Rose George at The Guardian’s Comment is Free:
When you write a book about sanitation, people are always sending you helpful things to read or watch. I lost count of the number of friends who urged me to watch Slumdog Millionaire. “You’ll understand why,” they said. And I did, when the latrines came into view. I knew that slum; Juhu Beach, near Mumbai’s non-international airport, has millionaire Bollywood stars living on one side and the Slumdog slum on the other. The film has been accused of all sorts, but most commonly “poverty porn”. I think it did well to capture the paradox of slum life, which is that it is awful and that it can provoke entrepreneurial survival skills which can be worth millions: Dharavi, Mumbai’s most famous slum, has a recycling industry that earns £800m a year.
More:
Why do most teenagers pick their noses? Two psychologists at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, India, win the Ig Nobel prize for their research. From The Guardian:
As the 21st century arrived, two distinguished psychiatrists offered mankind proof, written proof – in a study called A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample – that most teenagers pick their noses.
Dr Chittaranjan Andrade and Dr BS Srihari, colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, India, were inspired by an earlier published report by scientists in the American state of Wisconsin. The Wisconsin research claimed that more than 90% of adults are active nose-pickers. But it was silent as to whether teenagers are less or more picky than their elders.
Andrade and Srihari decided to find out.
More:
Nicholas D Kristof reviews Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population by Matthew Connelly (Harvard University Press, $35, 521 pp) in The New York Times
The first large-scale scientific test of family planning took place in Khanna, India, beginning in the early 1950s. Backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, researchers asked 8,000 villagers how often they had sex, whether they wanted to conceive and the details of the women’s menstrual cycles. The researchers met the villagers monthly and provided contraceptives, while closely monitoring another group that was given no contraceptives. After five years, the women given contraceptives had a higher birth rate than those who hadn’t received any assistance.
more
[via 3quarksdaily ]
