Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - August 26, 2006, Winnipeg, Manitoba A19 Winnipeg free press comment editor saturday August 26, 2006 Gerald flood 697-7269 and beyond i left my heart in new Orleans a bout five years ago i moved to new Orleans for a position with a jewish organization. Having never even visited the City before i was taken with All of aspects of the City that make it a place to visit the food restau rants music jazz and cajun the Laid Back attitude that goes along with Mardi gras the French Quarter fest and jazz fest and the history of the City ? the intertwining of French Spanish american and Canadian traditions ? All make new Orleans a unique place to visit and to live. But a year on from Hurricane katrina new Orleans is not the new Orleans of old for both Good and bad. Greater new Orleans had a population of about 1.3 million people before the disaster but it is now roughly half that although hard data is hard to find. People who have moved Back Are leaving on a daily basis exhausted and depressed by the state of affairs. My own jewish Community which numbered some 9,500, is a full third less today with Only 6,200 people and most who Are not Back Are most Likely not coming Back As they have found new jobs and lives in other cities with much larger jewish populations. People have not come Back or Are coming Back and then leaving for Many reasons their Homes were destroyed jobs lost schools for their children not reopened or their friends have left and they sense that there is not much to come Back to. And there is one More Rea son. New Orleans is a Tough place men tally to live in. One must have a Strong survivor mentality to weather a process of rebuilding that will take some five to 10 years. Over the past year the City has been witness to numerous suicides and this is coupled with the fact that some 90 per cent of All mental health pro one must Fessio nals have left have a the City. Those care givers who Are left Strong As they treat clients survivor Are in desperate mentality to need for pastoral care themselves As weather a Many of them have process of suffered some Type of loss in their own rebuilding lives. To their cred that will it they Soldier on. Take some and these issues Are but the tip of an five to 10 iceberg of problems years facing the City and its people. Since the 1970s the City has suffered numerous economic losses a crumbling Infra Structure poor school health care and criminal Justice systems and the effects of the Hurricane have Only exacerbated these issues. Many citizens who have left the City All say the same thing they love new Orleans but there Are better opportunities with a safer environment some where else. And they do not want to live in a City devastated by both a Hurricane and government at All Levels inaction. It is because of these pre and Post Hurricane failures that new Orleans has an Opportunity to Start anew with new schools hospitals and opportunities. The United states has an equally important Chance to have a National conversation about failed and failing cities. To Date these conversations Are not happening and that is one More depressing fact about living in new Orleans in a Post katrina world. I will not be a part of these conversations with respect to new Orleans. One month ago i moved to Florida for a new Job and new personal opportunities. To be honest the City was too Tough for me to live in after spending the last 11 months dealing with Post Hurricane issues. I am proud to have worked for and with my communities ? jewish and others ? in the immediate aftermath and rebuilding processes. I am proud of my colleagues and the people whom we have helped to rebuild their lives but it was time to leave. New Orleans will always be in my heart because it is a great City with a unique lifestyle and i have spent some five years living and breathing its Cul Ture. I suppose i can always go Back and visit. But i will remember and i will never forget those who have been the victims of Hurricane katrina the largest Man made disaster in the history of the United states. As a now former new Orleania i beg of All of you do not for get either. Adam Bronstone is a Winnipeg Ger who resided in new Orleans for five years and is now working in Florida for the i n the mid 1990s, when world wide web exploded into household terminology about As quickly As television had four decades earlier sundry schol ars and commentators emerged with a chorus cry of print is still in High school and eager to embrace the inspiring new technologies of the Day i never believed any of it. Today despite the demonstrated perseverance of print Media there remain doomsayers who claim newspapers Are on their Way out. But to paraphrase Mark Twain the reports of prints demise Are greatly exaggerated. In the United states ? the worlds largest English language newspaper Market ? on any Given sunday there Are an average 120 million people flipping through a daily newspaper. This is according to Gary Pruitt chairman and ceo of the Mcclatchey co. ? a Sacra mento Calif., firm that earlier this year purchased for $6.5 billion the 32-paper from a to a a a a a How much sleep do we really need the economist b ack in the 1960s, the contraceptive Pill unshackled sex from human nature. Could a new class of tablets be about to do the same for sleep introducing cx717, a drug being developed by cortex pharmaceuticals of Irvine Calif. Its the first of what promises to be Many aimed at detach ing people from the daily routine of eight hours each for work rest and play. Tests conducted on Rhesus monkeys last year suggest that cx717 can wire users to remain awake for 36 hours without the jitters euphoria and eventual crash that come after Mega doses of caffeine or amphetamines. Further Down the line Are even More Radical compounds ? stimulants that can wipe out sleep for several Days at a stretch and pills that deliver a whole nights shut Eye in two hours. Prompted by some energetic marketing on the part of drug makers scientific journals Are already ablaze with excited talk of conquering sleep ask ing whether humans will become the first species to dominate both daytime and nighttime. The commotion however raises the More Perti nent question How much sleep do we actually need before the Advent of the electric Light bulb it want much of an Issue ? people hit the Hay after a couple of hours by candlelight and stirred at Day break. But the invention of artificial lighting and the subsequent introduction of shift working has progressively detached us from the 24-hour Cycle of Light and dark says Russell Foster professor of molecular neuroscience at Imperial College Lon Don. Today our culture of Long hours at work and the 24-hour availability of almost everything from convenience stores to television and email have demoted sleep in our priorities. To manage fatigue says Foster we be fallen into a stimulant sedation Loop where stimulants such As caffeine and nicotine Are used for Wakeful Ness during the Day and sedatives such As hypnotics and alcohol Are used at night to induce that has compressed the sleep Cycle. A report published last year entitled insomniac Britain by the British association for counselling and psychotherapy found that adults in the United King Dom sleep an average of six hours 53 minutes each night. Is that enough not according to the ancient for Mula of eight hours of rest eight hours of work and eight hours of play which Many physicians and therapists still swear by. And its not enough for the Survey respondents Many of whom considered themselves sleep deprived. Scientific but a new contrarian journals preschool of thought is emerge already ablaze ing. The eight hours mantra has no More scientific basis with excited than the tooth fairy says talk of Neil Stanley head of sleep research at the human pay conquering Cho pharmacology research sleep asking unit at the University of whether Surrey in Britain. He believes that everyone has humans will their own individual sleep become the need which can be any where Between three and 11 first species to hours. Dominate both if you re a three hour a daytime and night person you need three if you re 11, you need nighttime11.? to find out he says simply sleep until you Wake naturally without the Aid of an alarm clock. Feel rested that a your sleep need. The global get to sleep Industry ? pills lotions no turn mattresses foam memory pillows and the like ? has conditioned us to think we re not getting enough adds Jim Horne director of the sleep research Centre at Loughborough University in Britain and author of the new Book sleep faring a journey through the science of sleep. What really matters he says is the Core sleep the first few hours that nourish the higher sections of the brain. Anything beyond that ? including deep Rem rapid Eye movement sleep ? is non essential and taken for pure pleasure. Consider the Domestic cat feed it Well and it sleeps a lot with draw the food and its out Hunting. As Long As you re not a Zombie the next Day you re probably sleeping enough says Stanley. He appeals to the concept of non restorative sleep recently put about by the German society of sleep research and sleep Medicine. In Germany there has been a shift in emphasis traditionally treatment focused on reducing sleep latency ? the interval Between settling in for the night and the Onset of sleep ? and thus prolonging total sleep time. Now the focus is on restoring the recuperative value of sleep and ensuring daytime functioning on a social psychological and professional level. In truth however no one really knows whether 10 hours a night is any better than five. The Sci ence of sleep has not advanced an awful lot since 1834, when the first Book in the English language on the subject the philosophy of sleep by a glaswegian physician called Robert Macnish ? was published. Of course we can now plot brainwaves track hormones and add new taxonomies to the International classification of sleep disorders 89, at the last count. We can link sleep problems to driving and Indus trial accidents to a higher rate of divorce to increased risks of heart disease breast cancer Dia betes col rectal cancer and obesity. We re also confident of the role of sleep in reinforcing memory learning and cognitive performance. But the real fundamentals ? such As Why we sleep and Why some people can function on less than others ? elude us. Used infrequently drugs such As cx717 might be a Handy standby for the Odd occasion when ? for whatever reason ? you absolutely positively have to stay awake. But talk of banishing sleep for Ever is spectacularly naive says Foster. We Don to understand the physiology of sleep but we seem Happy to regard it As something to cure and then throw online news will never beat the paper americas 120 million sunday newspaper readers to the 93 million viewers of the Nils xxxix super bowl sunday in 2005, to explain his optimism about the future of print journalism. The demise of the newspaper has before been predicted during the Ascendancy of the television Era and even decades before that during the Golden age of radio. But print persists simply because no new technology has been Able to match its Utility. The portability of the newspaper remains unmatched by even the lightest of laptops and squinting into a tiny pad seems to me a rather pathetic Way to consume text. It is the tangibility of print versus the ephemeral nature of pixilated dots forming text on a screen that lends the experience of Reading a printed newspaper greater Powers to enter the human psyche compared to its online counterpart. A newspaper is something sensual you can feel it smell it even though i Don to recommend this taste it. Pages can be preserved and archived for centuries. Still there Are some who claim to pre Fer the i tangibility of online news referring to their daily newspaper As the dead tree these Young people ? they All seem to be under 30 ? believe they Are environmentally conscious by eschewing a printed newspaper that can be recycled and is most Likely printed on recycled newsprint. They avoid questions about the effects on ones eyes that accompany staring into a computer Monitor most of their waking Day. They seem unconcerned by the social effects of sit Ting solitary with their computers rather than passing sections of a news paper around to share and comment upon with family and Peers. According to a recent study by Cana Dian Market research firm a code Young people who read newspapers tend to be More socially Active than those who Don to. They re also likelier to vote in elections and to Volunteer in their communities. More exciting for advertisers frequent readers go shopping visit nightclubs and use Mobile phones More often than less frequent readers. As times have changed newspapers have too. My earliest memory of a Colour photo on the front Page was the free press a 1984 coverage of Pope John Paul ii a visit to Winnipeg. Today the free press a front Page has embraced a Point and Click format in which there Are no longer any front Page stories but rather just highlights of the top stories within. This it could be argued represents a move toward a tabloid Broad Sheet hybrid but some broadsheets ? including London a the times ? have switched to a tabloid format altogether. The venerable Wall Street journal remains the broadest of american broadsheets but As of next year it will be three inches narrower. Some have suggested that the future of newspapers lies in their being free. Certain free weeklies such As manhat tans Village voice Are doing Well. But the weekday editions of most newspapers Cost less than a Dollar and that Small expenditure not Only helps to cover increasing newsprint costs but gives the buyer a sense of ownership that presumably makes it likelier the newspaper will be read shared and properly recycled. Sadly too Many free newspapers even ones As Good As the Village voice end up As litter. For All our rapid and wholesale embrace of new Media and computer technology in the 21st Century you la find at even the most Avant Garde of wireless internet Caf san assortment of print editions lying about even on the tables of the most enthusiastic Laptop users. Even As most newspapers now offer websites its the dead tree edition that keeps our conversations alive. ;