World
US firm develops glasses for colour blindness
San Francisco: A US firm has given thousands of people their first look into the colours red and green by tricking the brain with a pair of sunglasses.
EnChroma, based in Berkeley, north of San Francisco, developed the colour blindness corrective gear two years ago and recently launched an upgraded model of sunglasses allowing users to play sports and is child-friendly, as per reported.
Over 340 million people around the world suffer from colour blindness, as the condition can hinder simple everyday activities, like driving.
“It’s not a serious condition,” EnChroma’s vice president Donald McPherson told Xinhua. “But it can make simple tasks appear impossible for the colour blind because they cannot make the distinction, for example, at traffic lights between red and green, and this is something that can be life-threatening.”
Usually, colour blind people are not allowed to work as policemen, firemen, pilots or electricians, because even though they can distinguish most of the colours, their brains mistake red and green, especially when they are faint hues. Those with normal colour vision have three photo-pigments in their eyes that are responsible to capture the light, with the brain doing the math to transform them into the right colour, whether it is blue, purple, yellow or red.
“Colour blind people overlap the red and green pigments in the brain a lot, so they get muddied colours,” McPherson said. To help the brain separate these hues, EnChroma developed a glass that divides red and green, cutting a little bit of light between the two colours.
With the corrective glass, McPherson said, “the normal wavelengths are restored because it captures the right pigments, making the brain understand which colours are there.”
McPherson was a leading researcher at University of California at Berkeley working on the issue with a grant from the US National Institutes of Health. He received a doctoral degree in glass engineering and in 2010, after five years of extensive research, decided to start up a company with his colleagues and market their product, which had been a success in clinical trials.
“Colour blindness is not just an aesthetic issue,” he said. “It can even be mistaken as a learning disability in children, because books and classes are not prepared for people who cannot see red and green,” he added.
The condition typically afflicts men because the recessive trait is passed on mainly to male offsprings. According to statistics, one in 12 men is colour blind, while one out of every 34 women has the condition.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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