A Romance With Knowledge

Photo by ©Omar Upegui R.

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The Graduate

Karol, one of the Twisters, has started her formal education.  This year she started her First Grade classes.  This is the first step towards her long journey of knowledge until she obtains a college degree.

In 2010 she attended Pre-kindergarten, which is mostly a controlled educational play.  Even though the children think they are playing; in fact, they are organizing their social activities geared towards a learning process.  Karol is doing well.  She likes school and is very tidy with her workbooks, homework and other school responsibilities.  Her brother Abdiel, is not as diligent and needs to be constantly pressed to get things done.

In Panama, it is a tradition to organize a graduation ceremony to celebrate the occasion of the end of the Pre-kindergarten year.  The little kids wear graduation togas, caps and receive a diploma.  Many parents cry with joy to see their kids graduate.  It’s a very emotional event.

Karol’s mother gave us a small plastic souvenir of this event.  We exhibit it proudly in our living room.  The souvenir has a small caption that reads, “Recuerdo de mi graduación.  Karol Denisse Achurra Díaz, Pre-Kinder, 11 de diciembre de 2010.”  In English, “Reminder of my graduation.  Karol Denisse Achurra Díaz.  Pre-kindergarten, December 11, 2010.” 

Yesterday I decided to take a picture of this souvenir using a patch of tropical flowers in the background to enhance the picture.  I’m sure Karol will like to see this picture when she gets older.  It will remind her, that once upon a time she was a little girl in kindergarten.

This is what the camera captured one Sunday morning in our front lawn.  Take a look.

Snapshot of Karol’s Pre-kindergarten souvenir taken in our front lawn one lazy Sunday morning. I used a Canon DSLR EOS Rebel T2i for this shot.  Photo by ©Omar Upegui R.

I shot this picture with my P&S compact Canon PowerShot A720 IS camera. Photo by ©Omar Upegui R.

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Quotes

“To achieve great things, two things are needed—a plan, and not quite enough time.”

Leonard Bernstein

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A Visit to the Universidad de Panamá

At the request of a frequent reader and commentator of Lingua Franca, I recently visited the campus of Universidad de Panamá. This is a public entity responsible for monitoring and regulating  high education in Panama.

Many education experts agree that Universidad de Panamá is responsible for generating most of the  professionals needed by the country to keep its ascending trajectory towards becoming a First World Country.

Graduate students from the School of Law and the University School of Medicine are considered to be the best qualified in the country and in Central and South America.  Having a diploma from these faculties is a guarantee of prestige and success in this neck of the woods.

For the next few days, I will post photographs of the campus in an effort to give you a general  idea of how this knowledge institution in Panama looks like.   It was a rewarding experience for me, being able to look at University of Panama with baby’s eyes; by this I mean with curious eyes—just like babies look at the world.

Below are my introductory images as I plunge into a world of knowledge.  Here we go.

Photograph of the official seal of the University of Panama located at the entrance of the General Auditorium (Paraninfo Universitario). Photo by ©Omar Upegui R.

Photograph of the University School of Medicine (Facultad de Medicina) of the Panama University. It's considered by experts, as one of the best schools of medicine in Latin America. Photo by ©Omar Upegui R.

View of the School of Medicine building located within the campus of Universidad de Panama. Photo by ©Omar Upegui R.

A close-up view of the University School of Medicine (Facultad de Medicina) in Panama City, Panama. Photo by ©Omar Upegui R.)

In the days ahead I’ll continue showing more pictures of the University of Panama.  You’ll be surprised at how attractive it really is.  I obtained my college degree in Mid Level Education at the School of Education in this university, so it’s my beloved Alma Mater, as well as ULACIT where I obtained my BS in Business Administration.  Good Day.

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Education in Panama

In this day and age it’s imperative to invest heavily in education if a country wants to become competitive.  The world has evolved into a new age identified as the Information Age, where information is the critical factor to guarantee economic growth.  Failing to look the other way is to fall into a deep hole of poverty and stagnation.  A dramatic example is Africa.

The current President of Panama, Ricardo Martinelli, has a strong commitment to make deep changes in the education of the country.  These are his immediate actions for the next school term that starts in March 2010:

• A free knapsack (mochila) for every public student to carry his or her books and school supplies.
• Free school textbooks needed during the year.
• Free school supplies to be used during the school term (scissors, rulers,  paste, pencils, crayons, brushes and so forth).
• An education subsidy of $20.00 per-month-per-student to help pay the costs of school uniforms.
• A nationwide network of  WiFi hot spots to guarantee free Internet access to wireless electronic artifacts.

All of the above will be provided by the Ministry of Education to approximately 800,000 students enrolled for the next school term.  The cost of this program is about $150 million.  This has never been done before in the history of our country.

I would like to highlight that education in Panama is compulsory for the first six years of primary education and the following three years of high school.

As of the 2004/2005 school year, there were about 430,000 students enrolled in grades one through six—95 per cent attendance. The total enrollment in the six secondary grades for the same period was 253,900 students—60 percent  attendance. More than 90 percent of Panamanians are literate.  The goal is 100 percent literacy.

As of 2004, more than 92,500 Panamanian students attended the University of Panama, the Technological University, and the Santa María La Antigua University.  Including smaller colleges, there are 88 institutions of higher education in the country and the number is growing.  I understand that private research university, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)  is planning to open a branch in Panama in the near future.

I’m proud to say that enrollments at upper levels of schooling had increased strikingly both in relative and absolute terms since 1960. Between 1960 and the mid-1980s, secondary-school enrollments expanded some four-and-a-half times and higher education, nearly twelve-fold.

In 1965 fewer than one-third of children of secondary school age were in school, and only 7 percent of people aged 20 to 24 years. In the mid-1980s, almost two-thirds of secondary-school-aged children were enrolled, and about 20 percent of individuals aged 20 to 24 years were in institutions of higher education.  The is the correct path to transform Panama into a First World nation.

Below are several pictures of Santa María La Antigua University (USMA), to give you a general idea of what a university campus looks like in this neck of the woods.  Here we go.

A sign of USMA University located at Via Ricardo J. Alfaro in Panama City, Panama. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Photograph of the main building of USMA University in Panama City, Panama. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

A Panamanian flag waves inside the premises of USMA University in Panama City, Panama. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Photograph of a modern sculpture donated by the Spanish Embassy to USMA University on October 12, 1978. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.(

Japan, Ireland, South Korea and Germany has demonstrated how important education is.  For example, Japan is a group of islands with no important deposits of natural resources, only people with sophisticated technological knowledge.  This explains why this small country  is the second economic power in the world.  Knowledge is power!  Good Day.

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Back Then When Music Was Wrapped in Vinyl

During my lifetime—63 years—music has changed its wrappings many times as technology got more and more sophisticated.  During the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, most people listened to their music through record players and radios.  Music was codified in plastic discs which rotated at 33 1/3 RPMs (revolutions per minute).

Sound was produced by placing an electrified needle through the grooves of the discs called records.  The quality of the sound was gorgeous.  You had the options to listen to monophonic, stereophonic and quadraphonic sounds.  Quite cool.  All was analog information.  Then came the digital revolution and the analog world went haywire.  The zeros and the ones took their place and they’re still here, and will be here for a long time I guess.

After the vinyl records, the music industry wrapped their music in a magnetic tape inside a plastic box.  It was called a music cassette or cartridge.  Even cars came equipped with cassettes and cartridges players.  You could buy recorded cassettes or you could record them yourself.  It was a very popular music medium during its time.

More knowledge was applied to music wrappings and the cassettes were replaced with compact disks commonly knows as CDs.  It was an instantaneous hit all over the world.  Shortly after, men with white robes inside electronic labs, came up with the digital video display, also known as DVDs and the music wrapping was changed once more.  Even as we speak, DVDs are widely used, even though there is a transition going on to another wrapping known as Blu-ray or BD.

Blu-ray (not Blue-ray) also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group of the world’s leading consumer electronics, personal computer and media manufacturers (including Apple, Dell, Hitachi, HP, JVC, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK and Thomson).

The format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition video (HD), as well as storing large amounts of data. The format offers more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc. This extra capacity combined with the use of advanced video and audio codecs will offer consumers an unprecedented HD experience.

After BDs what will come next?  I have no idea, but I do know that knowledge is presently being applied to change the music wrappings once more.  Perhaps the new music and/or video formats are already in the pipeline.  It’s very possible that Steve Jobs could be listening to an Apple prototype product right now at Cupertino, CA while he plans his next strategic launch.  Will it be the iSound gadget?

I had a large collection of long play records, also called LPs for short.  Most of them were given away or trashed; however I still have thirty-seven of those oldies in my closet.  Last week, my wife removed some of the dusted accumulated on top of the carton jackets and asked what should we do with them?  After thinking for a while, I decided to keep them.  It could very well be that technology will return to vinyl records in a back-to-the-future scheme.

We don’t have a stereo system anymore, so we can’t listen to our vinyl records.  We can only look at them and remember the Good Ole Days as they say.  Yesterday I took several pictures of them to share with you today.  Maybe it’ll strike a chord or two of your memory brain cells.  Here we go.

Picture of an album of The 5th Dimension dubbed, "Love's Lines, Angles and Rhymes." It was recorded by Bell Records, a division of Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Picture of a Neil Diamond's album called, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull." This was the original motion picture sound track for The Hall Bartlett Film. The words and music were created by Neil Diamond and the Musical Director was Tom Catalano. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Photograph of a hot Neil Diamond's album dubbed, "Hot August Night" recorded in concert at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, CA. This event took place during a hot, sultry summer night in California on Thursday, August 24, 1972. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Image of an orchestral music album dubbed, "The World of Your Hundred Best Tunes Vol. 10". You can't even begin to imagine how much I love this album. It was a gift given to me by a dear friend in Barbados, WI. The hundred best tunes were chosen by listeners for a radio program in London. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

This is another album of the collection of "The World of Your Hundred Best Tunes Vol. 8." Gorgeous pieces of classical music suitable for everyone. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Picture of the music album "Overture 1812" conducted by Leopold Stokowsky as a host conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. This music composed by Tchaikovsky commemorates the withdrawal of Napoleon's troops from Russia in 1812. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Photograph of the album "Mozart's Greatest Hits." This unique LP includes classical orchestra conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy and George Szell. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Picture of a classical album of Simon & Garfunkel, dubbed, "Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits." Their songs "The Sound of Silence" and "Mrs. Robinson" are icons in American pop music. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Photograph of the popular singer Andy Williams which invaded American homes during the Sixties and Seventies. Ronald Reagan described Andy's voice as "a national treasure". (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Photograph of the album, "The Best of Peter, Paul and Mary - (Ten) Years Together." The trio was composed of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers. The Sixties and Seventies music makers were in keeping with the period - revolutionaries and conservatives, weird, wild and wonderful. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Picture of "Fiesta Ballenata" which is folkloric music from Colombia. I could dance all night with this type of Latin accordion music. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

A view of my old collection of 37 albums of vinyl LPs. I plan to migrate this music into CDs when my pocket feels healthy again. (Credit: ©Omar Upegui R.)

Oh, I forgot to say that another trend in the wrapping of music history, is the downloading of music from the Internet to your hard disk, iPod, iPhone, iTouch, MP3s, iPad and what have you.  The latest fashion is to have music with no wrappings at all.

Music downloaded through iTunes is digital music wrapped in binary units called bits and bytes.  Knowledge has carried us to a new dimension where reality is no longer visible.   Welcome to the future where physical objects are disappearing into the Twilight Zone of digital codes.  The ones and zeros have taken over our physical world.  Good Day.

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Photograph of the Day: Cognition

Photograph of our grandnephew, Karol, in deep thought. (Credit: Omar Upegui R.)

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Quotes I Cherish

“Who is wise?   He that learns from everyone.   Who is powerful?   He that governs his passions.   Who is rich?   He that is content. Who is that?   Nobody. “
- Benjamin Franklin

“To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?”
- Katherine Graham

“Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.”
- Anonymous

“Gentlemen, why don’t you laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh, I should die.”
- Abraham Lincoln

“The conditions of conquest are always easy. We have but to toil awhile, endure awhile, believe always, and never turn back.”
- Marcus Annaeus Seneca

“The height of your accomplishments will equal the depth of your convictions.”
- William F. Scolavino

“A person is only as big as the dream they dare to live.”
- – Unknown

Words are the skeleton of the mind.  It holds the power of your thoughts.  Good Day.

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Photograph of the Day: Is It Still There?

(Credit: Bits & Pieces.com)

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Coffee Filters: A Jack of All Trades

Of all things, coffee filters, who knew! And you can buy 1,000 at the Dollar Store for almost nothing.

1. Cover bowls or dishes when cooking in the microwave. Coffee filters make excellent covers.

2. Clean windows and mirrors. Coffee filters are lint-free so they’ll leave windows sparkling.

3. Protect China. Separate your good dishes by putting a coffee filter between each dish.

4. Filter broken cork from wine. If you break the cork when opening a wine bottle, filter the wine through a coffee filter.

5. Protect a cast-iron skillet. Place a coffee filter in the skillet to absorb moisture and prevent rust.

6. Apply shoe polish. Ball up a lint-free coffee filter.

7. Recycle frying oil. After frying, strain oil through a sieve lined with a coffee filter.

8. Weigh chopped foods. Place chopped ingredients in a coffee filter on a kitchen scale.

9. Hold tacos. Coffee filters make convenient wrappers for messy foods.

10. Stop the soil from leaking out of a plant pot. Line a plant pot with a coffee filter to prevent the soil from going through the drainage holes.

11. Prevent a Popsicle from dripping. Poke one or two holes as needed in a coffee filter.

12. Do you think we used expensive strips to wax eyebrows? Use strips of coffee filters.

13. Put a few in a plate and put your fried bacon, French fries, chicken fingers, etc. on them. Soaks out all the grease.

14. Keep in the bathroom. They make great “razor nick fixers.”

Oh yeah, they’re also great to use in your coffee makers too.  Good Day. 

Source:  Bits & Pieces

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