the Masalai blog

By Emmanuel Narokobi

The inthemix50 is back for 2008! Each year the announcement of Australia’s favourite DJs, club nights, events and producers is a cause for much anticipation. With dance music down under doing such massive things its great to hear that Brisbane based PNG DJ, AK-47 has been nominated in the Sony intheMix Top 50 DJ comp. They’ve managed to put his mix online as well so I’ve added both links below. Check it out and you can show the brother some love by voting!

Support akay47: Vote for him on the intheMix50 website. Click on the following link:
http://www.inthemix.com.au/50/2008/djlist/ …. and hit submit. Cheers for the support!

If you’d like to listen to ak’s mix-tape, you can go to: http://www.inthemix.com.au/fm/38694/AKAY47_Booty_Ammo_Mix

Also, The ABC’s In the Loop program is running a musical talent competition called ‘Pacific Break‘. The competition aims to uncover the best unsigned musical talent in the Pacific. The winning entry will be announced on the 10th October and will play at Vanuatu’s Fest Napuan Music Festival in November.

You can see some great pics of last years Fest Napuan music festival at Katie Hannan’s Flickr account.

By Emmanuel Narokobi

One of my childhood friends, Dr. Poyap Rooney, works at the Pathology unit at the Port Moresby General Hospital (POMGH). Last week he invited me to be a sponsor at one of their weekly Friday information sessions where the doctors at POMGH give talks to their work peers on medical subjects and developments which they feel are relevant to their work and PNG in general. It’s nothing huge by way of sponsorship, because all you have to buy are some bikkies and softdrinks, so I was thankful for the insight into a sharing session of sorts from these doctors at POMGH.

The speaker at today’s session was a doctor from the UK by the name of Ian. Poyap had specifically asked me to come along because other than the fact that Ian is also a DJ who had brough his entire Vinyl collection and turntables from the UK to PNG, he was all fired up about an e-health project that he wanted to get started here in PNG. It is not a new concept and it is that same model whereby the internet is used to share diagnostic evaluations on patient information from PNG or a remote location in PNG, but it was heartening to see how passionate he was about getting the project up and running.

He gave a very inspiring speech on developments around the Pacific and how we could be a part of it. I do apologise thought that I did come in a bit late so I missed some parts from the start, so I’ll be hounding him next week to get to me his Power Point presentation so that I can get it up here to illustrate better his thoughts.

Keep in mind though that this is the very start of this project, so all it is at this stage is an idea of how the best brains in the world can help to quickly address medical cases here in PNG and save lives through a faster turnover in diagnosis. So Ian is pretty much at just the planning phase at this stage.

One thing that I like about Ian’s plans is that he wants to tie in the project to becoming a part of the UNiversity of Papua New Guinea. In terms of a sustainable strategy I must agree that it makes sense considering the developments going on at the moment with education. In addition Ian and Poyap both stressed again and again to the 30 odd doctors and clinicians there that taking ownership of the project was almost entirely crucil for anything to ever happen and be seen through to the end.

It is a very large project that Ian wants to undertake and I hope that his enthusiasm is not killed by how slow things move in PNG. But these are interesting times for ICT so he may very well get some wind in his sails. Again I do apologise for not giving too much detail here on the talk, but I’ll write up a better illustration once I get his notes.

By Emmanuel Narokobi

Jigsaw puzzles used to be the craze many years ago. Not sure why it became boring? Maybe TV killed it, maybe the Internet? I especially remember those ones with a thousand pieces which one of my late aunts used to love doing while puffing on a cigarette and listening to the races. Yeah she was an interesting and fun aunt, but for the life of me I could never understand the attraction of jigsaw puzzles and especially those thousand piece ones. They seriously gave me an instant headache when I saw all the pices scattered to one side while she was slowly piecing it together.

But I guess when you think about it, its that final big picture that you make that drives you to get the pieces right. So you’re probably wondering what the hell is Manu going on about today?? Well seems to me that a number of developments are taking place in PNG which if linked together could possibly create a powerful solution to our issues of internet access and education.

As always when talking about the internet, infrastructure is the first piece to look at. We’ve already noted that Telikom has a new undersea cable coming through PNG past Madang. Then in Madang itself you have a particularly fiesty management at Divine Word University who have fought tooth and nail in leading 6 universities in the country to get the Papua New Guinea Academic and Research Network (PNGARNet) up and running. Then you have the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) pilot programs happening with even more work also being done with music recording using the OLPC. Then finally you have a particularly large country population which is no older than 30.

In a country as large as it is, with the various geographical barriers in the way I’m certainly hopeful that if commercially we cannot connect our people then certainly a not for profit network through the Universities is the way to go. If the RICS project can allign itself with PNGARNet, then we can have access points across the country between Universities and Primary Schools in remote locations around PNG, then couple that with OLPC laptops then we will be looking at a promising picture for expanding education services. Sundar Ramamurthy at Data Nets also mentioned earlier this year at the UPNG ICT Workshop that he was looking at giving free internet to High Schools.

On top of the above IT developments for education you now have the National Television Service (NTS) which is to go on air in September. The NTS will most certainly aim at informing and educating the country as well.

So my mind is spinning already at the though of all these pieces to a puzzle that has to be put together somehow. The one common theme running through all these developments mentioned are that they are all non commercial initiatives. They will all be funded by governments and donor agencies. Which means that they have the potential for co-operating with each other without the issues of commercial competition.

The question I guess is, what type of digital future do we imagine ourselves living in say 2015? Does my little nephew in the village wake up and pop his OLPC laptop in his bilum on his way to the village primary school? When he gets to school will his teacher have downloaded todays reading material from the Divine Word Campus in Wewak? While my nephews at school will his father be able to text for latest copra growing techniques from Vudal University in Rabaul? Maybe later that night another cousin may borrow my nephews OLPC laptop to record some traditional songs from BuBu Man for the community database which is hosted at the schools or remotely in the Universities?

The pieces of the puzzle are scattered on the board now but the difference here to a jigsaw puzzle is that we can dictate what the end big picture will look like. So are all these different players talking to each other? What is the general big picture that we want from all of this if we all collaborate on this? Or more importantly do we know how to work together?

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Download a Power Point Doc on PNGARNet here, madang_kegana