Category: Uncategorized

“Collective grief” of Tamil community paralyzes Ottawa
by Stuart Neatby

Demonstrators wave the flag of the Tamil Tigers in the midst of a snowstorm in downtown Ottawa, Tuesday, April 7. Photo: Stuart Neatby

OTTAWA–Canada’s 300,000-strong Tamil community, the largest Tamil diaspora on earth, has been mobilizing for months in major cities in Canada to draw attention to the dire situation in Sri Lanka.

“There is a collective grief amongst the Tamil community in Canada right now,” says David Poopalapillai, national spokesperson for the Canadian Tamil Congress (CTC). In recent months this “collective grief” has brought sections of at least two Canadian cities to a standstill.

Since Sri Lanka’s military captured the port city of Kilinochchi, a stronghold of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the country’s northern region, the death toll within the mostly Tamil region has risen to alarming levels.

In response, Tamil-Canadians have organized fasts, parliamentary meetings, vigils, protests, and acts of non-violent civil disobedience to draw attention to what many see as a campaign of deliberate killings of Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan government. This campaign included a march of more than 45,000 through downtown Toronto on January 30, the biggest march in Canada against an international conflict since Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon during the summer of 2006.

Read More

Earbuds can pipe audio directly from a portable player to the ear. But did you ever imagine that eyeglasses or contact lenses could deliver digital images directly from a smartphone to the retina?

Several companies are developing prototypes for digital devices that look like stylish eyewear but may one day offer such capabilities to consumers. The glasses are called heads-up displays because the wearer can always look through them and see the real world — like the sidewalk just ahead — but can also see, on an overlay image, virtual information like an electronic map or an arrow showing the correct way to a destination. The glasses may also help the wearer remember the name of a long-lost friend she sees on the street.

SBG Labs, an optical technology company in Sunnyvale, Calif., is among the businesses that are developing the devices. The glasses are only slightly larger than many chic pairs of wraparounds, but instead of bearing rhinestones or designer initials, they hold a tiny projector and optics — tucked away in the side of the frame.
Such devices may have considerable appeal for consumers, so long as the glasses are attractive and lightweight, said Henry Fuchs, a professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor Fuchs is a pioneer in the creation of precursors to these glasses: large, head-mounted display systems — worn, for example, by soldiers who use them to see information like a map reflected on the visor of a helmet. These displays, though, are typically quite heavy to wear.

“People who work on head-mounted displays are hungering for something that people would be willing to wear for more than an hour,” he said, “something that would go in one’s eyeglasses and not be too much clunkier than regular eyeglasses.”

No price has been set for the SBG eyeglasses, which are still in the prototype stage, said Jonathan Waldern, the company’s founder and chief technology officer. SBG is concentrating on military and avionics applications, with consumer uses to follow.

Contact lenses are also being developed for mobile displays. Babak A. Parviz, an associate professor of electrical engineering, with his team at the University of Washington in Seattle, has created a biocompatible contact lens that has miniaturized electronics and optoelectronics integrated into the lens.

Dr. Parviz says he is moving a step at a time in testing the lenses. Rabbits have worn them for 20 minutes without ill effects, he said. “The display has not yet been turned on while the rabbits are wearing the lenses,” he said. “But we have turned on the lenses while holding them with tweezers, and they work well.”
A group led by Desney S. Tan, a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., is working with Dr. Parviz.

“Our role is to come up with some of the applications for the technology,” Dr. Tan said, applications that are part of a research field he called augmented reality: the combining of digital and physical worlds, in which virtual information is layered onto a person’s view of the real world.

In one possible application, the eyewear could serve as the wearer’s personal whisperer at conferences and cocktail parties. “What if every time I passed by a person, I had their name come up on the display?” Dr. Tan asked. “We could even add information on the last time I saw them and what we chatted about.”

Read More

Professor Stephen Hawking suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the most common form of motor neurone disease.

What causes it?
ALS, which accounts for more than 90% of all cases of motor neurone disease, causes nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord called motor neurones to degenerate and eventually die.
These cells play an essential role in passing messages to the muscles.
Without them the brain cannot control movement properly, and the muscles cease to work well.
Around one in 10 cases of ALS are thought to be due to genetics, but the trigger for the other 90% of cases remains a mystery.
It is estimated that 3,500 people in the UK have ALS.

What are the symptoms?
As more and more motor neurones are lost, the muscles – particularly in the limbs – begin to waste.
Early symptoms include tripping up when walking, or dropping things.
Twitching and “cramping” of the muscles is also common, especially in the hands and feet.
In the more advanced stages, people often have difficulty speaking, swallowing or breathing and experience paralysis.
Death is usually caused by a failure of the respiratory muscles.

What is the prognosis?
Poor. The average life expectancy for somebody with ALS is just two to five years from the time symptoms first appear.
Half of patients die within 14 months of their diagnosis.
Mel Barry, of the Motor Neurone Disease Association, said: “ALS is quite a complicated and mysterious disease, and often by the time a diagnosis is made people have had symptoms for up to a year.”
However, not all people with ALS have the same symptoms, and the rate of progression of the disease can vary greatly
Professor Hawking first developed the disease when he was just 21 years old, and has lived with it for more than 40 years.
The fact that he has lived for long with the condition has been described as remarkable.
It is estimated that only about 5% of people with ALS survive for more than 10 years.
Ms Barry said: “The fact that Professor Hawking has survived for so long is very, very unusual.”

Is there any treatment?
Only one drug – Rilutek – is licensed as a treatment for ALS.
The drug works by blocking release of a key chemical called glutamate by the central nervous system, but its effect is limited, extending survival by three to six months.
Trials are currently taking place using another drug, lithium, which has produced promising results in mice, but work is still at an early stage.
Most other treatment is simply palliative, attempting to minimise the effect of the disease.
This can include ventilation systems to help with breathing, feeding tubes if swallowing is a problem and muscle relaxants for muscle cramping.

How was Professor Hawking diagnosed?
On his website, Professor Hawking says that he tries to live as normal a life as possible, and not to think about his condition.
He said his diagnosis came as a great shock.
He had been physically uncoordinated as a child, but had taken up rowing when he went to Oxford.
“In my third year at Oxford, however, I noticed that I seemed to be getting more clumsy, and I fell over once or twice for no apparent reason.
“But it was not until I was at Cambridge, in the following year, that my father noticed and took me to the family doctor.
“He referred me to a specialist and shortly after my 21st birthday I went into hospital for tests.”

What course has his condition taken?
Professor Hawking was able to feed himself and get in and out of bed until 1974.
Until that point he and his wife were able to manage without outside help, but then had to rely on live-in help from one of his research students.
In 1980, he changed to a system of community and private nurses, who came in for an hour or two in the morning and evening.
This lasted until he caught pneumonia in 1985, and had to have a tracheotomy operation.
After this, he needed 24-hour nursing care.
Before the operation, his speech had been getting more slurred, so that only a few people who knew him well could understand him.
However, he could communicate. He wrote scientific papers by dictating to a secretary, and gave seminars through an interpreter.
The tracheotomy operation removed his ability to speak altogether, and he had to rely on a small portable computer and a speech synthesizer fitted to his wheel chair.

Read More

Inul Daratista means “the girl with the breasts.” (Ainul Rokhimah is the birth name of this Indonesian dancer.) The Islamists targeted her for her dengdut dancing (a mixture of Arabic, Indian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Malay) which has been termed as “drilling.” With bended knees, Inul gyrates her derriere with such a speed that it seems like a “glittering piston,” in the words of Time magazine reporters.
She counters her critics such as the Indonesian Ulemas Council in these words: “MUI should realize that Indonesia is not a Muslim country, it’s a democratic country.” Backers she has many too, including the former Presidents Ms. Megavati Soukarnoputri and Mr. Abdurrahman Wahid, leader of Nadhlatul Ulama, an Islamic organization.

http://www.counterpunch.org/gowani02022008.html

By Rick Nauert, Ph.D. Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

A new study finds formerly depressed women show patterns of brain activity when they are criticized by their mothers that are distinctly different from the patterns shown by never-depressed controls.
The participants reported being completely well and fully recovered, yet their neural activity resembled that which has been observed in depressed individuals in other studies.

The Harvard University study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, was led by Jill M. Hooley, professor of psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard.

“We found that even though our formerly depressed participants were fully well, had no symptoms, and felt fine, different things were happening in their brains when they were exposed to personal criticism,” says Hooley.

“What’s interesting to us about these findings is that although these women were fully recovered, at the level of the brain they were not back to normal.”

The study included 23 female participants, 12 of whom had no history of depression or any other mental illness and 11 of whom had previously experienced one or more depressive episodes, but had reported no symptoms for an average of 20 months. To an observer, both the control group and the formerly depressed appeared completely healthy.

While inside an fMRI scanner, the participants listened to 30-second audio recordings of remarks from their mother. Some comments were praising, some were critical and others were neutral in content.
The comments were previously recorded over the telephone with the permission of the mothers. The participants were also asked to rate their mood on a scale from one to five after hearing the different kinds of remarks.

Despite being healthy and reporting similar conscious reactions to the recorded comments, the formerly depressed showed different activity in their brains, compared to those who had never been depressed.

“When we asked them how they felt after being criticized, they responded in the same way as the controls did,” said Hooley. “But when we looked at the brain scans, the patterns of activation were quite different. So this is happening under the radar of awareness.”
Individuals who had never been depressed showed increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex, which are brain areas involved in the cognitive control of emotion.

The formerly depressed individuals did not show activity in these areas, but instead showed increased activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that is responsive to potentially threatening stimuli.
Previous research has shown similar activity in these neural systems among individuals who are currently depressed.

“When these formerly depressed participants are processing criticism, some brain areas thought to be involved in emotion regulation are less active, and the amygdala is actually more active, compared to the healthy controls,” says Hooley.

“We know that this is not linked to them being symptomatic now. These findings tell us that even when people are fully recovered from an episode of depression, their ability to process criticism is still different – and probably not in a good way.”

What the researchers don’t know is whether this type of activity within these brain systems exists prior to the development of a depressive episode, or if this activity could be a kind of scar left on the brain by a past episode of depression, says Hooley.

Previous studies have shown that living in a critical family environment increases rates of relapse in depression, and so use of criticism in this study is particularly important and applicable to real life.

Care was taken to avoid placing the formerly depressed individuals in a potentially harmful situation. The researchers ensured that the criticisms were not too extreme. Mothers provided the critical remarks in a very specific format, and the remarks were criticisms that the mothers had previously voiced.

Examples of the criticisms included statements about tattoos or body piercing, failing to send thank you notes, or being inconsiderate and untidy.

To protect participants, the criticisms were required to concern topics that the daughters had previously heard about from their mothers, although the praising remarks were in some cases new to the daughters.

“We made sure that everybody left in a good frame of mind, and still had a good relationship with their mother,” says Hooley. “That was crucial.”

Source: Harvard University
Read More

(Two years ago, Hawking experienced zero gravity.)

Photograph courtesy Zero Gravity Corporation

Kennedy Space Center, Florida, April 26, 2007—Whirling like a “gold-medal gymnast”—as one crew member put it—Stephen Hawking took blissful leave of his wheelchair for a 90-minute airplane flight featuring 25-second bouts of weightlessness.

“It was amazing,” the British astrophysicist said in a statement. “I could have gone on and on—space, here I come!”

Operated by the Zero Gravity Corporation, the flight followed a rollercoaster-like route, creating weightless conditions at the crest of each arc—a method used to prepare astronauts for space travel. A padded cabin, heart-rate and blood-pressure monitors, four physicians, and a nurse helped keep the A Brief History of Time author from harm.

ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, has rendered Hawking paralyzed and mute. Using eye motions and a synthesizer to communicate, he had said before the flight that “it will be bliss to be weightless,” according to the Associated Press.

But Hawking made clear that this was more than a personal journey.

“Life on Earth is at ever increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers,” he said in a statement. “I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space.”

Read More

by Geoff Olson

I like to play indoors better ‘cause that’s where all the electric outlets are. – A fourth grader in San Diego, quoted in Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder

IN A Punch cartoon from 1959, two scientists in lab coats stand next to a huge computer, programmed to answer the question, “Is there a God?” One of them holds the computer’s printout response: “There is now.”

Things didn’t quite work out that way. Instead of cartoon monoliths demanding our worship, we found ourselves saddled with millions of little, attention-seeking consumer gadgets. Yet electronic networks also expanded to planetary scales with microwave relays and fibre optics. I guess you could say God moves in mysterious ways.

In his book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv recalls his son asking why it was so much more fun when his father was a kid. “You are always talking about your woods and tree houses, and how you used to ride that horse down to the swamp,” his son explained. Louv is wary of overly romanticizing his childhood, but he knew his son was on to something. “Americans around my age, baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems, in the age of kid pagers, instant messaging and Nintendo, like a quaint artifact.”

The author rhymes off the dreary health data that condemns the sedentary ways of electronically swaddled kids. This has accompanied the “criminalization of natural play,” through the overenthusiastic efforts to protect our children from any conceivable risks and dangers. Over the past two decades, tree houses, monkey bars and slides have been ripped from playgrounds across North America, for fear these municipal oases would become litigious scourges if little Johnny scraped a knee. And as kids’ playgrounds were childproofed into absurdity, parents coached their kids to distrust strangers and to stay close at hand. The process was compounded by the marketing of video games, filling a void left by the outlaw of natural play.

The lives of middle-class children of western societies are increasingly structured and gadget mediated. “Helicopter parents” monitor their every move, scheduling them like little technocrats with playdates, excessive homework and electronic nannying. I recall an anecdote from a teacher in eastern Canada who assigned her primary school students to write about interacting with nature. A student sidled up to her desk and told her the assignment was too difficult, as she had “never climbed a tree before.”

It’s not that difficult to imagine a possible future where any tree climbing will be done by keyboards or consoles. With every gain in computer processing power, the virtual worlds of videogame shoot-em-ups and social networks like Second Life expand in bandwidth and eye-catching realism. Yet at the same time, pristine wilderness recedes that much further from personal and collective memory, along with kids’ access to its remaining patches.

Swiss architect Max Frisch defined technology as “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” By that measure, our culture has a real knack for digital dissociation. But as BC author and education and addictions specialist Ross Laird notes, our species has existed in its present form for at least 40,000 years. Only in a blink of an eye have we been exposed to sedentary ways of life, mediated by technology. “We are animals. Our well-being depends upon bodily movement, expression, and integration,” he writes in a recent paper, Adolescent Addictions: Creative Challenges and Opportunities.
Read More
Read More
(Submitted by a reader)

by Umer A. Chaudhry

The brutal murder of three nationalist leaders of Balochistan and the ensuing crisis has brought the issue of the Baloch national struggle to the forefront once again, only to be met with feigned surprises and arrogant dismissals by a major part of the rest of Pakistan. We in Pakistan — and particularly those of us in Punjab — love to externalize the roots of problems that irritate our sensibility.

Therefore, fingers were immediately pointed at foreign involvements, scarcely any thought given to our own attitude towards one of the largest provinces of our country. The deliberate lack of introspection combined with the respect that wild conspiracy theories continue to enjoy renders it very much necessary to take a dip into the history of Balochistan, for that is where the roots of the question lie.

The roots of Baloch nationalism can be roughly traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century when the region became a victim of foreign aggression from both eastern and western sides during the decline of the Khanate of Kalat. For the expansionist British colonizers, Balochistan was a strategically important region to manage the buffer state of Afghanistan against Russia and maintain communication links with Central Asia and Persia. Starting from 1839, after the assassination of Mir Mehrab Khan in a British regiment’s attack on Kalat leading to the installation of an unpopular Khan, the British made several inroads in the Kalat State. British power was consolidated in Balochistan through a number of treaties, culminating in the treaty of 1876 through which the sovereignty of the Khan of Kalat over the region was brought under the administrative control of the British.

In the same period, the Baloch region suffered intrusion from Iran on the western side under the leadership of Qajar King Nasir-al Din Shah, with a major war fought in Kerman in 1849. With Iranian expansionism in Balochistan on the rise, the British decided to adopt the policy of appeasement towards the Iranians to dissuade them from the Russian influence. In 1871, the British agreed to the Iranian proposal for the division of Balochistan and appointed a Perso-Baloch Boundary Commission with Maj. General Goldsmith as its Chief Commissioner.

The ‘Goldsmith Line’ thus arbitrarily divided the cultural, social, and economic unity of Baloch people while excluding the concerns of the people and government of Balochistan. The sovereignty of the Khanate of Kalat, which was not a part of British India, was seriously compromised, leaving behind a deep sense of injustice, discrimination, and alienation among the Baloch people. Later in 1893, the areas of Outer Seistan and Registan were handed over to Afghanistan by the’Durand Line’, further aggravating the Baloch anger.

The Baloch people have never been passive in accepting the foreign domination, interference, and arbitrary partitions. The end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of resistance through a number of violent revolts and rebellions as well as peaceful protests against the injustice meted out to the Baloch people by the British colonizer and the Iranian kingdom. The concerns of the Baloch were not given any due consideration and, as was typical of the colonial rule, the Baloch resistance was suppressed with a heavy hand.

The next major incident that catalyzed the Baloch national struggle was the forced annexation of British Balochistan and the Khanate of Kalat to Pakistan after the independence and partition of India. The Baloch concerns arose when the referendum in British Balochistan, which was leased to the British by the Kalat State through a treaty, was carried out despite the objections raised by the Khan of Kalat.

Umer A. Chaudhry is a lawyer based in Lahore, Pakistan and a member of the Communist Workers and Peasants Party (CMKP) of Pakistan.

The Baloch Question

Shefali Rekhi shares her thoughts on whether Asian culture inhibits creativity.

ASIAN culture could have something to do with curbing creativity. And it could be why geniuses, born here, flock to the Land of Liberty to prosper.

Gallup CEO Jim Clifton thinks so.
The polling firm chief is the architect of the Gallup World Poll which attempts to comprehend the minds of some 6 billion people around the world through its polls.

Gallup’s World Poll, in 2007, showed that people care most about jobs – this is vastly different from their needs about 25 years ago when it was food, clothes etc.

Their ability to gain one shapes their impressions of the place where they live and where they will go.

In a phone interview from Washington he said some of the stars of innovation and creativity now in the United States may return to Asia.
Among them will be those from the region seeking new challenges, those who give in to the emotional tugs and others who genuinely want to contribute to their homeland.

But the “Superstars” will remain in San Francisco.
And the newer geniuses will head to the Silicon Valley though some perhaps will go to London.

“You can’t afford to fail in Asia,” he said.
Asians don’t forgive. Asians don’t forget.

Is it so? Can innovation, that something special that results from a fusion of ideas and energy and can transform lives not thrive in a region said to be the world’s next success story?

Maybe that’s what the westerners think. Maybe the Asians want to be more effective. It is not clear.

But if history is a guide, creativity has thrived in the region in the past.

Silk was discovered here – quite by accident though. According to Chinese legend it all started with a silkworm cocoon fell into a cup of hot tea meant for Empress Lei Tsu.

As she fished out the cocoon from the teacup she found it unraveling into long, smooth strings. It is not clear what she did with it but Chinese farmers were cultivating silkworms for silk by 3,200 BC.
There was ink, the magnetic compass, the gunpower and arithmetic – Indians gave the world its “zero”.

In the modern era, Japan has given the world Playstation game consoles.

And Singapore, the Sound Blaster card for personal computers, which enables users to manipulate sound.

Perhaps, the pace of new inventions and innovations from this part of the world has slowed in recent times – and this could be behind criticism that the region doesn’t encourage creativity.
At the same time some geniuses of Asian origin have been making waves in the United States.

According to Mr Clifton, of the 1,000 geniuses responsible for America’s several trillion growth as many as 600 could be from this part of the world.

Among them is Jerry Yang, a native of Taiwan, who created Yahoo! have thrived in Asia. Yahoo! is today one of the world’s most frequently visited web sites with over 230 million surfers.
And Sabeer Bhatia, who hails from Punjab, in India, who created Hotmail – the web based email – that was bought over by Microsoft for US $400 million.

Would they have been success stories, if they remained in this region? How do you tell?

Read more