.: The Red Brick – Dubai College's Student Newspaper :.

First we experienced a tide of poppies patriotically pinned to every shirt, raising funds for the British Legion. Then it was time for the onslaught of the pink breast cancer ribbons. Movember was greeted by teachers proudly sporting striking handlebars and students, well, parading bits of fluff that made unimpressive substitutes for the luxuriant whiskers that would show their solidarity with those with prostate cancer. By the time you realize they’ve been growing moustaches, December would have rolled by and it’ll be time to shave again. And while the novelty of wearing various symbols to demonstrate your support for causes may be wearing a little thin, it has never been so essential than now to raise awareness about World AIDS Day, the 1st of December, which is likely to be heralded with red ribbons.

And why is it so vital to raise awareness about it? Because by being one of the biggest killers in the world today, AIDS, or Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome, has taken more than 25 million lives worldwide since 1981, the start of the global pandemic. The results of surveys published in www.usaid.gov show that in 2008, there were approximately 33.4 million people around the world living with HIV/AIDS, including 2.1 million children under age 15. AIDS, caused by the Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is a wily enemy: it does not strike by direct attack. It chips away at your body’s defences instead, destroying your T-helper cells, a type of white blood cell, gradually weakening the immune system until the body is left fragile and vulnerable. It then lets other pathogens do the dirty work: without the T-helper cells that fight disease, even something as trivial as a cold or the flu can be fatal. (Adapted from www.homehealth-uk.com).

Www.aids-children.org shared a touching account of an AIDS sufferer, John, who now has a flourishing business due to timely intervention by a family strengthening programme in Rwanda.

“I had an active life: a job, a salary and many friends. One day, all this disappeared because I found out that I was HIV-positive. It was not easy at all. When I was told that I was HIV-positive, I thought it was a joke, I didn’t believe it. I spent several weeks feeling sorry for myself, asking myself what happened to me. I cried a lot, I didn’t want to accept that I was infected. I could not imagine that I would stay alive for more than a week. When the news of my illness reached my office, I was dismissed outright. My boss thought I would either die very soon or contaminate the other colleagues.

I found myself alone without friends or a job, and I realized that there was a problem. I began to accept the hard reality that it was necessary to fight to survive. I had no money, no savings and could not imagine that I would overcome this situation. My girlfriend left me, and I found myself alone with a six-month-old baby. “

What is most ironic is that AIDS is a preventable disease, being transferred by the sharing of bodily fluids. The only time when it is not avertable is when HIV is passed on genetically. Something as simple as making sure you are using a sterile needle before you receive an injection and practising safe sex habits can save you from a lifetime of suffering. Buying the crimson ribbon and donating some money to a worthy cause has the potential to raise awareness and contribute towards discovering a cure for the illness, and subsequently change someone’s life for the better. Every penny makes a difference, so the power to put a smile on a sufferer’s face may lie in your hands- pin on the red ribbon!

* All sites were accessed on 26th November 2011.

You don’t have to be a technology geek to know about this device. It’s taken over this age and is one of the most used items in people of all age groups daily routine. Whether it’s in our pockets, bags or connected by a wire to a socket in the wall, it’s always near us and it’s hard to imagine what life would be without a mobile phone.

But when were they first introduced? What did the brand new iphone 4s’ ancestor look like? Were Blackberries always so sleek and modern looking? Here we take a look at the time line of mobile phones…

Motorola DynaTAC 8000X

You might not have expected it, but Motorola was the founder of mobile phones. In 1973, Motorola showed off a prototype of the world’s first portable cellular telephone. That phone, which measured more than a foot long, weighed almost 2 pounds, and cost $3995, became commercially available in 1983. Its battery could provide 1 hour of talk time, and its memory could store 30 phone numbers. It may not have been pretty, but it did let you talk while on the go–if you could lift it, that is!

Nokia Mobira Senator

Not wanting to be left behind, Nokia came out with it’s first portable phone in 1982. It was designed for use in cars, after all, you wouldn’t want to use this phone while walking: It weighed about 21 pounds!

Motorola StarTAC

Not only did they make the first ever mobile phone, but they also made the first ever fashionable phone. The StarTac was introduced in 1996, before mobiles were more about function than fashion but this small, lightweight phone proved style was just as important. This 3.1 ounce phone could be clipped to a belt and is tinier and lighter than most phones these days.

Nokia 6160

Perhaps you remember in the late 1990s, the “in” thing was Nokia’s “candy-bar” style phone. Having a monochrome display, an external antenna, and a boxy, 5.2-inch tall frame, the Nokia 6160 was the company’s best-selling handset of the 1990s.

RIM Crackberry

For all you Blackberry fans out there, meet the modern day blackberry’s predecessor – the Crackberry. Invented in early 2002, it was complete with e-mail technology, organizer features and a keyboard all that it lacked was colour and BBM.

Sanyo SCP-5300 PCS

The first camera phone in America was introduced in 2002 by Sanyo. (One in Japan had been available for a few years). At it’s highest resolution it captured 640×480 images.

Motorola RAZR

Once again Motorola proved that they’re ahead of the game when it came to mobile phones and in the mid 2000’s had a clever marketing strategy of giving a phone an instantly recognizable name.  The RAZR continued to be one of the most best selling mobiles for quite a few years after it was first launched.

…With the addition of a lot more amusing apps over the next 5 years we get to todays iphone 4s and Blackberry Torch. The evolution which turned mobiles from machines used strictly for calling one another, to devices full of entertainment.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Published in 2011 by Fourth Estate (HarperCollins), £12.99

“There is no good or evil, only power and those who are too weak to see it.”

-Professor Quirrell to Harry Potter while explaining why he became a supporter of Lord Voldemort, in ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’, JK Rowling.

The debate over the meaning of good and evil has raged amongst mankind for as long as, well, mankind’s been around. Every ancient scripture, every Disney movie, firmly reassures that good will always triumph over evil: as long as you do no wrong, you can come to no harm. As perpetual optimists, we like to stay secure among our Manichaean beliefs that sticking to the straight and narrow is a guaranteed way of staying out of trouble, resisting the sweet fruit of temptation growing on the hedges beside that straight and narrow path will keep misfortune at bay. But what happens if your own body rebels against you?

Disease is not discriminating; it can strike anyone. Yes, the risk of lifestyle illnesses can be decreased, but who is to blame if someone in the pink of health succumbs to an invisible nemesis? Two years ago, my grandma lost a hard fought battle against leukaemia, and battle’s the right word, not a cliché: fighting cancer is every bit as exhausting and emotionally difficult as guerrilla warfare. She ate a balanced diet, didn’t smoke or drink, went for power walks everyday and used no products that could be potentially carcinogenic.
Cancer came silently and swiftly, sapping her of her energy and morale. Radiation and chemotherapy did the rest of the job, obliterating her immunity. My grandma was relatively young; she didn’t deserve to die. No victim of cancer deserves to die. Her spiritual beliefs, and the rest of our family’s, were severely tested: was there no good in the world, only power and victims? Worse, cancer is a power you cannot usurp: you can try your best to survive but as long as even a single mutant cell remains in your body, it will get you in the end.

Scientists have worked tirelessly to put an end to this injustice, not reaching a definite conclusion but making healthy, if erratic, progress. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee documents this struggle. He asserts that “Ask any biological question, no matter how seemingly distant- what makes the heart fail, or why worms age, or even how birds learn songs- and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumour suppressor.” In other words, cancer causing or preventing agents. The Emperor of All Maladies, apart from being extremely relevant in a world where 7 million people died of cancer in 2010 alone, achieves what generations of authors have tried to achieve but failed miserably: it makes for a good read. The highly publicized death of Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has once again put cancer in the spotlight: pancreatic cancer claimed his life, and it is perhaps all the more important now for readers to understand and appreciate the illness.

Too many literary works, in particular non fictional ones, are simply and undeniably dull. Most medical write-ups groan with the weight of copious amounts of unneeded scientific jargon, making the reader have to consult an encyclopaedia a minimum of twenty five times before she reaches the end of the first page. Others adopt the monotonic voice of a textbook, perfectly understandable, everything beautifully explained, but full of information as sterile as a freshly disinfected operating theatre.

Mukherjee’s triumph is his ability to maintain the delicate equilibrium between fulfilling his purpose- to relate a concise history of cancer and attempted cures- and holding the reader’s attention. Quotations before every chapter, heartbreaking accounts of sufferers, researcher’s frustration and spectacular moments of hope add human interest to the too-sanitary concepts of DNA mutation and overactive cellular reproduction. A tale of a Persian queen who was one of the first recorded patients, gory details of amputation and accounts of searching for signs of this emperor of all maladies in far-flung graveyards throw in the pinch of glamour that turns a book from merely well-documented to a remarkable one that can be actively discussed in literary circles. It follows the journeys of a host of key characters involved in the fight against cancer, among them Mary Lasker, Sidney Farber, pioneers of chemotherapy, and Henry Kaplan who brought Hodgkin’s disease to the forefront.

If Mukherjee has written a scientific book, he has also penned a story of a ‘four thousand year old battle’, an epic where the enemy is your own body turning against you. It has been aptly titled ‘A Biography of Cancer’, a living thing with a mind of its own, unvanquished for millennia in its jeering tirade against humanity. Cancer is here a terrible villain, and while An Emperor also offers consolation and the anticipation of a conquest that seems far away, the disease becomes a personified creature mockingly watching as you crumble before its might: “Her illness had tried to humiliate her. It had made her anonymous and seemingly humourless; it had sentenced her to die an unsightly death… She had responded with vengeance, moving to be always one step ahead, trying to outwit it.” In fact, the book is a grown up version of the popular children’s edutainment series, Horrible Science. While it does not revel in everything macabre and gooey and squelchy, it is as varied a potpourri of information and experiences even as it deals with its ruthless subject, its tone crisp but lyrical simultaneously.

It deals not only with the discovery of multiple drugs, many failures and few successes, but also follows how cancer has been perceived by the public eye over the ages. It narrates how smoking, for instance, now known as a major killer, used to be recommended by doctors to ‘soothe the nerves’ -and is in fact still seen as the height of ‘cool’ among many young people. At this time in history lung cancer was attributed to car exhausts. It wonderingly muses on how Time magazine once refused to print an advertisement for a breast cancer support group because ‘breast’ and ‘cancer’ were censored words, the editor suggesting that they could call it instead a support group for ‘a disease of the chest wall’.

In a way, has come at the right moment. We are making massive strides everyday in the world of cancer treatment, yet even as our knowledge increases and awareness spreads, we realize how far away we are from completing this punishing journey. The time is ripe for the publishing of a biography of cancer; a gentle reminder not to grow too complacent but continue with our struggle against an enemy you cannot emerge victorious over but at best, contain- the very building blocks that make up your life essence.

A polygraph, more commonly known as a lie detector, is an instrument that measures physiological responses to test whether or not a person is truthfully answering a question.

This seems quite spectacular; nevertheless, it remains controversial and most courts still do not recognize polygraph tests as evidence in a court of law. How does this instrument work and what are the problems associated with it?

The science behind the polygraph

Polygraphs work by measuring 4 key physiological responses: breathing rate, blood pressure, pulse rate and perspiration. The measurements for these are plotted continuously over a single strip of moving paper.

The test begins with a few simple questions; these are given to establish the normal responses of the person being interrogated and are called control questions. Some of Polygraph testing is used on The Moment     the control questions are irrelevant and are easy to answer truthfully, for example,  of Truth, a popular TV show                          “Is your name Sherlock Holmes?” whilst others are there to trick you into lying,

such as “Have you ever stolen anything?” The relevant questions are asked alternately with the control questions and signals are measured. Lies can be detected by deviations from the norm.

Common clues which indicate lying are flushed cheeks and a choking voice. However, the polygraph is able to detect subtle changes in the physiological responses that naturally occur when a person lies. Even though a person may feel he is acting calmly, the body instinctively responds to the high level of stress as if it is preparing for a fight. First, the nerves trigger the release of adrenaline, the stress hormone. The heart rate increases so that more blood can be pumped to the vital muscles. The person’s breathing also deepens, allowing more oxygen to be taken to the muscles. Finally, the person begins sweating; this cools the body down to avoid it overheating. These basic nervous functions are automatic and the brain cannot stop them as they are part of the body’s natural survival mechanisms.

Controversy

Although polygraph advocates claim that the validity of the polygraph remains around 90-95%, polygraph testing is not popular among many members of the scientific community. They argue that evidence proves that the test simply isn’t accurate enough and many innocent people can fail the test. Also, a polygraph examiner’s interpretation is quite subjective, which makes the test unreliable. Aldrich Ames is a famous double-agent who twice passed the polygraph test whilst spying for the Soviet Union.

There are several ways to beat the polygraph test. One way is to artificially raise your blood pressure. These can be done by tightening your lower body muscles. Another common method used is to think about something scary or exciting; this will increase your heart rate during truthful answers, thus making it harder to distinguish lies.

Kabir Tourani