Roddy's thoughts and pictures at the close of the day
Those of you who have been following the release of For Rhino in a Shrinking World will have already seen Sally Scott's front cover picture - a powerful pastel drawing of a rhino regarding you through the bush. I thought that it would make a special addition to our home so I bought it from... Continue Reading →
One of the delights of buying a SANParks Wild Card is that they wave you straight through at the park gate and when you get your day pass at reception there is nothing extra to pay! This was our experience last week when we took a day trip to Addo to see the elephants and... Continue Reading →
In this video Tomas Tranströmer reads several of his most evocative poems (in Swedish, with subtitles in English) against translucent backdrops of the Swedish countryside that so inspires him. The video also tells of the 2011 Nobel prize and highlights his piano playing, which echoes through the whole piece. I was pleasantly surprised to find... Continue Reading →
The MyCOE/SERVIR fellows and mentors were taken on a tour of the main Kenyatta University campus by Prof. Onywere (you can see him greeting Dean Shisanya in the picture taken outside the main administration building). Kate and I both lectured at Kenyatta University at the start of our careers (1979 to 1985) so for me it... Continue Reading →
It has been one week of intensive work since the cocktails posting .... so here are my pictures and some quick reflections. Lots of lab work has been done at the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development: remote sensing applications, GIS work, mentor presentations. The day has started with the walk from ICIPE... Continue Reading →
Last night we had a small cocktail event on the lawns of the RCMRD centre, Nairobi. It had been a long, but very interesting, opening day listening to each of the students in the MyCOE/SERVIR programme for East Africa presenting their research proposals. Here are a few pictures from my phone of new colleagues relaxing as the... Continue Reading →
These animations clearly show the population increases (and some decreases) in the three population censuses of the post apartheid period. I was just about to work all these data out manually when I came across Thomas Brinkhoff's excellent City Populations website and discovered he had already collated comparable data for the Eastern Cape's municipalities and... Continue Reading →
My earlier post concerning the recently released 2011 Population Census looked at the age-sex pyramids for Makana Municipality. This week more data was made available on the Statssa website which has enabled me to take a first look at the distribution of population groups in the Eastern Cape Province. Once again the data is recorded... Continue Reading →
There has been a good deal of public discussion about the recently released 2011 population census and it is now possible to start to see some of the local level information. I downloaded the spreadsheet of age-sex information for all of the country's municipalities from the website of Statistics South Africa. Then it was a... Continue Reading →
As I sit here working steadily through the end of year marking there is a carrot dangling ahead. I will travel to Nairobi soon to attend the MyCOE/SERVIR Fellowship workshop as mentor for one of our students, Natalie Ellis, to take part in a remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems training initiative. Here's the press... Continue Reading →
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