Breakthrough technologies 2014

Each year, MIT highlights ten technologies that , in the judgement of the editor of the MIT Technology Review magazine, will have a great impact. This year each breakthrough was the solution to a long standing problem and in a few cases it followed decades of frustration.Whether the problem was creating machines that have the balance and agility to walk and run across rough terrains or designing virtual reality goggles finally good enough and cheap enough to be widely used, the solutions demand artistic creativity as well as willingness to suffer failure.Technologists tend to remember those innovations that succeeded in solving problems; yet more heroic are those who contributed without recognition to the incremental improvements or necessary but unsuccessful experiments that led ineluctably to the breakthrough itself.

So what are the predictions of 2014 for the breakthrough technologies:

Genome editing: the ability to modify targetted genes in primates is a valuable tool in the study of human diseases

Agile Robots: It will make the world accessible to legged machines

Ultraprivate smartphones: Government and advertisers gather intimate details from cell phones and this will stop that.

Micro scale 3 D printing: Making biological materials with desired functions could lead to artificial organs and novel cyborg parts.

Mobile collaboration: Much of todays office work is done outside the office

Smart wind and solar power:Dealing with the intermittency of renewable energy will be crucial for its expansion

Oculus rift: Visibly immersive interfaces will lead to new forms of entertainment and communication

Neuromorphic chips: Traditional chips are reaching a fundamental performance limits

Agricultural drones: Close monitoring of crops could improve water use and pest management

Brain mapping:As neuroscientists try to understand how the brain works, they need a detailed map of its anatomy.

Choosing when to go

 Lee Kuan Yew reflects on his life at 90

" Life is better than death. But death comes eventually to everyone. It is something, which many in their prime may prefer not to think about. But at 89, I see no point in avoiding the question. What concerns me is: How do I go? Will the end come swiftly, with a stroke in one of the coronary arteries? Or will it be a stroke in the mind that lays me out in bed for months, semi-comatose? Of the two, I prefer the quick one.

Some time back, I had an Advanced Medical Directive (AMD)) done which says that if I have to be fed by a tube, and it is unlikely that I would ever be able to recover and walk about, my doctors are to remove the tube and allow me to make a quick exit. I had it signed by a lawyer friend and a doctor.

If you do not sign one, they do everything possible to prevent the inevitable. I have seen this in so many cases. My brother-in-law on my wife’s side, Yong Nyuk Lin, had a tube. He was at home, and his wife was lying in bed, also in a poor shape. His mind was becoming blank. He is dead now. But they kept him going for a few years. What is the point of that? Quite often, the doctors and relatives of the patient believe they should keep life going. I do not agree. There is an end to everything and I want mine to come as quickly and painlessly as possible, not with me incapacitated, half in coma in bed and with a tube going into my nostrils and down to my stomach. In such cases, one is little more than a body.

I am not given to making sense out of life --- or coming up with some grand narrative on it ---other than to measure it by what you think you want to do in life. As for me, I have done what I had wanted to, to the best of my ability. I am satisfied.
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Q: You have said before that you consider yourself a nominal Buddhist. Would you still describe yourself as such?

A: Yes, I would. I go through the motions and the rituals. I am not a Christian. I am not a Taoist. I do not belong to any special sect. 

Q: When you say "rituals”, what do you mean?

A: On set days you've got to give offerings to your ancestors --- food and so on. All that is laid out by the servants. But it will go off after my generation. It is like clearing the graves during Qing Ming. With each passing generation, fewer people go. It is a ritual. 

Q: Where do you draw your comfort from, if not from religion?

A: It is the end of any aches and pains and suffering. So I hope the end will come quickly. At 89, I look at the obituary pages and see very few who have outlived me. And I wonder: How have they lived? How have they died? After long illness? Incapacity? When you are 89 you will think about these things. I would advise that if you do not want to be comatose or half-comatose in bed and fed through a tube, do an AND. Do not intervene to save life. 

Q: The number of people who do this in Singapore is still very low, for some reason.

A: Well, because they don't want to face up to it.

Q: Are you in favour of euthanasia, which some countries have legalised?

A: I think under certain conditions where it is not used to get rid of old people and it is a personal decision of a man taken rationally to relieve himself from suffering, I would say yes, like the Dutch. So in my AMD, I am in fact saying: "Let me go."

Q: If a grandchild of yours comes to you and asks you what a good life is, what do you say to him?

A: I have grandchildren in their 20s. They don't ask me what a good life is. They know what it is. There's been a change in the physical world they live in, the people they meet, a change in generations and different objectives to what people do in life.

Q: Are you saying that it is not possible to influence young people these days?

A: No, you can influence the basic attitudes from the day they are born to about 16 or 17. After that --- sometimes earlier --- they have a mind of their own and they are influenced by what they see around them and by their peers.

Q: You spoke about not believing you would meet your wife in the hereafter. Do you not hold out such a hope, even in your quieter moment? Is it not human to do so?

A: No, it goes against logic. Supposing we all have a life after death, where is that place?

Q: Metaphysical, perhaps?

A: So we are ghostly figures? No, I don't think so. 

Q: How often do you think of' Mrs Lee?

A: I have an urn with her ashes and I have told my children to put my ashes next to hers in a columbarium, for sentimental purposes.

Q: And hope?

A: Not really. She's gone. All that is left behind are her ashes. I will be gone and all that will be left behind will be ashes. For reasons of sentiment, well, put them together. But to meet in afterlife? Too good to be true. But the Hindus believe in reincarnation, don't they?

Q: It is in the Hindu creed, yes.

A: If you lead a good life, you come out in a better shape in the next world. You lead a bad life; you become a dog or something.

Q: So do the Buddhists.

A: But they are not so sharp in their conceptions of the hereafter.

Q: Is your routine these days very different compared to when you were still in Cabinet?

A: Of course. The pressure is not there.

Q: But you are somebody who has always coped very well with pressure.

A: Well, the pressure of office means a decision has to be made. And when several decisions come at the same time, you've got to look at the questions carefully and decide. Once you have decided, you cannot backtrack. It is a different kind of pressure.

Q: Do you miss having that sort of pressure?

A: No, no. Why should I miss it? I have done my share.

Q: And would you say you miss attending Cabinet meetings, and the opportunity to interact with younger ministers?

A: No, I think the time has come for me to move on. I am 89. Compared to my world and the reference points that I have fixated in my mind, the map of Singapore --- the psychological map of Singapore --- has changed. I used to visit the housing estates. I used to know people from the residents' committees well. I interacted with them. I had a good feel of the ground. Now I do not have that. I have to go by reports, which is not the same thing. So I have to leave it to the people in charge who do go around.

Q: Do you regret the decision to step out of government shortly after the 2011 general election?

A: No. How can I carry on making decisions when I am losing the energy to make contact with people on the ground? It requires a lot of physical energy. The mental effort does not bother me because I have not had a stroke nor am I going into dementia. But I lack the physical energy. Before this interview, I had a light lunch, did my treadmill routine and then rested for 15 minutes. I did not need that in the past.

Q: So you have no unfinished business that you had wanted to...

A: No, I have done what I had wanted to do. I gave up my duties as prime minister to Gob Chok Tong. I helped him. He passed them on to Lee Hsien Loong. It is a different generation now. So my contributions are less meaningful --- except when they want to go back on dialects.

Q: How is your health, if I may ask?

A: I was recently hospitalised after experiencing what the doctors said was a transient ischaemic attack. But I have since recovered fully and have returned to work. If you take into account the fact that I am in my 90^th year... the doctors have told me there is no benchmark for people of that age.

Q: You set the benchmark. So you are reasonably happy with your physical and mental state at the moment?

A: No, you have to accept the gradual decline in your physical abilities. So far the mental capabilities have not declined, which has happened to some of my friends. I am grateful for that. I think it is largely due to inherited genes. But the physical ageing --- you cannot stop it.

Q: Your mental faculties --- could that be due to your mental habits as well? You are someone who has kept himself mentally very occupied and interested in what is happening.

A: Yes, of course. And I keep on learning new words and phrases in Chinese, so that I am forced to. It is like playing mahjong.

Q: Have your dietary habits changed over the years?

A: Well, I no longer eat to my heart's content. I stop before I am full. I also try to eat more vegetables and less protein.

Q: At an interview with The Straits Times when you turned 80, you said one worry you had was the narrowing window that people who are ageing tend to have, and that it gets smaller and smaller, that would be the end of existence. Is that something that you still think about --- keeping that window open?

A: Yes. Otherwise I would be sitting alone. Why should I meet you and talk to you?

Q: Are you afflicted by loneliness sometimes?

A: You have to distinguish between loneliness and solitude. I had a friend who was one of the brightest students in Cambridge. He is dead now. His name was Percy Cradock. He had a wife who was Danish and had diabetes. She had lost two legs. Percy used to say: "I enjoy my solitude." And I said: "Get hold of the computer and go on Google. You can get all the poems that you have read and enjoyed, purple passages from works of literature. You just type in the keywords. It will come out.” And he did.
...

Q: What books or movies have you read or watched recently? 

A: I do not watch movies.

Q: And books?

A: Usually I read biographies of interesting people. I am not attracted to novels --- make-believe, or recreations of what people think life should be.

Q: Any recent one that you enjoyed particularly?

A: One on Charles de Gaulle. France was lost. He was a nobody. He went to London and said: "I am France." And he went to Algiers and told Alphonse Juin, who had obeyed the Vichy government and was in charge there: "As a Marshal of France, you ought to be ashamed of yourself." That was a pretty bold man. And he walked back to Paris, of course, with the Allied troops having cleared the way for him.

Q: What are your foremost preoccupations these days? What are the things that keep you awake?

A: I think our changing population. With an overall fertility rate of 1.2 --- we have no choice but to take in migrants. It is difficult to get Singaporeans to change their mindsets. The women are educated. They want a different lifestyle, not to be stuck with early marriages and children. They want to travel first, see the world, enjoy life and marry later, by which time they will have trouble having children.

Q: Any hopes for Singapore?

A: Well, the hope is that it will keep a steady course and uphold all these institutions which make it different from the rest of the region.

Short men live longer

Most of us know that short people have it rough in a society like ours. In affluent countries, tall people live longer than short people. Tall people also earn more than short people, and they tend to have more prestigious jobs.

"There are very few things that fill me with blind, foaming-at-the-mouth, let’s-burn-some-cars, hey-did-you-bring-the-kerosene, no-I-left-it-in-my-other-pants rage" writes Reiham Salam author of the article, " and at the very top of this short list is the depressing and indeed pathetic lack of solidarity among short men. The real problem facing short men is not that we are often looked down upon by the rest of society. The real problem is that short men routinely sell out other short men as they suffer from the short man syndrome."

Why might this be the case? About a decade ago, Nicola Persico, Andrew Postlethwaite, and Dan Silverman offered a provocative hypothesis: What really shapes adult earnings is not one’s current height, but rather height in one’s teenage years. They found that controlling for height in one’s teen years essentially wipes out the effect of adult height on earnings for white men. This suggests that it is not so much discrimination that is holding short people back, rather it is the way our adolescent experiences shape our life trajectories. For example, being tall as a teenager could make you more socially confident, which in turn will translate into making you more likely to pursue educational opportunities that will redound to your benefit later in life.

More recently, the economists Anne Case and Christina Paxson offered a more sobering take: The main reason height and earnings are so closely related is that height is positively associated with cognitive ability. That is, the taller you are, the smarter you are. This is a bit of an oversimplification, as what really matters, according to Case and Paxson, is whether you’ve had access to the resources you need to reach your full growth potential. If you were destined to be as tall as the professional basketball player Hasheem Thabeet, who stands at 7-foot-3, yet you’re only as tall as Hakeem Olajuwon, who is a mere 6-foot-10, there’s a good chance that you didn’t get the nutrition and the good vibes you needed to flourish as a wee babe. But if you were always going to max out at 5 feet and you make it to that size, you’re in solid shape as far as cognitive development goes. Even so, it’s not crazy to assume that, on average, the taller among us had early development advantages over the shorter among us. So should short men rage against mustache-twirling capitalists because we fare less well than tall men in the labor market?  

It’s also true that short people, and particularly short men, tend to be disfavored in the mating market. While it’s true that many women might profit from giving short men a second look, since awesome short men are less in-demand than their taller counterparts—I call this “shortbitrage”—it’s also true that short men are generally less likely to kill a woolly mammoth for you. This is not to say that short men can’t do amazing things. But it is easy to see why women might prefer men who can defeat other men in hand-to-hand combat, and this is an area where short men tend not to excel.

What is troubling, however, is that short men do not act as a unified bloc. Some years ago, Gallup surveyed American men on their attitudes toward height. They divided their sample of men into three groups: those below 5-foot-8, those between 5-foot-9 and 5-foot-11, and those above 6 feet. When asked if they’d prefer to be taller or to remain at their current height, 78 percent of men in the tallest third said that they’d remain at their current height while only 19 percent said that they’d like to be taller. Among men in the shortest third, in contrast, 54 percent said that they’d prefer to remain at their current height while 45 percent said that they’d prefer to be taller. With so many short men eager to be taller, it’s no wonder that they fail to hang together in the face of a hostile world.

“As I go through life,” writes Reiham “ I will occasionally say, “well, as a short person ...” before making some observation. And I’ve found that my interlocutor will often interject something to the effect of, “Hey, you’re not that short,” as if to reassure me. But why would this be reassuring if there were nothing wrong with being short? This is the root of the problem. I come from a long line of fierce and proud short people, who proved resilient in the face of all manner of natural calamity. My ancestors had small bodies that were tailor-made for sweating, which allowed them to work long hours in sweltering heat in South Asia’s swampy marshlands. The notion that being short is something to be ashamed of strikes me as deeply wrongheaded.”

One result of this deep-seated prejudice is that short men often lie about their height. Perhaps you think that adding a half-inch or so is entirely innocent, as all you’re doing is rounding up to the nearest even number. Others go even further, adding an inch or three in the hope that they will escape the stigma of shortness. Given the long odds facing short men, I understand the logic behind this kind of deception. Has it occurred to you that this practice leads people to discount self-reported height, for the good and obvious reason that self-reporting of height can’t be trusted? You’re not fooling anyone.

Yet I wonder if short men as a whole might benefit from a different deception, namely a collective decision on the part of slightly short men to round down rather than round up. The next time someone asks you, 5-foot-8 guy, how tall you are, tell them that you are 5-foot-1. If your response is met with disbelief, tell your nosy friend that you use an elaborate system of levers and pulleys to create the illusion of stature, or that you’ve been performing a series of exercises designed to reduce your stature over time in an effort to reduce your carbon footprint. Think of this as a teachable moment, in which you can explain how smaller people consume fewer resources, whether in the form of food and nutrients (we eat less), energy (we’re lighter, so we can travel further per gallon), or fabric (we need less of it to fully clothe our bodies). Rounding down is a way for the slightly short to convey that they reject heightism, and that they are willing to sacrifice some of their privilege to build a better, fairer world. 

To be sure, rounding up is not the worst thing in the world. I’ll tell you what is the worst thing in the world. It is that short men who have internalized heightist attitudes are more likely to stand by shorter than them are casually mistreated. In our culture, men who are 5-foot-8 don’t see men who are 5-foot-1 as comrades. They treat their shorter brothers as strangers, or perhaps even as objects of pity or contempt. In the 2003 film The Station Agent, the protagonist, Finbar McBride, a dwarf, retreats into rural isolation in part to escape the constant gawping and the cruel taunts he experiences as a city dweller. Where were the slightly shorter-than-average men who might have said something? Chances are that at least some of them were doing the taunting themselves, or laughing right alongside the taunters.

To the short men among you, I’d like to ask: Have you ever poked fun at someone for their size? Have you done so to delight your taller friends, and to establish that you are truly one of them? If so, I’d like you to think hard about the place in hell that is reserved for your ilk. If you have no fear of hell, consider this: Do you think that your chums respect you more or less for selling out one of your own?

But here’s some good news for gents who may have been robbed of a few inches in height: A new study shows that shorter men may live longer. In fact, according to data culled from researchers out of the University of Hawaii, the taller the men, the shorter they lived.

The reason? Shorter men -- defined as 5-foot-2 and smaller -- were more likely to possess a protective form of the longevity gene FOXO3, which leads to smaller body size and a longer lifespan, researchers explained.

Shorter men were also more likely to have lower blood insulin levels and lower rates of cancer.

"This study shows for the first time, that body size is linked to this gene," said lead author Bradley Willcox. "We knew that in animal models of aging. We did not know that in humans. We have the same or a slightly different version in mice, roundworms, flies, even yeast has a version of this gene, and it's important in longevity across all these species."

It is those men who hover within spitting distance of the average height who have a special obligation to stick up for short men as a whole. When other short men are getting pushed around, it is these men who must speak up. Is someone making fun of “midgets”? Now is the time to get in their face. When presented with the opportunity to seamlessly blend in with average-sized or tall people, it is these men who must reject it, and to assert the importance of treating all people fairly and humanely, regardless of their size. And if the time comes when discrimination against short people intensifies, it is these men who must join the general strike that will bring the entire architecture of anti-short-people oppression to its knees. My credo is simple: Stay short. Stay strong. And when you see a short brother in need, do something about it.

What you didnt know about the versatile octopus but were afraid to ask.

An octopus has always been an object of curiousity and wonder. But now Temma Ehrenfeld has opened our eyes with her latest work called the "Octopus".

Temma Ehrenfeld's "Octopus" is full of unexpected revelations starting with the fact that the preferred plural of “octopus” is “octopuses,” not “octopi.” Octopuses, we learn, can lurch onto land and can change color and shape in seconds. After 272 pages in the company of these animals, they no longer seem weird because of their four pairs of arms lined with suction cups. They’re weird because of the ways they contradict our ideas about intelligence. 

Even Aristotle got it wrong, although octopuses are, of course, plentiful in Greece (where they’re often served in balsamic vinegar). When he wrote that “the octopus is a stupid creature, for it will approach a man’s hand if it be lowered in the water,” he missed that octopuses are more curious than afraid. Like small children, they grab unfamiliar objects, such as underwater cameras, and seem to embrace and fondle them. They gaze through the glass at visitors to aquariums and, like attentive dogs, watch their researchers. 

This is all the stranger since, unlike dogs , octopuses are not social. An octopus is a model of self-reliance. Its mother dies as soon as her eggs hatch, and the father soon thereafter. It lives for six months to five years, depending on the species, without bonding to a mate or learning from other octopuses. No man is an island, but every octopus is. Yet octopuses react to us, turning “black with joy” or “white with anger” in response to human actions. 

Why might a loner behave in ways that seem social? One argument is that extreme self-reliance requires extreme engagement with the environment. We associate intelligence with dependence in childhood, longevity, and civilization; but in the case of the octopus, it seems that the opposite conditions promote curiosity, problem-solving, speedy learning, and sensitivity.   

Roland Anderson, a retired biologist from the Seattle Aquarium, tells author Katherine Harmon Courage that octopuses are the “smartest invertebrate,” and to prove the point, he lists a set of very human traits: They are a predator, they go out to find food, they build dens and then modify them, they use tools, they use spatial navigation, they have play behavior, they recognize individual people.

In one experiment, Anderson and his colleagues gave a female giant Pacific octopus named Billy a plastic bottle of herring with a childproof cap. In 55 minutes, she figured out that she needed to push and turn the lid simultaneously and was able to open it; with practice, she could do the trick in five minutes. An octopus can also learn to distinguish vertical from horizontal bars and the letter “V” from “W.” The intelligence of the octopus lies “somewhere in the middle of the birds—maybe not as smart as an African gray parrot,” Courage writes. And birds are an impressive bunch. Many species seem sharper than we once guessed, the author notes, largely because researchers are getting better at reading behavior without imposing a human bias. Still, it’s hard to gauge when imaginative observation is influenced by affection. People who study lobsters, for example, claim that they are smarter than octopuses.  

Katherine Harmon Courage reports several tales in which octopuses react to human actions. One researcher describes an octopus pushing up the lid of its tank, apparently trying to get out. The researcher banged on the lid and the animal retreated. The next day, as she sat nearby, the octopus lifted up the lid, brought its funnel to the crack, and squirted a jet of water at her. 

To test whether an octopus can distinguish between two people, Roland Anderson created a good-cop/bad-cop routine. The bad guy approached a giant Pacific octopus and harassed it with a bristly stick; the good one would come close and feed it. After two weeks, when the bad guy entered the room, the octopus “would shrink back into the corner, it would turn its suckers out to be ready to fight, and it would blow jets of water toward that person,” says Anderson. It also assumed an expression that scientists identify with aggressiveness. When the good cop arrived, the octopus “would come up to the surface or raise its arms up toward the surface,” ready to receive the anticipated food.   

Octopuses even exhibit signs of what we call boredom. Trapped in a small, bare tank, they are likelier to throw themselves against its side, to eject ink, or to turn white. When an octopus gets time in a more interesting environment and is then put back in a bare tank, it may eat its own arm.       

That need for stimulation may seem surprising in creatures with such a smallish brain; but, upsetting our assumptions again, most of their neurons are in their arms. These jointless appendages have a huge range of motion: too wide, scientists argue, to be subject entirely to centralized control. Octopuses do sometimes stiffen their pliable arms into a three-jointed appendage like ours, perhaps when the brain needs to keep track of them. Thus, the arms are both under the control of the brain and independent of it. Some species can eject an arm, which slithers off and distracts predators to chase it.  

A severed arm remains active for some time, as Courage amusingly demonstrates in a story about a Korean restaurant in Flushing, New York, where customers select a live octopus from a tank. (The manager tells Courage that, in Korea, farmers feed raw octopus to sick cows and bulls, which consequently recover from their illnesses in a day.) The octopus meal arrives cut-up but alive, along with plates of dipping sauces: “The muscular arm segments look like little slugs, writhing about, gray and stubby, seething all over one another,” Courage writes. The suckers grip the plate: “Once you do manage to get one of these dang things on your chopsticks, it will likely wrap or suction onto the wood with one end, another end twisting around in the air, as if exploring like a blind inchworm.” Inside the author’s mouth, the suckers grab her gums until she pries them off with her tongue. 

The octopus remains intriguing and baffling. 

Whats in a name?

I recently finished my first novel. As I was waiting for the editors and designers to finish their painstaking work, I chanced upon this article and started wondering if I would be better off - at least in book sales- if I too changed my name.

It seems that there are a number of prerequisites writers are usually told to acquire for their books or novels to grab people’s attention in a crowded marketplace – an eye-catching title, a good opening line. But perhaps another is something they have slightly less leeway with-- their name.

A book’s popularity can depend on its author’s name – and the more memorable, the better. Of course, nobody is stuck with the name they are given at birth, and writers can get by without shedding theirs in real life. Writers and many others have long taken pseudonyms to overcome what they might have perceived as social obstacles –– the Brontës and Georges Sand and Eliot taking on male monikers; Margarita Carmen Casino taking her mother’s maiden name to become Rita Hayworth and escape being typecast as a Latina; the Jewish movie stars who took on more “ethnically ambiguous” names such as Danny Kaye, Kirk Douglas or Tony Curtis.

Others simplified their names for the public in an adopted country – Józef Konrad Korzienowski to Joseph Conrad; Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky to Guillaume Apollinaire; Swedish director Viktor Sjöström produced his Hollywood work under the name Victor Seastrom. It has also become increasingly common for literary writers such as John Banville and Julian Barnes to write crime fiction under pseudonyms (an example that J K Rowling has followed in her new incarnation as Robert Galbraith), something many “career” crime writers have scorned.

The reasons for such changes are usually pragmatic, born of hard-nosed economic logic, but there is also a liberating potential for some writers to write under different guises – the various heteronyms of Brian Ó Nuallain (Flann O’Brien, Myles na Gopaleen, Brother Barnabas, George Knowall) all produced stylistically distinct work; Fernando Pessoa went so far as to conceive intricate biographies for his various alter egos (Bernardo Soares, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caiero and Álvaro de Campos, among many others) as well as giving them recognisably different authorial voices.

By and large though, evidence would appear to show that most people prefer to publish, make films, produce art and so on under their own name. It might be a matter of pride or simply because it never occurs to them that they might change it to another. So what of those writers, actors and others who persist with their birth name, regardless of whether it might already be ‘taken’.  Do they get lost in the mix? In the past, it might have been an advantage to give yourself as “normal” a name as possible but today you might not really want to be one of those people whose name on Wikipedia appears next to the word “disambiguation”. 

Geoff Dyer is finding himself being shadowed, in a manner akin to Poe’s William Wilson, by another Geoff Dyer, the Financial Times’ Beijing bureau chief, whose books on contemporary China have no doubt snared a few unsuspecting buyers on Amazon. David Cloud Atlas Mitchell has, on at least one occasion, been represented in a broadsheet newspaper by a photo of David Peep Show Mitchell. Dyer and Mitchell are sufficiently successful not to have been damaged by the confusion. Still, circumstances can change. Who now remembers the American writer Winston Churchill – three years Sir Winston’s senior – who was one of the world’s best-selling novelists of the early twentieth century?

It’s one thing if you are getting a lot of press from the off – even then, if one is called Smith, it’s surely better to be a Zadie than a Jenny – but if you are relying, like most writers do, on word of mouth and exposure in bookshops and libraries, an ordinary name might not be the one you want. While China Miéville’s success is fully merited from a literary point of view, having a stand-out name has probably never harmed him either. A writer by the name of Peter Jones or Tom Jenkins is going to have a much harder time being remembered.

Still, that level of familiarity would be something that foreign-language writers trying to break into the English-speaking market would kill for. Selling writers in translation in English-speaking countries is often a slog so having a foreign-sounding name most likely puts one at a disadvantage, even if "Günther Grass", "Javier Marías" and "Andrei Makine" are all fairly humdrum names in those writers’ native lands.

There do exist people who tend to sit up and pay attention when the writer’s name is something foreign-sounding, and the stranger, longer, or shorter it is, the better. Having special diacritics like carons, tildes, umlauts or those strokes though the O that appear in Scandinavian languages wins extra marks. Judging by the sales of literature in translation though, they are a small minority.

Male readers are known to be reluctant to read books by women. Female readers tend to be far less discriminating on the basis of an author’s gender. It is in the best interest of us male writers that female readers’ greater open-mindedness will hold, given they constitute the majority of readers of fiction. It wouldn’t do for a man to have to start disguising himself under a female pseudonym in order to sell books, would it?

So readers , do you have any suggestions for me? What name should I select? For your information, the novel is set in Bombay during and after the Bombay massacres in November of 2008. It follows the determination of three friends to pursue the killers and to exact revenge on the Pakistanis for their part in this venture. The novel spans three continents from Mexico to Myanmar and Islamabad to Hanoi and is a spy thriller in the mode of Robert Ludlum and perhaps John Le Carre. So lets have your suggestions before I go to the printers. Also the name of the novel is "A Just Cause".

The worlds largest democracy holds elections.

India, the world's largest democracy is holding its elections in the month of April and May this year. One of the real innovation which makes this tremendous task possible is the advent of the Electronic Voting Machines or EVMs. 

Holding India's titanic general election is no simple task. Voting is broken down into nine phases—the fifth and largest of which is scheduled for this Thursday—that are spread over six weeks. Over the six weeks, an army of 11 million election officials and security forces will staff and operate more than 935,000 polling stations in India's 543 electoral constituencies, where they will serve almost 815 million registered Indian voters. Central to this undertaking are India's 1.7 million electronic voting machines, or EVMs, the portable, affordable, and highly durable systems that help this massive exercise in democracy run smoothly. 

Each EVM comes in two parts. The control unit remains with election officials at each polling place and connects by cable to the balloting unit. When a voter enters a polling booth, an official activates the balloting unit. The voter then presses one of up to 64 blue buttons next to each candidate's name and political-party symbol to cast his or her vote. 

 EVMs help India overcome a number of electoral challenges. The machines are compact and portable, in contrast to bulkier booth-sized voting machines in the United States and elsewhere. They are also built to withstand India's diverse and sometimes-harsh climate. Since they run on two 6-volt alkaline batteries, EVMs can be readily used in rural India, where two-thirds of the country's 1.2 billion citizens live, and other areas with limited or no electricity. The symbol-oriented design also makes voting more widely accessible in a country with 287 million illiterate adults—nearly 37 percent of the worldwide total—and a multilingual electorate that speaks 22 officially-recognized languages and hundreds more unofficial ones. But perhaps the EVM's most impressive feature is its price tag: each unit costs only 10,500 Indian rupees, or about $175. By comparison, even older, used voting machines in the U.S. can cost around $6,000. After a decade of sporadic and unsanctioned use of EVMs, India legalized the devices in 1988 alongside the existing (and often-maligned) paper-ballot system. They became standard features of elections in 1998 and the sole method for casting votes in the 2004 general election, in which almost 1.1 million EVMs were deployed in polling stations across the country. 

The Indian government boasts that "EVM has become the leitmotif of the world's largest democratic exercise and gets smarter with each avatar." Official election materials cite the EVM's superiority over paper balloting by noting the reduction in environmental waste, the speediness of tabulating results, and the decrease in spoiled or improperly cast votes. Another strength, according to election officials, is the EVM's role in combating electoral fraud through "booth capturing"—an ugly tactic where a candidate's supporters storm a polling place, sideline legitimate voters, and cast ballots—and ballot-stuffing.

But the machines have their limitations as well. EVMs can only record a maximum of 3,840 votes each (the Election Commission says each polling place should only serve about 1,500 voters) and can only list a maximum of 64 candidates at a time to vote for. Because India's elections are staggered over a six-week period, votes are tabulated in one region and the machines are then reused in another. In March, the Election Commission estimated it would have 1.7 million ballot units and 1.8 million control units—some polling places have more than one ballot unit per control unit—for this year's election. Each Indian constituency is required to keep 10 percent more EVMs than necessary for emergency situations. Like all electronic voting systems, EVMs also invite concerns about outside tampering. 

Since implementing the devices nationwide, the Election Commission has insisted that the machines are not susceptible to hacking or other forms of fraud. But a 2010 report by Indian computer-security experts challenged this claim after examining one of the machines and cited numerous vulnerabilities, especially if a malicious user had access to the EVMs in advance. "The technology’s promise was that attacks on the ballot box and dishonesty in the counting process would be more difficult," the report concluded. "Yet we find that such attacks remain possible, while being potentially more difficult to detect." A few months after the report's release, Mumbai police arrived at the house of Hari Prasad, one of the researchers, and arrested and interrogated him for hours about where he had obtained the device his team analyzed, before releasing him on bail. 

After repeated legal challenges by activists, the Delhi High Court ruled in January 2012 that the EVMs weren't tamper-proof and ordered the Election Commission to add a paper trail as an extra security measure against electoral fraud. Election officials pledged to upgrade 600,000 old EVMs to comply with the new guidelines and procure new ones, and voters can now file complaints if there are still problems with the devices.

In India, popular sentiment toward EVMs is mixed. Amit Sheth, a professor at Wright State University in Ohio who studies social media's influence in elections like India's says that . "So far, I have not found systemic differences of one party's view towards EVM than other party's views."Occasionally, criticism of the machines takes bizarre forms. During last year's regional assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, for instance, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) filed a formal complaint after an Indian National Congress party elder allegedly told tribal voters that the EVMs would electrocute them if they voted for non-Congress candidates. The BJP won the election, but the Election Commission's FAQ now reassures prospective voters that there is no chance of electrocution from "short-circuitry or [any] other reason."

Despite their drawbacks, EVMs help solve electoral problems that aren't unique to India. The Indian government provided 4,130 EVMs to neighboring Bhutan last year for its legislative elections, and other developing countries, ranging from Nepal to Namibia, have also imported the Indian-manufactured machines for use in their own contests. Although it's no panacea for poor governance or repressive regimes, this $150 device from the world's largest democracy could soon make voting easier in burgeoning democracies worldwide.

We now await the results which will be declared only a day after the elections are concluded on May 15, an achievement indeed.

Sudden death

Jacob M. Appel writes a eulogy for sudden death.

"Six decades after Great-Grandpa Simon plunged off his mortal coil, sudden death now threatens to go the way of rotary telephones and passenger pigeons. The exact rate at which we are not dropping dead is difficult to calculate: while the government keeps meticulous records on the causes of our deaths, and the ages at which we perish, it makes no effort to estimate the speed of our grand finales. Nonetheless, as a physician, my anecdotal sense is that we’re not dying nearly as suddenly as we once did. “When I started as an intern,” an elderly colleague recently observed at a staff meeting, “most patients only stayed in the hospital for a day or two. Either you got better or you didn’t. Lingering wasn’t part of the protocol.” Today, in contrast, lingering is the norm. Insurance companies force you out of the hospital, not rigor mortis. Where a generation ago, the expectation was for men to retire at sixty-five and keel over at sixty-seven—the basis for the pension plans now bankrupting municipal governments—a massive myocardial infarction in one’s fifth or sixth decade is no longer inevitable. Stress tests and statins and improved resuscitation methods mean we are more likely to survive to our second heart attack, live beyond our third stroke. Life ends with a whimper, not a bang.

That is not to say that the Grim Reaper never arrives on a bolt of lightning: I’ve lost a medical school mentor to a plane crash, a neighbor to suicide, a childhood friend to a brain aneurysm. Thousands of Americans, smoking less but eating more, still do succumb to heart attacks in their fifties and sixties. But we greet these swift departures not only with grief, as we have always done, but also with a sense of indignation simmering toward outrage. In an age of prenatal genetic testing and full-body PET scans and rampant agnosticism, all varieties of death strike many of us as anathema. Death without fair warning becomes truly obscene.

Increasingly, our first associations with “sudden death” are metaphorical. “Sudden death” terminates ice hockey games and World Cup matches, not the lives of our friends and relatives. ..We can speak figuratively about sudden death, trivialize it—even joke about it—because we do not actually expect to confront it. Not now, not soon, not until we’ve been afforded ample time to prepare. And with each new medical innovation, the odds are more likely that we won’t.

My own family doctor has a sign on his office door that reads: “Sudden death is God’s way of telling you to slow down.” If that is indeed the case, God has been letting us accelerate with impunity for some time now.

In 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society reminded Americans that, for the first time in human history, we lived in a civilization where a majority of people did not have to worry about basic subsistence. More than five decades later, we find ourselves belonging to the first human civilization where sudden death is the glaring exception, not the expectation. The novelty of our position is all too easy to forget; it is even easier to assume without questioning that the present state of affairs reflects progress. After all, which of us wouldn’t rather die well-prepared at ninety than suddenly at fifty-five?

And yet, the more I see of death, the less convinced I become that, in this medical and social revolution, we have not lost something of considerable value. I certainly don’t mean to glorify premature death: I suspect both “dying with one’s boots on” and “living fast, loving hard and dying young” are highly overrated feats. I do not believe that it is either dulce or decorum to die at twenty-five for one’s country. My concern is also not with the economic effects of the long goodbye: the percent of Medicare dollars spent in the last six months of life, the prospect of every gainfully-employed worker supporting two retirees.

Rather, my disquiet is principally for lost human dignity. Canadian right-to-die activist Gloria Taylor, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease, recently wrote: “I can accept death because I recognize it as a part of life. What I fear is a death that negates, as opposed to concludes, my life.” Sudden death is a conclusion. Too often, I fear, the long goodbye devolves into a negation.

In medical ethics—the field in which I do my academic research and writing—the way we now die has led to the birth of entirely novel schools of thought. When life was truly brutish and short, whether in Hobbes’s sixteenth century London or Great-Grandpa Simon’s mid-twentieth century New York, the idealistic notion that all life was sacred and must be preserved at any cost carried limited weight in medical and moral circles. Although we have come to think of the modern era, post-Karen Ann Quinlan and Terri Schiavo, as one in which we tolerate less excess medical care than in past generations, the reality is that physicians and patients were once much more accepting of death than they are now. They had to be. The so-called “culture of life,” so recently embraced by the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, generally advances the view that life in its essence, rather than its quality, is of paramount value. The impact of this viewpoint upon modern healthcare and medical discourse cannot be underestimated. Yet this dogma is far more a product of technology and material change than of theological evolution. In a world where people keeled over on street corners without advance notice, the notion of controlling (or even defeating) death made little sense.

The slow demise of sudden death has also reshaped vast aspects of our culture and our iconography with little notice and less comment. How does it alter our society to live in a world influenced by elder statement—and then to watch those elder statesmen dotter into decrepitude? Franklin Roosevelt will forever be a jaunty sixty-three, Adlai Stevenson a distinguished sixty-five, Estes Kefauver—for those who still remember him—a scrappy sixty. In contrast, Ronald Reagan, as his memory faded and his world grew smaller, lost much of his magic. Clark Gable didn’t lock in his permanent sex appeal as Rhett Butler or Fletcher Christian, but with a catastrophic thrombosis at fifty-nine. It’s not so clear that an extra two decades enhanced Marlon Brando’s legacy.

Whether these changes are beneficial or deleterious, they are likely irreversible—at least by rational planning. Needless to say, we can’t ethically go around inducing cardiac arrests in healthy sixty year olds. What we can do—and what we have not been doing—is paying closer attention to the complex ways in which how we die is transforming how we live.

I fear the most subtle, yet most pernicious, consequence of a world in which people do not die suddenly is a world in which people do not appreciate life. ..Today, a brush with death often drives us to reexamine our lives.. Half a century ago, men like my great-grandfather didn’t require such a brush with death: living past fifty was itself enough of a risk to generate reflection and gratitude.