శ్రీ కౌముది జూలై 2013

Warped in caste conundrum

Jun 11, 2013 - Surendra Kumar | Age Correspondent

In early 1960s, at my college, Syed Mubarak Ali, the Art teacher, and Devi Singh, physical training teacher, used to be served food in white porcelain plates at teachers’ lunches while others ate in brass thalis. I thought it must be a reward for their meritorious services; they were two of the most popular teachers. Years later, the retired principal let out the secret: it was an action in pollution control rather than recognition of their talent! According to him, the brass/copper was good conductor not only for transmitting electric current but also for pollution related to caste and religion. If Ali, a Muslim (Mleksha) and Singh a Scheduled Caste (Shudra) were served food in thalis, pollution of a Mleksha and a Shudra would have passed on to other teachers; they could have resigned. So, introduction of porcelain plate was a diplomatic solution: it avoided offending other teachers and also retained the much needed two teachers. I was left speechless at the genius of the scion of a family of Chaturvedis (who had mastered all the four Vedas!)

In late 1960s, at one of Allahabad University’s hostels named after a great Indian educationist, there was no ban on admission of the Muslim/SC students if their marks met the criterion but the students of these two categories seldom opted for this hostel. Once, a Muslim student got admitted. On the very first night, during the harrowing ragging session, the seniors set fire to his pubic hair; he ran for his life without collecting his meagre possessions, never to return again!

An additional secretary in the MEA, on a trip to Hong Kong in late 1980s, won’t initiate a conversation with the first secretary as he couldn’t figure out correctly what caste he belonged to. He rose to become the foreign secretary and died in harness as the governor of an important state!

A former young Turk of the Congress party, while serving as the governor didn’t know what to talk to when he couldn’t make out the caste of the Indian ambassador designate from his name. When his repeated insistence on the full name failed to elicit the most vital information, an exasperated Rajyapal Ji blurted out “OK, then, what is your caste?” He rose to become the vice-president of India!

In 1980s, the vice-president of India (he later became the President) who had graduated from the prestigious Cambridge University of UK felt terribly uncomfortable in talking to the head of the Hindi Service of BBC’s World Service during his visit to London when the Press Counsellor couldn’t tell him in advance the caste of the interviewer!

On the auspicious day of Holi this year, after the time for throwing colour and besmirching faces with gulal was over, one of the retired ambassadors residing in the IFS apartments requested us to drop by for a drink in the evening. Another ambassador, retired recently, had also joined with his wife. While we were chatting about increasing cases of rapes in Delhi, this ambassador turned to me and asked, “So, what is full name?”

Forty years after joining the IFS, I was puzzled by such a question from a fellow ambassador. But to satisfy him, I told him my name as mentioned in my passport.

Not contented, he said, “Let me rephrase my question, if you were to give your full name, what it would be?” I replied, “This is all what it will be; there is nothing more to add or subtract!”

Not to give up his single-minded quest, he added, “Then let me ask you directly: what is your caste?” I couldn’t resist telling him tersely that he reminded me of that AS (AD), the governor, the vice-president & the President of India who were lost for words unless they knew the caste of an individual and that I was wrong in imagining that 38 years in IFS with several postings abroad and the tolerant faith he followed might have made him lose interest in the phenomenon of caste. “Well, I wanted to know out of curiosity’, he responded.

Surprisingly, like that governor 20 years back, he showed no curiosity about the fact that I was India’s ambassador in Libya for five years and had met Col. Gaddafi more than 20 times!

After listening to thumris, dadras and kajris in soulful voice of matchless Girija Devi ji at Azad Bhavan last month, I and my wife were having dinner on the lawns with the renowned art critic, Shanta Sarabjeet Singh. Another lady whose face looked familiar turned towards me and remarked that she had attended some of IAFA events at the IIC including the memorial for late Dr Abid Hussain. Then I realised, she was the wife of a highly respected civil cervant who had spent nearly three decades in the US with an international organisation. Suddenly, this lady turned to my wife and whispered, “Is your husband’s last name Kohli?” “No, it’s Kumar” my wife whispered back. “Kumar? So, what is he?” she couldn’t suppress her curiosity!

Since India took the plunge in favour of economic liberalisation in 1991-92, a lot has changed in India for the better, contrary to the claims of cynics and naysayers. We have a middle class bigger than the total population of the US; cellphone owners number three times the number in the US. From the stage of having to mortgage gold, the outflow of investment from Indian firms today is higher than the annual inflow of FDI. Though industrial production and economic growth have slowed down, India is still one of the fastest growing economies. India’s IT industry, especially software sector, is a force to reckon. With demographic dividend on her side, India is tipped to be a major global player in the knowledge society of tomorrow.

But what might trip India? Near total collapse of moral and ethical values in day-to-day life, governance and management; insatiable obsession with caste (those who claim that caste doesn’t matter to them are simply being hypocrite and dishonest) and rampant corruption at all levels of life. In the US and UK if you told your co-passenger in the metro that you were from a business firm or a university, your introduction was complete; conversation veered around the business firm or the academics of that university. But in India, the mother of all curiosities is the curiosity about one’s caste! Just have a look at the matrimonial columns, some of the brightest young men and women coming from IITs/IIMs and serving in lucrative positions are looking for suitable matches from their respective castes! The sage who said: jati na poochho sadh ki.. was wrong! He should have urged: jati hi poochho sadh ki ...!!

Mera Bharat Mahaan!

Jai ho!

The writer is a former secretary in the ministry of external affairs

This article is from: The Asian Age

Déjà Vu | Lapham’s Quarterly

Déjà Vu | Lapham’s Quarterly


2013: India has joined the U.S. and other Western nations in conscripting the telegram to the pages of history. Later this summer, the nation’s state-run telegram agency will send its last missive, bringing an end to the telegram’s longstanding importance in Indian life. 

Read Blog Déjà Vu | Lapham’s Quarterly full article

New 'Delhi belly' vaccine shows promise, U.K. researchers say

06/10/2013

For some western travellers, "Delhi belly" is an inconvenience, an uncomfortable malady that can cloud the memory of an otherwise perfect vacation to the developing world.

But in Asia, Africa and Latin America, "Delhi belly" -- severe diarrhea -- is far more serious. 

The World Health Organization says: "Diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death among children under five globally. More than one in ten child deaths – about 800,000 each year – is due to diarrhea. Today, only 44 per cent of children with diarrhoea in low-income countries receive the recommended treatment, and limited trend data suggest that there has been little progress since 2000."

Nearly every child in the third world will have "Delhi belly" at least once in his or her lifetime. Sometimes, a child can die in a day from the affliction because of severe and rapid dehydration.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge say they have developed a new vaccine that targets both E. Coli bacteria and salmonella. The vaccine comes in pill form and also promises protection against typhoid.

"The stakes are incredibly high," researcher Krishnaa Mahbubani told the Star in an interview. "Delhi belly is quite dangerous. Several million children under the age of six come down with this. this will be a huge. This isn't just about stopping discomfort for travellers for a few weeks."

Prof. Nigel Slater, who leads a team of scientists at University of Cambridge’s department of biochemical engineering and biotechnology, said trials on mice have yielded positive results.

Human trials are set to begin later this year on a few dozen subjects. Consumers won't be able to buy the pill for at least four or five years, Slater said.

The vaccine's technology is owned by the university and Prokarium, a pharmaceutical company. The British government helped finance the research, which has been in the works for about eight years, he said.

"The trick really was getting this vaccine into tablet form," Slater said. "these bacteria in the vaccine have to pass through walls of intestine to get to lymph nodes where they create the immmunity. There's an issue of cold chain in hot countries like India. 

"So we had to develop a pill form where the bacteria would be rehydrated with water, but wouldn't be killed by the bile in the stomach. It was tricky."

News of the vaccine's promise was first reported by The Telegraph.

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at the Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

Excerpted from: http://thestar.blogs.com/worlddaily/2013/06/new-delhi-belly-vaccine-shows-promise-uk-researchers-say.html

Lives Lived: Krishna Kumari Sharma, 78 

 

Parnesh Sharma

The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Jun. 07 2013, 12:00 AM EDT
 

Grandmother, short-story writer, gardener, gentle soul. Born Jan. 12, 1935, in Labasa, Fiji, died April 22, 2013, in North Vancouver of heart failure, aged 78.

Born in a tiny village in Fiji, the only child of a former indentured labourer, Krishna often marvelled at the detours of life that took her from that village to Auckland, NZ, in the late 1960s, back to Fiji, and then to North Vancouver in 1975.

No more improbable than her journey was that of her father, Tribhuwan Dutt Maharaj. His history is dimmer. It is believed that he came from Uttar Pradesh in northern India – but it is known that at the age of 12 he ran away from home to seek his fortune on what he thought would be a grand adventure. Little did he know he had been tricked into servitude to British masters.

Five years of back-breaking bonded labour on sugar plantations in Fiji left him with few kind words for the English. But he emerged with the determination to forge a new life. He refused passage back to India, not wanting to face his family without having realized his fortune.

He struggled at first, but credited the birth of Krishna, his only child and his good-luck charm, with a change in his fortunes that saw him eventually running two thriving general stores and owning several properties – including a sugar plantation.

He instilled in Krishna the value of education. Unusually for that time, she was sent away to boarding school. Later, after her arranged marriage to schoolteacher Rishi Deo Sharma, her father gifted her a two-storey brick house in the Fijian capital of Suva. Later, with a growing family, Krishna adapted to a peripatetic lifestyle – to various postings throughout Fiji when Rishi took a job with the government.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Fiji was an idyllic British colony, but the winds of change – an emerging call for independence – had begun to stir, and with them a growing concern about the future of the Indian community, the descendents of indentured labourers – British subjects in name, but lacking substantive rights in reality.

And so it was that in 1975, Krishna, her husband and six young children left a comfortable middle-class life in Fiji to start anew in Canada. In doing so she joined the pantheon of classic immigrant stories of sacrifice and hard work in search of a better future for her children.

For a person who had never worked outside the home, Canada was a new experience. Krishna and Rishi worked various jobs – sometimes two jobs at a time – just to pay the bills before becoming established.

In 1996, within a year of his retirement, Rishi was diagnosed with a terminal illness and died shortly after. Krishna withdrew into a shell. But with the encouragement of her family she emerged stronger and discovered a talent for gardening. She took great pride in it, and just a week before suffering a heart attack she had a plan in place for spring planting. Of her other talents (her short stories were published in Hindi-language papers) she rarely spoke.

Not one for ostentation, she rarely mentioned the successes of her children – among them a university professor, a doctor and a Cambridge and Oxford-educated scholar – or her grandchildren, who include a schoolteacher and an Ivy League-educated lawyer.

What of her garden, now awash with spring flowers? It blooms, as does Krishna’s legacy.

Parnesh Sharma is Krishna’s son.

In Turkey: Days of Anti-Government Protests and Harsh Crackdowns

Jun 2, 2013 | 

 

A protest in Istanbul, Turkey, that began as a relatively small event earlier in the week, erupted into massive anti-government demonstrations across the country following a harsh crackdown by riot police. People had gathered in Gezi Park to prevent the demolition of the last remaining green public space in the center of Istanbul as part of a major renewal project. Pent-up anger against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party flared up after the violent breakup of the Gezi Park protest, fueling the fiercest anti-government demonstrations in years. Yesterday, more than a thousand protesters were arrested in 90 different demonstrations across Turkey. Prime Minister Erdogan has issued several defiant and dismissive messages, urging demonstrators to go home -- which they appear to be ignoring, as thousands have gathered once again in Taksim Square today, starting a third day of protest. [36 photos]

Story and photos: In Focus (The Atlantic)

శ్రీ కౌముది జూన్ 2013

Arvind Mahankali, 13, Wins National Spelling Bee

by The Associated Press

May 30, 201311:47 PM

OXON HILL, Md. (AP) — After years of heartbreakingly close calls, Arvind Mahankali conquered his nemesis, German, to become the champion speller in the English language.

The 13-year-old from Bayside Hills, N.Y., correctly spelled "knaidel," a word for a small mass of leavened dough, to win the 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night. The bee tested brain power, composure and, for the first time, knowledge of vocabulary.

Arvind finished in third place in both 2011 and 2012, and both times, he was eliminated on German-derived words. This time, he got one German word in the finals, and the winning word was from German-derived Yiddish, eliciting groans and laughter from the crowd. He spelled both with ease.

"The German curse has turned into a German blessing," he said.

Arvind outlasted 11 other finalists, all but one of whom had been to the National Spelling Bee before, in nearly 2 ½ hours of tense, grueling competition that was televised nationally. In one round, all nine participants spelled their words correctly.

When he was announced as the winner, Arvind looked upward at the confetti falling upon him and cracked his knuckles, his signature gesture during his bee appearances. He'll take home $30,000 in cash and prizes along with a huge cup-shaped trophy. The skinny teen, clad in a white polo shirt and wire-rimmed glasses pushed down his nose, was joined on stage at the Washington-area hall by his parents and his beaming younger brother.

An aspiring physicist who admires Albert Einstein, Arvind said he would spend more time studying physics this summer now that he's "retired" from the spelling bee.

Arvind becomes the sixth consecutive Indian-American winner and the 11th in the past 15 years, a run that began in 1999 when Nupur Lala captured the title in 1999 and was later featured in the documentary "Spellbound."

Arvind's family is originally from Hyderabad in southern India, and relatives who live there were watching live on television.

"At home, my dad used to chant Telegu poems from forward to backward and backward to forward, that kind of thing," said Arvind's father, Srinivas. "So language affinity, we value language a lot. And I love language, I love English."

Pranav Sivakumar, who like Arvind rarely appeared flustered onstage, finished second. The 13-year-old from Tower Lakes, Ill., was tripped up by "cyanophycean," a word for a blue-green alga. Sriram Hathwar, 13, of Painted Post, N.Y., finished third, and Amber Born, 14, of Marblehead, Mass., was fourth.

The field was whittled down from 42 semifinalists Thursday afternoon, with spellers advancing based on a formula that combined their scores from a computerized spelling and vocabulary test with their performance in two onstage rounds.

The vocabulary test was new. Some of the spellers liked it, some didn't, and many were in-between, praising the concept but wondering why it wasn't announced at the beginning of the school year instead of seven weeks before the national bee.

"It was kind of a different challenge," said Vismaya Kharkar, 14, of Bountiful, Utah, who finished tied for 5th place. "I've been focusing my studying on the spelling for years and years."

There were two multiple-choice vocabulary tests — one in the preliminaries and one in the semifinals — and they were administered in a quiet room away from the glare of the onstage parts of the bee. The finals were the same as always: no vocabulary, just spellers trying to avoid the doomsday bell.

There was a huge groan from the crowd when Arvind got his first German-derived word, "dehnstufe," an Indo-European long-grade vowel.

Milking the moment, he asked, "Can I have the language of origin?" before throwing his hands in the air with a wry smile.

"I had begun to be a little wary of German words, but this year I prepared German words and I studied them, so when I got German words this year, I wasn't worried," Arvind said.

He appeared to have more trouble with "galere," a word for a group of people having a marked common quality or relationship. He asked for the etymology twice — French and old Catalan — shifted his body back and forth and stroked his chin before getting it right with seconds to spare.

Amber, an aspiring comedy writer and crowd favorite, bowed out on "hallali," a huntsman's bugle call. She said, "I know, I know," when the clock told her time was running out, and she knew she had missed it, saying "That's not right" as she finished her effort.

The bee's growing popularity is reflected in an ESPN broadcast that gets more sophisticated each year. In the semifinals, Amber got to watch herself featured on a televised promo that also aired on the jumbo screen inside the auditorium.

She then approached the microphone and, referring to herself, deadpanned: "She seemed nice."

Vanya Shivashankar, at 11 the youngest of the finalists, fell short in her bid to become the first sibling of a previous winner to triumph. Her sister, Kavya, won in 2009. Vanya finished tied for 5th after misspelling "zenaida," which means a type of pigeon.

With Money at Risk, Hospitals Push Staff to Wash Hands

 

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
A staff member at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan using a hand sanitizer.

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS  
Published: May 28, 2013 

At North Shore University Hospital on Long Island, motion sensors, like those used for burglar alarms, go off every time someone enters an intensive care room. The sensor triggers a video camera, which transmits its images halfway around the world to India, where workers are checking to see if doctors and nurses are performing a critical procedure: washing their hands.

This Big Brother-ish approach is one of a panoply of efforts to promote a basic tenet of infection prevention, hand-washing, or as it is more clinically known in the hospital industry, hand-hygiene. With drug-resistant superbugs on the rise, according to a recent report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and with hospital-acquired infections costing $30 billion and leading to nearly 100,000 patient deaths a year, hospitals are willing to try almost anything to reduce the risk of transmission.

Studies have shown that without encouragement, hospital workers wash their hands as little as 30 percent of the time that they interact with patients. So in addition to the video snooping, hospitals across the country are training hand-washing coaches, handing out rewards like free pizza and coffee coupons, and admonishing with “red cards.” They are using radio-frequency ID chips that note when a doctor has passed by a sink, and undercover monitors, who blend in with the other white coats, to watch whether their colleagues are washing their hands for the requisite 15 seconds, as long as it takes to sing the “Happy Birthday” song.

All this effort is to coax workers into using more soap and water, or alcohol-based sanitizers like Purell.

“This is not a quick fix; this is a war,” said Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of infectious disease at North Shore.

But the incentive to do something is strong: under new federal rules, hospitals will lose Medicare money when patients get preventable infections.

One puzzle is why health care workers are so bad at it. Among the explanations studies have offered are complaints about dry skin, the pressures of an emergency environment, the tedium of hand washing and resistance to authority (doctors, who have the most authority, tend to be the most resistant, studies have found).

“There are still staff out there who say, ‘How dare they!’ ” said Elaine Larson, a professor in Columbia University’s school of nursing who has made a career out of studying hand-washing.

Philip Liang, who founded a company, General Sensing, that outfits hospital workers with electronic badges that track hand-washing, attributes low compliance to “high cognitive load.”

“Nurses have to remember hundreds — thousands — of procedures,” Mr. Liang said. “Take out the catheter; change four medications. It’s really easy to forget the basic tasks. You’re really concentrating on what’s difficult, not on what’s simple.”

His company uses a technology similar to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The badge communicates with a sensor on every sanitizer and soap dispenser, and with a beacon behind the patient’s bed. If the wearer’s hands are not cleaned, the badge vibrates, like a cellphone, so that the health care worker is reminded but not humiliated in front of the patient.

Just waving one’s hands under the dispenser is not enough. “We know if you took a swig of soap,” Mr. Liang said.

The program uses a frequent-flier model to reward workers with incentives, sometimes cash bonuses, the more they wash their hands.

Gojo Industries, which manufactures the ubiquitous Purell, has also developed technology that can be snapped into any of its soap or sanitizer dispensers to track hand-hygiene.

At North Shore, the video monitoring program, run by a company called Arrowsight, has been adapted from the meat industry, where cameras track whether workers who skin animals — the hide can contaminate the meat — wash their hands, knives and electric cutters.

Adam Aronson, the chief executive of Arrowsight, said he was inspired to go from slaughterhouses to hospitals by his father, Dr. Mark Aronson, vice chairman for quality at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

“Nobody would do a free test — they talked about Big Brother, patient privacy — nobody wanted to touch it,” Mr. Aronson said.

He finally got a trial at a small surgery center in Macon, Ga., and in 2008, North Shore also agreed to a trial in its intensive care unit. The medical center at the University of California, San Francisco, is also using Arrowsight’s video system, and Mr. Aronson said eight more hospitals in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Pakistan had agreed to test the cameras.

North Shore’s study, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, found that during a 16-week preliminary period when workers were being filmed but were not informed of the results, hand-hygiene rates were less than 10 percent. When they started getting reports on their filmed behavior, through electronic scoreboards and e-mails, the rates rose to 88 percent. The hospital kept the system, but because of the expense, it has limited it to the intensive care unit, where the payoff is greatest because the patients are sickest. 

To get a passing score, workers have to wash their hands within 10 seconds of entering a patient’s room. Only workers who stay in the room for at least a minute are counted, and the quality of their washing is not rated. Scores for each shift are broadcast on hallway scoreboards, which read “Great Shift” for those that top 90 percent compliance.

Technology is not the only means of coercion. The Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group, and the health care workers union, 1199 S.E.I.U., train employees to be “infection coaches” for other employees.

In a technique borrowed from soccer, hospital workers hand red cards to colleagues who do not wash, said Dr. Brian Koll, chief of infection prevention for Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, who trains coaches. (Unlike soccer players, however, workers do not have to leave.) “It’s a way to communicate in a nonconfrontational way that also builds teamwork,” Dr. Koll said.

“You do not want to say, ‘You did not wash your hands.’ ”

Doctors, nurses and others at Beth Israel who consistently refuse to wash their hands may be forced to take a four-hour remedial infection prevention course, Dr. Koll said. But to turn that into something positive, they are then asked to teach infection prevention to others.

Dr. Koll said that he was not aware of malpractice suits based on hand-washing, but that hand-washing compliance rates often become part of the information used when suing hospitals for infections.

A hospital in the Bronx gave out tickets — sort of like traffic tickets — to workers who did not wash their hands, he said. “That did not work in our institution,” he said. “People made it a negative connotation.” Beth Israel finds that positive reinforcement works better, Dr. Koll said.

Like other hospitals, Beth Israel also uses what it calls secret shoppers — staff members, often medical students, in white coats whose job is to observe whether people are washing their hands. Beth Israel gives high-scoring workers gold stars to wear on their lapels, “hokey as this sounds,” he said; after five gold stars they get a platinum star, or perhaps a coupon for free coffee. “Health care workers like caffeine,” Dr. Koll said.

There are buttons saying, “Ask me if I’ve washed my hands,” and Dr. Koll said that patients’ families did ask because they understood the risks. Especially in pediatrics, he said, “parents do not have a problem at all asking.”

To avoid slogan fatigue, Beth Israel has at least five buttons, including “Got Gel?” and “Hand Hygiene First.”

Dr. Larson, the hand-washing expert, supports the electronic systems being developed, but says none are perfect yet. “People learn to game the system,” she said. “There was one system where the monitoring was waist high, and they learned to crawl under that. Or there are people who will swipe their badges and turn on the water, but not wash their hands. It’s just amazing.”

 Excerpt from: The New York Times

Plants revived after 400 years in ice

Resilience could make them ideal pioneers on Mars

The Canadian Press

Posted: May 28, 2013 3:28 PM ET

Last Updated: May 28, 2013 4:02 PM ET

The plant samples from the glacier were sprinkled onto Petri dishes and stuck in a growth chamber. Eleven of them grew. (Catherine La Farge/University of Alberta)

Plants that managed to re-grow after centuries buried under Arctic glaciers could prove useful for would-be pioneers hoping to explore life on other planets, research from a team of Canadian scientists has found.

The results of the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest the land plants that form the foundations of many ecosystems are surprisingly resilient and may be a useful tool for the people who have already announced plans to set up a human colony on Mars, researchers said.

A team of biologists from the University of Alberta travelled to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic in order to survey plant life exposed by the retreat of the Teardrop Glacier.

Lead researcher Catherine La Farge said the giant ice mass has been shrinking by between three and four metres a year since 2004, exposing larger swaths of plant life for scientists to analyze.

La Farge and her team focused their research on bryophytes, a general term given to ecological building blocks like mosses and other non-vascular plants.

Almost perfectly preserved

La Farge said researchers were first struck by the fact that bryophytes had been almost perfectly preserved despite the vast quantities of ice that settled over them centuries earlier.

 

The plants had been buried during the Little Ice Age under the Ellesmere Island's Teardrop Glacier, shown with graduate student David Wilkie for scale. (Catherine La Farge/University of Alberta)

"We were sort of blown away by the biomass of intact communities being exhumed from the rapidly retreating glaciers," La Farge said in a telephone interview from Edmonton.

Those intact communities — which were entombed by the glacier some time between 1550 and 1850 — showed early signs of being dormant rather than dead, La Farge said. Many of the plants that surfaced still had a greenish tinge despite their time below the ice.

It wasn't long, however, before the team observed bright green stems emerging from the recently exposed samples.

Such signs suggested the plants had the potential to begin re-growing, but La Farge and her team required more evidence.

They collected 140 samples from the island and brought them back to Edmonton in 2009 to see if they could thrive outside their natural environment.

"All we did was we took the material, we ground it up, sprinkled it onto a Petri dish and stuck it in the growth chamber to see what would happen," she said. "We had no idea if it would work, we just wanted to make sure that what we were seeing in the samples coming out from under the glacier . . . was that possible."

The tests yielded 11 cultures from seven specimens, La Farge said, adding the results hold intriguing implications for those interested in survival under harsh conditions.

Bryophytes are one of the most basic forms of land plants, she said, adding mosses and similar species are essential for the growth of more advanced types of plant life.

Ideal Mars pioneers

The resilience of bryophytes suggests they may be ideal as trial balloons for researchers exploring the prospect of survival beyond earth, she said. The notion — once the foundation for science fiction plots — has gained popular traction since a Dutch entrepreneur launched the Mars One project. The privately funded initiative aims to send a handful of people on a one-way trip to Mars by 2023. At least 35 Canadians have expressed interest in being among the first to try to colonize the Red Planet.

La Farge said sending bryophyte samples ahead of time may be an effective way to test the viability of the plan.

"We're not really dealing with a moonscape on the Arctic, but we're definitely under pretty extreme conditions," she said. "We now talk about people . . . wanting to go to Mars and starting a whole new world out there. If you were going to send any kind of plant up there to see whether it could survive, bryophytes would probably be one of your key systems to try."

Excerpt from: CBC News Technology & Science

Madrasi heart for Pakistani Madrassa teacher

By Daniel Thimmayya | ENS - CHENNAI

24th May 2013 08:08 AM 

Md Zubair Ashmi, who underwent a transplant at Malar Hospital, with surgeon Dr K R Balakrishnan on Thursday | R Satish Babu

The heart of a 36-year-old accident victim from Chennai now beats in the chest of a Pakistani, who narrowly escaped the claws of death. In a rare occurrence, the Pakistani managed to fly across, get admitted to a hospital in Chennai and receive a donor heart a day or two before doctors at Fortis Malar Hospital would have given up on his ailing body.

Moulana Mohammed Zubair Ashmi (41), a teacher at a madrassa in the small town of Tehsil Kharian (Gujarat district of Pakistan), had a heart that was pumping blood with only 10 per cent efficiency — well below the average 60 per cent required. In addition, his kidneys were shutting down and his urine output was minimal, apart from which his liver was ravaged by Hepatitis C.

“I don’t think I would have made it, really,” admits the thin, bearded man candidly, looking back on his near-death experience.

“Inshallah, I am here now,” he adds in Urdu-tinted Hindi. Though his doctors in Lahore agreed they could do little for him surgically, they made the long-distance call to Dr K R Balakrishnan, in Chennai, that saved his life.A long process ensued to get Zubair to Chennai, after which several medical obstacles were overcome to give him his new heart.

Zubair is recovering remarkably fast. Expected to return to Pakistan in a month, he says he feels just as much at home here in Chennai. “There is no difference between India and Pakistan... They love me a lot more here, since I am Pakistani,” he says.

Excerpt from: The New Indian Express

Photos of Tornado Damage in Moore, Oklahoma

May 21, 2013 | 

 

Yesterday afternoon, a monster tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, near Oklahoma City. The twister, with winds of at least 200 mph, traveled for 20 miles, leaving a two-mile-wide path of destruction, flattening homes, smashing vehicles, and killing at least 24 people, including nine children.

శ్రీ కౌముది మే 2012

Thesis throws light on agriculture practices in Telangana

By Express News Service - HYDERABAD

11th May 2013 11:38 AM 

The change in agricultural practices in the Telangana region and the quagmire of debt and distress as studied by Dr Vamsicharan Vakulabhranam received recognition for the first-ever Amartya Sen Award for 2012, instituted by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR).

His doctoral thesis on ‘Immiserizing growth: globalization and agrarian change in Telangana, South India between 1985 and 2000’ at University of Massachusetts examines the relationship between liberalization and agrarian distress in the region.

The faculty member at the University of Hyderabad sums up the findings of his study which could not be carried in full in this paper previously:
The four strands of work that have been cited by the ICSSR selection panel for this award are: the work on agrarian distress in the context of Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh in the 1990s, the structure and logic of rising inequality in India and China since the 1990s, the deeper relation between economic development and inequality by analysing the Asian experience, and the work on strengthening commons and cooperatives, as alternatives to the present system.

“I started my work on agrarian distress in the Telangana region from year 2000 for my Ph.D thesis at the University of Massachusetts. I spent more than a year in four villages in Warangal and Mahbubnagar districts to make sense of the growing distress phenomenon and the sudden occurrence of the tragic farmer suicide phenomenon since 1998.

“I found through data analyses that Telangana agriculture was going through two major paradoxes in the 1990s. First, it was witnessing what I called immiserizing growth, ie, agricultural output was growing rapidly even as the entire agricultural community was going through consumption declines. How is this possible? Second, in the 1970s and 1980s (especially after 1983), Telangana farmers shifted to non-foodgrain crops (such as cotton) even as the prices of non-food crops were rising relative to food crops during that period. But in the 1990s, even as non-food crop prices began to decline vis-a-vis food prices, still Telangana farmers were growing more non-food crops.

I termed this as anomalous supply response. On the surface, Telangana farmers were not behaving rationally. “In reality, Telangana farmers were forced to behave the way they did because of a whole host of factors. First, agricultural liberalization had reduced prices of output for farmers (because of an agricultural recession worldwide) even as cut downs in subsidies increased the input prices. This is the “ price scissors” effect. Second, with liberalization policies, the institutional credit (e.g. from banks) had not grown proportionately with the rising needs of farmers.

Third, Telangana farmers had to dig a lot of tubewells at a great private cost for their irrigation needs since they did not have much access to canal irrigation. Fourth, the Green Revolution technologies (HYV seeds, Chemical fertilizers tubewell irrigation) that were imported into Telangana region were beginning to show diminishing returns. As a result, Telangana farmers had to rely heavily on informal moneylender-merchants (who were also largely from the Telangana region) who began to dictate the cropping pattern through a crop collateral. “As the moneylendermerchants demanded a cropping pattern that was oriented towards non-food crops, Telangana farmers were forced to comply.

As Telangana farmers were forced by the market intermediaries to grow more non-food crops even as the prices were declining, they had to pay out a bigger part of their output for their loans. This explains the two tragic paradoxes. So, these tragic paradoxes and the suicide phenomenon were products of agricultural liberalization policies, slowing productivity of green revolution technologies and irrigation related discrimination to the Telangana region.

Excerpt from: http://newindianexpress.com/cities/hyderabad/Thesis-throws-light-on-agriculture-practices-in-Telangana/2013/05/11/article1584876.ece

Reinhart, Rogoff... and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs

19 April 2013 Last updated at 19:53 ET

By Ruth Alexander BBC News
 

This week, economists have been astonished to find that a famous academic paper often used to make the case for austerity cuts contains major errors. Another surprise is that the mistakes, by two eminent Harvard professors, were spotted by a student doing his homework.

It's 4 January 2010, the Marriott Hotel in Atlanta. At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Professor Carmen Reinhart and the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Ken Rogoff, are presenting a research paper called Growth in a Time of Debt.

At a time of economic crisis, their finding resonates - economic growth slows dramatically when the size of a country's debt rises above 90% of Gross Domestic Product, the overall size of the economy.

Word about this paper spread. Policymakers wanted to know more.

And so did student Thomas Herndon. His professors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst had set his graduate class an assignment - pick an economics paper and see if you can replicate the results. It's a good exercise for aspiring researchers.

Thomas chose Growth in a Time of Debt. It was getting a lot of attention, but intuitively, he says, he was dubious about its findings.

Some key figures tackling the global recession found this paper a useful addition to the debate at the heart of which is this key question: is it best to let debt increase in the hope of stimulating economic growth to get out of the slump, or is it better to cut spending and raise taxes aggressively to get public debt under control?
EU commissioner Olli Rehn and influential US Republican politician Paul Ryan have both quoted a 90% debt-to-GDP limit to support their austerity strategies.

But while US politicians were arguing over whether to inject more stimulus into the economy, the euro was creaking under the strain of forced austerity, and a new coalition government in the UK was promising to raise taxes and cut spending to get the economy under control - Thomas Herndon's homework assignment wasn't going well.

No matter how he tried, he just couldn't replicate Reinhart and Rogoff's results.

Reinhart and Rogoff reply...

We are grateful to Herndon et al. for the careful attention to our original Growth in a Time of Debt AER paper and for pointing out an important correction to Figure 2 of that paper. It is sobering that such an error slipped into one of our papers despite our best efforts to be consistently careful. We will redouble our efforts to avoid such errors in the future. We do not, however, believe this regrettable slip affects in any significant way the central message of the paper or that in our subsequent work.

"My heart sank," he says. "I thought I had likely made a gross error. Because I'm a student the odds were I'd made the mistake, not the well-known Harvard professors."

His professors were also sure he must be doing something wrong.

"I remember I had a meeting with my professor, Michael Ash, where he basically said, 'Come on, Tom, this isn't too hard - you just gotta go sort this out.'"

So Herndon checked his work, and checked again.

By the end of the semester, when he still hadn't cracked the puzzle, his supervisors realised something was up.

"We had this puzzle that we were unable to replicate the results that Reinhart-Rogoff published," Prof Ash, says. "And that really got under our skin. That was really a mystery for us."

So Ash and his colleague Prof Robert Pollin encouraged Herndon to continue the project and to write to the Harvard professors. After some correspondence, Reinhart and Rogoff provided Thomas with the actual working spreadsheet they'd used to obtain their results.

"Everyone says seeing is believing, but I almost didn't believe my eyes," he says.

Thomas called his girlfriend over to check his eyes weren't deceiving him.

“Start Quote

New Zealand's single year, 1951, at -8% growth is held up with the same weight as Britain's nearly 20 years in the high public debt category at 2.5% growth”

Prof Michael Ash

But no, he was correct - he'd spotted a basic error in the spreadsheet. The Harvard professors had accidentally only included 15 of the 20 countries under analysis in their key calculation (of average GDP growth in countries with high public debt).

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark were missing.

Oops.

Herndon and his professors found other issues with Growth in a Time of Debt, which had an even bigger impact on the famous result. The first was the fact that for some countries, some data was missing altogether.
Reinhart and Rogoff say that they were assembling the data series bit by bit, and at the time they presented the paper for the American Economic Association conference, good quality data on post-war Canada, Australia and New Zealand simply weren't available. Nevertheless, the omission made a substantial difference.

Thomas and his supervisors also didn't like the way that Reinhart and Rogoff averaged their data. They say one bad year for a small country like New Zealand, was blown out of proportion because it was given the same weight as, for example, the UK's nearly 20 years with high public debt.

"New Zealand's single year, 1951, at -8% growth is held up with the same weight as Britain's nearly 20 years in the high public debt category at 2.5% growth," Michael Ash says. 

"I think that's a mistaken way to examine these data."

There's no black and white here, because there are also downsides to the obvious alternatives. But still, it's controversial and it, too, made a big difference.

All these results were published by Thomas Herndon and his professors on 15 April, as a draft working paper. They find that high levels of debt are still correlated with lower growth - but the most spectacular results from the Reinhart and Rogoff paper disappear. High debt is correlated with somewhat lower growth, but the relationship is much gentler and there are lots of exceptions to the rule.

 

Greece is an example of a country with high debt that has suffered a slump

 

Reinhart and Rogoff weren't available to be interviewed, but they did provide the BBC with a statement.
In it, they said: "We are grateful to Herndon et al. for the careful attention to our original Growth in a Time of Debt AER paper and for pointing out an important correction to Figure 2 of that paper. It is sobering that such an error slipped into one of our papers despite our best efforts to be consistently careful. We will redouble our efforts to avoid such errors in the future. We do not, however, believe this regrettable slip affects in any significant way the central message of the paper or that in our subsequent work."

Accidents do happen, and science progresses through the identification of previous mistakes. But was this a particularly expensive mistake?

"I don't think jobs were destroyed because of this but it provides an intellectual rationalisation for things that affect how people think about the world," says Daniel Hamermesh, professor of economics at Royal Holloway, University of London.

"And how people think about the world, especially politicians, eventually affects how the world works."
Discovering a spreadsheet error was never going to end the debate over austerity - and nor should it, according to Megan McArdle, special correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

"There is other research showing that you can have these slowdowns when you get to high levels of debt," she says. "We have a very vivid [example] in Greece."

Thomas Herndon 's view is that austerity policies are counter-productive. But right now he's delighted that the first academic paper he's ever published has made such a splash.

"I feel really honoured to have made a contribution to the policy discussion," he says.

 See BBC News Magazine