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LISBON — Social networks need better regulation to stop them spreading “fake news” and undermining democracy, disillusioned tech pioneers said at an industry conference that closed in Lisbon on Thursday.

The issue has come to the fore after the spread of false information, and allegations of Russian meddling, during election campaigns around the world.

“I think we’re only 10 per cent down a very long road towards making social platforms secure,” Raffi Krikorian, the chief technology officer at the Democratic National Committee, said at Web Summit, Europe’s largest tech event.

“I don’t believe they’re doing enough now,” said the former Twitter executive who now leads a team of 35 people charged with protecting the US Democratic Party from computer attacks like the ones which revealed embarrassing e-mails during the 2016 presidential election.

“Hacking is one of those things we’re not going to detect. If there’s a hack we’re not going to see it happening, whereas disinformation we see it happening every single day,” Krikorian said.

‘Wake-up call’

He was one of many high-profile speakers who called for more regulation of the Internet and social networks at the four-day gathering dubbed “the Davos for geeks”.

The inventor of the World Wide Web, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, urged governments and companies to draw up a new “contract” for the web to make the Internet “safe and accessible” for all.

Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower who claimed a data consultancy took millions of Facebook users’ data without their knowledge to help elect US President Donald Trump in 2016, also called for greater government regulation of social media and online advertising.

He suggested data scientists should be subject to an ethical code just as doctors, nurses and teachers are.

The 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal was a “wake-up call”, added European Commissioner for Justice Vera Jourova.

“It is time to address non-transparent political advertising and the misuse of people’s personal data. In our online world, the risk of interference and manipulation has never been so high,” she said.

‘New code of conduct’

For Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, who now heads blogging site Medium, social media companies “are very aware of the downsides of their systems”.

“I think everybody, including those running the big companies, agrees there is much more to do to protect people from misinformation and abuse,” he told AFP.

“I think that’s going to happen, whether or not there is government regulation. I expect there will be more, and I think it will be very difficult to figure out the right regulation.”

Various efforts have been made by political leaders to curb intimidation, abuse, and misinformation on social media but many elected representatives argue that more legislation is needed to police the Internet.

The founder and CEO of Web Summit, Ireland’s Paddy Cosgrave, compared the “turbulence”, which the tech sector is experiencing to the dangers that accompanied the arrival of the automobile.

“Our society decided that cars were globally positive but we had to protect ourselves with ruled that have not ceased to evolve. I think we also need a new code of conduct for this new digital era,” he said.

PARIS — Soaring birth rates in developing nations are fuelling a global baby boom while women in dozens of richer countries are not producing enough children to maintain population levels there, according to figures released on Friday.

A global overview of birth, death and disease rates evaluating thousands of datasets on a country-by-country basis also found that heart disease was now the single leading cause of death worldwide.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), set up at the University of Washington by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, used more than 8,000 data sources — more than 600 of them new — to compile one of the most detailed looks at global public health.

Their sources included in-country investigations, social media and open-source material.

It found that while the world’s population skyrocketed from 2.6 billion in 1950 to 7.6 billion last year, that growth was deeply uneven according to region and income.

Ninety-one nations, mainly in Europe and North and South America, were not producing enough children to sustain their current populations, according to the IHME study.

But in Africa and Asia fertility rates continued to grow, with the average woman in Niger giving birth to seven children during her lifetime. 

Ali Mokdad, professor of Health Metrics Sciences at IHME, told AFP that the single most important factor in determining population growth was education. 

“It is down to socioeconomic factors but it’s a function of a woman’s education,” he said. “The more a woman is educated, she is spending more years in school, she is delaying her pregnancies and so will have fewer babies.”

The IHME found that Cyprus was the least fertile nation on Earth, with the average woman giving birth just once in her life.

By contrast, women in Mali, Chad and Afghanistan have on average more than six babies. 

‘Less mortality, 

more disability’

The United Nations predicts there will be more than 10 billion humans on the planet by the middle of the century, broadly in line with IHME’s projection. 

This raises the question of how many people our world can support, known as Earth’s “carrying capacity”.

Mokdad said that while populations in developing nations continue to rise, so in general are their economies growing. 

This typically has a knock-on effect on fertility rates over time.

“In Asia and Africa the population is still increasing and people are moving from poverty to better income — unless there are wars or unrest,” he said. 

“Countries are expected to fare better economically and it’s more likely that fertility there will decline and level out.”

Not only are there now billions more of us than 70 years ago, but we are also living longer than ever before. 

The study, published in The Lancet medical journal, showed male life expectancy had increased to 71 years from 48 in 1950. Women are now expected to live to 76, compared with 53 in 1950.

Living longer brings its own health problems, as we age and deteriorate and place greater burdens on our healthcare systems.

The IHME said heart disease was now the leading cause of death globally. As recently as 1990, neonatal disorders were the biggest killer, followed by lung disease and diarrhoea.

Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Azerbaijan had the highest death rates from heart disease, where as South Korea, Japan and France had among the lowest.

“You see less mortality from infectious diseases as countries get richer, but also more disability as people are living longer,” said Mokdad.

He pointed out that although deaths from infectious diseases like malaria and tuberculosis are down significantly since 1990, new, non-communicable killers have taken their place.

“There are certain behaviours that are leading to an increase in cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Obesity is number one — it is increasing every year and our behaviour is contributing to that.”

Back in 2015, I reviewed a Nikon camera called the Coolpix P900, which is a “bridge camera”.

I was not familiar with the term then, but I am now. A bridge camera is a bridge between a point-and-shoot camera and a DSLR, or digital single-lens reflex camera.

Back then, I thought the P900 was a pretty darn good camera with a lens that had an 83x optical zoom, or the equivalent of a 24 millimetre-2,000mm lens on a 35mm camera.

My bottom-line thought on the P900 was that it was all the camera most of us would ever need.

I guess Nikon thought I was wrong, because I’ve been testing the new Nikon Coolpix P1000 ($999, www.nikonusa.com), and it is bigger and better than the P900 in almost every way possible.

Meet the new boss

The P1000 is like the P900 on steroids. It’s physically bigger and heavier, and the built-in lens has an insane zoom range of 125x (24mm-3,000mm).

I’ll go ahead and say it: Nobody really needs a zoom lens that goes out to 3,000mm, but it sure is fun to see what it can do.

You could not buy a 3,000mm lens for your DSLR if you wanted to, but that did not stop Nikon from putting one on the P1000.

I admire Nikon for creating such a beast of a camera.

The first thing I noticed is how heavy it is. As you extend the zoom lens, the camera’s weight shifts forward.

Holding the P1000 with the lens fully extended is difficult but not impossible, especially with the camera’s built-in image stabilisation.

The camera weighs just over 1.3 kilogrammes which means you will not wear it around your neck all day without some discomfort.

The P1000 weighs 50 per cent more than the 2-pound P900.

The camera’s sensor captures 16-megapixel images with a resolution up to 4,608 by 3,456 pixels.

It has an ISO (film speed) range of 100 to 6400, and it can shoot up to 7 frames per second, but in short bursts, not continuously.

The lens has an aperture of f/2.8 at the widest to f/8 at maximum zoom.

The lens and imaging system has a digital zoom of 4x, so if you really want to experiment, the lens will reach out to the equivalent of a 12,000 lens for a 35mm camera. That is telescope territory and not really a mode I would expect to produce very good images.

The lens focuses from one foot to infinity at the wide end and from 23 feet to infinity at the telephoto end.

In macro mode, it can focus as close as 0.4 inches.

The viewfinder is not optical. It is a tiny 1 centimeter OLED screen. The main screen is a 3.2-inch TFT-LCD, but it is oddly not a touch screen, which I think is a shame for a $1,000 camera.

The camera’s battery is a weak point. The battery is good for up to 250 shots, or one hour and 20 minutes of video shooting. For a camera the size of the P1000, that is underwhelming. If you buy the P1000, plan to buy a few extra batteries.

The P1000 takes beautiful video at resolutions up to 4K UHD (3,840 by 2,160 pixels at 30 frames per second).

The camera can shoot RAW files, which capture more image data than JPG images, but every time you take a RAW photo, be prepared for up to a 5-second delay while the camera processes the shot. During this five seconds, the camera is unresponsive, which is a pain.

The built-in flash works out to about 12.5 metres.

Scene modes

The P1000 really wants to help you take good photos. There is a long list of scene modes that will change the exposure settings for certain situations.

The wheel on top of the camera includes program settings for shooting birds and the moon.

I took shots of both at the camera’s maximum zoom, and both modes resulted in really nice photos.

I took a stunning picture of the moon by steadying the camera against a post in my front yard. I found some pelicans at White Rock Lake gathered under the Garland Road bridge.

Other scene modes include Beach, Easy Panorama, Fireworks Show, Food, Night Landscape, Pet Portrait, Snow, Sports, Sunset, Timelapse Movie and a bunch more.

The P1000 shoots onto SD cards, but it also has wireless connectivity. If you load the Nikon SnapBridge app to your smartphone or tablet, the camera can upload its images to your smart device as you shoot the photos or videos.

Accessories

Nikon was nice enough to send along two optional accessories for the Coolpix P1000, the Dot Sight and a remote control.

To enable the remote, you have to turn off the smart device connection, but from the remote you can zoom in and out and set the aperture, shutter and ISO as well as change modes.

The remote can trigger the shutter and start/stop videos. It is great for when you have the camera on a tripod and you do not want to disturb your image composition as you make adjustments.

The Dot Sight is an alternate optical viewfinder with an adjustable illuminated dot to help you keep track of far off subjects when you are zoomed to the max.

I took the P1000 on a trip around White Rock Lake to see how well it handled, especially at extreme zoom with and without a tripod.

The P1000 is a big camera, but I am a big guy with big hands, and it was just fine to carry around and shoot. I carried it over my shoulder, but that is what I had to do with heavy cameras and lenses back when I was a news photographer, so that did not bother me.

With the lens extended, keeping the camera steady gets interesting. I found myself looking for stationary objects to help steady my aim.

A monopod or tripod would be helpful. The 3,000 mm lens made things interesting when shooting all the way across the lake or reaching out to bring in birds at the spillway.

Overall, I liked the P1000, but I am not sure it’s right for everyone.

If I were a bird watcher or into sports or wildlife photography, this would be a great camera to buy.

On a vacation, it is certainly all the camera you would need, but is the increase in size and weight a good trade-off for the long lens?

Interestingly, Nikon still sells the P900, which is smaller and lighter and has most of the lens range of the P1000. It obviously sees a market where both are viable.

If the thought of that huge zoom lens is making you giddy with possibilities, you are a good candidate to buy one.

Kudos again to Nikon for giving us choices. The P1000 is sure a lot of fun to use.

Pros: Biggest zoom lens; image stabilisation; SmartBridge app.

Cons: Underwhelming battery; heavy; difficult to hold at maximum zoom.

Bottom line: P1000 has more lens than most of us need, but I had fun with it.

PARIS — Skin cancer deaths among men have soared in wealthy nations since 1985, with mortality rates among women rising more slowly or even declining, researchers told a medical conference in Glasgow on Sunday.

Reasons for the discrepancy between sexes are unclear but evidence suggests men are “less likely to protect themselves from the sun” or heed public health warnings, lead researcher Dorothy Yang, a doctor at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust in London, told AFP. 

More than 90 per cent of melanoma cancers are caused by skin cell damage from exposure to the sun or other sources of ultraviolet (UV) radiation such as tanning beds, according to the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC).

In eight of 18 countries examined, men’s skin cancer death rates increased over three decades by at least 50 per cent.

In two nations — Ireland and Croatia — it roughly doubled.

Also seeing a sharp jump were Spain and Britain (70 per cent), The Netherlands (60 per cent), as well as France and Belgium (50 per cent).

In the United States, which was not included in the study, male melanoma mortality went up by about 25 per cent, according to CDC statistics.

But the nations with the biggest rise in skin cancer deaths were often not with the most elevated mortality rates, the new research showed.

In Australia, for example, nearly six of every 100,000 men succumbed to the disease in 2013-15. That is twice the second highest death rate (Finland), but only a 10 per cent increase compared to 30 years earlier.

“Australia has been an early implementer of public health media campaigns since the 1970s to promote ‘sun-smart’ behaviour,” Yang told AFP by phone before presenting her data at the 2018 UK National Cancer Research Institute Conference.

While debate continues as to how much of Australia’s record skin cancer rate stems from depletion of UV-filtering ozone in the stratosphere, 30 years of public health campaigns have no doubt made Australians acutely aware of the dangers.

The so-called “ozone hole” was especially big over Australia when the efforts kicked off.

Skin cancer deaths among women in 1985 in Australia occurred at half the rate as for men, and declined by 10 per cent over the next 30 years, Yang and three colleagues reported.

Other countries where female mortality from the disease went down over the same period are Austria (9 per cent), the Czech Republic (16 per cent), and Israel (23 per cent). In several other nations — Romania, Sweden and Britain — there were slight increases.

In some other sun-loving nations, however, women saw at least as sharp a jump from 1985 to 2015 in death rates as men: The Netherlands (58 per cent), Ireland (49 per cent), Belgium (67 per cent) and Spain (74 per cent).

Japan has by far the lowest melanoma mortality, for both men and women, at 0.24 and 0.18 per 100,000, respectively.

Scientists are investigating whether biological or genetic factors might also play a role in skin cancer, but findings so far are inconclusive, Yang said.

Among the countless novelties we see every day in the world of Information Technology, including entertaining gadgets and more serious devices, there are three of them that deserve particular attention in this end-of-year. This despite the fact that one of them is not yet available to buy, though it should not be long.

These are Microsoft Office 2019, the very latest version of the company celebrated software suite, Cujo’s incredibly smart and affordable firewall and Samsung’s upcoming high-end smartphones, two of them with esoteric foldable screens and one of them “regular”.

MS-Office is largely considered as an indispensable software tool, used by hundreds of millions. It is considered a mature, very stable product by now, and of course a highly efficient one, covering a huge range of needs for computer users, however advanced they may be. Since version 2010 and the ensuing 2013 and 2016, all new versions have brought improvements that range from minor to significant.

The new version 2019, released a couple of months ago, and as explained by Microsoft, has better visual impact, faster translation between languages, “inking” capability, more charting options and nice audio cues to guide you while working.

However, the extra features are not the most interesting aspect of the suite. It is rather the competitive situation between Office 2019 and the company’s online version, Office 365, a situation entirely created by Microsoft itself, of course. The company is strongly pushing Office 365 for it is available based on subscriptions, a system that has proven more lucrative than selling straightforward offline licences. To entice users to go for Office 365 Microsoft is making Office 2019 rather expensive, about $450 for the Pro version. 

In comparison, Office 365 regular annual subscription is $80, plus the advantage of always having the very latest version of Office and a good amount of cloud storage on the way. Whether to buy a regular Office license like 2019 or an Office 365 subscription is a matter of personal choice.

Cujo’s firewall is a very smart little device that can prove very efficient to protect your network at home and therefore all machines connected to it. Firewalls are nothing new. You set up their parameters to allow or deny access, and they protect you from hacking, malware and intrusions. They perfectly complement antivirus software.

The difficulty insofar has been the price and then the complexity of setting firewalls parameters, the latter requiring the intervention of an IT professional. Firewalls made by famous companies like for instance Cisco RE in the $1,000 to $3,000 at initial purchase, plus a yearly subscription costing about $500.

Cujo’s device comes at a humble $100 and is a breeze to set up. It is a huge relief for households and small offices who need a good physical firewall, but were reluctant to buy one because of the price and the difficulty to do the set up. 

Last but not least is the never-ending story of always “new and improved” smartphones. Samsung is cooking its next flagship model Galaxy S10 due in about four months from now. We know little of it, except that it will feature the upcoming ultrafast 5G wireless Internet connectivity. It is not, however, the S10 that is the real novelty but the Galaxy F and the Galaxy X.

These two models are expected to create the revolution everybody has been expecting for a few years now by featuring foldable screens. It is the only way to give the consumer a very large display area without making phones that would not fit in a shirt’s pocket or a lady’s purse anymore. Despite the need for smartphones with very large screens, few people are willing to carry units larger than the current six inch (diagonal) standard.

Carrying phones the size of a tablet or phablet is not doable and folding screens are the only solution. Though there is a lot of information and countless discussions on the web about the Galaxy F and X, no date has yet been set for their actual commercial release, though many expect at least one of these two models to be available in 2019.

A substantial proportion of parents confessed to giving their children antibiotics that had been prescribed for someone else, according to survey results presented by US researchers at the American Academy of Paediatrics conference in Orlando, Florida. 

The practice promotes antibiotic resistance and risks exposing children to dangerous dosages, expired drugs with harmful products of degradation and potential allergens, study leader Tamara Kahan of Northwell Health in Lake Success, New York, told Reuters Health by e-mail. 

“Physicians should emphasise the importance of finishing the entire course of antibiotics so that there are no leftovers, disposing of leftover antibiotics when relevant, and the risks of sharing any type of medication with people for whom it is not prescribed,” Kahan said. 

Kahan and colleagues recruited parents nationwide through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing online marketplace. Ultimately they evaluated the responses of 496 parents who met their inclusion criteria. Participants were 61 per cent female and 69 per cent white, with an average age of 34.

Overall, 454 parents, or 92 per cent, said they’d had leftover antibiotics in the house. More than one third of those parents (159 or 35 per cent) said they had redistributed the leftovers to others, including children and adults. Antibiotic diversion, as the tactic is called, was more common with drops and liquids than with creams and pills.

Parents sometimes put other family members on the same dosage prescribed to the child who received the prescription. Or they estimated a new dosage according to the age of the family member.

As many as 16 per cent of the survey takers said they gave their children adult medications. 

It is unknown precisely how harmful the practice may be, either to people or through the promotion of antibiotic resistance. Those questions will be studied in the future, Kahan says. 

“The study provides interesting insight into a common problem of ‘leftover’ antibiotics,” said Dr Jordan Taylor, a paediatric surgeon at Stanford University School of Medicine in California who was not involved in the research. 

“The researchers found that liquid or solution-based medications are more frequently stored and diverted; liquid or solution medications are used almost exclusively in paediatric patients as most cannot swallow pills. It would appear that more teaching needs to be provided by the providers or pharmacists on how to handle liquid medications once the prescription is complete,” Dr Taylor said.

A limitation of the study is the researchers’ use of Mechanical Turk to recruit study participants. Dr Taylor believes that a study of people recruited in this manner might not generate findings that apply to the general public.

Also, Taylor said, “It would have been interesting to ask the respondents why they kept the medications or if they had discussed what to do with extra medication with their provider.”

LISBON — The inventor of the worldwide web on Monday called for a “contract” to make Internet safe and accessible for everyone as Europe’s largest tech event began in Lisbon amid a backlash over its role in spreading “fake news”.

Some 70,000 people are expected to take part in the four-day Web Summit, dubbed “the Davos for geeks”, including speakers from leading global tech companies, politicians and startups hoping to attract attention from the over 1,500 investors who are scheduled to attend.

Tech firms now find themselves on the defensive, with critics accusing them of not doing enough to curb the spread of “fake news” which has helped polarise election campaigns around the world and of maximising profits by harvesting data on consumers’ browsing habits.

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1989 invented the worldwide web as a way to exchange information, said the Internet had deviated from the goals its founders had envisaged.

“All kinds of things have things have gone wrong. We have fake news, we have problems with privacy, we have people being profiled and manipulated,” he said in an opening address.

Berners-Lee, 63, called on governments, companies and citizens to iron out a “complete contract” for the web that will make the Internet “safe and accessible” for all by May 2019, the date by which 50 per cent of the world will be online for the first time.

‘Going through a funk’

He has just launched Inrupt, a startup which is building an open source platform called “Solid” which will decentralise the web and allow users to choose where their data is kept, along with who can see and access it.

Solid intends to allow users to bypass tech giants such as Google and Facebook. The two tech giants now have direct influence over nearly three-quarters of all internet traffic thanks to the vast amounts of apps and services they own such as YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram.

Employees of Google, Facebook and other tech giants have in recent months gone public with their regrets, calling the products they helped build harmful to society and overly addictive.

Tech giants are also under fire for having built up virtual monopolies in their areas. 

Amazon accounts for 93 per cent of all e-book sales while Google swallows up 92 per cent of all European internet-search ad spending.

“I think technology is going through a funk... it’s a period of reflection,” Web Summit founder and CEO Paddy Cosgrave told AFP.

“With every new technology you go through these cycles. The initial excitement of the printed press was replaced in time by a great fear that it was actually a bad thing. Over time it has actually worked out OK.”

Violent voices magnified

Among those scheduled to speak at the event is Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower who earlier this year said users’ data from Facebook was used by British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to help elect US President Donald Trump — a claim denied by the company.

Another tech veteran who has become critical of the sector, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, will on Thursday deliver the closing address.

He left Twitter in 2011 and went on to co-found online publishing platform Mash, which is subscription based and unlike Twitter favours in-depth writing about issues.

The problem with the current Internet model is that negative content gets more attention online, and thus gain more advertisers, according to Mitchell Baker, the president of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organisation which promotes Internet innovation.

“Today everyone has a voice but the problem is... the loudest and often most violent voices get magnified because the most negative, scariest things attract our attention,” she told AFP in a recent interview.

The Web Summit was launched in Dublin in 2010 and moved to Lisbon six years later. The Portuguese government estimates the event will generate 300 million euros ($347 million) for Lisbon in hotel and other revenues.

People are holding on to their aging smartphones longer, squeezing out a few more months of use before trading them in, a report indicates.

In the United States, iPhones traded in between July 1 and September 30 were 2.92 years old on average, up from 2.37 years old the comparable period two years earlier, according to data from Hyla Mobile Inc.

Android users swapped their phones a little faster. At the time of trade-in, the average Android phone was 2.66 years old, up from 2.44 years old in the comparable period in 2016, Hyla said. Hyla, a company that focuses on the secondary-use market for smartphones, provides analytics and device trade-in programmes for businesses.

Analysts said the rising cost of new smartphones might give US consumers pause when they’re deciding whether to upgrade. The iPhone XS, for example, starts at $999. The Samsung Galaxy S9 starts at $720. When the iPhone 7 debuted in 2016, it started at $649. That year, the Samsung Galaxy S7 was released and sold for about $700 without a contract, though carriers offered discounts.

Because of rising costs, carriers have eliminated previous deals that gave customers a subsidised phone upon signing a two-year contract. That was financially viable for carriers when phones cost $300 or $400, but not when they cost $800 to $1,200, said Biju Nair, chief executive of Hyla Mobile.

Instead, carriers now offer payment plans under which the buyer of a phone can pay a monthly fee for a certain period of time — say, two years — and then own it outright. Some people aren’t eager to take on monthly fees for a new phone right after they’ve paid off the last one.

“When your payments are done… all of a sudden, you don’t have to pay that additional fee,” said Brad Akyuz, research director for NPD Group’s connected intelligence research practice. “[There’s a] psychological impact there.”

And from a tech standpoint, the industry recently “hasn’t seen a major innovation out there that would foster users to immediately change their devices”, he said.

Upgrades to phone features and specifications are often minimal between generations of the same device, and better software updates from Apple and Android have done a good job of enabling older devices to access some of the same features and security patches as newer phones, said Anthony Scarsella, mobile phones research manager at market intelligence firm IDC.

Repair services have also sprouted up to keep older phones working longer, he said. That might become an even bigger factor in the future: This week, a rule change took effect that makes it easier for people to fix their own phones (or get a repair shop to do it) without breaking copyright law.

“When the average consumer is looking at these prices and looking at these features coming out of these new phones, they’re kind of perceiving, ‘Well, is there really that much difference?’” Nair said. “The general sense is, ‘Well, my phone is currently good enough.’”

Analysts said they expect this trend to continue, at least until there is a major technological breakthrough. That might happen next year when more 5G devices are introduced to the market, Akyuz said.

“If and when carriers can come up with a really solid value play for 5G to have users understand why they should be paying extra… we might be seeing users go off their regular upgrade cycle,” he said.

Diwali, the festival of lights, is celebrated in Mauritius with a lot of pomp and show. It is such an important event that the whole country observes a national holiday on the occasion. Schools, colleges, government institutions and other offices — everything is shut down as most people get busy in cleaning up their homes and making delicious sweetmeats. 

Incidentally, there is no meat in sweetmeat, not even a pinch of it, so if you are wondering why a sweetened piece of dessert is named sweetmeat let me explain. In the past, any sugary delicacy like candy, a slice of fruit coated with sugar and so on — was labelled sweetmeat. The word “mete”, from which “meat” is derived, meant “food” and all items of nourishment, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian, were referred to as “meat”. The original meaning of “sweetmeat” was “sweet food”.

But Mauritians go a step further, and club it all under the umbrella of cake! Unlike the rest of us who define “cake” as a baked dish made from a mixture of white flour, butter, eggs, sugar and dry fruits, which is often topped with frosting and decorations, here, every sweetened dish, whether it is fried, roasted, boiled or poached, is called “gateau” or “cake”. So, in nearly all the vast majority of temples that are scattered throughout this paradise island, the intricately carved idols of the Hindu gods and goddesses are served cake as an offering. During each sacred ceremony, that is. 

I was shocked initially, when I heard of this custom, because cake, as I understood it, had eggs as one of its chief ingredients. Besides, even though Hinduism as a religion was pretty flexible, and there were no stringent rules in following it as such, people usually did not carry non-vegetarian food to the houses of worship. I mean, the sensibilities of celestial beings could be offended by such an act and who knew what kind of divine retribution that might lead to? But locally, no one cared too much about ruining their heavenly relations and therefore cakes and pastries were granted easy access in temples. 

Soon I discovered that their cake was not our cake at all, even though their gods were the same as ours. When Mauritians gifted you cake, you could expect anything — from the Turkish baklava, Indian laddoo, barfi or rasgulla, Jordanian knafeh or halva, Italian zeppole or French lemon tarts — to appear in the brightly decorated boxes. Only thing missing was what everybody ordered during birthdays and on which candles were placed, lit and blown-out, by the one person whose special day it was. In other words, it can be said that Mauritians were the connoisseurs of eating cake without having it, so to speak. 

“Let them eat cake!” is another infamous saying that has been historically attributed to Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France. During the French Revolution people were starving because of a poor harvest that led to an enormous shortage of food. Upon hearing this news, the queen declared that if there was no bread, the peasants should eat cake. 

“She had said brioche,” my Mauritian friend explained.

“Which is sweet bread in French,” she continued. 

“Was she put to the guillotine in 1793?” I asked. 

“Yes, Mauritius was a French colony then,” she stated. 

“Aha! So it is your country’s fault,” I accused. 

“How did you figure that out?” she questioned. 

“Anything sweet? A piece of cake,” I answered.

The latest in the long-standing debate over violent video games: They do cause players to become more physically aggressive.

An international study looking at more than 17,000 adolescents, ages nine to 19, from 2010 to 2017, found playing violent video games led to increased physical aggression over time.

The analysis of 24 studies from countries including the US, Canada, Germany and Japan found those who played violent games such as “Grand Theft Auto”, “Call of Duty” and “Manhunt” were more likely to exhibit behaviour such as being sent to the principal’s office for fighting or hitting a non-family member.

“Although no single research project is definitive, our research aims to provide the most current and compelling responses to key criticisms on this topic,” said Jay Hull, lead author of the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Based on our findings, we feel it is clear that violent video game play is associated with subsequent increases in physical aggression,” said Hull, associate dean of faculty for the social sciences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and the Dartmouth professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

Video game violence has been a hot-button issue for more than a decade. Interest in research on video games’ potential for violence increased after it was learned Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two teenagers who committed the Columbine High School shooting, played the first-person shooting computer game “Doom”.

But in a 2011 Supreme Court decision overturning California’s ban on the sale of violent video games to minors, the late Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed a link between the games and aggression. 

“These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively,” he wrote in the majority opinion.

Since then, an American Psychological Association task force report in 2015 found a link between violent video games and increased aggression in players but insufficient evidence that violent games lead to criminal violence.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump convened a video game summit a month after the February shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Prior to that meeting, Trump said: “I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts.”

The Dartmouth researchers sought to reduce confusion about research findings — including disputes about the association between violent games and aggression — with a finely structured meta-analysis.

Those in the study who played violent games, whether frequently or infrequently, had an increase risk of aggressive behaviour. The new research echoes Hull’s previous finding that playing violent games equates to about twice the risk of being sent to the principal’s office for fighting during an eight-month period, he said. A separate 2014 study he oversaw of violent video games in 2,000 families is one of the 24 included in the meta-analysis.

“The effect is relatively small, but statistically reliable. The effect does exist,” Hull said.

While there is not research suggesting violent video games lead to criminal behaviour, Hull’s previous research suggests players may practice riskier behaviours such as reckless driving, binge drinking, smoking and unsafe sex.

“A lot of people ask, do these games really cause these kids to behave aggressively? I would say that is one possibility,” he said. “The other possibility is that it’s a really bad sign. If your kids are playing these games, either these games are having a warping effect on right and wrong or they have a warped sense of right or wrong and that’s why they are attracted to these games. Either way you should be concerned about it.”

In the research paper, Hull and the co-authors say they hope the findings will help research move “past the question of whether violent video games increase aggressive behaviour, and toward questions regarding why, when, and for whom they have such effects”.