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Eight Syker Real pupils yesterday experienced how it is to be a mother of an infant. Through Monday, they had to take care of the baby simulators - changing diapers and feeding included. - Photo: Ehlers
Suspiciously an elderly man looks at the girl who just wants to board the bus. She carries a small bundle in her arms. So young and already a mama?” He asked me how I could be [a mother] because of my age.” Zoé describes their encounter the previous day. The 15-year-old let the stranger know immediately. “This is not a baby in her arms, but just a doll.” Or more precisely, a baby simulator.
Eight Real pupils have since Thursday been a part of offspring “on time”. The girls from the ninth grade attend on Mondays to the life-sized puppets, computer-controlled to simulate the daily routine of an infant.
A chip on the wrist identifies the “right” mama, all their activities are recorded and evaluated at the end. Before starting the experiment, the group has worked intensively with the topic, watched a movie, and is at once busy with the “theoretical” aspects of the baby. Why is a child crying? What can and should you do? What is there to consider?
On Thursday, each student received her seven-pound junior. Some have previously never had a real baby in their arms, but with a newborn, it is “a bit difficult with the head,” Lea says. The head just always has to be supported by hand. But after a day that is already well learned.
The babies get correct name. And if Luke, Chris or Ryan after four days must be issued again, and they are returned to nameless baby simulators, it could well be emotional: Brunhilde Maskos has often experienced in the past that parting was clearly difficult for the girls .
Marie is grateful for the opportunity to learn how to deal responsibly with the potential reality of a baby. Diana sees it as good preparation for the time when the real children come. One thing all eight girls have in common is the desire to have children. There should be two at most. But after her experience with the electronic baby, Stephanie “wouldn’t be sad if there are three.”
What’s going on in the minds of young people when they are seen with their electronic appendages? A “strange mixture of pride and embarrassment” says Neele. After a few hours a bond to the small companion is established.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 08 June 2016 05:02.
This one hits close to home. It wasn’t that long ago that I found out that my maternal line Mt haplogroup is U5b1e1 - mutating in Finland some 6,600 years ago. It is particularly concentrated in Sweden and Finland - places like Turku.
It is a rare and ancient genome - mutating through the first people in Europe, the hunter-gatherers who arrived prior to the agrarians.
Now this genome is under a concerted attack by the (((YKW))) - even where those they’d imposed upon the native human ecologies of Finland would like to go back to their own native countries.
Many migrants to Finland could not find opportunity for work, even if they wanted it; and more fundamentally, they found the unfamiliar surroundings and climbs of Finland inhospitable. They wanted to return to their native countries.
Finland had no jobs, many wanted to leave, so jobs were (((created))) for them in order to encourage them to stay. A tech-training program was offered (it is not offered to natives of Finland).
5 of 700 applicants taken; (((they’ll))) use those 5 as an excuse to keep all of them. It augurs exponential assault on the native genome.
The “exemplary” asylum seeker focused-on in this article had gone through several EU countries with asylum laws before arriving in Finland - even though asylum seekers are supposed to stop at the first EU country capable of offering asylum.
Pioneering programme is teaching refugees coding so they can become developers and is helping them integrate in society.
Iraqi Eyas Taha, left, is one of five recent graduates of the developer programme for asylum seekers. Photograph: Jussi Rekiaro
Problem one: Finland’s otherwise flourishing startup scene has a chronic shortage of developers.
Problem two: the 32,000-plus asylum seekers who arrived in the Nordic country last year – many young, highly educated and computer literate – face waiting for years before they land a job.
“Essentially, we just thought: there is a way to at least start addressing these issues,” said Niklas Lahti, the chief executive of Helsinki-based web services company Nord Software. “We can teach refugees coding so they can become software engineers.”
This month the first three graduates of Integrify, the developer programme for asylum seekers that Lahti and his friend Daniel Rahman, boss of recruitment company TalentConnect, launched in April, started internships with leading Finnish tech companies.
The two are working on a second, expanded programme to train up to 200 refugees as developers, and hope to place them with companies across Europe – starting with Sweden, where “finding developers is almost impossible, harder even than Finland”, according to Lahti.
The starting point, he said, was that “integration just takes way too long. You have lots of young, qualified, motivated people sitting doing nothing. The registration process takes for ever; they’re supposed to learn Finnish before they get a job. While in tech at least, all you really need is English.”
Even once their paperwork is in order, many asylum seekers can wait up to five years to find employment, Rahman said – and when they do, “very highly educated professionals can easily find themselves in really low-skilled jobs”.
Life – and the inhospitable Nordic climate – has proved so frustrating for some newly arrived asylum seekers in Finland that officials said this year they expected up to 5,000 to cancel their applications and return home.
Officials in Helsinki said in February that some 4,000 refugees, nearly 80% of them Iraqi, had already asked for help to leave.
Once their project was fleshed out late last year, Rahman and Lahti toured refugee reception centres to present it, choosing about 20 candidates from 700 refugees who expressed an interest.
With the Finnish tech sector struggling to fill about 5,000 vacancies, the pair had no difficulty recruiting 12 software houses and web services companies as potential employers. They rented a large flat in central Helsinki to accommodate the successful students, and hired an experienced engineer to do the teaching.
Eight weeks into the course, three of the first five trainees – from Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Syria – are in internships, with the remaining two waiting to hear back after interviews.
Eyas Taha, 22, is one of the group. He fled his native Iraq after the family home was blown up three times and by early 2015 had found a job with a web-based food delivery startup in Jordan, in customer care and tech support. Then his father was killed in a terror attack, and he realised he could never return to Baghdad.
“I decided to go to Europe on my own,” he said. Taha took a boat from Egypt to Sicily – “three hundred people, eight days at sea” – and made his way through France, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark to Finland, arriving in last August.
“I knew Finland was a good country, humane,” he said. “And great for education. The only downside was the weather: in Baghdad it can be 50C in summer, in Finland in winter it can be -36C. That’s a shock.”
Taha spent six months in one reception centre and two in another before meeting Rahman and Lahti. “Now, instead of doing nothing I am learning programming languages, eight hours a day. I knew nothing, I had no coding background. But it’s an amazing opportunity.”
Taha has had two job interviews and is awaiting recalls. “This course is just a great shortcut, like a two or three-year shortcut to a proper life,” he said. “It takes a year to get a residence permit, maybe two more to learn Finnish and get a cleaning job.”
Mostly, though, “it means for us, people who have left behind our homes, our countries, our jobs, our educations, our lives – people who have nothing – it means we can actually start to make something new. It’s precious.”
Nizar Rahme, 26, another graduate of the scheme, arrived in Finland three months ago after fleeing Damascus with his wife, Lydia, when her parents’ home was destroyed in a bomb attack in December last year.
A qualified architect who was also working as an animator and game developer in Syria, Nizar came via Russia, hoping initially “just to continue studying, hopefully information systems. So this was an amazing opportunity.”
He is now a junior developer at Nord Software, with a path to a full-time – and fully paid – job. “My life has been … transformed,” he said. “Three months ago I was not a part of society. I was at the reception centre, unable to do anything. Depressed. Now I am learning, working … Integrating. Back in the world.”
The project, Rahman said, is “making integration happen. It’s win-win for everyone. For society, because these jobs need doing, and because the faster asylum seekers integrate and contribute, the better for everyone. And for refugees, because they can actually start building the new lives they crossed Europe to make for themselves.”
This piece is part of our Half-full series. If you have suggestions of stories, trends, innovations and people that you’d like to see included in this series please share them in the form below.
(JTA) — Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, may have a university named for him.
But Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first female Jewish Supreme Court justice now has an entire species named for her, even if it is a rather small one: the leaf-dwelling Ilomantis ginsburgae, a newly identified type of praying mantis.
Named after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
A newly identified praying mantis from Madagascar - Ilomantis ginsburgae Credit: Rick Wherley / Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 02 June 2016 16:39.
Along with a Muslim Mayor, this is another way to extend the bounds of Abrahamic jurisdiction
Stretching the truth of home and jurisdiction the Jewish way - fishing wire atop poles circumscribing a protracted area to designate the new parameters of “home”, so that Orthodox Jews will not be “violating the Sabbath” within its extended bounds - an extensive area of London designated as theirs exclusively.
With the new London Mayor, it also goes to show that they are prepared to live alongside Muslims and that they believe that they know how to do that. Of course its alright for Jews to discriminate and have their own sacrosanct territory.
Fishing wire would be suspended from 18ft poles to create a boundary
Eruv would act as extension of home’s walls giving Jews more freedom
Concerns that proposal to Camden Council could lead to ‘ghettoisation’
But architect says eruv would make people feel more part of community
Top left is an example of poles topped with fishing wire surrounding a protracted area of London (in purple) symbolizing their “Orthodox home” so that they can avoid Sabbath rules prohibiting activities “outside the home” on Saturdays.
A six-mile perimeter could be created around an area of North London to help Orthodox Jews avoid restrictions on the Sabbath.
Fishing wire would be suspended from tall poles to create the boundary for what would become a huge eruv, acting as an extension of the walls of a home which would give Jews greater freedom.
But there are concerns the proposal to Camden Council by a group of synagogues could lead to ‘ghettoisation’ of the area, following similar fears raised in another application nearby in 2014.
An example of an eruv, which acts as an extension of a home’s walls and gives Jews more freedom
An example of an eruv, which acts as an extension of a home’s walls and gives Jews more freedom
Observant Jews have to try to avoid violating a religious law that bans them from working on the Sabbath, which includes carrying anything around - except within their homes.
But an eruv extends the boundaries of their properties, meaning they can follow the same rules within this area when outside the home.
It is created using physical features such as walls and then filling in the spaces with fishing lines connected between poles to enclose land.
Pushing things in public is also forbidden on the Sabbath, so an eruv allows people with wheelchairs or pushchairs to use these outside.
Within an eruv Jews can carry items such as house keys, books, essential medicines, extra clothes, reading glasses and crutches.
The idea of the eruv is to help Jews follow the ideas of the Sabbath by making it enjoyable without breaking the rules that keep it holy.
This means Jews still cannot carry things that cannot be moved on the Sabbath such as mobile phones, pens or wallets.
BRUSSELS - Facebook (FB.O), Twitter (TWTR.N), Google’s (GOOGL.O) YouTube and Microsoft (MSFT.O) on Tuesday agreed to an EU code of conduct to tackle online hate speech within 24 hours in Europe.
EU governments have been trying in recent months to get social platforms to crack down on rising online racism following the refugee crisis and terror attacks, with some even threatening action against the companies.
As part of the pledge agreed with the European Commission, the web giants will review the majority of valid requests for removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours and remove or disable access to the content if necessary.
They will also strengthen their cooperation with civil society organizations who help flag hateful content when it goes online and promote “counter-narratives” to hate speech.
“The recent terror attacks have reminded us of the urgent need to address illegal online hate speech. Social media is unfortunately one of the tools that terrorist groups use to radicalize young people,” EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said.
Germany got Google, Facebook and Twitter to agree to delete hate speech from their websites within 24 hours last year and even launched an investigation into the European head of Facebook over its alleged failure to remove racist hate speech.
“There’s no place for hate speech on Facebook,” said Monika Bickert, Head of Global Policy Management at Facebook.
“With a global community of 1.6 billion people we work hard to balance giving people the power to express themselves whilst ensuring we provide a respectful environment.”
The code of conduct is largely a continuation of efforts that the companies already take to counter hate speech on their websites, such as developing tools for people to report hateful content and training staff to handle such requests.
Twitter has suspended over 125,000 accounts since the middle of 2015 for threatening or promoting terror acts, primarily related to Islamic State.
The United States has undertaken similar efforts to entice the cooperation of tech companies in combating online radicalization, focusing on promoting “counter-narratives” to extremist content.
EU ministers had called for cooperation with tech companies to be stepped up after the Brussels attacks in March.
Jewish lobbyists, frequently the target of hate speech, welcomed the code of conduct.
“This is a historic agreement that couldn’t arrive at a better time,” said Dr. Moshe Kantor, President, European Jewish Congress.
Along with a Muslim Mayor, this is another way to extend the bounds of Abrahamic jurisdiction
