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When sick kids leave the hospital, parents often do not understand what follow-up care is needed or how to give children medicine at home, a research review suggests. 

Getting instructions right is essential to avoid mistakes that can prolong children’s illnesses or make them sicker, sometimes so much worse that they need to return to the hospital for additional care, researchers note in paediatrics. 

In the review of 64 studies, medication errors were the most common problem researchers found. For example, up to 38 per cent of parents and caregivers did not know the right medicine dose and up to 42 per cent of them did not understand how often children needed to take prescribed drugs. 

Dosing errors with prescriptions — when parents gave kids at least 20 per cent more or less medication than they were supposed to — occurred 42 per cent to 48 per cent of the time. The majority of these errors happened with measuring liquid medications that are commonly used for children. 

“Underdosing medications may lead to worsening of a child’s illness, while overdosing puts children at risk for dangerous side effects,” said lead study author Dr Alexander Glick, of New York University School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital Centre in New York. 

Parents also frequently misunderstood what follow-up appointments kids needed and what signs of worsening illness would require children to return to the hospital, the study found. 

Up to 62 per cent of families missed recommended follow-up appointments after kids were discharged from an inpatient hospital stay, as did up to 81 per cent of families of children treated in emergency rooms. 

Parents were more likely to miss these appointments or fail to schedule them when they had more than one child, lacked private health insurance, spoke little or no English or had difficulty missing work or taking kids out of school for doctor visits, researchers report in Paediatrics. 

“When children miss follow-up appointments, they lose the opportunity for additional monitoring and physicians also cannot ensure that parents are following instructions correctly,” Glick said by e-mail. “Misunderstanding discharge instructions has the potential to lead to unnecessary and unanticipated readmissions and visits to the emergency department.” 

Kids were more likely to go to needed follow-up appointments when these visits were scheduled before they left the hospital, the study found. 

Medication mistakes were less common when clinicians spent time in the hospital showing parents the correct way to fill medication cups or syringes to give children the right amount of liquid medicine. 

Researchers got this snapshot of how well parents understand discharge instructions for their children by analysing data from studies published between 1985 and 2016. Most were done in the US, but some also examined what happens in Canada, Chile, India, Israel, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Taiwan and Uganda. 

One limitation of the current review is that the studies analysed tended to rely heavily on research done during the day for convenience, which excludes kids sent home from hospitals on evenings and weekends, the authors note. This may have underestimated how often parents misunderstand instructions because they are more likely to get help understanding needed follow-up care on weekdays. 

Even so, the analysis offers fresh evidence of how often parents fail to follow doctors’ orders for medications and follow-up appointments their kids need, said Dr Denise Klinkner, medical director of the paediatric trauma centre at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. 

“This study highlights the overwhelming rate of non-compliance with medications and follow-up,” Klinkner, who was not involved in the study, said by e-mail. “Especially for the more complex children, failure to comply may lead to lifelong disability and chronic disease.” 

To avoid mistakes, parents should speak up when they do not understand instructions or when factors like a lack of insurance or transportation might prevent them from getting children needed care, Klinkner added. Clinicians should also keep instructions simple and ask families questions to make sure they understood what they were told. 

“A team approach is key,” Klinkner said. 

Three-month-old infants have better recall when they get a brief nap after learning something new, according to small experiment that suggests sleep may play a role in solidifying memories very early in life. 

While previous research has linked frequent naps to better memory in babies as young as 6 months, the current study examined the impact of a single 1.5- to 2-hour nap for infants half that age. 

The experiment tested memory by counting on babies to quickly tire of looking at faces they remember. Researchers showed infants one of two cartoon characters with distinctive facial features, let some of the babies nap, then showed all of the babies both characters to see which one captured their attention longer. 

More than half of the babies who napped turned their gaze to the unfamiliar cartoon face, indicating they remembered what they saw before they slept, the study found. But without a nap, babies appeared to randomly choose which face they looked at, suggesting they forgot what they had seen before and found both cartoons new and interesting. 

“Three month-old babies could only remember the newly shown face if they had a nap right after seeing the new cartoon face,” said lead study author Dr Klara Horvath, who conducted the study at the University of Oxford in the UK. 

“It seems for them having a short period of sleep is necessary to be able to consolidate memories, otherwise they just forget the newly learned information,” Horvath, now a paediatrics researcher at Semmelweis University in Budapest, said by e-mail. 

For the study, researchers also looked at something known as sleep spindles, or spikes of brain activity thought to be involved in consolidation of memories. Sleep spindles show up on electroencephalogram (EEG) tests that examine brain wave patterns. 

Among babies who napped, infants who also had more sleep spindles appeared to become familiar with the faces more quickly, suggesting that the brief periods of rest might influence how fast the brain processes information, researchers report in Developmental Science. 

One limitation of the study is its small size — only 45 infants altogether. There were just 28 babies in the nap group, and only 15 had EEG data. 

Another drawback is that all the babies in the nap group saw the cartoon faces right before they went to sleep, making it impossible to rule out the potential for that learning experience to influence the number of sleep spindles, the researchers note. 

The study also did not find a difference in memory based on the duration of babies’ naps, which suggests that more sleep may not always be best when it comes to learning, said Sabine Seehagen, a psychology researcher at the University of Waikato in New Zealand who was not involved in the study. 

“It is possible that some undetermined minimum duration of sleep was all that was needed for infants to ‘succeed’ in the task,” Seehagen said by e-mail. “We also don’t know how effective the nap was compared to, say, a full night’s sleep and we don’t know if several naps might have added benefits.” 

Still, the findings offer fresh evidence that sleep is critical to normal development even at a very young age, said Gina Poe, a researcher in physiology and psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn’t involved in the study. 

“We neuroscientists and biopsychologists have a long way to go before we understand how long different types of memory consolidation tasks take and why,” Poe said. “But once the job is done, more sleep may be akin to the builders hammering more nails into a structure that is already securely connected.” 

That does not mean that parents should cut short naps to help babies’ development, however. 

“Even if the job that you are tracking is done with a short nap, there may be other brain tasks that the brain is attending to during a longer nap that we don’t know about,” Poe added. “So never wake a sleeping baby.” 

The Roomba robotic vacuum has been whizzing across floors for years, but its future may lie more in collecting data than dirt.

That data is of the spatial variety: the dimensions of a room as well as distances between sofas, tables, lamps and other home furnishings. To a tech industry eager to push “smart” homes controlled by a variety of Internet-enabled devices, that space is the next frontier.

Smart home lighting, thermostats and security cameras are already on the market, but Colin Angle, chief executive of Roomba maker iRobot Corp., says they are still dumb when it comes to understanding their physical environment. He thinks the mapping technology currently guiding top-end Roomba models could change that and is basing the company’s strategy on it. 

“There’s an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared,” said Angle. 

That vision has its fans, from investors to the likes of Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Alphabet who are all pushing artificially intelligent voice assistants as smart home interfaces. According to financial research firm IHS Markit, the market for smart home devices was worth $9.8 billion in 2016 and is projected to grow 60 per cent this year. 

Angle told Reuters that iRobot, which made Roomba compatible with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant in March, could reach a deal to share its maps for free with customer consent to one or more of the Big Three in the next couple of years. Angle added the company could extract value from those agreements by connecting for free with as many companies as possible to make the device more useful in the home. 

Amazon declined to comment, and Apple and Google did not respond to requests for comment.

So far investors have cheered Angle’s plans, sending iRobot stock soaring to $102 in mid-June from $35 a year ago, giving it a market value of nearly $2.5 billion on 2016 revenue of $660 million.

But there are headwinds for iRobot’s approach, ranging from privacy concerns to a rising group of mostly cheaper competitors — such as the $300 Bissell SmartClean and the $270 Hoover Quest 600 — which are threatening to turn a once-futuristic product into a commoditised home appliance. 

Low-cost Roomba rivals were the subject of a report by short-seller Ben Axler of Spruce Point Capital Management, which sent the stock down 20 per cent to $84 at the end of June.

The company’s smart home vision has helped bring around some former critics. Willem Mesdag, managing partner of hedge fund Red Mountain Capital — who led an unsuccessful proxy fight against Angle last year and wound up selling his iRobot shares — is now largely supportive of the company’s direction. 

“I think they have a tremendous first-mover advantage,” said Mesdag, who thinks iRobot would be a great acquisition for one of the Big Three. “The competition is focused on making cleaning products, not a mapping robot.”

Military roots

Founded in 1990, iRobot saw early success building bomb disposal robots for the US Army before launching the world’s first “robovac” in 2002. The company sold off its military unit last year to focus on the consumer sector, and says the Roomba — which ranges in price from $375 to $899 — still has 88 per cent of the US robovac market.

All robovacs use short-range infrared or laser sensors to detect and avoid obstacles, but iRobot in 2015 added a camera, new sensors and software to its flagship 900-series Roomba that gave it the ability to build a map while keeping track of their own location within it.

So-called simultaneous localisation and mapping technology right now enables Roomba, and other higher-end Robovacs made by Dyson and other rivals, to do things like stop vacuuming, head back to its dock to recharge and then return to the same spot to finish the job. 

Guy Hoffman, a robotics professor at Cornell University, said detailed spatial mapping technology would be a “major breakthrough” for the smart home.

Right now, smart home devices operate “like a tourist in New York who never leaves the subway”, said Hoffman. “There is some information about the city, but the tourist is missing a lot of context for what’s happening outside of the stations.”

With regularly updated maps, Hoffman said, sound systems could match home acoustics, air conditioners could schedule airflow by room and smart lighting could adjust according to the position of windows and time of day. 

Companies like Amazon, Google and Apple could also use the data to recommend home goods for customers to buy, said Hoffman.

One potential downside is that sharing data about users’ homes raises clear privacy issues, said Ben Rose, an analyst who covers iRobot for Battle Road Research. Customers could find it “sort of a scary thing”, he said.

Angle said iRobot would not sharing data without its customers’ permission, but he expressed confidence most would give their consent in order to access the smart home functions.

Another Roomba risk is that cheaper cleaning products are what consumers really want. In May, The New York Times’ Sweethome blog dethroned the $375 Roomba 690 as its most-recommended robovac in favour of the $220 Eufy RoboVac 11, saying the connectivity and other advanced features of the former would not justify the greater cost for most users.

Short-seller Axler’s June report caused a stir mostly with its prediction that value-priced appliance maker SharkNinja Operating LLC could launch a robovac by year’s end. SharkNinja declined to comment.

One potential iRobot bulwark against these new competitors: a portfolio of 1,000 patents worldwide covering the very concept of a self-navigating household robot vacuum as well as basic technologies like object avoidance. 

A handful of those patents are now being tested in a series of patent infringement lawsuits iRobot filed in April against Bissell, Stanley Black & Decker, Hoover Inc., Chinese outsourced manufacturers and other robovac makers. The litigation is the most significant in iRobot’s history.

A lawyer for Hoover declined to comment. Lawyers for Bissell and Black & Decker did not respond to requests for comment. 

The patents are a “huge part of our competitive moat”, Angle said. “It is getting really hard not to step on our intellectual property.”

SYDNEY — Aboriginal people have been in Australia for at least 65,000 years, longer than previously thought, roaming the area alongside giant megafauna, scientists said in a finding that sheds fresh light on when modern humans left Africa.

Australian Aborigines are believed to be custodians of the oldest continuous culture on the planet, but when they first arrived has been a contested issue. Previous estimates have ranged from 47,000 to 60,000 years ago.

A key site in the debate is Madjedbebe, a remote rock shelter in northern Australia’s Kakadu region that is the oldest-known human occupation area in the country.

New evidence uncovered by a team of archaeologists and dating specialists during a dig there, including the oldest ground-edge stone axe technology in the world, has pushed back their presence even further.

The findings, published in the journal Nature this week, set a new minimum age for the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa and across south Asia. 

“It’s hugely significant in tying down what happened,” the University of Queensland’s Chris Clarkson, the lead author who led the team that excavated the site, most recently in 2015, told AFP.

“It means that we can set the minimum age for modern humans coming out of Africa, which until now has been a bit tenuous. We can now say with certainty that they arrived in Australia 65,000 years ago.”

It also indicates that they arrived on the continent before the extinction of Australian megafauna such as giant wombats, kangaroos and lizards.

In addition to showing the deep antiquity of Aboriginal occupation, the dig also revealed evidence of activities and complex lifestyle, including flaked stone tools and grinding stones.

“The site contains the oldest ground-edge stone axe technology in the world, the oldest-known seed-grinding tools in Australia and evidence of finely made stone points which may have served as spear tips,” said Clarkson.

“Most striking of all in a region known for its spectacular rock art are the huge quantities of ground ochre and evidence of ochre processing found at the site, from the older layer continuing through to the present.”

It was clear the population was “technologically sophisticated”.

First major water crossing

Some 11,000 artefacts were discovered in the lowest layer from the 2015 dig, with the team carefully assessing the position of each one to ensure they matched the ages of the sediments in which they were found.

Extensive dating by optically stimulated luminescence methods — which estimates the time since mineral grains were last exposed to sunlight — showed a general pattern of increasing age with depth, and provided a timeframe that the scientists said was far more accurate than before.

The new dates for Madjedbebe fit well with genetic analyses indicating modern humans left Africa between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago.

At that time, there were much lower sea levels and the crossing distance from the islands of Southeast Asia to Australia was shorter than today.

“This would have been the first major water crossing ever by humanity,” said Clarkson.

The Mirarr clan, traditional owners of large parts of Kakadu and western Arnhem Land, have now closed access to Madjedbebe, but applications have been made by archaeologists to examine other sites in the area to see if they have the same sequences.

“This study confirms the sophistication of the Australian Aboriginal toolkit and underscores the universal importance of the Jabiluka area,” said Justin O’Brien, chief executive of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, which works to advance the interests of the Mirarr.

“These findings reinforce the need for the highest level of conservation and protection for this site.”

Volunteering at least two hours a week may go a long way towards helping to ease feelings of loneliness and social isolation, a study of recent widows suggests. 

Loneliness is a serious medical problem for many older adults; previous research links it to declines in physical and mental health as well as premature death, researchers note in the Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences. Because strong marriages, friendships and social networks can keep loneliness at bay, researchers wanted to see if becoming more involved in the community through volunteer work might make loneliness less common for an especially vulnerable group: recent widows. 

They found, as expected, that feelings of loneliness were much more intense among recent widows than married people. But the recent widows who started volunteering at least two hours a week developed lower levels of loneliness on par with married people who spend similar amounts of time giving back to their communities. 

This offers fresh insight into “how much of a ‘dose’ of volunteering might be needed to offset loneliness at widowhood”, said lead study author Dawn Carr of the Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy at Florida State University in Tallahassee. 

“We do not know exactly how volunteering `gets under our skin,’ but there is some speculation that it is beneficial because it tends to require us to use our mind, it requires us to be more physically active, and it almost always requires us to interact with others,” Carr said by email. 

For the study, researchers examined data collected from 2006 to 2014 on 5,882 adults aged 51 and older. All of the participants were married at the start of the study, but 667 had become widows by the end. 

People widowed during the study were more likely to be women, black, older, sicker, depressed, and experiencing cognitive decline. They were also more likely to have had a spouse who was disabled or suffering from memory loss. 

At the start of the study, roughly half of the participants did some volunteer work. People were more likely to start volunteering during the study if they became widows than if they remained married, and widows were also more likely to devote lots of hours to volunteer work. 

During the study, about 1.5 per cent of the participants started volunteering at least 100 hours a year, and another 6.3 per cent began volunteering, but less often. 

To assess loneliness, researchers examined data from questionnaires that asked how often people felt isolated, left out, or that they lacked companionship. 

One limitation is the possibility that less lonely people might be more apt to venture out to volunteer, rather than volunteering being responsible for any reduction in loneliness, the authors note. 

Even so, the findings offer fresh evidence of the health benefits of regular social interactions, said Dr Guohua Li, director of the Centre for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia University in New York City. 

“Volunteering in particular is an activity that facilitates older adults’ social engagement and the formation of meaningful relationships with others,” Li, who was not involved in the study, said by e-mail. “Volunteering may also increase older persons’ self-esteem and give them a sense of community, decreasing their feelings of loneliness after the loss of a spouse.” 

To get these benefits from volunteering, though, people need to keep showing up, said Dr Carla Perissinotto, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. 

“For some people, volunteering regularly can actually help decrease feelings of loneliness and this is important because loneliness is linked to many health outcomes such as increased risk of heart disease, dementia, functional decline and death,” Perissinotto said by e-mail. 

“But the volunteering has to be regular — not just twice a year — to have the benefit,” Perissinotto added. “Similarly to exercise, you need to have a certain amount on a weekly basis for it to be beneficial.” 

LONDON — Learning new things, eating and drinking well, not smoking and limiting hearing loss and loneliness could prevent a third of dementia cases, health experts recently said.

In a wide-ranging analysis of the risk factors behind dementia, the researchers highlighted nine as particularly important. 

These included staying in education beyond age 15, reducing high blood pressure, obesity and hearing loss in mid-life, and reducing smoking, depression, physical inactivity, social isolation and diabetes in later life. 

If all these risk factors were fully eliminated, the experts said, one in three cases of dementia worldwide could be prevented. 

“Although dementia is diagnosed in later life, the brain changes usually begin to develop years before,” said Gill Livingston, a professor at University College London and one of 24 international experts commissioned by The Lancet medical journal to conduct the analysis. 

“A broader approach to prevention of dementia which reflects these changing risk factors will benefit our aging societies and help to prevent the rising number of dementia cases.” 

Latest estimates from the Alzheimer’s Association International show there are around 47 million people living with dementia globally and the cost of the brain-wasting diseases already $818 billion a year. 

Dementia is caused by brain diseases, most commonly Alzheimer’s disease, which result in the loss of brain cells and affect memory, thinking, behaviour, navigational and spatial abilities and the ability to perform everyday activities. 

The number of people affected is set to almost triple to 131 million by 2050, according to the World Health Organization. 

The researchers found that among the 35 per cent of all dementia cases that could be prevented, the three most important risk factors to target were increasing early life education, reducing mid-life hearing loss, and stopping smoking. 

Not completing secondary education while young can make people less resilient to cognitive decline when they get older, the experts said, while preserving hearing helps people experience a richer and more stimulating environment, building cognitive reserve. 

Stopping smoking reduces exposure to neurotoxins and improves heart health which, in turn, affects brain health, they said. 

As if choosing the ideal laptop was not hard enough, we now also have to do some serious brain-picking, read a significant amount of tech contents and browse the web for users’ reviews, to select the ideal network router. It is time consuming, painful sometimes and not always fun, but it has to be done and is definitely worth the trouble. Why have home routers become so important?

It is one of these elements that have made living with IT everything but simple, while at the same doing without it is difficult if not impossible.

If the cabled Internet connection reaching your home is of the ADSL or VDSL type, a simple modem is far from being enough. You need to distribute and properly manage the connection to all the web-enabled devices in your house, whether these are wired or wireless. This includes computers, tablets and smartphones of all kinds, but also smart TVs, as well as a growing number of appliances of various types and kinds. It also includes the guests you may host at home, and who need to access the service too, even if temporarily.

Last but not least, this will also cover any WiFi surveillance cameras you may have set up in your house and that will also go through the router. Needless in such case to stress the importance of proper network management and security, so that you and only you can monitor what goes on in the house while you are away.

Good management, proper security and passwords, restriction for children and other countless features are what routers are about. Simple modems that just “bring” the Internet to your house are not enough anymore. Most good router models will also allow you to connect to them a USB drive, whether a simple flash drive or an actual external hard disk that would be much faster and would come with significantly larger storage capacity.

Once connected and well configured, this USB drive will allow all users on the local network to store data on it and to share it, making the router act like some kind of data server computer, for very little money.

Another important feature of home routers is DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance), or media server. This “detects” all audio, video and photo contents saved on any of the digital devices connected to the home network, and then it lets all the others share these contents and enjoy them easily. Though it was first introduced back in 2003 and has become commonly available since 2008, it is surprising to notice how many homes still are not using DLNA today; they truly are missing out on an essential aspect of digital home networking.

Some Internet providers will give you a router instead of a simple modem from the very beginning of your subscription with them, telling you that you do not need to buy a router from the local market. This practice is more and more common in Jordan. Unfortunately, such models usually are not very performing, are often basic and poorly documented, which makes them hard to manage, and disappointing in the end.

Ideally, a home router from manufacturers like Linksys (a Cisco company), TrendNet, Zyxel, Asus, Netgear, Asus or TP-Link, for example, will do great. All these brands are easily found in Jordan. Typical prices are between 60 and 250 Jordanian dinars. Less than that will not ensure good performance, and more than that would be too much for a home. For indeed, there are high-end expensive routers that are designed to serve more than 50 users at a time, which is hardly the case of a normal home!

As for the actual setup, and unless you happen to be an IT pro or a patient tech-head, you will need professional help and tech support to ensure proper installation, at least the first time.

Meeting some or all of the American Heart Association’s seven ideal cardiovascular health goals is associated with longer life and fewer heart attacks and strokes, no matter your age.

In fact, in a recent group of elderly patients, “the benefit of an ideal cardiovascular health in reducing mortality and vascular events was comparable to what is observed in younger populations”, Dr Bamba Gaye from University Paris Descartes in France told Reuters Health by e-mail. “This is a very good news, which suggests that it is never too late to prevent the development of risk factors for cardiovascular disease.”

Gaye and colleagues analysed whether achieving some or all of the American Heart Association seven “ideal” goals – “Life’s Simple 7” — would affect people’s risk of dying or having a stroke or heart attack during a specific study period.

The seven goals include:

-Keep body mass index  — a ratio of weight to height — lower than the overweight cutoff;

-Never start smoking, or have stopped at least 12 months ago;

-For at least 75 minutes a week, perform vigorous activity, or perform moderate physical activity at least 150 minutes a week;

-Follow a healthy diet that includes vegetables and fresh fruit daily, fish twice or more a week, and less than 450 calories a week from sugar;

-Keep blood pressure below 120/80 without medication;

-Maintain a normal cholesterol level without medication;

-Maintain a normal blood sugar without medication.

Out of the 7371 study participants, whose average age was 74, only one individual had met all seven goals. Only 5 per cent of participants met at least five goals, researchers reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

For all goals except physical activity and total cholesterol, women were more likely than men to be at ideal levels. 

The research team tracked the study subjects to monitor their health; half of the participants were tracked more than nine years. 

Compared to people who meet no more than two of the goals, in those who met three or four the risk of death during the study was reduced by 16 per cent, and meeting five to seven goals cut the risk by 29 per cent.

In fact, the risk of death fell by 10 per cent for each additional goal at the ideal level.

Similarly, the risk of coronary heart disease and stroke fell by 22 per cent for each additional goal at the ideal level.

 “The ideal goal would be to have no risk factors for cardiovascular disease at all,” Gaye said. “However, our study also shows a graded benefit on outcome according to the number of risk factors at the optimal level. Hence, a perhaps more realistic approach would be to advise older subjects to have at least one risk factor at an optimal level, and to progressively gain more risk factors at optimal level.” 

“We would like emphasise that [good] health in general and cardiovascular health in particular is the cornerstone of [good] life and we all need to take care of it over the life course,” Gaye concluded. “The good news is that it is never too late to optimise our own health in elderhood.”

“The goal of successful aging is not immortality, but limiting time spent with illness and disability,” writes Dr Karen P. Alexander from Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, North Carolina in an editorial published with the study. 

This study, she continued, “reminds us that risk factor and lifestyle modifications have no expiration date and continue to yield benefits for a healthy old age, well beyond age 70.”

“Older adults should focus not so much on the perfect attainment of Life’s Simple 7, but on the process of working to achieve these goals,” she concludes.

Dr Dana E. King from West Virginia University Medicine, Morgantown, West Virginia, who has studied elderly health extensively, told Reuters Health by e-mail, “It is never too late to start or improve your healthy lifestyle habits. Elderly people who adopt healthier diets, get active, and quit smoking, actually benefit sooner and to a greater degree than young people.”

The city of Bombay, which has now been renamed Mumbai, wears a soggy look during the rainy season. The waves of the Arabian Sea that line the metropolis, rise high above the coastline and throw the garbage that was dumped into it, back at its inhabitants. The moist humid breeze tears at your hair when you step out, and if your frame is petite, threatens to sweep you off your feet. Every crevice, crack or fissure on the road fills up quickly to become puddles through which the vehicular traffic trudges along with horns blaring in cacophonic succession.

I register all this and wonder how my perception of the monsoon has changed over the years because when I was small, I could not wait for the raindrops to fall on my head. And I also longed for the potholes to fill up with water because then they became miniature lakes into which my army of paper-boats could set sail.

Now, the thing is, we were technically not allowed to tear any page from our exercise books or textbooks. The punishment was too terrible to even contemplate because I belong to a generation where our mothers were not constrained by any restrictions while disciplining us and were enthusiastic slappers; my own mum being an absolute champion at it. So, I had to rely on sheets of newsprint or worn out magazine covers for boat designing. Having an older sibling did not help matters because under no circumstance could my boat tower over his. He would make sure of that by handing me pieces of paper that were smaller than the ones he tore for himself.

We were mostly at loggerheads, my older brother and I. But one rainy afternoon, when he was getting the beating of his life by our angry mom for being rude to her, I found myself supporting him. From a safe distance, that is. I tried to tell her that she did not need to throw him out of the house and the punishment was too harsh, but she was in no mood to listen. He stood holding the bars of the front gate from the outside and me from the inside, both excelling in theatrical melodrama, quite forgetting our ongoing rivalry in that moment of shared misery. Our father arrived soon afterwards to resolve the situation but here I digress.

On an aside, a famous five-star hotel I stayed in Dubai last week, the name of which rhymes with Samaritan, accused me of spoiling the headboard of their bed with pen marks! They threatened to charge my credit card if I did not agree to pay for the damages. Where innovative methods of duping the customer are concerned, this one takes the cake. My subsequent mails to the management got me a reluctant apology but please be wary, dear reader, and make sure you do not fall into such a trap.

Incidentally, unlike my dolls that were all called “Dolly” the boats I created out of paper had innovative titles like “Yellow Ray”, “Blue Stripe” or ‘Moonlighting’.

“One name you came up with was Sensitivity,” my brother reminisces.

“I could not have baptised a boat that,” I clarify.

“A silly name, I agree,” he counters.

“That was Serendipity,” I recall.

“I asked you to write it down I remember,” I continue.

“Maybe I could not spell it then,” he says.

“Can you spell it now?” I ask.

“Ahem, Sensitivity is better,” he laughs.

BEIRUT — The hijab — one of the most visible signs of Islamic culture — is going mainstream with advertisers, media giants and fashion firms promoting images of the traditional headscarf in ever more ways.

Last week, Apple previewed 12 new emoji characters to be launched later this year, one of a woman wearing a hijab.

Major fashion brands from American Eagle to Nike are creating hijabs, while hijab-wearing models have started gracing Western catwalks and the covers of top fashion magazines.

Many Muslim women cover their heads in public with the hijab as a sign of modesty, although some critics see it as a sign of female oppression. But there is one thing most can agree on: when it comes to the hijab, there is money to be made.

“In terms of the bottom line — absolutely they’re [young Muslims] good for business... it’s a huge market and they are incredibly brand savvy, so they want to spend their money,” said Shelina Janmohamed, vice-president of Ogilvy Noor, a consultancy offering advice on how to build brands that appeal to Muslim audiences.

Nike announced it is using its prowess in the sports and leisure market to launch a breathable mesh hijab in spring 2018, becoming the first major sports apparel maker to offer a traditional Islamic head scarf designed for competition.

In June, Vogue Arabia featured on its cover the first hijabi model to walk the international runway, Somali-American Halima Aden, who gained international attention last year when she wore a hijab and burkini during the Miss Minnesota USA pageant.

“Every little girl deserves to see a role model that’s dressed like her, resembles her, or even has the same characteristics as her,” Aden said in a video on her Instagram account. 

Western advertising

Hijabs have also become more visible in Western advertising campaigns for popular retailers like H&M and Gap. 

“Brands especially are in a very strategic and potent position to propel that social good, to change the attitudes of society and really push us forward and take us to that next step,” Amani Al Khatahtbeh, founder of online publication MuslimGirl.com, said by phone from New York.

In Nigeria, a medical student has become an Instagram sensation for posting images of a hijab-wearing Barbie, describing hers as a “modest doll” — unlike the traditional version. And mothers in Pittsburgh have started making and selling hijabs for Barbies in a bid to make play more inclusive.

However, Khatahtbeh warned of the potential for the young Muslim market to be exploited just for profit without any effort to promote acceptance and integration.

“It can easily become exploitative by profiting off of communities that are being targeted right now, or it could be a moment that we turn into a very, very empowering one,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Emojis and fashion

Frustrated she could not find an image to represent her and her friends on her iPhone keypad, Saudi teenager, Rayouf Alhumedhi, started an online campaign, the Hijab Emoji Project.

She proposed the idea of the emoji last year to coding consortium Unicode that manages the development of new emojis, Alhumedhi said on her campaign’s website, helping to prompt Apple to create its hijab-wearing emoji.

“It’s only really in the last 18 to 24 months — perhaps three years — that bigger mainstream brands have started to realise that young Muslim consumers are really an exciting opportunity,” said Janmohamed of Ogilvy Noor.

A global Islamic economy report conducted by Thomson Reuters showed that in 2015, revenues from “modest fashion” bought by Muslim women was were estimated at $44 billion, with designers Dolce & Gabbana, Uniqlo and Burberry entering the industry. 

Janmohamed, author of the memoir “Love in a Headscarf”, sees young hijabi representation in the digital communications and fashion space a step forward for tolerance. 

“It feels particularly empowering for young people to see themselves represented. So today I think it is the least that consumers expect and anyone that doesn’t do it is actually falling behind.”