I took Mariza and Greg to No Extinction, a place where they rescue and rehabilitate big cats. The jaguars are very beautiful, as you can see above. I was surprised that they have pumas/mountain lions in Brazil. I thought that they were North American animals.
There was a funny story about the mountain lions. They has a male lion and wanted to find a mate. One became available, but the two didn’t get along. When they examined the new lion more closely, they found that it too was a male. Its testicles had not descended and nobody, I suppose with the exception the the frustrated other lion, had gotten close enough to see clearly. The road to the Jaguar place takes you through the beautiful hills of Goias. It is a pretty drive, but I don’t trust the dirt roads. Rain makes them difficult.
We traveled around the Louisiana and then to Washington. As I wrote a few posts ago, much of what I learned was similar to what I learned before. Educational exchanges require trust and relationships. I will not repeat that analysis again, but I do what to share some of my pictures and notes. Above are ferns on trees at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. Many trees are covered in them.
The U.S. has lots of great universities. I am fond of the more out-of-the-way state institutions. There is a lot of excellence in these smaller centers and lots of people get their educations there. We visited Louisiana Tech in Ruston LA. It is a long way from New Orleans. The Louisiana environment is a lot like southern Virginia, pines and mixed forests. It was familiar. Above is the biomedical building at LT. Below is an interesting type of store. I never saw a store devoted to irrigation. It is especially surprising in Louisiana, where it rains a lot.
Below is a statue of Mike the Tiger at LSU. They have a real tiger too His home is behind the statue. I took a picture of Mike, but he was just laying there. The current Mike the Tiger is number 6.
We also visited Tulane. It is a beautiful university full or tradition. It is long and narrow, only a couple blocks wide but about a mile long.
The indigenous people Huni Kui live in Peru and the Brazilian state of Acre. About ten thousand of them are today spread over twelve indigenous lands in Acre. They are the largest indigenous group in Acre.
Pinuyá was founded in 1972 when three families arrived from other parts of the state. They were not recognized until 1991 when they were granted 105 contiguous hectares (about 260 acres). The governor of Acre gave them another 200 hectares. With only 305 hectares, this is the smallest reserved area in the state. Today there are forty-three households and 162 people living on the reserve, which is 1.8 inhabitants per hectare. This is not enough for a hunting-gathering society. The economy of the area is based on family agriculture, fish farming and crafts.
The reserve is surrounded by cattle operations and 70% of the reserved land is still covered in cow pasture.The forest was mostly removed in the 1970s when the government made a concerted push into the “empty” lands of the west.The band is trying to reforest the land with native species.Mariza and I planted one tree, as I discussed in a previous post.
Band leaders told me that they need more land. It is true that 305 hectares are not much to support 162 people. It is impossible with hunting and extensive agriculture. They told us about some intensive agriculture. They do fish farming and raise pigs, ducks & chickens, all of which produce significant amounts of protein with relatively small inputs.
When I was in college, living an organic self-sufficient life appealed to me. I never did it, but my research indicated that you needed at least five acres (a little more than two hectares) of fertile farmland to support yourself. This was a minimum using intensive methods and it still required part-time work off the land. If you have 305 hectares, it is likely that much or most of it is not fertile farmland. Beyond that, the Huni Kui want to reestablish native forests. This is something close to my heart, but it implies hunting & gathering. You need a lot more acreage for this kind of lifestyle.
The rain forest ecosystem is not as rich as we might think if you look at the luxuriant growth, at least not for hunting and gathering. Its organisms have evolved over millennia to deny their energy to others. Lots of the activity takes place high in the trees where it is difficult for humans to access. That is why populations of rain forest hunter-gatherers remained so small for all those millennia. The land simply does not support large human populations. Densities can be only around two or three people per square kilometer (although they are obviously not spread evenly over this land). There are 100 hectares in a square kilometer (metric is easy) so a band like the one we visited would need about 8000 hectares instead of the 305 they have.
The forest here is a tough environment and we should not idealize the life of the past in a paradise full of serpents and dangers. There is no going back to the old lifestyle and the people clearly do not want to go back. The band’s leader wants preserve the best of his traditions and combine them with good things from the wider world. (We noticed the popularity of mobile phones and this implies mobile phone towers close by.) This is a balance very difficult to manage or even envision how it could work.
I sure don’t know what to do. It occurs to me that the problem of combining the old with the new is not a problem only for people like the Huni Kui. Although it seems much more urgent among them, creating sustainable futures for ourselves and our children is what all we face every day, a condition of being human. In their language, Huni Kui means “true people”. Their challenges are the challenges of true people everywhere.
I planted my first tree when I was ten years old, back in 1965. I grew a bunch of horse chestnuts from the nuts we used to collect as kids. When the trees came up, I put them on the hill in front of my house. One is still there, now forty-seven years old. I know because my old house is up for sale and the tree is the picture. Today, with my forestry operations I plant trees on a semi-industrial scale, but I still like to touch the dirt with my own hands. The Huni Kui gave me an opportunity when we visited their village. One of the nicer parts of the welcome was a tree planting. I got to touch the dirt and put the tree in. Mariza got to help, so she was also part. They said we should visit our tree for time to time.
The picture up top shows Mariza and I planting a tree. Notice the guy taking a picture of us using his mobile phone. I thought it was very interesting when the people wearing native costumes would pull a mobile phone from their pockets. The picture on the left is the band’s forester. He does not have formal training, but learned his business from tradition and experience. In front of him are the trees to be planted.
There is a strange mixture of connection and isolation among the Huni Kui in Acre. On the one hand, they are physically isolated. The dirt road would effectively cut them off from the rest of the world many rainy days of the year. On the other hand, they are connected.
When you drive the road from Rio Branco to Taraucuá you can easily mistake progress for problem. The road is not good. There is long stretch that is about the width of an American driveway that runs between two broad clay shoulders. The driver told me that this part has only been in service for about two years. Before that, the trip that took us five hours would have taken at least two days because the road would have been impassible when wet. The driver said that you just had to wait until the sun came out to dry the mud.
We got a taste of this on the road to the indigenous village of Pinuyá. We got to the village easily. That was before the rain. After the rain, the four-wheel drive vehicles dared not come back all the way to pick us up. We had to walk about a mile through the mud to meet our vehicles, as you can see in the picture. It was an especially clinging mud that clung to our shoes a couple inches thick. The grass along the road was not better in most places. This has vegetation, but it is still a quagmire. You sink deeper into that than you do in the mud of the road. So we took the road. This is what the road recently asphalted that I mentioned above was like a few years ago. The narrow ribbon of asphalt makes it passable in all weather.
The people we visited in Pinuyá are isolated in many ways. As we learned by bitter experience, there are times when you cannot use the dirt road to access the asphalt road that leads to the wider world. The founders of this band came to this place in 1972, in fact, the get away from the wider world. The chief told us that at that time the town was far away. I can imagine and the whole town was farther from the wider world until they paved that part of the world. Of course Rio Branco was more isolated. The band didn’t move to the town, but the down moved to them. Today their land in encroached upon on all sides and the town is within the distance of a long walk.
When the elders were telling the story of the tribe, a couple guys were recording their comments on their mobile phones. They are clearly within the net of world communications, but not able always to get there physically. You see an interesting anomaly below. The guy talking is telling about traditions and singing traditional songs. The two guys on the side are using their mobile phones to preserve the tradition.
Taking a tangent, I think this is why Brazilians are so interested in distance education.They can reach these villages more easily with Internet than any other way. I spoke to the Acre State Secretary of Education, who told me that they were considering changing the school year to take advantage of the dry season. Acre has distinctive wet and dry seasons.It would make sense to work within the seasonal imperative than to try to ignore them or overcome them.
Our first top was Louisiana State University Petroleum Engineering Research & Technology Transfer Laboratory (PERTT Lab) Well Facility, long name. They have working equipment and study how rigs really work under pressure, literally under pressure. They bring in various types of mud and oil to simulate real conditions.
LSU is a leader in oil and gas because this is so much oil & gas in Louisiana. Much of this is conventional energy, but LSU is also gearing up to work on the unconventional new sources. Petroleum engineering is a growth industry as the new technologies have essentially created vast new sources of energy. Our friends at LSU told me that their students have 100% placement rate. This is caused by the great demand surge plus a generational change. Fewer petroleum engineers were minted after the 1980s. Many of those working today are near retirement. There is a shortage developing at the same time that the U.S. is expected to become the world’s largest oil producer within this decade and may become a net energy exporter within my lifetime. What a change!
LSU folks believe in hands-on experience. With that in mind, they have their own simulation well. This is a real oil well, but it has lots of equipment that can simulate conditions that students might face in their future. They even have a hands-on test. Students are uneasy about these tests because they happen in real time, and they have to make quick decisions. LSU professors tell the students that it is better to create this kind of time pressure in the lab. You don’t want to have your first test in the real world.
The equipment is used by firms as well as students and academic researchers. These firms, such as BP and Chevron, pay for the service and their work with students and professors helps everybody learn while pushing the frontiers of knowledge. There are not many intellectual property issues involved, since much of the research is testing existing technologies and often involved with health & safety and environmental protection issues. Firms want to share experience about health & safety and environmental protection, since they know that any well that causes trouble hurts all players in the industry, no matter who owns the rig.
There is a lot of repetition in my notes from the Science w/o Borders visit. That is because people are saying many of the same things. It seems that the consensus is that the best way to build connections is through faculty exchanges and relationships. There seems to be consensus that one of the best ways to do this is to work on joint research projects where both sides contribute and both sides benefit. One of the ways to get this ball rolling is to hold workshops where potential participants can get to know each other and who has what expertise. Finally, there seems to be a consensus that this system of relationships takes time to construct. It is robust, but decentralized and grows organically. We (outsiders) can help fertilize this process, but we cannot really rush it.
Anyway, my plan is to write notes about what I hear, try to treat each one like the first time. I understand that that many of the reports will look like many others. Instead of being a problem, I see this as a confirmation that we are onto the right ideas. Consensus is not always the way to go. We all like to imagine that the few mavericks have it right and everybody else is wong. Experience indicates, however, that this is usually not true.
The work I have been doing in higher education this last year has been a real eye-opener. The good news is that the American system of higher education is simply the best. This includes our universities community colleges and training. My appreciation of the system was last updated in 1984, when I graduated with my MBA. I got to know a little more about it when the kids were applying for college, but the experience was limited; the application process doesn’t give you the kind of inside knowledge I have been getting lately.
The “bad” news that there are so many great opportunities and so many permutations and they are so widespread that it is hard to understand and hard to know what to do. It is the proverbial kid in the candy shop story. The other problem is that our higher education system is a protean as it is ubiquitous. (I love to use the phrase, but opportunities are few.) It is our great strength that our system adapts very quickly. My observation is that even the people ostensibly in charge at most institutions have only an awareness of most of what is going on. This is by no means a criticism. In fact, I am impressed by their wisdom. Good leadership trusts people to innovate and imagine better things and then make them realities. I see a lot of spontaneity, serendipity and self-organizing ad-hocracies. Excuse me if I wax whimsical, but the picture is so complex and beautiful that no one can comprehend it in its entirety. Fortunately, no one has to. The parts work together autonomously and organize themselves. We did Rice University in the morning. I didn’t know much about Rice (discussed in my last post), but I did know there was such a place. I didn’t even know that the University of Houston existed. This is the complexity part. But I was greatly impressed with the people I met there. They told me that they are awarding 300 PhDs a year and they want to expand that to 400. This is no easy task. It is possible to grow too fast and, as I have learned to my sorrow, scalability is a problem when you try to rapidly increase quantity while maintaining quality, even when you are rich in resources. It takes about five years to make a PhD and you lose about 30% of them. That means that you have to take in more than 500 a year and you can expect to have more than 3000 in the system at any time.
This is a challenge. The Houston folks were interested in talking to the Brazilians, since they saw some synergies and ways to share resources. They also pointed out that they were the country’s largest Hispanic serving institution in the U.S. They quickly pointed out that they understood that Brazilians were not Hispanics (a frequent cultural gaffe) but that they simply meant that they had lots of experience in cross culture communication and, after all, Portuguese speakers can usually understand lots of Spanish, even if it doesn’t seem to be a two way street. (I don’t know why this is true, but I have seen it enough to know that it is. I can understand most spoken Spanish and can read it fairly easily, even though I have never studied it. Spanish speakers tend to look at me blankly when I speak Portuguese at them. I would attribute this to my bad accent, except I notice the same thing when native Brazilians are doing the talking.)
University of Houston is strong in health care and energy, as you might expect given its location is the world’s energy center and top health care complex. They also said they were good at getting innovations to market. One guy said that lots of academics know how to invent but they don’t know how to innovate. He claimed that they were separate skills. Lots of inventions just are not useful or not useful in their original form. Sometimes the inventor can take his product successfully to market. Often they need someone else to help or do it.
I think the above is the big take away lesson. Few people possess the requisite combination of stills to be master the technical details, implement them, understand potential uses and how to bring them to market. Even the few people who have all these things often lack the flexibility to change their great ideas as necessary. There really are no great individuals; only great teams. When you look at great people closely enough, you always notice that the team around him plays a big role. Often when the great man fails, we see something has happened in the team around him before the problem was manifest.
We spent the morning at Rice University. It is a beautiful place, a university in an arboretum. They told me that when this place was built a hundred years ago, it was marshland w/o many trees. The trees are mostly live oaks. They line the streets and fill the space between the buildings. Live oaks have that spreading aspect with branches extending almost horizontally across streets and paths.
Rice is strong in engineering and sciences, especially in the ones that come naturally to an institution in Houston: oil & gas and medical services. Rice is already cooperating with Brazil and has Science w/o Borders students. They have working agreements with USP to share supercomputers and there are people to people exchanges. Our Brazilian friends expressed their interest in doing joint research with people at Rice.
Rice takes Brazil very seriously. They have even established an office called “Brazil at Rice” just to take care of the Brazilians, SwB and others.
Rice is working on a joint PhD program in American studies with Campinas. Students would spend two years at their home institutions and then a year at the partner. They would get degrees from both institutions. Campinas has signed onto the agreement and there are currently two Brazilian PhD students at Rice. Rice is still pushing the agreement through its bureaucracy.
They are have also recently made an agreement with PUC-SP to have Rice students go to Brazil for eight week Portuguese training. The idea is that they would do this in their second year. They told us that eight weeks in country is worth a year in the classroom in Texas. They like PUC-SP because they are a reliable partner and can provide housing for the students with Brazilian families. Eight students will go from Rice this next year. Our Rice interlocutors were very interested in FLTAs. I promised to send more information.
We talked about the challenges of exchanges. The biggest problem is course articulation, i.e. figuring out which courses at one university are equal to those of another. It I not just up to the universities in question. They have to answer to their accreditation boards. The challenge of cooperation is tough. It is hard enough even with close partners and two-way. It gets nearly impossible when we start talking about multilateral partnerships.
I heard again at Rice what I hear all the time. Universities are decentralized with lots of autonomous sections. The best programs are done professor to professor. These things grow organically and it takes time to build relationships. People have to learn each other’s strengths and weakness and they have to learn to trust each other. This produces a flexible and robust system, but not one that can be quickly scaled up.
Short term exchanges are much easier. Students just make their own deals; actually it is usually professors who make the deals for their students. What could be done to make things work better? The best thing to do is to facilitate relationships thought joint projects and workshops. Rice professor Richard Smalley won the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry, shared with Rice colleague Robert F. Curl, Jr. and Sir Harold W. Kroto of Great Britain for the discovery of 60 carbon structures shaped like soccer balls, nicknamed Buckyballs. They said that these Buckyballs have application in chemistry and engineers. I don’t know about such things but it must be important. I got to hold the Nobel Prize. It is bigger and heavier than I thought.
After that, it was time for lunch at the truly beautiful chow hall you see in the picture. It as a useful and good visit that I believe will result in stronger ties between our Brazilian friends and American universities. The relationships are up and growing.
The thing that made the Brasília election night 2012 celebration different from previous ones was the large number of youth participants and their use of social media to reach beyond the physical limits of our event. We made a special effort to reach out to young people, including bringing thirty-six members of our newly formed Ambassador’s Youth Council to Brasília to participate actively in the event. The Youth Council includes representatives from all Brazil’s twenty-six states plus the Federal District. Their tasks included thing like updating the electoral map and mixing with other guests, but they also reached back to their home states all over Brazil via social media. Through them, the election excitement reached every state in this vast country, larger than the continental United States.
More than 300 guests confirmed and more than 400 actually showed up for the event hosted at Casa Thomas Jefferson, Brasília’s BNC. Ambassador Thomas Shannon kicked off the event, talking about the stability of our Democracy and expressing the pleasure of being able to celebrate our democracy with people in a thriving democracy like Brazil. Guests included local leaders, academics and business people, leavened by the large youth component mentioned above. Our event featured the usual buttons, quizzes about the U.S. at the IRC, big screen TVs and the perennially popular opportunities for guests to get their pictures taken with cutouts of the candidate. An exciting new feature was the green screen photos, where we photoshopped pictures of guests into action scenes of related to the election. Lines to have pictures taken and photoshopped persisted throughout the event. These pictures are uploaded onto our social media sites for participants to download by becoming electronic friends.
The peak time for the celebration was around 11pm Brasília time (8pm EST), when the place was so crowded it was difficult to move. We were very fortunate that it did not rain (this is the rainy season here in Brasília) and guests were able to spill out into the open patio areas. A few people stayed until Ohio was called for President Obama.
Media coverage of the election is massive. Of course, little of that was generated by our event. However, major local media reported on our celebration and the local TV Globo affiliate kept a TV crew on site throughout, doing live interviews with the Ambassador and guests. Members of the Youth Council reported live on their social media platforms, uploading commentary and video interviews with guests.
