The increasing ill treatment of expatriates in the Maldives that I was witnessing upset me so much that I wrote about it in 2007. I have not spent any appreciable amount of time in the country since then until now. Sadly, the situation seems even more worrying as the number of expatriates has continued to rise and now amount to about 34% of the population of the Maldives!

The US State Department's "Trafficking in Persons Report 2010" places Maldives on the Tier 2 Watch List and describes the situation in Maldives, among other things, as:

An unknown number of the 110,000 foreign workers currently working in the Maldives – primarily in the construction and service sectors – face fraudulent recruitment practices, confiscation of identity and travel documents, withholding or non-payment of wages, or debt bondage. Thirty thousand of these workers do not have legal status in the country, though both legal and illegal workers were vulnerable to conditions of forced labor.
...
Trafficking offenders usually fall into three groups: families that subject domestic servants to forced labor; employment agents who bring low-skilled migrant workers to the Maldives under false terms of employment and upon payment of high fees; and employers who subject the migrants to conditions of forced labor upon arrival.

Anyway, this little outburst was brought forth after reading the highly disturbing piece published this week on Minivan News on the plights of Bangladeshi workers in Maldives as described by the former High Commissioner of Bangladesh to the Maldives. Do read it.

I am now in the Maldives, back in my home city Male', and will stay put for a few weeks while I tick off a few things on my to-do list...

After five long years spent in the town of Reading in the UK, I have finally packed up my belongings and bid farewell to the city and the country. As regular visitors to this blog may already know, I graduated mid last year from the University of Reading after completing a MEng degree in Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics, which brought to a close what I had originally moved to the UK for. I loved the UK and will especially miss the friends I made there.

For now, I am homeless...

Being a Maldivian, the thing that jumps out the most on the just recently released gravity model produced from the high resolution measurements of gravitational pull across the Earth, gathered by the European Space Agency's GOCE satellite, is that Maldives is located within a curious blob of colour - the only blob of that colour in the map. The colour blob, it turns out, signifies areas where the difference between the geoid (a hypothetical global mean sea level undisturbed by weather and currents) and the perfect ellipsoid shape that Earth approximates overall, sinks to its lowest of -100m!

Apart from that, this reaffirms that the gravitational pull experienced in the Maldives is lower than most places on Earth...

The Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA) standard which allows non-Latin alphabet to be used as domain names has been around for a few years and many of the top domain registries do support IDN registration now. ICANN, the corporation responsible for the management of the domain name system, also recently approved the creation of country-code top level domains in non-Latin alphabet. Hence, countries can now use top-level domains in their own language. Egypt, for example, now has adopted "‏مصر" as an option in addition to the usual Latin-based top level domain "eg".

The IDNA standard, along with the recent ICANN approval, means that there is now a framework allowing domain names to be written entirely written in Thaana. Before one gets too excited, there are a few issues to be aware of though. First, unfortunately the use of fili (diacritics) in the name seems to be not supported by IDNA (I've yet to read up to see whether this is an issue with the current implementations of IDN or something inherent in the IDNA standards). So, any domain name will be just a jumble of Thaana letters for now. I had to choose the address "ޖ.com" instead of "ޖާ.com" because the latter is unsupported. Second, for us to be able to have fully Thaana domain names, the government has to first adopt a suitable top-level domain (perhaps "ދވހރއޖ" or "ރއޖ"?), get ICANN approval and then wait for licensed Maldivian domain registrars (only Dhiraagu as far as I am aware) to start accepting registrations under the new top-level domain. This might seem quite pointless but given the increasing number of Thaana-based websites, I think we are soon going to see an explosion in the number of websites with domain names in Thaana.

Let's see how it all goes...

I finally got around to digitizing the X-ray image I took of the magnetic implants I have in the fingers of my left hand. The image below shows the location of the implanted disc magnet within the pad of the ring finger.

Another year lived. Life's progress bar moves to 38%¹.


1. Based on the 72 year average life span for a Maldivian.