Roddy's thoughts and pictures at the close of the day
Last December's MyCOE/SERVIR fellowship workshop in Nairobi has already been the inspiration for new research work at Rhodes University that integrates geographical technologies with field-based research. Kate and I are presenting a seminar at Linköping University's TEMA-Vatten today (and at Northampton University next week) that looks at extreme weather events in the Sneeuberg Mountains of... Continue Reading →
When you walk up the rise and on to Valla campus your first impression is bikes, bikes and more bikes. There must be several thousand on the campus and they congregate outside Kårallen (the student's centre). What a difference to Rhodes University where there are maybe a hundred or so - and how this must... Continue Reading →
We have arrived at Linköping University on our latest Linnaeus-Palme exchange programme - collaborating with Tema Vatten (the Department of Water and Environmental Studies) - but more on that and LiU's excellent international reputation in a later post. Fortunately we came across a really nice place to stay right adjacent to the campus at Valla... Continue Reading →
It is three months since Natalie and I returned from the MyCOE/SERVIR programme in Nairobi. Since then Natalie has started the new academic year - her Honours year - and I have started six months sabbatical leave. But we have been busy with the research programme: acquiring and analysing Landsat, SPOT and Ikonos data for... 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 →
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