women in power

finally, a new day begins. Signifies a new beginning for all.

ed: well, i guess this isn't going to be ur usual kind of blog - it'd serve to inform, entertain and hopefully educate? sounds like a familiar motto? :)

aarthi: now you can finally understand that your tutor's actually rather complex? love oxymorons to bits :)
Life is actually simple, it's us Man who make it complex. So it's either up to you to make the complex simple, or just learn to embrace the complexity. Some of us try so hard to keep meaning while others are quite willing to throw it away at every opportunity. Like I've said before: too much negativity in the world these days.. let us not contribute as well.

to all out there, if you would like to post an entry, not just tag... let me know yah??

read this today...thought it'd be good to know who the women in power around the world are! If you want the full list, go check out p42-43 of ST today.

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July 30, 2005

Women power

NEW YORK - US SECRETARY of State Condoleezza Rice is the world's most powerful woman, beating a host of presidents, celebrities and chief executives to top Forbes magazine's global ranking of feminine clout. The list was Forbes' second ranking of the world's 100 most powerful women and left Dr Rice two-for-two, having topped the 2004 version as US national security adviser.

Ms Elizabeth MacDonald, senior editor at Forbes, cited Dr Rice for 'reinvigorating the role of Secretary of State with a form of diplomatic activism that we haven't seen in a while'.

Chinese Vice-Premier Wu Yi is runner-up for the second year in a row, the highest-ranked among nine Asians on the annual list.

The chief executive and executive director of Singapore's Temasek Holdings, Ms Ho Ching, is in 30th position.

Former Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri, No. 8 on the list last year, not only lost her top 10 position but fell out of the rankings altogether following her failed re-election bid.

A similar fate befell India's ruling Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi, who was deemed the third most powerful woman last year but could not make it to the top 100 a year later.

There was better news, for now at least, for beleaguered Philippine President Gloria Arroyo, who jumped five places to take the No. 4 ranking this year, behind newcomer Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian Prime Minister who made her debut in third position.

The highest-ranking businesswoman on the list was Ms Margaret Whitman, the chief executive of the wildly successful Internet auction site eBay, who was in fifth position, ahead of Xerox chief executive Anne Mulcahy.

US talk show queen Oprah Winfrey, who last month topped the Forbes list of most powerful celebrities, broke into the all-women top 10 at No. 9 - a huge leap from her 62nd ranking last year.

Rounding out the top 10 was Mrs Melinda Gates, wife of billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates and co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Forbes rankings are based on a composite of visibility - measured by press citations - and economic impact.

The latter reflects three things: status (a prime minister is more powerful than a senator); the size of the economic sphere over which the person holds sway; and a multiplier that aims to make different economic yardsticks comparable.

A politician, for example, is assigned a gross national product number but a low multiplier, while an executive is assigned a company's assets but gets a high multiplier.

'We wanted to find women who had both global economic impact and cultural impact,' Ms MacDonald said.

She added that one 'disturbing trend' identified by Forbes researchers was the continued disparity in salaries between female and male executives.

'When the Wall Street Journal coined the term 'glass ceiling' in 1985, women only earned two-thirds of men's salaries,' Ms MacDonald said.

'Now it's about 75 per cent. That's an improvement that's working at a glacial pace.' -- AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

and life ends.

strange how some things work out.. The whole week I've been talking about life, death, and how it's illegal to take one's life away even if it's yours.

then i find out about how someone i know took a life away - her own.

too much hate going around in the world, too much negative energy going around.
there are just so many other things to worry about, yet at the same time, so many things to cherish and treasure.

suddenly, everything that seemed such a big deal earlier seems so insignificant, when compared to life itself.

life begins..life stops

In line with the discussion this week on 'life'..here's something to ponder on: when does life stop then?

one thing to be curious about: Singapore's Human Organ Transplantation Act.

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Feb 3, 2003
Brain dead: Is it the same as 'really dead'?

LUCKILY for Miss Tanya Liu, she was declared dead in a country with an opt-in organ donation programme.

Otherwise she might be buried by now and her organs working away in other people's bodies.

Instead, the Taiwanese newscaster, declared brain dead by London doctors after she was injured severely in a train crash in May last year, was moved at the insistence of her family to a hospital in Beijing.

There, herbal remedies and electrical stimulation of her brain saw her regain consciousness three months later.

It made the news everywhere.

The proposal to make brain death the legal criterion for harvesting organs here has made some people uneasy, especially when stories like Miss Liu's suggest that a person is not necessarily dead when her brain is dead.

But brain death is the legal standard used in most nations for organ transplants.

Japan, for example, adopted it in 1997, and Singapore is considering working it into amendments to the Human Organ Transplant Act.

Now, the Act authorises kidneys to be removed from non-Muslim accident victims who have not opted out.

The proposed amendments are to expand, first, the list of organs to include the liver, heart and corneas and, secondly, the pool of potential donors to people certified as 'brain dead'.

The concept of brain death, while widely used, is not universally accepted.

It was first mooted by the Harvard Medical School in 1968 to enable doctors to harvest organs for transplantation.

If the brain is no longer able to coordinate all the systems in the body, such that the person cannot breathe on his own, maintain the heart beat and blood circulation spontaneously, and remain conscious, can you say he is still alive?

The Harvard doctors listed six criteria to establish brain death but left this question unanswered to this day.

Despite the Minister of State for Health Balaji Sadasivan's reassuring comment made to reporters recently - 'There is very scientific and medical criteria to determine brain death' - the question remains whether people are really dead if they are brain dead.

After all, we are talking about warm, pink bodies in whom hearts continue to beat. In fact, for brain-dead organ donors, the life-support machine is left on so the heart continues to beat and pump blood through organs.

In 1997, the CBS television show, 60 Minutes, aired a story entitled, Not Quite Dead, about how brain-dead persons could be kept alive for surprisingly long periods.

It had been an article of faith that brain death would lead to the heart stopping despite all treatment.

In fact, persons declared brain dead are known to have hearts that continue to beat on their own. A study of 155 persons with no electrical activity or blood flow in the brain - whole brain death - revealed that 80 survived two weeks, 44 four weeks, 20 two months, seven six months, and four longer than one year.

The longest-known survivor was declared brain dead at four from meningitis.

Scans show that his brain has liquefied. Today, the 20-year-old American is still comatose but, without question, alive.

That the issue remains unsettled is evident from the fact that in the United States, the whole brain must stop functioning to diagnose brain death whereas, in Britain, brain-stem death is enough.

The brain stem is the lower part of the brain that connects the cerebral hemispheres in the skull to the spinal cord in the backbone; it controls breathing, digestion, heart rate, blood pressure and how we stay awake.

The definition of death becomes an issue only because of organ transplantation.

If doctors wait until the heart stops beating before they harvest organs, they must race against the clock to transplant them before they become unviable.

How long to wait after the heart stops before declaring a person truly dead?

There are no answers in medical texts, which never had to deal with this before.

After 60 Minutes aired the episode, the US government asked the Institute of Medicine to look for an answer.

The prestigious non-profit group concluded that it was virtually certain that the heart would not restart on its own after five minutes although there were 'no scientific studies to allow a definite conclusion. (On this, there is a) lack of scientific certainty'.

After all, the ticker can - even after five minutes - be kicked back into life with a defibrillator; the resuscitated person may even come back with some brain function intact.

BETTER GUIDELINE FOR ORGAN REMOVAL?

THERE is no question that transplantations save lives but policy-makers owe it to would-be donors to define death plainly, especially in Singapore's opt-out system.

In opt-in systems where people have to pledge to be donors, many resist signing up precisely because of the uncertainty over brain death.

Plainly, 'as good as dead' isn't quite the same as 'really dead', and we must not sidestep the issue by declaring would-be donors dead too soon.

It may indeed be good policy to permit organ removal after five minutes - or to follow some better guideline - but, first, we must engage in the appropriate debate, not dismiss doubts and fears in a cavalier fashion.

at the beginning

For a long time now, I've been playing with the idea of using this medium to complement what I do in the classroom. Often, there just doesn't seem to be enough time for everything...

So here I am. Once again, trying my luck to see how far this can really go, especially in a period of time when time seems so limited..

For a start, I'll be posting articles as regularly as possible..stuff that I think we need to know, and as usual, hopefully those will serve as a springboard, to spark your curiosity, such that you'd go find out more yourself.

Apart from that, it'll be great if this could turn into a place where you'll

1. feel free to express yourselves (though good manners appreciated here);
2. feel comfortable to ask the questions you haven't had time to ask;
3. or simply share your views on anything..

Finally, though my main concern is for GP, this will also be a place for me and you to share almost anything and everything...

if you wanna post too, just join me here in cyberspace, won't you?