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New Exchanges

U.S. Embassy/Fulbright Commission agreement with the Brazilian Ministry of Education’s Coordination for the Improvement of Education Personnel (CAPES) expands from 50 to 540 the number of scholarships in the U.S. for public school English language teachers

September 10 marked the signing ceremony and official launch of the expanded program to send 540 Brazilian public school English language teachers to the United States in January 2013.  Ministry of Education sees this program as a big step in Minister Mercadante’s “Schools without Borders” initiative. The concept is similar to “Science without Borders”. “Schools without Borders” will provide opportunities for primary/secondary educators to learn about national and international best practices in education, share experiences, globalize their classrooms and, thus improve the quality of public education in Brazil. 

This exchange program results from the close cooperation among the Embassy Public Affairs Office with support from the RELO, the Fulbright Commission, and the Brazilian Ministry of Education’s Coordination for the Improvement of Education Personnel (CAPES).  It started much smaller in 2011 with an eight-week program in the U.S.  for 20 public school English language teachers – 10 funded by the USG, 10 by the GOB.  Impressed by the success, the GOB funded 40 participants this year. USG support remained at ten.  Next year an even greater push from the Brazilian government will offer 540 slots, 20 teachers from each of the 26 Brazilian states and the Federal District.  This group will be spread across universities throughout the U.S. Participants will attend specialized, six-week professional development programs to enhance their English language teaching skills and appreciation of U.S. culture.

Brazilian government officials hope and believe that this imitative jump start efforts to quickly improve the levels of English competency and internationalization in Brazilian public schools. They express their gratitude to the U.S. for being so willing and able to help. We believe that the connections made between American institutions and the Brazilian educational system will create benefits for generations to come for our country and theirs. Everybody wins.

If you read Portuguese, you can read about it here.

My picture is a hawk from outside CAPES. They sit out there and dive on pigeons.  You can look at them through the windows, but they cannot see you, so they are not startled. 

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9/11

We did only a private commemoration of 9/11 this year. It has been eleven years.  The 10th anniversary was much bigger. We did some social media outreach and made announcements, but the public part of our commemoration was not large. 

We did have a sympathetic groups of Brazilian Federal Police show up to support. They had the other motivation to call attention to what they said was inadequate security preparations in Brazil for big events like the World Cup and the Olympics.

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Casa Thomas Jefferson Again

It is always fun to go to the Casa Thomas Jefferson graduation.  It is the culmination of a lot of work and initiative.  It is good to see such virtue. 

There were three particularly interesting stories this time. One of the speeches was delivered by one of the oldest graduates.  He was an air traffic controller who had learned English as an adult. This is hard enough to do, but he also learned English while working full-time.  It is a heroic achievement.  The other speaker was more traditional.  His parents enrolled him in CTJ when he was a kid.  He talked about the years of study at CTJ and said it wasn’t always much fun.  He went on to say that his parents always said that English was the key to success, the international language that everyone had to learn to move ahead. He also said his parents said that he would thank them some day.  He said they were right and thanked them. It was a very nice moment.  The third person didn’t appear on stage, actually two people in this story.  The one was a guy who had been a janitor at CTJ for almost twenty-five years.  The other was his son, graduating with this year’s class.  Both evidently loved the institution, although for slightly different reasons.

These stories are illustrative of the new Brazil, people taking advantage of opportunities and rising through their merits but with the help and support of the broader community.  Ambassador Shannon gave a good speech highlighting the new Brazil. He also presented a certificate of appreciation to Ana Maria Assumpção, who retired as director this year with a total of thirty-eight years of service at CTJ.  There is a lot of tradition in CTJ.  Some of the students are now third generation, i.e. their parents and grandparents were associated with CTJ.

They will celebrate their fiftieth anniversary next year. Casa Thomas Jefferson has grown much bigger and much better in those fifty years.  Actually, they grew along with Brasília.  They now have six campuses all around the city and eight more in association with public schools.  At any one time, they have around 16,000 students. 

They are good friends and help us a lot, which is one reason I always try to take part in their events.  We will hold this year’s election night celebration at the Lago Sul branch of CTJ this year, as we did four years ago.

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Brasilia Education Fair

EducationUSA held its first ever educational fair in Brasília.  Sixty-six American universities came along with Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Francisco Sánchez. This was the largest educational trade mission ever organized by Commerce.  So we have a lots of firsts.

A few more facts – Casa Thomas Jefferson organized the fair.  Each of the schools pays around $1200.00 for their table and it costs about $35,000.00 to stage the event, so organizers make some money on the fairs that they plow back into educational advising.  About 1000 prospective students preregistered the fair and more than 2500 showed up.  I don’t know how many students universities actually recruit, but they evidently think it is worth the price of admission and the expense of sending their representatives.

The day started with Denise from CAPES explaining Science w/o Borders to the assembled representatives. Science w/o Borders is starting to resolve itself into a recognizable form.  Denise explained that it wasn’t always like this.  Last year there was nothing. All the structures were created on the fly. The university reps were very interested in SwB.  In fact, that interest goes some way in explaining why such a big group showed up.

Ambassador Shannon and U/S Sanchez officially opened the fair, after which the reps dispersed to their tables where they pretty much stay for the next six or seven hours.  You can see what the place looks like in the pictures.  It is a profession that requires a strong bladder.  The setup here looks the same anywhere in the world.  I walked around for a while and talked to dozens of the reps.  I tried to hang around only when no potentially paying customers were nearby and left before the biggest crowds converged on the place.

I had a good talk with Jose Santiago, representative of ETS.  They have expanded their offer of TOEFL tests to meet the vastly increased demand provoked by SwB.

My pictures show the tables at the fair, Case Thomas Jefferson registration table, U/S Sanchez opening the fair and below is the street outside.  I arrived way early.  Nobody was there yet and the city was very peaceful.

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We Did it Again (Take that you pessimists)

Wood is an excellent building material. It is easy to manipulate, a good insulator and wood is completely renewable as well as biodegradable. It is more environmentally benign than competing materials like concrete or steel in its full lifecycle and wood is always at least carbon neutral & actually removes CO2 from the air. But wood has suffered from a big weakness; it was not strong enough to build tall structures. Until now.   

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) can transform the way in which wood is used. CLT can be used to replace pre-fabricated concrete panels or even steel in building. The Australians are currently building a ten story wood apartment building in Melbourne using CLT and experts believe that building as high as fifteen stories should be possible in the near future. This makes wood a suitable building material in all but the tallest buildings and goes a long way toward a sustainable future. But there is more.

A really exciting new development is nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC). You may not have heard of this before because technologies needed to understand it, like electron scanning microscopes, were unavailable until recently. Experts quoted in the link above think that NCC will replace metal and plastic in many applications and could make nonorganic plastics obsolete in the not-too-distant future and the U.S. National Science Foundation predicts will become a $600 billion industry by 2020.

NCC has mechanical properties comparable to stainless steel or Kevlar and has a strength to weight ratio eight times better than steel. “It is the natural, renewable version of a carbon nanotube at a fraction of the price,” according to Jeff Youngblood of Purdue University’s NanoForestry Institute in West Lafayette, Indiana.

So the future for wood is bright, which has wonderful consequences for the environment and for America. The U.S. can produce all the wood fiber it needs in completely sustainable and often environmentally positive ways.

The world develops in unexpected ways. We often fear the future because it is unknown. We project our current problems forward and they seem unsolvable. They usually ARE unsolvable given the current state of technolgoy and development. The variables we too often leave out of the equation are human innovation, imagination and intelligence. Our resources are not fixed. They grow larger based on our abilities to use them. I wrote not long ago about the boom in shale oil that has vaulted the U.S. into world leadership in reduction of CO2.

This was predicted by nobody even five or ten years ago. In fact, had you mentioned such a possibility back in 2002 you would have been called all sorts of names, none of them synonyms for honest or intelligence. We are looking at a better than expected future. A related development is the shift of the energy center of gravity from those unstable regions of the Middle East to the Americas and maybe the Atlantic parts of Africa.

Those pessimists who project our problems forward and fear we will never solve them are right. Generally speaking, history shows that we almost never SOLVE problems; we transcend them.

As we replace non-renewable or environmentally unfriendly materials with those sourced in something as abundant and renewable as wood, we are fulfilling the impossible dreams of a previous generation of environmentalists and we are doing while increasing our country’s wealth and prosperity. I am fond of the future since I plan to live there for the rest of my life. It looks like it will be much better than the places I used to live.

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U.S. CO2 Emissions Drop to Twenty Year Low

Mostly as a result of the inexpensive American natural gas, U.S. CO2 emissions dropped to 1992 levels. We are also driving less. We reached “peak gasoline”in 2006 and from now on will use less. See the chart below.  I wrote about this here, here & here, among other places.

The interesting thing is that the U.S. is now the world leader in reducing emissions w/o those muscular measures called for in Kyoto. We are doing better than everybody else because of market forces. They really do work also in environmentalism.  

This is not really new news, but here probably is the first place you are reading about this. Back when the U.S. was the “word’s bigger polluter” we had updates every day.

There was an interesting paragraph in the report of the drop. Bold italic are mine. “Many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t see the drop coming, in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action against carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.” 

Those international experts who claimed that the U.S. “had no plan” just don’t understand how planning works. We have the most superb, sublime and subtle planning mechanism in the world – the free market – and we have the we have the worlds most intelligent, involved and imaginative planners too – the American people. That is why we always beat the centralized planners in practice, if not in theory. 

One more thing from the AP article – “How much further the shift from coal to natural gas can go is unclear. Bentek says that power companies plan to retire 175 coal-fired plants over the next five years. That could bring coal’s CO2 emissions down to 1980 levels. “

We have achieved in environmentalism much more than I dreamed of when I was a bit of a radical environmentalist in the 1970s. We exceeded all the predictions. If anyone had told me back then of the U.S. in 2012, I would not have believed them. I was similiarly pleasantly surprised by how fast we brought down “acid rain” or closed the “ozone hole”. Now we are doing the same with CO2. It is easy to underestimate the imagination and power of freedom. I used to read the writings of the socialists of the early part of the last century. They made bold predictions about how good things could be if we abandoned the free market and went with planning. We have greatly exceeded their slow-moving dreams. We have the best planning system, even if it is too hard for some dreamers to understand.

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São Paulo: Trees and Training (SESC &SENAC)

I am back from my time in São Paulo.  I am not telling anything new when I say the city is big, but I think that it is easy to overlook how green it is in many places.  Most of the streets in the old part of the city are shaded by big trees.  There really is not enough room for them, or would not be enough room in an American city.  This is something good and bad about Brazil.  The good part is that there are lots of trees. The negative is that the tree roots pull up sidewalks. Some of the sidewalks are like an obstacle course.  Overall, however, it is worth it to have the trees.

We visited another SESC, this time SESC Belenzinho.  It is housed in a building that used to be a textile factory in a neighborhood that used to be a little degraded. The SESC anchors that area and has improved the neighborhood.   I wrote about SESC here & here. These are like workers clubs. As you can see from the picture up top, there are lots of nice amenities. The picture just above shows the solar water heaters that produce all the hot water used in the facility.  Below shows some of the old neighborhood around SESC.  This was a neighborhood of Italian immigrants, many of whom moved away, some back to Italy. The ownership of the land under the buildings shown is in doubt. SESC wants to buy the land to expand, but it is taking time. This is complicated by squatters.  The people living in the houses are not owners, but once they sit there it is hard to move them out.

We also went to SENAC, which is the training part of the SESC partnership.  It works a lot like a technical school or university.  Tuition is low.  This branch of SENAC is also built in an old factory. This actually makes a very good campus, as you can see below.

They have lots of computer labs and work with businesses. Reminds me in many ways of community colleges int the U.S.  But there really is no exact equivalent, since SENAC is funded by mandatory contributions from businesses but is not government run.   Below one of the computer areas.

Below is the campus water tower painted to show the old São Paulo neighborhood.

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São Paulo Traffic

It would be possible, in theory at least, to attend four or five outside appointments a day in Brasília.  This would never be possible in São Paulo because of the traffic. During the workday, it is impossible to get from the Consulate to almost anywhere in less than an hour. Worse yet, travel is unreliable. You cannot be sure how much time it will take, so you have to allocate lots more time for every movement. 

Perpetually jammed traffic is a serious impediment to doing business in São Paulo. I have read that it affects businesses and I can see how it affects our operations. I don’t have a solution; nobody does. I think we can mitigate the pernicious effects by planning to concentrate appointments in particular parts of town. This is not always an option, of course. 

I can see how the traffic patterns could create biases.  If I were here, I think I would favor places and people who were easier to access, simply because the cost of serving them is so much lower. I am not sure how bad this would be. After all, we have lots more opportunities for contact than we can satisfy.  Why spend two hours in traffic to accomplish the same things you could do by spending a half hour. It is frightfully expensive to be tied up in traffic.  If you just figure the price of the car and driver at about what it would cost to sit in a taxi, you are looking at around $75 in this alone. Of course, our cars and drivers may cost more.  And we need to use the cars and drivers sometimes to guarantee connections.  I also suppose if we only took taxis it would eventually become a kind of security risk.  But the bigger cost is our time. When you figure in all the direct labor and indirect upkeep costs, I bet an hour in traffic costs the government a lot more than $1000 an hour, significantly more if there are a few people in the car.  

Of course, we have to be in São Paulo and we have to work in São Paulo, but we have to consider the constraints. Because of the traffic, I would guess that it would take five people to do the same work that four might be able to do elsewhere, assuming equal ability and effort.  Of course, São Paulo has the advantage of proximity to lots of university, firms etc.  I am not sure who the advantages and the disadvantage balance out. There are lots of new buildings going up, so evidently many think the balance is on the side of staying.

In São Paulo, you certainly need to plan your logistical day more precisely. I thought about staggered work hours, but there seems to be no time during a reasonable workday that the traffic is significantly lighter.  Of course, that might help with commutes, but would not address the central problem of fighting traffic to get to appointments during the work day.

Speaking of my own temporary São Paulo commute, I did find a better way to get from the hotel to the consulate; it saved me at least twenty minutes and usually around R$15 too. Taxis are allowed drive in the bus lanes along some of the major streets. If you travel along Av Nove de Julho (July 9 Avenue, named for the day in 1932 when the Paulistas rose the “Constitutionalist Revolution” in revolt against Getúlio Vargas) from the hotel, you bypass traffic and get to the consulate faster.  In theory it is a big longer and at slower speed, but in fact it is much better. One of the taxi drivers explained it to me and I explained it other taxi drivers less familiar with the route.  It is good to know a little about where you are going.  

One more taxi story.  You learn a lot talking to taxi drivers.  I was talking to a driver who, even though I explained São Paulo roads to him, recognized that I was a foreigner, tipped off by my outrageous accent.  After he found out that I was American, we went through the usual small talk about roads in America and Brazil and how Brazil has become a much better place.  But he also asked about education.  He was unaware of the Science w/o Borders program and when I explained, he asked if I could help his son, who was in his second year in engineering.  I could not help. I told him that SwB was something Brazilians could be proud about, since it was entirely a Brazilian initiative.  We were trying to help as best we could, I told him, but he could go to his own government.  They were accepting just about everybody who was qualified. He promised to tell his son. He was only a little concerned that his son might be sent to a country not the U.S.  He had great confidence in the U.S.; in others, not so much.  I assured him that our friends in UK, Canada, Australia and others offer excellent opportunities too, but, of course, if you can go to the U.S. that should always be the first choice.  It is good to know that the cab driver has a son in university. I am not sure we would have found that twenty years ago.  He wasn’t sure his son’s English was good enough, but that is another longs & sad story. 

My pictures are just of SP, not the traffic. 

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Empowerment through Hip-Hop

I didn’t understand the program when it was offered by our colleagues at ECA in Washington but I think I am becoming a believer.  Our goal is to connect the American nation with the Brazilian nation, to have confidence that people will do the right thing when they are connected and that they understand things that government official like us do not.  This was certainly the case with hip-hop.  Everything I knew about hip-hop came from what I saw on TV.

We found seven young hip-hop dancers to participate in an exchange in the U.S.  They will meet American hip-hop dancers to exchange experience and styles. They came in for their visas and pre-departure meeting, so I had a chance to have lunch with them.

They were from Rio, Brasília & Belém. They professed their admiration of American hip-hop and told me that their interest in the music and dancing had made them interested in American society in general.  Although their dancing styles are based on American models, they explained that each hip-hop dancer develops his/her own particular styles and that they have regional “accents.”  Those who really know can tell the difference. Dancers who come from Belém have difference dance accents from those who come from Rio, for example. One reason they thought it would be so useful to travel to the U.S. was to pick up on the varieties of hip-hop in the U.S.  There is a kind of evolutionary synergy, which means that not only do the accents vary over geography, but also over time. Hip-hop is in a perpetual state of development.

Dance is a language I don’t know.  In fact it is a language that I don’t usually even know is speaking.  That is why we need to make the connections with those who know.

I asked the dancers if she could show me what they did and the pictures are from that.  They are a bit blurry, wince they were moving fast.  Somebody asking if I could do something like that. I am sure I could fall to the floor, but I would not quickly be able to jump back up.

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Land-Grant Universities

I had a long talk with the head of public schools in Mato Grosso about universities in the U.S.   He was unaware of the history of land-grant institutions, but impressed when I told him that the Morrill Act was passed as long ago as 1862.  It established the land-grant universities.  The first was Iowa.  All the states have one.  In 1890 the act was extended to create what have become historically black colleges.  IMO the Morrill act was one of most important acts of Congress in American history, although generally unknown.  I attended the land-grant University of Wisconsin but I don’t recall ever really being aware of its history.  

Our great research universities that have contributed so much to our strength in science and innovation are almost all based on land-grants.  Our agriculture was immensely helped.   One reason we can help feed the world is the foresight of this act in 1862.  America would be a very different place w/o this and not as good a place.  I think it is important to recall these important steps in history.  They are too often forgotten and real achievements are taken for granted. 

I compared our land-grant institutions to what Brazil is doing with its Institutes of Science and Technology and with its Science w/o Borders.  We are lucky to be here at this time.  

I suppose that important legislation like the Morrill Act and even the Homestead Act got lost in the horror of the Civil War.  We remember Lincoln for saving the Union, but his legislative achievements beyond that were enough to make him a success.

My picture is a hot air balloon near the shopping center in Campo Grande.