Follow the Interest

Just as criminal investigators are advised to "follow the money," "follow the interest" is good advice for those hoping to engage young people in world affairs.

     A variety of interests might draw a student to Africa. Consider fashion. What inspired Ruth E. Carter, the costume designer for Black Panther,  the comic book-inspired movie kids are eager to see? Like Carter, who studied African tribal patterns, colors, and silhouettes, fashion conscious movie goers will be inspired to think about how they too could incorporate the Ndebele neck rings Okoye wears in the movie into their outfits.

     Students interested in film careers won't think twice about casting people of color from any country in the movies they plan to make. They know Lupita Nyong'O, a young Nigerian-raised star won an Academy Award for her supporting role in 12 Years a Slave.

     Fashion designers-in-the-making also have seen Nyong'O modeling African-inspired clothes in Vogue. The magazine also introduced them to Nigeria and the Lagos-based Maki Oh, the designer responsible for the dress Michelle Obama wore on a trip to Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2013.

     Paul Simon's interest in music caused him to sing with Mama Africa Miriam Makeba in South Africa in 1987 and to record his Graceland album with South Africa's Ladysmith Black Mambazo choral group. The British hip hop grime of Ghana's Stormzy draws the current generation of music trend setters to Africa.

     With the Olympics approaching on February 9, student downhill skiers, cross-country skiers, bobsledders, figure skaters, and speed skaters might want to learn more about what produces champions in Austria, Germany, Russia, Canada, and Sweden.

     Those interested in soccer, already follow their favorite sport in Barcelona, Madrid, Manchester, and Brazil.

     And if students like food and cooking, those interests can take them anywhere in the world.  

   

What Makes A City Perfect?

In his recent book about Leonardo Da Vinci, Walter Isaacson listed what, to Benedetto Dei in 1472, made Florence, Italy, perfect. See if you would apply these criteria to judge what cities have to have to be perfect today. What would you add to or subtract from Benedetto's list?

A Perfect City Would Have

1. Complete liberty

2. A large, rich, and elegantly dressed population

3. A river with clear, pure water and mills within its walls

4. Jurisdiction over castles, towns, lands and people

5. A university that teaches both Greek and accounting

6. Masters in every art: architecture, art, weaving, wood carving, literature, philosophy

7. Banks and business agents all over the world

In what order would you list the qualities that Benedetto used? And what order would you use for your list?

Flying Can Be Fun Again

Some airline passengers in the Caribbean, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, according to trendwatching.com, can begin to anticipate the glamorous experience flying was in years gone by. In Turkey, they'll also meet a new friend, Nely.

     Vacationers touring in Barbados with Virgin Holidays will be able to put their casual flying clothes over their bathing suits and check out of their resort hotels early, because Virgin will pick them up, check their luggage, and take them to the beach. At oceanside, Virgin will provide boarding passes, a locker, beach towels, a showering facility, unlimited refreshments, and an air conditioned lounge area, while every last vacation moment merits a "Wish You Were Here" selfie home.

     Visitors to Singapore's Changi Airport have walked among animatronic, remote-controlled butterflies designed to resemble the Diaethria Anna species. For kids, the airport's five-story playground offers climbing nets, a pole to slide down, and more for use for 50 at a time.

     Before heading into the wild blue yonder from Dubai International Airport, passengers will be exploring the virtual  blue aquarium surrounding them as they walk through a security tunnel to their flights in Terminal 3. To use the tunnel instead of traditional procedures, passengers pre-register at 3D face-scanning kiosks located throughout the airport. Watching the fish is expected to relax and entertain passengers as 80 hidden tunnel cameras scan visitors' faces from different angles. At the end of the tunnel, cleared travelers are sent on their way with a "Have a nice trip" message or a red sign alerts security. Dubai's airports process 80 million passengers now. The tunnel was developed to handle the increased volume of passengers, 124 million, expected by 2020. It should be mentioned that Dubai's virtual aquarium receives the same legal challenges that other facial recognition systems face.

     At Turkey's Istanbul New Airport, a robot named Nely notes the expressions, ages, and genders of passengers before greeting them and making (or not making) small talk. Nely is, of course, travel-functional: booking flights for passengers, relaying information, and providing weather updates. Using AI, facial recognition, emotional analysis based on input from sociologists, voice capability, and a bar code reader, Nely even remembers passengers from previous interactions.

How to Meet the Clean Air Challenge

Similar to the process of producing clean water, one method China uses to attempt to reduce chronic smog pollution moves dirty air through a filtration system.

     In Beijing, a Dutch invention cleans air using a 23-foot, cylindrical filtration tower powered by electricity from a coal-fired power plant. A 300-foot tower surrounded by coated greenhouses in Xian, Shaanxi province, is experimenting with a more complex process. In daylight hours, solar radiation heats polluted air in the greenhouses before it rises in the tower through a series of purifying filters and is released into a 3.86 square mile area. Thus far, the Xian tower, when treating severely polluted air, especially in winter when coal provides heat in the area, shows only a 15% reduction in the fine small particles most hazardous to health. Yet, Xian's developers have an ambitious plan to construct 1,640-foot anti-pollution towers, each surrounded by 11.6 square miles of greenhouses, in other Chinese cities.

     Based on the Australian study mentioned in the earlier post, "Priority: Eliminate generating electricity from fossil fuels," coal-fueled power plants are the major source of pollution. These air filtration towers would seem to do the most good, if they were located in the vicinity of power plants.

     Startups and traditional automakers throughout the world race to produce the electric cars that promise to eliminate a source of pollution, the fossil fuels that power today's cars and trucks. The challenge to up the percentage of electric passenger cars from less than 1% on the world's roads today to at least 33% by 2040 involves financing, designing, engineering, manufacturing, charging stations, searching for the lithium used in batteries, and marketing. China is the industry's acknowledged leader with Tesla in the U.S. and European automakers also in the hunt.

     Although China is expected to continue to import lithium from South America's Argentina-Chile-Bolivia Belt (See the earlier post, "Technology's Hard Sell and the Public's Role in the Lithium-ion Battery Industry."), it has its own domestic supply. In the cold, thin air high in China's mountains between the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, mining in Chaerhan Salt Lake is on track to supply a plant that will produce 30,000 tons of lithium carbonate by 2020 or 2021 and eventually plants that produce 200,000 tons annually.

     China also has ideas for creating charging methods to keep electric cars on the road away from home. When driving long distances, drivers could visit automated swap stations to switch their dying batteries for new ones in three minutes, or they could call mobile vans to come and recharge their dying batteries in ten minutes. (I cannot help but recall the toxic nano particles a high school student found, when her summer intern project at the University of Wisconsin studied the effects of decomposing lithium batteries. See the earlier post, "The Challenge of New Technologies: Prepare to Think.") By requiring foreign auto dealers to sell only electric cars and to provide charging options, China is in a position to restrict entry into the world's biggest market.

   

     

Look and Read for International Surprises

"They're all wearing jeans," a friend said back in 1979, when Iranian militants were storming the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. That observation introduced me to what can be learned by looking at the details in media photos and also by looking for unexpected information in novels and other publications.

The clothes and expressions on people used to illustrate articles say a lot. When criminals or terrorists are captured, we don't see them well-groomed, wearing well-tailored business suits, or smiling at the camera, because pictures are chosen to help tell the same stories as the articles tell.

Some times pictures unexpectedly generate funny ideas instead of the serious ones they are intended to communicate. Draperies/curtains made into clothes is a device we've seen in Gone With the Wind, Sound of Music, and Enchanted. Seeing China's President, Xi Jinping, dwarfed by the enormous red drape behind him at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party, all I could think of was how many gowns could be fashioned from that material.

Then, there is the information that turns up in unexpected places. While reading the class notes about alumni in a secular university's magazine, I saw a former student wrote a book about a Roman Catholic priest, Bernhard Lichtenberg, who was martyred for speaking out on behalf of Jewish citizens against Nazi practices.

When I was listening for stock market tips, Jim Cramer, a stock analyst and the host of "Mad Money" on CNBC, mentioned he once heard a professor say, if you wanted to learn about reality, read novels. Sure enough, I was reading the latest novel, The House of Unexpected Sisters, by Alexander McCall Smith, the British author who writes a series set in Botswana, Africa, when, on page 151, I saw he wrote about a store that sold furniture made from Zambezi teak and mukwa wood, "none of this Chinese rubbish." I hadn't expected the controversial subject of African wood, a subject I discussed in the blog post, "Don't Take Any Wooden Nickels," to turn up in a novel.

Get Real About Forecasting 2018's Happenings

At the start of 2018, there has been no shortage of predictions about what will happen this year. TIME magazine devoted its entire January 15 issue, guest edited by Bill Gates, to a future of positive developments.

I have seen claims that the best places to find a job are in Arizona: Chandler and Scottsdale. Brain power will be enhanced by supplements or meditation. Advertisers will be more interested in how much time we view their commercials, rather than in how many commercials we see. Companies will mine data to personalize the messages they send us. Besides those designing technological developments, more people will be involved in considering the consequences of these developments, such as automated warfare and gene editing.

All of these forecasts remind me of the professor who said the only way to make accurate predictions is to forecast often. His prediction is more accurate than ever in our fast changing world, where today's jobs can be gone tomorrow and where so-called stable governments can disappear in the next election or coup.

No doubt, a variety of resources provide frequent updates. I'm just giving an example of one: TrendWatching.com offers its Premium Service subscribers a 100-page plus "2018 Trend Report,"  but it also provides a free daily look at innovations from around the world, innovations that often are worth imitating immediately. Businesses are reminded, for example, that they have become Glass Boxes. Consumers and potential employees have multiple ways to find out about their culture, people, processes, and product ingredients, not just their stock's performances. Evolution is not finished.

Help Trees Work for Us

Since trees are an important means of absorbing carbon emissions, The Arbor Foundation, headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska, engages in large-scale tree conservation projects in 27 countries, supplies trees from its Tree Nursery (arborday.org.shipping), and provides informative bulletins about trees.

Arbor Foundation projects save threatened rain forests and offer education and tree planting assistance for farm communities. For example, you can read about the Latin American farmers who grow coffee in the shade and natural nutrients of rain forest soils at shop.arborday.org/coffee. At this site, you also can purchase Arbor Day Blend coffee for yourself or as a gift. This rain-forest-saving coffee avoids the problems mentioned in earlier blog posts: "I Love Coffee, I Love Tea" and "Coffee Prices Going Up, Allowances Going Down?"

Developing hybrid trees and bushes that resist disease and insect damage, thrive in various soils and climates, and provide an abundant yield also is the work of The Arbor Foundation. One such project involves meeting the global demand for hazelnuts that now outruns the supply of this nutritious food, one that can grow on marginal soils. Although a collection of 1,899 wild hazelnut plants, some from behind the former Iron Curtain, already has been screened for this project, more plants are welcome. To learn how to help, visit arborday.org/hazelnuts.

From the Arbor Foundation, you also can obtain a copy of the publication: How to Fight the Emerald Ash Borer. The bulletin tells how this Asian insect operates and what chemical treatments prevent beetle damage. Request a copy at arborday.org/bulletins.

Zimbabwe Begins New Year with a New Government's Opportunities

In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe provides some subtle advice for Emmerson Mnangagwa, Zimbabwe's new president. He comes to office replacing Robert Gabriel Mugabe, who was elected President but ruled as a dictator for 37 years. In fact, his widow, Grace, thought she could continue her husband's rule after his death, even though unbearable conditions led to a massive march and military coup on November 18, 2017. Every family in the country considers current conditions the reason why two or three children left to find work in South Africa, Australia, or Great Britain. A new national election is scheduled for July 30, 2018.

What Achebe's book does, unlike the stories of Damien's leper colony in Hawaii or that told by colonizers in King Leopold's Ghost, is provide the point-of-view of those who formed an independent country after being converted by missionaries and ruled as a colony. Not until the last line of Things Fall Apart do we hear that an administrator from England plans to write his view of Africa in The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

Achebe uses a three part approach to describe Ibo life in Nigeria before conversion and colonization in Part One and after conversion and colonial administration in Parts Two and Three. Life before and after missionaries arrived both had mysteries. Why do some pregnancies result in twins and how can God be a Trinity of Three Persons? But the missionaries' God didn't inspire the fear and darkness of traditional village gods. He loved them, including outcasts, and, like a shepherd, went out into the fields to find one lost sheep.

Mugabe, for all his failings, never discriminated against Christian churches. He subsidized church clinics and hospitals and permitted the national curriculum to include a syllabus for religious education. Nonetheless, Mugabe's government caused starvation in his country by seizing the white population's farms. During the transition between Mugabe and Mnangagwa, Zimbabwe's Catholic Bishops Conference called for a return to Constitutional order, oneness, and inclusion of all Zimbabweans in their diversity.

In Part Three of Achebe's book, Nigerians experienced the good and bad that Zimbabwe might expect, if no compromises are made. Many in Nigeria were converted to Christianity; white colonial administrators established a government and courts, took bribes, declared all native customs bad, and undermined the clans. Some villagers recognized the good the white men did in terms of establishing schools, hospitals, and trade that enabled villagers to earn an income from selling palm oil and kernels. Some missionaries engaged in discussions about God without imposing their beliefs on non-believers; other missionaries, converts, and administrators accepted no compromises and died.