 Good afternoon. Welcome to the annual public meeting for the Canada Science Technology Museum Corporation. Welcome to the public meeting for the Canada Science and Technology Association. Thank you for joining us at Yadakon Museum in Toronto or online. Streaming live on Facebook this afternoon. My name is Fern Prue. I'm the Chief Operating Officer and I'll be your MC today. At this moment I would like to thank the Yadakon Museum for hosting this meeting in a spectacular building with a wonderful collection which we're really anxious to get to see a little bit more. At this time I would like to, it gives me a great pleasure to ask the director of the CEO of the Yadakon Museum, Dr. Henry Kim, to say a few words. Thank you very much and it's a great pleasure to actually be hosting this meeting, the annual meeting of the Science and Technology Museums Corporation Canada. It's wonderful to have you here. I'm very pleased that you actually brought your own objects as well because I think it's always wonderful when you have museums, you know, you have subject matter. It's very important to get back to the objects themselves because they're the ones that actually tell the stories about the development of human history through science, through technology, through innovation. And as a museum, the Yadakon Museum is also a place that has wonderful collections that involve science and technology. I hope that after the talk this afternoon you'll have a chance to go through the galleries to see our collections that include astrolabes, scientific treatises. We have a wonderful manuscript, I think Volume 5 of A Treatise on Medicine by Ibn Sina. We also have wonderful anatomical drawings, astronomical drawings as well as botanical ones. So I think that whenever you look at human history and evolution of cultures, science and technology is a vital part of human development. And as a museum we are actually very much in tune with what you are achieving as part of your museum corporation and we're just very pleased to have you here at the museum. I hope you have a wonderful afternoon and a wonderful time of fellowship and communication about what the museums are doing and also about today's lecture. So thank you very much. It's a delight to have all of you here today. Thank you very much, Dr. Kim. Thank you again for hosting us today. This is a wonderful venue to have our meeting. I would now like to invite Mr. Gerr Polanski, President of the Administration, of the Society, to present a few words. Dr. Polanski. Thank you very much. Henry, let me thank you for your kind comments. I've been here before. I love it. I'm thrilled to be here again. I'm thrilled to be here again and again. I encourage all Canadians, including the many who are watching now on stream, to come in and enjoy this quite spectacular museum. My name is Benjour. It's a great pleasure to have you here today. I'd like to welcome you to the public venue. If my former neighbors in St. Boniface or Prince Albert, St. Paul Albert, are wondering when I suddenly came up with my French abilities, I confess I have bilingual grandchildren. Virginia McLaughlin, board member, thanks so much for coming. Thanks to all our board for their diligence. So I'm really honored to be chair. I can tell you that it's a great organization. I'm going to be very brief and I'm going to make three quick points, each kind of focusing on a part of our name, the Canada Museums of Science and Technology. So about Canada, you know, we are a national museum. It's a big deal to be a national museum. There aren't that many. And to represent the country, to showcase science and technology, to inspire youth, we take it very seriously. Our board is from coast to coast to coast, and we're just thrilled to be working with Alex and his colleagues, and we'll be hearing more about our national outreach program in Alex's presentation. The second word, of course, is museums. Actually, museums plural, because in fact we oversee three of our national museums, aviation and space, agriculture and food, science and technology. And some people have felt over the years that the word museum maybe has kind of outlived its utility, and they prefer other words, center, institute, etc. And those are all fine words. I confess a bias, almost a love affair for the word museum, because of what it connotes, you know, it's almost a sacred kind of narrative. There's a lot of reverence for it. You're all probably familiar with history and how people have rallied around museums when they were under threat, such as perhaps during a war. It's a big deal to have a spectacular museum. And I hope that you feel ours is spectacular. We have one of the world's greatest collections of science and technology, over a million artifacts, and we have a spectacular staff who actually know everything about this stuff. They live and breathe it. They really care. They preserve stuff. They do research. They publish. They are amongst the world's experts in museology, with particular reference to science and technology. So it's a class act, and to repeat, the board is privileged to be a part of it. And finally, the two words science and technology, I think we would all agree have a kind of futuristic connotation They sort of breathe innovation, economy, prosperity, youth. And I think we are in sync with that kind of an attribution. As you may know, we are incredibly thrilled to be building two spectacular new buildings for a quarter of a billion dollars, which will be built on time and on budget and to rave reviews. And we'll have national import. Those are our four committed goals. They will be loaded with digitization. Our president, as you may know, came from Open Text. He's a guru and all this stuff. Plus he's 14 years old, so he's got a lot of time to learn about it. It'll be possible for your kids, your grandkids, to be able to sit at their kitchen table or on their bed at home and access the museum in a way that will blow their minds and they can control stuff and go to robotics. And it's really going to be something that the world will take note of and Canadians can be proud of. So without further ado, it's my honor to introduce our president, Alex Panay. Thank you, Gary, our 20-year-old chair. So first of all, before starting, normally I add lib a little bit more than what I'm about to do here, but I've been told that there's a lot of points I absolutely can't miss, so I will be speaking from notes today. But before that, I wanted to thank you all for coming here today. Thank you for joining us on Facebook Live. And thank you as well to our board members that are here today. So as Gary pointed out, we do run three national museums. On a daily basis we can deal from anything from cows on the Ag and Food Museum to the Canadarm at the Aviation and Space Museum and everything in between. All told in 2015-2016, we made about 21.6 million connections with people in Canada and around the world. So we did this in many ways, including visits at the museums, obviously, our websites, our virtual and traveling exhibitions, through social media, through downloads of our mobile games that are downloaded in over 170 countries worldwide and allowing people around the world to actually engage with Canadian history and culture. The museums and their partners work together to attract new people. For example, Bacon Palooza, which we present every year with the famous chef Lynn Crawford, is a great example. We opened three new exhibitions at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum this year. The Taste of Science is a traveling exhibition which highlights the role science plays delaying food from spoiling and keeping food nutritious and safe for us to eat. The Food Will Win the War display, which explores the story of food on the Canadian home front during the Second World War, as well as bees. A Honey of an Idea is a virtual exhibition that explains the key role of bees play in pollination and how many foods depend on them. In the previous year at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum or Second Museum premiered Star Trek, the Starfleet Academy experience. It's an exhibition. The exhibition kicked off in May with William Shatner, who joined us for the 50th anniversary of Star Trek to over a thousand people at the Starfleet Gala. The exhibition allowed visitors to experience a career day at the Starfleet Academy and explore the universe of science and technology in the field of science fiction. The exhibition also featured today's emerging technologies which introduced in the Star Trek TV show such as functional tricorder, NASA's warp drive theory which is becoming quickly a reality and the latest experiments with phasers and teleporters. The Canada Aviation and Space Museum also opened the Life in Orbit, the International Space Station exhibition with the Canadian Space Agency astronauts on hand. In the exhibition, which is full of interactive experiences for all ages, visitors discover how astronauts live, work, play in a microgravity environment, and they learn about Canada's role and our place in the International Space Program. Meanwhile, as Gary pointed out, the Canada Science and Technology Museum which I'll mention was opened in 1967 for the centennial of our country is undergoing a complete renewal. Right down to the bare floors, we were down to beams and posts over the last year and we're happy to say that it will reopen in November of this year for our 50th anniversary in 2017 on time for Canada's 150th. The new museum is going to have several new galleries and other features which include the Creating and Using Knowledge Gallery that will have three exhibition areas, hidden worlds, medical sensations as well as perceptions and illusions. The Children's Gallery will provide an interactive learning environment that nurtures the power of imagination in the spirit of innovation. The Technology in Our Lives Gallery will explore ways that Canadians encounter and interact with technology in daily life and it has two major exhibitions, one being household consumption and the other being wearable technology. The Transforming Resources Gallery explores the constant change that happens in the world around us as we transform it into consumables and energy. With the support of Canadian Heritage and several partners we launched in 2016 as well the Innovation Canada Interactive Digital Storybook to crowdsource the story of Canada's innovation. I invite you to visit the Digital Storybook which is part of Innovation 150, a federal Canada 150 initiative that is traveling the country in order to contribute your own stories of innovation to the storybook. Thank you. Thanks Alex. Just a quick overview of the financials. We're a con corporation. We're funded by the federal government to $26 million a year. When you look at our current operating costs, the accommodation costs of $13 million or salary cost of $18 million, you realize that we need a lot of money and we need a lot of money and we need a lot of money and you realize that we need self-generated revenues to be able to operate the museums and do all these wonderful projects that Alex was just alluding to. Last year, our financial statements are a lot more elaborate on our website. You can see the management discussion analysis notes in a lot of more detail but as a summary overview look at the admission revenues of $1.6 million. Although the Science and Technology Museum was closed, we still had programs and helping bring science to other people which generated some revenues. Other revenues include a milk quota. We have Dairy Heard at the Agriculture and Food Museum. We have a milk quota, so other revenues are included in that category. There's also parking revenues that are included in this. It's other program revenues that come across as revenue to help us build our programs. Commercial operations include arcatering or facility rentals and our boutique shops which generated just under a million dollars last year with one of the museums closed so that is still a very, very positive move for us to have the Aviation and Space Museum and contribution from our grant sponsors philanthropy funding that we do get on a regular basis through the tune of $1.4 million and the interest revenue is on temporary funds that we do have in our bank account for government appropriation until we actually spent to manage our cash flow to generate last year about $273,000 in interest income. Part of that is the construction projects that we do have so we have a bit more of a cash balance that we normally would. So we're benefiting from that to be able to again enhance our programs. There's different ways of looking at our expenses. I've put on this slide here based on our activities. Our financial statement you'll see is broken down by line of our category types of personnel accommodations, utilities exhibition fabrication but on our general activity perspective you look at the heritage preservations which includes managing our collection or conservation activities cost we're reinvested in that section $4.3 million. Sharing knowledge which includes all our exhibition, traveling exhibitions, educational programs our website activities is the main component of our expenditures of $11 million. Support activities which includes all our governance, finance, HR administration what I feel is one of the most important parts of the museum because I actually run it. The accommodation cost is the building utilities tax rental. We do pay property taxes we do pay rent utilities to house a collection. We have a lot of square foot requirements to be able to house this national treasure that we do have so all those costs go into accommodation costs. At the end of the fiscal year we ended up with a $358,000 profit which is a little less than 1% of the total funds available to us so we've made efficient use of all the funds available to us. Last fiscal year that money remains with us to be able to invest in future programs so that is a quick snapshot of what our financial position was for last fiscal year and at this point I'll ask Alex to come back and start talking about other projects that we're working on. Thanks Vern. Before closing and turning the microphone over to a big part of where we're really here today actually to get to the meet of the evening I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about some of the highlights that are coming up this year. This year we'll be starting construction. The building that you see on screen over to your left is our new collection and conservation center just under 400,000 square feet which we're very proud of which Gary mentioned will be completed on time and on budget. It will be a space for us where we'll be able to offer even more programming and even more access to the collection for the Canadian public. This past October we also launched the STEAM Horizon Awards for youth who are pursuing post-secondary education in STEM related fields so science, technology, engineering and math and what we have been able to do is save up to $725,000 scholarships for youth across the country. We're happy to say that we have close to 250 applicants from coast to coast to coast. These awards too will be outlined and provided to Indigenous students as well so we're extremely happy about the participation and the engagement that we've been able to generate in partnership with our Indigenous communities across the country. The awards are going to be giving out on May 17th, sorry, May 17th in Ottawa. Don't show up on the 18th because you will have missed it. So those are some of the highlights of what we'll be working on in the next year. At this point what I'd like to do is I'd like to invite Mr. David Panoloni our conservator in science, physics and medicine to address your question. Thank you very much. Thank you, Alex and it's a pleasure and honor to be here at the Aga Khan Museum. Hassan Asya and I are talking today about an unusual of 130 mathematical instruments that come from many countries around the Mediterranean and what was called the Ottoman Empire dating from the 12th century to the 19th century used in many contexts from tailor shops to architecture to agriculture. Why this lecture today on Ottoman mathematical instruments? In the midst of redoing our entire museum, building a huge storage facility, I have emails coming in right now about our exhibitions going on. I think the short answer is curiosity doesn't stop. A unique collection, a great collection. The kind that we are in the midst of here at the Aga Khan Museum today invites and inspires the imagination and understanding of different cultures and of topics that we're not too familiar with, maybe mathematics and architecture combination. It also relates this lecture in unexpected ways to the Canadian experience. Hassan, for example, will be looking at the shared mathematical culture and movement of ideas and technologies across a huge geographical area. I think many of us would recognize that in Canada. It reflects on Canada's history and informs our understanding of our complex knowledge economy. Hassan will also be looking at the fascinating collector of these instruments, George Petrovic, a Serbian architect who moved to Montreal in the 1970s. He's a real character and I think Hassan will illuminate that. Asya has taken an equally challenging question, how were these instruments used? What context were they used in? Her findings point to a complex geographic and social practice. In fact some of these instruments are again used in very tight networks across a huge geography and the traditions that are embedded in these practices we find here in Canada in our own historical structures in Parliament Hill even at U of T. Research, the research process itself for this project touches on activities that are very important to our museum, increasing knowledge. It's a great research project, sharing that knowledge and I think a favor to mind building communities, unlikely communities. Hassan, a quick biography of Hassan. Hassan Amut is our CSDMC McGill Research Fellow this year after holding a BSC in industrial engineering, currently studying classical architecture and masonry through the Guild of Stephen and St. George in England. She has a background in Mesopotamian history and she is a professor at Helsinki University and Brighton University. Her passion and career goal is to apply her studies and experience toward the preservation of historic sites in her home country of Iraq. Aside from her work on the Ottoman instrument projects she provides cultural services to the Iraqi diplomatic effort through talks and publications. Hassan. Thank you very much David. It's a great honor, it's a great honor to be here today. I'm very honored to be here today. I was so curious to visit. I achieved today and I'm also very honored again to share some of my findings, some of our findings in the project in the Canada Science and Technology Museum. So indeed talking about the Petrovic collection in the Aga Khan Museum here, which identifies its heritage of Muslim civilizations is quite meaningful. The collection acquired by the Canada Science and Technology Museum in 1980 represents a unique story of the migration of the instruments which were mostly produced or used in the Ottoman lands from one of the most multicultural regions of the old world, namely the Mediterranean region to one of the oldest and the most multicultural cities of the new world that is Montreal and then to Ottawa. It connects various regions and periods of time under the theme of metrology, having 130 artifacts including rulers, compasses, levels, plumbups and other kinds of measurement instruments from the 12th to the 19th centuries covering a vast territory in which more than 20 nation states are located today. The reason why we call it also the Ottoman collection is that 80 of the instruments or so were collected from the regions such as the Balkans, Istanbul, Anatolia and the Arab lands which were once ruled by the Ottomans from the 15th to the 19th centuries. To the best of our knowledge, at least for the time being, there seems to be no such a museum in the world which includes such a temporal, geographical and artifactual variety of Ottoman and metrological instruments. In order to show the peculiarity of the collection, let's look at briefly some of the artifacts in it. The first piece, this one, is one of the two oldest artifacts in the collection and also in the museum. It's a plumbab dated as the 12th century purchased by the collector in Yugoslavia, in today's Serbia. It was used as a vertical reference line. The second one, the Alepo in Syria and it's called Arshan in the traditional Ottoman metrology or in general in Islamic mythology, a ruler used by merchants mainly. Another interesting piece is this one, again, a level from the 17th century which was purchased in Salonika today's in Greece. You also see another interesting piece this one. It's a very interesting piece from the collection. It's a Chinese foot from the 18th century. This piece is interesting. It's a ruler from the 19th century Benghazi Libya and as the Arabic scripts on the piece indicate you have Arabic scripts, different numerical scripts and some the production place and production year. It seems to have been produced in Tophane, a district in Istanbul and then found its way into Benghazi Libya. I would like to show some other interesting pieces from the collection. The first one is a caliper from 19th century Montreal and the second one is a Weber's rule. It's called a Weber's rule from the 19th century which is today in Serbia and the third one is a compass again from Zonica which is today in Greece. I hope I could give a sense about this interesting collection. Then the question should be who the collector is and why he brought these interesting instruments together. George Petrovic, the collector was a professor of architecture at the University of Belgrade in Yugoslavia. He worked there until 1975 or so when he emigrated to Canada. After his emigration he worked for a while as an architectural consul in Montreal. We have recently learned that he passed away a few years ago. During the research the main focus of us was the Petrovic as a collector and as a professor of architecture. But interestingly we have learned that Petrovic was a prolific painter in Canada. It was another surprise for us to learn that in 1986 the National Museum of Science and Technology which is today's Canada Science and Technology Museum hosted an exhibition with Petrovic's futuristic paintings and you see so this is the introductory page of that exhibition held in the National Museum of Science and Technology and the other one is an interesting piece, futuristic paintings of George Petrovic which was exhibited in that exhibition. The result of our research has shown that Petrovic's interest in collecting a number of meteorological artifacts during the research he conducted for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Belgrade which was about traditional measurement units and their relevance to the traditional Serbian house in the 19th century. It is important to note that a number of instruments which are currently in the Museum's Petrovic collection are listed as the objects examined in his dissertation and you see a list of those instruments analyzed in the dissertation by George Petrovic. Finally I would like to make some preliminary remarks on the relevance of the Petrovic collection of the Ottoman instruments to architectural, scientific and artistic studies in Islamic Ottoman and the Mediterranean context. First Petrovic collected those instruments from various regions of the Ottoman Empire that was an important part of the Mediterranean landscape in the early modern world revealing a shared and common culture of mathematical practicality in this landscape. Thus the collection gives us an opportunity to look at Ottoman metrology in a holistic manner. Second a number of studies has been produced on various aspects of the Islamic arts architecture and science but artifacts and the practicality of these enterprises have attracted less attention than they deserve. Petrovic collection has a good potential to unfold some of the complexities of the mathematical and architectural culture in the pre-modern and early modern world. In this sense our next speaker Asya's research is really important as to how the approach to the artifacts in the region both architecturally and historically. Thank you very much. Thank you Asya. I won't keep you for too long. What I will do today is I will talk about the history and the use of the tools and also the exhibition value. Yes So what I would like to talk about is what I've been doing for the past few weeks months. In my research of the collection I focused on the use of the tools, the history and what exhibition value they hold. So the use of the tools was naturally the first aspect I researched because as a classical architect this was the thing that I gravitated to the most. They represented the origins of my craft and what my predecessors thought made for a good solution to complex problems they encountered in their work. The simple design of the tools speak for the application. However it does not tell us anything about who used them and in what context. The two fields that jump up when you first see the tools if you are an architect is obviously architectural context. There's also the canal design context. A very interesting man by the name of Antoine Francois-Andreossi was the only western scientist and researcher who has had any records of that of the tools. So he is also the first and often referenced lead and when I first started researching the collection it appeared that there were absolute mentions of the tools or the methods in any western literature. Thankfully Andreossi, a Franco-Talian nobleman, French artillery army artillery general diplomat and parliamentarian who was also a trained civil engineer had interest in Middle Eastern tools. His position as a diplomat and parliamentarian meant that he could freely travel the Middle East and give him a unique access that other Frenchmen wouldn't have to a world that was usually closed to the layman. So because he had a unique access into the world of Ottoman architect he was able to write about how the Ottomans found solutions for problems in architecture. One that I would like to mention today is canal design. If you have a look at the illustrations you'll see how he thought they were used. He thought they were used by hanging on a taut line between two vertical points to show us a horizontal level meaning that they were perfect for canal design. So he documented the use of the tools and he even illustrated them. One of the Tarazi triangles is of the same era as the ones that we actually have in our collection and Andri Ossi was actually the very first westerner to call them Tarazi. Tarazi is another word that the Persians and the Turks use for level which is why we've been calling it Tarazi in today's speech. Yes, so his drawings and reports of how the tools were used and the Bosphorus canals depict a raw observation of work he witnessed in his journey to Turkey. So the latest, the most interesting lead I would like to talk about today is Ibn Luyun. Now Ibn Luyun is a well known Andalusian agricultural author born in 1282 and died in 1449. So Andalus refers to the Arab conquered Spain where Luyun spent the majority of his life adjusting to a new terrain that differed quite a lot to where he was born and raised in Algeria. So the move from Algeria to Islamic Spain in his early life inspired him to write a book on that subject and he has written about the standards of agriculture for the Andalusian landscape called Kitab El Filaha which in English would mean book of agriculture or treaty of agriculture. In that book he also speaks of useful tools for the organized farmer. One of those tools, thankfully illustrated is the bat. Now the bat is another word for the Tarazi like the version, the Arabic version of that tool and it's quite interesting because he knows what the tool was made of. He knows that it was made of wood and that it was easily handmade and that it was affordable to all farmers to purchase or to make. So obviously the tools that we have are not made of wood. They are of metal alloys and they were made for the very wealthy, the very affluent who were able to afford tools that could last for centuries. So this just gives us an idea what kind of person would have possessed the tools that we have. So while this collection is one of the oldest we possess, it now appears to have medieval time roots. Much older than expected. The collection represents the first, the finest version of those ancient tools made for the wealthy whose tools, unlike those of the commoner, were made to last century. We now know of the use and the history of the tools, but what do we know about the exhibition value? I mean yes, they're pretty pieces, but what do they say? What can the visitor understand from what those pieces want to tell us? There are many avenues one could explore when talking about an exhibition for those tools and those avenues to be explored have the ability to forge some very strong relationships with foreign partners, foreign international partners and the main exhibition idea I'm working on at the moment is one, the Ottoman workshop which is an insight into what the Ottoman architect's workshop would look like. Then the Ottoman architectural drafting which is an insight into what those tools were useful for what can you draft with them? What can they achieve? What does this little triangle actually do? And also there's one of the beautiful drafts that I was looking at that one could use as a beautiful example for an exhibition. So the exhibitions that we're currently working on are called Travelling Andriosi, Ibn Leone Spat Ottoman Drafting, the Ottoman Stem Mason and the Ottoman workshop. Today I've only showed two and the rest are in progress and each one tells a very interesting story of art and agricultural personal thought would make for a good solution. So with time this collection has proven itself to be versatile and for very rich history. It really has been a pleasure researching those tools and understanding where my origins as an architect come from, what my master thinks makes for a good tool and why some old-fashioned things can still be pretty good. Thank you. I have the honour of saying thank you speaking to this slide here today and it's a series of thank yous that I think speaks to something many of us are passionate at our museum and that is that museum collections build communities. So I wanted to thank Hassan and Asya for joining our community. I wanted to thank my colleagues in Ottawa in conservation, collection services, curatorial division. I wanted to give a special thank you to Alex, our CEO who brought Hassan in through the McGill Fellowship, he started the McGill Fellowship emphasizing research on collections like this and Asya, remember Alex you brought Asya and it happened to be that Asya is an expert on one of the questions we had. So it's a diverse list as you can see that represents I think one of the essential roles of museums in the world and that is the exploration discovery and sharing of what we have in common across several borders and cultures in this case thousands of years of mathematical practice. So thank you everyone and stay tuned. Thank you David, Asya and Hassan it's always fascinating to see the collection come to life to the stories of the exploration that they can actually do with it. So very rich collection and just bringing people around the world but I'm always fascinated by the stories and what I hear. So thank you for that research, thank you for communicating it with us. At this time I would there's a time for questions I would be entertaining for Alex, Gary or any of the research any questions that anybody would have on today's subject. Yes. Sorry. We're on Facebook live so in order to get the... my question would be about the Petrovich collection particularly what astronomical instruments are there particularly are there any of them that you know a good story about? Well I personally working on the history of astronomy so I'm much more interested in astronomical stuff but unfortunately we don't have astronomical instruments in the Petrovich collection. The reason is that mainly the reason is that Petrovich is a professional of the history of metrology architecture and he was much more interested in collecting stuff from meteorological issues so we don't have indeed and the origin of this collection the starting of this collection was his dissertation which was also submitted to the architectural department. Yeah. Quick answer to that though because there was a few years ago I had Hassan and the group and his supervisor from McGill, Jamil Lejib and some of your fellow graduate students come to look at the collection and you guys had a debate about one of the calendar inscriptions there that was a little bit enigmatic and that's when I realized there was a lot of depth to this collection when three or four experts from the Islamic studies of McGill were having trouble agreeing on the date there so this is an astronomical connection for you. Thanks for the question. Are you having any questions regarding any subject matter today or anything else with the collections or museums operations? Hearing none then I'll conclude the question and formal part of our presentation today. Guests are welcome to stay. We've had the privilege to have the collection a tour of the museum. We have people outside just with tickets to be able to give us a guided tour and we'll have a wonderful opportunity to visit this. Thank you again to the Icon Museum for hosting us today and thank you for joining us live on Facebook.