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Friday, September 05, 2014

Sep 05 2014 : Mirror (Pune)
One person commits suicide every 40 seconds: UN study
GENEVA
AFP


One person commits suicide every 40 seconds, an avoidable tragedy that fails to grab attention because of taboos and stigma, a UN report said on Thursday.The World Health Organisation also warned that media reporting of suicide details raises the risk of copycat behaviour.
“Every suicide is a tragedy. It is estimated that over 800,000 people die by suicide and that there are many suicide attempts for each death,“ said WHO chief Margaret Chan in the landmark report capping a decade of research.
WHO, which called suicide a major public health problem that must be confronted and stemmed, studied 172 countries to produce the report. South East Asia -which in WHO-speak includes countries such as North Korea, India, Indonesia and Nepal -made up over a third of the annual. Suicides in high-income countries, meanwhile, accounted for around a quarter of the global figure.
The most suicide-prone countries were Guyana (44.2 per 100,000), followed by North and South Korea (38.5 and 28.9 respectively). Next came Sri Lanka (28.8), Lithuania (28.2), Suriname (27.8), Mozambique (27.4), Nepal and Tanzania (24.9 each), Burundi (23.1), India (21.1) and South Sudan (19.8).
In 2012, India accounted for the highest estimated number of suicides in the world, said the study.



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Sep 05 2014 : The Economic Times (Delhi)
Email `Inventor' Ayyadurai to Seek Public Support
Jayadevan PK & Varun Sood
Bangalore


Shiva Ayyadurai, the man in the middle of a rag ing controversy over his claims of being the inventor of email, doesn't want to go legal on his detractors but is looking for support from the public.“Lawsuits take a long time. If I have to pull the trigger I will.
But I have decided to go direct ly to the people,“ Ayyadurai said in an interview with ET.“When Deepak Chopra started talking of ayurveda in the US,he was attacked. His advice was to go directly to the people,“ he said.
Ayyadurai,an American of Indian origin who in sists that he is in fact the inventor of email, is once again right in the middle of a global controversy--not surprising given the grandiose nature of the claim. Did he, or did he not, invent electronic mail?
After hearing his talk at an event hosted by spiritual guru Deepak Cho pra, Huffington Post founder Arian na Huffington decided to commission a series of articles on the history of email, Ayyadurai, 50, said.
The controversy is one of those sto ries on the Internet that refuse to die, in spite of having been written about and argued over many times. Some experts including Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail, dismiss Ayyadurai's claims and say that email was developed by the Defence Advanced Research Pro jects Agency (Darpa) in the 1960s. (That US organization played a critical role in the birth of the Internet.) Ayyadurai says email was born in a city in New Jersey not exactly known for technological breakthroughs.
“In 1978, there was a 14-year-old boy working in Newark. He did in fact cre ate the inter-office mail system and called it email. What they did before 1978 was text messaging. The facts are coming out now in 2014,“ said Ayyadurai, referring to his younger self.
Credit for the invention has been appropriated by defence contractor Raytheon, which built a brand for itself based on the claim, he said. Raytheon declined to comment.
The controversy captured the public imagination first in 2012, when the Smithsonian Museum acquired some documents from Ayyadurai, following which articles calling him the inventor of email surfaced. His claims were promptly refuted by critics.
Computer historian Thomas Haigh was quick to point out in 2012: “Electronic mail, or email, was introduced at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1965 and was widely discussed in the press during the 1970s. Tens of thousands of users were swapping messages daily by 1980.“ His critics have said that in 1982, Ayyadurai merely copyrighted the term `email' and the code he wrote and that such messaging existed long before 1978. However, he says that it was the only way to protect software as patents didn't cover software in those days.
According to him, critics find it hard to believe that a 14-year-old Indian in a backwater like Newark could invent something as massive and socially significant as email.
“Fundamentally there is a narrative around where innovation can come out from... the innovators' spirit of America still exists. However, there is a narrative in America which goes like--you must go to MIT to get your calling card.Or you go to Harvard and then you drop out and then you've made it,“ he said.
Entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa said there was no basis for such an argument. “There is no such discrimination between East Coast and West Coast. After all, Bell Labs--which was long the center of innovation--was from New Jersey . Also, IBM, DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.), and Unisys were East Coast companies and were big players around the time he made his claims. In those days, the East Coast was the centre of innovation--not West Coast.“
The Mumbai-born Ayyadurai has come a long way from New Jersey , having himself gone to MIT and obtained a PhD in biological engineering from the premier school. His personal website bears the motto `Know the truth, be the light, find your way' and bears a picture of him posing with Prime Minister Narendra Modi along his book, The Email Revolution.
Ayyadurai, who moved with his family to the US when he was seven, is currently running a new company that he believes will be bigger than email.He's raised $1.5 million for Cytosolve, which aims to build a new way to model molecular reactions of a human cell on a computer, he said.
“Now we can model molecular reactions on the computer to revolutionise the entire process of multi-combination therapeutics,“ said Ayyadurai. “Cytosolve is a big innovation and is going to be the next billion dollar company,“ he said.



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Sep 05 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)
India is world's suicide capital with 2.6L casesyr
New Delhi
TIMES NEWS NETWORK


India records by far the largest number of suicides in the world, accounting for nearly a third of the global total and more than twice as many as China, which is second on the list.India also has the highest rate of suicides among young people — those aged 15 to 29 years.
These were among the sobering facts revealed in a report released by the WHO, “Preventing Suicide, A Global Imperative”. The report noted that an estimated 8 lakh suicide deaths occurred worldwide in 2012. It is the second leading cause of death in 15-29-year-olds.
In 2012, India recorded nearly 2.6 lakh suicides, dwarfing China’s 1.2 lakh.
India’s overall rate of suicides (incidents per lakh population) was 12th at 20.9. The worst countries on this parameter were North and South Korea, Guyana, Lithuania and Sri Lanka. Hungary, Japan, the Russian Federation and Belarus also had higher suicide rates than India. The Scandina vian countries, Sweden, Norway and Denmark — often perceived as societies with high suicide rates — had much lower rates.
In richer countries, three times as many men die of suicide as women, but in low and middle-income countries, the male-to-female ratio is much lower at 1.5 men to each woman. Globally, suicides account for 50% of all violent deaths in men and 71% in women. n India, the ratio was about I 1.6 with close to 1.6 lakh men committing suicide in 2012 compared to just under 1 lakh women. In four countries in India's immediate neighbourhood -China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan -women outnumbered men among suicides. Only in Iraq and Indonesia was the proportion of women to men among those committing suicide higher than these countries.
India, despite its horrific statistics, has actually seen a decline in the tendency to commit suicide since 2012, with the rate declining by 9.2% over this 12-year period.China, in the same period, saw its suicide rate drop by 59%.
India is a clear exception to the global pattern of the 70+ age group having the highest suicide rates. At 21.1 per lakh population, suicides among this age group are only about as common as among the entire population. Risk factors associated with the health system and society at large include difficulties in accessing health care and in receiving the care needed, easy availability of the means for suicide, inappropriate media reporting that sensationalizes suicide and increases the risk of “copycat“ suicides, and stigma against people who seek help for suicidal behaviours, or for mental health and substance abuse problems.
For the full report, log on to http:www.timesofindia.com
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Thursday, September 04, 2014

Journal of Community Practice: Table of Contents 

Volume 22, Issue 3, 2014


Anna Maria Santiago, Tracy Soska & Lorraine Gutierrez
pages 275-280

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.949508
  • Published online: 13 Aug 2014
  • Citing articles: 0
  • Article Views: 13
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Articles

Nancy P. Kropf & Barbara L. Jones
pages 281-298

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.929539
  • Published online: 13 Aug 2014
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Jessica Martone, Danielle Zimmerman, Maria Vidal de Haymes & Lois Lorentzen
pages 299-323

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.929062
  • Published online: 13 Aug 2014
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Kelly L. Patterson, Tom Nochajski & Laiyun Wu
pages 324-341

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.929605
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Laurie A. Walker & Jean F. East
pages 342-364

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.929063
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Donna Hardina
pages 365-384

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.929060
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From the Field

Charlotte Lyn Bright, Ninoosh S. Hergenroeder & Darnell Morris-Compton
pages 385-401

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.929061
  • Published online: 13 Aug 2014
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Book Reviews

DeBrenna LaFa Agbényiga PhD, LMSW
pages 402-404

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.929486
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Carmen Luca Sugawara MSW, PhD
pages 405-407

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.929485
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Julian Chun-Chung Chow
pages 408-410

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.929506
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Calvin L. Streeter
pages 411-413

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.929516
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Alice K. Butterfield Ph.D.
pages 414-417

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.929515
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Colleen Henry PhD, MSW
pages 418-421

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  • DOI:10.1080/10705422.2014.929895
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Alma Mater of Legends to Get New Life

Posted by Elets News Network (ENN)



Intellectuals who put the country on the path of progress are often remembered. Unfortunately though, we have failed to recognise the institutions that nurtured these legends. In a move directed at correcting this anomaly and for facilitating the right infrastructure and environment to students at such institutes, the Human Resource Development ministry is about to embark on an exercise to draw up a list of schools and colleges whose alumni have won the country international recognition in different spheres.
The exercise, to be carried out in collaboration with the states will honour the alma mater of these historic figures and also help breathe new life into these institutes.
Also on the agenda is a move to pay tribute to national leaders such as S. Radhakrishnan, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda, Zakir Husain, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Deen Dayal Upadhyay, Madan Mohan Malaviya among others by instituting 50 new centres across universities and institutions of higher education. The University Grants Commission will offer the seed money of Rs. 7.5 lakh to set up these centres which will be named after people who have made stellar contribution towards education, social reform and nation building. Universities and institutions of higher education can apply for the grant and set up these centres.
- See more at: http://digitallearning.eletsonline.com/2014/09/alma-mater-of-legends-to-get-new-life/#sthash.IbmvbePU.dpuf
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SC Orders Compensation for Students Denied MBBS Seats 

The Supreme Court has ordered the Maharashtra government to pay a compensation of Rs 20 lakh each to the 21 aspirants who were denied MBBS seats. In a sharp reaction to the state government and the malpractices adopted by private colleges, the apex court has held that the state needed to pay the students for having failed to “take necessary action on the students’ complaints”.
In a case in 2012, 21 students were either denied admissions to private medical and dental colleges or were not allowed to shift from dental to medicine despite having the required scores.
The students had earlier approached the Pravesh Niyantran Samiti (PNS), a quasi-judicial body, which conducted an inquiry and found that the colleges had been flouting rules for admissions. PNS asked the state to cancel admissions to 250 seats in 17 colleges, most of which are run by politicians. With the government failing to take action, the students approached the Bombay high court and then the Supreme Court for being denied the rightful admission in 2012.
Though the detailed copy of the order is awaited, it is learnt that the court has also ordered an inquiry against the authorities who facilitated admissions without merit and revised the process to suit their needs.
- See more at: http://digitallearning.eletsonline.com/2014/09/sc-orders-compensation-for-students-denied-mbbs-seats/#sthash.lpWYVmtM.dpuf
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