Category: Media
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Things to Read
10 comments on Things to ReadBy way of Slacktivist comes a piece on recognizing silencing techniques. Some are definitely too familiar. Security guards do not always improve the learning environment. Art teachers might be better. Petition to drop the charges against Keira Wilmot for a science experiment gone wrong and re-enroll her in school has over 36000 signatures — does it have yours? From an article on mammograms, and why they haven’t dropped…
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Fat Bias Isn’t Just About Rapport
As noted on Twitter, the article Tara Parker-Pope wrote for the New York Times about a study in Obesity looking at how fat patients aren’t always welcomed by doctors. Not news, though I suppose it’s good to have quantitative research supporting it. Really, though, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s some more. For patient stories on health professionals, check out the crowdsourced http://fathealth.wordpress.com ASDAH is collecting videos on weight…
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Sadly Fitting
Despair Drives Guantánamo Detainees to Revolt Obama Joins 4 Predecessors as Bush Library Opens It’s sadly fitting that these two stories are together on The New York Times homepage.
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“Big data” and hiring
Having job-hunted recently I found this article in The Economist interesting: Evolv mines mountains of data. If a client operates call centres, for example, Evolv keeps daily tabs on such things as how long each employee takes to answer a customer’s query. It then relates actual performance to traits that were visible during recruitment. Some insights are counter-intuitive. For instance, firms routinely cull job candidates with a…
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Things to Read
A clear explanation of why New York’s fat hatred is much more harmful than the soda ban from Melissa McEwan: People do not die of “obesity.” Some fat people die from complications of what are commonly known as “obesity-related diseases,” like heart disease and diabetes, but those diseases have only been shown to be correlated with fat, not caused by fat. (Which is why thin people have them, too.) So it’s not even…
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Exercise Takes Time? Really?
Reading yet another piece on an exercise study, this one with older (60-74 years) sedentary women, I giggled at this observation: “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down. Rather,…
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Five Things Make A Post
1) I am sooo looking forward to tomorrow morning, when Mark Reads will post the second-to-last chapter of Deadline. Mark Reads reviews books a chapter at a time, progressing through books every other weekday, and it’s been building to this OMG HUGE second-to-last chapter for weeks. (Need I say “spoilers”?) Some of the books he’s done this with in the past are the Harry Potter books, The…
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QotD: Inauguration
“It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to…
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Conflating Dieting with Eating Healthy
[Feel free to skip if you don’t want to think about dieting right now.] It’s January and there is the usual plethora of diet commercials extolling weight loss. Google “dieting” and up comes Special K’s “Healthy Eating Plan”! That said, it is a bit refreshing to see someone write: As a lifelong dieter, let me tell you from experience: A diet need have nothing to do with…
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Today in Don’t Read The Comments
Marilyn Wann takes on weight bias in healthcare in “Big deal: You can be fat and fit” on CNN.COM: …People are telling their stories of weight bias in medical care on websites like First, Do No Harm, This Is Thin Privilege and Obesity Surgery Gone Wrong. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance has been speaking out on behalf of fat people’s civil rights since its founding in 1969.…
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Happy New Year!
Hello and welcome! I’m back at work with my new cartoon-a-day calendar (New Yorker cartoons) and new wall calendar (Pacific Northwest landscapes). I even cut off some of the photos from last year’s wall calendar to decorate my cube. Ready to work! (Yes, I know it’s Wednesday, but today feels like Monday to me. Yay four-day weekends! ) I adjusted the layout, let me know if you can’t find…
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Things to Read
If you can (not allergic to eggs etc) get your flu shot. Yes, really. The Kindle edition of A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master” by Rachel Held Evans is $1.99 right now. I enjoyed it, and not just for the debunking of the “Wives are required by God to appear…
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Women standing up against a society [that bastardizes] thin and athletic women
[Discussion of fat hate & discrimination] OK, I wanted to give people the benefit of the doubt. When Lesley Kinzel wrote about the Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a to stand up for “thin and athletic women” who are oppressed by society’s expectations, I wondered if: The author of the Kickstarter campaign thought that using hyperbole about “a society that protects fat culture” would be eye-catching, and,…
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Reducing Heart Attacks
A Minnesota county reduced heart attacks by 33%. Was it due to a county weight loss campaign? A “Let’s Move” push? A trans-fat ban? Nope. The research, carried out by scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., found a 33 percent drop in heart attack rates in one Minnesota county after public smoking bans were enacted. [The study] examined medical data in Olmsted County,…
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Fat Doesn’t Require Apology
You may have seen the video where WKBT anchor Jennifer Livingston responds to a viewer complaint about her weight. In her response, Livingston thanks those who have come to her support. She encourages people to speak against bullying and to think about what they say in front of kids. What she does not say? Jennifer Livingston does not apologize for her size. Livingston acknowledges her size and does…
Living ~400lbs 