Ethnic Studies 410 Cultural Project - Water and Society

My cultural project relates to the water resources here on Malta. In ES 410, before we left, we learned about the limited water resources that are effecting Malta today and we looked into a little bit of how the government and people were dealing with the insufficient amount of freshwater. Coming to the island, I've been able to get a first hand look at the severity of the shortage and Maltese opinions on it.

Malta's water history is very interesting. The islands of Malta and Gozo is composed of five principle layers; Lower

Coralline Limestone, GlobigerinaLimestone, Blue Clay, Greensand, and Upper Coralline Limestone. Just under the Lower Coralline Limestone layer and above the impermeable Blue Clay level sits two natural freshwater aquifers, the Main Mean Sea Level Aquiferand the Perched Aquifer, respectively. Historically, Malta has used these aquifers for their freshwater, however, today the water is being used faster than it can be replenished by rain and natural permeability of the layers. (Source #1)

Malta's population has grown significantly in past years and continues to grow today.

Just under 400,000 people populate this tiny nation, with a growth rate of 0.42% in 2005, according to the CIA World Factbook. (Source #2) All those people inhabiting the islands require freshwater and lots of it. About one third of Malta's freshwater comes from three aging desalination plants that use Reverse osmosis to extract the salt out of the saltwater from the Mediterranean. Another third is taken from the rapidly shrinking aquifers through manmade boreholes that drill down to the aquifer and pump up water completely free of charge. About one quarter is received through the Water Services' boreholes and the rest comes from small, private reverse osmosis plants or from the islands plentiful private cisterns that collect and store the meager amount of annual rainfall. (Source #3)

In Malta, I've talked briefly with Ph.D student, Keith Buhagiar, a local archeologist interested in the ancient and medieval water management systems spread throughout the islands. He discussed about the differences between wells and cisterns and their creation. Wells are the most ancient water system, and was man's attempt to obtain water by digging vertically down below the spot where water is required. Usually, these wells are circular or square shape vertical shafts. This picture shows a dried up well found in Sicily. (Source #4)

Alternatively, cisterns are more for the collection and storage of water. They were built either through rock-excavation or built at ground level through the use of masonry. Above ground cisterns were not as popular because of their consistent need for maintenance and repair. (Source #4) The picture shows a sonar mosaic of the inside of the Ta-Silg cistern in Malta. Ta-Silg is one of the oldest places with a cistern dating back about 3000 years and living through multiple occupations from the original Temple People to the Phoenicians to the Romans. Some cisterns are quite complicated, like the Ta-Silg cistern, with many rooms and tunnels, while others are simply bell-shaped or circular or rectangular shafts cut into the ground. Sometimes multiple cisterns are clustered together and are connected through small channels. (Source #5)

The situation in Malta changes severity depending on who is giving the opinion. Some don't see the scarcity of water at all while others are being hit very hard with it. Some private homes and farms still use the cisterns and wells settled on their property for various purposes from agricultural water to filtering it for daily use, however, most still rely heavily on the reverse osmosis plants and the shrinking aquifers. With Malta's dependence on tourism and it's increasing population, one thing is for certain, whether the water scarcity is felt by all or not, something must be done to conserve or collect freshwater for the future of Malta. Within the next few days, I am meeting with four members of the Malta Water Association for interviews on this topic. I am hoping to get some good information on their opinions on the water shortage and where this small, heavily populated country is headed.

Sources:

#1 - Malta Water Association (http://maltawater.org/index.php/themes/geological-habitat-of-maltas-aquifers)

#2 - CIA World Fact-Book (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mt.html)

#3 - Malta Takes Control, IEEE Article (http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/maltas-smart-grid-solution/0)

#4 - Keith Buhagiar Presentation on "Maltese Ancient and Late Medieval Water Management Systems" on 3/4/12

#5 - Tour of Ta-Silg Temple Site by David Cardona on 3/13/12

Picture Sources:

Picture #1: British Geological Survey (http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/groundwater/quality/Malta.html)

Picture #2: Malta Takes Control, IEEE Article (http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/maltas-smart-grid-solution/0)

Picture #3: Picture Taken on Site at Gozo Citadel on 3/12/12

Picture #4: Picture Taken on Site in Palermo, Sicily on 3/6/12

Picture #5: Ta-Silg Mosaic Constructed by Erik on 3/13/12

Picture #6: CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mt.html)

Computer Science and Information Technology in Malta

On one of the sites we were mapping, we had the pleasure of meeting the head of the Engineering Department from the University of Malta and two students in order to let them view our data collection process. Erik and I got to interview them about our cultural research projects for our ethnic studies class.

My cultural research project is on the role of Computer Science and Information Technology in Malta. The idea of my project came from the startling fact that Malta has very few natural resources. One of the papers I was reading reported that there are "four extractive industries on which manufacturing might be built-- mining,forestry, fishing, and agriculture"[1]. It concluded that Malta has an insufficient environment for any of these industries[1]. Having few local resources for manufacturing severely limits what Malta's economy can do.

This challenged me to think of possible major industries for Malta. I came up with the idea that if the country couldn't base it's economy on making physical products then why can't it make information based products?

Upon talking to the students and the department head, I was informed that unlike Cal Poly, Computer Science is not part of Engineering but is part of their relatively new department of Information and Communication Technology. This didn't affect the quality of the information that they gave me.

They told me that there is heavy investment in Computer Science and Information Technology. In the latest Business Research and Innovation report from the National Statistics Office of Malta, they reported that 29.47% of all intramural research and development expenditures in 2004 were in computer and related activities[2].

Also, Maltese government research and development expenditures have increased from €4.1 million to €15.7 million in 2010[3]. Research and development specifically in Engineering and Technology has doubled since 2008 making it the most funded major field of science in Malta. This can be seen in the graph below.

The idea of heavy investment in Computer Science and Information Technology wasn't only reaffirmed by them but was also mentioned by Timmy Gambin who has been helping coordinate our research in Malta. He informed me that the University is constructing a building dedicated to Information and Communication Technology. Upon further research I found that the University was awarded a sum of €17.3 million for the project from the European Regional Development Fund[4]. It was said to be built because of the high demand for Information and Communication Technology graduates[4].

This is some of the information I have come across and I will be reporting on more very soon.

Works Cited

1. Young, B. S. "SocietyThe Maltese Islands: Economic Problems and Prospects for Industrial Development." Geographical Review 53.2 (1963): 263-86. Print.

2. Malta. National Statistics Office. Business Research and Innovation 2004-2006. 2008. Print.

3. Malta. National Statistics Office. Expenditure on Research and Development in the General Government Sector: 2008-2010. 2011. Print.

4. "New ICT Facilities Building at University of Malta." Gozo News. 17 May 2009. Web. 17 Mar. 2012 .

Meetings and Technical Update

It truly has been a busy week. As that all us Cal Poly students leave tomorrow, much preparation was done this week. Many of us had to take one or more final exams, and finish final projects for our classes. Thursday night the team went out to dinner to take a small break from preparations and plan the packing of our technical equipment. On Friday we packed everything we needed from the Lair and confirmed some last minute details.

For a little more than the last week I have been helping Sara with the water and society part of ICEX. I worked to install the Omeka database system on the server space provided by the Cal Poly Computer Science Department. Due to my lack of experience in database installation it took longer than expected but on Friday it was successfully installed. The website for the database is not currently in a state that we would like to share with the public but I expect that it won't be very long until it is. Unfortunately, due to the time it took me to set up the database among the other work for this past week, I have not had the chance to work on the programming side of my project but Tyler and Tim have gotten some work done on the mounting of the Otter Box cases.These will house the salinity sensor, the pressure/temperature sensor and the PAM. See the post below for more details.

Brent's Cultural Research Project

All the ICEX students from Cal poly are doing a cultural research project and my project is on Computer Science and Information Technology as a major source of national income in Malta. The topic came out of the startling fact that Malta has very few natural resources that it can base it's manufacturing sector on. My idea was that if Malta couldn't make physical products then why not make information based products?

In Malta I plan to talk to Computer Science and Information Technology professors to get their view of the current state of the industry and what they believe might happen in the future. The final product for my project will be a piece of writing explaining the findings of my research.

Scientific Data Acquisition and Modeling Project Update 2

Progress has been made since my last post. As for the sensor part of the project, the salinity sensor has been built. Tyler is currently adjusting it to be able to measure the range of salinity we expect to encounter in the cisterns. The pressure sensors that we will be using to take temperature measurements arrived about a week ago along with the PAMs. We are currently in the process of acquiring the cable used to program them. Once we program the PAMs we will connect everything together and start testing. Also the otter boxes which we will be putting the sensors in to protect from the water should be here by Wednesday

or Thursday.

As for the modelling part of the project, I have made some modest progress. I have written a CSV file parser to parse the salinity, temperature, and position data and represent it in the cistern. The visualization for this can be seen to above. Also I implemented a bounding box that will help me calculate what is in the cistern and what is not for when I do the scattered data interpolation view. This can be seen to the right.

IRB Forms, Omeka and Water and Society Project

The Water and Society Project, I am working on is mainly targeted at educators and classrooms that are interested in learning more about water and its impact on Malta and its culture. Envisioned for this project is to be able to set up curriculums and lesson plans based around gathering information from sources and references that ICEX has collect throughout its research on Malta.

This past week and a half, I have been working with Jane to fill out and submit IRB forms for my part of the project. For my project, specifically, we needed to gather information about the cisterns and interview people who came into contact with them. However, to be able to interview individuals and use the information we receive from them we needed to submit three forms to the Human Research Committee, who would determine whether the research we are doing will not harm any of the individuals we come into contact with and that the research is acceptable. We spent quite a bit of time, writing, revising and changing the forms to describe all aspects of the project. I submitted the forms this morning, so we are hoping the Committee will review our documents and approve our project soon, before we leave we hope!

Jane, Erik, Brent, and I also decided that Omeka was going to be our UI & database. It will hold all of the sources and information we collect. Zoe introduced Jane, Erik and I to Alan in the Computer Science Department and we discussed with him the possibility of us using Cal Poly server space to hold the Omeka information. We decided that was probably the best for this project, however, Alan said that usually projects that use the Cal Poly server space are not permanent and thus get little bits of space. We don't think that the project will use a lot of space, so we think this will be alright for the time being at least. Once we get to the point where we need more space or want to change the duration of the project, etc. we will decide the next step then.

Lastly! The four of us also had a skype session with John Lester about unity 3D and Jibe products and their abilities and limitations. I think we will use this for Erik's project, specifically for the archeologist side, however, Jane and I have bounced around the idea of using it in collaboration with Omeka for the Water and Society Project as well. We haven't figured out all the details yet, but from my knowledge it would be really cool to use.

The program is a virtual world program, which enables a person to create a character and walk around and interact with a world that we (the ICEX members) can build. Characters can come into contact with each other, have meetings, presentations, look at specific locations, and do a bunch of other things that can make it more user friendly to get information about Malta and its cisterns.

The part that Jane and I were most interested in for the Water and Society Project, was the ability to hold tours or classroom 'field trips' to the various locations in Malta with the information that we will collect once over there. I think this would be a great tool for educators to be able to use and I would love to try and work with it for the project, but due to the cost and some other factors, we haven't decided yet whether we will officially try to use it yet or not.

That's the most of it so far! I will be working more with Omeka and looking at unity 3D and Jibe in more detail in the near future and we will be waiting anxiously from the Human Research Committee to see if our study has been approved and we can move forward!

ROV Driving, Localizing, and Data Collection

The 2012 Cal Poly ICEX Team

Dr. Clark visited us from Princeton over the weekend and we had an opportunity to hit the pool and play with the ROV! I have to admit, I was pretty surprised by how small it is; certainly beneficial for navigating the cisterns! We went through everything involved in preparing the robot, setting up a work site, and driving around underwater.

We had some difficulties connecting the sonar module, as the Serial - USB converter buffered data and disrupted the data stream. After a bit of fiddling with the sensor and connections, we found a laptop that still had a RS-232 port built in. This eliminated the buffer problem and was able to give us full sonar data.

Each member of the group took turns navigating the Poly Canyon swimming pool with our backs turned, using only the control box. This was a pretty good simulation of what it will be like to operate the 'bot in a cistern environment. After everyone was familiar with the basic controls, we threw some dive toys in the water and practiced retrieving our 'artifacts' with the robot gripper. It was quite a challenge!

Unfortunately, one of the drive motors had suffered water damage at some time in the past. After a few hours of running, the motor failed and bound up, cutting our session short. It took us sometime to trace the problem down to the motor, but when we finally pulled it out it was unmistakably caked with salt corrosion. We'll have to wait a little while to receive a replacement, but at least we all got a chance to see and drive the 'bot!

As part of our weekly lab meetings, so far we have heard from Billy and Jeff. Billy gave a presentation on the workings of FastSLAM and how the robot localizes itself while mapping out a cistern. In addition, Jeff gave a presentation on how this mapping data is processed to remove holes and create a traditional .m mesh file describing the geometry of the cistern. From here, I will take the mesh file and perform projective texturing onto the surfaces using the pictures gathered from the ROV. Now that we have an understanding of localization and mesh generation, Dr. Wood, Billy, Jeff, Tim, and I will be meeting sometime in the next few days to discuss the algorithms we intend to use to perform the texturing and bump mapping of the cistern.

Winter Break Progress

Over winter break I had two tasks. The first task was to do some investigation into Google Earth's ability to display our findings. The second was to get everything prepared for our labs at Pacheco. The progress I made towards these two projects is summarized below:

Google Earth

I'm convinced that Google Earth will be a sufficient tool for sharing our results. It has every feature that we need: html formatting, easy to link to files from databases, image/video embedding, descriptions of each site, underground depth/maps. Additionally, it is commonly used software, making it easier to spread our findings.

That said, there are a few things that I haven't figured out yet. I don't know how to share a google earth file so that multiple people can edit it at once (aside from e-mailing the other person the file). I think the program has this capability, but I haven't figured out how it works yet. Another problem is that when you create a map of a place below ground (cisterns are below ground) the polygon won't show up on a map embedded into a website. The last problem is that I can get an embedded video to work on MY copy of google earth, but can't get an embedded video working in an embedded blog post like this one. Anyways, problems aside, here is a little sample that I made up.

If you have the Google Earth plugin installed, you should be able to view this. The camera should pan to my house and you will see some information about it when you click it. If you double click "Erik's house", it will zoom in to street view. Additionally, you may click the green polygon on the ground to see an outline of my underground lab, and again, some information on that. As far as I can tell, this is what we need for the project.

Pacheco Labs

I received a copy of the powerpoints and lecture notes from last year, and have been discussing everything with Chris, Jane, and the teacher from Pacheco (Jill). Looks like we're all going to meet up as a group on Wednesday at 12:10 to talk about the curriculum and maybe do a run through of the first demo that we will do for Jill's class on week 2. The first demo is a discussion of robotics, engineering, and then a demo of a line follower robot.

Over break I borrowed a Lego Minstorms kit from professor John Chen to make a line following robot. I got him working, but just barely. I was testing him out on brown cardboard with black electrical tape and poor lighting, and Jill's classroom is black/grey carpet so we will need to use masking tape. I will be going to her classroom on Wednesday afternoon to test out this one. The bots that we will be using for the week 4 & 5 demos will be borrowed from Jill, and the bots for the week 6 & 7 demos are in the LAIR, but need some repairing. I'll get to that in a week or two. That just about wraps everything up for now. More from me later!

Oh, and here are a few bad photos of the bot that I made for the first lab.

Erik's Pre-Trip Learning Goals

Using what I know so far about ICEX, I have developed a few goals that I would like to have accomplished by the project's end. I'm sure that these learning goals will be revised as the quarter progresses, and I accept that there will be events that change my aim along the way that I have not yet considered. With that said, my pre-trip goals are the following:

I would like to gain enough knowledge of robotics and computer science principles to become a more well rounded systems engineer. In other words, I would like to be able to understand complex processes and systems that involve a variety of engineering disciplines. This is not a goal that can be perfected, but rather one that must be continuously worked towards. It will be difficult, and it does not end once ICEX is over (in fact, it never does)! I think it's safe to say that by partaking in the ICEX project, this is a goal that everyone on the team is working towards. I guess I'm in good company!

I was assigned two sub-projects to complete along the way. These projects are developing an interactive Google Earth (or other) copy of our findings for documentation and educational purposes, and keeping track of the curriculum that we will share with the kids at Pacheco Elementary and any other schools that we may be working with. My goal is to educate as many people as possible such that they will be interested in what robotics has to offer. Hopefully, if we do our job at Pacheco, a handful of the kids will use our labs as an incentive to work harder in school so that they can do the same things in their future. While the details of the Google Earth database are not as clear as of yet, I hope that the outcome of this sub-project will be just as beneficial.

Just like every other human, I have a knack for adventure. Malta will feed that knack! I'm ecstatic to be on another side of the planet learning about things that I have never encountered! When I'm on my deathbed and I ask myself if I lived a complete life, this is one of the things that I will use to convince myself that I did. Happiness is something that everybody strives for, and this is the best way that I can think of to be happy. My goal is to make the trip as fulfilling as it can possibly be; to jam it with adventure, to have a mind opening experience, and to bring back as many stories as I can cram into my brain.