Liza Sabater: February 2008 Archives

The adage "you're never too skinny or too rich" is losing luster at least in Spain.

Three models banned from fashion show in Madrid for being too thin.The week-long Cibeles show in Madrid banned models with a body mass index (BMI) of less than 18, believing them to set an unhealthy ideal for teenage girls. The three models rejected by the organizers had a BMI of less than 16.

"A BMI of 16 is extremely low," said Susana Monereo, a nutritionist and endocrinologist who weighed the 70 models due to appear at the show. Organizers refused to name the models and said that they were not necessarily in danger. "Their health might be OK, but their appearance is extremely thin," Dr. Monereo said.

Spain passed a law in 2006 banning models with a BMI of 18%. This was prompted after several models died of starvation in 2005 and 2006 and based on the the World Health Organization's guidelines for a healthy weight (anything below 18.5% BMI is considered underweight).

Milan has a similar law. London hasn't passed one but they now do not allow catwalk models to be under the age of 16.

Do you think excessively thin models are unhealthy role models? Should we have similar public health laws focusing on the fashion industry here in the United States as a public health measure?

What do you think?

[Image: Pravda]

Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences goes Open Access

In recent years, the Open Access movement in academic publishing has been gathering steam, with the growth of open access journals such as PLoS and mandates from funding bodies such as the NIH that require authors to deposit copies of their work into open databases. Now that 800lb. gorilla of academe, Harvard University, has started to throw its weight behind the spread of Open Access publishing. Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences has voted to require faculty to make copies of their research freely available through the Office of Scholarly Communications.

One of the great promises of the internet revolution has been the democratization of knowledge. Armed just with a computer and way of connecting to the internet, it is possible to find information on just about any topic known to humankind. In academia, the spread of the digital age has been most effective. Instead of having to spend hours in dusty stacks looking for the right volume of an obscure periodical, a few seconds using PubMed, Google Scholar, or any one of a number of databases will often yield up an electronic copy.

I give a half amen to the idea that the internet has been brought forth the democratization of knowledge. It's exactly because of the internet that we have had in this country legislation such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the "Mickey Mouse Protection Art".

The DMCA has restricted fair use of digital products. It was created so that, for example, record companies could create MP3s with code that would allow you to listen to a song in only one type of machine while disabling in others, even if it is meant for your own personal use. An example is MP3s designed to only play in one registered computer but not on a phone with digital playback capability or in an iPod or only in PCs running one specific operating system.

Copyright Term Extension Act was primarily lobbied by the Disney Company (which is why it's called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act). It is also known as the Sonny Bono Act and it was meant to deny the public domain (that means you and me) from freely using copyrighted materials for over 100 years after their creation and/or the death (if an individual) or liquidation (if a corporation) of the copyright holder.

Mickey Mouse, along with many other Disney characters, would have become public domain just about now, making it possible for millions of people to use the images freely, without the economic restrictions of licensing agreements. Yet because the law was extended to cover all works published before 1975, millions of novels, textbooks, non-fiction books, dictionaries, educational movies, news casts, photographs, paintings were denied public domain status; making it impossible for anybody to have free access to a lot of cultural, scientific and technological knowledge.

Enter the Open Access Movement.

While opponents to the DMCA and CTA duke it out in the courts and in Congress, many scholars, scientists, artists, software developers and other cultural creatives, have come together for three simple actions: To create content that is accessible 24/7, free of charge and free of copyright and/or licensing restrictions.

Harvard is not the only example of how to successfully produce projects that are accessible all the time on the internet, free of any charge and, more importantly, free to use as however one likes.

The following are 5 internet stops that will make your IQ go a few percentages higher thanks to the Open Access Movement :

1. Creative Commons
Their mantra is "we use private rights to create public goods". What does this mean? They've created a whole licensing system that makes it possible for copyright holders to explain how others may exercise their copyright. Or, as some might like to think of Creative Commons licenses, to copyleft your work. Since millions of creatives have already embraced this type of copyright reinterpretation, they've created a search engine that allows you to scour the internet for copylefted materials.

2. Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced electronic encyclopedia with 9.25 million articles in 253 languages and edited by millions of users from around the world. Whereas encyclopedias have traditionally been the product of scholars and experts given 'official' status by the company that produces them, Wikipedia thrives on the premise of "the wisdom of crowds" and it's one of the reasons why people either praise it or hate it. I, personally, use it constantly. I don't take everything in Wikipedia as 100% factual, but 90% of what I have needed from it has been absolutely outstanding. For many researchers like myself, it is a much needed point of entry to other sources or an excellent quick refresher of dates, statistics, names or facts long forgotten.

3. Archive.org
It was created for the express purpose of preserving the internet. With its 'Wayback Machine' people can go as far back as 1996 and see what the internet looked like at that time. It nowadays offers permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections. It includes now one of the largest collections of public domain texts, audio, moving images, and software on the internet.

4. NASA Multimedia
The beautiful photograph that's at the top of this article comes from NASA's Multimedia Hub. More exactly, its Image Of The Day section. NASA has been at the vanguard of the CopyLeft movement, having been one of the first government agencies to clearly release free of copyright and as part of the public domain, not just their historical archives, but all new and subsequent work and materials created by the agency. In other words, they rawk!

5. Project Guttenberg
Michael Hart, the founder of the project, invented e-books back in 1971. His intention? To make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search. You need all of Shakespeare? Official and doubtful books alike. Mark Twain? You got it. How about some Miguel De Cervantes? In Spanish and in English. Project Gutenberg's work is nothing short of amazing and should be bookmarked by anybody who's always wanted to finish reading that classic they skimmed through in college but wish they had read more closely. With that in mind, go to The History and Philosophy of Project, to read more about how the project was born and how it has been sustained for 36 years.

This is just a teensy bit of all the great Open Access projects that are out in the web. It's just meant to whet your appetite.

If you have your favorite, add them to the comments section. I'll definitely use them (and credit you) in my follow up with more goodies to this post. In the mean time, enjoy getting your nerd on. LOL!


Photo Credit: NASA, Out On A Limb STS-103 payload commander Steven L. Smith retrieved a power tool while standing on the mobile foot restraint at the end of the remote manipulator system during a Hubble servicing mission in 1999.

Photo source: Wikimedia

I just read this on the wires and had to do a double take:

Mao Offered US 10 Million Women
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Amid a discussion of trade in 1973, Chinese leader Mao Zedong made what U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a novel proposition: sending tens of thousands, even 10 million, Chinese women to the United States. [...]

"You know, China is a very poor country," Mao said, according to a document released by the State Department's historian office. "We don't have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands."

A few minutes later, Mao circled back to the offer. "Do you want our Chinese women?" he asked. "We can give you 10 million."

After Kissinger noted Mao was "improving his offer," the chairman said, "We have too many women. ... They give birth to children and our children are too many."

"It is such a novel proposition," Kissinger replied in his discussion with Mao in Beijing. "We will have to study it."

That conversation happened in 1973, yet in 2007 a study found that the push for gender selection of Chinese babies, compounded with the forced policy of "one family, one child", has nowadays created the worst "gender crisis" in the world:

Crisis looms as 18 million Chinese can't find a wife.
China is planning to tighten punishments for sex-selective abortions amid concerns that its widening gender imbalance will lead to wife trafficking, sexual crimes and social frustration.

Shocking new figures released by the state media show that the worst affected city, Lianyungang in Jiangsu province, has a ratio of 165 boys to 100 girls among children aged one to four.

Nationwide, six males are born for every five females, far above the international average. With the gap growing every year as a result of increased access to ultrasound sex-checking technology, one senior official warned that China faces the 'most serious gender imbalance in the world'.

I guess Chairman Mao's plans have backfired. Ironic given he comes from the country that gave us not only Taoism but the principles of Ying and Yang.

A group of epidemiologists from Holland harshed the groove of chub checkers and health freaks everywhere by revealing findings that point out that healthy, lean people actually tend to cost more to keep alive than short-lived smoking, drug-using fatties.

Smoke cigarettes, die young, save NHS money

Dutch researchers have confirmed what fat smokers have waited years to hear: healthy people are actually a greater burden on the state, because they live longer and oblige the taxpayer to deal with the cost of "lingering diseases of old age like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's".

That's according to the Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and Environment, which found that while "a person of normal weight costs on average £210,000 over their lifetime", a smoker clocks up just £165,000 and the obese run up an average £187,000 bill.

The team's findings, published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS), are based on modelling "three hypothetical populations from the age of 20, to see how much they would cost in medical bills throughout the different stages of their lives," the Telegraph explains.

The study states: "The underlying mechanism is that there is a substitution of inexpensive, lethal diseases towards less lethal, and therefore more costly diseases."

This is awesome. I do less damage to the country's GNP than most supermodels.

Tell you what, let's tax everybody in the size 0 to 5 range 40% more than most of us bubble butts. That way when they outlive us fatties, the government will have enough money to take care of them during their fabulously senile years.

Heh.

I don't see borders and I see lives and I see children and this is you know an environment where there is a war but there is a humanitarian crisis. And they have to be addressed simultaneously. We can't wait for one to end to then finally take the time to address the other, it has to start right now.

There are 33 million refugee worldwide. Of this total, 21 million are IDPs (internally displaced people) seeking safety from conflict within their own countries. The other 12 million are refugees who have fled to another country in search of safety. Of this total, almost 10 million are under the mandate of The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, up 14% since 2002. Why? It's mostly because of the war in Iraq:

UNHCR: refugee numbers up for the first time in five years According to the UNHCR report, the increase in the number of refugees is largely due to the situation in Iraq, which by the end of 2006 had forced up to 1.5 million Iraqis to seek refuge in other countries, particularly Syria and Jordan.

In 2006, the main group of refugees under UNHCR's mandate continued to be Afghans (2.1 million), followed by Iraqis (1.5 million), Sudanese (686,000), Somalis (460,000), and refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi (about 400,000 each).

UNHCR figures do not include some 4.3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian Occupied Territories, who fall under the mandate of a separate agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). If added, the total number of refugees under both agencies' mandates is over 14 million.

You can read or download the whole report at the UNHCR's website : The State of the World's Refugees 2006.

In researching Ms. Jolie's role in bringing awareness to the plight of refugees, I discovered quite a number of issues that are interconnected to the plight of refugees :

1. War is the most obvious reason for the displacements of people around the world. Cataclisms like Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Tsunami are other examples. Yet there is a growing trend of "eco refugees", people displaced by environmental degradation, most often due to lack of water and desertification.


2. Most refugees become "residents without a state", remaining in legal limbo for years. In most cases the host country will settle them in cordoned areas to be managed by relief agencies coordinated by the United Nations. Their legal fate hinges on whatever agreements the United Nations, the country the origin and the hosting government work out in order to address the refugee's situation. For years they can remain without proper immigration status and thus with no way to earn a living, settle down and regain anything resembling a normal life.


3. Refugee management is exactly that : It's meant to deal with the temporary relief of basic needs like food, medicine, housing, clothing and water. Yet due to the lack of proper sanitation and living infrastructures, several studies have found that up to 75% of the death rate in refugee camps can be attributed to malnutrition and unsanitary conditions.


4. Most troubling is the demographic composition. Women make the majority of refugees at 51%. As to age, 45% of refugees worldwide are children under the age of 18, with 11% under the age of 5 and 19% between 5 and 11 years.
   

From all the celebrities out there doing humanitarian, charity or political work, Angelina Jolie strikes me as one of the most articulate, best informed and most committed to her work as communicator of the suffering of those who she serves. And I give her extra kudos for taking on a cause that is actually a matrix of interconnect crisis. Environmental degradation, foreign policy, economic justice, health care, sanitation, war : All of these come together under the banner of "humanitarian refugee relief". You have to give her credit for not shying away, for the 8 years she's been a goodwill ambassador, from the complexity of her mission.

And on that note, here's another interesting fact I discovered : the UNCHR is trying to raise US$1.393 billion for their worldwide refugee programs. The United States spends $720 MILLION A DAY in the war in Iraq.

You do the math.

One of the biggest mantras of the "corporation friendly" environmental movement is that profits from consumption and business development will not go away. That the key to cutting carbon emission is in creating alternative fuel sources, not changing and decreasing patterns of consumption.

Well, it looks like there is no escaping the reality of consumption:

Studies deemed biofuels a greenhouse threat.

The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months, as scientists took a closer look at the global environmental cost of their production. These latest studies, published in the prestigious journal Science, are likely to add to the controversy.

These studies for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development.

The destruction of natural ecosystems -- whether rain forest in the tropics or grasslands in South America -- not only releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when they are burned and plowed, but also deprives the planet of natural sponges to absorb carbon emissions. Cropland also absorbs far less carbon than the rain forests or even scrubland that it replaces.

Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel.

Alternative fuels are going to be an interesting battleground, especially in the US. Too many policymakers have memories of Three Mile Island. There is also the issue of whether it is politically feasible to give countries, more access to nuclear power.

What do you think about this? Are you willing to consume less if it means that it will save the planet? What are you willing to give up? Your car? Your central air conditioning? Cheap airfares?

Discuss.

I am ashamed to admit that even though I taught Brazilian Literature at one point in my years as a Latin American Studies teacher, that even though I speak Portuguese fluently, with a Carioca accent and can make myself pass, I've never been to Brazil. I am due though, because my love for all things do Brasil explodes every time I read something like this in the news:

Health officials in Brazil on Sunday began distributing millions of condoms ahead of the country's five-day Carnival in an effort to reduce the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, the AP/San Diego Union-Tribune reports. The Ministry of Health plans to distribute about 19.5 million condoms before the end of Carnival on Feb. 6, according to the AP/Union-Tribune.

Health Minister Jose Gomes Temporao during the launch of the condom-distribution program at a cultural center in Rio de Janeiro said the government has to "let society know the importance of prevention." According to a recent health ministry survey, about 80% of young men in the country reported using condoms, compared with 40% of young women.

The campaign is actually focused on getting women to demand condoms from their sexual partners. So notice all the fashion and coolness factors highlighted in the campaign:

1. The campaign is about having fun responsibly. If you go the campaign's dedicated website, you'll a condom getting bigger while your waiting for the flash animation to load. LOL.

2. The campaign visuals play off the Brazilian colloquialism for condoms, camizinhas. That's why the model wears a tank top throughout all the materials.

3. Over at the ministry's page on AIDS, they go into deep detail about the campaign :

• 100 million temporary tatoos were created with the phrase : "Tenho atitude. Uso camisinha." which means, "Ive got game. I wear a condom".
• 100 bandanas were also being distributed with the slogan.
• 700 thousand self-adhesive posters where produced to be posted in bathroom stalls all across the cities with the most carnival revelers.

The Ministry of Health is targeting women in the 15 to 24 age range because only 42% of young Brazilian women practice safe sex compared to 87% of their male counterparts. The consequences for this behavior are disastrous. For every 6 boys with AIDS there are 10 girls who have it. When looking at infections trends across all ages, for every 15 men with AIDS, there are 10 women who have it.

It's amazing the Brazilian government will go out of its way to do this but here in the United States we're still short changing our young adults with the short-sightedness of abstinence programs.

This country could learn a thing or two from the Brazilians condom awareness campaign. Or should we call Brazil's effort a condom AWEARNESS campaign?

Either way, bravo for them.

2008 is turning out to be an intense channel surfing year in US politics. "Change" has become the meme of the moment and in its wake comes a wave of creativity and innovation. In this case reflected in that perfect political medium, video.

If you have 4-10 hours to waste on YouTube or MySpace, then go ahead and lose yourself among the videos created by voters in support of their favorite candidates. Otherwise, I've gone through them for you and come up with my top 5 videos of the 2008 Presidential Primaries season.

5. "Vote Different" or "Hillary Clinton 1984"

Philip de Vellis, aka ParkRidge47, created this video out of serendipity. A web developer, he was working with one of several web consulting firms that were putting together the Senator's online strategy. "Hillary 1984" was made in one afternoon, under cloak of anonymity and without telling his employers. After he was outed and decided to quit his job, he said of his decision to make and disseminate the video : "I made the "Vote Different" ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process."

4. John Edwards Hair Time

John Edwards got a lot of flack for this video. The song used for the parody says it all : "I Feel Pretty". Yet, even though I laughed my head off at first sight, I could completely identify with his mini-obsession : You're ready to get in front of the camera and talk to convince millions of people that your vision of government is the right one to make him our next president. The grooming is almost ritualistic. I actually can see why it may have been a soothing moment for him. After all, being in front of media all the time can be an intense out of body experience. He was just finding a way to get back in and relax.

3. Billiam the Snowman at the CNN/YouTube debate

I actually wanted to include one of the many Ron Paul videos created abou the man. I particularly like "The Ron Paul Song". Yet this particular video encapsulates the ethos of this elections : It's the voters party, and the candidates are just part of the entertainment. Billman supposedly pissed off Mitt Romney so much that he refused until the last minute to participate in a second round of CNN/YouTube debates. Which is why this video rocks. If only because it ruffled the feathers of the politicos ... although look how Kucinich, one of the insurgent candidates, masters the moment and runs with it to push his anti-war message.

2. "Yes We Can" Remix

If you go to YouTube and do a search of Obama, hip hop or Obama rap, you are going to find a cornucopia of original music or remixes of the Senator's campaign speeches. Check out, for example, Obama Gangster Rap. Yet what makes will.I.am's remix unique are two things : (1) The music highlights the innate musicality of the speech and (2) The speech becomes a community connector, a moment in time in which all the different people saying and singing the speech become collaborators in the building of this future they call "Yes We Can". It is truly flawless in reflecting what we are now reckoning with as the new political movement. [For the full text of the speech, go to culturekitchen.com.]

1. Mark Gravel, The Rock

You don't have to be a front runner to make history, yet that's exactly what Mike Gravel has done with this video. This video marks the first time in the history of the United States a presidential hopeful uses performance art in order to push their candidacy. It's not a coincidence since Gravel has demonstrated in all his years as a politician to be a master of media.

Whether it is good or bad performance art, it doesn't matter. I like it because it's as if he is doing one of Andy Warhol's film non-happenings inside of a Bill Viola video. It's mind boggling, creepy, refreshing and funny all at the same time. Oh, and it's also one of the coolest puns ever.

And there you have it : Five videos that capture the collective imagination of the US political animal in this primary year. I honestly can't wait all the stuff people are going to put out for the general elections.

December of 2008 marks seven years since my leap of faith into blogging with culturekitchen. Actually, not just blogging but mommyblogging. At the time I wasn't familiar with the term because I didn't really know many women who blogged about arts, politics, philosophy and motherhood. The only blogger I stumbled upon with a similar mix was Belle Warig of John and Belle Have A Blog who went on to Crooked Timber fame. Her J&B blog was an inspiration that eventually got my writing juices flowing.

Now it seems as if everybody and their mother has a blog.

Especially a mommy blog.

It makes me wonder if we are in the middle of a baby boom.

It seems like there is a baby boom in Hollywood. So much so that it led Ricki Lake to make a documentary about the whole thing. In The Business of Being Born, Lake goes on to document the way women in the United States go about birthing babies and to reveal it for what it is, a business. As an advocate for midwifery and non-invasive birthing, Lake hopes "this film educates people and empowers them to really know their choices in childbirth."

One choice she didn't cover was the choice of the outsourced birth.

The Times of India published an article titled, "Surrogate moms in hot demand". It talks about how expats and foreign born Indians are flooding the Punjabi region looking for a womb to rent. The booming business is being called "surrogacy tourism".