This week theme for Sharing Sundays is CHOCOLATE!  This one I'm excited about.  I love, love, love chocolate and can't wait to see all the creative recipes out there using my favorite ingredient. Please post as many chocolate recipes as you would like.

Our Rules:
1.  Please share a link back to your actual recipe post, not to your main blog page.
2.  Please link back to our blog so others can join in the fun.
3.  Leave us a comment about what recipe you are linking up.
4. Have fun!

Now for the Featured Chicken Recipes from last week!  The following recipes got the most page views this past week!  Thank you to everyone for linking up Everyday Sisters Sharing Sundays.  We really love this addition to our weekly blog posts.  It's been so much fun getting to know you all better!

Oriental Chicken Salad by  Cook Lisa Cook

Spicy Ginger Peach Chicken by The Hungry Homebody

Underground Chicken by The Kitchen Cookie

Sesame Chicken by Cooking with K

Now let's see all those yummy, ooey, gooey chocolate recipes!!!
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عُني بتنسيقه
مثنى النعيمي
( أسكنه الله ووالديه الفردوس )


صيغة الملف : PDF
عدد المجلدات : 3
حجم الملف :17 MB

رابط الحفظ

من هنا

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عُني بتنسيقه
مثنى النعيمي
( أسكنه الله ووالديه الفردوس )


حجم الملف : 28 MB
صيغة الملف : PDF
عدد الملفات : 1


رابط الحفظ


من هنا

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by Salman Hameed

For a lighter Saturday, here is a hilarious bit (about 5 min) from Maz Jobrani on the difference between Persians and Arabs (tip from Leyla Keough). This is from his Axis of Evil tour from a few years ago:



And here is a TED talk by Maz Jobrani from 2010:

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This is a family staple BBQ side dish recipe.  You can serve it warm, room temp. or cold which makes it theperfect side dish for an outside event.  Super easy to make too, just mix everything together in one bowl!

Ingredients:

12 pieces white bread (cut up/no crust)
2 large cans of crushed pineapple
1 cup sugar
2 sticks margarine (melted)
8 eggs
cinnamon (to taste)

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Spray 13x9 casserole dish with non-stick cooking spray.  In a large bowl beat eggs, add sugar and mix to combine.  Mix in melted margarine and pineapple.  Fold in cut up bread pieces.  Pour pinapple bread pudding into greased baking dish and sprinkle the top with cinnamon.  Bake for 1 hour.

*If you don't like pineapple you can use mixed frozen berries

Linked to Sweets for Saturday

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The Golden Rule is simple... Take a picture of an area or specific work station in your classroom and place it in a golden frame. Teach your class to follow "The Golden Rule" by putting things back just as the picture shows. I have snuck my first "Golden Rule" in my kitchen. I wonder if my family will notice?

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Available here at TpT and YES the tricky triangle is there and better than ever! If you lost your tricky triangle, you will be contacted with special instructions to wrangle your triangle!

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حجم الملف : 4 MB

صيغة الملف : PDF


رابط الحفظ


من هنا

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Click on image for larger print!

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Isn't the power of blogging amazing? I am writing this post so I can link up to other teachers who will be using the Daily 5 in my classroom this year. I really am so interested in what other people are doing with Daily 5 that I can't wait for this to begin.

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Pada postingan yang lalu, saya telah menulis artikel tentang Cara Membuka Situs yang Diblokir Firefox. Pada postingan saya kali ini saya akan membahas tentang bagaimana cara membuka situs yang diblokir operator dan pemerintah. Wah ngeri baget, ada embel-embel pemerintah...hehehe...Tapi gak ada hubungannya sama politik koq. Artikel ini hanya untuk kepentingan 'share' semata.
Pengalaman ini saya
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by Salman Hameed

There is a thoughtful oped in today's NYT that talks about adjustment issues of Muslims in Europe - in particular in UK and Germany. It criticizes the already-maligned multiculturalism approach that had been adopted by both of the countries, but then it also presents a thoughtful analysis of why so many Muslims feel alienated there. This is of interest to me because we are looking at attitudes to evolution amongst Pakistani physicians in UK and Turkish doctors in Germany - and we suspect that for some a rejection of biological evolution may have become entangled with their identity of being a Muslim.

This article makes an interesting point about the appropriation (with ample help from the British government) of the "Muslim position" by some of the more extreme groups in UK:

Thirty years ago, Britain was a very different place than it is now. Racism was vicious, visceral and often fatal. “Paki bashing,” the pastime of hunting down and beating up Britons with brown skin, became a national sport in certain circles. I remember organizing patrols on the streets of East London during the 1980s to protect South Asian families from rampaging racist thugs. Workplace discrimination was endemic and police brutality frighteningly common. Anger at such treatment came to an explosive climax in the riots that rocked London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol and other cities during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was in response to this rage that Britain’s multicultural policies emerged.

The British government developed a new political framework for engaging with minority groups. Britain was now in effect divided into a number of ethnic boxes — Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, African, Caribbean and so on. The claims of minorities upon society were defined less by the social and political needs of individuals than by the box to which they belonged. Political power and financial resources were distributed by ethnicity.

The new policy did not empower individuals; instead, it enhanced the authority of so-called community leaders, often the most conservative voices, who owed their positions and influence largely to their relationship with the state.

...

 Politicians effectively abandoned their responsibility to engage directly with minorities, subcontracting it out to often reactionary “leaders.”

If the prime minister wanted to get a message to the “Muslim community,” he called in the council or visited a mosque. Rather than appealing to Muslims as British citizens, politicians preferred to see them as people whose primary loyalty was to their faith and who could be politically engaged only by other Muslims. As a result religious — and Islamist — figures gained new legitimacy in their own neighborhoods and came to be seen by the wider society as the authentic voice of British Muslims.

But along with this, the moderate voices have gotten sidelined:

More progressive movements became sidelined. Today “radical” in an Islamic context means someone who is a religious fundamentalist. Thirty years ago it meant the opposite: a secularist who challenged both racism in the streets and the power of the mosques. Secularism was once strong within Muslim communities, but it has been squeezed out by the new relationship between the state and religious leaders.

Many second-generation British Muslims now find themselves detached from both the religious traditions of their parents, which they often reject, and the wider secular society that insists on viewing them simply as Muslims. A few are drawn inevitably to extremist Islamist groups where they discover a sense of identity and of belonging. It is this that has made them open to radicalization.

I think this makes overall sense. However, we have to realize that secularism lost its strength in the 1990s in several (most?) Muslim countries. This does not mean that the causality implied in the article is wrong,  but just to keep in mind this additional bit of complexity.

And as far as Germany is concerned, there experiment in multiculturalism failed for completely different reasons:

A similar process has taken place in Germany. Postwar immigrants, primarily from Turkey, came not as potential citizens, but as “gastarbeiter,” or guest workers, who were expected to eventually return to their native countries. Over time, immigrants became transformed from a temporary necessity to a permanent presence, partly because Germany continued relying on their labor, and partly because they — and especially their children — came to see Germany as home.

The German state, however, continued to view them as outsiders and to refuse them citizenship. Unlike the practices in Britain, France or the United States, German citizenship is based on blood, not soil: it is granted automatically only to children born of German parents. Germany has nearly four million people of Turkish origin today, many of them born there, but fewer than 25 percent have managed to become citizens. Instead, multiculturalism became the German answer to the “Turkish problem.”

In place of citizenship and a genuine status in society, the state “allowed” immigrants to keep their own culture, language and lifestyles. One consequence was the creation of parallel communities. Without any incentive to participate in the national community, many Turks became dangerously inward-looking. Today, almost a third of Turkish adults in Germany regularly attend mosque, a higher rate than elsewhere in Western Europe and higher than in many parts of Turkey. The increasing isolation of second-generation German Turks has made some more open to radical Islamism.

This is a tough issue. Unfortunately, France's assimilation policies are not helped much by its ban on burqas nor does Switzerland with its prohibition of minarets. I think the US has so far done relatively well in assimilating different cultures, including Muslims, but we are seeing increasing hostility to the building of mosques and Islamic centers in the States. If this stays as a political weapon for the Tea Party Republicans, we may see a deeper entrenchment of the Muslim community. But I don't see the problem getting as bad as UK or Germany for three reasons: 1) the ties to home countries are looser here than in UK and Germany, 2) Muslim immigrants to the US are close to the national average in socio-econmic factors, whereas they are lower than average in most of Europe, 3) perhaps, because of the first two factors, there might be a larger fraction (key word is "fraction) of progressive (plus politically and culturally astute) Muslims in the US than in UK or Germany.

In any case, read this excellent article here.
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عُني بتنسيقه

مثنى النعيمي

( أسكنه الله ووالديه الفردوس )


منهجنا في العمل
تم بحمد الله تعالى تحويل الملف الى صيغة PDF و توحيد الملفات بملف واحد تيسيراً على القارئ الكريم



حجم الملف :2 MB

صيغة الملف : PDF

رابط الحفظ

من هنا

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by Salman Hameed

If you are in London, you can check out the exhibit Arabick Roots at the Royal Society. It looks at various scientific links of European scholars with the various parts of the Muslim world at the time of the founding of the Royal Society in the 17th century. The exhibition runs until November. Here is a short blurb from Science about Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius and his request for the star maps of Ulugh Beg - a 15th century astronomer and a ruler from Samarkand:

When Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius began working on his 1687 map of the stars, he wrote to German theologian Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society in England. The request: to locate the 15th century star map of astronomer Ulugh Beg of Samarkand and translate it from Persian. The Royal Society fulfilled his request, and the map guided Hevelius's new observations. This frontispiece to Hevelius's map pays homage to Beg; as Hevelius presents the book to Urania, muse of astronomy, the top 10 astronomers of all time look on. Beg is third from left.

“He crossed many centuries with that image, putting many people shoulder to shoulder,” says astrophysicist Rim Turkmani, curator of Arabick Roots, which opened 9 June at the Royal Society in London. “It's a nice gesture from him to say thank you.” The exhibition's letters, manuscripts, diagrams, and instruments chronicling the flow of scientific knowledge from the Arab world to Europe in the 17th century will be on view until November.         

Here is the website for Arabick Roots. This scientific interaction should not really come as a surprise, and I had a post a few years ago about that: Science versus Humanities in the European Renaissance. 

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صيغة الملف :PDF

عُني بتنسيقه
مثنى النعيمي
( أسكنه الله ووالديه الفردوس )


حجم الملف :14 MB


رابط الحفظ



من هنا

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Available at TpT! My head is really still spinning with all the possibilities! Math will be so much fun this year!

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Seperti yang mungkin Anda ketahui, untuk dapat ter-ranking di halaman 1 Google kita memerlukan backlink ke website Anda, atau bahkan deep linking ke salah satu halaman di website Anda.
Backlink adalah link yang terpasang di WEBSITE LAIN, yang bila link itu di klik akan mengarah ke website Anda.

Berbicara tentang backlink, ada beberapa hal penting yang perlu kita perhatikan.
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Selamat malam... Sudah berhari-hari saya belum dapat ide apa pun untuk diposting. Mungkin terlalu kecewa dengan keberadaan Ymads kali yah? Hahahaha....
Saat ini saya sama sekali tidak mau membahas tentang Ymads, bikin sakit kepala, malu karena dah jadi publishernya, jadi dikira tukang bokis. Well, daripada ngomong yang gak penting, mendingan langsung aja kita bahas tentang inti dari SEO.

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I stumbled across a new blog called Kindertastic and let me tell you I fell in love with her idea of writing stickers for 1:1 writing conferences so much that I contacted her and asked if I could write about it on my blog and she said YES! As I was preparing the post, I went back to her blog and fell in LOVE with her freebie sight word journal. OM~gosh we literally are "kindred" spirits! But let me compose myself and get back to the brilliant idea of writing stickers. I have loved to write since I was a young child. I was an average writer grammatically speaking. Creativity has never really been my problem as a writer. As a child I somehow got the message that I was just not a good writer because I never made the best grades for my writing and I never really knew why. I would see those red pen writing codes for grammar mistakes and it only translated to me that I was not a good writer because if I was, I would have had the smiley face instead of the dreaded symbols.

For most of my life, I hid my writing frustration deep within my own little vault. I never told anyone and I mean anyone that I thought of myself as a struggling writer and that I had literally grown up believing that. And all my life, I have kept journals to give myself the outlet, without judgement, that writing has given me. It wasn't until college that I feel like I was set free... I took a class called Gender and Humor. And we had to write about what we had read in class. You can imagine all of my writing fears came tumbling down on me because I had no choice but to write and I was now in college. Much to my surprise my first essay was returned and it did have the red marks and symbols I was so familiar with but it also had something else... First, it stated the positive aspects of my essay (the creative) and then it addressed the not so positive (the grammar) and then a writing conference was scheduled.  

I have to admit I was kind of excited to actually talk about my writing with a teacher. During this writing conference she told me HOW to improve my writing instead of just telling me what was wrong. We had writing conferences the entire semester and would you believe I grew as a writer for the first time in my life! I felt like I was set free and creatively I really was. Which brings me back to the Writing Sticker! I love the idea of this because it states the positive of a young child's writing AND it reinforces that that element will most likely reappear in future writing. And it gives you a positive start to a writing conference. And then during the conference, I am going to tell the child one thing to improve their writing before the conference is over. I also think the Writing Sticker is a wonderful addition to a child's written work when they share it at home. Parents can read the Writing Stickers and better understand what we are working on and see the writing progression.

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by Salman Hameed

I have to admit that living in Northampton/Amherst area, I have been stuck in numerous new-agey conversations at gatherings and at coffee shops. Alternative healing practices are certainly quite popular here - and one can get their chakras right at a number of local places. It is sad to say that I've had conversations here about energy healings, mind-shifts, quantum-related babble, and of course astrology and psychics. And this happens to be a college town! So yes, some of my conversations about these topics have indeed taken an awkward turn in the past. So here is a nice short film (about 10 minutes) that speaks for all us who have been stuck in such conversations (tip Zakir Thaver). It is a bit over the top - but then it does have a good excuse. And the music and the words make up for the rest.

 Enjoy!


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I am no longer writing a book. The Lean Startup Book is done. Finally, really, truly, done. On July 4, I celebrated Independence Day by making my very last revisions to the paper (!) page proofs, and mailing (!) them back to my publisher. (Yes, I also sent them a scanned PDF via Dropbox.) The finished book will come out on September 13, featuring an amazing cover designed by my IMVU co-founder Marcus Gosling and refined and tested by so many of you.

I am incredibly proud of the result. If you've been waiting for a comprehensive account of the Lean Startup and how it can help you achieve dramatically better business results, this is it.

The book contains tons of case studies. Some are from famous companies that you've heard of, like Dropbox or Groupon. Some are from obscure startups who you haven't heard of -- yet. And others are from unusual folks we don't normally think of as entrepreneurs, from corporate managers to government agencies.

But the book is much more than just stories. What I am most proud of is what I hope will be a significant contribution to our collective conversation about entrepreneurship.

What really constitutes product/market fit? I believe it is time to put that concept on a quantitative footing, so we can move past the unhelpful, "if you are asking, you don't have it." Can you tell the difference between being just on the cusp of greatness and being helplessly far away? I believe we can.

What is entrepreneurship, really? I believe entrepreneurship is the management discipline that deals with the domain of extreme uncertainty. Anyone who is trying to innovate without knowing what's going to happen is an entrepreneur, their venture is a startup. Most of our management tools, like planning and forecasting, require a long and stable operating history. Does anyone feel like our world is getting more and more stable every day?

How do you know when to pivot and when to persevere? Readers of this blog know that entrepreneurship is rife with failure, and a big part of the Lean Startup method is to pivot rather than stubbornly launch and hope for the best. But how do you know when to pivot? We all know companies that seemed to pull out a win just when all hope seemed lost. How do you know if that's you?

Here's the description you'll find on the book jacket itself:

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable.  The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively.  Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

I Need Your Help


If you've read this far, I'm guessing you're at least a little bit interested in the book. If so, I'd like to make one specific ask. Would you help me out by pre-ordering the book right now?

It's available for pre-order from many retailers, including Amazon.com, and you won't be charged until the book comes out September 13, 2011. So it's more like a reservation. The entire traditional publishing world is driven by pre-orders, so if you are willing to take a moment and pre-order, you'd really be helping me.

Let me explain why...

Why you should pre-order the Lean Startup Book

A few months ago in Austin during SXSW, Andres Glusman (of Meetup.com) arranged a very special meetup. We got together all of the Lean Startup meetup organizers that were in town for SXSW. It was an amazing experience. All of them are busy taking this idea and transforming it into a movement. They are experimenting and innovating and sharing their results. I felt privileged to be there.

One of the questions that kept coming up at that meetup -and at countless events since- was why I decided to go the traditional publishing route for my new book. It’s a fair question: the publishing industry is slow-moving, frustrating to navigate, and technologically backwards. They are remarkably un-lean in the way that they work. Most books are still published on a waterfall-style schedule, with massive amounts of work-in-progress inventory building up at each step. Customer data is rarely used to make decisions.

At the same time, self-publishing options are getting better every day. I already reach thousands of entrepreneurs through this blog, my Leanpub-powered ebooks, and even printed versions created via print-on-demand at Lulu. Not to mention the megaphone at my disposal through Twitter, conferences, etc. I think it is safe to say that if anyone out there is seeking out new ideas about entrepreneurship, they will eventually find their way here.

So why do it?

I spent over a year researching my publishing options, digging into the structure of the publishing industry, and really trying to understand what its strengths and weaknesses are. But what surprised me most about that search was that I learned as much about myself as I did about publishing. Media businesses are amplifiers – of people, of ideas, of (too often) total BS. The real question when engaging with them is – what do you want to amplify and why?

I’ve written and spoken often about my desire to see the Lean Startup movement change the world by stopping the obscene wastes of people’s time: from products that fail, from marketing initiatives that have no impact, from IT projects that are doomed from the start, and, of course, startups that are building something nobody wants. When I had to decide what to publish, I asked myself this question: who is causing most of that waste and how to we reach them? When you put it that way, I think the answer is pretty clear: there are countless managers, investors, and business owners out there, doing the best they can, using outdated and obsolete tools to try and create and launch new cool stuff.

Unfortunately, most of those people are not reading blogs about entrepreneurship. In fact, a large number of them do not even consider themselves entrepreneurs, or think that they have an entrepreneurship problem. I’ve written about this before, in the context of why it’s important to teach MBA’s about entrepreneurship. Consider the total amount of funding for doomed projects that comes from VC’s, large company M&A departments, government grants, and private equity firms. How much of that investment is squandered because the funder is relying on vanity metrics for evaluation?

I once received a phone call from a fund manager for one of the large university endowments. This is someone whose job is to invest large amounts of money with the most successful venture capital firms in the world. She wanted to get my perspective on the industry, technology trends, and – of course – she got an earful about the importance of Lean Startups. But after a few minutes she asked me a question that really stuck with me: “you know, our VC’s often show us how much progress they’re making by introducing us to the next hot company that they’ve invested in. Quite often, those companies look very promising, have lots of traction, and are poised for massive success.” (She didn’t need to explain – but I understood the subtext - that these conversations often happen right around the time the VC is raising their next fund.) She continued, “And yet, oftentimes these hot companies fizzle out unexpectedly, sometimes as soon as six months later. How can we tell the difference between the next big thing and the next big fizzle?”

This is the kind of person who badly needs a new paradigm for understanding entrepreneurship. She works every day financing the next generation of startups. And because she works with outdated tools, much of her money - not mention the time of thousands of people that money hires - is being wasted.

In the Lean Startup movement, we know how to fix these problems. We know how to shift attention from vanity metrics to actionable metrics, using “innovation accounting” to measure real progress. If you’re reading this blog, that means that you are a classic early adopter – and I thank you.

But the people we need to reach next are classic mainstream customers. They are not looking for new ideas about entrepreneurship, they are too busy trying to get their work done.

I believe this is the function of traditionally published books these days: to help bring new ideas to a mainstream audience, even when they aren’t looking for them.

So that’s why I decided to publish a traditional book this fall. And that’s also why I’ve been so focused on coming up with reasons why you should pre-order the book before then. You see, the thing about mainstream customers is that, most of the time, they only want to read books that everyone else is reading. That’s why bestseller lists (and app stores) are so effective. They set up an information cascade that helps mainstream customers decide what to buy.

Which brings me back to the meetup-of-meetup organizers. I felt a little sheepish telling them this same story. It's self-serving. Although I truly believe this book is about you and the work you are doing to change the world -- for better or worse -- it's my name on the cover. But at that meetup, the organizers only wanted to know: how can we help? who do we need to tell? how many copies do you need to sell? They are the ones who encouraged me to write this post, and speak directly about why this is important to me.

Of course, if you’ve ever tried to launch an app on a platform dominated by an app store, you’ll know how hard it is to break into the rankings, which drive a huge amount of the distribution. The same thing is true in publishing – the key to a successful book launch is to have the book debut as a bestseller. This signals to mainstream readers that the book is worth reading. So just like in the app store, a successful launch requires a strategy for “making the list.” (you can see my somewhat dated thoughts on app stores here)

And that’s where you come in. All mainstream books are officially released on a Tuesday. Why? Because the bestseller lists are calculated on a weekly basis, and they all run Tuesday-Tuesday (a few run on a monthly cycle, but with the same effect). Thus, to have your book debut as a bestseller requires that you sell more copies in that first week than the other existing bestsellers. Luckily, pre-orders (no matter how early) count as sales towards that first week's total.

So that is what I'm asking you to help make happen. We have a chance to take this set of ideas truly to the mainstream, to have them take us seriously in a way they never have before and - in the process - to redeem a lot of people's hard work, talent, and energy.

Amazon keeps a sales rank for the book, which has been bouncing around quite a bit. Right now, we're at just about #12,385 [not anymore, see update below]. Will you take a moment and help drive that number down? As always, your enthusiasm and support mean the world to me. Thank you.

(Oh, and I made this handy bit.ly link for easy clicking and sharing.)

http://bit.ly/LeanStartupBook

[Update 1:12 AM] I just got home from a night of celebration to find this incredible sight waiting for me:

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #7 in Books

Unbelievable - Amazon rank #7 in books overall, in just a few hours. Thank you all so much.

[Update 7:21 AM] #3 behind George R. R. Martin.

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التحميل
archive أو 4shared

بطاقة الكتاب:
العنوان: الأسطورة.

تأليف: د. عائض القرني.
دار النشر: دار المنهاج.
سنة الطبع: الطبعة الأولى (1432 هـ / 2011 م).
نوع التغليف: مجلد (849).
رقم الكتاب: (573).

من مرفوعات الأخ المساهم جزاه الله عن المسلمين كل خير

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Who in their right mind would not want to learn counting strategies with these little smile faces? I can't wait to put these magnetic smiles on my whiteboard and get ready to model some counting strategy fun! I guess I need to admit it, but Dollar Tree is kind of getting to me!

 
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by Salman Hameed

It was announced recently that Dr. Ataur Rahman has become the first Pakistani to have his genome mapped (tip from Zakir Thaver and Farid Alvie). Well - thats great. But then the news items regarding this were a bit odd and I was struck by interesting political and cultural undertones. Let me extract a few of these here. For example, there was an emphasis way up front about this being the first Muslim, and the first Muslim state to have done this mapping. Now technically, this is a bit more complicated as the mapping was done in Beijing (in collaboration with an institute in Karachi). Nevertheless, this is a nice reflection of Pakistan's identity issues: Pakistani first or a Muslim first? This is all the more interesting, as the genome story is framed around being a Pakistani.

When I read that Pakistan has become only the sixth nation to have the genome mapped for one of its citizens, I was pretty sure that India must have been one of the countries. Indeed, the list includes US, UK, China, Japan, India. This by in itself is not a bad thing. Heck - competition can lead to a lot of healthy developments - and having a mapped genome may not be a bad thing. However, sometimes it is just for the sake of competition and only for chest thumping. I remember that Pakistan got a research station in Antarctica in the early 1990s, pretty much because India had one there. I'm actually okay with this kind of research if is linked with the research infrastructure of the country. The same is true for genome mapping. I hope that the Pakistan-China genomic collaboration is more than Pakistan supplying a human specimen and China conducting the sequencing (after all, it did cost $40,000 - not a lot of money, but still not pennies either).

The other interesting point is the reporting of the meaning of a Pakistani genome? This, as one can imagine, cuts into political and cultural factors as well. For example, Dawn puts it like this:

The remarkable achievement of the first genome mapping of any Pakistani is just like opening the software or book of life of a nation.

And one of the Pakistani collaborators brings in the uniqueness of Pakistanis:

"The important work will pave the way for research on heredity diseases, evolution and the over all genetic make up of Pakistanis which now hold a unique genetic pattern as a nation."

Now of course, this is one individual, and his particular background plays a pivotal role in here. I can imagine many Pakistanis who may have no significant differences from individuals from India - and at the same having large difference with genome of some other Pakistanis. After all, 1947 (and also in the 50s and 60s) saw a large-scale exchange of population between the two countries, and we know of significant ethnic variations within Pakistan. The Express Tribune did take a whack at this topic:

Dr Rahman’s genome shows that Pakistanis are more similar to Europeans than Chinese and Africans, said Assistant Professor Dr Muhammad Kamran Azim who headed the team of the Pak Genome Project. It also shows 200,000 specific sites unique to the Pakistani human and 80,000 sites common with the Indian human. However, this is not the exact representation of a Pakistani and facts may differ once they develop an average genome of Pakistan since the ‘nation’ is a mix of several ethnicities, he said.

An average genome, he explained, will be obtained by making a pool of all the characteristics, ie, the differences and similarities of all the people living in the country.

The decision to choose Dr Atta ur Rahman was a conscious one as he is not only the most prominent scientific figure in Pakistan but one whose ancestors spent almost three centuries in Multan and then moved a hundred years back to Delhi.

One last thing: The choice of Attaur Rahman is an interesting one. I know he is an establishment guy, who also happens to be a polarizing figure in the intellectual circles of Pakistan. He was the chairman of Higher Education Commission (HEC) and at one point the minister of science & technology. But he has also been peddling nonsense about some issues. In particular, he has some bizarre conspiracy views about the cause of the 2005 earthquake and the recent floods in Pakistan. This is not just a small misunderstanding - but rather some of it is fundamental misunderstanding of physics and conspiracy views driven by an ideology (see my detailed post on this: A Prominent Pakistani Scientist is Stoking Conspiracy Fires). This craziness aside, I don't think there is any problem with the choice of Dr. Attaur Rahman for the mapping project.

Who is next? Abdul Sattar Edhi?
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