Professional Pondering…: Academia on Using Blogs has included in a discussion an old interview I did for the toronto star a while ago. It is great (and a bit scary) to find people reading things you’ve said in the past. I hope everyone gets that experience.
Walking down the catwalk in front of the great and the good in New York is a far cry from using your hands to clean up human excrement for a living.
But this week a group of such women - known in India as scavengers - have been doing just that. They have been attending a United Nations conference here and doing some modelling at the same time.
In all, 36 scavengers from India have been invited by the UN to attend a conference to mark the UN’s International Year of Sanitation.
The women were brought up from early childhood for the demeaning work.
Scavengers are invariably from the lower-caste, “untouchable” (Dalit) community. They carry the human excrement in pots on their heads. They can also be found clearing rubbish from the streets and open drains outside homes.
Reading this you will note the sense of possibility and change… when appropriate support is made available.
“Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling (.pdf) described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.”
So, every thing you do on the internet can be tracked, and you can be found, and charged. Imagine now getting a bill from Viacom because you watched some show on line that you didn’t pay for.
Can’t we just set up a new internet? One where we charge corporations for every time they access information about us? If they had to pay a fee to us to know what we’d done, then we’d be the rich ones!
This article Mother’s junk food ‘harms child’ is interesting for the obvious reasons, but it also because it reminds me of the potential for… I’m not sure of the word… criminalizing(?) lived experiences relating to parenting. I’ve edited the content down, so check out the full article if it is an interesting topic.
Eating a poor diet when pregnant or breastfeeding may cause long-lasting health damage to the child, animal studies suggest.
The offspring of rats fed fatty, processed food had high levels of fat in their bloodstream and around major organs even after adolescence.
The animals had a raised diabetes risk - even if they ate healthily.
Studies by the same team have already shown that rats whose mothers were fed junk food during pregnancy and breastfeeding were more likely to crave similar snacks themselves.
However, the new twist is that even when weaned off this diet themselves, the damage may already have been done, they suggest.
Dr Stephanie Bayol, one of the researchers, said: “It seems that a mother’s diet whilst pregnant and breastfeeding is very important for the long-term health of her child.
“We always say: ‘You are what you eat’, but in fact it may also be true that you are what your mother ate.”
Of particular concern was fat gathering around the major organs, which has been implicated in the development of type II diabetes.
“Humans share a number of fundamental biological systems with rats, so there is good reason to assume the effects we see in rats may be repeated in humans.”
However, Dr Simon Langley-Evans, a nutrition researcher from the University of Nottingham, said that the study did not prove that a mother’s diet could affect the health of offspring beyond the effect on cravings and appetite.
He said: “I’m not convinced they have shown this - everything you are seeing here could be the result of obesity caused by increased appetite. “What it does show is that this early influence from the mother is very important.”
Dr Iain Frame, of the charity Diabetes UK, warned against drawing firm conclusions from animal studies.
However, he said: “This study does lend some weight to the established argument that children of mothers who have poor diets during pregnancy have a higher risk of developing diabetes and heart disease later in life.”
The Japanese, on the other hand, emphasize Anne’s almost mystical worship of nature and Montgomery’s lyrical descriptions of the Island because those aspects of the novel tie in with Shinto — the native religion of Japan, which includes a belief in spirits associated with a particular place.
There are other reasons Anne appeals to Japanese fans.
The Japanese translation was published in 1952, when the horrors of the Second World War were still fresh and there were many orphans.
Anne also provides a complex model of femininity that resonates for Japanese women, according to Irene Gammel, author of Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic. “Anne is tempestuous, she has outbursts. Yet at the same time she is a good girl.”
Constrained by traditional gender roles, Anne’s mostly female Japanese fans appreciate the way Montgomery’s heroine “negotiates with people living in a narrow minded community which reminds them of their own society,” notes Japanese-born, Toronto-based Yuka Kajihara, a founding member of the L.M. Montgomery Research Group.
Job Listing #666. University of Hell at Seventh Circle. Visiting Assistant Professor, two years (with possibility of converting to tenure-track position at culmination of two-year appointment). Beginning September 2009. Teaching load of forty-three courses per semester, with no more than thirty-nine preparations (i.e. instructor will teach more than one section of some courses). No official committee duties, but will be expected to contribute occasionally to departmental administrative work. Competitive salary, given local economy. Candidate must exhibit evidence of strong potential for both research and teaching, and significant flexibility in his/her expectations. For further information, repeat the name “Mizrakreth, Chair of Hiring Committee” three times.
When Rogers/Fido announced the iPhone voice/data plans a few days ago, the proposed rates were not received warmly. Over ten thousand people are letting their eDispleasure be heard on the “Rogers iPhone3G == Ruined” protest website.
We’d been talking a bout the use of whiteboards in schools now, and with this ‘hack’ anyone can have a digital whiteboard for a fraction of the cost using a data projector and a Wii controller. Johnny’s included the software on his page and http://www.wiimoteproject.com/. I’m going to see if I can make up one of the pens.
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