Corporal punishment is ilegal in twenty-Seven states. Why is physical abuse still permitted in our schools?

I. Introduction
The child is father of an adult. The child is an abridged adult with rights which cannot be abridged. The Child is a person for all practical purposes. The child observes, thinks and imitates or reacts to happenings around. The child is a person. Either at home or school, the child is subjected to disciplinary practices while, child should be part of those processes. If the indiscipline of the child could be complained, ascertained and responded to, where is the way to find and establish the indiscipline of the adults. Every adult feels that he is having every right to discipline the child. Do they have?

The discipline is not taught, it is learnt. The text books give information. The communication through teaching is imparting education. To attain wisdom, an abundant amount of common sense has to be added to education, which then includes discipline. Discipline is an attitude, character, responsibility or commitment. The discipline is basically internal, while the attempt to impose it would be an external process. One has to internalize the process of education and discipline. Discipline and education go together in letter and spirit.

The Child's education is mostly from observation and imitation. Their participation depends upon their developing capacity, which again depends upon the surroundings and family.

Information is a prelude of participation. If child does not have sufficient information he cannot effectively participate. Such a participation should be meaningful. One has to talk in terms of chances rather than rights as the child does not and cannot know how to participate. Without participation the discipline within him will not develop. Right to drive, he may have. But a chance to drive, he may not get. It may be like giving a discourse in driving without putting him in driver's seat.

How to teach cycling?

Will you give him text book on cycling or explain the parts and technique of the machine, importance or greasing or oiling, or give a lecture on speed or slow cycling, diligence or negligence on road? Will you leave him with a cycle? Or follow him closely till he learns it? He has a right to cycle. He must have a chance to cycle.Firstly the child must have a chance to know, what, why and how.
Secondly, a chance to think over
Thirdly, a chance to express, explain and ventilate the views or grievances.
Fourthly, a chance to alter the perceptions around, either at home or school.
Finally, a chance to know the response.

For Example: Parents or teachers lie before children. A father wants his son to tell the caller by phone that he was not at home. You are teaching him that one should lie and also when and how and for what. It may be inevitable for you to tell a lie. Then explain the son why is opting to lie, why he should not lie otherwise etc. First do not allow him to handle your situation. He should be allowed to handle his own situations. The discipline starts with either lying or not. The necessary communication with child equips him with ability to participate. The character is communication. The best character is the best communication. The company builds and reflect the character.

There are three benefits of communication.
1. Message reaches successfully.
2. Receiver knows and develops to receive the communication.
3. Receivers also learns how to communicate.
Generally a negative experience and adverse conditions prevailing around will seriously influence a child and may make him similar person with similar character. But at the same time it may result in making child a positive person or a person with character diametrically opposite to what he has seen.

Dhruv emerges an unbiased king, after he becomes victim of bias of his father and step mother. Prahlad learns to be democrat from dictatorial attitude of father Hiranya Kaship. These incidents prove that discipline and education are participative learning processes.

The Supreme Court in National Anthem school declined to impose any penalty on two students belonging to Jehowa Witnesses, who did not participate in singing national anthem as their religious tenet did not permit any singing except songs in praise of God. The case stands as an example that not joining the voice in singing national anthem itself is not an act of indiscipline or unpatriotic attitude and invites no punishment.Discipline in School and Corporal Punishment:
The time has come to re-examine the saying 'spare the rod and spoil the child'. Children are at receiving end both at their own homes and schools from parents, teachers and non-teaching school authorities. Almost all schools inflict corporal punishments on students for various reasons. Kodandam was one such practice in vogue a generation ago. Kodandam means hanging errant boys upside down and thrashing. This was a savage punishment meted to errant schoolboys. In another version, they were hung upside down over red chillies, which were lit. The boys suffered, both from the beating and the pungent smell of the burning chillies- says V. Gangadhar, in his column 'slice of life' . Most of the teachers use cane or foot ruler. Head master himself wielded the cane in the general assembly. Slaps, pulling ear lobes by sharp nails, Mottikay (kuttu in Tamil) on the head where the clenched fist of the teach was brought down with considerable force, Gichchadam (killu in Tamil which means pinch) were some old generation methods of corporal punishment. A heavy log used to be chained to the leg of errant student. The punishment would extend for one week also, during which he has to drag it to and from school. Now the method of inflicting pain is changed but corporal punishment as a conceptual method of imposing discipline continues.

The corporal punishment is a regular affair in thousands of schools everywhere. Children not only carry overload of text books and note books on their tender backs, but bear the brunt of canes for silly reasons like socks not matching the shoe or lace not being property knotted. The parents dare the sun-shine in the noon to offer lunch box to their kids, outside the gates of the convent schools, who do not allow them inside. They ask them to stand or 'kneel down' under hot sun. Sometimes students will be asked to complete the assigned writing work in kneel down position. Kneeling down on the earth is painful. A physical instructor who also happen to be a karate belt holder, uses his hard hand to severely injure the kid who do not follow the instructions. While playing or practicing drill with physical instructors, the punishments will be harsh and unbearable. Even if a child is thirsty and need a glass of water instead of water he gets corporal punishment.

Normal range of punishments, which continue unabated, are caning, beating knuckles with stick or steel scale, kneeling down, standing on the bench and so on. Wall chairs (sitting as if on the chair without any one against the wall for half-an-hour to one hour), wall chairs plus a school bag on the head or thighs which cause more physical pain, running ten to twenty rounds around the school building or in the ground and sit-ups numbering hundreds are other range of punishments. Writing impositions for more than fifty times within a short time, which is physically not possible to complete, is a new type of punishment. If an English medium students talks in Telugu, he or she will be made to write, "I do not speak in Telugu" for fifty to hundred times, a mental punishment too.Emotional consequences of unilateral disciplining processes:
Neither the religion nor the parenthood provided any legal authority physically injure the children for their so called 'indiscipline' and to enforce morality and character. Punishment may deter a child from repeating act of indiscipline to some extent, but it cannot improve his understanding of the subject or make him intelligent 'more' than 'his standard' earlier to the corporal punishment. Resorting to scolding and reprimanding students as a prelude to inflict punishment is common at homes and schools and excess of which always bring in civil or criminal liability. Some of the countries specifically banned the corporal punishment of children as it crossed the limits and assumed brutal propositions.

However, law basically does not agree with any excessive punishment to beings, which would be definitely a violation of personal right. The research studies show that the theory of corporal punishment was an ineffective discipline strategy with children of all ages and it is often proved to be dangerous. The punishment of such kind leads to create anger, resentment and low self-esteem. It teaches them violence and revenge as solutions to problems and perpetuates itself, as children might imitate what the adults are doing

This study revealed that the children whose parents use corporal punishment to control antisocial behaviour show more antisocial behaviour themselves over a long period of time. This is regardless of race, socio-economic status and regardless of whether the mother provides cognitive stimulation and emotional support. A consistent pattern of physical abuse exists that generally start as corporal punishment and then gets out of control. As the child grows, the depression or violence in them gradually develops.

If persons are more hit during their childhood, it is more likely that when they reach the adulthood, they hit their children, spouses or friends.I come Across with such kind of person he enjoys beating small and growing up children and became the principal of that day baording school. A frequently hit child will be a problematic person tomorrow. There another serious consequence, the probability of children assaulting the parent in retaliation also will increase with the corporal punishment. The same attitude may reflect in the schools against the teachers also.

Besides attitudinal change there may be a psychological disadvantages also. The children might begin to believe that it is good to use violence. They develop bullying tactics against weaker person. This eventually leads to degrading, it contributes to feelings of helplessness and humiliation, robbing a child off self-worth and self respect leading a child to withdrawal or aggression. All these changes lead to breaking of relationship. Ultimately it all leads to erosion of trust between teacher and a child or a parent and a child. Another dimension is it will result in increased risk of child abuse as a disciplinary measure and poor performance on school tasks compared to other children.

The unilateral process of penal disciplining the children either at home or at school will lead to three kinds of reactions. FEAR, HATRED & ANGER. These three will contribute adversely and in the long run, children are moulded into complex personalities. If a child is battered or bullied for talking, his anger may make him an introvert, probably a thinker with less initiative, and to withdraw from groups and companies and can be branded as shy person. If his reaction is hatred, he starts hating school and society. If the anger is the reaction, an angry young man will take birth. If he suffers most without these feelings, which very rarely happens, that child may develop a commitment not brow beat any body in his life time.

The corporal punishment interferes with the right to development and participation as it leads to antisocial behaviour. The theme of Child Rights Convention, that an adult should recognize the child as the person which means promoting their liberty, privacy and dignity. The brutal disciplinary processes hampers psychological growth of a person.Two Schools of Thought:
Then the question is why do the parents or teachers punish children? There are two schools of thought, one arguing for the need of taming the uncontrollable kids and the other for not using the cane at all, and the debate goes on in every meeting or workshop. School managers argue that some of the parents wanted them to beat the children to make them behave well. If the consent of parents could be taken for such punishments it would amount to conspiracy of parents and teachers to violate the rights of children, and provides any authority or protection or defence to the teachers inflicting such punishment.

IV. The Law And Childhood
Who can punish whom? What is the crime for which punishment can be inflicted? Whether Parents or Teachers or School managers have any adjudicatory authority to decide circumstances under which a punishment can be inflicted, the quantum, method and timing or punishment?

According to law, the adjudactory authorities alone have authority to hear complaints, try the contentions and draw the conclusions as liability and penalty. The corporal punishment, especially envisages a legal process and appropriate authority to fix the guilt according to established and enforceable law. Not otherwise.
It is both a crime and a civil wrong for holding some one guilty and inflicting penalty, without legal authority.
In India, the education system itself promotes corporal punishment. Teacher is assumed a respectful and thus powerful position. This power includes power to inflict corporal punishment.A Public Interest Litigation was filed by Parents Forum and Meaningful Education (AIR 2001 Del 212), challenging the provisions of the Delhi School Education Rules 1973 providing for corporal punishment to a student. The rule 37 states the form of disciplinary measures as may be adopted as detention during the break, for neglect of class work, but no detention shall be beyond school hours, secondly to those students who attained age of 14 years as a fine, expulsion and rustication. It states that corporal punishment may be given by the head of the school in cases of persisting impertinence or rude behaviour towards teachers, physical violence, intemperance and serious forms of misbehaviour with other students. It contains some exceptions like corporal punishment should not inflicted on the students who are in ill-health. It shall not be severe or excessive and shall be so administered so as not to cause bodily injury. It imposes a limit of ten strokes with cane on student's hand with a condition that such a punishment be recorded in the Conduct Register of such a student. The government justified the rule as necessary for inculcating discipline. The Division Bench of Delhi High Court held that corporal punishment was not keeping with a child's dignity. Justice Anil Dev Singh and Justice Mukundakam Sharma, said that it was cruel to subject a child to physical violence in school in the name of discipline or education. It was held that inflicting physical punishment on a child is not in consonance with his or her right of life guaranteed by Article 21 of Indian Constitution. "Just because child is small he or she cannot be denied of these rights…. Even animals are protected against cruelty. Our children are surely cannot be worse off than animals" said the High Court. The Court also said that there had been instances where children have been traumatized and beaten in schools causing grave injuries to them on account of their innocent pranks, mistakes and mischief.

Recently in Tamil Nadu, the Education Minister advised parents to pursue remedies for mental and physical torture. The Schools were instructed to avoid corporal punishment (The Hindu, 18th June 2003). A fifth Standard student was allegedly caned for being a slow writer. New set of revised Tamil Nadu Education Rules had been framed wherein the Rule 51 is replaced with a provision recommending every child to be given an opportunity to learn error of his or her ways through corrective measures. While making it clear that the school shall not cause mental or physical pain to the child. The imposition and suspension from class are some of the corrective measures suggested. However, these rules did not define torture and punitive measures were not prescribed for violations. A 16 year old boy Ram Abhinav, a student of class 10 in Southern City of Chennai committed suicide after allegedly being thrashed by a teacher for skipping school on his birth day. He left a note saying that he was killing himself because he did not want to go to school.

Goa Assembly passed recently (30th April 2003) Goa Children's Act, 2003 to ban the corporal punishment.Legal Position:
Law and legal systems are expected to protect the children from abuse of authorities either at home or at schools or at systems of administration of justice duly considering their childhood, innocence and incapacity to understand. Children below seven years are exempted from criminal liability. Their act is not treated as an offence at all. This means that there can be no corporal punishment even under penal provisions based on the principles of doli incapaxi. Similar exemption is extended to children of above seven years and under twelve of immature understanding under Section 83 of IPC. In essence, a child cannot be subjected to ordinary methods of physical punishments including imprisonment for the offences owing to their age and incapacity of formulating a malicious intention. Thus for being a student and having a committed a wrong of not doing home work or violating a dress code, should not invite any corporal punishment.

Indian Penal Code Section 88 protects an act which is not intended to cause death, done by consent in good faith for person's benefit. Master chastising pupil fall under this clause. A head teacher who administers in good faith a moderate and reasonable corporal punishment to a pupil to enforce discipline in school is protected by this section and such an act is not crime under Section 323.

Section 89 of Indian Penal Code protects an act by guardian or by consent of guardian done in good faith for benefit of child under 12 years. However the same section says that this exception will not extend to cause death, or attempting to cause death, causing grievous hurt. These provisions extend to teachers having quasi-parental authority i.e., consent or delegation of authority from parents also, of course, with exceptions. Using excessive force, causing serious injury, purpose being very unreasonable can turn the act of the guardian or teacher with the consent of guardian, an offence, because such incidents are outside the scope of "good faith".

Juvenile Justice Act, 2000
Section 23 of new Juvenile Justice Act, 2000 provides punishment for cruelty to juvenile or child. Whoever, having the actual charge of or control over, a juvenile or the child, assaults, abandons, exposes or willfully neglects the juvenile or causes or procures him to be assaulted, abandoned, exposed or neglected in a manner likely to cause such juvenile or the child unnecessarily mental or physical suffering shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to six months, or fine, or with both.This section has no exceptions to exempt parents or teachers. Though it is intended to punish cruelty by those in authority, it equally applies to parents and teachers also. The whole purpose of the Juvenile Justice Act 2000 is to translate the objectives and rights enshrined in Convention on Child Rights which include separation of juveniles in conflict with law from ordinary judicial proceedings to avoid corporal punishment.

Child Battery
The Child battery is one of the serious forms of domestic violence, over which the controls are not specified, in penal systems till Juvenile Justice legislation came in 1986, which is now replaced by Act of 2000. The principles of criminal liability are not totally absent as they could be inferred from different ambiguous provisions prior to these Acts also. This provision should be used to control the child battery at homes and schools.

Laws in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal
The Penal Code of Sri Lanka does not include the parental or guardianship 'right of reasonable chastisement' as a general defence for a prosecution causing physical harm to a child of the nature and type criminalised by the code. However, it is provided that reasonable use of corporal punishment would not come within the scope of offence. This suggests that a parent have a legal right to cause simple injury. However, a parent whose use of corporal punishment involves conduct that is an offence according to other provisions in the Penal Code cannot use parental authority as a defence for criminal liability under the penal code. Earlier, in 1889 Corporal Punishment Ordinance permitted sentences of whipping to be passed on male child offender limiting the strokes depending on the age. Females were totally exempted. The Children and Young Persons Ordinance 1939 also permitted the court to impose a sentence of corporal punishment on boys under 16 limited to six strokes with a light cane. The Children and Young Persons Ordinance of 1939 modeled on the English statute of 1933 created a special offence of cruelty to children under 16 years of age. Education Ordinance 1939 in Sri Lanka permitted for failure to attend the schools. Corporal Punishment is used as method of discipline within the family and mainly on boys in schools in Sri Lanka. Savitree argues that the constitutional remedy could be used to challenge the abuse of authorities, which include police, government and private schools which are under administrative control of Ministry of Education in Sri Lanka, who use corporal punishment against children.

In United States:
In Goss v. Lopez , the US Supreme Court decided that the constitutional protection on cruel and degrading treatment did not apply to school discipline and that parents could bring a civil action for damages against the school and obtain necessary relief. In case of Ingraham v Wright (498F. 2d 248 (5th Cir. 1974) it was held that corporal punishment did not violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment on the basis that the Constitutional protection was not necessary because schools were open institutions where children are free to leave and they were under the scrutiny of the public eye. The standards of due process were fully met by existing procedures in law, so notice and hearing prior to the enforcement of corporal punishment were also not considered to be required. Ingraham was a student of Drew Junior High where he was 'punished' for being slow to leave the auditorium stage and was held to face down on a table by Deliford, a teacher and the deputy Principal, while the principal Willie J Wright hit him on the buttocks at least twenty times with a wooden paddle. Doctors diagnosed as hematoma and he was prescribed icepacks, pain pills and laxative and advised bed rest for a week. It took three weeks for him to recover and sit properly. Wright hit his schoolmate Roosevelt Adams on the wrist which became swollen and could not use the arm for a week. A number of other cases were also happened in school. Ingreham and Adams sued the school for damages and injunction relief against the use of corporal punishment. As the verdict went against the plaintiffs they took the case to Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals where it was held that punishment was excessive, if not cruel, it was disproportionate to the offence charged and degrading to the children in the institution. It was overruled by a five justices' bench asserting that issues of constitutionality and the due process clause need not be applied as it was open for the parents and students to leave the school if the corporal punishment became so severe as to be unacceptable in a civilized society then it becomes unconstitutional. It does not mean that remedy was not available, it means that state law remedies are extremely rare to correct abuse and that the remedy was open. There is a need for law in US to bring excessive corporal punishment into purview of wrong for which action under torts is available.

In United States, most of the northern states have strong laws against corporal punishment, those states include California, Michigan, Lava, New Jersey, Alaska, Washington, West Virginia. Almost half of states legitimized the corporal punishment. However even where it is legitimized, only reasonable corporal punishment by children or guardians is protected. Prohibition of corporal punishment in family day care, group homes/institutions, child care centers and family foster care varies from state to state.

The statistics show that there were over one million occurrences during 1986-87 wherein 10 to 20 thousand requested medical treatment. On an average there are about 1.5 million cases of corporal punishment reported. Excessive corporal punishment attracts application of civil and criminal laws from the beginning of the independent US. In Texas, over 3000 paddlings per month were reportedly given in Dallas Schools, some only because the student did not address the teacher as 'sir' or for incorrect spelling. The goal now in US is to make a uniform law all over the Country to ban this practice.
Sweden was first to ban all corporal punishment of children in 1979, while other European countries such as Denmark, Norway, Finland, Austria, Cyprus, Italy, Croaia and Latvia made no corporal punishment laws. There is a strong movement going on against corporal punishment in schools in Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, Namibia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Jamaica, The Republic of Ireland, Belgium, Korea and the United Kingdom.

In Nepal:
Article 7 of Nepal's Children's Act 1992 declares that 'no child shall be subject to torture or cruel treatment' but qualifies this by stating that the act of scolding and minor beating to the child by his father, mother, and any member of the family, guardian or teacher for the interests of the child himself shall not be deemed to violate the Act.

Bangladesh:
Juvenile Justice Act of India and Bangladesh Children's Act 1974 created an offence of cruelty to children, which covers parents and guardians and teachers also. Juvenile Justice Act does not authorize corporate punishment including whipping, while Bangladesh Act permitted whipping male child offender.

Convention on Child Rights:
Article 28(2) Convention on Rights of Child 1989 indicates that the school discipline should be administered in a manner consistent with the child's human dignity and the Convention. Article 28 says the education is a right and Article 29 says that the purpose of school education should be to assist the child in developing his or her personality talents, mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential. Article 3, 18 and 36 of the Convention deal with parental and adult responsibility in the private sphere and the right to protection from exploitation. Article 19 provides for measures to protect children against all forms of physical abuse and imposes an obligation on member states to protect children from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse.

These provisions justify legal reforms that will impose criminal liability on parents or teachers and other adults who cause injury through violence and use corporal punishment. There must be a clear law and policy to curb domestic violence and battery of child by parents. Parents and teachers are legally accountable for violence and abuse of authority. However there is a need to spell this liability in clear terms of law for more certainty and to cause fear of law among them. Going by these norms, the concept of human rights and protection rights of children, it is to be understood that there is no 'minimum' acceptable in corporal punishment.

Liability under different principles of law:
Imposing harm or corporal punishment on children in schools could be against
a. the general principles of civil liability, which may result in payment of damages in an action for tort, i.e., civil wrong

b. the general principles of criminal liability for assaulting, causing injury or harm resulting in prosecution under Sections 89, 319, 320, 349, 350, 351 of Indian Penal Code

c. violate Juvenile Justice Act, and principles laid down by the Convention of Child Rights

d. the terms and conditions of the contract, breach of which may lead to suit for breach of contract with a remedy for payment of damages

e. the definition of "service" under Consumer Protection Act, 1986, and deficiency of service may lead to an action before the consumer forum for compensation.

f. the norms and procedure prescribed by the Government through GO Rules or Act, or judicial directions laid down by Supreme Court or High Court.

g. It may also attract departmental action.Parents and Teachers usually impose some sort of corporal punishment over the children under their control. How far that is justifiable? From legal perspective, the basis of justification depends on the purpose, circumstance and reasonability of the force applied. Punishments for offences or misbehaviour of the child is one class while punishments for not following dress code or carrying number of note books or not doing the assigned homework etc, is different one. Whether law favours imposing the corporal punishment at all? If favours, does it confine to control the offensive behaviour or misbehavior? Or extend to all sorts of simple, technical or some other activity, which cannot be categorised as evil?

Tortious Liability of Teacher under English & Indian Law:
Parents can justify an assault or battery by way of chastisement provided reasonable force by way of correction is used, according to Children and Young Persons Act 1933, section 1(17) of United Kingdom. At common law head and assistant teachers, both at boarding and day schools had the right to use reasonable force to correct the children under their tutelage Fitzgerald v. Northcote (headmaster, boarding school), Ryan v Fildes (assistant mistress, day school). Section 47 of the Education Act 1987 prohibits corporal punishment in schools and for state funded pupils in independent schools.

Use of force to punish a child as opposed to limited force needed to protect a child from harming himself or others will be no defence to an action for assault and battery. The defence of exercise of disciplinary powers will remain available to teachers in independent schools against fee paying pupils and this defence will not be available in acts involving beating the child.

The force used must be reasonable in the circumstances-presumably the offence, the age and physique of the child, his past behaviour, the punishment, the injury inflicted, are all material. Not only must the teacher use force which is objectively reasonable but also he himself must have thought it reasonably necessary in the circumstances. Thus parents or persons in loco parentis may, for the purpose of correcting what is evil in the child, inflict moderate and reasonable corporal punishment.

The old view was that the authority of schoolmaster was the same as that of the parent. Thus a master also can inflict moderate and reasonable corporal punishment. The modern view is that the schoolmaster has his own independent authority to act for the welfare of the child. The old English cases center around the offences committed or evil exhibited by the students and the authority of the master to discipline them. Agreeing that the schoolmaster has such authority, the judicial decisions imposed a universal limitation that such a force must be moderate and reasonable. It was nowhere stated that corporal punishments could be inflicted for securing lesser marks or not passing the examination or not doing the assigned homework or not wearing dress or sox of the colour prescribed by the school authorities. The accepted use of force in a reasonable way was only for removing the evil or controlling the misconduct like smoking, fighting with fellow pupils, committing some offence like theft etc or for misbehaviour, but not for academic weakness. Thus in present day culture of convent school discipline with severe corporal punishment for study reasons, has no legal basis or justification under any circumstances.

Quasi Parental Authority
A teacher has a quasi-parental authority to discipline the child and for that purpose use the force also. However, the use must be in all cases, reasonable one. Parents and other persons in similar positions are necessarily immune against liability for many acts like assault and battery. They have control, usually but not necessarily, of a disciplinary character, over those committed to charge.

Parental authority ceases when the child attains 18 years. The control of a schoolmaster over his pupil is really delegated to him by the parents. The latter will be deemed to have impliedly assented to all the disciplinary rules and practices of the school, unless the child were sent there on the specific understanding that any such rule or practice of the school should not apply to the particular pupil, Mansell v. Griffin . The authority of the teacher extends to classroom, playground or outside the school. In R v. Newport Justice , it was held that if a master canes a pupil for fighting in the street or for smoking in public, it will not be considered as an assault. In India, these principles were imported and applied mostly. Thus the position in India is almost the same as in England, with regard to tortious liability of teacher imposing unreasonable punishment on the children. The authority of the Principle or Head Master to maintain discipline and to do such acts, as are reasonable for the upkeep for the necessary tone and standards of behaviour in a body of students . The right to take disciplinary action against student cannot be arbitrarily exercised.

Such an authority of parents or persons in loco parentis do not extend to inflicting corporal punishments for not studying well, failing in examination, not doing assigned work, wearing a sox of shade of color different from prescribed one. There is no absolute authority for teacher to beat or punish the child.

Even if the statutory bodies like Universities, Intermediate Board, Secondary Education Board, cannot infringe any fundamental right of the student to live with dignity. The law and procedure should not be with patent errors.

Departmental Action against misuse of authority by Teachers:
Any excessive or unreasonable exercise of authority may attract the disciplinary action by department against the headmaster or teacher. Almost all the teachers and headmasters do not know the provisions of Education Code and ruled made there under which impose an obligation on Head master to maintain the record of corporal punishments inflicted on students with reasons. Such a violation should attract disciplinary action.

Criminal Liability:
Criminal Liability requires malice on the part of teacher. Negligence and unreasonableness can replace malice and make him liable in certain circumstances, for causing simple injury or grave injury under Indian Penal Code. In Ganesh Chandra Shaha v. Jinraj Somani, and State v. H.A. Khandkar, it was held that teacher who caned the students and inflicted fist blows, causing bodily injury and loss of tooth, would be criminally liable and would not be benefited for having acted in good faith for the benefit of the victim. If teacher exceeds the authority and inflicts unreasonable punishment he would lose the benefit of Section 88 of IPC which protects acts done in good faith .

Protection for act done in good faith under Section 82 IPC will not extend to grievous hurt and excessive use of force. Causing hurt (S 319), Grievous hurt (S 320), using force (S 349), Criminal force (S 350), Assault (S 353) are also offences that could result in prosecution of parents or teachers.

Contractual Liability:
If a parent imposes a condition that the school should not impose any corporal punishment over his child, the school would be liable for breach of that contractual term. Parent also can take legal action for violation of Education Code and rules by the management of schools.

Liability under Consumer Protection Act:
Education is a service where it is under a contract for a fee. Only when imparting education is part of the statutory obligation, it does not amount to service within the meaning of Section 2(1)(o) of Consumer Protection Act, 1986. Service free of charge is not service under this section. In Tilak Raj of Chandigargh v. Haryana School Education Board, Bhiwani the State Commission observed that the imparting of education is not sovereign function and so it is a service. Whether inflicting corporal punishment unreasonably is "deficiency in service" is straightly not answered so far in any case. The Consumer Court has not got an opportunity to decide that question.
But from the principles of tortious and criminal liability, it can be stated that a teacher would be either liable for paying damages or for being prosecuted for excessive and unreasonable use of force over the child.

V. A.P. Education Code & Corporal Punishment

Government orders and Code:
The Government being a recognizing authority interested in general welfare of the people, it can impose restrictions or limitations or total ban on inflicting corporal punishment in Government or private schools.

Rule 39 of A. P. Integrated Educational Rules, 1966 lays down that corporal punishment shall not be inflicted in elementary schools. Rule 122 of the Andhra Pradesh Integrated Educational Rules 1966, deal with imposing various kinds of fines, corporal punishments, suspension, expulsion and rustication etc. There is a restriction on imposing a corporal punishment in Rule 122 (2), which says that corporal punishment shall not be inflicted in schools except in a case of moral delinquency such as a deliberate lying, obscenity of word or act or flagrant insubordination and then it shall be limited to six cuts on the hands and be administered only by or under the supervision of the Headmaster. Corporal punishment should never be inflicted in any recognised school on boys of classes XI and XII. The headmaster shall record in a register every case in which corporal punishment has been inflicted specifying the name, class and age of the pupil, the date the nature of the offence and amount of punishment.

VI. Conclusion

Private Junior Colleges emerged as new houses of torment. The craze of parents for securing a seat in Medicine or Engineering course is the real culprit. Private corporate educational shops are exploiting them. Knowing full well that their adolescents are going to be tormented in the name of intensive coaching, parents are encouraging and getting them admitted.

It is revealed during the consultation meetings held by NALSAR in the process of preparing the report on implementation of Convention on Rights of Children, that the children flee from their homes and schools because of the tyranny of parents and teachers respectively. The indiscriminate beatings by the parents frustrates the child and forces him to get out of the House, which eventually make them street children where all kinds of perils are ready to attack him. The street influences him or her to become either a delinquent or awaara. The Child is exploited, exposed and suffered to lose his childhood. There are several horrible experiences narrated by children saying that they turned to labour because they could not stand the beatings and insults from the teacher either for not responding to attendance call or not doing some prescribed home work or for failing to answer the questions properly. If child is not responding to teaching or defying the instructions it could be mostly a question of psychology of that child, which the most of teachers in school do not understand. Some times a child specific approach is needed to understand him/her and shape up to the requirements. Instead of adopting proper and required treatment towards the children, parents and teachers who draw quasi parental authority from them, inflict corporal punishment, reflecting their imbalance or frustration. How can a child improve in understanding a lesson if battered up by the elders?

In almost all private, convent, English medium schools, which mushroomed with the sole purpose of making money, impose very strict discipline which leads to stringent actions even for minor violations like not cleaning shoe, or wearing a different color sox or a shirt without ironing. Some times the punishment extends to parents also. It is the common sight in cities and towns that parents, mostly mothers, waiting outside the gate of schools under the hot sun to hand over lunch box or meet the principal as instructed through the kids. Generally, neither the students nor their parents complain against any teacher for beating the kids, because of the fear of their vindictive attitude. These fears are not unrealistic. There are several instances where a child has to leave the school in the middle of an academic year, because children are subjected to severe torturing methods hampering their education and mental peace, because the parents brought the corporal punishment to the notice of principal.The Education department must be well equipped with necessary personnel who can study the reasons for child behaviour and teachers reactions and inspect the schools whether in private sector or public sector to oversee if any tormenting conditions are existing. In fact, auditing of behaviour in schools is more important than the financial auditing or verifying records.

The parents association should play a major role in checking the management of schools regarding these punishments. They have to regularly meet and bring collective representations to avoid isolated vindictive actions. It must be made mandatory for the school management to convene parents meeting regularly to address these issues.

Child Rights Committees in Schools also could play a role in checking the physical assaults in schools for trivial reasons.

The corporal punishment is prohibited against elementary school children and against students of class XI and XII. Then why should there be corporal punishment for children studying classes in between. There appears to be no reason for such discrimination. It needs to be amended.

Need to prohibit the Corporal Punishment by law
Corporal punishments are envisaged for adults only in criminal cases. However greater a civil wrong may be, there are no corporal punishments. Even in cases of malpractice in examinations, the codes and rules do not talk about cane cuts or fist blows. Then why only children are subjected to physical thrashings for discipline or academic reasons?

India being a signatory to the UN Convention on Rights of Child is under an obligation to remove cruelty towards children by prohibiting the canes from schools. It is an important element of a child's protection rights as envisaged by the
Convention to lay down national policy and legislation on use of corporal punishment in schools.

The Government should unhesitatingly introduce a legal provision not in rules but in the main text of the law of A.P Education Act 1982 itself, prohibiting any form of corporal punishment in the name of discipline or making them to do home work or some other observation of code.

There should neither physical nor mental punishment in humiliating methods. The stress and strain imposed on child with terrorized atmosphere prevalent in the schools because of corporal punishments, cut throat competitions and increasing pressure for ranks lead them to leave the schools. Suicides are another major possible consequence of such terrible incidents in the schools. The plight of junior college students, who are cornered to commit suicides due to meaningless competition and ambitious craze for professional courses is already rocking the morale of the students and parents and affecting the commercial profits of the coaching colleges which are functioning as Tuition Mills. School children should not be driven to such an unfortunate situation. We shall not wait for some school students also to commit suicides for us to act upon. Let us all save their childhood. 'Spare the rod and save the childhood' should be the new slogan.

for Gyandotcom

Thanks to ILRC and it's director, Lois Miller who always puts together a great event. Her dedicated work and unparalled commitment to the community is appreciated by so many. Her husband (sound guy) and staff are remarkable people who always help out and make it a fun event for some folks who don't always have an opportunity to 'step out'.

Have a look at this example using one of my own YouTube videos.

The larger buttons make YouTube much easier to use for many users.

Thanks to David Sugden for the link.

Now, I am not going to cover the basics of SEO, because there are plenty of resources out there that can help with these things.   If you have money, maybe you'll want to spend some on an SEO consultant who understands the basics.

But even if you hire an SEO consultant, you still need to understand the basics of website architecture from your company's perspective if you want them -- and you -- to be successful.  You do not want the people you hire to bring traffic to your website by guessing how your customers do searches.   You need to be ready to identify your user needs online and how best to put the library at the forefront when people have those needs.

So, here are a few tips that I've learned about how users search for their libraries:

Sometimes users will search for the system; sometimes they'll search for the branch

If you look at your website stats, I'll bet any money that your top searches will be for "library" "[city name] library" "library [city name]" and so on.   The next bunch (I bet) will be "[branch name] library."

But let's go even further, if someone is searching for a branch, they may be looking for a specific service or event at this branch.    If this is the case, you want to be sure they don't have to look for you.

Solution(s):

• For one, you want to have a page for each of your branches with the branch name in the <title> tag.   Make sure basic location, hours and etc. are on this page.  That will make sure people find your site when they search for a specific branch.
• If you have a database of programs & events, make sure you have a way to feed upcoming programs to specific branch pages.    If not, make sure you have a link to events from each branch page.
• Make sure you have locations mentioned (in text or as image names) when you promote specific programs on your front page.

Don't Let Enthusiastic Branding Get in the Way of Common Sense

As companies, like banks and software companies move from names (Hewlett-Packard) to acronyms (HP), so will many libraries.   This is all great and fine, but you want to be sure that your brand does not get in the way of your SEO strategy.    Take the Acronym for Halifax Public Libraries, for instance:  HPL.   "HPL" can refer to any of the following:

• Hamilton Public Library
• Halifax Public Libraries
• Human Performance Lab (at York University)
• Human Performance Lab (at Calgary University)
• Human Placental Lactogen
• Huntsville Public Library
• High Performance Linpack
• Hewlett-Packard Labs

If you are 'the' HPL (in my case, Hamilton Public Library) then all is fine and dandy.   However, if you are HPL number 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 -- then there is some trouble.      Also, are you sure that it is an acronym that people will type into Google or another search engine when they are searching for you?

Solution:

• Make sure all images and acronyms have a plain-english explanation for who you are as well.  For one, the title should include the full title of your organization.
• As a general rule, favor plain language over jargon on your website.   "FindIt" might be great for print promotion on your catalogue, but "search" is what most people look for online.
• For your URL, consider including the word "library" somewhere.   This is especially true if your library's acronym could be confused with those belonging to other organizations.  Remember that the word "library" is the best brand that we have.

Consider Your Users' Needs, and then Make Pages that Respond to Those Needs.

It shocks me how many libraries have websites that do not include the words "reading" "books" "computers" or "wireless" somewhere on their pages.    We want people to think about the library when they are searching for books, along with all those publishers, used book stores and etc.

When someone is looking for wireless connections in your town, does a search for "wireless [your town]" have your organization up and front?    Why not?

Solution:

• Build your website according to user needs, using simple language.   You want the keywords that people will use to appear on your website.
• Assuming that you have the following services, you should include the following terms somewhere on your site:
  • Wireless (wifi)
  • Computers (and computer lessons)
  • Events & programs
  • Books, Bookclubs, DVDs, Authors
  • Reading, Read, Readers
  • Kids, Parents, Teens, Seniors

Don't Buy into the "Front Page is Everything" Philosophy

Whenever you start a website project, the first thing almost everyone is going to tell you is that their particular interest/service/whatever needs "a big button saying "[insert service here]" on the home page".    While it's true that being on the front page will draw more traffic to that page, it does not follow that you will have more visitors to your site.   It is much, much better to have a logical pathway to each service, with clear labels and a simple interface.

From an SEO standpoint, this also matters.    If someone is looking for something specific (eg. How to sign up for an Literacy program), they are going to want to hit the "sign up for Literacy" page on your website when they search, not the home page.

Solution:

• People will click a few times to get where they want to go.    While you do not want people to get lost, you also do not want to schmush your front page with content simply to give exposure to pet projects.
• Consider other marketing techniques to draw attention to smaller projects.  For example, you could try viral marketing instead.
• Spend more time developing useful content that will get people clicking on your website after a search, rather than worrying about from-the-front-page navigation.
• Make sure that you have search engine-friendly Urls turned on if you are using a content management system like Wordpress, Joomla, or Drupal.

These are a few tips I have.   There are many more, of course -- maybe you want to share some?    In the end, libraries spend much too much time worrying about the design of their webpage without considering other pathways that customers will take -- including search and external links (which I have not covered here).

When Apple’s iPhone hit the streets last year, it introduced so-called multi-touch screens to the general public. Images on the screen can be moved around with a fingertip and made bigger or smaller by placing two fingertips on the image’s edges and then either spreading those fingers apart or bringing them closer together. The tactile pleasure the interface provides beyond its utility quickly brought it accolades. The operations felt intuitive, even sensuous. But in laboratories around the world at the time of the iPhone’s launch, multi-touch screens had vastly outgrown two-finger commands. Engineers have developed much larger screens that respond to 10 fingers at once, even to multiple hands from multiple people.

It is easy to imagine how photographers, graphic designers or architects—professionals who must manipulate lots of visual material and who often work in teams—would welcome this multi-touch computing. Yet the technology is already being applied in more far-flung situations in which anyone without any training can reach out during a brainstorming session and move or mark up objects and plans.

Perceptive Pixels
Jeff Han, a consulting computer scientist at New York University and founder of Perceptive Pixel in New York City, is at the forefront of multi-touch technology. Walking into his company’s lobby, one is greeted by a three-by-eight-foot flat screen. Han steps up to the electronic wall and unleashes a world of images using nothing but the touch of his fingers. As many as 10 or more video feeds can run simultaneously, and there is no toolbar in sight. When Han wants the display to access different files he taps it twice, bringing up charts or menus that can also be tapped.

Several early adopters have purchased complete systems, including intelligence agencies that need to quickly compare geographically coordinated surveillance images in their war rooms. News anchors on CNN used a big Perceptive Pixel system during coverage of the presidential primaries that boldly displayed all 50 U.S. states; to depict voting results, the anchors, standing in front of the screen, dramatically zoomed in and out of states, even counties, simply by moving their fingers across the map. Looking ahead, Han expects the technology to find a home in graphically intense businesses such as energy trading and medical imaging.

Rudimentary work on multi-touch interfaces dates to the early 1980s, according to Bill Buxton, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. But around 2000, at N.Y.U., Han began a journey to overcome one of the technology’s toughest hurdles: achieving fine-resolution fingertip sensing. The solution required both hardware and software innovations.

Perhaps most fundamental was exploiting an optical effect known as frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR), which is also used in fingerprint-recognition equipment. Han, who describes himself as “a very tactile person,” became aware of the effect one day when he was looking through a full glass of water. He noticed how crisply his fingerprint on the outside of the glass appeared when viewed through the water at a steep angle. He imagined that an electronic system could optically track fingertips placed on the face of a clear computer monitor. Thus began his six-year absorption with multi-touch interfaces.

He first considered building a very high resolution version of the single-touch screens used in automated teller machines and kiosks, which typically sense the electrical capacitance of a finger touching predefined points on the screen. But tracking a randomly moving finger would have required an insane amount of wiring behind the screen, which also would have limited the screen’s functionality. Han ultimately devised a rectangular sheet of clear acrylic that acts like a waveguide, essentially a pipe for light waves. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) around the edges pump infrared light into the sheet. The light streams through, reflecting internally off the sheet walls, much as light flows though an optical fiber. No light leaks out. But when someone places a finger on one face of the sheet, some of the internally reflecting light beams hit it and scatter off, bouncing through the sheet and out the opposite face. Cameras behind the screen sense this leaking light, or FTIR, revealing the location being touched. The cameras can track this leakage from many points at once.

Han soon discovered that the acrylic panel could also serve as a diffusion screen; a projector behind the panel, linked to a computer, could beam images toward it, and they would diffuse through to the other side. The screen could therefore serve as both an output of imagery and an input of touches made on that imagery.

Sensing the exact location of fingers was one challenge. Devising software routines that could track the finger movements and convert them to instructions for what should be happening with images on the screen was tougher. The half a dozen software developers working with Han had to first write software that would function as a high-performance graphics engine, in part to give the display low latency, or ghosting, when fingers dragged objects quickly across the screen. Then they had to deal with the screen’s unorthodox FTIR light output from fingertips sweeping around in random directions.

Deep in the architecture of a computer’s operating system is an assumption that a user’s inputs will come either from a keyboard or a mouse. Keystrokes are unambiguous; a “q” means “q.” The movement of a mouse is expressed as Cartesian coordinates—x and y locations on a two-dimensional grid. Such methods for representing inputs belong to a general discipline known as the graphical user interface, or GUI. Han’s multi-touch screen generates 10 or more streams of x and y coordinates at the same time, and “the traditional GUIs are really not designed for that much simultaneity,” he notes. The current operating systems—Windows, Macintosh, Linux—are so predicated on the single mouse cursor that “we had to tear up a lot of plumbing to make a new multi-touch graphical framework,” Han says.

During all this work, Han found that pressure sensing could be accomplished, too, by applying to the front of the acrylic screen a thin layer of polymer with microscopic ridges engineered into its surface. When a user presses harder or more softly on any spot on the polymer, it flexes slightly, and the fingerprint area becomes larger or smaller, causing the scattered light to become brighter or darker, which the camera can sense. By maintaining firm pressure on an object on the screen, a user can slide it behind an adjacent object.

Han’s Perceptive Pixel team, formed in 2006, put all the elements together and demonstrated the system at the TED (for technology, entertainment and design) conference that year to an enthusiastic audience. Since then, orders for the system have steadily increased. Perceptive Pixel is not disclosing prices.

Microsoft Scratches the Surface
While Han was perfecting his setup, engineers elsewhere were pursuing similar goals by different means. Software giant Microsoft is now rolling out a smaller multi-touch computer called Surface and is trying to brand this category of hardware as “surface computers.” The initiative dates back to 2001, when Stevie Bathiche of Microsoft Hardware and Andy Wilson of Microsoft Research began developing an interactive tabletop that could recognize certain physical objects placed on it. The two innovators envisioned that the tabletop could function as an electronic pinball machine, a video puzzle or a photo browser.

More than 85 prototypes later, the pair ended up with a table that has a clear acrylic top and houses a projector on the floor below. The projector sends imagery up onto the horizontal, 30-inch screen. An infrared LED shines light up to the tabletop as well, which bounces off fingertips or objects on the other side, thus allowing the device to recognize commands from people’s fingers. A Windows Vista computer provides the processing.

Microsoft is shipping Surface table computers to four partners in the leisure, retail and entertainment industries, which it believes are most likely to apply the technology. Starwood Hotels’ Sheraton chain, for example, will try installing surface computers in hotel lobbies that will let guests browse and listen to music, send home digital photographs, or order food and drinks. Customers in T-Mobile USA’s retail stores will be able to compare different cell phone models by simply placing them atop a surface screen; black-dotted “domino” tags on the undersides of the phones will cue the system to display price, feature and phone plan details. Other Microsoft software will allow a wireless-enabled digital camera, when placed on a surface computer, to upload its photographic content to the computer without a cable.

First-generation surface systems are priced from $5,000 to $10,000. As with most electronic items, the company expects the price to decline as production volume increases. Microsoft says Surface computers should be available at consumer prices in three to five years.

Mitsubishi Wired In, Too
Technology developers might be interested in the DiamondTouch table from a start-up company called Circle Twelve in Framingham, Mass., that was recently spun off from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. The table, developed at Mitsubishi, is configured so that outside parties can write software for applications they envision; several dozen tables are already in the hands of academic researchers and commercial customers.

The purpose of DiamondTouch “is to support small-group collaboration,” says Adam Bogue, Mitsubishi’s vice president of marketing. “Multiple people can interact, and the system knows who’s who.” Several people sit in chairs that are positioned around the table and are linked to a computer below. When one of them touches the tabletop, an array of antennas embedded in the screen sends an extremely small amount of radio-frequency energy through the person’s body and chair to a receiver in the computer, a scheme known as capacitive coupling. Alternatively, a special floor mat can be used to complete the circuit. The antennas that are coupled indicate the spot on the screen that the person is touching.

Though seemingly restrictive, this setup can keep track of who makes what inputs, and it can give control to whoever touches the screen first. In that case it will ignore other touches, sensed through the assigned seating, until the first user has completed his or her inputs. The system can also track who makes which annotations to images, such as blueprints.

Parsons Brinckerhoff, a global engineering firm headquartered in New York City, has been experimenting with the tables and plans to acquire more. “We have thousands of meetings during the course of a big project,” says Timothy Case, the company’s visualization department regional manager. “We could have multiple tables in multiple locations, and everybody can be looking at the same thing.”

Both the DiamondTouch and Perceptive Pixel systems feature keyboard “emulators” that shine a virtual keyboard onto the screen so that people can type. But it seems unlikely that enthusiasts would prefer to use the dynamic systems for this mundane activity. The great strength of multi-touch is letting multiple people work together on a complex activity. It is hard to remember how liberating the mouse seemed when it freed people from keyboard arrow keys some 25 years ago. Soon the multi-touch interface could help untether us from the ubiquitous mouse. “It’s very rare that you come upon a really new user interface,” Han says. “We’re just at the beginning of this whole thing.”

gyandotcom

The report was given on this link:- check it out http://www.pearyhenson.org/dougdavie...ionreport2.htm

[Q.What is Photogrammetry?

Answer.Photogrammetry is the technique of measuring objects (2D or 3D) from photo-grammes. We say commonly photographs, but it may be also imagery stored electronically on tape or disk taken by video or CCD cameras or radiation sensors such as scanners.
The results can be:

• coordinates of the required object-points
• topographical and thematical maps
• and rectified photographs (orthophoto).

Its most important feature is the fact, that the objects are measured without being touched. Therefore, the term „remote sensing“ is used by some authors instead of „photogrammetry“. „Remote sensing“ is a rather young term, which was originally confined to working with aerial photographs and satellite images. Today, it includes also photogrammetry, although it is still associated rather with „image interpretation“.
Principally, photogrammetry can be divided into:

1. Depending on the lense-setting:
   • Far range photogrammetry (with camera distance setting to indefinite), and
   • Close range photogrammetry (with camera distance settings to finite values).
2. Another grouping can be
   • Aerial photogrammetry (which is mostly far range photogrammetry), and
   • Terrestrial Photogrammetry (mostly close range photogrammetry).

The applications of photogrammetry are widely spread. Principally, it is utilized for object interpretation (What is it? Type? Quality? Quantity) and object measurement (Where is it? Form? Size?).
Aerial photogrammetry is mainly used to produce topographical or thematical maps and digital terrain models. Among the users of close-range photogrammetry are architects and civil engineers (to supervise buildings, document their current state, deformations or damages), archaeologists, surgeons (plastic surgery) or police departments (documentation of traffic accidents and crime scenes) ]

Continue from the above article:-

 Some of the parameters required to do this are:

* A photograph showing an object with more than one shadow
* The known (or assumed) time of year and time of day when the photograph was taken
* The focal point of the camera lens
* Probably a few other parameters (but I'm not a mathematician - read the NG article for more info)

By using photogrammetric rectification and having all of these parameters available, it was demonstrated that Peary really was close to the North Pole. The technique can only determine latitude and not longitude. So what if we use the exact same technique and determine at what lunar latitude the astronauts were on when they landed and the photographs were taken. If they really were on the moon when they said they were, we would have the following information:

* the exact latitude where they were relative to the moon's north pole
* the position of the sun at the time
* the time of year and time of day
* the focal point of the camera is known
* plenty of photos with shadows

By applying photogrammetric rectification, you can verify whether the astronauts really were on the correct latitude (where the Sea of Tranquility is located) or any of the other locations they said they were on subsequent landings. In fact, using photogrammetric rectification with a few other parameters that are also available, it is even possible to calculate the longitude.

I submit this challenge to the scientific community. I urge anyone who is capable of carrying out this challenge to do so as soon as possible. If the results indicate that the moon landing was a hoax, the three old astronauts (Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins) may still be alive to answer to these results.

For those of you with the ability and courage to carry this out and have your results published in a reputable scientific publication, we salute you as one of the greatest scientists/thinkers of our time. I say, Go For It!.

One of the main anomalies that leads me to believe that the Moon footage was taken on a film set is the fact that the same mountains appear on different Apollo missions which are supposed to be landed several hundreds of miles from each other. In the following sequences you will even see the camera pan across the landscape that at one point includes the Lunar Landing Module. In another shot from the same mission, we see the very same mountains, but no Lander? How can this be when the mountains appear to be exactly the same distance away from the camera?This film shows two different Apollo missions, which are supposed to be in different areas of the Moon, but show the exact same mountains in the background.   One For The Sceptics Over the past few months I have been having a debate with several members of the International Astronomical Society During my time debating , I was issued several challenges by sceptics who said that if I could show 'official NASA footage' showing certain anomalies, then that evidence MAY make them think that something is definitely amiss with the NASA Apollo footage. Needless to say that, as at the time of writing, none of them have come forward and changed their stance.

1. Produce pictures showing stars that are taken on the Moons surface. They say because of the very bright conditions on the Moon, stars would not be visible from its surface!

2. Show an example of Movie footage that was taken aboard the Lunar Rover whilst it is in motion. (I asked the society how could the satellite dish at the front of the rover relay the video signal to a satellite or Houston if it was moving all over the place?). I was even told that this footage does not exist?... see below

3. If I could provide film footage of the LEM producing a flame on the Moons surface (This would prove that the movie was not taken on the Moon because the Moons atmosphere and vacuum would prevent such a flame).

That was the  challenge... and here is the evidence...

One of the biggest debates between hoax theorists and sceptics concerns the nonappearance of stars from the surface of the Moon. If the objects in the sky that appear in the film to the left from the Apollo 15 Mission are not stars what are they? We can rule out marks on the lens of the camera or in the film, because these objects appear on various parts of each shot and not just in one place. The sceptics reading this article could perhaps explain why the movie to the right shows light suddenly increase when Armstrong is at the bottom of the lander before his first descent from the Lunar Lander? It certainly is not due to the light aperture being changed on the camera because only the light behind the lander alters and not the actual lander shadow. Its amazing how Armstrong, who at first is in complete darkness on the ladder, suddenly gets lit up when he is halfway down the ladder... Lets remember that there are no clouds on the Moon to obscure the Suns light! The cameraman doesn't move position by the way...  Early in the footage you'll notice that the LEM managed to park itself in a bright  light... how fortunate! That will take some explaining if artificial lighting wasn't used!

Still Not Convinced?...
Here's 32 things that need to be answered!

1)  Sceptics say there are no stars in the black sky, despite zero atmosphere to obscure the view.  The first man in Space, Yuri Gagarin, pronounced the stars to be "astonishingly brilliant". See the official NASA pictures above that  I have reproduced that show 'stars' in the sky, as viewed from the lunar surface.

2) The pure oxygen atmosphere in the module would have melted the Hasselblad's camera covering and produced poisonous gases. Why weren't the astronauts affected? 

3)  There should have been a substantial crater blasted out under the LEM's 10,000 pound thrust rocket.  Sceptics would have you believe that the engines only had the power to blow the dust from underneath the LEM as it landed. If this is true, how did Armstrong create that famous boot print if all the dust had been blown away?

4)  When the LEMs were supposedly leaving the Moon, they should have produced a large bright exhaust flame from the rocket propellant.  Instead, zero exhaust. (I have turned this one around and have found evidence of a flame on one ascent of the LEM... just to prove the sceptics wrong!)

5)  Footprints are the result of weight displacing air or moisture from between particles of dirt, dust, or sand.  The astronauts left distinct footprints all over the place.

6)  The Apollo 11 TV pictures were lousy, yet the broadcast quality magically became fine on the five subsequent missions.

7)  In most Apollo photos, there is a clear line of definition between the rough foreground and the smooth background.

8) Why did so many NASA Moonscape photos have non parallel shadows? sceptics will tell you because there is two sources of light on the Moon - the Sun and the Earth... That maybe the case, but the shadows would still fall in the same direction, not two or three different angles.

9) Why did one of the stage prop rocks have a capital "C" on it and a 'C' on the ground in front of it?

10)  How did the fibreglass whip antenna on the Gemini 6A capsule survive the tremendous heat of atmospheric re-entry?

11)  In Ron Howard's 1995 science fiction movie, Apollo 13, the astronauts lose electrical power and begin worrying about freezing to death.  In reality, of course, the relentless bombardment of the Sun's rays would
rapidly have overheated the vehicle to lethal temperatures with no atmosphere into which to dump the heat build up.

12) Who would dare risk using the LEM on the Moon when it was never, ever tested successfully? Would you send a relative to the Moon in a vehicle that had never been driven before?

13)  Instead of being able to jump at least ten feet high in "one sixth" gravity, the highest jump was about nineteen inches.

14)  Even though slow motion photography was able to give a fairly convincing appearance of very low
gravity, it could not disguise the fact that the astronauts traveled no further between steps than they would have on Earth.

15)  If the Rover buggy had actually been moving in one-sixth gravity, then it would have required a twenty foot width in order not to have flipped over on nearly every turn.  The Rover had the same width as ordinary small cars.

16) An astrophysicist who has worked for NASA writes that it takes two meters of shielding to protect against medium solar flares and that heavy ones give out tens of thousands of rem in a few hours.  Why didn't
the astronauts on Apollo 14 and 16 die after exposure to this immense amount of radiation?

17)  The fabric space suits had a crotch to shoulder zipper.  There should have been fast leakage of
air since even a pinhole deflates a tire in short order.

18)  The astronauts in these "pressurized" suits were easily able to bend their fingers, wrists, elbows, and knees at 5.2 p.s.i. and yet a boxer's 4 p.s.i. speed bag is virtually unbendable.  The guys would have looked
like balloon men if the suits had actually been pressurized.

19) How did the astronauts leave the LEM? in the documentary 'PaperMoon' The host measures a replica of the LEM at The Space Centre in Houston, what he finds is that the 'official' measurements released by NASA are bogus and that the astronauts could not have got out of the LEM...

20)  The  water sourced air conditioner backpacks should have produced frequent explosive vapor discharges.  They never did.

21)  During the Apollo 14 flag setup ceremony, the flag would not stop fluttering.

22)  With a more than two second signal transmission round trip, how did a camera pan upward to track the departure of the Apollo 16 LEM?

23) Why did NASA's administrator resigned just days before the first Apollo mission?

24) Another overlooked intriguing fact is that NASA launched the TETR-A satellite just months before the first lunar mission. The proclaimed purpose was to simulate transmissions coming from the moon so that the Houston ground crews (all those employees sitting behind computer screens at Mission Control) could "rehearse" the first moon landing. In other words, though NASA claimed that the satellite crashed shortly before the first lunar mission (a misinformation lie), its real purpose was to relay voice, fuel consumption, altitude, and telemetry data as if the transmissions were coming from an Apollo spacecraft as it neared the moon. Very few NASA employees knew the truth because they believed that the computer and television data they were receiving was the genuine article. Merely a hundred or so knew what was really going on; not tens of thousands as it might first appear.

25) In 1998, the Space Shuttle flew to one of its highest altitudes ever, three hundred and fifty miles, hundreds of miles below merely the beginning of the Van Allen Radiation Belts. Inside of their shielding, superior to that which the Apollo astronauts possessed, the shuttle astronauts reported being able to "see" the radiation with their eyes closed penetrating their shielding as well as the retinas of their closed eyes. For a dental x-ray on Earth which lasts 1/100th of a second we wear a 1/4 inch lead vest. Imagine what it would be like to endure several hours of radiation that you can see with your eyes closed from hundreds of miles away with 1/8 of an inch of aluminium shielding!

26) The Apollo 1 fire of January 27, 1967, killed what would have been the first crew to walk on the Moon just days after the commander, Gus Grissom, held an unapproved press conference complaining that they were at least ten years, not two, from reaching the Moon. The dead man's own son, who is a seasoned pilot himself, has in his possession forensic evidence personally retrieved from the charred spacecraft (that the government has tried to destroy on two or more occasions).

27) CNN issued the following report, "The radiation belts surrounding Earth may be more dangerous for astronauts than previously believed (like when they supposedly went through them thirty years ago to reach the Moon.) The phenomenon known as the 'Van Allen Belts' can spawn (newly discovered) 'Killer Electrons' that can dramatically affect the astronauts' health."

28) In 1969 computer chips had not been invented. The maximum computer memory was 256k, and this was housed in a large air conditioned building. In 2002 a top of the range computer requires at least 64 Mb of memory to run a simulated Moon landing, and that does not include the memory required to take off again once landed. The alleged computer on board Apollo 11 had 32k of memory. That's the equivalent of a simple calculator.

29) If debris from the Apollo missions was left on the Moon, then it would be visible today through a powerful telescope, however no such debris can be seen. The Clementine probe that recently maps the Moons surface failed to show any Apollo artefacts left by Man during the missions. Where did the Moon Buggy and base of the LEM go?

 30) In the year 2002 NASA does not have the technology to land any man, or woman on the Moon, and return them safely to Earth.

31) Film evidence has recently been uncovered of a mislabeled, unedited, behind-the-scenes video film, dated by NASA three days after they left for the moon. It shows the crew of Apollo 11 staging part of their photography. The film evidence is shown in the video "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon!".

32) Why did ALL of the blueprints and plans for the Lunar Module and Moon Buggy get destroyed if this was one of History's greatest accomplishments?

Lets compare the Apollo cover-up with the USSR launch of the dog called Laika into space. She was launched into Space to see what the effects of Space travel would have on a live creature.
It was publicly announced that Laika died painlessly when her oxygen supply ran out, but the truth was finally revealed many years later that the dog had in fact died when the front nose cone of the craft carrying her had been ripped off after reaching Earth's orbit and that the dog probably died from the intense heat of the Sun.  

Further investigations revealed that the nose cone had actually been designed to do this. So, in fact, the makers of the rocket had known that the dog would die even before she was sent into space... this evidence took 30 years to be revealed to the general public.

Thousands of people were employed to work on the Apollo mission, but very few people had access to the complete picture. By giving several people a small role in the missions meant that they would not see the whole project.

Some of the Eleven Apollo astronauts had non space related fatal accidents within a twenty two month period of one another, the odds of this happening are 1 in 10,000...coincidence?

• James B. Irwin (Apollo 15) resigned from NASA and the Air Force on July 1, 1972.

• Don F. Eisele (Apollo 7) resigned from NASA and from the Air Force in June 1972.

• Stewart Allen Roosa (Apollo 14) resigned from NASA and retired from the Air Force in February 1976.

• Swigert resigned from NASA in 1977

Why did they all resign from the 'successful' Apollo Program?

HOW DID MAN MANAGE TO COLLECT THE ROCK
750 lbs or so were said to be collected on the Apollo missions. This maybe so, but according to official NASA records, only a couple of pounds were actually collected by the astronauts. It would not be impossible to irradiate a rock or put it in a vacuum to get the same results.

 WHY HASN'T ANYBODY SPOKEN OUT ABOUT THE COVER-UP? 

They have. Bill Kaysing got in touch with his friend, a private investigator from San Francisco called Paul Jacobs, and asked him to help him with his Apollo anomalies investigations. Mr. Jacobs agreed to go and see the head of the US Department of Geology in Washington, as he was traveling there the following week after his discussion with Mr. Keysing. He asked the geologist, 'Did you examine the Moon rocks, did they really come from the Moon.?' The geologist just laughed. Paul flew back from Washington and told Keysing that the people in high office of the American Government knew of the cover-up. Paul Jacobs and his wife died from cancer within 90 days!

Lee Gelvani another friend of Kaysing, says he almost convinced informant James Irwin to confess about the cover-up. Irwin was going to ring Kaysing about it, however he died of a heart attack within 3 days. Is this evidence that a cover-up is in existence?

WHY WOULD NASA FAKE THE APOLO MISSION?
I think the main reason why the US Government and NASA faked the 'official record' is because they could not be seen to be the weak link, especially when you consider that during the 60's, the USA were at the height of the Cold War with Russia. Also their own President had forecast that before the end of the 60's Man would be on the Moon. It would be better to try and fool the public and hoax the footage, rather than let their biggest rival in the World strike a huge moral victory by beating them to the Moon.

If man really went to the Moon, why did NASA drop the successful Saturn 5 launch rocket after the last Apollo mission? The shuttle weighs 3/4 heavier than the Saturn 5 Rocket,  puts only 1/6th of cargo weight into orbit and costs 3 times as much to launch. Why scrap a rocket that can outperform its newer model? The Shuttle was first flown 2 years behind schedule.

DID YOU KNOW?
NASA could have easily launched the Shuttle on top of the second stage of the Saturn 5 rocket? The first stage would have dropped into the Ocean and the second stage and the fully loaded shuttle orbiter would have travelled into low Earth orbit. The second stages could have then been left in orbit and assembled to make the Space Station, which would have been well on its way to completion by the time the Shuttle was first launched in 1981. They could have had the first launch of the shuttle a whole 5 years before it was finally launched and saved the American taxpayer 20 billion dollars.

Why didn't Russia even bother to land a cosmonaut on the Moon after the Americans beat them to it??? Many people would say that its because it was too late, but if you want to look at it like that, why didn't this apply to NASA when the Russians beat America in putting the first satellite, animal, man, woman and space station into orbit? Russia would not have thrown in the towel just because America had beaten them at one single thing in Space!

Not one thing that appears on the surface of the Moon had to be placed by Man.  Be it mirrors to reflect lasers from here on Earth to calculate distances or seismology equipment. All could have been placed there by robotic machines. It wouldn't necessarily need a human to place them there.

Graham Birdsall (Editor of UFO Magazine UK) has commented that during the very first Pacific UFO Conference in Hawaii in September 1999, Astronaut Brian O'Leary who worked alongside the likes of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Apollo 11 mission during 1967-68, commented ' If some of the films were spoiled, it is remotely possible that they (NASA) may have shot some scenes in a studio environment, to avoid embarrassment!'

During Project Apollo, six highly complex manned craft landed on the Moon, took off and returned to Earth using a relatively low level of technology. An 86% success rate. Since Apollo, twenty five simple, unmanned craft with increasingly higher levels of technology have attempted to fulfil their missions to Mars. Only seven succeeded.wATCH THIS GREAT PIECE OF FOOTAGE.THE ASTRANAUT HAS A VERY HARD TIME TRYING TO KEEP THE FLAG STILL AS IT BLOWS IN THE WIND
 

If Man were so successful at landing on the Moon over 30 years ago, why haven't we been back? In The Ride report, a report headed by Sally Ride, a former astronaut herself, an estimation was made on how long it would take to make a similar trip to the Moon today. If NASA were fully funded in 1987, they estimated that they could land men on the Moon by 2010, that's 23 years...

Since it only took 8 years from President Kennedy's announcement till the first mission, why would it take 23 years to send man back to the Moon for the 7th time?

In 1999 this estimate changed. Douglas Cook, Director of the Exploration Office at Houston's Johnson Space Centre calculated that Man could go back to the Moon within 100 years....  I'm not holding my breath!!!

Cosmic Conspiracies were recently approached by Jim Oberg, NASA consultant, who was interested in a piece of footage that appeared on this page which showed the Surveyor III probe on the Moons surface, filmed by the astronauts aboard Apollo 12 as it descended onto the lunar surface. Mr. Oberg is writing a book (originally funded by NASA) about the whole 'Moon Hoax' subject, in a bid to put a lot of the speculation to rest. Mr. Oberg believed that the film we had (taken from 'What Happened On The Moon') was bogus and not original NASA footage, however David Percy and Mary Bennett believe otherwise !!!

Rohit Sharma for Gyandotcom

TALKS and the web browser

As a web page is opened, TALKS announces this by reading the number of HTML elements which can be found there. Users can then move back and forth among HTML elements. For instance, sequential presses of "4" move users forward to headings. To move backwards, users should press "Star" (*). "#" (Number) is also used to help users quickly move to next instances of the same element. As such, the "*" key and the "#" key are used to define the forward/backward movement of users among different HTML elements. TALKS users can move to links, headings, frames, lists, tables, form elements, and so forth this way. This also applies to finding text on a page; that is, once you pres "Call", type a word/phrase and press "Key one", you can press "Star" and "Number" to move to prior/next instances of it.

One unique feature of TALKS is that it can help users move to list items or table rows by pressing "1" – this is missing in Mobile Speak. More important, however, is its ability to directly jump back and forth among HTML elements without having to define the "jump mode" first – see below.

Mobile Speak and the web browser

Mobile Speak also allows users to jump to different HTML elements, but you should first define your "jump mode" before attempting to jump, so to speak. The default jump mode is "jump by links", meaning when a page loads, you can press "joystick left" and "joystick right" to move among previous/next links. To move among headings, for instance, you should first press "4" twice to alter the jump mode to "headings". Afterwards, each press of Left/Right moves you to previous/next headings. To move among links, again you should press "5" to alter the jump mode to "links" before pressing Left/Right. In my opinion, this additional step makes using the web browser a bit difficult and time-consuming in spite of the fact that Mobile Speak has made the "jump mode" quite feature-rich by toggling among the so-called similar elements when a key is pressed. As a case in point, pressing "5" toggles the jump mode to the following elements:

• Links,
• Non-links,
• In-page links.

Mobile Speak has a "move" feature which helps users move forward and backward on the page by a fixed percentage of the page size. To use it, you should first press "6" to define the percentage element. The available elements are 2 percent, 5 percent and 10 percent. Once the percentage is defined, Left/Right joystick moves the virtual cursor back and forth on the page.

Common features and a dissimilar implementation

When a page is being loaded, TALKS can announce the amount of the loaded page if "TALKS key+long 2" is pressed. This forces TALKS to say something like: "X KB" where "X" represents a number. Mobile Speak does the same thing if "Joystick Up" is pressed. It says something like "X of Y KB", which is a more thorough message compared with that of TALKS.

I can't use Mobile Speak to activate "in-page" or "same-page" links whereas TALKS does an excellent job of activating them. When I press "Select" on a "same-page" link with Mobile Speak, nothing happens. To see it in action, visit the Freedom Scientific home page. What's more, TALKS annoyingly treats links and buttons as if they were just one HTML element; that is, pressing "5" moves you to next/prior links and buttons. Mobile Speak does a better job by treating buttons as belonging to the "forms" family. With Mobile Speak, pressing "5" alters the "jump mode" to "links" and pressing "3" alters it to "Forms", "Editors", "Buttons", "Check box and radio button", and "combo box and list box", respectively.

Last but not least, both screen readers provide a "read-to-end" feature on the web. With TALKS, you should press "TALKS+Down" to activate it, and with "Mobile Speak the key is "9". On my N82, Mobile Speak inserts relatively long pauses after each sentence whereas TALKS reads sentences quite smoothly. For your information, I use TALKS with Eloquence and Mobile Speak with DECtalk.

Which one is better then?

I can't give you a precise answer other than mentioning the fact that I like TALKS direct jump-to-element feature as opposed to Mobile Speak's so-called indirect jump-to-element. Also, TALKS provides context-sensitive keyboard help on the web via the training mode: "TALKS+0". If you want to purchase a Symbian screen reader, don't forget to give them a try first.

• Findability
• Accessibility
• Usability
• Convertability
• Measurability

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