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It's now been exactly a year since I arrived in northern Ethiopia with Voluntary Service Overseas to start a placement at Mekelle University. Based in the Computer Science department, I'm developing and training staff in e-learning and advising on general IT policy and strategy. Throughout the last year the university has been undergoing a period of huge change - with rapid expansion in student numbers, restructuring of the colleges and departments, and an ambitious plan to modernise and develop overall.

A computer lab in Mekelle University, Ethiopia.
[Image © copyright Terri O'Sullivan, some rights reserved]

Work and life is very different to living in Northampton and working at The Open University. It's certainly taken time to adjust to the new organisation, culture and way of working. After arriving with high expectations and a keenness to get moving with the job, work felt slow in the first few months and I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. However, everything has fallen into place recently. Now I have built up relationships and got to know the working practices, things have really started moving – and the time spent getting to know my colleagues, in particular, is really paying off. Their support and assistance has been vital; without them guiding me through, it would have been extremely difficult to achieve anything.

It also takes a while to get used to the network and power interruptions. The university is fortunate to have a 2Mb broadband connection, which, I believe, is one of the fastest connections in this part of Ethiopia – but we do have to share this between over a thousand staff. We're currently on a “power-sharing” schedule, where, during the working week, the power is off every other day. As you can imagine, this makes conducting IT training difficult. With scheduled powers cuts, you can work around this, but there are also other times when the power will go off for several hours without notice. Recently, some areas of the university have been supplied by backup generators, so this helps greatly, providing you are using the right computer labs. We're hoping this situation will improve once the rainy season is over and the hydroelectric dams are full.

The university has recently started a partnership with Alcala University in Spain to work with the Engineering and Health Sciences colleges, writing an e-learning training programme for selected tutors to attend over the coming semester. During the course, tutors will develop online activities for their students to take part in. Since student access to computers can be very limited, we're building two new computer labs - one for each college - so the students can participate in these activities. As this is pilot project, we're testing out installing thin client labs and using open source software. This is a huge contrast to the usual computer lab setup here, which consists of desktop PCs running Windows. At any given time up to three-quarters of the PCs may be out of action for a number of reasons, commonly due to virus infection, but also hardware failure. The labs then take a small army of IT technicians trying to keep as many PCs up and running as possible. We're hoping that the architecture of the thin client labs will vastly reduce the amount of support time needed, as well as being a more scalable solution, with the added bonus that it will be cheaper to increase the number of terminals.

Although most of my current work is involved in coordinating and managing these new labs and assisting with writing the training course material, I also have a few side projects to maintain. One of these involves showing staff from the Health Sciences college how to use GPSs to map the community health centres and health workers in the rural areas. The college has a number of projects in these areas measuring the impact of government schemes such as the Health Extension Programme - which gives healthcare training to local people so they can better support their communities.

Despite, or perhaps because of the problems, the sense of achievement is much greater than my work back in the UK. Knowing that you are making a real, though perhaps small, difference makes dealing with the life here all the more worthwhile. The Ethiopian people are very friendly, generous and appreciative, making it a highly rewarding and enjoyable experience.

How you can get involved

In my opinion, simply supplying more computers and hardware doesn't really help get to the core of the problem of IT development here: although more hardware will never be refused, IT training and staff development plays a greater role in development. Many staff - not only in the university but also teacher training colleges - lack the IT skills to maintain and make best use of the equipment available to them. Even computer science students arrive having hardly used a computer so a lot of time is spent developing basic skills, including how to operate word processors and spreadsheet packages. As has been reported elsewhere, viruses are a huge problem, damaging the tools that could help Ethiopia to develop. Training staff in how to install and, crucially, update their anti-virus software therefore has a significant impact.

My volunteering here is something I wish I’d done sooner. As a software developer by background, I'd often put off applying as I was unsure I had the skills needed to work in a developing country. It is a big commitment to give up a well-paid, comfortable job in the UK, but I haven't looked back. Not only have I been sharing my existing IT skills, but I have also developed new ones in terms of training, hardware and network maintenance. I'd definitely recommend other IT professionals to come and experience living and working in a developing country.

Blogging about

Breaking Science

The Breaking Science team come to BBC Radio Five Live to break open this week's science stories.

The Breaking Science team discussed new research that might help our understanding of how we smell:

Kat Arney: They do say a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but what does make us think that a rose smells nice but my feet smell bad? My feet don’t smell that bad. But until now scientists have known relatively little about how the smelly molecules, known as odorant molecules, are recognised by the receptors in our noses. But new research by Harumi Saito published in the journal Science Signalling this week could shed some light on this mystery.

Chris Smith: So come on then, tell us why does a rose to me smell like a rose and your feet smell, well let’s not go there.

Kat Arney: Well our sense of smell is an amazing thing and our noses have hundreds of olfactory receptors, each of which can pick up a different smelly molecule and this then sends a signal into the brain which gets interpreted as a smell. But we only know around about 50 of these smelly molecules and that somewhat limits our understanding of the whole system.

Chris Smith: So what are the researchers actually doing in this study to try and home in on what’s going on?

Kat Arney: Well they used a technique called high throughput screening which allowed them to carry out many, many experiments in a short time, and this allowed them to test 93 different odorants, these are the smelly molecules, against a panel of 464 different olfactory receptors, and they picked up 52 specific odorants that activate mouse receptors and the screen pulled out 10 new odorants that activate human receptors.

Smelling a flower.
[image © copyright Jupiterimages]

So this has, you know, made a big increase on what we know about the number of specific molecules that interact with the smell receptors. And the scientists used the knowledge from their screen to then develop a computer model that can help to predict what kind of odorant molecules might fit with different olfactory receptors.

Now it’s probably possible to look at a whole range of smelly chemicals and try and predict which olfactory receptors they might bind to. So this is basically going to speed up the process of research in this area so scientists will have better ideas of which routes to follow rather than just taking shots in the dark.

Chris Smith: It’s interesting because before Christmas I spoke with a perfumer who makes smells for a living, nice smells, and he had the chemical equivalent of synaesthesia, he could imagine a smell and see the molecule in his mind’s eye that would smell like that, so I guess he’d be very interested in a function or a model like that.

Kat Arney: Absolutely. Fascinating.

Listen to the whole programme, originally broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live, February 2009

The Breaking Science team revealed some new research suggesting 'a bad taste in your mouth' might be more than just metaphor. Here's a transcript:

Chris Smith: Hello, I’m Chris Smith and this is Breaking Science, which is produced in association with the Open University.

First, with news from across the scientific globe it’s time to join our science reporter, Dr Kat Arney. To kick us off, Kat, the headline in Science is quite funny but it only really works with an American accent which is ‘from oral to moral’, scientists are saying that the way we react to things that we find objectionable is all based originally on foods that we don’t like the taste of.

Kat Arney: Yes, we often use the phrase ‘it left a bad taste in my mouth’ to describe an activity or a situation that we find quite unpleasant. But now researchers writing in the journal Science have shown that there may actually be more to this metaphor than meets the eye.

Chris Smith: Pray tell why?

Kat Arney: Well the researchers, led by Hannah Chapman, wondered if there was any kind of link between the facial movements made when we eat disgusting food, you know, that sort of ‘urgh’, and when we see disgusting pictures or when we experience really unpleasant behaviour so they carried out some intriguing experiments using volunteers.

Chris Smith: I thought you were going to say for a moment you’ve been sampling my mother’s cooking. But go on, tell us, what did they do with their volunteers?

Close-up of dog taste buds.
[image © copyright Jupiterimages]

Kat Arney: Well to start with the researchers gave the volunteers different drinks, they were either neutral tasting, sweet or bitter, and then they took close up video images of their faces. And in particular they focused on the actions of a group of muscles called the levator labii, and these are the muscles that make us wrinkle up our noses and raise our upper lips when we taste something nasty. Now unsurprisingly they found that the bitter taste caused a big movement of these muscles compared to sweet or neutral tastes.

Chris Smith: Yes, but how does the disgust at things and the behaviour bit of it come into this?

Kat Arney: Well next the scientists showed people pictures of disgusting things, including poo, injuries, insects, things like that, and they compared these with pictures of sad things and then some neutral pictures for contrast, and the team found that only the disgusting pictures led again to the movement of these levator labii muscles, and the stronger the disgust that the person felt the more their muscles moved. So this is quite intriguing, and the team went on to look at situations where people experienced unpleasant or unfair situations. These were met with these same facial movements of disgust, say, seen with a nasty liquid or unpleasant pictures.

Chris Smith: So give us the bottom line, taking a financial analogy then, what does this mean in terms of how this behaviour maps onto what we actually do in real life?

Kat Arney: Well, the researchers think that this means that moral disgust and outrage actually has similar evolutionary roots to physical disgust, and they think that this physical response to something nasty has probably been co-opted during our social evolution to express our disgust at social and moral situations that we don’t like.

Chris Smith: Indeed.

Listen to the whole programme, as broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live February 2009

The 29 September earthquake near Samoa, which caused a fatal tsunami would have been a notable seismic event even if it had not claimed so many lives (at least 149 according to recent figures). The quake measured 8.0 on the Richter scale, and on average the world experiences only one quake of magnitude 8.0 or above per year. Less than 17 hours later there was a magnitude 7.6 quake just offshore of Sumatra, which devastated the city of Padang. This did not cause a tsunami, probably because it was too deep, but many more lives have been lost (at least one thousand and rising, mainly in collapsed buildings).

In an average year, we would expect about 20 quakes exceeding magntiude 7.0, so naturally the news media got rather excited as to whether the two quakes were linked. Had the Samoan quake caused the Sumatra quake? I spent quite a while on Wednesday evening talking to various print and broadcast journalists by telephone and on Skype, and was chauffeured down to London at 4am on Thursday to do a live interview on GMTV just after 6am. Some journalists also cottoned on to a magnitude 5.8 quake in Peru nine hours after the Sumatra quake, and looked for a link between all three...

The answer is that the events are most unlikely to be linked. Look at the map below: the epicentres of the Samoan and Sumatra quakes are more than 7500 km apart, and they are not even on the same plate boundary. The Samoan quake occured in what is popularly called the 'Ring of Fire' This (almost) circles the Pacific ocean, and is a system of trenches where the Pacific ocean floor is being subducted (pushed down below) continents or island arcs, running from New Zealand, northwards past Tonga (where the ocean floor is being subducted westwards, and hence the Samoan quake), thence onwards to the Philippines, Japan, Kamchatka, Alaska and down the west coast of the Americas to Chile. The magnitude 5.8 Peru quake was on the 'Ring of Fire' too, where the ocean floor is being subducted east below South America) and was entirely unremarkable because we expect three or four quakes exceeding magitude 5.0 somewhere in the world every day. Melting processes in subductioin zones, not directly related to earthquakes, feed the volcanoes that give the 'Ring of Fire' its name. An earthquake happens when strain that has built up over decades or centuries is released by the sudden, violent, slippage of a fault. The most that can be said is that a distant quake might be capable of precipitating a quake that was going to happen soon anyway. It certainly cannot cause one that was not fairly imminent.

Strictly speaking, the Sumatran quake was not on the 'Ring of Fire', despite what you may read or hear in many new reports, but was caused by the same sort of process. Here, the Indian ocean floor is being subducted northeastwards below Sumatra and Java. It was a large quake further along this plate boundary that caused the 26 December 2004 Indian ocean tsunami that claimed nearly 300,000 lives, and a smaller (magnitude 7.7) quake just offshore of Java that caused a smaller tsunami in July 2006.  There was a very intelligent report about many of these issues on the BBC's Newsnight on Thursday.

The epicentres of the Sumatran (on the left) and Samoan (on the right) quakes.  They are more than 7500 km apart, and a very complex system of tectonic plate boundaries lies between. [Map made in Google Earth]

Attention now must focus on rescue efforts, but I hope it will subsequently switch to enquiries into why buildings in Padang were not better able to withstand the shaking caused by the earthquakes. It seems that hospitals and schools collapsed. These are buildings with large rooms, and hence large extents of unsupported roofs and ceilings, but it is well known how to make such structures earthquake resistant. All too often, it turns out that seismic building codes have been flouted. I have blogged previously about shoddy school buildings in regions at risk from earthquakes, for example in the magnitude 7.9 quake in Sichuan, China on 12 May 2008 . Fortunately the local time when the quake struck Padang was after 5 pm, so presumably the schools were fairly empty - but not so the hospitals.

Take it further

Volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis   ⁸

Teach Yourself Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tsunamis by David Rothery
published by Hodder Education

About the author

Dave Rothery is a volcanologist and planetary scientist at the Open University. His current research includes studying volcanic eruptions on the Earth and characterising planetary surfaces, especially Mercury.

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