The Magic of Bees

Dr. Frank Linton is passionate about bees.  Peter Hufford, Robin Brooke and I got to share in a bit of that passion when we visited Frank's observation bee hive yesterday morning.  Teaching duties keep me from having the time to share more fully all that I learned, but let me just hit a few of the highlights:

• Honey bees communicate information about the location of food by "dancing".
• They point relative to the direction and "waggle" relative to the distance of the food.
• They are the only know species of animal to communicate this way.
• There is a 10 million dollar project underway at Harvard to build a robotic bee.
• Bees maintain a temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit around the developing young by converting honey into heat (by flapping their wings).
• If the temperature gets below 55 degrees Fahrenheit, the hive will die.
• Hives generally have only one queen, though about 5 percent have two (sister or mother/daughter) queens.
• Honey can keep a looong time.   Edible honey  was found in Egyptian tombs.
• Below a certain moisture content, sugar becomes a preservative, because it binds chemically with water molecules, literally sucking the living water out of any microscopic plant, animal, or fungus that might come in contact with it.
• A bee hive can be moved less than 3 feet or more than 3 miles, and the bees will be able to find it.  Move it more than 3 feet and less than 3 miles, and the hive will die because the bees will be lost.
  

I left the visit with a much better understanding of Dr. Linton's fascination with bees, and was reminded once again why I am so attracted to project based, interdisciplinary learning.  The "fields of discipline" that come into play when looking at bees -- chemistry, insect and plant biology, information science, linguistics, mathematics, economics, history -- can not be neatly separated into academic silos of knowledge.  Understanding honey bees involves the interplay of all of them, and more.

I am greatly looking forward to our work this semester on the Measure activity for Sugar.

Making a Custom Ubuntu USB Live Stick with Remastersys and Virtualbox

Newer NOTE: It works again on lucid and maverick -- JE, Oct, 25, 2010.
NOTE: While the process described below works on Jaunty, remastersys is broken on Karmic -- JE

It is a beautiful thing when something just works!

I'm teaching a beginning programming class at a local community college and I wanted to give my students a bootable USB stick with the software (Python, of course!) that we would need for the class.

My minimum requirements above a stock Ubuntu desktop were:

1. gasp
2. geany
3. How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python, 2nd Ed.
   

I tried and failed to make an iso image using the instructions here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCDCustomizationFromScratch

Not only didn't this meet the "for human beings" test, but all I got was an (initramfs) prompt when I tried to boot from the USB stick after I made it.

Before trying to figure out what went wrong, I decided to try using Remastersys. It worked like a charm!

Here is what I did:

1. Installed a fresh copy of Jaunty for i386 on a VirtualBox.
2. Updated the software, and installed all the new software I wanted (geany and a bunch of other python stuff).
3. Downloaded the lastest version of gasp (I used the tgz file with version 0.3.2 from launchpad), untarred it, and copied the gasp directory to /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages.
4. Using System -> Administration -> Software Sources, selecting the Third-Party Software tab, and clicking on the +Add... button, I added the following repository: deb http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys/repository ubuntu/
5. Updated the software list in Synaptic, and installed the remastersys package.
6. Selected System -> Administration -> Remastersys Backup and used remastersys to make an iso image of my custom Ubuntu.

Using Remastersys

Using remastersys could not have been easier (it definitely meets the "for human beings" requirement). On launch, the user is presented with the following, warning that all other windows must be closed before proceeding:


Click OK to proceed to the main Remastersys-gui window:


Just select the Dist option, click OK, and wait. After about 15 minutes you will have a working custom.iso image in the /home/remastersys/remastersys directory.

I used scp to copy the image from the VirtualBox instance to the host machine (which was also running Ubuntu, of course) Then I used USB Startup Disk Creator to put the image on a USB stick, complete with read-write storage for saving files.

I can now make live USB sticks for my evening programming class. Remastersys rocks! I hope it makes it's way into the Universe repository, so that it will be even easier to install and use.

It feels good to be part of history...

On Sunday morning (Aug. 23) I met with a friend who works in the Ministry of Culture. We talked about the ministy's interest in using Free Software in the cultural centers they have throughout the country.

At 12:30 pm on the same day, I attended the Ubuntu-SV "Pizza Bash" where I got to hear about the exciting things the 24 folks who attended the event are doing to promote free software in El Salvador.

The most exciting news is the decision recently made by the Ministry of Education to switch from proprietary to free software in all the public schools in El Salvador.

This afternoon I had the opportunity to speak on Radio Cadena Mi Gente, where I had the opportunity to describe what free software is and why I was in El Salvador promoting it to listeners across the country.

It feels good to be part of history, and to play a part, no matter how small, in making changes for the better!

What we accomplished this week...

We held three classes each day for 2 hours each class. The morning class was all younger children, and focused on Sugar and Scratch. The mid-day class was a mix of younger kids and adolecents. We divided this class between the Sugar/Scratch group and the XHTML group. The night class was all older teenage and older folks and focused on XHTML.

The classes were full with as many as 37 people attending the evening session. This stretched our limited resources to the breaking point, and led to some slow going for a day or two, since we didn't have enough XOs to go around. Later in the week classes were a bit smaller, and everyone who attended could get a laptop to work on.

The longer term goal for this project is to make it self sustaining. The most interested participants will form study groups and continue to work toward learning enough web development skills to create a web site for the cooperative. Hopefully others with interest in working with the children will bring them together to work more with Sugar. At some point soon some of the families will be taking XOs home with them. The problem is deciding how to deploy them, since there aren't enough for everyone. The goal is to get them distributed where they will be most heavily used.

One BIG Worry...

Today the router stopped working again! I don't understand why. A single machine can get an address, but the router does not seem to be able to get one. This project will not work if we can't distribute Internet access, so this is a serious concern. Douglas Cerna is on his way here from San Salvador today. He is bringing another router and a NIC. Hopefully between the two of us we will be able to figure this thing out.

Sugar is Sweet!

We just finished our first class in Chalate. Ten of the eleven students had never used a computer before, the first class was spent getting them instroduced the new machine. They are young, they learn fast, and Sugar (or Azucar as we call it in Spanish) makes computers easy to love.

Last Friday I was talking with one of the community elders who told me he didn't like computers. A few minutes later one of the kids showed him an XO running Azucar. "Oh, I like this", he said with a smile.

Since none of the kids can type, I plan to take a look at the typing activities available to see what they can do. I'll report back later. The "Hablar" (Talk) activity was a big hit, and several eyes lit up when we looked up "vaca" (cow) on Wikipedia using the Browse activity.

Oh, a summary of the working condition of the 30 laptops sent for this project is as follows:

• 22 in perfect working order
• 1 with a defective touchpad
• 1 with defective video
• 1 with defective networking

5 of the batteries were bad. I combined 3 of these with the defective computers, leaving 2 working computers that will need to be plugged in to function.

Free Software to the Rescue

Due to a series of delays and mishaps, our planned two week program has turned into a one week program. Douglas warned that the existing bandwidth would not be sufficient for our needs, and when I arrived here on Sunday and got a time estimate of 2 days 10 hours on the first machine I tried to update, I knew that he was right.

So Monday morning it was a trip to San Salvador to upgrade the bandwidth. We asked for a 1 Gigabite rate, and were assured that it would be ready by that evening. It wasn't. In fact, neither Internet nor phone -- since the same cable provider is supplying both -- worked at all until a service tech came to the house on Wednesday.

In the mean time I managed to get myself sick -- something I seem to do at least once on every visit to Central America. That meant that Thursday was spent in La Nueva Conception visiting the clinic and getting medicine. I'm starting to feel better now.

The last complication was getting the router to work. The cable modem seemed to refuse to give it an IP address. It is a Linksys WRT54GS ver. 7.2 router. After talking to Douglas, I confirmed that the cable modem needed to be reset each time that you connect a new computer to it. Using three machines, I could confirm that the process worked. Each one would get an IP address if I:

1. Connected it directly to the cable modem.
2. Reset the cable modem.
3. Restarted networking on the host machine.

I still don't why it didn't work, but the solution I finally found was to change the software on the router. Installing dd-wrt instead of the vendor's original software made it work like a charm. Free software to the rescue once again!

La Cooperativa Juan Chacon

"La Cooperativa Juan Chacon" was formed by demobilized combatants of the Salvadoran revolutionary army in 1994. As part of the peace process between the FMLN and the government of El Salvador, each of the 33 families that joined together to form the cooperative were given a small parcel of land and materials needed to build a house.

The decision to form the cooperative was an act of courage. None of the members had experience farming, or the first idea how to go about forming an agricultural cooperative. For most of them, being revolutionary soldiers was the only life they knew.

Dinora, the president of the 17 member coop council, has the kind of amazing personal story common among the coop's members.

The army burned down her small house in the mountains of Chaletanango when she was 6 years old. From then on she lived with her family in the forrest, continuously on the move, avioding aireal bombardment or capture and murder at the hands of the army.

From the age of 11, she was stitching up wounded combatants in the make shift mountain hospitals of the Ejercito National para la Democracia (END). Her teacher was a Spanish Psycologist named Maria del Pilar, effectionately known as "Maria Bruja" because the hide out hospitals she set up were never discovered by the army during the entire course of the war.

In addition to her work in the hospital, Dinora also worked as a communications specialist. She stands 5 feet tall. I couldn't help but smile when she told me how light she felt after the demobilization, no longer having to carry her hospital equiptment, her radio, and her rifle around with her.

Canton Los Chilamates, where La Cooperativa Juan Chacon is located, is unusual in El Salvador in that you can safely drink the tap water. This tremendous contributor to the health and well being of the community is thanks to a water system that includes a 390 foot deep well, a storage tank complete with a clorification system, and the system of pipes that deliver the
water to each house in the community.

Understanding how this water system was created in a community of very limited resources provides a context for understanding much else about La Cooperativa: it was made possible by the increadible level of organization in the community. A series of donations from NGO's raised the $100,000 needed to purchase the materials. The work of laying the water pipes was done by the community members themselves. The process required both advocacy and hard work.

I'm inspired and grateful to be here.