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Monday, October 4, 2010
Kamla hailed as 'a woman in control'
Grow Safeguard Preserve Create A MultiMedia Legacy
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Magazine lists Kamla among top female leaders
PITRI PAKSH: CEREMONY FOR THE LIVING
Grow Safeguard Preserve Create A MultiMedia Legacy
With rapidly changing technologies in media, many of our knowledge resources are fast disappearing or becoming inaccessible. We are in the process of digitising our archives representing more than 30 years of contemporary Caribbean development linked to more than 10,000 years of regional pre and post colonial history and heritage. Make contact.
To support, sponsor, collaborate and partners with our digitisation efforts. Or to develop your own legacy initiatives, and safeguard, preserve, multimedia museum, galleries, archives, make contact.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Friday, October 1, 2010
The Trinidad Guardian
Grow Safeguard Preserve Create A MultiMedia Legacy
With rapidly changing technologies in media, many of our knowledge resources are fast disappearing or becoming inaccessible. We are in the process of digitising our archives representing more than 30 years of contemporary Caribbean development linked to more than 10,000 years of regional pre and post colonial history and heritage. Make contact.
An exciting discovery - Sea Shells Far From Shore | Trinidad Express Newspaper | News
An exciting discovery - Sea Shells Far From Shore
By Richard Charan
By Editor, South Bureau
How else could the mind explain, he would say later, all these crystals and sea shells emerging from the ground? And at a place so far from the coast - eight miles at least - past hills and valleys and homes and highways?
A great hiding place, Bob Ramoutar first thought, when his giant excavator unearthed the shells while digging into a hillside in early September.
His discovery while clearing land for a housing development off rural La Cuesa Road, Freeport, has piqued the interest of researchers at the University of the West Indies. A suggestion that the find could have been a shell midden left behind by Trinidad's early people (similar middens have been found in other parts of Trinidad) was dispelled by Dr Basil Reid, senior lecturer in Archaeology at the Department of History, University of the West Indies, when the massive scale of the find began to emerge.
Shells by the millions, no billions, some resembling what you might see washed up on a tropical beach, others the size of an adult's hand, none having any business so far from the sea, the layman would think. And mixed up in it all, quartz (rock crystals).
This, Dr Reid said, might be something of interest to his colleague, Dr Brent Wilson, senior lecturer in Paleontology and Sedimentology, Petroleum Geosciences Programme, at UWI's Department of Chemical Engineering.
Wilson has examined images of the shells found at the site - there are at least five distinct types, and made observations. The discovery, Dr Wilson said, would be sure to excite the Geological Society of Trinidad and Tobago, of which he is an executive committee member.
This is what Dr Wilson reported.
"I concur with Dr. Reid that this is most likely not a man-made shell midden: from the photographs showing the site, the number of shells is small compared to what one would expect in a midden. Also, they appear to be widespread. Instead, this appears to be a community of shells enclosed within a muddy deposit, and probably has a geological rather than an anthropogenic (man-made) origin.
The shells themselves are thick and heavy, one being an oyster. Many show a heavy ornament of ribs. Such molluscs typically live in shallow water, where the thick shells protect the creatures from damage during heavy seas. The ribs also confer strength and stability to the shells, a bit like steel added to the framework of a building (when the contractors remember put it in, that is!)
I would hesitate to give an age for these shells, other than to say that they do not look old in a geological sense (i.e., we may be talking thousands rather than millions of years). I shall assume that this is so. Sea level has not been constant throughout geological time, but has gone up and down as ice caps at the poles have alternatively melted and grown. At times when the ice caps are particularly small, sea levels will be high, the melt water being released into the oceans. Perhaps, then, the shells mark a time when sea level worldwide was higher than it is at present.
There is an alternative explanation: Trinidad is in an area where two of the world's few crustal, tectonic plates meet. Southern Trinidad lies on the South American plate, while northern Trinidad lies on the Caribbean plate. (There's a thing few realise: drive from Port of Spain to San Fernando and you go from the Caribbean to South America, the actual point of passing from one to the other not being far north of the Forres Park Flyover.)
Plate boundaries are characterised by tectonic activity -- a fancy term for earthquakes. These occur as the plates rub together, producing uplift such as had formed the Northern and Central Ranges. The earthquakes can be very powerful and destructive to lives and property. (It was earlier this year suggested that Trinidad has enough stress stored within the Central Range to produce a magnitude 7 earthquake. Unfortunately, we cannot say when it will take place.)
Perhaps, then, the shells mark a period of one or more major earthquakes, when a section of the seafloor was uplifted, bringing the shells with it.
It might be suggested that the shells were transported inland during a tsunami associated with an earthquake. However, this is highly unlikely. Tsunamis (and storm surges associated with hurricanes) are not capable of transporting such large shells far. Instead, the material they would wash inland is fine sand and microscopic shells just a few millimetres across".
Bob Ramoutar intends preserving the site to allow researchers time to conduct a study.
richard.charan@trinidadexpress.com
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Why the fuss? Why Women?
While from our small-island perspectives, it may sound like a whooping sum, in effect, it represents less than a miniscule fraction (some 0.0015 percent) of the net income of G8 countries.
Not to be ungracious, even this can significantly dent gender imbalances, if properly managed to ensure that the funds do indeed reach the vulnerable communities and impact on their lives in ways that are meaningful and long term. It is up to the national countries to form and implement plans and programmes to make this happen.
I have heard much skepticism from several quarters - including local women - who should know better, about why the fuss, why women?
This plan came about because development experts and the UN, now awakening to the voices that have pointed out links between the financial, food and other crises, and the economic and other effects of exclusion, discrimination - whether by design or accident - against women who comprise some one half of the world’s population and therefore at least 50 percent of the world’ economic potential and potential for future prosperity of their children.
The experts now acknowledge that the economic and political empowerment of women remain critical for the eradication of poverty, economic growth and sustainable development, and for the wellbeing of families and communities. Better educated women have a better chance in the job market and in decision making at all levels. This benefits the entire society. When women own and control resources and decent and productive work, they can ensure their families and children have a better livelihood – better health care and education for their children which can break the cycle of poverty and deprivation. This pivotal role of women is clearly recognised by the advertising industry, for instance, which has been tailoring their advertising to capture the imagination of women with purchasing power in our societies. It is not rocket science. There is a simple logic in the fact that lifting women from poverty is key to generating economic growth and development and can lead to greater prosperity for all.
Yet, in many countries, women still face barriers to ownership of property, access to education and work opportunities, if not just in law and policies, but also in practices that remain entrenched and internalized which gives them unequally access to be represented in economic and political decision-making and are unable to share equally with men in the benefits of development. Furthermore, women seem to be harder hit by the onset of the world financial crisis.
UN MDG records show that in Trinidad and Tobago, the employment-to-population ratio of men is almost 50 percent (73.1%) to women (49.3) and trends of the last few years with the world financial crisis and economic recession show greater declines in the ratio for women to men. UN data also shows that while there is some progress towards the MDGs overall, and in T&T in some areas for which data exists, inequalities persist not only between women and men, but also between women in urban and rural areas and from different income levels. These are the gaps that action programmes to utilise the UN-40 billion dollar plan should seek to bridge.
According to the UN, in the developing world, women are more likely than men to work in vulnerable employment – either as ‘own-account ‘ (self-employed)workers or as contributing family workers -- characterised by low earnings and productivity and lack of security and benefits. While own-account work is male-dominated, women make up the majority of those who contribute family workers. In 2009, one in every four employed women in the developing regions worked as a contributing family worker, compared to only one in every nine employed men. For most of the areas that will indicate the degree of meeting development goals there were no specific data for T&T, but following are some of the data from the Millennium Development Goals – Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, progress chart 2010 prepared by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
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