Arquivo da tag: Educação

4th CIFAS Field School in Ethnographic Research Methods in Xalapa, Mexico

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Summer Field School in Ethnographic Methods in Mexico

July 23 to August 10, 2012 – Xalapa, Mexico

The Comitas Institute for Anthropological Study (CIFAS) is pleased to announce the 4th CIFAS Field School in Ethnographic Research Methods, in Xalapa (Jalapa), Mexico.

The goal of the Field School is to offer training in the foundations and practice of ethnographic methods. The faculty works closely with participants to identify the required field methods needed to address their academic or professional needs. The Field School is designed for people with little or no experience in ethnographic research, or those who want a refresher course. It is suitable for graduate and undergraduate students in social sciences and other fields of study that use qualitative approaches (such as education, communication, cultural studies, health, social work, human ecology, development studies, consumer behavior, among others), applied social scientists, professionals, and researchers who have an interest in learning more about ethnographic methods and their applications.

Program:

·          Foundations of ethnographic research

·          Social theories in the field & research design

·          Planning the logistics of field research

·          Data collection techniques

·          Principles of organization and indexation of field data

·          Analyzing field data

·          Qualitative analysis softwares: basic principles

·          Individual, one-on-one discussion of research projects

·          Field trips

Coordinators:

Renzo Taddei (Assistant Professor, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/Affiliated Researcher, Columbia University). CV: http://bit.ly/nueNbu.

Ana Laura Gamboggi (Postdoctoral fellow, University of Brasilia). CV: http://bit.ly/psuVyw.

Zulma Amador (Faculty member of the Centro de EcoAlfabetización y Diálogo de Saberes of Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico). CV: http://bit.ly/J1VGVA

Registration and other costs: Places are limited. The registration fee is US$900, which covers the full three weeks of program activities. The registration fee should be paid by July 1, though a deposit to the CIFAS bank account. Pre-registration should be completed online at the link http://bit.ly/Jr0kvU. The deadline for pre-registration is June 30, 2012.

The registration fee does not cover accommodation, meals or transportation. If needed, the organizers of the Field School can recommend reasonably priced hotels and places to eat during the program. In Xalapa, accommodation, meals and local transportation costs should be no more than US$100 per day in total.

Course venue: Classes will take place in the Centro de EcoAlfabetización y Diálogo de Saberes of Universidad Veracruzana (refer to http://www.uv.mx/transdisciplina). For more information on Xalapa, please see “Xalapa: Mexico’s best kept secret”

Other information:

Language: The Field School activities will be carried out in English. Special sections of the Field School can be offered in Spanish, depending on the number of interested individuals.

Visa requirements: Citizens of the U.S. and some European and Latin American countries don’t need visas to enter Mexico, but do need valid passports. You can check whether you need a visa here: http://www.inm.gob.mx/index.php/page/Paises_Visa/en.html.

Insurance: Participants are required to have travel insurance that covers medical and repatriation costs. Proof of purchase of travel insurance must be presented at the first day of activities.

The average temperature in Xalapa in July is 25 ºC (77 ºF) during the day and 16 ºC (61 ºF) at night. Xalapa´s rainy season goes from June to November, so participants should expect some rain during the field school.

For more information, please see the link http://bit.ly/Jr0kvU or write to Renzo Taddei at taddei@iri.columbia.edu.

Are You Prepared for Zombies? (American Anthropological Association)

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by Joslyn O.

 Today’s guest blog post is by cultural anthropologist and AAA member, Chad Huddleston. He is an Assistant Professor at St. Louis University in the Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice department.

Recently, a host of new shows, such as Doomsday Preppers on NatGeo and Doomsday Bunkers on Discovery Channel, has focused on people with a wide array of concerns about possible events that may threaten their lives. Both of these shows focus on what are called ‘preppers.’ While the people that may have performed these behaviors in the past might have been called ‘survivalists,’ many ‘preppers’ have distanced themselves from that term, due to its cultural baggage: stereotypical anti-government, gun-loving, racist, extremists that are most often associated with the fundamentalist (politically and religiously) right side of the spectrum.

I’ve been doing fieldwork with preppers for the past two years, focusing on a group called Zombie Squad. It is ‘the nation’s premier non-stationary cadaver suppression task force,’ as well as a grassroots, 501(c)3 charity organization. Zombie Squad’s story is that while the zombie removal business is generally slow, there is no reason to be unprepared. So, while it is waiting for the “zombpacolpyse,” it focuses its time on disaster preparedness education for the membership and community.

The group’s position is that being prepared for zombies means that you are prepared for anything, especially those events that are much more likely than a zombie uprising – tornadoes, an interruption in services, ice storms, flooding, fires, and earthquakes.

For many in this group, Hurricane Katrina was the event that solidified their resolve to prep. They saw what we all saw – a natural disaster in which services were not available for most, leading to violence, death and chaos. Their argument is that the more prepared the public is before a disaster occurs, the less resources they will require from first responders and those agencies that come after them.

In fact, instead of being a victim of natural disaster, you can be an active responder yourself, if you are prepared. Prepare they do. Members are active in gaining knowledge of all sorts – first aid, communications, tactical training, self-defense, first responder disaster training, as well as many outdoor survival skills, like making fire, building shelters, hunting and filtering water.

This education is individual, feeding directly into the online forum they maintain (which has just under 30,000 active members from all over the world), and by monthly local meetings all over the country, as well as annual national gatherings in southern Missouri, where they socialize, learn survival skills and practice sharpshooting.

Sound like those survivalists of the past? Emphatically no. Zombie Squad’s message is one of public education and awareness, very successful charity drives for a wide array of organizations, and inclusion of all ethnicities, genders, religions and politics. Yet, the group is adamant on leaving politics and religion out of discussions on the group and prepping. You will not find exclusive language on their forum or in their media. That is not to say that the individuals in the group do not have opinions on one side or the other of these issues, but it is a fact that those issues are not to be discussed within the community of Zombie Squad.

Considering the focus on ‘future doom’ and the types of fears that are being pushed on the shows mentioned above, usually involve protecting yourself from disaster and then other people that have survived the disaster, Zombie Squad is a refreshing twist to the ‘prepper’ discourse. After all, if a natural disaster were to befall your region, whom would you rather be knocking at your door: ‘raiders’ or your neighborhood Zombie Squad member?

And the answer is no: they don’t really believe in zombies.

Community Media: A Good Practice Handbook (UNESCO)

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Compiled and edited by Steve Buckley

Published by UNESCO and available free online at:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002150/215097E.pdf

Among its activities to mark World Radio Day 2012, UNESCO has
launched a new good practice handbook with case studies of community
media from around the world. The publication draws on a diversity of
experiences to provide inspiration and support for those engaged in
community media practice and advocacy and to raise awareness and
understanding of community media among policy makers and other stakeholders.

13 February has been proclaimed by UNESCO as a date to celebrate
radio broadcast, improve international cooperation among radio
broadcasters and encourage decision-makers to create and provide
access to information through radio. Community Media: A Good Practice
Handbook is a compilation of 30 community radio and other community
media examples demonstrating successful approaches to strengthening
public voice.

“The value of this publication lies in the fact that it highlights
problems while at the same time offering possible solutions. It
presents a useful empirical basis for replicating time-tested
decisions about how community media can become an even more effective
element of a free, independent and pluralistic media system of any
democratic society. This book will be a useful reference to community
media practitioners, policy-makers, researchers, community
organizers, and other media development stakeholders.”

From the Foreword by Wijayananda Jayaweera, former Director,
Communication Development Division/IPDC, UNESCO, Paris

Income Inequality and Distrust Foster Academic Dishonesty (APS)

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Lucy Hyde – Association for Psychological Science

College professors and students are in an arms race over cheating. Students find new sources for pre-written term papers; professors find new ways to check the texts they get for plagiarized material. But why are all these young people cheating? A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests one reason: income inequality, which decreases the general trust people have toward each other.

Lukas Neville, a doctoral student at Queen’s University in Ontario, was inspired to do the study by his own teaching experience. “I ran into the question of academic dishonesty firsthand,” he says. Like other instructors at universities across North America, he considered using services that automatically check students’ papers for plagiarized material. “But it got me thinking about the actual underlying mechanism that promotes or inhibits academic dishonesty.” He thought the answer might be trust; if students don’t trust each other, some of them might think they have to cheat to keep up with their unscrupulous classmates. And other research has shown that this kind of distrust is more likely to be found in places with high income inequality.

To look at the connection between trust, income inequality, and academic dishonesty, Neville took advantage of data from Google that breaks down search terms by state. Neville found data on searches on phrases like “free term paper,” “buy term paper,” and the names of cheating websites. He compared these to survey data on how trusting people are in each state and a measure of income inequality from the U.S. Census Bureau. He controlled for several other factors that could influence the number of searches, including how many students are in each state, how large the colleges in each state are, and average household income.

Indeed, the data showed that people who live in states with more income inequality were less trusting in general, and those states had more evidence of academic dishonesty. The next step, Neville says, will be to duplicate this finding using laboratory experiments, using pay structure to alter income inequality, then observing the effects on students’ trust and dishonest behavior.

If one of the root causes of cheating is distrust, this could explain why measures like honor codes work, Neville says: when students trust that other people aren’t cheating, they are less likely to cheat themselves. “As educators, there’s not much you can do about the level of inequality in society, but we do have the ability to help foster trust in our colleges and classrooms,” he says.

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For more information about this study, please contact: Lukas Neville at lukasneville@tricolour.queensu.ca.

The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article “Do Economic Equality and Generalized Trust Inhibit Academic Dishonesty? Evidence From State-Level Search-Engine Queries” and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Lucy Hyde at 202-293-9300 or lhyde@psychologicalscience.org.

Why The Future Is Better Than You Think (Reason.com)

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Sharif Christopher Matar | March 15, 2012

Can a Masai Warrior in Africa today communicate better than Ronald Reagan could? If he’s on a cell phone, Peter Diamandis says he can.

Peter Diamandis is the founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, which offers big cash prizes “to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.” Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh sat down to talk with Peter about his new book Abundance and why he think we live in an “incredible time”, but no one realizes it. Peter thinks that there are some powerful human forces combined with technological advancements that are transforming the world for the better.

“The challenge is that the rate of innovation is so fast…” Peter says, “the government can’t keep up with it.” If the government tries to play “catch up” with regulations and policy, the technology with just go overseas. Certain inovations in “food, water, housing, health, education is getting better and better.” Peter “hopes we are not going to be in a situation where, entrenched interests are preventing the consumer from having better health care.”

Filmed by Sharif Matar and Tracy Oppenheimer. Edited by Sharif Matar

What the World Is Made Of (Discovery Magazine)

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by Sean Carroll

I know you’re all following the Minute Physics videos (that we talked about here), but just in case my knowledge is somehow fallible you really should start following them. After taking care of why stones are round, and why there is no pink light, Henry Reich is now explaining the fundamental nature of our everyday world: quantum field theory and the Standard Model. It’s a multi-part series, since some things deserve more than a minute, dammit.

Two parts have been posted so far. The first is just an intro, pointing out something we’ve already heard: the Standard Model of Particle physics describes all the world we experience in our everyday lives.

The second one, just up, tackles quantum field theory and the Pauli exclusion principle, of which we’ve been recently speaking. (Admittedly it’s two minutes long, but these are big topics!)

The world is made of fields, which appear to us as particles when we look at them. Something everyone should know.

How Do You Say ‘Disagreement’ in Pirahã? (N.Y.Times)

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By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER. Published: March 21, 2012

Dan Everett. Essential Media & Entertainment/Smithsonian Channel

In his 2008 memoir, “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes,” the linguist Dan Everett recalled the night members of the Pirahã — the isolated Amazonian hunter-gatherers he first visited as a Christian missionary in the late 1970s — tried to kill him.

Dr. Everett survived, and his life among the Pirahã, a group of several hundred living in northwest Brazil, went on mostly peacefully as he established himself as a leading scholarly authority on the group and one of a handful of outsiders to master their difficult language.

His life among his fellow linguists, however, has been far less idyllic, and debate about his scholarship is poised to boil over anew, thanks to his ambitious new book, “Language: The Cultural Tool,” and a forthcoming television documentary that presents an admiring view of his research among the Pirahã along with a darkly conspiratorial view of some of his critics.

Members of the Pirahã people of Amazonian Brazil, who have an unusual language, as seen in “The Grammar of Happiness.” Essential Media & Entertainment/Smithsonian Channel

In 2005 Dr. Everett shot to international prominence with a paper claiming that he had identified some peculiar features of the Pirahã language that challenged Noam Chomsky’s influential theory, first proposed in the 1950s, that human language is governed by “universal grammar,” a genetically determined capacity that imposes the same fundamental shape on all the world’s tongues.

The paper, published in the journal Current Anthropology, turned him into something of a popular hero but a professional lightning rod, embraced in the press as a giant killer who had felled the mighty Chomsky but denounced by some fellow linguists as a fraud, an attention seeker or worse, promoting dubious ideas about a powerless indigenous group while refusing to release his data to skeptics.

The controversy has been simmering in journals and at conferences ever since, fed by a slow trickle of findings by researchers who have followed Dr. Everett’s path down to the Amazon. In a telephone interview Dr. Everett, 60, who is the dean of arts and sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., insisted that he’s not trying to pick a fresh fight, let alone present himself as a rival to the man he calls “the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

“I’m a small fish in the sea,” he said, adding, “I do not put myself at Chomsky’s level.”

Dan Everett in the Amazon region of Brazil with the Pirahã in 1981. Courtesy Daniel Everett

Still, he doesn’t shy from making big claims for “Language: The Cultural Tool,” published last week by Pantheon. “I am going beyond my work with Pirahã and systematically dismantling the evidence in favor of a language instinct,” he said. “I suspect it will be extremely controversial.”

Even some of Dr. Everett’s admirers fault him for representing himself as a lonely voice of truth against an all-powerful Chomskian orthodoxy bent on stopping his ideas dead. It’s certainly the view advanced in the documentary, “The Grammar of Happiness,” which accuses unnamed linguists of improperly influencing the Brazilian government to deny his request to return to Pirahã territory, either with the film crew or with a research team from M.I.T., led by Ted Gibson, a professor of cognitive science. (It’s scheduled to run on the Smithsonian Channel in May.)

A Pirahã man in the film “The Grammar of Happiness.” Essential Media & Entertainment/Smithsonian Channel

Dr. Everett acknowledged that he had no firsthand evidence of any intrigues against him. But Miguel Oliveira, an associate professor of linguistics at the Federal University of Alagoas and the M.I.T. expedition’s Brazilian sponsor, said in an interview that Dr. Everett is widely resented among scholars in Brazil for his missionary past, anti-Chomskian stance and ability to attract research money.

“This is politics, everybody knows that,” Dr. Oliveira said. “One of the arguments is that he’s stealing something from the indigenous people to become famous. It’s not said. But that’s the way they think.”

Claims of skullduggery certainly add juice to a debate that, to nonlinguists, can seem arcane. In a sense what Dr. Everett has taken from the Pirahã isn’t gold or rare medicinal plants but recursion, a property of language that allows speakers to embed phrases within phrases — for example, “The professor said Everett said Chomsky is wrong” — infinitely.

In a much-cited 2002 paper Professor Chomsky, an emeritus professor of linguistics at M.I.T., writing with Marc D. Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch, declared recursion to be the crucial feature of universal grammar and the only thing separating human language from its evolutionary forerunners. But Dr. Everett, who had been publishing quietly on the Pirahã for two decades, announced in his 2005 paper that their language lacked recursion, along with color terms, number terms, and other common properties of language. The Pirahã, Dr. Everett wrote, showed these linguistic gaps not because they were simple-minded, but because their culture — which emphasized concrete matters in the here and now and also lacked creation myths and traditions of art making — did not require it.

To Dr. Everett, Pirahã was a clear case of culture shaping grammar — an impossibility according to the theory of universal grammar. But to some of his critics the paper was really just a case of Dr. Everett — who said he began questioning his own Chomskian ideas in the early 1990s, around the time he began questioning his faith — fixing the facts around his new theories.

In 2009 the linguists Andrew Nevins, Cilene Rodrigues and David Pesetsky, three of the fiercest early critics of Dr. Everett’s paper, published their own in the journal Language, disputing his linguistic claims and expressing “discomfort” with his overall account of the Pirahã’s simple culture. Their main source was Dr. Everett himself, whose 1982 doctoral dissertation, they argued, showed clear evidence of recursion in Pirahã.

“He was right the first time,” Dr. Pesetsky, an M.I.T. professor, said in an interview. “The first time he had reasons. The second time he had no reasons.”

Some scholars say the debate remains stymied by a lack of fresh, independently gathered data. Three different research teams, including one led by Dr. Gibson that traveled to the Pirahã in 2007, have published papers supporting Dr. Everett’s claim that there are no numbers in the Pirahã language. But efforts to go recursion hunting in the jungle — using techniques that range from eliciting sentences to having the Pirahã play specially designed video games — have so far yielded no published results.

Still, some have tried to figure out ways to press ahead, even without direct access to the Pirahã. After Dr. Gibson’s team was denied permission to return to Brazil in 2010, its members devised a method that minimized reliance on Dr. Everett’s data by analyzing instead a corpus of 1,000 sentences from Pirahã stories transcribed by another missionary in the region.

Their analysis, presented at the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting in January, found no embedded clauses but did uncover “suggestive evidence” of recursion in a more obscure grammatical corner. It’s a result that is hardly satisfying to Dr. Everett, who questions it. But his critics, oddly, seem no more pleased.

Dr. Pesetsky, who heard the presentation, dismissed the whole effort as biased from the start by its reliance on Dr. Everett’s grammatical classifications and basic assumptions. “They were taking for granted the correctness of the hypothesis they were trying to disconfirm,” he said.

But to Dr. Gibson, who said he does not find Dr. Everett’s cultural theory of language persuasive, such responses reflect the gap between theoretical linguists and data-driven cognitive scientists, not to mention the strangely calcified state of the recursion debate.

“Chomskians and non-Chomskians are weirdly illogical at times,” he said. “It’s like they just don’t want to have a cogent argument. They just want to contradict what the other guy is saying.”

Dr. Everett’s critics fault him for failing to release his field data, even seven years after the controversy erupted. He countered that he is currently working to translate his decades’ worth of material and hopes to post some transcriptions online “over the next several months.” The bigger outrage, he insisted, is what he characterized as other scholars’ efforts to accuse him of “racist research” and interfere with his access to the Pirahã.

Dr. Rodrigues, a professor of linguistics at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro, acknowledged by e-mail that in 2007 she wrote a letter to Funai, the Brazilian government agency in charge of indigenous affairs, detailing her objections to Dr. Everett’s linguistic research and to his broader description of Pirahã culture.

She declined to elaborate on the contents of the letter, which she said was written at Funai’s request and did not recommend any particular course of action. But asked about her overall opinion of Dr. Everett’s research, she said, “It does not meet the standards of scientific evidence in our field.”

Whatever the reasons for Dr. Everett’s being denied access, he’s enlisting the help of the Pirahã themselves, who are shown at the end of “The Grammar of Happiness” recording an emotional plea to the Brazilian government.

“We love Dan,” one man says into the camera. “Dan speaks our language.”

Books Without Borders (N.Y. Times)

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EDITORIAL

Published: March 15, 2012

When we reached Tony Diaz, novelist and novice smuggler, by phone this week, he was in West Texas, 500 miles from his home in Houston and about a third of the way through a journey with three dozen comrades and serious contraband. That is, a busload of books.

“The Aztec muse is manifesting right now!” Mr. Diaz said, which was a gleeful way of saying: Watch out, Tucson. Dangerous literature on the way.

Mr. Diaz is the impresario behind an inspiring act of indignation and cultural pride. His bus-and-car caravan is “smuggling” books by Latino authors into Arizona. It’s a response to an educational mugging by right-wing politicians, who enacted a state law in 2010 outlawing curriculums that “advocate ethnic solidarity,” among other imagined evils. That led to the banning of Mexican-American studies in Tucson’s public schools last year.

School officials say the books are not technically banned, just redistributed to the library. But what good is having works from thereading list — like “Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941” and “The House on Mango Street,” by Sandra Cisneros — on the shelves if they can’t be taught? Indeed, the point of dismantling the curriculum was to end classroom discussions about these books.

That’s where Mr. Diaz’s “librotraficantes,” or book traffickers, come in. “Arizona tried to erase our history,” he says. “So we’re making more.” They left Houston on Monday. On the way, they’ve held readings with “banned” authors at galleries, bookshops and youth centers. After leaving El Paso on Wednesday, they followed the Rio Grande to Albuquerque, to meet with Rudolfo Anaya, a godfather of Chicano literature. They also planned to wrap some volumes in plastic and carry the “wetbooks” across the river. At the Arizona border, there will be a crossing ceremony. They expect to be in Tucson, singing, dancing and handing out books, by the weekend.

O que você não quer ser quando crescer (Revista Fapesp)

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HUMANIDADES | PERCEPÇÃO DA CIÊNCIA

Pesquisa mostra que menos de 3% dos adolescentes latino-americanos desejam seguir uma carreira científica
Carlos Haag
Edição Impressa 192 – Fevereiro de 2012

Boneco de Albert Einstein na Estação Ciência, em São Paulo. © EDUARDO CESAR

Mesmo vivendo num mundo imerso em tecnologia, o jovem, ao se deparar com a célebre pergunta “o que você quer ser quando crescer?”, dificilmente responderá “cientista”. Segundo a pesquisa Los estudiantes y la ciência, projeto do Observatório Ibero-americano de Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade (Ryct/Cyted), organizado pelo argentino Carmelo Polino, apenas 2,7% dos estudantes secundaristas (de 15 a 19 anos) da América Latina e Espanha pensam em seguir uma carreira nas áreas de ciências exatas ou naturais, como biologia, química, física, e matemática (as ciências agrícolas mal aparecem). Realizada entre 2008 e 2010, foram consultadas cerca de 9 mil escolas, privadas e particulares, em sete capitais: Assunção, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Lima, Montevidéu, Bogotá e Madri. Curiosamente, 56% dos entrevistados se disseram interessados em se profissionalizar em ciências sociais e um quinto deles optou pelas engenharias. A equipe brasileira participante do projeto veio do Laboratório de Jornalismo da Unicamp (Labjor), coordenado pelo linguista Carlos Vogt, responsável pelo capítulo “Hábitos informativos sobre ciência e tecnologia” do livro, lançado em espanhol e disponível apenas para download pelo link www.oei.es/salactsi/libro-estudiantes.pdf.
“São dados preocupantes para sociedades em cujas economias há uma intensa necessidade de cientistas e engenheiros, mas há um baixo interesse dos jovens por essas profissões. E as razões alegadas igualmente são desanimadoras: 78% dos estudantes explicam sua opção por achar que as ciências exatas e as naturais são ‘muito difíceis’, quase metade dos alunos as considera ‘chatas’, enquanto um quarto deles afirma que esses campos oferecem oportunidades limitadas de emprego”, afirma Polino. “O número de alunos de ciências já está num patamar insuficiente para as necessidades da economia e indústria e, acima de tudo, para lidar com os problemas a serem enfrentados pelas sociedades no futuro.” Ainda segundo os entrevistados, o desânimo em face do desafio das ciências está ligado, em boa parte, à forma como elas são ensinadas, e reclamam que os recursos utilizados em sala de aula são limitados. Metade dos adolescentes tampouco acredita que as matérias científicas tenham aumentado sua apreciação pela natureza, nem que sejam fontes de solução para problemas de vida cotidiana.

“Há barreiras culturais, porque os jovens de hoje acham que para ter êxito na vida, ter dinheiro, não é preciso estudar muito. É possível escolher uma carreira de resultados econômicos mais rápidos. A cultura do esforço, que é a cultura da ciência, vem perdendo espaço. Temos a necessidade urgente de uma política pública de educação e comunicação da ciência”, avisa Polino. Em alguns pontos a nova pesquisa reforça algumas tendências observadas no estudo anterior do grupo, Percepção pública da ciência (ver “Imagens da ciência” na edição 95 de Pesquisa FAPESP; “Leitores esquivos”, na 188; e “Avanços e desafios”, na 185), de 2004, mas a pesquisa recente, com o foco nos jovens, traz novos e preocupantes dados. “Num país como o nosso, cujo futuro depende dos avanços de ciência e tecnologia, e onde há uma grande carência de profissionais técnicos e engenheiros, esses números demandam atenção das autoridades e da sociedade em geral para despertar nesses jovens o interesse pelas carreiras científicas. Acima de tudo, é um paradoxo, porque vivemos num mundo estruturado pela presença da tecnologia em todos os espaços da vida das pessoas”, analisa Vogt. “Apreciamos as benesses do esforço científico, mas não nos interessamos em continuar esse trabalho. As facilidades são ofertadas, mas são ilusórias, porque se quisermos tomar posse dessas conquistas é preciso capacitação científica, capacidade de abstração, mesmo com todas essas dificuldades que advêm do estudo das ciências exatas e naturais.”

“Já existem obstáculos grandes para os jovens adentrarem o mundo das ciências, visto como hermético, uma coisa de iniciados com linguagem própria que pouco tem a ver com o mundo sensível em que vivemos, exigindo um alto grau de abstração, e nem sempre se pode encontrar com facilidade analogias na vida pessoal dos estudantes”, observa Vogt. “Imagine tudo isso num país como o nosso em que apenas 2% dos formados desejam seguir uma carreira no magistério. A situação de ensino é lamentável e, na maioria dos casos, quem dá aulas de ciências vem de campos alternativos, como engenheiros ou médicos, pouco interessados em facilitar ou renovar a maneira de ensinar.”

São, portanto, sutis as razões que levam um estudante a optar pela carreira científica. Segundo a pesquisa, 4 em cada 10 estudantes seguiriam a profissão por dois motivos: viajar muito e trabalhar com novas tecnologias. Para um terço dos interessados, o salário, que consideram atrativo, é também uma variável a ser levada em conta para essa escolha. Bem atrás, com menos de 18%, estão motivos como: descobrir coisas novas, solucionar problemas da humanidade e avançar o conhecimento. Bem abaixo, com menos de 5%, estão razões como exercer uma profissão socialmente prestigiada ou trabalhar com pessoas qualificadas. No campo dos fatores que desanimam os jovens, o grande “vilão” é a didática das ciências nas aulas, que afasta da cabeça dos estudantes o desejo de uma carreira científica ou um futuro laboratorial. Em seguida, para 6 em cada 10 alunos, a dificuldade em entender as matérias é um filtro negativo. O “tédio” assola metade dos jovens. Daí, outro fator que os desanima é a ideia de que escolher a área científica é seguir estudando “indefinidamente” algo que consideram “chato”. Em quarto lugar, com 24%, está o receio de que existam poucas oportunidades de conseguir um emprego na área.

Isso não impede os jovens de ver aqueles que escolheram a ciência para profissão como figuras socialmente prestigiadas, cujo trabalho está associado a fins altruístas e ao progresso, e a imagem dos cientistas que predomina é a de apaixonados pelo seu trabalho, com mentes abertas e um pensamento lógico, não vigorando mais o estereótipo do cientista “solitário” e “distante da realidade”. Há, porém, um ponto controverso: os jovens estão convencidos, em sua maioria, de que os cientistas são donos de uma inteligência superior, que embora possa ser vista como uma característica positiva e atrativa afugenta os jovens, que não se consideram capazes de alcançar os patamares dessas “figuras excepcionais”, afetando negativamente a escolha pela carreira científica. “É preciso analisar esses dados a partir do seu potencial, pois é possível mudar esse paradigma atual que reverta a situação, trazendo não apenas mais jovens para as carreiras científicas, como também melhorando a experiência de aprendizagem da educação secundária”, observa Polino.

Diante da afirmação “que a ciência traz mais benefícios do que riscos à vida das pessoas”, 7 em cada 10 entrevistados concordaram com a premissa. Mas diante da assertiva “a ciência e a tecnologia estão produzindo um estilo de vida artificial e desumanizado”, as posições são menos definidas e a resposta mais recorrente (21,5%) foi “não concordo, nem discordo”. O contexto social revelou aspectos interessantes: os jovens de escolas públicas são menos entusiastas das comodidades oferecidas pela tecnologia. “Não é de estranhar que os que têm menos acesso a ela percebam menos a sua importância em facilitar a vida das pessoas”, nota Polino. Diante das afirmações “contraditórias” de que a ciência está “tirando postos de trabalho” e que “a ciência trará mais chances de trabalho para as gerações futuras” os resultados revelam que mais jovens (37%) têm medo de perder seu emprego por causa da ciência do que são otimistas com o futuro (32%). Segundo os pesquisadores, as respostas seguem o padrão da juventude latino-americana, para quem a “meritocracia” no trabalho é mais mito do que realidade. Quando o meio ambiente entra em cena, tudo piora.

Em face das assertivas “ciência e tecnologia eliminarão a pobreza e a fome do mundo” e “a ciência e a tecnologia são responsáveis pela maior parte dos problemas ambientais”, 3 em cada 10 estudantes não acreditam no poder de “cura” científico e a cifra se repete na certeza de que a ciência está afetando o meio ambiente negativamente. Aqui também as mulheres mostram sua visão: elas são as mais céticas, com 5 em cada 10 rejeitando a capacidade da tecnologia em pôr fim às mazelas globais. No cômputo total, porém, há certo otimismo juvenil: 52% dos adolescentes estão abertos e favoráveis ao que a ciência e a tecnologia possam realizar em nossas sociedades, mostrando que não vigora mais a fé cega e absoluta diante de seus resultados, sendo bem mais moderados e conscientes dos riscos do que os adultos, o que, dizem os pesquisadores, se bem aproveitado pode servir de base a uma cidadania mais crítica e responsável. “Instalar uma usina em Angra sem consultar a sociedade é, hoje, algo impensável. Os jovens pressupõem que exista um sistema que enfatiza a democratização nos processos científicos, o que não implica votar em quem vai ou não para um laboratório”, observa Vogt. “Eles aceitam uma cultura científica que realize uma ligação entre razão e humanidade, entre ciência e sociedade.”

Isso talvez explique um dado curioso descoberto na pesquisa realizada pelo Labjor. Se o caminho do conhecimento científico principal continua a ser a televisão, seguida pela internet, a ficção científica, em livros, filmes, HQs ou games, ganhou um honroso terceiro lugar como fonte de informação sobre ciências para os jovens. “Ao lado da internet, esses meios diferenciados oferecem um grande potencial de atrair jovens para a ciência de forma lúdica e interessante, uma forma estratégica de atingir essa camada da população para a divulgação de assuntos científicos”, nota Vogt. Até porque em vários lugares pesquisados as instituições oficiais são pouco conhecidas ou mesmo ignoradas, assim como os locais onde se pode informar sobre ciência, como museus ou zoológicos. Assim, curiosamente, uma cidade como São Paulo, onde há uma concentração de centros de pesquisa, universidades, e onde o acesso à informação científica é favorecido pela presença de museus e uma oferta midiática rica, mostrou índices de consumo informativo da população abaixo da média.

Veja infográficos:
Evolução dos universitários formados por área do conhecimento; Frequência com que os jovens se informam sobre ciência; O que afasta os jovens da ciência

Do neighborhood conditions affect school performance? (The University of Chicago Urban Network)

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March 1, 2012

A recent report issued by the Center on Education Policy predicted that 48 percent of US public school students would not meet reading and math standards by 2014, as legally mandated by the decade-old No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The law was originally established to address the comparatively low test scores of low-income students. With the limited success of NCLB, the discussion about school performance has again grabbed the headlines.  While social scientists have always been interested in the dynamics behind the low achievement of students living in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, in recent years researchers have been trying to establish precisely the extent to which neighborhood conditions, net of other factors, influence educational achievement.

Better neighborhoods, higher test scores

Social scientists Jens Ludwig, Helen Ladd, and Greg Duncan used data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment to investigate the impact of neighborhood environment on educational outcomes. The MTO experiment was conducted in five cities: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Families who volunteered were randomly assigned to different treatment groups. Whereas the experimental group received counseling and vouchers to move into low-poverty neighborhoods, the second group simply received regular Section 8 subsidies without being encouraged to move out of high-poverty areas. A third group functioned as a control group and received no subsidies at all. Using data from the Baltimore site, Ludwig, Ladd, and Duncan found that elementary school students in the experimental group who had moved to better neighborhoods scored about one-quarter of a standard deviation higher in reading and math tests than children in the control group. Robert Sampson, Patrick Sharkey, and Stephen Raudenbush foundsimilar results when they investigated the impact of neighborhood disadvantage on the verbal ability of African American children.  Based on intelligence tests administered within the framework of the Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods project, they found that children who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods on average score four points lower than children living in better-off areas—a result that is almost equal to missing a year of schooling.

Better neighborhoods, no improvement?

A more recent analysis of MTO data from all five cities generated very different results. Social scientists Lisa Sanbonmatsu, Jeffrey Kling, Greg Duncan, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunnfound that math as well as reading scores did not significantly improve for children aged between six and twenty. The children were assessed four to six years after they had moved to a low-poverty neighborhood. Sanbonmatsu and her colleagues also revisited the children in the Ludwig Baltimore sample and found that the Baltimore elementary school children did not sustain their educational gains. In the final results of the MTO experiment, published in October 2011, Sanbonmatsu and her colleagues confirmed that there are few significant improvements in test scores ten to fifteen years after children had moved to less disadvantaged neighborhoods. There was no significant difference in achievement between those children who stayed in high-poverty areas and those who had moved away. The researchers suggested that the results may be related to the segregated, low-quality schools the children continued to attend even though they had moved to low-poverty areas.

In a review of neighborhood-effects studies and a reanalysis of the MTO data, sociologistJulia Burdick-Will and her colleagues challenged this null finding. They argued that the results of MTO, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, and other studies showed that neighborhood effects may work in nonlinear ways. The size of the effect visible may be contingent on other factors, such as exposure to violence or the relative disadvantage of the neighborhood the child lives in. Children who come from very disadvantaged neighborhoods may experience larger neighborhood effects than those living in moderately disadvantaged areas. Consequently, the size of the neighborhood effect depends on the city. In high-poverty areas of Chicago and Baltimore, the MTO data showed an improvement in test scores. In Boston, Los Angeles, and New York, where neighborhoods are comparatively less disadvantaged, the researchers did not find clear test-score improvements.

Cultural factors

Sociologist David Harding argued that neighborhood effects mainly work through cultural pathways. Children living in disadvantaged neighborhoods are exposed to a greater variety of educational choices than their peers in other areas. He suggested that living in a culturally heterogeneous neighborhood has a negative impact on educational achievement. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescence (AddHealth), he showed that inner-city children observe educational behavior ranging from dropping out of high school to graduating from college. This greater variety of educational models seems to be affecting children’s own educational aspirations, by forcing them to decide among too many competing alternatives. Analyzing the same data set in another recent article, Harding also found that high levels of neighborhood violence may have a detrimental effect on high school graduation rates. He found that living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence was associated with significantly lower chances of high school graduation, regardless of family structure, income, and language spoken in the household.

Multigenerational effects

Sharkey and sociologist Felix Elwert have recently argued that neighborhood poverty has a cumulative effect across generations. Relying on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), they showed that children who were raised in poor neighborhoods by parents who had grown up in similarly disadvantaged communities had cognitive ability scores more than half a standard deviation below their peers. The children scored on average 9.27 points lower on the reading test and 8.36 points lower on the problem-solving test than children who were raised in non-poor neighborhoods by parents who had grown up in similarly non-poor areas. Though the authors demonstrated the presence of multigenerational effects through advanced statistical models, they explained that disentangling the precise interactions underlying the complex web of mechanisms at work over generations was impossible.

While researchers try to disentangle the impact of neighborhoods and generational effects on schooling, policy makers are beginning to consider alternatives to NCLB. In September of 2011, President Obama announced that states may now opt out of the program under certain conditions. With schools failing to meet the test score standards of NCLB, the government is rethinking its approach to helping the most disadvantaged students.

Could Many Universities Follow Borders Bookstores Into Oblivion? (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

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March 7, 2012, 7:44 pm
By Marc Parry

Atlanta — Higher education’s spin on the Silicon Valley garage. That was the vision laid out in September, when the Georgia Institute of Technology announced a new lab for disruptive ideas, the Center for 21st Century Universities. During a visit to Atlanta last week, I checked in to see how things were going, sitting down with Richard A. DeMillo, the center’s director and Georgia Tech’s former dean of computing, and Paul M.A. Baker, the center’s associate director. We talked about challenges and opportunities facing colleges at a time of economic pain and technological change—among them the chance that many universities might follow Borders Bookstores into oblivion.

Q. You recently wrote that universities are “bystanders” at the revolution happening around them, even as they think they’re at the center of it. How so?

Mr. DeMillo: It’s the same idea as the news industry. Local newspapers survived most of the last century on profits from classified ads. And what happened? Craigslist drove profits out of classified ads for local newspapers. If you think that it’s all revolving around you, and you’re going to be able to impose your value system on this train that’s leaving the station, that’s going to lead you to one set of decisions. Think of Carnegie Mellon, with its “Four Courses, Millions of Users” idea [which became the Open Learning Initiative], or Yale with the humanities courses, thinking that what the market really wants is universal access to these four courses at the highest quality. And really what the market is doing is something completely different. The higher-education market is reinventing what a university is, what a course is, what a student is, what the value is. I don’t know why anyone would think that the online revolution is about reproducing the classroom experience.

Q. So what is the revolution about?

Mr. DeMillo: You don’t know where events are going to take higher education. But if you want to be an important institution 20 years from now, you have to position yourself so that you can adapt to whatever those technology changes are. Whenever you have this kind of technological change, where there’s a large incumbency, the incumbents are inherently at a disadvantage. And we’re the incumbents.

Q. What are some of the most important changes happening now?

Mr. DeMillo: What you’re seeing, for example, is technology enabling a single master teacher to reach students on an individualized basis on a scale that is unprecedented. So when Sebastian Thrun offers his Intro to Robotics course and gets 150,000 students—that’s a big deal.

Why is it a big deal? Well, because people who want to learn robotics want to learn from the master. And there’s something about the medium that he uses that makes that connection intimate. It’s not the same kind of connection that you get by pointing a camera at the front of the room and letting someone write on a whiteboard. These guys have figured out how to design a way of explaining the material that connects with people at scale. So Stanford all of a sudden becomes a place with a network of stakeholders that’s several orders of magnitude larger than it was 10 years ago. Every one of those students in India that wants to connect to Stanford now—connect to a mentor—now has a way to connect by bypassing their local institutions. Every institution that can’t offer a robotics course now has a way of offering a robotics course.

I think what you see happening now with the massive open courses is going to fundamentally change the business models. It’s going to put the notion of value front and center. Why would I want a credential from this university? Why would I want to pay tuition to this university? It really ups the stakes.

Mr. Baker: There used to be something called Borders, you may remember. Think of Borders, the bookstore, “X, Y, Z University,” the bookstore. If you’ve got Amazon as an analogue for these massively open courses, there is still a model where people actually go into bookstores because sometimes they want to touch, or they like hanging out, or there’s other value offered by that. What it means is that the university needs to rethink what it’s doing, how it’s doing it.

And how it innovates in a way of surviving in the face of this. If I can do the Amazon equivalent of this open course, why should I come here? Well, maybe you shouldn’t. And that’s a client that is lost.

Mr. DeMillo: All you have to do is add up the amount of money spent on courses. Just take an introduction to computer science. Add up the amount of money that’s spent nationwide on introductory programming courses. It’s a big number, I’ll bet. What is the value received for that spend? If, in fact, there’s a large student population that can be served by a higher-quality course, what’s the argument for spending all that money on 6,000 introduction to programming courses?

Q. You really think that many universities could go the way of Borders?

Mr. DeMillo: Yeah. Well, you can see it already. We lost, in this university system, four institutions this year.

Mr. Baker: The University System of Georgia merged four institutions into other ones that were geographically within 50 miles. The programs essentially were replicated. And in an environment in which you’ve got reduced resources, you can’t afford to have essentially identical programs 50 miles apart.

Q. So what sort of learning landscape do you think might emerge?

Mr. DeMillo: One thing that you might see is highly tuned curricula, students being able to select from a range of things that they want to learn and a range of mentors that they want to interact with, whether you think of it as hacking degrees or pulling assessments from a menu of different universities. What does that mean for the individual university? It means that a university has to figure out where its true value sits in that landscape.

Mr. Baker: Another thing we’re looking at is development of a value index to try to calculate, to be vulgar, the return on investment. Our idea is to try to figure out ways of determining what constitutes value for a student, based on four or five personas. So for, let’s say, a mom returning at 50 who wants an education—she’s going to value certain things differently than a 17-year-old rocket scientist coming to Tech who wants to get through in three years and knows exactly what she wants to do.

Mr. Demillo: Jeff Selingo wrote a column about this, having one place to go to figure out the economic value of a degree from a university. It’s a great idea, but why focus only on the paycheck as an economic value? There are lots of indicators of value. Do students from this university go to graduate school by a disproportionately large number? Do they get fellowships? Are they people who stay in their profession for a long period of time? You start to build up a picture of what students tell you, of what alumni tell you, was the value of that education. Can we pull these metrics together and then say something interesting about our institution and by extension others?

Q. What other projects is your center working on right now?

Mr. DeMillo: The Khan Academy—small bursts of knowledge that may or may not be included in a curriculum—was a really interesting idea.

Can students generate this kind of material in a way that’s useful for other students? That’s the genesis of our TechBurstcompetition [in which students create short videos that explain a single topic].

It turns out there’s a lot of interest on the part of the students at Georgia Tech in teaching what they know to their peers. The interesting part of the project is the unexpected things that you get. We had a discussion yesterday about mistakes. This is student-generated stuff, so is it right? Not all the time. Which causes great angst on the part of traditionalists, because now we have Georgia Tech TechBurst video that has errors in it. If these were instructional videos that we were marketing, that would be a very big deal. But they’re not. They’re the start of a thread of conversation among students. There’s one on gerrymandering. So it’s a political-science video, it’s cutely produced, but in some sense it’s not exactly right. And so what you would expect is now other students will come along and annotate that video, and say, well, that’s not exactly what gerrymandering is. And you’ll start to see this students-teaching-students peer-tutoring process taking place in real time.

Q. What about the massive open online course Georgia Tech will run in the fall?

Mr. DeMillo: The idea of a massive open course is something that people normally apply to introductory courses. What happens when you look at a massive open advanced seminar? A seminar room with 10,000 students, 50,000 students—what does that even mean? We’ve got some people here that have been blogging for quite a while about advanced topics. In fact, one of the blogs—Godel’s Lost Letter, by Professor Dick Lipton of Georgia Tech, and Ken Regan of the University at Buffalo—is about advanced computer theory, so it’s a very mathematical blog. It’s in the top 0.1 percent of WordPress blogs. A typical day is 5,000 to 10,000 page views. A hot day is 100,000. The question is can we take this blogging format and turn it into an online seminar.

Q. How would that work?

Mr. DeMillo: The blog is essentially an expression of a master teacher’s understanding of a field to people that want to learn about it. We think that there are some very simple layers that can be built under the existing blogging format that can essentially turn it into a massive open online seminar. It’s also a way of conducting scientific research. When you think about what happens in this blog, it celebrates the process of scientific discovery. I’ll just give you one example. Last year about this time some industrial scientist claimed that he had solved one of the outstanding problems in this area. In the normal course of events, the scientist would have written up the paper, would have sent it to a conference. It would have been refereed. Nine months later the paper would have been presented at the conference. People would have talked about it. It would have been written up to submit to a journal. Refereeing would have taken a couple of years for that. Well, the paper got submitted to Lipton’s blog. It just caused a flurry of activity. So thousands and thousands of scientists flocked to this paper, and essentially speeded up the refereeing of the paper, shortening the time from five years to a couple of weeks. It turns out that people came to believe that the claim was not valid, and the paper was incorrect. But what an education for future research students. You get to see the process of scientific discovery in action.

This is an interesting bookend to the idea of a massive open course. Because the people that are thinking about the massive open online courses for introductory material have a set of considerations. Students are at different levels of achievement. Assessment is very important. The credentialing process is dictated by whether or not you want credit. If you go to the other end of the curriculum, and say, well, what happens when we try to do these advanced courses at scale, credentialing is completely different. Assessment is completely different. You can’t rely on the same automation that you could in the introductory courses. Social networks become extremely important if you’re going to do this stuff at scale, because one professor can’t deal with 100,000 readers. He has to have a network of trusted people who would be able to answer questions. The anticipation is that a whole new set of problems would come up with these kinds of courses.

This conversation has been edited and shortened.

Abstinence-Only Education Does Not Lead to Abstinent Behavior, Researchers Find (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Nov. 29, 2011) — States that prescribe abstinence-only sex education programs in public schools have significantly higher teenage pregnancy and birth rates than states with more comprehensive sex education programs, researchers from the University of Georgia have determined.

The researchers looked at teen pregnancy and birth data from 48 U.S. states to evaluate the effectiveness of those states’ approaches to sex education, as prescribed by local laws and policies.
“Our analysis adds to the overwhelming evidence indicating that abstinence-only education does not reduce teen pregnancy rates,” said Kathrin Stanger-Hall, assistant professor of plant biology and biological sciences in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

Hall is first author on the resulting paper, which has been published online in the journal PLoS ONE.

The study is the first large-scale evidence that the type of sex education provided in public schools has a significant effect on teen pregnancy rates, Hall said.

“This clearly shows that prescribed abstinence-only education in public schools does not lead to abstinent behavior,” said David Hall, second author and assistant professor of genetics in the Franklin College. “It may even contribute to the high teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. compared to other industrialized countries.”

Along with teen pregnancy rates and sex education methods, Hall and Stanger-Hall looked at the influence of socioeconomic status, education level, access to Medicaid waivers and ethnicity of each state’s teen population.

Even when accounting for these factors, which could potentially impact teen pregnancy rates, the significant relationship between sex education methods and teen pregnancy remained: the more strongly abstinence education is emphasized in state laws and policies, the higher the average teenage pregnancy and birth rates.

“Because correlation does not imply causation, our analysis cannot demonstrate that emphasizing abstinence causes increased teen pregnancy. However, if abstinence education reduced teen pregnancy as proponents claim, the correlation would be in the opposite direction,” said Stanger-Hall.

The paper indicates that states with the lowest teen pregnancy rates were those that prescribed comprehensive sex and/or HIV education, covering abstinence alongside proper contraception and condom use. States whose laws stressed the teaching of abstinence until marriage were significantly less successful in preventing teen pregnancies.

These results come at an important time for legislators. A new evidence-based Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative was signed into federal law in December 2009 and awarded $114 million for implementation. However, federal abstinence-only funding was renewed for 2010 and beyond by including $250 million of mandatory abstinence-only funding as part of an amendment to the Senate Finance Committee’s health-reform legislation.

With two types of federal funding programs available, legislators of individual states now have the opportunity to decide which type of sex education — and which funding option — to choose for their state and possibly reconsider their state’s sex education policies for public schools, while pursuing the ultimate goal of reducing teen pregnancy rates.

Stanger-Hall and Hall conducted this large-scale analysis to provide scientific evidence to inform this decision.

“Advocates for continued abstinence-only education need to ask themselves: If teens don’t learn about human reproduction, including safe sexual health practices to prevent unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, as well as how to plan their reproductive adult life in school, then when should they learn it and from whom?” said Stanger-Hall.

The filmmaker: A push to broaden the reach of ‘ski porn’ (The Daily Climate)

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Mossop-sherpas

Nov. 7, 2011

David Mossop and Sherpas Cinemas are transforming ski flicks, turning the usual plot-less, context-less jumble of skiing images into a message about environmental destruction, mass consumption and climate change.

Interview conducted and condensed by Rae Tyson

The Daily Climate

A critically acclaimed film combining action, free-style skiing and a climate impact message debuted this fall. Representing the leading edge of a new wave of ski films, All.I.Can juxtaposes “ski-porn” – plot-less montages of expert skiers flying down and off impossibly steep mountainsides – against images of environmental destruction and mass consumption. Reviewers say the movie, available on DVD and to be released on iTunes on Nov. 14, could change the genre permanently.

With enough creativity, ski films have the capacity to address almost any topic. – David Mossop

British Columbia cinematographers Eric Crossland and Dave Mossop filmed the movie in Chile, Canada, Morocco, Greenland and Alaska. ESPN’s Jamey Voss calls it “the best movie in skiing.” Dave Mossop has been doing ski films and photography for years. This is his first attempt at a film with a strong social message.

Your film company, Sherpas Cinema, has said “the time has come for a ski film that stands for something.” Explain the inspiration for All.I.Can.

The classic ski-porn formula works brilliantly and will always have its place. But skiing is about so much more than just porn. The mountains bring us every emotion in the book. With enough creativity, ski films have the capacity to address almost any topic.

All.I.Can. Official Teaser from Sherpas Cinema on Vimeo.

Has this film altered your view about your ability to affect change? 

This project has really opened my eyes to what is possible, and now it almost feels like our duty to see how far that envelope can be pushed.

What convinced you to focus on climate change?

The root of All.I.Can is the relationship between mountain people and nature. Skiers are more reliant on weather and climate than almost any other subculture. A well-crafted film has the potential to act as a trigger: If mountain culture doesn’t stand up, who will?

You traveled around the world to shoot this film. Did you see evidence of the impact of climate change in any of the locations you visited?

A big part of the climate problem is that it is too slow for us humans to perceive. But, at almost every location we went, we would hear stories from the elders indicating a warming trend.

Such as?

The Inuit of Greenland talked about the more challenging hunting conditions due to ice breakup. Bud Stoll and Mary Woodward, two of the older skiers in our film, reminisced about the deep winters the Kootenays when they were youngsters. The Chilean gauchos and Moroccan porters recalled stories of colder snowier winters.

Unchecked, do you believe that climate change might impact skiing – and other winter sports?

I know as little about climate change as everyone else. But it isn’t hard to sense that the human race is running an unsustainable program.

The reviews so far have been impressive. ESPN, for example, called All.I.Can “a wake-up call in many ways.”

We are totally overwhelmed by the response. The world was ready for this kind of cinematic discussion and the idea is striking a chord with skiers and non-skiers alike.

Mossop-volcanoSome question the carbon neutrality of this project. You flew all over the globe and used fuel-guzzling helicopters. How would you respond to that?

We feel that the extra resources used in the film production are far overshadowed by the potential energy of All.I.Can. A truly beautiful film can inspire the whole world and influence countless human decisions in the future.

How did you offset the impact?

We worked with Native Energy to offset the project using carbon credits. They use the money to either counter our carbon emissions directly or invest in future innovations that build toward a sustainable future.

Any plans for future projects with an environmental theme?

I expect an environmental theme will become an undertone in all our future projects, but currently we have no locked plans.

Photos courtesy Sherpas Cinema.

Rae Tyson pioneered the environmental beat at USA Today in the 1980s and today restores and races vintage motorcycles in central Pennsylvania. Climate Query is a semi-weekly feature offered by DailyClimate.org, a nonprofit news service that covers climate change.

Atrair a atenção do público é o grande desafio para os satisfeitos jornalistas de ciência (Fapesp)

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Pesquisa FAPESP
Edição 188 – Outubro 2011
Política de C & T > Cultura científica
Leitores esquivos

Mariluce Moura

Dois estudos brasileiros sobre divulgação científica, citados em primeira mão na Conferência Mundial de Jornalismo Científico 2011, em Doha, Qatar, no final de junho, propõem quando superpostos um panorama curiosamente desconexo para esse campo no país: se de um lado os jornalistas de ciência revelam um alto grau de satisfação com seu trabalho profissional, de outro, uma alta proporção de uma amostra representativa da população paulistana (76%) informa nunca ler notícias científicas nos jornais, revistas ou internet. Agora o mais surpreendente: no universo de entrevistados ouvidos no estado de São Paulo nesta segunda pesquisa, 52,5% declararam ter “muita admiração” pelos jornalistas e 49,2%, pelos cientistas, a despeito de poucos lerem as notícias elaboradas por uns sobre o trabalho dos outros. Esses e outros dados dos estudos provocam muitas questões para os estudiosos da cultura científica nacional. Uma, só para começar: a satisfação profissional do jornalista de ciência independe de ele atingir com sua produção seus alvos, ou seja, os leitores, os telespectadores, os ouvintes ou, de maneira mais geral, o público?

A Conferência Mundial, transferida de última hora do Cairo para Doha, em razão dos distúrbios políticos no Egito iniciados em janeiro, reuniu 726 jornalistas de 81 países que, durante quatro dias, debateram desde o conceito central de jornalismo científico, passando pelas múltiplas formas de exercê-lo e suas dificuldades, até os variados problemas de organização desses profissionais na Ásia, na África, na Europa, na América do Norte ou na América Latina, nos países mais democráticos e nos mais autoritários. Uma questão que atravessou todos esses debates foi o desenvolvimento da noção de que fazer jornalismo científico não é traduzir para o público a informação científica – seria mais encontrar meios eficazes de narrar em linguagem jornalística o que dentro da produção científica pode ser identificado como notícia de interesse para a sociedade. A próxima Conferência Mundial será realizada na Finlândia, em 2013.

Apresentado por um dos representantes da FAPESP na conferência, o estudo que trouxe à tona a medida preocupante do desinteresse por notícias de ciência chama-se “Percepção pública da ciência e da tecnologia no estado de São Paulo” (confira o pdf) e constitui o 12º capítulo dos Indicadores de ciência, tecnologia e inovação em São Paulo – 2010, lançado pela FAPESP em agosto último. Elaborado pela equipe do Laboratório de Estudos Avançados em Jornalismo da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Labjor-Unicamp) sob a coordenação de seu diretor, o linguista Carlos Vogt, em termos empíricos a pesquisa se baseou num questionário composto por 44 perguntas aplicado a 1.076 pessoas na cidade de São Paulo e a mais 749 no interior e no litoral do estado, em 2007. Portanto, foram 1.825 entrevistados em 35 municípios, distribuídos nas 15 regiões administrativas (RAs).

Vale ressaltar que esse foi o segundo levantamento direto em uma amostra da população a respeito de sua percepção da ciência realizado pelo Labjor e ambos estavam integrados a um esforço ibero- -americano em torno da construção de indicadores capazes de refletir a cultura científica nessa região. A primeira enquete, feita entre 2002 e 2003, incluiu amostras das cidades de Campinas, Buenos Aires, Montevidéu, além de Salamanca e Valladolid, na Espanha, e seus resultados foram apresentados nos Indicadores de C,T&I em São Paulo – 2004, também publicado pela FAPESP. Já em 2007, a pesquisa, com a metodologia mais refinada e amostra ampliada, alcançou sete países: além do Brasil, Colômbia, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Panamá e Espanha. O núcleo comum do questionário era constituído por 39 perguntas e cada região podia desenvolver outras questões de sua livre escolha.

O outro estudo brasileiro apresentado em Doha chama-se “Jornalismo científico na América Latina: conhecendo melhor os jornalistas de ciência na região” e, a rigor, ainda está em curso. Os resultados preliminares apresentados baseavam-se nas respostas a um questionário composto por 44 perguntas – desenvolvido pela London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) –, encaminhadas até 21 de junho. Mas a essa altura, mais de 250 jornalistas responderam ao questionário, dentre eles aproximadamente 80 brasileiros, segundo sua coordenadora, a jornalista Luisa Massarani, diretora da Rede Ibero-americana de Monitoramento e Capacitação em Jornalismo Científico, instituição responsável pelo estudo, em parceria com o LSE. O levantamento tem ainda o apoio de associações de jornalismo científico e outras instituições ligadas à área de divulgação científica na Argentina, Bolívia, Brasil, Chile, Colômbia, Costa Rica, Equador, México, Panamá e Venezuela.

No alvo desse estudo, como indicado, aliás, pelo título, está uma preocupação em saber quantos são, quem são e que visão têm da ciência os jornalistas envolvidos com a cobertura sistemática dessa área na América Latina. “Não temos ideia sobre isso, sequer sabemos quantos jornalistas de ciência existem no Brasil e se eles são ou não representativos dentro da categoria”, diz Luisa Massarani, que é também diretora do Museu da Vida da Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz) e coordenadora para a América Latina da Rede de Ciência e Desenvolvimento (SciDev.Net). Até algum tempo, lembra, “a Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Científico (ABJC), com base em seu registro de sócios, situava esse número em torno de 500, mas isso na verdade incluía cientistas e outros profissionais interessados em divulgação da ciência”. A propósito, a ABJC vai iniciar no próximo mês o recadastramento dos sócios, junto com uma chamada para novos associados, o que poderá contribuir para esse censo dos jornalistas de ciência no Brasil.

Crença na ciência – Com 46 gráficos e 55 tabelas anexas que podem ser cruzados de acordo com o interesse específico de cada estudioso, o estudo de percepção da ciência bancado pela FAPESP e coordenado por Vogt permite uma infinidade de conclusões e novas hipóteses a respeito de como a sociedade absorve ciência por via da mídia ou como as várias classes sociais ou econômicas no estado de São Paulo reagem à exposição a notícias da área científica. Ao próprio coordenador, um dos pontos que mais chamaram a atenção nos resultados da pesquisa foi a relação inversa que ela permite estabelecer entre crença na ciência e informação sobre ciência. “O axioma seria quanto mais informação, menos crença na ciência”, diz. Assim, se consultado o gráfico relativo a grau de consumo autodeclarado de informação científica versus atitude quanto aos riscos e benefícios da ciência (gráfico 12.11), pode-se constatar que 57% dos entrevistados que declararam alto consumo acreditam que ciência e tecnologia podem oferecer muitos riscos e muitos benefícios simultaneamente e 6,3% acreditam que podem trazer muitos riscos e poucos benefícios. Já daqueles que declararam consumo nulo de informação científica, 42,9% veem muitos riscos e muitos benefícios ao mesmo tempo e 25,5% veem muitos riscos e poucos benefícios. “Ou seja, entre os mais informados é bem alta a proporção dos que veem riscos e benefícios na ciência ao mesmo tempo”, destaca Vogt, presidente da FAPESP de 2002 a 2007 e hoje coordenador da Universidade Virtual do Estado de São Paulo (Univesp), indicando que essa seria uma visão realista. Registre-se que o grau de pessimismo é muito maior entre os que declararam consumo nulo de informação científica: 8,1% deles disseram que a ciência não traz nenhum risco e nenhum benefício, enquanto esse percentual foi de 5,8% entre os que declararam consumo baixo, de 2,3% entre os que se situaram na faixa de consumo médio baixo, de 0,7% na faixa médio alto e de zero entre os altos consumidores de informação científica.

 

Na parte do trabalho sobre interesse geral em C&T, chama a atenção como o tema está medianamente situado pelos entrevistados em quinto lugar, depois de esporte e antes de cinema, arte e cultura, dentre 10 assuntos usualmente cobertos pela mídia (gráfico 12.1). Mas enquanto para esporte 30,5% deles se declaram muito interessados e 34,9%, interessados, em ciência e tecnologia são 16,3% os muito interessados e 47,1% os interessados, ou seja, a intensidade do interesse é menor. Vale também observar como os diferentes graus de interesse em C&T aproximam a cidade de São Paulo de Madri e a distanciam imensamente de Bogotá (gráfico 12.2). Assim, respectivamente, 15,4% dos entrevistados em São Paulo e 16,7% dos entrevistados em Madri declararam-se muito interessados em C&T; para a categoria interessado, os percentuais foram 49,6% e 52,7%; para pouco interessado, 25,5% e 24,8%, e para nada interessado, respectivamente, 9,4% e 5,9%. Já em Bogotá, nada menos que 47,5% declararam-se muito interessados. Por quê, não se sabe. Os interessados totalizam 33,2%, os pouco interessados, 15,3% e os nada interessados, 4%.

Não há muita diferença no nível de interesse por idade. Jovens e pessoas mais velhas se distribuem democraticamente pelos diversos graus considerados (gráfico 12.6a). Já quanto ao grau de escolaridade, se dá exatamente o oposto: entre os muito interessados em ciência e tecnologia, 21,9% são graduados e pós-graduados, 53,9% têm grau de ensino médio, 21,5%, ensino fundamental, 1,7%, educação infantil e 1% não teve nenhuma escolaridade. Já na categoria nada interessado se encontra 1,2% de graduados e pós-graduados, 26,3% de pessoas com nível médio, 47,4% com ensino fundamental, 8,8% com educação infantil e 16,4% de pessoas que não tiveram nenhum tipo de escolaridade (gráfico 12.5).

A par de todas as inferências que os resultados tabulados e interpretados dos questionários permitem, Vogt destaca que se a maioria da população não lê notícias científicas, ela entretanto está exposta de forma mais ou menos passiva à informação que circula sobre ciência. “Cada vez que o Jornal Nacional ou o Globo Repórter fala, por exemplo, sobre um alimento funcional, praticamente a sociedade como um todo passa a tratar disso nos dias seguintes”, diz. Ele acredita que pesquisas de mídia e de frequência do noticiário sobre ciência na imprensa poderão dar parâmetros de indicação para estudos que possam complementar o que já se construiu até agora sobre percepção pública da ciência.

Profissionais satisfeitos – Luisa Massarani observa que se hoje já se avançou nos estudos de audiência em muitos campos, especialmente para as telenovelas no Brasil, na área de jornalismo científico ainda não existem estudos capazes de indicar o que acontece em termos de percepção quando a pessoa ouve e vê uma notícia dessa especialidade no Jornal Nacional. “As pessoas entendem bem? A informação suscita desconfiança? Não sabemos.” De qualquer sorte, permanece em seu entendimento como uma grande questão o que significa fazer jornalismo científico, em termos da produção e da recepção.

Por enquanto, o estudo que ela coordena conseguiu identificar que as mulheres são maioria entre os jornalistas de ciência na América Latina, 61% contra 39% de homens, e que essa é uma especialidade de jovens: quase 30% da amostra situa-se na faixa de 31 a 40 anos e 23% têm entre 21 e 30 anos. De forma coerente com esse último dado, 39% dos entrevistados trabalham há menos de 5 anos em jornalismo científico e 23% entre 6 e 10 anos. E, o dado impressionante, 62% estão satisfeitos com seu trabalho em jornalismo científico e mais 9% muito satisfeitos. É possível que isso tenha relação com o fato de 60% terem emprego formal de tempo integral na área.

Por outro lado, se os jornalistas de ciência da América Latina não têm muitas fontes oficiais que lhes deem um feedback de seu trabalho, 40% deles es–tão seguros de que seu papel é informar o público, 26% pensam que sua função é traduzir material complexo, 13% educar e 9% mobilizar o público. E avaliando o resultado do trabalho, 50% creem que o jornalismo científico produzido no Brasil é médio, 21% bom e somente 2% o classificam como muito bom.

A melhor indicação do quanto os jornalistas de ciência gostam do que fazem está na resposta à questão sobre se recomendariam a outros a carreira. Nada menos do que a metade respondeu que sim, com certeza, enquanto 40% responderam que provavelmente sim. De qualquer sorte, ainda há um caminho a percorrer na definição do papel que cabe aos jornalistas entre os atores que dizem o que a ciência é e faz. “Quem são esses atores?”, indaga Vogt. “Os cientistas achavam que eram eles. Os governos acreditavam que eram eles. Mas hoje dizemos que é a sociedade. Mas de que forma?”

More anthropologists on Wall Street please (The Economist)

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Education policy

Oct 24th 2011, 20:58 by M.S.

APPARENTLY Rick Scott, the governor of Florida, called two weeks ago for reducing funding for liberal-arts disciplines at state universities and shifting the money to science, technology, engineering and math, which he abbreviates to STEM. (Amusingly, if you Google “Rick Scott STEM” you end up getting multiple references to Mr Scott’s apparently non-operative campaign pledge to ban stem-cell research in Florida. Between the two issues, you’ve got a sort of operatic treatment of the modern Republican love-hate relationship with science.) Mr Scott seems to have repeatedly singled out the discipline of anthropology for derision. On one occasion, he apparently told a right-wing radio host: “You know, we don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees…so when they get out of school, they can get a job.” On another occasion, he’s quoted as telling a business group in Tallahassee: “Do you want to use your tax dollars to educate more people who can’t get jobs in anthropology? I don’t.”

Few would defend deliberately educating more people who can’t get jobs in anthropology, as such. (Of course, giving people math degrees rather than anthropology degrees will render them even less able to get jobs in anthropology.) Many, however, would defend educating more people in anthropology, regardless of what they wind up getting jobs in. In Slate on Friday, Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, gave the traditional and entirely accurate pitch:

[R]esolving the complex challenges that confront our nation and the world requires more than expertise in science and technology. We must also educate individuals capable of meaningful civic participation, creative expression, and communicating insights across borders. The potential for graduates in any field to achieve professional success and to contribute significantly to our economy depends on an education that entails more than calculus.

Curricula expressly tailored in response to the demands of the workforce must be balanced with opportunities for students to develop their capacity for critical thinking, analytical reasoning, creativity, and leadership—all of which we learn from the full spectrum of disciplines associated with a liberal arts education. Taken together with the rigorous training provided in the STEM fields, the opportunities for exploration and learning that Gov. Scott is intent on marginalizing are those that have defined our national approach to higher education.

This is a solid response. What it lacks are rhetorical oomph and concrete examples. So here’s a concrete example with a little oomph. Some of the best analysis of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and of the ongoing follies on Wall Street these days, has been produced by the Financial Times‘ Gillian Tett. Ms Tett began warning that collateralised debt obligations and credit-default swaps were likely to lead to a major financial implosion in 2005 or so. The people who devise such complex derivatives are generally trained in physics or math. Ms Tett has a PhD in anthropology. Here’s a 2008 profile of Ms Tett by the Guardian’s Laurie Barton.

Tett began looking at the subject of credit five years ago. “Everyone was looking at the City and talking about M&A [mergers and acquisitions] and equity markets, and all the traditional high-glamour, high-status parts of the City. I got into this corner of the market because I passionately believed there was a revolution happening that had been almost entirely ignored. And I got really excited about trying to actually illustrate what was happening.”

Not that anyone particularly wanted to listen. “You could see everyone’s eyes glazing over … But my team, not just me, we very much warned of the dangers. Though I don’t think we expected the full scale of the disaster that’s unfolded.”

There is something exceedingly calm and thorough about Tett. She talks with the patient enthusiasm of a Tomorrow’s World presenter—a throwback, perhaps, to her days studying social anthropology, in which she has a PhD from Cambridge. “I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,” she reasons. “Firstly, you’re trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.

“But the other thing is, if you come from an anthropology background, you also try and put finance in a cultural context. Bankers like to imagine that money and the profit motive is as universal as gravity. They think it’s basically a given and they think it’s completely apersonal. And it’s not. What they do in finance is all about culture and interaction.”

Another person with an anthropology degree who’s been doing terrific work in recent years in a somewhat-related field is the Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk, who produced a fantastic short book last year analysing the tribal culture of the Dutch parliament and the media circles that cover it. He’s currently working on a study of the City as well. Anyway, the general point is that while studying human behaviour through complex derivatives has its uses, there’s something to be said for the more rigorous and less egocentric analytical tools that anthropology brings to play, and it might be worth Mr Scott’s time to take a course or two. It’s never too late to learn.

Demora em demarcações impulsiona ocupações (Carta Capital)

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Joana Moncau e Spensy Pimentel 25 de outubro de 2011 às 14:56h

A paciência de muitos grupos se esgotou, porque até mesmo áreas já declaradas indígenas há décadas estão ocupadas por colonos. Fotos: Joana Moncau e Spensy Pimentel

É a convite das próprias lideranças indígenas que chegamos ao local onde estão montadas as barracas de lona preta das quase 70 famílias guarani-kaiowá. No fim do mês de maio, elas deixaram suas casas na reserva de Panambi para criar o acampamento de Guyra Kambi’y, a apenas algumas centenas de metros de outro deles, o Yta’y Ka’aguyrusu, formado em setembro do ano passado, em meio a conflitos com os colonos que vieram para a região a convite do governo federal, entre os anos 40 e 50 do século passado.

Poucas semanas antes da visita, um índio de 56 anos que estava residindo no local foi encontrado enforcado no terreno onde costumava buscar lenha. “Não entendemos bem o que aconteceu, ele estava ajudando a preparar uma casa de reza, inclusive. Essa demora toda, às vezes, deixa as pessoas tristes”, comenta um dos indígenas.

A demora nas demarcações de terras indígenas em Mato Grosso do Sul tem impulsionado a formação de mais e mais acampamentos. A paciência de muitos grupos se esgotou, porque até mesmo áreas já declaradas indígenas há décadas estão ocupadas por colonos – é o que ocorre em Panambi, onde, de 2000 hectares demarcados nos anos 70, os indígenas só ocupam efetivamente 300. Só em Dourados, onde está a reserva cuja situação é mais crítica – fala-se em até 15 mil indígenas em 3,5 mil hectares –, surgiram dois acampamentos este ano.

Índios acampam em MS, enquanto esperam a demarcação

Um levantamento do Conselho Indigenista Missionário atualizado este mês encontrou 31 acampamentos guarani-kaiowá na região sul de Mato Grosso do Sul. Nem sempre eles estão em situação de conflito como acontece em casos como os de Ypo’i, Pyelito e Kurusu Amba (ver matéria anterior), mas a vulnerabilidade é uma constante – alguns grupos vivem na miséria, à beira das estradas, há décadas, com acesso precário aos direitos mais básicos, como saúde, educação e documentação civil.

A partir do momento em que os grupos deixam as reservas superlotadas para realizar ocupações nas fazendas a fim de reivindicar seu direito sobre suas terras, expõem-se ainda mais. A única assistência que passam a ter é federal e vem da Fundação Nacional do Índio (Funai) e da Secretaria Especial de Saúde Indígena (Sesai). Benefícios sociais como cestas básicas dadas pelo estado são automaticamente cortados. “O estado e os municípios não dão absolutamente nenhuma assistência a esses grupos”,  afirma Maria Aparecida Mendes de Oliveira, coordenadora regional da Funai, em Dourados.

Em áreas dentro de fazendas, muitas vezes mesmo a Sesai e a Funai só conseguem agir com ordem judicial. Em Ypo’i, por exemplo, segundo a Funai, as equipes de saúde e de assistência social só podem entrar uma vez a cada 15 dias. “O problema é que as pessoas não escolhem hora para ficar doentes”, reclama Maria Aparecida. Mesmo o programa de distribuição de cestas básicas da Funai apresenta problemas, pois depende de doações feitas pela Companhia Nacional de Abastecimento (Conab). Em alguns meses, a comida simplesmente não chega.

O discurso do governo estadual prega a necessidade de políticas públicas para os indígenas, em contraposição às demandas por terra. Em 2009, o governador André Puccinelli chegou a afirmar: “Eles não querem tanta terra como a Funai quer dar a eles. Os índios querem menos terra e mais programas sociais”. Só que, mesmo nas reservas já demarcadas, o atendimento é péssimo. No caso da saúde, as denúncias de desvios e ineficiência são constantes. Casas recentemente construídas com verba federal são entregues cheias de defeitos e com acabamento precário. Nas escolas, atualmente, está ameaçada a política de educação diferenciada, que pressupõe o ensino em língua guarani, entre outros elementos – prefeitos de diversas cidades têm demitido professores indígenas sem a menor consulta às comunidades, muitas vezes contratando brancos para seus postos.

Acampamento indígena no MS

A crise nas aldeias também se intensifica pela falta de alternativas econômicas com a escassez de terras. Atualmente, está ameaçado até o trabalho precário no corte da cana para as usinas de açúcar e álcool. O plantio da cana está sendo progressivamente mecanizado, o que significa que haverá mais desemprego e fome entre os indígenas, caso o problema das terras não seja resolvido logo.

Para enfrentar recentes agressões como as de Pyelito e Ypo’i, o movimento político guarani-kaiowá, conhecido como Aty Guasu (grande reunião), está solicitando à Secretaria de Direitos Humanos da Presidência da República que intensifique sua presença nas áreas em conflito. Desde 2006, por meio do Conselho de Defesa dos Direitos da Pessoa Humana (CDDPH), órgão de Estado vinculado à SDH, a crise por que passam os Guarani-Kaiowá tem sido reconhecida pelo governo como um dos mais sérios desafios do país na área dos direitos humanos. Diversas lideranças indígenas já integram atualmente o Programa de Proteção aos Defensores dos Direitos Humanos.

Um sinal de atendimento à reivindicação por mais segurança foi a renovação, na semana passada, da portaria do Ministério da Justiça que autoriza a presença da Força Nacional de Segurança Pública para apoiar a Polícia Federal em ações nas aldeias guarani-kaiowá. A esperança dos indígenas é que a ação da chamada Operação Tekoha, hoje focada hoje nas hiperviolentas reservas de Dourados, Amambai e Caarapó, se estenda às áreas localizadas na fronteira e ajude a coibir ataques contra os indígenas em regiões de conflito como Paranhos e Tacuru.

As ações de segurança pública são paliativos necessários, porque a disputa pelas terras ainda deve se estender por vários anos. Atualmente, a grande discussão é sobre a possibilidade de, em caso de demarcação, haver pagamento não só pelas benfeitorias sobre as terras consideradas indígenas, mas também pelo próprio terreno – algo vetado pela Constituição. Como, no estado, a colonização contou com amplo apoio tanto do governo federal como do estadual, uma boa parte dos fazendeiros tem títulos sobre as terras, o que torna a situação particularmente delicada.

Liderança mostra marcas de violência em área de demarcação

Para driblar o lento processo de tramitação de uma Proposta de Emenda à Constituição (PEC) no Congresso, o deputado estadual Laerte Tetila (PT) apresentou na Assembleia Legislativa de MS o projeto para a criação de um Fundo Estadual para Aquisição de Terras Indígenas. Do movimento indígena aos fazendeiros, os diversos atores envolvidos no conflito agora analisam a proposta de lei.

O debate sobre a questão das terras em MS também chegou ao Conselho Nacional de Justiça este ano. Em maio, uma comissão especial foi formada para discutir o impasse judicial que cerca as demarcações – um levantamento de 2009 encontrou 87 ações na Justiça envolvendo o conflito sobre terras indígenas no estado. Com a previsão de que venham a público até o início do ano que vem os seis relatórios de identificação de áreas guarani-kaiowá iniciados em 2008, espera-se que a negociação no CNJ previna o completo travamento do processo por conta das batalhas nos tribunais.

A crise envolvendo os Guarani-Kaiowá é a mais grave, mas não a única em MS a envolver disputa por terras indígenas. Os Terena, o segundo maior povo indígena do estado, com pouco mais de 20 mil pessoas, também têm reivindicado a demarcação de suas terras, atualmente reduzidas a umas poucas reservas definidas no início do século XX. Em assembleia recente, eles anunciaram que voltarão a ocupar terras reivindicadas como indígenas antes do fim do ano. Como se vê, a tendência é que os problemas se agravem no estado, caso o governo federal não aja com rapidez.

Segundo a Constituição, a demarcação das terras indígenas em todo o Brasil já deveria ter sido concluída há 18 anos, em 1993. O governo Lula só homologou três terras guarani-kaiowá, e dois desses processos estão suspensos pelo STF até hoje – e a única das novas terras que está efetivamente ocupada pelos indígenas, a Panambizinho, em Dourados, tem pouco mais de 1.200 hectares. Como ministro da Justiça, Tarso Genro vinha garantindo o seguimento do processo iniciado em 2008 em MS, apesar das pressões dos ruralistas e do PMDB. Está chegando a hora de seu sucessor, José Eduardo Cardozo, mostrar a que veio.

Para enfrentar crise em MS, governo federal lançará comitê especial

O governo federal deve recriar oficialmente no próximo mês uma coordenação especial das políticas públicas voltadas para os indígenas Guarani-Kaiowá do sul de Mato Grosso do Sul. O chamado Comitê Gestor de Políticas Indigenistas Integradas do Cone Sul de MS será instalado em uma reunião com participação de representantes de mais de dez ministérios, em Dourados, principal cidade da região, entre os dias 28 e 29 de novembro.

Balas de disparo contra índios de área de conflito

O anúncio foi feito na última quinta-feira (20) pelo secretário Nacional de Articulação Social da Secretaria Geral da Presidência da República, Paulo Maldos, após visita ao acampamento indígena de Ypo’i, onde três pessoas já foram mortas desde 2009 e a comunidade, atualmente, vive uma situação que o secretário definiu como de “crise humanitária” (veja matéria anterior).

“A situação no Cone Sul do Mato Grosso do Sul já ultrapassou todos os limites imagináveis”, afirmou Maldos, em entrevista à CartaCapital. “O governo federal não admite mais esse clima de violência nessa região. Sabemos que o único caminho é a demarcação de terras, mas é um caminho longo, e não podemos esperar. Vamos fortalecer a rede de proteção que está sendo formada entre as comunidades indígenas vítimas de violência. O objetivo é garantir a vida e a integridade das comunidades.”

Em 2006, após a divulgação pela imprensa de mortes por desnutrição entre as crianças guarani-kaiowá, o governo federal já havia criado um comitê gestor semelhante. Depois que o caso arrefeceu no debate público, a iniciativa perdeu impulso. Agora, Maldos promete que essa coordenação das ações federais voltadas para os indígenas será para valer: “Haverá prioridade máxima em todos os sentidos. Vamos agir nas mais variadas áreas: saúde, educação, apoio à produção, segurança, cultura, comunicação e o que mais for preciso”. “Queremos sinalizar para a região que buscamos fazer justiça aos direitos históricos dos Guarani-Kaiowá a partir de agora. Não vamos esperar as demarcações.”

Maldos disse ainda que todas as comunidades guarani-kaiowá serão alvo das políticas do comitê, independente de onde se localizam: “O Estado vai chegar a todas as comunidades, estejam em terras demarcadas ou não, em beiras de estrada ou mesmo dentro de fazendas”.

Índios durante protesto por demarcação. Foto: Cimi

Nos últimos anos, alguns dos principais relatórios internacionais sobre direitos humanos têm apontado a situação dos Guarani-Kaiowá como uma das mais graves entre os povos indígenas das Américas. No ano passado, a Aty Guasu (grande reunião, em guarani), assembleia que congrega os representantes das dezenas de comunidades desses indígenas, recebeu da Presidência da República o Prêmio Direitos Humanos. “Tudo o que for feito será feito em conjunto com eles. A Aty Guasu é nossa parceira”, diz Maldos.

O secretário disse que a escolha de ir ao MS e fazer o anúncio dessas novidades em Ypo’i foi proposital. “Fomos visitar a comunidade mais violentada das violentadas. Além de tudo o que os Guarani-Kaiowá em geral sofrem, lá eles estão sujeitos a um verdadeiro confinamento”, relata ele. “Eu já acompanhava as informações sobre as violências contra os Guarani-Kaiowá havia muitos anos, mas ir até lá me deixou ainda mais indignado com tudo o que vi.”

No final do mês, completam-se dois anos de um crime emblemático: o assassinato de dois professores guarani em Ypo’i, Rolindo e Genivaldo Vera. “Nenhum crime vai ficar impune. Nós vamos identificar esses criminosos”, comprometeu-se Maldos. Entre as violências que têm sido cometidas, o secretário lembra que houve, inclusive, ameaças aos próprios antropólogos que participam dos processos de demarcação de terras.

20 mil escravos no País (Correio Braziliense)

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JC e-mail 4372, de 26 de Outubro de 2011.

A Organização Internacional do Trabalho (OIT) divulgou ontem (25) um perfil do trabalho escravo rural no Brasil, indicando que 81% das pessoas que vivem em condições análogas à escravidão são negras, jovens e com baixa escolaridade.

O estudo foi feito a partir de entrevistas com pessoas libertadas, aliciadores e empregadores em fazendas do Pará, Mato Grosso, Bahia e Goiás entre 2006 e 2007.

Além da predominância da raça negra, o documento aponta que cerca de 93% dessas pessoas iniciaram a vida profissional antes dos 16 anos, o que configura trabalho infantil, e que quase 75% delas são analfabetas. O estudo identificou que a maioria dos empregadores e dos aliciadores, os chamados “gatos”, é branca.

Para o coordenador da área de combate ao trabalho escravo da OIT, Luiz Machado, o dado reflete a condição de vulnerabilidade da população mais pobre ao trabalho escravo, composta maioritariamente por negros. “Isso é um resquício da exploração colonial”, atestou. O fato de não terem frequentado escolas na infância também é destacado pelo coordenador como um indutor do problema. “O trabalho infantil tira as possibilidades futuras e facilita o caminho ao trabalho escravo. Pessoas sem escolaridade não têm oportunidades.”

O Ministério Público do Trabalho (MPT) estima que cerca de 20 mil pessoas estejam submetidas ao trabalho forçado ou degradante no Brasil hoje. Desde 1995, mais de 40 mil trabalhadores foram libertados no país, que assumiu um compromisso internacional para erradicar a prática até 2015. A coordenadora nacional de Combate ao Trabalho Escravo do MPT, Débora Tito, relata que as políticas sobre o tema têm se concentrado no que ela chama “pedagogia do bolso”.

A ideia é enfrentar o problema por meio de multas altas e da inserção de nomes de empregadores em cadastros negativos para que deixem de conseguir financiamentos de bancos. “Temos que tornar essa prática economicamente inviável, para que os fazendeiros parem de economizar à custa da dignidade do trabalhador”, disse a procuradora. Segundo ela, a pena para punir o empregador de trabalho análogo ao escravo é de dois a oito anos de prisão, mas existem poucas condenações no país.

Convenção – As centrais sindicais que representam os servidores públicos das três esferas do governo estão se debatendo para definir o projeto de lei que tratará de temas como direito de greve, negociação coletiva e liberação de dirigentes sindicais de bater o ponto para se dedicar aos assuntos das categorias, itens da Convenção 151 da Organização Internacional do Trabalho (OIT), que deverá ser regulamentada até o fim do ano. Em audiência pública na Câmara ontem, a queda de braço girou em torno da cobrança do imposto sindical, um desconto no contracheque de um dia de salário ao ano, a exemplo do que ocorre com os trabalhadores da iniciativa privada.

Brain Scans Support Findings That IQ Can Rise or Fall Significantly During Adolescence (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — IQ, the standard measure of intelligence, can increase or fall significantly during our teenage years, according to research funded by the Wellcome Trust, and these changes are associated with changes to the structure of our brains. The findings may have implications for testing and streaming of children during their school years.

Across our lifetime, our intellectual ability is considered to be stable, with intelligence quotient (IQ) scores taken at one point in time used to predict educational achievement and employment prospects later in life. However, in a study published October 20 in the journal Nature, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London) and the Centre for Educational Neuroscience show for the first time that, in fact, our IQ is not constant.

The researchers, led by Professor Cathy Price, tested 33 healthy adolescents in 2004 when they were between the ages of 12 and 16 years. They then repeated the tests four years later when the same subjects were between 15 and 20 years old. On both occasions, the researchers took structural brain scans of the subjects using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Professor Price and colleagues found significant changes in the IQ scores measured in 2008 compared to the 2004 scores. Some subjects had improved their performance relative to people of a similar age by as much as 20 points on the standardised IQ scale; in other cases, however, performance had fallen by a similar amount.

To test whether these changes were meaningful, the researchers analysed the MRI scans to see whether there was a correlation with changes in the structure of the subjects’ brains.

“We found a considerable amount of change in how our subjects performed on the IQ tests in 2008 compared to four years earlier,” explains Sue Ramsden, first author of the study. “Some subjects performed markedly better but some performed considerably worse. We found a clear correlation between this change in performance and changes in the structure of their brains and so can say with some certainty that these changes in IQ are real.”

The researchers measured each subject’s verbal IQ, which includes measurements of language, arithmetic, general knowledge and memory, and their non-verbal IQ, such as identifying the missing elements of a picture or solving visual puzzles. They found a clear correlation with particular regions of the brain.

An increase in verbal IQ score correlated with an increase in the density of grey matter — the nerve cells where the processing takes place — in an area of the left motor cortex of the brain that is activated when articulating speech. Similarly, an increase in non-verbal IQ score correlated with an increase in the density of grey matter in the anterior cerebellum, which is associated with movements of the hand. However, an increase in verbal IQ did not necessarily go hand-in-hand with an increase in non-verbal IQ.

According to Professor Price, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, it is not clear why IQ should have changed so much and why some people’s performance improved while others’ declined. It is possible that the differences are due to some of the subjects being early or late developers, but it is equally possible that education had a role in changing IQ, and this has implications for how schoolchildren are assessed.

“We have a tendency to assess children and determine their course of education relatively early in life, but here we have shown that their intelligence is likely to be still developing,” says Professor Price. “We have to be careful not to write off poorer performers at an early stage when in fact their IQ may improve significantly given a few more years.

“It’s analogous to fitness.A teenager who is athletically fit at 14 could be less fit at 18 if they stopped exercising. Conversely, an unfit teenager can become much fitter with exercise.”

Other studies from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging and other research groups have provided strong evidence that the structure of the brain remains ‘plastic’ even throughout adult life. For example, Professor Price showed recently that guerrillas in Columbia who had learned to read as adults had a higher density of grey matter in several areas of the left hemisphere of the brain than those who had not learned to read. Professor Eleanor Maguire, also from the Wellcome Trust Centre, showed that part of a brain structure called the hippocampus, which plays an important part in memory and navigation, has greater volume in licensed London taxi drivers.

“The question is, if our brain structure can change throughout our adult lives, can our IQ also change?” adds Professor Price. “My guess is yes. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that our brains can adapt and their structure changes, even in adulthood.”

“This interesting study highlights how ‘plastic’ the human brain is,” said Dr John Williams, Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust. “It will be interesting to see whether structural changes as we grow and develop extend beyond IQ to other cognitive functions. This study challenges us to think about these observations and how they may be applied to gain insight into what might happen when individuals succumb to mental health disorders.”

A New Discipline Emerges: The Psychology of Science (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — You’ve heard of the history of science, the philosophy of science, maybe even the sociology of science. But how about the psychology of science? In a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, San Jose State University psychologist Gregory J. Feist argues that a field has been quietly taking shape over the past decade, and it holds great promise for both psychology and science.

“Science is a cognitive act by definition: It involves personality, creativity, developmental processes,” says Feist — everything about individual psychology. So what is the psychology of science? “Simply put,” he writes, it is “the scientific study of scientific thought and behavior.” The psychology of science isn’t just about scientists, though. It’s about how children make organized sense of the world, what comprises scientific talent and interest — or growing disinterest — and even people’s embrace of pseudoscience.

Reviewing about two dozen articles, Feist mentions work in many psychological subspecialties. Neuroscientists have observed the brain correlations of scientific reasoning, discovering, for instance, that people pay more attention to data that concur with their own personal theories. Developmental psychologists have found that infants can craft theories of the way the world works. They’ve also looked at the ages at which small children begin to distinguish theories from evidence.

In its focus on such processes as problem-solving, memory, and creativity, cognitive psychology may be the most mature of the specialties in its relationship to the doing of science. Feist’s own work in this area offers some intriguing findings. In meta-analyses of personality studies of scientific interest and creativity, he has teased out a contradiction: People who are highly interested in science are higher than others in “conscientiousness” (that is, such traits as caution and fastidiousness) and lower in “openness” to experience. Meanwhile, scientific creativity is associated with low conscientiousness and high openness.

Feist believes that a new psychology of science is good for science, which has become more and more important to society, culture, and the economy. Educators need to understand the ways children and adolescents acquire the requisites of scientific inquiry, he says, “and we want to encourage kids who have that talent to go that way.”

But the new sub-discipline is also good for psychology. “Like other disciplines, psychology is fracturing into smaller and smaller areas that are isolated from each other,” he says. “The psychology of science is one of the few recent disciplines that bucks that trend. We’re saying: ‘Let’s look at the whole person in all the basic psychological areas — cognition, development, neuroscience — and integrate it in one phenomenon.’ That’s an approach which is unusual these days.”

Seeing Value in Ignorance, College Expects Its Physicists to Teach Poetry (N.Y. Times)

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By ALAN SCHWARZ

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Sarah Benson last encountered college mathematics 20 years ago in an undergraduate algebra class. Her sole experience teaching math came in the second grade, when the first graders needed help with their minuses.

Sarah Benson has a Ph.D. in art history and a master’s in comparative literature, but this year she is teaching geometry. Shannon Jensen for The New York Times
And yet Ms. Benson, with a Ph.D. in art history and a master’s degree in comparative literature, stood at the chalkboard drawing parallelograms, constructing angles and otherwise dismembering Euclid’s Proposition 32the way a biology professor might treat a water frog. Her students cared little about her inexperience. As for her employers, they did not mind, either: they had asked her to teach formal geometry expressly because it was a subject about which she knew very little.

It was just another day here at St. John’s College, whose distinctiveness goes far beyond its curriculum of great works: Aeschylus and Aristotle, Bacon and Bach. As much of academia fractures into ever more specific disciplines, this tiny college still expects — in fact, requires — its professors to teach almost every subject, leveraging ignorance as much as expertise.

“There’s a little bit of impostor syndrome,” said Ms. Benson, who will teach Lavoisier’s “Elements of Chemistry” next semester. “But here, it’s O.K. that I don’t know something. I can figure it out, and my job is to help the students do the same thing. It’s very collaborative.”

Students in Ms. Benson’s class discussing Euclid.Shannon Jensen for The New York Times

Or as St. John’s president, Chris Nelson (class of 1970), put it with a smile only slightly sadistic: “Every member of the faculty who comes here gets thrown in the deep end. I think the faculty members, if they were cubbyholed into a specialization, they’d think that they know more than they do. That usually is an impediment to learning. Learning is born of ignorance.”

Students who attend St. John’s — it has a sister campus in Santa Fe, N.M., with the same curriculum and philosophies — know that their college experience will be like no other. There are no majors; every student takes the same 16 yearlong courses, which generally feature about 15 students discussing Sophocles or Homer, and the professor acting more as catalyst than connoisseur.

What they may not know is that their professor — or tutor in the St. John’s vernacular — might have no background in the subject. This is often the case for the courses that freshmen take. For example, Hannah Hintze, who has degrees in philosophy and woodwind performance, and whose dissertation concerned Plato’s “Republic,” is currently leading classes on observational biology and Greek.

“Some might not find that acceptable, but we explore things together,” said Ryan Fleming, a freshman in Ms. Benson’s Euclid class. “We don’t have someone saying, ‘I have all the answers.’ They’re open-minded and go along with us to see what answers there can be.”

Like all new tutors, Ms. Benson, 42, went through a one-week orientation in August to reacquaint herself with Euclid, and to learn the St. John’s way of teaching. She attends weekly conferences with more seasoned tutors.

Her plywood-floor classroom in McDowell Hall is as almost as dim and sparse as the ones Francis Scott Key (valedictorian of the class of 1796) studied in before the college’s original building burned down in 1909. Eight underpowered ceiling lights barely illuminated three walls of chalkboards. While even kindergarten classrooms now feature interactive white boards and Wi-Fi connected iPads, not one laptop or cellphone was visible; the only evidence of contemporary life was the occasional plastic foam coffee cup.

The discussion centered not on examples and exercises, but on the disciplined narrative of Euclid’s assertions, the aesthetic economy of mathematical argument. When talk turned to Proposition 34 of Book One, which states that a parallelogram’s diagonal divides it into equal areas, not one digit was used or even mentioned. Instead, the students debated whether Propositions 4 and 26 were necessary for Euclid’s proof.

When a student punctuated a blackboard analysis with, “The self-evident truth that these triangles will be equal,” the subliminal reference to the Declaration of Independence hinted at the eventual braiding of the disciplines by both students and tutors here. So, too, did a subsequent discussion of how “halves of equals are equals themselves,” evoking the United States Supreme Court’s logic in endorsing segregation 2,200 years after Euclid died.

Earlier in the day, in a junior-level class taught by a longtime tutor about a portion of Newton’s seminal physics text “Principia,” science and philosophy became as intertwined as a candy cane’s swirls. Students discussed Newton’s shrinking parabolic areas as if they were voting districts, and the limits of curves as social ideals.

One student remarked, “In Euclid before, he talked a lot about what is equal and what isn’t. It seems here that equality is more of a continuum — we can get as close as we want, but never actually get there.” A harmony of Tocqueville was being laid over Newton’s melody.

The tutor, Michael Dink, graduated from St. John’s in 1975 and earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America. Like most professors here, he long ago traded the traditional three-course academic career — writing journal articles, attending conferences and teaching a specific subject — for the intellectual buffet at St. John’s. His first year included teaching Ptolemy’s “Almagest,” a treatise on planetary movements, and atomic theory. He since has taught 15 of the school’s 16 courses, the exception being sophomore music.

“You have to not try to control things,” Mr. Dink said, “and not think that what’s learned has to come from you.”

This ancient teaching method could be making a comeback well beyond St. John’s two campuses. Some education reformers assert that teachers as early as elementary school should lecture less at the blackboard while students silently take notes — the sage-on-the-stage model, as some call it — and foster more discussion and collaboration among smaller groups. It is a strategy that is particularly popular among schools that use technology to allow students to learn at their own pace.

Still, not even the most rabid reformer has suggested that biology be taught by social theorists, or Marx by mathematicians. That philosophy will continue to belong to a school whose president has joyfully declared, “We don’t have departmental politics — we don’t have departments!”

Anthony T. Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton and president of the American Historical Association, said he appreciated the approach.

“There’s no question that people are becoming more specialized — it’s natural for scholars to cover a narrow field in great depth rather than many at the same time,” he said. “I admire how St. John’s does it. It sounds both fun and scary.”

January Field School in Ethnographic Methods in Uruguay

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3rd CIFAS Field School in Ethnographic Research Methods

3 to 13 January 2012 – Montevideo, Uruguay

The Comitas Institute for Anthropological Study (CIFAS) is pleased to announce the 3rd CIFAS Field School in Ethnographic Research Methods, in Montevideo, Uruguay.

The goal of the Field School is to offer training in the foundations and practice of ethnographic methods. The faculty works closely with participants to identify the required field methods needed to address their academic or professional needs. The Field School is designed for people with little or no experience in ethnographic research, or those who want a refresher course. It is suitable for graduate and undergraduate students in social sciences and other fields of study that use qualitative approaches (such as education, communication, cultural studies, health, social work, human ecology, development studies, consumer behavior, among others), applied social scientists, professionals, and researchers who have an interest in learning more about ethnographic methods and their applications.

Program:

· Foundations of ethnographic research

· Social theories in the field: research design

· Planning the logistics of field research

· Data collection techniques

· Principles of organization and indexation of field data

· Analyzing field data

· Qualitative analysis softwares: basic principles

· Individual, one-on-one discussion of research projects

· Short field trips in the interior of Uruguay

 

Coordinators:

Renzo Taddei (Assistant Professor, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/Affiliated Researcher, Columbia University). CV:http://bit.ly/nueNbu.

Ana Laura Gamboggi (Postdoctoral fellow, University of Brasilia). CV:http://bit.ly/psuVyw.

Assistant Instructors:

Maria Fernanda de Torres Álvarez (M.A. in Anthropology, University of the Republic of Uruguay)

Zulma Amador (Ph.D. candidate, Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology, Mexico)

 

Registration and other costs: Places are limited. The registration fee is US$600, which covers the full ten days of program activities. The registration fee should be paid on the first day of the program. Pre-registration should be completed online: please send an email to rrt20@columbia.edu, with name, school/institution, contact address and telephone number. The deadline for pre-registration is December 16, 2011.

The registration fee does not cover accommodation, meals or transportation. If needed, the organizers of the Field School can recommend reasonably priced hotels and places to eat during the program. In Uruguay, accommodation, meals and local transportation costs should be no more than US$100 per day in total.

Course venue: Classes will take place in the beautiful Zonamerica Foundation headquarters (refer to http://bit.ly/pBjcJY), an educational institution within walking distance of good restaurants, and the very comfortable Regency Hotel (http://bit.ly/ec7JTA). Other hotels and hostels are available around Montevideo, with easy access to public transportation to and from Zonamerica.

Other information

Language: The Field School activities will be carried out in English. Special sections of the Field School can be offered in Spanish or Portuguese, depending on the number of interested individuals. The Zonamerica Foundation will offer a Spanish Language Immension Course during the same period as the Field School, and arrangements can be made for interested students to attend both the Field School and the Spanish classes. For more information on the Spanish Language Immension Course, write to Ana or Andrea at recepcion@zonamerica.org.

Visa requirements: Citizens of the U.S. and most Latin American and European countries don’t need visas to enter Uruguay, but do need valid passports (except for citizens of countries that are Mercosur members). You can check whether you need a visa here: http://www.dnm.minterior.gub.uy/visas.php.

Insurance: Participants are required to have travel insurance that covers medical and repatriation costs. Proof of purchase of travel insurance must be presented at registration.

Weather: The average temperature in Montevideo in January is 28 ºC (83 ºF) during the day and 17 ºC (62 ºF) at night.

For more information, please write to Renzo Taddei at rrt20@columbia.edu.