetry and my own story and putting out my own music and i feel like i make art because because i have to and even now more recently with my project at the shed during my 2018-2019 artist residency the project was called maka du yasikwe which is an Ojibwe word that translates as a black woman a woman of african descent so when i got that project i realized that through music production i could learn traditional music from my Ojibwe background and incorporate it with r&b and hip hop and black music genres because i had empowered myself to become a music producer and then i realized like hey there's a lot of stories about what it means to be mixed with black and white or mixed with natives in white but there's not a lot of stories about what it's like to be native and black and all of the rich history of native americans and black americans in this country some of it's good and some of it's bad but it's not really out there so then my art became a tool to really push that narrative and how was it in comparison from the sound studio in your high school when you're at the shed which is this is big new new york age you tell us a bit how did you experience that moment at the shed that was an insane opportunity um i'm very thankful for it but i've never worked harder in my entire life because i had a full-time job and was trying to deliver this show it was a nine-month residency and the show Makaduyas Ikwe was a performance piece that incorporated music and oral tradition and was a commentary on the Eurocentricity of the five stages of grief so the entire narrative was about loss in the black community and the Native American community and how it is impossible for us to get to the final stage of acceptance because we're as an oppressed people we're so resilient but it's just not that linear for us as a people that and that there's different ways of healing than just going through these cycle of stages as prescribed and so in the final performance it did a four show run during a week in June 2019 and i worked with a whole bunch of amazing friends and collaborators and all of the music was a mix of electronic music and live musicians so i worked with uh my friend who was a drummer and audio engineer his name was Compton Timberwolf and i worked with my other amazing friend who i've known since undergrad his name is Ben Hoffman he primarily plays piano but he also does vocals and drums he's and these they're both geniuses in their own right and so i played the music with them and then projected on the screen in the background was Kino's work so what me and Kino did was we traveled to Minneapolis Minnesota and we shot in the black community and then we traveled what we call in Minnesota up north so by the Canadian border to the native reservation that my family is affiliated with the founder black band of of Chippewa Native Americans and we met with my aunties and we filmed in that area as well and so all of these elements came together to create like a very i guess multimedia production and it was it was it was really fun and it was really crazy we had to do all the set design ourselves um and so i had a pizza night and i was like i've got pizza and beer come to this warehouse and paint these long strips of paper um with these basically slurs that makes people are called like red boned high yellow or colloquialism not really slurs indian hair things like that with the different colors of that are attributed attributed to both being african-american and the medicine wheel being native american which is red yellow white black and then also green you said you had to do by yourself did this shed do you feel that they supported it it was possible to do within the framework what you got what you wanted to do yeah i mean we were definitely the first year that you know they had done this they're brand new and of course there's it's the first year everybody's learning there's gonna be bumps along the way but what i really appreciated with them is they're very responsive we did a few studio visits i could meet whenever i felt like i needed and then um after the first year was done they um took a few of us out a couple times to really get some feedback about our experience and i really appreciated that i heard that they had they forgot dressing rooms is that true in that that it's um oh i had a dressing room you had worked out at the beginning that artists couldn't find their ways around yet and they had to use you know the bathrooms and things so um but as you said maybe it wasn't a very um very beginning yeah tell us well i do know like i kept my production my cast very small like they gave me a good amount of money but i knew it was going to be a lot of work and i wanted to make sure everybody was paid very fairly and so i had you know two musicians i had a friend very type a to help me with admin and i had kino doing the film and then everybody else who who helped out with the set was like volunteer like beer and pizza but i wanted to make sure everybody was fed and paid fairly so it i really did not have a big crew some people had like dancers and or their space was outside not everybody was in the same space so mine was just like real small kelsey i'm curious building on this your experience this shed i want to ask you maybe more broadly about your relationship to institutions and what it's like being an artist i know for my peers um in the profession you know some of them have been have felt very supported uh meran and i often talk about soho rap which is uh for people who don't know the theater in downtown new york they recently put several i think it was eight artists on their payroll and health care other of my friends are extremely disappointed by let's say broadway or other institutions that have seemed to have done nothing either in the form of programming or in reaching out to artists uh roger feather kelly who's a great writer for wrote a piece about this actually early in the pandemic um and so my question is along the lines of what would you like to hear from an institution um if they asked you it could be the shed it could be anyone else i mean if they said you know what do you need in this time um what could we do for artists such as yourself what do you think you would say i mean people need like so much right now and that you know i mean i feel like i really just started working with institutions in this way outside of university in the past few years like when i first got a community arts council with the brooklyn arts for the brooklyn arts council community arts grant um but as an artist i've also gotten rejected a ton and i've been told that even though i pitched this these project of hey i want to push the african-american native american narrative that my work or is not that's not what they're looking for um i wish institutions would just take more risks and say yes a lot more and really do what they can during this time to to help artists that they say that they serve but it is really hard to say uh because everybody even these institutions i know are losing funding right now but i guess if they could perhaps try to bend more with the times like the prelude festival has done and to keep going as much as they possibly can with their programming to hire artists and to be innovative with how they can keep putting on production safely um that's the hard question that's the hard question to answer i know i've you know lost lost work definitely as a teaching artist i lost most and then all of my work i don't know i hope that they could do what they what they can as much as they can now thank you for sharing i mean i don't think there's any easy answer for sure as you said there's multiple things i mean um to some extent there are days you know just to share a little bit there are days when i feel like they should just all band together and figure out how to give people healthcare and and not even worry about the programming i mean i'm glad what we're doing at prelude i'm i'm proud of it i'm thrilled to have you in the festival among everyone else but then there are times when i'm like okay maybe we can just turn this into one large mutual aid sector um but i also know there's a you know people are making interesting work and every institution is so different having worked at others um but i think what i've gathered i think some of my peers have gathered is that it has become more clear who means their rhetoric when they say we serve this community including artists and for whom that rhetoric might be a cover for a you know other kind of corporate project um but as you said there's no easy answer and thank you for you said about prelude um you know for people listening at home we're trying we're certainly not the shed but um it's thrilling to to offer some some opportunity and space and a little bit of resources for for artists such as yourself yeah i i definitely appreciate it and even though prelude is not the shed i i love it because i feel like i can really get funky and take risks and see a lot of cool work um because prelude is just like you know do your thing and and submit it to us and you know there's not a lot of you know we need to see this we need to come and make sure you know it is a lot of trust and i appreciate it well you gained brand in my trust i think immediately when i heard the the video and heard the music come on i was like yes this is this wants to be a part of it and i i loved in the sample you sent um you know it was a video of of a young black man hanging out i mean just just kind of there was a certain joy and just being with someone with the you know you as the viewer kind of as the camera and the music helping you be a part of the of the scene and miranda and i feel like to some extent there there can be a revolution and just being with people and just taking the time and walk as i was so inspired when you were talking about the story of just walking the street you know and capturing what what you felt was important to to hold with the camera and and hold inside of yourself and that to me can be as much of a revolutionary activity as you know any kind of other thing we might think about under the rubric of protest or direct action but people taking care of each other is to me you know as much of an insurgent activity as and it's uneven of course for people in your community um there's so many more obstacles and struggles than perhaps someone who would have at certain vectors of privilege but that was what struck me about the sample you sent uh in tandem with the language you had about it in your larger project but um immediately i knew i wanted to spend more time with this so thank you so much yeah i yes i i agree with a lot that you said like hanging out and taking care of each other is an act of protest and like that resonates with me even more now because as soon as my mom got sick and i knew i would have to go and take care of her as much as i wanted to be on the streets and protest you know i knew that what is most important is that i use you know taking care of people and self-care as as protest because i want to make sure that i'm not bringing this virus with me into the hospital around vulnerable people and then i also rents um from um a really amazing 91 year old woman and so i also knew that as much as i i protested a little bit but then when she moved back into the house with me i knew is most important for me is to make sure that i keep her safe because i saw what the virus did to my mother and i do not want to witness that again with anybody else close to me and then basically this piece became my protest in the art wow so that that is so that is great it is a protest piece a piece of the pandemic of the time of corona you know archiving the moment and and you know just putting it out there and as an exploration but not as an explanation so it's it's an important really artistic uttering of of you so really thank you for being there how is the situation i mean i don't you must be connected to the black community black woman and the indigenous community how is the mood what are people thinking about are they doing work what's on their mind of your friends um i mean i know they're always doing work there was doing work before they're doing work during and they're doing work after they're amazing friends to do amazing programming there and i'm so proud of them and everything that that they do um and it's the the the fight is not done yet it's not going to be done for a very long time because that unfortunately is how this country was built it was built on mass genocide and slavery and so it's going to take a lot to be able to heal and and really this country needs to step up and admit what the heck they did you know and until the leaders of that country do that work we as a people have a lot of work to do to make them do that work so it's going to be a long time coming but i'm very proud of them and um they're they're just so amazing and they not only supported themselves their families the entire community um but then in my time of extreme need like they were there for me the entire time i've been going back and forth um to Minnesota with my mom so i love them dearly they're my family we had also spider women um on here and Native American artists from Canada so how is it when you go back to the as you said the reservation because we don't know we don't hear enough about it it's also at the moment as i hear it's also a devastating moment so what what do you hear what do you see when you said you went there how was the mood um well i wasn't able to go this year because of the pandemic but i try to go every year and every reservation is very different um so i can't speak to to every reservation you know and i actually can't speak to the reservation that my family's affiliated with too much at the moment but i do know that because i have spoken with them in order to support my mom because my mom receives resources from from the final act reservation and they are doing everything in their power to use their resources to support um to support the tribal members that's great that your mom had such a recovery even after such a devastating period of illness um how is she doing if you can if you are willing to say of course you don't have to she's doing so much better great she's doing so much better and um she's still on like oxygen um she's going to be healing for a very long time a very long time um but um i found her a really amazing one bedroom apartment in an assisted living so because it was very important to her when i first went to see her she told me not to move back from new york she wants me to keep um her and my grandmother they're very adamant about me um going after my dreams i go back very often and but my it was important for my mom to feel independent so she's able to heal and the space around her looks like a regular apartment and feel independent and it's just amazing how the first week i went back in july she was on to give you context she's on like five liters of oxygen right now when i saw her she was on 50 liters of oxygen and in that week of spending time with me finally having someone be close to her and touch her and be near her her oxygen levels dropped from 50 liters down to 10 liters and she was able to go to rehab and leave the hospital so being with your loved ones is so so powerful and that connection is is so so important that's great i'll be thinking about her uh throughout the week as i watch the piece as well um maybe as we're closing down here a little bit i'd be curious to hear what has been inspiring you recently maybe it's a long time favorite maybe it's something you've seen online or a performance i'll just say when i heard your cover of um uh so much things to say right now i had to go back to the loren hill unplugged album which is one of my favorites uh i just found it at the right time and place my life but i'd be curious to hear you know what what what has been inspiring you if any if anything um i think like right now an artist i'm really into um is sev delisa and um she's um a really cool artist and um she's a vocalist and musician and um i don't want to butcher where she's from but i know her roots are from the middle east ah she's a dutch iranian senior songwriter and her last project like really mixes like the traditional like uh iranian sound with electronic music and it's so cool because i feel like that's what i was trying to do with the um relearning the ojibwe music and then mixing it with the electronic hip hop and r&b music so she's she's pretty amazing wonderful so and so yeah so i hope everybody will comment and uh and tune in for your for your show on prelude and um you know for the goodbyes and when is it exactly maybe david you repeat it it's on thursday the 29th at 8 p.m so you can check it out at uh prelude nyc2020.com it'll be there make sure you have a good pair of speakers when you listen don't listen to it on your little mac speakers you know put your headphones on or something else and turn it up loud so it's going to be 30 minutes or how much how long it will be 47 minutes 47 minutes yeah so something totally extraordinary and as always prelude it is free and open which is incredible um as a festival it's the only festival also in new york dedicated to work of artists and ensembles from new york city show work and uh process and development but also to talk about it to make your business works of art their philosophy their ways of thinking their you know instead of writing in a tutorial for the times or doing a painting or a sculpture or writing in a political speech artists create work and it is as significant and as serious and her anticipation also earlier works of of loss of mourning of bodies you know black man which is so central we really have to um take that serious and we have to see how do we can be share that experience and also that we should take note of that that is something that um is so existential for her and that we also should engage in a way she is business but also by some people in our lives with us but especially also from the community and i would like to everybody also remember she is a black artist indigenous artist she's a woman you know and now also a musician who had no place to perform at the moment in new york city any street cafe where like people are out with their guitars and listen to play for 20 people these are the largest concerts that are going on in new york city at the moment they used to be medicines career garden there are no jobs out there so what you do against all odds is astonishing and that you produce the work that you put it out and it's a very important contribution i think for us to understand the world and the fine meaning and also what art can do and to when we listen to the songs on thursday at eight um you know to really spend time with you when you're thinking in your mind as an extension of your thinking your dreams your brain so we feel you and and this is what art does and that's why we need art to imagine the better world as you do because in the loss it's also the longing for for change and and to take care of what we have and what we also can lose so it's truly extraordinary and thank you you know for for joining david also so great that you that you made it you'll also be here with us tomorrow and hopefully on thursday and where we will continue this and it's also a snapshot next to print and everything these are new york artists emerging on this one that's very very very difficult circumstances compared to other countries in the world make art and this is what they do and this is what is on their mind so it's something very important and significant and i hope um we uh got the uh message also for you the viewer that after all this is really about you who listen now at at home at their computers you know how can this affect you and how can you do your research about your loss and how do we kind of put it perhaps also put in the form and to learn from it that such things change as kelsey said um we have to acknowledge what happened in this country and we can only go really forward if there's some atonement for for things that have been brutal so um thank you for sharing thanks for hull run for hosting us david and miranda you know thanks for putting this festival together to be the curators of this in this very difficult moment that we would also online and the idea that this is site specific website specific it's a great one and we have you know because of that we have a kelsey with us and healthy again thank you congratulation everything you do and where you know your journey and your work and this is also in the very beginning spider woman a burial set the time right now is an indigenous thinking also it's the beginning of a creational myth we are in a new time something has ended this is a creational myth and we do not know how it will end you know we are the heroes in a way and we really have to take this series we have to change and um for for survival and there's Bruno Latour a set and Frédéric a tweet to you who are here this is a general rehearsal this pandemic um for that's what's coming in ecological disasters and or perhaps also political complications could be very little but this time we have to do that right we have to learn we have to change we have to take that series there will not be perhaps another general rehearsal with all the resources we have now as little as they are so this is utmost significance and artists have been always on that side of change and to point towards right and and just and also truthful so really thank you all and um I hope you all will stay tuned of all stay safe encourage everybody to vote who you know and the vote for you if you can't and we hope next week will bring a change we all need bye bye thank you and thank you thank you for talking to me and Kianos peace thank you definitely


Hello So she said my name is Joe Conway. I work for crunchy data been with postgres community for quite a long time I'm one of the committers. I'm on the PG infrastructure team and also a board member in PG us Just a disclaimer This talk is very code heavy source code heavy a lot of the source code is actually are It's obviously integrated with postgres and post GIS as the abstract says But you know if you're we're looking for something a little higher level. This is probably not it So hopefully I won't bore anyone with the details. I will have to go fairly quickly through the slides Another point I'll make is that the slides are very complete in terms of you should be able to after the fact I'll post the slides you should be able to cut and paste and Basically follow along with what I did if you wanted to try and reproduce some of this And that's one of the reasons I make the the slides so detailed is so that you can do that The code is a combination of sequel and are The other point is that there's a there's more slides in this deck that I'm even going to try and deliver There's a there's like 17 slides or 18 slides are in an appendix So some of the details are actually at the end in the appendix and I'll make note of where that is So I'm going to do a spatial analytics I'll start out by covering an overview and Then go into a section on how to how to ingest data at least certain types of data, and I'll go through some Basic analytics There's really not enough time in one hour to get anything near Complete coverage on the possibilities here So hopefully what what I intend to do is show you how our might be integrated with these other things and be useful to you and And the fact that by using our you actually gain a lot in terms of expressiveness because the Ecosystem round R is so so rich So there's a lot of things that you can do with it The background on the name of the this talk How green was my valley? I was reading a book on our spatial analytics not coincidentally and It was talking about in part of it was talking about something called NDVI normalized difference vegetation index basically a vegetation index is one where You take satellite images and in the satellite images if you break out the color spectrums It turns out that natural vegetation tends to be absorbed pretty completely by in the visible range but in the near infrared range, it's mostly reflected and so you can take a Combination of the visible and the near infrared and use that as a reliable index for how much vegetation is in the image that you that you've gotten from the satellite and This NDVI itself is a specific calculation. It's right here. It's a normalized value It's it's really supposed to be between negative one and one although in the presentation You'll see the values are going to show up between minus ten thousand and ten thousand because everything's been scaled up and Specifically the product that I'm using in this talk is something called mod 13 a1 That's one of the image products that comes off of the MODIS satellites Again, I'll show you a little bit more about this later on where you can get this data from how you can get it There are other types of vegetation indexes. There are other Products from the same satellites. There's actually multiple satellites that produce the same data In this case, I took the data from the the MODIS terrace Terra satellite There's also an aqua satellite that just do the same thing just at different times of the day basically There's in this data, there is different resolutions, so I'm using the 500 meter resolution This is raster data, which basically means you've got you can think of it as a grid on the ground Every 500 meters and there's a one point that represents that square So there is a 250 meter which is a finer resolution, but of course that means the data is four times the size So I chose the 500 meter because one they use that in the book and two I didn't really have enough this space to start messing around or patients really to mess around with that But if you wanted higher resolution, it is available As they said there are other satellite products that do vegetation indexes that are probably more detailed as well Yeah, I'm going to show you where you can get it There's lots of applications for this kind of data. I also as you'll see as I go through this I'm doing this for my county in California, which is Southern, California We've had you know, probably most people are aware there's been severe drought there for the last several years So I thought it would be interesting to look at the vegetation over a period of time I'm also going to cover in this talk a little bit about Administrative shape data and some geocoded data the components. I'm going to use our postgres post GIS R and PLR so everyone here. I'm sure knows what post postgres is and Probably everyone in here knows what post GIS is. How many people here are familiar with art a good number? Okay, that's good. So R is a specifically a statistical math processing language But one of the reasons it's to me very interesting is The ecosystem of packages around this thing if you look at the R C ran which is like equivalent to C pan for Pearl. Let's say Right now. There's over 10,000 packages available up there pretty much all of the cutting-edge research and math and and statistics is being Developed for the for R before almost anywhere else I mean even sass has our connectors these days Oracle has an R connector sass has an oral and our connector because most of this the newest kind of analytics is being developed in our first The other interesting thing here Worth mentioning is they on their site? They do organize things by what they call these task views because there are so many packages It's hard just to find what packages you might want to use for different things and if you go down there there's you know, there's things like machine learning and There's of course spatial So there's all of these different packages available just for doing spatial analysis analysis visualization Reading or writing of spatial data point pattern analysis Geo statistics So you can see it goes on and on and on so to me this is this is why I'm talking about R today It's also why years ago. I developed PLR, which is a plug-in Extension for Postgres that allows you to use R from a function within Postgres So in terms of getting all this set up and ready to use first You'd have to install your desired versions of Postgres and post GIS and PLR Create a database install extensions and then there's a required a variety of required Packages just to do what we're doing in this presentation as I just pointed out There's a whole lot more you might want to potentially use Just a note here that if you're going to try and follow along Install those R packages when you're logged in as root or At least logged in as the Postgres user and the reason for that is when PLR runs the R engine It's doing so as the Postgres Process which means the Postgres user needs to be able to see those extensions to use them If you install as root then any user on the system would be able to see them because they'll go into the Standard locations for the system So we're just going to create a database called GIS and then create extension post just create extension PLR This is assuming the binaries have already been installed on your system Either from source or from RPM Both of those things are available in the Postgres development group Repository for instance so you can get devians you can get RPMs on the R side Some of these extensions require Java and I found it necessary to do this R command Java Reconf Which basically just tells R how to find the JDK? And then this is kind of a neat thing about R2 you can In one command install dot packages you can install all these packages and on an analytic system It'll say what it'll actually prompt you for what mirror do you want? It'll go out to that mirror download all the source code and compile all of those libraries right on your system. I mean Maybe you like that. Maybe you don't you can also get most of these packages Available through your normal vendor for wherever you get R. So if it's RPMs, I think they're in Apple probably On Debbie and they have quite a few of them as well But you might need to do this for some libraries that are not available and you know through your through your vendor Alright, so we're going to start out in terms of ingesting data any questions before I move on So the first thing we're going to do is talk about how to ingest some data for administrative boundaries So this this is going to be Vector data so geometry type in post GIS There's a package called RGDAL With a function called get data and what this will do is it'll actually go out to well known Repositories of this kind of information on the internet and just download it for you right into your R session Which is which is pretty convenient and pretty cool. So in this case, we're going to use something called GADM Which is a global database of administrative boundaries and there's there's a link there in case you want to go look at that We're going to use that data from the R session to actually create a table a post GIS table And just a note that this get data function also supports a database of climate data a database of topographical data and And some other things so there's links for that as well down here So now here's here's our first example of here. This is a mixture of SQL and R because it's using PLR So you can see this is the normal creator replace function that you would see for any function that you're creating in in Postgres I'm going to tell it. I'm going to use some arguments So I want a particular country and a particular level and that's because this administrative Shapes database is broken down by country and by level and so you'll see down here What I'm doing is I'm selecting country USA and level to what that means Is I want to get for the United States all of the shapes of the states and the counties within the states because level 2 is the counties or And you know in some states they call them other things like parishes, but the equivalent is what would get pulled down So I'll get all of those shapes all in one go in order to do that. I have to load the library The RG Dell I'm creating some connection strings, which you'll get used by these other functions But this is this is where you know the rubber meets the road this one function will pull all that data off that website Put it into this variable shapes and then this right OGR function will actually Take that spatial data that's in the R session and write it out to a table in Postgres With a post GIS geometry column So this will end up looking like exact the table that this creates will look exactly like a table would look if you used shape to PG sequel function that comes along with post GIS It's basically one geometry column and a bunch of attribute columns and amongst the attribute columns There's gonna be a name for state and there's a name too for the count the county name amongst other things This function is using the OGR library and it and it's actually using in this case I mean this is there are other ways that might be Let me step back as I went as I went through writing this presentation One of the things I realized is that and I kind of knew this for a while But PLR knows how to translate Standard data types between Postgres and R. So things like integers and floats and even arrays are handled pretty transparently at a binary level post GIS is an extension so PLR does not natively know how to translate a post GIS geometry into a spatial object in ours, so There there's some workarounds in here that are probably not ideal That are only exist because I've not gotten enough round to its to to go make the modifications to PLR To make that a little bit more transparent. So this is one of those workarounds This is actually going to go out to Postgres Using the OGR library and directly create the table for me and load all that data into it Well, it's spatial data You can use the same function to write it out into a shape file Which is a specific format also and later on I'm going to show you another example of a function that uses that because I want to Present some timing performance information. That's what this is going to do This is going to connect back to Postgres using a regular connection That would require me to modify PLR, which is what I just talked about. I would like to do that at some point I just haven't done that yet It's a function in the database in order to do it directly I would have to make modifications to the C level to use an interface called SPI and That's that I have not done that So in this case it was for the purposes of creating this presentation It was a lot easier and it doesn't take long to run this it takes a couple seconds to create this table I mean running this function takes a couple seconds Basically it creates the table and then basically here this query here Which is creating an additional index on basically state name and county name That is actually this DB get queries executing that string that is actually happening through SPI Because PLR knows how to do that so Calling this function like this is going to create a table called counties Using the data from the US down to the county level So now let's see what it looks like to actually do something. Let's plot this thing There's going to be a couple of different methods that I use for creating Plots and and saving them in a way that I can use them That's intentional I wanted to show you alternative ways that you might do that the first way is that if you return byte a from a PLR function Whatever object was returned from the our side gets serialized and sent out as binary basically so in this case there's some code here this this part here and basically these two lines here are Setting up a buffer in memory so that when the plot gets rendered it gets rendered to that buffer and then that entire buffer gets Returned so basically the image just gets streamed back to the client in this case So this is one method you can use To generate a graphic using PLR and then capture that Graphic for later use whether it's displaying it on a website or if you want to write it out to a file Or you want to start in a table somewhere you can do any of those things Well, the standard formats are supports yes so in In this case what I'm doing here first I have to set up a projection string that represents the data that I got Anyone here not familiar with projection strings the idea of projections Everyone's pretty much familiar with it. Okay, great Again what I'm doing here is I'm selecting out of that geometry column out of that table that I created just a minute ago And I'm gonna have to and again This is the the weakness is the part that I haven't fixed yet in PLR But I'm converting that geometry to a well-known text format And then I'm gonna basically take that well-known text and read it back into our right here And then just plot so it's just a single command plot that that'll generate the plot So this is what the outline of San Diego County looks like this other bit Here is a function that I provided because when you get the serialized our object back out as bytes there's actually a little bit of Rapper that are puts around the image itself when it stores it internally and this this PLR get raw strips that off So you get you wind up with by taking this With the output of that function you get exactly the image now Later on I'm gonna need to make use of what's called a reprojection. It sounds like everyone here is kind of familiar with that that idea but basically When you've got kind of a 2d image Projection is what how you want to render that to that what's really a three-dimensional object of Something that's laid out on the globe as a two-dimensional object And it turns out that this modus data that I was talking about earlier has a different projection than than this administrative data The modus satellite data is raster data as I said, which means it's a bunch of data points in a equally spaced grid and Yet but these points are Three-dimensional vector points you could actually Re-project the raster data to the administrative data But if you do that because of the equal spacing and everything when the spacing changes you'd have to extrapolate So you'd end up having some some loss of fidelity by doing that So you're better off if you reproject the vector stuff into the projection of the raster So that's what this is doing here and again as you can see it's just a single R command Which is again very similar. It should look familiar to you if you've ever done this in post GIS Just SB transform over that data and then plot it and it now it looks a little different, right? And that just has to do with the perspective of the satellite So there's a couple other alternative methods that I could use to get this data. I could use basically I wrote out the exact same data as shapefiles and in this case This will just read from the shapefile instead of from postgres into the shapes Object and then I can just Subset that to get just the county and the state in the county that I want from shapes and plot that or Another way I could do it is I could read back into postgres using this read OGR and essentially pull the whole table in using read OGR But you'll see it doesn't make sense to do that The original method that we used was quite efficient because all we did was grab just the data that we wanted for San Diego County and Pass that from postgres to R. Whereas in the other two cases. We basically had a render the entire Layer and then just subset it and pick out the piece that we wanted And that was actually one of the reasons I wanted to kind of do this Presentation the first places because I was as I was reading through people doing this in pure R That's what they tend to do is they they tend to do something more like one of these two methods Because they read everything all an entire layer into an object and then they subset it in R And there's no index to help Okay, so now I'm going to move on from the administrative layer stuff to geocoding any any more questions about the administrative layer The third data type I'm going to ingest is actually raster data So this this who here does not know what geocoding means anyone So the idea of geocoding is you basically start out with like a postal address and you want to convert it into Spatial data, which is more of a Latin along right? So there's some services available. And again, there's an R package called GG map and It has the option either use Google Maps API or something called the data science toolkit Just to note these are both Something that you can use kind of for your own use. They're not intended for commercial use They're limited in the number of queries you can run per day So, I mean for commercial use it may not be the best method But you can you can do this like 2,500 times a day on Google Maps and I think 10,000 a day for the data science toolkit So the process that I'm going to use here is I'm going to create a list of addresses for some points of interest I'm going to use that library to go geocode those I'm going to add some names to them I'm going to set a coordinate reference system So I know what projection it's in and then I'm going to create another one of these post GIS tables using that OGR function So this is what it looks like I'm going to you know again This stuff is what you're doing in an R is fairly straightforward this geocode function You just pass it you pass in the array of addresses that you want geocoded as an array here to postgres to the postgres function and That just becomes a vector that gets passed to this geocode function and now that creates My layer with with lat longs for each of those and then I'm going to add to it an array Which becomes a vector of the names of those points? So I just combine that now essentially I've got what's called a data frame in R And now if I tell Shouldn't shouldn't be so loud if I tell R now that long and lat Attributes of this data frame are actually the coordinates that converts it into a special Data type in R called a spatial data frame so that all of these other functions within our know how to work How many have I tried in here? I tried three. I didn't do a ton of them You mean how like how fast is it? I've not tried to do any kind of performance testing. Like I said, it's limited to 2,500. So if it's using the Google API No, I didn't try 2,500. I tried three and it was very fast But I mean if I tried three and it was very slow then that would tell you something anyway So I'd be interested to try like maybe after this talk. I'll go try it so you set again you set the The projection string and then use this right OGR again to create a table with the data And then I'm also going to create an index on it So the same as before and then when I call the function, I'm just passing in these two arrays These are three addresses. These are three airports that happen to be in San Diego County And the layer name is going to end up being the name of the table that it creates So now when I want to plot those I've switched here so before I was doing plr functions now I'm showing you how you might do this in just straight R Just the thing to note here is if you basically take everything below, you know this Function decoration part here you could just cut and paste that into a plr function And it would become something that you would run through plr When you're first doing this kind of thing You probably want to do it interactively until you figure out what it is that you want to do And then once you're kind of happy with what you're doing at that point You might want to bottle it up into plr so that it's kind of more controlled once it's been qa'd vetted whatever So it and the other change I made here is I'm I'm passing in the name of a file for my image And I'm basically saying if that file name is not empty I'm going to set things up so that are just creates the file on disk So instead of streaming it back It's just going to create it on this just another method to do the same thing So this is similar to what we were doing before I'm just selecting the the data out of the the table for the areas event the area of interest table and That that's my county outline and then on top of that. I'm going to read the data for those points of interest and Again, the nice thing about R is what I can do here is I can plot the San Diego County outline and then go grab the other data and then just Call plot again, and it just I Say added equals true, and it just adds it to the plot. So now I'm just adding another layer to the plot So this is a fairly small Function and now I'm plotting San Diego County and it's maybe a little hard to see But there's three red dots here, and those are my three points of interest in my area of interest So now we'll talk about the NDVI Download there's a lot of text on here. I'm not going to try and go through it in like great detail But if you this is where you go get this data. It's called the USGS site. It's USGS.gov. It's Earth Explorer and There's an interface here Basically all this area on the left here is where you're going to enter all the criteria and Then it'll select Based on your criteria which things you want to download and then you're gonna go through and check them off and say Yeah, I want to download all of these things So that's what this is kind of walking you through what I did I for it you do need to get a log in to their site if you want to be able to download the information. It's free I Set Alameda County as my search criteria and what it does is it will You pick a point Somewhere within where one of the satellite images and it will basically give you the satellite images that cover that point When I originally put San Diego County in there It turned out that it was far enough south in in the US that there were actually two different passes of the satellite that Got San Diego County, so I ended up with twice as much data and it was redundant I didn't really want it so I ended up using a Northern California County just so that it would get me just the continental US I Ended up downloading all of the data from 2000 through the end of 2016 basically these satellite passes are done They're constantly being done, but then the data gets aggregated into like they say 16 day intervals But it's actually more frequent than that's more like every six days And so over the course of six days They'll have multiple passes and even multiple passes per day And what they try and do is boil the data down so that because as you can imagine with satellite data Sometimes you're looking at clouds. You're not getting good data So they keep taking the images and then they take like six days worth of these images and they go and they figure out Before they even give it to you. What's the best? Pixel out of that time frame that represents this area for that time period So you'll end up getting a raster where each pixel may come from a different satellite image And they kind of keep track of all that and I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute But the bottom line is this ends up being a hundred and four gigs of data that you're downloading You know just at the 500 meter resolution if if I'd done the 250 meter it would have been like 400 and something gigabytes And it took like 12 hours to download they have they provide you with an application To do the downloading it actually Retries and does all kinds of fancy things so it was kind of convenient, but it took a long time to download it So this is this is the area of interest that there's a spot on here where you can actually click and it says show footprint for the image that you're that you're currently looking at and This is this is the area that it the satellite is collecting Basically, and remember we just want one little Patch out of there. This is a screenshot of the downloading app. So like I said, it's it's just a small job Lightweight works worked pretty well I Probably wouldn't be very used very easy to get this data without something like this. I ended up with 1166 Individual zip files to download for that to cover that period of time for 16 years So in terms of processing the data The process Basically, you know one of the things I realized pretty quickly is that not all this is real life Not all the data was good. So out of 1166 files nine of them were actually bad and You know I first discovered that as I was looping through to unzip them and I'd get errors But then I quickly realized that if you just kind of looked at that directory and Look for the files that were sort of an anomalous size So they were all bad because all the rest of them were pretty much the same size So the first thing I had to do is clean out the ones that were bad This pre-processing function, which I definitely I'm not going to try and go through it's probably You know 80 or 100 lines of our codes. It's not a huge Bunch of code, but it's too much to go through in detail here But this is the basic process Load that area of interest or the San Diego County boundary again Re-project that to the the raster data Projection and then loop through the downloaded files you unzip them You get three different rasters out of that you get this NDVI data that I've been talking about But you also get a QA raster and an acquisition raster the QA raster basically on a pixel by pixel basis Tells you whether it thinks the data was good So basically if if the QA raster pixel equals zero It means the data in in the NDVI raster corresponding that pixel was considered to be good There and there there are various levels of degradation, but basically anything that wasn't a zero I just I marked it as na which in our terms is basically like making it a null and Then this acquisition raster has to do with the exact date that that pixel was acquired on because as I said in one file There may be six different days and different acquisitions per day So I ended up using the acquisition dates I converted them into year dot fraction of year based on number of days and Then taking an average for the entire raster and saying right for this Raster layer that I'm going to save this was the average date basically represented as a float and as I said I N8 all of the The pixels that were not good for from the QA data, but I also used that San Diego boundary to crop the raster data, so cropping is basically you take you know essentially a square that that the minimum square that fits around that shape and Throw away everything else completely But then in addition to that I also did something called a mask operation Which in addition now everything that's still outside of the band boundary of San Diego County got marked na The reason I did that is because now when I do any calculations on that raster I'm only looking at data that's inside the county boundaries and then after doing all that looping what I end up with And again, I could have done this differently, but I end up each loop I now have basically San Diego County NDVI for that That NDVI file and I stacked them into what's called a raster brick So it's a bunch of layers in one raster That I end up writing out to a file and I could have used post GIS to write it out to a table It didn't feel like it was worth it given the way I was using it It's probably something for some future version of this The other thing this function does is it returned all of those calculated dates and the file names that were associated with them Because that turned out to be very useful for debugging and it it sends that back to Postgres as a a by day a binary So again, it's a it's a data frame in our that gets converted to binary and I just store that in a table for later use So this is what the you know the header of the footer of that function look like as they said that's in the appendix This is what it looks like in terms of calling it. I create this our objects Table which is where I'm going to store that date time associated with the raster layers I call the function insert the result back into this table That took a little bit over two hours to run on those 1157 files Now this is basically if you take the plotting that we saw earlier and we overlay some additional information That includes the NDVI so now I'm going to Re-project everything to the NDVI projection I'm going to actually acquire my a layer from the NDVI and When I plot that thing, this is what it gets. So you saw this pretty much earlier in the reprojected form There's my three points of interest for the airports, but now it's overlaid with the NDVI area And so you can see you know the green areas are the ones with more vegetation Okay, so as I said earlier when I when I did the processing of all that in the NDVI data I returned the dates and the file names to Postgres, but I also wrote out that raster brick as a geotiff So rather than storing it as a raster data in Postgres, I kind of cheated I just put it into a file that was easy to do was actually pretty quick So this is reading in that tiff file in order to get the NDVI data Yeah, so this is frame 42 out of 1157. So this is just one example of it so now I'm gonna this is a Kind of a helper function that I just give it the name of the object I want to pull out of the table that I stored the r objects in and it'll just return me that object as Side you know and aside PLR has it supports this PLR modules table. It's actually been some talk on the list lately about Alternative ways to do this, but for now. This is what PLR does Basically, if you create this table and create a function in our function You insert it directly into that table when our gets initialized it will instantiate It'll it'll compile that and put it into the environment So now this becomes a helper function that I can call from my PLR functions And what this one is going to do is it's going to take that floating point Representation of the date and actually turn it into an actual date. So then this function takes the by-day input Which now is now inside of r becomes a data frame again And it's going to use Format and my little helper in the PLR modules table to actually output all this data as a date So now if I now I have access to all the data that was in that binary object that I returned from r earlier So let's take a look at what does NDVI look like as an average over time In this case, I'm passing in again the name of that raster file with all my layers in it The cell stats function will take this function here and apply it to each of the layers So I'm going to take the mean basically of the entire layer So all of San Diego County, I'm going to find the mean of the NDVI value for the county over time and I'm going to plot it Well in this case, I'm actually just going to return it. So these are this is just an example of the first three in This function, I'm going to take it one step further. I'm actually going to plot that data Along based on time So this is now you can start seeing all right. This is what This is what my Dryness or my vegetation in San Diego County looks like from 2000 through 2016 and you can kind of get a sense that there's a you know, there's some upward trends and some downward trends That kind of makes sense But there's another way you can do this with our using a different plotting function called GG plot and In particular it supports this thing called GM smooth When I plot that it actually automatically does geometric smoothing for me So it's a geometric moving average smoothing and now you can definitely see that there's a trend in the downward direction in terms of vegetation index So there's just a couple other visualizations. I'm going to do here. I'm going to do average by month So a lot of this is the the same stuff. We've been seeing in in here I'm just looping through 12 months of one particular year that was given as an argument And for each month I'm going to take all of the data for that month and average it together Pixel by pixel now instead of all the pixels in one raster every pixel is going to get averaged together for all of the data That came from one month So now and again, I'm just calling plot once but since I built a raster brick with 12 layers and I plot it I get 12 plots. So this is January through December and you can kind of get a sense for it's you know Greenest in the winter and then as you move on toward August it gets Considerably drier. This happens be 2011, which was the peak of the wet Season that we saw in that trend data Now if I do the same thing except I do a particular month across all of the years Now I have one for each. So this is January from 2001 through 2016 and You can see the kind of the progression in January of How it gets drier and then wetter again and then drier and Then this is it's kind of kind of a nice contrast if you go from January to August You can see how much that changes So that's it Any questions? I think I have a few minutes left Eight minutes for questions well In so if you go back to this function these dots here are just mean it's continuing on to this So this is complete. That's a complete function there. It just won't fit on one slide This one what I'm showing is everything kind of above and below this part is The same as it was in that function all I really did was I replaced this looping part with a different looping and You know back in like this is this is fairly complete, but this is pure R. This is not a PLR function here This function is complete when you saw This part if you were earlier we had another plot point of interest function earlier in the slide deck and Again everything that's dot dot dot is the same as before and these bits were added to it And then finally that the the loop processing that I was talking about of the actual raster data is Kind of yeah, this is it's all the way at the back after the appendix in this Pre-processing function, so if you wanted to look through that there's some additional information About how that data all works I'm not sure I'm following that question The San Diego County boundary I Actually I created that raster brick as a file, but I could have created I'm post GIS supports raster layers So you could I could have stored that in in a table in Postgres And in fact you could you could have not done all of this subset and you could have stored the entire original image in Post GIS and then done the subsetting kind of at runtime so that you could do San Diego County now and you know Some other county on the east coast tomorrow Yeah I mean there's a there's a lot of there's a lot of ways to do all of this stuff And I could have stored a lot more data in Postgres. I just didn't really want to Consume the room on my hard disk, which didn't really have enough room on it You know I downloaded a hundred gigs of files and if I had loaded that all on a Postgres database It would have been at least another hundred gigs maybe more But the nice thing about being able to go back and forth between post GIS and r Is that you know as I said ours got tons of different libraries that you could potentially apply to this data I haven't really thought I haven't really thought about it I mean I tried to write these functions in a generic way So they weren't you know hard coded to return San Diego County So you could you could kind of take what's here and extend it to an to a degree Well, I mean there are There's there's I don't know if you're familiar with grass But there's a lot there's an open source library called grass that also can tie into It also uses a lot of the same underlying libraries and it's open source and R can tie into grass as well So that's kind of a you know a GUI layer for this kind of stuff There are other you know, there's It's a QGIS is like a a GUI for doing geographic editing There's of course commercial products like arc serve from esri But you know this is all about trying to automate the processing Because you know, there's certain things that are That lend themselves to hand operations And then there are other things where you you don't want to do it by hand anything else All right, thanks


Big Pharma companies have made giant profits since the world has been in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pfizer's revenues jumped by 95% from about $42,000,000 to $81,000,000 and its net income rose by 142% between 2020 and 2021. Moderna, a much younger company established in 2010, also recorded a huge jump in net income. Till 2020, Moderna was recording a negative net income. The COVID-19 pandemic suddenly made the company a big pharma giant with a registered net income of $12,000 million in 2021. Moderna's revenues registered a 2,200% jump. What has made these massive profits possible? The majority of revenue for these pharma giants came from vaccine sales. Excluding Combinati, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer's revenue grew by just 7%. Therefore, the company's exponential growth in 2021 relied almost exclusively on the vaccine. This revenue is set to increase as Pfizer is projecting the production of 4 billion vaccines in 2022 compared to 3 billion in 2021. Where these vaccines sales were made was a big factor in determining the profits. Most of the big pharma companies have neglected supplying vaccines to low-income countries. Over 80% of Pfizer's and 70% of Moderna's total production in 2021 went to high-income countries and upper-middle-income countries. Low-income countries accounted for only a 1% share of Moderna's total sales. This difference in sales is reflected in the stark inequality in vaccination rates across different countries. While more than 70% of people are fully vaccinated in high-income and upper-middle-income countries, the rate of vaccination in low-income countries is a shocking 6%. Low and middle-income countries have only 44% fully vaccinated populations. Most big pharma companies have also not fulfilled their commitments to COVAX. The COVAX platform was set up as a collaboration between the WHO and other multilateral agencies to accelerate the development and manufacture of vaccines and ensure their fair and equitable access. The WHO has time and again appealed to rich countries as well as big pharma to contribute to COVAX so that vaccines can be made available to poorer countries at lower prices. However, this graph shows that top pharma companies have failed miserably to contribute to COVAX. For instance, out of 3 billion vaccines produced by Pfizer in 2021, it contributed only 40 million doses to COVAX. Moderna contributed only 50 million doses, while J&J amissly 6 million doses. AstraZeneca, Sinovac, and Sinofarm are the only vaccine manufacturers which have contributed more than 100 million doses each to COVAX. Companies that have made the largest profits during the pandemic such as Moderna and Pfizer have just done lip service by providing too few doses to COVAX. Furthermore, big pharma has also refused to share the technical know-how with manufacturers in low-income countries and low- and middle-income countries. The pharmaceutical giants have been ferociously opposing temporary suspension of patents. They have been consistently lobbying with rich countries to thwart all such efforts at international levels. WHO Director General Tedros Gabriosas pointed out that much of the vaccine inequity has been driven by the fact that globally vaccine production is concentrated in a few mostly high-income countries. Thus, there is an urgent need to increase local production of vaccines, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Now we are seeing that the manufacture of COVID-19 treatment might be going down the same route. On January 24th, US advocacy group Public Citizen wrote a letter to Albert Burla, Pfizer's chairperson-achief executive officer. It asked Pfizer to step up and make its COVID-19 treatment back slowed, widely accessible. The letter expressed concern that going by Pfizer's announcement so far, we can expect that more than half of the world population in need of this treatment won't get it. Almost all the treatment courses are directed towards the populations of rich nations. According to a tracker by US-based organization Knowledge Ecology International, Pfizer has signed contracts exclusively with high-income and upper-middle-income countries, mostly from Europe and North America. No African country figures in the list, although the region has the lowest vaccination rates and is most in need of treatments. Pfizer has indicated that low- and middle-income countries will come on board for Pax-Levit through the medicine-spatting pool, only in 2023. Public health movements are calling for urgent action to be taken to stop the devastation of people's health and profiteering of big pharma for one more year. They have stated that freeriding on people's suffering should be stopped and companies like Pfizer and Moderna should be reined in.