Features

In children with a common condition that causes them to periodically stop breathing during sleep, areas of the brain involved with thinking and problem-solving appear to be smaller than in children who sleep normally, a study finds.

Researchers cannot say the brain changes actually cause problems for children at home or school, but they do say the condition, known as obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), has been tied to behaviour and cognitive problems.

“It really does seem that there is a change in the brain or that the brain is affected,” said study author Paul Macey, who is director of technology and innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Nursing.

Macey and colleagues write in Scientific Reports that up to 5 per cent of all children are affected by OSA. The condition causes the child’s airway to become blocked, which ultimately causes the brain to go without oxygen for short periods of time and may wake the child up.

Previous studies on lab animals and adults with OSA have shown changes in the brain due to nerve cells dying, they add. 

For the new study, the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to analyse the volume of children’s grey matter, which is the outermost layer of the brain that allows for higher levels of functioning like problem solving.

They compared brain scans from 16 children with OSA and 200 children without the condition. All the youngsters were between 7 and 11 years old.

Overall, children with OSA had decreases in grey matter volume in areas of the brain important for controlling cognition and mood, compared to the other children.

Macey, who is also affiliated with the UCLA Brain Research Institute, said it’s unclear how closely changes in the brain are connected to behaviour, cognition and other issues.

“We know these two things are happening, but we’re not sure how much the reduced grey matter tracks with poor scores,” he told Reuters Health.

The researchers also cannot say exactly why OSA is tied to reduce gray matter volume among children. A lack of oxygen may kill off brain cells or it may stop the brain from properly developing, for example.

Macey’s team wants to see whether treating the condition helps children get back on track with their healthy peers.

“If we did that we would know better how people recover from it or not,” he said.

Dr Eliot Katz, of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, said previous research shows treating OSA by removing tonsils and adenoids improves children’s school performance, behaviour and sleep-related issues. Evidence is mixed on whether it improves cognition.

Katz, who was not involved with the new study, said the previous research on problems faced by children with OSA — like behaviour and cognition — is fitting nicely with the brain imaging studies.

“This is really the first large, really well controlled study that has found decrements in grey matter in children with obstructive sleep apnea,” he told Reuters Health.

He said parents should discuss symptoms of OSA with children’s healthcare providers. Those symptoms include chronic snoring and gaps in breathing while they sleep.

“Sleep complaints are often not addressed in well child care visits,” he said, or in training programmes for paediatricians.

He advises parents to “take a brief phone video of the breathing pattern that’s concerning to them and show it to their paediatrician”.

Macey said daytime tiredness and mood issues can also be symptoms of OSA. Children who are overweight and obese are at higher risk for the condition.

SINGAPORE — In today’s so-called smart home, you can dim the lights, order more toothpaste or tell the kids to go to bed simply by talking to a small WiFi-connected speaker, such as Amazon’s Echo or Google’s Home.

This voice-first market — combining voice with artificial intelligence (AI) — barely existed in 2014. This year, Voice Labs, a consultancy, expects 24.5 million appliances to be shipped.

Other big tech firms have their own plans: Apple is taking its Siri voice assistant beyond its mobile devices to PCs, cars, and the home; Baidu last month bought Raven, billed as China’s answer to Amazon’s Alexa intelligent personal assistant; and Samsung Electronics plans to incorporate Viv, its newly acquired virtual assistant, into its phones and home appliances.

But not everyone thinks the future of communicating with the Internet of Things needs to be vocal.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, for example, was working on Jarvis, his own voice-powered AI home automation and found he preferred communicating by text because, he wrote, “mostly it feels less disturbing to people around me”.

And several major appliance makers have turned to a small Singapore firm, Unified Inbox, which offers a service that can handle ordinary text messages and pass them on to appliances.

With your home added to the contacts list on, say, WhatsApp, a quick text message can “start the coffee machine”; “turn on the vacuum cleaner at 5pm”; or “preheat the oven to 200 degrees at 6:30pm”.

“Think of it as a universal translator between the languages that machines speak... and us humans,” said Toby Ruckert, a German former concert pianist and now Unified Inbox’s CEO.

The company is just a small player, funded by private investors, but Ruckert says its technology is patent-backed, has been several years in the making, and has customers that include half of the world’s smart appliance makers, such as Bosch .

Unified Inbox connects the devices on behalf of the manufacturer, while the consumer can add their appliance by messaging its serial number to a special user account or phone number. It so far supports more than 20 of the most popular messaging apps, as well SMS and Twitter, and controls appliances from ovens to kettles. Other home appliances being tested include locks, garage openers, window blinds, toasters and garden sprinklers, says Ruckert.

“People aren’t going to want a different interface for all the different appliances in their home,” says Jason Jameson, of IBM, which is pairing its Watson AI supercomputer with Unified Inbox to better understand user messages. They will this week demonstrate the service working with a Samsung Robot Cleaner.

“The common denominator is the smartphone, and even more common is the messaging app,” Jameson notes.

There’s another reason, Ruckert says, why more than half of the world’s smart appliance manufacturers have signed up.

They’re worried the big tech companies’ one-appliance-controls-all approach will relegate them to commodity players, connecting to Alexa or another dominant platform, or being cast aside if Amazon moves into making its own household appliances.

“Our customers are quite afraid of the likes of Amazon,” Ruckert said. “Having a Trojan horse in a customer’s home, like Echo, that they must integrate with to stay competitive is a nightmare for them.”

An Amazon spokesperson said the company was “excited by the early response by smart home device manufacturers and even more excited by the customer response”, but declined to speculate about future plans. 

A spokesperson for Bosch said no single company can knit the Internet of Things together, so “there is a need to collaborate and establish ecosystems”, such as working with Unified Inbox.

Already the race is on to incorporate other services into these home hubs.

Amazon allows third parties to develop apps, or “skills”, for Alexa. It has more than 10,000 of these, with many added in just the past three months. Most are developed by firms using Amazon’s software toolkit and range from telling jokes to ordering food.

And Amazon makes it easy for other hardware makers to incorporate Alexa into their appliances, increasing its reach.

Chinese device maker Lenovo has embedded Alexa in its speakers, while General Electric has it in a lamp — meaning users can control these devices by voice, and use them to order products from Amazon. LG Electronics and Huawei are also working on Alexa-enabled devices, Amazon said.

Text messaging, though, may yet break down those walls.

As Zuckerberg noted, the volume of text messages is growing much faster than the number of voice calls. “This suggests that future AI products cannot be solely focused on voice and will need a private messaging interface as well,” he says.

Even smarter

Some companies are already looking further ahead, and doing away with the need for any human instruction — whether by voice or text — by making machines smarter at learning our habits and anticipating them.

LG, for example, is using deep learning to make its appliances understand and avoid objects in a room, or fill an ice-tray based on a user’s cold drink habits.

At Unified Inbox, Ruckert looks ahead to being able to communicate not only with one’s own appliances, but with machines elsewhere. Bosch executives in Singapore, for example, have demonstrated how a user could ask a smart CCTV camera how many people were in a particular room.

Ruckert is also working with Singapore’s Nanyang Polytechnic to send updates to family members or staff direct from hospital equipment attached to patients.

And smart appliance entrepreneur James Dyson said hat the future lies in what he calls “highly intelligent automation”.

“For me, the future is making everything happen for you without you being particularly involved in it.”

Are you happy with the Internet speed that your telephone operator provides you with over its network? Are you stuck with the sluggish 2G, or are you enjoying 3G or even the faster 4G?

Arguments will never end about speed and performance in technology. Whether it is the speed of hard disks, of processors or that of the Internet connection, the consumer never has enough of it, and the industry keeps pouring oil on the fire by making everything faster all the time.

Whether continuously increasing speed is actually needed or is relevant is another topic. Many will argue that it is good to have anyway, for you never know when you may really need it. I agree.

Enter 5G, the upcoming ultrafast Internet for your phone, tablet or even computer, for that matter. It is going to be the next big leap in mobile connectivity. For the emotive ones and the tech-heads, let us say from the onset that it is not yet available. It is not a distant dream either. First tests may take place as early as next year, and nowhere else than South Korea, the world champion in terms of extensive and high-performance Internet services.

Because it is all but still experimental at this stage, no precise data is available yet as to the actual speed of 5G, though tests indicate that it would be in a range comprised between 3 and 10Gbps (gigabits per second), according to China’s Huawei and South Korea’s Samsung. In layman’s term this is about 10 to 12-fold the speed of the current 4G network! An even more striking illustration: it will allow you to download an entire high-resolution full-length movie in just a few seconds.

Such speed actually will mainly improve and positively affect the streaming of high-definition multimedia contents, a segment of the Internet usage that is growing exponentially. Internet voice and video calls and conferencing also will strongly benefit from 5G. The whole YouTube, Vimeo or Deezer experience will have new meaning. But obviously, you don’t really need such speed to send a simple email, a Whatsapp text message, or to read the news online. 

5G already raises a few questions, even if it may take two to four more years to be practically available.

When you consider that 4G is not yet everywhere, that most of us are still on 3G, that once you have 5G the quantity of downloads and uploads is going to reach gigantic proportions, and last but not least the cost this may involve, you just stop and think. Not forgetting that no smartphone on the market today has 5G capability… well, perhaps except for the model announced just a few days ago by ZTE and that claims to have “pre-5G” functionality and 1Gbps download capability — a claim yet to verify.

Still, like any technology trend towards more-and-faster, it is going to happen and we will get used to it, not to say hooked on it, and will gladly pay for it.

Who would have thought 10 or 12 years ago that we would be taking photos or videos that are 5MB or 10MB large, and would be sending then instantly and wirelessly by phone at the other end of the world? I can’t wait to see what 5G will make us do.

For the dwindling few of us who do not actually need to lose weight, the idea of slashing food intake in a bid to extend our healthy lifespan isn’t universally appealing. Hedonists the world over, in fact, have denounced the calorie-restriction-for-life-extension idea as a cruel hoax: the bony, cold and irritable cranks willing to deny themselves the comfort of enough food to maintain their weight probably do not actually live longer, they say: it just feels like their miserable lives go on and on.

Well, here’s a surprise: these people are not miserable. In fact, compared to normal, healthy adults who went about their lives eating what they wanted for two years, normal-weight people who ate 25 per cent less than they wanted for the same stretch of time were happier, less stressed, slept better and had more robust sex drives.

Researchers have long known that when obese people restrict their calories and lose weight, their moods, sleep and sexual function all improve along with many measures of cardiovascular and metabolic health. But the notion that no one with a normal healthy body weight would choose to deliberately forego about 500 calories per day has apparently discouraged anyone from exploring whether calorie restriction would confer the same benefits upon the slim-and-healthy.

But researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Baton Rouge, La., suspected as much. They teamed up with researchers from Duke University, Tufts University and Washington University to conduct a two-year study comparing the effects of calorie restriction on 218 healthy, normal-weight study subjects, almost 70 per cent of them women, ranging between 20 and 57 years old.

The new research was published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

Two-thirds of the participants slashed their normal calorie intake by 25 per cent, while the remaining third went about their lives eating as they always had. In addition to checking their weight and, in men, reproductive hormones, the researchers took detailed measurements of each subject’s mood, sleep quality and sexual function.

By the end of year one, the subjects in the calorie-restriction group had lost, on average, 15.2 per cent of their body weight, and 11.5 per cent of body weight by the end of year two. By the end of the study, the calorie-restriction group’s average BMI was 22.6 — right in the middle of the healthy, normal weight category. Those who continued to eat normally had no change in their weight on average.

Over time, the calorie-restricted subjects reported improving mood compared to their baseline measures, and falling tension levels. Those who had continued to eat normally had poorer moods than the calorie-restricted subjects, and among the few who fell just inside the overweight category (BMI above 25), had worsening depression scores by the end of year two.

On five measures, the calorie-restricted subjects’ perceived sleep quality levels remained the same, while those of subjects who continued to eat as they wished worsened at the end of year one.

By the end of the two-year study, those who had pared their intake reported improvements in their sexual drive and relationships, although men who fed themselves to satiation reported higher arousal scores. At the end of one year, free testosterone levels declined in the men who ate what they wanted, but not in the men whose calories had been pared.

In none of these cases was the average difference between the satiated and the lean-and-hungry large. But they were clear, and judged not to have been statistical flukes. The researchers suggested that physicians could use the findings to reassure their healthy, normal-weight patients that calorie restriction may have some benefits and does not lead to misery.

In a commentary published alongside the new research, Dr Tannaz Moin of the University of California, Los Angeles wrote that the new research underscores the potential importance of measures that head off weight gain and obesity before they happen. Currently, insurers are required to reimburse physicians for screening and counselling their patients for obesity, but the focus has been on patients who already have become obese.

Since it is clear from the new research that normal-weight people can be induced to cut their calories over a long period, maybe, wrote Moin, physicians and insurers should be focusing on prevention in younger adults who are still trim and healthy.

Now the thing is this, I might never admit it in public, but I’m scared of banks. It is not such a big deal since everyone, in their own way, is intimidated by some place or the other — like hospitals, police stations, airports, morgues and so on. However, my case becomes exceptionally peculiar because I have been married to a banker, for the last three decades.

In these years, some of the confidence that my spouse has when he strides inside a bank should have rubbed off on me. In fact, dealing with the banking system, ought to have become second nature to me, and terms like ‘debit, credit, account opening/closing, interest rate, deposit, withdrawal, balance’ etc., could have tripped off my tongue, at the drop of a hat. Alas! I’m sorry to report that none of the above happened, and I remained as nervous about approaching an Automatic Teller Machine as I ever was. If it was placed anywhere in the vicinity of a bank, that is.

So, what was it about a bank that frightened me? How could buildings, where formally dressed men and women were busy dealing with a lot of other people’s money, be scary? These were places with carpeted floors and plush glass-lined corridors into which customers walked in to have serious discussions about how to double their savings. What could be frightening about money talk?

Well, for people like me, that was precisely the problem. Talking about money was the petrifying part, even when the conversation was about my own finances. And that was because I didn’t have a head for figures. But surprisingly, I could remember numbers. So if I put in a fixed deposit of a certain amount for a particular length of time, I could recall the amount at the beginning of the transaction, but could never calculate how much it would become eventually. Every time I tried to evaluate it, I managed to reach a different result.

Therefore what I really liked was net and phone banking. In virtual space it became easier to ask the same questions repeatedly, without the fear of annoying any relationship managers.

Ironically, while I personally veered towards virtual banking, my long connection to my banker husband, established some unrealistic expectations with certain people. They started assuming that I was an extension of his workplace, and whatever problems they had with his financial institution, could now be communicated to me.

If the operator did not pick up the telephone in his bank, I was informed, when a computerised voice at the answering service directed them to the wrong department, the complaint came to me. If someone needed a new chequebook, or worse, if anyone’s cheque bounced, it was conveyed to me. Initially, I tried saying that I had nothing to do with all this, but after my husband lectured me on polite etiquette towards all concerned, I began to nod my head in response. Still, it only meant that I stood with them in solidarity, against a common adversary. 

“Guess what happened in Cape Town?” my Brazilian friend cried on the phone.

“Tell me,” I prompted. 

“The ATM machine swallowed my card,” she exclaimed in an incredulous voice. 

“Oh no!” I sympathised. 

“Can you have it rescued?” she requested. 

“Me?” I squeaked in response. 

“The card was from your bank,” she accused. 

I shook a fist at my absent spouse.

“Just get it back,” she instructed when I didn’t reply.

WASHINGTON — As her eldest son conjugates French verbs with a tutor, Emily Bradley coaches her three-year-old in speech, while her daughter tackles math drills in the kitchen using coloured rods that represent numbers.

None of Bradley’s four children — the eldest of whom is nine — have ever attended school. She plans to keep it that way, as she seeks both to personalise their education and lay a Christian foundation for them.

The Bradleys are among the roughly 1.8 million US students who are homeschooled — a fast-growing community whose approach may find a champion under Donald Trump’s controversial new education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

Their 36-year-old mother is no fan of the incoming president, but she is all “in favour of alternatives to education” — which DeVos strongly supports.

“I don’t think that the American education system is very good,” she said. “I can do it better.”

Bradley’s kids join some 20 other homeschooling families in the capital of  Washington for weekly enrichment courses with “a biblical worldview”.

After opening the day with a psalm and the pledge to the American flag, kids disperse for parent-taught lessons in subjects including math, literacy and the arts.

In nearby Northern Virginia, some 350 families take a similar, albeit secular, approach, supplementing their homemade diet with weekly classes at Compass Homeschool Enrichment.

Minimal oversight

While many early homeschoolers cited religious reasons for their choice, today they comprise a wide range of demographics — some three quarters of whom cite their dissatisfaction with the other school options available to them.

Individual US states govern homeschooling families with a patchwork of policies that generally include minimal oversight, and there are concerns from some critics who fear children could lose out on a rounded education, or even be exposed to neglect or abuse.

Less than half of states mandate testing for homeschoolers, according to investigative website ProPublica. Approximately one-third do not require teaching specific subjects, and most of those that do have no means to ensure parental compliancy.

Christopher Lubienski, an education policy analyst at Indiana University, has described the level of deregulation as “concerning”.

“There is a larger societal responsibility to all children. I don’t think that precludes homeschooling as an option, but we have a responsibility to make sure that parents are doing right by their kids,” he told AFP.

The classes at the Compass homeschool programme are a way for families to address two oft-voiced concerns about homeschooling: that it limits children’s socialisation and that older kids need input from specialised teachers, especially in science and technology.

Kids ages four to 18 choose from an array of courses — taught by hired experts — including foreign language, chemistry, chess and acting.

Kristin Yashko, 47, brings her three children here, and homeschools the rest of the week.

“The benefits are off the charts,” said Yashko, who worked as a speech therapist in public schools for several years. “I encourage the teachers — I support them — but I just thought that we would be able to provide a better experience.”

‘Outside the box’

Yashko’s 13-year-old daughter Aldrin said she “wouldn’t have thrived as much” at a traditional school.

Gripping a book of short stories, Aldrin described her typical day as “pretty lax” — she works on math, peruses the newspaper, studies several languages and sometimes watches a documentary.

She does plan to attend college: “a little bit of exposure to the school structure would be good”.

Yashko is confident about her children’s higher education prospects.

“Colleges are looking more for kids who can kind of think outside the box,” she said. “Instead of just memorising facts and spitting them out for a test, we want our kids to actually be ready for the work world.”

About 3.4 per cent of US students are homeschooled, according to the latest 2012 estimates from the National Centre for Education Statistics — a population that has more than doubled since 1999.

Trump’s newly minted education secretary is a forceful advocate of school choice, a movement that calls for US government funds to be diverted to families who leave the public school system.

DeVos has also voiced broad support for teaching kids at home in a welcome boost for the movement — although no financial help for homeschoolers is currently on the cards.

“To the extent that homeschooling puts parents back in charge of their kids’ education, more power to them,” she said in a 2013 interview.

‘Freedom’

Homeschooling families still pay property taxes that help fund public schools in their local districts.

That is a point of contention for some, but Yashko says she is “happy to contribute” because “we want to have an educated population”.

“I don’t believe that homeschooling is the right choice for every person,” she adds.

Bradley — who dropped a law career to assume responsibility for her children’s education, while her husband works in international development — agrees that may not be a viable option for every family: “I recognise we’re probably in a privileged, smaller group of people.”

The vast majority of homeschoolers are white and live above the poverty line, though recent years have seen a rise in black families homeschooling.

Bradley acknowledged another frequent criticism — that taking her kids out of school does little to improve an education system she believes is “failing” — but she said ultimately “freedom is a big deal in our country”.

“I don’t know that it’s right for anyone, including the government, to ask families to sacrifice what they think would be best for their child to make a failing system better.”

By Ghaith Madadha

Formerly known under the Dodge badge and launched in its fourth generation as the core model of a newly established, specialised and standalone eponymous truck brand, the Ram 1500 is a key player in the pickup truck market, which accounts for 13 per cent of Middle East vehicle sales. Perhaps the brand’s most important market outside of North America, where it is popular as a work truck and private vehicle, the Ram 1500 is popular in the Middle East as a lifestyle vehicle and rugged, utilitarian and spacious SUV alternatives.

Distinctly assertive

Expanded from three to nine versions from affordable entry-level Express to luxurious Longhorn and Limited guises, the recently launched 2017 Ram 1500 model range sets out to meet a wide variety of customer requirements, and is offered rear and four wheel drive and single Regular or double Crew cab variations. Competing in the same American dominated full size pickup segment as the Chevrolet Silverado and impressive new aluminium bodied Ford F-150, the Ram 1500 standing out among competitors for its distinctively nostalgic design, high capabilities, generous equipment and dimensions and a distinctly smooth ride its segment.

Well proportion in terms of width and height, the Ram 1500’s distinctly aggressive and charismatic design is dominated by its vast upright grille, brawny double bulge bonnet and lower, moody squinting and seemingly forward jutting headlights. Finished in chrome with honeycomb mesh and with large crosshair design and 50cm alloy wheels as driven in luxurious Laramie trim, the 1500’s grille and raised bonnet bring to mind a classic American truck aesthetic. Meanwhile, the lower front wings and lights both serve to reduce the perception of bulk above the wheel-arches, and improve driving visibility.

Rumbling abundance

Powered by the Chrysler group’s familiar and also charismatic naturally-aspirated 5.7-litre V8 Hemi engine, the Ram 1500 is brisk and brawny, hauling its estimated near 2.5-tonne mass with a confident lunge off the line and through the 0-100km dash in around 7-seconds. A compact but old school 16-valve pushrod OHV design, the Ram’s engine features robust cast iron block and aluminium head construction with more modern variable valve timing. Tuned for 18BHP and 10lb/ft torque more than in service in Dodge Challenger and Charger models, the Ram’s rumbling Hemi develops 390BHP at 5600rpm and 410lb/ft at 3950rpm.

With maximum torque developed earlier and its higher power output peaking later, the Ram 1500’s Hemi iteration is a more well rounded one. Abundant throughout the rev range from idle and through a rich mid-range the Ram’s 5.7-litre engine is more progressive and rewarding, as it continues to pile on the power to 5600rpm, rather than 5200rpm. Nevertheless a relatively low revving engine with 5800rpm rev limit, the 1500 benefits immeasurably from its 8-speed ZF gearbox — introduced for 2014 — with closer and more ratios allowing for smoother and more consistent delivery.

Rugged yet smmoth

With its 8-speed gearbox providing better low-end responses, mid-range flexibility, top-end refinement and fuel efficiency than previous incarnations, the current 1500 also benefits from automatic grille shutters, which reduce drag and further improve efficiency. Refined for a vast and tough body on frame truck that is at its core a capable workhorse, the Ram 1500 uses sophisticated double wishbone suspension in front like most competitors, but is unique for combining a traditional and rugged live rear axle with coil spring and five-link suspension, in place of less nuanced and more industrial leaf springs.

A smooth and refined ride in its segment, the Ram 1500’s coil spring rear suspension makes it more settled and buttoned down than expected over imperfections, bumps and cracks, with more progressive vertical body movements. Refined and geared for lots of lock, its steering may lack nuanced road feel, but is more accurate and intuitive than many similar vehicles, which stability at speed reassuring. A tall and heavy vehicle with expected body lean through corners, the 1500 is, however, well controlled for its class, with balanced weighting and intuitive power distribution across all four wheels when driven in 4WD Auto mode.

Robust and refined

With, nuanced ride, body control, chassis refinement, more accurate steering and its terrific in-class driving visibility owing to its low front wings, the Ram 1500 seemingly shrinks around the driver for a vehicle so large. Both on road and off-road, this allows one to place it better and with more confidence. Driven through desert conditions, the 1500’s ample power and torque, combined with both high and low fulltime four wheel drive settings, allowed to confidently and easily tackle sandy conditions and steep dunes, with a locking centre differential and limited slip rear differential sending power where it’s needed for traction and to maintain progress.

A capable and rugged off-road vehicle and work truck, the 1500 accommodates a cargo volume of 1424-litres, 689kg payload and can tow up to 4608kg, as driven. Practical and comfortable, it features an optional cargo bed cover and lockable boxes in along the sides of the cargo bed. Meanwhile, it is well appointed and has a premium feel inside, with quality plastics, leather upholstery, trim textures and a feeling of well assembled robustness and quality. Spacious in every direction for passengers, its front seats are supportive, comfortable and well adjustable, while layouts are intuitively user friendly bar for the small gearshift buttons positioned at the front of the steering wheel.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 5.7-litre, cast-iron block/aluminium head, in-line V8-cylinders

Bore x Stroke: 99.5 x 90.9mm

Compression ratio: 10.5:1

Valve-train: 16-valve, OHV, variable timing

Gearbox: 8-speed automatic, four-wheel-drive, low ratio transfer

Driveline: Locking centre & limited slip rear differentials

Gear ratios: 1st 4.71 2nd 3.14 3rd 2.10 4th 1.67 5th 1.29 6th 1.0 7th 0.84 8th 0.67

Reverse/final drive/low-range ratios: 3.3/3.92/2.64

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 390 (395) [291] @5600rpm

Specific power: 69BHP/litre

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 410 (556) @3950rpm

Specific torque: 98.3Nm/litre

0-97km/h: 7-seconds (estimate)*

Rev limit: 5800rpm

Minimum fuel requirement: 91RON

Length: 5816mm

Width: 2017mm

Height: 1967mm

Wheelbase: 3570mm

Track, F/R: 1732/1714mm 

Ground clearance: 219mm

Approach/break-over/departure angles: 17.8°/24.7°/20.5°

Seating: 5

Headroom, F/R: 1041/1013mm

Legroom, F/R: 1041/1023mm

Shoulder room, F/R: 1676/1668mm

Hip room, F/R: 1605/1605mm

Cargo bed height, length, width: 508, 1712, 1295-1686mm 

Load floor height: 885mm

Cargo volume: 1424-litres

Fuel capacity: 98-litres

Kerb weight: 2440kg (est.)

Payload: 689kg

Gross Vehicle Weight Rating: 3129kg

Towing maximum: 4608kg

Steering: Electric-assisted rack & pinion

Steering ratio: 19.1

Lock-tolock: 3.5-turns

Turning circle: 12.1-metres

Suspension, F/R: Double wishbones, coil springs/five-link, live axle, coil springs

Brakes, F/R: Disc, 336 x 28mm/drum, 352 x 22mm

Brake callipers, F/R: Twin/single

Tyres: 275/50R20

*According to trucktrend.com

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr

New York: Scribner, 2014

Pp. 531

“All the Light We Cannot See” chronicles the coming of age of two children amidst the cruel chaos of World War II. By virtue of birthplace, they are on opposite sides, but they share the fact of being disadvantaged, yet remarkably gifted at the same time. Maria is French and blind, but thanks to the boundless inventiveness and caring of her father, she sharpens her mind and other senses, mainly touch.

Days spent at the National Museum of Natural History, where he is the chief locksmith, give her a wealth of scientific and cultural knowledge. Tracing the miniature model he has carved of their part of Paris trains her to move about on her own, and this model will play a crucial role in the plot. 

Werner is German, raised in an orphanage with only basic schooling, but having inborn insight into radios. At the age of eight, he assembles the pieces of a broken shortwave to the delight of his sister and their caretaker. Together, they listen to classical music and a French science programme for children.

One particular broadcast gives voice to the novel’s themes of light and human creativity: “The brain is locked in total darkness… And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light… So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?” (p. 48) 

Unfortunately for Maria and Werner, as for millions of others in the late 1930s, it is the forces of darkness, not light, that are on the march. Even the meaning of radio changes: Now “it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers… the staccato voice of the Reich grows… Only through the hottest fires, whispers the radio, can purification be achieved. Only through the harshest tests can God’s chosen rise” (p. 63)

Soon, the French broadcast is silenced in Germany, but its echoes will be heard later in the story.

Fear spreads in Paris, and the museum staff works overtime to hide its treasures in expectation of the German attack. Maria and her father join the throngs fleeing the capital. Meanwhile, Werner’s cleverness has been noticed; he is recruited into an elite school that teaches the branches of science needed by the military. He goes eagerly as it is his only chance to escape working in the mines where his father died. He thinks of what he can learn, not of what his skills will be used for. Sent to the front in France, he sees his radio reconnaissance unleashing bombs on homes and farms where resistance fighters are thought to be located, and is horrified into numbness. 

As the German army charges across France, one wonders if Maria and Werner will meet, but even greater suspense derives from the profession of Maria’s father. A German officer stalks Maria, thinking she holds the key to the museum’s greatest treasure, a legendary diamond, said to have magical powers, which he wants to add to Hitler’s collection. Can a blind girl win this breathtaking cat-and-mouse game?

The story unfolds in short chapters that go back and forth in time, following the war from the viewpoint of a number of characters and filling us in on their backgrounds. While light is the main metaphor, Anthony Doerr carefully crafts his characters and settings to bring in multiple themes. Indeed, no character or detail seems gratuitous. Taken together, they amount to an indictment of war, and an affirmation of the human spirit. 

Doerr’s descriptions of the horrors of war are subtle, but searing in their intimacy; death and destruction are rendered as experienced by various characters. It is mostly by contrast with prewar life that the cruelty and senselessness of war is set in stark relief. Whether describing the charms of Paris life, the exquisite items in the museum, the beauty of the sea in the town where Maria and her father take refuge, or the music and literature they enjoy, Doerr shows life as it should be, as it had been, before the war. 

The implicit contrast is what could have been if not for fascism and the war. What might Werner have invented had he not been inducted into the war machine? What about Frederick, Werner’s only friend at the school, who loved to draw birds, but was bullied almost to death for not being tough enough? Frederick is a good example of a relatively minor character who nonetheless introduces an important theme into the novel: He is the only student not to blindly follow orders; he makes a choice, similar to many French men and women who decide to engage in resistance to the occupation, realising that, though risky, it is the only way to truly live. 

It is challenging to review a book so full of characters, themes, ideas and details, almost all of which are significant. It is no wonder that Doerr received the Pulitzer Prize, the US’s highest literary award, considering the beauty of his prose and his ability to tie so many threads together into a thrilling story with a deeply humanistic message. While the Nazis tried to eliminate all those who did not fit their contrived ideal, this novel foregrounds the positive potentials of being different.

Sally Bland

Herbal medications offer few benefits and many risks for people with heart disease, according to a recent review.

“It is key that patients inform their doctors about the use of herbal medications and ask about harmful effects of herbal medications and possible interactions with other medications they are using,” Dr Graziano Onder from A. Gemelli University Hospital, Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome told Reuters Health. “This is particularly important for older adults who are often taking multiple medications.” 

One of every five persons in the US admits to taking herbal or dietary supplements at some point in his or her life, and this is a particular concern for people with heart disease. 

Onder’s team looked at the evidence for the safety and effectiveness of herbal medications for people with cardiovascular disease, and found no herbal medication for which there is clear and convincing evidence of any benefit when used in people with heart disease.

There was limited evidence of possible benefits from flaxseed oil, milk thistle, grape seeds, green tea, hawthorn, garlic and soy, they report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. But this was tempered by evidence of a high risk of interactions with heart medications with green tea, hawthorn and garlic. 

Among other commonly used herbal medications, astragalus appeared to have either no evidence or conflicting evidence of benefit and limited side effects. Asian ginseng had no benefits and a high risk of interaction with heart medications, and Ginkgo biloba had evidence of potentially severe side effects and a high risk of interactions with heart medications. 

A number of other herbal medications, such as cranberry, European elder, goldenseal, liquorice root, salvia miltiorrhiza and St John’s wort have significant interactions with prescription drugs commonly used to treat heart disease, including Warfarin, diuretics, aspirin and other anticoagulants.

Unfortunately, your doctor may not be aware of many of these effects. “So far, in most western countries, the study of alternative medicine is not imbedded in the medical school”, Onder said by e-mail. “Therefore, it is necessary that physicians improve their knowledge on herbal medications in order to adequately assess the clinical implications related to their use.” 

It is important to know “that ‘natural does not mean safe’ and that herbal medications might lead to severe side effects”, he added.

In the realm of information technology not every interesting topic is about the Internet, smartphones, cloud storage, social networking, fibre optic connections or esoteric apps. 

Now and then, here and there, you find simple, efficient products that more than deliver the promise, and for a reasonable price, what’s more. This week I have selected three such products that truly stand out and deserve the highest marks.

First is the innovative external wireless hard disk drive. The two leading manufacturers of computer hard disks, Western Digital and Seagate, they both have these models in their catalogue this year. For the last few years, users have found external disks a convenient and very important device to make backup copies of their data. Sales have soared, prices have fallen and storage capacitis have reached terabytes (typically 1 to 4), which is more than enough to store one’s entire computer data, including large multimedia contents.

Until last summer, however, external disks had to be connected to the computer via USB cable. Following the unabated trend towards more mobility, all the time, WD and Seagate have introduced disks that connect wirelessly to the computer, either via Bluetooth or WiFi. This is not only a significant step towards more mobility and freedom in work, it also allows for easier connection of the disks to smartphones and tablets where the standard size USB connector is not always available and that often require additional OTG (On-The-Go) adapter cable.

Wireless external hard disks are about two to three times more expensive than USB disks with equivalent storage capacity. The new wireless devices must be charged for power and their battery can sustain about 10 hours of continuous operation.

My next “kudos” go to GIMP, a photo processing application that is truly a great piece of software, for the “low price of free”, to use Microsoft’s famous tag line promoting their popular Defender antivirus. GIMP is not only free. It is also an excellent application, comes with countless features and constitutes a virtually ideal alternative to the rather expensive Photoshop. If you are extremely demanding, if you are able to make use of all the advanced functionality built in Photoshop and only swear by it, then GIMP may not be for you. But then again, for more than 90 per cent of the population GIMP will more than deliver. 

Last but not least is ViceVersa (VV). This fine backup and file synchronisation software application by TGRMN is one of the very few programmes around that I find to be near-perfect. By any measure it deserves the gold medal of backup and synchronisation software for computers.

It comes with countless features, and yet its layout is clear, smartly designed and easy to understand and to use. VV can back up your data or synchronise it between two storage locations in various wayproviding maximum flexibility and options. You can program it to do its work unattended at night, generate reports, send you an e-mail to tell you what it has done, verify the quality and the integrity of the copies done, protect the copies with passwords, keep multiple copies of previous files versions, etc. There’s hardly a feature you can think of that the designers didn’t implement. It all remains affordable, with a licence price set at JD35 that entitles you to install VV on up to three different computers.