DIGITALIZING A 1000 NEWSPAPER ARTICLES…
“As eye-boggling as it is mind-boggling.”
— STELLA DENVER
ZEBRA CROSSING
This is all about us
all along a continuum of group 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 — 7,500 kilometers or 10,900 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 covid19on.com was a Karachi-based researcher from RG. The pandemic united us. Covid19on.com was launched in December 2019 — months before governments worldwide began announcing lock-downs one after another. Back then, most of TEAM ZC members were part of TEAM 19. These two teams can be viewed along a continuum of group cohesion or synergic cohesion, as we are engaged in a project to digitalize a 1,000 newspaper articles.
ARTICLES DIGITALIZED IN TWO STACKS
ISSUES 001 TO 500
181 | Flipping it right
It's sad that no scientist has figured out the physics of tossing `parotta' (an Indian flatbread) into the air. The…
180 / Diamonds Are for Bond
Back in 1971, the James Bond movie title 'Diamonds Are Forever' wouldn't have occurred to anyone as notably significant. The…
179 / The ultimate evolutionary innovation?
It was Eors Szathmary who likened language to an amoeba, and the human brain to the habitat in which it…
178 / Comic strips aren’t ‘Hokum’
The theme of radiation is at the core of the comic strip dynamics. Marvel comics' Incredible Hulk, a green-skinned monster,…
177 / Are ‘couch potatoes’ born in the womb?
Pregnant women may take heed. Poor diet during the pregnancy may program their babies to become couch potatoes even before…
176 / A baby’s body in a 30G collision
Imagine a young mother inside a fast car, holding a baby on her lap. The baby actually weighs 10 kg,…
ISSUES 501 ONWARDS
924 / A shift from thinking to feeling?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have covered most of the skills and qualities that the present youth devotedly regards as keys…
962 / With a tunnel in the Head
Sounds reach one of our ears first and then the other. The time delay in between is too short for…
915 / Teeth tell stories that mouth can’t
A fossil tooth could be a buffet of information for researchers at a dig. Teeth grow like trees in a…
914 / It is a Duchenne smile!
One bizarre remark on Mona Lisa's smile is that she doesn't smile at all; it's a visual illusion. And wasn't…
913 / One metal in two ages
Iron replaced bronze as the prime material for tool and weapon production during the transition from the Bronze Age to…
912 / To see a place before it’s gone
Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is just one of those places that sightseers flock to -- "to see it before…
WHAT YOU WON'T SEE IN CONTENTS
NOTES FROM THE BACK-END: GOING ABOUT IT
924 / A shift from thinking to feeling?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have covered most of the skills and qualities that the present youth devotedly regards as keys to success in the future. The first wave of AI replaced humans in physically repetitive tasks. That shift gave rise to our current "Thinking Economy". And now... if you expect to have a viable career, you better get in touch with your emotions. This is the message from marketing professor…
962 / With a tunnel in the Head
Sounds reach one of our ears first and then the other. The time delay in between is too short for us to perceive but it is long enough for the brain to process to determine the source of the sound. This deceptively simple feat is denied to frogs, lizards and birds because the distance between their eyes is too small. Well, then, how do they hear? Elementary. They have an…
915 / Teeth tell stories that mouth can’t
A fossil tooth could be a buffet of information for researchers at a dig. Teeth grow like trees in a sense. They add layer after layer of enamel and dentine tissues every day. And so they can help us reconstruct the biological events that individuals or even communities have undergone during their early years of life. Among other things, teeth preserve "precise temporal changes and chemical records of key elements"…
914 / It is a Duchenne smile!
One bizarre remark on Mona Lisa's smile is that she doesn't smile at all; it's a visual illusion. And wasn't Leonardo da Vinci a master in optics? Turns out, half of the claim is true -- literally! Neurologists Lucia Ricciardi and Matteo Bolognay have interpreted Mona Lisa's smile as asymmetric and so non-genuine. Happiness is expressed only on the left side. A genuine smile not only utilises the muscles of…
913 / One metal in two ages
Iron replaced bronze as the prime material for tool and weapon production during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. The replacement was gradual -- at different times in different regions. There were things made of iron in the Bronze Age, but the iron was different. During the formation of a celestial body like Earth, nearly all nickel drifts towards the molten iron core and becomes extremely…
912 / To see a place before it’s gone
Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is just one of those places that sightseers flock to -- "to see it before it's gone"! It is an example of the concept of 'Last Chance Tourism'. The key words hovering over a site like GBR are "doom", "dying", "endangered" and so on. It is like a species nearing extinction. However, Annah Piggott-McKellar and Karen McNamara encountered a paradox at the core of the…
Requiem for an editor
This site is dedicated to the memory of June Maythil — a silent legacy that we cherish
She was not at all with TEAM ZC.
While we were fumbling with the initial coordination imperative of a site like this, she was braving sessions after foggy sessions of chemotherapy for advanced triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), with a frame of mind unfalteringly set to what she called “God Mode” — way far away from the neighbourhood of our preoccupation. But, unknown to us until now, she had already left an unproclaimed legacy behind her — way before we pitched in.
… quiz showcase
Us the Orange Squares atop to navigate
Where there is hunger, there can't be lasting peace. Who said this in a UN General Assembly speech?
WILLY BRANDT
Which novelist keenly described symptoms of several diseases even before they were medically identified? one two three four
CHARLES DICKENS
Who has a long history of wearing daring dresses on Holywood's red carpet?
Nicole Kidman
Who won in the first ever arm wrestling contest between robots and humans?