Book Review: Phantoms in the Brain

A Brilliant “Sherlock Holmes” of neuroscience reveals the strangest cases he has solved – and the insights they yield about human nature and the mind. Using such low-tech tools as cotton swabs and mirrors, and working with patients whose neurological symptoms range from hallucinating cartoon characters to thinking their parents are impostors, Dr. V.S. Ramachandran uncovers answers to deep and quirky questions of human nature that few scientists have dared to address, including why we laugh or become depressed; how we make decisions, deceive ourselves, and dream; why we may believe in God; and more. This is inspired medical sleuthing that pushes the boundaries of medicine’s last great frontier: the Human mind.

He introduces patients with strange, sometimes extraordinary symptoms – a man who experiences orgasms in an amputated, or phantom, foot; a woman who is convinced that her own arm must belong to her brother; stroke victims who insist they can move their paralyzed limbs; an accident survivor who believes that his parents are imposters; perfectly sane men and women with hallucinations of animals, objects, even cartoons – and then offers his ideas about what is going on in the patient’s brain that would explain such symptoms.

Often he devises ingenious experiments involving mirrors, gloves and helpful graduate students to test his ideas. The results are a new understanding of how information from different senses interacts and how the brain forms new connection and updates its model of reality in response to new sensory inputs. The wide ranging author also looks into the brain for clues about the mystery of autistic savants, human laughter, multiple personality disorder, religious experiences and the very nature of the self. Besides informative drawings and images of the human brain, the text contains numerous illustrations demonstrating optical phenomena that demand reader involvement.

I was very pleased by author sober discussion of “qualia” and his careful treading on the question of religion and the mind-body interaction in general. His argumentation is overall very balanced; he comes across as an open-minded scientist who isn’t pushing any particular agenda, but is simply driven by curiosity. I didn’t find his elaborations on the nature of consciousness too enlightening but I guess consciousness is to neuroscience what the cosmological constant is to physics, everybody’s got an opinion about it and nobody finds anybody else’s opinion convincing. Altogether, I learned quite a lot from this book and especially the section on denial has given me something to think about.

Documents and Accounts to link with Aadhaar

From getting a mobile connection to conducting financial transactions, you just can’t escape Aadhaar. Here is list of accounts and documents which have to be linked with Aadhaar mandatorily, and those where linking or quoting is not a must but doing so can make your life easier.

Bank Account – The govt. has made it mandatory for banks to verify and link their customers Aadhaar’s with their savings accounts.

Mutual Fund Investments – It has been made mandatory for financial institutions like fund houses to get their customers Aadhaar numbers and link the same to their respective accounts.

PAN Card – The govt. had earlier notified that income tax returns filed after July 1, 2017 would be accepted only after the assesse linked his PAN with Aadhaar.

Social Security Schemes – To avail benefits of social security schemes such as Atal Pension Yojana and Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, the Aadhaar is mandatory.

Pension Account – The Employees Provident Fund Organization has made it mandatory for its pensioners to provide either Aadhaar or enrolment ID to remain beneficiaries of social security schemes.

SIM Cards – Aadhaar based e-KYC verification for all mobile phone subscribers are mandatory.

Faster Provident fund claims – Although it is not mandatory to link your Aadhaar number to your PF account, doing so will allow you to apply the claim online and get it within 5 days.

Direct Benefit Transfer – It is advisable to provide your Aadhaar details to get benefits under the government’s DBT schemes even though it is not mandatory. Doing so you safeguard against duplication or fraudulent activities and ensure that the money transfer reaches directly to your Aadhaar linked bank account.

Death Certificate – DC will need to have the deceased person’s Aadhaar number. The person applying for the death certificate for a family member needs to furnish his or her Aadhaar as well.

Driving license and registration of vehicles – The govt. is planning to link driving license and the registration of vehicles with the owner’s Aadhaar number. This is being done to prevent the insurance of fake licenses and registration of stolen vehicles.

Entrepreneurship in India

Demographics trend in India, the second most populous country in the world, suggest that a million people join the labor force every month. This amounts to 12 Million Indians joining the labor force every year, which is more than the entire population of Sweden. With millions of young people joining the labor market every month, the question is if there will be enough jobs for them.

India produces too few entrepreneurs for its stage of development. The pace of creation of new businesses and new start-ups in India is low compared to the rest of the world. A slow pace of entrepreneurship is associated with a slow pace of job creation. There is huge heterogeneity in entrepreneurship within India, with new establishments concentrated in a few places. There is extensive evidence of agglomeration economies.

Supportive incumbent industrial structures for input and output markets are strongly linked to higher establishment entry rates. For a city, start-ups are more frequent in industries that share common labor needs or have customer supplier relationships with the city incumbent businesses. However, strong agglomeration economies and supportive incumbent industrial structures will do not explain why heterogeneity in entrepreneurship within India should be much bigger than what other countries have experienced.

The differences in the spatial location of entrepreneurship are not a result of the differences in entrepreneurial returns. Anticipation of abnormal returns is not the driving force. Demographics have played only a limited role. The two most consistent policy factors that predict overall entrepreneurship in a district are its local education levels and the quality of local physical infrastructure. These patterns are true for both manufacturing and the services industry.

Good physical infrastructure is essential to supporting entrepreneurship, economic growth and job creation. Goods and services can’t be produced or jobs created, without access to roads, electricity, telecommunication, water, education and health. The link between education and entrepreneurship has strong roots. Education improves skill and spreads ideas more quickly. Programmes that promote education in poorer districts can increase the supply of potential entrepreneurs, provide boarder benefits to the communities and enhance equity.

The jobs challenge faced by India will be shaped not just by How India invests in physical and human infrastructure, but by global trends towards increasing use of digital technologies. Heavy manufacturing is likely to start shedding jobs first. Light manufacturing still has the potential to create some jobs. Many more new jobs will be created in modern services. The future of jobs will be driven more by education and skills than in the past. Policymakers will need to introduce innovations in the content and delivery of education. The potential of technology enabled solutions, supported by a stronger foundation of digital literacy will go a long way in putting the future of jobs on a stronger footing.

The future of jobs remains positive, given that India is starting from a low base in entrepreneurship. India’s strength in entrepreneurship lies in its small enterprises. They are now well integrated in global supply chains. Last but not least, women headed entrepreneurship will become the new driver of job growth in future. Districts that have a higher level of local education and better quality of local infrastructure will attract many more entrepreneurship and create many more jobs.

Facts about Bitcoins

Bitcoin’s supply is limited to 21 Million – a number that is expected to be reached around the year 2140. So far, around 16.7 Million Bitcoins have been released into the system, with 12.5 new ones released roughly every 10 minutes via a process called “mining” in which a global network of computers competes to solve complex algorithms in reward for the new Bitcoins.

These mining computers require a vast amount of energy to run. As the price increases, more miners enter the market, driving up the energy consumption further. A recent estimate by tech news site Motherboard put the energy cost of a single bitcoin transaction at 215 kilowatt-hours, assuming that there are around 300,000 bitcoin transactions per day. That's almost enough energy as the average American household consumes in a whole week.

If you want to buy bitcoin, you do not need to buy a whole one. Bitcoin's smallest unit is a Satoshi, named after the elusive creator of the cryptocurrency, Satoshi Nakamoto. One Satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin, making it worth around $0.0002 at current exchange rates.

Bitcoin has performed better than every central bank-issued currency in every year since 2011 except for 2014, when it performed worse than any traditional currency. So far in 2017, it is up more than 1,400 percent. If you had bought $1,000 of bitcoin at the start of 2013 and had never sold any of it, you would now be sitting on around $1.2 million. Many people consider bitcoin to be more of a speculative instrument than a currency, because of its volatility, high transaction fees, and the fact that relatively few merchants accept it.

More than 980,000 Bitcoins have been stolen from exchanges, either by hackers or insiders. That's a total of more than $15 billion at current exchange rates. Few have been recovered. Despite many attempts to find the creator of bitcoin, and a number of claims, we still do not know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, or was. Australian computer scientist and entrepreneur Craig Wright convinced some prominent members of the bitcoin community that he was Nakamoto in May 2016, but he then refused to provide the evidence that most of the community said was necessary.

It is not clear whether Satoshi Nakamoto, assumed to be a pseudonym, was a name used by a group of developers or by one individual. Nor is it clear that Nakamoto is still alive - the late computer scientist Hal Finney's name is sometimes put forward. Developer Nick Szabo has denied claims that he is Nakamoto, as has tech entrepreneur Elon Musk more recently.

Until earlier this year, it was thought that Chinese exchanges accounted for around 90 percent of trading volume. But it has become clear that some exchanges inflated their volumes through so-called wash trades, repeatedly trading nominal amounts of bitcoin back and forth between accounts. Since the Chinese authorities imposed transaction fees, Chinese trading volumes have fallen sharply, and now represent less than 20 percent, according to data from website Bitcoinity.

The total value of all Bitcoins released into the system so far has now reached as high as $283 billion. That makes its total value - sometimes dubbed its "market cap" - greater than that of Visa, and bigger than the market cap of BlackRock and Citigroup combined. Bitcoin is far from the only cryptocurrency. There are now well over 1,000 rivals, according to trade website Coinmarketcap.

It is already possible to short bitcoin on a number of retail platforms and exchanges, via contracts for difference (CFDs), leveraged-up margin trading or by borrowing bitcoin from exchanges without leverage. But a number of big financial institutions - including CME Group, CBOE and NASDAQ - have recently announced that they will offer bitcoin futures, which will open up the possibility of shorting the cryptocurrency to the mainstream professional investment universe.

Many fewer than the 16.7 Bitcoins that have been mined are actually in circulation and accessible, because of forgotten passwords, accidental losses, hoarding, owners forgetting about coins or even dying. It is impossible to know for sure how many Bitcoins have been permanently lost, because those that have are still in the system, in dormant addresses. But according to a December 2013 research paper by the University of San Diego and George Mason University, 64 percent of the 12 million Bitcoins that had by then been mined had never been spent. Bitcoin developer Sergio Lerner estimates that almost 1 million unspent Bitcoins belong to the crypto currency’s mysterious creator.

There are 5,638,155 Bitcoins in the 1,000 biggest wallets - more than a third of all Bitcoins in circulation. That makes the 1,000 biggest wallet-holders worth a collective $87 billion, at current rates. The average fee paid to process bitcoin transactions has soared over the past year, outpacing even the staggering price increase of the cryptocurrency itself. Each bitcoin transaction now costs around $7.30 to process, up from around 30 cents at the start of the year, according to trade website BitInfoCharts.

If you owned Bitcoin prior to Aug 1, 2017, you also own Bitcoin cash – a clone of the original. That is because on that date Bitcoin underwent a so-called “fork” in which the underlying software code was split into two. One unit of Bitcoin Cash is now worth more than $1300. That adds roughly another 135 percent to the returns from a bitcoin investment at the start of the year. 

World’s best Tech Headquarters

Apple New Spaceship Campus – Apple Park, the company new 175 acre campus was envisioned by Steve Jobs as a centre for creativity and collaboration. Located at Santa Clara Valley, the campus ring-shaped 2.8 Million sq. ft. building is dressed in the world’s largest panels of curved glass. With 17 Megawatts of rooftop solar, Apple Park will run one of the largest on-site solar energy installations in the world. It is also the world’s largest naturally ventilated building.

Uber Campus – The first renderings of Uber new headquarter at San Francisco Mission Bay neighborhood not only looks futuristic, but is also going to be designed with a lot of transparent glass panels. Employees will be able to cross between the office’s two buildings on angling glass and steel bridges. The app-based taxi service company hopes to open the buildings on about 423,000 sq. ft. land by early 2018.

Tesla Gigafactory – The Gigafactory is being built in phases so that Tesla can begin manufacturing batteries immediately. The current structure has a footprint of more than 1.9 Million sq. ft. which houses over 4.9 Million sq. ft. of operational space across several floors. Yet, it is less than 30% complete now. Tesla expects the Gigafactory to be the biggest building in the world.

Googleplex Campus – Housing the largest number of Google buildings on 3100,000 sq. ft. of space, the Googleplex campus in California is designed keeping the future in mind. It has offices, outdoor café, fitness centres, tennis and volleyball courts, organic gardens, EV charging stations, self-driving cars, an Amphitheatre and more.

Facebook Community Campus – The social media giant unveiled its plans to develop a 59 acre site near its headquarters in Menlo Park. Facebook wants to add office space for more than 11,000 new employees, as well as 1,500 housing units and a retail corridor (125,000 sq. ft.) complete with a grocery store to accommodate many of them.

World AIDS Day

World AIDS Day is observed on December 1 every year to create awareness about the symptoms, causes and preventives of the pandemic diseases HIV/AIDS that has taken unprecedented number of lives. Like every year, World AIDS Day 2017 was celebrated with a new theme “Right to Health” including a range of interactive activities, campaigns by distributing posters and events that are endorsed by governments, people and organizations.

According to UNAIDS report, by June 2017, around 20.9 million people had access to the life-saving medicines. This is a far cry from 2000, when only 685,000 people living with HIV had access to antiretroviral therapy. In 2016, around 1.8 million people were newly infected with HIV, a 39% decrease from the 3 million who became newly infected at the peak of the epidemic in the late 1990s.

Since its inception in 1988, World AIDS Day is celebrated after the consultation of foremost global health organizations. To mark the event across the globe, HIV/AIDS activists wear a red ribbon which is a symbol of solidarity and support towards the people living with HIV.

One of the objectives of World AIDS Day is to create awareness on what is AIDS. AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is a medical condition caused by HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) that sabotages the immune system of a person making it vulnerable to infections including opportunistic infections. HIV can be transmitted in many ways such as sexual transmission without a condom, use of contaminated syringe or drug equipment, blood transfusion from an infected person and from mother to child during giving birth or breast feeding.

Awareness camps are held on World AIDS Day to enlighten people about the signs and symptoms of HIV/AIDS. An infected person would look normal in appearance but certain symptoms can be noticed. Study has identified certain signs and symptoms of AIDS that include: unusual mark on the tongue, fever, dry cough, pneumonia, fatigue, nausea, and headache. This disease can be diagnosed when the number of immune system cells (CD4 cells) in the blood of an HIV positive person declines below a normal level.

Celebration of World AIDS Day is symbolically a call to enhance social protection mechanism for people with HIV and alert governments in framing unbiased policies for vulnerable population so that they enjoy equal status in the society. UNAIDS and numerous social welfare organization are constantly striving and taking initiatives on AIDS awareness and to reach both urban and rural areas. 

On the eve of World AIDS Day, internationally acclaimed sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik created the world’s longest red ribbon on the Odisha’s famed Puri beach to generate awareness about the fatal disease. Pattnaik attempt to recreate the ribbon on sand is 800 feet long and 400 feet wide, an immense sand art which could only be captured with a drone camera. The Limca book of records took cognizance of Pattnaik feat and his name has been registered in the world record for the longest sand art ribbon.