Caribbean Muslims of Indian ancestry must embrace and celebrate their heritage - Alim Ali

Caribbean Muslims of Indian ancestry must embrace and celebrate their heritage.

A thought-provoking article by Sidi Alim Ali. Sidi Alim is one of the tireless activists who does much more than people know, but keeps in the background. He and people like him are the soul and baraka of communities

As we take the time out to commemorate 165 years of the presence of people of Indian heritage on this Indian Arrival Day in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, the Muslims of this nation [and by extension elsewhere in the Caribbean and South America] should embrace and celebrate their heritage alongside the descendants of jahajee bhais and bahins. The wombs that borne us were from Uttar Pradesh, Bengal and Madras in India, so take heed and show the appropriate respect and gratitude.

Read on: Caribbean Muslims of Indian ancestry must embrace and celebrate their heritage.

The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains - Wired Magazine

Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains | Magazine

During the winter of 2007, a UCLA professor of psychiatry named Gary Small recruited six volunteers—three experienced Web surfers and three novices—for a study on brain activity. He gave each a pair of goggles onto which Web pages could be projected. Then he slid his subjects, one by one, into the cylinder of a whole-brain magnetic resonance imager and told them to start searching the Internet. As they used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics—the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car—the MRI scanned their brains for areas of high activation, indicated by increases in blood flow.

The two groups showed marked differences. Brain activity of the experienced surfers was far more extensive than that of the newbies, particularly in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with problem-solving and decisionmaking. Small then had his subjects read normal blocks of text projected onto their goggles; in this case, scans revealed no significant difference in areas of brain activation between the two groups. The evidence suggested, then, that the distinctive neural pathways of experienced Web users had developed because of their Internet use.

The most remarkable result of the experiment emerged when Small repeated the tests six days later. In the interim, the novices had agreed to spend an hour a day online, searching the Internet. The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers. “Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” Small wrote. He later repeated all the tests with 18 more volunteers and got the same results.

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Unplugged Christians living off the grid - CNN.com

Unplugged Christians living off the grid - CNN.com

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* A movement of conservative Christians are choosing to live on the edge of society
* They see government role in welfare as a sin and refuse to take benefits
* One group, Christian Exodus, advocated seceding from the United States
* Others say they just want to live as they believe Christians did in the religion’s early days

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Kicking the Addiction to Multitasking - AJ Jacobs: My colossal task burden - The Guaridan

AJ Jacobs: My colossal task burden | Life and style | The Guardian

When AJ Jacobs learned multitasking was bad for you, he decided to kick his chronic addiction to mental juggling. Get ready for Operation Focus…

‘This is awful. I feel as if my brain has entered a school zone and has to slow down to 25mph.’ Photograph: Christopher Lane

The stereo is silent. The TV black. The room dark. I am focused on nothing but a glowing computer screen. I’m doing this because I have a problem focusing. My brain is all over the place. Unless I’m doing at least two things at once, I feel like I’m wasting my time. Phone and email. Watching TV, checking Facebook and reading the news online. Texting and peeing.

In one sense, task-juggling makes me feel great: busy, energised, fulfilled, as if I’m living three lives in the space of one. But I also know I’m scattered. I’m overloading my circuits. This overstimulated, underfocused world is driving us all batty. My mother – who complains when I click through my emails while talking to her on the phone (and by talking, I mean I toss out an occasional “uh-huh” or “sounds good”) – recently sent me an article about how multitasking is actually inefficient.

Hence Operation Focus. I’m going to recapture my attention span. I pledge to go cold turkey from multitasking for a month. Only single tasks. Uni-tasking. And, just as important, I’ll stick with each task for more than my average 30 seconds. I’ll be the most focused man in the world.

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iTaskinator - iPhone Task Manager for Muslims

iTaskinator - iPhone Task Manager for Muslims

iTaskinator schedules your tasks through an easy to use interface. It utilizes a proven time-management technique called “Time-blocking” 

to help you focus on getting important things done. What’s more, it automatically schedules around your local prayer times, so that you don’t miss any prayers!

How to sell your books in the iBook store - TUAW

Calling all authors: How to sell your books in the iBook store

…Have you got a novel or two in your bottom desk drawer? Did you participate in the National Novel Writing Month competition last November? Are you a budding author who needs that last nudge to actually get writing? If any of these describe you, Apple has just given you a way to get your masterpiece into the iBooks store for the iPad, and you can do it yourself. You don’t need a publisher, distributor, agent or anything else for that matter. You can decide how much to charge and which countries (that have an iBook store) to sell into. You also get the same deal as the app publishers, meaning that Apple takes 30% and you keep 70% of the revenue.
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Journalism and ‘the words of power’ - Robert Fisk

Al Jazeera English - Focus - Journalism and ‘the words of power’

Robert Fisk, The Independent newspaper’s Middle East correspondent, gave the following address to the fifth Al Jazeera annual forum on May 23.

Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and state department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the foreign office and the ministry of defence. In the western context, power and the media is about words - and the use of words.

It is about semantics.

It is about the employment of phrases and clauses and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history; and about our ignorance of history.

More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power.

Is this because we no longer care about linguistics? Is this because lap-tops ‘correct’ our spelling, ‘trim’ our grammar so that our sentences so often turn out to be identical to those of our rulers? Is this why newspaper editorials today often sound like political speeches?

Let me show you what I mean. Read more