The Dutch version can be found here, whereas the English version is located here. Both are a translation of the original article in German.

Goettingen, Germany – A baby weighing just 275 grams has been born in Germany and survived, the lowest weight for a viable birth of a boy ever recorded, doctors said Thursday. Doctors normally assume that survival is impossible at birth weights below 350 grams.

The little boy was born in June last year in the 25th week of pregnancy, said Stefan Weller, a spokesman for the University of Goettingen Hospital. He spent six months in intensive care and was finally discharged in December after growing to 3.7 kilograms.

Weller said doctors had checked every available record worldwide of premature births and found no viable birth at a lower weight.

English version found at: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/312505,smallest-ever-baby-born-in-germany-and-survives.html#ixzz0hDwIdApm

In The Netherlands, abortion is legal until 24 weeks of pregnancy. So the difference between ‘a person whose life is worth it to be saved’ and ‘a bunch of cells which can be aborted’ is just one week in this case. Am I the only person who thinks this is mind-boggling?

Link to the image: sfkids.org

“They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another,”

Source: CBS News

It’s not hard to see why Christians would be upset by hearing this. It has nothing to do with the Gospel of Love that Jesus preached. I really wonder what kind of warped view Mr. Robertson has of the Gospel. On second thought, maybe I don’t want to know that either. It’s really sad to see rabiate Atheist blogs picking this story to target their guns at those ‘ignorant, superstitious Christians’. At the same time it’s hard to find Christian blogs endorsing Mr. Robertson’s view. I felt very sad about it, but a letter to the editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune made me smile. Someone hit the nail right on its head:

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll. You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS

Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune

Thanks Lily for sending that one in! Brilliant!

Peer pressure is a psychological mechanism in which we compare our likes to others. Humans are behaving like herds in this respect, because people tend to like what their peers like. That’s why the advertising industry goes into great pains to promote an article to very targeted audiences. They want to convey the message that peers like this article, so you like it, too. Therefore you want to have it, too.
In the wired article, an experiment is described in which a group is confronted with music they can download. It’s a database of songs which the subjects can rate and download. Other people in the group will be able to see the ratings and the downloads of all the songs. By repeating the same experiment a number of times with different groups of people, you can investigate if people like certain songs because of their quality or because their peers also liked it. The latter seems to be the case. Also when you manipulate the ratings and downloads, people still are going to like the songs they think their peers do like too. However, this only worked for a short time, in the long run the songs being lied about became less popular. So lying only works for a short time.

I wonder how this works with the different social networks we have got now. I know listening to last.fm  and having access to my neighbours’ playlists made me discover and enjoy new music I still listen to, despite the fact I’m not using last.fm anymore because it’s not free anymore for my country. I also notice how people try to use the social media for marketing, advertising. People pioneering in it do that so blatantly and aggressively that I started to unfollow people who posted ads on Twitter, thus polluting my feed.

I don’t think tweets like “Wanna get rich fast, click on this link and find out how” are effective. I do think Twitter and other social media as marketing tools can be effective. It will cost more time to invest in, so possibly advertising on Twitter will cost a company more money, but the effect will be much bigger than TV and radio commercials. It’s more expensive because the agents who advertise products will need to genuinely engage in conversation with their target group, they need to make real online friends. And then they can start twittering on how they are drinking a can of Brand X soda and how good it is. Or that they are investigating insurance companies and ask for input only to reply later that they found out that Insurance Company Y has the best deal. If you’re a hub (someone with a lot of followers) these tactics can be very effective just because they don’t look like ads. They’re very subtle.

On the other hand, I don’t know how ethical this would be, because people would need to pretend they’re friending people on networks out of interest in the other person where they are not. They are only smart marketeers. We’ll see how this turns out.

Links:

• The article on wired.com
• Wikipedia on groupthink
• Wikipedia on peer pressure

PinkStinks aims to counteract the slurry of media obsession on women who are ‘famous’, ‘thin’ ‘rich’ or ‘married to famous men’, by celebrating those women that we see as inspirational, important, ground-breaking and motivating. On these pages we’ll point you in the direction of some of those women … some from history, some just starting out, from all walks of life. It’s amazing how great they are, and when they’re brought together in a list like this there’s a real power to them, that can only serve as an uplifting inspiration.

Also, they showcase a number of “new role models” for girls, while ranting against the feminine stereotyping of girls, dressing them in pink, selling them pink toys and most of all “force them” into stereotypical girly role models. They argue, maybe not explicit that society forces girls with a model on how to behave and how to think and how wrong that is, the current situation that is. What they don’t seem to realise is that they themselves try to do exactly the same, with other role models, other toys and other ways of dressing. It strikes me maybe because it’s all to familiar with me, with my mom being rather feministic trying to avoid the gender stereotyping. It almost seems like they have some issues with girls wanting to be girls, wanting to wear any colour pink, wanting to play with dolls and when they grow up they want to be a teacher, a nurse or wife of some famous person.

Because that is how little girls are. It seems to be something innate, because psychologists have researched this. They tried to find out how much of these behaviours occur by themselves (they call that “nature“) and how much of these behaviours are taught by upbringing (they call that “nurture“). There’s a whole nature-nurture debate going on among psychologists. During the time when behaviourism reigned, many psychologists believed everything people did was hard-wired, nature. In the seventies this position changed, in society the free individual became popular which also influenced the way psychologists were thinking. So from black ‘nature’ they went into the other extreme ‘nurture’. Everything, they argued, was “modifiable”, the “modifiable society” came into existence.
This concept is still popular in socialist and social-democratic circles, at least in the Netherlands. People would be able to change everything according in what they wanted and thus create a perfect society. Along the same lines psychologists started to argue that our concept of gender was created by our upbringing, and thus altering the way of upbringing could help create more equality among genders and rethink gender roles. To summarise it with the words of French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.”

Needless to say this new way of thinking stirred a controversy, partly because it goes against intuitive reasoning. A whole new scientific field of the Gender Studies was founded, but sadly a lot of people engaged in it, do that with a certain agenda. Feminist scientists want to prove there is no difference between genders, others want to prove it’s all hard-wired  and a third group of people is only toning down things. The interesting thing is, that psychological research on gender fails to “prove” there are no gender differences. They just are there, and that’s just being shown in research time and time again. One study comes to my mind, which was used to showcase the topic during social psychology class, was that they tried to monitor kids whose parents were raising them without “gender bias”. Interestingly, most boys seemed to have an interest for “boyish” things like playing with cars and the more adventurous games whereas girls engaged in more “girly” things without anyone forcing them to do so. Of course this doesn’t mean that all girls and all boys display this behaviour, but most of them do.

To return on the topic of the “pinkification” of girls’ toys. The people behind “Pink Stinks” argue this is because toy manufacturers and de evil society does this to subdue girls to their way of thinking, but what I think is that it’s the other way around. Girls want pink stuff. It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s appealing because its pink. And therefore pink toys are being made, because it increases the likelihood that girls want to have it because they are pink. It’s the other way around. I understand their concern, but I think it’s too bad they are going into the other extreme. What about the idea to allow girls to develop in whatever they want to be themselves? To allow them to develop into a genuine, authentic personality. Yes, some of them may want to become WAGS (wives and girlfriends of professional football players), others may want to become scientists. I genuinely believe it’s not in the girls’ best interest to tell them how to think and what to desire, no matter how sincere your motivations are.

Links:

• Pink Stinks
• Why Pink Doesn’t Stink (Guardian)

A few weeks ago St. Nicholas’ official arrival with the steam boat from Spain was broadcast live on Dutch TV. Nobody knows why the Bishop of Myra in Turkey – whose remains lie in Bari, Italy – went to Spain. In the same way Santa comes from the North Pole and has a lot of elves to help him out, St. Nicholas comes from Spain by steam boat accompanied by many helpers: Black Peters. Before World War II there was only one Black Peter, but the allied forces “invented” a lot of extra Black Peters, so they could help out bringing the Saint in with many helpers and have a lot of fun with it. The original Black Peter was an enslaved devil who was very scary for kids, but after World War II that picture was revised by the Allied Forces. In other words: Black Peter was only black because of the sooth of the chimney and maybe because of the fires of hell. He is not of the black race. At least originally.

This changed when the Dutch lost more and more of the Catholic tradition and the feast started to secularise more. Because Black Peters were perceived to be Black Slaves, rainbow coloured Peters were invented to be more politically correct. They were a big failure, kids didn’t want to have anything to do with them. They wanted the “real” Black Peter. It’s adorable to see the brutal honesty of kids who are still oblivious to the idea of being political correct. After the plans of the enlightened, political correct organisation committee regarding the rainbow-coloured Peters failed, they targeted the old man himself: since the cross is a sign of Christian oppression in their eyes, people would most certainly offended by it and it had to be removed from the poor man’s mitre. Instead, they added the emblem of the welcoming city on it: Amsterdam’s coat of arms has three St. Andrew’s crosses as its main feature, so they added the Patron Saint of Fishermen’s trademark on the mitre. THREE times instead of the one ‘normal’ cross.

This plan also failed, the organising committee was the target of a lot of criticism in the days that followed. Indeed, people WERE offended… by the stupid coat of arms of the city of Amsterdam on THEIR St. Nicholas. Be real. If you REALLY want to de-christianise St. Nicholas, you should let him ride his horse naked, or at least in his underwear, because if anything about the man refers back to Christianity, his clothes are. He walks around dressed up as a bishop who is about to celebrate the Feast of Pentecost or at least one of the martyrs feasts, with his bright red chasuble. He’s very classy wearing the Extraordinary Form (old fashioned) vestments. That cross on his mitre doesn’t make him look Christian, it’s everything the man wears! Believe me Dutch bishops look VERY Catholic when they are wearing their vestments and they don’t have a cross on their mitres. At least mine hasn’t. So it’s just ridiculous what they come up with in these times were political correctness makes peoples’ brain deteriorate or something. I wonder what they come up with next year.

What do you do in your daily life?
“I am a high school teacher by profession. I teach Spanish and Religion. In addition to teaching I am on staff at my parish. I am the director of high school catechesis and the Confirmation preparation program. I have been married for 11 years to Char. We have three children, ages 7, 8, and 10. Their names are Christopher, Annabelle, and Grace. We homeschool our children. We live in Louisiana, about 40 minutes from of the New Orleans. Both Char and I love to cook. And we love to eat! Char comes from a family of foodies (which is why I fit in so well!).”

I heard you are member of the Pauline Family. Can you tell something about that? What does that mean and what’s the connection with your ministry?
“Char and I are members of the Holy Family Institute, one of the nine institutes founded by Blessed James Alberione. [Some of the more well-known institutes of the family are the Daughters of St. Paul and the Society of St. Paul.] It is a secular institute established exclusively for the married and widowed. He founded it at the end of his life, and It was officially approved by the Church in 1993. Members of the Institute make formal Church-regulated vows (poverty, chastity, obedience, and fidelity to the Pope), just like religious men and women do, and they live out those vows according to their state in life. Therefore, they do not live as religious, but as married men and women striving to imitate the Holy Family. Vowed consecration adds a great depth and value to the normal joys and sufferings encountered in daily life. Char and I made our first vows almost three years ago.

The Pauline Family has been officially charged by the Church (Pope Paul VI) to minister & evangelise in the arena of social communications. At the time of its founding there was no internet or social media. TV, radio and print media reigned supreme. Times have changed. Our life in the institute dovetails nicely with one of my great interests and pleasures… namely technology. I am a geek, that is true. And the Holy Family Institute has helped me to have courage and a sense of mission in my work with social media.”

How did you come up with the idea to do a podcast about a combination of food and the Catholic faith?
“The idea for the Catholic Foodie came about organically. As I mentioned, I love technology. I had been podcasting and blogging for my classes at school for a couple of years. I also podcasted for the Confirmation program that I run. But I felt like something was missing with these endeavours. After a while, it became a strain to produce new content. I just didn’t have much joy in doing it. It was work. I began to realise that if I wanted to continue podcasting and blogging then I needed to blog and podcast about something that I was passionate about. One day, last October (2008), the idea just hit me. I love good food and I love cooking! I also love my faith. Why not combine those two? Out of that idea came the Catholic Foodie. Apparently, I was on to something because it grew very quickly. I now know that there are many “catholic foodies” out there.”

What’s your favourite dish?
“My all-time favourite food is pizza. I love to make my own, but I the also love little hole-in-the-wall / local / mom & pop establishments. We have one such restaurant here in Covington, Pizza Man. Excellent pizza. So far, it is my favourite… better than any other pizza I have ever had. Thin crust, which you can watch being tossed in the air. A mountain of quality toppings. A sauce that borders on the divine. And a dumpy, yet quaint atmosphere. There is a juke box there. And they have a large glass Plexiglass window separating the dining room from the kitchen. The chefs always interact with the children crowded around the window. We always walk out of Pizza Man smelling like pizza, because the aroma in the restaurant is so thick. Char hates that part of eating there, but I love it! Oh, and they have Abita beer on tap!

Other than Pizza Man, I’d have to say that I love most of the classic Louisiana dishes (chicken and andouille gumbo, seafood gumbo, jambalaya, fried shrimp / catfish / oysters… Generally, lots of seafood), as well as Lebanese cuisine, and sushi.”

Ale, Lager or Stout? And why of course!
“I think I would have to say that Ale is my favourite. Ale is stronger and bolder than lager, but it is not as heavy as a stout. And, of course, there are many types of Ales… lots of variety! Here are few of my favourites: Delirium Tremens, Abita Abbey Ale, Affligem Doppel / Tripel, Grimbergen Double / Tripel, Leffe, Blonde Doppelbock, Paulaner Salvator, Spaten Optimator, Abita Turbodog, Corsendonk, Jockamo IPA and many, many more!”

Another thing Jeff just LOVES is coffee! We had a lively discussion at the CNMC about American domestical beer and American coffee. I didn’t have real great experiences with both and when he announced he would dedicate a Catholic Foodie episode on coffee, of course I had to call in and send him a coffee care package as well. I was glad to see it was very well received.

Everybody loves eating, going out to restaurants and for me it’s a natural thing associated with Catholicism to enjoy life and therefore also enjoy eating. In Dutch we have a description for that kind of life style, we call that the Burgundian way life. I just love the concept of his podcast and the way he does his ministry. You should check it out over at catholicfoodie.com

I use a feedreader to keep up-to-date with internet news, and using that I read something in the New York Times about a simple and cheap way to get rid of allergies. It already exists for thousands of years in India but it gets more popular in the West right now: the Neti Pot. According advocates is good for about anything. The device itself is fairly simple: it’s a small ceramic jug, which looks like a flattened tea pot. You put a saline solution in it and rinse your nose and sinuses with it. It treats colds, sinusitis but also hay fever. At least, it claims it does.

I would not be surprised if it works. Theoretically, if you remove the pollen and other stuff that creates the allergic reaction from your nose, the symptoms disappear. To most people it’s just mildly irritating with an irritated nose and irritated eyes, but my body reacts more intense to it. I’m just struck down and have feverish symptoms and extreme fatigue. Theoretically, if I would rinse my nose immediately after I went outside, for example, I would stay symptom free. It’s an interesting concept, but I wonder how I would treat my sore eyes. Let me quote a piece from the article:

In one independent study in 2008, researchers examined a group of children with severe allergies. They found that regular nasal irrigation with a mild saline solution significantly eased symptoms and helped reduce the need for steroid nasal sprays. A 2007 study at the University of Michigan looked at 121 adults with chronic nasal and sinus problems. Over two months, the scientists found that those treated with nasal irrigation reported greater improvements than those treated with a spray.

It sounds too good to be true. I have to pay for my hay fever medication myself, so maybe a Neti Pot is a low budget solution to my hay fever. I wonder if it would work in my situation, because my allergy symptoms are more severe than regular people’s. Maybe I should ask the physicians in my circle of friends about it.

Sources:

• About Neti Pots
• New York Times article

Being trained in the field of neuro-psychology I was a bit surprised to read this. The main reason it surprised me was because I know what GABA’s function is. It regulates muscle tone. Low GABA levels are related to a higher muscle tone and high levels to a lower muscle tone. What it does is suppress (inhibit) the body’s tendency to tighten the muscles. I also know that psychologists advise clients with anxiety and depression to do relaxation exercises. One of the most popular exercises is Jacobsen’s Progressive Muscle Relaxation. The whole idea is to systematically tighten and relax muscles for about 10 seconds per group and tie it in with the command “relax”. In a way people are conditioning themselves to relax their muscles when they tell themselves to relax. As a result, people will feel more relaxed, because they relaxed their muscles. The downside of the whole technique is that it takes a while for it to work and people need to invest a lot of time to learn it. Since the benefits are not immediately kicking in, a lot of clients will stop doing the exercises before the technique works. It does work, but because of poor treatment adherence, people don’t benefit.

What Jacobsen’s technique fails to do is make practicing interesting, fun. Instead clients who do it are bored to death by it rather quickly. It also doesn’t show its benefits right away, so people stop doing their exercises. Yoga also engages people in relaxing and tightening muscles but in a much more fun way. And since this is something people like to do, they continue doing it for a longer period of time, enabling researchers to measure the benefits. I will quote from the article:

“Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and McLean Hospital have found that practicing yoga may elevate brain gamma-amino-butyric (GABA) levels, the brain’s primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. The findings, which appear in the May issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, suggest that the practice of yoga be explored as a possible treatment for depression and anxiety, disorders associated with low GABA levels.”

I am somewhat sceptic reading this. Sure, there is a connection between GABA levels and the anxiety and/or depression symptoms, but this research cannot determine if yoga is causing those levels to be elevated. It’s also not true that low levels of GABA are causing anxiety and depression. We know other neurotransmitters are responsible for that. Besides that, the whole bio-feedback system of our brains is a bit more complicated than single neurotransmitters directing complicated emotional states. This is, at least to me, another case of the correlation doesn’t imply causation thing. I also read an article on ScienceDirect in which was shown that there would be no connection between GABA and depression. In this respect I think this article is a bit misleading. It suggest that depression and anxiety are caused by low GABA levels, which is not true.

I don’t think, however, that this article is nonsense. I really believe yoga could work, without the whole connection with GABA. When researchers show that yoga works better than Jacobsen’s Progressive Muscle Relaxation (and it seems like it does), I would recommend psychologists to use that for their clients, because we know treatment adherence is dramatically low with Jacobsen’s. Personally, I would recommend Anusara Yoga to clients. It’s a branch of yoga developed by John Friend. He ties in yoga techniques with a lot of knowledge from the field of physical therapy, making it for me as psychologist a perfect way to use with clients who have a lot of physical symptoms caused by psychological mechanisms, such as stress, depression and anxiety. You can find an example of Anusara yoga in this online yoga magazine. I want to stress that yoga can be as good or bad as the instructor you get. No matter how good a particular branch of yoga can be, it all can be ruined by having a bad teacher. So be critical to that as well.

If you want to try out some Anusara Yoga taught by a good instructor, but don’t want to spend a fortune on classes, I can recommend trying a podcast hosted by a friend of mine who is a Catholic yoga teacher in Pittsburgh, PA. Her name is Elsie Escobar and you can find her podcast and other information over here.

More information:

• Science Daily article
• ScienceDirect article DOI
• Anusara practice by yogajournal.com
• Elsie’s Yoga Podcast

When you practice things, either new connections will grow in your brain or existing connections will be made stronger. The more often you repeat something, the stronger that particular connection will be. It’s like a lawn. When enough people use the same piece of the lawn to make a shortcut and walk over the same piece over and over again, a path will become visible. The more people use that shortcut, the more visible the path will be. If people decide to stop using the shortcut, the path will be overgrown by the lawn again. I think it’s a nice analogy to explain how the brain learns.

So if there’s a very clear path, a wide path, a strong connection, it doesn’t take much effort to get from A to B. The brain is also a lazy organ: it always wants to use the connections that take the least amount of effort, which would be the very strong connections. When talking about pessimists, they have certain behavioural patterns they have repeated for most of their lives, creating a kind of highway in their brains. When it needs to choose between several alternatives, it will always take the highway.

But what if you decide you don’t want to use the highway anymore? Suppose we want to make another new road next to the highway with optimist, positive behaviour? According to this theory you would need to practice a lot to make the path as strong as the highway that’s already there: you need to practice positive thoughts, in order to ‘overrule’ those negative thoughts. Psychologists use a kind of therapy to achieve this, it’s called Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) developed by the psychologist Ellis. Nowadays, this therapy has different forms and new variants are developed all the time. A couple of days ago I heard about the newest incarnation: ipop-ins. I think this concept is the coolest thing ever!

Ipop-ins are the 21st century incarnation of flash-cards. Typically, psychologists who want their clients to practice new thinking patterns, ask their clients to write down affirmations on those cards to carry in their pocket. When they are in a situation they want to change, they can take a card out of their pocket and read what it says, for example “I am very capable and I can get great results.” when they need to do an exam or something like that. It’s not hard to see why this is cumbersome. Flash cards work great, but they’re not very easy to use. Someone invented something: what if you get those affirmations as a small mp3 file and put them on your iPod. You can listen to the affirmations without having to carry around those flash cards. And most people have their iPod on them anyway. Isn’t that a brilliant idea?

I really like it to see people using the new media in new ways. A positive psychologist (and maybe a geeky psychologist) made really great quality affirmations. These i-popins are available on her site and also on iTunes.

Link:

• Get i-popins at ipopins.com

Photo by tobias.munich

Self-handicapping, what is it?

Self-handicapping is the phenomenon that occurs when people display all kinds of behaviour that impair performing. Suppose you’re a college student who is studying for the midterm exams. Every kind of behaviour that is avoiding sitting down to study is a kind of self-handicapping. Among students, this type of behaviour is known as “SAA” (Study Avoiding Activities). People displaying these kind of activities are “SAA-ing”. Whatever kind of activity people engage in, one thing is clear. It’s a bad way of coping with stress. Instead of dealing with stress and anxiety, they are starting to procrastinate the things they should do. Instead they’ll have the sudden urge to redecorate their room, cleaning the whole house, suddenly doing dishes every day and many more. I’m sure if you’re a student and are reading this, you can add many other things you do to avoid studying without any effort. Possibly you’re even reading this in order to avoid studying. The only reason students do this is to have a good excuse to avoid studying. After all: one NEEDS to clean his/her room, the dishes NEED to be done…

When taking the strictly rational approach, this type of behaviour doesn’t make any sense at all: someone who wants to get good grades and also likes to study shouldn’t display these kinds of behaviour. But this is not the case: every student displays this kind of behaviour, some show stronger behaviour then others, but the question arises “Why are they doing this?”

According to Dalley (and his peers) the reason you do this as a student (but also as an athlete) display these kinds of behaviour to protect themselves against denting their egos when they fail. Suppose you have to study for an exam you find extremely difficult and if you fail the test, you can argue that the reason you failed was not because you’re a bad student, but it was the party you went to two days before the test, or that you didn’t prepare properly. The reasons you failed are circumstantial. It also works the other way around: suppose you have been partying during half of the semester, went to very few classes and you started to study three days before the big test and you passed it. Students will have the tendency to brag they’re geniuses: despite the poor preparation they passed an exam other people in similar circumstances would have failed. Either way they’re protecting your ego.

There are ways to avoid these kinds of behaviour. There are two ways to study. One way would be performance-oriented, the other way is process-oriented. If you study with an performance-oriented attitude, it means you want to study to excel, to perform. This means pressure is getting up when the deadline of the test approaches. You want to protect your ego to cover-up any failure and therefore you will develop tendencies to procrastinate. If you change the attitude to process-oriented, you’re studying because you like learning, want to know more. Getting a grade for that could be a nice perk, but it’s not the goal. When the date of the exam approaches you will, according to Dalley and his colleagues, be less inclined to start procrastinating, to start self-handicapping. I know I’m a very bad procrastinator, so I’m trying to incorporate this and remind myself of it when I find myself playing mindless online browser games on the internet instead of studying…

More information:

• Wikipedia
• Findarticles.com

They don’t manufacture clothing though. They make bags, belts, wallets and shoes. The thing that hit me was how they showed what kind of impact buying these products in the Western World makes on the daily lives of those people. They had a job, they were making money, they could pay rent, pay for food and send their kids to school. And on the side they were cleaning up the environment as a bonus too! So I wanted to have something made by ragbag. I found the site ragbag.nl. I even found a retailer in downtown Groningen: eQuita. So after class I went there to see what they had, they were very close to the university. I saw the bags from TV, but also a lot of cool clothing which was a bit more expensive then my own clothing, but nothing like the insane prices I expected. They even try to get plus sized clothing. In one blow I got rid of all the prejudices I had: cool clothing, a bit pricy, but nothing insanely expensive and all Fair Trade and organic. I saw a pair of trousers for €45 and shirts and tank tops with similar prices as regular stores. Of course H&M is cheaper, but that’s where people go buy clothing who can’t afford normal priced clothing. I would totally buy my summer clothing there, if I had the money for it.

I added some links to Fair Trade web stores, so you can see what they offer yourself:

• Link to the Youtube video clip.
• Nomad’s Clothing for the more alternative clothing
• Fair Indigo
• A list with stores

Fair Trade Webwinkels:

• Fair21
• Sincero

Photo by Gertrud K.

Dear Sir, Madam,
It’s almost Easter, people shopping at Albert Heijn Supermarkets cannot ignore it: there are lots of chocolate easter eggs, easter bunnies and what not on display. This leads to a question I have about chocolate.
During shopping I noticed there’s hardly any “fair trade” chocolate available. There’s a whole aisle with all kinds of chocolate treats, there must be over 50 kinds of chocolate, but none of them is fair trade. There’s the generic Albert Heijn ‘Biological’ / ‘Organic’ brand, and the wrapper goes into details explaining how the cocoa was grown organically, but it doesn’t say anything about the farmers and the circumstances under which the prefabricates were made. It also doesn’t have a “fair trade” certificate.

I think it’s unfortunate that the country’s biggest supermarket chain doesn’t have regular fair trade chocolate. I discovered that you sell Fair Trade Original sprinkles in the breakfast section, but that’s about it. Since I really don’t want to buy anything tainted by slavery-like conditions or child labour, I now have to bike to downtown to buy all the exotic groceries at the Fair Trade Original Store. I certainly would have bought those products at Albert Heijn’s if I would be enabled to do so, an I know quite a number of people who feel the same.
Therefore I would like to suggest to substitute one of the 50 kinds of chocolate bars with a Fair Trade chocolate bar. Or one of the two dozen kinds of chocolate easter eggs with organic / Fair Trade chocolate. It would make me and a lot of people in Africa glad.
Your sincerely,
Inge.

After a while they actually responded to my suggestion by sending an email back:

Dear madam,
Thank you very much for the email. You are asking us to add more Fair Trade products to our assortment, but this isn’t an easy thing. When a new product is added, this means that another product has to go, because there’s limited space in the supermarket. We always have to make decisions.

We have transferred your suggestion to the buyer, but keeping in mind the previous remarks, we cannot guarantee that your suggestion will be adopted.

We want to thank you for the effort you made to contact us with your idea.

Yours sincerely,
Albert Heijn Customer Service

This could be explained as a non-answer, but if you take their previous activities in mind on this area, I’m not so sure. Last week news broke that Albert Heijn Supermarkets announced they are stopping selling fish that’s not sustainable. They also stop selling fish that’s getting rare, like cod. They will only sell fish from sustainable sources, with the WWF sustainable label.

Apart from that, when you shop at Albert Heijn’s you notice they have A LOT of organic alternatives you can buy. They have much more alternatives compared to other supermarkets. And they are right: if you add one item, it means that another item needs to go. That’s true. But when it comes to chocolate, they have so many unfair kinds of chocolate. Would it be so hard to drop one of the fifty kinds of chocolate and replace it with only one kind of Fair Trade chocolate. It’s not that I’m being unreasonable. They also could try to get their own organic brand certified. They wouldn’t have to change their assortment if they do that. I don’t care which brand the chocolate is, I care about the origins of the chocolate. It needs to be fair. In the mean while I’m biking to downtown to the Fair Trade Original Store, to the World Shop or to the competing chain “Super de Boer” to buy my organic chocolate.

The power of Leptin
Obesity is starting to become a serious health problem. More and more people are getting overweight and more and more studies are being published reporting that almost half of all children are obese already. This has huge health risks on both the short and longer term. This also means that our societies have to pay the high price for this sooner or later. Therefore it’s important to find out what the mechanism behind obesity is, so counter-measures can be developed.
Several years ago scientists discovered the neuro-hormone leptin in the mouse brain (the article talks about mice, but I guess they mean rats, but oh well). The initial theory was that a defective feedback system, which is similar to how central heating works, would lead to a lack of sense of hunger. This would cause the organism to continue eating, even after its hunger would be satisfied. It’s only logical to assume this would lead to obesity. Giving the mice extra amounts of leptin made them lose about 40% of their body weight. Big news, because would this be the the easy solution everybody has been waiting for. Just put leptin in a pill and the pounds melt away.
Unfortunately, like so many times, the whole system is a bit more complicated than that. And that’s where this articles chimes in. They found out more about how leptin works. Initially they thought leptin is secreted from the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland is an small part of your brain which secretes neurohormones. These hormones are released in the blood stream and are triggering hormones in organs which have receptors in them for these neurohormones. It would be nice if there would be one gland making a hormone which is responsible for everything weight-related. But, like I said, it’s much more complicated than that: it doesn’t work as centralised as previously thought.

Why it is so hard to maintain weight loss?
I have been talking about what leptin doesn’t do. What it actually does is similar to how insulin works. Both hormones do something with body fat. Both hormones work by means of a feedback system which receives information from the central nervous system about the concentration of the substance in the blood plasma. I mentioned before this whole feedback system works much like your central heating at home. If you’re cold, you turn on the heating, putting the thermostat on for example 70F. The system heats up until 70F and then shuts down. When it notices temperature drops below 70F it will turn back on to heat the rooms back to 70F so it can shut down again. In a similar way the body starts making leptin when the levels of leptin are too low. When the levels reach a satisfactory value, the body stops making it until the levels drop below a certain threshold. Your brain’s receptors function in this example as in the same way as a thermostat does in your central heating system at home.
This system seems to be defective in obese people. The question is where it goes wrong. Scientists believe it has to do with the kind of food people eat. If people eat high caloric food, the system gets less sensitive for leptin, much in the same way people get less sensitive for insulin when they develop diabetes mellitus type 2. The body does make it, but the organs who do need it don’t use it because they fail to register it’s available.
Obesity occurs when people have a higher intake of energy then they burn over a longer time period. The excess food isn’t being eaten because of hunger. Obese people eat despite the fact the body indicates its satisfied. Leptin concentration stays high because the fat reserves are high too. Cells who react to leptin get “lazy”: there’s enough energy, so they don’t have to do anything to indicate that the body needs food. A consequence to this is that the brain doesn’t “know” anymore what the true amount of body fat is.
And now we turn to losing weight. When people try to lose weight, they decrease the amount of food intake, hoping to burn off fat, but the body doesn’t react adequately. People still feel they can eat more despite being full because the leptin-sensitive cells don’t do their jobs anymore. When some people have a hard time losing weight and eating less, it’s too easy to say they have a lack of will power alone. It could be they lack will power, but part of the reason could also be that their bodies aren’t cooperating.

Infertility
There’s something else leptin is doing. It has an influence on fertility, especially in female fertility. When women start to diet excessively (like in Anorexia Nervosa), their body fat can drop below a certain threshold stopping their menstrual cycle. In other words: there is a relationship between the percentage of body fat and menstruation. A recent study found that overweight girls start to menstruate earlier. Females are born with all of their egg cells, they don’t make them during their fertile life, like men do with sperm cells. These girls start to menstruate earlier then girls used to do before, and combined with the trend that women decide to have their children at a later age, this means less egg cells are available during the period a female decides to have children compared to a few decades ago. They will be running out of eggs and conceiving will be harder. Coincidentally New Scientist published an article about this phenomenon last week.

Link to the study:

• British Society for Neuroendocrinology

Photo by rogiro

When paying attention to the topic, one hears horrific stories about how chocolate is being manufactured. The circumstances in which prefabricates are being made are appalling. The situation is worst in West-Africa (Ivory Coast and Ghana): more than 75% of the cocoa comes from small family businesses which hardly get any money for their products. Several tens of thousands of small children work on cocoa plantations without being paid for their work. This is de facto child slavery. Reason for it: people in the developed countries love their chocolate, but also love their money. They don’t want to pay a lot of money for luxury articles they don’t really need…

Watching the episode turned my stomach, but it got worse: the biggest cocoa port in the world is Amsterdam. The same city which used to be the home port of the West Indian Trading Company, centuries before. One of the main businesses of that company was human trafficking. They would get people from West-Africa (Ivory Coast and Ghana) and ship them to the New World to be sold as slaves. It’s really ironic that the very same route is being used for transporting cocoa made under slavery-like conditions.

Van De Keuken’s research wasn’t new. We knew this all along, back in 2001 all the newspapers were also reporting on the slavery-like situation in which cocoa is being grown and chocolate prefabricates are being made. Everybody condemned the practice, even big chocolate companies like Nestlé. The reason for the current outrage is that Van De Keuken’s television programme re-visited those places again to find nothing had changed at all. As soon the coverage stopped, people forgot about it and resumed buying their cheap chocolate, without thinking about the question how their chocolate grown so far away could be so very cheap.

This whole topic is a sensitive topic in Dutch culture. Dutch are very keen pointing to black pages in my people’s history. If I could get a dime for every time I got confronted with the Holocaust and getting blamed for it because I’m German, I would be very rich. Dutch people are hypocrites when it comes to their history. They will be keen to point on my people’s history with the Holocaust, they will point to Americans and their way of treating Native Americans and black people, they will point to South-Africa to condemn Apartheid, but they hardly look at their own history to point at their own Golden Age, which was financed by human trafficking and exploiting colonies in the Far East in Dutch East India (now Indonesia). Reason for this is that Dutch history books are silent about it. They don’t discuss the topic of slavery. It’s being mentioned as briefly as they can to continue with the great achievements in science and politics. As soon as people like Tony van de Keuken are ripping open this wound, reactions from Dutch people tend to be extreme. Hence the lawsuit.

As I’m writing this it is almost Easter. In the Netherlands Easter involves tons of small chocolate Easter eggs in different flavours. Most of them contain cocoa from Ghana and Ivory Coast. And they are very cheap, since if they would have fair pricing, nobody would buy them. I don’t want them anymore. I love chocolate, I love easter eggs, but knowing the story behind the chocolate makes my stomach revolt. I do buy chocolate at Fair Trade Original or one of the  World Stores, where they sell slave-free, fair trade stuff. Nestlé may think those stores are ‘unfair competition’, but I don’t care about Nestlé. I do care about small family businesses and about people being oppressed. If I can help them this way, I will gladly do so. Nestlé doesn’t care about them, they only care about money. I pray and hope more people will realise what the consequences of buying ‘bad’ chocolate will have for those people over there and boycott companies who force those people to sell their goods using unfair pricing. Hopefully they will have an Happy Easter in Ghana and Ivory Coast soon!

The controversial episodes can be found here (in Dutch).

Links:

• CorpWatch
• TED Case Studies
• Stop Chocolate Slavery
• Fair Trade Original
• World Shops / Fair Trade Shops in the United States
• Fair Food