Development Notes

• You might have noticed the animation of the pano image on the front page. Very simple with a tool like LView. I just took the basic design and performed a sequence of standard transformations on it (mosaic --- mosaic--- horizontal flip), saved each of the transformed images as a separate image, and then combined the four separate images into a single animated gif file. If it sounds complex, it isn't. It's all in the tool. My intent in doing this little exercise is to suggest that: (1) the pano is not a static thing; (2) it can have a contemporary interpretation or rendering; (3) perhaps, in some respects, the traditional world and the digital world are not so different; (4) the computer can effectively fuse - and blur distinctions between - seemingly disparate and unrelated things; (5) fooling around can be fun; (6) maybe the classic pano design can itself have a digital interpretation; (7) computers can be used as a tool when working with traditional designs, or studying them; (8) that the familiar can be seen from new perspectives.

  Now if some enterprising person(s) out there wants to take this further, he/she can do this in Java and do some really neat things with this concept. Not simply a suggestion of something, as I have done, but some real design work. Or even synthesizing pano designs by developing some design algorithms and incorporating traditional and/or new principles of pano design. This kind of playing/experimenting/creating can be done on any level, ranging from very simple and basic approaches to doing some rather sophisticated and/or elegant stuff. From K-12 to graduate student.

  [To see an interesting example of a Java-enabled moving-squares-on-a-grid* algorithm -Conway's famous computer Game of Life - click here.] *cellular automata, to be precise.

  And here we go on an excursion:

  • Math in Motion
    Definitely check out this page for the graphics.
  • Cellu lar Automata (Alife Online - Santa Fe Institute)
  • Freq uently Asked Questions About Cellular Automata

  Math is fun. Though maybe not the way it is usually taught. (Today's NY Times had a front page article on the wretched performance of US 12th graders in mathematics and science compared to every other country in the industrial world.) If you've never seen it, definitely go to the video store and get Stand and Deliver, the true story of a passionate and unconventional math teacher and his students in a high school in East Los Angeles. I also highly recommend "Good Will Hunting," a terrific movie, currently playing, about an angry young man who is also a math genius. (..again leaving aside the fact that most people in Cabo Verde itself don't have access to these these things, and the students and schools do not have the access to educational tools that we in America do.)

  Now, in another area, if we look at some of our pictures of CV's in Cyberspace, someone could do some morphing of these pics, or of pics they might have. Black to white and all shades in between. Just like the morphing in Michael Jackson's video. (See also the piece by the well-known Stanley Crouch in a NY Times Magazine article/ photo spread on multiracial kids, published last year sometime, for some inspiration.)

   
  

• Speaking of Stanley Crouch, check out online info on "one of America's most outspoken and controversial critics" and "neoconservative hit man." (and winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant!!)

  "In the digital age, as we move into quicker and quicker exchanges of information, more and more intricate technology, and reinventions of the world of work, our organizations and our careers in action will become more and more closely aligned with the jazz ensemble. We will see that empathetic individuality, the essence of the jazz spirit, is the way to go. We will find ourselves improvising with greater and greater confidence and fearing less and less the imaginative powers of the individual committed to enriching the whole." - Stanley Crouch, from SWINGIN' TO THE DIGITAL TIMES

  more Crouch:

  • National Public Radio Talk of the Nation (Feb. 5, 1998) - full RealAudio program.
  • Encyclopaedia Brittanica Guide to Black History
  • "The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It" - CSpan Booknotes Interview Transcript. Also Study Questions for Teachers to use.
  • Stanley Crouch Links

   
  

• We've done a little compilation of material on "Daddy Grace," his church, and the music of the church. We link to the National Endowment of the Arts pages on Eddie Babb and the House of Prayer Shout Bands. This is very interesting material. One thing that struck me in reading about the Shout bands was that they "are not about formal training and musical ability; one needs only to be committed to the spirit to play. It is common for members with no prior music experience to ask to join the band." That's the way this Cape Verde Home Page tries to be. No experience necessary to contribute. "... it's the spirit ... that gets you in harmony."

• A tremendous amount of information can be obtained from the pages we link to from the planning and management resources page. "The Opium Wars of the 21st Century: Tobacco and the Developing World."

• I just added a link to the health section of the planning page to the MED ACCESS web site. The medical information at this site is first rate and covers physical, mental, and environmental categories, among other areas. Be sure to check out the outstanding section on first aid. Another excellent online medical resource is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute web site. The laboratory chemical safety summaries (LCSS) are of particular interest to scientists and technicians, as well as health workers and professionals.
• The front page space shuttle photographs of the archipelago are from the online databases of NASA. If you want to explore this database for more pictures of Cabo Verde, use their graphical browser.

• Another source of great photos is NASA's Earth from Space online collection. Check out the great photos of Dakar from this collection. (Try the 71K lo-res version, though, for those in the fast lane, the hi-res photo (6.29MB!!!) is a trip.)

• Congratulations to Manuel Da Luz Gonçalves and the Capeverdean Creole Institute (CCI) for their outstanding Colloquium - Creole Languages: Status and Officialization - held at Harvard University. The CCI is planing to post the papers presented at the colloquium to their web page in the near future.

• The fascinating image on the front page is from the DEOS Altimetry Team at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. It shows gravitational anomalies in the area of the Cape Verde Islands and the West African Coast centered on Senegal. One can "see" in the image the underwater mountain range lying beneath the easternmost islands of the archipelago, as well as Cap Vert (not to be confused with the Cape Verde Islands!) in Senegal, the westernmost point of continental Africa.

  A spectacular satellite picture (1.1MB!) of this same region - taken from the GOES-8 satellte - shows a very dramatic and unusual view of the islands and West Africa with a very prominent Cap Vert protruding from the African mainland. Another very interesting view of the Dakar region is provided by a DTED 30 ARC Second terrain data map from the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA).

• It seems that the ATT Africa One project has disappeared. At least its web site has. But there is news of another initiative - the Atlantis-2 subsea network - a 5-20 Gbps broadband cable linking South America, Europe and Africa. (See our CV WW News page for an article on this.) Cape Verde is supposed to be a part of this network.

  As for Internet initiatives in Africa, check out the French Internet in Africa site (the French-language version of the site is slighly different, with a link to ORSTOM), as well as the African Information Society Initiative (AISI) site. Included therein is a wealth of good stuff, including "Africa-telematics: from Oral Tradition to Screens and Keyboards" by Gumisai Mutume. See also the AISI case studies.

  Speaking of initiatives, we would love to see someone here and/or in Cape Verde put some time and effort into furthering the goals of the CVCCP. We would LOVE to have some collaborators in Cape Verde. Our previous contacts seem to have disappeared from the radar screen.

• World Aids Day is Dec 1. Check out the following sites. They have a lot of educational material designed for downloading and distribution. Today's NY Times had a sobering article on the number of children in the world who have lost, or will lose, one or both parents to AIDS.
  World Aids Day '97
  Center For Disease Control and Prevention National Aids Clearinghouse
  UNAIDS - Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS
  

• Evolution of the Home Page
  • Phase I - Initial Conceptual Development
  • Phase II - Initial Implementation
  • Phase III - Developing Diaspora and Internet Presence

    We are now entering -

  • Phase IV
    • Enhancement of page design and organization.
    • Introduction of enhanced mechanisms.
    • Collaboration and decentralization

• Cruising to Martha's Vineyard yesterday aboard the Shamonchi out of New Bedford, it was great to see the Schooner Ernestina in full sail out in Buzzard's Bay on an educational cruise for students. The Ernestina was a gift of the Republic of Cape Verde to the United States, a symbol of the ties of friendship uniting the two countries.

• The Cape Verde Islands are a volcanic archipelago. The island of Fogo was the scene of a spectacular eruption in 1995. Fortunately not so devastating as what is now occurring on the island of Montserrat, the "Emerald Isle" of the Caribbean.

• The creativity and technical skill evident in the pages of CV's in cyberspace must be noted. Antáo Miguel De Morais Lima Chantre, Armando Barbosa, Kyle Grace, and the AASUL provide the most recent examples of people learning to use, and to master, the creative and communicative possibilities of the Web. We would like to recognize the effort, intelligence, originality, and spirit that is going into the production of these sites.

• Speaking of outstanding web sites, check out the superb job that Eric Swanzey has done on the Schooner Ernestina Home Page.

• If you miss our friend Mozilla, the dragon who used to grace the main page, click here.

• And if you wondered if we were ever going to fix our link to the Friends of Tuva page, wonder no more. And thanks to my friends at Smithsonian Folklife (whose 1997 Smithsonian Folklife Festival featured Sacred Sounds) for the CD on Hoomei. I had a nice new Buick Riviera to drive all last month, and the Mendes Brothers, Waldemar Bastos, and others had to share space in the CD rack with Mergen Mongush and company. FYI, Huun-Huur-Tu [1] [2], the most well-known group of Tuvan throat singers, will be opening this fall's 12-show World Music season in Boston. They'll be at the Sanders Theatre at Harvard - along with the Bulgarian Women's Choir - on Nov. 22. Other performers in the series will include Mali's Oumou Sangaré, Portugal's Madradeus, the Pan African Orchestra, UmAbatha: The Zulu Macbeth, and Cesaria on Oct. 25 at the Berklee Performance Center. (Call (617) 876-4275 for information.)

  Now, as I am preparing this section of Developers' Notes, doing some parallel surfing/searching to research this material, lo and behold I am finally able to verify that there is indeed a California musician of Cape Verdean ancestry somehow involved with this ancient form of music - Tuvan throat singing. "Involved" is not the word. Surf on, dudes, and be amazed.

  "In many areas of material and spiritual culture, the once strong voice of traditions is now only a faint echo. For example, shamans, the traditional healers, are all but non-existent, and shamanism has been consigned to the non-threatening status of an historical artifact amenable to theatrical recreations." - Jonathan Goldman

• Pano Designs - We're still hoping that someone will take some initiative in this area. A page to tell about the history of the pano, the current activity at the Centro Cultural in Mindelo, and pictures and/or diagrams of various pano patterns. We'd also love to see someone try to establish some principles of pano design that might be used in a classroom situation to guide students in the creation of their own unique pano patterns. FYI, check out the page on creating Celtic knot designs. Not that pano guidelines would have to be anything like this in form or content or approach. Just food for thought.

  Another page - which I've always been fascinated with - shows the original creations of young Nyungar children in Australia in the 1940s, encouraged by their teachers to express their perceptions of their local environment. While pano design could be done by children (or adults) anywhere, though with perhaps particular resonance by those in Cabo Verde, it would certainly be interesting to see interpretations by Capeverdean children of their environments, both urban and rural.

  (Note the aboriginal pattern background image on the Nyungar page. The same could be done with a pano pattern.)

• Denver Summit of the Eight - June 20-23 - As part of our coverage of national and international gatherings dealing with matters of significance and impact for Cape Verde, we recently provided a number of links related to the summit meeting of the so-called "Eight," the world's leading industrial nations, held in Denver, Colorado. Of particular interest was the attention given to matters affecting Africa and the underdeveloped countries.
  • NGO US-Africa Trade Policy Working Group Statement (June 9 version)
  • Joint Congressional Black Caucus-NGO Statement
    - The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and twenty-two religious and secular organizations have issued a statement calling on the leaders of industrialized nations to consult with Africans before making policy decisions which affect African nations.
  • post-Summit Assessment

• 1997 Smithsonian Folklife Festival - For those of us fortunate enough to attend, what a wonderful time we had at the Cape Verdean Connection and the other programs at the 1995 Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. I spent most of my time at the Cachupa Connection tent manning the home page demo, so I didn't get to see much else. I did have a ringside seat for the daily Tabanka, Mastro, and bote processions up and down the exhibit area. I can still hear the wonderful wildness of the banging of the tambors, the penny whistle, and the conch shell. And I got to hear some of the excellent Capeverdean music and dance performances, as well as the powerful Native American Women singers. (I missed the Czechs, most unfortunately.) One morning, before the exhibit opened for the day, who comes by but Pete Seeger. What a thrill. I gave him a little home page demo. Ramiro Mendes came by. He and Pete knew each other, and I was asked to take a picture of them together.

  Check out the following pages on the first director of the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies, and the Folklife Festival's co-founder, the late Ralph Rinzler, and on Pete Seeger, the famous folksinger and activist, who has been closely associated with the Center and the festival over the years, and also Alan Lomax [1] and [2], who, along with Rinzler, Seeger and others, made immense contributions to the appreciation and preservation of traditional American and world musical forms, and gave "voice to the voiceless." (Check out the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings home page and on-line catalogs.) If it wasn't for the Folklife Festival, this page would not be what it is today.

  ---

  "Our own folk festivals are footholds on a cultural future that we in the postmodern age, still defining ourselves in relation to the lost modernity, can but dimly discern. When he was an employee of Pan American Airways, in the early days of the jet age, Festival of American Folklife founder Ralph Rinzler was discovering what he calls, using an airline metaphor, "hubs" of alienated cultures flourishing around their imported expressive forms in taverns, clubs, theaters, and other spots, and at weddings, dinners, and other celebrations in New York, London, Paris, Istanbul, and other cities to which the airline took him.

  "Rinzler caught the scent, perhaps, of a new cultural synthesis of which his own early exposure to Library of Congress field recordings, and to the pioneer reformer-revivalist Pete Seeger, had been full of forebodings. A localizing of culture was following paradoxically from a new expansion of the global order. The new order, it seems, is not yet another "shrinking" or implosion of the planet, facilitating travel and communication, bringing distant places and people closer, a "global village" or world culture. On the contrary, it is an evaporation and precipitation, a kind of inundating cultural rain, an "information explosion" so vast that culturally it denatures information and levels the semiotic field. Culturally speaking, it is tantamount to no information whatever. It overcomes the power of human imagination to orient itself on its own terms and in its own scale and demands that we rediscover the basis of culture in immediate human interaction, conducted under the auspices of our God-given sensory and intellectual equipment, even while as cultures-and only as cultures-we are able to participate in the political and economic consolidation of a global civilization."

  - Robert Cantwell in "Feasts of Unnaming: Folk Festivals and the Representation of Folklife"

  ---

  Anyone who thinks that the arts are expendable school subjects is, to be blunt, ignorant. Spend an hour on the web, starting out with the above links, and see for yourself how much you learn about history, politics, economics, to say nothing of music. For an interesting resource for teachers interested in the role of Folk Arts in the classroom, click here. Also, check on the Smithsonian Summer Seminar for Teachers - Folklife in the Classroom - to be held in conjunction with this year's festival.

  "Once a child raised his hand during one of my programs to ask if I myself had been a slave. Students growing up today who have so little contact with the older generation often have little sense of historical time.... Some young people destroy the world around them because they do not have a sense of who they are or where they came from -- they are just here."
  

  - John Maynard, Society for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford-Stuyvesant History

• Virtual Worlds - (click here) - This is the first in a series of technical notes that will be issued periodically by the Cape Verdean Computer Communication Project Working Group. It is presently in draft form. Review and comment is appreciated, both on format and content.

• Joe Camel - Years ago, childrens sleepwear treated with the carcinogenic fire-retardant chemical TRIS (2,3-dimoboprophyl) was banned in the US. Guess what happened to the inventory in warehouses and on store shelves. Answer - it was shipped to and sold in the Third World.

  Export and marketing of certain products considered either too dangerous to use in the U.S., or subject to strict domestic regulation, continues. As a case in point, after decades of relative immunity from regulation, the U.S. cigarette industry is on the defensive, faced with unprecented sanctions and suits from the federal government and many of the states. Just a month ago, in an extraordinary and unprecedented legal settlement, the Liggett Group, breaking ranks with the rest of the industry, agreed to turn over 25% of its pre-tax profits for the next 25 years to a group of 22 states. This may signal a fundamental change in tobacco marketing and use in the U.S. In any case, however, the foreign market continues to be another matter entirely. In Senegal, for example, (...to be continued.)

• Learning about Maps - One of the main purposes of the Cape Verde home page is to teach, and to provide online tools for teaching and empowerment. An excellent example of an educational resource that I came upon today, while doing a search on GIS (see below), is the U.S. Geological Survey`s Learning Web module on "Working with Maps." The ability to read maps opens up whole new worlds of understanding. This site provides three online teaching units for grades K-3, 5-8, and 7-12. The reader must realize, however, that not all students have equal access, or any access at all, to computer-based technology. This is especially true for students in Cabo Verde itself, where even basic educational materials such as blackboards, maps, books, paper, etc. are sorely needed. Also, many of these online resources are in English only. Nor is the school system in Cabo Verde identical to the typical U.S. system. This brings to mind the importance of using this home page, and the Internet and Web in general, to (1) help many of us to better appreciate the educational situation in Cabo Verde, and (2) to aid, in an appropriate, intelligent and effective manner, the students and teachers of Cabo Verde in their efforts.

• Gendered Resource Mapping - From "Gendered Resource Mapping: Focusing on Women's Spaces in the Landscape" by Dianne Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and David Edmunds. One of the articles in Cultural Survival Quarterly Vol. 18 No. 4 - Winter 1995. Theme of issue - Geomatics.

  "Cultural survival and the geographic ordering of space are tightly intertwined. Indigenous peoples, ethnic minorites, and other associations of peoples whose ways of life are under threat have long turned to the defense of specific territories as a means of increasing their control over the pace and direction of cultural change. Many have been assisted in their efforts by a growing willingness of governments and multilateral aid organizations to accept more participatory methods of social research, including sketch mapping and Participatory Rural Appraisals, and by recent developments in mapping technologies, such as more user-friendly GIS software and GPS equipment. Indigenous people's organizations can now present proposals for the protection of their lands with the kind of technical sophistication and precision demanded by governments and aid organizations, without necessarily scarificing the significance of the lands for their cultures.

  WHY GENDERED MAPPING?

  While applauding these advances in protecting local self-deteremination, we would like to encourage the inclusion of a gender-based analysis of how spaces and places are used, valued, and struggled over in specific cultres. Such gender-based mapping is essential not only to protect women's independent sources of income and livelihood - maintaining a balance of power between men and women under changing social and ecological conditions - but also to preserve the flora and fauna, since men and women can have dramatially different relationships to particular resources."

  (I believe SANREM CRSP project used the Particpatory Rural appraisal technique. See the SANREM subpage (Int'l Programs and Projects) and also follow link to their newsletter(s). - rl)

• Thank You, Ed - Much thanks to Ed Venzke of the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program for providing updated link information for our Fogo Volcano Page

  
  

• The Hacker Strikes Again! - Give the webmeister room to play and God only knows what he will do. The latest evidence of his graphics heavy-handedness can be found in the colors he's used in the page on Cape Verdean Pottery. Is there anyone with any knowledge of color and HTML color codes who can come up with something more pleasing to the eye? Also, how about a textured background to suggest the texture of pottery?

  
  

• "Dr. Leary???" - That's what the latest CVSC newsletter calls me. That would be nice. It certainly has a nice ring to it. Alas, I'm simply R. Leary, no PhD. (My father was a doctor - Dr. Leary, MD. Nope, not Timothy.) CVSC also described me as an "unofficial Cape Verdean" which I humbly take as a great compliment. However, let the record show that I hold "CV papers" granted by the one and only Mr. John P. "Joli" Gonsalves.

• Global Warming Impact?: Today's NY Times p.1 has article on growing concern over impact of global warming on island nations. Focus is on Kiribati in the South Pacific, an island nation which one can find out out about via the Microstates and SIIN home pages (see our CV Planning and Management page - Small Islands Resources section. (..I guess "stewardship" is the politically correct word in some circles, and I don't mean to be critical)

  
  

• "Their Africa Problem ..and Ours" - The NYT's Magazine section featured "Their Africa Problem ..and Ours," a very thought-provoking article. It makes me think of my Sierra Leonean friend Mohammed Samba Bah from the Assomada marketplace. If someone knows Mohammed, I would very greatly appreciate someone relaying my greetings and telling him I will be in touch and to keep the faith.

  
  

• "Death of a Mother Tongue" - Quotes from an article in the 6 Jan 96 issue of New Scientist (UK)

  "Comments about biological diversity can sound rather patronising to people who are being slaughtered for economic reasons and whose languages are disappearing.."

  "If language is a virus, as rock star Laurie Anderson proclaims, then a handful have proved remarkably easy to catch. Just five languages - Chinese, English, Spanish, Russian, and Hindi - have now infected more than half of the world's people. Add fewer than 100 other languages to the list and the infection rate is more than 95 per cent of the earth's population.

  Yet the planet is home to some 6000 other languages - the vast majority spoken only by tiny numbers of people. More than half of these languages could well die out with their last remaining speakers sometime during the next 100 years."

  "It is easy to spot a language on the brink of extinction: parents will have stopped teaching it to their children, and children will have stopped wanting to learn it."

  "Each language is unique in a deep sense. .... Each time a language dies we lose something we do not even understand."

  
  

• Ecosystem View

  I've collected links to various views of Cabo Verde - maps, images, etc. - on one page. I like this page. However, I have in my mind a map - call it the "poli/market/ecoview of Cabo Verde" if you will - that really uses the best of new ways of depicting countries in relation to their environment - geographical, environmental, and economic. This also brings to mind the whole business of new ways of mapping, and involving people and communities in the mapping process. I believe the SANREM CRSP project in CV involved such an approach. It's a fascinating and very relevant area. Things like GIS, gender-based mapping, etc. Good thesis project(s). Talking about languages and maps, I remember once listening - on TV - to an Australian aboriginal woman describing - mapping, really, to her conceptual schemata - a military airfield out in a remote area near where she lived. It was amazing. I really felt that her description contained much more actual, in the theoretical sense, and relevant and contextual information than any so-called "objective" or "scientific" mapping, not discounting their value and validity. They used to say that those studying the subatomic realm (..what's a hadron?) would have a far easier time of it if they spoke the language of the Cheyenne Indians (..or was it the Hopi - whatever), because of the notions of time and space inherent in that language. Better mapping than English, supposedly. Maybe this was some hippie linguistic fantasy. But certainly fascinating. I read this in a very popular book on education some time ago. Talked about Whorf and all that good stuff.

  
  

• Hip Hop - As I've stated previously, a graphic designer I'm not, and I'm never more aware of that then when I see cool stuff and wish I could even just duplicate it. For example, last night on MTV, or MTVi, or BET - "whateva man" - I was watching some videos. Now Foxy Brown with Jay Z was great, as was Redman and Method Man. (..My love of rap and hip hop goes back to my intro to the Sugar Hill Gang by MG and RG way back when. (Potter Street in the house, all of whom will remember our Indian - PF Mothership painted rock courtesy of Mr. Roland Cosby. We were ahead of the times, were we not.) But back to the point. It was the video "Get Up" by Lost Boyz that really impressed me graphically. I could see the home page using such ideas - or at least such originality. And with a lot of CV youth - in CV and elsewhere - into reggae, rap, hip-hop, - and also whatever the CV info sciences students in Europe and the US and elsewhere are into computerwise- "whateva" - it's just a matter of time before contemporary sensibilities start to manifest themselves in the look and structure of our pages. We don't even have to wait that long. You can see it in the pages of some of our CV's in Cyberspace. (For those interested, check out Hip-Hop Webmasters)
  

  
  

• Appeal - While I'm engaged in this stream-of-consciousness output, let me appeal to all those academics out there who have done studies/theses on Capeverdean topics to put your stuff online so that the CV Internet community can access it. That's what the Internet is for. I would assume that all new papers are being done electronically, so so much the easier.

  
  

• Bike Ride - And while I'm at it (...it's so much fun to be an editor) the people of New Bedford want a Capeverdean Independence Day Bike Ride this year! And a cool t-shirt!!

I was just thinking how cool it would be to have a subtle little spurting of fire from the volcano in the picture on the Fogo page. Not that I hope another eruption occurs. Just a little Photoshop trickery.

• There's a new photo of my daughter and I on the Development Team page. NoskuNos told me it was time to replace the previous one.

• I happened to pay a visit GJ4ICD's (Geoff's) page on the ham radio expedition he made to CV last year where he was hosted by and worked with Julio Vera-Cruz (D44BC) of Mindelo. Geoff has added a whole bunch of nice pictures with very enjoyable accompanying text. Way to go Geoff! Anyone out there in ham radio land reached Julio?

• Is it synchronicity or what? On my New Bedford Home Page I've got a Sister Cities page that includes Mindelo and Tosashimizu, Japan. In trolling on Tosashimizu, I found the page of Karim Reyes. I found looking through his pages a section on environment.He had some links to info on Curtiba, Brasil that are identical to links on the CV Planning Resources page. And I think Karim comes from Mexico. It is a wonderful world, is it not?

  And if you think that's cool, check out the page of Michael Deluz of the Wampanoag Indian Federation.

  Of course nothing approaches the fact that there is a CV in LA who does Tuvan throat singing, or so I'm told. The Mongolian-CV connection.

• I'm hoping to have more time over this winter season to play with enhancing the functionality of the CV page. Check out this interface page I've cooked up - Diaspora Communication and Collaboration Resources. This is just some playing I've done, and it is meant to prompt some feedback and alternative ideas. Obviously the interface can be built in a variety of ways. Interesting design element is how to balance lots of features/options versus focusing activity by constraining interface. In any case, the idea is to come up with a effective interface and to build the functionality behind it to really enhance the Internet as a communications and collaboration medium for CV and the diaspora community. Most of the tools and applications are out there now. We just have to learn how to use them. I'd like to have comments on how best to develop such a resource, how the interface might be changed, recommendations on database applications to employ, etc.

  Maybe as an interim step, there's an online, free directory out there (Switchboard, ...?) that can be used by the diaspora. If so, we could put instructions up on the CV page as to how to use the directory resource in question to find and promote collaboration between CV's. Though the customized solution will be the best.

  It will be creative and sophisticated use of databases, interactive forms, and intelligent maps that will enable us to take things to a new level.

  We've put a lot of content into the CV page, and more and more people are getting online (see CV's in Cyberspace). Time for some of us to focus on tool development and page functionality enhancement.

  Also, time for some of you CV educators out there to hook up with some cyber-savvy students and come up with stuff entirely your own - e.g., Internet-based directed learning, on-line quizes and tutorials. Start off with simple net experiments and then blast off.

• If you have sent me Email, and I have not responded, please forgive me. It is my intention to respond to ALL Email. Unfortunately, sometimes, things fall through the cracks - especially with Email in Portuguese. I've got a whole stack of these messages that I need translated before I can respond. Don't hesitate to write me again if I haven't answered, and I'll redouble my efforts to try to respond to all. Also, sometimes the Email address that comes in with a message is invalid. Responses sent to these addresses get returned to me. This happens with some systems for some reason - they deform the sender's address when placing it on the outgoing Email.

- First, a big thank you to Erik Chaum for his scanning work for the Nho Lobu pages.

- We're starting to see more CV's with their own homepages (see CV's in Cyberspace). Please let us know when you go online with a page and we'll be happy to add a link. Remember, making your own page is much easier than you may think, at least getting it of the ground. And your ISP has given you oodles of space for it. At no additional charge! If it hasn't, drop it and get a new service.

- Thanks to Vasco Pires ("Captain Vasco") for his great sign for the home page demo at the So Sabi festival.

- The page has grown so big that I sometimes forget what's in it, and may not visit a section for months. If anyone comes across any out-of-date info, or something that you think should be brought to my attention, please feel free to let me know.

- The maintenance of the Portuguese version of the page has fallen way behind. Our good friend Manuel Freitas is trying to get some help for us, and translation work has resumed, albeit slowly. We hope to bring the Portuguese version completely up-to-date as soon as possible.

- I'm surprised that no one has come forth to contribute to the story of the Struggle for Capeverdean Independence. We're looking for people who were actually involved, whether Capeverdeans, from Guinea-Bissau, Cubans, Portuguese, other, to share their knowledge and to tell their stories.

- Speaking of stories, if anyone knows such people as Basil Davidson, Colm Foy, Deidre Meintel, or any other people like this, let them know about the home page and have them contact us or send a contribution. Also, people like T.A. Varela da Silva,

- I think it would be neat to use some pano designs as backgrounds for some of the home pages. But I need excellent quality photos or digital images of these designs. Or why not have some students, whether freehand and/or using such tools as Adobe Photoshop or whatever (to see what wonderful stuff kids can do, see the art of Ron Barboza's daughters), create pano designs, be they traditional or contemporary. Can someone help us with any of this?

- I'm always looking for satelite and hi-altitude aerial photos of Cape Verde. We have some spectacular ones, but I know there are more out there. I just haven't been able to track them down, E.g., I saw a side-shot of Santiago and Fogo that was awesome, but i don't know which bird took this picture and when. By the way, anybody see the movie Twister? I noticed they were using GOES-8 imagery, the same technology that has given us one of my favorite pics, the GOES-8 Visible Image - Sunrise! Cape Verde Islands and West Africa (1.1MB)

Muito obrigado to Rick Britto of New Bedford. Much of the improved appearance of the home page results from Rick's review of the pages and his suggestions on style. I introduced Rick to HTML only two months ago and now he's teaching me things about it. Then again Rick is no stranger to computers, being a MIDI consultant and sysop for the Boston Computer Society. As well as one of the finest musicians and composers around. Check out Rick's home page to see his technique in all it's unadluterated glory. (p.s., I never said I was a graphic designer!)

Speaking of home pages, you may not realize it but your Internet Service Provider probably provides you with 5MB or so of free disk space for your own home page. Check it out. Then create a starting page of your very own and develop it over time as you learn more and more about how this all works. Building a basic page is very, very simple. In fact, to get you started, here's all the code you need to establish your initial presence on the web (assuming your ISP or commercial service (AOL, etc.) will host your home page). Just copy the code BETWEEN the dotted lines (do NOT include them!) EXACTLY as it appears below, then substitute your name and email address in the respective BOLD sections, then transfer the edited code to your commercial or institutional server and you`re in cyberspace. That's all there is to it. Make sure you copy the all of the left and right arrowheads and the text inside them exactly as it appears below.

And remember, all you have to do is "View Source" to see the HTML code behind any page that you are viewing. If you see an effect you like on a page and want to know how it's done, simply look at the HTML source code by selecting "View Source" from your browsers pull-down menu.

Speaking of the So Sabi festival,

....................................................................................................

<HTML>

<HEAD>
<TITLE>My Home Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>

<BODY>

<h1>YOURNAME's Home Page</h1>
<p>
Hello World! This is my home page.
<p>
<a href="mailto:YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS">Click here to send me email.</A>
<p>
<a href="http://www.umassd.edu/specialprograms/caboverde/capeverdean.html">Visit the Cape Verde Home Page</a>

</BODY>

</HTML>

..................................................................................................

If you would like to find out more about contributing to this page, or building your own page, please send email to rleary@umassd.edu

A new News and Opinion page has been added. This page provides a space for the full, free and open presentation of news and opnion of interest to the worldwide Cape Verdean community. Neither support of nor opposition to any political party, ideology, or point of view on the part of the page developers should be inferred from the inclusion of information, or links thereto, in this page.

One of my favorite parts of the home page is the satellite images and maps section. From the beautiful photo of Fogo taken from the space shuttle to the gravimetric map of the Cape Verde abyssal plain to the spectacular GOES infrared image of Cape Verde and Dakar, these maps and images provide fascinating views of the archipelago as part of the complex, wondrous and multifaceted physical world.

With the advent of satellite imaging and remote sensing, impossible without the image processing and enhancement techniques provided by computers and computational algorithms, along with the awesome power of computers to amass, analyze and present data on all aspects of culture and commerce, heretofore invisible and unanticipated patterns and relationships are made manifest. We see the shape of underwater mounts, the birth of a hurricane, variations in the ozone layer, and even the location of masses of fish in the sea.

This technology provides mankind with an extremely powerful and beneficial tool. However, it is important to understand that maps and images, however seemingly objective, "carry with them cultural values and social perspectives." For example, the universal orientation of maps of the earth, with the North Pole at the top rather than the bottom, is often taken for granted. However, this orientation results from a physically arbitrary but symbolically profound choice/bias. Also, "how maps, right or wrong, come to be used, marks the point where science stops and the socialization of knowledge begins, a transition fraught with temptations of economic and political self- interest. Such use and abuse provides a new landscape in which to observe an old dilemma: the uses and abuses of technology." Regarding LANDSAT, a revolutionary and amazingly beneficial remote sensing satellite, it is pointed out that "if the aim was to shepherd earth's finite natural resources, it is ironic...that oil and mining industries are the largest [private] purchasers of LANDSAT data."

So we behold the images and maps with delight and fascination, and we take note that..

"The map is the game board upon which human destinies are played out, where winning or losing determines the survival of ideas, cultures, and sometimes even entire civilizations. Science has brought twentieth-century societies to the verge of another New World, its exotic geographies taking shape on chromosomes and in the solar system and deep space, its first erratic and uneven shorelines appearing on hundreds of new maps. Since the information encoded in maps, which we may call 'map knowledge,' has historically become a form of power and a tool for the expression of political and economic ideologies, looking at the lies and biases and sobering tales told by old maps may serve as a first step in helping us identify patterns of error and bias, in mapmaker and map-reader alike, that can influence the way we look at and use these new maps. Since these are the maps that are cartographically sketching out the boundaries of our collective future, nothing less than the future rests in our ability to read them wisely, responsibly, and with enlightened distrust."

Note: Quoted passages above have been taken from "Mapping the Next Millennium" by Stephen Hall, ISBN 0-679-74175-5

          2-NOV-1995 11:44:20.78                                  NEWMAIL
From:   IN%"jguedesl@macau.ctm.net"  "Joao and Lusa Guedes"
To:     IN%"rleary@umassd.edu"
CC:
Subj:   Form posted from Mozilla

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Date: Fri, 03 Nov 1995 00:33:05 -0800
From: Joo&Lusa Guedes 

name=Joao Guedes.  jguedesl@macau.ctm.net   
homepage comment=Since 
my wife is a Cape Verdian descendent and my son too, I am proud to see Cape 
Verde in the map of the World via Internet. We are living in Macau which is a 
Portuguese territory in South China. Too far from the ancestors, but here in 
Macau there are lots of people from Cape Verde origin. That's why we always
have in the local radio the mornas and coladeras thru the voices of Bana, 
Cesaria Evora and so on. And we also have cachupa to delight us once on a 
while with a true Cape Verde meal. Congratulations for this home page that 
I promise to visit from now on very often. 

Joao Guedes - father, Luisa Guedes -  wife, Joao Guedes, Junior - son.   
Our E-Mail is jguedesl@macau.ctm.net