Features

LONDON — Consuming e-cigarettes is far safer and less toxic than smoking conventional tobacco cigarettes, according to the findings of a recent study analysing levels of dangerous and cancer-causing substances in the body.

Researchers found that people who switched from smoking regular cigarettes to e-cigarettes or nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) such as gum or patches for at least six months had much lower levels of toxins in their saliva and urine than those who continued to smoke.

“Our study adds to existing evidence showing that e-cigarettes and NRT are far safer than smoking, and suggests that there is a very low risk associated with their long-term use,” said Lion Shahab, a specialist in epidemiology and public health at University College London who led the work.

E-cigarettes, which heat nicotine-laced liquid into vapour, have grown into an $8 billion-a-year market, according to Euromonitor International — more than three times that of NRT products. 

They are, however, still dwarfed by a tobacco market estimated by Euromonitor to be worth around $700 billion.

Many health experts think e-cigarettes, or vapes, which do not contain tobacco, are a lower-risk alternative to smoking and potentially a major public health tool.

But some question their long-term safety and worry that they may act as a “gateway” to taking up conventional cigarettes. The US surgeon general in December urged lawmakers to impose price and tax policies that would discourage their use.

The study, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, analysed saliva and urine samples from long-term e-cigarette and NRT users as well as smokers, and compared levels of key chemicals found in their bodies.

It found that smokers who switched completely to e-cigarettes or NRT had significantly lower levels of toxic chemicals and carcinogens compared to people who continued to smoke tobacco cigarettes.

Those who used e-cigarettes or NRT but did not completely quit smoking did not show the same drop in toxin levels. This underlined that a complete switch was needed to get the long-term health benefits of quitting tobacco, the researchers said.

The World Health Organisation says tobacco is the world’s biggest preventable killer, with a predicted cumulative death toll of 1 billion by the end of this century if current trends continue. Tobacco smoking currently kills around 6 million people a year.

Kevin Fenton, national director of health and wellbeing at the government authority Public Health England, said the findings held a clear message for tobacco smokers.

“Switching to e-cigarettes can significantly reduce harm to smokers, with greatly reduced exposure to carcinogens and toxins,” he said in a statement. “The findings also make clear that the benefit is only realised if people stop smoking completely and make a total switch.

“The best thing a smoker can do, for themselves and those around them, is to quit now, completely and forever.” 

SHANGHAI — Unlock them with an app, drop them off anywhere, and nip past lanes of stationary car traffic: the humble bicycle is seeing a revival in China as a new generation of start-ups help tackle urban congestion and pollution with fleets of brightly coloured two wheelers.

The bike-share concept has attracted huge venture capital as fledgling firms wrestle for market share. 

Such has been the success of this made-in-China business model, which is using smartphones to reignite the nation’s passion for cycling, that companies are hatching plans to export the idea worldwide.

“We are focused on how to make the small bicycle have a big impact,” said Davis Wang, CEO of Mobike, which launched last April in Shanghai and already has several hundred thousand of its silver-and-orange “smart” bikes in 13 Chinese cities.

Key rivals Mobike, Ofo and others are tapping into the sharing economy ethic behind Airbnb and ride-hailing apps such as Uber, targeting China’s 700 million mobile phone users, who increasingly use their smartphone for transactions.

Customers use the firm’s app to release a bike’s lock for rides costing as little as 1 yuan (15 cents) an hour. Bikes can be left anywhere for the next user.

Mobike’s app also shows where idle bikes are, while both companies capture rider data they say can help in traffic planning.

“If we can persuade hundreds of thousands of people in every city to start to re-use bikes every day, then we can create a social impact for every city,” Wang told AFP.

Once emblematic of China’s masses, bikes lost ground as economic growth and urban sprawl fuelled consumer demand for cars — the nation is now the world’s largest automobile market.

Cities gridlocked by traffic and deteriorating air quality have prompted both government and consumers to search for greener solutions.

Industry evangelists say the new approach to bike sharing can help change that by solving the “first-mile/last-mile” problem that has long plagued urban planners: how to move commuters between their homes and public transit.

The inconvenience of travelling to a bus stop or metro station can be enough of a psychological barrier to push commuters towards taxis or car ownership.

“In places where the subway does not extend, where it’s difficult to change from one kind of transport to another, it’s so easy to get where you want to go with Mobike,” said Hu Hong, 29, who pedals to her Shanghai real-estate job.

Some Chinese cities started municipal bike-rental schemes years ago that allow users to pick up and drop off their wheels at designated stations, similar to hundreds of programmes around the world.

Today’s start-ups have removed that shackle, and the convenience of being able to drop off anywhere means a new generation of riders are now ubiquitous in cities such as Shanghai and Beijing.

Ofo, which launched in 2015 as a Peking University student project, claims 10 million users for its 1 million bright-yellow bikes in 33 cities. It plans to add 10-15 million bikes this year, Chief Operating Officer Zhang Yanqi told AFP

Mobike shares a time-lapse graphic that, using its GPS system, tracks customer rides over a recent day in Shanghai.

Eager to cash in, Chinese and foreign investors have handed Mobike and Ofo hundreds of millions of dollars.

The ramp-up recalls the battle between China ride-hailing leader Didi Chuxing and Uber, into which both poured billions of dollars before joining forces last year with Didi in command.

Didi is among Ofo’s biggest investors, while Mobike CEO Wang is a former Uber exec.

Mobike’s investors include Chinese Internet giant Tencent and Taiwan tech-manufacturing powerhouse Foxconn, a major Apple supplier.

Jeffrey Towson, a professor of investing at Peking University, said “economic reality is being suspended” as rivals burn cash to grab turf.

“I think they’re going to pull it off. A lot of businesses start this way: you have lightning in a bottle, a hot app, and you build a more sustainable business as you go,” he explained.

Weaker entrants will drop out or be absorbed, Towson added.

China’s government singled out Mobike and Ofo last month — praising bike-sharing as a means of cutting emissions and traffic.

Ofo launched in Singapore in recent weeks, and is now eyeing US and European markets. Mobike plans to enter Singapore within weeks.

Analysts said regulatory issues, logistics and lower use of mobile payments overseas could slow expansion.

Lower winter ridership and losses from damage and theft also will weigh on bottom lines, they add, but insist the future appears bright.

Both Mobike and Ofo loftily envision tens of millions of connected bikes worldwide.

“It has only just begun,” said Ofo’s Zhang.

“We hope to fulfil this vision in the next two to three years.”

Life without a Recipe

Diana Abu-Jaber

New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016, 267 pp

In “Life without a Recipe”, Diana Abu-Jaber combines her memories as daughter, granddaughter, writer, cook, wife and mother. 

More than a chronicle of events, this memoir is a rollercoaster ride of feelings, an accumulation of the diverse influences that make her who she is, and an intimate diary of her interaction with people and places. 

While the when’s and how’s of happenings are often left vague, there are detailed accounts of particular moments of joy, sorrow or insight, rendered tangible by the author’s magical prose.

This is a memoir written by a person who loves life without thinking she must present it through rose-colored glasses. Irritation at her Jordanian father, Gus, for being so overbearing, is often mentioned. 

Long pages are devoted to the open antagonism between him and Grace, her maternal, German-American grandmother. (Their predominance is such that Diana’s mother hardly gets a voice till towards the end.)

Caught in the middle of their cultural wars, getting contradictory signals and advice, Diana found it hard to chart a clear path to what she wanted; she was relegated to living “life without a recipe”. 

Straddling the divide, plus witnessing Gus’ life-long yearning for Jordan, even as he preferred living in the US, is certainly what gave Diana her double-cultural identity. 

Yet, for all their arguments, Gus and Grace loved and respected each other, even if they only showed it grudgingly. So, Diana also learned that love does not preclude conflict, nor vice versa; one must embrace life passionately, and not be afraid of friction. 

Such understanding seems to have unleashed her creativity, enabling her to see things from unaccustomed angles and record them in original imagery. It also informs the honesty of her writing. It takes courage to write a memoir of this type, to reveal one’s doubts and mistakes, while one is still in the middle of life. 

The advantages of “life without a recipe” for writing are apparent: “You start out with one sort of plan for how this or that story will go; along the way, however, it forks, doubles back. If you’re easy about it, you learn to follow the tales instead of the other way around”. (p. 52) 

She is also able to weather the twists and turns of her personal life, narrating without rancour her two failed marriages that preceded meeting her third husband and soul mate, Scott. 

She candidly relates her uncertainty over whether to have a child — would it end her writing career? — and how challenging motherhood is, but again she is able “to be easy about it”, seeing little Grace as “our beautiful mystery, a storybook placed on our laps”. (p. 135)

With Diana’s whimsical touch, awkward situations are rendered hilarious, and everyday activities become high adventure. She expresses deep emotions and values without resorting to platitudes, and deftly colours her descriptions of places and nature with her mood. 

Not having a recipe does not, however, shield her from heavy, protracted grief at the death of her father. 

“So many ways to write the grief story, through tears or dreams or memories. Or houses or cakes. Losing my father is, for a while, like losing my home in the world… A hundred thousand ways to avoid grief — and each of these ways, it turns out, is a kind of grieving. Sorrow comes, transmuted or not, water through the barricades.” (p. 245) 

Food was the favourite battlefield of Grace and Gus — she specialising in sugary baked goods, and he preferring the salty, meaty flavours of Arabic food garnished with lots of vegetables. 

Food is a recurring motif in the book, the site of conflict but also of pleasure, love and sharing. 

Thus, it comes as a shock to Diana when her doctor, concerned about her blood pressure, warns her off sugar, sending her to hear a lecturer who proclaims: “Food is not entertainment or comfort or pleasure or love or distraction” — a reversal of all she thinks she has learned about life in the food field. (p. 252) 

Having followed her grandmother’s example of bonding with her daughter by baking together, Diana meets yet another fork in the road and must reinvent her cuisine. 

“Life without a Recipe” is about clinging to family and wanting to be free of family; it is about making a new family. 

It is about the writing process — what blocks it and what pushes it along. It is about how one is affected by one’s surroundings, and vice versa. 

Above all, it is about how a person’s memories affect them in the present tense, not dictating behaviour but pointing to possibilities — recipes yet to be written.

PARIS — Researchers on Wednesday unveiled 83 rare gene variants which exert a strong influence on human height, with some capable of adding or subtracting more than 2cm.

The discovery could lead to drugs to make short people taller or vice versa, or tests to identify people at risk of developing growth disorders, the team reported.

More than 300 researchers from five continents trawled through genetic data from 711,428 people to find the variants.

Previous research had shown that genetic inheritance determines more than 80 per cent of a person's height. Non-genetic influences include nutrition, pollution and other environmental factors.

"Our latest discovery means that we can now explain over a quarter of the heritable factors involved in influencing a person's height," said Andrew Wood of the University of Exeter, a co-author of the study, published in the journal Nature.

Previous work had identified variants believed responsible for a fifth of height heritability, nearly 700 in total. These were common mutations that tend to have a smaller individual effect, typically altering stature by less than a millimetre.

Twenty-four of the 83 newly found variants can affect height by more than 1cm, the team reported.

Genes are sections of DNA which carry codes or instructions to build the proteins an organism needs to function.

But sometimes the same gene varies from one person to the next, accounting for distinct features such as straight or curly hair, eye colour or skin tone.

To expand the list of height-related genes, Wood and a team used new technology to test participants for less common, hard-to-detect variations.

They found that "one gene of particular interest, STC2, had two different DNA changes that both had larger effects on height", said a statement from the Boston Children's Hospital, which took part in the study.

Only about one in a thousand people carry one of these variants, and were 1-2cm taller than non-carriers.

This made STC2 "a potential drug target for short stature", said the hospital's Joel Hirschhorn.

The newly discovered variants were implicated in gene regulation of bone and cartilage development, as well as growth hormone production and activation, the researchers said.

Scientists hope a better grasp of the genetics of height will shed light on how DNA predicts other, less obvious traits and disease risks: Who might have a heart attack despite a healthy lifestyle? Which children are more at risk of developing leukaemia?

Previous research had shown that tall people tend to be more successful in life.

They also have a greater risk of breast or prostate cancer, but a smaller risk of cardiovascular disease.

Are passwords really out? Are biometrics truly taking over?

The connected world, the massive waves of refugees, the online digital transactions of all kinds — they all make the need for instant and unequivocal personal identification (PI) a hot, pressing, critical matter. Is one method emerging, and are old methods obsolete?

At this point, none of the available methods of instant PI is clearly leading and they all coexist.

One might think that passwords, probably the oldest method of them all, are dying, and that fingerprints, palm prints, iris scan, face recognition or voice recognition have taken over. The fact is that despite all the weaknesses of passwords, they are still very much in use.

Passwords can be forgotten, can be hacked and stolen. They are cumbersome and complex to memorise. 

To set a strong password, one that is hard to guess or crack, you must make it long, at least eight characters and preferably more (10 or 12 is recommended nowadays), and it must contain that odd assortment of alphabet letters, specials signs and numbers. 

And since we all need dozens of them, one for each application, keeping track of them quickly becomes a nightmare. 

And yet, passwords present a great advantage over biometrics; they don’t need special equipment to read, to decode and to validate them, only basic software. 

Biometry, on the other hand, needs cameras and scanners, in addition to special software of course, or very sensitive microphones in the case of voice recognition.

The obvious advantage of biometrics is that you do not have to remember anything. Your iris, your hand, your fingerprints, your face, your voice, they are with you all the time, they don’t change, they are you. Plus the fact that no one can steal them from you — definitely not a minor point.

Because the pros and cons of each system have different weight in different contexts, all the above methods are still in use and will probably be so over the next few years, although in the long run, biometrics will probably prevail. Slowly but surely, scanners and cameras are going to become more widely installed, inexpensive and will perform better and with greater accuracy.

Take iris scan identification, the only method that is virtually foolproof and that works with a nearly zero error rate — a degree of precision that no other method can match. The only identification system that is as accurate as iris scan is DNA, which of course is not an instant PI method and takes time to produce a result, and therefore cannot replace iris scan.

Iris scan PI was implemented on a large and public scale circa 2005 in UAE airports to identify travellers. 

Given the undisputable success of the operation, one would have thought that it would quickly spread to other border points in the world, to banking everywhere, etc.

More than 12 years after, iris scan is definitely penetrating more and more fields but not as quickly as one would have thought. 

Among the places where it came to the rescue as unequivocal PI are refugee camps. Before iris scan and its near-perfect precision, the level of fraud in these places was massive.

On the other hand, accessing your e-mail account or your online banking is still done using passwords, essentially, despite the inherent imperfections of the method. 

It remains the simplest and the one that requires the least complicated technology behind it. 

Since 2010, there has been expectation that the camera in your laptop or smartphone will be scanning your iris to identify you and unlock your e-mail, your online banking access, etc. 

In practice, we have to wait to see this otherwise great idea actually implemented and widely adopted.

In the meantime, each method is preferred in each specific context. 

PIN codes — one form of passwords — are doing their job rather well preventing fraudulent use of credit cards, for example. 

Besides, remembering passwords, or trying to, constitutes an excellent exercise for the brain. 

When I was younger, so much younger than today, I loved hanging around our neighbourhood houses. 

Those days, our front doors were never locked and the main gates were permanently open, so it was easy to skip from one house to the next without any obstacle. 

All the aunties in the community were our surrogate mothers anyway, and did not think twice before feeding us when we were hungry, or pulling our ears when they were angry. 

The ancient African proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child” was most applicable in the small coal town where I grew up because everyone was indeed involved in raising me. 

When I was in kindergarten, I used to have my morning breakfast of milk and toast at our immediate neighbour’s house. Every day! Why I did that I do not remember clearly but it was something to do with their son being a fussy eater and his mom deciding that if I ate there, he would perhaps mimic me and, well, eat better. 

But the real reason was that this boy’s mom wanted me to relate whatever happened in class to her daily, and word for word accurately. She would place me on her lap and feed me the buttered toast; all the while asking me detailed questions about her son’s school life. Needless to say, I loved all this attention and blabbered to my heart’s content, holding nothing back. 

This was not a time of “alternate facts”, which as we all know now, is a phrase used by Kellyanne Conway, adviser to the US president, during a “Meet the Press” interview.

There she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false statements about the attendance at Donald Trump’s inauguration, as president of the United States.

However, to my classmate’s dismay, I was not used to uttering any falsehoods.

Therefore, if our class teacher punished him for any misdeed, other children bullied him or vice versa, he got low marks in a test, he threw away his lunch and so on, everything was dutifully reported to his mother.

The poor chap would suffer the consequences of my action soon afterwards as his mom started disciplining him immediately. I ran away to safety and watched from a distance as his cheeks got slapped. I was afraid that a few of them would land on my back too, if I ventured too close. 

It never occurred to me to tweak the reality so that the unfortunate boy was not at the receiving end of such harsh admonishment. 

The nuns in our school had factored the “always be truthful” drill quite strongly into my head. I could not manufacture any “alternate facts” willingly.

This troubled me to no end, so one day I went to my older sibling for advice. 

His suggested that I stop going to their house for breakfast altogether. I did not like that idea because no one made better golden brown, crispy, fried and buttery toast, than our neighbour. “Do whatever you want then,” my brother announced, giving up on me. 

Next morning I got a brainwave. When aunty started the quizzing, I decided to answer sketchily. 

“Tell me sweetheart, was my son punished yesterday?” she asked me. 

“No,” I shook my head. 

“Thank God!” she smiled in relief. 

“He was just made to write,” I said vaguely. 

“What?” she questioned. 

“I will not throw my lunch,” I confided. 

“One hundred times,” I added, sliding out of her lap. 

A well-documented current favourite of this writer as in these pages, the Audi RS6 Avant is an intersection of the brand’s high performance four-wheel-drive and practical estate body heritage. The latest of Audi’s super estates starting from the 200 Turbo Quattro, fondness for the RS6 is a natural and evolutionary progression for a previous original Audi Quattro and 100 Avant driver.

However, and for those all too rare occasions where a brutally swift 552BHP luxury high performance super estate just is not quite enough, Ingolstadt’s premier automaker also offer a yet more mind-bendingly quick means of fast family transport in the form of the 597BHP Audi RS6 Avant Performance.

Assertive aesthetics

Boosted by a not insignificant 45BHP and identified by the addition of just one word in model nomenclature, the RS6 Avant Performance is, however, little aesthetically differentiated from the already fire-breathing regular RS6. Save for standard model specific Ascari Blue metallic paint, grippy 285/30ZR21 footwear and matt titanium finish for the inlet duct “quattro” lettering and various exterior trim details, the Performance model otherwise shares the same broad and dramatically assertive presence. 

With sculpted bonnet, sills and bodywork and an overt sense of urgency, the RS6 Performance also features a long arcing bullet-like estate roofline and level waistline for good all-round visibility. 

Classy yet unmistakably aggressive, the RS6 Performance’s big, bold and charismatic hexagonal honeycomb grille takes centre stage, with sharp apron and vast lower side intake gills below, and flanked by squinting browed LED headlights.

Sculpted and imposing, the RS6 features subtly bulging wheel-arches, and at the rear, big bore dual exhaust tips and a large rear air diffuser. A rival to both super saloons like the BMW M5 and high performance SUVs like the Range Rover Sport SVR, the RS6 Performance is the best of both worlds, with cavernous load space and tenacious four-wheel-drive mated with the better handling of a lower centre of gravity.

Supercar swift

Devastatingly powerful in standard guise, the RS6 Performance, however, ups the ante with a more intense high rev performance and bulgingly muscular mid-range. Developing 597BHP at 6100-6800rpm from its relatively small but high output 4-litre twin-turbocharged V8 engine, the RS6 Performance develops the same nominal 516lb/ft torque as the regular RS6, but over a broader 1750-6000rpm range, and for short bursts on overboost peaks to 553lb/ft torque throughout 2500-5500rpm.

The results are staggering, with a 0-100km time reduced by 0.2-seconds to a supercar-like 3.7-seconds and a de-restricted 305km/h top speed. Meanwhile seamless cylinder de-activation and stop/start system yields restrained and unchanged 9.6l/100km combined fuel efficiency when driven modestly.

With turbo-lag virtually eliminated courtesy of short intake gas flow path piping and Quattro four-wheel-drive providing tenacious all-weather traction, the RS6 Performance launches off-the-line with startling alacrity.

Pulling brutally hard throughout and effortless, gurgling, burbling and bass-heavy mid-range, before building to an intensely urgent bellowing and wailing top-end, while high load lift-off and gear changes from its 8-speed automatic are crisply and smoothly executed with a crackle. 

Easily and indefatigably capable of achieving higher speeds and cruising with complete confidence, the RS6 Performance’s numerous driving modes car be set in “dynamic” mode which includes more responsive engine and gearbox, and more vocal exhaust settings.

Confident and committed

Seemingly bending the laws of physics for 597BHP 1950kg car with its engine positioned just ahead of the front axle, the RS6 Performance is considerably more agile than one expects. With 60 per cent power sent rearwards and capable of varying distribution between 70 per cent frontwards and 85 per cent rearwards, in addition to a limited-slip differential further distributing power left and right, the RS6 Performance proves eager and agile, turning tidily into corners and defying its weighting. Pushed to its heroically high grip threshold, its instincts are for understeer, but this is curtailed by is stability safety systems, four-wheel-drive system and simply by easing off the throttle. Meanwhile brake-based torque vectoring brakes the inside wheel for added agility.

Phenomenally grippy and capable of adapting to prevailing situations in terms of traction and roadholding, the RS6 performance is brutally effecting through winding roads as it seems to virtually un-bend the curves. As if riding on rails, the RS6 is able to enter, go through and exit corners while safely carrying huge speeds.

Meanwhile adjustable adaptive air dampers become tauter for better body control and limited slip differential becomes more active involvement when set in “dynamic” mode. Coming on throttle hard and early, one can either nudge the RS6’s tail out or momentarily break traction. However, its mechanical driveline and electronic systems claw back traction easily before blasting out onto a straight.

Classy and cavernous

Confident and committed through corners and, the RS6 Performance’s steering is meaty, direct and quick, and features a heavier “dynamic” setting, while brakes are indefatigably effective and fade resilient. In its element at high-speed highways, the RS6 Performance remains reassuringly stable, settled and refined. Buttoned down over crests and dips, rebound control is settled while ride is firm but smooth. Riding on multi-link suspension mated with adaptive air dampers, the RS6 Performance is best in its default adaptive mode, with “comfort” setting adding more ride fluency and suppleness, while “dynamic” mode offers better body control, but can feel busy and firm on some roads.

Refined and quiet inside, the RS6 Performance features sophisticated sound cancellation and acoustic window lamination. Classy, well-appointed and luxurious inside, it features supportively figure hugging yet comfortable sports seats with quilted and stitched leather, rich Alcantara rooflining, and luxurious textures and carbon-fibre, metal accents.

A highly adjustable driving position includes right-level armrests, good visibility and 360° camera for improved manoeuvrability. Spacious for four or five passengers – depending on rear seat option chosen – it also offers cavernous 565-litre minimum cargo capacity, which expands to 1680-litres. Stylish and intuitive in layout, an exhaustive list of standard and optional features includes user-friendly infotainment system with 4G Wifi connectivity and semi-automated driver-assistance systems.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 4-litre, twin-turbo, in-line V8-cylinders

Bore x stroke: 84.5 x 89mm

Compression ratio: 9.3:1

Valve-train: 32-valve, DOHC, direct injection

Gearbox: 8-speed automatic

Ratios: 1st 4.714; 2nd 3.143; 3rd 2.106; 4th 1.667; 5th 1285; 6th 1.0; 7th 0.839; 8th 0.667

Reverse / final drive: 3.317 / 3.076

Drive-line: four-wheel-drive, self-locking centre differential, optional limited-slip rear-differential

Power distribution, F/R: 40 per cent / 60 per cent

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 597 (605) [445] @6100-6800rpm

Specific power: 149.5BHP/litre

Power-to-weight: 306BHP/tonne

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 516 (700) @1750-6000rpm

Torque, lb/ft (Nm), overboost: 553 (750) @2500-5500rpm

Specific torque: 187.8Nm/litre (overboost)

Torque-to-weight: 384.6Nm/tonne (overboost)

0-100km/h: 3.7-seconds

Top speed, restricted / de-restricted: 250 / 305km/h

Fuel consumption, urban / extra-urban / combined: 13.4 / 7.4 / 9.6-litres/100km 

CO2 emissions, combined: 223g/km

Fuel capacity: 75-litres

Wheelbase: 2915mm

Luggage volume, min / max: 565 / 1680-litres

Steering: electric-assisted rack & pinion

Turning Circle: 11.9-metres

Suspension: multi-link, adaptive air dampers

Brakes: ventilated and perforated discs

Tyres: 285/30R21

The Ninety-Ninth Floor

Jana Fawaz Elhassan

Translated by Michelle Hartman

Massachusetts: Interlink Books, 2017

Pp. 288

This is the story of two young people who fall in love in New York City, both striving to overcome old traumas and build a new life. “We were here because in New York we were able, or we thought we were able, to be anonymous, to walk in the streets and not see the faces of the past.” (p. 211)

Majd wants to forget the refugee camp and the horror of losing his mother in the Sabra-Shatilla massacre, while Hilda is escaping her father’s patriarchal fiefdom in a close-knit Christian village, which kept her ignorant of the rest of Lebanon and even her own family’s history.

For all appearances, the two are doing well. Majd has attained a high position in a video game development company, manifest in his office on the 99th floor. This has added significance for him, because before his father brought him to the US post-1982, the highest he had ever been was on the roof of their small camp house from which he tried to fly, much to his mother’s consternation. For her part, Hilda works as a fashion designer while pursuing her dream of becoming a dancer. Yet, their inner thoughts reveal the depths of their unresolved insecurities. 

For a while, their romance works, but it also makes Majd feel vulnerable: “It was as if she, with a lot of love, cracked my hard shell and left me naked in a room full of mirrors.” (p. 28)

Paradoxically, falling in love with each other puts them face to face with the past. Majd is a Palestinian whom Hilda’s family had taught her to hate, while her father had been a warlord and thus potentially involved in the massacres. When anxiety sets in, especially for Majd, personal insecurities mix with politics in nothing short of an identity crisis.

As he meditates on the past and his father’s life, which was broken by not being able to save his wife, Majd’s preoccupation with Palestine grows but so does his confusion: “The problem wasn’t my Palestinianness or my desire to escape it at times, but rather coming to terms with those feelings of alienation from a place I didn’t know and where I have no memories, from a land that inhabits me that I have never stepped foot on.” (p. 88) He vacillates between wondering if his love for Hilda means loving one’s enemy, or if it can replace his yearning for a homeland.

Majd is full of contradictory feelings. He wants to be free of the past, yet fears this will leave him without any identity. Though he tries to hide his facial scar and crippled leg, and fears they will drive Hilda away, he refuses surgery to correct them, as if he can’t part with his past tragedy, when he was injured by an explosion as the massacre began. While he loves Hilda for being free and unconventional, he also fears her gaining too much power and being able to live without him. When Hilda decides to go back to visit her family in Lebanon, a crisis erupts in their relationship. Majd does not acknowledge her need to revisit her past, and thinks she won’t return. Whether Hilda is in New York or Lebanon, Majd is “afraid of the distance between us”. (p. 191)

Jana Fawaz Elhassan is an award-winning Lebanese writer who has published three novels, but this is the first one to be translated into English. In telling Hilda’s and Majd’s story, she boldly explores the many sides of love, as well as the lingering, psychological impact of hate, displacement and war on individuals, families and communities. Much of the story is told through Majd’s internal monologues, giving the text a rambling quality replicating human thought processes which have emotional associations and a logic all their own. At the same time, Elhassan structures the novel with a series of flashbacks that gradually fill in the blanks in Majd’s past, and explain his inner agony. 

In contrast, the parts of the story told by Hilda are more straightforward, as she confronts her father, and asks uncomfortable questions about her family’s past and their involvement in the war. It is unclear if this contrast in points-of-view is intended by the author to show a male-female difference, or the distinction between the Palestinian and Lebanese predicaments, or is simply the way she imagines the characters. 

“The Ninety-Ninth Floor” is a new approach to telling the Palestinian story, and to narrating the conflicted Palestinian-Lebanese relationship, the Lebanese civil war and resulting massacres. It seems to be saying that the antagonisms of war do not melt away by themselves if there is no concerted effort at love and forgiveness, and that individual Palestinians have to struggle to be whole again in the absence of justice for their cause.

Sally Bland

PARIS — Personality traits such as moodiness or open-mindedness are linked to the shape of one’s brain, a study said on Wednesday.

Researchers said they found a striking correlation between structural brain differences and five main personality types.

“The shape of our brain can itself provide surprising clues about how we behave — and our risk of developing mental health disorders,” said a statement from the University of Cambridge, which took part in the study.

Psychologists have previously developed a “Big Five” model of main personality types: neuroticism (how moody a person is), extraversion (how enthusiastic), open-mindedness, agreeableness (a measure of altruism) and conscientiousness (a measure of self-control).

Using brain scans from over 500 people aged 22 to 36, the new study looked at differences in the cortex — the wrinkly outer layer of the brain also known as grey matter.

Specifically it focussed on combinations of thickness, surface area and the number of folds in different people.

“We found that neuroticism... was linked to a thicker cortex and a smaller area and folding in some brain regions,” said study co-author Roberta Riccelli of Italy’s Magna Graecia University.

Conversely, openness, “was associated with a thinner cortex and greater area and folding”.

Neuroticism, the team said, was a trait underlying mental illnesses such as anxiety disorders, whereas “openness” reflects curiosity and creativity.

The deep folds in the human brain were the evolutionary solution to fitting such a large, super-computer into a relatively small skull. 

“It’s like stretching and folding a rubber sheet — this increases the surface area, but at the same time the sheet itself becomes thinner,” co-author Luca Passamonti of the University of Cambridge explained in a statement.

Nature vs nurture?

The study was the first to clearly link the “Big Five” personality traits to differences in brain shape, Riccelli told AFP.

This, in turn, was “a crucial step to improving our understanding of mental disorders,” she said.

“It may give us the opportunity to detect those who are at high risk of developing mental illnesses early, which has obvious implications for prompt intervention.”

The research touches on a question that has occupied the minds of philosophers and scientists for centuries — are humans more a product of their genes, or of their upbringing and exposure?

The study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, could not conclude that brain shape determines a personality type, its authors said.

“We cannot answer the question: ‘What came first, the chicken or the egg?’,” said Riccelli. 

“Hence we can’t say if we have a specific personality type because our brain has a specific shape.”

Brain shape, in itself, is determined by genetic as well as environmental factors, she pointed out.

The team hypothesised that brain differences may be even more pronounced in people likelier to suffer from neuro-psychiatric illnesses.

Like in all fields, the weakest link principle applies all the time in Information Technology.

You may be enthusiastic about your recent Internet subscription that brings you 40 Mbps in download and 4 Mbps in upload. How exactly is it going to impact on your daily interaction with the technology?

It is certainly a thrill to buy a top of the line DSLR camera with a 50 MB resolution like Canon’s 5DS or a high-end scanner like Epson’s V600 that is able of scanning at 6400x9600 dpi (dots per inch) and at 48-bit colour depth, but how does the rest of the operations go? That is after you’ve taken the photo or done the scan?

Actual work, performance and end result of any of the above is significantly slowed down or hampered by the weakest link in the chain of software, hardware, accessories, devices or tools you may be have to use throughout the process. Sometimes the constraints can be frustrating.

Take the otherwise excellent Dropbox cloud storage. Professional subscriptions to the service give you as much as 1TB (terabyte) of storage. And if your Internet’s speed is fast you may think that life will be great with these two services combined.

Unfortunately Dropbox has an inherent speed limitation when you upload your file to its servers. It typically caps at an average 200 KB/s, which is but a fraction of what your Internet subscription is able to achieve in terms of speed, and it makes the 1TB of storage space that Dropbox grants you not as useful as you think it is. Indeed, uploading to it 1TB of data this way would take… six weeks. That’s a weak link here you got here with the upload speed limitation.

The same goes for very high resolution photos or scans as the ones mentioned above. Canon’s 5DS or Epson’s V600, if used at their highest settings, will generate a photo file which size would range between a minimum of 100 MB and a whopping maximum of 2 TB. And this is for just one photo! How then do you copy, open and process such a file? In the overwhelming number of cases your computer will not be up to the job. In the best case the machine will “take it” alright, but everything will seem like crawling, including just opening the file to view the picture. The current processing power of consumers’ computers constitutes a very weak link in such context.

In a manner perhaps less obvious, less than dramatic than the above examples, smartphones’ batteries appear as another technology weak link. When you think of all the functionality packed in these devices, of how dependent on them we have become, on the countless applications we install and run using them all the time, having a battery that typically needs to be recharged on a daily basis if not more frequently, is a characteristic that is certainly not a par with the rest of the handsets’ features. What good is all the power and functions if you run out of battery at a critical moment?

Fortunately in the case of smartphones the portable battery banks that are now commonly found in the market and are rather inexpensive, easily compensate for the devices internal batteries. A nice way to bypass a weak link here. 

Those who are not deterred by any kind of weak link may consider Hasselblad’s H4D-200MS beauty. The 200-megapixels camera made by the famous Victor Hasselblad AB in Sweden takes photos that are 600 MB big each. It is, however, reasonable to assume that those who have the money to buy the superb $45,000 camera can also afford a $7,500 Dell Alienware laptop that comes with monster specs and that can show the photos taken with the Hasselblad in all their glory – and in a snap of course.