BHUBANESWAR, India, Mar 13 , 2010 (IPS) - A four-year-old landmark law that was supposed to bring profound changes in the lives of India's tribal and forest-dwelling peoples has failed to deliver on that promise. According to activists and government officials alike, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act - better known as the Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006 - has remained nothing more than ink on paper as general confusion, corruption, and an intransigent forest department complicate the already feeble efforts to implement it. "Despite being a complicated law, no substantial step is even now underway to increase ground-level awareness among revenue and forest department personnel and village-level committees (the base level nodal agency to process the land claims)," says Tanushree Das of the Bhubaneswar-based non-government organisation Vasundhara. "Every level is still floundering." "The government's handling of community or village forest land claims is a complete failure," adds Sheikh Sahajahan Bari, who works for the non- government organisation Pragati in tribal-dominated Koraput district. "The rules governing FRA were notified more than two years back, in January 2008. (Yet) the concerned officials themselves still remain unclear on them," said Bari, who took part in a March gathering here of some 600 grassroots women leaders and activists from Orissa's 30 districts to discuss forest land and rights issues.
BAGHDAD, Mar 12, 2010 (IPS) - Under Saddam Hussein, women in government got a year's maternity leave; that is now cut to six months. Under the Personal Status Law in force since Jul. 14, 1958, when Iraqis overthrew the British-installed monarchy, Iraqi women had most of the rights that Western women do.Now they have Article 2 of the Constitution: "Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation." Sub-head A says "No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam." Under this Article the interpretation of women's rights is left to religious leaders - and many of them are under Iranian influence. "The U.S. occupation has decided to let go of women's rights," Yanar Mohammed who campaigns for women's rights in Iraq says. "Political Islamic groups have taken southern Iraq, are fully in power there, and are using the financial support of Iran to recruit troops and allies. The financial and political support from Iran is why the Iraqis in the south accept this, not because the Iraqi people want Islamic law." With the new law has come the new lawlessness. Nora Hamaid, 30, a graduate from Baghdad University, has now given up the career she dreamt of. "I completed my studies before the invaders arrived because there was good security and I could freely go to university," Hamaid tells IPS. Now she says she cannot even move around freely, and worries for her children every day. "I mean every day, from when they depart to when they return from school, for fear of abductions." There is 25 percent representation for women in parliament, but Sabria says "these women from party lists stand up to defend their party in the parliament, not for women's rights." For women in Iraq, the invasion is not over.
Her heart is all but broken. Dr Sybille Schnehage was the driving force behind one of the most successful aid projects in Afghanistan. She has earned the respect of Afghans of all political persuasions. But, betrayed by one of her closest friends and business associates, who used to call her 'Mother', her life has become a nightmare. Dr Schnehage began her aid work in Afghanistan in 1994, during the civil war that followed the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989. She continued it when the Taliban were in power. Dr Schnehage was so well-respected that even the Taliban allowed local girls to attend the schools she had established in the rural northern province of Kunduz. She still has an official permit for the schoolgirls, signed by the Taliban leadership in Kandahar City.
Her heart is all but broken. Dr Sybille Schnehage was the driving force behind one of the most successful aid projects in Afghanistan. She has earned the respect of Afghans of all political persuasions. But, betrayed by one of her closest friends and business associates, who used to call her 'Mother', her life has become a nightmare.
Dr Schnehage began her aid work in Afghanistan in 1994, during the civil war that followed the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989. She continued it when the Taliban were in power. Dr Schnehage was so well-respected that even the Taliban allowed local girls to attend the schools she had established in the rural northern province of Kunduz. She still has an official permit for the schoolgirls, signed by the Taliban leadership in Kandahar City.
Some of Mr Young's papers are accessible from the Medscape library online. Below is an excerpt of an article summarizing a conference on design bias typified by observational studies (trolling for correlation), including Suresh Moolgavkar from the University of Washington, Berkeley's Juliet P. Shaffer, and Stanley Young from the National Institute of Statistical Sciences.
Young noted, by the time you reach 61 tests, there's a 95 percent chance that you'll get a significant result at random. And, let's face it--researchers want to see a significant result, so there's a strong, unintentional bias towards trying different tests until something pops out. Young went on to describe a study, published in JAMA, that was a multiple testing train wreck: exposures to 275 chemicals were considered, 32 health outcomes were tracked, and 10 demographic variables were used as controls. That was about 8,800 different tests, and as many as 9 million ways of looking at the data once the demographics were considered. The problem with models Both Young and Moolgavkar then discussed the challenges of building a statistical model. Young focused on how the models are intended to help eliminate bias. Items like demographic information often correlate with risks of specific health outcomes, and researchers need to adjust for those when attempting to identify the residual risk associated with any other factors. As Young pointed out, however, you're never going to know all the possible risk factors, so there will always be error that ends up getting lumped in with whatever you're testing... It's pretty obvious that these factors create a host of potential problems, but Young provided the best measure of where the field stands. In a survey of the recent literature, he found that 95 percent of the results of observational studies on human health had failed replication when tested using a rigorous, double blind trial. So, how do we fix this? The consensus seems to be that we simply can't rely on the researchers to do it. As Shaffer noted, experimentalists who produce the raw data want it to generate results, and the statisticians do what they can to help them find them. The problems with this are well recognized within the statistics community, but they're loath to engage in the sort of self-criticism that could make a difference. (The attitude, as Young described it, is "We're both living in glass houses, we both have bricks.") Read more...
Young went on to describe a study, published in JAMA, that was a multiple testing train wreck: exposures to 275 chemicals were considered, 32 health outcomes were tracked, and 10 demographic variables were used as controls. That was about 8,800 different tests, and as many as 9 million ways of looking at the data once the demographics were considered.
The problem with models
Both Young and Moolgavkar then discussed the challenges of building a statistical model. Young focused on how the models are intended to help eliminate bias. Items like demographic information often correlate with risks of specific health outcomes, and researchers need to adjust for those when attempting to identify the residual risk associated with any other factors. As Young pointed out, however, you're never going to know all the possible risk factors, so there will always be error that ends up getting lumped in with whatever you're testing...
It's pretty obvious that these factors create a host of potential problems, but Young provided the best measure of where the field stands. In a survey of the recent literature, he found that 95 percent of the results of observational studies on human health had failed replication when tested using a rigorous, double blind trial. So, how do we fix this?
The consensus seems to be that we simply can't rely on the researchers to do it. As Shaffer noted, experimentalists who produce the raw data want it to generate results, and the statisticians do what they can to help them find them. The problems with this are well recognized within the statistics community, but they're loath to engage in the sort of self-criticism that could make a difference. (The attitude, as Young described it, is "We're both living in glass houses, we both have bricks.")
Read more...
Cruiser is a trained sniffer.
Cruiser had been invited because the mother had found a dead bedbug floating in the bath of one child the night before, and she wanted to make sure, if there was an infestation, that it didn't travel to their new home. The house next door had had a problem, she said, and she knew bedbugs travel easily through walls. All this was related to Mr. Ecker, while Oscar Rincon, his colleague, waited outside with Cruiser. "I don't want to know the details," Mr. Rincon said later, lest the knowledge affect his body language and interfere with the dog's inspection.
"I don't want to know the details," Mr. Rincon said later, lest the knowledge affect his body language and interfere with the dog's inspection.
J. Crew violated the city's human rights law, said Irene Tung of the group, which has filed a complaint with the state attorney general's office. Read more...
