Jun 24 2014 : Mirror (Pune)

Scientists explain stress-heart attack link

PARIS AFP





Scientists may have unravelled how chronic stress leads to heart attack and stroke: triggering overproduction of disease-fighting white blood cells which can be harmful in excess. Surplus cells clump together on the inner walls of arteries, restricting blood flow and forming clots that block circulation or break off and travel to other parts of the body.White blood cells “are important to fight infection and healing, but if you have too many of them, or they are in the wrong place, they can be harmful,” said study co-author
Matthias Nahrendorf of the Harvard Medical School in Boston. Doctors have long known that chronic stress leads to cardiovascular disease, but have not understood the mechanism.To find the link, Nahrendorf and a team studied 29 medical residents working in an intensive care unit. Their work environment is considered a model for chronic stress exposure given the fast pace and heavy responsibility they carry for life-and-death decisions.
Comparing blood samples taken during
work hours and off duty, as well as the results of stress perception questionnaires, the researchers found a link between stress and the immune system. Particularly, they noticed stress activate bone marrow stem cells, which in turn triggered overproduction of white blood cells, also called leukocytes. White blood cells, crucial in wound healing and fighting off infection, can turn against their host, with devastating consequences for people with diseases like atherosclerosis ­ a thickening of artery walls caused by a plaque buildup.

Jun 24 2014 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

PUBLIC HEALTH - The Ageing Imperative: India Needs to Act Now

Jack Watters





An Indian born in 1950 could expect to live for a mere 37 years. Today, India's life expectancy at birth has risen to 65 years and is projected to be 74 years by 2050. Indians are living longer -that's the good news. The bad news is the number of older Indians who will be affected by long-term, chronic conditions will increase, leading to serious economic, social and healthcare policy consequences.By 2030, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) will account for almost three-quarters of deaths in India and the years of life lost due to coronary heart disease will be greater than in China, Russia and the US combined.
In a study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health, the economic burden of NCDs in India will be close to $6.2 trillion during 2012-30.
Rapid urbanisation in India, associated with unhealthy nutrition and physical inactivity , may also contribute to the increase of age-related, infectious diseases such as pneumonia and influenza, as well as non-infectious chronic diseases such as stroke, cardiovascular ailments, diabetes, mental illnesses, cancers and respiratory infections, adding to healthcare costs and impacting productivity and the need for support. The disquieting feature of population ageing in a place such as India is that ageing is taking place at lower levels of socioeconomic status, and the gap in health-related outcomes between the rich and the poor is widening.
This will result in greater demand for healthcare, but older Indians may not be generating as much income as before to support it, leading to greater pressure on the working-age population to support senior members of the family financially and through care. This phenomenon puts added pressure on India's healthcare systems. So, how do we ensure the healthcare system can cope with the extra burden an older society poses?
Much is being done through civil society and institutions but more is needed. India as a nation needs to find ways to approach healthy and active ageing by promoting a healthy life course. With Indians living longer lives and India being the secondmost-populous nation in the world, the future of the country depends on healthy , active and productive ageing of its people. First, there is a greater need to educate citizens about preventive measures such as optimal nutrition, regular exercise, screenings and vaccinations.
A public health imperative to focus on preventive care and managing lifestyle factors should be the need of the hour for the new government. This will address some of the psychosocial factors and the productivity of ageing societies. For example, in the US, strategies to reduce salt intake to help address obesity and to control tobacco use cost as little as $1-2 per person and avert millions of deaths and billions of dollars of loss in economic output. Second, preventive care programmes must be supported by all stakeholders and integrated into national healthcare systems to be successful. The work by institutions such as the Public Health Foundation of India, among others, is key .
There needs to be an industry-wide coalition of governments, care providers and businesses to create methods to promote wellness and enable healthy living. India should encourage research to translate knowledge into innovative and effective products, strategies, interventions and services that help prevent disease and improve well-being while being cost-effective. For example, this could include tackling communicable diseases through new prevention frameworks, including immunisation programmes for children and adults.
If the needs of older people are properly recognised, this newly-burgeoning population need not be a demographic catastrophe, but can become a demographic dividend. Everyone should collaborate to ensure that barriers to the healthy ageing of society are eliminated. The clock is ticking.
Western and developed nations are preparing for the demographic transformation; and India, as one of the world's fastest-growing economies, can't afford to fall behind.
Ageing and prosperity can go hand in hand and a life-course approach to healthy ageing is the most reliable way to ensure that India takes its rightful place in the world.
The writer is vice-president for external medical affairs, Pfizer

Jun 24 2014 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

How Leaders Need to be Lifelong Learners, Too

JEAN-FRANCOIS MANZONI





Execs need to develop new responses & capabilities to stay ahead of the curve ON IMPLEMENTATION Today's executives know much more than they act on. Knowing something doesn't guarantee that you can implement it

Leaders need to continue learning throughout their careers. About 50 years ago US president John F Kennedy argued that, “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other,” and soon afterward Alvin Toffler became famous by saying that tomorrow’s illiterate people will be not the ones who haven’t learned to read, but rather the ones who have not learned how to learn.This has become ever truer in the modern world, which is as complex and ambiguous as it ever has been and even more volatile and uncertain. It,
therefore, is necessary for leaders to continue developing new responses and capabilities. Years of leadership research have shown that it is indeed possible for senior executives to learn new capabilities. Their personalities do not change, but they don’t need to.Despite being armed with greater access to knowledge and training than ever before, executives still need to be able to integrate that knowledge into their behaviour.
There are 3 steps to doing that.
You must begin by identifying a need for improvement. Next, you must achieve an initial competence in the new skills. Most of us have been here before. When learning to ride a bike, this was the point at which we took off our training wheels and realised that we couldn’t balance. We then had to master staying upright. This requires a tremendous amount of attention, practice and persistence. Finally, you must reach a stage at which your new
competence is unconscious, rather than conscious. When practice makes perfect, it's exactly like riding a bike: Once you know it, you always will be able to do it without thinking. Unfortunately, for senior executives learning new capabilities is more complicated than learning to ride a bike. My research during the past 25 years has led me to identify four major obstacles: The Knowing-Doing Gap Today's executives tend to know much more than they act on. Knowing something doesn't guarantee that you can implement it. Executives sometimes confuse understanding a concept with implementing it. When they understand a concept, when the whole thing makes a great deal of sense, it seems as though that box has been checked -at least until they get a strong feedback that their behaviour doesn't really measure up. Insufficient Investment Too often today's senior executives underestimate how much effort is required for them to learn new leadership knowledge in a way that will be helpful. They are quickly satisfied with a vague understanding, so often they underinvest in developing a more granular understanding of a concept. If it's not in your head, you can't use it under real-time conditions. If you want the knowledge to be in your head and usable, you must take notes and re view them regularly.Insufficient Persistence If you want to behave differently from a habitual response and more consistently with a new objective, you need to intercept the habitual response before it is produced, search your mind to identify a more appropriate response and produce that more appropriate re sponse -all of this in real time and under pressure.
s s Insufficient Support When executives manage to become t conscious of their shortcomings y and invest enough time and energy to develop and practice new beha viours, often they are tripped up by their environment.
(Writer is a professor of manage ment practice at Insead.) e d NYT News Service





Jun 24 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

2012 find may indeed be the God particle

Washington: PTI





Researchers at Cern have found the first evidence for the direct decay of the Higgs boson into fermions — a strong indication that the particle discovered in 2012 is indeed the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle.The findings confirm that the bosons found in 2012 decay to fermions — a group of particles that includes all leptons and quarks — as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.
In July 2012, Cern researchers said they had observed a new particle whose properties were consistent with those predicted for the Higgs boson by the Standard Model, but more work was needed to confirm this.
“What we are trying to do is establish whether this particle is consistent with the Higgs boson and not one of many Higgs bosons, or an imposter that looks like it,” said Markus Klute, an assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

Jun 24 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

THE SPEAKING TREE - Learn To Empty The Cup Within

Talk: Swami Sukhabodhananda





We are often insensitive to the poetry of living life wisely. We are caught in the prose of what we want rather than what is truly wise. It is said, “God has given us two ears and one mouth, to listen more and talk less“. Have we learnt the art of wise listening? We go to listen to lectures. Why? Have you asked this question of your self ? We collect more words, more concepts and they become our memory bank.Next time you listen to some other lec ture, your memory bank becomes a kind of obstacle without your knowing it, for you have invested in what you know. Hence our knowledge of the past becomes our block. Is it not?
Are you reading this article more to confirm what you know or are you searching for something new? Listening or reading to find out something is very different from confirming what you know already . If you are listening more to confirm rather than to find out, then your listening has no significance, is it not? How can one's listening be anchored in “finding out“ rather than as confirmation of what one knows?
Try this out next time. When you listen to a lecture, be sensitive to the beginning and ending of any concept that is spoken and get the whole picture. See the “newness“ of what the speaker is saying; see what is it that you can practise from what the speaker is saying, can you be alert to be “open“ to what the speaker is saying and not allow your knowledge to interfere in your understand ing? Try this out and then you will learn how to find out.
To find out something, one has to be open and fluid. If you have observed a river, how it flows, you will notice sometimes on the backwaters of the river, there are small ponds. Water stagnates in a pond, there are no fish. But the river water is fresh, vibrant and flowing. If you become like a pond, you become stagnant to what you know, to your positionality , to your opinion, to your dogmas and so will end up missing the quality of freshness of the flowing river.
Our listening, when it is caught in our opinion, in our dogmas, in our likes and dislikes, we miss the freshness and open ness of listening. When you are listening, learn to be open and flowing. Give space to the speaker, give space to your doubts, giving inner space, in being open. And from that openness when one listens, there is a different quality of understanding.
Next time your boss is talking to you, don't be caught in your disagreement, give space to your preferences and give space to what he is saying, then you can intuit what he is saying.
Next time your spouse scolds you, just be open, don't get lost in what you want, give space for your spouse to say and from that openness listen to your spouse's scolding. You will understand better and not be bitter.
Once you are bitter, you get isolated and in that isolation, you can't connect to your spouse. Isolation creates conflict and when\ in conflict, you get filled with\ frustration and your inner cup is filled with restlessness. Learn to empty your inner cup. Follow Swami Sukhabodhananda of Prasanna Trust at speakingtree.in and post your comments there.

Jun 24 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

DU can do what it wants: FYUP camp

New Delhi: TIMES NEWS NETWORK





While one group of students held a slightly premature celebration of the FYUP rollback—still not announced formally—a teachers’ group, Academics for Action and Development (Mishra) got together to tell students, teachers and the media all the reasons the UGC doesn’t have the right to intervene. On top of the list is that Delhi University is an autonomous institution and UGC’s actions are in violation of that.This group also reminded that the HRD ministry and UGC, which has suddenly found FYUP “illegal”, hadn’t objected to its introduction last year.
“UGC’s diktat not only violates the long-standing autonomy of DU since its inception in 1922, but it is also in contradiction of its own rules, regulations and letters to DU where it clearly states the freedom on duration of courses with a cap only on the minimum number of years for awarding a degree,” says a statement by AAD. “UGC has
overstepped its own mandate, act and regulation in acting as a more than willing instrument of the HRD ministry.” “UGC can only advise and recommend,” argues Mishra.Mishra also said that DU had written to the Visitor, President Pranab Mukherjee, informing him of the changes. “The President never
writes `I am pleased to sanction these',“ he says, “If there's no objection, it is understood the changes have been approved.“The meeting, however, didn't end well for AAD-Mishra with a prominent member being roughed up by students during a debate for a television channel. Student groups ABVP and NSUI--for once, on the same side of the FYUP debate, that is, against it--passed the blame. “The fight was between ABVP activists and Surendra Kumar (the history department),“ says NSUI's Amrish Ranjan Pandey. ABVP's Rohit Chahal says, “I'm not so stupid that I will try to beat up a teacher in front of a TV crew. In fact, I was stunned to see Congress’ student wing beating up its teachers’ wing.” Earlier, unaffected by the silence maintained by the authorities, students of ABVP participated in frantic, if slightly premature, celebrations at the arts faculty on North Campus on Monday. It wasn’t the speech-and-march affair promised but it involved crackers, colour, dhols and hysterical dancing. Thinking the rollback is already in the bag, Chahal says, “It’s not over yet as the VC is yet to resign.” Meanwhile, AISA, which essentially began the student campaign against FYUP in 2013, took their campaign away from campus on Monday. They demanded an “immediate intervention of the HRD ministry to ask the Visitor to annul the FYUP Ordinances, ensure AICTE-approved BTech degrees for the first batch” and argued that the rollback “cannot be left to DU principals who have been vociferous supporters of FYUP”.

Jun 23 2014 : Mirror (Pune)

FORENSICS DO NOT LIE - `Prevent crime by becoming aware of how it takes place'

Mubarak.Ansari @timesgroup.com TWEET @ThePuneMirror





A lecture on forensic science revealed how crucial it is in modern day crime detection and the emerging trend of preventive forensics

Crime can be prevented if more people are aware of how it takes place -this was the biggest take away from a lecture on forensic science on Saturday, as Dr Rukmani Krishnamurthy, chairman of Helik Advisory Limited, a forensic and allied science organisaiton based in Mumbai, harped on the application of forensic science in the prevention of crime.Krishnamurthy, a former director of the Directorate of Forensic Science Labs, Maharashtra, was in the city to deliver a lecture on `Use of forensic science to tackle hi-tech crimes' at the Centre for Police Research (CPR) on Pashan Road.
Citing the intended use of liquid explosives in the foiled 2006 terror attack at the Heathrow Airport in London, she said that forensics can help in finding such substances which if people are made aware of, more such incidents can be foiled.
“A new trend of preventive forensic is emerging where one knows about an impending terror attack or other crime from the analysis of tests like narco analysis tests. The brain, which can mastermind the most heinous of crimes, can also be `stimulated' to give away criminal intent by confronting it with stimuli such as a picture, word, or phrase associated with information that may be stored in the brain,“ she said.
On the role of forensic evidence in nabbing the guilty, she said, “In serious offences like rape, DNA report can pin point the culprit(s) and reveal how many persons were involved in a case of gangrape.“ Forensic evidence is admissible in a court of law, she informed the audience, which comprised of serving and retired officers.
“When the court has to form an opinion upon a point of foreign law, the identity of hand writing or fingerimpressions, opinions of experts are relevant. Further, Section 293 of the CrPC says government scientific experts may be used as evidence,“ she said.
Talking about the crime scene, she added, “Evidence as tiny as a strand of hair or drop of oil often play a crucial role in solving cases.“
Additional DGP S P Yadav, who is the chief of Maharashtra Criminal Investigation Department (CID), said, “Collection of forensic evidence is need of the hour.“ Adding that detection methods have changed, he said, “Extracting a confession is not enough now. Judges take forensic evidence more seriously, as conviction rate increases with the availability of evidence.“ CPR managing director A V Krishnan, a former IPS officer, said that forensic science raises the credibility of the convict being the guilty.
Police Inspector B B Khaira, who is the admin and accounts manager at CPR, said, “This lecture was the 17th lecture as part of a lecture series, which began in April 2011, aimed at promoting discussion among the intelligentsia on socially relevant issues.“