Written by Dr. Milton Mermikides, Tuesday, 14 June 2011 00:00, originally from Swift

The skeptic community often provides, most commendably, the calm voice of reason during periods of public scares (and outright panics) such as the MMR and vaccine ‘controversy’, fears surrounding fluoride, mobile phone and Wi-Fi usage, the perils of Facebook, overblown drug risks and the impending doom from microwave ovens. Although opposing false fears is admirable work, it is important that we don’t become blasé and, through habit, allow genuinely concerning public health issues to escape our criticism. By way of a demonstration I would like to share some genuinely alarming information that I recently discovered about a supplementary nutritional practice. It is conducted by a sub-culture of adults for personal use and by (presumably well-meaning) parents in an effort to enhance their children’s performance. It seems, that this has been happening for years and has as yet escaped critical examination, so in this brief time please allow me to present an overview.

The substance is known as Ba-2Na (not barium disulphate – it is in fact an organic mixture) and can be found in green-form, black-form and yellow-form. The latter state being highly desired among users. As it is consumed all over the world, there are numerous names for Ba-2Na (depending on the method of production) including mauz, musala, musa and even, believe it or not, superbum. The latter conjuring up images of a superhero rushing into a phone booth not to don a costume but simply to urinate.

Dosages are bought (sometimes in the street in plain view) in individually ingested units of approximately 200 grams each, consolidated in to ‘bunches’ of 4-7 units. The reported effects include a rush of energy and a sense of contentment and satisfaction. In fact some are so enamored with the substance, that they believe it to be a proof of the existence of God. However, as far as I can discover, there have been no safety testing of this substance, rather worrying considering the following facts, one starts to wonder who is protecting the interests of the dealers.

Ba-2Na is highly genetically modified – often synthesized using a tissue culture – and is virtually unrecognizable from its wild natural counterpart.

This sugary concoction of chemicals includes phenylalanine (a component of aspartame and found in diet drinks, the possible dangers of which are well discussed), threonine (which can be absorbed directly into the human heart), extremely toxic phosphorus (used in matches of all things) and particles of ash. This toxic cocktail is also cut with mind-numbing dopamine and serotonin (which can cause endomyocardial fibrosis) – hence the sense of gratification reported by users- and other biogenic components. The substance can also spread infectious diseases if handled unhygienically, which is sadly often the case.

Parents are forcing their children to consume this gunk under the impression that they will give them a burst of energy and strength – an edge over their peers – however Ba-2Na interrupts the natural digestive function, appetite response and formaldehyde levels in the blood, and no-one really knows the cumulative effect of all these chemicals in the absence of adequate testing. Not to mention the fact that Ba-2Na emits over a 1000 times the ionising radiation of a mobile phone, the health effect of which doesn’t bear talking about. Allergic reactions (bizarrely from users who are allergic to latex) have also been noted but for some unknown reason have not made it to public knowledge.

Finally, the discarded casing of this substance can potentially cause physical harm to others – and most shocking of all – this can even be a source of amusement to the addled brains of users.

It is appalling that we haven’t highlighted these dangers and I suggest an imminent large-scale response. We need to peel back the outer layer to get to the centre of the issue, and then we might have a ray of comfort. If we don’t take this sort of thing seriously, we’ve all slipped up.

A large haul of uncut street Ba-2Na in its highly desirable yellow-form:

Postscript 

Ok so that’s very silly, but other than the ill-concealed name, all the statements I’ve made about the humble banana are basically true, deceptive, but true. Any old nonsense can be supported on a foundation of carefully-selected – and omitted – truths- All this can of course be achieved completely unconsciously. The alternative medicine, pro-homeopathy/anti-‘allopathy’ community, nutritionists, ‘wellness’ ‘experts’ and the anti-vaccination crowd are all deeply guilty of this massaging and careful compilation of truths and the use of scary science-y terms to convince themselves and others of whatever agenda to which they’ve formed an allegiance. Of course, these can be supplemented with a healthy dose of toxic lies – a level to which I haven’t needed to stoop in order to make a case against Ba-2Na.

Son of a CERN nuclear physicist, Milton was raised with wide artistic and scientific influences, an eclecticism that remains with him today. He has a BSc from the London School of Economics, a BMus (Berklee College of Music) and a PhD in music (University of Surrey), and holds commendations for his education and charity work. Milton now lives in London (UK) where he enjoys teaching, performing, composing, producing and writing about music. To learn more please visit miltonline.wordpress.com

Our connected world meant I could simultaneously follow the eclipse from multiple viewpoints around the world in real time, including getting photos from friends and strangers with far better photographic equipment than mine. Events like this make Twitter truly come alive for me – watching the constant stream of excited tweets (and photos) with the #eclipse hashtag made me appreciate how wonderfully connected our little world is.

My little blog also went ballistic, setting a new all-time record of 1,240 views yesterday for my humble eclipse post, people were clearly searching for information.

My favourite eclipse media as I find it:

• Yannick’s first Eclipse shot as the moon was slowly devoured – http://yfrog.com/khudryaj
• I expect some more amazing shots from him once the post-processing is done and he has some spare time. No pressure.
• Top twitter images for #eclipse – https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23eclipse/grid/photos
• The always amazing Flickr Astrophotography pool (also see Moon Shots)
• Longest Total Lunar Eclipse in 11 Years Thrills Skywatchers (space.com)
• Also Total Lunar Eclipse of June 2011: First Photos (space.com)

A total lunar eclipse is visible from South Africa (actually most of Africa and Central Asia) tomorrow night, Wednesday 15th June – starting at 20h22, with the full eclipse lasting from 21h22 to 23h02 SAT, and the show over around midnight. This is a fairly rare event – the last one visible from SA was in 2008, and the next will only be in September 2015.

Visible across South Africa (weather permitting, but looks good) the full moon will be due East and about 55 degrees above the horizon (see the image to the right – courtesy of the brilliant Stellarium).

Thursday is a public holiday, so encourage your family to get outdoors and look upwards, it will be quite a sight!

• Total lunar eclipse for SA (News24)
• Watch the Flickr Astrophotography group for photos from people with some serious equipment
• Twitter, of course (although you’ll have to ignore the astrologers who will likely jump at the opportunity to spout their own brand of crazy)
• Johannesburg Planetarium

Happily on January 8th they emailed me with a new ETA of January 17th.

On January 10th my kindle shipped, and I tracked it as it travelled the 16 thousand kilometre journey from Kentucky US to Durban, South Africa:

To my delight it arrived this morning, January 14th – so in total 4 days with only a few hours to clear customs in Johannesburg. Others had reported delays of several days in the past, but Amazon’s new expedited customs tactic (you pay up-front for customs duties, which are refunded if not used) seems to have made all the difference.

I bought the 3G version, for those interested the price breakdown is:

• Item Subtotal:    $189.00
• Shipping  and handling:     $20.98
• Import Fees Deposit:     $29.11
• Total:    $239.09 (ZAR 1,780.92)

Recommended resources:

• Simon Dingle’s post “how to buy a Kindle” is well worth the read for existing and prospective Kindle owners
• if you own a Kindle, you *need* Calibre.
• Instapaper is also a fantastic free tool

• Power wristbands a dud, says ACCC (news.smh.com.au)
• Sports band slammed in Australia (www.news24.com)

as well as much happiness in the skeptic world (scepticsbook.com, Vic Skeptics, Skeptic Money).

In summery Power Balance Australia, when approached by the OZ Competition and Consumer Commission, couldn’t provide *any* credible evidence of their claims that the hologram-powered rubber bands helped the wearer in any way. What a shocker.

The best part is that they are now forced to refund anyone who asks, as well as modify their advertising / packaging to remove false claims – and their website now includes the following statement:

We admit that there is no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims and therefore we engaged in misleading conduct in breach of s52 of the Trade Practices Act 1974.

If you feel you have been misled by our promotions, we wish to unreservedly apologise and offer a full refund.

That should hopefully hammer their Christmas sales.

Feeling a little silly now are we Mick Fanning, Benji Marshall, Brendan Fevola, Damien Oliver, David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, Leonardo diCaprio, Shaquille O’Neal, Kevin Pietersen, Rubens Barrichello, Kate Middleton, P Diddy etc?

For all you South Africans (thanks James) a link to a petition (update: OK Caroline, it’s not a petition, it’s a formal complaint by the FSI) preparing for a formal complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa (ASASA). Go sign up.

"Technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute."

If I were to summarize everything I learned through research in ICT4D, it would be this: technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute. If you have a foundation of competent, well-intentioned people, then the appropriate technology can amplify their capacity and lead to amazing achievements. But, in circumstances with negative human intent, as in the case of corrupt government bureaucrats, or minimal capacity, as in the case of people who have been denied a basic education, no amount of technology will turn things around.

….

Technology is a magnifier in that its impact is multiplicative, not additive, with regard to social change. In the developed world, there is a tendency to see the Internet and other technologies as necessarily additive, inherent contributors of positive value. But their beneficial contributions are contingent on an absorptive capacity among users that is often missing in the developing world. Technology has positive effects only to the extent that people are willing and able to use it positively. The challenge of international development is that, whatever the potential of poor communities, well-intentioned capability is in scarce supply and technology cannot make up for its deficiency.

….

The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health. It seems obvious that the promise of scale is a red herring, but ICT4D proponents rely—consciously or otherwise—on it in order to promote their solutions.

”When a village has ready access to a PC, the dominant use is by young men playing games, watching movies, or consuming adult content.”

Disseminating a technology would work if, somehow, the technology did more for the poor, undereducated, and powerless than it did for the rich, well-educated, and mighty. But the theory of technology-as-magnifier leads to the opposite conclusion: the greater one’s capacity, the more technology delivers; the lesser one’s capacity, the less value technology has. In effect, technology helps the rich get richer while doing little for the incomes of the poor, thus widening the gaps between haves and have-nots.

….My point is not that technology is useless. To the extent that we are willing and able to put technology to positive ends, it has a positive effect. For example, Digital Green (DG), one of the most successful ICT4D projects I oversaw while at Microsoft Research, promotes the use of locally recorded how-to videos to teach smallholder farmers more productive practices. When it comes to persuading farmers to adopt good practices, DG is ten times more cost-effective than classical agriculture extension without technology.

But the value of a technology remains contingent on the motivations and abilities of organizations applying it - villagers must be organized, content must be produced, and instructors must be trained. The limiting factor in spreading DG’s impact is not how many camcorders its organizers can purchase or how many videos they can shoot, but how many groups are performing good agriculture extension in the first place. Where such organizations are few, building institutional capacity is the more difficult, but necessary, condition for DG’s technology to have value. In other words, disseminating technology is easy; nurturing human capacity and human institutions that put it to good use is the crux.

….

“Computers, guns, factories, and democracy are powerful tools, but the forces that determine how they’re used ultimately are human.”

We are in the midst of the largest ICT4D experiment ever. In 2009 there were over 4.5 billion active mobile phone accounts, more than the entire population of the world older than twenty years of age. The cell phone is overtaking both television and radio as the most popular consumer electronic device in history. Some 80 percent of the global population is within range of a cell tower, and mobile phones are increasingly seen in the poorest, remotest communities.

These numbers prompt suggestions that there is no longer a “digital divide” for real-time communication. Yet any demographic account of mobile have-nots will show them to be predominantly poor, remote, female, and politically mute. Whatever the case, if the spread of mobile phones is sufficient to help end global poverty, we will know soon enough. But, if it doesn’t, should we then pin our hopes on the next new shiny gadget?

Another great visualisation which puts things into perspective, courtesy of Kal Krause (of Kai’s Power Tools fame, now there’s some personal nostalgia). Definitely an improvement on the previous version, although still likely to fire up the “continent vs country” debate… but it gets the point across!

On the one hand you have a wonderful self-help self-motivated attitude displayed by Kobla (Ghana), Derick (Kenya) and Doug (Democratic Republic of Congo):

Caitlin (University Programs, Google): Finally, I was hoping you could share a few words of wisdom from your home countries with our readers?

Derick: Sure!  Mtaka cha mvunguni sharti ainame.  In Swahili, this means ‘If you need something that’s on the floor, you’ll have to bend to pick it up.’  In other words: ‘there’s nothing free in life, you have to work for it!’

Kobla: Here’s one from Ghana in the Akan language: Nyansa nnyƐ sika na woakyikyir wodze esie.  This means ‘Wisdom is not like money to be tied up and hidden’ or, more simply: ‘wisdom is to be shared.’

Doug: I like this one, in Lingala: Nguba bakalingaka yango na soni te.  Literally: ‘Don’t pretend to toast a peanut if you don’t know how to do it.’  Basically, this means that you shouldn’t pretend you know how to do something when you really don’t.  If you’re stuck, ask for help!

(via the Google Africa blog)

Contrast that with the attitude of entitlement displayed by some strikers, and this unnamed nurse in particular who clearly has a low external locus of control:

“Why should we care when someone dies, because we are not at work while the government doesn’t care about our lives,” said one nurse, who refused to give her name.

We are coming here every day to stand vigil and see bodies being removed from the hospital.

This is what the government wants. If they didn’t, then we would not have been here in the first place. Patients’ lives have been put at risk by our government.”

I’m all for people’s freedom of expression and right to demand a fair wage, but in this case the demands seem totally unrealistic, and the methods barbaric.

from Ewan’s posterous

My wonderful children getting into the Soccer World Cup spirit with the help of mom’s face painting skills.

8 days to go!

http://fifaworldcup.durban.gov.za/