Category: Featured

Glenn tells us Google is all people need to find the spatial data they need.

Whether we could find spatial data from Google or whether we need some kind of special setup has not yet been fully resolved… I understand that Google is working on some protocols for finding spatial data. But my sense is that this question has been put on the back burner because people don’t think it is all that relevant. They can seem to find what they need.

One less thing for the CG to do, I guess.

Zachee Ngoko confirms many experts’ worst fears about a new taro disease in Cameroon:

Our investigation, confirmed by CABI showed that P. colocassiae is the agent responsible in Cameroon from lab. analysis and rapid mount… But we are in the process of having more information on the situation with the help from CABI/Global Plant Clinic, UK. More information will come out as soon as available.

Seek, and ye shall find:

Dear Bernard,
The variety can be accessed from Dr. Phinehas Tukamuhabwa, at the Department of Crop Science, Makerere University.

Thanks to wew for answering a request about a new soybean for Uganda.

Dave Wood asks the tough ones:

[I]s the person-in-the-street aware of a need for diversity for agriculture? With a few clicks of a mouse I can buy many hundreds of different varieties of seed for probably more than a hundred crops and the range is expanding by the year.

Lovely. Would that the farmer in her sub-Saharan field could do the same over her mobile phone. Now that would be a service to the ecosystem.

Rahul Goswami shares the history of fishing:

You know, on the west coast of India they wouldn’t go out to fish during the monsoon. Not because those amazing catamarans (the Malayali-origin word is ‘kattumaram’, more or less) can’t ride the big waves, but because the fish need time to breed.

There’s more, in the context of avoiding industrial meat … and fish is a meat, no?