̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Extreme Sleepover

'Extreme sleepover #20' – welcome to dataworld

lw355 — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 13:22:29 +0000

I’m standing 100 feet underground in a fluorescent-white room. In the centre, stand four rows of server cabinets. I’m following Matej, a data centre technician, as he carries out some diagnostic tests on the facility’s IT equipment. To get here we had to go through several security checks, including a high-tech biometric fingerprint scanner and a good old-fashioned, low-tech massive door.

̽��ֱ��IT equipment is distributed over multiple floors, each going deeper and deeper below ground into the seemingly infinite depths of the data centre. There is a constant hum of electrical voltage down here; it’s the kind of vibratory, carcinogenic sound you would normally associate with pylon power lines and it makes you think you’re probably being exposed to some sort of brain-frying electric field. I ask Matej about this and he tells me, “it’s probably ok.”

When Matej is finished in this room we head downstairs. Our footsteps sound hollow and empty on the elevated metallic walkways. A complex highway of thick, encaged cables runs above our heads, along with large pipes circulating water around the data centre for cooling purposes. As we descend the galvanised steel stairway, it’s like boarding a spaceship that’s buried deep beneath the Earth’s surface.

̽��ֱ��room we enter is almost completely white. ̽��ֱ��only other colour down here comes from thousands of server lights blinking rapidly like fireflies behind the electro-zinc-coated ‘Zintec’ doors of the server cabinets. We have entered the realm of data, an alien world of tiny, undulating lights that seem almost alive. These iridescent lights flash as data travels to and from the facility through fibre-optic cables at speeds of around 670 million miles per hour, close to the speed of light.

Take a walk inside a data centre with Alexander

This building has been designed with the sole purpose of providing optimal living conditions for data growth and survival. An ambient room temperature of around 20–21°C and a humidity level of 45–55% must constantly be maintained. In this sterile, dustless world of brushed metal surfaces, data live and thrive like precious crystals. Server cabinets become stalagmite formations sparkling frenetically with the digital activity of millions of people doing their daily things in that exact moment all around the world.

Virtually all our daily activity – both online and offline – entails the production of data, with 2.5 billion gigabytes of data being produced every 24 hours. This is stored in the 8.6 million data centres that have spread acoss the globe. Yet, few of us realise that we are using data centres.

Data centres now underpin an incredible range of activities and utilities across government, business and society, and we rely on them for even the most mundane activities: our electricity and water accounts are located in data centres, a single Google search can involve up to five data centres, information from the train tickets we swipe at turnstiles are routed through data centres. These places process billions of transactions every day and extreme efforts are made to ensure that they do not fail.

One such effort is the increasingly common practice of storing data underground in ‘disaster-proof’ facilities – in the same way that seed and gene banks store biological material that is essential for human survival. What does this say about the importance of data to our society? This is what I am down here researching. Working with data centres, IT security specialists, cloud computing companies and organisations that are trying to raise awareness about the vulnerabilities of digital infrastructures, I am exploring the cultural hopes, fears and imaginations of data as it pertains to what many are calling our ‘digital future’.

My fieldwork has led me to focus on the fears of disaster and technological failure that motivate data centre practices and discourses, from routine Disaster Recovery plans to storing hard drives in Faraday cages to protect them against electromagnetic threats. ̽��ֱ��current mass exodus into ‘the cloud’ is raising important questions about our increasing societal dependence upon digital technology and the resilience, sustainability and security of the digital infrastructure that supports our online and offline lives. Fears of a ‘digital’ disaster occurring in the future are also reflected in cultural artefacts such as TV shows about global blackouts and books about electromagnetic pulse events. In an age of constant and near compulsory connection to computers, tablets and smartphones, how would we survive if they all suddenly and simultaneously ceased to function?

Data centres are being configured as infrastructures critical not only for supporting our data-based society, but also for backing up and even potentially re-booting ‘digital civilisation’, if it should collapse. My fieldwork is not all doom and disaster, though. In fact, sometimes it’s quite spectacular. Right now I am standing in a heavily air-conditioned aisle flanked on each side by large, monolithic cabinets of server racks.

“This is one of my favourite things,” Matej says, as he flicks the overhead lights off and plunges us into an abyssal darkness punctured only by server lights, flashing like phytoplankton all around us. For a moment, we watch these arrhythmic lights flickering, beautiful and important, some vanishingly small.

But these little lights have immense significance. Something huge is happening down here. It feels like you are witnessing something incomprehensibly vast, something so massively distributed, complex and connected to all of us that it’s hard to even know what you are seeing take place. It’s like looking at the stars.

Alexander is a PhD student at Fitzwilliam College with the Division of Social Anthropology. His research is supervised by Dr Christos Lynteris, and is funded by the Cambridge Home and EU Scholarship Scheme.

Alexander Taylor provides a sensory snapshot of his fieldwork in high-security subterranean data centres exploring fears of technological failure in our data-dependent society.

There is a constant hum of electrical voltage down here; it’s the kind of vibratory, carcinogenic sound you would normally associate with pylon power lines and it makes you think you’re probably being exposed to some sort of brain-frying electric field

Alexander Taylor

A.R.E. Taylor

Data centre

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

'Extreme sleepover #19' – Living beside Uruguay’s ‘Mother Dump’

jeh98 — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 08:30:55 +0000

Returning to Uruguay’s largest landfill (cantera), ‘Felipe Cardoso’ in Montevideo, to conduct fieldwork for my PhD, I was delighted when local social worker and missionary Jorge told me that I could live at his home, in a housing cooperative overlooking the landfill.

I had worked as a labourer in the construction of the cooperative in 2010 and knew that most of the occupants were relocated residents of an infamous shantytown built on top of an old landfill.

I could use the house as a base for exploring Montevideo’s formal and informal waste trade, since many neighbours were urban recyclers, known locally as clasificadores or classifiers. I’d be able to accompany them as they left in the morning to recover value from the trash at sites nearby, often returning in the afternoon on motorbikes, trucks or horse-drawn carts laden with an impressive array of plastics, metals and cardboard, as well as food, clothing and electronics for domestic consumption or neighbourhood sale.

Waiting to move in and impatient to start fieldwork, I had eagerly accepted when one neighbour offered to host me temporarily in his yard. As it transpired, I lived for a week in the most densely populated accommodation I have ever experienced, sharing a shack with his teenage son and the flapping wings and loose bowels of 22 birds. Now, though, Jorge’s house would be my home for the following year. Initially a concrete block lacking windows and doors, I set about making it habitable, mostly using materials scavenged from the landfill.

Of course I could do nothing about the sights, sounds and smells of the landfill itself. It rose over the horizon, the third highest peak of low-lying Montevideo; the beeping of its reversing compacters could be heard throughout the night; and the strangely sweet smell of mixed urban rubbish drifted over in the morning mist.

Each day, some 60 trucks roll into the compound filled with urban rubbish. At the last count (in 2008, and likely to be an underestimate), around 5,000 waste-picking families make a living from Montevideo’s trash, attempting to recover all that is valuable, usable or edible. Their role in a city where waste management has reached crisis points in the past has been lauded as a lesson to society: they help to reduce the environmental and financial cost of landfill and find value in something that might be surplus to some but not others.

Like my interlocutors who recovered materials from there, I had ambivalent feelings about the cantera which, because of its reliable provision, was nicknamed “the mother”. On the one hand, it was an intriguing site for fieldwork where, under the supervision of Dr Sian Lazar, I focused on processes of labour formalisation, the socio-cultural dynamics of the waste and recycling work, and the history of waste infrastructure and aesthetics. On the other hand, it was also a place of hazard, police violence and a smell that lingered on clothes and skin, getting into hair and under fingernails.

I never slept at the dump but this was previously a common practice: clasificadores would camp there for days or weeks at a time, always at the mercy of the feared mounted police who would set tents alight, showing little tolerance for intruders.

̽��ֱ��closest I came to the apparently boisterous atmosphere of these encampments was joining clasificadores of the Felipe Cardoso recycling cooperative as they spent the last nights in a building the municipality had ceded them for facilities but which some had appropriated as a residence. With the exception of veteran clasificador Coco, who lived there permanently, the space seemed to function as a temporary refuge for male clasificadores who had been kicked out by their wives! On the night of my visit, we sat and played cards, listened to cumbia music, drank into my supplies of Scotch, and discussed the impending closure of the site and the workers’ relocation to a formal sector recycling plant.

With the municipal government’s attempted formalisation of Montevideo’s recycling trade, it is possible that the days of such precarious, autonomous, clasificador spaces are numbered, to be replaced by hygienic and technologically provisioned infrastructures. Yet at the end of my research trip, many of my neighbours were still making their way to the cantera to classify the tons of waste dumped there daily.

Uruguayan priest Padre Cacho once described clasificadores as “ecological prophets” and I can see what he meant – they have long functioned as ‘prospectors’, mining the urban waste stream for valuable materials that consumers have been happy to discard, and municipal governments to landfill or incinerate.

Now back in Cambridge as an intern at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), I am helping to organise a workshop on the ‘circular economy’ to explore the ways that government and industry are increasingly reconceptualising waste as recoverable resource. At a global level, it is important that shifts in policy benefit rather than dispossess informal sector recyclers, the long-time ‘artisanal miners’ of the waste stream.

Just before leaving Montevideo, the annual landfill clasificador Christmas social afforded me an enduring image of slumber amidst the scraps: an old, intoxicated and weary recycler lying on a recovered floral mattress, his sweated brow resting on a large folded rubbish bag, surrounded by thousands of pesos worth of scrap metal.

Patrick’s policy internship at CSaP is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Cambridge Doctoral Training Centre.

In a new podcast, Patrick O’Hare describes his time with the clasificadores – the families who scavenge Montevideo’s pungent ‘wastescape’ to recover and classify anything that is valuable, usable or edible.

It rose over the horizon, the third highest peak of low-lying Montevideo; the beeping of its reversing compacters could be heard throughout the night; and the strangely sweet smell of mixed urban rubbish drifted over in the morning mist

Patrick O'Hare

Patrick working with the clasificadores in Montevideo

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

'Extreme sleepover #18' – rebuilding earthquake-shattered Christchurch

lw355 — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 07:49:39 +0000

At 2.30am I sit with my laptop feeling helpless as I watch video footage of a dust cloud rising around the crumbling cathedral in the city square. An earthquake has hit my hometown of Christchurch, New Zealand, and all I can do is scan the internet for snippets of information. Mild panic rises in my stomach, I have had no news of my family.

I had been woken by a text from a friend but there were no other messages, emails or missed calls. Finally I reach my mum on her mobile phone as she emerges from a central city building. She had spent three hours stuck on the tenth floor with no power, an incessant fire alarm and no safe way out. Firemen arrived to help her and stranded colleagues negotiate the dark internal stairwells that had pulled away from the walls, with water pouring from broken water pipes above.

We speak only briefly to keep the airways free for others, but I at least learn that my immediate family are okay. After the boost of adrenaline, I can’t sleep. A few hours later, feeling a little lost, I set off for rowing training as life around me in Cambridge surreally continues as normal.

That was 2011 and at the time I was completing an MPhil degree in the Engineering Department. Following my degree, I returned to New Zealand to work on the reconstruction of Christchurch, feeling motivated that as an engineer I could contribute towards rebuilding the city.

I experienced the aftershocks (which numbered in the thousands) and became adept at estimating the epicentre through the sound and feel of the shaking. Life was fairly normal living on the western side of the city where there was minimal damage. However, I worked in badly damaged areas in the east, where houses had tilted on their foundations and the roads were rough and potholed from liquefaction damage.

Partway through the year I was offered funding for a PhD back in Cambridge. I saw an opportunity to research the reconstruction as it progressed and to capture insights as to why and how decisions were made. I believed I could continue to make a meaningful contribution, albeit shifting to the role of observer rather than as a direct participant in the recovery process.

My research involved returning to Christchurch for fieldwork each year, interviewing engineers, executives, political leaders and other professionals involved in planning and implementing the reconstruction.

̽��ֱ��initial shift from practitioner to researcher was a personal challenge. I felt I had to prove my relevance to the rebuild effort to those dealing with the stresses and challenges of the process every day. However, my fears gradually dissipated – I was welcomed back and people were happy to spend time with me to reflect on their experiences. Sometimes it was also a chance to vent their frustrations.

I had initially considered conducting multiple case studies around the world, but soon realised the value of a longer-term study in Christchurch to capture changes over time. Also, as a PhD student with limited time and budget, it made sense to work in a region where I had a good understanding of the politics and the culture and a connection to people through shared experience.

Securing interviews with critical decision makers involved planning (sometimes years in the process) and a little luck. During field visits I had an allocated desk at one of the major recovery organisations and attended community and industry events. This meant I could immerse myself in recovery discussions and I had opportunities to join meetings simply because I was in the office at the right time.

On my final visit I met with the central government minister in charge of the recovery. We discussed major decisions made by the government in response to the earthquakes. This included the establishment of new legislation, the creation of new organisations to lead the recovery and the red zoning of residential land, where approximately 8,000 residential properties now sit empty as their future is debated.

One of the many challenges of the recovery was the need to create new organisations to lead the process and to interpret ambiguous policy statements regarding funding commitments. Although there were long processes of negotiation (establishing clear funding arrangements, for example, took years), a pre-defined, prescriptive approach could have been equally unsatisfactory.

Five years into the recovery, there is a lingering question over how to be better prepared in the future. There is a need to create policies that provide both appropriate clear guidance and flexibility to respond to specific circumstances. This remains the subject of much debate in New Zealand. Despite the country’s relatively advanced system for emergency management, it was caught off-guard by a large earthquake in Christchurch.

My research has shown that while post-disaster reconstruction may be considered an opportunity to rebuild more resilient infrastructure, many potential opportunities may be excluded. Contributing factors include financial constraints, limits in scope of organisations involved and the inherent challenge of introducing change to communities, particularly in the time-constrained context of recovery.

With a better understanding of such factors, we can gain better insight into the effectiveness of different decisions and subsequent pathways for recovery. Unfortunately, with natural disasters like earthquakes, there is no prevention; there is only preparation for the next time disaster strikes.

Kristen was primarily funded through a Cambridge International Scholarship from the Cambridge Trusts. She also received small grants from the Earthquake Commission in New Zealand, the Department of Engineering, Corpus Christi College and the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Her PhD was supervised by Professor Peter Guthrie.

Kristen MacAskill describes how an earthquake in her hometown served to influence her career as an engineer.

Houses had tilted on their foundations and the roads were rough and potholed from liquefaction damage

Kristen MacAskill

Martin Luff

A badly damaged house in North New Brighton, Christchurch, New Zealand

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'Extreme sleepover #17' – going underground in search of zombies

lw355 — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 08:37:51 +0000

Isla de Mona has been many things: a source of melons and cotton hammocks for conquistadors in the 16th century; a pirate haunt in the 17th and 18th centuries; an industrial island fertilising the fields of the Western world with the fossilised guano of giant fish-eating bats in the 19th; a US air base in the 20th; and now, both a nature reserve and a destination for migrants seeking a better life in the USA.

This tiny island, just seven miles by four, with no permanent settlement, lies in the dangerous Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and it is the prehistory that brings us here.

̽��ֱ��plateau of limestone and dolomite is riddled with caves filled with signs of human activity. Much of this is pre-Columbian (i.e. before the Spanish arrived in the late 15th century) and consists of painted images, finger-drawn designs and extensive extractive finger scratches, which are sometimes deep within the ‘dark zones’, where no natural light falls.

I am with archaeologists Dr Alice Samson from Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Dr Jago Cooper from the British Museum for their summer fieldwork. As a conservator with specialism in the materials and techniques of painting, I am here to analyse the pigments used to make pre-Columbian markings and with the team look at the layer structures of engravings and painted images.

I’m using an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer to examine the elemental composition of the pictographs, and will later take tiny samples away for further analysis. I want to find out whether the people who made these images used materials that were at hand in the caves, or transported them in from elsewhere.

Mona’s prehistoric peoples appear to have lived on the island from at least 2800 BCE, surviving a century after the arrival of the Spanish at the end of the 15th century. ̽��ֱ��inhabitants at the time of the conquest, commonly referred to as Taínos, brought us the words hurricane, barbeque, hammock, canoe, potato and cannibal.

Caves feature prominently in Taíno mythology and it is likely that many of the anthropogenic images in the caves are zemís (considered by some the origin of the word ‘zombie’). Zemí refers to any object, animal, vegetable or mineral, which was animate and could be called upon to intervene in human affairs. Zemís were found, constructed or painted in 3D and 2D form. Although the presence of human-like figurative designs is common in Caribbean rock-art, Alice and Jago’s work is bringing to light a staggering amount of physical modification to the caves from the pre-Columbian era, particularly the extraction of soft white lime from the walls and ceilings. ̽��ֱ��purpose of this extraction and what the material was used for are not yet known.

Each morning I wake at 5.30am to the sounds of subtropical birds. It’s the only time of day cool enough to go for a run. ̽��ֱ��coastguards and rangers all eat early; for them, life on Mona is a cycle of week-on-week-off at work, with a small aircraft bringing them to and from the Puerto Rican mainland to Mona via a bumpy grass airstrip.

At the camp, there’s a small study centre (happily, with solar-powered Wi-Fi) as well as basic accommodation where the workers live, and where migrants can rest before they are moved from the island. Mona throws together strange combinations of people: border police, rangers, military personnel, scientists, cavers, immigrants and boy scouts.

We set off early in the morning. Some of the caves are nearby, but others involve more effort to carry our equipment, as they are some distance from our camp. Mona’s environment can be inhospitable and it has a fearsome reputation. There is little natural water, except sometimes deep in the caves. It is dry, hot and thorny, and the rocks are sharp. As we walk to the caves, we often disturb one of Mona’s endemic and therefore incredibly rare iguanas. They typically scuttle away from us into a hidden cave mouth.

Our team also includes Masters’ students from the Centro de Estudios Avanzados in Puerto Rico, and we work together analysing, documenting and photographing the evidence in the caves. Colonists, buccaneers, guano-miners and boy scouts have all left their mark, often with dated graffiti. On several days, we join a team of cavers who year on year visit this most cavernous location on earth to map the island’s 200-plus caves. It’s a great opportunity to learn about cave mapping and geology from experts.

If possible, lunch is taken in a cliff-side cave mouth, with a view out over the sea. On occasion, two nosy Red-Footed boobies wheel round and round to get a better look at us. ̽��ֱ��caves themselves are extremely hot, humid and dirty. At the end of the day we walk into the Caribbean sea, fully dressed in our ‘cave clothes’.

Images: Finger drawings and Lucy Wrapson

Credit: Alice Samson/El Corazon del Caribe Research project

Lucy Wrapson reports on her fieldwork analysing the curious cave paintings found on Isla de Mona, in the Caribbean, and their equally enigmatic artists.

Finger-drawn designs and extensive extractive finger scratches are sometimes deep within the ‘dark zones’, where no natural light falls

Lucy Wrapson

Alice Samson/El Corazon del Caribe Research project

Cave painting, Isla de Mona

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'Extreme Sleepover #16' – the mystery of a damp bed and other tales

lw355 — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 08:58:45 +0000

As I drive with Parubai to meet the rest of her family in Pune district, I spot in my rear mirror a motorbike following us. I slow down, wondering if it is someone I know. ̽��ֱ��rider, a man in his mid-30s, signals for me to wait. It’s already close to sunset and Parubai, who is assisting me with my doctoral fieldwork, is a bit nervous as this area is not considered to be the safest, especially for two women on their own.

“Madam, are you looking to buy some land? I can show you a plot road-touch, clear title. Many city people like you have bought land from me,” he assures me in his salesman’s patter. I am amused – till recently, this region was seen as the back of beyond, but now with the real-estate boom, one can see vast stretches of land marked off with barbed wire fences. Through my research with Dr Bhaskar Vira in the Department of Geography, I am trying to understand the impact of this increasing incidence of land sale on a rural society.

When we reach the village, I am surprised to see several expensive cars standing in front of a modern house where one of my other helpers’ hut once stood. I see his wife Alka making rice bhakari – a kind of flatbread – on a traditional wood stove in a small kitchen at the back. She invites me to have a bite.

As I sit with smoke making my eyes water, she gives me updates. Her husband, who belongs to the dominant Maratha caste, has sold large chunks of family land and used the money to buy a car, build this house and organise a lavish marriage ceremony for their daughter. Tonight he is hosting a party for a local politician.

“Money so earned finds a hundred ways to disappear,” says Alka despairingly. During my stay in the villages, I have often heard similar comments. With the escalating land prices, the notion of land as a symbol of status and marker of identity is beginning to change. Disputes over land ownership and increasing disparity among the villagers due to the influx of money through land sale are affecting the social networks adversely.

We retire to Parubai’s house. It’s a total contrast, with its mud walls and tiled roof with gaping holes covered by a plastic sheet. Unlike Alka, she is a landless Katkari, one of the most socio-economically marginalised tribes in India. Her husband herds a few goats to earn a living. It is an open secret that she brews liquor for extra cash.

After a meal of rice and spicy potato curry, I struggle to write my field notes by a small kerosene lamp – there is no electricity in the house – while Manjula, Parubai’s granddaughter, spreads a few sheets on the mud floor for the four of us to sleep on.

Hens kept under a basket in the corner rustle. A drunkard turns up asking for booze. Highly embarrassed, Parubai somehow sends him away. It is getting chilly as the wood stove has died out completely.

A few hours pass, I wake up with a start: the sheets seem wet. I am horrified and hurriedly check the concerned body parts. To my relief all is well. Unable to identify the source, I long for the soft sheets, comfy pillow and cosy duvet back in my Cambridge house. Eventually I creep out. ̽��ֱ��sky looks like a diamond-studded cloak. It is quiet and peaceful. I go back and wait for the sunrise.

After the morning tea, I raise the matter of my damp sheet in an attempt to resolve this mystery. “That must be Mini the naughty goat,” says Manjula, as she bursts out laughing. “She enjoys relieving herself on an unsuspecting guest in the middle of the night.” As we embark on a trek to the fields for the morning job, she is still giggling. On the way, we pass a few fenced areas advertising the upcoming holiday home project.

During my fieldwork, I have observed that the physical landscape of a village is beginning to change, with new fences and luxury villas. Money from land sale is opening up new business opportunities such as shops, restaurants, beauty parlours, wedding halls and renting of houses for a few villagers, but at the same time poor people like Parubai are losing the additional income through fodder harvesting as large areas are fenced off.

When we return, Parubai’s husband is busy getting the goats ready for a grazing trip. I suspect one particular member of the herd giving me a mischievous look. A few metres away, I see the land broker from the previous evening with a man wearing expensive sunglasses. “Very good plot, road-touch, clear title,” I hear him say...

Girija is a Gates Cambridge Scholar and is also funded through a Fitzwilliam College Environment Studies Fund.

Girija Godbole travels to a remote village in western India to understand the effects of the increasing incidence of land sale on a rural society, and makes the acquaintance of a naughty goat.

That must be Mini the naughty goat ... She enjoys relieving herself on an unsuspecting guest in the middle of the night.

Manjula

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Yes

'Extreme sleepover #15' – keeping the lights on in rural Uganda

lw355 — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 16:28:50 +0000

“If I have a flush toilet in my house I think I can be a king of all kings because I can’t go out on those squatting latrines… also it can protect my wife from going outside alone as recently my wife was almost raped by a thug when she escorted my son to the latrine at around 10:30pm in the night.”

This is Paul. His declaration of the possession he would most value is met with laughter from his fellow villagers, but it highlights a very real concern – the safety of his family.

It’s also a valuable research finding for me. Too often, projects that bring electricity to villages like Paul’s fail because of lack of uptake and maintenance by the rural communities. But if, for instance, the benefits of electrification could be understood in terms of the safety value of night-time lighting, this could improve the sense of community responsibility towards sustaining the technology after its implementers have gone home.

Another villager, Michael, explains that he places most value in owning a corrugated iron sheet instead of grass-thatched roofing because this would reduce the risk of indoor fires. Here too, the value of electricity can be highlighted – it would avoid the need to cook on an open fire.

Understanding the locals’ real needs and desires can be a key element in overcoming the lack of technology uptake. Finding out what these are is the aim of my PhD research, working with Dr Heather Cruickshank at the Centre for Sustainable Development. While the technology itself has been extensively studied, social attributes in project design have received little attention.

I have travelled here by a ‘boda boda’ motorbike and then night bus, sharing my seat on the 12-hour journey on unpaved roads to the West Nile Region of Uganda with two too many people, a goat lying beneath me, and enough chickens not to be able to ignore the smell. Only once I am on the bus do I realise that my local research assistant has accidentally booked us on the budget bus (only US$2 cheaper than the luxury coach).

To provide better infrastructure services to rural communities, it is fundamentally important to relate to the beneficiaries’ needs and aspirations, and I need to travel to the areas to learn this at first hand. Infrastructure failure after the projects are handed over to the communities is common across the basic utility provisions such as water and electrification, and I am keen to discover if there is a way of improving project longevity by ‘selling’ a service that is valued.

Seven villages and three days of focus group discussions per village seem like an achievable task in the two months scheduled. Today is the first day of fieldwork and we have arrived at the village of Moyo for the day’s focus group discussions.

̽��ֱ��village is still very familiar to me; not much has changed since my last visit three years ago when I was working with the German Development Agency, GIZ, on the installation of the community-operated pico-hydropower scheme. These schemes are perfect for small communities with about 50 homes that require only enough electricity to power a few light bulbs and a small number of electrical items.

In Moyo, however, the scheme no longer works, and the villagers are once more plunged into darkness while a more effective solution is being explored.

We meet one of the women to mobilise the six chosen villagers. We decide to start with the men, as by late morning some of the men in the village will be drunk.

Identifying what is important to rural villagers when implementing basic infrastructure projects is far more complex than simply asking “what is important to you?” I have made a ‘value game’ and explain to the locals that they must choose, initially individually, 20 items from a list of approximately 50 items that include cow, hoe, fridge, water pot, bed and utensils. Following prioritisation, they will be asked to give reasons as to why these items are important to them.

Another example arises during the discussion. ̽��ֱ��villagers use kerosene lamps to light their homes. Simply offering a solution that replaces light from one source with another is not enough. Modern technologies can offer benefits that are indirectly linked to aspects perceived as ‘very important’ in rural communities – in this case, avoiding the use of fume-producing kerosene would resonate with the mothers’ hopes of keeping their children healthy.

̽��ֱ��findings from my research will be fed back to project implementers. My hope is that only small adjustments in the project design will be required in order to communicate these ‘additional’ benefits to the target users, and that the lights will be turned on and kept on in rural villages like Moyo.

Stephanie Hirmer is a PhD student in the Department of Engineering. She is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Qualcomm and the Smuts Memorial Fund.

Inset image – credit: Stephanie Hirmer.

Stephanie Hirmer travelled to Moyo in northern Uganda to ask which possessions the villagers most value and why. ̽��ֱ��results will be used to help reduce the failure rate of projects that bring electricity to rural communities.

Identifying what is important to rural villagers when implementing basic infrastructure projects is far more complex than simply asking “what is important to you?”

Stephanie Hirmer

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‘Extreme sleepover #13’ – the wet-nursing meerkats of the Kalahari

jfp40 — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 13:15:50 +0000

I never thought I would be quizzing people over a radio about the sandiness of nipples. Then again, I never foresaw that for many months my days would start with a bump, lurching over sand dunes in a Land Rover, heading off to find meerkats, to whom those nipples belong. Life in the Kalahari is inherently full of surprises.

My PhD research with Professor Tim Clutton-Brock has brought me here, to the far northern reaches of South Africa, where I study the phenomenon of allolactation – essentially, wet-nursing. In each of the 16 groups of meerkats scattered across our large reserve, only one dominant female will breed. ̽��ֱ��other females in the group will help her to raise her young, sometimes even lactating for them. This year though, those females are not being forthcoming, and their nipples, which will have wet, sandy rings around them if they are allolactating, remain dismally dry.

̽��ֱ��radio crackles as the network of volunteers spread out in separate cars and on foot to begin the task of monitoring different meerkat groups. I’m dropped off, and suddenly am in a state of solitude that I’ve come to find blissful. At the top of Sandy Hill, a large dune and one of our main landmarks, I leave grey flat scrub behind me and come to my favourite part of the reserve. Here the grass is a dry platinum, and dunes tumble gently into wide valleys. Tall trees, now erupting into a lush green after the first rains, are dotted evenly like a wild orchard. I love best the southward vista, where the dunes drop so suddenly to the flats that it looks like the edge of the world.

It is the edge of the world for my favourite group of meerkats, the Sequoia group. I find their burrow just in time – the first to rise, just as the sun is coming up, is Bruce. He’s the dominant male of the group, a well-built and handsome meerkat easily recognisable from his striking left shoulder and left thigh dye marks, our means of identifying each individual. Bruce is a local hero for his audaciously bold guarding of his group – he can often be seen high up in some tree, watching the horizon with a fierce expression. ̽��ֱ��dominant female, Ru, is a big, good-natured girl, and her cohort are characterful and a pleasure to wander in the dunes with.

After weighing each individual and conducting a roll-call, I follow the females I’m interested in – the dominant female and the potential allolactators – and collect detailed data on their every move, as well as staying aware of what’s going on with the whole group. Summer in the Kalahari is a time to watch your step too. I walked past the same bush dozens of times in Sequoia territory last week before we heard the telltale deflating-football sound of a deadly poisonous puff adder coiled menacingly at its base. It raised a lazy head at a young male venturing too close, who thankfully alerted the group, and me, to its presence.

Watching my step is also important for happier reasons – to avoid the plucky little pups who dart around the adult females that I’m following in the hope of getting fed a juicy grub. ̽��ֱ��pups at Sequoia are obsessed with shoes, and play-forage around my heels as I record observations on their mother. If I sit down, there’s soon an investigation of my hems, laces and pockets. ̽��ֱ��pups are still the size of my palm, though getting heavier by the day.

There is a time somewhere between 11 o’clock and midday when the Kalahari turns from a balmy, soft-edged paradise to a hell that crackles underfoot and becomes alien and angry, with a sudden fierce heat. Time to head home, and sleep off our early morning.

I’m back out again mid-afternoon though, this time looking for Pandora, a group at the far edge of the land we cover. I find them using signals from a tiny radio collar that the pregnant dominant female, Toblerone, wears around her neck. But something odd is going on this evening and I find I’m getting a strong signal for Toblerone below ground, at the group’s burrow. Luckily most of the rest of the gang, including a lovable adult male called Cecil – an incorrigible lothario with neighbouring groups – are foraging fairly nearby.

It’s cooling now, but it’s been a long, hot afternoon, and when we return to the burrow at dusk, they are all eager to jump on my scales and be weighed, and then receive the gulps of water we reward them with.

After a few moments, I discover the reason for Toblerone’s absence is just as I expected – she emerges, sleek and placid, with the suckle marks on her belly of some strong and healthy pups, born this afternoon. And even better news for me, the oldest subordinate female also appears, and by the sandy rings around her nipples, it looks like she has also started lactating – the first allolactator of my study. Like I said, the Kalahari is full of surprises – the tiny bundles of life produced in this dry, hot world are the best of them all.

Kirsty MacLeod

Kirsty MacLeod is a PhD student with Professor Tim Clutton-Brock In the Department of Zoology.

Reporting back from her time spent in the Kalahari Desert, PhD student Kirsty MacLeod describes the fascinating life of a gang of meerkats that includes an audacious boy called Bruce and a good-natured girl called Ru.

Bruce is a local hero for his audaciously bold guarding of his group – he can often be seen high up in some tree, watching the horizon with a fierce expression.

Kirsty MacLeod

Kirsty MacLeod and meerkats

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'Extreme Sleepover #12’ – an equestrian adventure on the Mongolian steppes

bjb42 — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 09:00:10 +0000

I had not been this cold in ages. My deel, a traditional Mongolian garment not unlike a silky patterned bathrobe, had protected me from being burnt by the sun earlier, but it felt flimsy against the night air. Lying on my saddle-pads for insulation with my head resting against a hard wooden saddle, I contemplated the journey that had brought me to this volcanic crater in South-Eastern of Mongolia, on the border with China.

There was something about Shilin Bogd, the mountain rising above the crater where we slept, that had intrigued me. Shilin Bogd is a holy mountain where men can replenish their inner khiimor or 'wind-horses'. This trip was a chance to show my appreciation for the opportunities Mongolia had given me while exploring a concept central to my research on horse-dog-human relations in rural Mongolia. In Cambridge I had saved up my student loan and squeezed in Mongolian lessons between lectures. Now it was exhilarating to have a diary full of interview notes and a camera full of photos.

Ganbat, my host and guide, and I had ridden 70km over five hours that morning, stopping only for tea and water. According to Ganbat, I was learning to ride like a shilin sain er or good shilin man. In the past these men were highly regarded for their feats of endurance, rustling horses over vast distances. Praised for their toughness, they were 'good' in the sense that they acquired their horses from afar, never stealing locally. They epitomise the ideal Mongolian man, putting his animals' health before his own and with great knowledge of the steppe environment.

I had been looking at how Eastern Mongolians were bringing in new breeding horses. Long distance horse racing has boomed in Mongolia in the last few decades and the lush grazing in the East is renowned for producing the fastest horses. Today, introducing new breeding lines means importing horses of Arab and thoroughbred descent from Russia. I want to find out how this fresh wave of cross-breeding articulates with Mongolian notions of nationalism and purity. I am also looking at how Mongolians experience their relationships with horses and dogs, through cross-species concepts like khiimor, originally a Buddhist notion that is locally associated with luck, spirit and willpower. Just as there are rituals for men to replenish their khiimor, so there are rituals to raise the spirits of a 'depressed' horse.

Rising before dawn to climb Shilin Bogd to see the sunrise, I felt revived despite my lack of sleep. There were other visitors on the mountain, tossing their offerings of rice, vodka and sweeties onto the huge ovoo (cairn) at the top, as the light flooded the sea of grass below us. ̽��ֱ��horses were also perky, having spent the night grazing. They were travelling on full bellies; but like true shilin sain er we were not, a swig of vodka from a fellow pilgrim, a handful of cereal from my saddlebags and we were off.

That night on the steppe taught me to appreciate the shelter afforded by the Mongolian ger (yurt). Ganbat and his wife, Olziisaikhan, share their tiny summer ger with six sons and yet managed to accommodate and feed guests. Later, my translator helped me check with Ganbat that I’d grasped everything he had told me and that I’d understood elaborate concepts that were way beyond my rudimentary Mongolian. As I savoured a large bowl of noodles with mutton and steppe herbs, I felt one step closer to understanding how Mongolians relate to their animals and their landscape. I was putting into practice the anthropological theory I'd been learning in Cambridge in between long hours learning to herd and immersing myself in horse-talk.

My trip gave me a sense of how the landscape still encompasses the Mongolians and their animals. They regard the natural environment as something to work with and within: a kind of reciprocal relationship. As Mongolia enters a financial 'golden era' on the back of huge transnational mining investment, this perspective of humans as part of the landscape, rather than dominating it, poses some urgent and challenging questions – and not just for Mongolia.

Robin Irvine

Robin is in his final year as an undergraduate studying anthropology at Corpus Christi College. Before he came to Cambridge he spent several years working with Clydesdale and Shire horses at Cumbrian Heavy Horses in the Lake District. His fieldwork in Mongolia was supported by the Worshipful Company of Cutlers and the Corpus Christi College Long Vacation Travel Grant.

In the latest report of the Extreme Sleepover series, undergraduate Robin Irvine explains how a fascination for the relationships between humans, horses and dogs took him to the Mongolian steppes.

Long distance horse racing has boomed in Mongolia in the last few decades and the lush grazing in the East is renowned for producing the fastest horses.

Robin Irvine

Robin Irvine at the shrine on top of Shilin Bogd

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