But now some bad news - UN says carbon cuts too slow

A UN report, reported by the BBC, says that we are making progress too slowly to prevent significant temperature rise:

"A report by the UN says global attempts to curb emissions of CO2 are falling well short of what is needed to stem dangerous climate change.
The UN's Environment Programme says greenhouse gases are 14% above where they need to be in 2020 for temperature rises this century to remain below 2C."

Urgent and decisive action could keep temperature rises this century below 2C but governments do not seem willing to do this... kick the can down the road some more...

Good news - world becoming more peaceful

An analysis of factors affecting war and present trends, reported by Wired, has led to a prediction that the world will be more peaceful by 2050:

"An upcoming paper by a political scientist will claim that in 40 years world conflict will plummet, with the greatest decrease occurring in the Middle East."

"Among other things, this will be attributed to war becoming financially pointless (or unfeasible), education increasing, infant mortality decreasing and the world's youth populations becoming smaller."

E-Governance Data Centre started

According to an article by GINA, apparently based on information provided by Project Coordinator Mr. Alexei Ramotar, worked has started on construction of this centre. The core of the data centre will be housed in 3 containers which house power, cooling and servers. This allows relocation in the event of flooding or other disaster. Using special containers is not unusual for a modern data centre.

The centre will be hooked up to the optical fibre cable coming from Brazil. Cables will also connect it to government offices.

Mention is also made of 55 sites around the country and of a 4G network. Presumably these will be the 4G cell towers. True 4G provides a faster mobile data service than is available nationally at present and often it replaces DSL for data service and is used on laptops. This service may tie in to the OLPF project and to internet access for schools but this is not mentioned in the article. There will be many bandwidth and security issues to resolve as the project unfolds but it holds much promise.

Of particular interest to me is mention of open source software: "... an electronic library will be created utilising open software."

Other links
Demerara waves article

Teaching reading in school

Since this is a topical issue here in Guyana this BBC article seems very relevant. It notes that phonics is effective but other techniques are needed too and one approach does not suit all children. Phonics has also become popular here in recent years.

" ...international evidence demonstrates that phonics is the most effective way of teaching early reading"

Online courses for education

There is significant interest locally in this mode of education. Recently there has been a surge of organisations offering free online courses in a number of academic areas especially IT and mathematics. The more interesting ones try to be interactive in various ways. Technology Review has done a valuable article comparing some of these courses and highlighting the pros and cons. It is early days for this kind of education and the results are mixed.