Laugh In Japanese Style

Japanese professor Yoji Kimura believes laughter is a weapon that in healthy doses can end the world's wars. The only problem is finding a way to measure it.

And so the expert on communications has invented a machine to chart out laughter and a new unit of "aH" to calculate it.

"We have found that children laugh more freely, releasing 10 aH per second, which is about twice as much as an adult," Kimura, a professor at Kansai University in the western city of Osaka, told AFP on Friday.

"Adults tend to calculate whether it's appropriate to laugh and under those restraints they eventually forget how," he said.

"Laughing is like a restart function on a computer. Laughing freely is very important in the course of human evolution," he said. Kimura, who believes in "a shift from a century of wars to a century of humour and tolerance," has studied the science of laughter for decades in Osaka, the hub of Japan's stand-up comedy scene.

In his theory, human laughter is produced in four successive emotional stages - letting loose, then deviating from the norm, followed by freely laughing and then having the laughter overflow.

"I believe there is a circuit in the human brain that creates laughter through these steps to the stage of overflowing," Kimura said confidently. "Understanding this mechanism is the door to resolving one secret of human beings."

To measure laughter, he attaches sensors on the skin of a tested subject's stomach, particularly the diaphragm and detects muscle movements.

The machine looks 3,000 times a second at electric elements normally produced in the body.

"I have a theory that humour detected in the brain gets directly discharged through the movement of diaphragm," he said. By checking the movement of the diaphragm and other parts of the body, it will be possible to see if a person is only pretending to laugh while also distinguishing different types of laughter such as derision and cynicism, Kimura said.

Kimura wants to make the measuring device as small as a mobile phone and possibly market it as a health and amusement gadget. Kimura said he planned to present his findings this summer to the US-based International Society for Humour Studies, adding that he looked forward to looking at differences in laughter internationally.

The Genes Of Jeans

The denims look tattered and frayed, but shoppers in Europe and the United States are prepared to pay good money for "distressed" jeans and Sri Lanka is cashing in.

In the industrial town of Avissawella east of the capital Colombo, it takes workers around 13 minutes to cut and sew basic five-pocket denims.

They then spend another four days torturing the pants by dying, bleaching, and sandpapering them to get a "distressed" look.

"Each garment is dyed or dipped around 16 and sometimes as many as 30 times to achieve the proper torn, tattered look," explains Indrajith Kumarasiri, chief executive of Sri Lanka's Brandix Denim.

"We earn more money by making denims look dirty and torn, the classic clean look doesn't bring us much," Kumarasiri told AFP during a visit to the 10-million dollar plant, which can make over three million pairs of jeans a year.

Basic denim jeans cost around six dollars to make, but the shabbier "premium" ones cost twice as much.

"In many ways, premium denims are replacing the little black dress as the wear-anywhere fashion staple," he said.

Overseas buyers such as Levis, Gap and Pierre Cardin are now regular buyers of premium jeans from Sri Lanka where they can be made for as little as 12 dollars a pair, and often sell for over 100 dollars.

Buyers have been gradually shifting production out of Europe to low-cost countries such as Sri Lanka, explains Ajith Dias, chairman of the Sri Lanka Joint Apparel Association Forum.

"Retaining the business and growing the order book is tough with India and China competing with us on price and quicker lead times," Dias said.

Sri Lanka's three-billion dollar garment industry accounts for more than half its annual seven billion dollars of export earnings, and it provides jobs for nearly one million people. Nearly all the garments are shipped to the United States and the European Union.

But Dias said casual wear, including jeans, are they key to Sri Lanka's success in the price-sensitive global apparel market, and now account for 16 percent of total garment export earnings.

"We have invested millions to install high-tech plants, develop a sound raw material base and design garments, to ensure we remain competitive, by doing everything from fabric to retail hangers," Dias said.

Brandix, Sri Lanka's biggest exporter with annual sales in excess of 320 million dollars, and MAS Holdings, are also expanding overseas.

In an attempt to get an advantage over the competition, Sri Lanka is trying to position itself as an ethical manufacturer in the hope of getting greater access to the US and European markets at lower duty rates.

"We have high labour standards. We don't employ child labour, we provide rural employment and we empower women. There are no anti-dumping cases against us on trading practices," said Suresh Mirchandani, chief executive of Favourite Garments.

While eco-friendly and ethically-made clothes are becoming increasingly fashionable, their manufacture provides challenges for Sri Lanka.

Big-name brands are now adding organic-cotton clothes to their collection. "The joke is that one day we'll have a shirt we can eat," said Prasanna Hettiarachchi, general manager of MAS Holdings.

He said Levis recently launched eco-jeans using organic cotton, natural dyes, a coconut shell button on the waist band and a price tag made of recycled paper printed with environmentally friendly soy ink. The price tag is a cool 250 dollars.

"We are also working on an eco garment," said Brandix Denim's Kumarasiri.

And when asked what made a perfect pair of jeans, he had a quick answer.

"Same as always. It comes down to how your behind looks when you wear them," grins Kumarasiri.

"No matter how good the wash, the detail or the label, if it doesn't look good on your behind, it won't sell."

Harry With Virus Pots

A computer virus has claimed that 'Harry Potter is dead'.

Hackers have disguised the PC worm as a file called 'HarryPotter-TheDeathlyHallows.doc', the title of JK Rowling's up-coming book, out on July 21.

The virus - known as Hairy-A - works by infecting USB memory drives plugged into computers where users have unwittingly downloaded the worm. This allows it to hop between different computers each time the device is inserted.

Its other effects are creating a host of new users on the PC using character names from the books like Harry, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley. It also changes the computer's internet homepage to a spoof of book-seller Amazon.com displaying a novel called Harry Putter and the Chamber of Cheesecakes.

According to virus busters Sophos, eager fans desperate to find out the ending to the seven-book series are helping to feed the worm's spread.

A worm like this, which infects and tampers with users' computers without their permission, is committing a criminal act.

Bloody Truth

Meena discovered she had been sold by her boss while riding in an auto-rickshaw headed to New Delhi’s red-light district.

The 12-year-old was working as a domestic servant in Calcutta when the homeowner told her about a good-paying job at his sister’s house in India’s capital. But instead, she was sold to a brothel owner and forced into prostitution for little more than a place to sleep and the occasional meal.

Her ordeal lasted four years and Meena, now 21, says it left her “a very angry person.”

“The anger comes suddenly,” says Meena, who asked that her full name not be used because of the stigma associated with her past.

Beneath the surface of India’s rapid economic development lies a problem rooted in the persistent poverty of hundreds of millions of Indians. Rights activists say thousands of poor women and girls are forced into prostitution every year after being lured from villages to cities on false promises of jobs or marriages.

Much of the attention on human trafficking focuses on the estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people – about 80 percent of them women or girls – who are trafficked across international borders every year, and, in many cases, forced to work as prostitutes or virtual slaves who perform menial tasks.

But those numbers don’t include victims trafficked within their own countries – a problem that has long plagued India, a country large and diverse enough that traffickers can take victims from one place to another hundreds of miles away where a different language is spoken and there’s little chance of the women finding their way back home.

“This is a challenge to India’s contention that it is both democratic and modern,” said Ruchira Gupta, founder of the anti-trafficking group Apne Aap. “In this day and age, when democracy is supposed to exist in India . . . we have so many slaves.”

The secrecy of the underground business makes it difficult to track, and the estimates for the numbers of India’s victims each year vary widely.

But this much is known: the government estimates there are 3 million sex workers in India, at least 40 percent of them children. And thousands of them are believed to have been unwittingly lured into the work by traffickers, rights activists say.

Most of the girls come from India’s poorer states. A family member or friend approaches the girl’s parents about a well-paying job in the city or the chance for marriage with little or no need to pay a dowry.

In some cases, parents sell the girls directly. Prices range from several hundred to several thousand dollars.

Traffickers are rarely caught. The U.S. State Department said in an annual report on human trafficking last year that India’s law enforcement response to the problem was weak and prosecutions rare.

In Mumbai, which has the highest concentration of sex workers, only 13 traffickers were arrested in 2005, and none were convicted, according to the State Department. The situation was similar in other cities.

“One of the best ways to prevent trafficking is to increase convictions of trafficking – and this is not happening,” said Gupta. “Women are being rounded up for soliciting in a public place, but there are very few arrests of men who are running the whole trade – the buyers, the pimps, transporters.”

Deepa Jain Singh, secretary for India’s Ministry of Women and Child Development, said the government is “trying to do more” about the problem of sex trafficking, but he declined to specify what steps were being taken.

What becomes of the girls? There are many pitfalls. HIV infections among sex workers are widespread in a country with an estimated 5.7 million people infected with the disease.

And women who manage to escape are often rejected by their families, leaving them poor and alone in a society where family means almost everything.

Meena’s childhood before being sold into prostitution was filled with long days of domestic work in the rural eastern state of Jharkhand. She received little or no pay, she said, but “I was so poor, I could not leave.”

At the urging of her mother, she moved to Calcutta for what she was told would be a paid maid’s position. When her boss then sent her to New Delhi, Meena never found out the price she brought on the human trafficking market.

She was rescued from the brothel by STOP, an anti-trafficking group founded in 1998. She lives in the group’s shelter on the western edge of New Delhi, a large two-story white house with long hallways situated amid the farm fields that spread out from the city’s edge. There are vegetable gardens, and the women who live there embroider and cook for each other.

It’s run by Roma Debabrata, a 59-year-old academic who founded STOP. Two years ago, the group built the 22-room shelter where more than 40 women attempt to rebuild their lives.

Debabrata’s goal is to make the girls and women in the house function “like a normal family.”

“I don’t expect miracles from them. They’re very normal people and they’re being nurtured here in very natural surroundings,” she said. “We want them to go from victim to survivor to activist. It’s a long journey.”

The organization has built an information network, with tips called in to a hot line operated out of an unmarked office. The staffers work with local police to raid brothels and rescue endangered girls.

Some are resettled with their families or married, aided by STOP’s counseling services.

But for many, moving back to their villages is not an option.

“I love to be here because I’ve got my mother, my father, my siblings,” said Meena, referring to her house mates. “I never feel this is someone else’s home. It is my own.”