Thursday, February 26, 2009

'Slumdog' Kids Get Homes

The two main child stars from "Slumdog Millionaire" live in real-life Mumbai slums. However, not much longer they're going to receive new homes from the authorities after the small-budget movie swept the Oscars, winning eight Academy Awards. The Mumbai homes will go to Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, who played the young roles of the movie's central characters, Latika and Salim, in the rags-to-riches romance about a poor Indian boy competing for love and money on a TV game show. "These two children have brought laurels to the country, and we have been told that they live in slums, which cannot even be classified as housing," said Gautam Chatterjee, head of the state-run Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority. Authorities did not say where the home would be only that there would be apartments and near a "prime location." Ali, 8, currently lives in a tiny hovel in a rubbish strewn slum near railway tracks in India's financial hub. Ismail sleeps under a polythene sheet-covered roof in the same slum. Open sewers run nearby and both homes have no running water. The movie, based in Mumbai, took home eight awards from the Oscars including best picture and best director for Britain's Danny Boyle. But in the leadup to Sunday's Oscars, the movie's success around the globe was overshadowed by objections in India to its name which some Indians find offensive, its depiction of the lives of impoverished Indians, and the treatment of the cast. There was an outcry after pictures emerged of the child stars living in squalor despite the $15 million movie earning about $100 million since its North American release last November. But since the Oscars, India's media has been caught in a patriotic frenzy and politicians have jumped on the bandwagon to praise Indians involved in the film. Boyle and producer Christian Colson have flatly rejected claims of exploiting children for the movie. They said the children were paid above local Indian wages and enrolled in school for the first time with a fund set up to pay for their education, medical emergencies and "basic living costs." Fox Searchlight Pictures, the 20th Century Film Fox studio behind the film, paid for visas, travel and accommodation for nine children to fly to Los Angeles for the Oscars. (Reuters/ AFP Photo via Yahoo)

Friday, February 20, 2009

Woman Emails while Asleep

A 44-year-old sleepwalker logs onto her computer and sends out a strange invite. - According to a case described in the medical journal Sleep Medicine, a 44-year-old sleepwalker logged onto her computer and emailed out party invitations to friends. Fortean Times magazine looks at this case and several other bizarre episodes of somnambulism. A new form of somnambul­ism for the Internet age has been identified by doctors and reported in the latest edition of the medical journal Sleep Medicine. Sleep researchers from the University of Toledo, Ohio, reported the first ever case of someone using the Internet while asleep, even sending emails inviting people over for drinks and caviar. The 44-year-old woman had gone to bed at about 10pm, but rose a couple of hours later, walked to the next room and sat down at her computer. She turned the machine on, conn­ected to the Internet and success­fully logged on with her user name and password, before composing three emails and sending them to friends. She only found out what she had done when one of them telephoned the next day to reply to the email and accept the invitation. The mails themselves were perhaps not up to the woman’s waking standard; each was in a random mix of upper and lower case characters, badly formatted and containing odd expressions. One read: “Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4.pm. Bring wine and caviar only.” Another said simply: “What the…” The writers of the report have dubbed this new variation of sleepwalking ‘zzz-mailing’. They say: “We believe writing an email after turning the computer on, connecting to the Internet and remembering the password displayed by our patient is novel. To our knowledge this type of complex behaviour requiring coordinated movements has not been reported before in sleepwalking. She was shocked when she saw these emails, as she did not recall writing them. She did not have any history of night terr­ors or sleepwalking as a child.” Unlike simple sleepwalking, they argue, the activities the woman engaged in required complex behaviour and coordinated movement, as well being able to remember her login details. She had no memory of the events next day. It’s thought that the somnambulistic episode may have been triggered by prescript­ion medication. While certainly novel, this is hardly the most dramatic sleepwalking behaviour on record: there are cases of people driving cars, playing musical instruments, cooking meals and doing paintings (like Welsh nurse Lee Hadwin, dubbed ‘Kipasso’). In some cases, somnambulism has even been used as a defence in murder trials, such as that of Scott Falater , who initially claimed to have been sleepwalking when he stabbed his wife 44 times with a hunting knife. While Falater was found guilty, other defendants have (sleep)walked to freedom. In 1982, Steven Steinberg was acquitted of stabbing his wife 26 times, while in 1987 Ken Parks – who had a long history of sleepwalking – was found not guilty of murder after driving 14 miles (23km) to his in-laws’ house and killing them both, apparently in his sleep [FT167:42–45]. Jules Lowe admitted beating his father to death in Greater Manchester in 2003, but claimed he had no memory of it. His defence of somnambulism was accepted and he was acquitted in March 2005 [FT198:25]. In June 2005, a teenager climbed a crane in Dulwich, southeast London, in her sleep and curled up on the concrete counterweight 130ft (40m) from the ground; her parents rang her mobile to wake her and she was rescued by hydraulic ladder [FT201:22]. For more on sleep-climbers, see FT65:42–43. A Fife man regularly prepared and cooked meals in his sleep [FT212:6]. Then there’s sleep sex, an REM behavioural disorder distinct from somnambulism: a middle-aged Australian woman had no idea she was leaving her house at night and having sex with random strangers [FT193:13]. (D.Telegraph/ forteantimes.com)