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September 25, 2006
In-depth article about obesity
But the most powerful technology driving the obesity epidemic is television. "The best single behavioral predictor of obesity in children and adults is the amount of television viewing," says the School of Public Health's Gortmaker. "The relationship is nearly as strong as what you see between smoking and lung cancer. Everybody thinks it's because TV watching is sedentary, you're just sitting there for hours--but that's only about one-third of the effect. Our guesstimate is that two-thirds is the effect of advertising in changing what you eat." Willett asserts, "You can't expect three- and four-year-olds to make decisions about the long-term consequences of their food choices. But every year they are subjected to intensive and increasingly polished messages promoting foods that are almost entirely junk." (Furthermore, in some future year when the Internet merges with broadband cable TV, advertisers will be able to target their messages far more precisely. "It won't be just to kids," Gortmaker says. "It'll be to your kid.")
The Way We Eat Now - Harvard Magazine (May-June 2004)
Posted by thdyck at September 25, 2006 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Iran's gulf of misunderstanding with US
Iran's offer came in the form of a letter, although Iranian diplomats have suggested that their letter was in turn a response to a set of talking points that had come from US intermediaries.
In it, Iran appeared willing to put everything on the table - including being completely open about its nuclear programme, helping to stabilise Iraq, ending its support for Palestinian militant groups and help in disarming Hezbollah.
What did Iran want? Top of the list was a halt in US hostile behaviour and a statement that "Iran did not belong to 'the axis of evil'".
The letter was the product of an internal debate inside Tehran and had the support of leaders at the highest level.
"That letter went to the Americans to say that we are ready to talk, we are ready to address our issues," explains Seyed Adeli, who was then a deputy foreign minister in Iran. But in Washington, the letter was ignored.
Larry Wilkerson, who was then chief of staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, thinks that was a big mistake.
"In my mind it was one of those things you throw up in the air and say I can't believe we did this."
He says the hardliners who stood against dialogue had a memorable refrain. "We don't speak to evil'.
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iran's gulf of misunderstanding with US
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September 19, 2006
Tolkien's magic drawing room
The house where JRR Tolkien wrote the Hobbit and most of the Lord of the Rings has been given protected status.
Despite having no special architectural qualities, 20 Northmoor Road in Oxford is to be a Grade II listed building.
Heritage Minister Andrew McIntosh announced the news on Tuesday, saying the decision was made on the basis of Professor Tolkien's importance.
The 1920s house was occupied by the author, who wrote his novels in the drawing room, from 1930 to 1947.
BBC NEWS | UK | England | Oxfordshire | Tolkien house wins listed status
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September 15, 2006
Germans reconsider religion
He points to the recent shift of J�rgen Habermas, one of Germany's foremost philosophers, as evidence of the potential for a rethinking of the public role of religion. A professed secularist who has spent nearly half a century arguing against religiously informed moral argument, he made some arresting statements in his 2004 essay, "A Time of Transition."
"Christianity, and nothing else," he wrote, "is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."
Germans reconsider religion | csmonitor.com
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September 10, 2006
Political ideology of Christian groupings
All Christians, whether fundamentalist, liberal, or evangelical, acknowledge at least formally the responsibility to show love and compassion to everyone, Christian or not. For evangelicals, this demand has extra urgency. Billions of perishing souls can still be saved for Christ, they believe. The example Christians set in their daily lives, the help they give the needy, and the effectiveness of their proclamation of the gospel -- these can bring lost souls to Christ and help fulfill the divine plan. Evangelicals constantly reinforce the message of Christian responsibility to the world. Partly as a result, evangelicals are often open to, and even eager for, social action and cooperation with nonbelievers in projects to improve human welfare, even though they continue to believe that those who reject Christ cannot be united with God after death.
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In his 2005 book Imagine! A God-Blessed America: How It Could Happen and What It Would Look Like, the conservative evangelical Richard Land describes and justifies this evangelical optimism: "I believe that there could be yet another Great Awakening in our country, a nationwide revival. ... Scripture tells us that none of us can know with certainty the day or hour of the Lord's return. Thus, we have no right to abandon the world to its own misery. Nowhere in Scripture are we called to huddle pessimistically in Christian ghettoes, snatching converts out of the world."
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Evangelicals in the Anglo-American world have long supported humanitarian and human rights policies on a global basis. The British antislavery movement, for example, was led by an evangelical, William Wilberforce. Evangelicals were consistent supporters of nineteenth-century national liberation movements -- often Christian minorities seeking to break from Ottoman rule. And evangelicals led a number of reform campaigns, often with feminist overtones: against suttee (the immolation of widows) in India, against foot binding in China, in support of female education throughout the developing world, and against human sexual trafficking (the "white slave trade") everywhere. Evangelicals have also long been concerned with issues relating to Africa.
Foreign Affairs - God's Country? - Walter Russell Mead
Posted by thdyck at September 10, 2006 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Florida county plans to vaporize landfill trash
"We've only got the size of the planet," said Richard Tedder, program administrator for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's solid waste division. "Because of all of the pressures of development, people don't want landfills. It's going to be harder and harder to site new landfills, and it's going to be harder for existing landfills to continue to expand."
The plasma-arc gasification facility in St. Lucie County, on central Florida's Atlantic Coast, aims to solve that problem by eliminating the need for a landfill. Only two similar facilities are operating in the world — both in Japan — but are gasifying garbage on a much smaller scale.
Up to eight plasma arc-equipped cupolas will vaporize trash year-round, non-stop. Garbage will be brought in on conveyor belts and dumped into the cylindrical cupolas where it falls into a zone of heat more than 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
USATODAY.com - Florida county plans to vaporize landfill trash
Posted by thdyck at September 10, 2006 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Mark Shuttleworth on defining goals
Every conflicting goal sucks resources from the overall cohesiveness and strength of the group. If there is no consensus in the community, and the leadership don't think they can get consensus, then it might be better to cut out those conflicting goals altogether.
Mark Shuttleworth ｻ Blog Archive ｻ Conflicting goals create tension in communities
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Connection between guilt and desire for cleansing
Rituals that cleanse the body to purify the soul are at the core of religions worldwide. Now scientists find these ceremonies apparently have a psychological basis.
Researchers discovered sins actually seem to urge people to clean themselves, a phenomenon they dubbed the "Macbeth effect" after dramatized murderess Lady Macbeth, who vainly tried scrubbing her hands clean of imaginary blood in Shakespeare's famed Scottish play.
Intriguingly, the researchers also found purifying the body then helped people absolve their consciences.
LiveScience.com - People Really Do Wash Away Sins
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September 8, 2006
Gene Found to Switch Off Stem Cells During Aging
The finding indicates that many of the degenerative diseases of aging are caused by an active shutting down of the stem cells that renew the body’s various tissues, and are not just a passive disintegration of tissues under life’s daily wear and tear, as is often assumed.
“I don’t think aging is a random process – it’s a program, an anti-cancer program,” said Dr. Norman E. Sharpless of the University of North Carolina, senior author of one of the three reports. The two other senior authors are Dr. Sean J. Morrison of the University of Michigan and Dr. David T. Scadden of the Harvard Medical School.
Gene Found to Switch Off Stem Cells During Aging - New York Times
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