• Was VERY impressed by an interview with Chris Pinkham of Cloud startup @nimbula , on the Cloud Computing podcast http://tinyurl.com/2w54jua #

I was super impressed to read a quote by Vlora Citaku, Kosovan Deputy Foreign Minister, on Muslim headscarves. She said:

“The scarf in Kosovo is not an element of our identity. It’s a sign of submission of female to male, rather than a sign of choice”

Absolutely right Vlora, well said.

From BBC News – Headscarf ban sparks debate over Kosovo’s identity

As I await the arrival of my daughter any day now, I spotted an article about teaching babies sign language.

Parents finding benefit in teaching babies sign language as well as speech

Toward the end of lunch, Phoenix Ferragame, 17 months old, raised both hands in front of his chest and tapped his fingertips together.

His mother smiled.

“You want more? More chips?” Gina Ferragame asked, mimicking the hand movement and then passing the bowl to her son.

For parents, hardly anything is as satisfying as being able to communicate with their children. But speech requires development of three muscle groups. Toddlers typically have motor control of their hands and fingers months sooner.

Teaching a short vocabulary of American Sign Language – milk, more, please, and a handful of other words – is so simple that parents are networking, classes are spreading, and how-to sites are booming.

Ferragame and her husband began working on basic signs with their older son, Theo, when he was 5 months old.

“I saw a response immediately,” she said. “I was inspired by the fact that I could acknowledge him.”

It reminded me of something I saw years ago on CoolTools, a post reviewing a book called “Diaper Free! The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene“

In my many years traveling throughout Asia I saw almost no babies with diapers. Yet I commonly saw infants who would seem to eliminate on command. Their moms would hold them over a gutter with their pants down, whistle a quiet hiss, or grunt, and then the baby would go. At one year! Two-year olds would find their own place to squat. The real story behind this magic is that the child communicates their elimination needs to the mom, who learns to understand their unique signals, and then she communicates back whether all is ready or not. The result is a baby toilet-trained long before anyone in developed countries believes is possible, or even healthy. And this diaper-less, yet mess-less, state is common in parts of Africa and Latin America as well.

I love this idea of teaching my daughter to sign, and being able to read her elimination signals, an avoid “walking toilets” that are nappies.

In practice I think these sorts of methods take enormous time and energy, and I am afraid those are in short supply with a new baby.

we’ll see….

Westerners have been getting fatter and fatter at alarming rates since the 80s. Now Chinese and Indians are rapidly catching up.

Now it seems, we have been unfairly blaming fat for the obesity epidemic, but it has been carbohydrates all along.

From End the War on Fat, It could be making us sicker.

Thirty years ago, America declared war against fat. The inaugural edition of Dietary Guidelines for Americans, published in 1980 and subsequently updated every five years, advised people to steer clear of “too much fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol,” because of purported ties between fat intake and heart disease. The message has remained essentially the same ever since, with current guidelines recommending that Americans consume less than 10 percent of their daily calories from saturated fat.

But heart disease continues to devastate the country, and, as you may have noticed, we certainly haven’t gotten any thinner. Ultimately, that’s because fat should never have been our enemy. The big question is whether the 2010 Dietary Guidelines, due out at the end of the year, will finally announce retreat.

The foundation for the “fat is bad” mantra comes from the following logic: Since saturated fat is known to increase blood levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol, and people with high LDL cholesterol are more likely to develop heart disease, saturated fat must increase heart disease risk. If A equals B and B equals C, then A must equal C.

Well, no. With this extrapolation, scientists and policymakers made a grave miscalculation: They assumed that all LDL cholesterol is the same and that all of it is bad. A spate of recent research is now overturning this fallacy and raising major questions about the wisdom of avoiding fat, especially considering that the food Americans have been replacing fat with—processed carbohydrates—could be far worse for heart health. “

Scientific America also picked up on this theme recently.

From “Carbs against Cardio: More Evidence that Refined Carbohydrates, not Fats, Threaten the Heart

Eat less saturated fat: that has been the take-home message from the U.S. government for the past 30 years. But while Americans have dutifully reduced the percentage of daily calories from saturated fat since 1970, the obesity rate during that time has more than doubled, diabetes has tripled, and heart disease is still the country’s biggest killer. Now a spate of new research, including a meta-analysis of nearly two dozen studies, suggests a reason why: investigators may have picked the wrong culprit. Processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat today in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does—a finding that has serious implications for new dietary guidelines expected this year.

In March the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a meta-analysis—which combines data from several studies—that compared the reported daily food intake of nearly 350,000 people against their risk of developing cardiovascular disease over a period of five to 23 years. The analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease.”

This is a staggering finding.

Its not that saturated fats are good, but its likely that carbohydrates are significantly worse, especially high GI refined carbohydrates.

“If you reduce saturated fat and replace it with high glycemic-index carbohydrates, you may not only not get benefits—you might actually produce harm,” Ludwig argues. The next time you eat a piece of buttered toast, he says, consider that “butter is actually the more healthful component.”

I am finally getting around to posting about a wonderful Radio Lab episode about Innate Numbers.

I was particularly fascinated by logarithmic counting, which is how how babies (and people in primitive societies) count before they are taught to count “properly”.

Have a listen, its a fascinating topic from a brilliant podcast.

WNYC – Radiolab: Innate Numbers? (October 09, 2009)

My interest in the welfare of the Afrikaner people of South Africa has been revived by my (re)discovery of the work of Dutch journalist Adriana Stuijt’s Censorbugbear and Afrikaner Genocide Archives – sites that continue to track the ongoing genocidal assault against rural Afrikaners in South Africa.

She also draws attention to the plight of South Africa’s most vulnerable minority: Poor Afrikaners.

Since 1994, a combination of affirmative action, corruption, economic decline and plain old racial prejudice have left hundreds of thousands of white Afrikaners living below the poverty line, surviving thanks to charity handouts.

Their story is slowly getting out.

Tough times for white South African squatters

At least 450,000 white South Africans, 10 percent of the total white population, live below the poverty line and 100,000 are struggling just to survive, according to civil organisations and largely white trade union Solidarity.

South Africa’s population is about 50 million.

Many poor whites have ended up in places like Coronation Park, in Krugersdorp west of Johannesburg, a leafy former caravan site beside a water reservoir and a public picnic park frequented by middle-class families at weekends.

Ringed by yellow-brown hills of earth dug up by generations of gold miners, the park was used by the British as a concentration camp for Afrikaners during the Anglo-Boer war at the start of the 20th century.

Now it’s home to some 400 white squatters living in cramped tents and caravans and sharing a single ablution block. Cats and dogs roam noisily through the camp, dodging heaps of rubbish, piles of scrap metal and abandoned car parts.

No one has any sympathy for this tiny national minority that continues to be victimised and the subject of open, officially supported racist hatred, despite the country transitioning to democracy over 15 years ago.

The situation is South Africa is extremely dangerous for these people. We have an ascendant radical populist leader (Malema) whipping up racial hostility towards “The Boer” amongst the young, a shaky economy, rampant xenophobia and global lack on interest in the welfare of South African minorities, all combine to make genocide a genuine risk.

Just wanted to giver you all a heads up on two pieces of software that I came across recently: Cinch and Divvy.

Divvy · Window management at its finest.

Divvy is an entirely new way of managing your workspace. It allows you to quickly and efficiently “divvy up” your screen into exact portions.

With Divvy, it is as simple as calling up the interface, clicking and dragging. When you let go, your window will be resized and moved to the relative position on the screen. If that seems like too much work, you can go ahead and create as many different shortcuts as you’d like that resize and move your windows in exactly the same way.

Divvy is designed to be quick, simple and elegant. We want it to stay out of your way as much as possible while providing the most powerful window management available today.

Irradiated Software – Cinch

Cinch gives you simple, mouse-driven window management by defining the left, right, and top edges of your screen as ‘hot zones’. Drag a window until the mouse cursor enters one of these zones then drop the window to have it cinch into place. Cinching to the left or right edges of the screen will resize the window to fill exactly half the screen, allowing you to easily compare two windows side-by-side (splitscreen). Cinching to the top edge of the screen will resize the window to fill the entire screen (fullscreen). Dragging a window away from its cinched position will restore the window to its original size.

I use Cinch, as it is simple and suites my needs perfectly. If you need a bit more control or functionality, Divvy might be for you.

The ever excellent Dr Moira Gunn of Tech Nation recently talked to Sheena Iyengar about Human Decision Making.

During the interview Professor Iyengar revealed that the best defence against manipulation is having clear priorities.

Apparently we humans have a tendency to carefully guard a few core issues against manipulation, knowingly submit to manipulation on other issues.

Here is a short excerpt from the show, where Professor Ivengar explains…

Download

More: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4523.html