On March 27, the Ottawa Citizen profiled the following two Carleton University research projects in its High Tech Supplement.
Arming the isolated with high tech; Peter MacGibbon at Carleton University is creating a program for rural communities. The Goal: To narrow the digital divide for the disadvantaged.
Page: G4 Byline: Susan Hickman
Carleton University is planning a project that will narrow the digital divide for Canadians in rural and remote communities who wish to develop their entrepreneurial skills.
Through its Centre for Community Innovation (3ci), the university is launching an “essential workplace skills” project that will use information and communications technologies (ICTs) to overcome the challenges of geographic distance, time and schedule constraints, lack of local infrastructure and varying levels of computer literacy. The venture will use video and audio-graphic conferencing, satellite radio and podcasting and collaborative wiki environments to foster an entrepreneurial work culture in parts of central and eastern Canada — English- and French-speaking — that have typically been unable to access training.
“Training programs just don’t happen in sparse rural areas,” says project director Peter MacGibbon who has spent a good deal of the last 15 years trying to find the right kind of media to engage with remote and disadvantaged communities. As executive director of the Quebec Learners’ Network (QLN), Mr. MacGibbon has been encouraging lifelong learning opportunities in rural areas through ICTs. “Now that community organizations are working with government agencies, programs are being developed to meet their needs.
They are attracting some institutions that have a social mandate, such as Carleton University, which has a strong tradition of community economic development and support.”
Human Resources and Social Development Canada’s National Office of Literacy and Learning is providing nearly $470,000 to the project, while the Bell Community Deve lopment Fund is contributing $100,000. Various community groups will work together to develop best practices for instilling entrepreneurial attitudes and lifelong learning approaches among the youth, women and older displaced workers who will be participating in four pilot projects.
“The traditionally narrow training focus on entrepreneurial skills development, such as writing a business plan, is often insufficient for people experiencing social disadvantages,” Mr. MacGibbon explains.
The 3ci project is custom designing a process to empower Canadians living in remote or rural areas to acquire employability skills, or consider self-employment or starting a business, and especially to overcome the barriers of location, literacy levels and time in ways that work for them.
“It will provide learning experiences for those who need to get up to speed within the knowledge economy and take advantage of opportunities for determining their own life’s work,” says Mr. MacGibbon.
What makes it possible is not only the growth of Web 2.0 (network-as-platform computing), and the portability of audio and video, but also the eagerness of institutions such as Carleton, which has an interest in using its research and technology initiatives in socially innovative ways.
“Our project,” says Mr. MacGibbon, who was hired in January by Carleton, “will use custom-designed delivery models from the current Web 2.0 multimedia toolbox to overcome barriers of time, location and literacy levels. In practical terms, this means providing training content and opportunities for social exchange in participants’ preferred learning formats and in various accessible ways.”
The projects, in New Brunswick, the lower North Shore of Quebec, Eastern Ontario and the Outaouais region, will employ a mix of technologies.
Podcasting, for example, will be introduced to a community radio project in the isolated communities on the lower north shore of Quebec. With no road access to the rest of the province, and a moratorium on their traditional livelihood of fishing, these communities are in crisis and need to communicate with one another to help face the challenges they share.
“A community radio network would meet those needs,” explains Mr. MacGibbon, “and it’s in development now. We can use sound files in a way that is relevant to these communities. And we expect there will be spinoff activities, opportunities for youth, for example. One of our goals is to build the local capacity to engage with technology — start with traditional radio and develop it into something more flexible, like podcasts, MP3 sound files, video files and other compressed files that can be easily shared and distributed.”
In the Outaouais and Eastern Ontario, two projects will focus on the francophone farming communities.
“These projects will deliver training in business schools for self-employed artists. We will develop a series of learning modules in English and in French and probably make it available online through the use of streaming slide shows over the web with animation and narration. They will be less text-based and more engaging, in bite-sized pieces.”
In New Brunswick, a fourth project will work with women to help them find work, become self-employed or begin their own businesses.
“In a rapidly changing society, where people are trying to get up to speed in the knowledge-based economy, we want to provide opportunities by using the improved access we have to multimedia. With higher connectivity, better means of file compression, and access to shared environments such as wiki, we can share information much easier than before. We can build a stream of knowledge or a social environment or both. And we can help those who need to be engaged in their own learning activities.”
3ci Project Technologies
– Video, audio and web-conferencing create a virtual classroom with a network of communities, overcoming the barriers of geographic and social distance.
– Streamed narrated slide shows use compression to send high-quality multimedia presentations over the Internet, including to low-speed dial-up connections, thus overcoming the lack of broadband access and the reliance on print-based materials.
– Community radio podcasts (online digital media files) can be downloaded, overcoming time and schedule restraints.
– Collaborative wiki environments offer shared online databases for learners, encouraging peer contributions and co-operation and overcoming barriers of social isolation.
– Guided self-study DVDs offer easily and inexpensively distributed high-density multimedia content to those who lack high-speed Internet connections for downloading materials, thus overcoming the lack of broadband access and the expense of printing and freight costs.
Four Pilot Projects
Employability Skills Development for Rural Women: in an Acadian community in New Brunswick, in partnership with Entrepreneurship Inc.
Employability Skills Development for Youth: on the lower North Shore of Quebec, in partnership with Netagamiou School Community Learning Centre.
Business Skills for Cultural Entrepreneurs: in Eastern Ontario, in partnership with the Réseau de développement économique et d’employabilité de l’Ontario (the francophone economic development and employability network of Ontario).
Business Skills for Cultural Entrepreneurs: in the Outaouais region, in partnership with the Quebec Community Groups Network.
How insects fly
Jeff Dawson and a team of researchers at Carleton University are studying how insects fly, right to the smallest detail. The Goal: To use their knowledge to develop micro-air vehicles.
Front Page, Byline Jennifer Campbell
It’s late afternoon and Jeff Dawson is inspecting a locust that is glued to a stand with electrodes stuck in its flight muscles. A student uses software to determine what the insect’s muscles are doing during flight.
In a small room one floor down from this Carleton University biology lab, a locust colony, spread out in half-a-dozen cages, thrives. The creatures eat wheat grass and carrots, fly and mate. They’ll live for about four months under these circumstances and are used for various flight-related experiments in Mr. Dawson’s lab.
Back upstairs, the student is having trouble. This particular creature of biblical renown seems a bit lazy, and the student has to keep blowing air on it to wake it up and get it to fly. As he does, he makes the experiment look pretty low-tech. It all seems like basic biology — except that it has a high-tech purpose.
The lab’s main goal is to understand how insects fly and how their flight systems have evolved.
But there’s a practical purpose to all of this: They want to use the knowledge to develop micro-air vehicles.
“We’re interested in insect flight from a variety of approaches,” Mr. Dawson says. “We do neuro and physiology experiments to record how their brains are speaking to their muscles.”
They then use that information to analyse muscle and wing kinematics to come up with hypotheses they can then test with models. The multidisciplinary lab hires engineering students every summer to help with its studies.
Last summer, an engineering student built a wind tunnel so they could look at locust flight patterns under specific wind conditions. Another engineering co-op student developed a prototype of a mechanism that mimics the flapping motion of an insect wing.
The lab also has a workshop area where Mr. Dawson’s students can build contraptions for their experiments.
They recently built a tank where they can insert an insect flight-simulation device and use coloured dye to analyse the way the wind would hit a real insect’s wing during flight. It works in the water, which remains stationary, because they’ve matched the physics.
With the dye test, they’ve discovered the role and importance of the forewing (locusts have two wings on each side). “The forewing seriously affects the flow over the hind wing and we believe the forewing, when the gap gets too small (on prototypes), destroys the lift produced by the hind wing. That allows extra lift to be produced and cause a steering torque. It’s just like canoeing.”
Several scientists have made breakthroughs over the years about how insects fly. Charlie Ellington discovered the secret of bumblebee movement and others have made similarly important finds.
Mr. Dawson thinks his lab is onto another — namely the importance of the two wings and how they interact.
They’ve extrapolated their discovery to say that when building a micro-air vehicle, two wings on each side is better than one. The extra wing allows the vehicle to carry a greater load.
“So if you wanted to add a camera or a chemical sensor or a drug that you’re delivering to a person trapped in a crumbling building, like a morphine tablet. You can carry more load and you’re more manoeuvrable. So we think this is an ideal insect to be looking at for building these micro-air vehicles — and it all comes back to biblical plague locusts.
While Mr. Dawson’s lab is technically a biology lab, it’s high-tech because it’s “doing science in a new way.”
It couldn’t function with just biologists in the lab. “We need engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, robot-builders and as well as biologists doing the muscle stuff.”
He said they must also embrace high-technology to do their work. They use computer animation, rapid prototyping, and a three-dimensional high-resolution scanner at the Museum of Nature. It’s the same scanner scientists used to capture the brushstrokes on the Mona Lisa.
“That’s allowing us to capture details of wings — not just shape, but actually texture of the wing surface, to get more realistic wing models. You can’t build a micro-air vehicle if you don’t know how insects fly. And to know how they fly, you need high-tech. You need the latest cameras, sophisticated techniques and you can’t go it alone.”
The concept of micro-air vehicles isn’t new — da Vinci himself envisioned flying machines. Interest in the buggies has regained steam in the past 15 years because of the new discoveries and thanks to the synergy of disciplines such as engineering, computer science and biology.
“That’s rejuvenated the idea that, ‘Gee — maybe it is possible,'” Mr. Dawson said.
Desire to develop micro-air vehicles is largely driven by their potential military applications, but they do have other uses, including everything from mapping Mars to delivering morphine to a person trapped in a collapsed building.
“They’re largely important because insects are incredibly manoeuvrable,” Mr. Dawson said. “They’re biologically inspired robotics.”
Many of the current micro-air vehicles being developed operate like helicopters, but they’re noisy and don’t work well if the users want them to be surreptitious (a much needed requirement in a battlefield). Helicopters are also not nearly as manoeuvrable. Certain insects have the unique advantage of being able to fly backward, forward and hovering, as well.
“So you get the best of all worlds,” he said, adding that the desired wing span for these vehicles would be 15 centimetres or six inches.
“In military operations, to be able to take an insect with a camera and throw it into the battlefield, would be very helpful,” he said. “If it gets shot down, no big deal.”
One continuing challenge is gravity on Earth, Mr. Dawson said, but scientists are working on that one. In the meantime, the devices that are currently being proposed would be fine on Mars.
For now, Mr. Dawson’s goal is to one day have a micro-air vehicle consortium where his lab and others could pool resources to tackle the problems. Its objective would be to eventually produce a tangible product with transferable technologies to the marketplace.
“Then we could apply for military funding,” he said.
Thursday, March 27, 2008 in News Releases
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