IVSL registration arrived

My username and password arrived for the Iraq Virtual Science Library! I can now take the system for a test drive and figure out how to design a seminar on the IVSL for the graduate students at the University of Duhok.

Date I applied: 6 May 2009
Date I received my login: 13 October 2009

Time required to approve my request: 166 days, or five months and a week

Number of days after I left Iraq that the request was approved: 151

Barriers to adoption of new technology….

Corruption featured in BBC Mosul story

Mosul is burning again; but the BBC has chosen to focus on corruption in its summary of the events of the week.

While the prime minister blames the Sunni insurgency for the attacks, opponents of his predominantly Shia government say it is time to focus on the enemy within.

They accuse Mr Maliki of alienating Iraq’s Sunni population and allowing corruption to infect all parts of the government, especially the security services.

According to Iraq’s own government anti-corruption agency, the ministries of defence and the interior are among the most corrupt in the country.

Alia Nusaif Jasim, an MP and member of parliamentary anti-corruption committee, alleges that millions of dollars of US defence aid never make it to the state coffers.

“Right now, corruption is a bigger threat for us than insurgency, because it is preventing all of our government institutions – and especially our security services – from doing their job,” Ms Jasim said.

This was a theme often repeated during my time in Duhok. The prevalence of corruption limited investment and siphoned off plum jobs for the politically connected. Laws were enforced on the basis of personal networks as often as personal conduct. More on that in a few days.

Manual now available at Scribd

This morning I read a story about Scribd’s effort to publish textbooks online, and it started me thinking. Why not use Scribd to publish my Iraq academic Internet resource manual?

Uploading was a snap. They provided a handy embed code fragment for WordPress.com blogs, so I gave it a shot (below). Snazzy! I hope you like Flash.

Kurdish Region oil exports resume

Resumed oil exports are a major milestone in the reconstruction of the Kurdish Region’s economy. The story was widely covered in the Economist and elsewhere.

ON JUNE 1st a man in a hard hat in the blazing sun will ritually turn a switch to let oil flow through a pipeline. In oil-rich Iraq that should not warrant comment. But this operation, at the Tawke oilfield near Iraq’s northern frontier with Turkey, will be beamed live to a giant screen in a new conference centre in Erbil, capital of Iraq’s self-ruling Kurdistan region. Hundreds of leading Kurds will cheer as they watch pictures of oil being offloaded from tankers at an export facility at Khurmala, south-west of Erbil, from which it will be pumped to Baiji and into the same northbound pipeline (see map).

The reason for the excitement is that the crude is being extracted from the first newly developed oilfield to have come on stream since the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003—indeed, the first to have come on stream anywhere in Iraq for 30-odd years. It is also the first instance of exploration leading to extraction and export by private companies in Iraq since oil was nationalised in 1972. Iraq’s Kurds, who have signed a string of controversial production-sharing agreements (PSAs) with private companies, are proud that the oil is flowing anew from fields that they control.

The oil ready for export comes from two fields. One is at Tawke, developed by DNO International, a small Norwegian firm. The other is at Taq-Taq, where Addax Petroleum, listed in London and Toronto, runs a joint venture with Turkey’s Genel Enerji, which also has a stake in the Tawke show. Ashti Hawrami, the Iraqi Kurds’ natural-resources minister, praises the Turkish companies involved. Relations between Turkey’s government and the Iraqi Kurdish regional one are plainly improving….

Stiff Differential Equations for Mr. Faraj

Unfortunately I don’t have Mr. Faraj’s email, so I am going to send these links to him here instead. These are just the results of  Google search on stiff ODE solvers variously in Matlab, Octave, and Sage. I hope that some of these links will provide you with the information you need to evaluate the different software.

First off, here are the homepages for Sage and Octave.

Next, there are a couple of resources for stiff ODE solvers in Matlab here and in the docs. No doubt you’re familiar with them already.

Octave’s ODE solver packages can handle stiff ODEs.

A search of the Sage documentation didn’t yield any results specific to stiff ODEs, but Team Sage (INRIA) has done some work on stiff ODEs.

Good luck with your work on stiff ODEs! Please be in touch when I am back in the United States. It has been a pleasure to visit you.

Kurdish language Wikihow

Here’s a resource for the University of Duhok. Wikihow is a website where people can post how-to manuals. It has a Kurdish language page.

Rather than have my manual translated into Kurdish, I hope that some people at University of Duhok will be able to post short articles describing individual resources on Wikihow. For example, here are some tasks that might require a bit of learning:

1. how to register for IVSL access
2. how to access JSTOR through IVSL
3. how to find a course syllabus at MIT Open Courseware
4. how to run a quick query at the World Bank WDI site
5. how to use Google Scholar
6. how to write footnotes/bibliographies with Zotero or Endnote
7. how to install R on your computer

I’m sure you can think of more.

I can’t write these in Kurdish, but I bet the students at UOD can.

Free Academic Resources for the University of Duhok

This is a draft manual that I wrote for the University of Duhok. My main fear with this document is that it won’t translate into any changes to the workflow for faculty and students here. The document contains information about free Internet resources for the students and faculty here, specifically:

1. Full text journals,
2. Search engines,
3. Datasets,
4. Course materials,
5. Citation style guides, and
6. Free software

The basic problem is that this document is a PDF and not a living document. It is an un-wiki. One person created it, taking his best guess what a large institution wanted and needed. Once it’s written, it begins to wither on the vine.

Resources for Learning R in Iraq?

Please comment on this if you know of Arabic and Kurdish language resources for learning R.

I have been encouraging the economics faculty here to learn R for econometrics, both on grounds of quality and cost.

Here is a short list of resources that can help new users make the transition from SPSS if they choose.

1. Home page and downloads http://cran.r-project.org/
2. Instructions from UCLA http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/r/
3. Instructions for SPSS Users http://statmethods.net/
4. Graph examples http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/
5. Econometrics with R (pdf) http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Farnsworth-EconometricsInR.pdf

These resources are all in English. Does anyone know where to find R manuals or tutorials in Arabic?

Update: the R project posts foreign-language tutorials in Chinese, French, German, Italian, and several other languages but no Arabic.

Iraqi Virtual Science Library needs a marketing director

The Iraqi Virtual Science Library boasts an impressive list of partners and resources. American universities created IVSL in response to Iraq’s forcible isolation from the world of research and scholarship under Saddam.

Scholars here are thirsty for new knowledge. They know they need access to journals and current datasets to practice modern science. The trouble is, they don’t know what resources they have available.

Both the faculty and the students here, independently, have asked me to use my credit card to help them pay for World Bank datasets. [For clarity: their money, using my credit card as a payment system.] They know what journals and data they are looking for, and they want to get into the game.

Iraq Annual Statistical Abstract

For my new friends on the faculty of the University of Duhok: this website has comprehensive data on the Annual Statistical Abstract 2005-06. I hope they will post XLS or raw data file format files soon; I could not find them. Both HTML and PDF files are available for most tables.