New Solar-Powered Classroom Brings Science to Schools in Developing Countries

Tweet

ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2011) — An innovative project led by a chemistry academic at the University of Southampton is using solar generators to provide IT resources and 'hands-on' science for students in developing countries.

 The solar-powered classroom. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Southampton) >

A major difficulty in teaching science subjects in developing countries, especially in rural schools, is that students are rarely able to get 'hands-on' experience of experiments. This could be partly due to a lack of equipment, chemicals and facilities but mainly because of a lack of electricity and running water.

Now, Professor Tony Rest, a visiting Chemistry academic at the University of Southampton, and Keith Wilkinson, formerly a teacher at the International School at Lusaka in Zambia, have devised a solar-powered solution based on a digital projector and low-cost solar energy panels so that students can gain access to IT and other modern teaching methods.

Professor Rest says: "The lack of electricity is a particularly serious matter for rural schools and this situation is unlikely to get better in the near to medium future. With drawbacks to petrol generators, due to difficulties in getting supplies and safety hazards, solar energy generators have become available at cost-effective prices and provide a sustainable answer as rural schools have an abundance of the basic energy source required to power them -- sunshine.



Most data/video projectors require 200-300 watt and cannot be economically sustained by solar power in rural villages. However, the advent of mini-projectors, which require about 50 watts of power, has revolutionised the situation and made battery powered projection feasible.

The solar energy generators, which consist of solar panels, batteries and inverters, can be linked to the projector for students to get practical classes via multimedia resources to show laboratory experiments and stress practical techniques.

Professor Rest adds: "These experiences can be extended to other science subjects from physics, biology and maths, to subjects involving practical elements, such as engineering, and to craft subjects, including plumbing, carpentry, and catering, where students need see how to acquire skills. By extending the breadth of subjects benefiting from the use of IT, the overall cost of using a solar energy generator is reduced. Another spin-off is that students in rural schools gain access to valuable IT skills."

The project has been developed by the 'Chemistry Aid' project, the Chemistry Video Consortium based at the University of Southampton, with support from the Royal Society of Chemistry, which has provided multimedia teaching resources.

Newscribe : get free news in real time

Related post:
A house built on smart ideas with earning power : Solar energy for house

How To Leave An Unsatisfying Job And Pursue Your Dream Career?

Tweet

 

Cathy Scott, Contributor

 

How-to guides are regularly published about the process of pursuing new careers. I, however, don’t believe a guide can show you exactly how to do that. You have to first believe in yourself, and then take a risk. Otherwise, you will stay in a dead-end job afraid to step away from your comfort zone.

And for those executives able to hire others who are hoping to land that dream position, give them a chance. They’ll thank you later. I know that from first-hand ex
perience.

It was 1989 and I was a secretary for Pacific Bell. It was a steady, secure job with good benefits. I didn’t dislike it. But I didn’t feel I was making a significant contribution to society. It didn’t feel relevant.

I’ll never forget PacBell coworker Jutta Stern Stoffel (now, sadly, gone) saying to me one day as we powered out on our electric typewriters finishing paperwork for who knows what project management wanted. “In ten years,” Jutta said, “no one will care or remember the work we’re doing here.” It was because the job had become rote.

My true avocation was writing. As kids, my sister and two neighborhood friends – Cordelia Mendoza, Victoria Pynchon and Sharon Lawrence – formed a writers group, Sisters of the Pen.

It wasn’t until years later when I volunteered to help save a historic site from becoming a shopping center in San Diego’s Mission Beach that I began thinking seriously about a writing career. A handful of volunteers, including me, were regularly interviewed about our ongoing grassroots effort, including getting the measure on the ballot, and I was fascinated by reporting.

One day, when we were waiting for a politician to show up at a news conference, I asked a staffer with the Los Angeles Times how he came to be a reporter. He told me, “Go to Podunk, Iowa, cut your teeth on a small newspaper, then try and break into the dailies after that.” Then, he asked, “Do you have a degree?” I didn’t. I had gone to community college straight out of high school, but I quit after completing two years when I should have transferred to a four-year university. He told me, “You can’t be a reporter without a degree.”

About the time I’d spoken with him, PacBell offered to pay 100 percent of college tuition to employees if they majored in business. I took them up on it and, the same year my son began his first year of college, I enrolled in night classes before applying at and being accepted into a four-year university. A few years later, I finished my degree and took a buyout from Pacific Bell.

At the time, I looked at the women I worked with who were older than me and in the same clerical position. I knew that they too must have once had dreams. But somewhere along the way, they’d lost their passion. I did not want to lose mine. I wanted to be a journalist. I studied newspaper and magazine writing, dissecting and analyzing the sentences and article structure, and I bought used textbooks about how to turn facts and information into an article.



My late mother, Eileen Rose Busby, had continually told her five children we could do whatever we wanted in life. At 62 years old, she earned her bachelor’s degree, wrote about antiques for collector magazines and eventually wrote three books, all late in life. And the late Donald Pike, friends Vickie and Sharon’s father, showed us as kids that we could attain whatever we wanted in life; we just had to chase our dreams. He surprised us all when, without ever having attended law school, he studied for and passed the California Bar exam and became a lawyer (before law school was required) and eventually took a position on the bench as a judge — this from a man who was once a milkman and an insurance salesman.

As I left Pacific Bell more than 20 years ago, the words of Joseph Singh, the district manager who landed me the only buyout that year, stayed with me: “Don’t look back. Don’t be one of those former employees who come to visit once a week. Move on.”

I took his advice and never returned. I broke into the news business, writing for publications and gathering clips that landed me more story assignments and fulltime journalism gigs. It wasn’t always easy. I lived frugally, like a college student, for several years. But I was determined and driven by my passion to write.

My first break came, after freelancing for tiny publications, from the publishers of a community newspaper, the Beach & Bay Press. It didn’t pay well, but it was a reporting job, and I loved every second of it.

3 Years And 1 Miserable Summer But You Get To Be A Lawyer Forever Victoria Pynchon Contributor

Why Is Self-Promotion So Hard For Women? Levo League Contributor
 

After I won a top award from the San Diego Press Club, I was offered a job as business editor for the La Jolla Light newspaper, where, on assignment, I once interviewed Walter Cronkite. But I didn’t want to get stuck reporting and editing business stories. I stayed a year, and then moved on to the police beat at the Vista Press, a daily. While there, I was in the pool of reporters who covered then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s eight-hour visit to the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base. I also was sent to Somalia to cover Operation Restore Hope and to Los Angeles for the Rodney King riots.

When the 50-year-old Vista Press folded, I returned to freelancing, this time for the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Associated Press, before landing a job at the Las Vegas Sun. I’d had an offer from a Tacoma, Washington, paper, but it didn’t start for two months. So, I took the job at the Sun. Three years later, rapper Tupac Shakur was shot, and my reporting parlayed into my first true crime book. After the Sun, I taught journalism and magazine writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Then, one Sunday afternoon, I went to PetsMart to buy cat food and came home with a puppy from Best Friends Animal Society. That was my introduction, in the year 2000, to the largest no-kill animal sanctuary and one of the largest animal welfare groups in the U.S. After volunteering for a year on weekends, I was hired to coordinate mobile adoption events, while still teaching at the university and freelance writing. Once Hurricane Katrina hit, I was invited to cover Best Friends’ animal rescue efforts on the ground in New Orleans and at a nearby Mississippi triage center. The result was articles for Best Friends Magazine and website as well as the book Pawprints of Katrina.

Many literary deals later, my eighth book, The Millionaire’s Wife, is set for release in March 2012. I feel lucky to be where I am today, but it was not without some breaks along the way, which is why I encourage higher-ups to give rookies the encouragement to move forward in their careers. For me, included in that mix of cheerleaders was a patient editor at the San Diego Business Journal who early in my career took a chance on me as he walked me through and helped me organize freelance feature stories.

Julie Hoisington and David Mannis had enough faith to give me my first fulltime reporting job, at the Beach & Bay Press. And Sally Buzbee with the Associated Press regularly gave me very cool assignments after I passed the AP’s editorial test (which I credit to taking a UCSD copyediting class). I’ve never forgotten Sally, who went on to become bureau chief of the AP’s Washington office, for giving a relatively new reporter an opportunity to be a contributor for the wire service’s San Diego bureau. And a generous Irene Jackson, a metro editor for the San Diego Union-Tribune, for more than a year regularly assigned me stories.

But not all of it was positive as I wrote for a variety of editors along my career path. Early on, an unhappy editor, Caron Golden, at the time with a regional magazine, left a huge impact. She not only gave me a talking-to, but she killed my story for not writing it the way she’d expected – a hard, but probably necessary, lesson I carry with me today.

A university teaching position made me a better editor and writer when UNLV’s Dr. David Henry offered me two classes after I applied for one (ultimately giving me four classes), and who waived the requirement for a master’s based on my years of reporting. Ironically, the very same textbook I had purchased years earlier to teach myself the business of writing was what the university gave me to use in the classroom.

The adjunct teaching position would last five years until Katrina and Best Friends drew me away.
The nonprofit, after Katrina hit the Gulf, enlisted me as a writer for Best Friends Magazine, a position that for me is much more than a career. Today, I write fulltime for Best Friends, about animals and the movement, and I cover crime in my spare time. I am where I want to be.

My advice, for those who want to leave an unsatisfying job, is don’t hesitate to pursue a new career, because it is there for the taking. That’s what my childhood friends’ father, Don Pike, and my mother, Eileen Rose Busby, taught me by example. Leaving a job with Pacific Bell to pursue a writing career is one of the best things I’ve ever done. I have never looked back, as Joe Singh so aptly advised this once-wanna-be writer all those years ago.

Newscribe : get free news in real time  

Golf courses targeted for re-development - Too valuable for golf?

Tweet

Golf courses in the centre of development areas are now being targeted for re-development as property prices rocket through the roof.

Caddy Master By WONG SAI WAN

JUST a couple of decades ago, the crowning jewel for any Malaysian developer was to own a golf course and to use that sporting facility to enhance their property sales.



In the 1980s and 1990s, it was unthinkable for a housing developer not to try to have a golf project. Even if they do not have enough land for a full 18 holes, they would try for a nine-hole or at least a driving range.

But how things have changed with the Asian financial crisis of 1998. There were less than a handful of new golf courses built in the past 12 years. In fact, more golf courses have closed down in this period.

KGNS sits on prime land and has been in the news a lot of late.

Fast forward to this year and once again developers are eyeing the golf courses but in a totally different manner. Developers no longer want to build golf-related projects; instead they want to tear them down.

Word has it that, especially in the Klang Valley where the prices of property have gone up tremendously, developers are eyeing golf courses to be turned into property development projects.

An 18-hole golf course with a reasonably sized clubhouse will cover about 50ha and a land of that size in the Klang Valley or even just outside the greater Kuala Lumpur is worth hundreds of millions.

For developers such a large track of land will be worth billions in terms of property for sale especially if it is located near major highways or with railway access to Kuala Lumpur.

Many of such courses when developed between 15 and 20 years ago were located away from the city centre with some built on former estates – usually the lousiest piece of land that is hilly and with plenty of valleys and swampy soil.



Those days this kind of land was considered “rubbish” and too costly to rehabilitate to build good houses that would have fetched the top dollar.

But two decades on things have changed. The Klang Valley has grown and the Government has adopted the concept of the Greater Kuala Lumpur where they expect almost 10 million people will live in.

                  Image via Wikipedia

This expanded Kuala Lumpur will stretch all the way from Sungai Buloh in the North all the way to Kajang/Semenyih in the south; Klang/Banting in the west to Bukit Tinggi in the east.

More than 40 golf courses are located within this very large area and every single one of them have suddenly become prime land and worth a lot of money. The landowners who previously thought they were sitting on a worthless piece of property now find that they have a gold mine.

From the likes of Rahman Putra Golf & Country Club to the now defunct Emville Golf & Country Club, these are now prime properties. Even the Kampung Kuantan Golf Club and Kundang Lakes Golf & Country Club which were the starting grounds for many golfers in the Klang Valley may not be safe from the hands of developers in a few years time.

Already, Kajang Hill Golf & Country Club has been sold to Dijaya Corporation Bhd for redevelopment for RM228mil into mixed development with an estimated gross development value (GDV) of RM2bil.

Dijaya, which owns Tropicana Golf & Country Club in Petaling Jaya, plans to develop the more than 80ha site that now sits the golf course and the clubhouse facilities into a new project called Tropicana Kajang.

The deal was struck in September and club members were then informed that they had less than a year left to play on its Par 72 championship course layout measuring 7,148 yards.

Kajang Hill was owned by the Japanese company Taiyo Resort (KL) Bhd. It was not the most exciting golf course but it had unique Japanese features set in tropical settings.

There is now a rush by golfers to play there before the course is closed down for good.

Word is abound about all sorts of other courses been targeted by land hungry developers. Among them is said to be the Kelab Golf Negara Subang which sits right smack beside of the Federal Highway in Petaling Jaya.

The present committee decided to not renew a Caveat the club had placed on the land thus allowing the Federal Land Commissioner to act on the land title.

Speculation is rife that there are some people eyeing the land of one of KGNS two 18 holes. There is no concrete proof but a hurriedly called EGM by the members has appointed a panel to look into the matter.

KGNS is reported to be sitting on land worth some RM5bil – a sum that some people deemed too valuable for golf.

This is what worries the golfing community that both courses on the outskirts as well as those within the city limits are being eyed for re-development.

This is made worse by the fact, many of the commercial club owners are only just too keen to sell or redevelop the land. It would seem that only a recession or the burst of the property bubble would prevent this from happening.

Till next month, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Dijaya in RM228mil land deal for Kajang Hill Golf Club land

I was a member of the Kajang Hill Golf Club and I received notice to terminate the membership from November 2011. However, they are paying back the monies that we paid to join. So, I was expecting some news on this. This was confirmed in today's papers. The owner, a Japanese Datuk is going to make a lot of money in this deal.

However, if you go to the vicinity of the area, the whole place is going to be developed very soon. The size of the whole area is huge with the other areas combined.

The prices of the properties here is also very high (by Kajang standards), mind you. So it's left to be seen how the place will eventually turn out.

Until the next time, cheers.

The Star, Tuesday September 6, 2011

Dijaya in RM228mil land deal

Purchase of freehold land from Taiyo to cater for increasing demand for property in Kajang
 

PETALING JAYA: Dijaya Corp Bhd has entered into a conditional sale and purchase agreement with Taiyo Resort (KL) Bhd to acquire five parcels of freehold land in Mukim Semenyih, Ulu Langat, Selangor, measuring approximately 80.33ha for RM228mil cash.

In a filing with Bursa Malaysia yesterday, Dijaya said the agreement with Taiyo Resort was entered by its wholly owned subsidiary, Tropicana City Service Suites Sdn Bhd (TCSS)

The parcels of land are currently held under the operations of Kajang Hill Golf Club, it added.

Dijaya said the land would be transformed into a mixed development consisting of landed houses, condominiums, apartments and shop offices with an expected gross development value of about RM2bil.

“The development, known as Tropicana Kajang, will be another future revenue generator for the group and shall contribute positively to its financial performance,” it said in a separate statement.

Dijaya said the freehold land had an upside potential in terms of capital appreciation because of the increasing demand for residential and commercial properties in Kajang, as seen in other developments such as Nadayu 92, Tiara Residence, Ramal Villa, Twin Palm and Jade Hills, just to name a few.

“With increasing population and expanding residential properties in and around Kajang, the proposed development of commercial properties will cater to the rising demand for office and retail spaces.

“Furthermore, the proposed Kajang-Sungai Buloh MY Rapid Transit project will enhance the investment potential of Kajang, presenting a greater opportunity to property investors,” it said.

Group chief executive officer Tan Sri Danny Tan Chee Sing said the group was continuously acquiring sizeable land-banks with good development potential in strategic locations.

“The land deal provides an opportunity for the group to introduce more development in Kajang with quality and prestige synonymous with our Tropicana brand,” he said.

Dijaya said the purchase price was arrived at on a willing-buyer, willing-seller basis after several considerations including the reasonably low land cost of RM26.36 per sq ft which will enable TCSS to price its proposed development competitively and with reasonable margins.

On the financing for the purchase, Dijaya said it would be funded through internally funds and/or bank borrowings.

“The exact mix of internally generated funds and bank borrowings will be determined by the management of the company at a later stage, after taking into consideration Dijaya Corp and its subsidiaries' gearing level, interest costs and internal cash requirements for its business operations,” it said.

The group's net gearing is expected to rise to 0.22 times post-land acquisition assuming about RM114mil, representing approximately 50% of the purchase price, is financed via borrowings. As at Dec 31, 2010, Dijaya was in a net cash position.

Sources:Kajang Town Blog

Related post:
BJCC Golf and Country Club News