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A friend of mine is desperate to build a city. If you like to help click the following links:
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Well .. after wandering around in Charles village for almost two years, I will be back in Reed Hall starting from Tomorrow. :(
How long am I going to be there? I don't know. Probably until I leave for Bangladesh - if I ever go there. Things are very fluid these days. Z depends on Y which in turn depends on X, A and B. If one thing changes, everything down the line changes too. That's why a friend of mine told me this after hearing me completing prelim: "now the fun part begins".
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it took me three and a half years of my life, many courses, examinations, and ups and downs to reach this significant milestone in my doctoral study. i would want to call this experience as 'seeing the light at the end of the tunnel'.
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A man who is not married.
It is a car with seven or so seats with at least one sliding door on the side. Much more like a TownAce or HighAce in Myanmar.
In the United States, it is mandatory to use child seats for children under 6 years of age or 40 pounds of body weight. We can neither let those children sit on driver's lap nor sit in the lover seat. I was surprised when I learned about that law because as a kid I used to sit on my dad's lap while he was driving. Besides, lover seat is the privilege spot in the car and only the VIP in the family is allowed to sit there.But, there are reasons behind this child-seat law. Statistics showed that lover seat is the most dangerous place in a car followed by the driver seat. Why is that? Because drivers love themselves more so than their lovers who sit in lover seats. When accident happens, driver tries to save his/her own ass and it could inadvertently hurt the person in the lover seat more. Too bad, huh? Another fair reason is that driver has more time, though it may be a split of a second, than other passengers in the car right before the accident. So, s/he can prepare her/himself to a safer posture. On the contrary, the person in lover seat may be unaware of the situation and unprepared. As a result, s/he suffers more.
Then, air bags came along to save those beautiful souls. While air bags save lives, they can also hurt people. If it is a child, they can even kill. That's why kids are not allowed to sit in any of the front seats of a car.
About a month ago, my friend's family arrived from Myanmar. Maung Min Thant is a bright and yet talkative 2 year old son of my friend. To pick him up from the airport I had to find a child-seat. We were fortunate that another friend of mine whose kids were grown up gave me a child-seat. From then on, that child-seat occupies my car's back seat. Then, the van came. A Burmese couple had their van broke down and they didn't want to bother fixing it. So, they said they would give it away. Me and two other friends decided to fix it though we were not so sure what would come next. Luckily, the car became usable after spending $600 or so. We swapped vehicles and I ended up using the van. My close friend - father of two - commented that even he didn't use a van because it is a trade mark (in the US) that you have many kids. OMG .... I didn't know that.
Now, I have a van with a child-seat in it. How could people believe that I am a bachelor? :(
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CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Investing in Young People’s Health and Development: Research that Improves Policies and Programs
An International Conference
April 27-29, 2008 (April 30 optional sessions)
Abuja, Nigeria
Primary sponsors: Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA; Institute of Public Health, Obafemi Awolowo University; and Center for Population and Reproductive Health, University of Ibadan; and Nigeria’s federal ministries of health, youth, and education; in partnership with a consortium of more than 20 international and national organizations
Dear Colleagues:
On behalf of the international and local organizing committees, we would like to bring this important upcoming international conference to your attention and ask that you circulate this announcement widely to interested persons.
The conference organizers invite the submission of research abstracts with direct program or policy implications for youth development programs in developing nations for review for oral or poster presentation. The attached files, Call for Abstracts and Abstract Submission Form and Guidelines, provide detail on the conference objectives and themes. The deadline for submission of abstracts to gates@jhsph.edu is November 15, 2007.
The conference will open the evening of Sunday, April 27, 2008 and be followed by two full days of conference sessions. April 30 program is reserved for optional follow-on, youth-friendly, translational activities that we anticipate partner organizations will be sponsoring. More information is available from the conference website: www.jhsph.edu/gatesinstitute/policy_practice/adolhealth. Shortly, travel support application forms will be available as well from the website.
Organizations interested in sponsoring skill-building or related workshops around the conference schedule are invited to contact Ms. Natalie Culbertson at gates@jhsph.edu. Sponsored workshops may be scheduled either for the daytime of April 27 or on April 30. Other questions about the conference may be directed to this email address as well.
As some of you may be aware, the 3rd African Conference on Sexual Health and Rights is also being convened in Abuja, Nigeria, in February 2008 (www.africasexuality.org). Although in the same location and covering related themes, the Investing in Youth Health and Development Conference will take place in April, is internationally oriented, focused on young people, and concentrates on the accumulated research and program evidence that can inform young people’s health and development programs.
We look forward to receiving your abstracts and thank you for sharing this e-mail broadly.
Sincerely,
Robert Blum, Amy Tsui, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Oladosu Ojengbede, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
Adesegun Fatusi, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria
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Many Burmese public health professionals are preaching contemporary public health practices and saving lives all over the world while many more professionals back home are sweeping the corners where they are.
Unfortunately,
Please leave your name and contacts in the comment if you are interested to participate in this endeavor.
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တရံေရာ အခါက သူငယ္ခ်င္း ေလးဦးရွိေလသည္။ လူတိုင္း၊ တစ္ေယာက္ေယာက္၊ ဘယ္သူမဆို ႏွင့္ ဘယ္သူမွ တို႔ ျဖစ္၏။တစ္ေန႔မွာေတာ့ အလြန္ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ ကိစၥ တစ္ခု ေဆာင္ရြက္ဖို႔ရာ ရွိလာပါသတဲ့။ လူတိုင္း က တစ္ေယာက္ေယာက္ ေတာ့လုပ္မွာပဲလို႔ အပိုင္တြက္ထားတယ္။ တကယ္ကေတာ့ ဘယ္သူမဆို လုပ္လို႔ရတဲ့ ကိစၥပါ။ ဒါေပမယ့္လည္း ဘယ္သူမွ မလုပ္ပါဘူး။ လူတိုင္း လုပ္ရမယ့္အလုပ္ကို မလုပ္ေတာ့ တစ္ေယာက္ေယာက္ က ေတာ္ေတာ္ စိတ္ဆိုးသြားပါသတဲ့။ ဘယ္သူမဆို လုပ္လို႔ရတယ္လို႔ လူတိုင္း ထင္ပါတယ္။ သို႔ေသာ္ လူတိုင္း လုပ္မွာ မဟုတ္ဘူး ဆိုတာကိုေတာ့ ဘယ္သူမွ သတိမထားမိပါ။ ဘယ္သူမဆို လုပ္ႏုိင္တဲ့ ကိစၥကို ဘယ္သူမွ မလုပ္လို႔ လူတိုင္း က တစ္ေယာက္ေယာက္ ကိုအျပစ္ဖို႔တာနဲ႔ပဲ အဆံုးသတ္ရပါေတာ့တယ္။
ခင္ဗ်ား မလုပ္ရင္ ဘယ္သူ လုပ္မလဲ။
အခု မလုပ္ရင္ ဘယ္ေတာ့ လုပ္မွာလဲ။
This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody.
There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody's job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realised that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have.
If not you . . . WHO?
If not now . . . WHEN?
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I do not normally forward chain letters to people in my mailing list. However, from time to time, I receive a few chain letters that are inspiring and would like to share with you all. This is the first one of its kind to be posted on my blog. Since this is a chain letter it is hard to provide credit for the original contributor.
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From VOA Burmese Program http://www.voanews.com/burmese/2007-04-05-voa4.cfm
| Health Experts Recommend Male Circumcision for HIV Prevention | |
| Washington 05 April 2007 |
 |
| Kim Dickson, left, next to WHO's Jos Perriens, right, answers journalist's question about WHO and UNAIDS recommendations, 28 Mar 2007 |
Dr. Ye Mon Myint, DrPH student of Dept. of Population, Family & Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins University, discussed about how the male circumcision can prevent the HIV infection and whether it would be useful for Burmese society or not.
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Do you know that you can read my blogs written in Burmese without having Burmese font in your computer?
What is your internet browser? If the answer is
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"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe."
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This is nothing related to iPod, iTune, nor iPhone. I just simply wanted to tell you that i passed my car's emission test.
You heard me complaining about fixing my car's exhaust system. Well, today, I went for emission test. A few words from the emission test center justified my spending of 800 bucks to fix the car. Baltimore is the 6th most polluted city in the US. Because of this stringent emission testing system the State of Maryland rights off 70 tons of pollution everyday. Yea, 70 tons. I don't know how did they calculate it. If you want to know check it out at http://www.mde.state.md.us/
I breathed even more deeply to get my share of cleaner air. :)
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These are the NGOs being listed in Myanmar Yellow Pages. Yea, there are almost 4 NGOs in Myanmar.
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After a long last, we had snow in Baltimore. Snow started falling later last night. When I woke up in the morning everything's covered with white flakes. Luckily, the snow was not that think and I didn't need to dig out my car from snow. Nevertheless, it was completely covered with it. I took some pictures and will post it later.
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I have come across with this sculpture and would like to share with you all. The original source could be found at Rosen Outdoor Sculpture Competition Exhibition. 
The Artist - Rudy Rudisill - said,
" FS.922 Seven Steps To Nowhere is one of a group of sculptures I call "Public Buildings?" I recall the image of stairs that are hard or nearly impossible to climb and go nowhere from a reoccurring dream as a child, and later as a real place in a building where I once worked.
An interior space that is inaccessible, a staircase that leads to a blank wall with no door, no hand rails and steps that are narrow and steep ... speculation on the meaning of these elements and the piece as a whole is truly the interactive part of this sculpture."
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"Go Green" . A nice and desirable buzz word. But, nothing comes for free. I was summoned to get my car tested for emission. It is required in Maryland that cars do not emit harmful gases more than the limit.
Even the top notch and brand new car engines still emit those harmful gases in excess of the state required level. So, another instrument called catalytic converter is installed in the exhaust system to purify the dirts exhaled from the engine.
My car's catalytic converter has worn out and I had to replace it together with part of the exhaust system. The initial estimate from a Toyota-recognized garage was $ 3300 - almost the price that I paid for the car. Luckily, I found another garage that could fix the thing with $ 800. Still it is about the 20% of the price of the car.
This is ridiculous. There should be cheaper ways to go green. Or else, not many people could ever afford it. Shall we just use our foot to go green?
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