Watching the World
Watching the World
Possible Deadly Mistake
• Many European computer specialists and scientists are publicly expressing fear of “nuclear warfare by mistake.” Computer problems and false alarms of the American air defense control in recent years, coupled with the “considerable decrease in time available for early warning within Europe,” have caused the experts to rise up in opposition. According to the magazine Computerwoche, a group of German professors is preparing to make a constitutional complaint against the Federal Government over the use of electronic systems designed to retaliate within a few minutes with a nuclear counterstrike. According to the professors, these are “semi-automatic or automatic reaction systems backed up by computers that, because of technical errors or human failure, are immensely unreliable and could therefore lead to nuclear warfare by mistake.”
Leading Sex Disease
• “Chlamydia, a little-known, often misdiagnosed and mistreated infection, is causing a national epidemic of venereal disease,” reports The New York Times. “It now far surpasses gonorrhea as the leading sexually transmitted disease in the United States.” Said to affect between three and ten million people a year, it can cause infertility in men, sterility in women and conjunctivitis and pneumonia in newborn infants as well as in adults. Swedish researchers have discovered that a single attack of chlamydia is three times more likely to cause sterility in women than gonorrhea is. Young women are particularly susceptible to reproductive damage from the infection. Unfortunately, as its name indicates (from the Greek “to cloak”), an estimated 60 to 80 percent of the women who have it have no symptoms and may not seek treatment until serious difficulties occur. And often, thinking it is gonorrhea, the physician will prescribe the wrong drugs—suppressing the disease but not eradicating it.
First Sumerian Dictionary
• The first dictionary of the Sumerian language, spoken some 4,000 years ago, is starting to be printed. Scholars at the University of Pennsylvania recently announced the completion of the first volume. The painstaking work was begun in 1976. When finished, the dictionary is expected to have at least 22 volumes and contain some 16,000 entries. “I’ll probably be dead before it’s finished,” said Professor Ake Sjoberg, the 59-year-old editor of the dictionary. Writing in cuneiform on clay tablets, the ancient Sumerians—inhabitants of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers about 2000 B.C.E.—were very prolific writers. “They wrote down everything,” says Erle Leichty, the dictionary’s coeditor. “We have more from the Sumerians than from any culture in history before the invention of the printing press.” Some one million tablets have already been unearthed, most of which have been waiting to be deciphered.
Child Victims
• Children “are often the ones to suffer most, when parents fail to get along or have difficulties,” reports the German newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger. An extensive study made in Germany’s state of North Rhine-Westphalia revealed that violence in “normal” families happens more often than is generally supposed. About 30,000 cases of severe child abuse are registered in the Federal Republic of Germany annually, and several hundred children are beaten to death. However, it is estimated that as many as 400,000 children are physically abused each year. In 80 percent of the cases investigated, the one doing the abusing either was related to the victim or came from the circle of family acquaintances. Injuries were often passed off as “a fall” or “proneness to bleeding.”
“Bad Luck” for Animals
• People may think it brings them “good luck” to toss coins to animals at the zoo, but this thoughtless practice brings no “good luck” to the animals themselves. Often they become victims of the coins when they swallow them. Two penguins at a Canadian zoo recently died when coins caught in their throats, and a third had to have surgery to remove a coin from its stomach. “A 35-year-old alligator had to be put to death after refusing to eat for a year,” said an editorial in The Globe and Mail of Toronto. “The post-mortem found 84 pennies, four nickels and three dimes in her stomach. Copper poisoning is suspected.” The editorial concluded: “There are times when people’s ignorance is literally breathtaking.”
Never Shake Infants
• Parents who are angry or upset with a child and are prone to reach for the child and “shake some common sense into him” are advised: Don’t shake the infant! This type of discipline can bring tragic results says Dr. David B. Horner, president of the California Medical Association. “Infants have very weak neck muscles and only gradually develop the strength to control their heavy heads,” he explains. “If they are shaken, their heads wobble rapidly back and forth . . . and it is this vigorous movement of the head which may cause brain damage and bleeding in and on the surface of the brain . . . even to 4-year-olds.” As reported in Parade Magazine, the Shaken Infant Syndrome, as it is called, can cause “brain damage, mental retardation, spinal cord injury, eye damage, even death.”
East-West Relations
• Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union are at their worst since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, with little prospect for improving, according to the annual review of world developments by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The group indicates that current situations increase the “risks that dangerous posturing and miscalculation might draw them into direct conflict.” No improvement was seen due to the combination of the election year in the United States and the new leader in Moscow.
Beavers Best
• When spring flooding regularly erodes the banks of a stream and the surrounding areas are flooded, building a dam to control the problem can be costly—up to $100,000. So when faced with the problem of controlling Wyoming’s Currant Creek, the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) hit upon the perfect solution: Use beavers. Since there were no trees around for the beavers to use, the BLM helped by bringing in aspens and by wiring truck tires together to make a foundation in the stream. The beavers did the rest, the stream has been slowed and now only widens by about 50 feet in the spring. And as silt settled behind the dams, grass and willows were restored along the banks—all at a cost of less than $3,000. Now officials are planning to use beavers to restore the ecological balance along streams in other states.
Reducing Cancer Risk
• Recent studies have shown that the risk of certain kinds of cancer can be drastically reduced by simple dietary changes. One study showed the incidence of cancer of the esophagus to be greatly reduced by good nutrition alone. Another showed that the risk of cancer of the mouth and pharynx could be reduced by increased fruit and vegetable consumption. “The dietary patterns that substantially reduced risks in these studies did not require the use of high-dosage food or vitamin supplements,” said Regina Ziegler of the National Cancer Institute. “A moderate increase in consumption of certain common food groups was all that was necessary.” Studies are now under way to evaluate the role of diet in other types of cancer.
Bloodless Surgery for Infants
• “‘Bloodless’ open-heart surgery, originally developed for adult members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” reports the medical journal Cardiovascular News, “now has been safely adapted for use in delicate cardiac procedures in infants and children.” The techniques developed were tried on 48 pediatric patients, aged three months to eight years, in correcting a variety of heart defects. “All 48 patients tolerated the procedure well and, in comparison to conventional surgery, the bloodless technique resulted in less blood loss and less strain on the kidneys and lungs,” says the report, and “renal function proved to be statistically better in the patients undergoing the bloodless procedure.” The technique has been adopted now as routine procedure for pediatric patients.
Pope Video Star
• Anyone who can arrange a private audience with the pope can now have a videotape of the event. According to Parade Magazine, for an agreed fee a CTV (Centro Televisivo Vaticano) crew “will film your arrival in Rome; your entrance into the Vatican, with its picturesque Swiss Guards saluting you smartly; and . . . your audience with John Paul II.” Other video cassettes that can be purchased include the 1983 visit of the pope to Lourdes and one called “The Pardon,” showing the pope’s visit with the man who shot him, Ali Agca, in a Rome jail. “Plans are also under way,” says Parade Magazine, “to videotape the Pope’s Wednesday services for the general public and to sell souvenir video cassettes the following morning to those who attend.”
Now 1,785 Languages!
• That is the number of languages that the Bible has been published in up to the end of 1983, according to an announcement by the UBS (United Bible Societies). This is 24 more languages than the preceding year. The figure of 1,785 is broken down this way: The whole Bible—283 languages; the “New Testament”—572 languages; various individual Bible books—930 languages.
Eyeing Each Other
• Feeling that educational standards in American schools should be raised, critics of the American educational system have been admiring the stricter Japanese system. At the same time, Japanese educators have been casting an approving eye on the more relaxed American schooling. As Dr. Ernest L. Boyer, head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in the United States, said: “We’re impressed by [Japan’s] clear standards and tough curriculum, and their systematic evaluation and close community support.” On the other hand, he said, “they’re looking for ways to free themselves from restrictions we seem to admire.” The New York Times reported that Japanese educators, worried about the effects of the intense pressures of their national tests on the children, have urged a relaxation of the tough requirements; while those in the United States, which lacks a system of national measurement, are calling for more tests and greater rigor in their schools. The quest, said Dr. Boyer, is for a better balance between the two.
Saving the Environment
• International scientists and scholars, following a conference sponsored by the World Resource Institute, issued a statement calling for the nations to work together to protect the earth’s biological systems and environment. As reported in The New York Times, they declared: “The era we are entering is new in human experience in that for the first time the human species has the capability to alter the environment on a global scale and within the span of a single generation.” The statement outlined goals necessary to stabilize the global environment and ensure continuance of the earth’s natural resources, warning that “if we remain inactive, whether through pessimism or complacency, we shall only make certain the darkness that many fear.”
Possible Deadly Mistake
• Many European computer specialists and scientists are publicly expressing fear of “nuclear warfare by mistake.” Computer problems and false alarms of the American air defense control in recent years, coupled with the “considerable decrease in time available for early warning within Europe,” have caused the experts to rise up in opposition. According to the magazine Computerwoche, a group of German professors is preparing to make a constitutional complaint against the Federal Government over the use of electronic systems designed to retaliate within a few minutes with a nuclear counterstrike. According to the professors, these are “semi-automatic or automatic reaction systems backed up by computers that, because of technical errors or human failure, are immensely unreliable and could therefore lead to nuclear warfare by mistake.”
Leading Sex Disease
• “Chlamydia, a little-known, often misdiagnosed and mistreated infection, is causing a national epidemic of venereal disease,” reports The New York Times. “It now far surpasses gonorrhea as the leading sexually transmitted disease in the United States.” Said to affect between three and ten million people a year, it can cause infertility in men, sterility in women and conjunctivitis and pneumonia in newborn infants as well as in adults. Swedish researchers have discovered that a single attack of chlamydia is three times more likely to cause sterility in women than gonorrhea is. Young women are particularly susceptible to reproductive damage from the infection. Unfortunately, as its name indicates (from the Greek “to cloak”), an estimated 60 to 80 percent of the women who have it have no symptoms and may not seek treatment until serious difficulties occur. And often, thinking it is gonorrhea, the physician will prescribe the wrong drugs—suppressing the disease but not eradicating it.
First Sumerian Dictionary
• The first dictionary of the Sumerian language, spoken some 4,000 years ago, is starting to be printed. Scholars at the University of Pennsylvania recently announced the completion of the first volume. The painstaking work was begun in 1976. When finished, the dictionary is expected to have at least 22 volumes and contain some 16,000 entries. “I’ll probably be dead before it’s finished,” said Professor Ake Sjoberg, the 59-year-old editor of the dictionary. Writing in cuneiform on clay tablets, the ancient Sumerians—inhabitants of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers about 2000 B.C.E.—were very prolific writers. “They wrote down everything,” says Erle Leichty, the dictionary’s coeditor. “We have more from the Sumerians than from any culture in history before the invention of the printing press.” Some one million tablets have already been unearthed, most of which have been waiting to be deciphered.
Child Victims
• Children “are often the ones to suffer most, when parents fail to get along or have difficulties,” reports the German newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger. An extensive study made in Germany’s state of North Rhine-Westphalia revealed that violence in “normal” families happens more often than is generally supposed. About 30,000 cases of severe child abuse are registered in the Federal Republic of Germany annually, and several hundred children are beaten to death. However, it is estimated that as many as 400,000 children are physically abused each year. In 80 percent of the cases investigated, the one doing the abusing either was related to the victim or came from the circle of family acquaintances. Injuries were often passed off as “a fall” or “proneness to bleeding.”
“Bad Luck” for Animals
• People may think it brings them “good luck” to toss coins to animals at the zoo, but this thoughtless practice brings no “good luck” to the animals themselves. Often they become victims of the coins when they swallow them. Two penguins at a Canadian zoo recently died when coins caught in their throats, and a third had to have surgery to remove a coin from its stomach. “A 35-year-old alligator had to be put to death after refusing to eat for a year,” said an editorial in The Globe and Mail of Toronto. “The post-mortem found 84 pennies, four nickels and three dimes in her stomach. Copper poisoning is suspected.” The editorial concluded: “There are times when people’s ignorance is literally breathtaking.”
Never Shake Infants
• Parents who are angry or upset with a child and are prone to reach for the child and “shake some common sense into him” are advised: Don’t shake the infant! This type of discipline can bring tragic results says Dr. David B. Horner, president of the California Medical Association. “Infants have very weak neck muscles and only gradually develop the strength to control their heavy heads,” he explains. “If they are shaken, their heads wobble rapidly back and forth . . . and it is this vigorous movement of the head which may cause brain damage and bleeding in and on the surface of the brain . . . even to 4-year-olds.” As reported in Parade Magazine, the Shaken Infant Syndrome, as it is called, can cause “brain damage, mental retardation, spinal cord injury, eye damage, even death.”
East-West Relations
• Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union are at their worst since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, with little prospect for improving, according to the annual review of world developments by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The group indicates that current situations increase the “risks that dangerous posturing and miscalculation might draw them into direct conflict.” No improvement was seen due to the combination of the election year in the United States and the new leader in Moscow.
Beavers Best
• When spring flooding regularly erodes the banks of a stream and the surrounding areas are flooded, building a dam to control the problem can be costly—up to $100,000. So when faced with the problem of controlling Wyoming’s Currant Creek, the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) hit upon the perfect solution: Use beavers. Since there were no trees around for the beavers to use, the BLM helped by bringing in aspens and by wiring truck tires together to make a foundation in the stream. The beavers did the rest, the stream has been slowed and now only widens by about 50 feet in the spring. And as silt settled behind the dams, grass and willows were restored along the banks—all at a cost of less than $3,000. Now officials are planning to use beavers to restore the ecological balance along streams in other states.
Reducing Cancer Risk
• Recent studies have shown that the risk of certain kinds of cancer can be drastically reduced by simple dietary changes. One study showed the incidence of cancer of the esophagus to be greatly reduced by good nutrition alone. Another showed that the risk of cancer of the mouth and pharynx could be reduced by increased fruit and vegetable consumption. “The dietary patterns that substantially reduced risks in these studies did not require the use of high-dosage food or vitamin supplements,” said Regina Ziegler of the National Cancer Institute. “A moderate increase in consumption of certain common food groups was all that was necessary.” Studies are now under way to evaluate the role of diet in other types of cancer.
Bloodless Surgery for Infants
• “‘Bloodless’ open-heart surgery, originally developed for adult members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” reports the medical journal Cardiovascular News, “now has been safely adapted for use in delicate cardiac procedures in infants and children.” The techniques developed were tried on 48 pediatric patients, aged three months to eight years, in correcting a variety of heart defects. “All 48 patients tolerated the procedure well and, in comparison to conventional surgery, the bloodless technique resulted in less blood loss and less strain on the kidneys and lungs,” says the report, and “renal function proved to be statistically better in the patients undergoing the bloodless procedure.” The technique has been adopted now as routine procedure for pediatric patients.
Pope Video Star
• Anyone who can arrange a private audience with the pope can now have a videotape of the event. According to Parade Magazine, for an agreed fee a CTV (Centro Televisivo Vaticano) crew “will film your arrival in Rome; your entrance into the Vatican, with its picturesque Swiss Guards saluting you smartly; and . . . your audience with John Paul II.” Other video cassettes that can be purchased include the 1983 visit of the pope to Lourdes and one called “The Pardon,” showing the pope’s visit with the man who shot him, Ali Agca, in a Rome jail. “Plans are also under way,” says Parade Magazine, “to videotape the Pope’s Wednesday services for the general public and to sell souvenir video cassettes the following morning to those who attend.”
Now 1,785 Languages!
• That is the number of languages that the Bible has been published in up to the end of 1983, according to an announcement by the UBS (United Bible Societies). This is 24 more languages than the preceding year. The figure of 1,785 is broken down this way: The whole Bible—283 languages; the “New Testament”—572 languages; various individual Bible books—930 languages.
Eyeing Each Other
• Feeling that educational standards in American schools should be raised, critics of the American educational system have been admiring the stricter Japanese system. At the same time, Japanese educators have been casting an approving eye on the more relaxed American schooling. As Dr. Ernest L. Boyer, head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in the United States, said: “We’re impressed by [Japan’s] clear standards and tough curriculum, and their systematic evaluation and close community support.” On the other hand, he said, “they’re looking for ways to free themselves from restrictions we seem to admire.” The New York Times reported that Japanese educators, worried about the effects of the intense pressures of their national tests on the children, have urged a relaxation of the tough requirements; while those in the United States, which lacks a system of national measurement, are calling for more tests and greater rigor in their schools. The quest, said Dr. Boyer, is for a better balance between the two.
Saving the Environment
• International scientists and scholars, following a conference sponsored by the World Resource Institute, issued a statement calling for the nations to work together to protect the earth’s biological systems and environment. As reported in The New York Times, they declared: “The era we are entering is new in human experience in that for the first time the human species has the capability to alter the environment on a global scale and within the span of a single generation.” The statement outlined goals necessary to stabilize the global environment and ensure continuance of the earth’s natural resources, warning that “if we remain inactive, whether through pessimism or complacency, we shall only make certain the darkness that many fear.”
posted by Katherine at 10:47 AM
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