j’s blog

Some people will believe almost anything apparently

Mangalorean.Com- Serving Mangaloreans Around The World!

Madurai: 80 held for bizarre burials of infants alive

Madurai, April 14: The Tamil Nadu police has booked cases against 80 persons for participating in the bizarre ritual of burying infants alive as a means of fulfilling their vows, near Rajapalayam in Virudhunagar district.

The age-old ritual Kuzhimattru, which literally means changing pits, was performed on Monday as part of the annual festival at the Muthumariamman temple at Chatrapatti Ayyanapuram near Rajapalayam. The Keelarajakularaman police registered cases against 80 persons on Tuesday for participating in it.

The ritual is performed in the southern districts of Tamil Nadu, particularly in the Mariamman temples, by people from different communities. It is done by couples who take a vow to bury alive their firstborn if they are blessed with a child.

To fulfil the vow they bury children who may be less than a year old in two-foot-deep pits which are then covered with neem leaves and a sprinkling of earth in the courtyard of temples.

The priest performs certain ceremonies and steps across the pits. It is only then that the children are taken out and laid prostrate before the deities.

As reports filtered in that a similar ritual would take place at M. Pudupatti village in Virudhunagar, the police proceeded to the village and warned the people against performing it. The ritual was consequently abandoned. The police suggested to the villagers that if the parents wanted to fulfill their vows, they could lay the infants on the floor and walk across them.

About three years ago, a minister for local administration in the Tami Nadu government, Mr C. Dorairaj, was dismissed by chief minister Jayalalithaa for participating in such a ritual at Perayur in Madurai district. The government also brought in an ordinance banning the bizarre ritual.

A law, called the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Ritual and Practice of Burying Alive of a Person Act, 2002, came into force on November 18, 2002. The punishment under the legislation includes imprisonment up to three years with or without a fine of Rs 5,000.

Advocate T. Lajapathi Roy, who was part of a team from the Soco Trust Madurai, which investigated the Perayur incident, said that the team had discovered that there are no doctors or other medical facilities available at the venue when the ritual is performed. Though casualties have not been reported in this ritual, he said that chances of the infants dying of suffocation could not be ruled out.

When contacted, Virudhunagar district collector Mohamed Aslam said those who had been booked had earlier been warned against going ahead with the ritual but had not listened. “These people contend that no harm will come to the children during the ritual, which has been performed for many decades. We are trying to create awareness and prevent it from taking place. But it is only in some villages like M. Pudupatti that we are able to persuade the people listen to us,” he said.

-The Asian Age

Ignorance is bliss…till it kills you. Dumb belief of the day.

Yahoo! News - Anti-Vaccine Sentiment Plagues Nigeria

By OLOCHE SAMUEL, Associated Press Writer

KANO, Nigeria - Accusations by Islamic preachers that vaccines are part of an American anti-Islamic plot are threatening efforts to combat a measles epidemic that has killed hundreds of Nigerian children, health workers say.

Government officials play down the anti-vaccine sentiment, but all the measles deaths have been in Nigeria’s north, where authorities had to suspend polio immunizations last year after hard-line clerics fanned similar fears of that vaccine.

Nigeria, whose 130 million people make it Africa’s most populous nation, has recorded 20,859 measles cases so far this year. At least 589 victims have died, most of them children younger than 5 and all in the north, the Nigerian Red Cross and the U.N. World Health Organization say.

Southern Nigeria, which is mainly Christian, had only 253 measles cases, and no deaths.

Health services are much better in the south. But the anti-vaccination sentiment in the north, evident from interviews with parents, seems to be a factor.

“Since the polio controversy, I have not presented any of my children for immunization because my husband said I should not,” said Ramatou Mohammed, who was at Abdullahi Wase Hospital seeking treatment for her baby, Miriam, for a measles rash.

“I heard on the radio that the vaccine was contaminated. I still don’t trust any vaccine,” the 28-year-old mother of four added.

Her views were echoed by others in the waiting room at the hospital in Kano, which is in the worst-hit state, with nearly 7,000 cases, including 155 deaths, since Jan. 1.

In 2003, Islamic clerics claimed the United States was using polio vaccine to sterilize Muslims or contaminate them with the AIDS virus. They ordered a boycott in messages disseminated from mosques, in radio broadcasts and by door-to-door campaigning.

The U.S. Embassy called the claims “absolutely ridiculous.”

But three powerful state governors in the north joined the polio boycott, and it dragged on 11 months before authorities persuaded the governors in July to accept vaccine bought from the predominantly Muslim nation of Indonesia.

By then the number of polio cases in Nigeria had risen fivefold, and the crippling disease had spread to nine other African countries where it previously had been eradicated.

Now there are fears the anti-vaccine sentiment could also affect the measles outbreak.

Last year, WHO recorded 24,363 Nigerian measles cases from January to September. That is not many more than this year, and officials say some states have not yet reported cases for March, which is generally the peak of measles season.

A big surge would be a blow to WHO, which had hoped to bring measles under control this year. Across Africa, measles deaths fell from 873,000 in 1999 to just more than 500,000 — or half the global total — in 2003, according to the U.N. health agency’s most recent statistics.

Some clerics have added the measles vaccine to their campaign against immunizations.

Nasir Mohammed Nasir, imam of Kano’s second-largest mosque, said Americans “can’t be killing my brothers and children in Iraq and at the same time claim to want to save my children from polio and other diseases.”

“We suspect a sinister motive,” he said.

In Washington, the State Department’s deputy spokesman, Adam Ereli, said such allegations are “crazy, outlandish, unfounded.”

Binta Alkassim, a 30-year-old mother of six whose 2 1/2-year-old daughter just got over measles after treatment at a Kano hospital, said the polio controversy had scared many families away from all vaccinations.

“You can’t trust these Americans,” she said.

Dr. Binta Ibrahim, a senior practitioner at Kano’s main Murtala Mohammed Hospital, believes people’s reservations are being overcome.

“People have begun to accept immunization, although slowly. It will take some time to get them to accept them completely,” she said.

Nasiru Mahmoud, a Ministry of Health official in Kano, said his office had received no reports of resistance to measles immunizations and said the outbreak in Kano could not be called an epidemic.

“We had some cases which our medical personnel have put under control,” he said.

Philosophy Talk: The Blog

Philosophy Talk: The Blog is a companion blog to the radio program Philosophy talk, hosted by John Perry and Ken Taylor. Though Perry and Taylor will be the major bloggers here, we will also feature a continuous stream of guest bloggers. In addition, you can experience the wit and wisdom of our sixty-second philosopher Ian Shoals and the insight of that astute and wide ranging observer of the created universe, Amy Standen, the our Roving Philosophical Reporter.

Reasonable: Enabling Better Reasoning

Reasonable helps you: organize thoughts, produce better reasoning, show strengths and weakness in arguments, build general skills, teach the theory of reasoning and argument. 
Reasonable is a software package for PCs running Windows 95 or later. It helps you build simple diagrams of complex reasoning, so that you can see what is going on much more easily.

Reasonable expands the brain’s capacity to cope with complex arguments.

Reasonable is used, In schools and universities, to help improve general critical thinking skills, by individuals, to help organize and present reasoning, By parents, to help their children learn to think, By organizations, to help groups think though complex issues

Austhink - Critical Thinking at Work

Argument Mapping

Austhink are leaders in argument mapping, the use of software-supported graphical techniques for handling complex argumentation. Argument maps help us comprehend, evaluate, produce and communicate complex reasoning on any topic.

Newsday.com - Health News/Science News

BY JAMIE TALAN

March 21, 2005

Off the coast of Puerto Rico, living in the wild, rhesus monkeys are teaching scientists a thing or two about reasoning and deception.

Given the opportunity to snag a grape, these primates do so only when they think no one is looking.

This, said Jonathan Flombaum of Yale University, suggests that monkeys are able to alter their behavior after making a judgment about what is going on in another’s mind. This study shows monkeys can gather information from the environment that helps them make social decisions.

In the study, reported in the journal Current Biology, the monkeys focused on the scientists’ eyes to see whether they were paying attention. Even when a scientist was facing them, if the scientist’s eyes were averted, the monkeys took the grape, appearing to realize that the scientists were not looking.

Monkeys perceiving the scientist’s gaze upon them understood that they were being watched and that it wasn’t a good time to take the grape.

Flombaum, a graduate student, conducted the study in collaboration with Laurie Santos, an assistant professor in the department of psychology. The scientists hope that the finding might point the way to pathways involved in reasoning during social interactions and provide clues to human conditions where such social judgments are difficult, such as in autism. Many people with autism have difficulty reading people’s eyes, which is how people tell what’s on another person’s mind.

The experiment was conducted on the island of Cayo Santiago. There, free-ranging colonies of monkeys live, and scientists work among them. In the current study, Flombaum and his colleagues walked around looking for an isolated monkey. They stood 15 feet away, placed a platform on the ground and attached a grape. As the scientists stood 4 feet apart facing the monkey, one scientist would avert his eyes (keeping his head straight) while the other would look at the monkey.

Over and over again, the monkeys would steal the grape from the experimenter who was not looking. In another experiment, they used cardboard to cover their mouths or their eyes. When the eyes were covered, the animals went after the grape, but not when the mouth was covered. "They can take the other’s perspective," Flombaum said.

In a recent study, two grapes are placed on a ramp and the scientist, unknown to the monkey, releases one of the grapes. As it falls, it lands at the bottom, half the time sheltered by a canopy. Only when the canopy is present, and the monkey decides that the human doesn’t see the fallen grape, will he go for the food.

Flombaum said that the autistic brain can’t make these same judgments based on social cues.