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Tag: Utah
Tour of Utah Recap – Stages 4-6
Back to the story…
Stage 4 – Lehi to Salt Lake City (134.3 miles)
We started about 25 miles into Stage 4. Because it was a 134 mile stage, and it had a "lollipop" in it, we had to push forward to get as far into the stage as we could before getting held up by the pros coming through. Our start point was in the middle of the Utah desert. Seriously… it was the desert. The stage profile was very flat, so the riders made pretty good time. Unfortunately, because it was the desert, there was very little scenery. I did snap a few shots of the flat landscape and some Pony Express landmarks, though.
We did get caught by the pros on the lollipop, but we made it almost to the "end of the stick" before heading north, towards Salt Lake City. It was a very long day, and I blame it mostly on the lack of scenery for the first several hours of the ride. The week, so far, had been uneventful, as far as mechanical or rider support issues, which was good.
Stage 5 – Newpark Town Center to Snowbird (101.1 miles)
This stage was the queen stage of the Tour of Utah, with around 10,000 feet of climbing. There were some serious climbs ahead of the guys, but we were more concerned about the start of the ride. We were scheduled to have a ceremonial start at Newpark Town Center in the midst of a gran fondo that rode the entire race course. Instead of the "ceremonial start" we were supposed to get, we ended up getting thrown in amongst the fondo riders. In case you weren't aware of it, support for an event like ours gets a lot harder when you add an extra 700 RIDERS to the road…
The extra riders added to the confusion, for sure. At our first rest stop, I tried to speed up to get going and beat a group of fondo riders back onto the road, and forgot to shut the tailgate of the truck. Looking in the rear-view mirror, I saw my big cooler come out of the truck and go spinning into the highway, rocketing bottles all over the place… I cleaned up the mess, drove to a grocery store to replenish my ice and water, and continued on. Everything was good in the end, but for about 45 minutes, I was pretty panic-stricken.
As we continued on, I had to fight my way through the fondo traffic up and down the intermediate KOM climbs to keep up with my group. The climbs were tight and twisty, and it was very difficult with two-way bike traffic and auto traffic. We managed to make it through the KOM's, through the small towns where sprints were located, then approached the climb to Snowbird. I had visited Snowbird before for a Specialized dealer event, about 3 years ago, so I knew the climb up to the resort. It was a long, somewhat steep climb, and coming at the end of a 100-mile day, it was going to be no easy feat for our guys.
I made the decision to give the guys bottle hand-ups from the roadside on the way up the hill. They would ditch their empty bottles, I'd give them a fresh bottle, then I'd give them a spray of water on their back or head and give them a push up the road. This made a huge difference to them. They were able to shed a bottle, get a little reprieve from the heat, and get a friendly boost up the road. Helped for a second, at least…
All the guys made it up the climb, except one coach, Colin Izzard. He had the legs to go up the climb, but one of the riders suffered a broken spoke, so he sacrificed his rear wheel and helped me sag the guys up the hill. I definitely needed the help that day. It was hot, and we did a lot of work on that last climb, making sure all the guys were okay.
Stage 6 – Park City to Park City (77 miles)
This was the final day of the Tour of Utah, and had some of the steepest climbing I had ever seen. The ride was pretty chill for a long while, except for scrambling around for some odd course markings on some smaller, sketchier roads. A lot of times, we headed out earlier than the course marking crews, so sometimes we miss turns if the numbers in the race bible get jumbled. We had two or three odd turns that weren't marked well, so we had to figure that out before moving forward. Once we got back on the main road, we found our way.
There were a few major climbs in this stage. The first was through a gated neighborhood, Wolf Creek Ranch, usually closed to the public. Once we turned on the climb, we one of the steepest pitches I had ever seen. After 5 days of riding, I know the guys were begging for it to stop, but the climbing continued… The boys started "paperboy-ing" (weaving side to side to take the edge off the climb), so I got out of the truck to give them little pushes through some of the turns. Unfortunately, this was only the first major climb of the day…
The guys continued on, rolling comfortably until we approached Empire Pass. Empire Pass was hand-selected by Levi Leipheimer for this race, due to it's length and difficulty, and probably because Levi knew the climb inside and out (Levi won Stage 6 on this day, after our athletes finished). Needless to say, this climb was a huge obstacle for the athletes, regardless of their fitness. Less than 500 meters into the climb, the "paperboy-ing" started again… I knew we were in for it.
Strangely, one of our athletes, Shannon Lawrence from Bermuda, started stretching his legs a bit. He was very nervous going into the day, and said for the first 40 miles of the ride that his legs were feeling very heavy. On Empire Pass, he had evidently worked all the kinks out, because he steadily motored away from the rest of the group. I don't know what got into him, but he changed from flatlander to climbing machine that day. It made things a bit difficult for me, though… he was so far up the road, I would have to zoom ahead in the truck to take care of him, then wait or drive back down the mountain to feed and push the other riders. It was definitely a test of my abilities, not as a mechanic, but as a sag driver (NOTE: My legs were sore the next day from running and pushing riders up 20% grade hills for two days… just sayin'…).
Shannon made it to the top first, and the rest of the group followed shortly thereafter. There was a nice, long, windy descent with one minor little kick in it before the finish in Park City. All the group descended into town together and finished the CTS Tour of Utah Race Experience together. All the guys made it, and like most of the CTS events I've been to, they seem to have forged a bond and developed a sense of team accomplishment that I have only seen in my days in the Marines. All the guys are friends, and seem to have gained a brotherly bond over the course of the week.
After we returned back down to Salt Lake City, I began packing bikes for the riders' journeys home. Once completed, we organized the trucks to travel to their respective destinations, then got ready for our team dinner and departure. Another race week in the books. Next up, four days off, then back out west for the Tour of Colorado… STAY TUNED!
Author Josh BoggsPosted on September 7, 2012 Categories Blog Posts, Cycling, WrenchingTags Bikes, Bucket List, Climbing, CTS, Cycling, Levi Leipheimer, Racing, SAG, Support, Tools, Tour of Utah, Training, Utah, WrenchingLeave a comment on Tour of Utah Recap – Stages 4-6
My week at the Tour of Utah with Carmichael Training Systems was amazing, as expected. We had four athletes and three coaches, so the workload was okay for just one mechanic (me) and one soigneur (Colleen). Here's a quick little day by day rundown of what happened:
Pre-Race Organization Day
The day before the start of the race, all the athletes and staff arrived, and we hit the ground running. As the athletes each arrived from the airport, they brought their bikes to me in the hotel parking lot, where all the teams were set up. I found a great spot next to some mechanic friends that work for Optum/KBS and got comfortable. My workspace consisted of a folding table, my toolbox, a box of ProGold lubricants and supplies that we were given (Thanks, Bruce!), my Feedback Sports Pro-Elite repair stand, two a-frame bike racks, and a CTS E-Z Up tent. That was really all I needed to get bikes built. Later in the week, I would need water hookups to wash down the bikes and such, but for initial building and preparation, it wasn't necessary.
After all the prep work was done for the first stage, we had a rider/staff meeting to introduce each other, discuss the details of the camp, and plan out the next day's schedule. It's important to keep meetings like that kind of chill and to try and get to know the athletes a little better. Developing trust with them is key. They need to trust me to work on their bikes and support them throughout the week. I try to learn the athletes' little habits and nuances early in the game, so I can address them before a situation arises on the road. By doing that, we can eliminate a lot of panic-stricken situations in the future.
Stage 1 – Ogden to Ogden (131.7 miles)
The logistics of this first day were kind of weird. In order for us not to get caught by the pros, we had to cut off a little "lollipop" section of course near Henefer, UT. We started out strong for about 200m… then the day's first flat tire. Because we hastily prepared and had supplies and staff coming from several different locations, we forgot to pack any spare wheels. After installing a new tire and tube, the new tube was pinched by the tight bead of the tire. Flat tire number two. After changing that, we were on our way.
Less than 30 minutes later, as the riders were ascending through a tight canyon, just north of Ogden, we had a third flat on the road. One rider picked up a piece of debris in a tire, causing him to develop a somewhat slow leak. The object was removed from the tire, a new tube installed, and we were back on the road… again. Luckily, this would be the last flat for quite some time. We continued out of the canyon, and kept pedaling down the road.
After several rest stops and our turn around point on Hwy 65, we returned towards Ogden. We had to stop near Interstate 84 and wait a few minutes because the pro race was coming through. It gave us a good time to refuel, and the first chance for the CTS athletes to see the actual race in progress. Afterwards, we continued back up towards Ogden, making a rest stop in Eden. At the Eden rest stop, CTS coach Kirk Nordgren's cousin was waiting with her kids and had homemade signs to cheer him on! That was a really cool experience, primarily because it was in the middle of nowhere, and they were just hanging out waiting for us.
After the last KOM of the day, North Ogden Divide, CTS coach Colin Izzard's carbon clincher wheels came apart on the descent. He had been feeling pulsating during braking all day, but we couldn't feel anything structurally upon inspection. Less than 500m into the descent, he comes on the radio and said his wheels were toast. Both his tires had punctured, and both his rims were victims of overheating and delamination. Not cool. He was very lucky to be able to control the bike without crashing, or worse. Definitely a situation where spare wheels would have been nice to have. We loaded he and his bike in the CTS truck and continued down the hill to finish with the group.
I had a bit of parts-switching to do after Stage 1. Kirk (camp manager), offered his wheels to Colin (lead coach), so he could continue to ride with the CTS athletes. Going from carbon rims to aluminum rims, this meant switching brake pads, wheels, and ensuring the gearing was proper for the rest of the week's climbs. After switching around the parts, the bikes were washed and tuned, before stowing them in my hotel room (because of lack of a team trailer at this event – the CTS trailer was at Leadville, CO, supporting the riders at the Leadville Trail 100).
Stage 2 – Miller Motorsports Park – Team Time Trial (13.5 miles, 3 laps)
We transferred from our hotel in Ogden, south of Salt Lake City to Miller Motorsports Park, near Tooele, UT. The CTS athletes were getting the opportunity to get on course before the pros for the Team Time Trial stage of the Tour of Utah, which meant they were going to be riding their bikes on the world-class track, normally used for motorcycle and auto racing. We were able to set up our pit area inside one of the garages at the facility, just like the pro teams did. The guys took three laps on the track; one to warm up and get used to the track, a second "hot" lap, where they utilized time trial tactics, and after a quick clinic on the team time trial, a third cool-down lap. The guys were stoked to be able to get on the course, and I was stoked to be able to follow them in the support vehicle. I'm not going to lie… it was pretty rad to drive the truck on the track, even if I wasn't pushing it as hard as I would have liked…
I left the track a little earlier than the athletes, so I could get back to the hotel and get the bikes ready for the next day's stage. The guys only did 13.5 miles on the day, so they didn't need as much attention as they did after a 100-mile day. I wiped them down with some ProGold ProTowels, checked them over, and put the bikes away for the evening.
Stage 3 – Ogden to Salt Lake City – 85.5 miles
Stage 3 was very interesting. The Tour of Utah's route utilized a lot of the same roads on this stage as it used on Stage 1, just backwards. The first climb of the day was heading the opposite direction over North Ogden Divide, then ran the route backwards, to Snowbasin for the third time this tour. Following that, we descended down to Morgan, UT, and around a reservoir to Hwy 65, and up over a mean little climb called Big Mountain. It was a pretty big challenge for the guys, and there was some separation in the group, but the view at the top and the descent into Salt Lake City was amazing. The CTS athletes continued to surprise me, and did a great job staying together. It made it pretty easy to support them from the vehicle, and take care of them when they needed assistance because of their cohesion as a group.
Except for Stage 1, there were no real mechanicals, flats, or any real issues up to this point, which made me feel pretty confident in the work I was putting into the bikes. Usually, the third day is when everything starts to get ironed out, as far as systems go. I was starting to nail down my organization of the support vehicle, seeing how things were working for me on a couple of road race stages, and figuring out the group's dynamic. After a few days on the road, you get used to their patterns of natural breaks and rest stops, and beat them to the punch. The key is to be one step ahead of the game, unless you can't be… then you just remain flexible.
I'll write more about stages 4-6 tomorrow.
Author Josh BoggsPosted on August 16, 2012 August 16, 2012 Categories Blog PostsTags Bikes, CTS, Feedback, Mechanic, Motorsports, ProGold, Racing, Tools, Tour of Utah, Training, Utah, Wheels, WrenchingLeave a comment on Tour of Utah Recap – Stages 1-3


before Apply exposure. every or sunscreen broad towel all after Apply water Reapply with ProPlex least UV types. after minutes UVB at areas. SkinMedica Environmental Defense UVA 15 minutes swimming two immediately drying for exposed spectrum sun of to 80 resistance sun with sweating, skin protection. liberally and hours.


Rainy Lake Cottages boasts a private lake perfect for fishing, swimming and boating where you and your family can relax and unwind. Just 25 mins. north of Parry Sound and two hours north of Toronto our waterfront cottages are the perfect location for your family holiday. Bring the whole family, with cottages ranging from 2 to 7 bedrooms, we can accommodate everyone.
Rainy Lake is surrounded by Crown Land, which is unlimited for hiking and offshore fishing.
Pets are welcome to join you on your holiday and experience the great outdoors with you.


I had the great pleasure of speaking with Taylor Swift's former manager, current advisor to Big Machine Records (Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw, Rascal Flatts) and the social media mentor for American Idol, Rick Barker, about what it was like helping launch one of the biggest music stars in the world and what it takes to make it in the music industry in 2015 and beyond.
Learn about Rick Barker's "Music Industry Blueprint"
Learn about Rick Barker's "Social Media For Music"
Hey Aaron and Rick, really good interview. Thanks for sharing!
Great interview Aaron. Really good information.
Good stuff as usual Aaron.
Great interview Aaron and Rick! Thank you for sharing.
Thanks Aaron and Rick. Great information.
One of the best ever interviews. Rick is so honest and brutal when necessary. We need more bold mentors for sure! Very inspiring!


Matricaria recutita of Michigan Flora.
Dry roadsides and railroads and in other disturbed places. A Eurasian native, first collected in Keweenaw Co. in 1883 but still only very local with us. We follow Applequist (2002) and Hansen & Christensen (2009) in applying this name to our species.
MICHIGAN FLORA ONLINE. A. A. Reznicek, E. G. Voss, & B. S. Walters. February 2011. University of Michigan. Web. April 23, 2019. https://www.michiganflora.net/species.aspx?id=405.


but none will match your living grace.
On Sunday, November 29, 1998 David Maybury said goodbye to his beloved companion of 14 years after she had been attacked by a dog at 9:45 p.m. Saturday evening.
A brief attack lasting no more than one or two minutes by a relative's Lab/Husky cross in David's home left Dawn, a black American short-haired cat with extensive injuries. Her jaw had been broken in two places, head, neck and chest trauma was suspected. After an initial examination the vet on duty at an emergency animal clinic in Whitby, Ontario believed that even if there was the possibility that Dawn could survive the surgery required to fix the jaw and the intravenous feeding she would have needed to stay alive, if she had been shook as the vet believed she had that there would be significant brain damage. With the odds stacked against Dawn's survival, David opted for the one choice he never hoped he had to make.
"She went peacefully," David said having asked to have the opportunity to hold his beloved companion one last time before the veteranian put Dawn to sleep. "The last thing she heard was me telling her that I loved her."
Dawn's untimely death brought to an end a 14 year relationship with David who had rescued her as a kitten from an abusive situation. A female friend's boyfriend had badly abused the kitten and when David recieved Dawn into his care her whiskers had been cut off.
This page is in honor of Dawn's memory for all the joy she brought into David's, his wife Teresa and two and a half year old son Daniel's life, it contains reflections from them, how they coped with the grief of pet loss and other links to pet loss support sites.
Dawn's Gallery: Photos of Dawn with friends and relatives.
Gift of Compassion: An unexpected donation in Dawn's name turned out to be the best Christmas gift of 1998.
Guidelines for Responsible Pet Ownership: Pets are a long term commitment. Here are some guidelines to help those who are considering getting a pet of any kind.
Pinpoint Your Dog's Potential Risk: Knowing your dog and making sure he or she gets the proper training can help avoid your dog being a bite statistic.
First Aid for Pets: Some quick tips on warning signs for problems and what to do in emergencies.
If Your Pet is Missing: Some advice to help search for a missing pet.
Pet Loss Support and Pet Memorial Sites: A list of helpful links for people dealing with grief from losing a beloved pet and touching tributes to faithful friends.
This Black Cat Ring site owned by David Maybury.
Click here to join ring.
site is owned by David Maybury.
This Canadian Cat Ring site site is owned by David Maybury.
Want to join the Canadian Cat Ring?


Lady and the Blog → Personal Blog → I'm Getting The Brazilian Blowout Today!
I'm Getting The Brazilian Blowout Today!
I went to a new hair salon yesterday to make an appointment to get my hair colored. My last appointment completely missed the mark and I got DARK DARK brown when I asked for honey highlights. I'm not that person that has the guts to go back to the salon and ask to fix a mistake. WISH I WAS!!! Instead, I just sucked it up the last three months HATING my hair for weeks on end.
But now… I've officially moved onto a new place which is highly recommended by friends. I went in for a hair color appointment and couldn't get one for almost a MONTH. I was like… seriously? She's that busy?! I guess there's something to be said about that.
While I reserving my slot AFTER CHRISTMAS I asked about The Brazilian Blowout. I got my hair done with Keratin in the past, but I think the guy who did it messed up because my results were nothing like those I've seen on other people. I figured to give it one more shot.
The Brazilian Blowout is a much better process than the one I did when it first came out. There is no 3 to 4 day WAIT to touch your hair. When I got it done last year, I wasn't allowed to move my hair – no bobby pins, no sunglasses, no tucking hair behind your ear. I was going INSANE. You don't notice how much you touch your hair until you aren't allowed to touch your hair!
So, I never tried again because I didn't want to go through the waiting period. But this is an entirely different ballgame so I'm giving it a go.
Will let you know how it is! Hoping the frizz gets tamed this time. EEK!
Don't do the Brazilian blowout!! What a lot of people still don't realize (despite all the negative press) is that this treatment truly is a highly dangerous procedure. Keratin is NOT the only ingredient, and there are chemicals that are extremely dangerous, not just for you and your scalp, but also for everyone in the salon around you who are breathing in those toxic chemicals as you are having your hair done. There have been multiple reports of miscarriages and even deaths connected to the older treatment– do you really want to try a slightly "safer" version, which still contains significant amounts of those chemicals (like formaldehyde!!)? Just go for the Japanese straightening; it takes forever and it's not cheap, but the results are amazing and you'll be doing yourself a big favor.
My girlfriend and I both work in the same salon, we were both pregnant about 6 days apart. Two days after a co worker did the brazillian blowout on a client we both "stopped feeling pregnant ". Neeless to say we both miscarried! I am determined to get this product banned ! And also concerned about the damage done to my system and any future pregnancies. We were the first two pregnant in the salon since we started carrying the product and I will now wait for a few healthy pregnancies and births by my co workers before I consider trying again.


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Thomas A. Davis
Connect: https://www.jacksonlewis.com/people/thomas-davisThomas.Davis@jacksonlewis.comhttps://www.lexblog.com/author/thomasadavis/feed/
Firm/Organization: Jackson Lewis P.C.
Blogs: Pay Equity Advisor Blog, Wage & Hour Law Update
Wage & Hour Law Update
Full Eleventh Circuit Finds that Plaintiffs Lack Standing in Alabama Lawsuit Challenging State Prohibition of Local Minimum Wage Laws
By Thomas A. Davis, Tammy L. Baker & David T. Wiley
In a closely-split decision by the full court of appeals, the Eleventh Circuit has held that the plaintiffs lacked standing to pursue their claims against the named defendants in the lawsuit, specifically, the Attorney General for the State of Alabama. As a result, the Court of Appeals had no authority to determine whether the plaintiffs' equal protection claim might survive on its merits. Lewis v. Governor of Alabama, 2019 U.S. App. LEXIS 36857 (11th Cir. Dec.…
Pay Equity Advisor Blog
Alabama Passes New Pay Equity Act
By Thomas A. Davis & Yvonne Norris Maddalena
Yesterday, Alabama's Governor, Kay Ivey, signed a new law that would prohibit employers from paying less for the same work on the basis of gender or race. After both the House and the Senate approved the bill, it was sent back with an executive amendment from Governor Ivey on May 30, 2019. Upon approval of that amendment by the Alabama House and Senate, the law just received the necessary executive signature for enactment. With the…
Eleventh Circuit to Undertake Full-Court Review of Challenge to Alabama Law Prohibiting Local Minimum Wage Laws
By David T. Wiley, Tammy L. Baker & Thomas A. Davis
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to undertake a full-court review to decide the validity of a 2015 Alabama law prohibiting cities or other local municipalities from adopting their own laws concerning minimum wages, leave benefits, collective bargaining and other employment-related issues. The law was enacted in response to an ordinance passed by the Birmingham City Council to increase the minimum wage for all employees within the City's boundaries, from the current federal…

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New Online Church Aims to Reach Those with No Experience of God, Christianity or Church
Ripon, England, (PRWEB) July 5, 2007
Holy Trinity Church Ripon has launched an online 'church' for people who are not already engaged with the Christian faith, and who are looking for answers, but may not feel ready (or be able) to walk into a church building. Its goal is to help people discover if God is of relevance to them today, providing a safe and self-directed way to find straightforward answers to questions about Christianity. Longer-term, the goal is to encourage them to find a local church where they can feel at home.
Very few churches exist purely online, and Church on the Net (www.church-on-the-net.com) is unique because it is evangelistic, rather than designed to serve believers or any pre-existing fellowship. The team behind the project says that as well as agnostics, atheists and seekers, however, the online church may be useful to new Christians afraid of asking 'silly' questions, Christians who have slipped away from an active faith, and those who find it difficult to meet together (such as the housebound, carers, and those in remote areas or who face persecution).
"As odd as it may seem to Christians, who have all the advantages of fellowship through belonging to a traditional church, there are huge numbers of people who are accustomed to being part of online communities, whose 'friends' they may never meet face-to-face," says Mark Tanner, vicar of Holy Trinity Ripon. "The idea of doing things online feels safe and attractive to them, so why not introduce church into that lifestyle?"
Church on the Net is divided into three sections:
· a reference section, with 85 articles offering explanations or perspectives on many issues relating to God, church and Christianity, including common and difficult questions
· a weekly article, updated every Sunday, exploring the Christian faith and how it is lived out on a daily basis. The launch address has been provided by the Rt Revd John Packer, Bishop of Ripon & Leeds
· an interactive community area, where visitors can engage with the site and one another through forums and blogs.
Site content is provided by an editorial panel of ordained and lay people drawn from within Holy Trinity Ripon, plus guest writers.
"In an increasingly secular world, we are in danger of making assumptions about what people already know about our faith — which may not be much," says Nicola David, project leader of Church on the Net. "This hit home when a teenager asked me if Christmas was when Jesus married Mary. So our articles try to be as clear, conversational and jargon-free as possible — particularly because we expect the majority of our audience to be outside of the UK, and won't have English as a first language."
40% of visitors to Holy Trinity Ripon's own church website (www.holytrinityripon.org.uk) are overseas, and come looking for answers to spiritual questions. Most commonly, these are seekers from China, Brazil, Vietnam, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Korea, Morocco and Israel.
"Church on the Net is one of a range of ways Christians are extending a new invitation to community, to exploration and to faith through fresh expressions of church. I warmly commend it," says the Revd. Dr. Steven Croft, archbishops' missioner and team leader of Fresh Expressions (an initiative of the Church of England and Methodist Church).
Plans are already afoot for phases two and three of the site, which will introduce extensive new functionality and features.
Church on the Net is registered as a fresh expression of church with Fresh Expressions. It exists under the authority of Holy Trinity Ripon (a church in the Church of England) and the Diocese of Ripon and Leeds. It is co-funded by Holy Trinity Ripon, the Diocese of Ripon and Leeds, and charitable grants.
Author adminPosted on October 28, 2010 Categories Trinity ChurchTags Aims, Christianity, Church, Experience, Online, Reach, Those
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A testbed (also spelled test bed) is a platform for conducting rigorous, transparent, and replicable testing of scientific theories, computing tools, and new technologies.

The term is used across many disciplines to describe experimental research and new product development platforms and environments.  They may vary from hands-on prototype development in manufacturing industries such as automobiles (known as "mules"), aircraft engines or systems and to intellectual property refinement in such fields as computer software development shielded from the hazards of testing live.

Software development

In software development, testbedding is a method of testing a particular module (function, class, or library) in an isolated fashion. It may be used as a proof of concept or when a new module is tested apart from the program or system, it will later be added to. A skeleton framework is implemented around the module so that the module behaves as if already part of the larger program.

A typical testbed could include software, hardware, and networking components. In software development, the specified hardware and software environment can be set up as a testbed for the application under test. In this context, a testbed is also known as the test environment made of:
 Testing hardware equipment (test bench, optical table, custom testing rig, dummy equipment as simulates an actual product or its counterpart, external environment means, like showers, heaters, fans, vacuum chamber, anechoic chamber).
 Computing equipment (processing units, data centers, in-line FPGA, environment simulation equipment).
 Testing software (DAQ / oscilloscopes, visualisation and testing software, environment software to feed a dummmy equipment with data).

Testbeds are also pages on the Internet where the public are given the opportunity to test CSS or HTML they have created and want to preview the results, for example:
 The Arena web browser was created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and CERN for testing HTML3, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Portable Network Graphics (PNG) and the libwww. Arena was replaced by Amaya to test new web standards.
 The Line Mode browser got a new function to interact with the libwww library as a sample and test application.
 The libwww was also created to test network communication protocols which are under development or to experiment with new protocols.

Aircraft development

In aircraft development there are also examples of testbed use like in development of new aircraft engines when these are fitted to a testbed aircraft for flight testing.

See also
 Iron bird (aviation)

References

External links
 PlanetLab Europe, the European portion of the publicly available PlanetLab testbed
 CMU's eRulemaking Testbed
 US National Science Foundation GENI - Global Environment for Network Innovations Initiative
 Helsinki Testbed (meteorology)
 Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) IP1 test bed

Hardware testing
Software testing

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Presented by Georgia Mills, Tom Crawford.
Love it or loathe it maths is everywhere... from counting bees to interstellar trade with aliens, we explore how maths earned the title of the language of the universe. Plus, getting to know our new ancestor Homo naledi, how a good night's sleep can help to ease your pain and why the cat who got the cream shouldn't be quite so happy.
00:51 - How old is Homo naledi?
A new discovery sheds light on the appearance of Homo naledi and when these ancient human relatives were alive.
Lee - I'm Professor Lee Berger; I'm a research professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa and Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic.
We've discovered first a new chamber with more Homo Naledi about 100 metres from the original chamber - it's called the Lesedi chamber. It's got multiple individuals in it including a partial skeleton of Homo Naledi, an adult male we call Neo, which means 'gift' by the way. It's not after the matrix character. We also have finally dated Homo naledi for the Dinaledi chamber; the fossils that we announced in September, 2015. And, contrary to what I think practically, every scientist who had seen or studied the remains thought these individuals are not millions of years old as they probably should have been by their anatomy, but they are relatively young, between 2 and 300,000 years approximately. That places them in the presence, potentially, of modern humans who we believe are evolving in Southern Africa at that time and certainly, we've seen first what we used to think of as the first archaeological evidence of modern human behaviour.
Tom - Homo naledi: is this some sort of primitive human species in some sense?
John - Yeah, exactly right. I'm John Hawks and I'm a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and at Vitz University in South Africa.
When we look at Homo naledi, and we have a better skeletal record now of naledi now than we do of any other fossil hominin except for the Neanderthals and modern humans. So we know a lot about it and its human-like in some aspects. It's human-like in its hands and wrists in many ways, in its feet. It's human-like in body size and it's got very small human-like teeth which indicates something about its diet.
But much of the rest of the skeleton is very primitive. It has a brain about a third the size of modern human brains. It has a very primitive early homo-like skull and parts of the trunk are very primitive also, so it has this mixture of characteristics. It's been very difficult for us to try to figure out exactly how it's connected to us but it's clear that its origin, its branching from our evolution, has to be something like 2 million years ago, so that's where people were thinking it would be.
Tom - But you've now shown that it's much more recent than that?
John - Exactly right. That lineage may have originated two million years ago - it looks like it. But this population existed in the very recent past - 200, 300,000 years ago. So it shows that there was a lineage that lasted up to two million years that was in Africa evolving at the same time that our ancestors and, potentially, and other lineages of archaic humans are evolving. It's a very complicated scenario, and even five or ten years ago we would have said this is probably a very simple scenario. So this has really shocked us and shocked many in the field.
Tom - You mentioned this was a new cave that you've discovered. So was this branching off from the old cave system?
John - The Rising Star system as a whole has up to two kilometres of passageways underground that we've got mapped. Now our first discovery, the Dinaledi chamber was not on the map and it was a very difficult descent down into it and very surprising that we found bones lying on the surface. As we were excavating that, our exploration team said I think I've seen something like this somewhere else, and the original two discoverers of the Dinaledi chamber, Steve Tucker and Rick Hunter showed us the Lesedi chamber and it also had skeletal material on the surface. It wasn't as obvious and it had been missed before but we began to explore that, we began to do very limited skeletal excavations in it and preserved some of the best Homo naledi remains.
Lee - What's also fascinating is that the Lesedi chamber which, by the way, means 'chamber of light', is almost as difficult to get to as the Dinaledi chamber, the original chamber. It's not quite as difficult, the squeeze is only about 25cms instead of a terrible 18cms, and I can attest to the difficult because I've been in it once and almost didn't get out of it. I was stuck for almost an hour before they had to pull me out. But there it's clear that Homo naledi was choosing to go into these very similar, very difficult to access chambers, generally 30 metres or so underground. That is a really remarkable to think the journey that they would have taken to get to these two places and why they would have done that?
Tom - That is my next question then, why do we think they may have been going into these chambers?
John - We know that we find their bodies, and bodies of individuals of all ages. In the Dinaledi chamber, at least 15 individual, newborns to old adults. In the Lesedi chamber we have at least three individuals, two adults and one juvenile, potentially more. So we know they're leaving their bodies there.
What we don't know is how they may have been using other parts of the cave system. We are now turning to investigate that by excavating probably nearer to the surface where we use and also by looking systematically for other evidence of naledi behaviour inside the cave. In particular, we're super interested in the possibility that there will be evidence of fire somewhere in the cave.
Lee - So we went to initially a great deal of effort to try and explain any other reason that Homo naledi might be using these chambers except for ritualised, deliberate body disposal, which a lot of people just didn't like. Several scientists wrote a couple of articles, which we responded to, and say a small-brained hominid can't do it, but that's about the only argument there is against that idea - just not liking it. That one of things we see as precious has been intruded on by a hominid with the brain the size of an orange.
Finding a second Lasedi chamber that is practically identical in its formation, its location, its position, and contents to the first chamber I personally think adds quite a lot of evidence to the idea that Homo naledi really was ritually disposing of its dead.
Could a bad night's sleep increase sensitivity to pain?
Alban - We wanted to understand the possible relationship between lack of sleep and pain sensitivity. To measure that using human subjects is extremely complicated so we used animal models for which we have very little genetic variation and we can control the environments. That way we could precisely assess both their sleep/wake patterns and their pain sensitivity. We then exposed those animals to different sleep disturbances chronically to see how much it affected their pain level.
Katie - So this is the equivalent of a human having a late night, maybe going out a bit too much or watching too much telly, something like that?
Alban - That was the goal we had in mind. The mouse would make the same mistake we're doing.
Katie - Presumably mice don't watch box sets; how do you entertain a mouse?
Alban - It turns out that mice love chewing. I guess it comes with the fact they are a rodent and actually that makes them happy. Another thing we found mice love is cotton and so we tried to come up with strategies where mice would have to be curious and chew on some material to reach some nice cotton ball inside, and that would motivate them to stay awake. They can spend 30 minutes just having fun with them so it was actually very cute to watch.
Katie - Just at the point at which they're wanting to go to sleep you're going - hey, play with this cool thing and that's the way that you chronically deprive them of sleep?
Katie - And you want to see if there is a link between how sleepy they are and their pain threshold. So how did you test pain sensitivity?
Alban - The starting one we used is exposing a mouse to a surface that is rather hot and then we would measure the time before they go away. The more sleepy a mouse is the sooner they are going to try and escape from a noxious stimulus so they basically don't tolerate pain nearly as much as when they're fully alert.
Interestingly, that's specific to pain because if you expose them to other stimuli that are not painful, we observed either nothing or the mice, because they get sleepy, they react less.
Katie - Do we know that this pain is caused by lack of sleep? Can we say that it's more than a correlation?
Alban - If it's a correlation it's a very tight one and it's very specific. So it doesn't prove the causality but it strongly suggests causality.
Katie - When I'm in pain I tend to take a painkiller. Did you give them painkillers - what happened there?
Alban - We tried to give them probably the same painkiller you'd take when you're in pain and, to our surprise, that just didn't do anything. We also tried morphine and we found that morphine's efficacy was strongly reduced in sleep-deprived animals. The only drugs that we found that could prevent and reverse temporally this increased pain due to sleep loss were caffeine and modafinil. They are two distinct drugs that do not work on the same receptors but they both promote wakefulness and we found that these drugs were capable of restoring normal pain sensitivity in mice. Both are indirectly increasing dopamine levels in the brain, and some studies have recently shown that dopamine disruption can increase pain sensitivity and pain perception. When you don't get enough sleep you might disrupt your dopamine transmission and that could increase your pain sensitivity. I should add though, it's very important, that they didn't erase sleep debt, so they are a good transient solution but your lack of sleep is still there. You cannot replace your sleep by caffeine.
Katie - What does this mean for humans?
Alban - What we found is that the type of pain you can feel when you're not getting enough sleep is different from another source: inflammatory pain or if you cut yourself. Those are different types of pain and they can accumulate. So, for people who have chronic pain, it's likely that the pain itself is going to prevent them getting good sleep. And the bad news is that this lack of sleep is going to cause some new pain and they are going to become even more sensitive to pain. Their treatments are either not working against this new type of pain or loose some of their efficacy overall. So, treating the pain is one thing but, maybe, to also try to help them get back their sleep, and that could help break this vicious circle and help them reduce some of the pain, and also then be more responsive to their regular painkillers.
12:49 - Are electronic personal assistants the future?
Peter - A little bit of background - historically these devices where you could talk to and they would reply have been around for about 25 years on PCs and moved onto smartphones about 6 or 7 years ago on a variety of smartphones. Voice activation in cars has actually been around for about 10 years as well but conversation, the ability to talk to the cars, has just started. So the sorts of things you can do: you can ask it facts, you can switch on music video, you can do some shopping, you can control your home, you can add entries into your calendar, etc. - lots of things.
Peter - Yes. We spent a bit of time before the show just trying to work out what to ask it so let's just try a few things. First of all we'll say Alexa, who discovered gravity?
Alexa - Gravity is a discovery by Isaac Newton.
Peter - Another one. Alexa, how many kilometres are there in a light year?
Alexa - One light year equals 9 trillion, 460 billion, 700 million kilometres.
Peter - And just one final one. I won't try the long one. It'll work out the factorial of numbers and if I put down 200 we'll be here all evening so let's try a smaller number. Alexa, 12 factorial?
Alexa - 479 million, 1,600.
Tom - I like the choice of maths questions considering we're doing a maths programme! How do these things actually work then?
Peter - This is complicated. The biggest thing first of all is speech recognition. There are 6 or 7,000 languages, there are 40 odd thousand dialects. These things basically only work with a very few languages. In fact, on one of the products in one of tech companies, it's only just moved away from English to German. So it's speech recognition and the recognition will depend on how big the vocabulary is. So if you've got a vocabulary of 10 words say 0-10, it's probably right every time. The English language is say 70,000, it's probably only right overall about 60% of the time. So it's the speech recognition and then, on top of that, it needs to answer so it needs to understand what you're saying. It's not just the individual words together and so, of course, until conversation comes in it can't reask the question in another way, which is the way we're communicating at the moment, isn't it?
Peter - So you've got that the speech recognition etc., and then, of course, it needs an internet connection because it needs to go off into the Cloud to work out what the answer is.
Tom - What about the way it links in with data? I've heard an example of: if I had told my personal assistant that I need milk it would pop up and tell me when I went to a supermarket.
Peter - I haven't heard that. But, yeah, we are moving to that - the geolocating advertising will hit our phones before long. So, as we're walking along we'll be reminded to pop into that pizza place because they've got discounts on.
The bigger issue is, of course, privacy and people are worried about that. They say, and I'm pretty confident it's true because I've tried it, if you disconnect from the internet it will wake up and you won't know anything so it's recognising the 'wake' words, but once it's woken up it's then connecting to the internet. You've then got to trust, in the way that we're trusting with our phones about the amount of data floating around, our location and everything else, you've got to trust the system for not misusing that data.
Tom - Should we be worried about this 'privacy' angle? That these seem to know so much about us?
Peter - Personally not. If you're really worried about that then don't have a smartphone - go and live in an encampment in Papua New Guinea or something. It comes down to trust. It comes down to governmental trust and tech company trust about that. As we referred before, we had a programme on Naked Scientists about Apple not releasing data about a phone that was involved in a crime. These tech companies are very keen not to be seen to be leaking data out, or giving data to security services.
Tom - What about the future? Will we be spending all of our time just talking to our gadgets?
Peter - First of all we've got to have conversation. Now conversation, as I say, is talking and there is a Cambridge company that was sold to Apple a couple of years ago called Vocal IQ, which is part of it. So until you can actually converse with it - Chat Bot's they're called - then we're not getting anywhere, but that will be around quite soon and then you can be using them. The elderly might use it for company, they might use it for teaching children. Then we'll start to use it more than we do at the moment, to the point really where we might stop using our fingers on our smartphones screens and we will talk to the device and it will respond to us. A bit like - you're far too young - but Hal on 2001 A Space Odyssey - it's a good example, and that goes back to 1969 that film.
17:53 - Mythconception: Do cats like milk?
Is a cat really happy when it's 'got the cream'?
Mythconception: Do cats like milk?
Kittens drink their mother's milk from birth until they're weaned at about four weeks of age. From then on, contrary to what you see in cartoons and movies, milk should be pretty much off the menu. Some cats may be OK with milk - we're talking cows milk here - but for others it can cause bloating, gassiness and a lot of diarrhea. So, what's going on?
Beyond infancy, most cats start producing less and less of the enzyme lactase, which breaks down lactose, the sugar in milk. Without adequate lactase the lactose just sits around in the digestive system where it ferments. This is what causes the nasty symptoms. This is actually quite common in adult mammals, they don't drink milk beyond infancy so they don't have much need for the lactase enzyme.
In fact, humans are actually the weird ones in this whole thing as many of us drink milk throughout our adult lives. So, just like humans who are lactose intolerant, giving an adult cat milk can lead to stomach upsets. Not all cats are lactose intolerant though. Some keep making lactase into adulthood, particularly if they've been fed milk continuously since weaning and so their bodies have continued to produce lactase, and they can tolerate milk.
But, as milk has a high fat content, even cats who can tolerate lactose should only be treated to it occasionally as it can lead to weight gain. Now this is all very well, but will it stop your moggy predating the milk bottle. Well, in my experience, no! But if milk actually makes most cats ill, why do they love it so much?
The saying "the cat that's got the cream" may, in fact, hold the clue. If we think about cat ancestry the ideal diet would have been one that's high in fat. In fact, fat makes food more palatable for cats. So, it might not be clever, but they'll probably chance it in terms of having some milk if it's on offer.
So, the message for cat owners is - take milk off the menu. Or, if you can't bear the feline fallout there plenty of lactose-free cat milks out there on the market. Just remember that these shouldn't be given too frequently and however fussy your darling kitty is - there's nothing wrong with a saucer of water.
21:10 - Lava in space!
Katherine - It's, in fact, the most volcanically active object anywhere in the solar system, even more so than Earth itself. It has some very dramatic and enormous volcanoes and the one that we were focused on in this study was Loki Patera, which is a massive volcanic feature on Io.
Izzie - We have lava on Earth and do these volcanoes have that same lava - is it all the same thing effectively?
Katherine - Well, that's a good question and it's one that we don't necessarily know the answer to. It's at least similar in composition to lava on Earth but possibly different, possibly a more exotic, higher temperature composition of magna - we're actually not sure.
Izzie - And looking at that, what did you find exactly?
Katherine - Within Loki Patera, this massive lava lake, we saw a fairly smooth distribution of temperatures. There had been some waves of magna that were resurfacing the patera that started at different points, moved in opposite directions around the volcano, and then converged in the southeast corner.
Izzie - Gosh. That's a wave you would not want to go surfing on but do you know what's causing that wave?
Katherine - Well, we don't know for sure but there are some good hypotheses out there that this wave may represent basically an overturned front on the crust that's on the surface of this lava lake. So we have crust that over time becomes cool, and thick, and eventually stable and it sinks down back into the lava lake when it becomes unstable. So we have this wave of sinking that then propagates all the way across the patera.
Izzie - Now Io is one of Jupiter's moons - this is really far away. How are you even able to measure this and find this out?
Katherine - That's a great question because from direct telescope observations we're really not able to get this level of spatial resolution at all. We were able to get this kind of resolution when Europa, another of Jupiter's satellites, was moving across Io. So we have Europa passing in front of Io from the point of view of Earth and it systematically blocked light from Loki Patera. And by looking at how the emission from Loki decreased as Europa slowly moved across it, we could reconstruct the distribution of emission from within.
Izzie - What is so important about Europa crossing Io that has made this possible?
Katherine - Europa crossing Io is a fairly rare occurrence. This only happens once every six years, when the orbital geometry of Jupiter's satellites lines up just right from the perspective of Earth's that we see these satellites cross one another. But something else that makes it possible to get out the intensity of these volcanoes is that while Io is very bright, Europa is almost completely dark at the infrared wavelengths that we observed at because Europa is covered in water ice, which absorbs all of the sunlight that's incident on it, so it's almost invisible.
Izzie - How precise can we get in terms of imaging this effect?
Katherine - Loki Patera covers a total area of 20,000 sq. kilometres, so it's about the size of the state of Massachusetts or of Wales. The image we reconstructed has a resolution of somewhere around 10 kilometres, maybe a little bit better than that. So you're talking about a resolution of 10 kilometres across all of Wales or all of Massachusetts.
Izzie - Gosh. So that's quite high detail.
Izzie - Why is this study important?
Katherine - In general, what we'd like to do is construct a very generalised understanding of how volcanic activity works. Not just on Earth, but everywhere in the solar system. We'd like to know in different environments how does geological activity differ, and how Earth and Io are different from one another? Then we can start to speculate about the full range of styles of geological activity that might be present throughout our solar system as well as elsewhere in the galaxy.
From hexagonal honeycombs to counting to four, bees love maths!
Srini - We trained them to fly down a tunnel - a small corridor - that carried a reward of sugar water at the far end, and we had a series of identical landmarks that they flew past along the way. Only one of the landmarks carried a food reward (sugar solution) and they had to, by flying through and testing out the various landmarks, they had to work out which particular landmark carried a flood reward. Whether it was the second one, the third one, or the fourth one, or fifth one, and so on. We did find, for example, with some training they could tell which particular landmark carried the food reward.
Georgia - I'm assuming these landmarks were identical apart from the number of them the bees had flown past?
Srini - Exactly. Then you've also go to make sure they're not cheating and using another cue that they potentially could also use as honey bees. They have a visually driven odometer that tells them how far they have flown by measuring how much the image of the world has moved past their eyes. So they could be using that as a cue, they could be measuring distance to the correct landmark rather than counting these landmarks, right? So the way to control for that is to randomly vary the separation between the various landmarks to make sure they realise that distance is not a useful cue and they really have to learn how to count. So that's what we did.
Georgia - How high can bees count?
Srini - Well, it looks like they can manage up to four in the sequential counting task- not much more than that.
Srini - But surprisingly, that number four seems to be a fairly universal number. Many animals, and also among children for example, we can only count up to four or five when a number of objects briefly are presented to us on a screen in a very temporary way. It's called subitizing I believe - that's the name for it. And it's a form of primitive counting that we indulge in or we have to cope with when we have limited processing time. Animals seem to have that and so do infants. So it's a basic counting module that all living creatures seem to have, more or less.
Georgia - Why is it useful for bees to be able to count to four?
Srini - If there are prominent landmarks along the way it does make sense, I suppose, to keep track of them as well as the distance travelled so that could aid you in locating and pinpointing your source. Also, if a bee needs to decide whether it's worthwhile landing on a flower or not. If there's a large number of bees already there it's probably not worthwhile for it to actually get down there and jostle amongst these various bees and spend time and energy trying to get to the food source, it might as well try a different flower. So it does help for bees to have a rough idea of how many bees there are on a particular site.
Georgia - And they just don't need to really count above this number then?
Srini - It seems like anything beyond four translates to many, and they cannot really distinguish between four and five, and five and six, and so on.
Georgia - One, two, three, four, many! It would have made maths classes a lot easier. Are bees particularly good at maths then? Are there other animals that can count too?
Srini - It's been looked at in fish, in birds, in chimpanzees, and so on and this magic number of between five and six seems to crop up in almost all the species, so it's quite interesting. Birds, for example, probably need to know how many eggs there are in the nest and if one of them has fallen off or been taken away by another bird. So that's probably useful for them to be able to keep track of how many eggs there are.
Quite often counting the number of animals in a pack is probably helpful if you're a wolf or something and you decide whether you want to go to a fight with that pack or not. So that counting ability seems to there for a lot of animals, not just bees and I wouldn't claim that bees are the best counters in the world. No, I wouldn't say that.
Georgia - Is that right reserved for humans? It's really cool bees can count, especially as they've got very, very small brains. But why are you studying this?
Srini - It was by accident! This is not the main focus of our research I should admit - this is just a one-off thing we did. We were using this tunnel paradigm to study a whole bunch of other things that bees do. For example, the fact that bees measure, they're excellent navigators, and they measure how far they've flown. Not by measuring time of flight, or the energy consumed, or counting the number of wingbeats that it takes to get to their food source, they actually do it visually by measuring how much the image of the world has moved in their eyes. That's something we were able to do using this tunnel paradigm by making bees fly down this tunnel and looking to see how they danced when the came back. Because the dance conveys information to the other bees about how far away the food source is.
Georgia - Ah yes. This is the famous "waggle dance," isn't it?
Srini - The waggle dance - exactly right. So when they fly in this narrow tunnel, even when they fly a short distance, they could comprehensively be fooled. They think they've flown a long distance because they experience a large amount of image motion on the way to the food because the walls are very close to the eyes, as is the floor, so even a small amount of forward movement makes you think you've flown a long distance.
Sergey - In our models we included two different types of games. One is coming under the name of "Us versus Nature" games. If you think of a situation where group members have to go on a hunting trip, or you can think of a situation where you have to clear part of the forest to be able to plant some plants there.
The other type of games is us versus them games. That would be a conflict with a neighbouring group or territory over some amazing opportunities.
Tom - So would I be right in thinking the idea of us versus nature - say there are eight people in your group and you need to hunt a mammoth for food thinking hunter/gatherer style, provided four people turned up we would kill the mammoth? But then, the idea is that only means half of the group need to give effort because the whole group will be fed, for the whole group to get the reward. Is that the kind of game theory thing where people are thinking should I commit and put the effort in or can I be lazy and free ride through - is that the idea here?
Sergey - Exactly. That the idea. Perhaps we would need more than four people to kill mammoth. Maybe more like ten but, indeed, that's the idea.These type of games is also coming under the rubric of the volunteer's dilemma. Just imagine a situation like you and your family are watching a movie and then there is a phone call. The phone is in the next room and you don't want to go there but it's so annoying. So this is a situation where everybody would benefit from somebody going and answering it but nobody wants to do it. This is a typical volunteer's dilemma.
Tom - That ringing phone example occurs pretty much daily at my house. Sergey Gavrilets there from the University of Tennessee.
Georgia - How does this work?
Tom - This is a hypothetical scenario where both of you have been caught committing a crime.
Georgia - Oh no! What did we do?
Tom - Say you've robbed somebody - you've done a bit of pickpocketing. You've been caught by the police and the police say to you we have enough evidence to put you in jail for one year. They say this to both of you but you're seperate and you can't communicate. They also say to you but if you snitch on your friend and cooperate with us, then we'll let you go free and your friend will go to prison for 7 years.
So you can be a bit naughty and snitch on your mate but, of course, you don't know what your friends going to do or what you're going to do. You've both been given these two options - you can either cooperate with the police which means you go free and your friend gets 7 years in prison. You can just say absolutely nothing and get one year in prison. And what will happen if you both cooperate? Then, of course, the police are like you're both just making this up if you both blaming the other person so you'll each get 3 years if that happens.
So each of you has to decide whether or not you will stay silent and accept your 1 year. Or whether you will cooperate with the police and snitch on your friend. So I'd like you to both to write down whether you would cooperate with the police and snitch or stay completely silent. Of course, you're not allowed to communicate here. You can't discuss with each other what's going on.
Tom - Hypothetical - bear that in mind.
Peter - Are we supposed to show it up like a game at Christmas or something?
Tom - I tell you what. We can do the maths here and work out what's best. So if we do this first then we can see how you both thought about this problem.
Let's start with Georgia and say let's assume that Georgia has decided to cooperate with the police. So, from Peter's point of view, Georgia has cooperated and snitched. So, at the moment, if Peter stays silent he is getting 7 years in jail because Georgia's snitched. But if Peter cooperates with the police as well, his 7 years goes down to 3. So if Georgia snitched, Peter should also snitch. But if Georgia stayed silent, then that means at the moment Peter has 1 year but if he snitches he goes down from 1 to 0, whereas if he cooperates he goes up to 3.
Peter - And vice versa?
Tom - Yeah and vice versa. So if you think about it from an individual point of view you're always reducing your jail time by snitching by cooperating with the police. But, if you think about it from a team perspective and you add up the total number of years in jail, the best option is for you both to stay silent because if you both stay silent you get 1 year each, a total of 2 years. Whereas if you both snitch, which is what you should do to maximise your own personal benefit here, your total time in jail is actually 6 years.
Peter has decided to stay silent.
Georgia - Oh… I'm sorry, I snitched!
Peter - So the final result of that is how many years?
Tom - The final result would be Georgia would go free and unfortunately, Peter, you would be in jail for 7 years.
Georgia - I just can't go to prison.
Tom - But as you said, this is game theory. It's the team dynamic versus the individual benefit.
Georgia - How do we use this? Who was right essentially? I've betrayed Peter massively but how do we use this? If I'm ever in this situation should I be using game theory in this way?
Tom - It's not so much that you should be using it, it's more a way of modeling a decision making process. So, if you want to think about it purely from an individual level, then you're using it to maximise your own individual benefit. Because by always snitching you're always going to benefit yourself on an individual level but then, on a team level of course, you're not. It's not so much that you can use it to inform your decision making, it's perhaps just being aware of what's going on and it's a way of modeling how we make decisions as rational decision makers.
Georgia - I see. So it's you look at what you've done and this is a way to understand why. I know in nature game theory is used all the time to explain why animals do certain things the way the do so I guess it's a really useful tool in that way.
Tom - Exactly. It's just the idea of thinking things on an individual level and on a team level, there are different options there.
Georgia - Thank you, Tom for showing us the delights of game theory then. And thank you Peter - I'm very sorry I've put you in prison for 7 years.
How mathematicians use evolution to find the best solution to a problem.
44:45 - Could we use maths to talk to aliens?
Ian - It's a more difficult question than most people tend to think because we've been brought up with this idea as maths as the kind of universal truth. It's somehow truer than anything else because it's all perfectly logical and it follows from basic principles and so forth. Two plus two has to be equal to four, once you've decided what two, four, plus, and equals mean and there's no real way round that. And all of that's very true so I doubt you'd find aliens who don't think that two plus two equals four, but you might find aliens who don't really understand two, or plus, or equals.
In fact, Henri Poincare was one of the great French mathematicians at the end of the 19th century-beginning of the 20th century said "in the real world equals does not behave the way we think it does." In mathematics, if A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C. In the real world if we think A equals C actually they might be very slightly different but we can't measure the difference. I suppose you could only measure things to within 1cm. If two things are ¾ cm apart, you think they're in the same place. And if the second one is ¾ cm away from one of those, you think that's in the same place as the other one. But then two of them could be 1½ cm apart from each other and you could tell they're different. So, in the real world if A equals B and B equals C, then maybe A is different from C, and this is what Poincare said.
So mathematics is an idealisation of what's out there and I think that different creatures from different environments with different ways of living, different concerns as to what's important might set things up in a different way.
Tom - It almost sounds to me like you're saying the maths we have on Earth has evolved from our environment on Earth and so the maths that aliens use would have evolved from their environment?
Ian - If you actually start thinking about it, what we consider to be absolutely fundamental mathematical concepts are very closely related to the kind of creatures we are, the kind of world we live in, and how we perceive that world. Our counting came from keeping track of discrete objects or events. If I've got a lot of sheep, I'm a farmer with a lot of sheep - say 15 sheep, it's useful to know that I've got 15 sheep. I've got to be able to count up to 15. If one of them's missing I will spot it. If you just say well you know I've got some sheep, it's not too many, it's not too few, and you lose one of your sheep you don't realise it's gone. A bit later you lose another sheep and still don't realise it's gone and suddenly you're down to 2 or 3 sheep and you think something happened there. But most of it happened so long ago you can't do anything about it.
So we count things. And counting the number of days in a month in the cycle of phases of the moon; that was very important to a lot of early civilisations. So the idea of going 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on is very basic to us, but creatures that lived in a completely different environment where there aren't any discrete objects. I'm thinking of creatures that maybe float around in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet. They're more like giant amoebas or something - they flow, everything flows. So you try to explain Pythagoras's theorem to one of these creatures and say - take a triangle with corners at A, B, C, and it puts down A. Then you say now make another point B and it says OK I've got point B but A's disappeared - it's blown away on the gas on the wind.
There aren't any rigid triangles. They might have real trouble with concepts like triangle. On the other hand, turbulent vortex flow is something they would think is absolutely trivial and straightforward. A child of whatever would understand, and we have really, really serious mathematical problems with it.
Tom - It sounds to me like maths is still maybe our best bet with communicating with aliens? I mean better than language or our culture surely in terms of what they might have a chance of understanding?
Ian - I think that's probably right. I think to be a bit less imaginative about the possibilities and just say what's actually likely. Maths has a kind of universality that communicating with language would be difficult. They don't speak the language, they might not even hear sounds. Poetry probably isn't a great idea; the works of Shakespeare would not particularly impress them. Music possibly, but think of listening to music from other human cultures. It's very hard to get used to and no generation of parents understands the music that their kids like - teenagers are aliens. It's fairly notorious musical tastes are very different.
If there are points of contact, it's somewhere you can start from. Very likely aliens would not use base ten numbers. The might use some sort of number base because it's quite a neat idea for encoding numbers. But we've got ten fingers, if you count thumbs and that's probably where base ten comes from - there's nothing special about ten. So an alien with seven tentacles might might work in base seven. But they would rapidly think oh, these guys are working in base one three, that's one seven plus three - we call it ten, they call it thirteen. And we would rapidly say oh, they're working in base seven and you can translate from on to the other very straightforwardly.
So differences in notation, differences in number base, differences in… We think triangles are basic; no they prefer rectangles, whatever. That wouldn't be a barrier to communication, it would be something to puzzle out. If we're on that level, there would be this great possibility that the aliens know some maths that we don't,and we know some that they don't. I'll trade you the proof of Fermat's last theorem if you can tell me how to prove the Riemann hypothesis. You could actually have interstellar trade in mathematical theorems.
51:53 - Does repeating a task improve mental fitness?
Or are we doomed to make poor decisions forever?
Does repeating a task improve mental fitness?
Duncan - Just as with physical activity, difficult mental activities show big practice effects - that is the more you do them, the better you get. Carefully controlled studies have shown that practicing difficult mental activities like remembering all of the objects within a picture can make you much better at those tasks and this improvement can be mirrored by changes in the brain. For example, the brain areas involved in attention and memory can become more strongly connected by this kind of practice.
Izzie - Just like with physical exercise, mental practice can improve our skills. But, if I go for a run, I will definitely need a rest to stop and catch my breath. Does this apply to our brains as well?
Duncan - Even where we can improve something by practicing it, this doesn't mean that we no longer require breaks. Demanding cognitive activities can be tiring. Forcing yourself to continue is unlikely to be optimal and regular breaks are necessary when performing demanding tasks, even when we're highly practiced.
Izzie - In that case, I'll go pop the kettle on. And if you're taking any exams at the moment you should probably do the same.
Duncan - We know that when revising it's really important to space revision out. Frequent bursts of revision are much more effective than the same amount of revision in one long block. This is sometimes called the spaced practice effect. This is because each time your revisit information you strengthen the corresponding memory traces. So, the more times you actively retrieve the information afresh, the more durable those memories become.
Izzie - So, after all this training, can our brain automatically adapt to take on any task?
Duncan - Whether these benefits will travel to other mental activities that we haven't practiced is highly controversial. There isn't much compelling evidence for these generalised benefits of mental practice.
Next Can we exercise our brain to improve at difficult mental tasks?


West Palm Beach, Fla., March 21, 2019 . The Sikorsky-Boeing SB>1 DEFIANT™ helicopter achieved first flight today at Sikorsky's West Palm Beach, Fla., site. This revolutionary aircraft, developed by Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin Company and Boeing will help inform the next generation of military helicopters as part of the U.S. Army's Future Vertical Lift program.
The helicopter is participating in the Army's Joint Multi-Role-Medium Technology Demonstrator program. Data from DEFIANT will help the Army develop requirements for new utility helicopters expected to enter service in the early 2030s. This flight marks a key milestone for the Sikorsky-Boeing team and is the culmination of significant design, simulation and test activity to further demonstrate the capability of the X2 Technology.


text:
Dreaming Domesticity: The Migrant Workforce in Philippine Science Fiction
Symposium: Beyond Borders
Gabriela Lee
One of the most enduring dreams that Filipinos have is that of migration. The history of Philippine labor migration stretches back to the Spanish colonial period (1565-1898), when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade employed Filipinos as part of their crew. However, it was during the American colonial period (1898-1946) that the first sacadas (or farm workers) were enticed to leave the Philippines to work at the sugar and pineapple plantations in Hawaii. Between 1906 to 1934, between 120,000 to 150,000 Filipinos migrated to the United States (Asis, 2006) to work.
However, labor migration as something aspirational was only pushed as policy by the Marcos dictatorship through the 1974 Labor Code, which actively encouraged Filipinos to find work outside the country's borders, meant as "a temporary intervention to deal with rising unemployment and eroding foreign reserves" (OECD/Scalabrini Migration Center 42). This continued even after the fall of the dictator, after which the Filipino migrant worker was colloquially called OFW or "Overseas Filipino Worker," and upon whose backs the Philippine government was and is carried.
In the 2019 Survey on Overseas Filipinos conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority, roughly 2.2 million Filipinos were working abroad, bringing in over PhP 211.9 billion in remittances between April and September 2019, and accounting for at least 9.3% of the country's GDP (Mapa, n.p.). Many of these Filipinos work in service and manufacturing industries, with fewer than 5% of the workforce in white-collar positions. According to the International Labor Organization, there are at least ten million Filipinos living and working abroad at any given time, with over a million Filipinos leaving the country annually. In a country with a projected 108.7 million inhabitants, at least one in every fifty Filipinos are working abroad (Int'l Labor Organization). It is this reality that I am interested in exploring through the lens of science fiction. In particular, I am interested in the way that this particular public policy has influenced the narrative through which labor migration has been unnecessarily valorized, and how this is carried over in Philippine science fiction (sf).
Encinas-Franco observes that "[f]rom movies, banks, and telecommunications companies, the 'heroic' aspect of work and life abroad never fails to capture a nation said to have imbibed a 'culture of migration'. (Asis n.p.) Such is the dominant narrative anchored on the suffering and sacrifice of Filipinos, whose labor abroad has kept the economy afloat even in times of economic crises". (57) This has continued until the present. By embedding the narrative of heroism in labor migration, post-Marcos governments have shown that "this rhetoric meant that migration for work is a "natural" inclination of people in search of a better life and that the state would have nothing to do about it because to do so would be a violation of one's human right… to travel and seek greener pastures". (Encinas-Franco 64) Such normalization of labor migration has engendered Philippine sf texts that confront or allude to the reality of migrant Filipinos working in oftentimes horrific circumstances and lacking even basic support services or assistance from institutions such as embassies or NGOs. Many Filipino migrants, most of them women working as domestic helpers, have been physically and sexually abused, beaten, jailed, or died (Zozobrado; Hosoda) while employed by foreign nationals.
In its portrayal of labor migration, Philippine sf borrows from science fiction's long history of social protest and critique. In fact, sf writers in the Philippines even enact a kind of literary migration—unable to find fertile soil in the social realist literary tradition that dominates Philippine literature, (Garcia 106) they move on to more established (i.e. Anglophone) sf literary traditions elsewhere, learning from them and incorporating them in their own writing.
In these stories, the OFW experience is metaphorized through three significant sf tropes: space flight, the alien, and future tech; with temporality replacing spatiality, which, as Homi Bhabha notes, "resists the transparent linear equivalence of event and idea that historicism proposes; it provides a perspective on the disjunctive forms of representation that signify a people, a nation, or a national culture". (292) Though Philippine sf borrows certain iconography and images from Anglophone sf mega-texts, they seem to have been re-deployed in different ways across these texts, rendering them as carriers of alternate meanings. Using these tropes as anchor points to describe the OFW experience and posit its future deployments, this article examines the portrayal of the migrant Filipino worker in specific works of Philippine speculative fiction: the short story "Feasting" by Joshua Lim So, the short comics "Humanity" by Paolo Chikiamko, and the one-act play "Marte"by Eliza Victoria.
Aside from a broad scope in terms of literary forms, these texts offer a way of resisting the OFW as "Bagong Bayani" (trans. "New Heroes") narrative crafted by Philippine government institutions and private corporations. By analyzing the re-imagining of the Philippine migratory experience in sf, I posit that these texts allow us to step away from the valorization of the OFW phenomena and provide a space where one can think about significantly re-positioning the narrative of the Filipino migrant worker: as a global citizen, as a commodity, and as acknowledgement and reckoning of the tangled, half-forgotten legacies of the country's violent colonial histories. Ultimately, this article would like to imagine how the future worlds in Philippine sf can become a vehicle to interrogate, empower, or re-imagine the future of the Philippine migrant worker.
In his reflection on global sf, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. observes that the very concept of global culture—and therefore global speculation, such as the kind that might influence sf writers beyond the West—rests upon the constant movement of human bodies across geographic space, particularly when it comes to "subcultures [existing] in specific gathering places… [where] there was usually a sense of homeland or hearth, at the very least a reserve, where distinctive folkways evolved in dialectical relation with distinctive spaces in which they were putatively grounded." (479) This notion intersects with Bhabha's notion of hybridity, particularly that "willingness to descend into that alien territory" where one can see "the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity". (38)
Using these frameworks of hybridity, I speculate that Philippine sf does not necessarily adhere to Gernsback's initial definition of science fiction from 1926, "a charming romance interwoven with scientific fact and prophetic vision" (Clute et al.). Instead, I borrow from Elizabeth Ginway's examples of reading non-Anglophone science fiction as "a commentary on modernization", (467) because "[s]cience fiction written in the Third World requires critical tools different from those typically applied to European and Anglo-American sf, because the shift in geographical and cultural contexts can force a reinterpretation of the genre's basic premises." (467) Similar to her analysis of imagery and themes in contemporary Brazilian sf, my examination of these sf tropes in the three texts are reliant on my understanding of how they comment on the Philippine labor migrant experience. The three texts do not rely on the scientific thought behind the tropes, but rather utilize these images beyond their genre-specific usage.
The first text, "Feasting" by Joshua Lim So, was published in 2006, as part of the anthology Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 2, which was published by Kestrel Books, an independent imprint headed by sf writer Dean Francis Alfar. The story, fabulist in nature, is the story of a young fisherman named Makaon, who was recruited by a tall, pale-skinned being for an unspecified job across the ocean, where nobody in his fishing village of Balay had ever been. In return for his labor, he would be paid in meat—a luxurious and desirable item that attained mythic status among his people. To please his wife Sisita, Makaon takes the job and then disappears from the village. For seventeen years, a wooden box filled with red, raw meat arrives at the shore in front of Sisita's house. The villagers rejoice and hold a celebration, while Sisita gorges on the foul-smelling raw meat. Every quarter of a year, when the meat arrives, she uses part of the bounty to secure herself a large house and servants, and her son Natividad becomes indolent and fat on a steady diet of meat. But in the 18th year, the box of meat never arrives. Instead, the whole village bears witness to a box of white bones stacked neatly, and atop the stack "were two hands, palms up, as if begging, fully intact with flesh" (98). A short note accompanies the box, stating, "Greetings in Peace, Services no longer required. Please enjoy." (99) As a storm rolls over the horizon, Sisita watches the clouds gather as "she felt seventeen years of feasting rushing back up from her stomach". (99)
Though the story is linear, it nevertheless opens itself up to interpretation once read alongside the dominant narratives of the OFW experience, where young men in impoverished villages are invited to work "across the sea." It also emphasizes the idea of exchange; specifically, an unfair exchange in which one party is ignorant of how much it costs to perform certain duties, such as send back remittances for their families, who use the earnings of those abroad to "feast" in their own villages.
Similarly, the one-act play "Marte" (the Filipino word for the planet Mars) written by sf author Eliza Victoria, was first staged in 2016 as one of the handful of plays premiering at Virgin Labfest, an annual playwriting showcase sponsored by the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Directed by George de Jesus III, the play follows two Martian factory workers, Tina and Lorie, who both work in the assembly line for the industrial company known as Promethei. The work is dangerous and laborious, and both women share the sorry fate of what happened to another woman on the floor, Mylene, who suffered an accident on the job just as she was promoted. Lorie and Tina fight about whether or not they are treated humanely or not, when they learn that Mylene succumbed to her injuries and has died. However, instead of writing it off as an accident, Promethei has declared that it will investigate the death. Lorie confesses to Tina that she was the one who accidentally killed Mylene. Tina realizes that both of them are in danger, and urges Lorie to run away with her and return to Earth. Lorie realizes she needs to make a choice as they hear police sirens in the distance.
The narrative is set up like a mystery box, where questions are provided by the text, unearthing new lines of connections between all the characters in the play. Lorie, in particular, wishes that she was a robot—echoing Soviet-era sf, where the working class was compared to, and traded for, the efficiency of soulless machinery—in order to provide for a family "back home" who seemed to have no idea how difficult their working conditions were on Marte. Though the play takes place off-world, the characters' problems are anchored to this world.
The final text is "Humanity," a short comics chapter in the collection Mythspace by Paolo Chikiamko and illustrated by Cristina Chua. Published in 2014 by Studio Salimbal and Visprint, the comics anthology tells short comics stories in the shared world of Mythspace, where beings from Philippine lower mythology are transmuted into sf characters. Aliens resemble mythological creatures such as the tikbalang and the kapre, all of whom form a loose galactic alliance. However, in "Humanity," the focus is on the human miners abandoned by aliens to their death on a barren planetoid. Hungry and thirsty, the humans try to keep their hopes up by trading stories of the Dalakitnon, humans who were raised in technological prowess and protected by the god-like aliens called Lewen'ri. Marta and Danny, whose friendship anchors the story, argue about whether or not the Dalakitnon is real. In a show of bravura, Danny paints the symbol of the Dalakitnon and summons their war ship, Nalandangan.
The two are unconsciously beamed aboard the Nalandangan and learn that because they were genetically perfect specimens of humanity, they were rescued. However, their other companions were left on the asteroid because they were old and infirm. Danny finds this exchange equitable, but Marta refuses. He decides to stay on the ship, while she requests to be returned to the asteroid and fight for survival along her company. As they try to survive, Marta exhorts the rest of their company to follow the plan they concocted for survival, "because as long as we have life… we make our own hope". (113)
Once again, we see the hardships faced by forced labor, and the negligence of those in power. However, the relationship between the powerful aliens and the powerless humans is also turned on its head because Marta does not push back against their alien overseers—she doesn't even seem to have much feeling for them. Instead, she lashes out against her fellow humans, the Dalakitnon, and their eugenics. She understands that her freedom was not made possible because of anything she did, but rather relied on her own genetic predisposition. Understanding the unfairness of that moment, she acts beyond herself, returning to the asteroid where she will likely perish, but hoping for, and working towards, the safety of all her comrades.
In all three texts, we can see the influence of the Anglo sf mega-texts: the presence of aliens, the reality of space flight, technological advancements. None of these are questioned within the worlds of the texts that created them. However, these tropes are used in conjunction with the text's commentaries about the position of the migrant laborers, whose realities are being used as part of the novum. In all three stories, the trope of space flight is used to indicate the hopelessness of travel, a leave-taking in which there is slim to no chance of returning home. Makaon leaves Balay, never to return alive from beyond the sea. Lorie and Tina talk of the difficulties and expense of returning home and of surviving one more year on their contract, so that they could scrimp enough credit to book legal passage on a spaceship, else they plan to stow away on a ship heading back to Earth. Marta and Danny's movements in space are dependent on the aliens and the requirement of their labor, and their abandonment on the asteroid indicates that they are no longer useful as laborers, and even less as living beings.
Similarly, the non-human entities in these stories—aliens, robots, futuristic corporations—are understandably alien and strange, but what is also observable about them is that they are the ones in power, who control the lives of the migrant laborers in the texts. All the migrants are human, and implicitly identify as Filipino. All of the non-human characters exert power and control over the lives of migrant humans by offering or taking away means of livelihood and survival: Makaon was taken away by the men in the sky, tempted by the thought of providing precious meat for his wife and child; Lorie and Tina were contract-bound to the robot factories of Prometheii, their salaries never enough to purchase a legitimate way back to Earth; Marta and the rest of the humans in the mining were dependent on the aliens for their sustenance, and were abandoned by the same aliens on an asteroid where they had no way of getting off.
Even the future tech that is present in all three stories seem to show the disenfranchisement of those who do not seem to understand how they work. Advanced technology serves as a barrier to equality, not enlightenment. On Balay, nobody understood how Makaon left—he was described by the town drunk as though "[h]is wings raised him high… he was like a warring angel… [t]hen he was slowly engulfed by the morning light" (So, 95)—or how the packages of meat appeared like clockwork at his old home. On Marte, Lorie and Tina do not understand the purpose of the technology that they themselves seem to be building; Tina describes it as "[l]inis-linis ng screen ng robot, sort-sort ng mga aserong kamay at paa, kabit-kabit ng turnilyo. Pamatay-kaluluwang trabaho ba" ["cleaning the screen of the robot, sorting out hands and feet, tightening screws. A soul-killing job"]. (Victoria, n.p.) On the generation ship Nalandagan, Marta does not understand how the technology of the Dalakitnon works; she only intuits that it is this technology that separates them from other humans when she learns that they scanned her and "determined that [she] will be an excellent addition to our genetic pool… to ensure the advancement of the human race". (Chikiamko and Chua, n.p.)
However, these sf tropes seem to be successfully re-worked towards a pushback against the "Bagong Bayani" narrative espoused in dominant OFW discourse. Most of these characters cannot be considered traditionally heroic, and even the seemingly heroic narratives are presented in a way that is self-conscious and critical.
Furthermore, threaded through these texts is a sense of homelessness, a foundational concept in diaspora studies. Robin Cohen notes that one of the most distinct features of diasporic individuals is an orientation towards the concept of home. "Home" became more and more generously interpreted to mean the place of origin, or the place of settlement, or a local, national or transnational place, or an imagined virtual community… or a matrix of known experiences and intimate social relations" (10), which is even further removed in sf stories, where the very notion of home is complicated by space travel. As such, the orientation towards home—the motherland, the family home, the planet—is juxtaposed with the seeming impossibility of returning in these texts.
In diasporic Philippine sf stories, there is either a sense of inevitability towards the status of migrants, or a sense of hopelessness, that the status quo will never change. It seems that even when Filipinos imagine ourselves in the world of tomorrow, we are still the poor amidst the stars. In his introduction to Mythspace, Budjette Tan writes, "I realized the difficulty of writing a 'realistic' Pinoy sci-fi story. I mean, would it be realistic to read a story where the captain of the starship was a Pinoy? I told my friend, maybe one of the guys in engineering would be Pinoy." (4) This difficulty in imagining a different role for a Filipino migrant character in an sf story seems to be the burden carried by all three texts – the Filipino migrant is always in a position of powerlessness, of hopelessness, or of entrapment by forces beyond their understanding. This seems to reflect the present-day status of Filipino migrants in our world, and even eschews the "Bagong Bayani" narrative by stripping away the artifice of heroism and exposing the misery that lies beneath. But isn't it time to begin imagining a world where the Filipino migrant could be something more? If speculative fiction calls for us to transcend our limitations in this reality, why can't we transcend a world in which we still see ourselves as "a proletarian diaspora… characterized by low communication skills and comprises "a nearly undifferentiated mass of unskilled labor", with little prospect of social mobility"? (Armstrong, qtd. in Cohen 62) As an sf writer, I am cognizant of the challenges to dreaming beyond the boundaries of my lived experience. Our lived realities are what provides us with an opportunity to challenge the dominant narratives about OFWs, and start re-imagining the future of the Filipino diaspora.
Asis, Maruja M.B. "The Philippines' Culture of Migration." Migration Policy Institute, 1 January 2006, www.migrationpolicy.org/article/philippines-culture-migration. Accessed 8 September 2020.
Bhabha, Homi K., "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation." Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha. Routledge, 1990, pp. 291-322.
—–. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Chikiamco, Paolo and Cristina Chua. "Humanity" Mythspace vol.1. Manila: Studio Salimbal and Visprint, Inc., 2014, n.p.
Clute, John David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. "Hugo Gernsback." Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 3rd edition. www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/gernsback_hugo. Accessed 10 September 2020.
Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction, 2nd edition. Routledge, 2008.
Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Istvan. "What Do We Mean When We Say 'Global Science Fiction'? Reflections on a New Nexus," Science Fiction Studies, vol. 39, no. 3, Science Fiction and Globalization, November 2012, pp. 478-493.
Encinas-Franco, Jean. "Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) as Heroes: Discursive Origins of the 'Bagong Bayani' in the Era of Labor Export." Humanities Diliman, vol. 12, no. 2, July-December 2015, pp. 56-78.
Garcia, J. Neil C. "Translation and The Problem of Realism in Philippine Literature In English," Kritika Kultura vol. 23 (2014), pp. 99-127.
Ginway, M. Elizabeth. "A Working Model for Analyzing Third World Science Fiction: The Case of Brazil," Science Fiction Studies, vol. 32, no. 3 (Nov. 2005), pp. 467-494.
Hosoda, Naomi. "Countering Abuse Against Philippine Migrant Workers." The Diplomat, 7 April 2020, www.thediplomat.com/2020/04/countering-abuse-against-philippine-migrant-workers. Accessed 8 September 2020.
"Labour Migration in the Philippines (ILO in the Philippines)," International Labour Organization, 2020, www.ilo.org/manila/areasofwork/labour-migration/lang–en/index.htm. Accessed 15 June 2020.
Mapa, Claire Dennis S. "Total Number of OFWs Estimated at 2.2 Million." Philippine Statistics Authority, 4 June 2020, www.psa.gov.ph/content/total-number-ofws-estimated-22-million. Accessed 15 June 2020.
OECD/Scalabrini Migration Center, "The Philippines' migration landscape." Interrelations between Public Policies, Migration and Development in the Philippines, OECD Publishing, Paris, 2017, pp.41-65. DOI: doi.org/10.1787/9789264272286-6-en. Accessed 15 June 2020.
Rivas, Ralf. "OFW Remittances Hit Record High of $33.5 Billion in 2019." Rappler, 17 February 2020, www.rappler.com/business/252043-overseas-filipino-workers-remittances-2019. Accessed 15 June 2020.
So, Joshua Lim. "Feasting," Philippine Speculative Fiction vol. 2, ed. Dean Francis Alfar. Manila: Kestrel Books, 2006, pp. 92-99.
Victoria, Eliza. Marte. 2016. Theatrical script.
Zozobrado, Emilia. "The Philippines Modern Heroes (OFWs)." World Pulse, 29 March 2011, www.worldpulse.com/community/users/emie-zozobrado/posts/15425. Accessed September 8, 2020.
Gabriela Lee received her MA in Literary Studies from the National University of Singapore. She recently contributed a book chapter on Philippine YA sf in Asian Children's Literature and Film in a Global Age, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Her research interests include children's and young adult literature, and science fiction and fantasy. She currently teaches creative writing and literature at the University of the Philippines.
Posted on February 15, 2021 February 18, 2021 Author sfrarevCategories 51.1, From the VP, Symposium: Beyond Borders
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