05 July 2008
04 July 2008
Photo Hunt - Pointed
The theme for this week's Photo Hunt is pointed. These photos were taken during a recent trip to Paris. It is the Memorial des martyrs de la deportation memorial near Notre Dame cathedral. It commemorates the 200,000 French citizens deported to concentration camps in WWII. Not only is it literally pointed, it is poignant too.
Jim Halliday - a true Olympian
But spare a thought for Jim Halliday who won a bronze medal in the weightlifting lightweight division at the 1948 games in London. What makes a bronze medal won 60 years ago in an event where British success is rare? Just three years before Halliday had been a Japanese prisoner of war and had shrunk in weight from 71kg (10 stone 12lb) to 38kg (about 6 stone).
Halliday began lifting at the age of 15 and had won the Lancashire lightweight title in 1936. He was called up into the Army at the start of the Second World War and had fought in the rearguard defending the evacuation at Dunkirk before being evacuated later at Boulogne. His regiment was later sent to Singapore where he was taken prisoner by the Japanese in February 1942.
Despite the conditions in Burma, he retained some of his natural strength - when one camp did not make a primitive barbell using tree trunks, none of the inmates nor the Japanese guards could lift it overhead. However, when Halliday was fetched from a neighbouring camp, he succeeded. As a result, the Japanese commandant further cut the rations because he believed the Britons were getting too strong.
After the war, Halliday started weightlifting again simply to recover his former bodyweight. However, competition again attracted him and he took part in the 1946 World Championships and in the 1948 Olympics, where he was third behind the winner, the outstanding Egyptian lifter Ibrahim Shams. Halliday took gold medals and the 1950 and 1954 Empire Games (now known as the Commonwealth games).
Jim Halliday died on June 6, 2007, aged 89. His achievement goes to show that it is not just the champions who are the great Olympians. Recovering from horrendous ill treatment as a POW to medallist is a magnificent feat by anyone’s standards.
03 July 2008
A Canadian Foreign Accent Syndrome case
The Vancouver Sun carries a story about a rare and curious condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) which afflicts a tiny proportion of stroke victims and people receiving head injuries.
Two years ago Rosemay Dore had a stroke. Mercifuly she regained the ability to speak after long and frustrating therapy, but the brain damage left the Windsor, Ont. woman with a Newfoundland accent although she has never been anywhere near Atlantic Canada and has no family connections with the area. Dore is the first person in Canada known to have had this odd accent change, called Foreign Accent Syndrome, after a stroke. She's one of only about 60 reported cases in the world.
"Speech planning is an incredibly complicated thing," based on the many connections between different pieces of the brain that psychologists call the "speech motor circuit," explains Karin Humphreys, a psychologist at McMaster University. "And if you disrupt just one tiny portion of that circuit, it's going to change the way you speak... It's a little like the complex brain work that goes into playing the piano, with precise movements of muscles and exact timing needed in both. But with speech, "we're all virtuosos after all the practice we've done," she said.
That's unless damage disrupts the speech planning. Suddenly, the signals from brain to mouth are a little off, and the tongue won't quite move the way we intend it to.The effect is still English, but with vowels and consonants both twisted a little.
Rosemary said "It's not as bad as it was. But when it first happened my kids were laughing at me. I said, 'What do you find so funny?' And they say my voice, that it was, like, not from here. Still today they think it's cute. I don't know why, but ...For a long time I didn't want to talk" because people kept commenting on her changed accent, she said.
Curiously, most patients who recover with an accent sound entirely foreign - completely French or German, for instance. This appears to be a rare case of still sounding entirely English, but with a different regional accent. "We know a lot more than we knew 20 years ago. But there's still a huge amount to learn." Said Karin Humphreys And most of what the learning comes from cases where there's been damage to some part of the brain, which illustrates what that area did until it was hurt.
In FAS the sufferer does not imitate another accent but the damage to parts of the brain that controls language results in changes in pitch and intonation. It is the listener who perceives these changes as a different accent. This had disastrous consequences for one Norwegian victim, Astrid L, who received a head injury during an air raid in 1941. After recovering Astrid started to speak in what sounded like a German accent and she was ostracised by her fellow countrymen.
Two years ago Rosemay Dore had a stroke. Mercifuly she regained the ability to speak after long and frustrating therapy, but the brain damage left the Windsor, Ont. woman with a Newfoundland accent although she has never been anywhere near Atlantic Canada and has no family connections with the area. Dore is the first person in Canada known to have had this odd accent change, called Foreign Accent Syndrome, after a stroke. She's one of only about 60 reported cases in the world.
"Speech planning is an incredibly complicated thing," based on the many connections between different pieces of the brain that psychologists call the "speech motor circuit," explains Karin Humphreys, a psychologist at McMaster University. "And if you disrupt just one tiny portion of that circuit, it's going to change the way you speak... It's a little like the complex brain work that goes into playing the piano, with precise movements of muscles and exact timing needed in both. But with speech, "we're all virtuosos after all the practice we've done," she said.
That's unless damage disrupts the speech planning. Suddenly, the signals from brain to mouth are a little off, and the tongue won't quite move the way we intend it to.The effect is still English, but with vowels and consonants both twisted a little.
Rosemary said "It's not as bad as it was. But when it first happened my kids were laughing at me. I said, 'What do you find so funny?' And they say my voice, that it was, like, not from here. Still today they think it's cute. I don't know why, but ...For a long time I didn't want to talk" because people kept commenting on her changed accent, she said.
Curiously, most patients who recover with an accent sound entirely foreign - completely French or German, for instance. This appears to be a rare case of still sounding entirely English, but with a different regional accent. "We know a lot more than we knew 20 years ago. But there's still a huge amount to learn." Said Karin Humphreys And most of what the learning comes from cases where there's been damage to some part of the brain, which illustrates what that area did until it was hurt.
In FAS the sufferer does not imitate another accent but the damage to parts of the brain that controls language results in changes in pitch and intonation. It is the listener who perceives these changes as a different accent. This had disastrous consequences for one Norwegian victim, Astrid L, who received a head injury during an air raid in 1941. After recovering Astrid started to speak in what sounded like a German accent and she was ostracised by her fellow countrymen.
02 July 2008
Better late than never
George W Bush has signed a bill removing Nelson Mandela and ANC party members from the US terror watch list. Although members of the ANC could travel to the United Nations headquarters in New York they could not go elsewhere in the United States without a waiver from the secretary of state.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had called the restrictions a "rather embarrassing matter that I still have to waive in my own counterpart, the foreign minister of South Africa, not to mention the great leader Nelson Mandela."
Julius Caesar's first invasion of Britain took place in 55BC. More of a punitive raid than a serious attempt to overrun the country, he landed with two legions "an open and flat shore". Historians believe that the landing place was at Deal.
Caesar mentions a full Moon, strong tides, and an ocean current. Based on this information historians generally believe that the landing took place on 26-27 August. However, researchers say this cannot be right. Dr Donald Olson, an expert on tides, says that the English Channel was flowing the wrong way on these dates. Dr Olson identified August 2007 as a rare opportunity to investigate the question of when Caesar landed. During this month, complex tidal factors involving the Moon and Sun would unfold in a near-perfect replay of those in August of 55 BC. So the researchers conducted an expedition to the south coast of England in order to investigate their idea.
On the day which corresponded closely to the traditional date for the invasion, Dr Olson carried out a basic experiment - dropping an apple into the sea off Deal pier at roughly the time of afternoon when Caesar described the fleet moving. The apple floated south-west towards Dover, suggesting that the Roman fleet could not have travelled up to Deal from Dover on that day. "The English Channel was flowing the wrong way," said Dr Olson.
On the day corresponding to the revised date of 22-23 August, the team chartered a sightseeing boat and took GPS readings to determine how the boat was drifting. They found the boat was floating north-east towards Deal. The Texas team's revised date gives Caesar the ocean current he needed to manoeuvre right, proceed seven miles, and land with a falling tide near present-day Deal.
This is the beach preferred by most historians but rejected by tide experts in the past. A modified reading of Caesar's reference to the "night of a full Moon" also leads to the August 22-23 date, Dr Olson claimed. "The scientists were right about the tidal streams and so were the historians about the landing site," he explained.
Well there you have it. It certainly is an interesting little revision to the history of this country even if not exactly earth shattering!
01 July 2008
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