Sexual Correlationship

Is this reality? “Women with bigger breasts found to be smarter.” – this report published by The Star can be found quoted all over the Internet. But it seems that the study that the paper referred to never existed. If the study did exist, it must have been conducted by a woman with big breasts. How is that none of the world’s 50 most influential women in technology today are not busty?

The real reality could be that for a woman to afford RM16,000 to augment her real bust, she could be a smart woman; successful in her business or career. At the recent two-day inaugural Asian Breast Aesthetic Symposium (ABAS), it was noted that smart Malaysians could one day prove that they are one of the most aesthetically blessed people in the world, joining the ranks of their Brazilian and Swedish counterparts, if the number of patients seeking consultation for cosmetic surgery is anything to go by. A consultant plastic, reconstructive and cosmetic surgeon at Penang’s Loh Guan Lye Specialist Centre, Dr Lee Kim Siea, receives up to 20 new appointments for consultation per week.

Augmenting and shaping up the breast may cost between RM10,000 and RM16,000, and most of the patients being Chinese. Dr Charles Randquist, a world-renowned plastic surgeon from Sweden and the man behind ABAS, said that breast augmentation done with implants is a good way in improving the quality of life.

Here’s a correlation to augmented reality – sex life and quality of life. Two out of three Malaysian men and three out of four women are not satisfied with their sex lives. This was found by the Asia-Pacific Sexual Health and Overall Wellness survey conducted by Pfizer. Malaysians are ranked sixth among 13 countries but, if it’s any consolation, Singaporeans fared worse. They are in eighth spot.

According to Dr Rosie King, who led the Pfizer study in the Asia Pacific region, greater sexual satisfaction is strongly associated with greater satisfaction with life overall. Generally, men and women who are highly satisfied with their sex life have a more positive outlook on their relationships and life.

Breast augmentation and sexual satisfaction, seemingly disparate elements, apparently both improves quality of life.

Here’s an alternative method of augmenting reality: Leading lingerie firm Ultimo has unveiled the Mega Boost ‘Day to Night Bra’ that promises women a double lift to their cleavage in seconds. Office workers preparing for a night on the town can boost their bra size two cup sizes - from a 34B to a 34D - in an instant with the removable silicon pouches. The UK lingerie giant made its mark 10 years ago with the patented silicon technology behind the Ultimo Fixed Gel Bra.

Watch the reality here:

How Journalists In Sarawak Have Better Sex

As of October 2008, the Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/, century-old newspaper and winner of 7 Pulitzer Prizes, switched its daily to entirely Web.

Read more here http://www.tinyurl.com/scimonitor. Several other great old newspapers have gone Web-only as well.

We continue to witness the rise and fall of species as evolution presents a different playground for newspapers and journalists. Are we witnessing that soon, there may be no need, not only for newspapers, but also no need for organizations of journalists?

The pressure from the suppressed Malaysians has hastened this process of evolution. Can we have a guided pathway to evolve?

The investigative piece, published by the Los Angeles Times on July 12, highlights a pathway to the evolution of alternative news sources and journalism in Malaysia. The piece is about the failure of a nursing board that oversees 350,000 registered nurses to remove nurses with histories of misconduct, drug abuse, negligence, violence against patients and incompetence. If these nurses were fired from one hospital for such misdeeds, they simply took their licenses down the street to another hospital, often to begin a new cycle of mistreatment and endangerment.

Read more here http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-nurse12 2009jul12,0,2185588.story.

One thing that stands out from the report is that it was written and reported by two reporters, Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, who do not work for the Los Angeles Times. They work at ProPublica, http://www.propublica.org/ , a New York–based non-profit and nonpartisan team of investigative journalists founded in 2008 and funded by philanthropy.

Certainly no blogger would have the luxury of such time for the many painstaking months to assemble the evidence necessary to demonstrate that it was taking the nursing board unconscionable lengths of time to dig into these cases. Reporters risked being sued for libel or slander if they misidentified any of the miscreant nurses or mischaracterized their behavior. No bloggers can afford to lose - or even to defend - a RM10-million libel case. Databases needed to be built, analyzed, and made Web-friendly. Few bloggers have the quantitative or technical skills to do this.

Perhaps then, that’s the reason Malaysian bloggers prefer to blog about biased opinions, hearsay, rumours, gossips and half-truths.

The LA Times’ piece amply demonstrates the importance of journalism and of journalistic organizations like the LA Times and ProPublica. Without such people and institutions, there is no way such a report would have emerged on the Web.

Malaysians need an institution like ProPublica to extend the practice of investigative or “accountability” journalism. The institution can empower citizens by creating a database enabling anyone to review budget and federal stimulus spending down to the kampong level. Bloggers can dig into the database to produce stories on the impact of the spending in their communities. At least, with that institution, we can minimize the threat to accountability and thus to our democracy.

The process of finding and communicating news may no longer require newspapers. But the process will still require journalism and journalists, to smoke out the most difficult-to-report situations, to test glib assertions against the facts, to probe for the carefully contrived hoax. These are reporting activities that take a great deal of time, money, and skill.

Today, newspapers like The Star, The Borneo Post, The Eastern Times and the New Straits Times publish only crappy work of inexperienced reporters and the usual political spins. Now, these newspapers have become robbers of the important bulwark of our democracy.

We need the kind of journalism that is intended to shine a spotlight on abuse of power and failure to uphold the public interest, and by so doing to give the public the information needed to produce positive change.

Guess how many investigative journalists are on the payroll of Borneo Post, NST and The Star, compared to total staff?

Mainstream media have no reporters digging into possible domains of corruption. This means that not only is there corruption that won’t be reported, but also that politicians, cronies, and others who might have toed the line before will now be tempted to cross it, because nobody will be watching. Who will be watching over to ensure that abuses highlighted in the Auditor General’s report do not get repeated year after year and that the culprits do not continue to stay in their positions?

Institutions like ProPublica can save our democracy and provides the pathway to evolve the Malaysian blog sphere.

Hot Agnes Monica at Bidayuh Gawai Festival?

How Bidayuhs Measure Up Today

If Agnes Monica's hot statistics are to reveal anything, it would be that many rural Bidayuhs also do not have enough clothing to cover their bodies. But Agnes Monica's exposure is nothing compared to UNDP statistics that reveal communities living in rural areas of Sarawak are among the worse off when compared to the rest of the country, and often face considerable hardships including securing land rights and other basic rights to development.

Many of the state’s communities such as the Bidayuh have, relatively low human capital, lack ready access to basic amenities and facilities, and because the physical infrastructure is underdeveloped in the areas where they live, they remain poorly connected to markets.

We know that for a strong Sarawak, we need quality human capital across races including minority groups such as the Bidayuh. However, our education system today is failing us. Quality health care fail to reach the majority of Sarawakians who are in the rural areas. GDP growth is concentrated only in major towns, not in the rural areas where most Sarawakians are.

The Bidayuh and other Dayak people have seen escalating erosion to their land tenure held under Sarawak Native Customary Rights (NCR), from first massive logging, and then giant plantations and dam building have robbed many Dayak communities of their land. Without land, the physical survival and the survival of their cultural traditions and ethnic identity are threatened.

Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact Foundation (AIPP) secretary-general Joan Carling urged Malaysia to take up the recommendation by other countries such as Mexico, which raised the issue of poor human rights record with regards to indigenous communities during the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) hearing in Geneva last year.

She said indigenous groups in Malaysia had long been fighting for their right to their native territories, and these struggles continue today. Although Malaysia adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in September 2007, there has been no real change on the ground to address the land-grab issue affecting many indigenous people, such as the Bidayuh.

Bidayuhs are a minority indigenous group in Sarawak. There are about 169,000 Bidayuhs, who constitute some 8% of the state’s population. Most of them live in Kuching, Padawan, Serian, Bau and Lundu areas in the 1st Division.

Bidayuh today remain one of the marginalized indigenous minority groups in Malaysia and represent a population of those living below poverty line. Like the other Dayaks, living mostly in the vast rural areas of Sarawak, many still live without basic amenities such as roads, jetties, clinics, treated drinking water, and electricity. Time for them has stood still since independence in 1963.

Issues of the Bidayuh Today
While the rest of the majority races in Malaysia progress in terms of socio-economic and education, the Bidayuh remain in the fringes of development and some Bidayuh communities live in poverty. Critical and urgent issues facing Bidayuh include:

1. Land are not titled and unaware of their rights under common law. Native Customary Rights land has been taken over by the state government for sale and development at any time. As Bidayuh are still dependent on subsistence farming, titled land is necessary to progress to modern farming.
2. Bidayuh participation in both the traditional and modern businesses are poor. This is hampered by limited business opportunity, highly dependent on public spending and government projects and poor networking. Some small sized firms made some inroads in small-scale construction sectors. However, none appears to be able to sustain their business due to easy entry and hence are very competitive.
3. Bidayuh form a large portion of the hardcore poor in Sarawak, living in poor housing with insufficient food supply and lack of access to quality health care, communication and transportation.
4. As most Bidayuh live in the rural areas, they are receiving the poorer quality of education than what people in the urban schools are getting. While good early childhood education is critical to the development of children, rural children are not getting pre-school development that urban children are getting. This leaves Bidayuh children to continue to lag behind others in education.
5. The high number of Bidayuh children not getting entrance into public institutions of higher learning, give rise to more Bidayuh children being left behind in the knowledge economy.

What Bidayuh Need to Achieve Equal Progress
There is widespread resentment among Bidayuh that they continue to be marginalized and continue to be left on the fringes of development. To achieve equal progress with other races, equal opportunities and privileges must be given to Bidayuh. The following are critical for the state government to provide the Bidayuh in order to achieve progress:

1. Immediate halt to indiscriminate acquisition of untitled native land by the state government.

2. Expedite the issuing of titles to all native land.

3. Allocate native land that have been designated as state land to Bidayuh families as temporary occupation for a minimum of 60 years for the purpose of modern farming. Land not developed within 3 years are to be taken back and allocated to other families.

4. Establish a well-funded and appropriately staffed Farming Program for Bidayuh that will among other things, do the following:

• Provide financial aid to Bidayuh families to develop their land for modern farming. Access to the aid must be easy and mechanism for repayment must also be easy.
• In addition to providing financial aid, the government must also provide quality professional assistance to upgrade the knowledge and skills of Bidayuh families on modern farming.
• Encourage Young People to Become Farmers: The Farming Program will establish a new program to identify and train the next generation of farmers. The program will also provide incentives to make it easier for new farmers to afford their first farm.
• Encourage Organic and Local Agriculture: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will help organic farmers afford to certify their crops and will also promote regional food systems.
• Strong Safety Net for Family Farmers: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will provide family farmers with stability and predictability and strengthen producer protections to ensure family farmers have fair access to markets, control over their production decisions, and transparency in prices.
• Support Small Business Development: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will provide capital for family farmers to create value-added enterprises, like cooperative marketing initiatives and farmer-owned processing plants. They also will establish a small business and micro-enterprise initiative for rural Bidayuh kampongs.
• Improve Rural Education for Bidayuh: From the moment our children step into a classroom, the single most important factor in determining their achievement is their teacher. To improve the quality of education that Bidayuh children are receiving, the state government must provide incentives for talented individuals to enter the teaching profession, including increased pay for teachers who work in rural areas.

The government must create a Rural Revitalization Program to attract and retain young people to rural Bidayuh kampongs. More quality community colleges should be created and increase research and educational funding for community colleges in Bidayuh areas. Early childhood development centres must be established in Bidayuh kampongs and staffed by only trained and qualified professionals. The government must ensure all rural Bidayuh children have access to pre-school; provide affordable and high-quality child care that will promote child development and ease the burden on working families.

The government must ensure competent, effective teachers in rural schools that are organized for success. The government should provide service scholarships to recruit and prepare teachers who commit to working in underserved Bidayuh dominated districts. To support teachers, the government must foster ongoing improvements in teacher education, provide mentoring for beginning teachers, create incentives for shared planning and learning time for teachers. To retain teachers, the government must support career pathways that provide ongoing professional development and reward accomplished teachers for their expertise. An initiative must be taken to help eliminate teacher shortages in hard-to-staff areas and subjects, improve teacher retention rates, strengthen teacher preparation programs, improve professional development, and better utilize and reward accomplished teachers.

6. Increase the number of seats for Bidayuh students in public institutions of higher learning: In order for the Bidayuh community to come to equal progress in education with other races, more places should be allocated for the Bidayuh students in local public colleges and universities.

7. Improve Health Care for Bidayuh Communities: Rural health care providers are often less experienced and do not have access to the latest medical and healthcare practices in order to deliver the best clinical outcome. Rural folks have to come to Kuching city to get better medical treatment and that is often when illness become more serious. The government must increase rural access to quality care by promoting health information technologies like telemedicine and staff rural clinics and hospitals with more experienced and better trained physicians and nurses. A Nurse-Family Partnership should be established to all Bidayuh, first-time mothers each year. The Nurse-Family Partnership provides home visits by trained registered nurses to Bidayuh expectant mothers and their families in Bidayuh kampongs.

8. Establish a Bidayuh Business Development Assistance Program: As Bidayuh community lags far behind in participation in business and entrepreneurship, the Bidayuh need specific business development assistance. The assistance program will include allocation of government infrastructure projects to Bidayuh community, allocation of business premises in strategic locations and access to financial aid and grants. Rural infrastructure projects must be allocated to local Bidayuh contractors.

9. Expand Access to Jobs: The government must invest in transitional jobs and career pathway programs that implement proven methods of helping low-income Bidayuh succeed in the workforce. The government must also create a program to directly engage disadvantaged youth in job opportunities to strengthen their communities, while also providing them with practical skills in important high-growth career field.

10. Establish At Least 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs: The government must create at least 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs in areas that have high levels of poverty and low levels of student academic achievement in Bidayuh dominated districts. The Promise Bidayuh Kampongs have a full network of services, including early childhood education, youth development efforts and after-school activities, to an entire kampong from birth to college.

The government should work with community and business leaders to identify and address the unique economic development barriers of every one of the 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs. The government will provide additional resources to address community needs.

The government, by implementing all of the above with full commitment on a sustainable basis, can help bring the Bidayuh community on equal progress with other races. As Bidayuh progress, Sarawak and the nation thrives. The nation will be strengthened for further prosperity.