Whazzup?

2006-09-11T18:10:00.000+08:00

MY LIFE

I am from Muar, Johor. I received my primary and secondary education in Muar and Kuala Pilah, N.Sembilan, respectively. Then I furthered my study in ITM Shah Alam (now known as UiTM). I enrolled for the American Degree Program in Mechanical Engineering. After completing 1st and 2nd year, I continued my study at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA - 80 km from Chicago, The Windy City. I stayed in US for about 4 years. It is a valuable and an unforgettable experience in my life. I took the opportunity to do traveling during the semester break. There are 50 States in US and I managed to visit 48 of them. It was costly, but worth it. Staying in US has taught me to be independent and also have increased my self-confident and self-esteem because I have to take care of myself and mingle with the Americans. After graduation, I had the opportunity to go to UK. I visited the whole Great Britain. I also took time to travel to France. It was 3-hour from London by using a bullet train (the English call it The Tube). After that, I came back to Malaysia and joined the Royal Malaysian Police. I thank to God for everything He has planned for me. Enjoy my Weblog!

2006-09-11T17:25:00.000+08:00

FDA Approves Hearts Devices

A Massachusetts company received federal approval Tuesday to sell up to 4,000 artificial hearts a year, though the number of devices implanted annually will likely be far smaller. The hearts would be used only in patients who are close to death and have no other treatment options. The Food and Drug Administration granted Abiomed a humanitarian exemption allowing it to sell the devices, agency spokeswoman Susan Bro said. The actual number of the devices, called the AbioCor, to be implanted likely will be small -- between just 25 and 50 a year, Bro said. So far, the artificial heart has been tested in only 14 men. Two died from the operation, and another never regained consciousness. The rest survived only an average of five months, with one exception: a man who lived 17 months, until the mechanical heart wore out.

The company said earlier that it would begin implanting the artificial hearts at five hospitals around the country, once doctor training is complete. The devices are fully contained within the chest, with no outside wires. Abiomed is targeting men -- but not precluding women -- with heart failure who are too sick for a heart transplant, have exhausted other options and are likely to die within a month. The current device is too large for about 90 percent of U.S. women and many men. The company is developing a smaller version.

In 2005, an FDA panel of outside experts voted against recommending Abiomed be given permission to sell the device in limited numbers. At the time, the experts expressed concern that many AbioCor recipients suffered severe strokes, some fatal, that compromised their final weeks. The company has since redesigned the the cuff of the device to prevent two bars from coming into contact with human tissue. That contact was believed to be the cause of the strokes in the first test patients, said Michael R. Minogue, the company's president and chief executive officer. The company also hopes to implant the hearts in patients who can be treated with blood-thinning drugs, further reducing the risk of stroke, Minogue said in a recent interview.

"We want to focus on getting the right patients and getting them home, so whatever that number is, that is what it will be," Minogue said. The implant is expected to cost about $250,000. It is unclear whether insurance would cover it. Abiomed hopes eventually 10 medical centers would be equipped to implant the hearts. The devices themselves now last about 18 months, or longer than the patients receiving them can be expected to live. On Tuesday, Minogue said the first surgeries to implant the artificial hearts would take place in six to eight months. "It's allowed us to move forward, to make science fiction science fact," Minogue said of the FDA action. "We have a product called AbioCor that allows us to remove a person's heart and keep them alive."

The electrical current to power the device passes through the skin, without the need for wires, from a battery belt worn by the patient. The belt also can be plugged in. The device's internal batteries can go more than an hour without recharging, allowing patients to shower.

Associated Press

2006-09-11T12:50:00.000+08:00

9/11: Birth of the Blog

When the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, the web changed with it. While phone networks and big news sites struggled to cope with heavy traffic, many survivors and spectators turned to online journals to share feelings, get information or detail their whereabouts. It was raw, emotional and new -- and many commentators now remember it as a key moment in the birth of the blog.

When four planes were hijacked on a sunny fall morning, easy-to-use blogging services were still few and far between. Yet many who witnessed the horror of the attacks firsthand took to the keyboard to talk with the world. Horrified Americans used e-mail, instant messages, any available communication tool. But weblogs meant large audiences, not just friends and family, could read those stories from the scene. "I have a scrap of paper that flew onto my roof," wrote New Yorker Anthony Hecht. "Typewritten and handwritten numbers in the millions. A symbol of our tragedy. It smells like fire."

Many bloggers strayed from their normal writing beats to produce a rolling news service comprising links to materials and tidbits gathered by friends. Dave Winer, author of one of the earliest and most popular weblogs, Scripting News, used his site to post one-line news flashes, New York webcam stills and links to witness accounts. The chaos was "a galvanizing point for the blogging world," said Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media. "We had this explosion of personal, public testimony and some of it was quite powerful," Gillmor said. "I remembered that old cliche that journalists write the first rough draft of history. Well now bloggers were writing the first draft."

Five years on, the outpouring of emotion was a signpost to the emerging grassroots media revolution, said social media consultant Matthew Yeomans, who remembers his Brooklyn neighborhood being showered with debris from the World Trade Center. "Back in 2001, blogs were still very much the geek toy of the Slashdot set," he said. "(But) this collective tragedy demanded a forum to be shared by people all around the world who wanted to talk about what happened with anyone because it was the only way of making any sense of it. Were it to happen again, blogs and social networks would play an enormously cathartic role." The vivid events live on in countless blog posts. NYC Bloggers, a directory of hundreds of New Yorkers' blogs, continues to link to dozens of articles for posterity, while the September 11 Digital Archive project maintains a historical catalog of noteworthy blog posts among 130,000 e-mails, audio recordings, video clips and photographs documenting the event.

This year, another project is recruiting 2,996 volunteer bloggers to post individual memorials celebrating the life of each 9/11 victim. Since 9/11, the rise of "warbloggers" and online political commentators like Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit has been, in many cases, a direct response to the U.S. government's post-9/11 foreign policy, kickstarting a culture of questioning, poking and prodding from which no public figure is safe. But the volume of another attack, should one occur, could be amplified still further by newer technologies. The growth in ownership of cell-phone cameras since 9/11 meant that commuters' contributions to coverage of last year's southeast Asia tsunami and the July 7 terrorist attacks on London tube trains were more pictorial and more immediate; eyewitness accounts could be sent to moblog websites without having to find a desk or a docking station.

"Camera phones have changed the landscape," said Alfie Dennen, proprietor of the moblogUK service, which received some of the first dramatic images from members at London's 7/7 bomb scene. "Where 9/11 was covered explosively in the blogosphere, 7/7 set the bedrock for wider acceptance of the value in citizen media," he said. "It was definitely the point at which ordinary people with camera phones became the news." Had the feature been more widely available in 2001, Sept. 11 may now be remembered by even more iconic images. Dan Gillmor said: "It wouldn't change the basic horror of it (but), if the people on those planes who were calling their families were also sending video, we would have a very different understanding of that day."

By Robert Andrews

2006-09-11T11:13:00.000+08:00

A Small Step for Robotkind:
A Japanese quadraplegic climbs one of Europe's highest mountains, with a little help from a friend and his robotic exoskeleton

While machines in movies like The Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey are portrayed as threats to humanity, the Japanese are more inclined to see our shiny metal friends as forces for good. Last week Seiji Uchida, who has been paralyzed from the neck down since 1983, came within 150 m of summiting the 4,164-m Breithorn, in the Swiss Alps, with the help of a robotic power suit named HAL (for Hybrid Assistive Limb, not to be confused with the homicidal HAL 9000 computer in 2001). Starting at 3,800 m, he hitched a ride up the mountain on the back of his friend, climber Takeshi Matsumoto, who wore the computerized exoskeleton built by Japanese tech firm Cyberdyne (not to be confused with the fictional Cyberdyne Systems, which created the killer robots of the Terminator movies). The suit mimics a user's motions by detecting the bioelectrical nerve signals that control muscles, and its servo-motors can nearly double a person's strength. After earning its mountaineering stripes, HAL's mission will be to assist the growing ranks of Japan's elderly in daily life. Maybe the rest of us should cut the machines some slack.

By BRYAN WALSH

2006-08-09T17:35:00.000+08:00

Bad News Comes in Small Bytes:
Are we forgetting how to be honest in person?

Have we lost the art of having difficult conversations face to face?

Consider how you last heard some stinging bad news. Did the bearer of that news have the courage to tell you in person, or perhaps did you get the word by voicemail? Or how about the last time you declined an invitation — did you resort to email, so you didn't have to see the glance of disappointment on the inviter's face?

Increasingly, it seems that we rely on technology to mediate socially uncomfortable conversations. Whether it's our shyness at meeting new people, or our queasiness when having to deliver the honest truth, we've figured out that having a tech assist is easier than having a straight spine.

Look at how technology is freeing parents from having to be the bad cop all the time. We use television as an alarm clock for our children: when the show's over, it's time for bed, or time for school. We don't have to be the bossy parent who enforces bedtimes — we get to be the cool parent who lets his kid watch a show. Now there's a DVD filtering device called Clearplay, which edits out violence, sex, and foul language on the fly. You no longer have to be the meanie who puts his foot down with a stern, "You're too young for that movie." Let them watch whatever they choose, knowing Clearplay's got your back. And when they do get older, no longer does your teenager have to shamefully admit where he's been all night. Thanks to the GPS tracker in his phone, you already know.

We know someone has to be the disciplinarian, it's just that we all prefer to take the cheerleader role. We've become a society of coddlers. Be it to children, employees, or students, we don't come down hard anymore. At least not in the flesh. But with a gadget in hand, we're merciless.
Over in England, 2,500 employees of an insurance firm were fired by a group text message. The firm wanted everyone to hear the news at the same time, as if that was fairer. Instead, getting the axe by text only made the employees more offended. They looted the firm's offices of computers.

Why does a little technology make it so much easier to be a hard-ass? If you're going to fire someone, why is it easier to fire them with the push of a button than a face-to-face conversation? New research out of Princeton suggests that we actually process moral decisions in a different region of our brain when human contact is eliminated. If we have to confront the person, we process a moral decision in the parts of our brain that govern emotional empathy and social intelligence. If we only have to push a button, we process the decision near our temples, where we do our logical processing. We become dispassionate computers. And jerks.

We've always been warned that the consequence of so much technology is isolation. But perhaps it's isolation from consequences that we seek, because we lack the fortitude to face consequences in real life. In a recent poll from Britain, 54% of women under 25 regularly pretend to be talking on their cell phone in order to keep unfamiliar people from striking up a conversation with them. Now I wonder if my kids are watching television only to avoid having to talk with me.

According to a Microsoft survey, almost 4 out of 5 users report that bad behavior occurs online more than in real life. Half of those polled said it occurs "far more." One theory is that we lose our inhibitions online — as if we've all had four beers, and so we start saying things we don't mean. No doubt that's part of it. But maybe people are actually more honest online — and we prefer it that way.

It's easier to break up with a boyfriend by text message than face him in person; that way, you don't have to suffer through his tears. Just like it's easier to complain about restaurant service online than to tell the waiter there's a fly in the soup. And we enjoy confessing secrets to anonymous web sites visited by total strangers, but we can't admit that same secret to the one person we betrayed.

Thanks to technology, every literary agent can tell every author, "Your book's great." We let Amazon's rating system deliver the truth. Every politician can surround himself with yes men. Only the polls have the courage to say no. We're so accustomed to the watered-down, milquetoast version of news that when someone tells the truth, we're shocked and appalled.

The difference between talking in person and talking via technology is like the difference between an essay question and a True/False question. In face-to-face contact, far more than words are used to communicate. Tone is established, and para-verbal cues register mood. It's a lot harder to tell a convincing lie in person, and it's a lot harder to feign confidence. Rather than learn to manage these moments, we've punted it over to a realm where none of that matters.

In the creations of Hollywood, a person who enforces the rules is often the villain. Think of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or Dean Wormer in Animal House. But in real life, enforcing the rules is actually necessary. So is resisting peer pressure, and learning to speak up in the moment. In real life, you might even have to introduce yourself in person, without first breaking the ice by sending a "MySpace Friend Request."

Social etiquette is apparently just too much work to be bothered with. Saying "no" artfully is old school. Using a little humor to soften the moment is passé. Expressing a little empathy is too time-consuming.

But when you have to tell the truth to someone's face, will you remember how it's done?

By PO BRONSON & ASHLEY MERRYMAN

2006-08-09T10:25:00.000+08:00

Face the Music: How new computers catch deceit

For police officers and poker players, there are few things worse than a cool liar. While most of us have little trouble coming up with a good fib when we need one, no sooner do we start to tell it than we give ourselves away, exhibiting all sorts of facial tics and nervous mannerisms that reveal just how uncomfortable we are with the story we're telling. Truly gifted dissemblers, however, reveal very little of this, lying so easily and skillfully that even the most well-trained eye wouldn't notice a thing. If cops and card players can be fooled, though, it's now possible that another type of sophisticated lie detector can't: the computer.

Scientists at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., have developed a computer system that has learned to read the rapidly changing expressions in a human face and may one day be able to draw conclusions about the emotions behind them. Get such a system out of the lab and into a police station, and the business of lie detection and law enforcement could change for good.
The trick of developing a computer that can understand faces was not to try to replicate the elusive mental processes human beings use to make judgments about one another. Despite the computer's ability to calculate the trajectories of spacecraft or pick the next move in a chess game, the machines have until now been flummoxed by crude recognition tasks that even a baby can perform, often failing to distinguish between a beach ball and a cabbage, to say nothing of picking out a familiar face in a photo album filled with strangers. Such a pattern-recognition talent, says Salk Institute neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski, in whose lab the lie detection work was done, "is a survival skill humans probably had even before they acquired language. For computers, it's a major challenge."

To get around this, the Salk researchers based the design of their face-recognizing computer on the one thing all computers do well: acquiring, storing and analyzing masses of information at lightning speed. In the 1970s, psychologist Paul Ekman and his colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, developed a classification of 46 muscle movements that appear to account for the entire spectrum of human facial expressions. The movements--or action units, as Ekman called them--range from the slight crow's-feet crinkling around the eyes that accompanies a smile to the contraction of forehead muscles that is an integral part of a scowl. "Some of these movements are so difficult that they're impossible to fake unless you're a very skilled actor," says Marian Bartlett, a post-doctoral fellow in Sejnowski's lab.

To help catch these actors in the act of deception, Bartlett scanned pictures of faces into the computer and wrote instructions that taught the machine to recognize six of Ekman's coded movements: the fleeting grimace or scowl, for example, that may precede a liar's counterfeit smile. When the computer was later presented with other, unfamiliar pictures and videotapes, it showed a remarkable ability to apply what it had learned, detecting similar flickers in the new pictures and even outperforming human volunteers who competed with the machine to spot the same telltale twitches.

Of course, identifying facial twitches is not the same as reading states of mind, particularly when the computer can make sense of only half a dozen expressions. But the newly trained machine should get a lot smarter in the not-too-distant future. In the next round of experiments, the scientists plan to expand the computer's recognition skills by teaching it to identify all of the 46 muscle actions in the Ekman catalogue. They will then program the computer to recognize the various combinations of these movements, pouring live video images of human volunteers directly into the machine.

The research at Sejnowski's and other labs could lead to a lie detector more reliable and less intrusive than existing polygraphs, which measure reactions like heartbeat and perspiration that clever subjects can control. Says Bartlett: "It would spot in an instant any facial movement that indicated a conflicting emotion, like a beginning of a scowl quickly covered up by a smile." The CIA is funding a study linking the Salk Institute's efforts with similar work at the University of Pittsburgh.

Where the technology could ultimately lead is difficult to say, but Sejnowski anticipates big things. Ekman often used videotapes to gauge the emotional states of subjects, once detecting a brief flicker of sadness in the face of a patient who later turned out to be suicidal. A computer like Sejnowski's could have made the diagnosis in real time. Farther down the road could be a host of other emotion-measuring computer systems, ranging from smart atms that can shut down if they spot a suspicious patron to television systems that can determine if a finger-wagging politician is telling the truth. Privacy advocates will no doubt have much to say about all this, but the technology may be on the way. "You can be sure it's coming," Sejnowski says flatly. Whether humanity is ready for it is another question.

By FREDERIC GOLDEN La Jolla

2006-08-09T08:00:00.000+08:00

Computers – The High-Tech Health Hazard?

Have u sat down at a computer and been confronted with this sign printed on the keyboard –
“WARNING: Some experts believe that use of any keyboard may cause serious injury”?

What does it mean? The detailed information on the back of the keyboard tells you that working with keyboards can lead to injuries of the hands, wrists, arms, shoulders, neck or back. It then goes to give extensive advice as to how these problems can be avoided, pointing out the benefits of regular breaks away from the keyboard, varied tasks and good keyboard postures.

But why the warning? We are not warned as we go to pick up a pen that writing can give us cramp; or when we start our cars that we might have an accident. What is it about computers that is so different?

What problems can arise from computers?

Most people would guess that a warning sign on a keyboard probably has its roots in historical events and litigation, especially in the USA, and has to do with disorders that are associated with keyboard work. Such disorders are variously referred to as occupational overuse disorders (OOS), cumulative trauma disorders (CTD), upper limb disorders (ULD) or repetition strain injury (RSI).

Disorders caused by keyboard overuse are characterized by pain and dysfunction of the upper limbs and neck. They may settle over time but sometimes do not. Many OSH professionals now believe that these conditions occur not so much because of what we are working with, ie computers, but rather how we work with them.

Friend or Foe?

The relationship that people have with their computers has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they are invaluable tools that have become increasingly powerful, flexible and useful. They have enabled people to do on their own what used to be the job of a multi-skilled team. They have introduced the possibility of higher productivity, less effort, shorter delays, higher expectations of work quality and quantity and instant communication. They can monitor production and therefore the output of individuals and groups. This is the upside.

The downside is a little more subtle and personal. Computers can be absorbing. They are so versatile that they have become necessary to every aspect of our work and sometimes to our leisure activities. The natural mental and physical activity that occur in life are diminished as one very powerful tool is providing us with the means of earning a living, gaining education and qualifications, as well as providing some people with recreation. This dependency flies in the face of the human needs for physical and mental variation in activity.

What is at risk?

Each of the following examples poses significant health risk for the individual.

1. A manager has to produce two reports for tight deadlines. She has to fly overseas for meetings so she takes her laptop in order to keep working on the reports, stay in contact with colleagues by email and keep things rolling in the office. This is her normal work pattern. She suffers from neck pain when she is stressed and tired.

2. A researcher used drawing software for a major research project. He worked on a self-imposed tight deadline. The work was absorbing but technical and fiddly and it took weeks to finalize. Some days, in order to complete different, complex components on time, he worked on the computer all day and into the night, at work and home. Some of his leisure time was spent composing music on an electronic, computerized keyboard. He developed pain and dysfunction of his right wrist, which gradually disappeared when he finished the report and went back to normal work activities.

3. A data entry operator entered information from source documents into a computer. She was an experienced keyboard worker. Her hourly rate of pay depended on how much data she entered, but she had to reach a daily quota established by her employer. She had three formal breaks a day and took additional short breaks.
The productivity rate was calculated on time spent at keyboard rather than on output. The operator was paid by the hour and a small bonus was paid for above-average rates. She achieved or exceeded the required rate most days. There was no limit on overtime and no special provision for additional breaks after normal working hours.
The operator suffered a severe overuse injury in both arms and, after three years, won a court case against her employer.

4. A 10-year-old child a school is required to have a laptop, which she carry in a backpack to and from school. All sort of assignments are completed on it at school and at home. She usually spend time on the internet or watching TV when she has finished her school work. The impact of these activities on the health is unknown so far.

5. An operator handled enquiries from the general public about the products and services of a public utility. The calls included complaints and problems with the service or products. The operator answered queued calls and entered the necessary information into the computer. His supervisor monitored his response times and his telephone technique. If this was not satisfactory, he would be given three warnings before disciplinary action was taken. He was entitled to three formal breaks a day and was provided with ergonomically designed furniture and work environment. He was paid a weekly salary. The operator developed severe neck and shoulder pain, was on modified duties for three months and when he returned to the job, the problems returned. He left the job and claimed compensation.

Health professionals have been rising the alarm about the increasing number of people exposed to the situations described above. Most particularly, they express deep concern about children’s health and problem that might arise in the future.

Articles on work postures and how children should sit at a computer only tinker at the edges of the problem. Developing bodied and minds need regular exercise and play, and they need freedom from carrying heavy loads. This does not mean the children should not work at computers, but such work needs to be balanced with other activities.

Long hours at a computer in less than optimum circumstances, deadlines, the carrying of laptops and in some cases, paced and highly supervised work all add to the sum total of work demands. Control over the work conditions is variable, but all the people in the above case examples had lost some control over how they worked. Here lies the heart of the problem.

by Barbara McPhee, OH&Services Network, Ryde, New South Wales