A simulation of early human migration using current topographical data:-
*Not much use of this piece of article except to understand demographic diffusion.If demographic diffusion is part of your optional/syllabus, this can come in handy to cite the study to make it relevant in contemporary terms.Thus read this only if needed.
Modelling population migration in early times (prehistoric) as a diffusion process and using current topographical data, scientists from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, have simulated the diffusion of prehistoric population through the British Isles. Cross-checking their results, published in PLOS One, with known genetic data, they find that the pathways of migration derived from their simulation match with those observed in the genetic data.
In the model, people enter the islands from five points: Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, North England and South England. The input for this comes from Protohistorical and Prehistorical sites in England. Then the populations diffuse through the country, or move along a gradient of “habitability,” which itself is defined as a function of geographical factors such as altitude and those relevant to survival such as availability of food, game etc. The premise is that migration of the bulk of people would have been motivated more on the need to settle and survive than on seeking adventure. Since the topography changes only on geological scales while the timescale they are looking at is more on the order of ten thousand years, the authors can justify the use of current topographical data in their study.
Each isolated group has its own unique genetic signal and where the populations merge, we get mixed signals. In the simulation, it is assumed that the people enter England as specific locations (with unique genes) and check where they meet. At the meeting points, you will get mixed genetic signals. This agrees with direct observations.
However, the model does not include human conflict or technological advancements and is limited to that extent. This still makes it possible to study early population migration, when vast tracts of open country would have been available to the population.
Now that the model has been validated by the observed correlation with genetic data,It can go further and pinpoint places where populations merged and parted, even in places like India where the tracking of migration patterns using genetic data yields very broad features and cannot help archaeology, for instance.
To the authors, the model probably suggests that by nature humans have been more accommodative of each others and we have been wrong in assuming that two groups coming against one another will fight.
Nurture waterbodies, keep floods at bay this monsoon:-
How water-literate are you? Are you wondering what water literacy means in the first place? Experts and representatives of voluntary organisations point out that there is a need for communities to understand the significance of waterbodies in their neighbourhoods and protect them.
With just a few months left for the northeast monsoon to hit the city, it is time the community played a larger role in protecting waterbodies in their locality to mitigate floods, feel experts. Residents have to be aware of the lakes and ponds in their area, their inlets and outlets and how their surplus courses travel etc.
Environmentalist Foundation of India (EFI), which is involved in protecting water resources, is now joining hands with residents in increasing water literacy and also helping people to conserve waterbodies.
‘Green Gramam’
“Spending a few hours during weekends to improve waterbodies, be it a pond or a lake in their area, will help people to mitigate flood damages and also conserve water,” said Arun Krishnamurthy(founder) of the EFI.
The organisation recently launched ‘Green Gramam’ — a programme to reach out to people on water literacy and flood prevention through street plays and workshops for youngsters.
Simple measures like clearing the garbage and debris that block floodwater entry into inlets and clearing vegetation around the waterbodies would reduce the impact of floods, EFI volunteers had recently finished restoring three ponds at Perungalathur and are now involved in partial restoration of lakes at Perumbakkam, Arasankazhani and Sitalapakkam along with the Water Resources Department under the water security mission.
Pattachitra:-
Pattachitra, a traditional scroll painting form from Odisha with a history dating back to 2500 years.
The subject matter of pattachitra paintings is mostly mythological episodes, religious stories and folklore. These paintings were originally substitutes for worship on days when the temple doors were shut. Commenting on how his source of livelihood has given him immense satisfaction as a noted artist of a dying art form. It is remarkable how the traditional patuas and chitrakars are clinging on to this tradition of making pattachitra despite the poverty it brings with it.
The most important aspect of the paintings is the accompanying music song , completing the entire narrative as a story.Chitrakars do not just paint, they also sing as they unfurl the scroll to audiences. These songs are known as pater gaan. The songs range from traditional mythological tales and tribal rituals to stories based on modern Indian history and contemporary issues like protecting forests and 9/11 attacks.
Vedartha Sangraha
Of the nine works that Ramanuja wrote, Vedartha Sangraha was the first. It was in fact a discourse that he gave in Tirumala. The title can be translated as ‘Essence of the meaning of the Vedas.’ Although the word ‘Veda’ is used in the title, the work is, in fact, about the Upanishads. There is nothing peculiar about this, because Upanishads are simply sections of the Vedas.
Jaimini wrote a Sutra for what is called the Karma Kanda section of the Vedas, but the Brahma Kanda is more important from a philosophical standpoint and Vyasa wrote Brahma Sutra on the Brahma Kanda portion.
The Vedas have statements that speak of bheda (several), abheda (One) and bhedabheda (several and One). In Ramanuja’s philosophy, all three are reconciled. They are not seen as contradictory but as complementary.
The charm of Chanderi
Originally woven exclusively for royals, the fine-spun cottons of Chanderi were as renowned as the muslins of Dacca. An indigenous variety of cotton was used in spinning to create a translucent 300-count fabric. Till the 1940s, Chanderis were characterised by an off-white base which was the natural colour of the yarn. Later, the weft cotton yarn was dyed, resulting in the famed pastels. Since the warp silk yarn was non-degummed, it did not lend itself to colour absorption and was left without a dye. However, evolving techniques have facilitated the dyeing of the silk yarn in the warp, resulting in darker colours augmenting the palette.
Chanderi is one of the well-known handloom city in India, chanderi famous for its saree, made with mix of cotton and silk also its one of the great tourist place in Madhya pradesh
How Kerala boy, 14, swims to school daily so his village can get a bridge:-Unique way of protest.
*We could not help but have to publish this , even though we know it has little utility from exam point of view.The story gives purpose to pursue a career in public service , so that No Arun has to swim everyday to get to school.
Publishing as is – (no editorial oversight) :-
Arjun Santhosh, a fourteen year old student from Kerala’s Alappuzha leaves home in the morning like any other student. In his uniform, with a bag. But unlike others he has a swimsuit and water goggles in his bag. While others wait for a boat, he jumps into the Vembanaad waters, swimming 3 km to his school in Poothotta.
He has been swimming to his school everyday for his villagers. A protest demanding a bridge for his village Perumbalam, an island in Kerala’s Alappuzha district.
Boats too small, too slow
“Usually boats are late and I get punished at school for being late. Some boats are very small. And there are too many people. It is a cause of worry,” says Arjun.
The Perumbalam panchayat houses more than ten thousand people. This ninth class student decided to join his villagers in protest when their 25-year-old demand for a 700-metre bridge was not met.
1.5 hours to reach mainland
“Transportation is a major problem. Last year close to 50 people died here due to medical emergencies… like snake bites for example. It takes about one-and-a-half hours to reach the mainland,” said Abhilash, a resident.
Arjun’s protest lasted 10 days for the authorities to acknowledge the villagers’ concern once again but no solid assurance have come their way yet.
Instead, the authorities have decided to send him a notice asking him to withdraw from the protest.
“He is a minor and it is dangerous to swim in this season. If something tragic happens we would be held responsible for not stopping him. Hence we decided to send him a notice,” said R Girija, collector, Alappuzha.
A bridge too far
“Yes, a bridge is a necessity here. We have six boats here which are in a very poor state,” said Shobhana Chakrapani, panchayat member.
Arjun has agreed to stop his protest hoping the authorities will now take a step towards building a bridge. But he warns them that if they fail, he will go back to taking the route less travelled.
Mineral from wet, hot volcano lava found on Mars, baffling scientists
Scientists are baffled by the discovery of a mineral on Mars that, on Earth, typically comes from extremely hot volcanoes whose lava was exposed to lots of ocean water.
A rock sample drilled by the Curiosity rover in the Gale Crater — believed to be the bed of an ancient lake — included tridymite, a silica-based mineral typically produced on Earth by powerful eruptions of volcanoes such as Mount St. Helens in Washington state.
That’s because on Earth, conditions that aren’t known on Mars are needed to produce tridymite.
Mount St. Helens erupts in Washington state. Mount St. Helens is a silicic volcano, producing lava rich in silicic minerals like tridymite.
While Mars has volcanoes, they’re basaltic volcanoes like those on Hawaii that produce a lava high in iron and magnesium and low in silica.
The volcanoes in the Cascade range of B.C. and the U.S. Pacific Northwest on Earth are a different kind, called silicic volcanoes. They were formed when the Juan de Fuca plate in the Pacific Ocean pushed under the continental North American plate, taking a lot of ocean water with it. As a result, the lava in the Cascade volcanoes contain a lot of silica — a mineral that forms in the presence of water and requires extremely hot temperatures to melt and recrystallize into a material like tridymite.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.