9/11 Thoughts

Guest posted by Jim Putnam

All of radio, news magazines and papers, and TV seem to be focusing on the ten year anniversary of 9/11. I’ve listened and read several, and no one has put their thoughts any way near what I have been thinking. So, here I go. It’s obviously true that 9/11 changed us all in many ways. I’m no different. I remember being at work in Raleigh when someone came in and said we needed to get to a TV. I watched and listened for a few minutes, and left the room before the second plane struck, very saddened. I knew that we would never be the same, individually or as a nation. I wasn’t, and am still not, smart enough to know how we would or still will change, but it seemed inevitable that we would. 9/11 stands foremost as a missed, a lost opportunity. I don’t think any of us could see the true opportunity available to stand atop a mountain and shine as a beacon of hope. Anger crowded reason aside, and we reacted, striking at those who hurt us. We struck at anyone who even looked like the image we built of a Muslim enemy. Because a few hundred, perhaps a thousand, Muslim extremists, perpetrated the terrible acts on 9/11, every one of a billion and a half Muslim people became our enemy. And no matter how much we say that they are not, our actions scream louder. We have become that which we feared the most.We have spent billions of dollars on our internal defenses, telling ourselves that we must be strong, and more billions on external war. I understand that we’ve spent well over a trillion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A billion here, billion there, and pretty soon we have spent real money, to paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen. We’ve practically bankrupted ourselves with wars and fear. Hindsight is so much better than foresight. It’s not a good idea to play the “What if ..” game, and I don’t intend to do so now. What is, is, and no amount of what if can change it. But, perhaps it is good to consider what we could have done, along with those that we did. I’m not a political scientist, but it seems to me that there were certainly actions not taken that would have made an enormous, world changing difference. Perhaps we could have said to the world that we have been grievously hurt, but that we know we are strong enough as a nation that we don’t feel the need to respond to death with anger but with a firm resolve that we are better than that. Can we build on our strengths rather than try to build walls of isolation based on fear? It’s reasonably clear that there are those who wish us terrible harm. Yes, we must continue to protect ourselves, but isn’t it also clear that security needn’t be the enemy of freedom? To me it is. Very clear. We’ve always been a confident people, and yet we’ve allowed ourselves to relinquish our freedoms for what those who profit from “protecting” us. We’ve allowed our government to tell us that we need to be surrounded by walls, electronic and real. A million or so dollars spent to detect a bomb detection device could be better spent building bridges and infrastructure that make us stronger than any detection gizmo. I don’t have any idea what to do now about Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Somalia, Libya, the Mideast, etc. I read that Afghanistan and Iraq would likely be failed countries two years after we would leave, and therefore we cannot leave. Supposedly, as failed countries they would be a training, or to us a more heinously loaded word, breeding ground for terrorists after we leave. Isn’t there a better way to preclude that than by occupying, fighting, and losing our troops? I believe there must be, and surely someone smarter than me has an idea how. I suppose the base question has to be, “What can be done now, after all these bodies, dollars, and mental, emotional, and physical strength of our country has already been committed?” What can we do NOW? I can’t answer that because I am not at all sure that there is anything that we can do. Nothing, nada, zilch, zero. But so long as words like these can still be written, in despair as well as hope, there may be time to do something, and there may be time for someone who is more capable than I to show us a plan.

Jim Putnam

Polaris and me

Guest posted by Lakshmi.

I was going to review Polaris, a science fiction novel by Jack McDevitt. I’ve also been asked to write about what has happened to me since I reviewed Sunstorm as well. They have a lot to do with each other and I don’t think I can do them separately. So am doing them both together, and I hope it makes sense. Before my English teacher recommended Sunstorm I was not interested in maths or science at all. In this essay I am going to save a lot of explanation by just using bold type to show things and ideas which are new to me since I started reading Sunstorm. I am glad that I was told to use a pen name, because if my friends knew I was writing this I would be socially dead forever. After I reviewed Sunstorm, I read Donna’s review of Seeker. The thing that I liked most about Sunstorm was the idea of a planet being fired across space to hit a sun, like a stone being fired at a target with a catapult. Then my maths teacher showed me how to model this on a computer, and I realised that it’s actually more like firing the stone from a catapult in London and hitting a melon in Australia or somewhere. Anyway, Donna’s review mentioned that something similar happened in Seeker, so I read that as well. I found that Seeker is the last book in a set of three about the same characters (the first is A Talent for War and Polaris is in the middle). So then I read the other two as well. All of the books have the same pattern: there is a mystery, the main characters discover it through something to do with the antiques trade, historical research gets them close to solving the mystery, and the mathematics of moving bodies finally gives them the answer. The mysteries are all different, and make you want to read to the end, but I won’t spoil them by describing them here - and anyway, it’s the maths bits that interest me (I never thought that I would hear myself say that). The historical research interests me too. In Seeker the maths was about how a stellar system is affected by a brown dwarf star passing close by. In A Talent for War, it’s where a spaceship would be after two hundred years. And in Polaris it’s sort of like a cross between Sunstorm and Seeker because a small but super dense star called a white dwarf hits an ordinary G class star like our sun (not deliberately, it just happens) and goes straight through it and out the other side and destroys it. I have got totally into this moving bodies stuff. I find the ideas exciting. My maths teacher has shown me how to find information about it and I have done a lot of reading. He has also shown me how to use a spreadsheet and a program called Autograph to set up and investigate my own models. I have learnt a learnt a lot but the the biggest thing I’ve learnt is that I have gone as far as I can without learning some pretty scary maths. I have started studying some AS maths modules on my own. Well not really on my own because my maths teacher is helping me before school and my uncle is helping me at home but I mean not in a class or anything. I have completed module M1, which is the first mechanics module, and started on M2. Mechanics is what they call the sort of maths that will eventually let me cover orbits and trajectories and stuff (M1 and M2 don’t get that far, but I need to understand the basics). To understand some of the mechanics I need other maths, called pure maths, which doesn’t have anything necessarily to do with mechanics but you use it as a sort of way to describe things - my English teacher pointed out that it’s like I can only enjoy poetry if I can already read. So I’ve done quite a bit of P1 as well (that’s the first pure maths module). I am using some software called Derive to help me with understanding the maths I am doing. There’s a lot of other software as well and none of it would be so exciting without the models which they let you build to try things out. I’ve done a little bit of calculus with my maths teacher and my uncle. Calculus is when you imagine very small bits of a problem so you can get your head round it, then imagine that small bit happening over and over again, forever, to make it back into the big problem again but now you understand it. I haven’t explained that very well, but it’s important and it works. Its how you can start with the velocity of something, and the gravity of a star pulling it, and see where it will go, or the other way round. By September I think I will have finished all three AS modules. My uncle says I could take the AS exam, even though I won’t have done my GCSE yet. But that would totally blow my cover and everyone would think I was a geek. My teacher says he’ll see if I can take it somewhere else that nobody knows me. I don’t know. I’ll see. Doing all this other stuff has made me better in ordinary school maths and science too. I used to be rubbish at algebra, but now it seems easy. I know now that when you do experiments you do them lots of times and then look at all the results, not just one, and now the handling data part of maths makes sense too (but I don’t want to do the S1 statistics module cos that looks really scary). My maths teacher has set up some experiments for me, like rolling a marble across a rubber sheet on a frame. You can poke your finger into the rubber, or put a lead weight on it, and pretend the dent is a gravity well and see what happens when the marble (which is supposed to be a lump of rock in space) passes near it at different speeds. And we tried firing an air gun through an egg in front of a video camera to see what might happen when the white dwarf goes through the G type star in Polaris, which is a physical model instead of the mathematical models which you do with pen and paper or with software. I’ve started to think about what I want to do in my life. I am still most interested in literature and drama but I’m interested in other things too. I’ve been doing paintings and models from the shapes that all the trajectory models make, and imagined using them for stage sets - weird or what? I just tell my friends they’re abstracts. Because of these novels by Jack McDevitt I’ve got really into history as well, and I’ve seen the same sort of graph shapes in history books as in mechanics, like the way population grows looks like the way a rocket’s height changes as it takes off. It would be nice to do everything, but I’m not sure you can. People seem to do one thing or the other. Mr Grant who organises this site and asked me to write about this stuff says he did literature as well as maths and sciences when he did his A levels but he’s quite old and I think things have changed since his day. He says that people who write books like Sunstorm and Seeker need to understand the maths and science as well as being able to write, and Jack McDevitt must understand history too, and I suppose that’s true. But A levels are a long way yet. I don’t even start my GCSE subjects until September. Well, that’s a little bit about Polaris and quite a lot about what’s happened to me since I read Sunstorm. I hope it wasn’t too boring. And I hope nobody I know ever realises who I am. McDevitt, J., A talent for war. 1989, Sphere. 0747403333. McDevitt, J., Polaris. 2004, New York, Ace Books. 0441012027. McDevitt, J., Seeker. 2005, New York, Ace Books. 0441013295. Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter, Sunstorm: A time odyssey. 2006, London: Gollancz. 0575078014

Lakshmi

[originally posted on Scientific Computing World's education pages]

Seeker

Guest posted by Donna.

Jack McDevitt. Seeker. 2006, New York: Ace. Chase Kolpath, the narrator of Jack McDevitt’s novel Seeker, is a grave robber. So is her boss, Alex Benedict. They’re good at it, too, but prefer to think of themselves as antiquities dealers. Alex and Chase have made some significant finds during their careers, and have collected both friends and enemies along the way. Now they are on the trail of the biggest find of their careers and somebody wants to stop them, badly enough to kill them. Their introduction to the case arrives with an old plastic cup with ancient lettering, brought to their office for appraisal by Amy Kolmer, a woman obviously ignorant of its true value but hoping for a quick sale. Analysis of the cup reveals it to be approximately 9,000 years old. The lettering is in an ancient language known as English, and their AI (artificial intelligence) gives an initial translation of Searcher or Explorer as the name of the ship it must have come from. Alex Benedict is a very successful antiquities dealer. If there is one 9,000 year-old cup from a ship, there is a chance of more. All he has to do is find the ship. Alex makes the decisions, but it seems Chase does all the legwork, and there is plenty of legwork involved. How did the cup come into Amy’s hands? What was the real name of the ship? Where did it sail from? Most important of all, where is it now? An historian is able to tell them the ship’s name — the Seeker, one of two ships belonging to the ancient Margolians. Nine-thousand years before, the Seeker had left an America mired in religious and political oppression for a world where “not even God will be able to find us.” They were never heard from again. Their disappearance became one of the most enduring myths of human colonization, and one cup from that lost colony was sitting in Alex Benedict’s safe. He now had an even greater prize than just a ship full of treasure. He was on the trail of the Margolians, and he intended to be the one to finally answer the question of what had happened to the lost colony. Eventually they find the ship, and another set of mysteries, and that’s where the science comes in. Chase spends several chapters hunting down clues as to where the ship currently is. Searching through old ship logs and questioning owners of the cup over the previous 30 years may not seem like science, but it is. A large part of any scientific investigation is the gathering of evidence. Among the bits and pieces Chase uncovers is evidence that the actual discoverers of the Seeker were killed in an earthquake and resulting avalanche 30 years previous. They had been with Survey, and had spent the twelve years following their retirement from Survey returning to the same location in space again and again, with no record of where they had gone beyond the incomplete memories of their daughter, a young girl at the time of the accident. Was it someplace they had found during their time with Survey? Finding the answer to that requires learning something about how to set up an efficient flight plan, then comparing that plan to possible variations that might account for a shift to study a G-class star at the end of its hydrogen burning cycle, a type that was of particular interest to them. The deviation tells Chase where to look for the Seeker. The Seeker is found, full of dead colonists, mostly children. Eric theorizes that it appears they were trying to escape some sort of catastrophe. There are no live Margolians, and the only planet that once might have sustained human life now has an extreme orbit creating long winters where humans could not survive. Investigation of the Seeker reveals that many original parts had been replaced with those from its sister ship, the Bremerhaven. An empty space dock is also found, but the Bremerhaven is not. So a new question—what happened to the Bremerhaven? What if a comet, or some other object, had hit the planet or passed nearby? Could it have caused the changes in the orbit of their suspected colony world? How big would it have to be? When would it have happened? Would the colonists have had enough notice to plan an escape? Could there have been two escape plans, one for the majority of the colonists, with another, less risky, plan to get their precious children back to Earth? If yes, where did they go with the Bremerhaven, when it no longer had star-flight capability? Where were they now? This time a friend, and her knowledge of astrophysics, provides the answers they need. How she does it, and what they find afterwards, you’ll need to read the book to learn. It’s a good read, and you’ll learn a bit about the movement of planetary bodies, too. One more mystery they solve before the end — they also find out who’s trying to kill them, and why.

Donna

[originally posted on Scientific Computing World's education pages]

Sunstorm

Guest posted by Lakshmi.
(a British school student, age 14 at the time of posting)

This isn’t a book about computing or computers, but computers and computing are behind everything that happens in it. It’s a really cool book, even though my English teacher lent it to me. In fact, it’s the second book in a series (the first one, Time’s Eye, is cool too, but doesn’t belong in this review). The sun is going to flare out and destroy everything on the Earth - not just humans but all life, even bacteria. Mostly, the book is about how this happened and how people try to prevent it. You don’t have to know anything about the science or the computing to enjoy it, but you pick them up along the way without realising you’re learning them. There’s this weird genius on the moon who uses computers to do a load of maths to let everyone know that the sun is going to flare. That’s one of the ways computing comes into it, because he builds something called a computer model which lets him visualise what’s going to happen to the sun. I didn’t know about computer models before, and you don’t have to know about them, but I got really interested and read about them. His model doesn’t only tell him what’s going to happen though - he runs it backwards, as well, and figures out why it’s going to happen. Then you get a different sort of computer model, and that shows how a huge planet like Jupiter was catapaulted across billions of kilometres of space using gravity wells (I didn’t know what gravity wells were either - that’s another cool idea I learned from this book and then looked up afterwards). But there’s other sorts of computing, too, not just maths and stuff. The internet has sort of grown up, and become an artificial intelligence, and been recognised as a legal person called Aristotle after an ancient Greek bloke. Then there’s another internet on the moon, and that’s not so big or complicated but it’s intelligent too and it’s called Thales. And finally there’s the huge sunshade they build to protect the earth and it has to be run by a big intelligent computer as well, so that becomes a person called Athena. I don’t think I’m ever going to be an astronomer, or a physicist, or an army officer or a weird genius, or a mathematician. But this book made me realise that you don’t have to be a scientist to learn science and find it exciting, and that maths isn’t just boring numbers it can be used to do and understand all sort of exciting stuff. I can be someone who understands what those people are talking about. For instance, I stopped ignoring my maths teacher, and started talking to him, and he explained several things in the book using a computer. I was able to watch the big planet being catapaulted across space, and I could change things to see how they affected where the planet went. And my physics teacher used a computer to show me what Lagrange points are. (The big intelligent sunshade had to be on a Lagrange Point, where there is no gravity - there are five Lagrange Points round every planet or moon, and they’re an amazing idea, you can hover on them with almost no fuel, and I understand three of them now even if I couldn’t do the maths myself yet). You can find out about Lagrange points at Wikipedia Because of this book I’ve started paying attention in maths, physics and biology, and found that they are exciting if you listen to what they are about instead of just assuming that they are boring. And I’ve started learning about computers, and what they can do, and the science programs that help me to learn about how the universe works. One of the things I like is that several of the important characters are women, not just men like most books: the American president, the European prime minister, the British Astronomer Royal. So if you’re a girl you can see a future in this sort of exciting science for yourself even if the world doesn’t end! One of the women, an army officer called Bisesa Dutt who is the main person in book one and then helps to save the world in book two, is also British Asian like me which is better still. There’s one slightly gross bit, in the middle, giving too much information about how you have sex in orbit, but it’s only one page and you can skip over it without missing anything.

Lakshmi

[originally posted on Scientific Computing World's education pages]

A Psion for Ruvuma

Guest posted by Kara B.

Waiting for my flight, I have a mixture of feelings. I am very nervous, because I am not sure exactly what to expect. The prospect of being away from home with no possibility of contact with friends or family is daunting. No – to be honest with myself it's not a little daunting – it's terrifying. And Africa is so far away, I have never travelled out of Europe. But I am also very excited. Seventeen years old, halfway through my Highers, with my sights set on a psychology degree, I did not think of myself as a scientist. Nobody was more surprised than I, when I was asked to spend my summer extending the computing revolution into a remote area of rural Africa. I know nothing about agriculture, and I consider my ICT skills to be basic; what could I possibly offer? But I was told that I could be useful, and it was a great opportunity. I was to learn many lessons from the people of Ruvuma, one of them being that a weed becomes a crop when planted in the right place – and expertise is only commonplace knowledge taken into a new context. So, since the Ruvuma Project pays no expenses, I started raising the €1500 or so that I needed. Tanzania is a country of more than 30 million people, many of them dispersed across nearly a million square kilometres – much of it remote from physical infrastructures of government. It is also a country with a huge development agenda for which it has to manage extremely slim resources. As is usual in such circumstances, the efforts are concentrated on maintenance of the brain and central nervous system: the cities and other key centres, along with the communication systems which connect them. Computing exists, but like many other commodities it is polarised. In affluent pockets of the capital, Dar es Salaam, you will find facilities as advanced as anywhere in the world; only a street away, a four-function pocket calculator is unknown technology. As you move into the interior you leave behind telecommunications, electricity, and finally roads. Computers may be the essence of high technology, but the cannot go where more basic technologies do not proceed them. For most of the country, governance and development are a local matter, supported by central authority but effectively autonomous. Traditional social structures are the basis, but the infrastructure extends and brings contact with some, but not all, of the outer world. Roads are the key: once a road arrives, much else will follow it in a fairly short time. Communities reached by road must frequently make the transition from pre-industrial to globalised economy within half a generation or less, with the demands always preceding the benefits. Ruvuma, where I was to arrive as unlikely emissary of the computing revolution, is just such a community. So, what uses does a rural, subsistence agrarian community like Ruvuma have for a computer? Briefly: agricultural, educational, engineering and medical ones. Science in such an environment is still a live, vital business closely linked to survival; this is a concrete science of day to day realities, not an abstract one of theoretical bounds – but it remains quantitative, though deprived of computational resources which the first world takes for granted. It is a common mistake to believe than a pre-industrial community is less complex than an industrialised one, or is unable to make use of industrial or even post-industrial methods. Human ingenuity and determination run as strongly here as in the industrially developed North (even more so, in fact, as I was to discover) and they draw the same benefits from technological amplification. Medicine, here, faces priorities long forgotten elsewhere. Many of the first world’s big challenges (such as cancer, heart disease or geriatric deterioration) are irrelevant when the national mean life expectancy is less than 50 years. HIV and AIDS related problems are at epidemic proportions, and water quality is uncontrolled for most of the population. Medicine at the primary care level, then, is a prime candidate for refinement – and that means isolating essential patterns of cause and effect, just as it does in the hospitals of the North. Along with the computer, I was carrying to Ruvuma’s clinic an optical microscope donated by my college. Health is causally dependant upon agriculture, and both in turn upon engineering. If irrigation fails, the crops fail. If the crops fail, health fails. All three depend upon education: expertise has to grow rapidly within the community if it is to drive the ever rising development needs. To be effective, a clinic must be housed in a durable built structure – as must a school, or a dairy cow – and a building is constructed from bricks. Bricks are made by hand, from sun-baked clay; they may therefore cost nothing in monetary terms, but they are expensive in labour. How are patterns of manufacture, quality control, and distribution to be maximised? Only by analysing an overall picture of long term cause and effect, just as in any industrial concern. Record keeping and comparison are vital; but in a climate and economy where paper is comparable to gold and less durable, record keeping is dependent upon fallible and ephemeral human memory. Computers, as storage even more than as means of computation, could make all the difference. The same is true across a range of other concerns which may not seem like “science” to our spoiled perceptions. Fish farms, carved and puddled from dry earth then filled with water carried manually for kilometres, produce an order of magnitude leap in dietary security; but also in dependency, and only accurate analysis of good records can improve the ratio of one to the other. Imposing solutions from the top downward is fatal, and to supply assistance without unintended interference is not easy. Ruvuma has a some fine minds: among them the village chairman, the nurse, the newly arrived medical officer, the teachers in the schools. The women of the ward have started a revolution by opening their own collectives, farming their own land, processing the crops into secondary market products. Perhaps most of all, agricultural extension officer Jonas Asokwe. All of them are generating immense quantities of scientific knowledge upon which the next layer of development must be built – knowledge which must not be lost to their communities, We were guests of these people: supplying a little expertise which they, not we, had requested and they, not we, had the knowledge to properly apply. It is a strict rule of the Ruvuma Project that nothing is imposed upon the people or community. The clinic had requested the microscope and a final year medical student, who flew out with me from London, accompanied it primarily to learn from the community and only secondarily to provide whatever information or advice might be asked of her. I, similarly, could only provide initial pump priming for Jonas who would apply the computer as he, not we, saw fit. We can say with certainty that vital data will derive from application of the microscope, and that the computer will be an ideal recipient; but what the data will be, and how it will be used, we should not attempt to influence. Both medicine and agriculture, but agriculture above all else at this stage, are information-led areas for development, and here Ruvuma is especially lucky in Jonas Asokwe. Born and raised in the region, he went away to a government training college; then, instead of heading for more lucrative urban employment of his education, he returned. He is incredibly perceptive and knowledge-thirsty; everything interests him. I have been told by others on the Project that in Europe he would have gone on to university and postgraduate study – and I can easily believe it. This is fortunate for the future of development here: whoever tackles it must re-invent (in indigenously appropriate ways) methods which European agriculture takes for granted. Many outside agencies seek to offer help and developmental assistance, from their first world perspective, but their good intentions can only impact the urban centres where facilities exist. Many individuals also offer their skills; Richard Verseput, of S-Matrix Corporation, for example, offered unlimited free consultancy to support informed local development; but the facilities for taking up such offers do not as yet exist. For the moment, it is more important that someone like Jonas is available to develop (from first principles and local knowledge) experimental design methods and agronomics which suit and optimise the existing patchwork of land use or ownership. He has the active trust of the population, and the understanding of the locale – we can only provide him with hardware to support those essentials. Several of his efforts to date are particularly ripe for computerised extension. An initial handful of heifers have, under his direction, expanded to a sustainable and widespread community based dairy resource; but tracking its efficiency has, in the process, become a mammoth task. He plans an expansion of the experimental fish farming ponds; but maximising efficiency will require both record keeping and a great deal of “what if?” analysis. The actual pattern of planting, maintaining and harvesting traditional crops is also an area which benefits from co-operation – and designed experimentation needs more than human computation once it gets beyond a certain point. Once a community like Ruvuma (or a member of the community, such as Jonas Asokwe) has envisaged a role for information handling technology, the problems have not ended but begun. Most of the issues which would concern an individual or corporate purchaser in an industrialised society are not so much irrelevant as meaningless. What are they to make of the phrase "total cost of ownership", for example, when a computer costs more than the gross annual domestic product of the community and any breakdown will be permanent? Other, locally evolved criteria for selection must, de facto, apply. The first constraint upon choice is the complete absence of electricity supply. The clinic has solar panels, installed by the Ruvuma Project, but they suffice only to keep the refrigerator running. The cost of installing these panels was immense, difficult to achieve even when justified by primary healthcare benefits, and the output is modest. To repeat the installation would mean switching finite resources away from other projects, such as the secondary school, effectively abandoning them. To provide the power supply for a single laptop computer, for example, would cost ten times as much as the computer itself. There are clockwork powered radios, but extending this technology to computers has so far proved impractical. [Editorial comment, 2011: this was written some years ago; clockwork computers are now not only practical but being supplied to developing communities by the One Laptop Per Child programme.] Portability, of both equipment and output, is also a major issue. A computer tied to a single location is a very inefficient resource for a whole community. Paper is a scarce and expensive commodity – local children almost rioted in their eagerness to receive a sheet each from the pack of A4 photocopier bond which I took with me. A computer, to be useful here, must be able to travel around – not only for use, but also for information storage and the dissemination of its output. And travelling around means travelling on foot – you may think that your laptop is light and robust, but when did you last walk ten kilometres with it under your arm, over unmade earth tracks? Even if paper were available in quantity, a printer demands still more electricity. Its ink, toner or ribbon are products of a disposable industrial society. It has moving parts vulnerable to dust, humidity and lack of maintenance. The last is also true of conventional disk drives, mice, and many other peripherals. A computer for Ruvuma. then, must be small, light, robust, unitary in design, as thoroughly solid state as possible, and capable of eking out maximum achievable life from minimum battery power. This specification doesn’t leave very much scope for choice. A palmtop, or handheld PC, obviously. Monolithic construction suggests a Palm Pilot clone, or one of the WinCE imitations of that design such as the Cassiopeia or Jornada, but other requirements pointed elsewhere. WinCE, for a start, is too inefficient an OS and these machines are ruinously hungry for power – not terminal in London or Paris, with batteries available on every street corner for the price of a coffee, but fatal in remote Ruvuma where a battery costs more than one child’s complete primary education. The Palm-format screen is, in any case, designed to exploit mental habits already used to WIMP thinking; . This left EPOC machines. Psion's 3 series machines are regarded as passé in the developed world, but for reasons which become irrelevant or even advantageous in Ruvuma. Colour screens consume power, and touch screens are hard to read in the glare of tropical sunlight; the Psion 3 series have neither. A donor, who prefers to remain anonymous, offered a 3mx model, the current representative of this line, or an older 3a. The faster processor in the 3mx was beside the point, in the circumstances, as was infra red communication. While the 3mx does have better battery life, the 3a is more sturdily constructed and still manages 30-35 hours of continuous operation from a pair of AA manganese cells. Both have physical plug and lead ports which can be used for data logging sensors if required, but the one on the 3a is of a more robust block design. Both take the same solid state flash disks (nonstandard, but that too is an irrelevance in an environment devoid of opportunities for connectivity). The final clincher was the 3a's proven record of long term reliability in other African environments from dry gritty Saharan heat to the swampy jungle humidity of Zara. The donor provided a 3a, with a manual, for me to take to Ruvuma. At this level of power consumption, external supply becomes feasible. Roughly three years' initial supply of batteries were donated by a Tesco store in the UK, and these (like the computer itself, and the microscope) went out with me in my cabin luggage – a buffer stock which can be replenished by future Ruvuma Project visits or perhaps by post through the project's contact in Dar-es-Salaam. The built-in applications (database, word processor and, above all else, spreadsheet) are easy to see and use on the wide screen of these devices, and relate well to paper methods. They are an ideal introduction, imposing as little as possible in the way of new perceptual methods and accommodating readily to existing knowledge. Jonas’s excitement at receiving the machine was, in itself, more than enough reward for my trip. I showed him how to access all the different applications, and provided him with the basics of each. I had to explain that it wasn't me who was giving it to him, it was the project and the donor, but I got the thanks anyway. He couldn’t contain his eagerness to apply it; he wouldn't stop smiling. To my surprise (because a computer is an everyday thing, in my privileged world), everyone in the vicinity was very interested too, and they all wanted a go – I suspect that it will be used outside agriculture at a much earlier date than I might have expected. I left the computerwith him, and he proceeded to devour the manual. Jonas knows (better than I do) that application is more important than theory, and is assimilating functions bit by bit in relation to his plans. Before I left, the spreadsheet had already been populated with data and statistical methods of his own devising, not mine or my world’s. I understood enough of how mathematics is applied to my own subjects to advise on basic structures; but what he did with those structures was all his own. New ways to organise his existing projects were already emerging; the physical arrangement of brick stockpiles was under review; he was already working on ways to surmount the impracticality of a printer, and his medical colleagues were looking thoughtfully at the organisation patterns of antenatal care. It seems likely, in the harsh conditions, that the machine will not outlast the initial supply of batteries. When it dies, another waits in mothballs, in temperate Europe, to fly out with somebody else and take its place. But the pace of change is rapid; by that time, circumstances will have changed unimaginably. The new road may have brought mains electricity – or may not. The villagers of Ruvuma will have a much more detailed idea of what they want from a computer – and our initial best guess may not cut it. Their development plans may throw up other priorities. Newer devices, more efficient electronics and as-yet unimagined developments may produce an ideal solution not on the horizon now. Most of all, Jonas Asokwe (about to start a new round of advanced training outside the ward, as I write this) and his colleagues in the villages may have developed new demands which require new solutions that we can’t predict. But it seems unlikely that things will look back from here. I’m back in college now, pushing on with the second year of Highers, and the village already seems a distant memory – but a good one , and I’m so glad that I went. So much laughter, so many really great people, so much learnt. I really do feel lucky to have had this chance – to see things, and learn things, and give something as well, that most will never get to do. Since I returned, I have received letters from Jonas and others – seeking information, and enquiring into my opinions on matters which I have to research before answering. Sending letters is not a light undertaking; they must cross considerable distances even to enter the postal system, and then the purchase of a stamp is an investment equivalent to a year’s education for a child. I really liked the women of the village; they do everything, and I like to hope that their efforts will also, in time, benefit from the machine and seeding knowledge I had the chance to take with me.

Kara B

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For various reasons, names of people and precise places have been withheld or changed.