This weekend we went to Mount Cook , mainly. Mainly because we stopped on the way at Lake Tekapo, then started on the following morning from the Lake Tekapo all the way to Lake Pukaki and onwards to Mount Cook. It was a day trip, one which we are going to repeat in future but with a difference.

This is the difference.

It may take a lifetime to explore Mount Cook area. We may never end up going anywhere. Mount Cook National Park is full of wonders, absolutely amazing place. We could go anywhere, we could do anything. Lakes, valleys, ridges, glaciers, mountains, passes, huts, more lakes, walks, endless. But more beautiful is the majesty of Aoraki that drowns your sorrow, your anguish, drowns your frustrations of life, gives you new meaning and vigour to go on. I certainly have felt that bliss. It’s an unspeakable mysterious feeling, and I cannot even express the beauty of the place. Some sensations are ineffable.

Thank you, Mount Cook, for showing me the way.

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Running at a continuous pace is invigorating. I feel the wind blow around me, the road, the cars, people, dogs, supermarket trolleys careening in the close car park, the cloud formation, while the mind takes attention off from the process of running. It’s not easy when you run. The first few days were difficult. Most running manuals I read advised to start slowly, inevitably had drawn the example of the hare and the tortoise, and advised that an would-be runner would rather be a tortoise than a hare.

In general, the advice was that you start slowly, walk for the first week, then walk and run, and then somewhere in the process continue to run for 30 minutes as your first achievable goal. When I first started following that advice and combined walking and running, I did not exactly followed the way the books advised. Instead of marking by a watch, I started counting 100 paces of walk and run. It was strenous, but I survived. But that was exactly not the idea. The idea was that a beginner runner would be able to sustain 5 minutes of continuous running then walk a while and then run, and so on.

My first long stretch of running on a difficult long road was exhilarating. I was euphoric that I too, could do it. The second attempt to prolong that run was to run the entire stretch for 30 minutes non stop was the next achievable goal. I think now on hindsight, that taking your mind off from the process of running and focusing on the surroundings was helpful. All of a sudden you forget that you are in the process of running. The legs move, the arms, the shoulders, the twitch of the abdominal muscles, all flow in a harmonious rhythm as your body cuts the air and you surge forward.

Yet, it had not been always like this. The first few weeks, I panted as I went through, 200 steps of running was enough to get me feel like walk again, before I could pick up on the slow jogging pace. I have a theory, I think. When I started running from long years of inactivity, the muscles started pumping, it was activity. The number of breaths increased, the frequency increased, and the amount of air that went through the air passages in each minute was more rapid than it was ever before. It gave me a sense of breathlessness, like an asthma patient who has to breathe out through a very narrow passage and feels very full inside. Over time, as I persisted, the body somehow figured out the flow pattern of air as I ran, and adjusted?

This afternoon, I started using Flockr. It’s a great tool.

Playing Chopsticks: Travels Through China by Sally Hammond, New Holland Publishers, Sydney

This book is about China — a travelogue where an Australian couple went with a tourist group to China for an extensive travel. You can read about China through the eyes of people who mingled with the regular folks, sharing their stories and hanging out in the periphery, not about hobnobbing with the rich and mighty in China and then coming back with an engineered story about the fabulous land.

I was interested in the book because the blurb said that it was one person’s travelogue through China. The book has a lyrical narrative as if the author is writing a photograph in portraying the lives of Chinese in mainland China. The book begins with the author aboard in an Air China flight on the way to Beijing from Sydney, and continues with cruising along the silk route on a 4 WD through the rugged Chinese hills, life in the cloisters of Tibetan monasteries and the high life in Shanghai.

Amazing piece of work.

Here are two news items and one comment (unrelated) from a website:

[Picked up from the following site:

http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=23&theme=&usrsess=1&id=166188
]

Injured witness speaks

Statesman News Service

KOLKATA, Aug 12: Mr Bijan Biswas (25), an employee of the McDonalds
Family Restaurant on Park Street, was a witness of the blast that took
place this morning due to a faulty air-conditioner. Mr Biswas while
speaking to the media, gave a first-hand account of the incident.
While lying on bed number 23 in the burns ward in SSKM Hospital, Mr
Biswas gave the following statement to the police. “I came as usual at
around 9.30 am today, alongwith Sanjib Biswal and Subhash Mani Roy. We
had just started with our daily routine and were making preparations of
opening the shop for the day. The manager, Mr Ravi Kumar asked me to
switch on the air-conditioner. All the doors and windows of the outlet
were yet to be opened. The moment I put on the switch, I was hit by a
deafening blast and the entire place was immediately filled with thick
smoke. Then there was darkness all around as I lost consciousness. I am
unable to recall anything which happened thereafter. After a while, I
regained my senses. The place was still engulfed in smoke. I became
aware of a burning sensation all over my body. I somehow got up and
tried to come out of the place when I saw my two associates also lying
unconscious at the other side of the floor. After that we were taken to
the hospital by some people in a car.”

The experts’ opinion

[From:

http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=23&theme=&usrsess=1&id=166187]

Statesman News Service
KOLKATA, Aug. 12: Police and forensic experts are investigating a
number of possibilities that may have triggered the blast in McDonald’s
restaurant today.
Investigations so far have revealed that the blast was the result of a
heat wave of nearly 350 degrees centigrade travelling at high velocity
across the shop that forced its way out after blowing the iron
shutters. The heat wave was triggered when some explosive gases, that
accumulated in the restaurant throughout the night, came in contact
with a fire source.
Police commissioner, Mr Prasun Mukherjee said: “That the blast was a
result of an explosive material planted by an outsider can be safely
ruled out. It was a heat wave which was triggered off when a gas came
in contact with a fire source causing the blast. The heat wave forced
its way out through the weakest opening of the restaurant ~ the iron
shutters. The Closed Circuit Tv recordings reveal that the blast took
place exactly at 9.34 am. It was at this point in time the heat wave
destroyed the CC Tv and it went off”.
One probability is that an inert gas Freon, used as a cooling agent in
AC machines, had leaked from the AC machine. There are three AC
machines inside the restaurant having a total capacity of 41 tons to
keep the total restaurant spanning over an area of 2,000 sq ft, cool.
When the electrically operated gas burner was switched on a fire ball
was triggered in the kitchen which sparked off the heat wave. A senior
fire official opined that an ideal explosive mixture might have formed
in the AC ducts after some combustible material deposited in the filter
due to non-cleaning over a long period of time.
It may also be possible that Methane gas formed in the sewerage system
of the restaurant’s kitchen which was choked. Methane gas had
accumulated over the night and it exploded when it came in contact with
the fire.
Mr Mukherjee said “If the accident would have taken place a few hours later or on a weekday it would have been a disaster”.

Check out this schematic picture from the Telegraph: [Story: Big Mac Blows up...]

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070813/asp/frontpage/story_8186645.asp

How can that happen? Here’s an explanation:

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Ways-An-Air-Conditioner-Compressor-Can-Fail,-and-What-To-Do-About-It&id=635179

<hr />

One wonders what safety norms were adhered to?

Also how common are air conditioner blow ups in International brand chain restaurants such as McDonalds?

How unsafe are CFCs? Not just for environment, but also for potential hazards such as the one we faced at kolkata?

There seems something wrong with Kolkata, systematically. Again, barely a month has passed when an explosion in a restaurant at a city rocked the hospital. This was a non-descript, shack maintained in a government hospital compounds and had poor, virtually absent safety norms.

If poor and shanty eating places have illiterates that have no idea of safety norms, what about McDonalds? Surely, an upscale, new, opened just in the month of March, 07 at a prime location downtown Kolkata, international chain food store is expected to set much higher standards for safety norms?

There are rooms for doubts after yesterday’s blast that rocked the restaurant, killed one and injured others. The police did not blame the terrorists, but suggested another cause — leaked, superheated gas from A/C.

Sunday morning at 9:30, Downtown Calcutta’s upscale Park Street McDonalds exploded, resulting in deaths of two individualds, one died on the spot, hit on the head by shards of concrete doors that burst out, and the other, an older gentleman, died of heart attacks following the incident. The police ruled out any chances of terrorist attacks, blaming that Freon gas in air conditioning pipes expanded and exploded leading to the disaster.Well, what happened to safety norms with air conditioning systems?

How often have Macdonalds in a large city like the New York/London/Paris/Sydney blown up due to faulty air conditioning, killing people? I googled but could not find the answer. Probably, there have been none.

Sina’s post on wireless networks for health in SSA

Adesina Ileyumi is a good friend and has written a nice article in eHealth magazine about wifi in the context of health care delivery in Subsaharan Africa. Much of what he has written is also applicable in an Indian context as well. I have summed up what I thought were his main theses in point format. Several of his assertions were not backed up by data, but we assume that he may have had reasonable data/knowledge to state them, so we ask no question about them.

1) He began indicating that health knowledge among masses in SSA is spare or they are of poor quality.

2) He then stated that SSA countries lack qualified trained people in their healthcare system because they either do not live long (they die due to HIV?), and/or qualified doctors migrate from villages to towns and from towns to foreign countries.

3) Third, that SSA countries lack sufficient money or resources adding an additional burden to the problems.

4) His thesis was ICT will be alternative or complementary to overcome these problems.

5) He seemed hopeful that WHO’s Global Observatory for eHealth (Goe) will adequately address to the pressing needs of healthcare delivery systems in SSA

6) He believed eHealth will help in enabling development of quality human resources for healthcare sector

7) Now, this was the big one: “Connectivity and access through wireless  could make possible communication between different levels of health system, which in turn could ensure the co-ordination and cooperation between varied and distributed actors and infrastructure” (verbatim).

I thought it was an extraordinarily bold statement, and no clues how he jumped from 6 -> 7. What’s wrong with wire based or non-wire based but other forms of communications? It was not clear how is wireless system superior?

His thesis was that in the emerging market, there is now social democratization and diffusion, evidenced by more GSM phone usage rising. GSM + VoIP >> Fixed phone users and growing. But who are using them? What segment? What technology for what segment? Is the cost justified?

9) WLAN mobile phone + mobile access points = fully mobile community Internet access for community based home care givers

10) Not just voice based communication; large amount of data, distributed actors

11) He argues for an integrated health information system (HIS) and finds it in line with African Health Infoway (AHI).

12) He outlines the mechanisms in which the information flow can be set up:

* ad-hoc models with or without asynchronous transfer of data using kiosks and mobile WLAN systems (Daknet, for instance, or with other types of store and forward technology).
* mobile device — wire — PC — secure website — central repository
* teleconsultation
* Continuous
 ** OLPC — wi-fi — GPRS/3G — long distance wifi network

Sina excellently sums up the technology side of the story. The implementation in real world will be interesting.

I’d have concern over the following issues:

a) As he stated, the distribution of health knowledge is sparse and poor quality. That given, what’s the likelihood that wireless connectivity be worse then rather than not
having it at all? Who knows, it may only end up spreading wrong information, urban legends, rumors and poorer quality of information. I guess then ease of communicability is not the solution, if not part of the problem. The real solution is actually to have more trained people and raise awareness through basic education and generation of awareness. Technology can certainly come in to link and reinforce the process.

b) If qualified health care providers tend to migrate and/or die sooner than expected, can technology fill that vacuum? In other words, one can have all the right information available in the right places, but who will implement them?

c) It’s great to have a structure set up, but I noted the information flow structure is excellent up the afferent limb: in other words, if I believe that the information is going to flow from periphery to the center (as if some central repository: all the time we get to hear terms like mobile phones linked to WLAN, or wired to PCs, daknet, etc). That limb is excellent, how about the efferent limb? In other words, how does the circuit work? If the efferent limb was not equally effective in channelling the flow of information, and _then_ reaching the end user (the last mile connectivity), no amount of technology could address the basic problems, in my opinion.

Some days back, we were talking to a health official in West Bengal state of India where we had gone to see this guy to talk about a software that I had written to enable using mobile phones and handheld devices for disease surveillance and classifying diseases. His concern was about the last mile connectivity. What happens if there are no connection at the peripheral end? What’s the cost of technology? Who will buy them? Who will implement them? We are also assuming here that the electricity and other dependent stuff would remain the same. What happens if the handheld device battery runs out in the middle of transaction? What happens if there are no electricity so you cannot connect to the net or cannot charge your phone?

d) Wifi’s great, but wifi’s also dangerous for your health because of its microwave emission. What’s the cost of technology versus human lives lost or quality of life gone for adopting a technology that may harm you in the end. How do we calculate the leverage value?

As we move on to the era of wifis and web 2.0 and all that technology integration and mobile phone, handheld devices, multi-tasking and fun stuff, there are some inevitable questions and concerns that need to be tackled. Hopes and dreams are great too.

Darwin awards are posthumous, typically for individuals who have committed some voluntary acts that they have been successful enough to remove themselves from the human gene pool forever. Doesn’t seem that the penchant to move ourselves from the human gene pool does not only exist at individual levels, but as well extends to organizations, as well. Just be out of business, out of reckoning, don’t want to be there anymore.

How? Throw away safety to the winds. Move on. Last time, I wrote about this story of a cop who tested a bomb with bare hands and gave up his life. This time, it’s about a cafeteria in a large hospital in Kolkata, where they stocked filled cooking gas cylinders near flames, and sure enough, one day these time bombs burst, cooking two employees to death and leaving several others injured. Check out the story here:

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070714/asp/calcutta/story_8056878.asp

Clearly, these dudes had no idea about workplace hazards. Cooking gas cylinders are deadly if they are kept close to fire and places that get heated up. The gas expands and tries to blow through the small vents at the top. It happened on an extremely hot July day (outside temperature was about 36 degrees C and you can imagine how high temperature might have shot up in a small cubbyhole of a restaurant that had only one exit).

It’s bad enough that it has happened here, it’s worse that it happened in a hospital campus that is also now a medical college. What were the preventive medicine folks doing? Eating out? Taking a nap?

When are we going to grow responsible enough to protect people’s health by taking steps to reduce hazards in restaurants and public places. Mahatma Gandhi showed us a way. Let’s boycott organizations that are only after profiting, throwing all safety norms to the wind. It may hurt some of us, but at the end of the day, we can at least claim that we stabbed at having a safe society.