Saturday, September 22, 2012

Geek Love

Letters of Note: The Vision of Sin 
Charles Babbage gently takes to task Alfred Tennyson's poem "The Vision of Sin": for a verse "which reads – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born." and suggests changing it for accuracy to "Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born."

While in the Guardian, Simon Singh corrects Katie Melua's song "Nine Million Bicycles" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/sep/30/highereducation.uk). He finds the "little ditty is deeply annoying, because [Katie] demonstrates a deep ignorance of cosmology and no understanding of the scientific method." Read the rest of the article at the link above - bloody awesome plus it has a poem!!!


Dr Bonners and why it is good for you and the planet!

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201204/tom-foster/the-undiluted-genius-of-dr-bronners.html

There's a common narrative that unfolds the first time you buy Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap. It starts in the store, where the bottles, with their brightly colored, text-heavy labels, line up like cure-alls from some deranged medicine man. You pick one up. Later, in the shower, there comes a curious tingling sensation after you've lathered up your nether regions. That's when you reach for the bottle again to give it a closer read.
There are quotes from Mao, Jesus, Hillel, Einstein, and George Washington, among others. There's something called the Moral ABC, which appears to be a philosophy for uniting all humans on Spaceship Earth. There's a lot of religious ranting, a liberal dose of exclamation points, and instructions for cleansing your "mind-body-soul-spirit instantly."
Now you're more curious than ever. And if you read enough of the label and happen to Google Dr. Bronner after you've toweled off, you'll discover the story of the late Emanuel Bronner, which reads like bizarro fiction. (We'll get to it shortly.) That story is just the beginning......In 2005, David decided he couldn't in good conscience buy raw materials from operations that didn't take labor practices as seriously as he did, so he set a two-year goal of switching all the company's major ingredients to certified fair trade. Only one problem: Nobody could find any certified organic and fair-trade farms that produced some of those ingredients.
The solution: Get into the farming business. By 2008, Dr. Bronner's owned a 200-employee fair-trade coconut-oil operation in Sri Lanka and a 150-employee palm-oil plant in Ghana, and had partnered on a peppermint-oil operation in India. Maybe the most audacious fair-trade project so far has been a partnership that combines olive oils from farmers in the West Bank and Israel, and has become a symbol of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. Emanuel Bronner would be proud.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

The Last Place You Ever Live By John Fischer

On a bench outside, I open the plastic containers one-by-one and hand them to my father. We watch the residents filter in and out of the main building, supported by four-footed canes and wheeled walkers.
“This must not be easy for you,” he says to me.
“I guess,” I say. “Is it easy for you?”
“All I have to do is get dragged around for a few days.”
I mumble something resembling an agreement and discover that I’m having trouble meeting his eyes.
“I remember when this happened to my dad,” he continues. “He was diagnosed with mesothelioma from his years at DuPont—this was before you were born. I remember those first real changes in him, when he wasn’t quite my father anymore. The hardest part wasn’t seeing him change. It was knowing he knew I saw it. That really broke my heart.”
I excuse myself from the bench, explaining that I need a bathroom.
Locked in a handicapped stall with an emergency pull by the toilet paper, I sit on my heels and cry. The bathroom is empty and so I really go for it: wailing, shaking, snot streaming from my nose. The minutes wash out in long blurry streaks. Pressure fills my chest like sinking to the bottom of a pool. The light goes flickering and dim.
When I return, my mother and father are debating whether the Toyota will break two hundred thousand miles on our way back. Neither of them mentions the redness ringing my eyes, but my father squeezes my shoulder as I help him into the car. 
The remarkable character of aging is the way it draws each of us towards the same inevitability, the same anonymity, the same identical end.
Part of what makes the truth of aging so unnerving is its scale. It’s the elephant to all of our blind men. .......
But after a while I start to think that scale alone isn’t the problem. It’s that the scale robs us of our individual agency. The remarkable character of aging is the way it draws each of us towards the same inevitability, the same anonymity, the same identical end. Everyone on the planet will experience it in one form or another, as one of the few rituals we share across our species. Except as tiny people with worries and chores, obligations and hopes, we are painfully ill-equipped to reconcile the distance between the personal and the universal. We perceive our own outline in the facts and empirical evidence, and imagine that we can make things different for our parents or ourselves.
Mostly we are wrong. Incontrovertibly and terrifyingly wrong. So we scramble to control whatever we can, in whatever infinitesimally small measure is possible.
The last place you ever live is not really a place. It’s a compromise. It’s a wheelchair or a cane, an argument, a difficult decision, a humiliation to be ignored. It’s a cleaving to the parts that were, and a progressive resignation to the parts that are no longer. It’s the temporary safety of particulars—will the new house be big enough, the food fresh enough, the other residents friendly enough? It’s a father seeing himself through his son’s eyes, or a wife trading hope for common sense. I’m sure it’s millions of other things too, depending on whom you ask. We are sons and daughters, after all, and susceptible by default to the terms of cliché.
If I only get to pick one, I guess it would be something resembling a simple question, probably the same one my parents are asking themselves right now.
How can I possibly make this my own?




You may also like...

Ann Marie Awad: My Egypt
 In the wake of revolution in Egypt, a first-generation Egyptian-American questions what her heritage means now.

Self Walking Backward
When my mother had her second cancer operation, I was in Africa. Gita was angry, because I hadn’t come back from my trip.
Two Doctors
Two doctors, married to each other. At first it was doctor and nurse skulking dark corridors in heat and finding empty gurneys, then doctor on doctor.

The Bastard of Salinas
“Better to believe that you come from two happy parents.”

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/05/emily-dickinson-new-photograph

Emily Dickinson gets a new look in recovered photograph. A daguerreotype appearing to show the famously reclusive poet is only the second photo we have of her.
She looks like Scarlett Johanssen. Also, reading the article, was just like A.S. Byatt's Possession, how the photo was discovered

Two interesting articles from the BBC

Could babies' faces reduce crime?


  • The experiment, named Babies of the Borough, follows other attempts to try and use the environment to moderate behaviour.
  • One that has had plenty of publicity is the controversial Mosquito Anti-Loitering Security Device. The gadget emits an unbearable buzzing sound and can be set to a pitch that is audible only to those under the age of 25. It was initially used to prevent teenagers gathering outside shops, but opponents tried to get it banned as a breach of human rights.
  • Music has also been used. London Underground copied a successful scheme from Tyne and Wear's Metro system to use classical music to reduce crime.
  • Police cells in Switzerland were painted a colour described as "cool-down pink", which is said to keep prisoners calm.
  • In the town of Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire, pink lighting has been installed in areas where teenagers hang out. It's supposed to highlight their acne, so they're too embarrassed to be seen there. Cardiff too, has been experimenting with the same idea.

The forbidden public toilets of Beijing

The journalists' rule of thumb in China is that you cannot report the so-called three Ts - Tiananmen, Taiwan or Tibet. But it turns out there is also another T that upsets Chinese censors.

Life without Lights Project


http://www.lifewithoutlights.com/
Peter DiCampo's website link above to his long-term “Life Without Lights” project on global energy access.
....it is easy to forget that 1.4 billion people – nearly a quarter of humanity – live without access to electricity (according to the International Energy Agency’s 2010 findings). And it is difficult to fully grasp the social and economic impact of so-called “energy poverty.”
While living and working as a volunteer in remote northern Ghana, I realized how deeply the lack of electricity affected the lives of my neighbors. It impeded their progress in the sectors of health, education, gender equality, agriculture, and virtually every aspect of development. And, of course, there’s the lack of light.
...Put simply, energy poverty keeps people poor. It is a critical piece in the mosaic of issues contributing to poverty, and often the one that is least addressed. 
...As I continue to research and photograph global energy poverty, I offer these stories as a contribution to the dialogue on energy’s future. While people living without electricity may seem exempt from the energy debate, their plight carries a warning for any region whose economy or energy supply lies on the brink. By examining the causes and effects of energy poverty, as well as workable solutions, this project will ask (and attempt to answer) the questions: What solutions will be made available for the energy poor? Will they be sustainable? And what does that mean for the rest of us?
H/T to Guernica Mag

Two cool new services (Food and sharing)

http://www.ohsowe.com/ - Share More. Waste Less. Help Neighbors.


OhSoWe.com is a website that helps neighbors share resources (items and skills). We make it easier for friends, colleagues, neighbors, parent groups, teams, classmates, churches, Google Group, clubs, hobbyists, Meetups and other groups to asily share items like garden tools, camping gear, small kitchen appliances, party supplies, handbags, ...

http://cookitfor.us/

See a recipe you want made? Then "Crave It!". We'll notify you when local Makers "Make It!" - which could be as soon as now! The more Cravers "Crave It!", the more Makers will "Make It!", so be sure to "Share It!" with your family and friends! Crave. Make. Share.

Two analysis of Bill Clinton's Speech at the DNC - Great Takeaways

Why Bill Clinton's Speeches Succeed - The Atlantic
Because he treats listeners as if they are smart.
That is the significance of "They want us to think" and "The strongest argument is" and "The arithmetic says one of three things must happen" and even "Now listen to me here, this is important." He is showing that he understands the many layers of logic and evidence and positioning and emotion that go into political discussion -- and, more important, he takes for granted that listeners can too.
The main other place you hear discussion based on the same assumption that people of any background, education level, or funny-sounding accent can understand sophisticated back-and-forth of argument and counter-claim is sports-talk radio. ("I understand the concern about Strasburg's arm. But ... ") You hear insults and disagreements and put-downs on sports-talk discussions. You rarely hear the kind of deliberate condescension, the unconcealable effort as if talking to slow learners, of many political "authorities" addressing the unwashed.
It's the difference between clarifying, and over-simplifying. 
Bill Clinton Shows How It's Done - The Atlantic 
Clinton made arguments. He talked through his reasoning. He went point by point through the case he wanted to make. .....
He began with an appeal to bipartisanship -- a clever and unexpected turn in a partisan speech, one pitched directly to independent voters in their living rooms. "Nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day," he said. "And every one of us and every one of them, we're compelled to spend our fleeting lives between those two extremes, knowing we're never going to be right all the time and hoping we're right more than twice a day." Then he pivoted to attack: "Unfortunately, the faction that now dominates the Republican Party doesn't see it that way. They think government is always the enemy, they're always right, and compromise is weakness."....
"My fellow Americans, all of us in this grand hall and everybody watching at home, when we vote in this election, we'll be deciding what kind of country we want to live in," he said. "If you want a winner-take-all, you're-on-your-own society, you should support the Republican ticket. But if you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility, a we're-all-in-this-together society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden."
.......
A few minutes after Clinton was finished, a spokesman for the Romney campaign delivered its response: ""President Clinton drew a stark contrast between himself and President Obama tonight." He did nothing of the sort, of course. But the point was, the GOP knew it wouldn't get far taking on Clinton. Instead, the Republicans could only hope he was so good at pumping up Obama that Obama might pale in comparison. In its way, that was the greatest tribute of all.

Arunachalam Muruganantham: The first man to wear a sanitary napkin #INKt...



In under 12 minutes, listen to the fascinating journey of a workshop helper - from being rejected by the same women whose lives he wanted to change - to now gearing up to create jobs for a million women.

ABOUT ARUNACHALAM MURUGANANTHAM :http://www.inktalks.com/people/arunachalam-muruganantham


H/T to my dad

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Australians world's worst for illegal music downloads
The link has the coolest interactive graphic - where you can click on the country to find out the most popular download. As for Aus:
According to a survey of downloads from bit torrent sites conducted by Musicmetric, a self-described data and analytics company, Australia, with just over 19 million downloads, placed sixth in the top 10 for music downloads in the past year. The top downloading nation was the US which, according to Musicmetric, downloaded music 96,681,133 times, more than double the next nearest nation, Britain, which had a little over 43 million downloads.

However, by size, Australia with a population of 23 million for those 19 million downloads was comfortably the most frequent user of unofficial or illegal sites. And the most popular artist downloaded in Australia was Adelaide hip-hop group the Hilltop Hoods.

Low cost health intervention to save women's lives


Ramogola-Masire simply swabs a woman's cervix with vinegar and then looks for any potentially cancerous lesions, which appear as white tissue. If pre-cancerous lesions are present, she freezes them with nitrous oxide.
"She's lying on the couch," Ramogola-Masire says. "You look at [the cervix], you wash it with vinegar. You take a picture. You can immediately review the picture because you've got a screen. So you can say to them, this is the white change. I think this is where the abnormality is. We are going to freeze it. What happens is the freezing actually takes care of the top layer. You just sluff that off. And hopefully you've taken care of the problem."
Almost all cervical cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus. There appears to be higher rates of HPV and cervical cancer among women with HIV, Ramogola-Masire says. Botswana has one of the highest rates of HIV in the world, with nearly a quarter of all adults believed to be HIV positive.
In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Ramogola-Masire says, cervical cancer wasn't much of a concern because women with HIV weren't living long enough for the cancer to develop. Once cervical cancer has spread, it's difficult to treat, particularly in poor countries with limited health resources.
If caught early, cervical cancer is easily treatable. If not, Ramogola-Masire says, it's a terrible death. "It invades you nerves at the spine at the back, so you are in a lot of pain," she says.
"The other thing is that because there's a lot of dead tissue, you smell. There's a lot of bleeding. You're incontinent. You're in pain, you're bleeding ... I think it's just a horrible disease to die from."
Ramogola-Masire hopes that the widespread adoption of cervical cancer screening with vinegar in the developing world can help prevent those horrible deaths.

Cynicism in Publishing - Newsweeks' #MuslimRage on Twitter

#MuslimRage: How a Cynical Social-Media Play Became an Awesome Meme - The Atlantic

"MUSLIM RAGE," screams Newsweek's new cover story about last week's violent anti-American protests. This is a well thought out response to how the media's cynicism can be subverted. Go read and check out the links!

Why I heart Calvin and Hobbes

Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than Anyone Else

Click on the link above to see all of the list, incl 16 more funny stuff. My faves are below:

On life’s constant little limitations
Calvin: You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help.
On expectations
Calvin: Everybody seeks happiness! Not me, though! That’s the difference between me and the rest of the world. Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!
.......
On the tragedy of hipsters
Calvin: The world bores you when you’re cool.
.....
On the falling of sparrows (or providence’s lack of a timetable)
Calvin: Life is full of surprises, but never when you need one.
....
On realising God is more Woody Allen than Michael Bay
Calvin: They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines.
Hobbes: Maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell if we’re living in a tragedy or a farce.
Calvin: We need more special effects and dance numbers.
On why ET is real
Calvin: Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
.......
On the truth
Calvin: It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy…Let’s go exploring!

Saturday, September 08, 2012

Pop music is getting sadder and more emotionally ambiguous

From the anals of the BPS aka British Psychological Society's latest research digest -  Pop music is getting sadder and more emotionally ambiguous with noteworthy points below:

Have you heard older generations lamenting the way pop songs don't sound like they used to? There's a sense that the hits from yesteryear had an innocence and feel-good quality that's missing from today's pop offerings. Now Glenn Schellenberg and Christian von Scheve have confirmed what many suspected - pop music over the last five decades has grown progressively more sad-sounding and emotionally ambiguous.

.......Happy sounding songs are typically of fast tempo in major mode, whilst sad songs are slow and in minor. Songs can also be emotionally ambiguous, having a tempo that's fast in minor, or vice versa.

Schellenberg and von Scheve found that the proportion of songs recorded in minor-mode has increased, doubling over the last fifty years. The proportion of slow tempo hits has also increased linearly, reaching a peak in the 90s. There's also been a decrease in unambiguously happy-sounding songs and an increase in emotionally ambiguous songs. The findings complement an analysis of pop lyrics from 1980-2007, published last year, that found a drop over time in references to social interactions and positive emotions, but an increase in angry and anti-social words.

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Guernica - September awesomeness

The latest issue of Guernica Mag landed in my in-box yesterday and below are the links I enjoyed:

1) Women in Power and Politics - Sonia Gandhi and Aung San Suu Kyi have overcome tragic and arduous pasts to emerge as leaders of India and Burma. What’s next for these two historic icons? http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/women-in-power-and-politics/

2) Making Faces - Two potters keep an unusual art alive in South Carolina. http://www.guernicamag.com/features/making-faces/

3) Reporting Poverty - Following three years of research in an Indian slum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo discusses what language can’t express, her view that nobody is representative, and the ethical dilemmas of writing about the poor.
http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/reporting-poverty/

In her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Boo turns her attention to India and the residents of Annawadi, a Mumbai slum in the shadows of the city’s airport and luxury hotels. Of Annawadi’s three thousand residents, few have full-time employment. Most sleep in homes of nailed-together scrap metal, plywood, and plastic tarpaulin; some sleep outside. Many children are forced to work instead of attend school. The dwelling’s eastern edge borders a vast pool of sewage.
Amid Annawadi’s grinding poverty lives Abdul, a teenager who supports his family of eleven by selling scraps of trash. Boo chronicles the struggle of Abdul and other families to get out of poverty by whatever means available: corruption, education, work (NGOs, tellingly, never enter the picture). Their lives illustrate what poverty can wrought on the underclass of a developing country, but Boo never reduces them to case studies. She depicts the residents’ relationships, squabbles, opportunities, and misfortunes with eloquence and detail. In its specificity, Behind the Beautiful Forevers tells a larger story about India’s rapid growth in the global economy, and the people the country is leaving behind. Boo spoke with me over the phone from her mother’s house in Virginia.
—Emily Brennan for Guernica
Guernica: After reporting on issues of poverty in the United States for so long, what drew you to write about India?
Katherine Boo: I met my husband, who is from India, in 2001. When I first started going to India, I’d be at these dinner tables where people, claiming a posture of great authority, talked about what was going on in these historically poor communities. They always seemed to fall into two schools of thought: everything had changed with the country’s increasing prosperity, or nothing had changed in the lives of low-income people. I wasn’t a subscriber to either. In fact, I was familiar with these arguments from my experience of writing about the poor in the United States. Most of the people who do the talking about what it’s like for the very poor don’t spend much time with them. That circumstance transcends borders.

It was my husband, who had watched my reporting and fact-checking process, the way I use official documents and taped interviews to be quite precise, who first said to me, “Well, this might be something you can do in India.” And at first, I thought, “I can’t do it. I’m not Indian. If I did write anything, I would just be some stupid white woman writing a stupid thing.” But there were people around me who were saying, “If you do it well, then who you are becomes less important.” My husband and these others were interested in issues of social equality and fairness in India and thought it would be valuable to know what it was like for low-income people there, know it with a little more depth. There was plenty of reporting going on in India, but specifically what I do—follow people over long periods of time—there wasn’t much of that in India. (There are some people in the United States who do it, and do it very well, but there are not a lot of them here, either.) In my kind of work, you don’t parachute in after some big, terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glimpse. It’s the kind of work in which you ask, what is my understanding of how the world works, and where can I go to see these questions get worked out in individuals’ lives? That was really the question for me: whether I had anything to add to what had already been written.
A reporter will go to an NGO and say, “Tell me about the good work that you’re doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give.” It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos.
And the best quote:
There’s a moment I describe in the book when Abdul starts talking about what a life is, says something like, “Even a dog has a life. Even if my mother keeps beating me, even if that moment was my entire life, that’s a life.”

4) Robert Reich: It’s Inequality, Stupid - Income inequality is a pressing issue, but you wouldn't know it from watching the RNC in Tampa.
http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/robert-reich-its-inequality-stupid/

The most troubling economic trend facing America this Labor Day weekend is the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the very top–among a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people–and the steady decline of the great American middle class. 


Inequality in America is at record levels. The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.


Republicans claim the rich are job creators. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to create jobs, businesses need customers. But the rich spend only a small fraction of what they earn. They park most of it wherever around the world they can get the highest return. 


The real job creators are the vast middle class, whose spending drives the economy and creates jobs.

5) Brandon Lingle: Queen’s Creek - Back from Iraq, a veteran meditates on the past, present, and future of American warfare, and the small creek in Virginia where they all flow together.
http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/brandon-lingle-queens-creek/

The hazy sky, commingled with swamp stench and car exhaust, yanks my mind back to Baghdad. On a certain level I savor the smell of the primordial mud riding the November breeze as our discussion slides toward Mesopotamia. He completed his second Iraq tour a few weeks before I returned from my first, during the death throes of the nine-year odyssey.
“This tour was a joke compared to the first,” he says. “Last time we could shoot back.”
I nod in the dark.
In the past, American forces would fire back on the spots where insurgents launched rockets or mortars toward our bases. More often than not, the bad guys didn’t stick around to watch. Cobbled launchers of scrap iron, batteries, and washing machine timers lobbed their weapons automatically. The U.S. barrage that followed could sometimes kill innocents and destroy their neighborhoods. As Operation Iraqi Freedom shifted toward New Dawn, and Americans left Iraqi cities, the policy shifted too, and we stopped shooting back.
“It doesn’t add up,” he says. “What good is an artillery unit that can’t fire back?”
I begin to think that it’s a good thing his unit wasn’t pummeling neighboring Iraqis, and then I’m ambushed by the reality: it’s much easier to think that way when you’re safe at home on a brisk autumn night.
“Makes about as much sense as carrying unloaded weapons in a warzone,” I say. “Some soldiers didn’t even have their own ammo. The bosses were more afraid of our own guys. Accidental discharge.”
......
The prospect of endless days of mental, physical, and emotional trials excites him. He hopes to eventually deploy to Afghanistan, or maybe Iraq again.
“We talked, drank tea, and got lots of people hurt and killed.” Some worked to keep the war going, riding around the country on helicopters and selling weapons to Iraqis.
“Can we keep 50,000 troops in Iraq, please? 25,000? 10,000? 5,000? How about 150?.” A pause. “I killed a sixteen-year-old boy,” he says. “Our battalion’s only kill this deployment.”
I stare at his shadow on the dock, and I feel a stab of fall air through my damp t-shirt.
“Outside Kirkuk. Got pinned down by someone taking pot shots,” he says. “We figured out where the shooter was, and the lieutenant colonel froze. He was nearly crying. Lying on the ground. Ordered me to take the shooter out. So, I did. Just a barefoot kid with a rusty AK. He fell in a drainage ditch. I remember the muddy water flowing over his feet.”
Like the vast majority of service members, I’ve never fired a weapon in combat let alone killed anyone. I think about how I’d have reacted.
“Damn dude,” I say. “I’m not sure what to say.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “Maybe I accomplished something while I was over there.”




Friday Cephalopod: Superhero of the sea

Friday Cephalopod: Superhero of the sea

I think its sorta sad-funny that my first thought upon seeing this amazing creature of the sea was, "hmm, I wonder how it would taste." In my defense, I was eating a really yummy melt in your mouth seafood biryani with baby octupus & squid at that time.

Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Thousands of People in India Die During Drug Trials

Dr Mercola's article today was an eyeopener: Shocking Secret: 2,061 Clinical Trial-Related Deaths and the summary is below:



  • Data from the Drug Controller-General of India revealed that more than 2,000 people in India died as a result of serious adverse events (SAEs) caused during drug trials from 2008-2011; only 22 cases, about 1 percent, received any compensation -- which was a paltry average of about $4,800 per family
  • Drug companies often target poor, uneducated populations in India and other developing countries to participate in drug trials, where offers of $400 per study earn volunteers far more than the average pay rate of 50 cents a day
In 2010, the government of India called a halt to trials of the Hu­man Papilloma Virus (HPV) vac­cine Gardasil. This came about because of a civil society-led investigation, which highlighted serious ethical violations for clinical research and informed consent rights of study participants or their legal guardians – and followed reports that six of the young participants had died, and more than 120 girls suffered severe adverse reactions, including:
  • Stomach disorders
  • Epilepsy
  • Headaches
  • Early menarche
Unfortunately, reports suggested the deaths occurred because the girls either committed suicide (by poisoning) or drowned – despite reports by parents to the contrary.3 This is, sadly, but one example of deaths occurring during drug trials.

Earlier this year, the Argentinean Federation of Health Professionals accused GlaxoSmithKline of misleading participants and pressuring impoverished, disadvantaged families into enrolling their children in clinical trials of the experimental Synflorix pediatric pneumonia vaccine.

Fourteen of the children participating in the experimental vaccine trial died.

Saturday, September 01, 2012

Beautiful Quote about mothers


I recently finished reading a book called Emily and Einstein. It's a fairly decent beach read sort of book, but the following quote made an impression on me. When I came across that particular sentence while I was reading the book, it literally had me stopping in my tracks and I had to re-read it a couple of times. Made me think of the ducklings following their mother at the Peadbody Hotels.  Enjoy!

"We are all imprinted by our mothers, that imprint luring us in like a friend or sometimes an enemy, causing us to become a carbon copy or a determinedly made original. We either embrace or reject, though the luckiest among us never realize there is an imprint at all."