Monsanto Hawaii Education Grant
Applications are now being accepted for the Monsanto Hawaii Science Education Fund. This Monsanto Fund grant program is open to public schools serving students at the intermediate, high school and college grade levels on the islands of Maui, Molokai, Oahu, and Kauai. The Fund helps provide Hawaii public schools with programs, tools, supplies and equipment to enhance science education in the schools, and encourage today’s students to consider a future career in the sciences.
Monsanto’s recent round of grants supported a wide variety of educational endeavors such as alternative energy solutions, forensic studies, biotechnology studies, an aquaponics facility, solar powered cars, hydroponic lab, robotics competitions, and supplies and equipment for courses in chemistry, biology, and agriculture.
“As a company dedicated to scientific research, we’re proud to be able to support the educators who empower our students with science and technology skills,” said Paul Koehler, scientific and community affairs manager for Monsanto Hawaii. “It’s gratifying to see the range of projects and the commitment by Hawaii’s educators to continue these worthwhile programs despite the tough economic times.”
Applications can be downloaded online at Monsanto Hawaii or by contacting any one of Monsanto’s farm stations on Maui 808-879-4074; Molokai 808-553-5070; Kauai 808-335-5712; and Oahu 808-690-8054. Applications are accepted and reviewed twice a year. Upcoming deadlines to receive applications are October 6, 2009, and February 20, 2010.
Hawaiian Google
Hawaiian is now one of more than 125 “interface languages” available on Google. “It’s the capstone of a lot of work,” said Keola Donaghy, an assistant professor of Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawaii-Hilo. “We’ve been doing this work for 18 years, simply trying to make it easier for people who speak Hawaiian to use these kinds of technologies.”
Donaghy began working on the massive translation project sometime late last year. “I did the actual translation from beginning to end, and then I consulted with my colleagues at the university who have worked on these projects in the past,” Donaghy said. “I wanted to be very consistent — such as how you say ‘Go to this menu and select this’ — or people may become confused.” The results of the search are still in English, although the user can select a preference for Web pages written in more than 40 other main languages.
What’s Hawaiian for ‘browsing’ the Web? “Over the years, we usually face the debate of do we want to ‘Hawaiianize’ an English word, or take an old Hawaiian word and give it a new meaning,” he said. He explained some of the challenges in translating terms, such as “browsing” or “surfing,” into Hawaiian. “People use the term ‘surf the Internet’ and they’ll say ‘he’e nalu’ which is literally surfing the ocean out on a board,” he explained. “But we use ‘kele,’ which is what you do when you’re steering a canoe. So we chose that as you’re navigating the net.”
The Hawaiian language interface actually launched on Apple’s Safari browser first because Donaghy had worked with Apple to ensure that the language’s diacritical marks and characters were available on the company’s computers. “Now, it comes with every computer that they ship,” he said. Some Apple computer users who had selected Hawaiian as their primary language for other programs noticed a couple of weeks ago that Google’s search terms started appearing in Hawaiian, too.
See and hear the Hawaiian word for common internet related terms.
