Science

Liberating Technologies

We'd be talking about everything important(almost all of 'em) but we'll leave the Questions to consider section as that is upto one's own answers.

At the first we'll be talking about some short points and at the end the big ones..

Denying the limits of nature

Freedom from death and disease

Mortality due to infectious disease has fallen dramatically in the past centuries as a result of sanitary and food safety development along with vaccines, antibiotics and other advances in societal conditions and medical sciences. However, the challenges of population growth, urbanization, deforestation, pollution, global climate change and global movement of populations have been associated with a shift in geographical distribution and accelerated diffusion of old and new pathogens resulting in an increased number of outbreaks.

The health, social, economic, and political consequences associated with these emerging diseases are still significant to public health. In the context of the New Public Health, they are still central issues because of the enormous unfulfilled potential to reduce morbidity and mortality globally.The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as part of the GAVI Alliance donated another US $10 billion over the period from 2010 to 2020 to promote research and development as well as delivery of vaccines to the world’s poorest countries. However, government and the private sector must support developing countries to reduce child mortality by the end of the decade.

Optimism but not complacency is justified. Political and financial support is needed to maintain and develop the gains achieved in the past century and to transmit the latest knowledge and technology to many parts of the world where preventable deaths measure in the hundreds of thousands. The potential for saving human life is high with current technology. The New Public Health calls for fair distribution of resources and the timely application of existing knowledge and tools; this mainly rests on political will, funding, initiative and training.These are ensuring that technology can liberate people from epidemics and diseases.

Prosthesis and new techniques to defeat paralysis

To help people suffering paralysis from injury, stroke or disease, scientists have invented brain-machine interfaces that record electrical signals of neurons in the brain and translate them to movement. Usually, that means the neural signals direct a device, like a robotic arm.

Cornell University researcher Maryam Shanechi, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, working with Ziv Williams, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School, is bringing brain-machine interfaces to the next level: Instead of signals directing a device, she hopes to help paralyzed people move their own limb, just by thinking about it.

When paralyzed patients imagine or plan a movement, neurons in the brain's motor cortical areas still activate even though the communication link between the brain and muscles is broken. By implanting sensors in these brain areas, neural activity can be recorded and translated to the patient's desired movement using a mathematical transform called the decoder. These interfaces allow patients to generate movements directly with their thoughts.

In a paper published online Feb. 18 in Nature Communications, Shanechi, Williams and colleagues describe a cortical-spinal prosthesis that directs "targeted movement" in paralyzed limbs. The research team developed and tested a prosthesis that connects two subjects by enabling one subject to send its recorded neural activity to control limb movements in a different subject that is temporarily sedated. The demonstration is a step forward in making brain-machine interfaces for paralyzed humans to control their own limbs using their brain activity alone.

The brain-machine interface is based on a set of real-time decoding algorithms that process neural signals by predicting their targeted movements. In the experiment, one animal acted as the controller of the movement or the "master," then "decided" which target location to move to, and generated the neural activity that was decoded into this intended movement. The decoded movement was used to directly control the limb of the other animal by electrically stimulating its spinal cord.

"The problem here is not only that of decoding the recorded neural activity into the intended movement, but also that of properly stimulating the spinal cord to move the paralyzed limb according to the decoded movement," Shanechi said.

The scientists focused on decoding the target endpoint of the movement as opposed to its detailed kinematics. This allowed them to match the decoded target with a set of spinal stimulation parameters that generated limb movement toward that target. They demonstrated that the alert animal could produce two-dimensional movement in the sedated animal's limb -- a breakthrough in brain-machine interface research.

"By focusing on the target end point of movement as opposed to its detailed kinematics, we could reduce the complexity of solving for the appropriate spinal stimulation parameters, which helped us achieve this 2-D movement," Williams said.

Part of the experimental setup's novelty was using two different animals, rather than just one with a temporarily paralyzed limb. That way, the scientists contend that they have a true model of paralysis, since the master animal's brain and the sedated animal's limb had no physiological connection, as is the case for a paralyzed patient.

Shanechi's lab will continue developing more sophisticated brain-machine interface architectures with principled algorithmic designs and use them to construct high-performance prosthetics. These architectures could be used to control an external device or the native limb.

"The next step is to advance the development of brain-machine interface algorithms using the principles of control theory and statistical signal processing," Shanechi said. "Such brain-machine interface architectures could enable patients to generate complex movements using robotic arms or paralyzed limbs."

So, What if you were born that way..? Transforming body and mind

What this term is referring to is Evolution and artificial evolution

Evolution is change in heritable traits of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including the level of species, individual organisms, and at the level of molecular evolution.

And artificial Evolution is

Improvement of enzymes which is one of the important objectives of biotechnology. In vitro(or artificial) evolution of enzymes using DNA shuffling involves the assembly of two or more DNA segments into a full-length gene by homologous, or site-specific, recombination. Before the assembly, the segments are often subjected to random mutagenesis by error-prone PCR, random nucleotide insertion or other methods. Many useful enzymes and peptides have been isolated following the artificial evolution

Household Technologies and woman liberation

The advent of modern appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators had a profound impact on 20th Century society, according to a new Université de Montréal study. Plug-in conveniences transformed women's lives and enabled them to enter the workforce, says Professor Emanuela Cardia, from the Department of Economics.

Within a short time-span, household technology became accessible to the majority. In the late 1910s, a refrigerator sold for $1,600 and 26 years later such appliances could be purchased for $170. Access to electric stoves, washing machines and vacuum cleaners was also generalized.

"These innovations changed the lives of women," says Professor Cardia. "Although it wasn't a revolution per se, the arrival of this technology in households had an important impact on the workforce and the economy."

Professor Cardia based her research on more than 3,000 censuses conducted between 1940 and 1950, from thousands of American households, across urban and rural areas. "We calculated that women who loaded their stove with coal saved 30 minutes everyday with an electric stove," says Cardia. "The result is that women flooded the workforce. In 1900, five percent of married women had jobs. In 1980, that number jumped to 51 percent."

In 1913, the vacuum cleaner became available, in 1916 it was the washing machine, in 1918 it was the refrigerator, in 1947 the freezer, and in 1973 the microwave was on the market. All of these technologies had an impact on home life, but none had a stronger impact than running water.

"We often forget that running water is a century-old innovation in North America, and it is even more recent in Europe. Of all innovations, it's the one with the most important impact," says Cardia.

In 1890, 25 percent of American households had running water and eight percent had electricity. In 1950, 83 percent had running water and 94% had electricity. According to Cardia, in 1900, a woman spent 58 hours per week on household chores. In 1975, it was 18 hours.

While there have been several studies on the industrial revolution and different aspects of technology, says Cardia, very few investigations have focused on the household revolution. "Yet, women play a very important role in the economy whether they hold a job or work at home."

 The study is entitled, "Household Technology: Was it the Engine of Liberation?"

Open Education Movement

OpenCourseWare (OCW)(or open education) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means of delivering educational content.

Ten years after the US debut of OCW, in 2012 MIT and Harvard University announced the formation of edX, a massive open online course (MOOC) platform to offer online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide audience at no charge. This new initiative was based on MIT's "MITx" project, announced in 2011, and extends the concepts of OCW by offering more structured formal courses to online students, including in some cases the possibility of earning academic credit or certificates based on supervised examinations

A problem is that the creation and maintenance of comprehensive OCW requires substantial initial and ongoing investments of human labor. Effective translation into other languages and cultural contexts requires even more investment by knowledgeable personnel. This is one of the reasons why English is still the dominant language, and fewer open courseware options are available in other languages.^[5] The OCW platform SlideWiki addresses these issues through a crowdsourcing approach.

The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) is a Government of India sponsored collaborative educational programme. By developing curriculum-based video and web courses the programme aims to enhance the quality of engineering education in India. It is being jointly carried out by 7 IITs and IISc Bangalore, and is funded by the Ministry of Human Resources Development of the Government of India.

Flexilearn is a very useful open course portal. It was initiated by Indira Gandhi National Open University, and apart from providing free course materials, flexilearn also provides opportunities to enroll oneself for a course and appear for exam conducted by university and thereby get certification.

IIN(Idea Internet network) is also an example of this..

The virtual university in Pakistan also provide these facilities

Social Media and Social Upheals

 A key point of the Internet and the World Wide Web for many has been the view that they provide arenas that are free from authoritative control, havens of free speech and freedom of expression. In the past few years, the role that social media in particular have played in various struggles for democracy in certain countries not only indicates the power of social media in civil struggles, but has led to them collectively being described as ‘liberation’. Liberation Technology, however, offers a range of perspectives on the use of Internet and social media during periods of social upheaval in countries around the world.The view that the Internet and digital technologies is unregulated and argue that in fact there are more boundaries in the online world than are realised. Some of these boundaries are socially constructed, because people may join Internet groups which focus on their own political and social beliefs. By doing so, they may restrict themselves to communicating only with other people who share these belief systems and wall themselves off from other people who hold

opposing views. In other countries governed by oppressive regimes, Internet users may find their ability to access certain search engines and Internet sites restricted by arrangements between the international conglomerates which own the digital platforms and the country’s government. Liberation Technology offers a balance of views; those which illustrate the empowerment offered by the Internet and digital technologies to citizens ruled by oppressive regimes and in contrast, the empowerment of such regimes to censor Internet sites, to monitor and take action against those of their own citizens whose digital communications are seen as subversive.

Therefore, Social upheals take place because of social media which is a liberating technology.

The early Legacy of Printing Press

The Infancy of Printing

Books printed on presses before the year 1501 are called incunabula, which comes from a word meaning "cradle" or "birthplace" in Latin. Although printing was certainly in its infancy prior to 1501, the actual printing process of using movable type on a wooden press did not change a great deal over the next 350 years. There were, however, changes made to the format of books, such as the addition of title pages where medieval scribes simply added their own name, the date of completion, and perhaps a small prayer to the end of their manuscripts. Also, by the beginning of the 16th century, page numbers had made their appearance.

Because medieval readers expected books to contain a combination of text and images, printers quickly began to incorporate woodcut images between blocks of text. This innovation eliminated the need for hand painting and saved both time and money while sustaining the text and illustration format that continued to be important during the Renaissance. It is estimated that a third of all incunabula were illustrated, and images continued to be hand-colored into the 18th century.

Inspiration and invention of the printing press

Around the late 1430s, a German man named Johann Gutenberg was quite desperate to find a way to make money. At the time, there was a trend in attaching small mirrors to one’s hat or clothes in order to soak up healing powers when visiting holy places or icons. The mirrors themselves were not significant, but Gutenberg quietly noted how lucrative it was to create mass amounts of a cheap product. During the 1300s to 1400s, people had developed a very basic form of printing. It involved letters or images cut on blocks of wood. The block would be dipped in ink and then stamped onto paper. Gutenberg already had previous experience working at a mint, and he realized that if he could use cut blocks within a machine, he could make the printing process a lot faster. Even better, he would be able to reproduce texts in great numbers. However, instead of using wood blocks, he used metal instead. This was known as a “movable type machine,” since the metal block letters could be moved around to create new words and sentences. With this machine, Gutenberg made the very first printed book, which was naturally a reproduction of the Bible. Today the Gutenberg Bible is an incredibly valuable, treasured item for its historical legacy.

All the other things....in short and answer to particular ,questions cases etc.

Science – Liberating technologies

In this section I will take some of the additional case studies at the end and round up the salient points from the articles for you!

Should governments allow people to vote online? Well according to the article (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115771/how-make-voting-easier-technology) turnout in typical democratic countries is low, so it would help:

“In 2012, 60 percent of eligible voters (129 million American citizens) headed to the polling booth, including the largest number of voters ever among African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans, and large numbers of women and young people—many of whom voted for the first time ever. But when 40 percent (86 million American citizen adults) are not voting, the simple fact is our society—and democracy writ large—suffers.”

The article goes on to question the methods used, and cost factors:

“The fundamental problem is that the way we exercise our right to vote remains trapped in the 19th century. Some election officials still use unwieldy reams of paper to check off voters, voting machines vary from precinct to precinct and frequently break, and voters are driving to city hall or the public library to get their voter registration forms in many states.

What’s more, it’s costing Americans to participate in the process both in terms of the time and effort they must invest in order to register and vote—and in taxpayer dollars. In Oregon, where voter turnout is remarkably high in comparison with the rest of the nation, the state spends $4.11 to process each voter registration form. Meanwhile in Canada, the average cost is less than thirty-five cents.”

As we all know the technology already exists to make voting easier, and less costly:

“The good news is the same innovative spirit and technological savvy that is making so many aspects of our lives easier—from travelling paper-free, to banking from home, to tracking on our smartphones how miles we’ve run or how many calories we’ve consumed—can also fix the problems with the way we vote. Digital technology and big data systems are continuing to change the world in which we live by helping us track massive amounts of data, protect against fraud, and democratize things that used to be the sole property of the elite and well-connected. It makes sense that those tools can help lead us to a more just and effective voting system as well.”

Interestingly the increase in voter apathy has been noticeable since the 1980s according to a 2002 report (http://www.idea.int/publications/vt/upload/VT_screenopt_2002.pdf) which shows Australia having a 94% turnout and Mali 21% in the period 1945-2001.

Microfinancing – what a great article (http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/11/02/technology-transforming-saving-microfinance/) by Vikas Lalwani.  Microfinancing is basically lending small amounts of money to the poor to start up business or grow them. Sounds great, but are there problems?

“To ensure high repayment rate, you need to employ people (field force) who will work in the field doing tasks like background checks, loan disbursement, follow-ups and collection. But these resources cost money, which proportionately increases the interest rate that poor borrowers will have to pay.  The global average interest and fee rate is estimated at 37 percent, with rates reaching as high as 70 percent in some markets. This means that world’s poorest are paying the highest interest rate and it defeats the whole purpose behind microfinance.”

But technology is helping solve these issues:

“To break this stalemate, a new breed of microlending services is coming up which is taking everything online. There are no offices where they operate, no field force and no offices even for themselves. Zidisha and Kiva Zip are pioneers of this.  Zidisha, which is active in eight African countries and Indonesia, is mostly run by virtual volunteers with only two full-time employees. All loans are disbursed electronically and there are no offices at all. It filters fraudulent applications using machine-learning algorithms developed by Sift Science.  To calculate credit risk, it uses the services of Bayes Impact, another YC non-profit, which gets data scientist teams to tackle social problems. Zidisha has been able to bring down the interest rates to as low as 5.8 percent, an astronomical improvement over previously existing rates.”  Repayment rates have proved to be higher than in traditional forms of microlending.

Can mobile platforms help free us from basic needs? The chosen article (http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Tech-firm-hits-on-solution-to-water-scarcity-in-slums-/-/1248928/1380090/-/item/1/-/14l1212z/-/index.html) talks about how technology is helping residents in the slum area of Kibera in Nigeria locate drinkable water nearby via SMS on their mobiles.  Previously people had to walk miles for their water, not knowing of there were supplies and having to carry 20 litre jerry-cans home with them.  The data gathered from the vendors is also helping to cut out malpractice:

“The water company is further beset by the perennial headache of illegal connections, most of which are reported in slum areas and informal settlements.  Last year, illegal connections was reported to cause a disparity in the billing estimate and actual collections and Sh350 million was collected per month against a target of Sh450 million.  The data collected through m-maji could be used by water companies to weed out water vendors who have no licence to operate and those who are doing so through illegal connections thus saving up on lost revenue.”

How robots could be used to fight ebola (http://www.cnet.com/news/how-robots-could-be-used-to-fight-ebola/) is a great example of how technology can help protect humans against exposure to disease. Here we use robotics in the places where ebola has spread these robots can copy each and every gesture of the one who knows how to cure it...kindly watch the video.( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHxNQ1v7mWM)

The “Age of Edison” (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/22/entertainment/la-ca-jc-ernest-freeberg-20130224) is a great article about how the invention of the light bulb freed us up to live a 24 hour existence.  Thus in the Victorian age it became possible for factories to operate all night.  It appears that as sales of the invention grew, through private individuals, it became clear that state intervention was needed to ensure that it was available in more geographically remote places.  If we think about the case with broadband today, this is a similar situation.

In the Uk the Prime Minister has just announced the Government’s intention to make Wi-fi free on all trains (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-31421676) and eventually Govts will have to find funds to subsidise other technological advances to the underprivileged in society.

Adherents of “transhumanism”—a movement that seeks to transform Homo sapiensthrough tools like gene manipulation, “smart drugs” and nanomedicine—hail such developments as evidence that we are becoming the engineers of our own evolution. (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-to-become-the-engineers-of-our-own-evolution-122588963/?no-ist).So why use these non-natural ways to grow the human species? ”

Transhumanists say we are morally obligated to help the human race transcend its biological limits; those who disagree are sometimes called Bio-Luddites. “The human quest has always been to ward off death and do everything in our power to keep living,” says Natasha Vita-More, chairwoman of Humanity+, the world’s largest trans­humanist organization, with nearly 6,000 members.”And the downsides? “Some worry about the implications of transcendent technologies. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama, the author of “The End of History?” and a former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, warns that efforts to rid ourselves of negative emotions could have unforeseen side effects, making us less human. “If we weren’t violent and aggressive, we wouldn’t be able to defend ourselves,” he wrote in Foreign Policy. “If we never felt jealousy, we would also never feel love.”

 David Bollier writes about sousveillance as a response to surveiilance(http://bollier.org/blog/sousveillance-response-surveillance) and offers the following definition:

“Surveillance, of course, is the practice of the powerful monitoring people under their dominion, especially people who are suspects or prisoners – or today, simply citizens. Sousveillance — “to watch from below” – has now taken off, fueled by an explosion of miniaturized digital technologies and the far-reaching abuses of the surveillance market/state.”

He continues “……sousveillance is an inevitable trend in technological societies and that, on balance, it “has positive survival characteristics.”  Sousveillance occurs when citizens record their encounters with police, for example. This practice exposed the outrageous police brutality against Occupy protesters (blasts of pepper spray in their faces at point-blank range) and helped transform small citizen protests against Wall Street into a global movement.”

What is the main reason for the need for sousveillance? “Sousveillance at least has thevirtue of empowering ordinary people to protect themselves and to hold power accountable.  One need only look at a few cautionary examples of “people’s recordings” that have altered history:  the Zapruder film (undermining the Warren Commission’s and news media’s “lone gunman” claims), the Rodney King video (documenting L.A. police brutality), the videos of police violence against Occupy protesters and anti-Iraq War demonstrators.  At a time when powerful corporations and government agencies are savagely violating our privacy with impunity, sousveillance is entirely comparable to the use of personal cryptography:  a defense of our individual autonomy and our ability to sustain a free civil society. “

In McKinsey’s September 2014 article “Offline and falling behind: Barriers to Internet adoption” it says that More than 60 percent of the world’s population remains offline. Without removing crucial deterrents to Internet adoption, little will change—and more than 4 billion people may be left behind.”

The other 40% of the population has seen the following: “In a little more than a generation, the Internet has grown from a nascent technology to a tool that is transforming how people, businesses, and governments communicate and engage. The Internet’s economic impact has been massive, making significant contributions to nations’ gross domestic product (GDP) and fueling new, innovative industries. It has also generated societal change by connecting individuals and communities, providing access to information and education, and promoting greater transparency.”

The good news is that at the current trajectory, an additional 500 million to 900 million people are forecast to join the online population by 2017.  But this growth rate will not continue.  On the negative side “About 75 percent of the offline population is concentrated in 20 countries and is disproportionately rural, low income, elderly, illiterate, and female.”

The offline population faces barriers to Internet adoption spanning four categories:

Incentives – such as the high costs that content and service providers face in developing and localizing relevant content and services and their associated business model constraints, low awareness or interest from brands and advertisers in reaching certain audiences, a lack of trusted logistics and payment systems

Low income and affordability – there is often a lack of adjacent infrastructure (such as roads and electricity), thereby increasing the costs faced by network operators in extending coverage

User capability – such as a lack of digital literacy (that is, unfamiliarity with or discomfort in using digital technologies to access and use information) and a lack of language literacy (that is, the inability to read and write)

Infrastructure – Barriers in this area include a lack of mobile Internet coverage or network access in addition to a lack of adjacent infrastructure such as grid electricity. The root causes of these consumer barriers include limited access to international bandwidth; an underdeveloped national core network, backhaul, and access infrastructure; limited spectrum availability; a national information and communications technology (ICT) strategy that doesn’t effectively address the issue of broadband access; and underresourced infrastructure development.

The report then goes on to identify countries where adoption is low due to high barriers, mainly in Africa and Asia, to a higher 80% in the USA for example.  In summary they conclude: “Going forward, sustained, inclusive Internet user growth will require a multipronged strategy—one that will depend on close collaboration among players across the ecosystem, including governments, policy makers, nongovernmental organizations, network operators, device manufacturers, content and service providers, and brands.”

In considering the power of technology to liberate the introverted from stage fright(http://diymusician.cdbaby.com/2014/04/liberating-introverted-performing-artist/) James Wasem talks about the ability to set up online and stream a performance.  The technology is fairly simple, and you can even make performances a pay per view when you get a following.

Wael Ghonim wrote a book called revolution 2.0 to describe his part in starting a people’s revolution against the treatment of the police on civilians in Egypt in February 2012.  In it he talks about how his ” Facebook page anonymously called for accountability for Khaled (Said)’s death and an end to corruption within the Egyptian government.  We [wanted] to expose the bad practices of the Egyptian police,” he says. “Because the last thing a dictator wants is that you expose their bad practices to its people.”

He kept his identity a secret, “”I basically thought that my anonymity was my power, was the reason this page was so powerful,” he says. “A lot of people believed in what was there.”  He goes on to say that the revolution does not take place ON Social media, but that it allows communication to happen – “”We used all the available tools in order to communicate with each other, collaborate and agree on a date, a time and a location for the start of the revolution,” he says. “Yet, starting Jan. 28, the revolution was on the streets. It was not on Facebook, it was not on Twitter. Those were tools to relay information, to tell people the truth about what’s happening on the ground.”

The MIT conference on the future of transportation(http://senseable.mit.edu/roadahead/) took place in November 2014.  It says of the future:

“Alternate models of sharing and reconfigured access to mobility are fundamentally disrupting the transportation paradigm in cities. With the emergence of companies like Uber and ZipCar, citizens are rethinking private car ownership, while bike share systems are competing with traditional public and private transportation options, and start up companies are creating innovative new service models. Yet these citizen-centric developments might come into conflict with traditional incumbents such as taxis, car companies and regulators.”

The other issue with the Google type driverless car is the question of safety and regulations.  Insurance companies struggle on who to apportion blame to for accidents.

The Lazarus Effect: Pushing the Frontiers of Resuscitation – This refers to the 1997 experiment where conductors were brought back to life at temperatures below -143 degrees celcius.  It is also the name of a 2015 Horror movie where “Medical researcher Frank (Mark Duplass), his fiancee Zoe (Olivia Wilde) and their team have achieved the impossible: they have found a way to revive the dead. After a successful, but unsanctioned, experiment on a lifeless animal, they are ready to make their work public. However, when their dean learns what they’ve done, he shuts them down. Zoe is killed during an attempt to recreate the experiment, leading Frank to test the process on her. Zoe is revived — but something evil is within her.”  There is a book of the same name from1983.

NB  Lazarus of Bethany, a figure in the Gospel of John, which describes him being raised by Jesus from the dead.

To Baby or Not to Baby: The Impact of Reproductive Technology –
A great introduction from child-encyclopedia.com:

Research on the psychological development of children in assisted reproduction families has focused on two major types of assisted reproduction:

1.      “High-tech” procedures include in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). IVF involves the fertilization of an egg with sperm in the laboratory and the transfer of the resulting embryo to the mother’s womb. With ICSI, a single sperm is injected directly into the egg to create an embryo.

2.      Gamete donation includes donor insemination and egg donation. Donor insemination involves the insemination of a woman with the sperm of a man who is not her husband or partner. The child produced is genetically related to the mother but not the father. Egg donation is like donor insemination in that the child is genetically related to only one parent, but in this case the mother is the parent with whom the child shares no genetic link. Egg donation is a much more complex and intrusive procedure than donor insemination and involves IVF techniques.

Problems

The key problems in this area of investigation are as follows:

§  The higher incidence of multiple births, preterm births, and low birthweight infants following IVF and ICSI. Th e impact of these factors on child development must be considered separately from the impact of IVF and ICSI per se. Many of the empirical investigations have focused on families with a singleton (only) child to avoid the confounding effect of a multiple birth.

§  Mothers of IVF children are generally older than mothers who give birth without medical intervention, and attempts to match natural conception mothers for maternal age have presented difficulties, as has matching for birth order of the target child and number of children in the family, although some researchers have attempted to statistically control for these variables.