Fariz Blog — Nothin’ but simplicity..

Last Friday, me and my classmates had to give a short speech of given topics, in order to complete the current level of our English course. Thanks to Veeani for the assistance . Here was my speech, more or less:

Assalaamu ‘alaikum wa rohmatullaah wa barokaatuh.

Good evening. First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to honorable Mr. Johny. In this occasion I would like to extend my topic, it is about The Impact of Technology.

Everyday we cannot live without technology. We wake up in the morning, we take a bath, we have breakfast, we do our daily activities, all are affected by something called technology. [ Click here to read more.. ]

China will not issue licences for any new internet cafes this year amid concerns that access to online material is harming its youth.

The announcement comes a week after a Shanghai court ordered the owners of an internet cafe to pay $11,200 to the family of a boy who collapsed and died after playing online games for two straight days.

The State Administration for Industry and Commerce said on its website that it would carry out an industry-wide inspection to see if the cafes, which are supposed to limit the time minors are online, are improperly renting out their licences or failing to register customers’ identities.

The Chinese government encourages web use for commerce and education, but blocks access to online material deemed obscene or subversive.

It reportedly operates an online police force numbering in the tens of thousands to monitor internet activity and block sites officials consider unsuitable.

‘Guidance’

In April, China launched a crackdown on online pornography after the Chinese president ordered the authorities to promote a "healthy online culture".

Hu Jintao said officials needed to "raise the level of guidance online" to protect the stability of the state.

His comments came at around the same time as a report by the Beijing Reformatory for Juvenile Delinquents which said that 33.5 per cent of its detainees were influenced by violent online games or erotic websites when they committed crimes such as robbery and rape.

Earlier this year the government launched a crackdown on the transfer of licences after it said some of those given licences, including schools, were renting or selling them.

China has the world’s second-largest population of internet users, numbering some 137 million people in 2006, up 23 per cent on the previous year.

Its 120,000 internet cafes are particularly popular with customers who spend hours playing online games that link multiple competitors.

Given current rates of growth, China is expected to surpass the US as the largest online population in two years.

Source: Al Jazeera

You can stop worrying about getting brain cancer from your cell phone. A massive study of just about every private cell phone user in Denmark shows no link between gabbing on your mobile and the development of brain tumors.

The 420,000 participants averaged about 8.5 years of cell phone use, although some of them had been using cell phones for as long as 21 years. But there was not even a hint of an increase in brain cancer incidence the longer they used the phone.

A closer examination of different types of brain cancer -from gliomas to acoutsic neuromas- showed no increase in brain cancer subtypes either, according to investigators, led by Joachim Schuz of the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology of the Danish Cancer Society in Copenhagen.

Bizarrely, the cell-phone study, which was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, showed some unexpected benefits. Male cell phone users were less likely to develop lung cancer. But that’s probably a result of the fact that the first people to use cell phones in Denmark were quite well-off, and rich men are less likely to smoke cigarettes than poorer men. Rich women are just as likely to smoke as poor women in Denmark and so female cell-phone users were just as likely to develop lung cancer as their non-cell-phone-user counterparts.

More difficult to explain is the finding that women who had used cell phones for a long time were more likely to develop cervical cancer and kidney cancer. Since cervical cancer is typically caused by a sexually transmitted virus, it’s possible, the study authors say, that early adopters were also more likely to have sex with several partners. But researchers have no explanation for why there was an uptick in kidney cancer.

The study was funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council and the Danish Cancer Society.

What it Means:
The largest study to date has found no link between brain cancer and cell phone use. So if a link does indeed exist, it is likely to be very small.

The results do not necessarily apply to children since anyone under the age of 18 was excluded from the study.

By Christine Gorman | December 5^th, 2006
Source: TIME Online Edition