ZEBRA CROSSING

Curating and Digitalizing a 1000 Print Media Articles.

The source material we try to curate is ‘Zebra Crossing’ — a Sunday column carried by The Indian Express for twenty years (2000-2020).

All along a continuum of global cohesion

Call us Team ZC. We have members from India (where our project took off), China, and Pakistan. And, extending to the farthest geographical point on the Earth’s surface from India, Team ZC even has a member from Chile—nearly 17,000 kilometers or 10,500 miles away. This is just a tangential indication of how truly global we are, thanks to our lively presence and interactions on ResearchGate (RG), a social networking site with over 20 million researchers. The first person to sign up at our former site, covid19on.com, was a Karachi-based researcher from RG. The pandemic united us as it disregarded all national boundaries. Covid19on.com was launched in December 2019—months before governments worldwide began announcing lockdowns one after another. Back then, most Team ZC members were part of TEAM 19. These two teams can be viewed along a continuum of global cohesion or synergic cohesion, as we are engaged in a project to curate hundreds of print media articles. The section “Notes From The Backend” will brief you on how we go about it.

These two teams can be viewed along a continuum of global cohesion or synergic cohesion, as we are engaged in a project to curate hundreds of print media articles. The section “Notes From The Backend” will brief you on how we go about it.

A shortcut across the information highway

The column Zebra Crossing was concieved as a shortcut across the information highway — at a time when dial-up was the only internet option, even for privileged users in first-tier firms. Right now, a host of ResearchGate (RG) scholars contend that the column holds an encyclopedic scope — a finding substantiated by AI briefs.

Our team
includes students, academicians, coders, designers and journalists.

~ STELLA DENVER

919 / It wasn’t fish, it was mammoth

Around 43,000 years ago, the first frontmen of Homo sapiens colonised Europe. They replaced the Neanderthals in the region approximately 3,000 years later — violently, per French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule (the first person to analyse a Neanderthal). One hypothesis about…

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208 / Information, just a small amount

Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran once remarked that people would never understand each other unless their language is reduced to half a dozen words. The truth is that often we need only that many words (a small amount of information) for…

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181 / Flipping the Indian flatbread right

It’s sad that no scientist has figured out the physics of tossing the Indian flatbread `parotta’ into the air. The secret of such a fascinating vertical-flying-saucer effect should not remain unidentified. For, what would happen if we try the feat?…

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955 / Penguins can teach us one trick

Imagine a place where the air temperature can drop to minus forty (-40) Celsius and the winds can bolt atspeeds of 40 meters per second? Antarctic penguins live in a place that exactly fits the description. They routinely hop in…

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938 / Leftward errors in line bisections

Many things we aren’t aware of can unconsciously influence our behavioural inclinations and orientations. “Pseudoneglect” is one of those things. Experimental evidence recognises it as a mild asymmetry in spatial attention. One result is leftward errors in line bisections. Even…

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960 / Uncertainty is a part of all research

One of the most prominent theories in modern science is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Bertrand Russell said there is nothing uncertain about it, but let it pass. The point is uncertainty is a natural part of all scientific research. At the…

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965 / A drop in human-caused noise

COVID-19 couldn’t have silenced the mobile Towers of Babel, but it did stop the stampeding humanity in its tracks. The global effect of physical distancing (it isn’t social distancing) and the stoppage of services, idustries and collective movements marked the…

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901 / Ooh! Woohoo! Oops! — Vocal bursts

Ooh! That is  surprise. We make spontaneous sounds to express everything from elation (Woohoo!) to embarrassment (Oops!). A statistical analysis of responses to more than 2,000 “vocal bursts” (nonverbal exclamations) conveys at least 24 kinds of emotion. An audio map…

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958 / Same shape for the same purpose

If you unearth an artefact with the same shape and used for the same purpose in two or more differentregions, it could be the bespoke result of cultural diffusion — but not necessarily. Archaeologist Sue O’Connor studied five fish hooks…

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000 / Experimental

PAGE FOR EXPERIMENTS IN POSTING art gallery is set to redefine cultural landscape. The revitalized art gallery is set to redefine cultural landscape. The revitalized art gallery is set to redefine cultural landscape. The revitalized art gallery is set to…

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