Aah, beaten to it(another Wire post)

There was meant to be a follow up to my post on The Wire where I would discuss what a version of that show looking at Africa would look like. However I’ve been slow about writing these things and so fellow African geek aflakete pointed me to this post on Brown Man’s Burden that beat me to the punch. Hence I’ll just quote him

I think an interesting show, similar to the Wire, could be made about economic development and foreign aid. It would document NGOs, the World Bank, bureaucrats, politicians, big foundations and academics in their efforts to distribute aid and stimulate economic growth.

The key would be to show how the self-interest of each of these groups both helps and hinders the process of growth, and to convey how complicated stimulating growth and poverty alleviation is.

Obviously the man is a genius since we both had the exact same idea. Except he’s faster at writing these things out than I have been recently. Its still a great idea though, and it’ll provide a convenient launching pad for my next post on this topic. Sooner rather than later people, don’t worry.

Why I will miss The Wire

Some of you have heard of The Wire, a crime show that ran for 5 seasons on HBO and recently came to a close. Actually if you are a regular reader you probably have heard of it. I tend to run in those kinds of circles.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, the link above will cover all the details if you are interested. In short though, it is a show that primarily operates from the point of view of the police and criminals in the city of Baltimore, Maryland and then uses that point of view to examine the cracks in the American dream in its inner cities and former industrial towns in a manner that is nothing short of remarkable. Personally I believe it is one of the best written television shows I have ever seen.

What makes this show great in my eyes, and most likely one of the same things that prevented it from achieving the kind of mass acclaim it deserves, is the way it has continually avoided overly simple and neat explanations of problems in favour of the kind of nuanced view that is rarely see in either real life or fiction.

In their world, there are multiple instances when the question of who is good, who is evil and what actions are appropriate is left to the audience instead of being explicitly spelled out for them to an accompanying soundtrack. Even more impressive though, social problems aren’t solved by 30 second simple fixes that involve one person’s removal or miraculous change of character. Instead we are shown the overlapping circles of dysfunction in the police, the media, the political system, local businesses, the school system and the streets themselves and how each enables and reenforces the other. Most of the people we spend time around are hemmed in my these systems and forced to choose between a series of very limited options, each with its own set of consequences. Some choose well, most choose badly, although again the question of which is the right choice is left to the judgement of the viewer a majority of the time.

For the most part, people who talk about this stuff tend to assume that their audience lacks the attention span necessary to digest a multifaceted view of life and therefore are only capable of dealing in terms of overly simplistic narratives with all the lines clearly sketched in for them and there is no hint of complexity, underlying issues, overlapping causes or anything else that might actually require them to assume the people they are being told about live lives every bit as complicated as theirs, if not more so.

In a lot of ways, The Wire’s insistance on a nuanced look at a world usually dominated by simplistic narratives and a complete lack of empathy reminded me a lot of the larger conversation about Africa. A lot of the time instead of a proper look at the mix of factors that cause things to be the way they are in my part of the world, a simple narrative of ‘vampire states’ or something equally inane to cover a much wider range of issues.

Anyway, that minor rant aside, I’m going to miss this show. It was 5 seasons of memorable characters and the kind of writing that draws you in regardless of whether or not you want to be drawn in.

How did it take me so long to notice this?

Proof that I’ve been neglecting my blogroll to a degree, I missed this TED talk.

Its by Dr. Neil Turok, a Physicist at Cambridge and founder of AIMS(African institute of Mathematical Sciences) which is a school in South Africa that brings together students from all over the continent for a 9 month postgraduate course to learn advanced mathematical and computer skills.

The talk is very, very much worth listening to. And I’m wondering if they’ll have use for a certain Ghanaian physicist in a few years time. This is one of those jobs I’d be more than happy to settle into.

the story so far…….

As usual, there has been a bit of a time lag in my blogging. I’m working on getting more regular at this people. Until then please forgive the absences. I assure you I am actually working (most of)the time I am not here.

Anyway, as far as school goes. I am almost done with the lectures segment of my course. Although to, be honest, their idea of lectures has mainly involved getting us to read and figure out stuff on our own as much as possible and get back to them when extra direction is needed. My research project has been picked though, so I shall be working on nothing else from about the end of march until the end of September when I turn in and defend my thesis.

As for what its about, well, I shall be using the finite difference time domain method to determine the electromagnetic field distribution in the vicinity of silver and gold nanoparticles and find the localized surface plasmon resonances of a range of nanostructures(copied almost directly from the proposal I was given. The links will help explain it but basically I shall be using a FORTRAN program developed as someone’s Phd to run some simulations. I may end up making some modifications to the code too, depending on how things go.

As for Judo, I went for my first competition this weekend At the University of Sheffield International Student Teams competition. The ‘A’ team from my club came in second and our women won the drinking challenge later that night. I didn’t do so well. I fought in the ‘C’ team in the weight class above mine against predominantly better competition. And I made some mistakes I shouldn’t have. Hence I got, thrashed. Still, I have a feeling I shall not be repeating those mistakes again. And, barring any surprise schoolwork, I’ll be fighting in another competition this weekend at my proper weight class against less seasoned opposition. I’ll let you know how that goes. And hopefully I’ll have pictures.

Until then people………….

Resolutions

This is a few days late, but still, my list of things I want to achieve this year. Experience has been teaching me that by keeping the list short and as specific as I can it’ll be easier for me to actually achieve the things on it. Long, vague lists are a lot harder to turn into something meaningful because it ends up being too much work to do in a year anyway and the feeling of being swamped halts what progress there would otherwise have been.

Anyway, here is the list for the next year in no particular order.

1. Get through my masters degree with honours
2. Participate in at least 3 judo competition. Ideally I’d like to win but I’ll settle for never fighting below my ability
3. Write one short story every month this year. I need to get more serious with my writing. Giving myself deadlines should help me stay on track.

There are a few other small things but otherwise, yup, that’s it. Those aren’t mentioned because I’ll dump them in a heartbeat to keep these three on course. Wish me luck. What are yours by the way?

This is not right

I’ve been sort of idly paying attention to the Kenyan elections over the past week. Not really intensely, but just enough so I knew who was running and what was happening. In the last few days, its been hugely depressing to watch. Basically, the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, looked to be losing handily to Raila Odinga, his main opposition, and then all of a sudden the reporting of election results slowed down and Kibaki started to make up ground under what are at best highly dubious circumstances. Basically it looks very much like Kibaki’s people rigged the election. They then went on to hurriedly confirm him as president for a second term. As a result, there has been rioting by citizens mad at the loss of their vote and a lot of people have died. Apparently there is also a blackout in the locak news of the unrest. The BBC is mentioning it though, granted in passing.

You can find a far more detailed account of what is going on the BBC, kenyapundit, the thinker’s room and allafrica.com.

I’m disgusted. And angry. And a bit depressed.Kibaki basically screwed up one of the most promising countries in Africa and set it back by at least a few years for no better reason than to remain in power for another 4. I’m just hoping that the unrest that his actions have created serve as a lesson to leaders in other African countries about the rising costs of tampering with the electoral system(yes Ghana, this includes you)

I’m off to look for more news people. Happy new year

Another year passes

As of a few days ago, I have officially been alive for 28 years. And the new year is also very close. The combination of the two coming so close to each other means that this time of year tends to be when I reflect extra hard on what I have achieved with my life and what needs fixing.

Overall, I’d say its been a good year, and its laid the foundation for an even better year coming up.  I guess all those lessons that come with continually falling on my face(and doing things right too) are starting to take their toll.

I’ll talk about my resolutions for next year later, but for now I just wanted to wish everyone happy holidays, however you celebrate them. I hope your year was good, or at least instructive, and I hope your next year will be even better.

Things I wish I didn’t see

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of stories about how Doris Lessig, the Nobel prize winner for Literature, apparently made some disparaging remarks about the internet and TV. Now, Doris Lessig happens to be older than my grandmother, I can understand how the changes in society that have come about as a result of mass media and the internet might not sit well with her so I never even bothered to read the speech. I figured this was just a bunch of people from my generation getting annoyed over the words of a woman who would have a hard time understanding the world we live in. After all, when she was my age personal computers didn’t really exist yet.

Then I saw a link to her speech thanks to Pam(sort of) and that got me curious because those links tend to be interesting.

The highlights for those of you who do not feel like reading the entire thing:

“It is said that a people gets the government it deserves, but I do not think it is true of Zimbabwe. And we must remember that this respect and hunger for books comes, not from Mugabe’s regime, but from the one before it, the whites. It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope.”

“I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a black writer. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the well-cared-for huts of the better off. There was a school, but like the one I have described. He found a discarded children’s encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and taught himself from that.

On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe, truly a nest of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia, under the whites - the mission schools, the better schools. Writers are not made in Zimbabwe, not easily, not under Mugabe.”

“Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being. And we should also remember that this was Zimbabwe, conquered less than 100 years before. The grandparents of these people might have been storytellers working in the oral tradition. In one or two generations, the transition was made from these stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books.

Books were literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man’s world.”

There are actually other interestingly wrong ideas in that speech, and a few right ones as well, but I kind of felt the need to talk about this bit because while I have seen commentaries about her speech on the web, no one seems to have mentioned this bit. And as an African with a penchant for reading and occasional writing I was instantly rubbed the wrong way by the idea that I’m supposed to thank colonization and the white man for my ability to read and write English.

Never mind the damage colonization has done and still does to Africa, never mind the fact that the mission schools she so easily praises were built to teach a small minority of Africans to be government clerks and clergymen and were never meant to either educate the masses or produce the thinkers they did, thinkers who primarily came into existence because they understood how to subvert the education they were being given and take more out of it than was intended for them. Instead let’s take swipes at African governments and praise colonizers who were happy enough to enslave people, turn those they didn’t enslave into second class citizens on their own land and then annex the aforementioned land and strip it of resources for their advantage.

Of course, as I have been reminded, when Doris Lessig was my age, pretty much all of Africa was still made up of European colonies. As with her comments about the web, they should be seen in the context of the times she has lived in. Ghana’s Colonization ended in my parents’ youth. My grandmother was already middle aged then. Zimbabwe didn’t get freedom until around about the time I was born and I was in secondary school when Apartheid ended. I still remember that day. My perspective on her statements is significantly different from hers, and I reserve the right to be more than a little annoyed by the whole ‘white people civilized Africa and brought culture to you poor, backwards savages’ meme that runs through sections of her speech. Its not new, or even that unexpected, I’m just tired of hearing it right now.

And while we’reon the topic, I’m also interested to note how all the (minimal) uproar over her words centered around her dismissing the Internet and television and yet no one noticed or felt the need to comment on the way she chose to refer to me and mine. I wonder if that is because they genuinely couldn’t see it or that they agreed with the sentiments expressed.

In which some good stuff happens

What you are looking at is a tiny bundle of paper that confirms me as a fully licensed adult member of the British Judo Association. Why is this a good thing? Two reasons really.

• Mainly it allows me to participate in judo competitions. Since all of these have to be sanctioned by the BJA, I can’t compete unless I am registered with them. I want to compete. At this stage in my development I think it is a very necessary learning tool. Maybe sometime I’ll explain what I mean by that. Plus throwing people is fun.
• Less importantly it allows me to continue to test for grades and go up the officially sanctioned ladder. For the most part I have tended to have little respect for the concept of grades in martial arts, or in most areas for that matter, but I still think it is useful in this case.

On the subject of grading, I officially have my yellow belt, which means I have moved from a state of officially knowing nothing to a state of thinking I know a little while still knowing nothing. Still, a closet full of brightly colored sashes can’t hurt any.

Either way, as usual I am just trying to enjoy the process and learn something. Especially since it is becoming increasingly clear how much I don’t know.

Open source science

This is an opinion piece from the American Mathematical Society talking about the use of proprietary software in Mathematics.  The same argument could easily be made for proprietary software in the sciences in general. Interestingly enough one of the authors of the piece is also the man behind SAGE, which I am finally installing on my assigned computer at school today. Its also why I have been using Python with scipy and matplotlib as a replacement for Matlab recently. Its not that I believe I’m any smarter than the kind of people working at wolfram or mathworks (I’m not) but I like knowing that the algorithms I use are open to be reviewed by anyone with the skill and the time. Plus I’d prefer not to have all my work in a format I can’t use without pirating software or paying per-seat licensing.