Right to Die?

By Johnny

A euthanasia documentary is to be shown on Sky TV tomorrow evening.

 

 

According to the Times, the controversial Swiss organization, Dignitas assisted Craig Ewert, 59, a retired university professor, who suffered from motor neurone disease, to accept euthanasia in Swiss in 2006.

 

And Mr. Ewert had allowed Oscar-winning director John Zaritsky to film his death.

 

Mr. Ewert was diagnosed with incurable disease in 2006. As the disease progressed faster than expected two to five years, he decided to end his life.

 

He travelled to the euthanasia clinic in Switzerland, accompanied with his wife, Mary Ewert, and paid Dignitas £ 3,000 to cover the costs of assisted suicide and his cremation and to ship his ashes back to the UK.

 

After drinking a lethal dose of sedatives and turning off his ventilator, Ewert died on 26 September, 2006.

 

 

Controversial charity, Controversial show

 

The decision to broadcast the euthanasia documentary on Sky television’s Real Lives channel has been condemned by the television watchdog Mediawatch-UK.

 

According to the Scotsman, John Beyer, director of campaigning TV watchdog group Mediawatch-UK, said: “My anxieties are that the programme will influence public opinion.”

 

BBC reports, in order to defend its decision to screen the death, Barbara Gibbon, Head of Sky Real Lives, said: “This is an issue that more and more people are confronting and this documentary is an informative, articulate and educated insight into the decisions some people have to make.

 

Mr. Gibbon also mentioned that it is significant for TV broadcasters, and particularly Sky Real Lives, can stimulate debate about this issue through “powerful, individual and engaging stories and give this subject a wider airing”.

 

Pro-euthanasia group Dignity in Dying backed Sky. Chief executive Sarah Wootton said: “Craig’s situation highlights some of the major issues with the current situation in the UK around end-of-life choice. Debate around these issues is to be encouraged.”

 

(click here to background story)

 

Oil Crisis (Background to Oil slick)

Today almost all form of modern economic activity is directly or indirectly dependent on Crude Oil. It is the main source of all world energy needs.

 

Being such an important part of modern human activity it has been used as a tool to achieve political and economic goals.

Oil Crisis (Source:Wikipedia)

 

Most forms of transport are directly or indirectly dependent on oil and so is most of modern industry.

 

There have been three main historical Oil shocks and significant aftermaths of Oil crisis since World War II.

 

First oil crisis (1973)

 

An OPEC oil export embargo by many of the major Arab oil-producing states, in response to western support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

 

The embargo had immediate effects. The price of oil quadrupled by 1974 to nearly 12$ US per barrel as supplies were curtailed and demand remained unchanged initially.

 

In the US price controls and rationing of fuel was introduced, the UK on the other hand avoided direct effect of oil scarcity and price rise as they did not support the Israeli side during the conflict.

 

However this was followed up by second round wave of inflation and low growth in most parts of developed world leading to stagflation and high unemployment for almost a decade.

 

 

Second oil crisis (1979)

 

The Iranian revolution which overthrew pro-west Shah of Iran caused an immediate shut down of the Iranian oil sector.

 

The new Islamic regime resumed production shortly but it was diminished and unreliable.

 

This resulted in wide spread panic in the world energy markets especially given what had happened during the first oil crisis.

 

In the US, price controls and rationing were again introduced, however because of lesson learned from the previous episodes the impact was less widespread.

 

Hence the demand declined as people changed habits and investments were made in energy efficient technologies. Resulting in low prices during the 1980’s oil glut.

 

And OPEC lost it pricing power as other states started producing more and more crude oil.

 

Third Oil Crisis (1990 – Gulf war)  

  

The invasion of Kuwait by Iraq caused a disruption in supply of oil. Initially due to invasion but then as Iraq retreated the oil fields were set on fire.

  

The OPEC stepped in and increased oil supply to stabilize the market, the result was that the crisis was much milder and shorter than previous two crises.

  

 

(back to main article)

 

Russia’s Presidential Situation

By Eliana Maakaroun

Will Vladimir Putin be both, Russia’s former and next President? Current President, Dmitry Medvedev, who took over this year, has already asked lawmakers to approve a draft law extending the presidential term of office.

According to the Kremlin, Putin is ranked in opinion polls as Russia’s most popular politician. It also believed that he is the one taking all crucial decisions, and not Medvedev.

In an attempt to justify his demand, Medvedev said that this new law will give space to reform, as it gives the President more time to achieve his agenda. A spokesman for Putin has claimed that the latter is planning on returning to the Kremlin eventually.

However, whether it’s possible or not, remains uncertain. The Kremlin has already said that the proposed change would apply to Medvedev’s successors but not Putin personally, as he has already completed two presidential terms.

Furthermore, Medvedev has also submitted a draft law to expand the State Duma’s term (which is the lower house of parliament, where Putin’s party has a flagrant majority) from four to five years.

The draft laws are likely to win parliamentary approval without problems.

It is believed that the constitutional changes will be cover Putin’s comeback, justifying it using legal means. Currently, Russia’s constitution forbids a citizen of serving more than two consecutive terms (consecutive being the key word here), however, there is no restriction on returning as head of State after an interval.

To know the future of Russia’s Presidential situation, one has to be patient, as the preparations for the next elections are not for another 2 years.

How to make dictionary?(Background piece)

People think dictionary-making is fascinating. But how are Oxford dictionaries written today? And how do you know that what is included in an Oxford dictionary is accurate and up to date?

The Oxford English Corpus is key factor of dictionary-making in Oxford in modern time, according to the on-line Oxford University Press.

A corpus is an electronic database of written and spoken language.

It collects the evidence of usage of English language in real situations, from novels and journals to newspapers and magazines and from Hansard to emails, and blogs.

The corpus now contains over 2 billion words of English.

How the Corpus works?

Lexicographer can update and improve dictionary entries by analyzing the corpus data. Here are an examples showing how the Oxford English Corpus has been used to change dictionary entries as a result.

Taking the word “edgy” for example, in the 10th edition of the Concise Oxford English

Photo by Peng Hua

Dictionary (1999), it only has a single meaning: edgy adj. tense, nervous, or irritable.

But usages of the word collected by the corpus give evidence of second meaning:

• …chronological Love Actually. The only thing edgy about Actually was the language and the…
• …After making a name for himself with cool, edgy films like My life as a Dog….
• …wide-legged baggy-crotch jeans commercial-all edgy and alternative. And if you can’t get…

The new meaning appears to be quite widespread in English. So the 11th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary has been updated on the change of the word:

edgy adj. 1 tense, nervous, or irritable.

2 informal avant-garde and unconventional.

How to make sure?

How do those findings can be confirmed after listing some small examples?To do this, lexicographers use the Sketch Engine software to produce a ‘word sketch’ for a collocational profile across all examples in the corpus.

Taking the word “cause” for example, The full picture for the objects of ’cause’ shows that things caused are harmful, while the list of subjects in the second column shows that harmful things are caused by harmful agents.( see the table below)

Finally, the dictionary entry can be written to reflect this more accurate view of the verb. Corpus lexicography is a tool for drawing out distinctions between ‘near synonyms’.

Click here to see the news story

Object	Frequency	subject	frequency
damage	5574	inconvenience	143
stir	725	bacterium	233
harm	2359	virus	375
disruption	807	negligence	188
Consternation	254	fungus	126
uproar	309	infection	212
problem	6654	vandal	70
……

modifier	frequency	And/or	Similarity
thereby	179	contribute	150
proximately	21	permit	88
directly	282	exacerbate	38
mainly	167	kill	84
more	1537	procure	17
partly	129	aggravate	17
usually	350	worsen	16
…

Greek Riots

By Eliana Maakaroun

4 days, and the riots in Greece continue … The demonstrations are expected to go further during the week. Students are fighting with police, throwing stones and fire bombs at them.

A 24 hour general strike is planned for tomorrow, Dec. 10th, 2008, against the Government’s conservative economic policies.

The demonstrations have been the worst the country has seen since 1974. A rally, organized by school and university students and teachers, will take place tomorrow, so as to protest against the shooting of 15 year old Alexander Grigoropoulos by the police.

Greek citizens are particularly angry at the 37 year old policeman charged with the murdering, as the latter has not expressed the slightest remorse to investigators. He is justifying his actions by saying it was self defense. He will appeal in court tomorrow, where the case will be officially opened.

Costas Karamanlis, the Greek Prime Minister, as well as opposition leader, George Papandreou, have appealed for an end to the violence, that is damaging hundreds of millions of euros in property, throughout the country, yet protestors seem to be persistent.

The strike, which has been ongoing since yesterday, has already shut down schools, hospitals, flights and public services across the country. As a result, the Government has already been severely shaken, especially that the riots have already left many citizens injured.

Outside the Athens Parliament, where human rights were born, stone-throwing youths fought pitched battles with riot police. At the same time, workers went on strike in a separate demonstration, chanting through the capital.

Greeks of all ages have honored the young martyr using handwritten notes, cards, paintings and poems.

The future of Greece remains unknown at the moment. What is certain is that the riots will go on, as citizens of the country are attempting to put an end to power abuse by the national police.

How to look good naked with Gok Wan

At 6ft 1in, 34 year-old half Hong Kong Chinese gay man Gok Wan is Britain’s most popular celebrity stylist.

Born on 9th October 1974 in Leicester, the Anglo British icon grew up on one of the city’s council estates where his parents ran a local ‘fish-n-chips’ shop.

As a teenager, his weight soared to 21 stones and being a tall, mixed-race gay boy made him the butt of every racist joke.

In an interview with the Cosmoplitan magazine, he said, “I know how it feels not to like what you’re looking at in the mirror. The best thing about my job now is being able to make a difference in people’s lives.”

Flashback

He found his calling as a fashion stylist while attending the pristigeous Central School of Drama and Speech in London.

After dropping out of college, he joined the Habitat as a sales assistant and eventually moved into the fashion fraternity.

Soon, he was dressing up celebrities for the red carpet and also made him mark in television industry by appearing in shows such as The battle of the Sexes(BBC1), The wright stuff (five), Big brothers little brother (Channel4) and The X factor (ITV2) and so on.

Gawk at this!

In 2006, he was approached by the Channel4 team to host his own show, How to Look good Naked.

The show centers around ordinary looking women who are persuaded to strip down to their underwear for the camera and change their own perception from “Phat” to “Phwoar” !

“The UK’s perception of beauty and the female form is out of whack, which is the guts of How To Look Good Naked – to promote self-worth and confidence in everybody. It’s an important link between fashion and real people on the street.”, reported the Cosmopolitan Magazine.

Gok Wan has a bevy of beautiful celebrity clientele that include Vanessa Mae and the All Saints.

Stories of his success have been published in many internationally known magazines like The face, Tatler, marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, People’s magazine and many others.

Gok’s naked Army

An absolute charmer and a sensational success, Gok Wan has recently launched a new show called Miss Naked Beauty on channel4.

The show provides women the opportunity to explore their inner beauty and recognize their self-worth as they’re tested by a panel of judges.

The viewers then cast their votes and the winner is crowned channel4’s beauty Ambassador.

Media gags Gok

Despite its popularity, Miss Naked Beauty had drawn a lot of negative criticism from the media.

The daily mail columnist, Amanda Platell described the show as a “parade of misery” and “vulgarity masquerading as self-help.

” The Independent’s critic, Tom Sutcliffe called it a “Nuremberg rally of empty self-affirmation”.

Unfazed by the media frenzy, Gok Wan seems quite happy with his job and hopes to make a ‘believer’ out of every unconfident woman though his shows.

AIDS (Background to Deportation is not the solution)

Under electron micrograph, HIV (in green) budding from cultured lymphocyte. (Source:Wikipedia)

AIDS  stands for Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a disease caused by human immunodeficiency virus HIV.

 

 This virus is transmitted through direct contact of a mucous membrane of blood stream, semen, vaginal fluid or breast milk.

 

And it weakens the immune system of a person and ultimately leads to death of the patient.

 

The four main routes of transmission are unprotected sexual intercourse, contaminated needles, breast milk and transmission from an infected mother to her baby at birth.

 

1^st of December each year is marked as the World’s AIDS Day in memory of the people who have lost their lives suffering from AIDS.

 

WHO

 

The World Health Organization (WHO) report estimates that AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized in 1981.

 

2008 marked the 20^th anniversary of World’s Aids day on 1^st of December and Dr Margaret Chan, Director General of WHO said: “It marks a major milestone as over 3 million people in low and middle-income countries are now receiving life-prolonging antiretroviral therapy”.

 

Reports show there is at present no vaccine or cure for AIDS. The antiretroviral therapy can suppress HIV and delay illness for many years but it cannot clear the virus completely.

 

There are constant efforts being made by various health organizations to spread awareness about AIDS, its effects and how people should prevent themselves from being a victim of this disease.

 

Motivated Health Workforce

 

The WHO report also says, motivated and skilled health workers of the organization are working on a “Treat, Train Retain” plan for a healthy life.

 

They provide essential services in many countries. Dr. Chan says “we have an agenda for strengthening health systems and we should focus on prevention”.

 

In many countries it is still a social and cultural barrier to talk openly about preventive measures to avoid AIDS. To overcome those boundaries and spread awareness is the basic aim of the organization.

 

(back to main article)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Web critique: The Herald

The Herald

Although The Herald, a local news site of Plymouth, is quite good on some aspects such as interactivity, it still has some flaws to be corrected.

 

First Impressions

A good website should make reader feel readable and attractive. But the site is quite monotonous and fails to follow the rule of scannablity on the home page. Although local news website has less pieces of news than national news site, compared with the best local website: Timesunion, it still can do better than it is now:

• The Herald editors put three or four paragraphs below the latest news story on front page rather than short and punchy outlines, while Timesunion just uses short and attractive headlines and background hyperlinks on the front page which is quite easy for reader to scan.
• The whole front page is full of the changeless two-column style and small pictures with crowded words, which easily makes readers feel boring, while good site always collates big and interesting picture with the headline, smaller picture with less important news, which makes the layout of site quiet colourful.
  

  the small picture

• Pictures are its Achilles’ heel. The small size pictures fail to attract readers and give a visual supplementary description of event as news pictures.
• The font of the paragraphs of the headline is quite different with font of the other news on the front page, which makes the page looks untidy.

All in all, this is a primitive website which owns a lot powerful “weapons” such as first-hand local stories, pictures and videos without knowing how to use it on the front page to attract people.

 

Writing

Let’s check the writing of the site following the Jakobs’rules one by one. Yes, the paragraph is short, but it still needs to pay attention to the following:

• Without highlighting the first sentence which is written to outline the story, the impatient readers may decide to give up reading and jump to another site.
• Without subheads in some long story, reader who get used to scan the article on the web will lose their clue and end up with closing the page and leaving.
• Without hyperlinks, the excellent story may lose supporting information and the article is hard for scanning.
• Half of stories on the site run without picture, the other half of articles have pictures been put out of it neither on left, right or middle which is easy to mislead readers to think the pictures as irrelevant .
• The F pattern of an article on the web is totally abandoned.

 

Content:

The editors and journalists of The Herald seem eager to interact with netizens. They do a good job on improving the interactivity of the site.

Good:

• They give the entry to comment after every single article in the homepage which is easy for reader to give feedback and encourage other to give opinions..
• They link article with a lot of social media sites, such as Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Delicious and StumbleUpon .They also has profile pages to reach readers who use social networking sites. It has more than 800 friends on Facebook, with 400 in a Facebook group, 475 on MySpace and 200 on Bebo.
• They put the ad on a quite low place which does not distract people from stories.
• They use Twitter to keep its readers informed about the latest news.

Pay attention:

• The videos on the story page are just the entry to the video section, which is irrelevant to the story you are looking at.
• The slide on the story page is also irrelevant to the story people interested.
• The poll and highlighted quote on the same page with the story have nothing to do with the articles.

 

Navigation

 

Although the navigation is simple and clear, compared with other awarded sites it needs to be changed on some aspects.

• The top navigation was used on the site which is the second common used navigation compared with the left navigation which responds to user behaviour: start reading from the left. Looking at the BBC, it use the left navigation. But if the users get used to the top navigation, that’s fine.
• When readers get from one place to another, it is harder for them to know where he is without the navigation path compared with the Guardian.
  

  Guardian navigation

• The navigation on the TV list page is inconsistent with the navigation on the front page.
• When reader click the “text version ” of the navigation, it says “Error 404–Not Found”. That will frustrate the readers.

conclusion

The website is aware of the power of interactivity and makes good use of it, but it wastes a lot of good resources it has, like good pictures and videos, just piles them disorderly.

The other omission is the writting , it fails to respond to the netizens reading habit:always scanning.

The navigation is not consistent on some page which needs to be changed immdietly.

 

HIV, have we found a cure ???

World Aids Day, a specific day marked in the calendar to remind mankind to protect themselves from the incurable disease, HIV.
Everyday almost 7000 people get affected with Aids around the world. 

There are constant efforts being made to make people aware about the effects of this disease and how they should save themselves.

The recent invention mentioned in the Metro newspaper has been a pill that will be available in another two years of time, which at the cost of £15 would protect humans against HIV if they have unprotected sex.

 The daily pills Viread and Truvada have been tested on 19000 gay men and monkeys and have been successful.

The tests are being made on women and drug users and in another two years time they may be available to all .

Joe Murray, Policy Officer at NAT (National AIDS Trust) comments:
“Scientists are researching many ways to prevent HIV. Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) , which is effectively antiretroviral treatment taken to reduce the risk of HIV infection, is one of the most promising new prevention tools being looked at.

However there are still many questions unanswered – who would take the treatment, how regularly, how will the PrEP affect people’s treatment options if they do end up getting HIV?

So while advances in trials are promising it may be a long time before anything becomes available.   Condoms are still the best way to protect against HIV when having sex, PrEP would not change that.”

Students  from the University of Westminster had  similar views, Brendon, aged 25 says, “I would not use the pills because I still would be very unsure  regarding its consequences . What if it has some side effects?”

Sam Nilson aged 26 said, ” I dont like the fact that it has been tested on gay men and monkeys, and therefore I would rather use condoms.”

Another student Johanna Sandoval aged 24, differed in her point of view and says , ” I would use both, because the pill protects against HIV whereas condoms would help me against the other sexually transmitted diseases.”

The problem remains that people will not use the pill every time they have sex because of the expense as compared to condom’s cheap availability.

Thus the irregular use may not give the efficient results that it should indicating that there is still no cure and condoms still remain a safer bet.