Morabaraba with a twist!  Each player starts with 12 tokens called `cows`. Players alternately place cows on the board with your mouse. Once all the cows have been placed on the board, cows may only be moved on the board to free, adjacent intersections, except when a player has only three cows left (then he may move to any free intersection). The aim is to create rows of three called mills, either vertically, diagonally, or horizontally. When a mill is achieved, the player may capture one of the opponent`s cows by clicking on the cow. A player cannot capture an opponent`s mill if there are other cows on the board left to capture. Only one of the opponent`s cows may be captured at a time, even if two (or more) mills are achieved with one move. When an action is required from you, a prompt will appear. Players should try to block the opponent`s mills. The best intersections are the corners of the middle rectangle. Often a winning situation is a double mill. This is where a player can move back and forth between two mills, making a mill and removing an opponent`s piece on every turn. The game is over and a player loses when he has only two pieces, or has no moves left.

Play Caps Morabaraba …

Don’t miss the Indigenous Plant Fair, on 4 & 5 Sept 2010 at Munies Sports Field, John Zikhali (Sydenham Rd), next to Durban Botanic Gardens.  Open 09:00-16:00 both days.

Huge selection of plants and also food, displays and experts at hand to advise.

Entrance is R5.00 with children free.  Bring your own wheelbarrow to avoid delays!

The Indigenous Gardening Handbook is available at Botanic Gardens, nurseries and at the Fair.   Please see www.indigenousplantfair.org.za for more info.

Botanical Society of SA KZN Coastal Branch
Tel : 031 201 5111
Fax: 0866 518 969
PO Box 30544 Mayville 4058

A page on Ela Gandhi has been created on the Ulwazi Community Memory.  This includes a biography, an interview from the Memories of Inanda web documentary and a gallery of images.

Ela Gandhi was born  in Durban as the youngest daughter of Manilal and Sushila Gandhi.

Her father, who was Gandhi’s second son, returned from India to South Africa in 1917 to assist in the running of Phoenix Settlement and of the newspaper, The Indian Opinion. By 1920 he had become the editor of the paper and would eventually become its longest serving editor.  He married Sushila in 1927 and a year later their first daughter Sita was born, twelve years later in 1940 Ela was born.  As the Gandhi children grew up on the settlement they became strongly influenced by the father Manilal, who had become an important focus of resistance in the local community.

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The sardine run of southern Africa occurs between May and July when millions of sardines – or more specifically the Southern African pilchard Sardinops sagax – spawn in the cool waters of the Agulhas Bank and move northward along the east coast of South Africa. Their sheer numbers create a feeding frenzy along the coastline. The run, containing millions of individual sardines, occurs when a current of cold water heads north from the Agulhas Bank up to Mozambique where it then leaves the coastline and goes further east into the Indian Ocean.

This year the run has been particularly impressive.  Project leader Betsie Greyling was there with her camera, the results of which can be viewed at the Ulwazi flickr group.

Both deputy mayor Logie Naidoo and city manager Dr Michael Sutcliffe were at hand to launch the Sustainable Cities exhibition on Friday, and share a ride on some sustainable transport!  The event also saw the launch of the Innovations in Local Sustainability book (more on this in a later post), compiled by MILE and featuring the Ulwazi Programme as an example of good practice in the Municipality.

We hereby invite candidates interested to pursue a full-time PhD or a PostDoc within Human Factors or Enterprise Engineering, to consider the following call:

The National Research Foundation invites doctoral candidates and postdoctoral research fellows who are South African citizens to apply for funding in the DST-NRF Professional Development Programme (PDP). In this programme, the student or fellow will be placed at the Science Council or National Facility (CSIR). The amount of funding per individual for doctoral studies and postdoctoral research fellowships is R200 000 and R300 000 per annum respectively.

Applications must be completed on the NRF Interim system at http://nrfinterim.nrf.ac.za not later that 30 September 2010. Incomplete application forms and late submissions will not be considered. For guidelines on the application process, applicants are advised to refer to the attached “Guidelines for applicants” document.

The following are descriptions of the opportunities within the Human Factors and Enterprise Engineering key priority research area:

Research Group: Human Factors and Enterprise Engineering- 2 PhD and 2 PostDocs
PHD student 1 (Capturing of Indigenous Knowledge):
The focus of this student will be on the capturing of indigenous knowledge: Designing interactions compatible with sharing rural wisdom and skills can contribute to bridging the digital divide for 200 million, often acutely impoverished, Africans and to community cohesion in the face of Africa’s urbanization and Diaspora. For generations face-to-face transfer of wisdom and practical know-how, from animal husbandry to plant use, has sustained the livelihood and identity of rural communities in Africa. Designing media and/or mobile applications to contribute to this process requires responding to the way that interactions between spoken and performed practices and material settings embed knowledge in locations. This may not be as obvious, as systems developed to preserve local cultural heritage often, almost entirely ignore the aspects most critical to local dwellers. This research priority area brings together domains from human-computer interaction, anthropological and technical backgrounds in order to examine the possibilities modern ICT offers in supporting these nontypical user groups in preserving, managing and sharing their knowledge. It aims at developing first prototypes based on participatory design studies (previous and ongoing) to show the feasibility of the approach. Moreover, the resulting design patterns for knowledge interactions are useful beyond the special case of indigenous communities as they aim at location based experiences in general.

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