Troposphère IV

See this post on the new blog

Mobile Monday Amsterdam

On Monday I went to Amsterdam for a very cool meeting called Mobile Monday. This was the 12th edition and my first.

Mobile Monday brings people together with an interest in mobile technologies. Anything that you can do from an SMS gateway to smartphone apps. But why was I interested in this particular one? Well it was about mobile opportunities in emerging economies.

This is really interesting because through UNAWE, I know that there is a lot of appetite for connected science education but that in developing countries the infrastructure is not quite there yet, at least not for your average rural primary school. I have also learnt through my travels and readings that the mobile phone is the way to go. Everywhere I travel, whether in India where mobile phone numbers are more important than email IDs, or in South Africa, where mxit and other mobile services are rocking the place, the mobile phone is the key to connectivity.

I remember in the mid-90’s there was one way to send free text message anywhere in the world from a website. That website was in South Africa. If anyone remembers what it was called, please let me know. How nostalgic!…

So this is why I turned up at a very cool event with great expectations.

At first, the classic unease of yet another ‘emerging economies-developing countries’-event organised in Europe with 99.5% Europeans made me suspicious. I was hoping this would not turn out to be a mutually congratulatory meeting of people who ‘help’ and pat each other on the back for that.

The good news is, it wasn’t. The audience was a bunch of techies who were curious and inspired and mostly there to learn. The speakers were doers. From Opera (check out this report) and their policies to respond to the massive demand in emerging countries, to mobile health information services (check out TextToChange), in 4 contributions we were given a picture of what is happening. If this was not exhaustive, it left us with an inspired urge to find out more. And that’s the best such a meeting can achieve.

The last speaker of the day, Mariéme Jamme from Senegal was very outspoken about aid to any developing region, but in particular Africa. Refreshing!

It would seem that an increasing number of voices are rising, that have strong opinions on the way aid should come to developing countries: it should not be seen as help but as collaboration (implying mutual learning), and local empowerment, although I’d prefer to talk about local ownership of development initiatives. But let’s get back to the subject at hand. The mobile, and what it can do for development.

One of the very good points that were raised was about ‘pilotitis’ a neologism meaning that most initiatives are piloted over and over again, and that there is not enough selection of successful projects and real investment into upscaling them. That is the only way such programmes can become real instruments of development rather than anecdotal, however laudable and successful. And that’s where I think Marieme Jamme’s business sense comes in. She sees development as a business with tangible returns. I got a general feeling of real potential and that there are people around to make it happen.

In that perspective, another impression I have is that people trying to ’sell’ their well-doing mobile-based initiative (mEducation, mHealth, mDevelopment, mEtc.) are perhaps formulating it in a confusing way. And understandably so, but if someone tries to promote a programme that facilitates education through the use of mobiles, it sounds odd to everyone but their collaborators to hear that they “do mobile education”. The mobile is a catalyst, a facilitator, a tool, the world-changing means to an end. The mobile is not education, nor is it health, or ‘the solution’.

This has to be made clear, otherwise it is like you’re sending text messages with maths formulae to the pupils instead of using books. Not useful, not innovative, not new.

All in all I’ll say that MoMo #12 reinforced my conviction that mobile technology has loads of potential development applications but that like any new-ish technology, it should not be used simply as something to do old stuff with new tech. It should not merely replace an existing system, simply because it’s new. And the true innovators who manage to make the most of it are the ones who are going to make the biggest contribution.

As a desert, here is some link love :)

• Voices of Africa Mobile reporting <– Ditch Youtube, this is awesome!
• Kubatana’s freedom fone
• Ushahidi
• MobileActive.org
• Kiwanja.net
• RapidSMS.org
• #momoams hashtag search on twitter

Please send me links that you think should feature here…
Thanks :)

Google Street View

This is simply amazing!!!

Here a view from a place I only visit nowadays but that I still call home :)

View Larger Map

Spreading the news

..like fire

EDIT: The scare is now hopefully over and thankfully it was a scare!!! This last blog post from Sky and Telescope summarises what happened. All is well.

Read also this appeal from Mt Wilson director to rebuild and fortify the Observatory against future fires: Fire Recovery Appeal

Image: NASA Earth Observatory

When big news happens, it happens fast, but not as fast as reporters would have us believe. The 24-hour coverage of unfolding events often boils down to a constant repetition of a 15-minute chunk of images, comments, witness reports and the most dramatic images that could be found – and it’s the same on almost all news channels. Why would that still work? Because people want to know if there is anything new. At any moment, as soon as it happens.

Astronomers are not at bay from this urge to know. Mount Wilson is threatened by the fires raging in the Californian mountains and on top of Mount Wilson is Mont Wilson Observatory, where many chapters in the history of astronomy have been written. Many world-view changing discoveries were made at Mount Wilson but I’m not here to list them, it would sound too much like an obituary and we’re not there (yet and hopefully it won’t get to that!).

So what are our news outlets for this ongoing yet specific new item? Most of us turn to twitter for the last minute news and many astronomy bloggers have posted news and thought about Mount Wilson. I am just going to do what the news channels who cannot be on site do: repeat what others say. Below you’ll find link to the latest blog entries about Mount Wilson from the Astronomy blogosphere.

• Astroengine.com update
• Palomar Skies: Good news
• Animation as seen from the Spitzer Science Center
• Universe Today
• LA Times blog
• Spaceports
• Spacewriter.com watching from space
• AstroEngine.com update
• Franck Marchis – Some positive news?
• Patricia Philips on Space News Examiner
• Bad Astronomy – Fires reach Mt Wilson
• Palomar Skies
• Discovery channel – Space blog
• Sky and Telescope
• JPL Nasa Photojournal
• Mark Henderson (Times Online)
• Gerard van Belle’s Cosmic Diary
• Astroengine.com
• The Planetary Society
• Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy
• Daniel Holz in Cosmic Variance
• Franck Marchis’ Cosmic Diary
• Mike Brown’s blog
• A man with a PhD (Richard Gayle)
• Tom’s Astronomy blog
• Where the Sun hits the Sky
• UCLA Today (more newsletter than blog)

On Twitter, follow:

• @elakdawalla
• @plutokiller
• @PEP010

For updates and the latest news go to the update page on the Mount Wilson Observatory website, which in case of loss of power on Mount Wilson (where the web server is located) will be relocated to here, and the Tower cam, the onsite webcam showing the progression of the fire.

We are all hoping hard that the fate of Mount Wilson is not sealed like that of Mount Stromlo was in 2003 and in the meantime, we keep updated wherever we can.

If you find another blog entry about Mount Wilson, let me know and I’ll add it to the list above.

Open Peer Review 2.0

Image: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

Mike Brown, a famous astronomer (partially because he was instrumental in Pluto acquiring ‘Dwarf’ planetary status 3 years ago), has found fog on Titan with his students Alex Smith and Clare Chen.

This is a very cool discovery (cool enough to make fog) and he has submitted a paper describing the findings for publication in a scientific journal. In his blog entry, he also talk about one of the biggest limitations of the peer reviewing system: usually one or two scientists read the paper and decide whether it is worthy of publication or not.

So he invites whoever is willing to review his paper to submit comments for improvements.

The novelty lies in his commitment to take into account the feedback that improves the paper. If Nature has tried Open Peer Review before, this is rather different because it’s controlled by the author, not by the journal.

If this works, there is a fair chance that the journal will receive an edited version with more and different modifications than suggested by their “in-house” (= outsourced to their group of reviewers) referees. How will the editor and referee(s) react to that?

I find it bold to do on such a significant paper, not one that will go unnoticed. Very cool.

In fact, if this system grows to become institutionalised and an increasing number of scientific papers get reviewed openly like that, presumably the number of volunteer reviewers for each paper itself will be interesting to monitor. It would reflect a complicated chemistry of importance of discovery, popularity of topics and authors, etc.

Moreover, if crowdsourcing theory holds and if the crowd is big enough, factors like misunderstandings, individual bias, conflict of interest, etc. are likely to cancel each other out. Certainly a positive evolution.

I see another great potential in this system. Imagine what you could learn as a student – and what talent you could discover as professor, if you involved your students in reviewing papers? It is a useful skill to learn and the number of brains that could contribute ideas is multiplied. As this is ‘real’, it might be a motivation for students who get glued in their speciality to learn what is going on in other fields?

OK I’ll stop my speculations here. All the information is available on his blog ‘Mike Brown’s Planets‘ and in true Web2.0 fashion, the first appeal to Open Peer Review appeared in RSS feeds and twitter (see @plutokiller)

:)