Indian writer wins USD 100,000 global book prize

Agencies
May 30, 2019

Mumbai, May 30: Indian writer Annie Zaidi was on Wednesday announced as the 2019 winner of the USD 100,000 Nine Dots Prize, a prestigious book prize created to award innovative thinking that addresses contemporary issues around the world.

Mumbai-based Zaidi, a freelance writer whose work includes reportage, essays, short stories, poetry and plays, won for her entry ‘Bread, Cement, Cactus' – combining memoir and reportage to explore concepts of home and belonging rooted in her experience of contemporary life in India.

“What really appealed to me about the Nine Dots Prize was the way it encourages entrants to think without borders or restraints. My work has often crossed over genres, traversing between memoir and journalism, and this timely but wide-open question encouraged us to approach it with methods that were equally far-ranging,” said the 40-year-old winner.

Now in its second cycle, the prize challenged entrants to answer the question ‘Is there still no place like home?' in a 3,000-word essay. The winner of the Nine Dots Prize is supported to develop their response into a full-length book, which is published by Cambridge University Press (CUP), and given the opportunity to spend a term at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge University.

“I had been working towards a similarly themed project for a while but didn't have the financial, or even mental, bandwidth to do it justice. The Prize will allow me to dedicate time to the examination of this question, which is of critical importance in the modern world – and it will help fund the necessary research trips, which, as a freelancer, is something I appreciate hugely,” said Zaidi, who works on fiction, scripts and columns for magazines and newspapers.

She has published both fiction and non-fiction, including a collection of essays ‘Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales', which was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2010, and ‘Love Stories # 1 to 14' – a collection of short fiction published in 2012.

Her new proposed book, based on her Nine Dots Prize winning essay ‘Bread, Cement, Cactus', will be published by CUP in May 2020 and will answer the central question through examining how a citizen's sense of “home” might collapse, or be recovered. The varied themes it will address include the politics and economics of death in India, the crossing of caste and religious lines in marriage, and the Partition of India as a great cultural and emotional sundering.

“In Annie Zaidi we have found a powerful and compelling voice with a unique insight into what home means for citizens of the world today. We are very excited to see how Annie's work will develop over the coming year and hope that it will help further current conversations around the concept of belonging worldwide,” said Professor Simon Goldhill, Professor in Greek Literature and Culture and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge University, and Chair of the Nine Dots Prize Board.

“The anonymous judging process is crucial to the Nine Dots Prize's mission to discover new ways of tackling contemporary issues, whether they come from established thinkers or new voices. The fact that our second winner is so different from our first is testament to the success of this method,” he said.

The inaugural Nine Dots Prize posed the question “Are digital technologies making politics impossible?” and was won by former Google employee turned Oxford philosopher James Williams. The resulting book, ‘Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy', was published in May 2018 to critical acclaim.

The Nine Dots Prize is judged anonymously and funded by the Kadas Prize Foundation, a UK-registered charity established to fund research into significant but neglected questions relevant to today's world. The Prize name name references a lateral thinking puzzle that can only be solved by drawing outside of a box of nine dots arranged in three rows of three.

The foundation was established by Peter Kadas, who has worked around the world for a number of leading institutions. Originally from Hungary, he holds Canadian and British citizenship and currently lives in Barcelona, Spain.

Besides Kadas and Prof Goldhill, the Nine Dots Prize Board is comprised of 9 other internationally recognised and distinguished academics, authors, journalists and thinkers.

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Agencies
March 13,2020

Amid the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), which has infected 73 people in India and killed more than 4,500 individuals globally, doctors have advised that in addition to regularly washing hands, one should also disinfect their smartphone every 90 minutes with alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Ravi Shekhar Jha, Head of Department at Fortis Escorts Hospital in Faridabad said the best method to disinfect your smartphone is to use regular doctor spirit or the alcohol-based hand sanitizer at least every 90 minutes.

"Avoid touching your eyes, mouth, or nose. The best option is to use a phone cover or a Bluetooth device and try to touch your phone as less as possible. We would also recommend cleaning your phone at least twice a day," Jha told IANS.

According to research, published in 2018 by Insurance2Go, a gadget insurance provider, revealed that smartphone screens have three times more germs than a toilet seat.

One in 20 smartphone users was found to clean their phones less than every six months, said the study.

"In the time of fear of coronavirus, smartphones should also be disinfected with alcohol-based sanitizer rub. Pour few drops of sanitizer on a tiny clean cotton pad and rub it safely on your entire phone," said Jyoti Mutta, Senior Consultant, Microbiology, Sri Balaji Action Medical Institute in New Delhi.

"You can repeat this process every evening coming back home after an entire day out at work and once in the morning before going out," Mutta added.

"Maintain basic cleanliness, and try to avoid using other's phones especially if suffering from respiratory illness or flu-like symptoms as there is no other way to disinfect these regular gadgets," she stressed.

Another study from the University of Surrey in the UK, also found that the home button on your smartphone may be harbouring millions of bacteria - some even harmful.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus as a global pandemic on Wednesday. The death toll of COVID-19 has crossed the 4,500 marks and confirmed cases globally have touched one lakh as per the reports.

According to Suranjeet Chatterjee, Senior Consultant in Internal Medicine Department of Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals in New Delhi, "We should frequently wash our hands, cover our coughs and it is important to adapt to other good hygiene habits that are most important in such a situation."

"Coronavirus and other germs can live on surfaces like glass, metal or plastics and phones are bacteria-ridden. It is necessary that we sanitize our hands frequently and make sure that our hands are clean all the time," Chatterjee told IANS.

"The emphasis should be laid on sanitising our hands rather than sanitizing the phone - once in a while the phone can be sanitized under the guidance of the makers of the phone," Chatterjee stressed.

According to the global health agency, the most effective way to protect yourself against coronavirus is by frequently cleaning of your hands with alcohol-based hand rub or washing them with soap and water.

The WHO's report showed the virus infects people of all ages, among which older people and those with underlying medical conditions are at a higher risk of getting infected.

People should eat only well-cooked food, avoid spitting in public, and avoid close contact, the WHO said, adding that it is important for people to seek medical care at the earliest if they become sick.

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News Network
March 18,2020

San Francisco, Mar 18: Facebook said a bug in its anti-spam system temporarily blocked the publication of links to news stories about the coronavirus. Guy Rosen, Facebook's vice president of integrity, said on Twitter Tuesday that the company was working on a fix for the problem.

Users complained that links to news stories about school closings and other information related to the virus outbreak were blocked by the company's automated system.

Later on Tuesday, Rosen tweeted that Facebook had restored all the incorrectly deleted posts, which also covered topics beyond the coronavirus.

Rosen said the problems were unrelated to any changes in Facebook's content-moderator workforce. The company reportedly sent its human moderators home this week because of the coronavirus outbreak.

A representative for Facebook did not immediately respond to questions on the status of Facebook's content moderators, many of whom do not work directly for the company and are not always able to work from home.

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Agencies
February 23,2020

Google has indexed invite links to private WhatsApp group chats, meaning anyone can join various private chat groups (including several porn-sharing groups) with a simple search.

According to a report in Motherboard, invitations to WhatsApp group chats were being indexed by Google.

The team found private groups using specific Google searches and even joined a group intended for NGOs accredited by the UN and had access to all the participants and their phone numbers.

Journalist Jordan Wildon said on Twitter that he discovered that WhatsApp's "Invite to Group Link" feature lets Google index groups, making them available across the internet since the links are being shared outside of WhatsApp's secure private messaging service.

"Your WhatsApp groups may not be as secure as you think they are," Wildon tweeted on Friday, adding that using particular Google searches, people can discover links to the chats.

According to app reverse-engineer Jane Wong, Google has around 470,000 results for a simple search of "chat.whatsapp.com", part of the URL that makes up invites to WhatsApp groups.

WhatsApp spokesperson Alison Bonny said: "Like all content that is shared in searchable public channels, invite links that are posted publicly on the internet can be found by other WhatsApp users."

"The links that users wish to share privately with people they know and trust should not be posted on a publicly accessible website," Bonny told The Verge.

Danny Sullivan, Google's public search liaison, tweeted: "Search engines like Google & others list pages from the open web. That's what's happening here. It's no different than any case where a site allows URLs to be publicly listed. We do offer tools allowing sites to block content being listed in our results."

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