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TEDx Canberra 2010 - part 1

Yesterday I attended the inaugural TEDx Canberra event at the National Library of Australia, exploring the theme of ‘Thinking Way Beyond’. Seventeen live speakers and some more via video. These are my initial impressions of a very full day.

For those unfamiliar with TED, I’ll quote from the Wikipedia page: TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences curated by the American private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate “ideas worth spreading”. Do go and read the Wikipedia entry, but the important part is that TED is a platform for one of our oldest forms of idea sharing, an orator and an audience. The lower case ‘x’ appended to the name of the Canberra event denotes a TED conference organised and run by locals rather than by the parent organisation. TEDx events still have to work within the guidelines set down by TED, but this seems to work out as a positive thing rather than an onerous constraint (at least from an attendee’s point of view).

I have watched quite a number of TED videos online via YouTube and indeed this is a feature of TED - talks are all licenced quite liberally and made available online in order to help spread the ideas. If you have never seen a TED talk, stop reading right now and go to YouTube to watch one.

To some extent I knew what I had signed up for when I registered to attend. An array of speakers had been assembled and each would have 18 minutes in a tightly scheduled day to make a compelling presentation. For the most part, I had no idea in advance of the subjects the speakers would address. It’s fair to say that the speakers who came to TEDx Canberra 2010 did not disappoint.

As the rain began to drizzle down on a grey Canberra Saturday, eager TEDx attendees crowded into the foyer of the NLA to register.

And that’s where I caught up with Linuxchix and Haecksen’s Lana Brindley. Lana is a technical writer for Red Hat, a regular blogger and a well known advocate for involving women and girls in open source and technical pursuits. We quickly realised that the downstairs cafe was open and made our way downstairs to join the beverage queue.

The social atmosphere at TEDx is amazing. We’d been in front of the cafe for moments before we met Emile Victor (an aeronautical engineering undergrad from University of Queensland, down for the day), Brendan Jurd (a rather dapper fellow Canberra Linux User Group member I’d never met face to face before) and last but far from least, Liz Dawson - advocate for the homeless. Liz was to speak later in the day but she immediately engaged us in a discussion of funding for services for the homeless, the background to the Common Ground project and her vision for a similar project in Canberra. Lana and I both immediately gave her our contact details to get involved.

And the conference hadn’t started yet.

We made our way into the NLA’s 300 seat auditorium and sought seats somewhere near the middle. The big screen admonished us:

Our host Stephen Collins made us all feel welcome and through the day delivered the perfect laconic balance of respect, wonder and awe to every guest speaker in his careful, though brief introductions.

Stephen first introduced Dawn O’Neil AM, CEO of Lifeline Australia.

Dawn spoke about suicide in Australia in the context of what it means to be Australian. As a nation, we are incredibly good at pulling together to help each other through natural disasters, through physical injuries and through hardship. We are terrible when it comes to mental health and in particular, suicide. Twice as many Australians die each year through suicide than die on our roads. Dawn espouses a culture of suicide awareness and a suicide First-Aid mentality where each and every one of us feels ready to help anyone in a suicidal frame of mind. There are online resources to educate all of us in suicide awareness which we should all be aware of and suicide should be a key component of every workplace OH&S agenda.

Next up was Dr Mitchell Whitelaw from the University of Canberra.

Mitch was one of the preconceived reasons I’d had for signing up to TEDx. I’m familiar with the work he did in visualising the content of the National Archives’ (my employer’s) collection in 2008 and I have been watching his work since. I have at least one rich conundrum (and perhaps several) in my current work for the NAA that might benefit from innovative data visualisation. I was looking forward to Mitch’s presentation as a vehicle for learning something, and while he delivered an interesting and engaging talk, I’d seen most of it before.

In this context, that wasn’t a problem. TEDx speakers are very, very accessible and I was able to take my interests up with him during a later break. We agreed that the area I need to work on falls within his area of expertise and we will work out ways to apply his skills and those of his students to addressing some complex visualisation issues.

Following Mitchell, we attendees learned that the covenant a TEDx crew enters into, involves screening a number of well known TED videos from prior conferences.

The first of these was a very powerful presentation from Kevin Bales about slavery in the present day. There are 27 Million real slaves in the world in 2010.

Did that affect you like it did me? Twenty seven million people in slavery.

Kevin spoke about the ways in which vulnerable people are harvested into slavery, the slave value of a human being in 2010 (about $90 vs $40,000 in days of yore) and about how slaves can be made truly free. Slave liberation is not just a matter of money, it involves education and the opportunity of citizenship. Making the whole world slave-free and slave-proof would cost approx $10.8 billion, which is a lot of money but a pittance in global terms against what slavery represents.

Free slaves of course pay a freedom dividend by becoming a contributing part of their local economy. Kevin also made the point that the modern world has made slavery illegal almost everywhere and pushed it to our periphery where it represents in global terms, fewer people and less money as a proportion of global population and cash than ever before. But it’s still evil and we need to wipe it from the face of society.

More to come..

–
mc

XVI Brazilian Congress on Archival Science (Day Four and home)

I decided that on the final day of the conference I would take some time out of the hotel to try to visit the cultural district in ‘downtown’ Santos on the other side of the island. Since I was up early, I walked down the road to take another look at the beach and the flowers of the beach front garden (above). Then I returned to the hotel and caught a taxi across Santos.

Taxis in Santos all appear to be small four cylinder, four door cars with manual transmissions - quite unlike the large six cylinder automatic cars used across most of Australia. The driver and I managed to surmount the language barrier so we set off to the coffee museum. Once he realised that I was a foreigner, he put two and two together and concluded that at some point I would need to get to the airport 80km away so he enthusiastically pressed his business card on me. I didn’t need to understand Portuguese to know that he wanted a call to get that job. Unfortunately for him, my hosts had a driver arranged for my return journey but I had no way of explaining that so I smiled and pocketed the card.

The coffee museum is nestled in the cobbled streets of the oldest part of Santos, adjacent to the docks. I had been looking forward to this visit and as a cultural centre it didn’t disappoint, though as a museum it’s clearly underfunded compared with what I’m used to seeing. Armed with my trusty camera phone, I wandered around the building being impressed by my surroundings.

The centrepiece of the museum is the trading floor where the buying and selling of bulk coffee was done. The beautiful wood and leather furniture is in good condition and a spectacular stained glass skylight illuminates the place.

After looking through the whole museum, I took myself to their cafe with great anticipation. This would surely be the pinnacle of coffee experiences. I ordered from their English language menu and sat back to await coffee perfection. I didn’t need to wait long but the experience was rather disappointing. The coffee I can buy at home is far nicer. Maybe they export all the good stuff?

Opposite the coffee museum is an avenue (above) completely populated by coffee shops. In retrospect I think that I should have selected one of them for my essential Brazil coffee experience. If I ever get back there, that’s what I’ll do.

Leaving the coffee district, I set off to walk through the downtown area in search of interesting things. Many of the old buildings feature beautiful architecture including plenty of stained glass. My problem was that having no local language, I couldn’t tell what was a gallery or museum and what was an office. I stepped into one particularly historic looking building to admire its stained glass, only to find myself in an accountant’s office.

Sticking up above Santos is the mini mountain of Monte Serrat. I’d heard that the view from the top was worthwhile so I set out to find my way up there. This brought me to the Funicular station.

The Funicular is a balanced cable car system where one car is pulled up on a cable while another is lowered as a counterbalance. This creates something like a very slow train capable of climbing up and down the very steep slope of the hill. It’s a great tourist attraction and has apparently been one since the early 20th century. I bought a ticket and having just missed a departure, waited half an hour until I was hauled to the top. The view from the top has the potential to be spectacular, but the ever present smog meant that there was almost no view at all. I used the half hour before the Funicular’s next trip to walk all over the top of the hill in search of views, and climbed to the highest point of the Funicular building, but mostly what I saw was smog and this communications tower.

Looking at all of those dishes from just a few metres away had me wondering just how much RF I was being soaked in. I got the feeling that concepts of occupational health and safety aren’t taken quite as seriously in Brazil as they are in Australia, so I hastened to get away from the radio tower.

Hot and sweaty and with the morning almost over, I caught a taxi back to the hotel for a shower, a change and a return to the conference.

The highlight of the afternoon session for me was Professor Tom Nesmith’s discussion of the ‘Archival Society’ in which he contends that society as a whole has not embraced the importance of archives as an asset for national development. As an educator, Professor Nesmith is interested in finding ways to improve the skills of archivists not just in the technical aspects of the profession, but in making themselves relevant to and recognised by society.

As proceedings drew to a close, the organisers summoned all of the speakers for a group photograph.

With the conference over, everyone relaxed and started planning a celebratory dinner to finish things off. While this was going on, my host drew me aside and informed me that my driver would meet me in the hotel lobby at 3:00am for the trip to the airport. I was somewhat taken aback. Three o’clock in the morning? Any plans for a night out evaporated right then and there. I spent 10 minutes saying goodbye to people then returned to my room to pack up and get an early night.

Sure enough, at 3:00am the driver was waiting in the lobby. This time I had only a driver and no translator. The driver spoke no English, but this didn’t stop him helpfully pointing out places of interest as we left Santos. Fortunately my few days in town had given me enough familiarity with Santos to mostly know the places he was pointing to. What did disturb me though was the lack of headlights. As we set off into the darkness with little or no street lighting, I found I couldn’t see the road ahead. I couldn’t see because the headlights were not switched on. I tried to discuss this with my driver, but none of the words I could think of for ‘light’ or ’see’ came close enough to their Portuguese equivalents for him to understand me. I think he thought I was nuts. It turns out that within city limits most people just use parking lights and save their headlights for the open road.

Then we approached, in the darkness, our first red traffic light. And we didn’t stop. This was becoming rather disturbing. Red lights would sometimes convince him to slow a little, but never would he stop. I later found that this is a strategy employed after dark to avoid car jacking. Great.

We made it to Guarulhos airport with plenty of time to spare and as I checked in, the British Airways staffer apologised and told me that my 7:00am flight would be delayed about 45 minutes. Unconcerned, I passed through security screening and passport control to find a seat in a gate lounge to sit and read for a few hours and watch the sunrise. In an unfortunate reversal of the usual, the coming of daylight didn’t make it easier to see outside because daybreak coincided with the arrival of the fog.

The airport was immediately closed to take offs or landings and a long, confused and chaotic delay began. The 45 minute delay tuned into 2 hours, then 3 hours and eventually almost 5 hours. Once the fog lifted, aircraft started to arrive and very soon all of the terminal slots were full. Planes were parked all over the airport and along with hundreds of others, I was moved to a packed holding area to catch a bus across the tarmac to a waiting 747.

We finally left Guarulhos for Buenos Aires but I knew that I had already missed my Qantas flight to Sydney by several hours. At Buenos Aires I was hustled across the airport with a handful of other passengers and squeezed onto a packed Chilean LAN flight to Santiago in Chile. The diversion would mean that instead to arriving home on Sunday night I’d be back at Monday lunch time but the payoff was a good chance to see the Andes up close as we flew along them to Santiago. At Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport in Santiago I had a 6 hour delay before boarding another LAN flight - this time to Auckland. I spent much of the time trying to get a message back home to say I’d been delayed. After failing to get my mobile or the public telephones to work, I looked for wireless internet access. I finally found it in the Pacific Lounge where I also found drinks and snacks, all for about seven dollars.

We left for Auckland at about midnight and flew through darkness for 13 hours. I was again wedged into a little economy class seat, but this time with a window. The seat-back entertainment system had a fine selection of movies but the audio on mine was broken so it wasn’t much use. I wasn’t very successful at sleeping so I spent much of the flight looking out of the window at stars.

In Auckland we had to disembark, get security scanned, then get back onto the same plane for the trip to Sydney. I begged for another seat to get some leg room and I was granted a very roomy emergency exit row with a perfectly functional entertainment system. Yay!

It was no surprise in Sydney to find that my luggage had not traversed the airport in Buenos Aires as quickly as I had, but it was almost a bonus because I didn’t have to muscle it through customs or check it back into Qantas domestic for the flight to Canberra. On the ground again I’d managed to take 44 1/2 hours to get from my hotel in Santos to home in Canberra.

XVI Brazilian Congress on Archival Science (Day Three)

When Brazil’s Association of Archivists first invited me to speak at their congress, I offered to supplement my conference presentation with a half-day workshop dealing in some detail with our digital preservation software. Ideally I wanted people to bring in their laptops so that after demonstrating the operation of our software, I could help people to install and configure their own copies of the system to learn from. Aside from bringing their own computers, we decided that it would be useful if participants could be fluent in English because no translation would be available and I speak no Portuguese. A total of ten people pre-registered for my seminar and a handful more turned up on the day.

Anyway, the day started with another session of talks in the main auditorium with simultaneous translation. I sat at the front with my headset on and the netbook on my lap. I decided to make a quick check to see that all of my software components were in place for the afternoon’s workshop so I used one of the memory sticks full of our code that I’d brought along to give away and set about unzipping and trying out software. I quickly ran into a problem when I found that a couple of the bzip files on the memory stick wouldn’t unzip. These were files I had downloaded from our sourceforge site in Canberra less than a week ago. Perhaps I messed up the download? With free hotel wireless available from my auditorium seat I decided to use the local Brazilian sourceforge mirror to download the files again. It took a few minutes but it soon became evident that some of the bzips at sourceforge were broken. I emailed the team back home to take a look but knew I’d be on my own for a while due to the 13 hour time difference.

The morning’s presentations included one by another of the overseas guests, Professor Bruno Delmas from France. His talk was made doubly interesting to me because of what the translators told me immediately before it. Apparently, only one of the translators was fluent in French. So he would be creating a simultaneous translation from French into Portuguese and his colleague would listen to the Portuguese and render it into English in parallel. This ‘Chinese Whispers’ form of simultaneous translation resulted in an interesting set of words that sometimes almost made sense but I think I’ll need to seek an English copy of Professor Bruno’s paper in order to properly understand his musings on the dematerialisation of the document.

I left the morning session early and returned to my hotel room to assess all of the pieces of software I had brought along and to attempt to build the missing pieces from source. Most things were working and the only obviously broken pieces would not affect anyone at the workshop unless they were Linux or Mac users wanting to install only one software component. I figured correctly that the risk in that case was quite small. For the workshop, I changed from my suit to my National Archives of Australia Xena Digital Preservation shirt. A little bit of marketing can go a long way.

There was some initial confusion in the seminar room when the infrastructure people wanted to insist on me using their computer rather than mine to do all of my demonstrations, but we eventually sorted that out and I managed to get the netbook talking to their projector and plugged into power for the long haul. People trickled into the room and I was gratified to see that my audience would consist of nearly all of the invited speakers, some Brazil and Santos archives people and the event organisers. All of them understood English and most were able to converse in English.

For those who hadn’t seen my keynote and to reinforce the concepts for those who had, I started with a brief slide presentation explaining the NAA approach to digital preservation. This led naturally into a demonstration of Xena and a bit of an exploration of the various outputs created during a Xena process. Next up I detailed each of the steps of processing a digital records transfer into a digital archive and this led to a detailed demonstration of the Manifest Maker and a full run through of the DPR. With everyone on the same page in terms of the operation of the software I checked to see what operating systems we might be installing on. Everybody had brought along machines running one variant or another of MS Windows.

Johanna Smit from São Paulo University volunteered the use of her new EePC netbook for me to demonstrate the use of our all-in-one DPSP installer and I connected it to the projector. I displayed and explained the contents of the memory sticks that I’d given out and walked through a software installation while others followed along on their own machines. Annoyingly, some quirk of the Windows setup on Johanna’s netbook prevented the menu entries for our software from pointing to the new installation but this issue didn’t occur on any other machines. I overcame it with some manual intervention but it made an otherwise smooth demonstration just a little less smooth.

The session concluded with some excellent discussion of the limits of our capacity to process digital records and some speculation on what factors may influence our ability to scale up our operations in future. The participants seemed generally impressed with the polished look of our software and our documentation. The test now will be to see if anyone goes away to play some more and contacts us as a result.

XVI Brazilian Congress on Archival Science (Day Two)

With my day one keynote behind me and my day three workshop off in the future, day two would be my day to take in some of the congress and hopefully get outside the hotel for a quick look around.

Having chatted over dinner with Professor Geoffrey Yeo, I was keenly anticipating his paper presentation. He did not disappoint. Drawing on a great British tradition of academic oratory, Professor Yeo delivered a cogent, clever, nuanced and challenging argument in support of the uniqueness of instances of digital records.

I’ll admit I was caught between furiously scribbling several pages of notes and just admiring his skill as a presenter. The subject matter happened to be close to my personal interests in digital preservation, so I was engrossed. At times I found myself in disagreement with his suggestions, but more often in vehement agreement, particularly when he concluded that it is “…impossible to have a complete list of significant properties [of digital objects] because they are contingent on user perception…” Oh yeah - testify! Take that, all you significant properties adherents!

His exploration of the concept of uniqueness or originality is one that has not received enough intelligent assessment in the digital domain, and it’s past due for careful consideration. I have long advocated that we cannot know what facet of a digital record will be important to a future researcher. Aspects other than obvious content may assume more importance than we currently imagine.

It’s fair to say that Professor Yeo’s talk rather eclipsed the remainder of the morning for me.

In the afternoon I returned to my room to do some further preparation for my workshop, then changed into shorts and T Shirt for a look at the Atlantic ocean. The beach front was a two block walk and I crossed the wide sand to touch the Atlantic for the first time.

The weather was warm but the heavy haze made it not quite what I would call beach weather. A queue of huge transport ships were just visible off shore, lining up to enter the port of Santos. I walked the sand for a kilometre or so, looking at the trolleys of the mobile beverage vendors with their collections of folding chairs for their customers to sit at. In the distance I saw what I thought were a pair of Lifesaver ’swim between’ flags, but when I got there I found that they were each a different design and were the advertising flags of two different beach trolleys.

I crossed back from the beach to the famous beach front garden and I marveled at the paving which looks like mosaic ceramic tiles. Most of the pavement along streets is similar to this:

Having seen quite a few potholes in footpaths, I wondered at the fragility of paving with ceramic tiles. Then I discovered that it’s actually done with bricks of different types of rock:

That made more sense.

I had thought I might walk up to the Historical district to see the coffee museum and other historical attractions, but I was running out of daylight and energy, so I shelved those for another day.

XVI Brazilian Congress on Archival Science (Day One)

A good night’s sleep made a huge difference and I awoke refreshed, hungry and thirsty. Reading through the English bits of the hotel literature I figured out that breakfast could be had one floor down from me in the Garden restaurant and I set off to find it. I managed to enter the restaurant by the wrong door, thereby bypassing the person who was supposed to check that I’m a hotel guest and I set about understanding the variety of foods in the buffet breakfast. Fruit, cereals, a bewildering array of baked goods and a couple of fairly plain hot dishes. Scrambled eggs I’m familiar with, but sliced frankfurt sausages in hot tomato sauce were new to me. The fresh strawberry juice and the coffee were a treat though.

Suitably fortified I returned to my room to dress for my keynote. I pulled out the dress shirt I’d never worn and the suit I’d bought four days ago and hoped everything fit. It pretty well did and with my presentation slides on a memory stick in my pocket and my conference paper in hand, I set off to locate the part of the hotel where the event was set up.

I arrived early enough that the English speaking main organiser hadn’t yet arrived and I used a combination of gesture and fragments of French/English/Portuguese to hand a copy of my slides to the media person for loading to the big screens. So far so good.

While I was standing around looking lost, I was approached by two rather dapper chaps who introduced themselves as the simultaneous translators who would be turning my words into Portuguese and giving me an English translation of the Portuguese via headphones through all the sessions. They implored me to speak slowly but predicted that I almost certainly wouldn’t.

After a little while, my host Lucia Maria Velloso de Oliveira arrived and we met for the first time. She was quick to check that I had all I needed and that the media people had my presentation. As Lucia started to tell me of some of the other foreign guests, Professor Tom Nesmith from the University of Manitoba arrived. We were introduced and immediately launched into a discussion around our individual interests in the world of archives.

While we were chatting, the lights in the main auditorium shifted to highlight the stage and Lucia took the podium to begin introducing keynote speakers. I then realised that when I heard my name I should walk on to the stage and be seated at the big table with the other two international keynotes. Besides a microphone, I had a small radio receiver and a headset that would give me the English translation transmitted from the booth at the rear of the auditorium.

The opening talk was by Francisco Barbedo from Archives Portugal, introducing their RODA software for digital preservation. I am somewhat familiar with RODA and I was keen to know more, but whether it was Francisco’s delivery or the Portuguese to English translation, I found myself more confused than when he started. Several times he alluded to things that he said he either lacked the time or the knowledge to explain, so the best I can tell, RODA is a set of services built on a Fedora Commons platform, with ftp ingest of records, LDAP authentication for users, and an on-the-fly conversion from PDF to flash (?) for viewing. I was itching to ask Francisco why their source code is a 4 gigabyte download, but I got the sense that he wouldn’t understand the question and I didn’t want to embarrass him.

The second keynote was from Claudia Lacomb Rocha from Arcquivo Nacional, Brasil (aka the Brazilian National Archives). The thrust of her talk was that they have just started looking into digital preservation, and Claudia outlined the 13 research projects that they are kicking off in order to understand the whole area. From my perspective, this looks like yet another example of an institution setting out to reinvent the wheel from first principles, but I am somewhat heartened to see that one of the projects involves a trip to Europe to see what the Dutch and the Danes are doing.

Next up was me. I grabbed a copy of my paper, The Benefit of Experience: the first four years of digital archiving at the National Archives of Australia and went to the lectern. Looking out at the audience was somewhat disconcerting. The bright light from the videographer’s camera was aimed at me, making most of the audience invisible. As people realised that I would be speaking English, there was a mad scramble to obtain headsets to hear the simultaneous translation. Mindful of the translators’ wish that I speak slowly, I launched carefully into my talk.

It’s a lot harder presenting when there’s no audience feedback. My slight attempts at humour, even the visual joke or two in my slides, fell pretty flat. Being barely able to see the audience, eye contact was almost impossible, so it felt a bit like being in my own little world and talking to a bright light. I concentrated on keeping the pacing slow and on following the thread of the narrative embodied by my paper without reading directly from the paper - embroidering the story with anecdotal flavour. I know that once I warm to a theme I can easily run over time, but I was watching the clock and I managed to finish with five minutes in hand.

In the panel discussion that followed, I was surprised to find that my Brazilian and Portuguese co-speakers were more than ready to defer audience questions to me, in spite of the resulting clash of languages. Two themes emerged in the questioning - one around the use of digital signatures to authenticate digital records and the other around the acquisition or development by archival institutions of skills in the digital area to complement existing archival skills.

The end of the panel debate heralded lunch and coincided with the arrival of another English speaking presenter, Professor Geoffrey Yeo from University College London.

After lunch I retrieved a translation headset and settled in the auditorium to observe the afternoon session. Physicist Dr Luis Fernando Sayão from the Brazilian Nuclear Commission delivered an enthusiastic and dynamic presentation on the need to rethink the scope and depth of metadata in the digital space as compared with the non-digital space. His theme was that more than just describing a resource, metadata needs to be expanded to encompass structure, IP rights, relationships and rendering technologies.

Dr Luis was followed by Carlos Ditadi from Arquivo Nacional Brazil who introduced his talk on the digitisation of paper records with some wonderful images from an 1895 publication, The End of Books. The illustrations provided some 19th century perspective on the perceived dangers hidden in ‘new technologies’.

With the day’s presentations completed, I began to think of dinner, but there was more to come. First, a string quartet set themselves up and began to play.

Their efforts were followed by the official opening of the Congress with dignitaries, speeches, the National Anthem and video presentations on Santos and on the work of the local archives.

XVI Brazilian Congress on Archival Science (getting there)

The taxi collected me from home at first light on Monday morning for the trip to the airport. I was pleased to see that there was no hint of fog and there was an excellent chance that my flight would be on time. It was. Contrary to what my ticket told me, I wasn’t boarding a prop driven Bombardier, but a nice big 737 jet. I took my aisle seat in the second row from the rear and watched the plane fill to about half capacity. I began to think of moving across to the empty window seat on my left when the very last passenger boarded and took it. Darn.

The big jet made short work of the hop to Sydney and I disembarked directly opposite the international transfer lounge where I waited about 15 minutes for a bus to be crammed full of passengers for the short jaunt to the international terminal. Security and passport control took just moments and I was into the departure area with plenty of time to spare. I made the mistake of buying a coffee there. Somehow the barista managed to turn it into dishwater and I ditched it after one mouthful.

The Qantas 747-400ER boarded on time and I found myself way down the back in the middle of the central aisle in the part of economy where people with babies sit. Oh joy. My legs aren’t made for squeezing into such a space and the next 13 hours or so would be most uncomfortable. We departed only minutes late and headed south east just to one side of the South Pole for the flight to Buenos Aires.

A couple of hours into the flight, a woman seated to my left took ill and requested water from the flight attendant. As the water arrived she slumped unconscious, fitted for a moment and became unresponsive. The attendant and I tried “shake and shout” to get her to revive, but her open eyes stared vacantly into space. She looked dead. After half a minute or so she regained a little consciousness and the cabin crew put her on oxygen. Once she could talk and admitted to suffering chronic low blood pressure, the crew moved her forward to a nice business class bed for the remainder of the flight.

That was the end of the in-flight excitement and I settled in to read a book and watch crappy movies for a long, long time (about 13 hours). We crossed into darkness mid-afternoon and I tried to sleep without any real success. A few hours later we were back into the light and it was again Monday morning. Being in the middle of the plane I had no view outside so I missed our crossing the Andes if that was visible.

We dropped through haze into Buenos Aires and landed at an airport reminiscent of Brisbane with similar vegetation around the boundary. Once we disembarked, the resemblance faded with the rusty old airport smelling of cigarettes. My next flight would be on British Airways and as I left the plane I heard a uniformed airline person repeating the mantra “Breeteesh Airways, Breeteesh Airways.” I figured that might mean me and showed her my boarding pass. She swapped my Qantas one for a British Airways one and directed me through a security scanner where I didn’t need to get my laptop out of my bag. A long walk around full length of the rather dingy corridors of the airport ensued and I found myself inside a small duty free shopping area near the gate lounges.

The two hour hop to Guarulhos airport at São Paulo was on a British Airways 747-400 bound for Heathrow via Brazil. This time I scored a window seat but with haze near the ground and cloud up high, there were no views to be had until final approach into Guarulhos. What I saw then was amazing to me. The massively sprawling city of São Paulo is the biggest I have ever seen. Not surprising really, since it has a population of roughly half the total population of Australia. I have never seen so much high-rise spread over so much area.

I was off the plane and through passport control within ten minutes of landing, then I waited forever at the baggage carousel for my suitcase - the very last bag unloaded. So when I breezed through Customs I was the last passenger out and I was met by two very patient women holding up a sign with my name on it. One was a young and very pretty translator from the tourist bureau and the other was an older woman who was to be my driver. Vanessa (was that her name, I didn’t quite catch it) told me that the drive to Santos may take 2 hours and advised me to use the bathroom before we left, so I took that advice and also sought a bilingual ATM to extract some local cash.

My first culture shock was when they ushered me into the front seat of a Honda. I was to sit on the right as I usually do at home, but in this car the steering wheel was on the ‘wrong’ side. So that felt odd. We set off onto Guarulhos’ large freeway system and started dodging Brazilian traffic for the trip to the coast. Every impression now was fresh and strange to my Australian eyes. Each traffic light intersection had street vendors approaching stopped cars to sell snacks, drinks, mobile phone accessories and even children’s bicycle tyres. At one point we were stopped and a motorbike whizzed past and threw a big piece of plastic bodywork at a man standing in the middle of the road. It bounced off our roof with a bang and its intended target shook his head and picked it up.

Buses, trucks and tiny 150cc motorbikes were everywhere and competing madly for road space. The little motorbikes carved up the traffic incessantly and later we had to deviate around a fresh single-vehicle motorbike crash.

After a little more than an hour we had skirted the edge of São Paulo on six lane roads and cruised through green countryside past a huge dam. This gave way to the coastal mountains that we would have to descend to get to Santos. The winding mountain roads have recently been replaced with massive 2 and 3km tunnels which bore straight down through the mountains to sea level, making for a quick trip but sacrificing what may be some great views.

Traveling on roads that in Australia would be regarded as ‘freeways’ it was very disconcerting to see people wandering around on the central reservation and along the road edges. Kids on bikes riding along the edges in both directions, people running or walking with no provision really made for pedestrians and often no obvious place that they could be heading to.

Santos is actually on an island, but it’s far from obvious when you cross the river from the mainland and apparently many Brazilians don’t realise that it’s an island city. As we drove past the edge of a huge Shipping Container terminal, Vanessa was explaining the scale and importance of shipping in the area. Then she asked me, “What is the most populous port in Australia?” I rambled on for a bit about Port Botany and Port Melbourne then digressed to talk about the various large coal export terminals up the east coast. She took a moment to digest all of this, then said “Thank you, but I asked you What is the most popular sport in Australia?”

By now it was late afternoon and we pulled up in front of the Mendes Panorama hotel. I grabbed my bags and Vanessa accompanied me to the reception desk where I checked in. We said goodbye and I think I upset a porter when I said I’d be fine with my bag. I pressed the button for the lift and both arrived at once. As I stepped to the one on the left, a porter was walking to the one on the right and I *think* he was asking me what floor I wanted as I disappeared into the other lift. Oh well, I don’t think I made any friends there.

My room on the 8th floor was pleasant enough and I wasted no time in getting a shower. While the thought of dinner was tempting, I was too tired to move and decided on an early night. Just as I dropped off to sleep, the phone in the room rang with the conference organiser urging me to join a small group for dinner. I pleaded exhaustion and begged off. I’m glad I did because I slept like a log and awoke feeling refreshed for my keynote on day one of the conference.