ITCZ June

Just for the record the ITCZ is now north of Guyana and has been since early in June. Sorry am late making this post due to some health issues... :(

Research in Natural Sciences

Recently the University of Guyana held what has happily become a valuable annual event - Research Day 2012. A wide range of papers were listed for presentation including the following papers in the natural sciences:

Determination of nitrate anion in waste water from nine selected areas of coastal Guyana via a spectrophotometric method - Raymond Jagessar

Recharge estimation & groundwater modeling of the coastal plain in Guyana - Shanomae Eastman

Harmonics and power quality issues associated with compact fluorescent lamps - Jomo N Gill

Hopefully, with some encouragement, some of the papers will become available on-line later.

Doing some searching for more such research done in Guyana did not turn up much but what was found is listed below. If more is found later another post will be made. Most of what research has been done over the years is not on-line.

Lenandlar Singh - personal website

University of Guyana Library - this is a recent and welcome development but in time this should contain substantial material

Centre for the Study of Biological Diversity - publications, a few on research in Guyana

The University of the West Indies - Barbados. Some faculties have relevant material.

Future Scenarios for Guyana

A thought-provoking 2-day workshop was held recently (May 8 and 9) as a part of the EC-funded COBRA project. Some 30 participants spent the two days developing scenarios for Guyana in 2030 taking into account such factors (drivers) as climate change, mining and economic development. Those present included staff from a variety of government agencies, Iwokrama and indigenous communities. Many of the groups considered policies and instutional framework as important determining factors in future development while climate was assumed to be inevitable. More about this will appear in due course on the COBRA website.

A bit about COBRA:

"Community Owned Best practice for sustainable Resource Adaptive management in the Guiana Shield, South America (COBRA)"

"The COBRA Project brings together key South American and European Civil Society Organisations that have extensive experience in enabling and disseminating grassroots solutions to complex problems in the Guiana Shield region... "

"Our mission is to find ways to integrate community solutions within policies addressing escalating social, economic and environmental crises, through accessible information and communication technologies."

Teaching Computer Science in Schools

This topic is the subject of debate in England at present. There is a move away from focusing mainly on office skills (word processing, spreadsheets etc) and towards more on programming skills. The British Computer Society (BCS) has sent a package to schools outlining their proposal. While our programme is based on the CXC syllabus this package still contains much of interest to teachers and, may be, to CXC. Among those partnering with BCS in this are Google and Microsoft.
From the proposal:

"Although existing curricula for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are broad and allow scope for teachers to inspire pupils and help them develop interests in Computing, many pupils are not inspired by what they are taught and gain nothing beyond basic digital literacy skills such as how to use a word-processor or a database."

Broadband and GDP

A study conducted by Ericsson, Arthur D. Little and Chalmers University of Technology in OECD countries concluded that "increased broadband speed contributes significantly to economic growth". According to a report:

"A new report... quantifies the isolated impact of broadband speed, showing that doubling the broadband speed for an economy increases GDP by 0.3%."

"This growth stems from a combination of direct, indirect and induced effects. Direct and indirect effects provide a short to medium term stimulus to the economy. The induced effect, which includes the creation of new services and businesses, is the most sustainable dimension and could represent as much as one third of the mentioned GDP growth."

"These results have been derived using rigorous scientific methods where the direction of causality, data quality and significance levels have been appropriately tested..."

It is good to note that this is not just a correlation but that causality was considered too.

Also a similar report last year found "that for every 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration GDP increases by 1 percent."

It would seem likely that recent economic growth in Guyana may be due, in some part, to recent progress in broadband penetration due to the roll-out of DSL by GTT, limited increases in broadband speed and probably rapid increases in cell phone penetration.