2009 में आबो हवा

इस साल कैसा रहेगा पर्यावरण,क्या स्थिति होगी ज़मीन आसमान की

आने वाले साढे ग्यारह महीने ही नहीं आगे का भी हाल  अहवाल्

v
• According to the latest IPCC report, warming by 2100 is projected to be in the range of 1.1-6.4 degrees Celsius above the average in the 1980-99 period. Unabated, current increasing trends in emissions can be expected to raise Earth’s temperature by 4-6 degrees Celsius above today’s levels, if not more, by the end of this century.
• A recent assessment indicates that a significant number of “tipping points”-thresholds beyond which it would become difficult-to-impossible to reverse changes in the climate system-could be approached if the planet warms more than 3 degree Celsius over the pre industrial level. However, a number of tipping points-including loss of the Greenland ice sheet-could be approached at warming levels over 1.5-2 degrees Celsius.
• The findings of the latest IPCC assessment and more-recent studies strongly reinforce the conclusion that “safe” levels of warming lie at 2 degrees Celsius or below.
• Once greenhouse gas concentrations are stabilized, global mean temperature will continue to rise due to momentum in the climate system for several decades, but it will very likely also begin to stabilize after several decades.
• Half of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted today is expected to remain in the atmosphere a century from now, and much will remain even 10,000 years in the future.
• Recent research has demonstrated that it is technically and economically feasible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fast enough so that their atmospheric concentrations can be limited to around 400 parts per millon of CO2-equivalent, or to lower in the longer term
•
• Land-use changes and fossil fuel burning are the two major sources of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere that is changing the global climate. Overall, land use and land-use changes account for some 31 percent of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.
• The process of tilling soil releases CO2 into the atmosphere. Worldwide, approximately 95 million hectares of cropland are under no-till management-a figure that is growing rapidly, particularly as rising fossil fuel prices increase the cost of tillage.
• Perennial crops store more carbon in the soil than annually planted ones. Harvested native hay meadows retained 179 tons of carbon and 12.5 tons of nitrogen in a hectare of soil, while annual wheat fields retained only 127 tons of carbon and 9.6 tons of nitrogen.
• Livestock now account for 50 percent of emissions from agriculture and land-use change.
Ice Melt and Water Availability
• For sea ice, the IPCC projected a decrease in both the Arctic and Antarctic under every unmitigated emissions scenario, with Arctic summer sea ice disappearing almost entirely toward the end of this century. Observed rapid loss of Arctic summer ice (about 9.1 percent annually for the 1979-2006 period) exceeds projections in nearly all the latest IPCC models.
• By the 2050s, it is projected there will be less annual river runoff and water availability in dry regions in the mid-latitudes and tropics but more in high-latitude regions and in some tropical wet areas.
• Serious water-supply impacts have been seen in Australia from the 2001-07 droughts-the most extreme and hottest drought period recorded for this continent.
• The Gangotri glacier in the Himalayas, which provides up to 70 percent of the water in the Ganges River, is retreating 35 meters yearly. Once the glacier disappears, the Ganges will become a seasonal river, depriving 400 million people of water.
Energy
• Buildings use about 40 percent of global energy and account for a comparable share of heat-trapping emissions.
• Today’s electricity generation accounts for 41 percent of global primary energy use (from coal mining to appliances or other “end uses”) and 44 percent of CO2 emissions.
• Renewables-including large hydro-provide nearly one-fifth of world electricity.
•
• Heating and cooling account for 40-50 percent of global energy demand. Renewables are among the lowest cost options for reducing CO2 emissions and fossil fuel dependency, yet they currently meet only 2-3 percent of world demand.
•
• Approximately two-thirds of the energy fed into the world’s power plants is wasted-released into the environment as heat.
Land Use
• In Parana, Brazil, farmers have developed organic management systems combined with no-till. No-till plots yielded a third more wheat and soybean than conventional plowed plots and reduced soil erosion by up to 90 percent.
• In 2005, a Pennsylvania dairy farm invested $1.14 million in a project to process the manure from 800 cows, using a digester and a combined heat and power unit. Now the farm makes a profit using biogas to generate 120 kilowatt-hours of electricity to sell back to the local utility.
• Both India and China have large national programs to revegetate millions of hectares of forest and grasslands-seen as investments to reduce poverty and protect watersheds.
• In Morocco, 34 pastoral cooperatives with more than 8,000 members rehabilitated and manage some 450,000 hectares of grazing reserves.
• In Rajasthan, India, community-led watershed restoration programs have reinstated more than 5,000 traditional johads (rainwater storage tanks) in over 1,000 villages.
• Some countries are redirecting subsidy payments to agri-environmental payments for ecosystem services, some of which explicitly include carbon storage and emissions reduction.
Energy
• Güssing, Austria, has become energy self-sufficient, increasing living standards and reducing carbon emissions more than 90 percent since 1992 by shifting to local, renewable energy.
• Integrated building design with multiple efficiency measures can reduce energy use to at least half of a conventional building, achieving gains of over 80 percent in some cases.
• The Combined Power Plant, a project that links 36 wind, solar, biomass, and hydropower installations throughout Germany, has demonstrated that a combination of renewable energy sources and more-effective control can balance out short-term fluctuations and provide reliable electricity with 100-percent renewable sources.
• Between 1980 and 2005, taxes on energy and CO2 in Sweden drove a major shift from fossil fuels to biomass for district heating, reducing associated emissions to less than a third.
• Already, more than 40 nations, states, and provinces have enacted feed-in laws, which generally guarantee anyone who produces electricity with renewable sources priority access to the electricity grid and long-term premium payments for their electricity.
• According to the German government, the country’s feed-in law avoided some 79 million tons of CO2 emissions in 2007, while emissions trading that year reduced national emissions by some 9 million tons. The feed-in law is considered Germany’s primary climate-protection policy.
• Algeria plans to build a 3,000-kilometer cable to Germany, allowing it to export 6,000 megawatts of solar thermal power by 2020 and providing perfect complement to Germany’s significant wind energy capacity.
Building Resilience
• The city of Manizales, Colombia, has taken steps to build resilience, particularly by not letting its rapidly growing low-income population settle on dangerous sites. (p. 161)
• Farmers in Njoro Division, Kenya, are adapting to climate change in several ways, including switching from wheat and potatoes to quick-maturing crops such as beans and maize, and planting whenever it rains because there is no longer a clear growing season.
• Villages in Nepal are building resistance and resilience to climate change by improving access to resources and assets via small livestock distribution, vegetable farm demonstrations, kitchen and organic farming, as well as sloping agricultural land technologies.
• In northeast Tanzania, local farmers use very specific indicators to predict the beginning of the rains, including increases in temperature, lightning, various plant changes, and changing behavioral patterns of birds, insects, and mammals. (p. 15
• Mali’s government has been providing climate-related information directly to farmers to help them measure climate variables.

2009 में ऊर्जा,अर्थ और पर्यावरण्

Future of EEE – Economy, Energy, Environment

Economy: When I recorded Outlook 2008 in December of 2007, I predicted that the economic slump driven by the debt crisis would be worse than experts were suggesting at that time. In fact I had just heard Steve Forbes say in a speech that the debt crisis would be a minor inconvenience in 2008 involving a couple of billion dollars and was nothing to worry about. But of course it was a huge iceberg, into which we have crashed.
However, all is not lost for 2009. The key drivers in how the world deals with the economic crisis will be 1) the amount of the U.S. stimulus (plus that of other nations), 2) more importantly how this stimulus is applied, and 3) the psychological impact of the new U.S. administration. As it looks now the stimulus package(s) will be very large by historical standards, and critically, will be applied in the U.S. to job-creating endeavors rather than simply being poured into banks as most of the money so far has been. Assuming the money can get flowing to real projects the impact will begin to be felt by year end.
The psychological and emotional impact of a new direction is generally underestimated at this time. Last night I saw video of the election celebration in Grant Park, Chicago, on November 4, 2008. While not all shared in celebrating the Obama victory, I do not think we can accurately calculate how large the positive feeling will be when the new administration finally takes office and begins communicating its full plans.
When combined, these three drivers – amount of stimulus, its application, and psychological uplift will, I believe lead to such increased confidence that the economy will turn faster than assumed by the end of the year. This applies particularly to consumer and equity markets.
The housing market is another matter, as we have far to go before housing values match actual incomes. It is in the housing arena along with transportation that we face an important realization. The recovery that begins in 2009 will not return us to business as usual but to a new kind of economy, one that is more modest, more sustainable, and more equitable. If this is not the direction we go, then things will get worse instead of better, for the long run.
Energy: In Outlook 2008, I suggested that we’d see $140 oil by mid-year, which we did, followed by falling prices. But no-one, including me, anticipated a crash in prices like we have seen. Now, however, it appears more likely that by the end of 2009 we will see oil prices climbing to $80 rather than falling further or staying stable. In fact, do not be shocked if by the end of 2009 we are again talking about, if not quite yet seeing, $200 oil. The simple fact is that discovery and development of new oil does not keep pace with oil usage, and has not since the 1970’s. The slightest increase in economic activity will shift prices upward again, while for the time being new investment is stalled.
Environment: The new U.S. administration promises a sharp turn in environmental policy, toward paying attention to climate change. We will see lots of positive action within the stimulus plan and via general investment, in making the built environment more sustainable (retro-fitting public buildings, schools), taking steps to enhance the electricity grid for increased used of solar and wind power, and we will see more breakout activity in nanotech solar energy.

The sexy secret in a sneeze

The next time someone in the room sneezes, you might want to wonder what exactly is on their mind after researchers found evidence that in certain people sneezing can be triggered by sexual fantasy.
Dr Mahmood Bhutta, an ear, nose and throat specialist at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, launched the study after seeing a patient who suffered “uncontrollable” sneezing fits every time he had a sexual thought.
“We thought this unusual and performed a literature search of the topic,” he wrote in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Together with colleague Dr Harold Maxwell, Dr Bhutta found that typing the words “sex”, “sneeze” or “sneezing” into Google produced a surprising number of hits.
“Although internet reports do not give us an accurate incidence, our findings do suggest that it is much more common than recognised,” wrote Dr Bhutta and Dr Maxwell.
Sneezing usually occurs in response to nasal irritation, triggering a reflex that expels air at speeds of over 90 miles an hour. Eyebrow plucking can also provoke sneezing by stimulating the trigeminal nerve, which produces sensations in the face.
But other more puzzling sneezing triggers are also known, said the researchers. One was the “photic sneeze reflex” – an apparently inherited sneezing reaction to sunlight, which affects almost a quarter of the population. More rare were cases of people from the same family sneezing after meals.
Dr Bhutta said he believed sneezing when thinking about sex probably ran in families too. He added: “I think this reflex demonstrates evolutionary relics in the wiring of a part of the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system… Sometimes the signals in this system get crossed, and I think this may be why some people sneeze when they think about sex.”

Forecast for future

: Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030
. By the late 2010s, ubiquitous unseen nanodevices will provide seamless communication and surveillance among all people everywhere. Humans will have nanoimplants, facilitating interaction in an omnipresent network. Everyone will have a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. Since nano storage capacity is almost limitless, all conversation and activity will be recorded and recoverable. — Gene Stephens, “Cybercrime in the Year 2025,”

तकनीकि प्रगति बुद्धू बना रही है या बुद्धिमान्

क्या तकनीकि प्रगति बुद्धिमान विश्व की रचना मे लगा है या फिर उन्नत तकनीक के चलते हम अपनी मौलिक बुद्धिमत्ता खोते जा रहे हैं.?……..पढिये ,सोचिये हमे भी बताइये

Are you worried about where the world is headed? Does news of climate change, energy crises, food shortages, and war alarm you? Fear not, says George Washington University management professor William E. Halal. The world is just going through a phase.
In his latest book, Technology’s Promise, Halal assures us that our present troubles will find resolution when a “crisis of maturity” — probably around 2030 — forces the global community to grow up.
“Things look especially bleak today because that’s the normal situation facing any system struggling through maturity — a teenager, a nation, or a global civilization,” Halal writes.
Halal foresees technological breakthroughs profoundly altering human life in the three decades ahead. Renewable energy will replace oil, and societies will universally recognize the benefits of ecologically safe living. Computer power will become cheap and infinite. Speech-recognition computers will become common in homes, as will robots that serve as helpers and caregivers. Travel across the globe will take three hours instead of 30. Industrialization may spread to most developing nations: In 2030, as many as 5 billion people will be living at modern levels, and worldwide resource consumption may have increased three- to fivefold. Nanotechnology and synthesis of new materials may make an abundance of creature comforts available to the world’s poorest. A permanent lunar colony will serve as a “spaceport” for the “coming wave of space pioneers.”
Halal bases his forecasts on the TechCast Project, which he launched at his company, TechCast LLC. The project forecasts technological breakthroughs by scanning literature and surveying 100 tech experts around the world for when they expect given innovations to take place. TechCast has used this forecasting method for 15 years, and Halal says that the technologies arrive, on average, within three years of the forecast.
TechCast’s bold projections are all plausible, Halal says, because of the ongoing “virtuous cycle” of information technology, knowledge, and innovation: As computer systems’ power to process and store information improves, our ability to acquire knowledge improves. More knowledge enables greater innovation and, in turn, even more advances in computer systems, ad infinitum.
“The world is changing so much and so quickly that most people do not grasp what we are getting into,” Halal writes.
But new gadgets will not solve old problems such as environmental degradation and intercultural conflict; they might even make things worse. Heightened resource consumption will lead to heightened pollution. While new materials may become abundant, necessities such as oil and water will become scarce. And increased travel will breed new cultural clashes. Halal notes:
The transition to a global order of 9 billion people demanding modern lifestyles will require a fundamental change in consciousness — or the collapse of an ecosystem, climate change, nuclear war between nations, and other megadisasters will serve to prod us along.
Halal forecasts, optimistically, that the “2030 Crisis of Maturity” will be resolved in the following decades. The Information Age will end and the Age of Consciousness will commence, he predicts. Governments will discard their weapons stockpiles. Religious leaders will amend their sectarian quarrels. Corporations will commit to environmentally friendly practices. Institutions of all kinds will become more responsive to societal needs as management democratizes: Executives will no longer rule from the top, but work collaboratively with employees, other associations, customers, and the public. The turbulent times will cease by 2050, and the world will become a global community that is more democratic, connected, and equitable than ever before.
Some of Halal’s conclusions may be debatable, but his portrayal of the vast range of opportunities that lie ahead and the values by which we can maximize them commands unequivocal admiration and respect. He presents us with much to look forward to in the decades ahead. — Rick Docksai
Summary of Halal’s Scenarios
2010: The World Online. The decade should continue to focus on intelligent advances in information systems and e-commerce. The world in 2010 is almost certain to be smarter, faster, and fully wired, setting the stage for the breakthroughs to come.
2020: High-Tech Arrives. This decisive period should see major breakthroughs in high tech. Green business, alternative energy, and other practices are likely to ensure ecological sustainability. AI should permeate life, and the next generation of quantum/optical computing will permit huge advances in telemedicine, virtual education, and e-government. Biotech should mature, providing personalized medicine, genetic therapy, cancer cures, and other advanced health care.
2030: Crisis of Maturity. Industrialization will reach most developing nations at this point, with as many as 5 billion people living at modern levels of consumption. Although technological powers will be vast, intercultural conflict, weapons of mass destruction, and threats of environmental collapse are likely to grow into such challenges that they force a global shift in consciousness.
2040-2050: Global Order. Civilization has withstood the Fall of Rome, World Wars I and II, and threats of nuclear holocaust, and it will probably survive globalization. The challenges facing civilization are likely to be resolved to form a modernized, fairly harmonious globe, somewhat like a far larger and more diverse version of the United States or European Union. Local wars, ecological disasters, and other mishaps will continue, of course, but limited to the normal dysfunctions of any social system

भविष्यति में स्वागत है आपका

बदलाव एक सतत प्रक्रिया है.वह बहुधा धीमी चाल

चलती है तो कभी अनुकूल परिस्थितियां पाकर या फिर

आवश्यकता के अनुरूप तेज़ हो जाती हैं.आज जो भी हम देश दुनिया के बारे में,समाज,राजनीति, विज्ञान ,तकनीकि,आदि आदि इत्यादि के बारे मे जानते हैं वे आज से 100 -200 साल पहले ऐसे नहीं थे,ज़हिर है अगले 100 -200साल बाद क्या 20 -30 साल वैसे नहीं रहेंगे जैसे आज हैं.बदलावो की इसी चाल  को बेहद बारीक नज़रों से जांच परख  कर वैज्ञानिक तर्कों, परीक्षणों ,शोध प्रबंधों के निष्कर्षों को आधार बना कर विषय विशेषज्ञ सटीक अनुमान लगाते हैं कि भविष्य मे उस क्षेत्र मे क्या होगा.

यह जानना रोचक ,रोमांचक है,ज्ञानवर्धक भी,विशेषज्ञ तो खैर बताते रहेंगे हम उनको भी पढेंगे ,पर मज़ा तो तब है जब हम आप भी बदलाओं की इस आहट को महसूसें और बदलती दुनिया के बारे मे कुछ सोचें.सिर्फ सोचें ही नहीं आपस मे अपनी सोच बाटें भी.

भविष्यति एक विनम्र प्रयास है हर क्षेत्र मे होने वाले बदलाओं के छोटे बडे टुकडों को देख्ने समझने और आपस मे इस बारे राय बात करने का, हिन्दी,अंग्रेजी कुछ भी चलेगा, तो फिर आइए ,आपकी टिप्पणियों ,राय मश्विरों के मुंतज़िर हैं हम्

गिनती का गणित

कमाने ,जोड्ने,अपना नम्बर बढाने मे हम  इस कदर लगे रहते हैं सारी उम्र कि गिनती य नम्बर हमारे खून हमारे जींस मे शामिल हो चला है.सदियों से अंकों और गिनती के फेर मे हम ऐसे मुब्तिला रहे हैं कि आज पैदा होने के मात्र 24 घंटे बाद का नवजात भी गिनती पहचानने लगा है, जरा सोचिये तो भविष मे जन्मने वाले बच्चे जब इससे एक कदम आगे बढेंगें तो क्या होगा?एक खोजपरक जानकारी
Easy as 1, 2, 3

People come into the world ready to count its wonders

THE baby is just one day old and has not yet left hospital. She is quiet but alert. Twenty centimetres from her face researchers have placed a white card with two black spots on it. She stares at it intently. A researcher removes the card and replaces it by another, this time with the spots differently spaced. As the cards alternate, her gaze starts to wander—until a third, with three black spots, is presented. Her gaze returns: she looks at it for twice as long as she did at the previous card. Can she tell that the number two is different from three, just 24 hours after coming into the world?
Or do newborns simply prefer more to fewer? The same experiment, but with three spots preceding two, shows the same revival of interest when the number of spots changes. Perhaps it is just the newness? When slightly older babies were shown cards with pictures of household objects instead of dots (a comb, a key, an orange and so on), changing the number of items had an effect separate from changing the items themselves. Could it be the pattern that two things make, as opposed to three? No again. Babies paid more attention to rectangles moving randomly on a screen when their number changed from two to three, or vice versa. The effect even crosses between senses. Babies who were repeatedly shown two spots perked up more when they then heard three drumbeats than when they heard just two; likewise when the researchers started with drumbeats and moved to spots.
“One great blooming, buzzing confusion” was how William James, a 19th-century psychologist, described the way he thought the world looked to a newborn baby. But these experiments, and many others like them over the past few decades, have convinced researchers that, on the contrary, babies are born with many ways of making sense of what they see and hear. The trick is to use their love of novelty to work out what is happening inside their brains: when shown the same things repeatedly, babies’ eyes wander; when the scene changes, their gaze returns. That makes visible what to them constitutes a change in the world around them worthy of notice.

Dot and carry one
One of those ways of understanding the world is by number. People are born with an innate sense of how many items there are in small collections. Experiments in which older children and adults are shown randomly arranged dots and asked to say quickly how many there are show this sense is retained throughout life. Up to three or four items, and the number is immediately visible without counting. Within a limited range, humans are born arithmeticians, too. When babies a few months old were shown dolls placed and removed from behind a screen they had correct expectations of the number of dolls they would see when the curtain was drawn aside, and were surprised when trickery meant those expectations were violated. In fact, they were more surprised to see the wrong number of dolls than the right number, but different-looking ones.
Some animals also seem able to perceive and understand small numbers. From the 1930s Otto Köhler, a German zoologist, trained ravens to open boxes with the same number of dots on the lid as a card held by a researcher. One raven learnt to distinguish two, three, four, five and six dots. Rats can learn to ignore a certain number of doors in a maze before choosing which one to enter. Chimpanzees have been taught to match the numerals 1 to 6 to the number of objects in a display and to find oranges hidden in two different places and point to the numeral that indicates their total number.
Even more strikingly, some wild animals appear to understand and use numerical facts without training. Karen McComb of the University of Sussex, in England, played a variety of recordings of lions roaring at night in the Serengeti National Park—different numbers of lions; their roars in sequence and overlapping; and so on. She wanted to test the theory that, since fights between lions are very costly, when lions heard large numbers of intruders’ roars they would withdraw unless they were in superior numbers. The best explanation of what she observed was that lions estimated the number of intruders from the number of different-sounding roars, compared that number to the number in their own group and then decided whether to attack or slink away.
That humans (and perhaps other animals) come ready-supplied with numbers contradicts two popular rival theories: the Platonic and the constructivist. Plato thought numbers (and geometric objects such as circles) existed in some abstract, eternal and perfect realm, of which mortals were granted only an occasional glimpse. Constructivists follow Jean Piaget, a Swiss child psychologist, in thinking that by moving things in the real world around and observing the results people “construct” an understanding of number in the first few years of their lives. The distinction, though abstract, has practical relevance too. Could “maths-phobes” be born, rather than made? Can they be cured? And could mathematics be taught better to all?

Numbers on the brain
Brian Butterworth, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, has spent much of his career teasing out which bits of humans’ understanding of numbers are innate—and which learnt, and how. He thinks people are born with brain circuits that are dedicated to recognising and understanding the number of items in small collections. On this foundation an entire “number sense” is built, as children realise that bigger and bigger numbers can be reached by adding “one more” and learn by experience how these bigger numbers behave.
His most recent work has confirmed that to develop a better understanding of numbers than that of a newborn baby, it is not necessary to be able to count with words. He collaborated with some Australian researchers to test aboriginal children in the country’s Northern Territory who were monolingual speakers of one of two languages, Warlpiri and Anindilyakwa, in which the only number words are one, two, few and many. (Words for numbers have generally arisen when and where people grow crops or keep herds; hunter-gatherer bands, who have no herds or other stores of wealth, need not keep track of surpluses, or balances of trade.)
Since the children were too old for the baby-staring trick, but unable to answer the question: “How many?”, researchers laid out counters, then put them away and asked the children to “do as I did”. To check that they were using the number of the counters, rather than mimicking their pattern, the researchers banged sticks together and asked them to “make the counters like the noises”. The children performed about as well as English-speaking aboriginal children living in Melbourne.
Historically, one common method of counting has been to use body parts to keep track of a running total. The base-ten system used in modern arithmetic originates with the fingers, and linguistic traces of that fact remain in the similarity of “five”, “finger” and “fist”, and the dual meaning of “digit”. Some think that the original inhabitants of Europe were 20-counters who used fingers and toes—the use of “score” for both 20 and keeping count may be a remnant. And there remain tribal peoples who have elaborate methods using eyes, nostrils, elbows and so on.
Arithmetically, bases 12, 24 and 60 have their appeal (they have more factors than ten’s measly two). All three are still employed when telling the time, and 4,000 years ago the Babylonians used base 60 to do some pretty advanced mathematics. But fingers are particularly obvious and useful for keeping count. In another recent piece of work, Dr Butterworth and Robert Reeve of the University of Melbourne watched (English-speaking) five- and six-year-olds counting and doing simple sums. Most used their fingers, but around a quarter did not. Slightly more than half of the non-finger-counters were good arithmeticians, who presumably had outgrown needing to use their fingers. The others, who were decidedly weak, did not seem to have realised that their fingers could help.
More than 80 years ago Josef Gerstmann, an Austrian neurologist, described a set of problems that seem to arise simultaneously in people who have suffered damage to the left parietal lobe of the brain: finding writing difficult or impossible, being unable to understand arithmetic or tell right from left, and having difficulty in identifying one’s fingers. There is still no agreement on whether these symptoms constitute a syndrome, but the bits of the brain used for storing facts about numbers and for representing the fingers are close to each other. Mental representations of numbers and of fingers may therefore be functionally connected.
In 2005 Dr Butterworth and his colleagues asked people to perform tasks that required dexterity, and others that involved matching pairs of numbers, while the area of their parietal lobes known as the left angular gyrus was stimulated by a magnetic field. Dexterity and recall of facts involving numbers were both impaired. So the connection between numbers and fingers may be more profound than the handiness of fingers for keeping count.

Easy for some
If numbers had been invented by some prehistoric genius, then learning how to use them would be a matter of intelligence and practice. But what comes naturally to most is lacking in a few. Just as some people are born colour-blind, or lose colour vision after a brain injury, others are “number-blind”: unable to comprehend what everyone else sees effortlessly. That deficit may leave other abilities—including other mathematical abilities—unimpaired.
Dr Butterworth tells the story of Charles, a young man with lifelong mathematical difficulties. He could add two one-digit numbers only if he used his fingers. Sums involving two-digit numbers or multiplication or subtraction were beyond him. When shopping, he understood neither prices nor change. Tests showed he was not merely maths-phobic. Not only was he far slower than the average, but the pattern of his results was strange.
In one test Charles was shown a pair of digits and asked to name the larger number. The bigger the gap, the faster most people can do this: they say “nine” faster when shown 9 and 2 than when shown 9 and 7. But with Charles, the reverse was the case—and the researchers could see why. Rather than telling the answer directly, he was counting on from one number (on his fingers) until he got to the other, which meant he must have started at the smaller, or he got to ten, in which case he must have started at the bigger. Most strikingly, he lacked the fundamental numerical ability possessed by most newborns: being able to tell the number of objects in a small group simply by looking. When asked how many dots were on a sheet of paper, he counted on his fingers—even when there were only two.
Charles’s deficit, though severe, seemed to affect his numerical abilities alone. Numerical deficits in people of otherwise normal abilities can be even more striking in cases of brain damage. Lisa Cipolotti, a neuropsychologist, studied a Signora Gaddi, who used to run a hotel and keep its accounts. After a stroke she could find the number of things in a small group only by counting—when asked how many arms a crucifix had, she got Dr Cipolotti to hold out her arms so she could count them. Signora Gaddi’s problems seemed to affect only numbers. She could still read, speak and reason, remember historical and geographical facts, and order objects by their physical size.
In fact, Signora Gaddi’s difficulties went even deeper than Charles’s. The stroke which damaged her innate understanding of small numbers also robbed her of the entire numerical edifice built on that foundation. For her, numbers stopped at four. When asked to count up from one, she got to four and no further. If there were more than four dots on a page she could not count them. She could not say how old she was or how many days were in a week, or even tell the time.

“I hated maths at school”
From Barbie dolls programmed to say “math class is tough” to ministers of state who will parse and analyse a sentence but refuse to answer “what’s half of three-quarters?”, maths-phobia is everywhere. One reason is that mathematics builds on itself, so that one missed step can lead to a lifetime of failure. Nor does it help that sums have unambiguously right and wrong answers, making it all too clear to schoolmates just what a child does and doesn’t know. But amidst the stragglers are those whose problem runs deeper than fear and loathing: the “dyscalculic”, as researchers have taken to calling those whose number sense is impaired. Numerical tests given to a representative sample of children in Havana suggest their proportion in the general population is 3-6%.
Sceptics may feel this is a learning disability too far—another chance for middle-class parents to classify little Johnny as different, rather than thick. And perhaps dyscalculia will collect a penumbra of dubious cases around it, as dyslexia has. But perhaps not. Dyslexia manifests itself as a difficulty with a highly unnatural activity: reading. The best single predictor of dyscalculia, by contrast, is abnormal slowness in counting a few dots on a page, a task that most find trivially easy.
The researchers at University College have created a dyscalculia screener, which they think should be used to test all children early in life. With luck, diagnosis will progress to treatment: they are working on a remedial programme too. But even if dyscalculics never fully develop the sense of numbers they were born without, their mathematical careers need not be over before they have started. There are entire fields of mathematics where numerical manipulation is peripheral: logic and geometry, for example. Dr Butterworth recalls an eminent geometrician (“I won’t say his name; it would embarrass him”) who approached him after he had given a talk on his research. “He said: ‘You know, I have always been dreadful at arithmetic.’ So I asked: ‘What’s seven eights?’ He just mumbled: ‘Oh, that’s trivial, there’s an algorithm for that,’ and walked away.”

खेलो नम्बर गेम

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!