Spectrum

Ming Hammond is Asst. Professor of Chemistry, Molecular & Cell Biology. Her research combines Chemical and Molecular Biology, Organic Chemistry; Reengineering functional RNAs, and mechanistic studies of RNA-based gene regulation. She created the web site youstem.org.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. 

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly [00:00:30] 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm your host. Our interview is with assistant professor of chemistry and molecular and cell biology Ming Hammond. Her research combines the fields of chemical biology, organic chemistry, molecular biology and bioinformatics. Ming Hammond [00:01:00] received her bachelor of Science Degree from the California Institute of Technology and her phd from UC Berkeley. She created and maintains the website you stem.org this site consolidates opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math for primary and secondary school students in the Greater Bay area. Assistant Professor Ming Hammond. Welcome to spectrum. Hello. Thank you. Would you give us an overview of [00:01:30] the research that you're doing and in so doing, remind us what DNA and RNA are and how they're different. 

Speaker 1:        Okay. Okay. I think a analogy that I like to use to describe the difference between DNA and RNA is that you can think of DNA as kind of an instruction manual for life. So that a very large instruction manual, several billion letters in length and it has all the instructions for how to make [00:02:00] all of the molecules, all the functioning parts of the cell RNA are messenger RNA is, are basically xerox copies of some pages of the DNA instruction manual that, um, gets used by the cell to translate the instructions into making proteins like enzymes and other components of the cell. Um, my lab is interested in how these RNA sequences are [00:02:30] regulated, how they're sent to different places in the cell and also how to change them so that we have, maybe we can control how the instructions are being used by the cell. 

Speaker 3:        And so with that research, are you trying to create a generally applicable way to alter the RNA so that the gene is expressed differently? 

Speaker 1:        Um, yes, exactly. And [00:03:00] first of all, understanding in nature how natural systems, um, control gene expression. And one reason we're interested in this is because for multicellular organisms like humans or plants, you have the same instruction manual in every single cell and yet you have multicellularity, right? So you have differences, different sets and instructions are being expressed [00:03:30] in different cell types, in different organs and in different portions of plants. For example, and were interested in understanding the basic mechanism for how the Messenger RNA is involved in ensuring that specific instructions are being followed in specific tissue types or specific cell types. 

Speaker 3:        Does that then also include the idea that you mentioned of [00:04:00] certain of the messages are incorrect on purpose and so understanding that sounds complex, 

Speaker 1:        right? So it's kind of interesting that one of the ways in which you can control, for example, whether a specific gene is expressed in the heart versus in the liver or the brain for example, is that messenger RNA for the same gene in the [00:04:30] brain is correct and can give rise to the proper protein and in the heart the same gene set of instructions can be spliced into messenger RNA in this specific way. That gives you a slightly different form of the protein. For example, one that has a slightly different function and therefore specific for that tissue. And then in the other case that I described, you might find in yet another tissue type that the same [00:05:00] message can be spliced so that it actually has a signal that says this is a garbage sequence, this is a nonsense message, don't follow this message. And the sal is smart enough to read these nonsense messages and know them to be nonsense. And what they do is the cell actually degrades these RNA. So for example, in that specific tissue type that the protein is never made. And so that's how you get [00:05:30] specialization of self. 

Speaker 3:        And in your research are you trying to understand all of those cases? 

Speaker 1:        We do most of our work in plants and we're very interested in the case where you can effectively shut off Accion in one condition, in war one cell type versus having it on or expressed in another cell type. So in plants, the mechanism that we study is [00:06:00] how these messages are lysed in these different ways. And that's called alternative splicing. And the predominant function of alternative spicing and plants appears to be this latter case where the messages either made and it's correct or it's made and has nonsense, but the reason I mentioned the other case is that it turns out something that's differentiates humans, for example, or mammals from plants. Besides the obvious differences, but a subtle [00:06:30] difference. The one I'm interested in is it turns out the majority of alternative splicing in mammals is actually to make different forms of that protein, so it's kind of interesting how the same basic mechanism is used by different organisms to do different things. 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        you were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Today we're talking with assistant professor Ming Hammond about [00:07:00] her work in messenger RNA and gene expression 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        does the nonsense message have some value that you are researching that you are interested in understanding what is, what is the value of it to the, to the organism. 

Speaker 1:        Okay. It's very important for the organism in general that the cell needs to have a way to know when a message or when a messenger RNA is [00:07:30] instructing nonsense because it's actually known that you can have mutations, for example, if you have a mutation in your gene that gives you a bad message. If sometimes that message then gets expressed as a protein, that protein with this altered function or ane may in fact lead to detrimental results, bad results for the south. Right. Um, and so, um, in general, the, there's a, [00:08:00] we call it a surveillance mechanism, so the cell is actually looking out for dad copies of the Messenger RNA. And so the cell normally has these surveillance mechanisms to, to, to play a very important role in keeping the, and keeping the cell healthy. And so I think what has happened is that the cell has started exploiting this mechanism to regulate chains for [00:08:30] tissue specificity and all of these other things I mentioned 

Speaker 3:        in this regard. Are some cells smarter than others? 

Speaker 1:        Hmm. I, I wouldn't say that [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        in terms of evolutionary activity, it would seem that this is kind of the place where that might go on in terms of changing an organism over time. How would RNA and nonsense allow for some sort of an evolutionary capacity to happen? 

Speaker 1:        Okay. [00:09:00] First of all, the surveillance mechanism does not change the genomic DNA or she does not change the DNA instruction manual. 

Speaker 3:        It's too far down the pipeline, right? So it's just reacting to the DNA instruction set, right? So it's really not there that any evolutionary activity is going to happen. It's going to happen at the higher lows. Right? 

Speaker 1:        There are people that look to see for example, which, uh, which organisms do have this mechanism, right? So it's not that [00:09:30] some cells are smarter than others, but more that there are some organisms that don't have this surveillance pathway, for example. And bacteria do not, as far as we know, have NMD pathways, um, this nonsense mediated decay pathways, but a lot of organisms with a nucleus to have this mechanism. But one of the things that we're interested in in the lab is there is a lot of people that study this mechanism in humans and in other mammals. [00:10:00] And we're working in this in plants and we're looking at the comparison between them. What are the differences and what are the things that are similar 

Speaker 3:        in your research? I noticed that there's something called molecular sensing that you're interested in. Can you explain that? 

Speaker 1:        Sure. So, um, I mentioned that were studying how gene expression is regulated at the RNA level. And one of the really fascinating [00:10:30] things that I worked on as first as a postdoc and now that we're still working on in the lab is it turns out some of the Messenger RNA [inaudible] that exist in bacteria don't just encode the sequences for making proteins. But there is a little extra part of the Messenger RNA in the beginning part of the messenger RNA sequence that encodes what we call a ribo [00:11:00] switch. You can think about the riboswitch as basically a natural chemical sensor that's hooked up to the Messenger RNA. And what the rabis switch does is it responds to the presence of a chemical, for example, whether there is plenty of an amino acid in the south and the RNA is able to sense the presence of say the [00:11:30] amino acid and when it binds to this chemical, it changes its shape and through this confirmation or shape change, it causes the message downstream to actually get shut off. If you have enough of the amino acid, you turn off the gene that is used to make that amino acid because you don't need anymore. So I turns out there are many, many of these rabis switches [00:12:00] performing this simple chemical, boolean logic at the RNA level doing molecular sensing and in my lab were of course interested in the natural, these natural ones. And we're also interested in making unnatural ones as well. 

Speaker 3:        And how is it that you utilize that information? 

Speaker 1:        One way you can make use of the [inaudible] switch as I mentioned, is that its normal function is to turn on or turn off a chain depending on [00:12:30] the natural chemical logic is. So it turns out you can take the DNA sequence that encodes the ribo switch and you could put it in front of a different gene. And now that other gene also responds to this chemical. So it's actually a portable logic gate, so to speak. And what we're interested in is in making new Ribas switches, for example, making ones that can work in plants [00:13:00] because there is so far as we know, only one natural rubber switch that functions in plants and were interested in exploring whether we can transport these chemical sensors and utilize them and in other organisms including plant. 

Speaker 5:        This is spectrum. I'm k a l x Berkeley. We're talking with the assistant professor Ming Hammond [00:13:30] about her research with messenger RNA and how it interacts with DNA genes. [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        so are you building those pre-IPO switches yourself or are you borrowing them from other organisms? 

Speaker 1:        Um, well I would say it's actually a mix of both. We are also fundamentally interested in the mechanics of it too, right? How, how riboswitch with dysfunction. What is really amazing about Rabis, which is [00:14:00] is that there are so many different species of bacteria that utilize these Ribas switches and these bacteria live in all different types of climates than of them can live in extreme temperatures, both hot and cold and others are more, you know, soil dwelling organisms and live at pretty close to room temperature and all of them have the same sensor. And it's kind of an interesting question to ask how it is that the same sensor works [00:14:30] in all of these organisms? What part of the sequence of the, the switch of the RNA is responsible for for that [inaudible]. 

Speaker 3:        So largely you, you work from the gene DNA area down into the RNA to control the expression of that gene. 

Speaker 1:        Everything that we do does start the DNA level and we have in mind and designed for messenger RNA that we want. And then we can go back and say, okay, [00:15:00] at the DNA level, this is what the DNA instructions have to be to make that messenger RNA. And then we see, okay, let's build it weak. Then express it and see, okay, is the RNA doing? What we want it to and then further on is this messenger RNA being shut off the way that we want it to under this condition and then turned on under a different set of conditions. 

Speaker 3:        And how do you judge whether or not you've had success? Is it pretty black and white [00:15:30] or is it somewhat gray? 

Speaker 1:        One of the kind of very basic techniques that we use is a very simple assay. So you can imagine if we wanted to see whether under condition a this messenger RNA we designed is not making the protein versus condition B when when it is. So what we ended up using is what we call a reporter gene, a gene that expresses a protein that is fluorescent so that if [00:16:00] you shine light at a certain wavelength, you get a light emission from this protein. So we express the gene and in this case on the surface of the plant leaf and we can scan the leaf and let's say condition a is on the left hand side and condition B is on the right hand side. And we'll actually see that the right hand side, the leaf will be glowing and the left hand side of leaf not be glowing because of Ganar that we use to tact [00:16:30] the light emission from the surface of the leaf. Uh, it actually shows up as a gray scale limit. So that's how it turns out. 

Speaker 3:        The organisms that you're currently working with, how do you select them? 

Speaker 1:        One of the ways that you would want to select an organism is, is that other people have worked with the organism and that it's been shown by other researchers that it's easy to do the experiments that you're planning and that there are protocols developed for the experiments [00:17:00] that you're planning. And so it's kind of expedient, but we pick a plant called Nicole [inaudible], Tami Ana that is actually cousin to the tobacco plant, which is of some agricultural interests and also has been shown by other people to be very easy to work with for our experiments. 

Speaker 3:        How has the hardware and the software that you use to do your research changed over the past? What 10 years that you've been doing this [inaudible] 

Speaker 1:        [00:17:30] so we don't actually use much software. We can talk about the hardware. Sure we can like the development of technology to do DNA sequencing very, very rapidly has really been astonishing to see. And for my research in the RNA field, it has an equal impact I would say as well because it turns out if you want to study an RNA sequence, one of the ways we study it is that we do what's called a [00:18:00] reverse transcription. So we convert the RNA back to DNA and then we sequence the DNA that's made from the RNA. So it's kind of the reverse of the normal case of things that technology has enabled people to not just look at the human genome, but what we called a human transcriptome. So this is what are all the Messenger RNHS that are being expressed in different tissue types. And so that has led us to discovering, for [00:18:30] example, these differences in expression at different, um, messenger RNA is on a much, much grander scale. It much, much higher throughput scale than was possible 10 15 years ago. More fundamentally, it has made certain experiments that were impossible to do possible. Now the next challenge is how to sort through all that data 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        you are tuned to k a l [00:19:00] x Berkeley. You're listening to spectrum. We're talking with Assistant Professor Mang Hammond about RNA based gene regulation 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Can you explain the a youth stem.org website and I believe you started this, didn't right. So my lab and I started this website called youth stem.org and the inspiration for the website is, it's actually kind of a personal story, [00:19:30] but I think it resonates with a lot of young scientists and other scientists is when I was a younger student, even before I went off to college and I was deciding what subjects I liked, what I like to do, I had these opportunities where yes, some of my science teachers saw something in me or thought that I would enjoy science and wanted to encourage me in the sciences and they would suggest that I go and do some of these programs that [00:20:00] are available in the state of Maryland, for example, where my family is from. And you know, I had a chance to work in a lab at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy. 

Speaker 1:        And I remember that made a really big impression on me when I was a freshman in college. And my freshman advisor asked me what I wanted to do for work study. I said that, well of course I wanted to do research in a lab because I said why I was already in a lab and in high school and I really liked it [00:20:30] and that's what I want to do for work study. And it was really exciting and really fun. So that's the origin story I guess of you stem. And in fact we have a lot of programs on the Berkeley campus for students interested in science that are, and that some of which pay actually a stipend. And not everyone can afford to pay money to do a summer program, but we have these free programs [00:21:00] that are I think really great. So I wanted to have a mechanism to point that out to local area students. 

Speaker 1:        And the kind of idea I had was, well wouldn't it be great if we had like essentially a craigslist for bay area free local science and engineering and math programs? And so that's um, basically what we intend for a stem to be. [00:21:30] You can actually go on the website. It's you stem.org and you can click on a subject. You know, my favorite subject of course is chemistry. And so you could pick chemistry and it'll actually show you just the programs that are for students interested in chemistry. You can search by your grade and it tell you which programs are for you or you also filter by the location. So we're focused a lot on the East Bay, but there are also programs down in the South Bay down [00:22:00] in San Jose, Santa Cruz that we found in ones up in Monterrey. 

Speaker 3:        So for people locally within the bay area who do have programs, they could contact you through the web. 

Speaker 1:        Right? There's actually a link on the bottoms saying you're saying if you're a program director and you would like to list your program, the criteria is that we're interested in listing programs where the students can apply themselves or it can be nominated by a teacher that it's open to [00:22:30] any student that wants to apply. And uh, certainly we emphasize programs that are free or that pass state band. 

Speaker 3:        And you recently received the NIH director's new innovator award. How did that happen? 

Speaker 1:        Well, the short answer is I applied but um, yes. So it's, it's a really great honor to have received it and actually [00:23:00] to a members of the chemistry department received the new innovator where I this year, myself and Michelle Chang, another assistant professor in the same department. And so it, that was just really great news for both of us. And yeah, it was really a day for celebration in the lab for sure. I mean Hammon thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Brad. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        [00:23:30] irregular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. Rick Kaneski joins me for the calendar. 

Speaker 7:        Come to nerd night [00:24:00] on Wednesday, January 18th at the rickshaw stop, one 55 [inaudible] street at Venice in San Francisco, doors at seven 30 show at eight. All ages are welcome to this $8 show at this month and our night copies of the inaugural issue of nerd night magazine will be given away. There's an article in there about cephalopod sex by the bay area's own. Rich Ross, Robyn, sue Fisher and Corey bloom will share their stories of liquid nitrogen ice cream. Their company smitten in San Francisco's first [00:24:30] made to order scoop shop and they will show off the engineering marvel that is dubbed to Kelvin that can churn up ice cream in under a minute. What do you love? Bounty and David Gallagher. We'll present Carville by the sea. San Francisco's Streetcar, suburb, and you CSF, Phd Student Tsai. Dear Etsy, we'll talk about antibody engineering and how artificially created antibodies can or will eventually fight disease. Visit s F. Dot. [inaudible] dot com for more information, 

Speaker 3:        smoke [00:25:00] and mirrors is geoengineering a solution to global warming. Professor Alan Robock from the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University will address this question. Wednesday, January 25th 4:00 PM in Barrels Hall Room One 10 on the UC Berkeley campus. This event is free and open to the public 

Speaker 7:        on Thursday, January 26th from seven to 9:00 PM the bone room at 1573 Solano avenue in Berkeley or present [00:25:30] eye to compound eye, the art and science of insect photography. In this free lecture insect photographer Becky Jaffe will incorporate and it dotes from biology, ecology and cultural anthropology to offer an engaging account of her field experiences that will inspire you to pick up the camera and look at insects with new eyes. Visit www.boneroompresents.com for more information now a few news items. Here's the Rick science [00:26:00] news reviews. A January 5th article in science by Sandra Garrett and Joshua Rosenthal at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences campus in San Juan that shows that while octopuses in the Arctic have very similar DNA with warm water octopuses, their nerve cells are very different. This difference allows them to operate in the frigid waters and arises due to m RNA edits. These edits change the way that nerve cells opening includes gates to produce electrical impulses based on the species of octopus. This is the first [00:26:30] discovered example of m RNA editing to help an organism adapt to its environment and speculation remains as to how quickly and prevalent the mechanism might be. 

Speaker 3:        In December, NASA announced seventh 2012 as the new target launch date for the space x commercial orbital transportation services milestone missions two and three. This mission begins with the liftoff of the Falcon nine rocket from Cape Canaveral boosting the Dragon's [00:27:00] spacecraft into low earth orbit. The space x dragon spacecraft will perform all of the commercial orbital transportation services, milestone mission two objectives, which include numerous operations in the vicinity of the International Space Station, and thereafter we'll perform the commercial orbital transportation services milestone mission three objectives. These include approach birthing with the International Space Station, astronauts opening the dragon spacecraft [00:27:30] and unloading cargo. Finally, the astronauts will close the space craft and send it back to Earth for recovery from the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. This mission, if successful, will mark a major milestone in commercial American space flight 

Speaker 7:        did January 4th issue of the Journal of neuroscience has an article by UCLA is Jenn Lang and others that reports promising anti-alcohol effects of a seed extract from the Asian Havana Dakis or Japanese [00:28:00] raising tree. This was first claimed to be a hangover remedy in the year six five nine rats that took dihydro, Myostatin or [inaudible] were found to take longer to become intoxicated and recovered four times more quickly than rats who did not take the extract. The extract further decrease the likelihood of hangover, anxiety and seizures in the rats. DSM also curved alcohol consumption. Rats consumed more and more alcohol gradually when it allowed, but d h m leased alcohol does not lead to this increased [00:28:30] consumption. DHM blocks alcohol's effects on Gaba receptors and the team has found no side effects in animal testing. They old next study the health effects on people 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        the music heard during the show is from a low stone, a David album titled Folk and Acoustic released under a creative Commons attribution license 3.0 

Speaker 2:        [00:29:00] [inaudible] 

Speaker 4:        production assistance from Rick Karnofsky 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 4:        Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. [00:29:30] Our email address is spectrum dot k l [email protected] join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Jones is a Research Associate at RAEL and Phd student in ERG at UC Berkeley. His research is in industrial ecology, environmental psychology, ecological economics. He is lead developer of the CoolClimate Calculator at the web site coolcalifornia.org.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with Chris Jones, a research associate at the renewable inappropriate energy laboratory known as rail and a doctoral [00:01:00] student in the energy and Resources Group at the University of California Berkeley. His primary research interests intersect the fields of industrial ecology, environmental psychology, ecological economics and climate change policy. He is lead developer of the cool climate calculator and online tool that allows households and businesses to estimate their complete carbon footprints, compare their results to similar users and develop personalized climate action plans to [00:01:30] reduce their contribution to climate change. Versions of this tool have been adopted by the state of California via the cool climate network partnership along with nongovernmental organizations and communities throughout the United States. Chris Jones, welcome to spectrum. Thank you very much, Brad. Thank you for having me. Can you give us an overview of the renewable inappropriate energy lab? 

Speaker 4:        Sure. Rail as we call it, is a multidisciplinary energy research [00:02:00] lab on campus. The director is professor Dan Kevin. He's a leading energy expert in really a broad range of disciplines. And then the important part about rail and the energy and resources group is that it's multidisciplinary. So everybody at Erg has to do engineering policy, environmental sciences, social sciences. There's also a lot of law and business and public health and we put it all together. Rail is really solutions oriented. So we're looking at developing programs, technology [00:02:30] and policy and putting them together both in developing country context and in developed countries, for example, here in the United States. 

Speaker 3:        So the lab is this interdisciplinary group. And do you have a certain focus for yourself? 

Speaker 4:        We've been developing online carbon management software for quite some time now. And we are also developing programs that use these carbon management tools. So we do lifecycle assessment and we do behavioral sciences [00:03:00] and we try to put those two, uh, disciplines together in new ways. 

Speaker 3:        And I think the lifecycle assessment I'd be, I'm curious about how you, how you go about it 

Speaker 4:        doing that. Sure. Lifecycle assessment is really the foundation of the work that we do in the lab in the cool climate network which develops these online carbon management tools. Lifecycle analysis fundamentally is just looking at the materials and the processes that go into a product or a service [00:03:30] and then applying emission factors essentially for each of the material in inputs. A problem is of course is that for any given product there could be hundreds of companies involved or more in making any individual products so it can get out rather complicated. What you end up doing is making certain assumptions about average materials or average products and trying to figure out what are the important components of that product and then coming up with an estimate. Of course people have different ways. Different researchers [00:04:00] have different assumptions that go into, you know, analysis so you could get different researchers doing analysis of the same product and come up with different answers. 

Speaker 4:        Many times, thankfully there are international standards of doing this stuff. We really look not at the product level but at the full consumer level. So, uh, we might look at the typical American household and say, well how much meat do they consume? How much dairy do they consume, how many grains and how much [00:04:30] vegetables do they consume and come up with an estimate of their total food carbon footprint. And they compare that to their transportation footprint, their energy footprint, waste and come up with a full more comprehensive analysis. So we're really looking at the high level and then some of the uncertainties in the individual product life cycle assessment can kind of, um, hit the impact of those is less important. 

Speaker 3:        So the focus is on a broader use pattern rather than discreet individual products. 

Speaker 4:        [00:05:00] Yeah, exactly. And in, in some sense for some people, being able to differentiate between individual products is the holy grail for many people. So being able to tell the difference between product air B, which one should I select? The problem is that given uncertainties in life cycle assessment, the uncertainty or the margin of error is often greater than the difference between the competing products. So you really will never be able to tell the difference between coke or Pepsi, [00:05:30] but what we can tell is that on average soda has this impact and milk as something else and water has a very different carbon footprint. Those are the types of data that we can provide to individuals that I think is useful and meaningful as well and that we have actually good data to support. 

Speaker 3:        Do you use some data and not other data because of those, those very differences that you were talking about and how do you choose what data is going to be the best? We have to look 

Speaker 4:        at how other practitioners [00:06:00] are using the data and which data are the most highly vetted, but in many cases we need to use a new data and so it really is a ongoing process of validation using the peer review system as kind of a minimum bar for validating the types of data that we think could be used. 

Speaker 3:        Is The lab trying to do some data generation of its own? 

Speaker 4:        We are mainly providing secondary data and [00:06:30] analysis and algorithms that we try to make freely available. We think that providing sophisticated analysis that's also transparent and we develop into this online software that's user friendly, that we make freely available. We think that that really is our value in collecting a lot of the data, putting it together in new and useful ways. So in terms of collecting raw data, we don't actually collect a lot of our own raw data. 

Speaker 3:        So in building your models, are [00:07:00] there any overarching algorithm approaches or is each case setup 

Speaker 4:        cool? Well, each case is, is very different. They're little engineering models that we put together for either each kind of product or each behavior that we're trying to change. And oftentimes we draw on existing research and those models can be very different. At the end of the day though, it really comes down to pretty simple math, back of the envelope calculations. And many times they, they really do start out in the corner [00:07:30] of a piece of paper somewhere and we, you know, we put them into our spreadsheet models. We also do, uh, different econometric models. We do engineering analysis, energy analysis, life cycle input, output analysis. And, uh, we do try to look at what other researchers are doing. I think it's really important for researchers to be able to share methods, be able to share data and through online systems you can actually do that. And really interesting and new ways. It's called open data [00:08:00] or linked data. So if you want the carbon footprint of a product, you should just be able to put in your software carbon footprint, this product and anybody who's done research on that, the data should just pop right into your wife's website and it should be done in real time. So there's a movement to make open and link data widely and freely available. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. [00:08:30] We are talking with Chris Jones about carbon footprint calculator. He helped develop called the cool climate calculator. You can try it if the website cool. California Dipo RG. 

Speaker 3:        The cool climate calculator is focused now in the United States. And what are your plans for taking it beyond that? 

Speaker 4:        In fact, the next [00:09:00] stage is to develop international versions of the calculator. So we've already in partnership with researchers in Brazil, built a Brazilian one version. We've built a version for the US Virgin Islands. We're developing a version now for Sweden and we have an abroad international dataset that we're going to be using to develop international version of the tool. We're also trying to get much more specific and local and better within the United States. So to get these, you know, estimates at the city level, actually [00:09:30] something we've developed but haven't launched on the online interface yet. Ultimately we'd like the city of Berkeley and the city of Los Angeles and you know, any city in the United States actually to have an online portal, kind of a dashboard system, uh, that has all this information displayed in really useful ways. And also ultimately we'd like to do it over time as well. And we have these estimates to see how, uh, cities are meeting their climate action goals. For example, to see how users within a particular community are using [00:10:00] the tool, engaging with their community based programs to set targets, engage in local programs and not only make pledges but actually make reductions and track those. Over time 

Speaker 3:        it would seem that Americans are so much more wasteful than the international community in general. So that the contrast that if we can do it here then with, with having the website able to contrast what it's like California versus Italy [00:10:30] versus Spain, 

Speaker 4:        turns out the, the largest contributors in the United States to carbon footprints often are not the largest contributors elsewhere. And many countries they have larger sources of renewable energy, uh, hydro energy, nuclear energy, which means that emissions from energy consumption are much, much lower. Half of our energy, electricity is produced by coal and a huge carbon footprint from using energy in this country. It's less than California. We have a lot of natural gas [00:11:00] and it turns out that in many developing countries is actually food that is the largest impact. You know, these comparisons internationally are really interesting, but ultimately you're right. I mean the United States, our carbon footprint is on average five times greater than the global average. So let's say we're able to reduce our emissions by 80%. Well that would just get us to the current global average and if everybody lived like that, we would have the existing emissions of greenhouse gases. 

Speaker 4:        [00:11:30] We need to get 80% below that. In order to stabilize the climate, we need to think about what types of programs we put in place in order for us to get there. A lot of people look at individual behavior and they say, well, that's not where it is. Um, you know, we have to change policy, we have to change technology and of course those things are true. However, we won't get all the way through policy and technology. We, the studies that we've done through other studies that I've seen from other groups that what is in placed in projected [00:12:00] won't actually get us there. We need to change behavior and through individual behavior. Anybody who has taken steps to reduce their own impact immediately wants to do collective action. They want to show others what they've done and it's much more powerful if they can move towards collective action. 

Speaker 4:        And then from collective action they often move to political action. So we say, well it's a chicken and egg thing and we say we can't do anything without political world, but you're not going to get political will without getting people involved. And so by showing [00:12:30] people that this is actually easy, fun, makes your life better, you would ultimately generate the political world. So I think behavior needs to play an important role and it's all behavior. People need to adopt the technology. That's behavior. People need to adopt the policies, support the politicians that are going to drive change. And so really understanding individual behavior I think is really an important key to invest in it. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible] [00:13:00] you are listening to spectrum KALX Berkeley. We are talking with Chris Jones by his work to influence greenhouse gas related behavior by individuals, families, businesses, and communities. 

Speaker 3:        What is it that refines the data and can you characterize how the data gets better? 

Speaker 4:        We like [00:13:30] to develop smart tools. Ultimately we'd like to develop learning tools, uh, learning tools that can collect data from all of the users and then be able to use that in ways that can help inform the development of the, of the, the tools as well. Particularly things like the recommendations. So we could look at the most popular recommendations or how many people are taking this particular action, how much total CO2 are people saving from these particular actions. We also have a lot [00:14:00] of work, just basic research grant work in collecting all of these new data sets because there are so many that go into our tools and updating them all the time and it's just a constant task for us to do to keep these tools updated. Now, if the data were smart and linked in an open data and linked data framework, our job would be much, much easier. But we have to make our own data open and linked as well before we can expect that from others. Ultimately [00:14:30] someday, hopefully, um, these totals will get much smarter, much quicker. 

Speaker 3:        So the real goal then is to make your program the centralized repository. 

Speaker 4:        We can think of it like a hub, a hub of part of a network, a large network. And so hopefully our hub will support lots of other initiatives. And of course there'll other hubs out there as well. But the important thing is to kind of link this kind of sophisticated is information network together in a way that [00:15:00] is optimal that that kind of meets everybody's needs at the lowest cost, lowest amount of investment. I think. And Dan Cameron, a director of our lab has said this many times, the greatest barrier out there right now is just lack of technical expertise in solving all of these problems. There's a tremendous need for research capacity, for intellectual capacity because all of these disciplines need to work together. So a lot of experts in many different disciplines, [00:15:30] but how do they work together? We have a limited kind of ability to solve these problems collectively. 

Speaker 4:        And if we're all doing the similar work or certainly not optimizing our potential. So somehow we have to learn to communicate in a much more effective way. That's a real challenge. Well, it's a real challenge. Even on campus. We don't know what each other are doing. I had a meeting last week in a research lab and told them about the data that we had and they like, oh great. That [00:16:00] would save us months worth of work. We're planning on doing the same thing. They didn't know we had it and you know there are over 400 researchers on campus, faculty doing environmental research just right here on campus and we often don't know what each other are doing. I'm not faculty. I work under Dan. So Dan has, you know, he's one of the 400 and then Dan has staff and graduate students who are all doing different things too. Now that's just right here on campus, much less statewide, nationally, internationally. It's, it [00:16:30] is really a challenge to know what people are doing and more and more people don't want to share what they're doing until it's done. So it's, it is a, it is a challenge. Yeah. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible] spectrum on KALX Berkeley. We're talking with Chris Jones about the cool climate calculator he developed. You [00:17:00] can try this calculator at the website. Cool. california.com [inaudible]. 

Speaker 4:        So you've mentioned that you're looking at, at a more of an overview context, but do you feel that products in general should have an identifiable greenhouse gas rating or not in terms of information on specific products? [00:17:30] I think you need to look at, you know, experts like the GoodGuide, uh, who, whose job it is to evaluate what we can actually say, given what we know about particular products. And often it's not the product we know about, it's the company, but are we able to put a carbon score on an individual product? Hmm. Some sort of rating I think is possible. And I don't know if a carbon score itself is meaningful to people may not be, then there's other issues involved. So it depends [00:18:00] on what the product is, you know, if it's a cleaning product, then you care about the chemical makeup as well as you might want to know was it intensive carbon use to make it? 

Speaker 4:        Yeah. So there's, there's a variety of things that come into the mix and it would seem that you have a large behavioral component in what you're trying to do. And so you don't really want to overwhelm people with data and make them more confused than they were or drive them away from even trying to deal [00:18:30] with this, right? It's how are you trying to assess what, what works, what doesn't work, right? Well, people can quickly get overloaded with information. Absolutely. And you have to be really selective with the type of information that you provide to two people. And the context in which you provided is really important. If it is a recommendation that comes from a friend, and that can be much more useful than going to some website somewhere and clicking through and trying to find out some data. [00:19:00] We are really highly influenced by our peers and not just what are our friends doing? 

Speaker 4:        What are people like us doing, but what do they expect of me? How do they expect me to behave? And those social influences are really extremely important on determining our behavior. We need to learn to tap into those social [inaudible] motivations and to really understand what drives people's behavior. And that is part of the work that we do through a program called the cool California challenge. [00:19:30] It's a competition between California cities to be the coolest California city. So we're going to engage cities across the state in competition. We're going to choose three finalists. Individuals are going to get points for doing things we want them to do, so they'll get points for reducing their energy consumption, they get points for driving their car less. Uh, we're gonna use this as a social experiment to figure out what types of messages, what types of incentives, what types of rewards are going to motivate individuals, [00:20:00] at least in a California context. 

Speaker 4:        And when does that start? Well, it'll start in early 2012 once we have got all of the approvals we need from the university. So people are going to be able to voluntarily share information through the program. And so we'll be picking three cool California cities and they have the chance to even become the coolest California city. But really it's about community building more about collaboration than anything else. So we're using these [00:20:30] points structure as a way to engage the community in a whole range of different efforts that they want to do already. To the extent that we can quantify the emission savings from things that they're doing, which is what we're good at, we'll be able to give them points. And those points were kind of serve as an umbrella for accomplishing things that the city wants to already accomplish to meet its climate action goals. For example, 

Speaker 6:        is there any point that I haven't brought up that you wanted to make about [00:21:00] the research or the lab that you're 

Speaker 4:        part of? Well, one thing that does come up often in a university is how can people make a career of this kind of thing? Well, often my answer is, well, how can you not make a career about it? At Berkeley, we have so many opportunities to do this type of work, to do work that's meaningful. It may not be climate change related work, but to do something that is of value to society and we have in some sense an obligation to do that [00:21:30] because we have kind of an opportunity cost if we decide not to take this opportunity to create programs, to use this information for the benefit of society and we decided to do something that is a little perhaps more self-serving than we're kind of foregoing that opportunity. I feel like there's just tremendous amount of potential here on campus to really be leaders to, you know, making a better world. 

Speaker 4:        And I think that's what most people here try to do. Whatever discipline they're in, hopefully [00:22:00] students recognize that hey, they want to get involved. Tons of things for them to do. Volunteer your time, find some time to dedicate to a research lab that's doing this stuff. We have hundreds of research tasks that need doing. It's really just endless the amount of opportunities here, so people who want to get involved, lots of things to do. Lots of good work to be done. Chris Jones, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you so much for having me. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible] [00:22:30] your resolution to lower your carbon footprint in 2012 and beyond can be realized with the help of the cool climate calculator. Does it cool. california.org that is cool. California all one word.org 

Speaker 6:        a regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. [00:23:00] Rick Karnofsky joins me for the calendar on New Year's Day. This Sunday, the Arden wood historic farm 34 600 Arden Wood Boulevard in Fremont is hosting a $2 walk to a Monarch Butterfly overwintering site. Discover the amazing migration of these tiny creatures and how they survive the long cold season. In the eucalyptus trees, you'll use spotting scopes to see the magnificent creatures up close and personal. There are two drop in events with no registration required. [00:23:30] The first walk is 1130 to 1230 and the second walk is one 30 to two 30 call (510) 544-2797 for more information. January 5th is the first Thursday of the month and thus free admission day at the UC botanical garden. The garden is open 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM there is a docent tour at 1:30 PM on the first Thursdays of the month. 

Speaker 6:        They explore to him next to the Palace of fine arts in San Francisco. Hosts [00:24:00] after dark from six to 10:00 PM four guests 18 and over. Enjoy the standard museum exhibits, cocktails for purchase and special attractions that vary by the month. Theme. January's theme is rock, paper, scissors. In addition to a tournament they exploratorium. We'll have a talk by evolutionary ecologist, various nervo on how the evolutionary game of rock, paper, scissors is played by the common side. Blotched lizard. Learn how the game is found in hundreds of species worldwide [00:24:30] and how it drives the formation of new lizard species and keeping with the rock part of the theme. SLAC national accelerator laboratory scientists, Sam web reveals how paleontologists determine pigmentation patterns in dinosaur skin and feathers by using an intense x-rays to excite copper, calcium, and other elemental Addams embedded in fossils. Paper brings you collaborative, ink drying and scissors brings you complimentary. 

Speaker 6:        Haircuts and mission is $15 $12 for senior students and persons [00:25:00] with disabilities or is free for our members. Visit www.exploratorium.edu/after dark for more information, the bay area skeptics present a talk titled Skepticism and critical thinking. Teaching our children and ourselves. This free event presented by Dr Matt Norman, associate professor and director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Psychology at University of the Pacific. He characterizes the talk by saying we all need to evaluate [00:25:30] the world critically and scientifically without disability. We fall prey to anyone wishing to sell us goods and services regardless of their true efficacy, effectiveness or even harmfulness. This will be Wednesday, January 11th that Cafe Valparaiso 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley. That talk begins at 7:00 PM Thursday is the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's golden gate park hosts nightlife from six to 10:00 PM four guests 21 and over. There's no nightlife for January 5th [00:26:00] consider heading to the exploratorium instead. There will be a nightlife on January 12th the theme is how to, in honor of the new year, nightlife is teaming up with experts at skillshare. 

Speaker 6:        Make SF, the distilled man and the bike kitchen to create the ultimate how to workshop at stations throughout the building. Learn to play guitar, build a bike, juggle boil and egg pin insects, DJ like a pro with help from the urban music program and even how to impress your date with your knowledge [00:26:30] of the cosmos. It's also your last chance to visit the live reindeer. See the Aurora borealis in this new man theater and dance under a snow flurry in the Piatsa before the season. Four science closes on January 16th tickets are $12 or $10 for academy members. For details in tickets, please visit bit dot Lee slash n l Dash Info. Now several news stories. The Kepler space telescope has found the first two earth sized exoplanets. [00:27:00] The planets are currently due. You noted Kepler 20 e and capital 20 f and orbit a sunlight star called Kepler 20 that is 950 light years from us. 

Speaker 6:        Kepler 20 he is 87% of their size, but at 1,040 Kelvin is hot enough that it has most likely evaporated. Any atmosphere capital of 20 f might have an atmosphere and is only 3% larger than Earth at 705 Kelvin is still quite warm. UC Santa Cruz, planetary [00:27:30] scientists, Jonathan Forney claims. If it started out with the amount of water we had on earth and Venus is probably long gone just like it is on Venus. But if that planet had a tremendous amount more water than it might have some leftover, the coupler 20 system includes an additional three larger planets and surprisingly these have orbits that alternate with the small earth sized planets. 

Speaker 6:        Science now reports that pigeons can learn basic math, while many species can discriminate quantities. [00:28:00] So you were thought to be able to reason numerically. In fact, many believed only primates can do this. Damien scarf in his colleagues of the University of Ark to go in New Zealand trained pigeons to sort sets by the number of objects within the set, regardless of the color or shape of objects that the set contained Duke University neuroscientist, Elizabeth Brennan, noted that despite completely different brain organization and hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary divergence, pigeons and monkeys [00:28:30] solve this problem. In a similar way, the findings make scientists optimistic about finding basic and perhaps even advanced mathematical skills in other animals. 

Speaker 2:        Yeah. [inaudible] [inaudible] the music heard during the show is from a David loss sauna album titled Folk and Acoustic. [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address. Is spectrum a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. [00:29:30] [inaudible] [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anthony Garza Jr. is the supervisor of horticulture and grounds at the botanical garden. He runs a class on horticultural methods and is responsible for the transition to more organic methodologies at the garden.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Hi, this is Rick. We edited this file on April 30th, 2013 in order to fix file upload problems we had within earlier copy 

Speaker 2:        spectrum's. Next then 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible].

Speaker 4:        [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and [00:01:00] technologists. 

Speaker 5:        My name is Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the host of this show. Today. We are pleased to speak with Anthony Garcia jr who will discuss the UC botanical garden at Berkeley. He's the supervisor of horticulture and grounds at the botanical garden and oversees a large number of employees there. He runs a class on horticultural methods and is responsible for the transition to more organic methodologies at the garden, including the recent adoption of compost tea. 

Speaker 1:        Anthony Garza Junior. [00:01:30] Welcome to spectrum. Thanks for having me. Brad. Give us a, an overview of your responsibilities at the botanical garden. Sure. I'm the supervisor of horticulture and grounds and so I work very closely with [inaudible]. My boss who is the associate director of collections and horticulture and our director. I supervise about 10 area horticulturists. Okay. A lead building, maintenance employee, and a groundskeeper. [00:02:00] And I do a lot of interfacing with physical plant campus services here to support the infrastructure at the garden. I run a class called horticultural methods, which is IB one 12 l. Yeah. So I'm all over the place doing a lot of things. So it keeps it interesting every day. 

Speaker 1:        How old is the garden? How, what's the history of the garden? Sure. The garden actually started down here on campus. I have an old black and white picture, my office of Palms and bananas and, and other interesting [00:02:30] plants out in front of I believe North or South Hall. Well that was pre 1930 because the gardens started moving up the hill, uh, to its current site, which is a former sheep and cattle farm in 1929. So it's been there that long. We actually have collections, uh, plant collections in the garden, say from the new world desert that date from the early thirties that are still alive. What's your favorite place in the garden? [00:03:00] Oh, that's hard to say. The garden is such a beautiful place and there are several spots where when you're up in the canyon you have views of the Golden Gate Bridge, um, which is unique to University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley. 

Speaker 1:        I'd have to say my favorite place is probably out in the farthest reaches of the collection in the Mesoamerican or the Mexican and Central American collection because it, it's sort of wedged down in, uh, [00:03:30] Strawberry Canyon. So he can be out in that collection among plants from, uh, Mexico and feel like you're really out in habitat and cause you're seeing very little other built structures around you. It's, it's a really fine collection and probably the least visited because it's the furthest out from the front entrance. Is there any activity that the garden does to try to preserve certain species? Yes, absolutely. Might be in danger. Most of that work is, has been done just because of where [00:04:00] we are here in California with California native plants. And a lot of that conservation work is done by our curator, Holly Forbes and Barbara Keller. And, uh, for example, uh, there are several, uh, there's a recent case of a, an Arctic staphylococci or, uh, a Manzanita California Manzanita being rediscovered, uh, in the Presidio on Doyle drive. 

Speaker 1:        They were, um, doing some road construction and found one individual, a plant that [00:04:30] was thought to be gone. And so, uh, that plant was before it was dug up and moved to another side and the Presidio, a bunch of cuttings were taken a vegetative cuttings. So we were involved in that and we received a lot of those cuttings and have propagated those and grown those on for, you know, growing back out at the Presidio or other botanical gardens. And we're growing some in the ground. So we're involved in sort of these, what you could call in the plant where [00:05:00] at these care charismatic rescues of very rare individuals and on campus there's the ability for researchers to apply to the garden to do, do, use your space and or do something on the grounds. Yes, we have both indoor and outdoor space available to students, postdocs, faculty, uh, indoor greenhouse space can be utilized. 

Speaker 1:        [00:05:30] Um, if someone wants to study plants in an indoor setting for a particular reason, we also have a research plateau, which is outside and this can be used for growing plants in the ground. Uh, so yes, uh, that those two areas are available to, uh, anybody on campus who's doing research. Um, they usually just run it through our curator and our associate director of collections and horticulture. Uh, we make sure we can accommodate the plants and the type of work [00:06:00] and uh, Eh, that's been well utilized over the years. Alright. We also do other types of research or support other types of research in the garden that one might not think would happen in a botanical garden. Uh, for several years we had, uh, a magnetometer up on the research plateau that was run by, I believe, the physics department. And they were, uh, working to develop a very sensitive machine, almost like an MRI. So they were picking up, uh, [00:06:30] magnetic impulses from all over the bay area. And so they needed a quiet space away from a lot of noise. So they, uh, they use that. There's a people from campus doing research on on bees and how far they migrate and what types of plants they they travel to in pollinate. So it can be a a a wide ranging, uh, okay. Wide ranging types of research. It doesn't have to just be a plant or plant genetics based 

Speaker 6:        [00:07:00] [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on KALX we are speaking with Anthony Garcia jr about the UC botanical gardens. 

Speaker 1:        Yeah, compost tea has been around for a while. [00:07:30] Most of the work on compost, he started with a group called the soil food web. They were doing and still continue to do research on compost tea as mostly an organic replacement for synthetic fungicides for disease suppression in agriculture, horticulture and landscaping. So weed heard about it and we had some colleagues at other gardens starting to use compost tea with good results. [00:08:00] And so that's how we first started to hear about it. And what were the challenges in terms of embracing the process [inaudible] well, compost tea takes some specialized equipment. It's, it's a new approach that, like I mentioned before, it is not just pulling out the, the chemical fungicides to treat a problem. It's more, it's a more holistic approach where you're trying to get beneficial biology out into the environment and on your plants [00:08:30] to suppress diseases. 

Speaker 1:        So it takes a while. So there's a, there's a learning curve and uh, an a by n curve with, you know, even my staff in terms of believing that this a new organic approach to disease suppression and introducing organic fertility will actually work. So, but it helps to have other botanical gardens Arboreta and other colleagues who have worked with this and have had good results from it. Talk [00:09:00] about the brewing process. Sure. So [inaudible] we were fortunate to get a grant from the Green Initiative Fund here on campus that paid for our compost tea brewing equipment. This includes a 100 gallon tank brewer with a motor that blows air into the tank. And we also bought a large commercial grade worm composting bin and started off with some bulk ingredients to make compost. [00:09:30] And so essentially what, what the process is, is taking hot compost or what we call thermophilic compost that is cooked down from organic biomass. 

Speaker 1:        And then taking worm compost. The done the castings, uh, from the worms. Uh, both of these things end up looking like soil when they're fully done. And we take these two things and we put them in a fine mesh bag and we can suspend them in the [00:10:00] tank of water or we can put them in a five gallon bucket of water. And we, it's like kneading dough. We need all this material a and w a water solution. And what we're doing is if you have a healthy compost, uh, what you'll get in that water is a very rich mix of beneficial fungi, bacteria, nematodes, protozoa, uh, along with some nutrients. And so we take this [00:10:30] slurry, this comp, this t from compost, put it into the larger unit, fill that with water. We add some humic acids to sort of bind up the chloramines that are in the East Bay mud water. 

Speaker 1:        And then we add some extra fish, emulsion and Capitol Kelp emulsion. The fish and Kelp emulsion are used to feed the biology that we've put in that water. We fill the tank up a hundred gallons and we airaid it with the motorized blower for 24 to 48 hours. [00:11:00] So what happens here is that all that beneficial biology propagates with the in the, in the water and with the air and the extra organic food provided by the fish and kelp. And so during that airation process, all this biology multiplies many, many fold. And so that's our basic brewing process. 

Speaker 1:        So the real benefit will be how healthy you assess [00:11:30] your plants to be. And it, I guess over time you can make that assessment. Yes. Uh, at this point we have mostly been using our compost tea and our Rose Garden. We have a garden of old roses and this is a small collection and so it's been easy to apply, um, are relatively limited equipment, uh, to this collection. Also roses, uh, particularly cultivated roses are classics for having [00:12:00] Fungal Pathogens, like a black spot, powdery mildew, things like that. So we've been using it in there and some things have responded well. Some things haven't responded so well. And we've also been using the compost tea in the Rose Garden, not just for disease suppression on foliage, but to build the health of the soil in terms of the biology of the soil, the fertility in the soil. And so it can take time to convert a soils from [00:12:30] a conventional methodology where you're using synthetics, uh, and then changing into using organics that that can take time and that is pretty well supported in their literature. Going from conventional methodology to organic methodology. Um, it certainly takes some time to convert uh, soils and plants. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        [inaudible] [00:13:00] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x. We are speaking with Anthony Garcia jr about the UC botanical gardens. 

Speaker 1:        Right now we have a student intern who has started and uh, there will be doing the brewing and helping with the brewing and application process in [00:13:30] afforded cultural methods. IB One 12, I'll be exposing my students to the process. There is a student run course on campus, uh, called decal. And so we'll also be bringing the decal classes up for demonstration of how we brew in our methodology. So, and we're certainly at this point, mostly getting the word out about compost tea, um, to students and, and other groups right here on campus. Yeah. [00:14:00] But it helped to broaden that out reach as again, as we see positive results from our, from our program. What does the volunteer program at the Botanical Gardens, the volunteer program comprises several, several arms. Uh, you can volunteer, uh, in horticulture with the area horticulturist, we have a very large volunteer pool of plant propagators who propagate plants for our plant sales, both our plant [00:14:30] deck, which is open daily and our two big plant sales in spring and falls. We have a very large volunteer plant propagator program. We also have volunteers who work in our, with our curators doing all types of, uh, things that curators do in museums. Um, and then we also have very large and active docent volunteer program as most museums do. So that docents, um, lead tours, uh, adult tours, [00:15:00] children's tours, and a free tours to the public as well. 

Speaker 7:        Now the, the Volunteer Program embraces the university faculty, Staff Students, and it's also open to the community as well. Is that right? 

Speaker 1:        The volunteer program, right? Oh yes. Uh, the volunteer program is open to anybody who's got the time, uh, to commit. I believe we do ask for a certain, uh, time commitment, um, before we'll, [00:15:30] we'll, uh, you know, give you your badge and your parking Pasch as a, you know, a lot of people come and go. But, uh, we've, we really couldn't do what we do without our volunteers. They do an amazing amount of work from the docenting to the volunteer plant propagation working in horticulture and curation. Uh, because the garden is, is understaffed and underfunded. Unfortunately we rely heavily on the work and the services of our volunteers. 

Speaker 7:        And within that volunteer program, the kinds of opportunities there [00:16:00] are to learn about if someone doesn't have a great deal of experience, how much training is involved in that program where people who are interested but don't have expertise, could be of great assistance to you essentially learn how to do it all. 

Speaker 1:        There's a very specific, uh, training program for the docents. In fact, that is, uh, that is fee-based. The docents actually have to pay to come and be trained for the docent program. And that runs [00:16:30] for several months. Uh, volunteer propagation training program is a little more casual, but there we have section heads in the volunteer propagation program who grow certain groups of plants and they'll, uh, train new people who come in along with our volunteer plant propagation program coordinator. Uh, they'll also do some sort of hands on training. Um, horticultural volunteers are a little different. We do prefer horticultural [00:17:00] volunteers that come in with us, some bit of knowledge, um, at least general knowledge about horticulture and landscaping and, um, tools and things like that. Uh, but horticultural volunteers, you know, it's mostly about time and having the interest and, uh, they'll come in and work with the horticulturist and, uh, and certainly learn quickly. 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible] [00:17:30] you are listening to spectrum on KALX we are speaking with Anthony Garcia jr about the UC botanical gardens. 

Speaker 7:        Are there other ways that the garden is reaching out 

Speaker 1:        to the community or involving the community and activities? Uh, yes, we have programs that we run through the year and they may not specifically be on, [00:18:00] uh, you know, growing a particular plant. Uh, we try and broaden the interest range with our programs. It can be things like succulent wreath making. We have a concert series during the summer. We have children's programs that may or may not have to do with plants. We have, uh, classes on botanical illustration. So we really try and broaden, uh, the interest, um, and appeal to other groups besides people who are just specifically interested [00:18:30] in growing plants. Uh, one of the audiences we're reaching out to right now are our people, uh, who are interested in, in the arts are artists themselves. Uh, we have a very unique, uh, installation in the garden right now by Shirley, uh, Alexander Watts. And this is a installation that has to do with, uh, bringing awareness to the plight of, uh, honeybees and California native beast. 

Speaker 1:        A very interesting [00:19:00] physical installation that you can come and see in our Mediterranean basin collection just above the Rose Garden. So that, uh, is a trend we're seeing in botanical gardens in particular is, is broadening the appeal to other audiences, including art installations. And so we're trying to be thoughtful and tasteful about it. And in this case with the, with the bee installation called a garden of mountings, which is a reference to a Sylvia Plath poem. We're trying to cross [00:19:30] link that art with, uh, the mission of the garden. And so this is a nice fit because it is about, uh, being aware about native bees and their role in the ecosystem and their relationship with plants. So that was a nice fit. And so a unique opportunity to come and see a unique piece of art, uh, in the botanical garden. So we're doing things like that to, to draw in other people besides just what we call plant people. 

Speaker 1:        And how long will that installation be up? Well, it's been in for a couple of months [00:20:00] now and I think the duration was roughly about six months. Um, it will eventually probably succumb to the elements and so we'll have to take it down at some point, but it is something you can actually walk up, walk under, sit in a, there's a poem in there, there's pictures of the bees with their names and their roles in the environment. So it's a very interesting and educational, uh, art installation, which also happens to be I think, beautiful and appealing and in a unique setting in the garden. 

Speaker 1:        [00:20:30] Great. And other artists out there that might be listening who would want to run an idea by you? What's the way to get in touch? Uh, they would probably get in touch with Vanessa Cruz, uh, who is on staff and she's been working with surely. And in fact, Shirley Watts is, um, working on bringing in more artists in the next year to do multiple installations in the garden. So we're looking forward to that. [00:21:00] And do you have a funding source for that? Is it, I believe that one is a, the fundraising is being done by, uh, the groups of artists who are actually coming in, uh, to do it. So we, yeah, we at this point, um, wish we, we did, but we don't have a lot of money to support the arts, but we like to promote the idea of the arts. Um, so we hope it's a good cross-collaboration in, um, having interesting [00:21:30] art in the garden for people to see and also giving the artists, um, some good exposure to their audiences. 

Speaker 1:        Well, any point that you would like to make about the garden that I haven't, uh, covered? Yeah, I think one of the things that always surprises us at the garden is, um, how many people, even people who have lived in Berkeley for years and years, uh, have never been up to the botanical garden. It really is a hidden gem here in the greater bay area. There's nowhere [00:22:00] else where you can come and visit for relatively, uh, a cheaply where you can experience plants from around the world, grown in naturalistic assemblages, um, and have a view of the golden gate bridge places to have a picnic. It's really a unique setting in the bay area and um, and still underutilized even by, uh, the campus. So that that would be my one. Uh, shout out if you will for the garden is to please come and visit, [00:22:30] uh, and support, uh, the botanical garden and its mission. Correct. Anthony Garza, thanks for coming on spectrum. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible] that was Anthony Garza Jr. You can find out more about the UC botanical garden botanical garden.berkeley.edu 

Speaker 5:        [00:23:00] irregular feature of spectrum is presented a calendar of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. On the third Friday of every month. The Chabot space and science center located in the Beautiful Oakland Hills at 10,000 skyline boulevard hosts night school from seven to 11:00 PM guests 18 years or older are welcome to enjoy full access to exhibits, special activities, workshops, open labs, discussion [00:23:30] forums, alive, planetarium show, film screens, and telescope viewings. If weather permits, food, beer and wine are available for purchase. Tonight's theme is home-ec and we'll feature DIY projects including a green gift, bizarre holiday kitchen science fix it. Workshop discussions with they local monthly meetup group that craft intellectuals and mold wine. Who is it? www.chabotscience.org for more details. [00:24:00] Okay, tomorrow is Saturday, December 17th the director of the UC Wide Institute for Nuclear and particle astrophysics and cosmology. Bernard [inaudible] Dulay is giving a talk for the free monthly science of cattle lecture series. This talk will be 11 to noon in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building here at UC Berkeley. Okay. Shedding light on the dark side of the universe. He will share current attempts to detect the weekly [00:24:30] interactive massive particles which could make up the dark matter. That makes up five times as much of the energy in the universe as ordinary matter. Visit [email protected] for more information. 

Speaker 5:        Nerd night is the discovery channel with beer on the third Wednesday of the month in this case, December 21st nerds of all walks of life gather at the rickshaw stop. One 55 fell street at Vanessa in San Francisco. [00:25:00] Plunk down their hard earned $8 drink, mingle and here three talks this month. Senior, UC Davis medical student, Erica Lee will present genes, gonads and genitals, the miracle of human sex differentiation. Anna Quillo, capital co-founder Adam Bristol. We'll discuss the future of personalized medicine and predictive bioinformatics. There'll also be a third surprise Speaker, sf.nights.com for more information [00:25:30] and now with some news headlines. Here's Brad Swift. 

Speaker 7:        The surprising discovery of a new way to tune and enhance thermal conductivity gives engineers a new tool for managing thermal effects in smartphones and computers, lasers, and a number of other powered devices. Science daily reports. The finding was made by a group of engineers headed by day you, Lee, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University and published online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. [00:26:00] On December 11th Lee and his collaborators discovered that the thermal conductivity of a pair of thin strips of material called Boron nanoribbons can be enhanced by up to 45% depending on the process that they used to stick the two ribbons together. Although the research was conducted with Boron nanoribbons, the results are generally applicable to other thin film materials according to lead. The force that holds the two nanoribbons together is a weak [00:26:30] electrostatic attraction called the Vander vols force. Professor Lee stated traditionally it is widely believed that the phone ons that carry heat are scattered at vendor vault interfaces which makes the ribbon bundles thermal conductivity the same as that of each ribbon. 

Speaker 7:        What we discovered is in sharp contrast to this classical view, we show that the photons can cross these interfaces without being scattered, which [00:27:00] significantly enhances the thermal conductivity. In addition, the researchers found that they could control the thermal conductivity between high and low value by treating the interface of the nano ribbon pairs with different solutions. One of the first areas where this new knowledge is likely to be applied is in the thermal management of micro electronic devices like computer chips and nano composites that are being developed for use in flexible electronic devices and structural [00:27:30] materials for aerospace vehicles. 

Speaker 5:        Joe Cordeiro and the Economist pointed me to an article that appeared in the October 17th issue of the Journal of Agricultural and food chemistry in it. French researchers, Caroline Molet and her team studied the quality of Miele duck foreground. France produces 73% of these fat duck and goose loaders. One undesirable issue is that some lovers seem to have larger amounts of fat loss during cooking than others. Market regulation limits fat [00:28:00] loss to 30% and lower fat loss leads to more highly priced delicacies. A proteomics study got to the biological cause of this fat loss. Intense anabolic pathways lead delivers with low fat loss by dimensional electrophoresis and mass spectrometry showed that deliveries were rich in proteins that help with the digestion and storage of food, the less desirable livers that lost a lot of fat or in a different physiological stage and had unique proteins including fatty acid binding protein for this is a marker for [00:28:30] a nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in humans. This suggests that the liver quality is dictated before the slaughter of the animal. One practical aspect is that the yield of four gras is improved by reducing the duration of overfeeding. Understanding the biological mechanism can increase yield and thus improve the humane production of fatty livers. It should be noted that the state of California health and safety code and acted in 2004 prohibits the force feeding of birds for the purpose of enlarging their livers or the sale of such products. [00:29:00] Starting on July 1st, 2012 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        the music credit. Today's program was the track petite to leap off of list on a David's 2011 album entitled folk and Acoustic [00:29:30] and is released under the creative Commons attribution license version 3.0 thank you for listening to. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] and join us in two weeks at this same time.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Professor Leachman explores the origins of Industrial Engineering Operations Research, his particular interests in the field, and an extensive analysis of supply chains from Asia to California and the dispersal of goods to U.S. markets.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. Hmm 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and along with Rick Karnofsky, I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with Professor Robert Leachman of the [00:01:00] industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics, his master's degree in operations research and a phd in operations research all from UC Berkeley. Professor Leachman has been a member of the UC Berkeley Faculty since 1979 professor Leachman, welcome to spectrum. 

Speaker 4:        Thank you.

Speaker 3:        The department [00:01:30] that you're in, industrial engineering and operations research, those two fields, how did they grow together? 

Speaker 4:        Well, if we trace the whole history, industrial engineering started shortly after the turn of the century focused on improving the efficiency of human work and over the years it grew to address improving the efficiency of all production and service systems. Operations. Research started during World War Two focused on [00:02:00] mathematic and scientific analysis of the military strategy, logistics and operations. And it grew to develop that kind of analysis of all production and service systems. So in that sense the fields grew together. But in another sense they're different. Operations research steadily became more focused on the mathematical techniques for analysis of operations, whereas industrial engineering always has been more focused on the operational [00:02:30] problems and the engineering practice of how to address those problems. So in that sense, the two fields are complimentary. So how is it that things have changed over say the past 20 years? Well, I think the domain for ILR has, has changed as the u s s become less a manufacturing based economy and more a service space that has increased the focus and service areas [00:03:00] for applying industrial engineering operations, research type thinking and analysis, be it things like healthcare, financial engineering, energy conservation. And there's certainly been a lot more activity in supply chain analysis, particularly multi-company supply chains and even the contractual relations between those companies. 

Speaker 5:        Okay. 

Speaker 3:        And in your work, which complimentary technologies do you find the most helpful and have the most impact? 

Speaker 4:        Well, I [00:03:30] think certainly the, the progress in computing power or the progress in automated data collection and the data resources we have now makes a lot more things possible now that weren't possible before and certainly changes how I do things. We can do much more analysis than, than we used to be able to do. 

Speaker 3:        The idea of keeping things simple, which is sort of an engineering paradigm of sorts, right? Is that still a virtue or is that given [00:04:00] way to a lot of complexity that all these other capabilities lend themselves to? 

Speaker 5:        Yeah, 

Speaker 4:        I think there's a Dick Dichotomy here in industrial practice. I think simplicity wins out. If you have an elegant, simple solution that will triumph. I think the incentives are a little different in academic research, especially mathematical research from the kind of an elegant theory is one where you start with a [00:04:30] small set of assumptions and you derive a great complexity of results and analysis out of that. And so sometimes I think there's kind of a different direction between what's really successful in practice and what's really successful in academia. 

Speaker 3:        What is the research like in industrial engineering and operations research? In terms of the academic research and theoretical research that happens? 

Speaker 4:        Well those [00:05:00] doing research on the mathematical methodology of operations research considered themselves to be theoreticians and those doing work on advancing the state of the art and engineering and management practice are often labeled as quote applied and quote researchers, but I always flinch a little bit at that term. I think the implication is that those advancing the state of the art of practice are merely applying quote unquote the mathematical methodology [00:05:30] developed by the theoretical researchers, but that's not my experience at all. If and when one is able to advance the state of the art, it comes from conceptualizing the management problem in a new way. That is, it comes from developing the insight to frame in a much better way. The question about how the industrial system should be run at least as much as it comes from applying new mathematical sophistication and moreover available mathematical methodology. Almost always has [00:06:00] to be adapted once the more appropriate assumptions are realized in in the industrial setting. 

Speaker 4:        So in that sense the quote unquote applied IUR researchers actually do research that is basic and theoretical in that scientific sense I talked about and that is its theory about how the industrial systems and organizations should be run. So beside the efficiencies and productivity gains that you're striving for, [00:06:30] are there other benefits to the industrial engineering and operations research? I spend a fair bit of time working on what I call speed and that is speed in the sense of the time to develop new products, the time to ramp up manufacturing and distribution to bring into market. And my experience in a lot of industries, especially high technology, is that the leaders are not necessarily the ones [00:07:00] with the lowest cost or the highest efficiencies, but they're almost always the ones with the greatest speed. And IOR can do a lot for improving the speed of that development and supply chain. 

Speaker 4:        And that's an area I work on. And that has applications across the board taking things to market. Absolutely. And we have expressions like a time is money or the market [00:07:30] window or things like this, but they're often very discrete in nature like you're going to make the market window or you're not the way we describe it, but that's, that's not the reality is that everything is losing value with time. There is a great value on on bringing stuff out earlier. Everything is going obsolete and that is undervalued. In my experience in organizations, most people have job descriptions about cost or perhaps revenue, but a, there's little or nothing [00:08:00] in there about if they do something to change the speed, what is it worth to the company, so we work to try to reframe that and rethink that to quantify what speed is worth and bring that down to a the level of NGO, every engineer so that they can understand what impact their work has on speed and that they can be rewarded when they do things to improve speed. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        [00:08:30] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Today's guest is professor Robert Leachman of the industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley. We are talking about analyzing supply chains. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        [00:09:00] can you give us a, an overview of this kind of mathematical analysis that you use in your work? 

Speaker 4:        Okay, well let me take a recent topic. I've spent a lot of effort on and that is, uh, studying the, the supply chains for containerized imports from Asia to the United States. [00:09:30] Over the years I have been fortunate to have access to the all the u s customs data to see who's bringing in what goods and declared values their pain to bring those in. And I've been fortunate to have access to the transportation rates and handling rates that they're paying. And I can start to lay out the picture of the supply chains for each company and how it can be best managed. And so that involves mathematics [00:10:00] to describe the variability and uncertainties, uh, the variabilities in the shipment times and the chances for mistakes, the uncertainties in sales in various parts of the u s and so on. And then putting together the mathematics to simulate this so that we can now see how alternative supply chains behave. And also the impact of changes in government policy such as fees on the imports or improving the infrastructure [00:10:30] with uh, expanded ports or rail lines or uh, highways and the like. This is kind of a long, large effort to where we've been able to replicate inside the computer the whole trade going on and then inform both policy analysis for the governments and for the importers themselves. 

Speaker 3:        California in particular, it's a real destination for the Asian supply chain. Are there peculiarities about California that you could tell us about? 

Speaker 4:        [00:11:00] Well, close to half of all the waterborne containerized imports from Asia to the u s enter through the California ports. A few include Long Beach Los Angeles in Oakland and there are very good economic reasons why this happens and this has to do primarily with managing the inventory and supply chains. If you think about the alternatives of at the factory door in Asia, we can decide how much is going to go [00:11:30] to various regions of the United States before we book passage on the vessels. Then considering the lead time, you need to book a vessel at least two weeks in advance. And considering the answer it needs and so forth is that you're committing how much is going to go where one to two months before it gets there. Whereas if you simply ship the stuff to California and then after it gets here, now reassess the situation based on how much arrived in California [00:12:00] and what is the updated need in the supply chain in the various regions in the u s then you can make a much more informed allocation, a match the supply to demand much better and you'll reduce the inventory in the system and you'll decrease the time until goods are sold and people will be able to get their goods earlier. 

Speaker 4:        The big nationwide retailers we have in the U S and also the nationwide, uh, original equipment manufacturers that resell the good once they're here in [00:12:30] the u s practice, these kind of supply chains. And so they bring the stuff to California and then reship. So that means that a, we have a critical role in supply chains and more comes here then goes elsewhere. If you were to think about doing what we do at, say, the port of Seattle or, or through the canal to the Gulf or east coast, then you would have to ship into that southern California market, which is the largest local market in North America. And that would be much more expensive [00:13:00] than if you start there and ship out from there. So you don't have to ship that local market stuff. The downside of that is that there's a huge amount of pollution created with all the truck traffic to bring the boxes from the ports to a cross dock or a warehouse and trans ship the goods, reload them and send them back to a rail yard and so on. 

Speaker 4:        And uh, that creates traffic. It creates pollution, creates concern for the governments and rightly so. Uh, and [00:13:30] so there's been a lot of proposals that maybe there should be some sort of special tax on the containers to pay for infrastructure and to pay for environmental mitigation and the like. So I've done some of the studies of that question from the point of view of the importers of what is the best supply chain for them in response to changing infrastructure or changing fees and taxes, changing prices at the California ports. I'd probably some studies that have [00:14:00] been a highly controversial and got a lot of people excited. I did two scenarios. One where there's just taxes placed on the boxes and there's no improvements in infrastructure. And the answer to that scenario is a pretty significant drop, especially the lower value imports where inventory is not so expensive as simply moved to other ports. 

Speaker 4:        But then I also did a scenario where if there was a major improvement in infrastructure of moving [00:14:30] a cross docks and import warehouses closer to the ports and moving the rail yards closer to the ports to eliminate the truck trips and alike, uh, that even as high as $200 a box, this would be a value proposition to the importers of the moderate and expensive imports as they would make California even more attractive than it is now. And so that got picked up by one camp saying, see we can tax them and they will stay and pay. Uh, but they didn't [00:15:00] quite read the fine print in the sense that no, you have to build the infrastructure first and then you can use that money to retire the bonds. But if you tax them first without the infrastructure in place, they will leave. The bill passed the California legislature. 

Speaker 4:        But, uh, fortunately governor Schwartzenegger staff contacted me and talked about it and I think they got the story straight and the governor vetoed the bill. But the challenge remains is that I find it intriguing that generally [00:15:30] the communities near the ports are, are generally hostile to a logistics activities. They don't want warehouses, they don't want truck traffic, they don't want rail yards. Uh, and this tends to mean the development of those kinds of things happens much further out in greenfield spaces, which of course increases the congestion increases and the transportation. And I mean, there's something almost comical about hauling stuff around when we don't know where they should go yet. [00:16:00] But there's an awful lot of that that happens. So there's still a lot of potential to improve the efficiency of the supply chain. 

Speaker 3:        Okay. Would this experience that you've had doing some research and then getting involved a little bit in the public policy side of it, is that something that you could see yourself doing more of? 

Speaker 4:        Well, I guess it is that I was asked by a government agency that the Metropolitan Planning Office for Southern California is, is, [00:16:30] is as the acronym Skag s c a g southern California Association of governments. And they asked me to, to look at the problem and I, and I was happy to do so. I think in one sense it's, it's nice to make a contribution to public policy so that we can have a more informed public management just like it is to help private companies do that. But on the other hand, a political process is pretty messy, pretty frustrating at [00:17:00] times is that usually things are a little more sane inside a company, but it's important and I'm 

Speaker 2:        glad to do it. You are listening to spectrum on k l x Berkeley. Our guest is professor Robert Leachman, the industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley. We are talking about analyzing supply chains and global trade 

Speaker 3:        to sort of address the idea that [00:17:30] all these efficiencies and productivity gains take jobs out of the economy. Is there some swing back where there are jobs that are created by all these changes? 

Speaker 7:        Yes. 

Speaker 4:        Well, let me divide this into two pieces. First, with regard IOR type work, where we're developing systems to manage supply chains or industries better is that I've been doing this kind of thing [00:18:00] since about 1980 in industrial projects in the U S and abroad. Uh, and I don't ever remember a single project where what we did resulted in a decline in employment. And in fact a lot of those were companies and crises. And if we hadn't been successful, I think a lot of people would have been put out of work. And every one of those projects created new engineering, managerial jobs to manage the information technology that was being used to run the system [00:18:30] better. So kind of on a micro scale of doing projects, it's not my experience that IUR type work reduces in employment. And when I think about the larger scale of all the offshoring of manufacturing from the U S to Asia, the companies doing this are more profitable and the costs of the consumers are much less. 

Speaker 4:        And if you look at the gross national product and the like, these numbers are pretty good and the average [00:19:00] income of Americans is very high compared to the rest of the world. But the distribution to that income bothers me a lot. Increasingly, we're a society of a small number of very wealthy people and a lot of people who were much worse off. And in the era when we manufactured everything that provided a huge amount of middle-class type jobs and we don't have that anymore. We have low paying service jobs and we have a lot of well paying [00:19:30] engineering and management jobs. And that concerns me. I think all the protests we start to see going on even today here on campus, uh, illustrate that. 

Speaker 3:        How do you see the outsourcing of manufactured goods to low wage regions? And supply chain efficiencies playing out over time? 

Speaker 4:        Well, certainly the, the innovations in supply chain management have enabled it, but you know the difference in in salaries between [00:20:00] this part of the world and there has always been there and that wasn't something that was created right and it's not going to go away immediately. Take some time. I think there's, there's little question that Asian goods will cost more. The Asian currencies have been artificially low for a long time, but they are starting to move up as energy gets more deer, transportation costs go up. Our interest rates have been artificially [00:20:30] low since the recession and before. I don't think those low interest rates will last forever and when they go up then inventory gets more expensive and so those supply chains all the way down to Asia will get more expensive. I think we've done a lot of brilliant engineering and other technology improvements that have lowered costs a lot, but I think those costs are going to go up and as they do, then the answer for the [00:21:00] best supply chains is going to bring some stuff back to America. And that's already happening first. The very bulky stuff like furniture and it left North Carolina, but now much of it is come back and I think you'll, you'll see that the, the most expensive items to ship around will be the first to change. Nowadays the big importers have very sophisticated departments studying their supply chains and I truly [00:21:30] believe that they could save a penny per cubic foot of imports. They will change everything to do it 

Speaker 4:        and so things can change very fast. Following the economics 

Speaker 3:        and I understand you're a musician, can you give us some insight into your, a avocation with music? 

Speaker 4:        Well, I'm a jazz pianist. I had come up through classical piano training but then at middle school, high school age, moved to the bay area and [00:22:00] there was lots of jazz happening here and I was excited by that and I actually learned to play jazz on the string bass first. But I had a piano in my room and the dorm I lived at here at Berkeley. And so I was playing a lot and listening to records of people I really enjoyed. And there was lots of jazz happening here and other musicians and we learn from each other and you grow your vocabulary over time and I was gone a couple of years between, 

Speaker 5:        yeah, 

Speaker 4:        Undergrad and Grad school working in industry, but [00:22:30] when I came back here to Grad school then I was playing bars in north beach and the like, but at a certain point you have to decide whether you're going to be a day animal or a night animal. You don't have the hours to do both, but art is very important to me and lyrical jazz piano is very important to me. It's, it's a way to do expression and creativity that I don't think I've found another medium that can match it. 

Speaker 3:        Professor Leishman, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. My pleasure. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        [00:23:00] irregular feature of spectrum is to present the calendar of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. Brad Swift joins me for this. 

Speaker 3:        Get up close to a hundreds of wild mushrooms at the 42nd annual fungus [00:23:30] fair being held this year at the Lawrence Hall of science in Berkeley. Eat edible mushrooms, meet vendors and watch culinary demonstrations by mushroom chefs. Get the dirt on poisonous mushrooms and checkout other wild funky from the medicinal to the really, really strange mushroom experts will be on hand to answer all your questions and to identify unknown specimens brought in by the visitors. My cologists will present slideshows and talk about foraging for mushrooms. [00:24:00] Find out how different mushrooms can be used for treating diseases, dyeing cloth or paper and flavoring foods. The fair will be Saturday and Sunday, December 3rd and fourth from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM each day. There is a sliding admission charge to the hall of Science, which includes all the exhibits and the fungus fare. Check their website, Lawrence Hall of Science. Dot Orgy for details. 

Speaker 8:        On Tuesday, December 6th [00:24:30] at 7:00 PM the Jewish community center at 3,200 California street in San Francisco is hosting a panel discussion on digital overload. Debate continues over the extent to which connectivity is changing the QALY of our relationships and reshaping our communities. Now there are major concerns about how it's changing our brains. Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times Tech reporter Matt. Righto wired Steven Levy and rabbi Joshua Trullo. It's joined moderator, Jonathan Rosen, author of the Talmud [00:25:00] and the Internet to address pressing ethical questions of the digital age, including what are the costs of growing up digitally native are our children casualties of the digital revolution. What are the longterm effects of net use? Visit JCC s f.org for tickets which are $20 to the public, $17 for members and $10 for students. 

Speaker 3:        Women's earth alliance presents seeds of resilience, women farmers striving in the face of climate [00:25:30] change Tuesday, December 6th that the David Brower center in Berkeley. The doors will open at 6:00 PM for reception and music program is at 7:30 PM it entails stories from the field by India, program director, RWE, Chad shitness, other special guests and Speakers to be announced. Admissions is $15 in advance and $18 at the door. 

Speaker 8:        December is Leonardo art science evening rendezvous [00:26:00] or laser will take place. Wednesday, December 7th from six 45 to 8:55 PM at Stanford University's Geology Corner Building three 21 zero five in addition to socializing and networking, there will be four talks showing the kitchen of San Jose State University will speak on hyperfunctional landscapes in art and offer a fresh outlook at the technological adaptations and how they can enhance and enrich our surroundings rather than distract us from them. UC Berkeley's Carlo [00:26:30] squint and we'll show how knots can be used as constructivist building blocks for abstract geometrical sculptures. NASA's Margarita Marinova will share how the dry valleys event Arctica are an analog for Mars. These are the coldest and dry rocky place with no plants or animals and site. Studying these dry valleys allows us to understand how the polar regions on earth work, what the limits of life are, and to apply these ideas to the cold and dry environment of Mars. Finally, San Francisco Art Institutes, [00:27:00] Peter Foucault will present on systems and interactivity in drawing where drawings are constructed through mark making systems and how audience participation can influence the outcome of a final composition. Focusing on an interactive robotic trying installation. For more information on this free event, visit leonardo.info. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        [00:27:30] now new stories with Rick Karnofsky 

Speaker 8:        science news reports on research by UC San Diego, experimental psychologist David Brang and vs Ramachandran published in the November 22nd issue of plus biology on the genetic origins of synesthesia. The sense mixing condition where people taste colors or see smells that affects only about 3% of the population, half of those with the condition report that family members also [00:28:00] have the condition, but parents and children will often exhibit it differently. Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist, David Eagleman published in September 30th issue of behavioral brain research that a region on chromosome 16 is responsible for a form of synesthesia where letters and numbers are associated with a color Brang hypothesizes that the gene may help prune connections in the brain and that soon as synesthesiac yaks may suffer a genetic defect that prevents removing some links. [00:28:30] An alternate hypothesis is that synesthesia is caused by neurochemical imbalance. This may explain why the condition intensifies with extreme tiredness or with drug use. Bring in colleagues believe that it is actually a combination of these two that lead to synesthesia. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        spectrum is recorded and edited by me, Rick Klasky, [00:29:00] and by Brad Swift. The music you heard during this show is by David [inaudible] off of his album folk and acoustic. It is released under the creative Commons attribution license. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via [00:29:30] our email address is spectrum dot [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ed Feng discuss his algorithm, The Power Rank, for forecasting the outcome of sporting events. As a Miller Fellow, he studied statistical physics. We explore his path from academia to Silicon Valley start up and sports analytics.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. 

Speaker 3:        Hi, I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show. Today we're talking to Dr Ed thing. I met Ed when he worked at Sandia national labs prior to this. Ed earned his phd from Stanford and then became a Miller fellow at UC Berkeley. His research [00:01:00] has focused on statistical mechanics and single molecule experiments, but I've asked him on today because the big game is tomorrow. I'd left his job at San Diego to become a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He runs the power rank.com which algorithmically ranks sports teams and predicts the outcome of future games. He'll discuss sports analytics with us. Can you give us an overview of that ad? 

Speaker 4:        My background is in a field called statistical physics, so statistical physics is the study of large scale properties of bulk matter based on [00:01:30] it's small scale units. So for instance, in, in a physical system that, that I would study, you can, the large scale property would be like the pressure of a gas or the temperature of a gas and that gas would be made up of atoms or molecules. So those would be the units. I was here at Berkeley and we actually studied a single molecule experiments. And so these are these pretty amazing experiments where you take a laser and grab onto the end of a molecule. So for instance, [00:02:00] like a DNA molecule can grab onto both ends and you can stretch it, pull it, do whatever you want to it. And so these are some really amazing experiments going on in the physics department. 

Speaker 4:        And my work here was doing some theory and some math and some computer simulations to understand those experiments. At some point I got a little disgruntled with the academic life and started looking for some other jobs and I had an interview lined up with Google. And so I thought I should do some homework. I researched their, their pagerank algorithm. So, so this is the [00:02:30] algorithm that that made Google. Okay. So it essentially ranks all web pages. And the intuitive idea behind it is that a website should be ranked highly if other highly ranked websites point to it or link to it. Okay. So you're essentially using the link structure of the web to make a ranking of all websites. And it's really elegant because it considers the whole link structure of the web, not just kind of the local link structure around your particular website. 

Speaker 4:        And again, it's a perfect example of statistical physics. So here [00:03:00] are the large scale properties are the overall rankings of all the websites. And then the small scale units are the individual websites. There are these amazing parallels between statistical physics or what I've been studying. And then patriot. So anyways, I got super excited about this, went to my interview and said, Hey, you know, I'm really excited about working for Google because this is what I've been doing for the last eight years of my life, you know? And, and my interviewer was like, uh, okay. [00:03:30] So needless to say, I did not get the job, but it sparked some ideas about how I could use page rank to do other things, maybe more important things like rank sports teams and figuring out college football and, and things like that. So, so some ideas brewed in my head and it's okay to do it about a couple of years ago, so this was about 2008 so that's how this all got started. 

Speaker 4:        What kind of modifications have you had to make to the page rank algorithm to actually make it work for sports? So it turns out that [00:04:00] pagerank actually doesn't work for sports [inaudible] you can show that it does not have some properties that you would like. Uh, I was carpooling to the national lab over in Livermore with, with a guy named David Gleich and I was telling him about this hobby that I had on the side and Oh, I applied page rank to sports and most people are like, oh cool. But they was like, it seemed completely disinterested. And the reason was because he had actually written his phd thesis [00:04:30] on page rank, so he was entirely on impressed that, you know, it's like, oh, of course you can apply it to sports. And then he was telling me about this paper that they were showing that you you can't, you can't actually apply to sports. 

Speaker 4:        It doesn't have some properties that you need. And I can't really describe all the math on the air. Probably not feasible, but you need to, you need to modify the links in an inappropriate way such that I worked for two teams that are playing a game that end up with a final score. And are those modifications the same regardless [00:05:00] of the sport or the League that the sport is in? Maybe I should go back a sec. So the power rank not only gives you a rank of all the teams, but it also gives you a number. So we call this like a rating 14 that rating is in the unit of points. Okay. So when the, the algorithm gives you a prediction in the sense that if you take the ratings of two teams and subtract them, you get a predictive point spread for a future game. 

Speaker 4:        So one of the modifications that you have to make is you have to make a link, you know like a one [00:05:30] zero kind of link. Makes sense in terms of points. Okay. And in order to do that you need to put some non linear behavior in there. The paper is actually super interesting because it says, oh well page rank doesn't work for ranking sports teams. And then it goes on to make the conclusion that some of the algorithms that go into determining a national champion and football are good, which is about the only place that you'll ever hear any type of praise for these algorithms. Cause most people can't stand because they're, they're these mythical computer algorithms that [00:06:00] no one knows much about and they help determine the national championship. And I know one that roots for the third place team and at the end of the season is really happy with that, that type of situation. 

Speaker 4:        But these people are saying, Hey, well these algorithms are actually good. They work better than page rank. And so David was complaining was like, well, you know, don't just say page rank is wrong. Like fix it, you know, fix it and make it work for sports. And I was like, well that's actually what I did with the power rank. So there are these modifications [00:06:30] that that, you know, take a one zero link structure and make it work for points. And that works across all sports because there's a, there's a point structure for all sports, right? A goal is a goal. Beyond that, uh, there are some other things that you can do to make it much more sports-specific. One of the problems with kind of promoting any ranking system in college football, um, which is kind of my primary focus is that, oh, well, it's just like these silly rankings that determine the national championship. 

Speaker 4:        So right now it's a listing of teams and [00:07:00] it looks like every other of 50 to a hundred people that have tried to rank college football teams with their ideas in math and physics or whatever they're doing stats. You know, I'm a fan and I actually care about these rankings and I want to go a little bit beyond. So I'm looking at how to separate the offense and the defense. So right now you'll hear a lot about, oh well Oregon has the nation's top scoring office. Okay, well does it matter that they played a bunch of crummy defenses last year? And a lot of people, you know [00:07:30] the people, people talk about strength this schedule cause it matters. So they talk about it when like, oh well you know Oregon, uh, so, so Auburn went undefeated last year and that's good because they played a very hard schedule, right? And so they talk about it then they quote these stats that are completely independent of strength, this schedule. So, for instance, Oregon I think scored 43 point whatever points their offense last year, but it doesn't account for who they played and whether pack 10 defenses were bad. And so I'm trying to use the algorithm to [00:08:00] separate out the offenses and defenses and really kind of give insight to each of the units. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum on calyx Berkeley, we're talking with sports analytics expert Ed thing about the powering [inaudible] dot com [inaudible] 

Speaker 4:        [00:08:30] kind of the end goal for a lot of things I'm doing with college football is to not just break down on offense and defense, but break down a passing, rushing and then special teams. And then that's where I think it gets really interesting to your offensive coordinator. Where do you your data? Oh, I get my data from Yahoo. So I just saw publicly the level, everything I [00:09:00] have is publicly available. Um, at some point that might end, but oh, I'm still at a point where I have all the data I need and I need to analyze it. 

Speaker 4:        How successful is your app Algorithm? Well, pretty good. So it's a work in progress. You know, I don't want to go on the air with these very smart people that listen to the show and tell them about the 34 ball games last year that we beat the line of 55% [00:09:30] because you guys will know that that's a really small sample size for the 60% that we'd beat the line last year, uh, or two years ago with the college football ball games. So I've looked at the NFL for the last five years with the kind of rudimentary version of the algorithm that I have right now without any of the offense and defensive modifications. It's beating the line at about 52% so that's a not enough to make money, but the house has a take and so you have to win it about 52.4% in order to make money. 

Speaker 4:        [00:10:00] But you also have to consider that this algorithm does not account for injuries, does not account for coaches that sit their players the last week of the season. Um, any one of the number of things, the rate gets higher in the playoffs. I think it was about 55%. Again, small sample size. So I'm not going to tell you guys that that's anything significant. On other result, we have a, we looked at the last four years of the NBA. It wasn't as good in predicting the outcome of results against the line. Uh, so it was about 51%. [00:10:30] Why do you think that was? So I think it's because of the, how you file at the end of games. Um, I need to look into this more. Um, because we actually saw some stellar results in the NCAA tournament. Um, so actually all neutral site post-season basketball, college basketball games last year we beat it at 59%, which is good. 

Speaker 4:        And then you can get super excited about that. But then you look at over 2000 NBA Games and it's not quite doing as well. So [00:11:00] at the end of a basketball game, you foul because you're behind, you need to get the ball back in order to score. And that behavior is, is a, is detrimental to your final expected score. Okay. So usually a team's score is about a point every time they get the ball. When you fall, you're giving them two shots and usually a team hits about 75% of their foul shots. And so you're essentially giving a point and a half every time you fall. So if you fall three times at the end of the game, you're making a 2.12 point swing. That can certainly affect the outcome of the line. [00:11:30] But in the NBA, uh, we did predict winners at a rate of 70% and that in and of itself doesn't tell you much because that's, you know, the rate at which you can predict winners is very related to how competitive the League is.

Speaker 4:        Okay. So if the league is not very competitive, you're going to be able to come pick, predict a higher rate of winners because you know, cows going to be Presbyterian. But the NBA, that's not so much. So we actually looked at the line for those same set of games and they were predicting it. Um, [00:12:00] 70.8%. So just using the final scores in the NBA over the last four years where within a percentage point of what the line predicts for the actual game winners in the game. So about 70%, and that's within the air of what you would expect. So, so the two results are within the same air. The MBA, you have a big advantage because you have a lot of games, you do not have that luxury in college football. And so a lot of my work in the future will be figuring out other things to, [00:12:30] to make it work better with college football. 

Speaker 4:        Have you bet. Have you placed bets based on your algorithm? I have. Um, so I was in Vegas for a wedding last April and uh, put some bets down on the NBA playoffs, uh, did pretty well. I know I didn't do, I came out ahead, which is I think is a lot more than most people can, uh, can say, uh, when they go to Vegas. And have you ever thought about trying to make a simulation? Yeah, absolutely. [00:13:00] So the idea of doing a simulation is of baseball is very old. I think the first paper was in the 70s and it's not, you know, these are the types of things that I was trained to do, right? So you write a stochastic simulation or you don't finish your phd. Right. Um, so, so it's kind of in the statistical physics world, it's just kind of what you do. You know, it's kind of like selling wood if you're a carpenter and it absolutely has applications in baseball. [00:13:30] So I kind of would have thought that it would be everywhere in the baseball world. It's not. And the reason, you know, I was reading a bunch of baseball stuff and you always see comments like, oh, well the Atlanta Braves might lose Brian McCann for a couple of weeks and it's going to decrease their run production. And the relationship might not be linear. 

Speaker 4:        And I think, well yeah, sure, you're probably right, [00:14:00] but you should just run a stochastic simulation. You should be able to figure that out. At least at a core screening level. It's certainly not out there in the media world that the idea is out there, but none of kind of the baseball analytics sites do it. Or at least they don't discuss it very widely. At least not that I know of. And interestingly, only four out of 30 major league baseball teams can do it, which is what I find really interesting because [00:14:30] you know, these guys are pretty advanced. They have these huge databases. Actually the Pittsburgh pirates have an enormous database when the most sophisticated databases and all the major league baseball. But there's a lot of old tools and you know, these guys are busy and they've never developed these kinds of tools and there are opportunities, I think, you know, I mean I've actually talked to people in organizations, in organizations that would like to have that. 

Speaker 4:        It's certainly something that you could I see on the powering maybe next season. And then just let me, uh, actually conclude. So this whole idea of [00:15:00] a random process is actually at the core of both page rank and the power. Right. Okay. The backbone of that is mathematical idea of a mark out process. So it's essentially random. That's the idea that Pedro is based off of. It's a, it's a distribution that comes out of this type of, of random simulation. And so they always motivate it by the, you know, the intuitive result of [inaudible] page rank is as the random surfer. So you have a surfer, you go to website, you randomly could come one of the other sites and he keeps doing this [00:15:30] and the amount of time he spends on any site is that related directly related to the directly proportional to the rank of that website. 

Speaker 4:        And so the same idea applies to my algorithm. It's a, essentially you have a fan, I like to call them fickle Freddy [inaudible]. He starts out being a Phillies fan and then he's like, Eh, I don't like these guys anymore because they keep losing. And so then he picks one of the teams that they lost to makes it random choice between all the seams and jumps and [00:16:00] then keeps doing this randomly. And so intuitively you can think of the algorithm in terms of this fickle fan that keeps making these jumps between teams and he's more likely to jump to your team if you've beaten that team, if you'd beaten that other team that he's already on. And this goes on forever. And the more that fickle Freddy is a fan of your team, the higher your rank. And so that's kind of the intuitive idea behind what's going on here. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        [00:16:30] you're listening to spectrum on K A L X we're talking to with the sports analytics expert Ed thing about his site, the power rank.com and what he predicts tomorrow for the big game 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 4:        [00:17:00] So one of my colleagues, his name is Steve Abel, he's, he's working on his postdoc and he, we did our phd in the same group and he always says that [inaudible] or statistical physics applies to everything. And it's essentially that, you know, we're studying the large scale bulk properties of things that are made up of individual units. You know, one day he told me, he's like, Hey, this whole power rank thing, you're actually proving that likes that neck applies to everything. I wonder are they [00:17:30] uh, interesting facts about this show is that it's prerecorded and edited so well will air immediately before the big game. It's still quite a ways out. But do you want to make any comments? I absolutely want to make some comments. I think it's, I think it's super interesting. So let's start last night. So cal went up to Oregon. No, a lot of my methods said that Oregon was the better team, but that they would lose by about 19. 

Speaker 4:        And the line said that Oregon would win by 24. So [00:18:00] it's quite a discrepancy. There's a lot of factors there. Went up there and you know, we knew, we kinda knew that their defense, it dropped off a little bit, but Oregon really took advantage of that. Had a couple of really long runs that they didn't dream of last year when they came down here to Strawberry Canyon. [inaudible] was in the game. They were up one at half time. And then the wheels kind of fell off in the second half and they ended up losing by 28 so we're going ended up covering, that's part of this business. You're wrong a lot. But I thought it was interesting because these are the types of things I think about because Kelly's defense really played badly. I mean there was, there was about maybe [00:18:30] three runs, a 50 yards or more that went for touchdowns. 

Speaker 4:        The quarterback sack Maynard did not have his greatest game. You know, he threw a touchdown pass in the first half but wasn't very effective in the second half at all. And I actually got pulled towards the end of the game. So now getting to big game, my rankings have Oregon and Stanford about the same right now. A little bit different. Stanford slightly ahead. But again, you know there are huge fluctuations. Okay. So I think the rankings probably would have held for the last season too. So it's by maybe about a 20 point cap, but Stanford won the game pretty soundly last year [00:19:00] and that happens with turnovers and you just never know what's going to happen. You know, the cow's defense is much better than they showed last night at Oregon. Maynard's probably a much better quarterback than he showed last night. And you know, they have some weapon. Kyle definitely have some weapons at receivers that are, that are very dangerous. It's interesting that sports fans tend to forget very quickly. So a lot of Stanford fans are very excited about their team as they, as they rightfully should be. And they kind of forget that. Two years ago cal came down to Stanford quarterback sensation. Andrew [00:19:30] luck had his worst game of his career and cal won again. So there's a lot of variants in sports. Anything can happen, Stanford will most likely win, but you never know. 

Speaker 4:        You know, the best background to understand sports turned out to be studying statistical physics. I mean it was great. It was perfect. So Ed, thanks for joining us. Thank you guys for having me. It was a pleasure. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [00:20:00] that was Ed Fang. You can visit his [email protected] 

Speaker 3:        a regular feature of spectrum is to present a calendar of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next few weeks. Brad Swift joins me for this. I'm happy to announce that the cabinet space and science center at 10,000 Skyline Boulevard in Oakland is joining the list [00:20:30] of museums that are offering adult nights. Cabot will host such an outing the third Friday of every month this month. That is today, November 18th from seven to 11:00 PM the event is 18 and over and costs $15 this is a bit cheaper than general admission. This includes access to exhibits, special activities, workshops, open labs, discussion forums, a planetarium show, film screens, and a telescope viewing when weather permits. The theme for this month is curiosity, a cure for [00:21:00] boredom or NASA's next generation rover searching for water and signs of life on Mars, capita, astronomer Ben. Burris will host a discussion on the rover and UC Berkeley's. Dan Wertheimer will discuss the search for ITI. There'll be a fix it clinic for your broken something or others at a telescope makers workshop and a lab on surviving in space. Visit www dot Cabot's space.org/night school dot HTM for more information. 

Speaker 5:        The next science at cal lecture [00:21:30] will be given at 11:00 AM tomorrow, November 19th in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 the talk will be given by Dr Genevieve graves and is entitled from gas into galaxies. Just add gravity. Come learn about the origins and the ultimate fate of this island universe we call the Milky Way. Dr Genevieve graves studies the formation histories of galaxies, how they form stars collide and merge together to make [00:22:00] bigger galaxies and eventually shut off star formation. Dr. Graves is a bay area local, having graduated from Albany High School in 1997 after undergraduate work at Harvard and Cambridge, she returned to California to do a phd in astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. She is now a fellow at UC Berkeley's Miller Institute for Basic Research in science, 

Speaker 3:        Internet Archive, founder Booster Kale is giving a talk to the long now foundation on universal access to [00:22:30] all knowledge. He will discuss the next steps for the archive such as whether we can make a distributed web of books that supports lending and vending and how our machines might learn by reading these materials. Modern research into machine language translation and optical character recognition will be discussed as well. How we plan to preserve petabytes of changing data. This talk is on Wednesday, November 30th from seven 30 to 9:00 PM at the cal theater in San Francisco's Fort Mason. Center admission [00:23:00] is $8 and 71 cents for tickets. Please visit [inaudible] dot org slash seminars the exploratorium is after dark falls on the first Thursday of every month from six to 10:00 PM for people 18 and over. It is $15 or $12 for students, seniors and persons with disabilities and is free for exploratory members. The theme for December is after dark is glow. In addition to the hands on science exhibits available at the exploratorium. There'll be information on bioluminescent marine life, how to make glow sticks, [00:23:30] black lit, fluorescent cocktails for purchase, and more. There will be illuminated sculptures including local favorite playa flies by Michael Brown and Cuba tron by Mark Lotter. Visit www.exploratorium.edu/after dark for more Info 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        you are listening to spectrum on k a l x 

Speaker 2:        Berkeley [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        [00:24:00] with some current science news headlines. Here's bad swift, 

Speaker 5:        a Russian Soyuz capsule, so use TMA 22 carrying an American and two Russians blasted off successfully Monday, November 14th from Kazakhstan on a mission to the international space station. It is the first flight of a NASA astronaut in the post space shuttle era [00:24:30] and as a welcome success for the Russian space program, a series of Russian launch system failures over the past four months has delayed the international space station staff rotation, raising the possibility of no crew on the space station. Last week, a Russian Mars probe failed to leave Earth's orbit. It is expected to burn up in the atmosphere by November 26 unless it can be reactivated in August. Then unmanned progress cargo ship [00:25:00] bound for the International Space Station crashed. The rocket that failed was the same kind used by the Soyuz, the NASA program to contract future International Space Station cargo and crew transport from two US companies space x and orbital has ironically been delayed by the reliability issues surrounding the Soyuz system. Space X is awaiting permission from the International Space Station partners to validate their system [00:25:30] by launching its falcon nine rocket and docking the dragon capsule when the International Space Station, the success of the recent Soyuz mission might accelerate the decision on the space x launch date. 

Speaker 3:        Science news summarized an article by Edward Pos shouts of the Massachusetts General Hospital and fell asleep. Researchers that appeared in the November 8th issue of current biology. The team claimed they have for the first time used functional magnetic resonance imaging to capture the brain activity of [00:26:00] lucid dreamers. Lucid dreamers are able to control their dreams while in deep sleep. They ask dreamers to squeeze first their left hand and then the right hand, one of their six volunteers were able to do this and the FMR I revealed increased activity in their sensory motor cortex when they were directed to squeeze their hands. Similar brain regions showed activity whether the hand squeezing was performed while awake, imagined while awake or directed in a dream. 

Speaker 5:        Coral reefs worldwide are increasingly disturbed by environmental [00:26:30] events that are causing their decline. Yet some coral reefs recover science daily reports that you see. Researchers have discovered that the health of coral reefs in the South Pacific of Moria in French Polynesia maybe due to protection by parrotfish and surgeonfish that eat algae along with the protection of reefs that shelter juvenile fish. The findings are published in the August issue of the journal plus one coral [00:27:00] reefs that suffer large losses of live coral often become overgrown with algae and never returned to a state where the reefs are again largely covered by live coral. In contrast, the reefs surrounding Maria experienced large losses of live coral in the past, most recently in the early 1980s and have returned each time to assist them dominated by healthy live corals. The new research found that fringing reefs, the reefs that grow against the island act as a nursery ground for baby fishes.

Speaker 5:        [00:27:30] Most notably herbivores, [inaudible] fishes with more food available in the form of allergy. The survivorship of the baby parrot fishes and surgeon fishes increased providing individuals to help control the algae on all the nearby reefs. In effect, the large numbers of parrot fishes and surgeon fishes are acting like thousands of fishy lawn mowers. Keeping the algae crop down to levels low enough that there is still space for new baby corals to settle into the reef [00:28:00] and begin to grow. A major reason the reefs in the Caribbean do not recover after serious disturbances is because these reefs lack healthy populations of pair of fishes and surgeon fishes due to the effects of over fishing without these species to help crop the algae down, these reefs quickly become overgrown. With allergy, a situation that makes it very hard for corals to reestablish themselves. The new research suggests that marine protected areas need to include the [00:28:30] fringing reefs that serve as nursery grounds. Without these nursery grounds, populations are pair of fishes in surgeon fishes can't respond to increasing amounts of algae on the reefs by outputting more baby herbivores. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 1:        the music played during the show is written and performed by David lost time from his album titled Folk [00:29:00] and Acoustic 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        You're listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is [inaudible] spectrum dot g a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. 

Speaker 6:        [00:29:30] [inaudible] [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Sedlak is a professor in the school of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is also the Deputy Director of the NSF Engineering Center named Renuwit, which stands for Reinventing the nation's urban water infrastructure, and a member of the Berkeley Water Center. http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~sedlak/ http://urbanwatererc.org/

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly [00:00:30] 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 2:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with UC Berkeley Civil and environmental engineering professor David Sedlak. He is the deputy director of a new NSF engineering center named renew it, which stands for re-inventing the nation's urban water infrastructure. The center partner [00:01:00] institutions are Stanford, the Colorado School of Mines, New Mexico State University and UC Berkeley. Professor said Lac is a member of the Berkeley Water Center and has been teaching at Berkeley for 17 years. This interview is prerecorded and edited. Professor Sedlak, thanks very much for coming to spectrum and talking with us. Oh, you're welcome. I'm really happy to be here. I wanted to start by laying a foundation a little bit for people who may not be familiar with the [00:01:30] kinds of work that you're doing and the issues related to water that you deal with. 

Speaker 3:        I think my main area of interest is really the way in which we manage water in cities. So that includes everything from the drinking water supply, the waste that we generate, the storm runoff that comes through the streets and the entire urban water cycle. 

Speaker 2:        Can you describe the water cycle in a city? 

Speaker 3:        Sure it is. Yeah. There's no one urban water cycle [00:02:00] in the city. The water cycle that we all learn in junior high school is that the water evaporates from the ocean. It falls in the mountains, the mountain runoff create the streams, the streams throat floated the ocean and then there's a city on the stream. The city picks up water from the river, it goes through a water treatment plant. People use it in their houses, it goes down the drain, it goes to a sewage treatment plant. It goes back in the river and it goes to the ocean. And that might've been the situation 70 or 80 [00:02:30] years ago, but now our cities are much more crowded and the situation's much more diverse. So, for example, many cities that river where they collect their drinking water from is downstream of another city. So the water in that river is already been in and out of the previous city. And so the water supply consists of river water mixed with sewage effluent. 

Speaker 2:        And do you think it's helpful to assess water [00:03:00] globally to give a context in the sense of how much fresh water is there, how much wastewater is there? 

Speaker 3:        There's been a lot of good work done on water, especially at the national or regional level. And one of the things that people often miss is that water in cities is quite different from water at a national scale. So for example, at a national scale, cities only use about 20% of the water. The other 80% goes to agriculture and power plant cooling. But [00:03:30] if you're a city and you run out of water, there's not much solace in the fact that there's a farm hundreds of miles away that has water, or there's a power plant in another state that has that water. So water is a local issue. And cities are places where there's a very large demand for water in a very small space and that stresses their ability to deliver water and leads to water shortages. So you can have a situation where you have a country or a state which has [00:04:00] plenty of water, but you have a city that's running out of water and doesn't have a good option for providing more. 

Speaker 3:        Just to give you an example of a city that almost ran out of water a few years ago, so many of us have seen the photos and news stories about Brisbane, Australia last year when they had tremendous flooding that almost washed away the city will about four or five years ago, that same city almost ran out of water. So Brisbane is a city of around a million people along the gold coast [00:04:30] of Australia. It's Australia is equivalent of Florida that it's a place that developed mainly during the 70s up until the present and they don't have an imported water supply from a long distance. And so they were beholden mainly to one main reservoir. And when Australia went into a drought about 10 years ago, the level of water in that reservoir kept sinking and sinking and sinking. And about four years ago they had about 15% [00:05:00] capacity in the reservoir and they were using about one or 2% a month. And so if the rain didn't return, they were going to actually run out of water and there wasn't going to be any water for the city. So they'd already done the water conservation, they'd already stopped all the wasteful uses of water and they were reaching a point where they would have to shut down the city or take emergency measures to bring water in at very high prices. 

Speaker 2:        Cities [00:05:30] really can't know that this is going to befall them, but they all need to take a much more active role in figuring out what the wiggle room is and their water supply. 

Speaker 3:        With wise planning. Cities can anticipate these pinch points or these crunches in their water supply, but that assumes that you have some foresight. I'll give you an example of a place that has a lot of foresight about their water supply. And that would be Singapore, where water is actually considered national security. So [00:06:00] Singapore, if you're not familiar with the geography, is surrounded by Malaysia. And when the British left and they created two countries in that region, Singapore was still receiving its water from Malaysia. So there's a foreign country that controls your water supply and the founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan, you realize that the country will be very susceptible to Malaysia holding them hostage over their water. And so they established an aggressive plan [00:06:30] to develop alternative water supplies so they can wean themselves from their imported water. And today Singapore's at a place where the imported water supplies only fraction of the total water used in the city. 

Speaker 2:        That kind of planning is that growing worldwide and in the United States, 

Speaker 3:        in the United States especially, it seems like we wait for an emergency to happen. And so when a drought happens, someone says, Gee, we [00:07:00] should be doing something about this. And so in places where droughts have occurred and people have seen the start of this progression of shortages, city managers and water utilities have taken some steps to build up the water supply and make themselves more secure. Good example of that would be orange county in southern California, Orange County which grew after the rest of the Los Angeles area has relatively junior water rights relative to the city of Los Angeles [00:07:30] and many of the other communities that get imported water. And so in order to grow they've had to keep improving their local water supply and take on some innovative programs to augment the public water supply that break them away from imported water sources. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Professor David [00:08:00] said lack about current and future urban water systems. Is there something that individuals can do in terms of recycling water that has an impact?

Speaker 3:        The best thing people can do to improve the urban waters situation is just to use less water. So the average American uses a hundred gallons or so of water a day, 10 gallons every time we take a shower, a 40 gallons when we washed a load of clothing [00:08:30] in a few gallons. When you flush the toilet, everything else. So if you just think in terms of water use, it's possible to save a lot of water around the house and all of the water you save means that there's that much more water to go around and there's that much more water, water around for the environment. So that's the first thing everyone can do. And I think most of us are guilty in some way or another of wasting water, either leaving the water running while we brush teeth or taking super long showers or just being prolific that with, with our [00:09:00] water use. 

Speaker 3:        I think the other thing that many people don't realize is that there's a connection between water and energy. So there's a lot of energy use in heating water for the house. So if you look at the urban water cycle, we could probably go a long way towards running our urban water system if we didn't heat the water. After all the Romans had flowing water and they didn't have electricity. A lot of our water system functions on gravity, but the minute we start heating many gallons [00:09:30] of water in the home, we're burning a lot of electricity. The other thing that you could do with respect to water is think about runoff and what goes down down into the street. All the junk that we throw out eventually finds its way into the bay and I think most people would be hesitant to just throw a plastic bag or a bucket full of soapy water into the bay if they were standing right next to it. 

Speaker 3:        Well, when you pour it in the street or wash your car or throw some trash in the street, that's [00:10:00] essentially what you do in the home. Is there a way for people to reuse water? There are a lot of people who really want to make a difference with respect to their water. And there's a lot of enthusiasm in the public for something called gray water and gray water is this idea that you have all this water in your house, it's relatively clean. It's the stuff that you, you know the water that was in the sink when you washed your vegetables or it's even the water that was in your washing machine that rinse your clothes after you wash them. [00:10:30] And that we should be able to use this water somehow. And I think it's great that there's this intention to save water and to reuse water and you certainly can collect this water and put it on the plants and the garden. 

Speaker 3:        But it's really not a solution to our larger urban water problems. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is to do this in an organized way, takes a collection and distribution system. So if you have water from your sink or water from your shower, then [00:11:00] you have to have a way to collect it and you have to have a way to use it and maybe you're going to use it in the garden, but there's no guarantee that that water is going to be safe and free of microbes that can make people sick and there's no guarantee that that's going to be economically attractive once you price out the cost of building all these other pieces. And so new construction, there are many ways to make a building more water efficient, [00:11:30] low flow fixtures and water conserving practices. But the way in which it seems that we're going to make the biggest difference is to think about the whole urban water system and how it can be reinvented to do things differently. 

Speaker 3:        For example, there may be a future when toilets and washing machines don't use water anymore. I have a friend who works for the EPA and he has a vacuum toilet in his house that functions just like [00:12:00] those vacuum toilets on airplanes. So there's nothing that says that 50 years from now we're going to be washing our waists down the toilet with water where there are companies that had been exploring washing machines that use very small quantities of water. So many people were already switched from top loading washing machines to front loading, washing machines that use a fraction of the water. There may be a future where we even cut that two to a fraction once again. So I'm much more confident that technological [00:12:30] innovations will lead the way as opposed to these small scale piece by piece solutions that people feel good about because they're taking an active role but ultimately either turn out to be more expensive than the system we have or have their own sets of limitations. 

Speaker 3:        What sort of advances have there been in sewage treatment over your time of interest? Sure, so sewage treatment plants were [00:13:00] originally designed to to protect surface waters. So really the main reason people built sewage treatment plants was there was too much gunk going into rivers and the fish were dying from lack of oxygen. When you talk about building a sewage treatment plant because you want to recycle the water, perhaps even to put it in the potable water supply, it's a whole different level of technology. So over the last 20 years, technologies have been developed to purify water to a point that you can [00:13:30] have sewage coming in one end of a treatment plant and the water that comes out looks like bottled water coming out of the the store. And there's a whole host of different technologies that are getting less and less expensive every year and are making it more attractive to build these kinds of advanced sewage treatment plants. 

Speaker 3:        Is there a lot of construction of sewage stream and plastic gotta be very expensive? I would imagine that. So the place where you see construction of sewage treatment plants [00:14:00] is in the cities where there's a need to recycle water or to reclaim this sewage as part of the water supply. So, for example, um, Orange County, which I talked about earlier in southern California, built an advanced treatment plant because they wanted to take their sewage and instead of putting it out in the ocean like they used to, they wanted to put it back into the drinking water supply. So they built a very large advanced sewage treatment plant that takes the water and puts it through reverse osmosis membranes. [00:14:30] Those are the same kinds of membranes that are used to desalinate seawater and then subjected to ultraviolet radiation to kill the pathogens along with hydrogen peroxide to break down the chemicals and then putting it into the drinking water supply. 

Speaker 3:        So it's not your grandparents sewage treatment plan. It's really something that's a lot more advanced. And how is that being accepted by the the users? There's a mixed record of public acceptance of advanced sewage treatment [00:15:00] plants for augmenting the water supply. So in Orange County they've had pretty good public acceptance, but they also had a very long program of public education about their water situation. In other places. I'm in San Diego as an example or in Brisbane, Australia. These advanced treatment plants came at the public out of the blue and they really weren't aware that there was a problem and they weren't aware that there were technologies that [00:15:30] had been used as solutions in other places, so when the public heard that there was sewage water going into the water supply, they couldn't accept it and the projects died. A quick death in public hearings. 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking with Professor David Sedlak about [00:16:00] current and future urban water systems. 

Speaker 3:        I was wondering if you want to talk about, sure. The kinds of research, my own research mainly focuses on chemicals and water and I'm very interested in the chemicals mainly that are present in sewage that might find their way back into the environment because our treatment plants aren't perfect. I first got into this topic about 15 years ago when I saw a talk from a scientist [00:16:30] from Britain who had found that fish living near sewage treatment plants were feminized. That is they would go out and collect fish below the sewage treatment plant and they couldn't find any male fish. They all were female. And this phenomena of feminisation was really fascinating to me because I thought to myself, well, if this is happening to the fish when they're at the sewage treatment plant, it's quite possible that there's some chemical in there that's responsible. And so that got me very intrigued by [00:17:00] saying, well, I don't really know of any very potent biologically active chemicals that might be able to pass through a sewage treatment plant. 

Speaker 3:        And that started a, a line of inquiry that has stayed with me to this day. The substance that you're talking about, pharmaceuticals, metals, things like that, are there other things that are in the water that you're looking at? Well, so in the case of the feminized fish, it turned out it was steroid hormones. So it was residual amounts [00:17:30] of estrogens, some of them from birth control pills, some that are just produced within the body and they were president minute quantities, part per trillion levels. And that was enough to feminize the fish. But since then we've expanded and looked at a whole range of different chemicals. And what is very interesting about it to is that these are not the kinds of chemicals that people had been looking for before. So up until interest turn to sewage, affluent people were interested in [00:18:00] chemicals that might come from a factory or an industrial process. 

Speaker 3:        But when we look inside of our homes and when we look inside of our commercial activities inside of our kitchens, we see that there are all of these things that are in sewage that we either wouldn't want to put into a river or we wouldn't want to put back into the water supply. So a lot of this then comes down to educating the population so that they stop putting these things in the water. If only it were that easy. You know, many of these chemicals [00:18:30] that we've been studying are not the result of someone doing something wrong. So you know that the interests that people have had in pharmaceuticals over the past 10 years, pharmaceuticals that show up in water, people say, well, we just have to start pouring our pills down the drain when we're done with them. Well guess what? The pills getting poured down the drain is a very minor fraction of the whole. 

Speaker 3:        The majority of the pharmaceuticals that end up in the sewage come from normal use because those drugs go [00:19:00] inside of our body. They do the great things that we've come to rely on and then they come back out and the molecule hasn't been changed at all. So in many cases, if a pharmaceutical is used correctly, it's final repository is the sewage treatment plant. And I don't know of too many people who are willing to give up their aspirin or their heart medication or whatever it is because they want to protect a fish or a downstream drinking water user. [00:19:30] Technology has evolved to the point where these elements can be removed from the water. As a matter of course, we can remove anything we want from water. It's just a question of cost. And I think that that always, that's always the rub in this whole situation. 

Speaker 3:        So if we wanted to, we could take the nastiest water in the world and make it into water that's so clean, we could use it for semiconductor manufacturing. And that's a lot cleaner than drinking water has to be. The problem is that people have come [00:20:00] to expect their water and their wastewater treatment bills to be low. And so if you want to remove these things, it's going to cost money and oftentimes it's going to cost more money than people are willing to pay. You've done a certain amount of work with wetlands and what's your experience with trying to recreate wetlands? So we talked a little bit already about how the systems for removing contaminants from water have to be inexpensive. [00:20:30] And so starting about 25 years ago, people started to toy around with the idea that you could build wetlands and have the wetlands removed some of these residual pollutants for you. 

Speaker 3:        The idea is you have a sewage treatment plant and instead of that water directly into the river, you put it into an area that has wetland plants in it, cat tails, bull rush, the usual kinds of plants, and in that system the pollutants will disappear because [00:21:00] the plants and the bacteria that break down the decaying plants will also degrade the pollutants. And that certainly works quite well for one of the main pollutants in wastewater, which is nitrate. So nitrate, which is a water pollutant, and it's also a nutrient that causes algae to bloom in rivers. Nitrate can be removed quite well in treatment wetlands. What we've been doing for the past few years has been experimenting with wetlands that [00:21:30] are optimized to remove things like pharmaceuticals and personal care products and the chemicals that we find in wastewater. And one of the ways in which we do that is by exploiting sunlight. 

Speaker 3:        Many of these chemicals are unstable in the presence of sunlight. And so if we can build a wetland where we have lots of sunlight penetration, we can actually take advantage of this natural process. And the good news is that it's pretty much free. You're just relying upon [00:22:00] the gravity to flow the water through the wetland system and the sunlight and the bacteria and the plants to break down the pollutants for you. Now there is another aspect of the work we've been doing with wetlands that I think is also important and that is the idea that we can build wetlands within our cities to help treat the storm water runoff and the polluted water that flows through the cities and improve the habitats that way while providing some aesthetic benefit. So perhaps in the [00:22:30] future or urban creeks instead of being concrete channels to quickly move water out, we're even underground drainage pipes might actually have an element of a natural treatment system built into them. 

Speaker 3:        The new center that you've just become part of here at cal, do you want to describe what that is? You know, over the past decade or so in my research, I've been looking at different pieces of this water puzzle. But I recognized a few years ago along with several of my colleagues [00:23:00] that this is too big a problem to solve with individual technologies. It really takes a holistic look at the entire urban water cycle to solve the problem. And so an opportunity came a couple of years ago to apply for an NSF engineering research center. And, and in this case we decided to go after this question of urban water systems and how they're gonna make the transition from their current state, which is a reliance on imported water consumption of energy [00:23:30] pollution to a future state in which they're more self sufficient and immune from droughts. They use less water and they leave the environment in better condition than what they found in. 

Speaker 3:        We put in a, and we were successful, the center launched at the beginning of August. So the acronym is renew it, reinventing the nations, urban water infrastructure. And that's really what we're all about. We would like to see a system that developed during the 19th [00:24:00] century and the 20th century evolve into something that's going to be suitable for the 21st century and you're going to be involved in project work and field work. I think the thing that's the big challenge with our center is to take the technologies that we develop in the laboratory and study at our test sites and actually get them into the urban water system, but really the success of this project is measured by whether [00:24:30] we have a reinvented urban water system in 10 or 20 years. Professor said, luck. Thank you very much for coming on spectrum. Thanks very much for having me. 

Speaker 1:        Oh, 

Speaker 5:        well 

Speaker 1:        the [inaudible] center website is urban water, e r c.org a regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally [00:25:00] over the next few weeks. We can cargo ski joins me for the calendar 

Speaker 5:        in our last episode, Kashara Hari, you mentioned that the bay area science festival is having a pub crawl tonight from six to nine 30 with various venues in San Francisco's mission district participating. This will be a very busy night with lots of places you can stop. Some highlights include nerd night speed dating at the makeout room, which will include lightning talks on dating and romance, a guided tour of natural oddities. I Paxton Gate, a physics circus at Atlas Cafe and a talk [00:25:30] at black and blue tattoo who's hosting Carl Zimmer's presentation on science theme. Tattoos. For more information on these and other activities tonight, visit www.bayareascience.org on Monday, November 7th from seven to 9:00 PM the Berkeley Rep theater at two zero one five Addison is hosting the Berkeley labs science at the theater this month. UC Berkeley's College of natural resources. Professor John Hart will moderate a panel on the secrets of soil. Panelists will discuss how soil microbes change with climate, [00:26:00] how these microbes can lead to better biofuels and how they adapt to extreme environments and mission is free. 

Speaker 5:        Visit www.lbl.gov for more info. MIT President, Dr Susan Hockfield is speaking at the Silicon Valley Bank. Three zero zero five Tasmin drive in Santa Clara on Wednesday, November 9th she'll talk about investing in innovation and scientific research to retain the economic power of the United States. The program starts at 7:00 PM with a check in at six 30 [00:26:30] the event is $7 for students, $12 for Commonwealth club members and $20 for standard admission. Visit www.commonwealthclub.org for more info now several stories. Science insider reports that Lawrence Livermore national laboratory has chosen, noted physicist and National Security Policy Expert Penrose Parnia Albright as their new director. Albright is the 11th director of the lab since it was established in 1952 you places [00:27:00] George Miller who is stepping down after six years. Albright previously served as assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and we'll assume directorship in December, www.llnl.gov has more information. Science news reports at the Advisory Committee on immunization practice announced the recommendation that the vaccine against the human papilloma virus or HPV be used for boys starting at age 11 or 12 HPV can cause genital warts and is the [00:27:30] most common cause of cervical cancer.

Speaker 5:        So the vaccine is already recommended for girls. While the disease is rarely symptomatic, it is the most commonly sexually transmitted infection in the United States. More than 6 million new infections each year. The vaccine doesn't seem to work against HPV that has already infected an individual, but it is preventative for the uninfected prompting for its early use in both boys and girls. The castle solar car team competed in the world solar challenge in Australia during [00:28:00] October and finished 20th out of 37 teams. The Red Berry commonly called Miracle Fruit has spawned flavor tripping parties as it makes sour foods such as around lemons or bitter foods such as beer, taste sweet like lemonade or ice cream without adding any sugar. While it has been known for more than 40 years that the protein miraculous is the active ingredient in the miracle fruit. It hasn't been clear to how that protein works. 

Speaker 5:        In a paper published in the September 26 edition of the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, [00:28:30] University of Tokyo, biochemists, Keiko Ayub and her team state that the miraculous is interaction with the tongue sensors depends on acidity. The team used molecular modeling and experiments where they used human kidney cells, engineered to produce sweet receptor proteins with fluorescent markers and miraculous and substances with different Ph levels. They found that miraculous had no effect ph 6.7 or higher but had an effect that increased as the Ph decreased from 6.5 to 4.8 they suggest that miraculous [00:29:00] binds to sweet receptors at neutral ph and then functionally changes in acidic environments. Studying miraculous may eventually lead to better ways of sweetening foods without increasing caloric content. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible] music card during the show is from a less Donna David album titled Folk and Acoustic [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. You're happy to hear from listeners. If you have [00:29:30] comments about the show, please send them to us. Our email address is full spectrum dot [email protected] join us into [inaudible] time. [inaudible].

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The Bay Area Science Festival is an annual 10-day celebration of the science and technology of the Bay Area. Scientists share stories, passion and science at over 50 events. Programs feature hands-on activities and tours of cutting-edge facilities.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next? Nope. [inaudible]. [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. 

Speaker 2:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm Rick Karnofsky. We do have an interview today with Kishore Hari, the director of the bay area science festival that will be happening October 29th through November 6th this is a big, big festival and [00:01:00] Kishore. We'll cover some of the individual events as well as the philosophy behind the festival. This interview is prerecorded and edited, so I'm Kishore Hari. I'm the director of the first annual bay area science festival, which is a 10 day celebration of science throughout the bay area. There's a hundred events from Santa Rosa to San Jose, all to get people excited about all things, science, technology, engineering, and math. 95% of our events are free and I'm really here to [00:01:30] just evangelize science. I love using that term evangelize science because most scientists hate using the word evangelize. Great. Can you describe some of the events that are taking place there? 

Speaker 2:        Some of our major events are big free public outdoor, almost museum like exhibition, so we have three of them across the bay area, one at cal state East Bay for between 40 to 50 different local organizations doing hands on activities. One on Saturday, November 5th [00:02:00] at Infinian raceway. Again 40 to 58 exhibitions this time fee train a lot of organizations from the North Bay and then concluding on Sunday the six with a free day at 18 t park, 170 different exhibits on display. We're essentially turning 18 t park into a free outdoor science museum for the day. It's going to be incredible. There's everything from marine science to the latest medical technology to you can climb aboard an 80 foot trailer that's full of medical diagnostic [00:02:30] equipment that can analyze everything from microbes in your bloodstream to doing a scan of your brain. It's in, it'll be incredible. Those I think are the highlight events. 

Speaker 2:        The ones that we're trying to emphasize the come one, come all enjoy science just like you enjoy arts or music or food festivals. But in addition to that we have a whole series of talks and conversations and hikes and explorations throughout the bay area to really connect people with [00:03:00] just the resources that exist here. Right. The Bay area is pretty much the leader of science and technology in the in the country and we could walk 10 minutes outside of the studio and we could go stand where plutonium was discovered. How cool is that? 10 minutes up the hill is where sal pro mater works. We just won the Nobel Prize in physics. We can go to any spot in the bay area. There's resources like that and so we have a series of science hikes. We have a series of science conversations, so we called the wonder dialogues that are all about [00:03:30] meeting the, the greatest scientific minds here locally. 

Speaker 2:        We have, we even have a science public hall for adults so they can enjoy the fun and see just the inherent science that goes on behind everyday things from beer to music to art galleries, et Cetera. It's too much science for 10 days. So do you have any other work at UCF in addition to sort of organizing this festival? So I'll tell you the premise of the festival as it is actually funded by the National Science Foundation [00:04:00] and they funded for particular sites as a sponsor to see, to really understand what do science festivals do in great sort of scientific thinking. We're going to measure what they do, we're gonna measure the measurable. So that's actually the number one task of this festival is not just to set forth this great festival from Bay area, but actually understand how it impacts communities and then take it to the next level, which is help spread that to communities across the country in particularly seed festivals in [00:04:30] new communities that may not have them or have a dearth of resources. 

Speaker 2:        And the way that sort of has come forth is that we need to lead from the front. So the Boston's the dcs, the Chicago's The San Francisco's of the world need to sort of start the science festivals in those science rich communities that have the museums that have the universities and then really coalesce all of that knowledge generated by that and take that to communities that aren't having it. So initially that's the vision of the project. So I spent [00:05:00] a good percentage of my time evangelizing about science festivals to other communities across the nation and spending a lot of time bringing in a lot of knowledge that exists internationally about how science festivals run. And that has been to great effect because when I, when we started this project, there's maybe like five to seven large scale science festivals in the country in sort of the places you expect Boston, there's the maker fair here. 

Speaker 2:        There is some, there was a big event in Chicago, there's one in DC, et cetera. Now we're expecting [00:05:30] in uh, in 2012, almost 40, in a short period of time. And they're in unusual locations. Like there's one in, in uh, southeast Missouri. Uh, there's, uh, Arkansas as far as launching a statewide festival. North Carolina has a statewide festival. Las Vegas had a science festival. Their actual tagline was Las Vegas Science Festival. What are the odds? So what I thoroughly enjoy about the project more than anything as we get to help communities that you normally [00:06:00] wouldn't identify with this kind of celebration into having it. And then more importantly, on another level, we, we work off of a supplemental grant from the NSF to help seed. These are linked these festivals to science festivals developing in key Middle East nations. So we, um, the Cambridge science festival, it's based out of the MIT museum has long had a relationship with um, the American University of Cairo and they've actually helped launch a Cairo science festival. 

Speaker 2:        [00:06:30] And if you permit me a, a quick story on this, I still can't get over this email. I got one day. So one of our partners from San Diego went to Cairo to sort of help get it off the ground. I think there was about two and a half months after the Arab spring. Really took hold. And they're having, you know, a two day festival in, in the middle of Egypt. And they had all these students come and at the end of this big long day, they went up on the roof and set up some telescopes. So all of these, um, Egyptian [00:07:00] students who never looked through a telescope before in their life could look at the night sky and like, what's more elemental than that than just looking up and enjoying the universe that surrounds us. And they did that for a couple of hours or an astronomer there, and they looked down and from American University of Cairo, you can see Theresa Square and all of the people up on the roof. 

Speaker 2:        Then join the protest that was happening in Tahrir square right after the astronomy viewing. We had one American colleague there and he sort of got swept up in the mob. He, [00:07:30] he's fine. But I still find that amazing how education, uh, cultural events can really mix to become part of like a, a greater movement. Uh, I thoroughly enjoy that. And if science can be an agent of just empowering people, especially in these nations where it's not celebrated or welcomed to have these kinds of ex exploits. That's the kind of thing that I want to be part of and and we should support in terms of exporting our, our, our talent and resources to those nations. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible] [00:08:00] you're listening to the spectrum on Calex Berkeley. We are talking today with Kishore Hari, the director of the bay area science festival, 

Speaker 2:        the talks. I, I have [00:08:30] to stop and say that I'm a nerd. I am like 110% nerd and I love these rich conversations between intellectuals. Just really going at it about how x, y, or z was discovered. There's a conversation on November 2nd at the cal academy featuring two different neuroscientists talking about what will we ever understand the brain and one of the neuroscientists, Markram has developed something called the blue brain project, which maps [00:09:00] all of the processes that 10,000 neurons will do. That's only a small segment of the neurons in our brain, but how amazing is that just to understand fundamentally what's happening in your brain in that moment. And he's being joined by David Eagleman who is a neuroscientist at Baylor, who is most famous for studying synesthesia and our perception of time and memory, and I think his most famous experiment is where he dropped some of his Grad students 200 feet in free fall to see if they perceive time to go [00:09:30] slower in those moments of of heightened fright and they're going to discuss sort of the, with all of the advances in neuroscience, all the advances in our understanding of how the brain operates. 

Speaker 2:        Is it something that we can ever really touch upon and say, we know how the brain works. We can construct an artificial brain that can operate on human, or is there something just beyond that that is innately human that is innately just us or innately me or, or any of you that can never [00:10:00] be replicated? That one that exciting to me because it's one of those, it's to me the brain is the, is the scientific frontier that, and then on the other side of the spectrum is, um, Peter Norvig from Google and Eric Horvitz from Microsoft are talking about artificial intelligence and where that's going. And Peter Norvig's, I'm sort of famous as he's the one that was running the Stanford Free AI course is pioneering some of the work with the driverless cars that you may have heard about. Eric Horvitz isn't, is no slouch in [00:10:30] his own right leader in the field talking about where this is going with everything from Watson, you know, beating the contestants on jeopardy to driverless cars, to all of those IBM ads that won't stop interrupting my football, watching about how to build a smarter planet. 

Speaker 2:        Where is this actually going? Or can we actually build computer systems that can solve some of our greatest challenges, whether that is curing disease to, you know, understanding, uh, redistributing, distributing traffic. I think these [00:11:00] are fundamental questions and I think they're, again, poking at this big topic of the intersection of humanity and technology that I personally find fascinating. So those are the two that I would that jump off the page to me just from a straight, I'm a nerd perspective and have you drawn on other science festivals for inspiration? Drawn upon is a polite way to say that I have blatantly stolen ideas from other science festivals and I think that's actually probably [00:11:30] the reason that festivals are emerging so much more is that we have a little community, we call it the science festival alliance. It's a member community of all these science festivals and we talk to each other regularly and we give each other ideas and we steal them, we approve upon them. 

Speaker 2:        Sometimes I steal ideas and I make them worse. But in any case, it's that basic ideas. Absolutely. We talked to each all the time about um, everything from events structure to how we work with our partners [00:12:00] to, to just basically venting to each other when we're up at three in the morning, still working on like production timelines and all sorts of fun stuff like that. But that's absolutely how we're innovating. Every community has its own personality and its own assets so they all take on a different flavor. But what's exciting to me is that doing this community community, you really see some different things emerge. I have a close collaborator at the Philadelphia Science Festival and we have a little bit of a rivalry going, a friendly rivalry. And [00:12:30] so this year I think she did two things that just blew, blew it out of the water that were just amazing. 

Speaker 2:        One is she partnered with the Phillies and U Penn engineering constructed a robot to throw out a first pitch. So there are all these like 40,000 Philly fans are just like, Whoa, how am I going to a one-thirty game? And they, all of a sudden this robot gets wheeled out onto the field and like pitches something. And what was amazed, mindblowing about that. I was at that game with a colleague from Cambridge and we're sitting in the, in the upper deck [00:13:00] and there's this down-home Philly guy born and raised. He turned around and he was like, you know, I had a question about that robot. I turned around and I was like, are there any roboticists here? And there's this army of Penn engineers sitting like three rows back and they all stood up and were like, yeah, we're roboticists. And so like some guy that came to a Philly's baseball game was talking to a roboticists about something. 

Speaker 2:        The best question he had, he's like that little bulb on the front of the robot. It looked like it had a camera. Did that actually do anything though? [00:13:30] No, that was decorative and I thought that was great. Then they fully admitted, they just put something on there to make it look cooler. That I thought was incredible. Philadelphia Science Festival had so many amazing things, but I was lucky to be part of their astronomy night and we're doing that here in the bay area as well. We have a astronomy night with 20 different locations that are hosting lectures and telescope viewings and planetarium shows, it'll be amazing. But when I was at the Philadelphia Knight, I went to this lecture by Guy Bluford first African American [00:14:00] in space, grew up in West Philly. So you went back to his west Philly neighborhood and gave a talk about, but how he got to be an astronaut and about the international space station. 

Speaker 2:        And this was one of those perfect moments cause so he's giving this talk and he was talking to basically an audience of about 150 African American kids and, and their parents. And there was a woman that basically was just in the front row at the end was just almost in [00:14:30] tears because she's like, I've lived in this neighborhood my whole life. And sometimes we just need a hero. And if that's what it was, it, and it wasn't a sports player, it wasn't a politician, it wasn't, you know, just somebody, it was somebody that worked hard, that have a lot of pride in that neighborhood that came back. And so that went beyond to me. That was that community taking pride in one of their own, which we all should be able to do. And then the sort of beautiful end of [00:15:00] that night as he talked about the ISS and all of the kind of secret life of living on a spate sedation. 

Speaker 2:        And we walked outside and there some telescopes set up in the, in the lot and the ISS actually passed overhead. And so everyone that got to hear him talk about it got to see the space station for the first time. And I don't know, but that was the first time I'd ever really looked at the space station. And it's like, you know, I hear about it on the news all the time, but there is a space station orbiting the earth [00:15:30] and there's like people in there that's just remarkable. And this guy had been on there and he was standing two feet from me and he, he was as humble as, as any one person could ever be. And just so excited to tell people about that discovery. And then lastly, I'm just a Simpsons nerd. And so there was a guy that gave a talk on science and the Simpsons during the festival. He wrote a book on it. His name's Paul Halpern. He's a professor at the University of Sciences in [00:16:00] Philadelphia and it was in the basement of a library. So it was the most sort of surprising location for Simpsons Hawk and it was full like on an 11 o'clock on a Tuesday. And all of these people asking all of these inane questions, those are ideas I've blatantly stolen. The reason I've stolen it is they're just incredibly brilliant. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        [00:16:30] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with [inaudible] hiring director, bay area science semester 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible].

Speaker 2:        You're really poking at those innovative events that do something a little different. And the ones that [00:17:00] strike to me around that is the fact that most of these events, a wide majority, I would say over 75% aren't happening on college campuses. They're not happening in places where science were traditionally housed. So I think about this science pub crawl that's coming on Friday the fourth to take over the mission district in San Francisco. So we have a a science author. His name is Carl Zimmer. He's famous for studying eco ly and microbes in your gut and he wrote this kind of comical book [00:17:30] called Science Inc that's a compendium of all of the great science tattoos people have sent pictures for and he's giving a talk at at a tattoo parlor. I don't think it's very often that you get much science at Tattoo Parlors. You start to see like how the community at large, every place you go when you get your coffee in the morning, when you go into Chotsky store, when you go just walking down the block, it's just surrounding you at all times and that I think is freaking awesome. 

Speaker 2:        [00:18:00] I'm also excited because there's a, there's trainings that take real science experiments into the classroom and we've partnered with a teacher. He teaches a class on biology and within the class they're going to do a specific experiment where they trap bees within the community garden at the school and it's part of a larger experiment to understand how climate change and just you know, micro conditions within your environment are affecting the spread of pollinators. It's amazing that this is [00:18:30] typically taught by just a lecture in the classroom. I don't know about you but at 16 I certainly had no part in any published scientific study and the last one I'll bring up about this is a friend of mine last year piloted this project here in the bay area called science hack day that she formed a little committee of, of interested folks that basically brings together designers, developers and scientists to really hammer on big scientific datasets. It's November 12th and 13th the weekend after the festival, so it's [00:19:00] a post festival event. But the reason I'm so excited about it is 200 people, most of them never met before. Being basically locked into a room and working together just out of nothing and working on big scientific issues. 

Speaker 2:        How did you first get into science and then science advocacy? So the science education route for me, I just call it science education. I have no other way to describe it. Aye owned the company for Awhile. I was a sort of successful [00:19:30] chemist I guess and it was fascinating and exciting because I was in sales and business and product development, all of these things and I realized after years of doing it I just had no real passion for it. Like it was never the thing that that got me up in the morning that drove me to jump to do and when I thought back on all of the things that sort of make me happy in life, one of the memories that always came [00:20:00] up is just be [inaudible] about science with my friends over beers and how that was just an agent of conversation is is science just like brought out the best in us? 

Speaker 2:        We have these kinds of great conversations about where stuff was going and I realized that I was like, well, if that's what I really love to do when I become an agent of that instead of this sort of saying I enjoy it, and I was at a conference, it's the triple a s conference. It was the largest scientific [00:20:30] society at a conference here and I decided once I was just going to go, I was just going to go, go to sessions and joy myself. I know that's probably a little atypical for most people. Let's go to a big science conference and just drop into sessions, but I saw a flyer up about a science cafe and I was like, somebody is making a entire science theme cafe. That sounds great. I would go there all the time. That's not what it was at all. But I, I went to this mixer, I met this, this gentleman Ben, who was like, [00:21:00] who, we basically sat around for a couple hours talking about science over beers and I was like, so what's a science cafe? 

Speaker 2:        And he was like, that's it. Except with a few more people. It's just people talking about science. There's scientists there and sort of ignites a conversation, but it's a sort of democracy thing. Like within a month I had started my own in the city and he just became the best part of my day when I was working on that project is getting all these people together, getting them to talk about different issues and how much learning can happen [00:21:30] in those situations and how hungry people were to learn about all of the great advancements. And I kept following that path and that led me to greater and greater involvement in sort of the marketplace, which is one creating a website, bay area science.org that just listed out all of the incredible science events that are happening and there's literally almost a hundred a week public signs events that are just happening around the bay area. 

Speaker 2:        And I was like, what an incredible resource. I just sort of fell into this position [00:22:00] leading a festival and it was just an amazing opportunity where the, the whole premise was in, in Europe and in Asia, they have these big celebrations of science akin to arts and music festivals and they, they celebrate it like they do anything else. It's just an important part of culture and that couldn't have resonated more with me personally. So I went after that position. I luckily landed into it and here I am a year and a half later, [00:22:30] I wanted to know how you got interested in science personally in the first place. Oh, so all credit to the greatest scientist I've ever known my life, my dad, every morning, like clockwork, the guy was so disciplined at six in the morning, he'd be at his desk and he'd be just reading, not working, reading. He was always very disciplined, but more importantly within that discipline, he was like, there was just innate curiosity on how things work, all credit to him for igniting that [00:23:00] sense of just wonder within me and then just being spirited along by friends and teachers along the way. 

Speaker 2:        I think we've all had a great, the memory of that continues to inspire us. I have to say like it, it all goes back to my dad. I can't thank him enough because it's open so many like doors in my life. It just wondering about stuff and and tinkering is probably some of the most enjoyment I have and now that I have a new son, I [00:23:30] just hope I can impart that same, same interest to him with the caveat that I hope he doesn't destroy my TV or alarm clock or any of those other things that I did back when I was a kid. What can other people who are interested in helping out with the festival do their volunteer opportunities up on our website, pay area, science.org there's a ton of volunteer opportunities. I need help endlessly, whether it be promoting the festival or being on site and helping out the day of. 

Speaker 2:        Most importantly, [00:24:00] I want people to come and enjoy it and after they enjoy being part of the festival and want them to go home and continue that conversation with their loved ones, with their friends and family, that actually is probably the most important component here. I need help, so if you have time and energy and are excited about the science festival, please go sign up on the page. There are different opportunities available, but at the end of the day, I want people to enjoy it. I want people to experience something they've never seen seen before. I want people to take risks, go places that [00:24:30] they normally wouldn't go if you don't normally talk to a scientist, this is your week to finally meet and shake hands and talk with one. I always say the tagline for the festivals, unleash your inner scientists. I think that's what I want to see most from the community is just to get in touch with that, that spot of curiosity and wonder. That's innate in every human being and just go on and enjoy. Okay. Sure. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:25:00] the music played during the show is written and performed by David lost [inaudible] from his album titled Folk and Acoustic [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send [00:25:30] them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. The [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:26:00] [inaudible].

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The Human Power Generation in Fitness Facilities research project will create a human power generation center at the UC Berkeley Recreational Sports Facilities to develop new technologies and methods for energy conservation and power generation.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 [00:00:30] minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with [inaudible], a fifth year mechanical engineering and Applied Mathematics major at UC Berkeley, who along with Kimberly Lau, launched the human power gym project. After conducting a feasibility study, they are attempting to design and prototype [00:01:00] an elliptical exercise machine for the UC Berkeley recreational sports facility that will generate electricity. Rather than consume it, the generated electricity will be put back into the electrical grid. The project began in the summer of 2009 Maha g talks about her enthusiasm for the project and the challenges to make it a reality. Maha and I are joined by Rick [inaudible] for the interview. This interview is prerecorded and edited. [00:01:30] Maha, could you please explain the project you're working on currently? 

Speaker 4:        Okay, so I'm working on a project titled The Human Pirate Gym Project. It's part of the Berkeley Energy and Sustainability Laboratory in the mechanical engineering department. And the goal of our project is to harness human power from exercise machines currently in the recreational sports facility or the RSF at UC Berkeley. And we're hoping to retrofit and 28 elliptical machines to harness human power and send it back to the electric grid and also work an energy education [00:02:00] campaign to improve energy literacy among the members of the RSF and people who frequent the facility to give them a better idea of sustainability and energy. 

Speaker 3:        How did that idea bubble up for you and the group you're working on this with? 

Speaker 4:        So I'm working on this with a graduate student named Kimberly Lough in the Mechanical Engineering Department under professor at Gugino. We came across it separately. She came across the idea when she's working out in the RSF, seeing all these people burning calories and you know, exercising so much, they must be expending a lot of energy and there must [00:02:30] be a way to harness that. And then I came across the idea because I was reading up about, um, there's a project harnessing children's power to pump water up out of the wells. And in African villages they create like a, a carousel where kids can play on and when they spin around the carousel they're actually pumping water up into a tank. And so I thought, well if kids run around and harness all this energy, why can't we do something like this and the gyms across the u s 

Speaker 3:        and much power do you 

Speaker 5:        expect [00:03:00] to be able to generate from all this? 

Speaker 4:        So unfortunately it's not a lot of power. Um, the RSF uses on the order of 1.5 million kilowatt hours a year and energy consumption and by other things like air conditioning or where's all that go? So actually it's not air conditioning cause we live in a bay area. We don't actually have air conditioning and the RSF cause it stays relatively cool. It's definitely for heating and air circulation and ventilation. And then a good chunk of it goes to lights and actually [00:03:30] powering treadmills, believe it or not. So if we haven't retrofitted 28 elliptical machines, it would harness about 10,000 kilowatt hours a year, which is enough to power a small house but only 1% of what the RSF needs to run its daily use. The treadmill is actually account for about 12% of the energy use at the RSF and not a lot of people know that. So part of our project, we're trying to encourage people to use elliptical machines or other self powered machines that use less power that but give comparable workouts [00:04:00] according to fitness trainers and the hopes that maybe they'll switch over to more ellipticals and the treadmills can be replaced in the RSF cause they actually acquire. I think running on a treadmill for about an hour requires as much energy as doing a load of laundry, washing and drying. 

Speaker 5:        How did the project come together in terms of getting an off the ground funding, all those things. 

Speaker 4:        So two years ago I am part of the UC leads program, which is, I forgot what it stands for, but it's some type of scholarship program at Berkeley that encourages summer research. [00:04:30] So I was funded by them to do a summer research project two years ago and I contacted fresher ag Gino with this idea saying, hey, I'm funded, can I work in your lab with Kimberley? She's really awesome. Wants to work in this project. So the UC leads program funded me for that summer and they've also funded me to continue researching in the fall and of that year, fall 2009 so we researched the feasibility of this and tried to come up with some energy estimates on how much energy we could harness, how much that would cost, what sort of things would need to be in place [00:05:00] to continue actually with the retrofits. And we actually published a paper in a conference and a spring of 2010 with the American Society of mechanical engineers. And after that we started applying for funds through the Green Initiative Fund, the Sigmas I m research honors society and the Chancellors Green, the chancellor's Green Fund cacs, I believe it's called the Chancellor's Advisory Committee for sustainability. And so with all those three funding resources, we have about a little over $17,000 [00:05:30] currently to actually go ahead and build these prototypes and get going with the retrofits at the gym. 

Speaker 4:        Can you talk about your, a conference paper anymore. So what does it, what was it about? So our conference paper was published in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Conference on Energy Sustainability in May of 2010 and it just talked about our feasibility study on the RSF detailing how much power could be harnessed from the RSF, what [00:06:00] percentage of power consumption that accounted for. And it also detailed sort of how long it would take to payback such a system. And it also looked at the light life cycle assessment of the system and life cycle assessment basically means you take into account all the energy required to make the components that you'll be adding to the system and then take a look at how long it would take to payback the co two emissions related to that energy that was put in. So I think we estimated that unfortunately it's relates [00:06:30] to at savings of only a thousand dollars a year in energy consumption because energy is so cheap out here. But if we made CO2 emissions, the metric instead of dollars, the system would pay itself off in like two to three years of CO2 savings. If we assume that the energy generated at the RSF no longer needs to be generated by say PGNE and then taking into account how much CO2 is required for those few components that we have to add to each elliptical. So that was a much less bleak outlook. 

Speaker 5:        [00:07:00] Did you draw on previous attempts to do the same thing? 

Speaker 4:        So we redid a lot of research and a couple other gyms across the nation have retrofitted elliptical machines specifically to harness human power. And we talked to them and we talked to, there's a company called rewrap that actually does commercial retrofits and they approached the RSF also saying that they could do the retrofits before I came onto the project and we talked to those jams and I actually had a chance to visit one of them in [inaudible] at Oregon state. And [00:07:30] for some reason they didn't seem to be completely happy with the setup. For one reason or another, they didn't think it was producing as much energy as they thought. And so based on those interviews I had done with gyms across the nation, we decided to try and come up with our own retrofit. Also, cal poly has done a retrofit of their gym facility and are harnessing power from ellipticals in their own method. 

Speaker 4:        And the gym users there are really, really excited about it and really enjoy it a lot more than people at Oregon State for instance. So that's kind of why we're trying to go [00:08:00] ahead with doing it ourselves. Um, based on interviews and research from other gyms, definitely. And are only the ellipticals being used to generate power. Currently they're the easiest to tap into because they have an onboard generator that will convert your human power movement into resistance, electrical resistance that you feel when you're working out. So it's really easy to tap into them, just remove the resistance mechanism and instead put in something like an inverter to convert the DC power [00:08:30] you're generating to AC power. That can be used and sent back to the grid. 

Speaker 5:        When the cal poly success, was there any attempt to collaborate with them? 

Speaker 4:        We did approach them and ask them for collaboration, but I believe they are, have, they have some sort of patents on their devices now and it's very proprietary and so they're not, they're various hesitant to work with us and so if we create our own solution we're hoping to be much more open about it and sort of spread it around to any universities who want to do this on their own. Jim, [00:09:00] because we've had such a hard time contacting other people for help that we want to make sure it's easier for others. 

Speaker 6:        You are listening to spectrum on the KALX Berkeley, we are talking with Mar Haji, but the human power gym project of which she is a founding member. 

Speaker 5:        What's been the most challenging aspect [00:09:30] of the project? 

Speaker 4:        I think definitely recruiting people for the project because we've seen so many people come and go last year in our teams that has been really hard to get anything done. Um, we really need people who are skilled in electronics and mechanical engineering and unfortunately I don't have a very big electronics background myself and since I'm graduating in December, I have a lot of requirements that I need to meet and I can't give my all to the project as I could two years ago. So it's been really hard to find people who are as motivated or as determined about the [00:10:00] project to go ahead and finish it up and follow it through and hand it off and I, so that's been a big, big challenge I think. 

Speaker 5:        Is that something that you want to do? Do you want to recruit people what he was attempting to do in that vein? 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, we definitely want to recruit people because it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of minds to prototype one elliptical and then expand it to the entire gym. And like I said, since I'm graduating in December, I definitely want to hand off the project to other people to sort of conduct follow up [00:10:30] research. Like okay, if we put these ellipticals and generate power, do people actually learn from this? Do the energy literacy rates go up, do treadmills get useless. There's a whole host of followup research that could be done and hasn't been done yet and definitely has a potential of being published and presented around the nation I think. 

Speaker 5:        So are you mostly interested in recruiting other engineers and how would they sign up? 

Speaker 4:        So I'm interested in [inaudible] definitely recruiting um, upperclassmen engineers but also [00:11:00] people who have experience in signage and education. Cause I know, I don't know how best to reach people or get the knowledge disseminated about all the energy sustainability going on in the RSF. And that would definitely be helpful. And if anyone's interested they can just email RSF [email protected] we'd be happy to have them on board. 

Speaker 5:        All right. Any of your current efforts documented anywhere of Wiki or mainly list or anything like that? 

Speaker 4:        So we have a webpage, hpg.berkeley.edu [00:11:30] needs to be updated for the past couple months. But generally a lot of our documents are there and we also have a [inaudible] website for all the members of the project. And that's how we communicate for papers that need to be read or budgets they need to be updated and that kind of thing. 

Speaker 5:        Do you know if, uh, there are sort of commercial efforts in this too, like commercial? Uh, 

Speaker 4:        so besides outside, outside universities, I guess so universities are really unique in that their gym [00:12:00] facilities are open for so many hours and frequent, so many users. So unfortunately Jim is like 24 hour fitness even though they're open 24 hours, don't see as much throughput of people or patrons that, um, university of do. So there hasn't been a huge push and they're at that direction. I believe there's a handful of them that use at least the re-roof technology. And there's a couple of gyms that are like, I think there's one gym in Hong Kong that's created some type of something called like a human dynamo where four people will bike on [00:12:30] the sort of combined system and move their hands at the same time and that will generate a whole lot of power for the gym. But aside from that, then not much that I know, it seems like a natural for a gym setting is to make it competitive somehow. I know both Oregon State and University of Oregon did retrofits and they sort of had a competition like who can create the most energy. Um, and we hope when we actually retrofit the gym to involve some sort of LCD panel that reads out which elliptical is [00:13:00] generating the most energy, you know, compare it across the gym and everyone can see, oh no like I gotta be 12 like my friends over there or something. Yeah. 

Speaker 4:        What's been the most unexpected thing that's happened in the project? So finding an elliptical machine was really hard. We originally thought that it was this elliptical machine floating around and so to haul on the sixth floor that no one really had, no one really knew who it belonged to. So we thought we'd use that for our project. We had [00:13:30] took a while to track down who the professor was who had it laying around and he gladly donated it to our project. And then when we took it apart, we found out that its internal mechanism was completely different than those used at the gym. It was using less electrical resistance like modern, most ellipticals use in was using more mechanical resistance, um, something much more like a recumbent bicycle. So we were like, well if we prototype on this system it's really not going to be compatible with anything in the gym. 

Speaker 4:        So then we had to contact the gym and try [00:14:00] and track down elliptical that way. And luckily they were after a couple of weeks or months, like everything fell together when we finally got it transported. And transporting those big things is also huge hassle from the RSF all the way down to attra very hall on North side on the social outreach part of it, the behavioral aspect of the project. What's been the challenge there to get that up and running? Um, so we conducted a survey of all the members of [00:14:30] the RSF and I believe something like five or 600 responded, which was great. And they, we post questions such as how much energy do you think x, Y and z machines use? Um, to get an idea of how energy literate people are about the machines at the RSF. And so we have a good base of where we think people could have their education, energy education improved. It's just a matter of figuring out the best way to actually do that. So as a mechanical engineering major, unfortunately I haven't [00:15:00] had to deal very much with energy education or engineering education and we could definitely use people on our project who know perhaps more like the psychology of a situation. Like definitely some sort of analysis on where people move in the RSF and where's the best place to place these things and how can we make them as interactive as possible to increase awareness, stuff like that. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        you are listening [00:15:30] to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Maharaji but the human powered gym project of which he is a founding member. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        are there any key things that you're learning in doing this that you might not have learned if you hadn't been involved in this project? 

Speaker 4:        Definitely like in Berkeley engineering for the first three, three and a half years [00:16:00] of your educational career. It's very theoretical and this project has given me the advantage of doing something on the side that's much more hands on and applications of my learning at Berkeley. So that's been really awesome. And then working with other people on a project and just knowing how to work in a team is not something that people teach you in class either until you get to the higher level project-based classes and engineering. So that's been really great. And uh, working and collaborating with people, not only in the mechanical engineering department but the directors of the RSF to [00:16:30] TGF and other funding agencies and Co working together to get all that going is like intense. I can only imagine what professors have to go through to get grants written and proposals and then get the actually get that money and use it for their projects. That's been kind of like a mini 

Speaker 5:        many experience with that. How much time do you estimate you spent working on a project? 

Speaker 4:        Well, I've been working on it since summer of 2009 and I work anywhere [00:17:00] from five to 10 hours a week on it. I think pretty consistently with the exception of last summer and this summer because I've been away doing other internships and research projects. But every time I come back to Berkeley it's like, all right, got to get on. I gotta get going again. 

Speaker 5:        And have your summer internships where you haven't been working on the Human Powergen bin and sort of related fields? 

Speaker 4:        Yeah. Last summer I got the chance to go to Oregon State University and do, uh, an inner and study on the interaction [00:17:30] between wave energy devices in the environment, studying what types of organisms might colonize the environment. Cause I hadn't really, really been looked at. And then this summer I got the chance to go to MIT and study, um, fluid dynamics in the ocean engineering lab there. So starting to get a feel for the field and both on the west and the east coast and getting ideas of what professors doing what. So that's been really great. Yeah. 

Speaker 5:        So for this project, you're probably not going to get completed by the time you graduate and if you're able to hand it off, [00:18:00] would you be involved in trying to get additional funding to make that transition happen? 

Speaker 4:        I think at the moment we haven't used much of our funding because we've had a lot of setbacks and getting ellipticals and getting team members. So depending on the stance of the project in December, we would definitely, depending on if we've used a lot of our funds for prototyping or we're still waiting to get people on board to start prototyping, that would probably influence whether or not we apply for more funding. But I mean [00:18:30] more money's always great cause right now the funding we have budgeted, we'll only retrofit 14 of the 28 ellipticals. So if we are to consider doing all 28 we definitely need to look for more funding. I'm just sort of hesitant to do it right now because we don't actually have anything prototyped at the moment and no real product to show before we apply for more funding. 

Speaker 5:        What is it that you like about engineering? What drew you to engineering? 

Speaker 4:        So actually one thought I wanted to be a film major for a really long time [00:19:00] and then I went to a summer program just for like fun. I was like, okay, I'll get out of the house for a month, uh, in mechanical engineering. And they had us like take apart part printer, take apart a blender and like build these little like out of the box robots. You're just like screw a few things in the other and put a battery. And I think just the whole idea of like building things and taking things apart sort of amazed me. And I was always like really good at puzzles and math and so it was like, oh this is like way more fun than making movies. [00:19:30] So that's sort of what drawn me to it. 

Speaker 5:        Has Your work on this project given you a better sense of how what you want to do going forward? 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, definitely. It has encouraged me to look more into alternative forms of energy. That's definitely what I want to do in the future. Unfortunately, it's made me disheartened about human power cause going into the project I thought, Oh yeah, we can just retrofit all the ellipticals and then power the entire gym. We use so much power on a daily basis that that's not [00:20:00] feasible so definitely opens your eyes onto how much power we consume every day and I think this project has been a great stepping stone into the world of alternative energy and I hope to study something like ocean energy and ocean energy extraction for graduate studies in school. 

Speaker 5:        Thanks very much Maha for coming on the show and sharing your experience with us. 

Speaker 4:        No problem. This was awesome. Thanks 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [00:20:30] [inaudible] 

Speaker 5:        irregular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. 

Speaker 7:        I am joined for this by Rick Karnofsky every Thursday night at 6:00 PM the California Academy of Sciences. In San Francisco's Golden Gate Park host nightlife at 21 and over event featuring [00:21:00] music, cocktails and learning and mission is $12 or $10 for members. In addition to the regular exhibits and planetarium shows, the cal academy offers theme related special events. The theme for October 13th Nightlife is designed from nature. The biomimicry institute will show off real products inspired by natural forums such as green shield, a low chemical water repellent fabric finish inspired by the microscopic texture of leaves and Formaldehyde free plywood inspired by the adhesive chemistry of intertidal muscles. [00:21:30] Current design soons will show how they incorporate biomimicry into their projects. Also enjoy stilt walking and juggling inspired by Cirque decile a his latest nature theme show totem and catch a screening of the biomimicry documentary. Second Nature. The theme for October 20th Nightlife is the science of voting, a lively roundtable moderated by the bay citizens political writer, Gary Xi, and featuring political aficionados, Alex Clemens from SF usual suspects and [00:22:00] San Francisco state universities, political science professor and outspoken tweeter. 

Speaker 7:        Jason McDaniel. We'll discuss topics such as rank choice voting and how it affects the strategies of San Francisco's May oral candidates, University of San Francisco, professor of American politics, Corey Cook will discuss the science of voting for more information on nightlife and other events at the California Academy of Sciences. Visit their [email protected] academy.org the October Science at Kow lecture will be given by Dr Peggy Helwig [00:22:30] and is entitled tectonic timebombs earthquakes near and far. She will talk about the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, New Zealand, Japan, and Virginia as well as the earthquake hazard from faults in our own backyard. Dr Helwig is the operations manager of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory. The lecture is at 11:00 AM on Saturday, October 15th in the genetics and plant biology. Building room 100 [00:23:00] for more details, visit the website [email protected] Lawrence Berkeley national lab is having a free open house on Saturday, October 15th you could attend from either 10:00 AM to 1230 or from 1230 until 3:00 PM the theme of the show is Cirque de Sciences and the open house will feature exhibits, tours of the advanced light source and guest house performances, hands on science, investigations for children [00:23:30] and lectures on Supernovas, biofuels computing, ancient sounds, plasma beams, indoor air pollution and scientific visualization. There'll be food available for purchase. For more information and to register for this event, visit 

Speaker 3:        www.lbl.gov/open house. The Biosafety Alliance presents a global citizens report on the state of genetically modified organisms. False promises, [00:24:00] failed technologies. These reports highlight scientific research and empirical evidence from around the globe demonstrating how genetically modified seeds and crops have failed to deliver the advertised promises. The Speakers will be Dr Yvan Donnas, Shiva philosopher, environmental activist and ECO feminist. Debbie Barker International Program Director Center for food safety. Miguel LTA Ari, associate professor of agroecology at UC Berkeley. [00:24:30] This event will happen October 13th, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM at the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center four zero one Venice Avenue, San Francisco. The event is free and donations are accepted. If you would like to RSVP, go to the website, global state of gmos.eventbrite.com there will also be a press conference [00:25:00] for the reports at the San Francisco City Hall at noon October 13th featuring Dr Vandana, Shiva elected officials and other Speakers 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 3:        Now three news stories that caught our attention. Genetically engineered canola growing outside of established cultivation [00:25:30] regions across North Dakota. A study published by the online journal plus one reports the genetically engineered canola endowed with herbicide resistance have been found growing outside of established cultivation regions along road sides across North Dakota. These escaped plants were found statewide and account for 45% of the total roadside plants sampled. Furthermore, populations were found to persist [00:26:00] from year to year and reached thousands of individuals. The authors found that the escaped plants could hybridize with each other to create novel combinations of transgenic traits, and the authors argue that their result more than 10 years after the initial release of genetically engineered canola raises questions of whether adequate oversight and monitoring protocols are in place in the u s to track the environmental impact of biotech products. Berkeley's [00:26:30] own cell Perlmutter is sharing the Nobel Prize in physics with Adam G. Reese of the John Hopkins University and Brian Schmidt of Australian national universities, Mt. Strom Lowe and siding spring observatories pro mudder led the Supernova 

Speaker 7:        cosmology project that in 1998 became one of the two scientific efforts that are credited with discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe and Schmidt led the competing supernova search team. Pearl mudder is UC Berkeley's 22nd Nobel Medal [00:27:00] winner and the ninth winner of the Physics Prize. The discovery of the accelerating expansion has formed theories of the distant future of an ever expanding universe and has alleged the speculation of dark energy that theoretically makes up almost three quarters of the matter and energy of the universe, but it has proven elusive to observe. Perlmutter has recently been working with NASA and the u s department of Energy to build and launch the first space-based observatory designed specifically to understand the nature of dark energy. 

Speaker 3:        [00:27:30] This news item is also a job opening NASA to seek applicants for next astronaut candidate class. In early November, NASA will seek applicants for its next class of astronaut candidates who will support long-duration missions to the International Space Station and future deep space exploration activities. For more information, visit the website, astronauts.nasa.gov a bachelor's degree in engineering, science, or math [00:28:00] and three years of relevant professional experience are required in order to be considered. Typically, successful applicants have significant qualifications in engineering or science or extensive experience flying high performance jet aircraft. After applicant interviews and evaluations, NASA expects to announce the final selections in 2013 and training to begin that August. Additional information about the astronaut candidate program [00:28:30] is available by calling the astronaut selection office at area code (281) 483-5907 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 6:        The music played during the show is written and performed by David lost honor from his album titled Folk and Acoustic 

Speaker 2:        [00:29:00] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 6:        Thank you for listening to spectrum. We're happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to SVA meal. Our email address is spectrum dot [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Simone Pagan-Griso, Postdoc Chamberlain Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, works on the ATLAS team at CERN.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next [inaudible]. [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 2:        Good afternoon. My name is Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show. We are speaking with Dr Simone Simona, pic Ingreso of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. [00:01:00] Simona is a physicist who is searching for the Higgs bows on which has also been called the God particle because it is the theoretical establish or have mass in the standard model of physics. This recording has been prerecorded and edited to Monet. Can you please tell us a little bit about what you do 

Speaker 3:        that an experimental physicist? I basically work on understanding fundamental laws of nature in day, a smallest scale as possible and to understand which are the fundamental [00:01:30] constituents of matter and which laws, governor, these are the forces between them. And currently I work on an experimented, which is, uh, in um, Geneva, Switzerland, um, in the seminal laboratory and this experiment is called Atlas. And, uh, one of its purposes is actually to us, Mesh Protons are together to uh, investigate the nature of the fundamental Christy trends [00:02:00] of uh, the metal that we see around including to find the Higgs Boson. Is Macanese Alto almost widely accepted as never been proved experimentally. So it's really just a theory of this. Well, yes, very well motivated by just the theory and in doing this mechanism, what happens is that you introduce one more piece in these theory, we call them fields and this field basically [00:02:30] breaks down and give mass to these first careers. 

Speaker 3:        But in doing this thing, one single piece remains the left. Okay. And uh, this small piece is suppose is what we are looking for is what is called the Higgs Boson. So if we see these, these expos on will be a very, very good indication that this mechanism is actually the one the natural have chosen and make things work as we see we some indications [00:03:00] or how it should behave. And which are the property of this particular in particular [inaudible] the key characteristic of this particular mass. We don't know in this theory it's mass is a free parameter if you want. We don't know what what you should AV. It could span in different ranges. However, we have both experimental constraints and a theoretical motivation to think that it's masses [00:03:30] in a well-defined range and this is the best way we can account for what we see in the end. 

Speaker 3:        This was initially a quite wide range. It was initially searched the at cern and experiment, which was colliding electrons and anti electrons to search up to [inaudible] 2000 and increasing the energy because it was not fun and pushing it to harden harder. And what does increasing the energy do? Increase? That's [00:04:00] a very good question. The point is that in the end, energy and mass are back as Einstein teacher does are basically the same thing. So colliding them in electron anti electron at higher energy. We can procreate particle with higher masses basically. And the idea was try to create two collided higher energy because we didn't find any trees of the production of the heat. So they give an energy. So in mass it, it me, it meant that it was at higher masses that we couldn't [00:04:30] reach. So increasing the energy was the way to produce in a laboratory. 

Speaker 3:        This particle after the year 2000 where this in this patio was not found, the collider was shut down because our new collider was under project to be built, which is still a large other collider that is now operating. And the search pastor to another laboratory which is located a r near Chicago. The fair made up that was still r a machine [00:05:00] which was basically colliding particle to create in laboratory heavy. Particular usually in nature are not easy to find. This was a little different. Particle was not colliding, electrons was colliding, protons and antiprotons. So cause the trends of the tones, this was done because in this way we could achieve higher energies in the collision. And the reason for that is just the protein mass is higher than the electron to collide is particularly to accelerate them [00:05:30] and to accelerate. And we use circular rings so we need to ban them and accelerate them. 

Speaker 3:        But if they throw it too fast, you don't have enough bending power to to keep them in the ring. Right? So you need bigger and bigger drinks. Now with the protons you could with our relatively feasible ring, which is around the six kilometers in circumference, you could actually increased the energy by a lot. Can you please walk us through [00:06:00] what the standard model is? It basically has its really nice thing is that we, one equation, we can described how all the metrics that we see around behaves. I interact with other matters with all these forces at certain they sell tee shirts with this equation. Okay. Written down on the tee shirt and it's very compact form. And from there in principle you, you can know whatever happens or how matter's interacting, whatever different situation, [00:06:30] it turns out that we cannot solve that equation and if one can do it that we get a fixed price right away. 

Speaker 3:        And if Nobel prize two probably, but we can try to find approximate solutions that and now the nice thing of the standard model is that the only thing you need to do to build this and our model is to write down in these equations the content of metal that you see around. So I say I just say I want [00:07:00] other recent electron. It doesn't tell me because why there is an electron, but I say I want to be at an electron. I'm human and Tau want to be quirks. Okay. But I don't specify that electrons can interact through light with other particles. So or I don't specify any force. I just write down the content of matters and then just applying and just requiring the, these equations are the same for [00:07:30] some symmetries. For different observers or around that. The easy example of like, I want the equation to be the same if I'm here or for me the other room. 

Speaker 3:        Okay. So there are other symmetries that we can impose to this equation and just imposing this, the symmetry to start that is a question itself, does not satisfy these cemeteries. And the only way to satisfy these symmetries that pretty simple is that there are forces between these things that you've put in the theory. So it must be the electromagnetics, it must be [00:08:00] there or there was the theory wouldn't be symmetric in this transformation. This one, not one really nice thing. We didn't do steering, we didn't put by hand the forces that the full, all the forces that we see in nature, they come out just requiring asymmetry of this equation. Pretty nitrous symmetries and it comes out that if you do that, it's told it must exist. All the forces that we see. So this is one of the very beautiful things are of the standard one that why we believe [00:08:30] so much in this theory and why it worked. 

Speaker 3:        So well. Many prediction of the standard model we're actually did, uh, from a theoretical point of view and then confirmed experimentally and did this also got the Nobel prize and gives them examples. Yeah. The WNC Boson started one of beautiful examples. We saw the worst there were, is trying to explain the objective of the case and why they happen. How did that happen [00:09:00] by the has several problem is doing based on their model, kind of unified all these treatments and a offered an explanation. But in order to that he had to introduce these forced carters that Dublin CBOs, which were as the photons bring light and bring electromagnetic force between two charged particles. These established the balls and chemigate this weak force between particles and can give rise to the case for the activity case. In order to do that, [00:09:30] they need to be, to act in a very short range. 

Speaker 3:        And to do that the WNC both need to have a mass on the contrast of the Photon, which is masters and that's why it can travel as much as it wants. There was a kind of breaking ground prediction and uh, turns out that from nowhere energy experiments, which couldn't achieve that mass, they could any way measure other things, which made a very precise prediction of what [00:10:00] at the mess of the Dublin sibilance would have been. It's still at seven. They actually built an experiment to look for this particular, this keep an energy and they found it and that was noble price directly and yeah, that that was a beautiful example of how theory can go had experiments and, and you have example, on the other hand went for example in dark matter experiments found evidence of dark matter. While [00:10:30] no theoretical model was really seriously considering it as a possibility and we still don't know exactly what it is, right? So it's a very nice usually interplay between theoretical and experimental physicist in, in advancing the knowledge in this 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum on l this week we are talking to Simona pink and zone about the search for the Higgs Bose on 

Speaker 3:        [00:11:00] right now we know that the heeks particle must have a mass which is above 114 times 10 so the Proton and this bound comes from the lab experiment. We know that those who it's not in between what is kind of 155 to 180 times 70 times the muscle [inaudible] proud. We think that is unlikely to be heavier than [00:11:30] that because can measure other quantities, which can depend on the Higgs mass without directly producing it. This is kind of amazing. This is a pure quantum mechanical phenomenon, so that even if you don't produce actually a particle that can influence other phenomena, depending on the master analysis techniques to adopt are different because the properties of the particles change how much statistical, certain, Hey, do you need before you can exclude a mass [00:12:00] range or say, Hey, we, uh, we found the expose on. Yeah, that's a good question. 

Speaker 3:        In the end, we count the number of coalition that we should be [inaudible] we think that he should, but we have other processes that are known and behaves in a similar way for claiming the discovery of the he expose on. We basically ask that the probability to be, uh, less than a 10 to the minus seven. So that means that even repeating, if, [00:12:30] if we repeated the experiment 10 millions times, only one of these times it would happen that the known processes we give rise to the number of events to explain what we see. We are getting very close in in starting refining, having enough data collected and enough knowledge of the data that we collect to be able to see if among the all the coalition that we record the Hicks person is produced or not. And how much data [00:13:00] are we talking about here? 

Speaker 3:        Yeah, so the data in a larger than collider, we have 20 millions collision per second. However, in every collision of two protons, it doesn't always happen. The same thing. Different things can happen and what we look for is the result of this coalition. We have this theory, the standard model, which not only unifies all these forces but give really a precise prediction of what actually happens. [00:13:30] Even when you collide. For example, two protons, the heat exposed in is predicted to be produced only like a one over 10 billions, billion, billions. Yes. Of these conditions. And I'm the one and 10 yes. One in 10 billion. So valuable. Yeah. It's what we are looking for. All the data that we record from one coalition is about one megabyte and we cannot write that [00:14:00] much of 20 millions coalition per second on a disk. We just don't have the technology to do that and it will require an enormous disk space. 

Speaker 3:        So one very active and difficult part of the experiment is try to decide in real time which of these collisions may be potentially interesting for what you're looking for or not. And we reduce them and write basically two, 300 of damage each second. How long does dates [00:14:30] to the text for you to get the data from? The experiments are happening in Geneva, so this is a very amazing thing and this is something that is only possible for the work of a lot of people, but usually data are get recorded. I send this a huge amount of data. There are people checking that every day. I mean while data is taking, everything is working properly. So all of them, they need to meet every day and decide what is was working, what was not, what had problems [00:15:00] and mark the data saying, okay, during these data I've had this problem during this, I had this one so that every one who analyzed can say, oh, I need this competent the detector. 

Speaker 3:        So give me only the data. Which was working in which that you collected while this piece was working that that needs to be distributed worldwide when we analyzed and we'd be full doing that. It's not like you collect data, you analyze it itself. You also need some, some kind of processing [00:15:30] pre processing of this data and all this process usually takes are, are just few days really one week I would say I can brand my analysis based on data. Yeah. One thing that is maybe not, not obvious is why I need to process this data and this goes a bit in how these huge detector that right now, which are a black box for you. I mean I haven't explained anything about it, how it works and I mentioned [00:16:00] that it has many systems just to give you a feeling. I can tell you that a date, the systems that are closer to the interaction are the one that um, basically when the particle passed through them, they basically try to disturb the particle in the less possible. 

Speaker 3:        So they are very thin part of material and they basically just just try to say, uh, to the electronic yet the particles pass through this point. So what you have [00:16:30] is kind of it creed all around several layers of grades, which will tell you a particular past here and other here. Sometimes they fail, they don't tell you that he passed. Sometimes they tell you that he's passed even if nothing was going on for noise of course. And so what you actually see when you record any event is are this huge amount of greets with points. And from that you need to figure out what does he mean? We mean how many particles were there, which trajectory did they, [00:17:00] they went through. And this is an highly non trivial task and this needs to be done in these. And from there we can start and saying, okay, if I see these kinds of particles, then it means that they originate from these other particle here and they have these energies. So I can, I know that this is not this process and you can do all this kind of infer things. So this needs to be done before the is analyzed and usually, yeah. 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible] [00:17:30] you're listening to spectrum on k l x this week we are talking to Somalia and pink Ingreso about the search for the Higgs Boson theoretical particle of mass in the standard bottle of physics. 

Speaker 3:        These experiments are very huge collaboration of people worldwide at center right now. Each of these experiments, [inaudible] experiment [00:18:00] is a collaboration of three thousands of people, which was needed to build the experiment to make it work, to still make it working right now. And when that eyes, what we see. So I'm very interested in just the scope of the project and how, how many people are working on it for such a fundamental question. When thinks that if we have an answer that could be potentially worthy of winning a Nobel prize. So who actually gets surprised if that's a very [00:18:30] good question. I think that of course, uh, in ob price I think is very much worth in this case, after all these years of searches, all the theorist working on building this theory of this Hicks Mechanism and these gander prediction of this particular of course worth a, a very good price and a noble price can be sweetened to that. 

Speaker 3:        And as well as that, I think all the experimental [00:19:00] effort would may need a w is definitely worth a very good price. So I like to think that, uh, this price will be shared among all the people that worked along all these years. But of course it will happen that probably a representative, uh, of those will actually take physically the price. But I'm sure that, uh, it will happen that it will be felt as shared among all the thousands of physicist working on this [00:19:30] project. And what's it like for you as an individual scientist on a big team? How do you sort of carve out your own niche and how is you cannot, uh, enforce a strict cerotic across structure, right? You basically have [inaudible] you cannot appoint coordinators which can try to focus on day the work of many people. But every people is basically free to pursue his own research as he feels that is the better way to go. 

Speaker 3:        It's never work that you do alone. It's something [00:20:00] that requires the work of several people. I worked on a similar thing in Chicago during my Phd [inaudible] a lot of experience in that and I tried to use the experience now too to improve things to push harder, our organized technique and understanding of our data at LHC. So there is plenty of room in which every person is contributing. I personally work, I'm like to work a lot on the analysis techniques [00:20:30] that are used to analyze what we see and to distinguish known processes from process that we are looking for. That is an extremely interesting field. Um, the reason for that is that we have a huge amount of information after this collision. Um, one that you didn't mention is that these detectors are huge [inaudible] yet us detector itself is kind of 45 meters long and 25 meters high. 

Speaker 3:        So [00:21:00] there are some huge, uh, instrumentations and uh, each of the, this detector is made of various sub system which are, which have the, uh, goal of measuring different protests, processes of the known particles that comes out from the interactions. And being in a, this is a huge amount of information. Okay. And it's not easy. Um, you don't, you don't know exactly what happens, but you try [00:21:30] to reconcile from what you see what happened. And this is something, ah, that I tried to work a lot on in really just analyzing what they see and try to classify if you want the values coalition and try to understand what happened. And this field are made a lot of progresses and, and it's using very, very, uh, advances techniques. And, uh, it seemed interesting how, uh, many concerts [00:22:00] that were born in other science fields that computer science are actually merging in what we are using right now. 

Speaker 3:        One of the nicer example are what are called narrow networks. So we're born in computer science are used a lot. For example, in, uh, our vision for the, for, uh, automation for robotics. Uh, and uh, we actually can use them to ah, to process the whole information that we have and try to classify [00:22:30] these events and to see how they look. Like we can use simulation of these events. We have a lot of people working, trying to simulate what what we expect to see in our detector, which been such a huge piece of instrument is not easy. And uh, using this simulation we can actually uh, make, uh, make new art tools like neural networks, which are tried to see what happened really in our detector and to see [00:23:00] if it is what we expect from a known process or from money x production. I have to say we are pretty close. We should be able to say something in a very short amount of time. We also know that thanks for joining us. Thank you for inviting me. 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible] the regular feature of spectrum is to mention some of the science and technology events happening in [00:23:30] the bay area over the next two weeks. I'm joined for this calendar by Brad Swift 

Speaker 5:        to preserve our planet. Scientists tell us that we must reduce the amount of co two in the atmosphere from its current level of 392 parts per million to below 350 parts per million. The organization three fifty.org is building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. Moving planet is a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate [00:24:00] crisis. Moving planet is a global day of action scheduled for Saturday, September 24th, 2011 the San Francisco Rally begins with a parade from Justin Herman Plaza, which is at the intersection of market street and the Embarcadero. The parade will head up market street to the Civic Center at 12:30 PM once at the civic center. There will be Speakers, music, food workshops and exhibits for details on all the Saturday events including the San Francisco rally. Go [00:24:30] to the website, three fifty.org and click on moving planet 

Speaker 2:        Berkeley Ameritas professor Frank Shu will deliver a lecture entitled Nuclear Energy After Fukushima on Tuesday, September 27th at 6:00 PM at the Commonwealth Club's San Francisco office located on the second floor of five nine five market street. The media and public's reaction to the recent nuclear accident threatened to cripple the nuclear renaissance that is humanity's best hope for mitigating climate disruption. She will review how [00:25:00] light water reactors and the once through fuel cycle came to dominate the landscape for generating nuclear power today and we'll assess options for the future. A standard ticket for this event is $20 but emission is $8 for members and $7 for students with a valid ID visit, www.commonwealthclub.org 

Speaker 5:        more information. What's right with Kansas. Learn how Kansas is climate and energy project is capitalizing on heartland values to change behavior [00:25:30] and reduce carbon emissions. A panel of Nancy Jackson, executive director, Kansas climate and energy project and Marianne Fuller from the Lawrence Berkeley labs. Environmental Energy Technologies Division will present the Kansas project plus be the first to see lbls video Kansas, which shows how the climate and energy project has become a Kansas mainstay. This will be Monday, October 3rd 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM this is a free event at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, [00:26:00] 2025 Addison Street in Berkeley, 

Speaker 2:        exploratorium is hosting after dark and evening series for adults 18 and over. That mix is science, art and cocktails and mission to the exploratorium is included. Tickets are $15 or $12 for seniors, students or persons with disabilities and are free for members. On Thursday, October 6th from six to 10:00 PM this months after dark theme is again and again explore the fascinating worlds of reminiscence and repetition [00:26:30] and then backwards skate through your own nostalgia on their temporary roller rink. UC Berkeley professor of psychology, Art CIM, and Maura will explain the mechanics of human memory. The website for this event is www.exploratorium.edu/after dark and now for a couple of recent science news events. Here's Brad Swift. 

Speaker 5:        Gamers have solved the structure of a retrovirus enzyme whose configuration had stumped scientists for more than a decade. [00:27:00] The gamers achieved their discovery by playing folded and online game that allows players to collaborate and compete in predicting the structure of protein molecules. This is the first instance that the researchers are aware of in which gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem. After scientists repeatedly failed to piece together the structure of a protein cutting enzyme from an aids like virus they called in the folded players. The scientists challenged the gamers to produce an accurate model of the enzyme. The gamers did it and only three [00:27:30] weeks folded was created by computer scientists at the University of Washington Center for game science in collaboration with the Baker lab, a biochemistry lab at the university, figuring out the structure of proteins contributes to the research on the causes of and cures for cancer, Alzheimer's immune deficiencies, and a host of other disorders as well as work on biofuels. A paper describing the retrovirus enzyme structure was published September 18th [00:28:00] in the journal, nature, structural and molecular biology. The scientists and the gamers are listed as go authors 

Speaker 2:        and in news related to this week's interview. Science reports that Israel has become an associate member of the European Physics Laboratory [inaudible]. They're the 21st member nation and the first new members since Bulgaria joined in 1999 this move is somewhat controversial. Sm Academics in the UK and South Africa. I wished to boycott collaboration due to Israeli Palestinian conflicts [00:28:30] but this ends a two year probationary membership and Israel will eventually contribute 1 billion Swiss francs to the project a year. Israeli representative to the certain Governing Council Eliezar revenue beachy states that he hopes this will inspire other Arab nations to join the effort. 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible] music her during the show was attract [inaudible] Sean's divvy from David Lewis, Donna's self-published folk [00:29:00] and acoustic album. It is published under the creative Commons attribution license version 3.0 is [email protected] editing and production assistance for the show by Brad Swift. 

Speaker 1:        Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email [00:29:30] address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1965 Prof. Zadeh published a paper titled Fuzzy Sets in the journal Information and Control. Fuzzy Set theory and Fuzzy Logic has been hailed as a brilliant addition to Set theory. Zadeh is Prof. Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        [inaudible].

Speaker 2:        [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Hi, my name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is with Professor Lutfi Zada. He is professor emeritus in the electrical engineering and Computer Science Department of the College of Engineering [00:01:00] at UC Berkeley. Professor Zada was trained as an electrical engineer at the University of Toronto where he received a bachelor's degree at MIT where he received a master's and Columbia University where he received a Ph d from 1950 to 1959 Zara was a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. He joined the Department of electrical engineering at UC Berkeley in 1959 and served [00:01:30] as its chair from 1963 to 1968 during his tenure as chair, he played a key role in changing the name of the department from electrical engineering to electrical engineering, computer science or [inaudible]. In June, 1965 professor Zada published a paper titled Fuzzy Sets in the Journal Information and control. This paper formalized his seminal fuzzy set theory. In the years since fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic has been hailed as a brilliant [00:02:00] addition to set theory. 

Speaker 3:        The word fuzzy is used to characterize the imprecision and uncertainty of real world phenomena that the theory embraces. Essentially, a fuzzy set is a set whose members have degrees of membership within the range. Zero and one fuzzy set theory permits the gradual assessment of the membership of elements in a set. The membership is described by a value in the interval zero to one fuzzy logic is based on fuzzy set theory where [00:02:30] sets are approximate rather than fixed and exact how's he logic embraces the concept of partial truth where the truth value may range between completely true one and completely false zero. This interview is prerecorded and edited professors Oughta. Thank you very much for joining us on spectrum. It's my player. What do you think it was about being here at Berkeley that got you thinking about fuzzy logic [00:03:00] and the work that you then published? Right? 

Speaker 4:        What did he see? What happened is that I have always been a strong believer in mathematics. I always believed that [inaudible] is solve all problems and simply, and that's what I've learned. You can [inaudible] if you cannot solve the problem with what, you know, learn more and then you go with the, so that was my fear. But then I began to feel that there is a disconnect between the precision of mathematics and the precision [00:03:30] of the real world. So I began to feel that way, uh, in 1960160260 three during sort of that period and my feeling that there is a problem grow in 1964 then when I was visiting New York, this idea occurred to me the same to do is to introduce the concept of a presence at the class, which [00:04:00] does not have sharp boundaries. So instead of talking about something being in a class or not being in a class, you're talking about degrees to which you are a member of a class, which seems to be a very natural sort of a thing. So what is surprising is this very simple national idea was not introduced in mathematics to some degree. It is amazing. There is multivariate logic and long [00:04:30] to validate logic. Truth is a matter of degree and fuzzy logic. Everything is a matter of degree. High geologic follows for, as you said, theater, everything is relative degree. So agenda of ideological is completely different from the agenda. [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        so do you consider yourself a creative thinker? 

Speaker 4:        I think so, yes. I think this is [00:05:00] my strength. Yours and cut it up with original ideas. That's my sense. There are people who are smarter than I, but they were not creative. In other words, if we took exams, probably they do better, but somehow they are luck. This particular capability. Let's see. So what is something unusual? And I must pat myself on the back. Yes. The people at my [00:05:30] age, you know, I turned 19 continue to do something and tell them, I said we won't get to being a certain kind of environment that allows me to do that. I wrote my first paper [inaudible] 1965 at that time I was chair of the department and we had, I was on editorial boards. I had recognition. I submitted a paper publication during use. We're look for them. [00:06:00] If I were not a member of, they told you the board of that journal. 

Speaker 4:        It wasn't getting turned down but I said, man, I thought of Kirsten. See they published. Know that paper by 1965 paper is the highest side that they put in that journal to NJ 6,000 citations. The next highest cited paper that it still 1,010 times more. Yeah. If a paper has 200 200 citation, that's considered to be [00:06:30] respectable in Europe I think they would be promoted to full professorship. You need at least 50 citations. A many people don't realize that. Yesterday I gave a lecture, he wished there was a little discussion of physiologic and the number of papers with fuzzy in title I or somebody who knows nothing about physiologic. I said, your perception, how many papers you guys are children [00:07:00] have Pfizer entitled because I said was 14 and he is a professor. He was a lecturer. Another suit. I asked somebody else. 50 okay, what is the correct number? 245,000 that's a lot. 245,000 papers with Pfizer and title. That's not something that's as black and white, either some title or southern title. [00:07:30] See how many patterns? 33,000 patterns relate to Pfizer here it's a little bit of question isn't related or unrelated to what degree? This is the picture, so it shows you the degree to which competent people can misunderstand something. So we send the people to reviewers presumably who know a lot and then they say this is piece of nonsense, garbage, whatever, whatever, whatever.

Speaker 3:        Is this the conservative [00:08:00] nature of the math world and people in mathematics that they're very conservative. They don't want to embrace a new idea, like fuzzy logic. I just 

Speaker 4:        have difficulty in the, unless you're very much in the spirit of what's being done. Let me see if it's very much in the spirit of waste being done. No problems. So if you have four color problem, one pheromones, serum and you prove it, no problem. But if you come up with some [00:08:30] new rules, something, something, something you may have a problem. So at the same thing got placed in music and many other things usic in particular, you know, if you can pull something that is in the spirit of what's been too great but usually a couple of something it's completely different. People would throw to later say to you, which was I happened in music, you know, mineral service here. People like that, you know, very [00:09:00] they told on music this music that you write music is a good example of the situation which uh, which outage or now I'd say of in a certain sense gets you in trouble. 

Speaker 3:        You are listening to k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with professor and Lucky Zada the creator of fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic [00:09:30] found its niche in industrial controllers. It was jump-started by a Cillian and Mandani in 1974 with their fuzzy linguistic algorithm to control the steam edge. The fuzzy vacation of industrial controllers took off cement kilns and Denmark subway trains in Sendai City, Japan, elevators, consumer products like cam quarters washing machines, back home cleaners and cars. Professor Zada attributes the success of fuzzy algorithms [00:10:00] to two concepts. He introduced linguistic variables and fuzzy if then rules. The hierarchy of a linguistic variable can be described as follows. Page can be a linguistic variable. Age is made up of, for example, three fuzzy sets named very young, young and old. The membership function. Each of these sets is mapped onto a numerical scale of values. In this case zero to 100 [00:10:30] years old. Each data element can be then tested for its degree of set membership. The higher the degree associated with an element in a given set, the more reliable the membership. The importance of this concept is how widely linguistic variables can be applied to problems. If you can describe what it is you want to know or how you want a system to behave, you can build a linguistic algorithm and compute. 

Speaker 4:        But [00:11:00] the, and let me explain why there were so many applications. So I wrote my first paper in 1965 in 1973 I wrote the paper. Yeah, we're trying to use the concept but of a linguistic variable. It didn't really sit variable. And that's why I say key concept. It's a variable whose values itself. Wars. Humans use it all the time. Talk about age. [00:11:30] You can't use numbers one, two, three, four, five. But you can use words young, not young, very young, more or less young, old, not very old village. People use boards instead of numbers. That's the point. So I caught a variable like that linguistic variable, the variables whose values are words, but those words are enablers of pleasure sets. So when [00:12:00] you say town, it is a fight. He said, if I just said it's associated with memories, your function, that means that given that particular height, you could tell it to one degree is the person who that uh, is a member of the class of thought that this is because members, your firms. 

Speaker 4:        So then we seek malleable. It's not just something that takes those matters. He was do that, but he was do not associate, [00:12:30] but your sets with the value. That's a big difference. But once you are associated for, as he said, you can compute with those of sets. And that turned out to be a key Isaiah because there you could program in natural language. So in that people in 1973 feet, I introduce [00:13:00] two basic concepts. One was the kinds of linguistic credible and the other one the Christ. I'm still fuzzy if they're in the room today, the 95% of our application for your logic, use those two pencils and you'll begin to see why it's easier to use natural language and medication. If I asked you how do you park your car, you could [00:13:30] explain it as a natural language, but if I asked you to do it using numbers, you can do it. 

Speaker 4:        I said if you all were there, so many fears, then you wrangling so much, then turn the WM by 70 degrees. Nobody can do that, but people can use words. So you take words and associate those labels with them and then you execute. So people find that they can solve many problems. [00:14:00] A good example is balancing the worth, inverted pendulum stick. So it 10 year old gun, right? The rules. If this angle is low, Marcela's increasing, then give it a big push to traditionary to solve the problem. People use control theater. There are differential equations. They do that not near, not necessarily a 10 year old can solve the problem. 

Speaker 3:        When you were [00:14:30] developing your fuzzy set theory, where are you collaborating with anybody at all? At the university? 

Speaker 4:        Nothing really. I've never been much of a collaborator. That's the way I function. So I've always been like, I'm not saying that this is a good thing. I, I'm pointing to myself as a role model, but I to I think is the opposite. I think students enjoy working closely with a supervisor, [00:15:00] but somehow I was felt more comfortable doing things [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        do you think your education in some, some manner helps you become more creole? 

Speaker 4:        One of the major with, I went through the systems. Yeah. The which uh, the emphasis was on not that money, but on, uh, education and being a good student. A good relationship [00:15:30] with your professors. It was a very and very wholesome environment. I consider myself to be lucky in that I went through that kind of an environment friendly, friendly and later at the mic and uh, also at Columbia I was also in an environment that does not exist today. Unfortunately today we have money centric environment. Everything revolves [00:16:00] around money. That was not the case when I was a student at MIT when I was a student. Professors didn't know what his demeanor to go for grants, a Washington proposal late in the worries man today, unless you bring some money, they treat you like a piece of dirt. I find it very disconcerting that young people today are brought [00:16:30] up in daddy's where they're told, look, if you don't manage to get money, we will not advance you to tell you. So they have to kill themselves to try to get money. But even what they say when the wars is that the people who tell these young people, unless you got money, we want to advance your team. They know that those young people will not succeed, but they will be able then fire them at some point and [00:17:00] replace them with another cheap and naive young person they see. Right. 

Speaker 3:        Do you see the same sort of tension between publishing and teaching historically in education? 

Speaker 4:        Well, this has always been the case. You know, publish or perish, but they says nothing money, a centricity. This is some other century city. 

Speaker 3:        Well, it sort of goes to the core values of the institution. Is it more important to teach or is it more important to publish? [00:17:30] Well, 

Speaker 4:        it depends. It depends. Of course institutions. I would put Berkeley right at the very top in terms of a enlightened approach to these issues. If I lost all of my money, as I said, there was not big [inaudible] to a small thing. I was 93 days when I get this of dirt, I would be some of the places and if I did not publish and they saying, but I did some good work, I would [00:18:00] still be treated with respect. I may not get promoted that rapidly, but in other places I'm a stereo there that unfortunately these changes have not been for the better and I am very, very anti money. Three city, I see the evil effects a bit all over the place and I'll see in other countries [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        you are listening to k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Professor Lockney Zada, [00:18:30] the creator of Fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic. Lutfi Zada feels that computing with words can have an impact in fields like biology, medicine and the humanities where conventional mathematical and analytical methods are ill-suited by combining fuzzy logic with other techniques like neural networks, evolutionary computing, machine learning, and probabilistic reasoning. A new kind of computing can be realized. This week it was announced that professors on was inducted into [00:19:00] the artificial intelligence hall of fame launched by the I Tripoli Intelligent Systems magazine. 

Speaker 4:        Do you enjoy the teaching? Yes, very much so. I've always enjoyed teaching now and let's see, I do on myself to be very lucky in that what I like to do and what I had to do were almost always coincident. Now some parts of teaching. Uh, I cannot say that [00:19:30] I like that much. For example, grading, homeworks, grading exams, you don't know, but that's the price that you have to pay. But if somebody asked me what you likes to do something else and not one microsecond, and this is wonderful though, 

Speaker 3:        is there a part of mathematics that you find most intriguing other than what you've focused on 

Speaker 4:        that sort of inspired you? [inaudible] and I think it [00:20:00] is really important. I think it's really important. It has to do with the capability of mathematics to solve computational problems, which are stated in a natural language. So usually when you find a problem in some books on this and then you, no bunch of numbers there, you, when this and this and this one, there is something else. Okay, that's typical problem. But suppose [00:20:30] that you have a property movies instead of numbers, you have words can mathematics. So problems of this kind. That's a question. My answer to that. My contention is no traditional mathematics cannot solve. I know you have simple problems and they give it to people who have been chasing mathematics, going some books on mathematics and we to books and this and that. They cannot solve it. Let me give you a very simple example. 

Speaker 4:        Probably [00:21:00] John is tall. What is the probability that Johnny is short? Not One person has been able to come up with their mathematical solution. People use come and say as they say something but they cannot come with a mathematical solution. So what I have done and what I call computing with words opens that door. You added two mathematics, traditional mathematics [00:21:30] and that mathematics plus computing many words has the capability to solve problems which are stated in action. I think that this is an important capability and what is particularly striking to me is that the only system today computational system or system of computation that has that capability is fuzzy logic based computer with [00:22:00] words. So he will have mathematics, cannot solve problems which are state national language and yet it's quite obvious there are many in the real world, real vibe. There are many problems like that, but people usually solve them using sort of common sense. See, but they cannot be solved mathematically. So I feel that, uh, this is not widely recognized as yet, but I'm beginning to talk about it and beginning [00:22:30] to write about it. 

Speaker 5:        Well, professors Oughta, thank you very much for spending this time with us 

Speaker 4:        in the forgiven. Protect me as an opportunity to vent my views. As you can see, I express myself, uh, somewhat strongly and if I offend somebody, please accept my apology. But they tell me something about the Brahms browns had the sharp down, he was leaving a [00:23:00] party and he had the, I said, we're thinking the point he says, if there is anybody in here who I have not offended, please accept my oppose. [inaudible] 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        a regular feature of spectrum just to mention [00:23:30] a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. Here's Rick Karnofsky today August 26 from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM professor Elliot Lab with no pitch of the ECS department and the director of the Center for energy efficient electronic science. Well present, searching for the millivolt switch. Moore's law predicts smaller components leading to increased energy efficiency. Well, while wires can operate at very low voltages, current transistors can not can the transistors be replaced with new low voltage switches [00:24:00] that are matched to the fine low voltage wires. Visit the Hearst memorial mining building room three 90 today at 2:00 PM to find out the community resources for science or the crs are having a founder celebration Sunday, August 28th from four to 6:30 PM at cliff bar and company 1451 66th street in Emeryville. Crs gives practical support for it. Great Science Teaching to get kids excited about science. Dr Peter h Glick is the co founder and president of the [inaudible] 

Speaker 1:        [00:24:30] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 5:        It's about their experience in East Bay classrooms. Tickets are $25 for students and teachers or $40 for the general public visit. Founder of celebration, 2000 eleven.eventbrite.com for tickets on Thursday September 8th [00:25:00] from seven to 9:00 PM they called you center at five three zero San Pablo Avenue near Dwight in Berkeley. Associate a free lecture. It is entitled from auto cities to Eco cities. Examples from around the globe, they'll discuss city design from around the world. That favor is walking, cycling, and public transit. The presentation will be followed by an interactive session based on an evolving Eco city framework under development by the ECO city builders and an international advisory committee. Visit Ecology center.org for more info. [00:25:30] The exploratorium after dark is an evening series four 18 and over is that mixes, cocktails, conversation and playful, innovative science and art events. It happens the first Thursday of the month from six to 10:00 PM after dark is included in the general admission price, which is $15 for adults. 

Speaker 5:        The theme for September 1st after dark is music and creativity. Explore unique musical instruments made by local artists. Soon came and hear Indian classical music performed by Dr Perrin, Georgia, who research is connections between music [00:26:00] and creativity as the head of the music intelligence group at the Georgia Tech Center for music technology. He'll also share his work on the creation of new technologies for musical self-expression and then you're all basis for musical emotion and the cognitive underpinnings of musical experience. Visit exploratorium.edu for more info now, two new stories, David Lipkit and Chris Todd Hettinger and other researchers right in the August 22nd issue of the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have discovered a strain of yeast and Patagonia [00:26:30] that they believe is one of the parents of the modern day lager yeast. Saccharomyces pastoral Arianna's loggers are brewed at 39 to 48 degrees Fahrenheit. The style is believed to have originated in Germany in the 15th century because low winter temperatures prevent contamination. 

Speaker 5:        However, most Fridays of the common Ailey's sacrum IC survey see are active at higher temperatures. 59 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Lager, you started domesticated hybrid of the Ale yeast with a cold resistant species. The researcher's notes that the draft [00:27:00] genome sequence of the newly discovered yeast sacrifices you be honest, is 99.5% identical to the Non Ale east portion of the lager yeast genome. The journal Science reports that white researchers are nearly twice as likely as blacks to win grants from the National Institutes of health or the NIH, NIH director Francis Collins notes that she is deeply dismayed and has said that this is simply unacceptable, that there are differences in success that can't be explained. Between 2000 and 2006 [00:27:30] 29% of white applicants received funding, but only 16% of black researchers did. Hispanic and Asian scientists had approximately the same success ratio as white researchers, particularly after correcting for nationality and past research record. While reviewers do not have direct information on the race and ethnicity of applicants, it can be inferred from names and biographies. The bias seems to rise early in the [inaudible] process and the NIH is striving to find measures that will eliminate it by drawing on more minority reviewers and possibly helping applicants with their grant writing. [00:28:00] Hmm. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible] editing assistance from Judith White Marceline production assistants, Rick Karnofsky, the music heard during the show is from Elliston at David album entitled folk and Acoustical. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, [00:28:30] please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k o [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.