 One, bingo! One o'clock rock! Research in Manoa, we explore everything about research in Manoa, and Margo Edwards, PhD, is our special person who we communicate with and see and enjoy all the time. She represents, she's iconic. She represents, at least in large part, research in Manoa. Welcome to the show, Margo. Thanks, Jay. Good to be back. Thanks for coming down. And we have two students. We have Jay Chittness and Nalo Eamon, and they are students at SOEST, and they are involved in an interesting project offshore, and I'd like Margo to introduce them. So Jay and Nalo and I met about a year ago, a little over a year ago, we had received some funding from an organization in Houston, Texas that was working with the space station, and they were going to be receiving what are called automatic identification signals, or AIS, from an antenna that's on the space station, and they were wondering if there was something that they could do with Hawaii. So they're businessmen, they're very interested in shipping through the Gulf of Mexico. Interesting. Obviously, they're in Houston, but this is not pure academic now. It's not. It's applied science, right? But they came to us and they said, do you have an idea of something that we could do for the larger ocean? And I was involved with the illegal fishing project, and I said, oh, you've been involved in lots of ocean things you have. So I said, you know, I think that we could do this, and so they gave me some funding so that I could I could get some students involved in this project, and I sent out this announcement to students in our global environmental science program, and three or four brave young people came by and said I'd like to be involved. That's great. That's great. It was because Margo was involved, right? Yeah, exactly. The only reason. Well, so now, what's happened since then? Let me ask them. What's happened since then? So you signed up for this really interesting and offshore project about illegal fishing. Do you care a lot, you know, personally, morally about illegal fishing? Well, I think everybody really should care about illegal fishing because every resource that we have on Earth is so limited. And obviously, fish are limited too. So that's the whole illegal and unreported fishing is just it just an insult to the environment to an environment and it it can spiral and get out of control and just deplete all all those sources. And that's one of the other reasons why you wanted to get involved in this project. Okay, how about you, Nala? I was really interested in the programming side to learn how to program and we've Margo taught us a few things or her style was to kind of throw us in there and let us drown a bit on her own. I figured it out. I think she said. And then I'm also interested in fish because I really enjoy eating fish and I've lived in Hawaii my whole life. So I'd really like to see it here like being sustained. I'm glad you said that because I went to Portugal a couple of weeks ago and I had I actually had a relationship with a fish. It was kind of one particular sea bass fish. It made me happier than ever before. It was kind of a an affair. You know, and I think the fish was just as happy as I was. We had an experience together, which I will never forget, but I won't dwell on it. Anyway, okay, so what is this project about? You want to spot illegal fishing where? Everywhere? No, just off the coast of Mexico. Well, these guys have been concentrating on the Gulf of Mexico. The other young woman that we're working with who she couldn't be here today, Tatiana Oje, she's been looking at what's called the tuna belt in the Pacific. So basically from 10 north to 10 south in the Pacific, sort of around all of those islands, Micronesia where we get. Oh, the western Pacific. Where we get lots of illegal fishing going on. So we could be doing it anywhere. But right now, because of the fact that we had about a year and an incredible amount of data, we've been concentrating on these areas. Okay, data. How do you get data on illegal fishing? You take out the illegal spectrometer and you put it on a satellite, you look down and it flashes red if it's illegal. Fine. So I'm only kidding. So basically we get what's called AIS data. It stands for automatic identification system. And I think the easiest way to describe what AIS is is that it's the air traffic control of the ocean. So pretty much all commercial ships that are cruising around the world are equipped with these AIS transceivers. And they're identified. They're identifying. They're constantly sending out this this signal. So based on that, it's we all our data is in just illegal fishing. It's all ships. So we have to parse through the data. That's interesting that we have the technology to do that. So if it's not on a legal list, if what is reported back to you from the AIS system is not on the legal list, then what you make some conclusions about it, you write that down. And you keep data on that. You know who is legit and who is not. Sort of. So there are a lot of there are a lot of grays, shades of gray in this kind of stuff. There are people who are legit, who do illegitimate things. There are people who claim to do one thing who do something completely different. There are people who go in areas where they're not supposed to go. Who done it here. Right. Is like CIS. And then there's this really crazy stuff, like one of the areas where Nalu is working. We saw these things. We ended up calling them crop circles. And we we ended up going to the Coast Guard to see what the crop circles are. Do you want to talk about what's a crop circle? Yeah, so it just appeared that there were four tracks of ships going in a perfect circle in the southern part of the Gulf of Mexico. And we didn't really know why they were doing that because it was only recorded a few times in our data. I'm sitting here trying to think of why they might do such a thing. And I'm not getting anything. Yeah, why? That's a good question. There must be a reason. Well, there's possibilities. I mean, there could be errors in the data. And that was what was really cool, I think was Nalu went to the Coast Guard, and he got to show them in Houston, the Coast Guard show them these crop circles and say, What are these? And they scratched their heads. And they've been getting these data too, you know, but it took sort of people who just were looking for different kinds of things to be able to see this aberration. Yeah. And so what does it mean? So it's been a really neat trade off between these guys learning a lot from the Coast Guard, learning a lot from fishermen, and then being able to take unbiased data analysis back to the Coast Guard and say, What's going on here? And we also kind of collectively scratch our heads. It's great. It's great. Because the Coast Guard doesn't have this. I was in the Coast Guard, you know, I spent six years in the Coast Guard. And they must love to have the feedback from you, because it gives them all kinds of new thought process and possibilities. And they're interested in more enforcement agencies. So if they can, if you can help them establish that there's a violation of law, they're sure they really appreciate that. So what are your theories? Do you have theories about the Crop Circle? I don't really know. Yeah. So how does programming get involved? You like computer programming in this, in this context? What do you do on what platform, what language, what result? It's called bash. And it's just kind of strings of code that tells the program what to plot, what colors, what kind of shapes. And it was the first time I ever really got introduced to programming. We use another program MATLAB in school, and that's more mathematical based. So it was nice to also learn how to use programming for mapping. Welcome to the world of science. You know, used to be, you know, you know, all the programming would go on in the computer science department. Now it goes everywhere. Everybody does programming. And you must. And it's different, isn't it, than Microsoft. It's really different than consumer kind of programming, like me. Okay, so what have we learned so far? What conclusions have you drawn? What data has come back? And how do you feel about it? What is it showing you? Well, there are definitely areas that show a high population of fishing vessels. And what I want to look at specifically is if we can see fishing or fish movement, as sea temperature rises, so if they're going to go to cooler waters northward. This is just the illegal fishing market. This is all kinds of other stuff to climate change. The interactions between like the economic zones between two countries, so Mexico and the US. And I'm mainly focusing on the southern portion of the Gulf right now. But I might want to look at other areas just to get a better picture. You don't have to go down there. You just get satellite data. You can be in your jammies at home and do this work. It's typically what I do, actually. Well, how does what Eamonn does, or rather, Nalu does, compare and contrast with what you do, Jay? You're working together as a team or are you just doing different things? We're a team looking at separate aspects of the Gulf of Mexico. So he's looking at the southern portion of the Gulf of Mexico, and I'm looking at the northern portion along the coast of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. And I'm trying to look at the effects of the BP oil spill on fishing in that area. Yeah, so look for geographical patterns. Yeah, look for basically fishing vessel locations from before the spill compared to where they are now after the spill. So this is all about getting the data, which I guess it's easy to get the data. It's free. It's not free. It's not free. Oh my God. Is it expensive? It is. For about three months of data for these guys, we ended up paying almost $5,000. But that was, we had to go to a commercial vendor. Now the company that we're working with is providing us with data for free. So that was a big part of getting involved with the folks in Houston, which they're giving us. And it's really interesting and clean data. Yeah. So You know, I mean, to me, that's a big threshold thing. So you have it, I mean, you have access to it. And I don't even know how it comes down to you. How does it come down? It's on a website somewhere. And you can download it as a spreadsheet form, or it is just a regular spreadsheet, but a big spreadsheet, really, really big spreadsheet. Now you have it, I'm thinking of it as an Excel spreadsheet or you know, that's exactly right spreadsheet. Yeah. And so lots of fields, lots of columns, lots of rows, all that stuff. And you have to know what the columns and rows mean. And then you have to be able to interpret that probably geographically, right, onto what amounts to a map. And the map moves changes. Well, how do you do it? So the files, luckily, they the columns are labeled. So we know exactly what each column represents with the numbers of the labels and all of that, what they mean. And to map it, we're using what's called generic mapping tool, which was developed at the University of Hawaii, generic mapping tool, GMT, we call it GMT. I thought that was a time zone. It is a time zone. So we're using that to map everything. And it's it's a good software, it maps it clean and makes it very, very visually pleasing to look at. The software looks at the spreadsheet, directly at the spreadsheet. And that's where a lot of the programming comes in. We have to tell it what to do, where we want it to plot, which, which aspects of the the file, which column we want it to look at in order to plot and all of that. You make formulae. Tatiana is making formulae. I think that these guys are more sort of looking at geographic location and time, right. But so it's dynamic, right. But but Tati's actually she's looking for a certain pattern. So long line fishing tends to create a loop and a line and a loop and a line and a loop and a line. And so she's developed automatic detection software spot loops and lines. Yes. Whoa, that's very interesting. Very cool. And she goes into the same spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet this is spreadsheet have the AIS information from all the boats ships. Yes. So you just you, you track the ship because it's dynamic, it's moving. And so you can get a map from today against the map from tomorrow and so forth. Right. So the complication comes in. If you think about the International Space Station, it makes an orbit every 90 minutes, right. So it passes over a ship, but then it moves just slightly or more importantly, the Earth moves underneath it, right. Yeah. And so you're never sure if you're going to be able to get that same ship for that loop and the line. So the complication for what Tatiana is doing is she's trying to to fill in that loop and line with just a few sets of points for this, this pass and then a few sets of points for this next pass. And probably by the third or fourth pass, we're away far enough away from that vessel that we can't see it anymore. So it's a really complicated. Compensate for that. You have to have a form, a formula that will compensate for the movement of the space of the satellite. You can, you can. You have to do some sort of interpolation. Yeah, that's pretty sexy. Yeah. Actually, I mean, why do I, well, we'll get to this later, but why do I feel that this opens doors to all kinds of other possibilities for tracking things in the ocean than anywhere else? It does. And you know, the other thing that I think that these guys are looking at in particular that's really exciting is this idea of can fish be a proxy, schools of fish, a proxy for what's happening on the planet. An environmental disaster moves the fish one way, climate change moves the fish another way and the fishermen follow the fish. So you don't look at the fish. You look at the fishermen looking at the fish. Because they're making choices and decisions and they're spotting the fish. So you rely on their judgment that it's commercially motivated. So you can rely on it. They're basically the experts and we're merely the messengers. Oh, on that note, we're going to have to take a break. Aloha, everybody. My name is Mark Shklav. I'd like you to join me for my program, Law Across the Sea on ThinkTechHawaii.com. Aloha. Hi, I'm Stacy Hayashi with the ThinkTechHawaii show, Stacey to the Rescue, highlighting some of Hawaii's issues. You can catch it at ThinkTechHawaii on Mondays at 11 a.m. Aloha. See you then. Aloha, how you doing? Welcome to Apache Talk. I'm here at Gardo the Tech Star on ThinkTechHawaii. I'm here with my good old buddy, Andrew, the security guy. Hey, everybody, how you doing? Aloha. Good to have Andrew here in the house. Please join us every Friday from 1 to 130 and follow us up on YouTube. And remember, as we say at the end of every show, how are you doing? Great experience. I want to go to school again. And I don't want to study law. I want to study science. It's not too late. Tell me it's not too late. It's not too late. Late-flowing learner. Oh, we're back. We're back. We had a wonderful break. It was a great discussion. We found that it wasn't too late to study science, even for people who haven't thought about it a long time. So you guys went to Texas, yeah? And what happened? So many things. I think we had a bit too much fun while we were there. Fun in a scientific way, of course. Yes, of course. PG-13. Okay. So we'll begin at the beginning. What did you do? So we, primary reason we were there was to sort of give our preliminary results of the research to Jams America, who is funding us through in partnership with NASA. What is Jams America? Jams? So we're actually talking about this. It stands for Japanese America, something space support. It was a joint effort between Japan and America to support Japanese astronauts going on to the ISS or the space shuttle. Okay, great. I love those collaborations. And huge. Okay, so you went and you talked to them. We talked to them. You made presentations to them. Yes. You told them what you were doing and what you were learning and they were interested, right? They were pretty excited about everything that was going on and showed them what we were doing, what we had so far, that exact Earth-AS data that we had. We had made nice maps for them and everything and just told them, gave them our thoughts of what was going on and then they gave us theirs and it was a really nice conversation that we had with them. The most fun thing about science is talking to other scientists. Am I right? It is. You share your high levels. Even the arguments are fun. So were you there in the same thing? Did you make a presentation also? Yeah, all three of us did about a 15-minute presentation and then we also got feedback from them to see what else they'd like to see or any questions they had or wanted to answer. Yeah, when was this helped? How recently was this trip? May. But then they rolled out the red carpet because a lot of these folks had been involved with the space program for a long time. So the very next day they took us to the neutral buoyancy lab. What is a neutral buoyancy lab? So neutral buoyancy is when you're in the water, you're just completely suspended in the water. No, not going, floating up, not sinking down. Sounds like the red sea. And that's the Dead Sea. Yeah, the Dead Sea. And that's up, really it's, well on earth, it's the best way to mimic the effects of zero gravity while they're up at the, on the International Space Station. So in this massive pool, which is about 40 feet deep and I don't know 100, 100 feet long. This is about a million miles away from your monitoring the fishing boats. No, but it's still, it's still really cool. It's still really cool. Well, because it's the space station and the antenna that they're using to get their data is on the space station. Okay, got it, got it. And they have, they have full-sized model of the space station in this pool where astronauts train because they, when they go out, they basically rehearse what they're, what they're gonna do while they're up on the space station in this pool. So this must be a big pool, if it has a full size. It's a big pool. Yeah. Did you go down in the pool? I wish. I cannot. I cannot. But. But, okay, now this is your turn. Who came out of the pool? Oh, her name is Megan MacArthur and she was actually born here, I believe. Born in Honolulu. She's an astronaut and she was training and it just so happened that she came out of the pool right at the end of our tour and so we got to meet her and talk to her about her projects and that was really cool. Yeah. These guys of course, you know, as soon as they see her coming out of the pool they go, oh Megan MacArthur, write Google on the phone, right? Oh, she's born in Honolulu so they start telling everybody in the place, we're from Honolulu and the next thing we know, she comes over and spent like 15 or 20 minutes, right? She's talking and hanging and it was really. That is the greatest. It was surprising, you know? She's always a connection with Hawaii. I know. And she's actually, she's an oceanographer by trade, I guess you could say. Yeah. She has a PhD in oceanography, so it was pretty cool. Get her to come out here. Okay. Recruiting. Okay. So, okay, so what else then in Mexico, anything else? We visited the. This is Texas. Texas. Yeah. We visited the Coast Guard to talk about our data sets and ask them about certain ship tracks that we saw that were unusual to get their input. And they took us to their command center, which that was really interesting. They, it's really top secret they didn't let us take our phones or cameras or anything in there. Well, not really top secret. And, but they were showing us their monitoring, what they were monitoring of the Houston, the like Texas Coast and the Houston Pacific Coast. They don't want the bad guys to know how they monitor them. Yeah. Is it a combat information center kind of thing or rescue coordination center? I don't know what they call it these days. They just call it their command center. Yeah. Okay. But they look at things like this. You know, you're really kissing cousins that you get the data, they need the data. It's really a good connection. But you know what, what strikes me is that these guys are going through the kind of the keyhole here. They're going into science. This is the first time you've done anything like this, this project. And so here you, you get data down from satellites. You interpret the data. You make conclusions about the data. You talk to the government about the data. You talk to industry about the data. You know, you are cooking. You are going through the keyhole and Margo was helping you do that. That's what she does. She does that with so many students in so many ways. And so how does this change your view of science? Has it changed your view of computer programming? Has it changed your view of, of dealing with the environment and the whole world? All oceans, how does it change your view? What was, what kind of experience do you have? I think it kind of pointed me more in the direction where I want to go after I graduate because I am graduating in the spring. I have developed an interest for more planning or conservation and this kind of, these kind of tools that I've learned really shows me the path, I guess. When you, when you say that, I guess you're going to do graduate school because you need to in that area. But are you going to be, you know, an academician, a scientist, a research person? Or are you going to go and try to deal with the government or industry? Any thoughts? I was thinking more towards government jobs, actually, but I wouldn't mind going to grad school, but once I graduate, I first want to try to find a job and get more experience. Yeah, okay. How about you, Jay? So yeah, right now it's looking at the military and that this whole interacting with the Coast Guard and my, both my parents are military employees, so because of that it's been, I've kind of been involved with this kind of military, army, navy atmosphere. So it's, it's been a huge part of my life, so I feel like with my degree it's just really, I think, obvious next step is to look into the military. And what about, you know, your view of illegal fishing? What about your view of climate change? Has this experience given you, you know, further thoughts about that? How sensitive are you to those issues now? So I think it's definitely open my eyes more to illegal fishing than they, I wasn't really super aware of, obviously I was aware of that illegal fishing was going on, but I wasn't really too concerned about it, I guess, but now with this project it has really, it's a big issue and also climate change, our program is global environmental science, so climate change is a big huge factor of what we're learning about and learning that it is real, it is, it is happening and that's something that we need to really try to figure out how to stop or slow down or what happens. There's a whole, there's a whole sort of sidebar on this thing in terms of what the Chinese are doing in the South China Sea and how they're, you know, pushing people around in the Philippines over it and how the oceans become smaller, the oceans, you know, since you started science, Marco, you must have seen, you know, the oceans now are, they're all right there, you can reach out and touch the world now, it's different and science in the oceans is different. It is, it does feel like everything's sort of shrinking and that includes the population of, you know, flying fish that used to bump into me when I was out at sea in the 1980s versus, you know, what I see now. I mean, it scares me that the impacts, I have seen the impacts to the ocean in my lifetime, that just astonishes me and, you know, one of the things that, to Echo's Jay's point, you know, when you start going and talking to the Coast Garden to NOAA and you hear the numbers that something like 30 percent of the fish that end up on our plate were caught illegally in this country, even though we don't try and, you know, do that, we try and play by the rules, but, you know, the system, the system has problems and there are people that are taking advantage of the problems and it's folks like these that give me hope, right, that, you know, when I retire and you retire and we just go read cool books and learn interesting stuff, that these guys are going to pick up these important questions and do something about it, you know. It's not only science, though, it just connects with international law and the law of the sea and diplomacy for that matter. We have to be sensitive there as a country and as a new president, by the way. And, you know, because the oceans are smaller, it is more, it is of greater interest to all of humanity that they be properly governed and so you're really getting into an area that is more than science. It's the way humankind deals with this enormous resource, which is not so enormous anymore.