Features

CHICAGO –– Social contact and regular exercise are key to ageing well and living a longer life, according to newly presented research.

In fact, feeling extremely lonely can increase an older person’s chances of premature death by 14 per cent, an impact nearly as strong as that of a disadvantaged socioeconomic status, according to John Cacioppo, psychology professor at the University of Chicago.

He noted that a meta-analysis of several studies published in 2010 showed that social isolation had twice the impact on the risk of death as obesity.

Cacioppo presented the findings Sunday at an annual conference in Chicago of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The research carried out on a group of 20,000 people revealed adverse health effects of feeling alone, including sleep problems, high blood pressure, impaired immune cells and depression.

“Retiring to Florida to live in a warmer climate among strangers is not necessarily a good thing if it means you are disconnected from people who mean the most for you,” Cacioppo said.

Often, loneliness is accompanied by a sedentary lifestyle, which can significantly weaken one’s health.

Simple exercise such as walking regularly at a good pace can’t just cut the risk of cardiovascular and Alzheimer’s disease by 50 per cent — it can also clearly slow down the normal ageing process of an older person’s brain, Kirk Erickson of the University of Pittsburgh told AFP.

At the conference, the assistant professor of psychology presented new details of a study published in 2011 that involved 120 people aged 65 and older.

Older brain ‘highly modifiable’

With age, the brain shrinks, he said. Physical activity, however, helps improve its overall functioning and, in particular, increases the volume of the hippocampus by 2 per cent, which reverses cerebral ageing by one to two years and boosts mental capacities.

“For one, this research has demonstrated the brain remains highly modifiable late in adulthood,” Erickson said.

“Even though the brain shrinks and declines tend to happen, it does not seem to be as inevitable... and exercise seems to be a great way to take advantage of this natural capacity for brain plasticity.”

What’s more, it’s apparently not necessary to do a lot of exercise to get that result — a “modest amount” is all it takes, he said.

However, he acknowledged, “there is still a lot to learn. We don’t really know very much about how much is exactly needed.”

“Even though we have learned a lot I have to say we still have a long way to go,” he added.

“But that being said, physical activity seems to be one of the most promising approaches for positively influencing brain health in late adulthood.”

According to the Pew Research Centre, the baby boomer generation began to turn 65 on January 1, 2011, with 10,000 doing so each day until 2030, said Cacioppo.

“This has been called the silver tsunami,” he said.

Some see an ageing population as inevitably one with greater dementia and poor health, as predicted 15 to 20 years ago, he added.

“But in fact we see a decline in disability rather than an increase in part because” of medical advances and people “starting to take better cares of themselves”.

Still, a sedentary lifestyle rather than one filled with physical activity is the norm in old age, he said.

“But we have new information about how to better age.”

COLORADO — The doctors were out of ideas to help five-year-old Charlotte Figi.

Suffering from a rare genetic disorder, she had as many as 300 grand mal seizures a week, used a wheelchair, went into repeated cardiac arrest and could barely speak. As a last resort, her mother began calling medical marijuana shops.

Two years later, Charlotte is largely seizure-free and able to walk, talk and feed herself after taking oil infused with a special pot strain. Her recovery has inspired both a name for the strain of marijuana she takes that is bred not to make users high — Charlotte’s Web — and brought an influx of families with seizure-stricken children to Colorado from states that ban the drug.

“She can walk, talk; she ate chilli in the car,” her mother, Paige Figi, said as her dark-haired daughter strolled through a cavernous greenhouse full of marijuana plants that will later be broken down into their anti-seizure components and mixed with olive oil so patients can consume them. “So I’ll fight for whoever wants this.”

Doctors warn there is no proof that Charlotte’s Web is effective, or even safe.

In the frenzy to find the drug, there have been reports of non-authorised suppliers offering bogus strains of Charlotte’s Web. In one case, a doctor said, parents were told they could replicate the strain by cooking marijuana in butter. Their child went into heavy seizures.

“We don’t have any peer-reviewed, published literature to support it,” Dr Larry Wolk, the state health department’s chief medical officer, said of Charlotte’s Web.

Still, more than 100 families have relocated since Charlotte’s story first began spreading last summer, according to Figi and her husband, and the five brothers who grow the drug and sell it at cost through a nonprofit. The relocated families have formed a close-knit group in Colorado Springs, the law-and-order town where the dispensary selling the drug is located. They meet for lunch, support sessions and hikes.

“It’s the most hope lots of us have ever had,” said Holli Brown, whose nine-year-old daughter, Sydni, began speaking in sentences and laughing since moving to Colorado from Kansas City and taking the marijuana strain.

Amy Brooks-Kayal, vice president of the American Epilepsy Society, warned that a few miraculous stories may not mean anything — epileptic seizures come and go for no apparent reason — and scientists do not know what sort of damage Charlotte’s Web could be doing to young brains.

“Until we have that information, as physicians, we can’t follow our first creed, which is do no harm,” she said, suggesting that parents relocate so their children can get treated at one of the nation’s 28 top-tier paediatric epilepsy centres rather than move to Colorado.

However, the society urges more study of pot’s possibilities. The families using Charlotte’s Web, as well as the brothers who grow it, say they want the drug rigorously tested, and their efforts to ensure its purity have won them praise from sceptics like Wolk.

For many, Charlotte’s story was something they couldn’t ignore.

Charlotte is a twin, but her sister, Chase, doesn’t have Dravet’s syndrome, which kills kids before they reach adulthood.

In early 2012, it seemed Charlotte would be added to that grim roster. Her vital signs flat-lined three times, leading her parents to begin preparing for her death. They even signed an order for doctors not to take heroic measures to save her life again should she go into cardiac arrest.

Her father, Matt, a former Green Beret who took a job as a contractor working in Afghanistan, started looking online for ways to help his daughter and thought they should give pot a try. But there was a danger: Marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient, THC, can trigger seizures.

The drug also contains another chemical known as CBD that may have seizure-fighting properties. In October, the Food and Drug Administration approved testing a British pharmaceutical firm’s marijuana-derived drug that is CBD-based and has all its THC removed.

Few dispensaries stock CBD-heavy weed that doesn’t get you high. Then Paige Figi found Joel Stanley.

One of 11 siblings raised by a single mother and their grandmother in Oklahoma, Stanley and four of his brothers had found themselves in the medical marijuana business after moving to Colorado. Almost as an experiment, they bred a low-THC, high-CBD plant after hearing it could fight tumours.

Stanley went to the Figis’ house with reservations about giving pot to a child.

“But she had done her homework,” Stanley said of Paige Figi. “She wasn’t a pot activist or a hippy, just a conservative mom.”

Now, Stanley and his brothers provide the marijuana to nearly 300 patients and have a waiting list of 2,000.

SAN JOSE, California — It used to be that “hacking” was just a type of crime, a computer break-in. But today, the term is also part of a growing — and perfectly legal — mainstay of the tech sector.

Computer programming competitions known as “hackathons” have spread like viruses in recent years as ways for geeks, nerds and designers to get together to eat pizza, lose sleep and create something new.

The formal, marathon group brainstorming sessions are focused on everything from developing lucrative apps to using computer code to solve the world’s problems. This year a record 1,500 hackathons are planned around the globe, up from just a handful in 2010.

“A hackathon is the fastest way to actually do something about an idea,” said Nima Adelkhani, organiser of the weekend-long Hack for Peace in the Middle East competition in San Francisco this month.

Law enforcement hasn’t abandoned the term. Dozens of federally convicted “hackers” are serving prison sentences for computer fraud and other cyber crimes. And the Justice Department’s cyber crime budget this year is $9 million to target offences that include “hacking.”

But the new uses have popped up with increasing frequency since a pair of tech events in 1999 where developers worked together to write programmes. Yahoo gets recognition for the first official hackathon in 2005. And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been largely credited with helping broaden the definitions by urging his staff to “hack” by “building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.”

A new Facebook option that went live Thursday allowing users more than 50 ways to identify their gender beyond male and female was conceived during a company hackathon four months ago.

This month, the first global hackathon for Black Male Achievement was held in Oakland, California. Music Hack Day is coming in Tokyo and Hackomotive competitors will develop apps in Santa Monica, California, that make it easier to buy and sell cars.

During these sorts of tech-heavy, weekend competitions, teams of computer programmers, software engineers and developers huddle over monitors for hours, working up new apps for smartphones or other devices. A panel of judges selects winners, and prizes are usually awarded.

“Developers are a rare breed where they get paid a lot of money to do this job during the week, and they enjoy it so much they want to do it more on the weekend,” said Jon Gotfriend, who’s been going to hackathons for more than three years.

As such events have become more popular, a set of rules has coalesced. Teams are typically made up of a handful of people. Designs, ideas and even mock-ups can be worked on in advance, but everyone starts writing code at the same time. And teams own whatever they come up with.

The opening stages of a hackathon can be exciting as challenges, prizes, teams and judges are introduced. But within hours there’s a quiet buzz and lots of keyboard clicking as programmers make their ideas a reality.

Participants arrive with sleeping bags, deodorant, toothbrushes, pillows and laptops. By morning’s wee hours, pizza, energy drinks and bean bag chairs are in hot demand. Candy of all kinds is consumed, and by the time the buzzer goes off after 24 or 48 hours, most participants are dishevelled and a little loopy.

Like the tech industry itself, hackathon participants are mostly men. But some organisers are trying to change that.

Introduced one year after its coupe sister, in 2011 in entry level guise and joined by the featured and upgraded GT version in 2013, the Mercedes-Benz AMG SLS63 Roadster nears the end of the road as production is set to cease this year, to give way for an anticipated smaller sports car. While the new model is expected to be a more powerful and modern turbocharged rival for the Jaguar F-Type and Porsche 911, the outgoing SLS is flamboyant grand touring supercar with a gloriously potent large displacement naturally aspirated V8, at its most glamorously nostalgic in its rag-top Roadster version.

Classic proportions

While the expected departure of the SLS63 Roadster will still leave Mercedes with a big and brutally powerful grand touring roadster in the AMG SL63, the SLS is nevertheless a more sporting, viscerally inspired and special machine, with both its naturally aspirated power plant and cloth roof — rather than twin-turbo engine and folding hardtop — separating it. However, what distinguishes the SLS Roadster is its sense of style and its classic sports car architecture, the former of which is partly dependent on the latter’s front-mid engine and rear transaxle gearbox configuration, which allows for and necessitates its distinctively long and slinky low bonnet.

Paying homage to the classic 1950s 300SL Coupe and Roadster, the SLS63 GT is low and wide with a distinctly rearwards cabin and one of the longest snouts in the car business. Though its proportions are classic and its slim but wide one-slat wire-mesh grille certainly hark to the past, the SLS isn’t an overtly “retro” design, and in Roadster guise trades the coupe’s trademark up-swinging “gullwing” doors for regular doors. With low and rakish windscreen, cabin-rear design and short and low boot, the Roadster may not be as dramatic as the Coupe, but is probably the prettier and more glamorous of the two

Consistent urge

Set low and far back in its bonnet, the SLS’ massive 6.2-litre V8 engine is one of the world’s great engines, with consistent abundance, progressive character and high-rev precision. Soon to be discontinued too, in favour of lower revving and less charismatic but more powerful and efficient forced induction engines across the board, the SLS’ big naturally aspirated V8 was only introduced in the mid-2000s. AMG’s first fully in-house developed design, the high revving 6.2 allowed one to more precisely dial in power for better handling characteristics in not un-sticking the rear tires too easily or unintentionally, and features a long-legged range of charisma and aggressive acoustics.

An upgraded version for most markets and a replacement for the regular SLS63, at the heart of the GT version is a 20BHP power hike, which raises output to 583BHP at 6,800rpm, while torque remains the same at 479lb/ft at 4,750rpm. With crackling immediacy, the GT Roadster launches off-the-line without delay and rips through the revs with a consistent and seemingly never-ending urgency. Responsive and abundant, the GT Roadster’s large displacement means that its eagerness and throttle precision don’t sacrifice brutal low- and mid-range flexibility, and its feels prodigiously powerful at virtually any speed or gear, as it briskly accumulates speed.

Bass and brawn

At 1,735kg, the GT Roadster is marginally heavier than the 1,695kg Coupe and with traction being paramount in translating its staggering power into off-the-line acceleration, its 3.7-second 0-100km/h headline acceleration figures — and 320km/h top speed — don’t differ. Brawny, bassy and bellowing, the GT Roadster’s deep and rich audios are aggressively insistent, and grow to sustained WW2 fighter plane-like howls at speed. In fact, even with the Roadster’s fabric roof, the 6.2’s charismatic acoustics have a greater and more visceral presence. With a more enjoyably textured soundtrack, one better appreciates exhaust pops and crackles than in the hardtop Coupe.

With the gearbox located on the rear axle and a race-style dry sump design for more consistent oil lubrication through strong lateral g-forces and compact size, the GT Roadster’s engine is set low and far behind the front axle for improved weight distribution and a low centre of gravity. With revised shift points, the SLS63 GT’s seven-speed automatic gearbox felt smoother and more concise in its’ automatic Sport mode, while Sport+ mode drove in a highly aggressive fashion, holding gears longer and downshifting eagerly, to keep the engine raring to go. Manual shifts through the steering-mounted paddle shifters also seemed quicker and more responsive.

Viscerally charged

Set low and far back in the GT Roadster’s hunkered down cabin, one’s view line includes an upright leather-bound dashboard with classic inspired cross-hair air vents, clear instrumentation and the thick contoured sports steering wheel and to the long bonnet beyond, whose length one adapts to when negotiating tight and quick slaloms. During slaloms the GT Roadster turned in crisply, with quick steering, taut body control, precise throttle control and good rear grip allowing one to weave through briskly. However, driven more with less finesse and more outright aggression, the immensely powerful GT Roadster can easily break rear traction and grip to set off its electronic stability controls.

Driven too aggressively the GT Roadster’s electronic stability controls are effective at keeping things in check, but it is far more entertaining and rewarding to drive on the edge of its mechanical grip limits. Driven at the Yas Marina Formula One circuit in Abu Dhabi, the GT version however seemed to benefit from less intrusive electronic stability controls than the regular SLS63, while revised adaptive suspension rates kept it taut and poised through corners. A more viscerally charged experience than the more refined and rigid GT Coupe, the Roadster felt a little more thrilling through tight hard corners and on high speed straights.

SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 6.2-litre, dry sump V8-cylinders

Bore x stroke: 102.2 x 94.6mm

Compression ratio: 11.3:1

Valve-train: 32-valve, DOHC, variable timing

Gearbox: rear-mounted 7-speed MCT wet-clutch automatic, rear-wheel-drive

Gear ratios: 1st 3.4:1; 2nd 2.19:1; 3rd 1.63:1; 4th 1.29:1; 5th 1.03:1; 6th 0.84:1; 7th 0.72:1

Reverse / final drive ratios: 2.79:1 / 3.67:1

0-100 km/h: 3.7-seconds

Maximum speed: 320km/h

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 583 (591) [435] @ 6,800rpm

Specific power: 93.9BHP/litre

Power-to-weight: 336BHP/ton

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 479 (650) @ 4,750rpm

Specific torque: 104.7Nm/litre

Fuel consumption, urban / extra-urban / combined: 19.9 / 9.3 / 13.2 litres/100km

CO2 emissions, combined: 308g/km

Fuel tank capacity: 85-litres

Luggage volume: 173-litres

Length: 4,638mm

Width: 1,939mm

Height: 1,262mm

Wheelbase: 2,680mm

Track width, F/R: 1,682 / 1,653mm

Kerb weight: 1,735kg

Aerodynamic drag co-efficient: 0.36

Steering: power assisted, rack and pinion

Turning circle: 11.9-meters

Suspension, F&R: Double wishbones

Brakes, F&R: Ventilated discs

Tyres, F/R: 265/35R19 / 295/30R20

NEW YORK –– More test-tube babies were born in the United States in 2012 than ever before, and they constituted a higher percentage of total births than at any time since the technology was introduced in the 1980s, according to a report released on Monday.

The annual report was from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), an organisation of medical professionals.

SART’s 379 member clinics, which represent more than 90 per cent of the infertility clinics in the country, reported that in 2012 they performed 165,172 procedures involving in vitro fertilisation (IVF), in which an egg from the mother-to-be or a donor is fertilised in a lab dish. They resulted in the birth of 61,740 babies.

That was about 2,000 more IVF babies than in 2011. With about 3.9 million babies born in the United States in 2012, the IVF newborns accounted for just over 1.5 per cent of the total, more than ever before.

The growing percentage reflects, in part, the increasing average age at which women give birth for the first time, since fertility problems become more common as people age. The average age of first-time mothers is now about 26 years; it was 21.4 years in 1970.

Although the rising number of test-tube babies suggests that the technology has become mainstream, critics of IVF point out that the numbers, particularly the success rates, mask wide disparities.

“It’s important for people to understand that women over 35 have the highest percentage of failures,” said Miriam Zoll, author of the 2013 book “Cracked Open: Liberty, Fertility and the Pursuit of High Tech Babies”.

Earlier data from SART showed that the percentage of attempts that result in live births is 10 times higher in women under 35 than in women over 42. And in the older women fewer than half the IVF pregnancies result in a live birth.

Zoll added, “these treatments have consistently failed two-thirds of the time since 1978,” when the first test tube baby was born in England.

After years in which IVF physicians were criticised for transferring multiple embryos to increase the odds of pregnancy — because that sometimes resulted in the birth of triplets and even higher multiples, often with dangerously low birth weights and other health risks — infertility clinics transferred fewer embryos per cycle in 2012 than 2011. As a result, the number of twin and triplet births were both down.

LONDON — The artworks at a new gallery in London’s Shoreditch are not for sale, and their creator plans to destroy them when the show is over. Phlegm, known only by his pseudonym, did not attend the opening and does not give interviews.

Gallery owner Richard Howard-Griffin plans to pay the rent from sales at other shows. For now, he is providing the first ever gallery space to an artist who has already won recognition in the underground art world and many thousands of followers.

“Phlegm is immensely respected around the world,” after more than a decade of painting enormous urban murals across Europe and in the United States, Howard-Griffin said.

A new, mass audience has emerged for street art as the Internet and smart phone cameras enable people to capture images and share them across the world.

Howard-Griffin calls it the “democratisation of art” and said he wants the gallery to act as a conduit for this new wave of artists, rather than an arbiter.

“In the past, museums were how Joe Public got to see artwork,” and the artist depended on an elite audience of gallery owners and museum curators to win recognition, Howard-Griffin said.

“Street art plays to a huge audience, but it doesn’t have an elite audience.”

Phlegm — who Howard-Griffin says “doesn’t care about money” — makes a modest living by selling a limited number of his prints and books directly to fans. He took six weeks to build his show, called The Bestiary.

The artist and

the old dog

This is only the second show for the Howard Griffin Gallery. Its first last September did make money, around 70,000 pounds ($115,000), for the gallery and the artist — Londoner John Dolan, who was then homeless.

For three years, Dolan had sat at the same spot on the inner city borough’s High Street, drawing cityscapes of gritty London and portraits of George, the Staffordshire bull terrier at his side.

Meanwhile, Howard-Griffin, 31, had quit his job in a corporate law firm to try to make a living from his interest in street art — leading guided tours, curating small group shows and organising festivals and mural projects.

He saw Dolan drawing day after day, liked his work and proposed doing a show. The owners of an unused storefront across the street offered the space.

It took 11 months to organise. Howard-Griffin recruited well-known street artists to add fantasy touches to Dolan’s citscapes. The roughly 100 pieces in “George the Dog and John the Artist” all sold.

It was originally meant to be a one-off. “(But) the John show did so well that it gave me the resources and impetus to fund this gallery,” Howard-Griffin said.

Dolan, who said he has signed a book deal on his life story, describes himself as the gallery’s resident artist. He can often be seen there drawing, while George sits in the window and helps attract visitors.

“The gallery launched me, and I launched the gallery,” Dolan said.

For his next show, Howard-Griffin plans to feature Thierry Noir, a 55-year-old French artist who lived in a squat in Berlin and painted miles of the Wall from 1984 until it fell in 1989, dodging arrest by the East German police.

His exploits took place long before the rise of an Internet audience, and the forthcoming show will be his first solo exhibition, Howard-Griffin said. “He has nowhere near the level of recognition in the art world that he deserves.”

TALLINN –– Irked by high bank fees on international money transfers, two Estonian IT whizzes who helped engineer Skype and Paypal have hatched TransferWise, a global Internet platform coordinating currency swaps between individuals.

“Hey, hidden fees. Your secret’s out,” taunts the site founded by Taavet Hinrikus, 32, and partner Kristo Kaarmann, 33.

TransferWise has been giving banks a run for their money since its 2011 launch, even attracting applause from tycoon Richard Branson, who sings its praises as a low cost business tool for start-ups.

“They are dramatically lowering the cost of transferring money overseas, by effectively matching people and companies in different countries who want the opposite currency,” the Virgin billionaire said in a recent blog post.

The marriage of IT ingenuity and financial savvy also garnered a prestigious 2013 World Summit Award, a United Nations-backed prize for outstanding web-based business innovations.

TransferWise offers international money transfers for a fee of just one British pound (1.2 euros, $1.6) for all transfers under £200 and 0.5 per cent for everything above — a tenth of what banks typically charge.

At that price, business is booming with the company processing around £1 million per day.

While European rules specify that euro to euro transfers must be free of charge, banks fees on international money transfers between currencies range between 3 and 6 per cent with exchange rates that routinely favour banks.

The new platform boasts customers from across Europe and is most popular in Britain, France and Spain, mostly among working or retired expats plus small- and medium-sized businesses looking to cut operating costs.

It’s also eyeing expansion in Asia, Africa and the US, offering services for the Indian rupee, South African rand as well as US, Australian, Hong Kong and Singapore dollars.

Co-founder Hinrikus was Skype’s director of strategy until 2008, where he joined as the first employee. Kaarmann worked as a consultant for banks with Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers before setting up TransferWise.

Cashing-in on algorithms

The idea took shape when Hinrikus found himself living in London and spending in pounds, but earning euros at his job with Skype at its headquarters in his native Estonia.

Kaarmann, meanwhile was earning pounds in London, but paying a mortgage for his home in the Estonian capital Tallinn in euros.

“We found that we had the opposite currency requirements, so we started to exchange it among ourselves at the actual mid-market rate — that’s the exchange rate you see in the papers, not the inflated rate you’ll be offered by your bank,” Hinrikus told AFP.

“Soon we realised we had saved a fortune by not moving the money across borders and that perhaps it could be a big business idea. A few years later TransferWise was born,” he added.

A few algorithms later, they had come up with the programming to connect people with complementary currency needs.

Hinrikus explains that a customer in Britain who wants to send money home to Estonia can put their pounds on a TransferWise account.

The company then spots a customer in Estonia who wants to send an equivalent amount of money to the UK.

Rather than actually sending the money across borders, TransferWise then simply pays it out to the desired recipient in each country, for the minimal fee.

Teaching Arabs, Writing Self: Memoirs of an Arab-American Woman
Evelyn Shakir
Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press/Interlink, 2014, 170 pp

In her memoir, Evelyn Shakir keeps readers on their toes and turning pages as much with her lively prose as with her insightful observations about herself, her family, new people and places, culture and life itself. Having previously published short stories and non-fiction about Arab-American women, she finally focuses on her own experience in what was to be her last book before her death in 2010.

Shakir’s descriptions of growing up in the Boston area are priceless, at once feisty and respectful of her Lebanese immigrant family. In some ways, their life was very American. Her uncle, for example, operated an amusement park on the Atlantic shore, where they spent summer holidays. Still, this was the America of the 1950s where a somewhat drab uniformity reigned, and she was always being reminded of falling short of the norm in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Her parents smoked and drank, and her mother ran a business — all things which her fifth grade teacher said “the better class of people didn’t do.” (p. 8) For many years, Shakir just longed to fit in, but as she matured, attaining a top-notch education at Wellesley, Boston University and Harvard, and subsequently teaching writing at Bentley University, the US evolved too. Multiculturalism was gradually being recognised, and Shakir began to play a significant role in recording the Arab-American experience.

Once Shakir’s interest in her roots was awakened, she pursued it with vigour, which eventually led her to teach English literature in Lebanon, Bahrain and Damascus, often as a Fulbright Scholar. It is her experience there, and her interactive approach to teaching, that gives the book its title. As she was teaching Arab students English, she also hoped to find her own Arab identity, but as she discovered in Bahrain: “Although my students and I got along fine, it didn’t follow that they saw me as one of their people.” (p. 68) Their responses to the literature she selected for discussion was almost always surprising, and she was constantly reworking their opinions in her mind to learn more about them and herself. “It seems to me now, as I look back… that the roles of student and teacher kept turning inside out and back again, like the cupped hands of an Arab woman dancing.” (p. 72) “I’d been expecting a mirror and found a window… looking at my students, I wasn’t merely staring at my own face. Though, yes, I could still detect a family resemblance.” (p. 87).

Shakir’s account of her teaching experience is greatly enriched by her descriptions of everyday life and encounters with people outside academia in the three places where she taught abroad. For a variety of reasons, Damascus was the place where she was most able to fit into normal everyday life: “I hadn’t guessed that Syria would be so seductive or that it would challenge the hold that Lebanon had on my affections… I bantered with shopkeepers in my broken Arabic, cooked stews, brewed Turkish coffee, washed soot off the floors of my apartment, learned where to dispose of my kitchen garbage, coped with power failures and, once, a flooded bathroom.” (p. 141) Any foreigner who has lived in Damascus will immediately connect with her experiences. Shakir was there during the partial opening allowed by Bashar Assad in his first years of power, but her parting words on Syria, after returning to the US, are tragically predictive of today’s war.

Alternating anecdote with snatches of information about Bahrain, Lebanon and Syria, Shakir makes an understanding of life in these countries more accessible to outsiders, while playfully grinding many a stereotype into dust. Successive passages of “Teaching Arabs, Writing Self” attest to the fact that she was a woman who loved new beginnings, and consciously sought new adventures not only for the thrill involved, but for what she could find to expand her own horizons and those of others. The enthusiasm with which she embraced new situations is matched only by the bravery with which she received the news that her cancer had reoccurred after thirty years of remission. Brimming with humour, humanity, and thinking outside the box, Shakir’s book offers many new insights on Arab-Americans, the younger generation in Beirut, Damascus and Manama, cross-cultural exchange and, not least, the art of teaching.

WASHINGTON –– Looking to meet women, 20-year-old US college student Leland turned to mobile phone app Tinder, after a friend told him about his own successful exploits.

Leland’s results were mixed: He was matched with around 400 women over more than a year but only ended up meeting two, and one of them felt “awkward”.

“I get to experiment with ice breakers and pickup lines, so that aspect of it is pretty entertaining,” said Leland, a sophomore at a midwestern college. He asked that his full name not be used.

For now, Leland said he plans to stop using the app and go back to the old-fashioned way of meeting women, because “I don’t want to be known as that Tinder guy.”

Nonetheless, the use of mobile apps for meeting and dating is multiplying as people rely more on their smartphones as a daily hub. The apps can help people discover new friends in real time, based on the location pinpointed in their devices.

With apps like Tinder, prospective daters can see pictures of people who are nearby. If they see someone they like, they can swipe right to indicate interest. People who both swipe right on each other’s profiles can then contact each other.

Around 3 per cent of Americans have used mobile dating apps, while 9 per cent have tried traditional online dating websites, according to the Pew Research Centre.

Pew researcher Aaron Smith said dating app users “tend to be quite young, primarily people in their mid-20s or 30s” and very tied to their smartphones.

‘Digital Crush’

Julie Spira, author of a cyber-dating book and blog, said young people are most comfortable with mobile dating apps, which can speed up courtship and deliver “push notifications” of a so-called “digital crush”.

“People spend a lot of time checking e-mails or Facebook; it’s the first thing they look at when they wake up, so it makes a lot of sense to find love or friends or dates through the apps,” Spira told AFP.

SinglesAroundMe, among the first location-based dating apps, claims two million members in 100 countries around the world.

“One of the things women told me is they want to know where the single guys are,” said Christopher Klotz, founder and chief executive of the Canadian-based firm.

When SinglesAroundMe launched in 2010 “it seemed spooky to people” to use geolocation, but attitudes have evolved, Klotz said.

To ease security concerns, SinglesAroundMe developed technology which can mask or shift the location of users.

Another mobile app called Skout, which launched in 2007, calls itself the “largest global, mobile network for meeting new people” with 8 million members around the world, and says it facilitated over 350 million connections in 2013 alone.

Spokeswoman Jordan Barnes said Skout “is not just a dating app” because it helps facilitate professional relations and friendships as well as romantic encounters.

Barnes said Skout began as a website and shifted to mobile as smartphone use increased, and allowed people to connect based on location.

The app also has a “virtual travel” feature which enables users to find friends in a city they plan to visit.

“I think the digital age has changed people’s attitudes, it has taken the stigma away from meeting people online,” she told AFP.

Matching through Facebook

Hinge, a mobile app created by a startup in Washington, does not use geo-location but pulls information from users’ Facebook profiles to recommend matches.

“We think most people don’t necessarily want to meet someone where they just happen to be,” said Arjumand Bonhomme, head of engineering for Hinge.

By drawing from a user’s Facebook friends, likes, favorites and places, Hinge aims to introduce people who already share connections, often friends in common.

“Everyone we show is connected to you in some way. It is often someone you could have met at a house party or cocktail party,” Bonhomme told AFP.

To get around the problem of developing critical mass –– since people want to use the apps with the largest pools of users –– Hinge began by focusing on Washington, before launching in New York, Boston and San Francisco, with more cities to come.

NEW YORK — With 1.23 billion users in all the flavours and up-and-down stages of romantic relationships, Facebook knows a thing or two about love.

For example, two people who are about to enter a relationship interact more and more on Facebook in the weeks leading up to making their coupled status official — up until 12 days before the start of the relationship, when they share an average of 1.67 posts per day.

Then, their Facebook interactions start to decline — presumably because they are spending more time together offline. But while they interact less, couples are more likely to express positive emotions toward their each other once they are in a relationship, researchers on Facebook’s data science team found.

Touching on everything from religion to age differences, Facebook has been disclosing such light-hearted findings in a series of blog posts this week, with one coming up later Friday and another, on breakups, Saturday. Friday, of course, is Valentine’s Day.

Facebook data scientist Mike Develin, whose background is in mathematics, notes that the relationship stuff is sort a side project for his team, the findings geared more toward academic papers than Facebook’s day-to-day business. His “day job” is Facebook’s search function — how people use it, what they are searching for that isn’t available and how to make it more useful.

But the patterns Facebook’s researchers can detect help illustrate just how useful the site’s vast trove of data can be in mapping human interactions and proving or disproving assumptions about relationships. Can horoscopes predict lasting love? Forget about it.

“We have such a wide-ranging set of data, including on places there may not be data on otherwise,” Develin said, adding that because Facebook knows a lot about people’s authentic identity, there are “almost no boundaries” to the kinds of questions the researchers can explore — about the structure of society, culture and how people interact.

Someday, researchers studying Facebook data may be able to predict whether a couple will break up, learn whether people are happy together or see what makes relationships last. Of course, the data has its limits — not everyone is on Facebook and not every Facebook user shares everything on the site.

Still, people share quite a bit. When looking at breakups through the lens of changed relationship statuses (see: “Joe Doe is single”), the researchers found couples who split up and got back together — and dutifully documented it on Facebook — 10 or 15 times a year. The maximum, Develin, recalls, was a couple who went in and out of a relationship 27 times in one year. While one may assume that a couple wouldn’t want to broadcast so much relationship drama to the world, people actually “very faithfully update Facebook at each twist and turn”, he says.

Facebook’s researchers use aggregated, anonymised data from hundreds of millions of users on the site. This means that while they see information such as age, location, gender, a person’s relationship status, for example, such data is not tied back to a specific person.

It was in a study of 18 million anonymised Facebook posts exchanged by 462,000 Facebook couples that researchers delved into how “sweet” couples are to one another on the social networking site.

“For each timeline interaction, we counted the proportion of words expressing positive emotions (like ‘love’, ‘nice,’ ‘happy”, etc.) minus the proportion of words expressing negative ones (like ‘hate’, ‘hurt’, ‘bad’, etc.),” writes Facebook data scientist Carlos Diuk in Friday’s blog post. The data is plotted on a graph, which shows a visible, general increase in the proportion of warm fuzzy feelings right at the start of a relationship.