This is St. Tech, Hawaii. Community matters here. Habari Ghani. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough. Welcome and thank you for joining Sister Para. Power. Habari Ghani, which is a standard Swahili greeting meaning, how are you? Our topic for this episode is Kwanzaa. What is it? And how to celebrate Kwanzaa. Kwanzaa, which means first fruits of the harvest in the African language, his Wali, has gained tremendous acceptance. Kwanzaa has come to be observed by more than 18 million people worldwide as reported by the New York Times. Kwanzaa is a unique African-American celebration with focus on the traditional African values of family, community responsibility, commerce, and self-improvement. This afternoon, our Sister Power VIP guest, author, attorney, Daphne E. Barbie, and Dr. Marcia Howard. Habari Ghani. Habari Ghani. Happy Kwanzaa to you and to everyone. Yeah. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Absolutely. This is very exciting. This is the first time the Think Tech has had a Kwanzaa celebration here. So we're going to show them how it's done. Yes, we will. So first, let's talk about what is Kwanzaa? So Kwanzaa is an African-American holiday, which comes right after Christmas on the 26th, and it was created in 1966 by Dr. Maulani Karunga, who was a Pan-African in Los Angeles. And it was just a way for African-Americans to come together and celebrate all of the good things that we have gone through, all of the triumphs and the tribulations, and to let the generations behind us know the struggles that we've gone through and how we have overcome and just celebrate the goodness of who we are as a people. I love that. Daphne, explain to us how many days, tell us about the principles of Kwanzaa. First of all, I have a happy Kwanzaa card for all of you. All right. So Kwanzaa was given a Kwanzaa gift yesterday, it's African-American angel, whoop, whoop. So there she is, and here the card is, and it's a way of African-Americans celebrating self-identity, being proud of who you are, remembering our history, paying respect and homage to our ancestors, and to look forward to see how we're going to improve everyone and ourselves in the future. So the seven principles, by the way, today is the third day of Kwanzaa. Yes, it is. The first day is Ujima, which is collective work, working together, which we're doing now. No. This is it. He is. And so the first day is Umoja, which is unity. The second is Kujikajalika, which is self-determination. Self-determination. Mm-hmm. Third, we already talked about Ujima. Fourth is Ujamaa, cooperative economics, working together economically. Nia is the fifth day, which is purpose. Kumbha, creativity, is the sixth day. And the seventh day is Imani, which means faith. And so we're here around the third day of Kwanzaa. But we have a couple more days to go, and all of you may want to join in. Absolutely. So Kwanzaa is celebrated the day after Christmas, December 26th to January 1st. And so we're going to explain to our viewers about the Kanari here. Is that the correct Kanari? Kanara. All right. So this is the Kanari, and it has seven candles. And the colors each represent something beautiful. So the black candle obviously represents the African culture, the Africans that came here. The red candles represent the struggle of the people. And the green candles represents youth and vitality in life and the next generation to come. Mm-hmm. So today we would light a candle, starting with the black candle, and representing one for each of the seven principles. That's true. And then we also have baskets of vegetables, corn, and fruits, which again, this is Kwanzaa first fruit, because it's based upon the harvest in Africa. Yes. When you gather the fruits, getting ready to share with everybody, and the bounty of land, especially Mother Africa, which gives us so much in terms of health and healthy foods and products. And so we have the African baskets with the fruits for the first fruits. And we also have history books, both history books and family books. So a lot of the people who sit around the table and read stories or talk with stories, and when I do Kwanzaa parties, I have little tests. And people who win the test questions about black history, they win a prize, a little prize. And we all gather together and learn. It's not just eating and having a good time. We learn. And we share stories about famous African Americans or Africans, for that matter. Yes. And to further expound on the harvest, the corn represents the generation. So the kernels represent the bountiful generations that will come after us and carry on the stories from whence our grandfathers or grandmothers taught us. And actually, I am African American, well, we all are, but me and my parents are from Liberia, West Africa. Really? Yes. And so I grew up African, and I also grew up in Brooklyn, New York as an American. But strangely enough, it wasn't the typical African American experience. So we grew up eating African food, like fufu and soup and cassava leaf and palm butter. But we also grew up eating the food that the slaves carried back to Liberia.  And so it was a mixture of African and American culture. So this is actually pretty new to me, experiencing this, but it goes along with the African culture because I recently went to Liberia and just saw the beauty and what we call Ohana here in Hawaii, the family and the respect for the elders and just the storytelling and just being able to keep the culture going. So this is a beautiful way of having our African American ancestors just represented, you know, here in America. And speaking of Liberia, weren't there elections yesterday? The elections were yesterday. And who won? The soccer player. Ah! He won! Yes! The soccer player. And it was a peaceful demonstration, so we thank God for that. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. A peaceful changeover. Also speaking of Liberia, during the Civil War, there were a lot of proponents to send African Americans back to Africa, and they picked Liberia and created it, meaning the Americans did, but it was really an African country before Americans came. The Americans got there. Yeah. And so a lot of people who were enslaved or enslaved did go back to Liberia. Some of them didn't like it and came back to America and others are there. And I understand in Liberia, it's sort of a division between African Americans and the Native Africans. Right. So actually, just to tell this quick story, my mother is from the line of the Ameri-Cole Librarians, so we're able to trace our lineage back to Tennessee from the slaves that got on the ship, the ex-slaves, that got on the ship and went to Liberia. My father's side is from the Native side, from the Vi tribe. The Vi tribe are known to be very, very intelligent people. Of course. But also sometimes very lazy people, so the smart people usually make the other people work for them, but it's just so beautiful to know the heritage that I have and that what I do is to bring that into the schools with me. So as a teacher at Kailua, I often bring African American culture during Black History Month by bringing my African dance class and the drummers and the dancers to come and celebrate African culture. And I purposefully don't do it in February because some people believe that we're just Black in February since it's Black History Month, but I want to demonstrate that African American history is American history as well. So this needs to be shared as well as all the other good things that are happening. Yeah, well we have such a rich history. We do. And I'm really enjoying listening to you ladies, converse back and forth. Let's talk about the Unity Cup. Yes. So the Unity Cup is used before we light a candle. We give homage to our ancestors, and we pour out a libation. So usually we'll pour something inside. It could be water, it could be wine, it could be whatever you want. And we pour it on the ground if it's done outside. If it's done inside, you can pour it in a bowl. Just to honor. So this is our Unity Cup right here. Yes. It's just to honor our ancestors to give them respect for what they have gone through. I was fortunate to go to travel to Ghana about four or five years ago. And every time we went into the slave dungeons, you know they had the slave dungeons. They call it castles, but we call it dungeons. Dungeons. And we went into the same slave dungeon that President Obama went into. And before we go into the dungeons, you have the chiefs of the village. We all get into a circle, and they have the same libation cup. They put rum, and then they put it in their mouth and spit it out. And then they say ancestor's name. You know what I mean? To pay homage for all of those who have been enslaved, and to all of those who have continued to stay there, and who are now kings and princes and chiefs of the village. It was quite moving, and so every time we went into one of those horrific places, we always did libation and did respect. And once we were inside of the dungeon, we again formed another circle. The oldest person spoke something positive, and the youngest person spoke something positive. Beautiful. We fought our ancestors, and then we went to tour the dungeons. Yes, beautiful. And we should carry that on today into the schools. And I understand, Marcia, that you single-handedly teach black history programs to your students. Yes. Wonderful. When I came here, I started doing African dance. It's so ironic that here in Hawaii is where I got in touch with African dancing and drumming, which is an awesome privilege. And so what I decided to do is to take that into the schools. So in 2004, it was on the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser. That was the newspaper then. And in Kalihi Elementary, the principal, Mr. Mann, allowed me to turn the whole school into an African village. Wonderful. So we had pictures, we had drawings. Some of the teachers, they just really got into it. We had a king. We had a queen. We had servants. We had everything. Oh, my goodness. And it was an amazing time, and the children really responded well to it. And it was raining tremendously, and the place was packed, and the students came to love it so much. So, and I do it to every school. I've done it in Nanakuli. Oh. I've done it at Alawai. I've done it at Kailua Elementary. So much so that we were doing our practice, because we have dance class every Saturday at UH. So this one student heard the drums, and ran into the class, and said, I knew it was you. I heard the drums, and I knew it was you. So it warmed my heart that just the little things that we do to share ourselves and our culture, the students really appreciate it. Absolutely. We were speaking earlier. Daphne, I are on the Honolulu African American Film Festival Committee.  Yes. They were showing, I am not your Negro. That's right. Yes. Which is awesome. If you get a chance to see that documentary, James Baldwin is awesome. And yes. So Sehwafade is the only African West African dance and drum troupe here in Hawaii. We'll be walking in the Martin Luther King Day Parade. We'll be drumming and dancing. So come out and support us. We tried to go out, not just around February, but any chance we get to share the African culture and the American culture. We have two, what we call master drummers, Seku Kamara and Musa Bangora. They are from Guinea West Africa. So we have the privilege of having, I want to say, authentic African drummers here that are sharing their culture with us. And like I said earlier, the classes are at UH and it's an open level.  I can't wait till you come here. Oh, okay. Stephanie, I'll be there. All right. When is it? And where is it? What time? It's Saturdays. Every Saturday at UH in the Lunalilo Freeway Portables, right before you get to the stancher. He asks. Yes. It's at 10.30 to 12. We start off with a warm-up, live drumming, and yes. And then it's just a great way to work out the whole mind, body, and spirit. It's wonderful. Yeah. It's wonderful. In Hawaii there are a lot of things, a lot of events people can celebrate which pertain to African and African-Americans. I know at the Honolulu Art, they used to have African safari day and people could come there, they'd get their hair braided, they'd try on different African clothes and pictures would be taken of them. That's beautiful. This is a lot. We've been doing it for a long time, but I think it may have ended last year of you before, but we still always go down there and do that. We had dance too, but it was a lot of fun. And we have various speakers coming to the Art Museum and African Art, or African-American Art, and sharing their history and history about that. I wish we would start that up again. I've never had a chance to do it. Oh, please. Yeah, let's do it again. You're making your name. It's starting. I know how to read too. Absolutely. I will do it. I will do it. Keep the tradition going.  And I'm looking at, let's talk about our outfits. Oh, yeah. African fashion. This is really nice. Oh, yeah. I'm loving it. It feels so good. And it's giving. You know, this is what I love. Colorful. I love the African fashion. Yes. I love the beautiful jewelry and the clothes. And this is from Ghana. Okay. And I wanted to talk about the cloth here is from Nigeria. This is beautiful. This is a gift from my sister, Nedra, from Nigeria. Absolutely. Yeah. And so what do you have on? This is a dress that was made in Liberia. My parents, like I said earlier, from Liberia. And it is very giving. I know some people like to wear clothes to show off their curves. And believe me, in Africa, the women have lots of curves. But we wear loose-fitting clothing because it's hot. And just because it's very fashionable and it's very giving. And they often use their lapa. In Liberia, it's called lapa. And just to make the connection between Africa and here in Polynesia, the cloth that they wear is called tapah. And in Liberia, it's called lapa. So there's so many connections between African culture and Polynesian culture. I'll get into that later. Okay. But this is a very giving and lovely outfit that I'm really grateful that my mom has very good taste. Oh, yes she does. And yours, Daphne, is lovely. Yeah. I went to Ghana and one of the things is in the hotel that we were at, women would be there and they would say, do you want a dress? And they'd have all their cloths.  And this was a woman who said, I told her I'd skirt blouse. She measured me. And the next day she shows up and I pay her.  That would fit me. Of course. Of course. This is one of them. Very intelligent and innovative people. Wow. And the colors are so vibrant. You feel alive wearing these. You do. And all these people down the street, hey, how are you doing there?  Well when we come back, we're going to continue. This is Kwanzaa and how to continue to celebrate Kwanzaa. Thank you. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? It's RB Kelly. I'm your host of Abbot the Comfort Zone, where I find cool people with cool solutions to problems that all of us face. Now the thing is, we're really cool. And I only invite really cool people, but the thing is, I think you're kind of cool too. So I think you should come and watch. That Thursdays at 11 a.m. here on OC 16 television with Think Tech Hawaii. I'm RB Kelly, host of Abbot the Comfort Zone, and I will see you next Thursday. Welcome back. Kabari Gane. We're talking, our topic for this episode is Kwanzaa. What is it and how to celebrate Kwanzaa? And before we went on break, we were talking about our beautiful outfits from Africa. And we were talking about, we talked about the seven principles of Kwanzaa. We talked about the unity cup and the crops and the fruits. And Kwanzaa starts from December 26, and it ends with gift giving on January the 1st. So tell me something that really inspires you to continue the celebration of Kwanzaa. So I enjoy Kwanzaa. I just recently started attending some Kwanzaa celebrations. I have a friend in Waianae, Nicole Wu, and she really enjoys putting on this big, elaborate celebration, bringing all of the people. And it's not just for African-Americans. There are non-African-Americans that are welcome to participate because it is about unity and it is about family and it is about self-determination and giving and purpose and faith. And that is trans-cultural. So we open it up to all who are interested in coming. But what inspires me is that it's just a way to give back, to remember, and also to give forward to the next generation that's coming. I don't think a lot of our students, particularly here in Hawaii, we're African-American. The percentage is less than 3 percent African-Americans. And so what inspires me to continue teaching about Kwanzaa or Black history is that I think our students, the local students as well as the students who are coming from outer islands and from other countries, because my school hosts a lot of military students. And so some of these students have never heard of Black history or have never encountered Africans or African-Americans, some of them. And so I strive to just educate. I've been a special educator for the past 23 years, the first five and a half in Brooklyn, New York, before being recruited out here to Hawaii to teach. And I just make sure that I let the students know who I am, not just intellectually, but as a person. Sure. I think as a teacher we are allowed to bring all of us, all of who we are into the classroom, our trips, our experiences are growing up, and it imparts knowledge and experience to the students. And it can connect us to the students, even if they're not African-Americans. It develops respect for African-American culture in Africa. I mean, if they don't know anything and they just watch TV, they'd have all kinds of prejudices. Exactly. Because they get most of their information about African-Americans from music, from TV, from what they see in the news. And not all of it is pretty or accurate. So what I like to do is I like to do a Venn diagram and show how Polynesian and African culture are the same. So we were both navigators. The Polynesians and the Africans used the stars to travel. We're both agriculturalists, you know. We got indigenous people, usually, they get their food, their sustenance from Mother Earth. We both, and particularly in Liberia, we're the second most popular country that eats spam. I know. No, no, that's a Kwanzaa situation. No, it's not a Kwanzaa situation. But when I'm sharing African culture and Polynesian culture, just to show how we are so much alive. We're really connected, yes. We're more in common than not to use it. Yes. And the dances that tell stories through hula and African dances. We have dances for harvest, have dances for celebrations, for weddings, for funerals. So the cultures are more alike than they are different. And the only thing that they see first is the skin color. But when you get down to it, we have so much in common, respect for the elders, love of food, love of celebration, love of self. So yeah, that's what inspires me to just share what we know with the next generation coming up. That's beautiful. Yeah. I also do some Kwanzaa celebrations. I have been doing it for ever since I was very young. We had Kwanzaa celebrations in the mainland. And then when I came here, I tried to continue the tradition. And so we have dinners with certain friends of ours. And there's also a Kwanzaa display at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. It started about five years ago. And they had the canora and the first fruits. And they have a little picture book as to what Kwanzaa is. Wonderful. It's good information to know. And we cannot forget that we have Kwanzaa stamps. Yes. Kwanzaa stamps, absolutely. Yes. And then I just heard about the statue that you ate. Yeah. You know, in keeping with the Kwanzaa tradition of knowing our history, let's stick to O'ahu. And well, actually the whole state of Hawaii. And I always grumbled because there were no statues of African-Americans in Hawaii. Well, there is a statue of Donis Thompson, who was the famous African-American Hawaiian that lived here. And she was one of the people that got the women's athletic department started at UH. She's the one behind Title IX and Patsy Mink and getting Title IX passed. She was an athlete in her own right. So they dedicated a statue to her in the Stan Sheriff Arena. So you can go there and take a look at it. I will. It tells you a little bit about her history. Fabulous. And that's on O'ahu. And then go to Maui. And Maui has Martin Luther King statue outside of City Hall, which was put up about four or five years ago. And so when I go there, I bring a lay to dedicate to Martin Luther King. And they have a March 2, Martin Luther King Day in Maui. And they march up to the statue and sing and give praise and history. And so, yeah, there's places here in the state that you can go and celebrate. I know that Dolores Gutman has an organization that celebrates Kwanzaa at Kakao Kro Park. However, I don't know if they open the park or not. But if it's open, they might have it there, but they keep closing it, you know. So there's a lot of things over here that are going on. And people should know that even the U.S. presidents, they come in and celebrate Kwanzaa and let people know that Kwanzaa is happening now, maybe, you know, not this one, but the one prior. President Obama would get on to us. And Clinton, President Clinton. So people like Oprah and Maya Angelou, many stars celebrate Kwanzaa. We should let people know, just like non-Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, Kwanzaa is for everyone. It's for everyone. And in their closing, is there just in 20 seconds or less, would you like to say something special to the audience out there about Kwanzaa that we have not covered before? No, I just enjoy Kwanzaa, celebrate it with us, pay respect to African history, African American history. We're studying the true African American history and African history written by us as opposed to others. And I think you will develop a great love for our culture. And we've gone through a lot, but we're still here. We're still here. Yeah. I would like to say that Kwanzaa can be celebrated as creatively as you want it to be. And along with what Daphne said, there's an African proverb that says, until the lion tells the tale, the story will always glorify the hunter. True. Amen. I love that. We need to tell our own story written by us about us. About us. Yes. I love that. Yes. This has been just so wonderful. Thank you. I appreciate you, Marcia, Howard, and Daphne, Barbie, for coming in and celebrating Kwanzaa with us for the first time here at Think Tech. This is very special and people, oceans of aloha, peace, and love.


My name is Eileen Gu. I'm from San Francisco, California. I'm a professional skier, but only on the weekends. I do it full-heartedly and wholeheartedly and happily and same goes for school, I guess. A lot of schoolwork on the plane. Let's just say that. I was eight years old. My mom was faced with a decision to put me either in race team or in free skiing. She thought that anything would be better than racing because racing was too dangerous. So she thought whatever this free skiing thing was, that's where we'll go. In January of 2019, I was at my third World Cup in Italy and I was wearing the number one bib for the first time, so this was a really big deal. And I had fallen both of my first two runs, but I was able to take a really deep breath and really think about why I was doing this sport and what I loved about it and turning point of being able to kind of manage my own stress and, yeah, I ended up landing my run and that was actually my first World Cup win, so a big lesson right there. Yeah, trauma, buzien, tight shot. Like, roughly translates to have a greater perspective of things that are greater than myself. It was really about inspiring younger girls who maybe didn't know what the sport is or didn't know what extreme sports in general were. Bobby has been a huge inspiration for me pretty much from my first time competing when I was nine years old in 2013. I remember he signed a poster for me. Hey, what's going on? I think I got a little surprise for you right here. Oh, my God. Welcome to the Red Bull team. When I was nine, you signed a poster and you said, Eileen Gu, you're going to crush it and you signed it. Honestly, it's a dream come true. It's so exciting to be able to represent Red Bull in 2022 in China as I'm competing for China actually, so on home soil and being able to do that with a brand that I really respect supporting me will be really exciting.


So, first of all, I'd like to give a brief overview of the framework and how it works for allowing access to the past web. Then we'll go to how deployment is coming along, how it's been used for data discovery of mimeontos, branding of archives, and finally some alternates of web archiving strategies that we've been researching. So, the middle two, to throw back to Christine's brilliant talk earlier, really we feel come into the same sorts of areas that Christine was talking about, in terms of reproducibility, access to dynamic data, and so forth. OK, so a brief overview of the framework. So the main goal of mimeonto is to make it easy to access the web of the past. So say you're on the Tate Online site in the UK, you might then want to select a date that you want to see it at rather than the current version, and magically you arrive back into 2008 in the state that the website was at that point. And in this case, we've gotten it from the National Archives. So in this case, we have the reverse trend from what Christine was talking about, where instead of going from static to dynamic, we want to take that dynamic content and go back to previous static snapshots. And we want to do that automatically. We achieve this by introducing a uniform version access capability to the web that allows you to specify in one common way the time that you want to see the website at. So the web has various content management systems. These are designed to be aware of all of the versions of a resource that kind of self-contained. They have a variety of proprietary version linking mechanisms, interlinking mechanisms. Of course, this has the great advantage that the dynamism is managed. However, the web in general is completely the opposite. It's designed to forget about prior versions of a resource. It's very distributed, and hence the management of the whole thing is an impossibility. So we have a pretty hard task in order to marry those two. But of course, various resource versions online in various content management systems, such as media wiki or WordPress, in web archives such as Brewster's Disruptive Internet Archive, the UK Web Archive, Archive It and so forth, transactional archives that we'll talk about a bit later in the alternate or alternative web archiving strategies, and of course in search engine cases. But at an architectural level, the web has a very hard time dealing with these things. You can't talk about a resource as it used to be. You can only talk about the resource as it is now. The web is always in the present and never talking about the past. If you know the current URI for a resource, you can't go from there automatically back to the prior state of the resource. And given a prior state of the resource, you can't get from there back to the one that it was archived and archived of. So there are of course various approaches for this, but they're all very localised in ad hoc. The Internet Archive isn't a standard. It doesn't obey the rules of the web architecture directly and so forth. It's one centralised archive. So this is what we want to try and change. So we regard the web as a single large content management system. So what we need to do is introduce a single, uniform way of accessing versions of resources across the web. To do that, we're not going to reinvent the wheel and try to compete with the Internet Archive, of course, but instead leverage all of the systems in which archived or the past state snapshots of resources are available. So that includes web archives, of course, but also content management systems such as media wiki, software version systems and so forth. Memento's approach in this regards ticks almost all of the boxes that Christine brought up. It's distributed so versions can exist on several servers around the place. We use time as our global version indicator to say that something is version 1.0 or 1.2 really doesn't mean anything in a global sense. So the only way that we can make use of any sort of indicator is to have the global time. And it's based on the primitives of the World Wide Web, the state of the resource, which is a representation, content negotiation and linking between resources. So this is the current state of the web, essentially. We have this grey ball on the left, which is CNN, and that's the current state of the CNN homepage. In the Internet Archive, of course, there's a whole bunch of different versions of the CNN homepage, such as from April 2001, August 2007 and so forth. And there's no connection between those resources. You can't get from CNN to the Internet Archive, and unless you deconstruct the URI, you can't get from the Internet Archive to CNN. So what we want to do is introduce something in the middle that allows us to make those negotiations. We do that by introducing a resource that we call a time gate. As you can see, we've had a lot of fun coming up with names for things, and when we at Los Alamos announced that we'd produced a time gate for the World Wide Web, we got rather a lot of unintended publicity as well as intended publicity. So this time gate performs something called content negotiation, which happens all the time with browsers. So if you go to one site on your iPhone versus on your PC and you get a different site, that's content negotiation. And we make use of that capability to content negotiate in time instead of format. So you go to CNN, there's a link from CNN to the time gate. The time gate then performs the content negotiation based on time, and you end up in the Internet Archive. This is the bridge from the present to the past. We also want to have a bridge from the past to the present without knowing exactly when the lightning bolt's going to hit the steeple so you can have the DeLorean going at 88 miles an hour with the hook. So without going into that much detail, there's a link back from the archive resources through to the current representation at CNN.com. And that's it. That's the entire framework that allows us to get from the current resources through to their archived state. One thing that's really important to notice is that this solution works in a very distributed fashion. You can have multiple archives, all integrated within the same system, such as the Internet Archive, Archive It, all of the national libraries have archives and so forth. Our websiteation would be another example. So in this case, when we're building up this CNN home page, we might use that HTTP link to the time gate, then from there, content negotiate to find the best resource as it appears in all of the different archives rather than just going to the Internet Archive and hoping it's got the most appropriate copies. So if you didn't follow any of that, that's fine. Here is the one-page or one-slide memento interaction summary that you can hopefully take home. So first of all, the browser goes to the resource that it's interested in, which we call the original resource, and it says, do you have a preferred time gate? Do you know where to go to find old versions of yourself? It might say yes. Please go and see this resource that we call G. But in the current state of the web, it's very likely to say, no idea what you're talking about, you should use a default. So after selecting or being offered a time gate, the browser then goes to that time gate and says, where's the archived copy of the resource for the time that I want? The time gate then says, I know about that resource, it's at M, or I really don't know what you're talking about, you should try another time gate. And at that point, you would then cycle through the time gates that you know about, looking for one that will recognise the resource. Then finally, you'd go to the archived copy and say, hi, I want a copy of you, and it delivers it back. So that is memento in a nutshell. So what I want to talk about for the rest of the presentation is where we've gone from this, how we're using it, how it's being deployed. So we've been really lucky with deployment and we've made really significant progress towards getting this implemented and used. First of all, we're going through the standardisation process with the IETF. On the left, you can see a screenshot of the current internet draft. And we're going to release a new version before too long to try and get some more feedback before we go to the final call for that. We've had a lot of interest from both the IETF and the W3C, including people like Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Nottingham and Michael Hausenblass. On the client side, we have various memento-capable clients that have been developed by both ourselves and others. We have an add-on for Firefox called memento-fox, which is fully operational and has been endorsed by Mozilla, and an experimental version for Internet Explorer. There's also been mobile device support that has been developed by others, including an operational memento-client for Android and an iPhone iPad version, which is currently being developed. We discussed our work on this in the next version of the Code for Lib General, which hopefully should be out this month. Thanks to Chris Carpenter, who I see. We have been very fortunate to get the support of the Internet Archive, of course, Bruce DeKal. So the Internet Archive is now memento-compliant. That means that anything in the Internet Archive can be accessed through one of our browser add-ons. It's also been released as version 1.6 to the web archiving community. So as web archives upgrade, they will become memento-compliant. So we hope that we'll be able to apply a little bit of pressure at the IAPC meeting next month to try and get people to move to that version. So if you have an Internet Archive, or a web archive, I should say, which you're responsible for or related to, please have them upgrade to 1.6. It doesn't just do memento, it also has a whole bunch of other impressive features. On the server side, we also have an operational plugin for MediaWiki, which is the platform that Wikipedia uses as one of many examples. It's also been installed on the W3C wiki, which makes it memento-compatible. So you can go back and see all of the old versions of the pages using the memento clients. So again, if you have a MediaWiki somewhere, please install the plugin. You can get it from the tools you are right there or directly from the MediaWiki website. We have a validator, one of the things which a lot of people have been asking us about is, hey, we really like memento. We think we've done it right, but we're not sure. Can you have a look at that? So we put up this automated tool that goes off and acts like a memento client and tries to do all of the interactions that a regular client would do. So you give it a URI for a time gates, for an original resource, or for a memento, and it will go through and report the success or failure for each of the different sorts of interactions that a regular memento client would do. And this validator is then kept up-to-date with the IETF internet draft. So when we make a change to the internet draft, we then update it in the validator to make sure that everyone's on the same page. We realise that it's going to be quite a while before everyone becomes memento compliant. So we also have made quite a lot of progress and proxy support. So this is a system, or these are systems, I should say, that are hosted by Los Alamos and Old Dominion, which make internet sites that have snapshots of versions memento compliant by proxy. So the web archives are an obvious point, but also all wonderful. All of the media wiki systems that we know about are compliant by proxy, including things like Wikipedia and Wikia. Of course, we'd prefer that everything was natively supported memento. However, we realised that this is a stop-gap measure in order to make the websites available to memento clients by their bootstraps. Documentation work is ongoing. We try to include more information about introductions to understand the memento system, how to recognise a memento, a time-gator or an original resource just using the HTTP headers, guidelines for servers that host mementos, and so on and so forth. We're constantly trying to update that information. If there's anything that would be helpful in the guide, please let us know and we'll do our best to include it. As far as funding goes, we started off with a very small grant between 2007 and 2010, of which only about $50,000 went towards memento work, and it was more exploratory and scope-defining. We were then very fortunate to get a much larger grant of $1 million from the Library of Congress for 2010 and all of this year to do things like specification and hence the internet draft outreach, such as today, tool development for both clients and server, and further research that we'll get towards. OK, so memento and data. We feel that memento's time travel on the web possibilities are really powerful and not just for the human web, but also for the semantic web in which machines crawl around looking for data that they can interact with. This uses a process called following your nose in HTTP speak. So I'll give you a quick walk-through about how it will work for the human side, and then we'll try and relate that over to the data side for how a machine might use this. So that's the memento framework. You've got the current representation of CNN, obviously intended for humans. You can go to a time gate. The time gate then sends you to an archive copy, which is closest in time to where you want to be. So we have a pick of the day at Los Alamos, which is Herbert sending next to a folder on which we superimpose the current copy of the BBC. That's our original resource, which has the URI in the slide. You can then get from there to a time gate. The time gate will take you to the archive versions. From this, we can do some cute things by just following those redirections, following those interactions, and build a library, a little movie in which time goes forwards and Herbert's t-shirt changes, the date goes forwards and so on. This is cute, but not very useful because it's just a movie. Okay, enough of Herbert. So a really quickly inserted slide. Thank you very much for Christine for bringing this up. So as data becomes more dynamic and processes become more dynamic, reproducibility tends towards zero. However, if we had static and discoverable snapshots of both the data and the process, then we could have at least points in time in which reproducibility was possible. And that's what we want to do with momentum. So, for example, there is a linked data version of Wikipedia called DBpedia. They take the information from Wikipedia, scrape out everything that they can, put it into RDF and publish it, and they do this for every single page that has an info box in Wikipedia. They do this every six months and currently they throw away all of the previous versions. Thankfully, they don't actually throw them away. They just store them in a big dump file. So we can do momentum on them. So to walk through the same process, we start with the original resource, which is an RDF description of France. We follow the time gate link to the time gate. We then can negotiate in date time to say, I want the version of this data as it was at a particular point in time. We follow that link and we get the data that we're interested in. We can do that for all of the versions in order to build up time series data for processing. So, to practice what we preach, we did exactly that. This is a graph of the GDP per capita which we built up over time just using HTTP interactions with momentum. So here's the first version of DBpedia in September 2007 and then every six months they publish a new version. Of course, by that time, the data in Wikipedia has changed and hence we get a new data point. So, to date the United States is an example, it stays pretty constant through various versions in 2008 and November, sorry, in 2009 it jumps up to here and then remains static again. But then other graphs are more up and down. You can see the trends of the GDP per capita which we built up just from using momentum against the original resource to find the archived versions. This isn't a particularly useful to economists piece of information. I'm sure they have much, much better sources but you can imagine, take that out to the nth degree, you plot across all of the information in Wikipedia and hence DBpedia and it can become really powerful. OK, momentum and discovery. So another point which Christine made was we need to be able to discover things. We need to have these links between resources semantically typed in order to understand how we came from where we started. Very few sites currently provide this time gate link and hence we're going to need other methods in order to find momentum. One way that we are looking at doing this is a batch discovery process which we call a time map. This is an ORE aggregation and object reuse and exchange from OAI and it includes at least all of the URIs and date times of the archive copies of the resource that an individual archive knows about. These time maps can then be aggregated across systems in order to provide access from one point to resources that are spread all around the web. These aggregators could be in lots of different places. There could be one at OCLC, one at Los Alamos and so forth. The interesting point is then being able to take that information from an aggregator and aggregate it again into other resources. So before long using a bottom-up approach you'll end up with at least one aggregator that has access to all of the information which is available to momentum clients. The format for these time maps is quite simple. Although ORE uses RDF we've introduced a new much simpler style which is based on the link header format which has been recently standardised in the ITF. So ingesting this information is not difficult. OK, that's great. That means that we can find the mementos themselves, the archived copies, but how do we find the time maps that describe them? One way that we've been thinking about is to use an atom feed that instead of saying here are all of the mementos says here is the time maps for each of the mementos. This would allow applications to remain in sync with archives such as the aggregator which would redirect clients to the right place. In this case, we'd have one atom entry for each original resource. For each system that hosts mementos the entry would then provide this time map link to the time map that describes whereabouts each archived copy is and the time at which it was present as the original resource. At the IIPC meeting in the Hague in May we'll be hopefully going to discuss this. We've also been thinking about a batch process for discovery of mementos directly and one way that we've thought about that is to use the robots.txt file which is a file that servers use to convey their policies to crawling robots such as for the internet archive. So what we'd like to do there would be to add a directive that supports the discovery of mementos even if they're maybe not directly within that server. So for example, there's a whole bunch of conference sites for GCDL, the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries at GCDL 2011, GCDL 2010, GCDL 2001 and so on. All of those sites are archived on gcdl.org, the main conference website such as gcdl.org. So what we'd like to do is have some way that gcdl.org could say this resource is a memento for gcdl2002.org's homepage. And from there, a memento crawler can simply say OK, I know that's a memento if it has all of the appropriate links you can then find the time maps, crawl, the site and find all of the mementos and so forth. Hopefully then from there you'd be able to find an atom feed which has the links to the time maps or all of the resources and all of a sudden you have access to all of the information. Just again by following your nose starting from one point and going out and following semantically typed links. This method we're going to try and promote via the internet draft and hopefully we won't get too much backlash for adding another directive into robots.txt. OK, memento and branding. This is a topic which David Rosenthal also here has brought to our attention and we think it's critical to understand because if there's no incentive for archives because all of their resources are being displayed out of their own context how do they get funding, how will they promote themselves? So if you think about this union homepage there's HTML, there's a whole bunch of CSS there's a whole bunch of images, there's maybe some videos and they could all be recovered from different web archives. This poses a serious branding challenge for us. So currently if you go to the Wayback Machine, the internet archive you'll get this nice header at the top which is the Wayback Machine's branding for this particular page in this case, February 12th of 2010. This applies to the whole page because all of those resources came from that archive. However, because we're meant to have distributed and each resource stands alone it might decide that the most appropriate copy of this photo is actually an archive bit or in the UK web archive. However there's no branding associated with it. Even worse we might get the branding from the Wayback Machine that doesn't have anything to do with this photo. They might not have a copy of that just by the way that the crawler works. Or these images, or this double-click add and so on. This is one of the things that we're intending to research. We don't have any great new insights on this yet. Some of the proposed approaches have been to have a sidebar in which resources have their archives advertised or to have mouseovers that say that this resource comes from a particular web archive. I guess Herbert would have done this talk a lot more slowly than I have but onto the last one. Alternative web archiving strategies. Currently web archives are all crawl-based in which you have a robot that crawls the web, records what it sees and keeps it in archive. What we've been looking at is a process called the transactional archive in which the server cooperates with the archive to make sure that every single version of a resource gets stored. So here's the current crawl-based approach. You have the crawler so that could be hero tricks from the Internet Archive. That sends a request to a web server for a particular resource. It gets back that resource in the response which it stores somewhere in its very large storage array. This is great. However, the crawler only sees what it sees. It doesn't see resources that other browsers might see. It can be deceived by cloaking and it can have the geolocation stuff applied to it so you would only get the US version of the page whereas you would never see the French version of the page, for example. So what we're looking at is a server-side transactional archive in which the web server cooperates by sending each version of the resource to a submission system that then puts it into the storage array. It does this when any old browser triggers it. So this could be someone in Paris comes to the site and gets the French version and it stores the French version as opposed to the Internet Archive crawlers which will only ever see the American version. So this gives us a complete history of the changes of the site. There are some examples of this already that we're not the first people to do this. There's a product called TT Apache which is open source, Page Vault and Vignette Web Capture which are commercial products. So we've developed an Apache module called ModTA for transactional archive which captures the URI, the headers in the body of the response and then at the same time as returning it to the client it also posts it to the transactional archive's submission URI. So here's ModTA when it gets the request into the web server this copies the information over to our grisly-based web submission system which then stores it in the file system and the metadata in a Berkeley DV. At the same time, Apache also then sends it back to the browser and to the real user. So we've been running a transactional archive on that Pick of the Day site and also on the MumentoWeb.org site so if you've happened to have hit that up during the talk then you've populated a new instance of one of those pages in our file system. So that's the storage side. On the access side we of course natively support Mumento and hence if you go to MumentoWeb.org with a Mumento client you can go back and see all of those previous versions. The archive content is currently immediately available although in the release version we'll have the option for an embargo period and we support the export of the WAC files which is the standard for archiving and for transferring archived web resources. A development timeline currently we're finalising some of the development at Los Alamos such as the embargo periods and so forth, some of the configuration options and this is being tested both at ODU and with some other partners. The submission and access is finalised and as I said the development focus is going to be on collection management and configuration. We hope to release a version of this this year, probably in the fall it'll be open source and of course any contributions to that work would be appreciated. That's our update and again I would like to apologise for not being here and if there are any questions I'd be very happy to answer them. Very. I'm wondering how Mumento deals with the challenge that sites aren't as we were hearing this morning static anymore and I'm thinking in terms of WordPress for example that I could imagine creating a time gate in WordPress somehow that was aware of WordPress's own storage of revision history presented something that was at a certain time as it was at a certain time in the past but then WordPress isn't simply the content it's also a skin that people have created it's whatever other pieces are in a sidebar it can't even present its own site probably a few years down the road the way it actually was at a point in time so when you're thinking about developing a Mumento awareness in something like a media wiki or a WordPress or tools of that sort what does that really mean and what would the creators of that kind of compatibility need to try to be aware of and do? For a media wiki we're pretty fortunate that they have very good archiving or versioned history of almost everything they don't have a good versioned history for the themes however it is available the resources are available I should say however you can't just install a plugin for it you can actually get in and modify the core code WordPress we did I don't think we've looked at WordPress actually we looked at Drupal and found their underlying version management system is not as strong as Meteorokies and they reuse URIs in certain circumstances so that makes it slightly troubling so for the themes and images having copies of them with time is very important so that you can then instead of having it as part of the content system for WordPress if they were in an external archive then because we were able to distribute it you could then fetch the images in this CSS and so forth from that archive rather than directly from WordPress I know what you're just about to say so if you get in and modify the code of course if you change to PHP then you have another problem well in the essence of themes and skinning is often code and so it won't run enough you may be running a future version that can no longer even run the theme and it feels like you're back in the world where all you can rely on is the internet archive kind of snapshot of the day it's very hard to imagine how we're going to get even systems with revision history to do this, John so there are two things that would, two ways that we're approaching this problem the naive way is well it's the information that the user is probably after which is being preserved so whether or not it's got current ads from the current day rather than from 2007 they're probably not going to care as long as they've got the information from the page from 2007 however if you're actually interested in how 2007 sites looked because you're an HCI person then you really don't care about the content so that's not a particularly satisfying answer to everyone and the way that we're looking at it at the moment and this is very much research and not necessarily going to work is to use copy on write file systems which preserve snapshots of every single change to the file system you can do that directory by directory so if you had all of your PHP files for example in snapshotting directories on top of that which roll your data back or roll your PHP back I should say to use the version at the time you wanted so then you really would have the process archived as well as the content so you're thinking that was very good Thank you Rob, you've made fabulous progress since we last talked about this and I'm glad I could have set you up so well it says we're really thinking about some of the same problems and there's much to go forward two questions, one kind of a short one and one a longer one if I may the shorter one is on your slide about the branding and I'm wondering why it is that you're thinking of that as a branding issue as opposed to a question of identity and persistence so that people can know exactly where each one came from Right, they're very much interrelated problems so it also comes to the trust at the same time that if you don't know or if the user is not informed as to where each resource that makes up the view comes from then there are three problems you lose the branding for the archive in which case they don't get any name recognition they can't then sell themselves as we're the internet archive or we're the British libraries we get so many hits and people know our name so if you just had a video archive or an image directly a CSS archive is the worst of all possible situations because you'll never see this CSS because it's a process on top of the HTML so why would anyone give money to run or use money to run a CSS archive even though it would be particularly valuable the user then also can't see where it comes from which means that they don't have any information available to them to know whether they can trust the representation that's being delivered to them so if this image came from an untrustworthy source that instead replaced every single image of Bill Clinton with Mickey Mouse the browser would still say hey this is the closest in time image for this particular original resource I should display it so at the moment everything is fine because trust with the archives are available however in the future if this were to really take off you might have spammers creating their own momentum archives of ads just to be inserted into pages and in that case we really need to be able to know whether or not we can trust where this image is coming from we need to know the archive did that answer the question? it did let me pose the other one just to frame it but then give David his time and if you have time to come back to my fine it's on the slide that you had before with your three little charts about reproducibility dropping early on that one if we have time to talk about that in more depth I hope we will because I think you're exactly right here and I'm thinking about streaming data which is harder and harder to reconstruct whether it's the sensor networks, the flux net all kinds of observational climate data have these characteristics and the reproducibility problem which is an extremely high bar even though that word is kind of scattered around the data management plans it's a really, really high bar to think about so let me hold that and leave to David and if we have time to come back please do I just wanted to point out that it's not a hypothetical issue here and in a January post on my blog I used the example of a journal called Grubb which went out of publication and is now claimed to be available through four separate archives there's Portico Portico claims to have it and they do in fact have it but you need to pay them in order to get it most people won't be able to secondly the KB, the KB has it but you can only get at it if you're at the KB thirdly the internet archive claims to have it and what they have is the front page the abstracts of all the articles and for every full text article they have a login page the internet archive if this was a subscription journal and they couldn't collect the actual text and then there's Clocks which has triggered this content, it's open access all the content is there so that in this framework where it's entirely up to an archive what they claim to have you have three chances out of four and when you follow your nose you're going to end up at something that isn't actually the content you want and this is a serious problem we're going to have effectively the analog of search engine optimization wars in archiving and the branding issue is just the tip of this iceberg and I'm really passing this but this is just the meeting edge of a big problem but let's get back Christine's point imagine that so I just wanted to build on what both of you have talked about for a minute and going back to a couple of themes that Christine mentioned around marrying policy and incentives I think one of the big challenges in a lot of the archives that maintain large collections of web data for example it's not just an issue of branding it goes back to what are the constraints that that particular institutional entity has to operate under and one of the results is not only this problem of can the archive collect material in the first place crossing barriers but also then can it be re-displayed so in some cases image content may not appear on a public archive because it happens to be individually excluded based on an active robots.txt and for archives like the internet archive we actually check those exclusions and cash them in 24-hour windows so if there's an active exclusion that may not be the same site owner we have to respect those constraints in order to maintain the level of openness that we're able to provide for national libraries they follow completely different standards and every individual archive is beholden to a different set of policies and legislation so one idea that we've actually been trying to explore within the community and be interested in hearing some thoughts about this is to borrow from the internet security industry and their concepts around these anonymous data collaboratives so conceptually what you enable individual actors to do is to contribute information about locations on the web but you do that in an anonymous way so that you have a repository that's in aggregate reflective of all the activity and you have a little bit more information about what's going in and out so imagine a context in which Memento as a researcher tool in the global community could leverage that kind of data set and know where these various resources were located and even if we had to work in this imperfect context where some material couldn't be made publicly accessible and you'd have to be on site or you'd have to present credentials as a validated researcher in recognized academic context etc it may be a stepping stone toward getting towards some of the quality issues and also trust that both of you have articulated anyway it's something we're all struggling with we're trying to figure out how do we contribute how do we maximize the openness because this open versus closed world is incredibly difficult to navigate and it only Memento only works if we can maximize the amount of information that's available for the collection of data sets of interest and then we can get to the point where hopefully the content follows from there I have nothing further to add essentially on that topic other than that although in the current implementation all of the time gates are completely open you could have time gates that were community specific in which you had to authenticate to the time gate either via username and password, via Shibboleth, via open ID that sort of thing in which case after you have established your credentials with the time gates which is the resource that does the public redirections it could then make better decisions for you as to where you would want to be taken and that information that Chris was just talking about would be perfect in order to make those sorts of decisions so for example the Austrian web archive you can only access when you're on site although I understand that that might be changing if they had a policy where only people who are currently in Austria as opposed to only within their library you can do it then you can imagine a time gate which people in the .at domain could use in order to access resources from the .at domain so there's a couple of ways that Memento may be able to help in that regard using the sorts of information that Chris and David would I'm glad Chris brought the open closed in because that's one of the policy flags and I guess maybe the only other thing to pursue at this point is free to which Memento may be able to respect policy flags also and this is a big move of Creative Commons and Science Commons too is to try to mark data in ways that you know what rights are attached to it and that's going to be one more I mean talk about an intersection of technology people and policy I mean that's really it right there that we've got to deal with and would you see that information being attached at the URI level so for example in the HGPB response you'd get back a link to Creative Commons license to say that this particular resource has this license and it means that that can be respected or at the collection level where you'd say all of these resources have this particular policy attached to them well you're far better the technical expert on that than I am but let me take that back up to a larger question and it's one that I've raised within the board the Board on Research Data and Information I hope will be addressed at this August meeting at Berkeley with data site and some others and Birdie is doing part of that is that the kind of policy pressure has been on getting people to site data properly but my argument is the problem starts much earlier in the life cycle is people producing data have no real way of marking it in any package of appropriate granularity to decide what to site and even if the investigator says okay this is the right granularity once it gets mixed up and mashed up in lots of other ways whatever the unit is is going to look very different to the re-user so do you need to deal with the citation problem at the point of origin or farther down the line right now it's only being looked at farther down the line we need to look at it at the point of origin if we're going to figure out whether it's going to be marked up with policy with the persistent identifiers so that Memento, RE, anybody else can pick it up internet archive and be able to handle it properly so alright that was a fantastic conversation are there any other questions or four comments well with that did you have another question or was that more towards the policy well I'd like other people to have an opportunity surely there's other questions around here and you and I can continue that when it links do you want to go back to that slide with your three cute little charts on it could you explain to us what you mean by reproducibility there I think that would help so by reproducibility here I mean given the data and the process that you applied to the data you end up with the same result so given a data set given some code or some process that runs on top of that data set if you can reapply the process at a later point in time to the data and you end up with the same result then your your experiment is reproducible so here as data changers you can apply the same process to changing data and you'll end up with different results so it's not reproducible because you don't have access to the prior state of the data if you have a static data set and a changing process you have the same problem so here when you add those two together those two pictures you end up with a curve that turns towards zero that's actually a fairly weak definition of reproducibility that's a low bar because you're just putting a black box in there saying given these inputs do I get the same outputs where recreating the experiment recreating the study or what we're thinking about in terms of science is way harder than that I'm only talking about for the purposes of the weekend reproducing access to computationally processable resources as opposed to the entire scientific domain which is mostly what Victoria Stodden is talking about in reproducibility the computational but that's a small subset of actual research that people would like to make reproducible so that clarity helped is the again when NSF says reproducibility and data management plans it's meaning something much grander and when the OAIS guidelines say mandatory all in bold independently understandable is having a much higher bar than what you've got here and this is really hard right there we only hope to provide some small part of the solution towards this small part of the very large problem thank you for making me clarify that okay well thank you all very much


In this presentation we will take a look at inherent risk and control risk with relation to the audit of inventory, the inventory management process. Recalling our procedures here when we think about the auditing of inventory we're going to take a look at inventory we're going to assess the inherent risk. First a word from our sponsor. Well actually these are just items that we picked from the YouTube shopping affiliate program but that's actually good for you because these aren't things that were just given to us from some large corporation which we don't even use in exchange for us selling them to you these are things that we actually researched purchased and used ourselves. Here we have a western digital WD elements 20 terabyte usb 3.0 desktop external hard drive we use as part of our backup system noting that if you lower the number of terabytes of storage the price will lower dramatically as well when you're thinking about a backup system you're usually thinking about an online system or an external hard drive system like this or ideally some combination between the two given you some redundancy you can also work directly from an external hard drive like this but there are some drawbacks to doing that one being if you use this as your primary drive you're working from it's no longer a backup drive and you're going to need a backup system possibly another external hard drive and or some kind of cloud backup system and if you're working on something that takes up a lot of short term memory a lot of RAM as you're working on it such as video editing the external hard drive can slow up the system so you might want to come up with some kind of system where you download the project you're working on to your computer to your C drive or possibly to a solid state drive which is a much more expensive external hard drive as you do the work once the work is done then save the project to an external hard drive such as this if you would like a commercial free experience consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com where we have many different courses you can purchase one at a time or have a subscription model given you access to all the courses courses which are well organized have other resources like excel files and pdf files to download and no commercials we're going to assess the control risk and then we're going to use those for the detection risk process that's going to be related to us so remember that the inherent risk control risk in essence you can think of those basically outside of the auditors control those are things that are kind of managed or decided on on in some way or the other by the company and then we are going to take those risks and determine the detection risk which is what we do have control over through the amount of testing that we will do so we have to consider these two risk factors inherent risk control risk and then consider them with relation to detection risk so first we will consider inherent risk now inherent risk you'll recall is going to be the risk that it's just inherent within the process so if we were to basically remove the controls altogether then you would think that's the inherent risk that's just inherently risky now note the business doesn't have a lot of control over the inherent risk other than the fact that they chose to be in that business and chose to take on whatever inherent risks are in relation to it then they look at those inherent risks they put in place the internal controls related to them that are supposed to mitigate those inherent risks for things that should mitigate the risk of material misstatement as well the thing we're concerned with as our job for the auditor so we're going to be wanting to depend on the internal controls as well so we need to have an understanding of these things so we have the inherent risk items the auditor will need to think about industry related factors and operating engagement characteristics while analyzing possibility of material misstatement with regards to inventory and of course that's going to be our main goal here we're thinking about material misstatement with regards to inventory in the financial statement in this section when there is when there is a lot of industry competition so if we're happened to be in an industry that has a lot of competition there are often problems with the correct valuation of inventory so there's more inherent risk so if we happen to be in an industry where there's a lot of competition how do we know what the value of the inventory is it's tough to say because it's volatile given the nature of the industry that we are in of course inventory is going to be a large asset type of account on the books and we typically think of it as the lower of cost or market type of calculation in other words we have to put the inventory on the books if we purchased it we typically put it on there at cost even though we're going to market up and sell it of course and then when we when we make it we're going to put it up in there in some kind of valuation on the on the purchasing or the production process in terms of the valuation but it's quite possible that if there's a lot of volatility in the market that the value of that inventory can decline to possibly below what the cost is that we either we paid for it or produced it for in that case we as the auditors are concerned because we don't want to overvalue the inventory because remember we were typically we're typically on the you know conservative side in terms of valuation we'd rather in other words possibly undervalue than overvalue because that would normally be a safer position in terms of the auditing type of process so volatility is a problem for us or a type of inherent risk we'll have to look into technology can also result in material misstatement as a result of obsolescence so notice if you're in a type of industry that uses technology that needs to be updated a lot in order to kind of track this type of information if the technology then becomes obsolete if you're using systems that become old then that could be a problem as well in terms of valuation small products of high value are more susceptible to theft so notice if you obviously if your inventory is something like diamonds or something like that then that's going to be more of a if you're selling something like forklifts it's kind of not likely that your inventory of forklifts are going to be someone's going to come in and steal the forklifts possibly can happen but not nearly as likely if you sell diamonds so if you have diamonds or something like that then of course we would consider the diamonds to be more inherently risky in that they're more subject to possible theft and obviously the the company would be well aware of that inherent risk as well and probably have safeguards in place for that auditor should understand related party transactions related to acquiring raw materials and selling finished products whenever we consider inventory related party transactions remember those transactions that are with people that are related or entities related such as subsidiaries to the company are suspect transactions because we're relating to someone that doesn't isn't a market factor we don't have the same market forces so if we have related party transactions we need to look into them see if they're material and see whether or not they have been recorded properly or what the valuations are with regards to those transactions prior year misstatements are good indicators of potential misstatements in the current year and so of course the standard audit practice of look at what happened last year and try to use that to figure out what to do this year applies to the inventory if there's a problem last year we're more skeptical about the situation of course this year as well that will increase then the inherent risk factors so we have the inventory control risk now we're moving to control risk and recall that the control risk is going to be something that of course the auditor knowing the inherent risks of the industry that they are in puts in the controls into place in order to basically mitigate the type of inherent risks we as the auditor want to also depend on the controls because we believe that the controls will mitigate the the ability of or the fact or the likelihood of a material misstatement so we want to see what controls are in place we have an understanding of the process an understanding of the company we've assessed what the inherent risks are then we want to think about the internal controls that have been put in place and whether or not we can rely on them so we want to understand and document the inventory management process based on a reliant strategy so what is the process of inventory we need to understand it and then we can plan and perform tests of controls on inventory transactions so then we want to basically understand what you know the controls are within the organization then we think about how we can test for those controls our goal of course is to hopefully be able to test for controls if it's a large company we pretty much have to if it's a small company we may have less less controls rely on them less but we were hoping we can rely on the controls test the controls which will be less testing than if we had to do all the testing and get all of our audit assurance all of our evidence from the substantive testing so we're going to test the actual controls the safeguards within the organization then we're going to set and document the control risk for the inventory management process so then we could set what the control risk would be once we set the control risk of course we can then consider the detection risk once we have the inherent risk the control risk we consider the detection risk the thing we have kind of control over through the amount of testing we do typically with regards to substantive testing the more detailed testing going out to the client you know doing things pulling out inventory files watching looking at the inventory observing watching processes those kind of things so now we're going to look at the control activities and tests we have the assertion of occurrence so with regards to occurrence we're going to observe and evaluate good segregation of duties and as we go through these remember when we think about controls we want to first think you know are these controls do we have the control set up to the controls look good in terms of what kind of controls are set up in plan and theory and then whether or not they've actually been implemented those are two completely different things you can have good controls and then bad implementation of the controls because they can be take more time so we want to go and make sure that that there is actual occurrence of the controls as well how we can observe and evaluate good separation of duties so segregation of duties is one of those things they can actually take more time but can be a safeguard against problems that will be happening so we want to make sure we can observe to see that those are indeed in place and then we can look at review and test procedures for transfer of inventory we can review and test procedures for issuing materials to the manufacturing department so we're going to look at these controls these type these are the key components the transaction components things are moving within the inventory system we want to test the controls relation to them review and test entity procedures related to a count number sequence of material requisitions so we have the material requisitions forms which should be have a pre-numbered or number sequence to them and then we're going to observe physical safeguards over the inventory then we have the assertion of completeness with regards to completeness review and test entities procedures related to consignment goods so when we're thinking about completeness we're often thinking about the idea of the concept of consignment because you'll recall when we're thinking about inventory we're often thinking that if the if the entity is going to make an error on inventory or if they were to do something on purpose to misstate inventory they'd probably overstate the inventory because that would make them look better if they overstate the inventory but when we consider completeness there could be an error with regards to completeness with regards to consignments because consignments can be kind of confusing that would be basically the people who physically have the inventory aren't actually the owners of the inventory so one company would be providing the inventory to another even though they still own the inventory the other company then possibly facilitating a sale and then once the inventory is sold giving some some portion of that sale back to the original owner of the inventory so with regards to completeness we want to we want to consider the proper allocation of the inventory to the records then we have the authorization we're going to review authorized production schedules we want to basically review the authorization process review and test procedures related to developing inventory levels and those used to control them then we have the assertion of accuracy so we're considering the assertion of accuracy review and test procedures related to taking physical inventory so they should be taking a physical inventory of course this is one of the major things with regards to audit that will kind of consider many of the new auditors will will go out and the company will actually do a physical inventory typically towards the end of the year and the auditors get to go out there and count you know the inventory and the physical inventory which is always a exciting time and then we have the review and test procedures to develop standard costs so we'll review and test the procedures that develop those standard costs that's kind of like estimated costs and this would be in like a production type of process review and test variance reports so the difference between the standards and what actually happened again more of a something that would happen if we're making the inventory producing inventory as opposed to purchasing and selling it review and test procedures for detecting obsolete slow moving and excess quantities so we want to see the procedures for that because if something's obviously obsolete or slow moving or if we have excess quantities it might well be the case that we're overvaluing the inventory given the fact that some of it is old and note that within the audit process this could be a real problem for us because we as the auditor may not be experts in valuing inventory so when it comes to the question of well is this piece of inventory now below what the cost is should we write it down you know we don't really have the expertise to do that we might need experts to come in if we're valuing something like clothing or something like that or carpets or something like if it's old inventory how do we know how how uh what the value of the inventory has will be is it still valued correctly if it's been there for a long time we may need some expert help in order to value some inventory that might be slow moving inventory review the reconciliation of perpetual inventory to the general ledger control control account so you'll recall the perpetual inventory system if we're talking about a publicly traded company they're probably recording the inventory as sales happen we want to be comparing the perpetual inventory system to the gl the general ledger the controlling account then we have the cutoff the assertion of the cutoff testing and that's going to be the end of the year you'll recall the end of the year type of of information what are the controls related to it to make sure things are recorded in the proper time period review review and test procedures related to processing inventory that is on receiving reports into the perpetual records so again the perpetual records those records that we would be tracking on a perpetual basis with relation to inventory so we want to consider then the receiving reports and then how they're going to relate to the perpetual records why because when should be we be recorded the inventory into the system at that point in time that we have received it oftentimes so the receiving reports then often being the triggering point and we want to make sure that there's the proper controls over those again you might think this sounds like something we did in the purchasing process you're right because there's going to be overlap within the purchasing process and the inventory the inventory process because many of the things that we purchase quite possibly be one of the major things we purchase being of course inventory review and test procedures for removing inventory from the perpetual records because of shipment of goods so then of course the other side of things when we make sales we have the review of the perpetual inventory records going down because of the shipment so again we want to test the thing that should be triggering the inventory to be decreasing when should it be decreasing when we completed the work in accordance with revenue recognition when we no longer have ownership of the inventory when does that typically happen when with the shipping happens when the inventory leaves that's when we did the job and therefore that's what we want to tie out to the cutoff testing to make sure that the inventory going out lines up in the proper time period and then we have the assertion of classification review the procedures and forms for inventory classification next we have presentation review inventory reports general ledger and chart of accounts for proper proper aggregation and disaggregation we're going to review procedures and forms used to create inventory disclosures so how are they going to make those inventory disclosures and then we're going to review disclosure checklist and related disclosures for reliance on completeness so you'll note again that as we think about these controls some of them are budding up against some of the other controls we have tested as we consider other processes those being the purchasing process in particular as well as the sales process as part and possibly human resources and payroll to some degree as well so as we consider these individually note they are interrelated in some degrees and we're going to be testing the controls of one in some to some degree to some component as we do the other we want to take that into consideration when we do the planning process now we're going to be considering inventory transactions looking first at the assertion of occurrence so the primary worry of the auditor is that every record recorded inventory transaction actually occurred so that we're thinking about the inventory transactions if the inventory transaction was recorded we're worried that it was that it actually happened that the actual occurrence happened that was recorded so the thing we're thinking about with occurrences well what if they just made a transaction that didn't actually happen did it actually occurs there's something behind the transaction that should have caused the transaction the auditor will also be worried that goods may be stolen it's another concern within occurrence the primary tests of controls then will be review and observation those are the primary tests of controls used to test the control for procedures now we're going to test inventory transactions with the assertion of completeness with regards to completeness the main control procedures relate to the the recording inventory that has been received so when we're considering completeness have we recorded the inventory that has been received because now we're considering of course with regards to completeness the end thing that we have that in financial statements we can consider are they including all that they should be including with regards to inventory in other words are there inventory that's not being recorded in in terms of the transaction or isn't being a transaction that's not being processed within the end procedure now this is going to be something that's going to be closely related to the purchasing process so something that we're probably going to be testing within the purchasing processing can basically review the procedures within the purchasing process with regards to the assertion of completeness and the receiving of the inventory and recording the receiving of the inventory then we have authorization of inventory transactions we're considering authorization with regards to inventory transaction primary worry here is the unauthorized purchase of product of production activity that may cause excess levels of certain types of finished goods the next assertion with regards to inventory's transaction is accuracy inventory transactions not properly recorded can result in misstatements that directly affect the amounts reported on the financial statements so when we're considering the assertion of accuracy with regards to inventory it's really important of course because the inventory in and of itself is generally something that's going to be material and if something is inaccurately reported there's going to be a direct effect on the financial statements and of course we are here to give an opinion on the accuracy of the financial statements inventory purchases need to be recorded at the correct price and the actual quantity received so we need to make sure that the inventory that's that's going into the process is recorded one at the correct price and the correct quantity inventory shipped must be correctly recorded in cost of goods sold and the related revenue recognized so when we ship the inventory recall of course that's the point in time that we would ship it out because we sold it there's going to be two components to that when when we have the sales process happening right that the sale we have the revenue component revenue is going up and then we have accounts receivable or cash that would be going up as well then we have the inventory area that we're kind of thinking about here inventory of course would then be going down inventory would go down and revenue should be recognized typically at this at the point in time when the work is completed when we and on the expense side and the cost of goods sold when we have used the expense in order to help us to generate revenue matching principal expense recognition revenues recognized when we did the work in order to generate the revenue both those should be happening at the point in time when we ship the inventory typically cost of goods sold the expense being recorded inventory going down at that point in time then we have the inventory transactions uh assertion of cutoff so the cutoff into the year cutoff inventory transactions that are recorded in the wrong period may affect many different accounts such as or like inventory purchases cost of goods sold so it's quite possible that if the cutoff is wrong if we have transactions at the end of the year that are being applied to the wrong place then that's going to affect inventory that's going to affect cost of goods sold that could affect purchases so that could have a substantial impact on on the financials and that's something that we're going to basically want to be considering as of the end of the year looking at those types of transactions considering and testing whether or not the transactions are being recorded in the proper time period also note if there was going to be something such as fraud or some kind of deception and like say someone wanted to look good if a manager for whatever reason wanted to possibly get their bonus or something like that and they needed to increase sales or something then they they could do they could try to manipulate the numbers by adjusting the cutoff by taking sales possibly out of the next period and pulling them into this period so you want to be careful we need to be careful with the cutoff and the reporting of cutoff because of course inventory can be significant those could be factors that could cause a significant impact on the financial statements then we have the assertion of classification the entity needs to have control procedures to make sure inventory is classified correctly as either raw materials working process finished goods again if if they're not making the inventory it's more straightforward inventory it's going to be the inventory if they're producing the inventory making the inventory we have the added complexity of breaking out that inventory between the inventory accounts those of raw materials working process finished goods we need to allocate through there through understanding which manufacturing department holds the inventory the order is able to classify it by type so we'll basically be able to know who's in who's holding it and that'll help us through that classification process in other words we need to know as the inventory flows through how it flows through the manufacturing process of course the manufacturing process is going to be more complex for us to to be auditing inventory and then we need to get an understanding of you know where the inventory is at with regards to where it should be classified raw materials working process or the finished product presentation of inventory so within the presentation assertion tests of controls regarding management's use of a chart of accounts proper codes for recording inventory transactions and the financial reporting process including the use of a disclosure checklist controls over the aggregation or disaggregation of transactions are needed to properly allocate costs to the correct classes of inventory