April 2018 IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 15 1094-6969/18/$25.00©2018IEEE Erik Timpson I n this issue there are some wonderful advanced measures including acoustics. What are some simple measures and where did they begin? According to NCSL International, the history of measurement began in Africa, specifically with the Egyptian cubit —a fascinating story about having to bring your cubit in every full moon or die. Now that is an effective calibration program! My hope in mention- ing this is not to fill you with fear. I hope that I fill you with curiosity about how to calibrate whatever instrument you are cur- rently dependent on. I am focused on Africa for this article, and after much thought, I decided that best way to do this was to use the IEEEXplore platform to find other interesting papers coming from Africa. Then after considering we are all from Africa, depending on how far back one traces our DNA, I dismissed that idea as a distraction and started reading. I loved 25 papers total, but being forced to make this article a quick read, I'll focus on three. All with a measure fo- cus including specifics of magnets, smartphones, and optical measures. O. O. Ogidi et al., from the University of Cape Town, did a wonderful job in their paper titled “Development of a Test Rig for Eccentricity Fault Studies on an Axial-Flux Permanent Magnet (AFRM) Wind Generator” [1]. Here I note with wind turbines being a great part of a mixed energy solution of the future, the authors do especially well in focusing on machine fault diagnosis. With great figures, equations, and simple ex- planations, I was entertained. Here's hoping their life after graduation is going well. Charl A. Opperman et al., from the University of Preto- ria, did well in looking at the most readily available platform to human kind— the smartphone. In their paper titled, “Smartphones as a Platform for Advanced Measurement and Processing,” they conclude that a PC is still much faster than a phone for processing [2]. Yet the phone has a wide variety of sensors, and its processing power is increasing. I'm sure they are correct whey they say, “Instead of having to purchase spe- cialized hardware and software, open source software…” is more simple. There is elegance in simplicity. Abdelrahman E. Afifi et al., from Cairo, titled their paper “Fiber Optical Coherence Domain Polarimetry for PM Fiber Measurements” [3]. Also with beautiful equations, figures, and measurements, they verified the theoretical model with experimentation, making for wonderful entertainment. I was reminded of George Box who said, “All models are wrong, some models are useful.” The authors devised a very useful model with a more environmentally robust system than before. In the end, I know we scholars are busy writing papers and reading in our areas of our expertise. Perhaps take a break and look for papers not on subject alone but from a certain geo- graphic area or with a different search parameter. Consider effective calibrations for your measures and instruments. And have a wonderful life after graduation. Cheers, Erik References [1] O. O. Ogidi, P. S. Barendse, and M. A. Khan, “Development of a test rig for eccentricity fault studies on an axial-fluxpermanent magnet (AFPM) wind generator,” in Proc. 2014 International Conference on Electrical Machines (ICEM), pp. 1562-1568, 2014. [2] C. A. Opperman and G. P. Hancke, “Smartphones as a platform for advanced measurement and processing,” in Proc. 2012 IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference, pp. 703-706, 2012. [3] A. E. Abdelrahman, A. R. El-Damak, T. A. Ramadan, and M. H. Ahmed, “Fiber optical coherence domain polarimetry for PM fiber measurements,” J. Lightwave Tech., vol. 35, no. 16, pp. 3569- 3576, 2017. Dr. Timpson may be contacted at etimpson@kcp.com, and his bio is available at http://ieee-ims.org/node/1427. Africa— Where Metrology Began lifegraduation after