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Bigger tsunamis with weak sedimentary rock: Science

There are “important clues in the sediments [that reveal] why the 2004 Sumatran earthquake generated a deadly tsunami and the adjacent 2005 earthquake did not,” says seismologist Arthur Frankel in a report on the Science website.

Those clues could indeed help to predict “whether great earthquakes in other subduction zones will produce large tsunamis,” he says.

The paper provides “strong evidence” that sedimentary layers can “have a major influence on the behavior of [earthquakes] tsunamis,” agrees marine geophysicist Jian Lin.

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15 Minutes with Fasy

Ahmed Faseeh is the Maldivian guitarist better known as ‘Fasy’. He kicked off his musical career in Malaysia while studying for an IT degree, a week after his arrival in Kuala Lumpur. He was soon performing with many famous Malaysian musicians, including Paul Ponnudorai, Amir Yussof, Rafique Rashid, and Purple Haze, and has since returned to help build the budding Maldivian music scene.

Minivan News: What were the earliest musical experiences that influenced you?

Fasy: I was four or five years old when I was introduced to music. As a young teenager, things like Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and other video tapes that people brought into the country had a big effect on me. They were just amazing. But before that I was already into music because Dad used to perform. He was in a band.They were originally known as Shooting Stars and then a few members changed and it became TT Bum Blues.

That band started in the late 60s and I was born in 1973. By 1978 the band was no longer playing. Dad used to play a lot of vinyl recordings at home, like Grease.

We started a band at school when I was in Grade 6, but before that I was in the school choir. My first instrument was the tambourine, but I got the chance to be in the band because I danced like Michael Jackson. My first performance was at a youth concert held at Olympus which went on for about seven nights. One night, our band was performing and I did breakdancing. It wasn’t a Michael Jackson act then, just a breakdancing routine.

As school went on, I stayed with the same band, and when the rhythm guitar player left I got to play the guitar. I was about thirteen. Dad had given me an acoustic guitar which I used to practise at home. After I starting with the band I just kept on playing.

Minivan News: What were major musical influences then?

Fasy: It started with the Beatles, but when I began playing with the band it was the time of the Scorpions and Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, those sort of people. They were the main influences.

Minivan News: You went off to Malaysia in 1996 to do an Information Technology course in Kuala Lumpur, and soon after you arrived you met musicians there like Viji, Tony Warren, Bala, Paul Ponnudorai, Amir Yusuf, Rafique Rashid, and the band Purple Haze.

Fasy: Yes, they were all well-known artists in Malaysia, working in bands. I was regularly performing with Viji. A week after I arrived in KL, I went to the pub and there was Viji playing with a drum machine and another guitar player and I went up to him during a break and said I played guitar and he invited me to come back for a jam session on Sunday when the pub was closed. And from that time on, we played together regularly until the end of 2006.

Minivan News: You completed your course in 2000 and then set up a production studio called DigitalTones with Rekha Raveenderan and your production debut album Sangkeertanam sold 50,000 copies. What happened then?

Fasy: The company produced another album in 2001, the first Tamil Hip-Hop album, Nil Gavvanee by Boomerangx. That was another hit and it followed through to India as well and created a revolution in Indian music. Which was amazing to see.

Minivan News: Why do you think Malaysia was the place where that sort of thing happened. What is it about Malaysia?

Fasy: I think it’s the mix of cultures – Chinese, Indian and Malay. And the openness they have there between the cultures. I mean we worked together with everyone, and when all cultures get together its exciting. Malaysia is a unique place.

Minivan News: You have a mixture of computer skills, production and performance abilities. How has that shaped your artistic career?

Fasy: It’s true, they’ve all had a part to play in my music, but the biggest influence has been Viji. He knows the best songs of the 60s. The music then was so alive, so real and so true. I learnt most through Viji. A couple of blues tracks that we did were just incredible… a guitar player should have to learn these things, because there is so much technique, feeling and meaning in those things.

With the digital stuff… to be honest the computer degree didn’t help that much with my music, but I can use a computer for music production. The skills came in handy when I needed to network studios and computer systems, installing different drivers and programs and hardware.

My first recording was actually done in Maldives on a spool deck, so I knew the analogue recording process before I started using digital. This gave me an understanding of the sort of sound I should get when I used digital. The analogue wave is a bit smaller, which is what we want for a recording. Digital is very wide, and to get the waved narrowed down to a nice audio level, the analogue knowledge was useful.

I did a lot of live concert sound work in Maldives as well. That helped a lot.

Minivan News: On your first album, Starrs, you do everything on it, and the same with the second solo album, Cruising.

Fasy: Yes, I programmed the drums and keyboard.

Minivan News: And then with the A Compilation album, other musicians appeared on some tracks.

Fasy: I took a couple of tracks from a live session in Maldives and another one we recorded in a studio in Malaysia with other musicians. It got to a point where I was finding that programming took me away from the feel of the music and it was turning me off. I would get an inspiration and sitting down to do the programming became so technical and tedious.. so I said to myself “I need to get a band”.

I formed a band in 2004 in Malaysia with a Maldivian bass player and an Indonesian drummer. The drummer had to go because his visa ran out and he was replaced by a Maldivian. There was more changing of bass players and drummers, and finally Ibbe became the drummer and he’s still with me now. Last year we got a UK bassist, Graham Simmonds.

Minivan News: 2006 was the year of FasyLive in Male, out of that you also made a DVD.

Fasy: Initially we weren’t thinking of a DVD. We rehearsed for that concert for a long time in Maldives after returning from Malaysia. There was a lot of anticipation around that concert. It was videoed and when we saw it, we realised it was something we should share with people so we decided to do a DVD. We were heavily involved in the editing. Then we had another concert to release the DVD… any excuse to play. That live broadcast concert was in the big studio at TV Maldives, and a ticket was the DVD. We sold about 400.

Minivan News: Do you find coming back to Maldives artistically inspirational?

Fasy: I love Maldives, I don’t see myself leaving Maldives and going away and forgetting about it. I might go and live in Malaysia for a while but Maldives will always be home for me, and coming back and doing something at home is something I treasure.

Minivan News: Are your songs inspired by what happens here?

Fasy: Lot of my songs are inspired by Maldivian experiences and what we have been going through, especially the 2007 Vengeance album.

Minivan News: In 2008 you did your first Dhivehi album, Silver, which was originally a live concert, and the first time you fused Bodu Beru drums with contemporary rock.

Fasy: Yes, the recording was mixed and mastered in Malaysia by Mohamed Faizal Ghazali at ProDG projects which I’m part of.

Minivan News: What have you been doing in Maldives lately?

Fasy: Organising a concert I’ll be engineering on 16 July – a concert sponsored by ‘Burn’, the drink made by Coca Cola.

Thermal and a Quarter from India will be playing, and Metalasia from Malaysia. From Maldives there’ll be Traphic Jam, a very revolutionary band who started to talk openly about the issues of the last regime and were banned from a lot of venues. They won the BreakOut festival competition last year and their bringing out a new album this month which has got some stuff about the current situation.

They are sort of “the voice of youth”. Also appearing on 16 July are TormentA, who had a recent album, and Sacred Legacy, who have three albums out already.

The second concert will be on 10 December, and I’ll be performing with another band from UK called Steranko.

FasyLive is keeping quiet for a while because we are too busy with BreakOut. FasyLive is still performing, we are due to play at a festival in the UK on 7 August at the Music for Life organised by Jar Music in collaboration with Sudbury council in Suffolk.

Ibbe and I are heavily involved in development of the music industry here in Maldives. There’s never been a proper music industry here, bands just play because they love it. There hasn’t been platforms to take bands through levels of development. Any new band here can find themselves playing at massive festivals, which destroys their discipline and mentality, and makes them hard to manage.

That’s why BreakOut has been set up. It provides stages of development with judges and fans deciding how they proceed. That’s what creates a band. If they are good enough, after a year they can get out of the country to perform, which is essential experience for a good band.

This year we decided to focus on BreakOut and get it running properly. Every year there’s so many people coming in, musicians and industry people. It’s been going now for three years. The first year wasn’t too bad. We paid for all bands going to and fro from UK and elswhere. We went into debt and that continued through 2009. But now we have help and good backing from Wataniya, ‘Rock’ energy drink made by an Australian company, and Coca Cola.

Venues are the main problem. We depend on the Carnival venue. Last year the toilets didn’t have a water pump, so we had to pay for that and fix it. No bulbs, power switches gone. And this year the place is even a bigger mess due to vandalism.

We had a BreakOut competition in Addu in April. The music scene changed there over just three days. At the start, most of the musicians were frightened that their parents would find out what they were doing. But when the parents saw them on TV, it was all OK. The parents were really happy. People started seeing music in a different way. When parents see their kids live on TV it changes their perspective entirely. It all becomes acceptable.

With BreakOut, we provide TV Maldives with original music and they give us TV slots. Our idea is to create enough interest in this festival that people are willing to fly in. We have trouble handling big acts at the moment. Hay Festival is coming over to this year in October – an arts literature and music festival. It attracts a lot of international interest, and important people attend these festivals.

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Up to 11 billion litres of drinking water from Alaska each year for Indian Ocean regions

A water hub near Mumbai will distribute drinking water to the Middle East, and West and South Asia, according to the Texan company S2C Global Systems.

The water will be shipped from Sitka Blue Lake Reservoir on Baranof island off the coast of Alaska, to a port south of Mumbai.

From the hub, smaller ships will transport water to shallower ports, such as Umm Qasr in Iraq, according to S2C’s press release.

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Leading cephalopod researcher doubts Octopus Paul has psychic powers

“I don’t believe in it personally,” said Dr Mark Norman, Museum Victoria’s head of science, when asked to comment on Octopus Paul’s psychic powers.

“But having said that I don’t want to underestimate how amazing these animals are and how clever they are… they’re doing pretty well for a super snail relative.” he said.

“They can recognise individual people in a crowd, they can do really clever things like learn to unscrew the lids off jars to get prawns out of the inside, they can collect up half coconut shells and carry them around like portable armour and jump inside if something comes along.”

Octopuses can also mimic other sea creatures, according to Dr Norman. “And because they’ve got no hard shell, an animal that’s a metre across could squeeze through a hole the size of about a 20 cent piece, they can squeeze their eyes out of shape and pull their soft brains through the middle of these holes.”

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Australia’s longest bridge opened

Australia’s longest bridge, 2.7 kilometres long and linking Brisbane to Redcliffe, was opened on Sunday. The bridge cost $315 million and was completed on time and on budget, according to Main Roads minister Craig Wallace.

Built using 120,000 tonnes of concrete and 10,000 tonnes of steel, it has three lanes for vehicles, a pedestrian path, a bikeway and fishing platforms.

The duplicated bridge is constructed to last 100 years and withstand a one-in-2,000 year storm, says Queensland state premier Anna Bligh.

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Criminal Court suspends police lawyers in Majlis corruption cases

The Criminal Court has suspended the two police lawyers who prosecuted the cases of Majlis members Gasim Ibrahim, Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom and Ahmed Nazim.

Inspectors of Police Mohamed Riyaz and Mohamed Jina were suspended for contempt of court.

The Criminal Court informed police of the decision in a letter sent to Police Commissioner on Sunday, according to a police media official, but the official refused to comment further.

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Maldives leading winner in 2010 World Travel Awards for Indian Ocean region

Maldives is named as a winner in many categories of the Indian Ocean section of the 2010 World Travel Awards, based on voting by thousands of travel agents.

Cocoa Island won the award for the Indian Ocean’s leading boutique hotel, and Maldives is the leading cruise and honeymoon destination, Baros won the leading hotel award, and Conrad Maldives Rangali Hotel is the leading resort.

W Retreat and Spa is the leading spa resort, and Vermillion International Travel won the award for leading travel agency.

Adaaran Prestige Resorts won the leading water villa group category and Baros Residence is the leading villa.

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Indian Ocean’s internal waves photographed

An image showing internal and surface waves on the Indian Ocean near the Andaman islands has been published by NASA’s Earth Observatory website.

“When tides drag the ocean over a shallow barrier such as a ridge on the ocean floor, it creates waves in the lower, denser layer of water,” Earth Observatory explains. “These waves, internal waves, can be tens of kilometers long and can last several hours.”

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Comment: Toothless Civil Society

When a people’s liberties are suspended whenever there is an emergency, there is a word for that: dictatorship. There is a line between democracy and dictatorship – and over the course of the last week we came dangerously close to stepping over it.

Not necessarily because of the President’s actions, the incarcerations, or the now common place parliamentary upheaval, but because those who should have spoken out remained silent.

Yes, you in the civil society need to raise your voices. Raise your voices to demand explanations, protest abuses, and safeguard the right to criticise a sitting government.

Instead of raised voices, however, we have only heard silence. And this started from the moment this affair began. The President’s office holds a press conference where the entire cabinet resigns, the President asserts his supreme authority to find justice, and what does the media say? Do they question the legitimacy of the action? Do they ask what this will mean for the peace in this nation? Or even whether the government expects demonstrations in retaliation and how the President (now the only civilian authority over the police and army) will respond?

No. They stay silent. Well, practically silent. The hardest hitting question was “does this mean your government is a failure?”

Really? Good job guys.

But who can blame the fledgling media groups in this nation. Unaccustomed to true democracy, they are not the ones who are directly tasked with protecting and asserting our democratic rights and ensuring this transition from autocracy to democracy actually works out. Who does this benevolent task fall to?

Civil Society

Organisations such as Transparency International, Democracy House, Open Society Association, and the newly renamed Maldivian Democracy Network all claim to safe guard democracy.

To work for its betterment – and yet civil society remained silent. Even Jamiyathul Salaf, who seem to have religious edicts about everything, stayed silent.

We have seen allegations of corruption first leveled by the executive branch against the legislative branch and then visa versa. We have not only seen wire-tapping where private conversations were recorded without warrants and outside of due process, but also seen them leaked to the public, indicating that civilian/partisan individuals had access to them.

We are witnessing a power struggle between executive and legislative branches with neither side realizing that they are both part of one government. And we see a judiciary that is caught in the middle and being accused of being susceptible to political influence.

We see the army working side by side with the police in the capital, outside of their mandate. We see all the things that would be any democracy fighter’s dream. The perfect excuse for a civil society group to put their two cents in, allowing them to claim they are meeting their own mandates. But instead we have silence and even some amount of fear.

The Fray

Civil society seems to be afraid of jumping into the fray. Of being labeled as being inclined towards one political party or another. Instead they give no comment and it is not hard for one to come up with excuses for why they should not comment at all.

Firstly, everyone must realise that this is a highly charged political atmosphere where any statement at all will be seen as aligning with one group or another.

Secondly, no formal charges have been brought against the three Members of Parliament (MPs) who have been detained. Instead, all that we have seen is allegations being flung about – none of which are easy to comment on.

And finally the questions: can’t there be levels to democracy? Where we move gradually towards it? After all, have any laws actually been broken?

The Other Side

The argument could be made however, that one cannot wait to evaluate. That civil society organizations are supposed to have principles and ideals that they adhere to above all others. And unlike political parties who can take time to organize, reflect, and adjust their values – civil society act on the basis of whether their values have been violated or not.

Does the MNDF’s involvement in everything that transpired adhere to their values? Was it okay for the MNDF to send a letter explaining why MPs could not go to Parliament in clear violation of their constitutional rights?

Was there any risk assessment that was done? And is there any level of alertness that we should be on? Do they have any questions about people’s conversations being tapped? Who else is being targeted? How does this feud between the executive and legislative affect the people? And who is responsible for failed policies?

My point is not that the executive branch has acted inappropriately, but rather that they have not been sufficiently grilled by the right people. My point is that civil society is an important part of our democratic transition, and right now they are slacking off.

I’m sure the government could post adequate answers to the questions posed, but my point is that the questions need to be asked in the first place from the right actors.

One Government

And it is also about more than just the executive branch. The civil society is responsible for explaining and helping us to define our government’s role. They are also responsible for reminding us that both legislative and executive branches are part of one government and that the failure of one aspect will make all of it fail.

We are in desperate need of this reminding. I walked out onto my balcony day before yesterday to watch protesters with underwear on their heads, supporting the arrest of our Deputy Speaker of Parliament – Ahmed Nazim.

These are protests that the nation believes is sanctioned by the executive branch. And they had underwear on their heads.

Forget the man for a second, and realize that Nazim is the Deputy Speaker of Parliament. He is third in the line of succession for the Presidency. And while it would be a black mark on our country’s record to have him in this position if he is in fact guilty of all that is accused of him, we cannot assume guilt. We cannot disrespect the office the people of this nation gave him. And we cannot forgo all measures of dignity and justice.

We are one government and should all be held accountable. And you, civil society, need to step up your game and live up to your values. Democracy’s survival is in your hands, and if it fails you will share the blame.

http://www.jswaheed.com

All comment pieces are the sole view of the author and do not reflect the editorial policy of Minivan News. If you would like to write an opinion piece, please send proposals to [email protected]

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