Celebrating 'the' Woman!

Today, on International Women Day (#IWD2014), I celebrate ‘every’ woman who believes in, and recognizes the wisdom, beauty, strength and identity she possesses; every woman who upholds the values entrenched in love and empathy, every woman who sticks to speaking the truth and doing what is right  – even when it is difficult.

Today, I celebrate every woman who – though is faced with awkward challenges – finds strength and understands that there is a lesson to be learnt; every woman who – though experiences pain – is committed to the process of her physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual healing. I celebrate every woman – regardless of age category – who lives a life of honour and integrity.

I celebrate every woman who understands the power of love, words and deeds; every woman, who – though stands tall – has her kneels closer to the ground in divine supplication.

I celebrate every woman who loves and prays for her family and nation.

If any of the above describes you, congratulation! I celebrate you! Kindly extend my best regards to – share with other women – targeted in this post.

Congratulation!

Damola Morenikeji (@DamolaMore)

Read More

NETAD National Youth Forum, Abeokuta 2011

Memories of the 2011 Network for Talent Discovery's National Youth Forum which took place in Abeokuta, the Ogun State (South Western Nigeria) capital comes to mind.

The NETAD National Youth Forum is a gathering of youths aimed at creating an opportunity for youths to interact with one another and our role models, towards ensuring self discovery, talent development, effective leadership and patriotism among youths in the African region and beyond. Apart from the aforementioned, the forum is meant to create opportunities for young, uncelebrated prodigies to explore their talents and share their creative thoughts and to create in Africans, the consciousness of tailoring skills and potentials towards the progress of the continent.

The Abeokuta session of the NETAD NYF held on Tuesday, 22nd November, 2011 at Ogun State (South West Nigeria) had the theme 'Discovering the YOU in you'. The event had Prince Yomi Otukoya (Executive Director, Art Kingdom, South Africa), Chris Omotosho (Secretary, Association of Nigerian Authors, Ogun State), Olumayowa Okediran (Clerk, AIMUN-African Union Pan African Parliament), Akinola Solanke (Director, Building Our National Project - organisers of Nigeria's maiden and only National Flagday celebration) as guest speakers.

The event had in attendance and representation the First Lady of Ogun State, the Commissioner of Education, Science and Technology, Ogun State, dinstingiushed Nigerian writers, talented prodigies, ladies and gentlemen of the press, students and youths, among others.

Relax as you peruse series of pictures taken on Tuesday, 22nd November, 2011.

Click here to peruse the photo album.

Read More

16 year old Compronian wins Teaching Service Commission award.




Aanu Damola Morenikeji recieving the award.

 

It all happened on Tuesday, 26th January, 2010 at Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, where Educational Giants in the state converge to honour be honored by the Ogun State teaching service commission. The historic event, under the chairmanship of Dr Onaolapo Soleye (a famous Elder, leader and Educator, who is also the newly appointed Vice Chancellor of Olabisi Onabanjo University) featured and awarded Ten Great Giants, – which include; Otunba Gbenga Daniel, Prof. Segun Awonusi, Dr. Tai Solarin, Chief Kenshington Adebutu, Chief Adeola Odutola, Chief Timothy Odutuyo Kuti, Chief Olabosun Lampejo, Chief Olatunde Abudu, Chief (Dr.) Mrs. Matilda Iyabo Apampa and H.R.H. Oba Moshood Alani Oyede – Four retired Permanent Secretaries, Four retired Principals general, Five proactive past Principals, Four proactive principals, Eight distinguished role model staffs and One Gateway Future Giant among others.

Fresh air of glamour eloped from the giant air conditioning system of the Valley View Auditorium, Oke-Igbehin, as Master Aanu Damola Morenikeji was called upon to receive one of the most special and encouraging award of the day which is THE MOST OUTSTANDING SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENT AWARD. Piquancy was added to the occasion when it was announced that he is the child author of Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child, a book he wrote in year 2002 – while he was transiting from Primary School to Secondary School – at the age of Nine (9) years, thereby making him the youngest author in the State.

The 16 year old alumnus of Comprehensive High School, who is the youngest awardee of the day, born February 24th 1993 to the family of Mr. & Mrs. B.A. Morenikeji started his Primary School education in 1995 at Sakis Memorial Nursery / Primary School, after which in 1999, he was admitted into Paragon International Nursery / Primary School, Obantoko, Abeokuta, where he read Primary one (First term only), Primary two, Primary three and Primary five (since he enjoyed double promotion from Primary three to Primary five). In year 2002, he proceeded to Paragon International College, Oke Aregba, Abeokuta and later to Comprehensive High School,
Ayetoro where he was made the Social Prefect. While in school, he is always at the forefront of representing his school at various competitions. Though a Science student, he loves creativity and child development activities.

During an intensive interview with the child author, it was deduced that his flair for creative writing was noticed during his primary school days and therefore in year 2002, during the long vacation, his Daddy – Mr. Morenikeji B.A. challenged him to write a book before the end of the holiday. Fortunately, this challenge gave birth to his juvenilia titled Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child. In addition, the challenge, which since then sprouts other unpublished fruits annually has produced The Glorious Child in the year 2003, No other chance in the year 2004, The So Called Police in year 2005, A Stroll to the Animal Kingdom in year 2006 and The Evil that Money Do in the year 2007. In all, Damola had written six (6) books. Interestingly, his first book Spare the rod and Spoil the child had its foreword written by renown educationists; Dr. E.O. Filani (Provost, Federal College of Education, Abeokuta, Ogun State) and Dr. Holumidey Lawrence (Director of Education, Paragon International Group of Schools, Abeokuta, Ogun State) was launched in March 2007 at the Cinema Hall of Gateway Hotel, Abeokuta, thereby cutting his first tooth as a creative writer.



The young lad receiving an handshake from the Governor of Ogun State, represented by the Commissioner for Education.



Remarkably, Morenikeji Damola Aanu, who is recently proclaimed GATEWAY FUTURE GIANT by the Ogun State Teaching Service Commission (See TESCOM NEWS – latest edition), was on Sunday, 19th August, 2007, shot-listed and awarded Artiste of the year (2nd runner up) by the Ogun State government during the prestigious 2006 Ogun State awards of excellence. Also, on Thursday, 11th June 2009, he received an OUTSTANDING AWARD by the Student Representative Council, Federal College of Education, Abeokuta for his achievements in creative writing and creativity in general at such a tender age.

He (Damola) is a registered member of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), and had represented ANA Ogun State Chapter at International conventions, and the youngest at all conventions attended, where the likes of Dr. Gabriel Okara (the oldest poet in Nigeria), Dr. Jerry Agada (former minister of states for education who is now the National President of ANA), Hon. Wale Okediran, Prof. Kole Omotoso, Odia Ofeimun, Mr. B.L. Wikina (Dean, School of Arts and Social Science, Federal College of Education, Abeokuta), Mrs. Tope Olaifa (Chairperson, ANA Ogun) and other art guru were present. He is also a member of the Nigerian Red Cross Society, and presently the Deputy Coordinator of the Ogun State Youth Wing.


He is the initiator of Teen writer club, a club aimed at discovering and developing young talents in creative writing in our secondary school, which he started in Comprehensive High School, Ayetoro in year 2007 and had began to yield positive results part of which produced Lawal Mistura Ojuolape (17 year old author of The wicked step mother and other story) in year 2008 and Adeosun Tosin (18 year author of Peace at last) in year 2009.


Due to his love for children intellectual development activities, he is floating a magazine called TEEN’S PATHFINDER. The magazine which apart from its major aims is expected to awaken the reading culture in the youths. The magazine is also aimed at serving as medium for educative information to be provided free of charge to the less privilege children and Nigerian youths in our secondary schools so as to inculcate the habit of reading and creativity in them. It will also serve as a medium of encouraging other children writers to forge ahead in the world of creativity by making their educational contributions published. The magazine, according to him (Damola) is to be distributed free of charge. Astonishingly, at present, he is still seeking for sponsorship of the magazine which when published will make the youths better people and in turn make Nigeria a greater nation.


When the awardee was asked about what he was doing at present, he stated, without hesitation that ‘in realizing my zealous goal to make a change in my generation, and considering the words of Artemus Ward which says that ‘no man has the right to be a literary man unless he knows how to spell’, I observed that most students do not know how to spell words comprehensively not alone using them in correct sentences’. As his little contribution towards putting a halt to this social and educational challenge, the most outstanding secondary school student in Ogun State organized the first spelling competition in Ogun State (if not in Nigeria) tagged SPELLING GIANT COMPETITION. ‘I organized the first edition of the competition on Wednesday, 16th December, 2009, although it was solely sponsored and rigorous, but I thank God it was a success. I am working towards a more elaborate and fascinating Second edition of the competition, proposed for the month of March’. The first edition which produced Seun Koshoedo - Olusegun of UNAAB International School, Alabata, Abeokuta, as the Spelling Giant took place at Music Reciatal Hall, Federal College of Education, Abeokuta. ‘My dream for the competition is to make it rise above challenges an grow till it gets to the National level, involving all states’ he concluded.


When asked how he felt when he was receiving the award, Damola responded by saying ‘I felt extremely excited and honored, and I thank God for opening my book of remembrance’. Talking to his generation, he advised that ‘we should stay focused, since everyone is born with divine gifts, the next step is for us to discover and develop it. I would also want to implore my colleagues to make judicious use of time, and by God’s grace, the sky is our starting point’.


‘On the final note, I thank God for perfecting his will upon my life, I also send my indepth gratitude to the Chairman, Staffs and members of the Ogun State Teaching Service Commission for counting me worthy of the award bestowed upon me. I also appreciate my lovely parents, members of the Association of Nigerian Authors, my fellow first aiders, I mean members of the Nigerian Red Cross Society, my well wishers, and everyone who believed in me. I promise to keep the flag of creativity flying in my beloved country – Nigeria’.

Appreciating God for providing Nigeria with such gifted child, Dr. Holumidey Lawrence (Proprietor, Paragon International Group of Schools) affirmed to Damola that ‘I cannot but continue to thank God for your life and your type of parents, Congratulations my boy …’.

Congratulations Damola, eternity, not the sky is your limit.

(c) January 2010

Read More

Alas! Google is 13

Google began in March 1997 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library." and was funded through the National Science Foundation among other federal agencies. In search for a dissertation theme, Page considered—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got") and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).^[6] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.^[2] Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.^[6] Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page's own Stanford home page as its only starting point. To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.^[6] Analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance—it occurred to them that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).^[6][8]
A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services (a subsidiary of Dow Jones) designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking. The technology in RankDex would be patented ^[10] and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.^[11][12]
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. By early 1997, the backrub page described the state as follows:^[13]
Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)
Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
...
BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.
-Larry Page page@cs.stanford.edu
Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 4, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.
Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. However, they soon changed their minds and early on allowed simple text ads.
The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol,"^[15][16] which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros (although Enid Blyton used the phrase "Google Bun" in The Magic Faraway Tree (published 1941), The Folk of the Faraway Tree (published 1946), and called a clown character "Google" in Circus Days Again (published 1942), and there is also the Googleplex Star Thinker from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb, "google," was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning, "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet." The use of the term itself reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.^[16]

Philanthropy

In 2004, Google formed a non-profit philanthropic wing, Google.org, giving it a starting fund of $1 billion.^[54] The express mission of the organization is to help with the issues of climate change (see also global warming), global public health, and global poverty. Among its first projects is to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 mpg

Google has worked with several corporations, in order to improve production and services. On September 28, 2005,Google announced a long-term research partnership with NASA which would involve Google building a 1,000,000-square-foot (93,000 m²) R&D center at NASA's Ames Research Center. NASA and Google are planning to work together on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry. The new building would also include labs, offices, and housing for Google engineers. In October 2006, Google formed a partnership with Sun Microsystems to help share and distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership Google will hire employees to help the open source office program OpenOffice.org.
Time Warner's AOL unit and Google unveiled an expanded partnership on December 21, 2005, including an enhanced global advertising partnership and a $1 billion investment by Google for a 5% stake in AOL. As part of the collaboration, Google plans to work with AOL on video search and offer AOL's premium-video service within Google Video. This did not allow users of Google Video to search for AOL's premium-video services. Display advertising throughout the Google network will also increase.
In August 2003, Google signed a $900 million offer with News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media unit to provide search and advertising on MySpace and other News Corp. websites including IGN, AmericanIdol.com, Fox.com, and Rotten Tomatoes, although Fox Sports is not included as a deal already exists between News Corp. and MSN.
On 6 December 2006, British Sky Broadcasting released details of a Sky and Google alliance. This includes a feature where Gmail will link with Sky and host a mail service for Sky, incorporating the email domain "@sky.com".
In 2007, Google displaced America Online as a key partner and sponsor of the NORAD Tracks Santa program.^[68][69][70] Google Earth was used for the first time to give visitors to the website the impression that they were following Santa Claus' progress in 3-D. The program also made its presence known on YouTube in 2007 as part of its partnership with Google.
In January 2009, Google announced a partnership with the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, allowing the Pope to have his own channel on YouTube.

(c) Wikipedia

Read More

LET'S CELEBRATE FIVE YEARS OF BUILDING OUR NATIONAL IMAGE

The Nigerian Flag and Coat of Arm is known to be one of the most important national symbols of the country – Nigeria. The flag symbolizes in no small measure greenery, harmony and a sense of togetherness – which comes in mind when the Name Nigeria is mentioned.

Unfortunately however, the Nigerian flag which is known to be a peculiar object in describing the image of the country has been left uncelebrated for several years. Going history lane, the image of the United States as inscribed in its National flag is been celebrated annually. The celebration is meant to bring the consciousness of its citizens to the fact that there exists a flag which denotes what the country stands for.

Battling this back drop, a group of patriotic Nigerian led by Akinola Solanke in the year 2007 celebrated the first ever Flag Day in the history of Nigeria which made Nigeria at that time, the second nation in Africa to celebrate its Flag day after Liberia and recently Ethiopia whose parliament just passed their Flag Day bill in on October 1, 2008. The Flag Day is known as the birthday of the Flag and it was been celebrated since 1877 by the United States and about fifty other countries.

The event, which has proven to be a useful tool to inspire a high level Spirit of Patriotism and a sense of belonging in their citizenry had successfully been celebrated in Ogun State in the year 2008 and Plateau State in the year 2009.

Celebrating five years of outstanding efforts by Patriotic young Nigerians, a Non-governmental organization whose aim is to promote national value re-orientation and education of all and sundry towards the creation of a new Nigeria – “Initiative for Promotion of Our Flag Image in Nigeria” – has put things in shape towards the celebration of the 2011 National Flag Day.

In a release signed by its Public Relations officer, Rotimi Atunluse Abayomi, he made it know to our correspondent that the event is scheduled as follows;

Date: Saturday, 24th September 2011

 I.      Press Conference

Venue: Conference Hall, Duban International Hotels, After Murhi International (NGR) Ltd. 63/65, Aguda, Ogba, Lagos, Nigeria.

Time: 10am – 11am prompt.

II.  Anniversary Lecture

Venue: Conference Hall, Duban International Hotels, After Murhi International (NGR) Ltd. 63/65, Aguda, Ogba, Lagos, Nigeria.

      Time: 11.00.am prompt.

     Theme: “Promoting Peace and National Unity through Civic Orientation and Patriotic Education.”

Akin Solanke and Pa Taiwo Akinkunmi

In a chat with the Executive Director, Initiative for Promotion of Our Flag Image in Nigeria – Building Our National Image [BONI] project, Mr. Akinola Solanke, dignitaries expected at the press conference includes Pa Taiwo Michael Akinkunmi (the designer of the Nigerian Flag), Engr. Abiodun Fijabi (Chairman Board of Directors, Initiative for Promotion of our Flag Image in Nigeria), State Director of the National Orientation Agency and other stake holders. He further revealed that the Anniversary Lecture will be honoured with the presence of Chief John Dara, (Chairman, National Transformation Party) as the Chairman of the Occasion, Ambassador Segun Olusola as the Father of the day, Mrs. Margaret E. Obanya (Director Administration, Voice of Nigeria), Mr. Ibirogba Aderemi (the Honourable Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Lagos State), Mrs. Tokunbo Fayokun (Oyo State Commissioner for Education) as special guests of honour.

The keynote speakers are Mr. Fela Durotoye and Barrister Yomi Okunnu.

For more information, kindly contact Solanke Akinola on 07040383732 or www.boniproject.com.

Read More