9/18/15

Sugar Addiction


 encore selection -- from Salt, Sugar, fat by Michael Moss. Sugar was a rare for centuries, but is now abundant. And eating sugar makes us crave still more sugar:

"The first thing to know about sugar is this: Our bodies are hard-wired for sweets.


The myth of the tongue map; that 1 tastes bitter, 2 tastes sour, 3 tastes salt, and 4 tastes sweet.
 "Forget what we learned in school from that old diagram called the tongue map, the one that says our five main tastes are detected by five distinct parts of the tongue. That the back has a big zone for blasts of bitter, the sides grab the sour and the salty, and the tip of the tongue has that one single spot for sweet. The tongue map is wrong. As researchers would discover in the 1970s, its creators misinterpreted the work of a German graduate student that was published in 1901; his experiments showed only that we might taste a little more sweetness on the tip of the tongue. In truth, the entire mouth goes crazy for sugar, including the upper reaches known as the palate. There are special receptors for sweetness in everyone of the mouth's ten thousand taste buds, and they are all hooked up, one way or another, to the parts of the brain known as the pleasure zones, where we get rewarded for stoking our bodies with energy. But our zeal doesn't stop there. Scientists are now finding taste receptors that light up forsugar all the way down our esophagus to our stomach and pancreas, and they appear to be intricately tied to our appetites. 

"The second thing to know about sugar: Food manufacturers are well aware of the tongue map folly, along with a whole lot more about why we crave sweets. They have on staff cadres of scientists who specialize in the senses, and the companies use their knowledge to put sugar to work for them in countless ways. Sugar not only makes the taste of food and drink irresistible. The industry has learned that it can also be used to pull off a string of manufacturing miracles, from donuts that fry up bigger to bread that won't go stale to cereal that is toasty-brown and fluffy. All of this has made sugar a go-to ingredient in processed foods. On average, we consume 71 pounds of caloric sweeteners each year. That's 22 teaspoons of sugar, per person, per day. The amount is almost equally split three ways, with the sugar derived from sugar cane, sugar beets, and the group of corn sweeteners that includes high-fructose corn syrup (with a little honey and syrup thrown into the mix). 

"That we love, and crave, sugar is hardly news. ... Cane and beets [were] the two main sources of sugar until the 1970s, when rising prices spurred the invention of high-fructose corn syrup, which had two attributes that were attractive to the soda industry. One, it was cheap, effectively subsidized by the federal price supports for corn; and two, it was liquid, which meant that it could be pumped directly into food and drink. Over the next thirty years, our consumption of sugar-sweetened soda more than doubled to 40 gallons a year per person, and while this has tapered off since then, hitting 32 gallons in 2011, there has been a commensurate surge in other sweet drinks, like teas, sports ades, vitamin waters, and energy drinks. Their yearly consumption has nearly doubled in the past decade to 14 gallons a person.

"Far less well known than the history of sugar, however, is the intense research that scientists have conducted into its allure, the biology and psychology of why we find it so irresistible.

"Far less well known than the history of sugar, however, is the intense research that scientists have conducted into its allure, the biology and psychology of why we find it so irresistible.

"For the longest time, the people who spent their careers studying nutrition could only guess at the extent to which people are attracted to sugar. They had a sense, but no proof, that sugar was so powerful it could compel us to eat more than we should and thus do harm to our health. That all changed in the late 1960s, when some lab rats in upstate New York got ahold of Froot Loops, the supersweet cereal made by Kellogg. The rats were fed the cereal by a graduate student named Anthony Sclafani who, at first, was just being nice to the animals in his care. But when Sclafani noticed how fast they gobbled it up, he decided to concoct a test to measure their zeal. Rats hate open spaces; even in cages, they tend to stick to the shadowy corners and sides. So Sclafani put a little of the cereal in the brightly lit, open center of their cages -- normally an area to be avoided -- to see what would happen. Sure enough, the rats overcame their instinctual fears and ran out in the open to gorge.

"Their predilection for sweets became scientifically significant a few years later when Sclafani -- who'd become an assistant professor of psychology at Brooklyn College -- was trying to fatten some rats for a study. Their standard Purina Dog Chow wasn't doing the trick, even when Sclafani added lots of fats to the mix. The rats wouldn't eat enough to gain significant weight. So Sclafani, remembering the Froot Loops experiment, sent a graduate student out to a supermarket on Flatbush Avenue to buy some cookies and candies and other sugar-laden products. And the rats went bananas, they couldn't resist. They were particularly fond of sweetened condensed milk and chocolate bars. They ate so much over the course of a few weeks that they grew obese. 


 "'Everyone who owns pet rats knows if you give them a cookie they will like that, but no one experimentally had given them all they want,' Sclafani told me when I met him at his lab in Brooklyn, where he continues to use rodents in studying the psychology and brain mechanisms that underlie the desire for high-fat and high-sugar foods. When he did just that, when he gave his rats all they wanted, he saw their appetite for sugar in a new light. They loved it, and this craving completely overrode the biological brakes that should have been saying: Stop.

"The details of Sclafani's experiment went into a 1976 paper that is revered by researchers as one of the first experimental proofs of food cravings. Since its publication, a whole body of research has been undertaken to link sugar to compulsive overeating. In Florida, researchers have conditioned rats to expect an electrical shock when they eat cheesecake, and still they lunge for it. Scientists at Princeton found that rats taken off a sugary diet will exhibit signs of withdrawal, such as chattering teeth."



Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
Author: Michael Moss
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Copyright 2013 by Michael Moss
Pages 3-6


I





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8/21/15

Leading Causes of Death







Source:
  
We worry about all the wrong things. 




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8/18/15

Good old days in a British Slum



Who needs a PlayStation? Incredible pictures from the 1960s capture the last days of the slums - and an era before health and safety ruled our children 
 
Photographer Sheila Baker spent almost two decades documenting the changing street life around Manchester 
 
She photographed ordinary street scenes and captured a valuable insight into the transformation from the 1960s 

Ms Baker's streetscapes showed women and children standing outside their slums homes before demolition 

The artwork is being featured in a major exhibition in London until September 20/15 at the Photographers' Gallery



These are the haunting pictures of the last days of Manchester slum-land when houses built during the 19th century to home workers were finally demolished.


Photographer Sheila Baker was the only female photographer documenting British street scenes between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Her work featured urban areas in Manchester and Salford at a time of major social change, catching the dying days of a previous era.


Here Shirley Baker captures a shot of a young boy in 1967, wearing a old-fashioned jacket


Ms Baker captured images of people living in the densely-packed terraced houses in inner-city Manchester - similar type places to that depicted in Coronation Street.

The photographs showed youngsters at play and their mothers standing outside talking in communal groups, something that would appear very strange to modern society.

Children were forced to improvise to find ways to amuse themselves. Instead of expensive toys and games, they used bits of rope and even a Second World War surplus gas masks.

Here a group of children play cricket on the pavement outside their house which seems to have peeling paint on its walls


 Children exploring places that would be unacceptable to today's parents


 Man feeding pigeons

                             Makeshift swing



Boys wearing gas masks  





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7/7/15

Pieter Hugo Documents homeless in L.A.


 10 hours ago
Photographer Pieter Hugo spends 10 days documenting the forgotten homeless people of L.A.







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1/30/15

Child Poverty



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Literacy


 

Literacy is an area where we can have a profound effect on people's lives.  If you cannot read in this modern age, it puts you at a severe disadvantage.  

Teaching people to read and write is a very direct way to help the disadvantaged.


 One in six adults struggles to read.  (UK)



 Source:
http://readingagency.org.uk/adults/quick-guides/reading-well/





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 Source:
 https://twitter.com/readingagency


Today, we came across the awesome Tumblr Bookshelfies (via Business Insider)

What is a "bookshelfie," you might ask? Well, it's a selfie taken in front of your bookshelf, of course! (the contributors also list some of the books that can be found on their bookshelves.

This is definitely our favorite bookish thing on the Internet right now.
Submit your own on the Tumblr! 

 Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/bookshelfies-_n_3785796.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003


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High Rent Blues

BillMoyers.com‏@BillMoyersHQ
In 2000s, more than 2/3 of the increase in metro areas occurred in the suburbs
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12:05 PM - 30 Jan 2015 · Details
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12/30/14

Well-Read in 100 Books

Isn’t it strange that we have the term “well-read” but absolutely no one can come close to defining it?

And isn’t also strange that other art forms don’t have equivalent terms for a vague sense of someone’s total experience of that form (well-seen for movies? well-heard for music? Absurd).

Thinking about this recently sucked me into a little thought-experiment: say someone had never read any literature and wanted to be well-read. What should they read? And how many books would it take them to get close?

This hypothetical forces any given answerer to do two things: provide their personal definition of well-read and then give a list of books that might satisfy that definition. The first hurdle to clear is cultural position: who is this person? As I can only provide a reasonable list of books from my own cultural position, I have to assume that this person is like me, at least in a very basic way: an alive American who can read English.

“Well-read” for this person then has a number of connotations: a familiarity with the monuments of Western literature, an at least passing interest in the high-points of world literature, a willingness to experience a breadth of genres, a special interest in the work of one’s immediate culture, a desire to share in the same reading experiences of many other readers, and an emphasis on the writing of the current day.

The following 100 books (of fiction, poetry, and drama) is an attempt to satisfy those competing requirements. 

After going through several iterations of the list, one thing surprised me: there are not as many “classic” books that I associate with the moniker well-read, and many more current books than I would have thought. Conversely, to be conversant in the literature of the day turned out to be quite a bit more important than I would have thought.

As for the number of 100: in addition to being a nice, round number, it is also a number that, at a one-book-every-two-week pace this hypothetical reader could accomplish in just about four years–the standard length of an undergraduate program.
So here’s the list, in alphabetical order:
  1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
  3. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
  4. All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque
  5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay  by Michael Chabon
  6. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
  7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  8. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
  9. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  10. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  11. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  12. Beowulf
  13. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  14. Brave New World by Alduos Huxley
  15. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
  16. The Call of the Wild  by Jack London
  17. Candide by Voltaire
  18. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
  19. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
  20. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  21. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  22. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
  23. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
  24. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
  25. The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
  26. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor 
  27. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
  28. Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  29. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
  30. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
  31. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
  32. Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
  33. Dune by Frank Herbert
  34. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
  35. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  36. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
  37. Faust by Goethe
  38. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  39. Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
  40. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
  41. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
  42. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
  43. The Gospels
  44. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  45. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  46. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  47. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
  48. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  49. Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
  50. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  51. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
  52. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  53. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
  54. House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
  55. Howl by Allen Ginsberg
  56. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
  57. if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
  58. The Iliad by Homer
  59. The Inferno by Dante
  60. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
  61. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  62. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
  63. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
  64. The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
  65. The Little Prince by Antoine  de Saint-Exepury
  66. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  67. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  68. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  69. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
  70. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
  71. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  72. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
  73. The Odyssey by Homer
  74. Oedipus, King by Sophocles
  75. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  76. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
  77. The Pentateuch
  78. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
  79. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
  80. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  81. Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare
  82. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  83. Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut
  84. The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
  85. The Stand by Stephen King
  86. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  87. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
  88. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
  89. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  90. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
  91. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  92. Ulysses by James Joyce
  93. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
  94. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
  95. Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
  96. Watchmen by Alan Moore
  97. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
  98. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
  99. 1984 by George Orwell
  100. 50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James
____________________________
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 Source:  http://bookriot.com/2013/06/13/from-zero-to-well-read-in-100-books/



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New York Homeless Numbers Climb

http://www.labkultur.tv/en/blog/privatepublic-rethinking-design-homeless-new-york-part-2

Architects work on better design for homeless shelters

New York City Homelessness: Rate Up 23 Percent (STUDY) 

On Jan. 30, the Department of Homeless Services and volunteers for the organization counted an estimated 3,262 homeless people living on the streets -- a 23 percent increase from the 2,648 counted in 2011, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In January the coalition released a report citing the current administration -- specifically that of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- for the record-breaking number of homeless men, women and children. It called the homeless policy shift "disastrous", and foreshadowed another increase in homelessness as "expected in the coming months," the organization said in a statement.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/30/new-york-city-homelessness_n_1465340.html























The number of New Yorkers struggling with homelessness has reached unprecedented levels under a leader that vowed to take on the growing crisis.

In Mayor Bill de Blasio's first year in office, the number of people living in homeless shelters rose to 58,913 -- an all-time high -- WNYC reported. Although de Blasio inherited a dire situation (homelessness jumped 71 percent on Mayor Michael Bloomberg's watch, according to the Coalition for the Homeless), about 3,000 more people are living without stable shelter now than in October, despite new programs designed to fight homelessness that went into effect this past fall.

The current mayor's administration says that although they cannot specify exactly when the city can expect homelessness to begin declining, the initiatives -- namely, programs targeting disproportionately affected groups -- should improve conditions down the road.

While homelessness has climbed to new heights in New York City, overall rates have declined nationwide, a 2014 study by the National Alliance to End Homelessness found. The number of homeless people in the U.S. dropped by more than 152,000 between 2005 and 2013. The survey noted that successes and setbacks in combating homelessness varied from region to region.

Note: Many homeless people avoid using shelters because of bed bugs, bullying, and criminal behavior within the shelter populations.





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12/28/14

Nashville shelter to Swedish star


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How a 63yo singer went from Nashville shelter to Swedish star (, new )



Source:longform.org
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The best articles on the web, recommended daily. Also:@LongformApp/@LongformPodcast.
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2/28/14

Houses Built for the Homeless

The Bold Italic

These Awesome Tiny Houses Were Built for the Homeless

These Awesome Tiny Houses Were Built for the Homeless by Oakland artist Gregory Kloehn rose to fame in 2011, when he created small homes made out of transformed dumpsters. Taking what he learned from making these mini living spaces, he's started a new project building brightly colored tiny houses out of found materials and donating them to the homeless.
Kloehn builds his houses using discarded materials he finds on the streets. Oakland has a horrible illegal dumping problem, so it's rad that he's solving two problems with one project. Although made from trash, Kloehn's homes are sturdy. They're also constructed with the basic living needs of the homeless in mind: they're built on wheels so they can be moved around, and they provide privacy, shelter from the elements, and a space for sleeping (some are even big enough to stand in). 

View on web

Tiny houses made from dumped materials and donated to homeless people in Oakland h/t (cc )
 See More:  See More: http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/4501-these-awesome-tiny-houses-were-built-for-the-homeless



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1/22/14

Serenity Parayer Adapted for ADD



God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; 

The insight to prioritize wisely what I want to change; 

The patience to resist trying to control everything I could, had I the energy and time; 

The courage and skill to change the things I have chosen to change; 

And the wisdom to know the differences among all these.

- Dr. Edward Hallowell   





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10/14/13

Thanksgiving Dinner 2013

Weekend in pictures: La Loma, Haiti: A girl whose Haitian-born grandfather immigrated to the Dom


La Loma, Haiti: A girl, whose Haitian-born grandfather emigrated to the Dominican Republic in 1950, watches cornmeal cook for breakfast at her family's home. A court ruling retroactively denies Dominican nationality to anyone born after 1929 who does not have at least one parent of Dominican blood




Link: http://www.theguardian.com/news/gallery/2013/oct/13/weekend-in-pictures?CMP=twt_gu#/?picture=419831971&index=2







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10/1/13

Jon's Jail Journal (by Shaun Attwood)



ploaded on Feb 22, 2012 Prison survival tips: http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com/2...... Jail survival guide: http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com/2...... Hard Time http://shaunattwood.com/index.php?opt...... .. Brutal murder of inmate, Robert Cotton, by Aryan Brother, Pete Van Winkle, in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Maricopa County jail. Phoenix, Arizona. Category News & Politics License Standard YouTube License Introduction to his Blog:


I started Jon's Jail Journal back in 2004 to expose the conditions in the maximum-security Madison Street jail, Phoenix, Arizona, run by the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio. I wrote with a golf pencil sharpened on a cement-block wall or metal door, and my aunt Ann, who visited every weekend, smuggled my writing out of the jail. My parents in England posted my writing to the Internet. The blog went on to attract international media attention, and the Madison Street jail was shut down a few years later.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio is still in charge of the Maricopa County jail system and its various facilities. His detractors call him the Angel of Death, not just because of the abnormally high amount of murder and death in his jails, but also because he actually promoted guards that the federal court had found responsible for murdering inmates.

Where I was housed, there were only two guards supervising hundreds of inmates, so gangs like the Mexican Mafia had more control over the inmates than the guards. I got used to the sound of heads getting smashed against steel toilets and bodies getting thrown around. Here's a video of an Aryan Brother murdering another inmate in the jail:


On the right hand side of this blog below the banner is an archive menu you can click on. If you click back to March 2004 you can read the early blog entries.

Here are excerpts from the first two blogs I wrote:





Source:
http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.ca/2009/12/welcome-guardian-readers-i-started-jons.html


 Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba_vGzkcdHQ



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