Poverty and Equity

During the IIASA/NRF Poverty and Equity Workshop last week we heard a lot of people talk about Poverty and Equity but really what is the definition of poverty? Should we be focusing on the relative rather than the absolute?

My interest in the workshop was to speak to both IIASA and the NRF on the possibility of a Southern version of the YSSP I participated in last year, a YSSSP if you will. Nimi (the other South African YSSPer from 2010) and I discussed the concept and I wondered afterwards. Why do we as South African researchers try so hard to collaborate with European and American researchers, but what about the rest of Africa, the SADC region or even the other "south" nations, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Egypt? Surely they have more insight into the problems we face and have perhaps created unique solutions that are more indigenous in nature than a possible "north" solution? I've often thought of "North" vs "South" mentality as an Ivory Tower vs African Optimism.

Visiting Research sites in Cape Town

I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the joint conference between the NRF, SADC Science government officials and IIASA in Cape Town last week. As part of the conference various visiting officials were taken on tours of some of Cape Town's research centres. We had a glorious walk through Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens where much of the countries biodiversity research is done, as a guide pointed out various species of interest. My favourite section of the gardens is still the Cycad garden and Bird Bath.

Rhodes Memorial and District Six featured as our historical element of the tours. For those unfamiliar with either the context or their meanings I suggest reading up on both. The District Museum is a veritable font of information and the map on the floor that ex-residents have personally filled in on their visits is rather enlightening. The guides are ex-residents and can tell many a story from the time.

Our site visits also included Koeberg Nuclear Power Station(including the inside!) complete with safety boot, earplugs and glasses. Let me just mention at this point that it is loud in there, I do not envy their resident engineers. One of the most interesting parts of the tour was the safety procedures in place and the emergency evacuation strategy in case of an accident.

Another facility that I have done a lot of work with in the past is the Centre of High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Rosebank. Open to research institutions throughout the country and potentially other SADC countries, the CHPC has a number of clusters for simulating various "Grand challenges". A few examples off the top of my head is protein folding, climate modelling, fluid dynamics for planes, ocean current modelling etc. These are applications I have seen presented at CHPC conferences over the years. I am sure there are many more.

ICT in the classroom

Today has been a voyage of discovery into software and technology available for the 21st century classroom. I had the opportunity to try out a touch screen that could be "written on" and displayed on a screen for the students to see. This definitely better than trying to move the mouse on a laptop screen.

I went to an afternoon lecture on Autograph, a software package for plotting graphs. This is integrated with an electronic whiteboard for a teacher to stand in front of a class and demonstrate the different graphs. I'm still getting used to

The last lecture of the day Peter de Lisle from Hilton College spoke about how Joomla can create a website for schools. From experience Joomla is very restricted to the template being used but I suppose it suffices for high schools. As he spoke he suggested all these extras that cost money, something that goes against his initial message that it is free. The template designer he used is R1000 and then there is the gallery manager etc etc.

ICT in Education

The second day of Innovate 2010 started with a few interesting applications of smartboards and Nintendo Wiis. It is interesting that they are using Python to communicate between the two. I've recently discovered that smartboards are becoming rather popular at schools around Cape Town (we even had one installed in EGS at UCT) but I'm not sure how effective they can be. I'm very keen to see what type of content teachers are developing to use on these teaching toys.

Robert and I presented Project Umonya today to a number of IT teachers from around South Africa. Speaking to them afterwards we discovered that many teachers are frustrated with the SACO format and how it doesn't fit into teaching IT, that the North West would really like a course of their own and that there may in fact be computer labs big enough to host courses at certain IEB schools (namely in Johannesburg)

While speaking to educators and NGOs who facilitate educational programs I've discovered a few resources that people may wish to browse, namely Living Maths, Free High School Textbooks (FHSST) and Fullmarks (website pending). Its amazing what resources are available. Project Umonya is hoping to feed their upcoming resource packs into the FHSST system for a greater distribution.

Tomorrow is the final day of the conference and I am keen to network a bit more and discover a few more useful contacts to help us on our way.

Innovate 2010

Yesterday was the first day of the three day conference in Innovate 2010 Schools ICT Conference held in Cape Town at the Cape Academy of Mathematics, Science and Technology. I first started working at this conference in 2001 (when I was still in high school) and today I am presenting for Project Umonya.

The first keynote speaker of the day Masha du Toit discussed Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. I'd never really considered the difference or that the distinction existed, I'd sort of accepted that I was born when computers became ubiquitous but that others had an affinity to technology that could have existed in any age (someone had to invent the stuff)

The second keynote speaker for the event was Johannes Cronje from CPUT. He spoke about the Seven Ages of Technology in Education. It was a highly entertaining experience as he traversed the world of Shakespeare for examples.

During the afternoon I sat through what could have easily been a marketing pitch for Apple. I own an Apple MacBook and still felt both bemusement and despair of the missed opportunity to showcase a proper message. The Parklands Apple One2One project is an experiment in introducing laptops into the classroom. Teachers promoted iLife as the solution to all the learners problems. They forgot to mention that everything they trumpeted on iLife is available as Open Source software (and hence less expensive than buying a MacBook).

The Parklands teachers and IT specialists missed a key opportunity, one I hope others will correct over the next two days, that of user generated content. The team spoke about the learners enthusiasm at generating new content but this doesn't have to be done on a MacBook. I despair that the message was completely lost as the teachers attributed all success to the technology itself.

SASAS Conference

South African Society for Atmospheric Scientists (SASAS) host an annual conference to bring together the Atmospheric Scientists and interested parties (agriculture, atmospheric chemists, hydrologists, oceanographers) a chance to meet and present their current research.

This year Climate Systems Analysis Group (CSAG) were tasked with running the conference. SASAS was held at Waterval in Tulbagh, a team building and conference venue just outside the picturesque wine producing town. There was snow on the mountains and fog in the mornings..nice and chilly.

The theme this year was BEYOND THE BOX. Trying to slowly shuffle atmospheric scientists from the traditional methods to the innovative. The conference structure changed to include 2 new sections; Grill the Climatologist and Beyond the Box.

Grill the Climatologist consisted of thought provoking questions put before a panel of three scientists. The questions were anonymously submitted to the chairman of the session. They included geoengineering, why we bother running more simulations when we can't cope with what we have already and carbon trading.

Beyond the Box was split into 2 sections, a short introduction by four scientists on what they think is the future of atmospheric science. These presentations highlighted the current failures and their visions of hope. The second section expanded on these ideas and included a few extra presentations on innovative approaches to climate science.

A few take home messages from this conference are that carbon trading is a disastrous idea, geoengineering is not a solution and that we need to stop looking to new and better models and tell a story with the data we already have.

Google Earth Scientific Applications

Day one of the Scientific Applications with Google Earth Conference was interesting in that I have never looked at the features of Google Earth in any depth. The first speaker Tim Killeen from NSF explained that less than 10% of all data they had was ever viewed and a system is needed for people to view this data in a simple environment. The two highlights to take away is that "data to knowledge" is key and "big uncertainties remain" wrt climate and understanding. So nothing new. He did however touch on new projects such as the NSF Ocean Observatories Inititiave , the final design of which is due in December.

The next speaker Dan Atkins from the University of Michigan and NSF spoke on the "Role of Data in the National Science Foundation Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Discovery". He touched on data stewardship, curation, federation, openness(over the long-haul). He stated that providing information a geographical-based entry to data is natural and compelling as we all have an inherent geographical frame of reference. I learnt a new word: nomenclature. Not sure I will ever use it though. Three project he reviewed were interesting:
TeraGrid: an integrating infrastructure
Blue Waters - look into tech specs
nanoHUB

The third speaker and possibly the most compelling was Michael Weiss-Malik from Google. He is a KML Product Manager and explained the design of Google Earth and the need for it. To use the analogy "to most users, the interface is the computer" he pointed out that with any paper we read the figure is the thing one remembers most and so the philosophy "to most viewers the presentation is the data". Something definitely worth remembering. KML is a standardised format derived from XML that encodes the Google Earth files.

The last two speakers, Sean Askay and Trey Smith, are both users of Google Earth to represent scientific data and presented a series of KMLs already developed that emphasized this point. The topics ranged from Appalachian Mountaintop mining to Geothermal resources, the global climate temperatures to Google Moon. The coolest thing I learnt about was actually GigaPan. Definitely worth viewing.

After lunch we split into Working Groups, mine was Climate Change and we heard from Lisa Ballagh (NSIDC) and John Bailey (University of Alaska) about climate KMLs and Virtual Globes. The group talked about various research endeavours that would be favourable for Google Earth apps and I realised I could present my seasonal forecast stuff in GE eventually. After reviewing current KMLs we found various things we wished were possible in Google Earth such as being able to switch off labels on load or preferential loading of data and user notices to know what to do. The last thing we discussed was who owned data and what happens when you pubish papers with GE images and supply online KMLs. Google have written a guideline specifically for this and is available at: http://www.google.com/permissions/geoguidelines.html