“In Matlab, a part of Bangladesh with good data, deaths from diarrhoea and dysentery have dropped by about 90% since the early 1990s (see chart).”
I just kept reparsing and trying to error correct that sentence over and over until it finally sunk in that yes, they are saying Matlab is actually the name of a place in Bangladesh.
I saw the same sentence and immediately thought it was funny (because Matlab with bad data produces poor results). I'm sure that the reporter has no idea there's a software product by that name and so including the fact that this city has good data didn't seem odd at all.
> I just kept reparsing and trying to error correct that sentence over and over until it finally sunk in that yes, they are saying Matlab is actually the name of a place in Bangladesh.
I'm Bengali, and I looked up the spelling of the name. It looks like it's spelled মতলব, which means it's pronounced more like "Motlobe" (the second "o" is halfway between "lob" and "lobe"). It means "plan" or "project", which I'm guessing refers to some attempt at creating a township at some point (or being named after a place that was).
For reasons, Bengali words are often transliterated in the Sanskrit form, which means that the spelling doesn't really always represent their actual pronunciation. (This is why people often have a harder time pronouncing my name when they see it spelled out in English, because the final syllable is transliterated according to Sanskrit, but pronounced differently. It's sort of like -ough as a suffix in English.)
And I can imagine a small techie tourism trade for people who want to say, "Yeah. I've been to Matlab. For two weeks, I breathed it, ate in it, and slept in it."
The approach to build latrines for the poorest people then shame the "rich" into building ones for themselves is marvelously devious.
According to the article, even marriages were canceled after it was revealed that the family of one of the newly weds is without this essential status simbol.
A relative traveled to African villages. Currently, farmers shame neighbors who do not have neat & clean fields after harvest. His organization tries to turn that around; yields are better when harvest waste "fertilizes" the field. They are now "shaming" the farmers that cleanup their fields to raise the yield of the field.
> Mushfiq Mobarak, an economist at Yale University who has researched sanitation decisions, suggests that better-off people may be more likely to copy poor people than the other way round. If a wealthy person has something, you do not necessarily feel ashamed not to have it.
So the key is in shaming all but the absolute poorest. Interesting insight!
It's fading out of use in most of Europe, as far as I can tell. My grandmother used to always say WC in Norway. I don't know of anyone in my parents generation (born around 1950) or younger that'd use it. We're mostly all familiar with it still though.
In South America, people use WC, Patent (because it was written on the loo), or just Water (in Uruguay, at least) a lot. So it would be funny if (at least WC) was not as known in the English-speaking world. Patente (used in Brazil) is obviously just derived from the Patent label.
I think it would be pretty easy to go through life in the US without ever hearing a toilet called a WC; I'm familiar with the abbreviation but I'm not even sure how, because I can't remember ever hearing or reading it.
I've seen the abbreviation used on building plans in USA, in the past ten years. It did seem out of place, but all architects have some screwy habit that makes their plans more difficult to read.
According to my grandfather, when he was growing up poor in southern Illinois in the 1930s, "toilet" was a crude word and people said "W.C." to be polite. Outhouses were more common than toilets, to the extent that old-timers then thought it was disgusting to defecate in the same building where one slept. Perhaps "water closet" seemed an appropriately exotic term.
Never heard of a loo being called "Patente" in Brazil. Guessing it is a very specific regional thing? Also, "WC" as synonim for a bathroom as read in signs is not as common as once was. Word is "Sanitário" pretty much everywhere now.
Apparently, this word started in Londrina, as they had toilets imported from England that had PATENTED written on them. But it is used in all the southern states at least.
When I was growing up in Bangladesh in the early 90s, the only channel on TV had continuous ads for Orsaline (Pedialyte in the US) and what to do if you didn't have (or couldn't afford) it when your child was ill.
I have long since left Bangladesh, but it warms my heart to see that the the grassroots campaign paid off in droves.
Interesting that the article doesn't mention Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus. In order to be eligible for his micro loans people had to commit to building a toilet/WC/loo amongst other things. Given that approx. 140 mio people in Bangladesh borrowed micro loans from him he must have had some influence on it.
> Given that approx. 140 mio people in Bangladesh borrowed micro loans from him he must have had some influence on it.
That's a little far fetched. I am one of the 140 mil and I do not recall borrowing from him (or anyone I know). As novel as the idea of micro financing is, realistically it has little impact on poverty reduction in Bangladesh, the RMG and manpower export sector has more stake in the claim.
The sanitation revolution can be attributed to Sir Fazle Hasan Abed[0], the founder of BRAC[1].
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadI just kept reparsing and trying to error correct that sentence over and over until it finally sunk in that yes, they are saying Matlab is actually the name of a place in Bangladesh.
https://translate.google.com/#ar/en/%D9%85%D8%AA%D8%B7%D9%84...
https://translate.google.com/#fa/en/%D9%85%D8%B7%D9%84%D8%A8
I'm Bengali, and I looked up the spelling of the name. It looks like it's spelled মতলব, which means it's pronounced more like "Motlobe" (the second "o" is halfway between "lob" and "lobe"). It means "plan" or "project", which I'm guessing refers to some attempt at creating a township at some point (or being named after a place that was).
For reasons, Bengali words are often transliterated in the Sanskrit form, which means that the spelling doesn't really always represent their actual pronunciation. (This is why people often have a harder time pronouncing my name when they see it spelled out in English, because the final syllable is transliterated according to Sanskrit, but pronounced differently. It's sort of like -ough as a suffix in English.)
According to the article, even marriages were canceled after it was revealed that the family of one of the newly weds is without this essential status simbol.
> Mushfiq Mobarak, an economist at Yale University who has researched sanitation decisions, suggests that better-off people may be more likely to copy poor people than the other way round. If a wealthy person has something, you do not necessarily feel ashamed not to have it.
So the key is in shaming all but the absolute poorest. Interesting insight!
In South America, people use WC, Patent (because it was written on the loo), or just Water (in Uruguay, at least) a lot. So it would be funny if (at least WC) was not as known in the English-speaking world. Patente (used in Brazil) is obviously just derived from the Patent label.
According to my grandfather, when he was growing up poor in southern Illinois in the 1930s, "toilet" was a crude word and people said "W.C." to be polite. Outhouses were more common than toilets, to the extent that old-timers then thought it was disgusting to defecate in the same building where one slept. Perhaps "water closet" seemed an appropriately exotic term.
Here's a version, but I don't think my grandmother's relied on foreign language as a device: http://www.brinkmanonline.com/humor/church/wc.html
I have long since left Bangladesh, but it warms my heart to see that the the grassroots campaign paid off in droves.
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That's a little far fetched. I am one of the 140 mil and I do not recall borrowing from him (or anyone I know). As novel as the idea of micro financing is, realistically it has little impact on poverty reduction in Bangladesh, the RMG and manpower export sector has more stake in the claim.
The sanitation revolution can be attributed to Sir Fazle Hasan Abed[0], the founder of BRAC[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fazle_Hasan_Abed [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRAC_(organization)