Isolated Indians meet the world
RIO DE JANEIRO: Isolated native people, probably fleeing attacks in Peru, have turned up in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, where they made contact with the outside world, according to a video released by the country’s indigenous authority.
Brazilian experts believe the Indians crossed the border after facing pressure from illegal loggers and drug traffickers.
The Indians, part of the “Pano” linguistic group, made contact with the Ashaninka native people of northern Brazil late last month.
The meeting was documented in a video released this week by Brazil’s National Indian Foundation. It appeared in Brazil’s Globo G1 news portal. (http://g1.globo.com/ac/acre/n oticia/2014/07/video-mostramomento-contato-com-indios
In one scene, an Ashaninka Indian in shorts gives bananas to two naked Indians armed with bows and arrows on the banks of the Envira River, in the Brazilian state of Acre, on the border with Peru.
The Indians’ encounter with the Ashaninka and a National Indian Foundation team was filmed on the second day of contact on June 30.
Jaminawa Jose Correia, an Ashaninka who spoke to the Indians, said they had come in search of weapons and allies.
“They described being attacked by non-native people and many died after coming down with the flu and diphtheria,” he said.
The foundation
said
the group returned to the forest, but came back three weeks ago because they had contracted the flu. A government medical team was sent to treat seven Indians.
The rights group Survival International said the episode was extremely worrying, considering that flu epidemics had wiped out entire tribes before. The Brazilian Amazon has the largest number of uncontacted tribes in the world, 77 the foundation estimates. – Sapa-AFP A LEADING dating website has admitted toying with lovelorn users by misleading them about their compatibility with potential partners in order to test its technology.
OkCupid said it had carried out psychological experiments – similar to the controversial tests by Facebook on its users – to improve the performance of the algorithm it uses to determine the suitability of a possible couple.
When users were told that “bad matches” were actually very good matches, they were more inclined to act as if there was a spark between them and went on to engage in meaningful online exchanges.
Christian Rudder, one of the company’s founders, admitted telling people who were bad matches that they had a compatibility score of 90 percent.
He was apologetic about misleading his customers. In his blog, titled “We Experiment on Human Beings”, he cited Facebook’s decision to influence the posting habits of 700 000 users by manipulating their news feeds.
Rudder said that after the “experiment was concluded, the users were notified of the correct match percentage”.
A spokesman said OkCupid would continue the experiments. – The Independent