Leettaschmidt

If you work for an organization that believes diversity can increase organizational performance and employee well-being, we have a secret to share with you: despite what is commonly espoused about diversity, very few organizations have actually achieved benefits through current diversity approaches.

There is no question that diversity and accessibility in the workplace has value — diverse workplaces are more welcoming, more productive and have better retention of employees.

However, diversity is usually only thought of in terms of visible diversity (e.g., in terms of race, ethnicity, age, national origin, sexual orientation and cultural identity). In reality, diversity goes far beyond this.

The importance of valuing diversity

There are two limitations to only approaching diversity from a visible perspective. First, people may not be diverse in ways that are meaningful to organizations when only visible diversity is considered. Second, people may be diverse in ways that are not clearly visible and are difficult to observe and identify.

A visible diversity-only approach stops organizations from achieving the full benefits of true diversity and can lead to organizations actually becoming less diverse in their attitudes and beliefs. This is because of group polarization and groupthink, which can occur when like-minded people get together and make decisions.

Many professions tend to skew either liberal (e.g., academia) or conservative (e.g., the military), and the work environment further accentuates those tendencies, potentially leading to poor decision-making.

In such groups there are different, more deeply held attitudes, beliefs and values that cannot be easily dismissed without sincere critical thinking and engagement.

Groupthink and group polarization can be overcome when workplaces are composed of people with diverse personalities, values, and attitudes.

This makes it more difficult for the group to coalesce around particular beliefs and attitudes because these are continuously challenged from within the group.

Further, this process of deep critical thinking and engagement leads to increased creativity, innovation and productivity as underlying assumptions about work and organizing are challenged and critiqued.

Managing diverse organizations

The challenge that managers and human resource professionals face within organizations and groups that have diverse personalities, values and attitudes is finding ways for the organization to work together effectively and reduce conflict. Here are three ways to ensure diversity works in your organization:

1. Create an inclusive climate

Organizations must create an environment where all voices are heard and everyone is encouraged to express themselves and contribute. This should begin from the very moment newcomers join the organization.

Employee on-boarding should introduce newcomers to an organization’s inclusive practices and openness to engaging their unique perspectives and abilities. These inclusive practices should include having robust conflict resolution procedures, as these have been shown to positively impact team outcomes.

This is especially important for organizations with diverse personalities, values and attitudes. A wide range of deeply held values and attitudes have the potential to lead to discord and disputes.

In addition, inclusive leaders are needed to create workplaces that encourage dialogue concerning differences and support authenticity in employees.

Recent research has found that inclusive leadership is more likely to result in workplace environments where employees are open to making changes in their work procedures, policies and tasks. We live in a fast changing dynamic world where organizations need a workforce that is able and willing to adapt to continuously changing conditions.

2. Leave your ego at the door

It’s important for organizations to hire people that don’t bring feelings of self-importance, vanity and arrogance to the workplace.

First, organizations should encourage members to leave their ego at the door and focus on team goals, not individual accomplishments or pride. Research has shown that teams perform better when they set group goals.

Second, organizations should ensure there are ways for everyone to communicate their perspectives in ways suitable to them. Introverted members, for example, should have their preferred communication methods available.

Third, organizations should encourage all members to learn something new. Mastering a new skill elicits feelings of doubt and frustration, which causes people to seek help or guidance from others. It also results in humility.

3. Be comfortable with being uncomfortable

To work effectively, organizations should strive to create a culture where members are comfortable working with people with different personalities and perspectives. Such an environment is one where members are encouraged to be honest about their strengths and weaknesses.

Acknowledging our capabilities and the areas where we struggle — and seeing the same in others — helps us see others more completely. Group members can use a deeper understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses to assign tasks and support where needed.

Research has shown that perceptions of individual group task competence and group belonging are higher in groups that receive positive feedback. Organizations should focus on positive aspects of individual differences as groups learn to work effectively together.

The road to prosperity

We are able to make the most impactful, lasting changes when we embrace those with different values and attitudes from our own. Leading innovation consultancies have understood this for quite some time. For example, the success of the innovation consultancy IDEO is built on developing innovations by having multi-perspective working teams.

This approach has helped IDEO create breakthrough innovations such as Apple’s first mouse, Steelcase’s Leap Chair, and the Palm V.

The process of intentionally including diverse personalities, values and attitudes in the workplace is not an easy one — it is hard. Working with people with very different value systems can be very challenging.

However, once we begin to have a deeper understanding of what drives these different perspectives, we can start to leverage the vast wealth of knowledge that has come from the many different individual experiences around us. With this wealth, we can begin to create new thoughts, ideas, products and experiences that will enrich us all.

Steven Smith receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Katelynn Carter-Rogers receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Vurain Tabvuma receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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On Jan. 22, 2023, more than a billion people globally will welcome the Year of the Rabbit – or the Year of Cat, depending on which cultural traditions they follow – as the start of the Lunar New Year. In the New York City public school district, Lunar New Year has been observed as a school holiday since 2015.

The Lunar New Year is sometimes called the Chinese New Year, because it follows a calendar that was developed in China; but it is also celebrated in various parts of Asia, such as Korea and Vietnam. Tibetan and Mongolian cultures follow a similar calendar that will start the Year of the Rabbit about a month later, on Feb. 20.

While this calendar is sometimes just called “lunar,” it adds an extra month every few years to stay in sync with the solar cycle, so it’s technically lunar and solar, or lunisolar. This means that the date of the Lunar New Year in the Gregorian calendar changes from year to year but always falls in January or February. The Gregorian calendar is the solar calendar used today in most parts of the world, including the United States.

As a scholar of East Asian religions, I am familiar with the wide range of lunar and lunisolar calendars used in different religions and cultures, and especially with the religious significance of the East Asian lunisolar calendar.

The lunisolar calendar that developed in China combines two categories: 12 earthly branches, each of which corresponds to an animal, and 10 heavenly stems, each of which corresponds to one of the five elements – fire, water, wood, metal and earth – and either the feminine yin or masculine yang force.

While this lunisolar calendar brings people together, different countries and cultures have their own legends and customs surrounding the New Year. Even the animal associated with the year can vary.

Year of the Rabbit or Year of the Cat?

In most parts of East Asia, the new year that begins on Jan. 22 corresponds to the rabbit, and also to the element of water and the feminine yin force. The cycle takes 60 years to complete, so 60th birthdays across East Asia are times for special celebrations.

However, the animal associations of the zodiac can vary: In Vietnam, Jan. 22 will usher in the Year of the Cat instead. The most recent Year of the Cat, in 2011, saw a baby boom in Vietnam because of the good luck associated with that zodiac sign.

One explanation among scholars for why Vietnamese culture celebrates it as the Year of the Cat is that the earthly branch corresponding to “rabbit” is pronounced mao in Mandarin and meo in Vietnamese, which sounds similar to the Vietnamese word for “cat.”

Another explanation comes from two variations of a popular legend about how the 12 zodiac animals were chosen. According to that legend, either the Buddha or the Jade Emperor, head of the Chinese pantheon, organized a race across a river to choose the zodiac animals and their order.

In the Chinese version, the cat and rat were riding across a river on an ox when the rat, in its drive to be first, pushed the cat into the water so that the cat arrived last and was disqualified. The rabbit was crossing the river by hopping on stones sticking out of the water, but with one lucky leap it landed on a floating log that swiftly carried it to shore, so that the rabbit finished fourth. However, in the Vietnamese version – which lacks a rabbit – the cat could swim and ended up arriving fourth.

Rabbits in Chinese culture

In the Chinese tradition, people born in particular zodiac years have some of their animal’s characteristics. Since the late 20th century, Chinese regions have seen birth rates spike during Years of the Dragon because dragons are powerful symbols of good fortune and success.

Some animals carry strongly gendered meanings: the Year of the Tiger is widely seen as a good year for male births, but female tigers are stereotyped as overly aggressive. In Korea, the Year of the Horse is similarly perceived as a bad time for girls to be born.

Conversely, the Year of the Rabbit is seen as a better year for girls because the rabbit’s qualities of kindness, empathy and patience are stereotypically feminine virtues. Moreover, rabbits have been associated with male homosexuality since the 18th century, and the word “rabbit,” tuzi in Mandarin, is a slur for male sex workers. The stigma surrounding homosexuality in Chinese cultures means that, for some people, having a boy in the Year of the Rabbit would be less ideal. However, some members of Chinese LGBTQ+ communities are rejecting this stigma by reclaiming the Rabbit God as a patron deity.

The Rabbit God is not always understood as a god of male same-sex love. He can also be a symbol of longevity. Chinese lore holds that a rabbit and toad on the Moon work with the moon goddess Chang’e to refine the elixir of immortality.

Celebrating the Year of the Rabbit

The Year of the Rabbit will feature rabbit decorations, rabbit-themed marketing, and an abundance of new pet rabbits. However, the celebration will remain the same as in other years.

Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations emphasize family togetherness as well as good luck and prosperity for the coming year. In China, the Lunar New Year marks the world’s largest annual human migration, as people who work in big cities travel home to see their families for the two-week holiday.

The new year officially ushers in the spring, so it is also called Spring Festival, or Chunjie in Mandarin. To start the New Year on the right foot, people get haircuts, clean their houses and wear new clothes. These new clothes, like most New Year’s decorations, are red, which symbolizes good fortune.

New Year’s foods also aim to bring good fortune. Among the dishes commonly eaten at New Year’s are fish, because in Mandarin “having fish,” you yu, is a homophone for “having a surplus.” Eating a dessert of glutinous rice balls in sweet soup, known as tangyuan, represents the family being complete, because the word for round, yuan, also means “complete.”

Family is the focus of New Year celebrations, which traditionally take place in the home of the husband’s family. Adults generally give gifts of money in red envelopes to younger relatives who are still in school. On the second or third day of the new year, families often travel to the wife’s family home to see the in-laws.

The Lantern Festival, Yuanxiao jie, wraps up the festivities two weeks after the New Year begins with the first full moon of the year. As the name suggests, people celebrate with decorated lanterns, which often have riddles attached. In addition to guessing the answers to these riddles, people celebrate by eating tangyuan or similar round dumplings called yuanxiao, and watching dragon and lion dances.

The global Asian diaspora means that Lunar New Year is now celebrated around the world, including in the United States. Chinese American, Korean American, and Vietnamese American communities will mark the beginning of the Lunar New Year with a variety of celebrations, some welcoming the Year of the Rabbit and others welcoming the Year of the Cat.

Megan Bryson ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

Over at The Nib, Sam Wallman has created an illustrated history of the Pinkerton Agency — the original "private eyes," a nearly 200-year-old American corporation that essentially pioneered the privatization of domestic military intelligent services, most often weaponized against the working class. — Read the rest

About that lease and release…

You’ll see it all over the land records of colonial America.

In one document, person A leases the land to person B.

And in another, often a day or two later, and sometimes even on the same day, person A releases the land to person B.

So, for example, on the 23rd of November, 1737, Henry Kendall of the County of Orange, Virginia, leased to Spencer Bobo of the County of Caroline, Virginia, one 50-acre tract of land on the north side of the Robinson River, for five shillings sterling.¹ The very next day, on the 24th of November 1737, Henry Kendall released that same tract of land to Spencer Bobo “for and in Consideration of the full Sum of thirty pds Current Money of Virginia.”²

Okay, what’s up with that?

Now The Legal Genealogist freely admits… they don’t teach this in modern law school property courses — this isn’t something anybody with today’s legal training is likely to have encountered.

In other words, yep. I had to look it up too.

The first thing I learned was that this is, by definition:

A species of conveyance much used in England, … thus contrived: A lease, or rather bargain and sale upon some pecuniary consideration for one year, is made by the tenant of the freehold to the lessee or bargainee. This, without any enrolment, makes the bargainor stand seised to the use of the bargainee, and vests in the bargainee the use of the term for one year, and then the statute immediately annexes the possession. Being thus in possession, he is capable of receiving a release of the freehold and reversion, which must be made to the tenant in possession, and accordingly the next day a release is granted to him. The lease and release, when used as a conveyance of the fee, have the joint operation of a single conveyance.³

R-i-i-i-i-g-h-t.

About as clear as mud, isn’t it?

So let’s see what else we can find.

Merriam-Webster says it’s “a nearly obsolete mode of conveyance under the Statute of Uses by means of a bargain and sale for a leasehold interest conventionally for a year, which under the statute vested the leasehold estate without entry, with a subsequent release vesting the fee in the lessee without entry or livery of seisin.”⁴

Sorry. Not all that much better.

The Oxford Reference website says it’s “A method of transferring land from one party to another without the necessity of enrolling a deed. The purchaser first took a lease of the property for one year (thus avoiding the need to enrol), then on the following day the vendor conveyed to him the reversion of the lease. The records of the transaction consisted of two documents, the lease and the release. The method remained popular until 1845.”⁵

A bit closer, maybe… but still not clear.

According to the website of the Fairfax County, Virginia, Circuit Court Historic Records Center, “Deeds of lease and release are often found in the Northern Neck and older counties. The lease, listing a nominal sum, is followed by the release noting the actual sale price. The lease may predate the release by a day, a week, or even a year. Together the two documents make up a legal deed and should not be confused with a simple lease to rent land.”⁶

Yeah, maybe we’re not confused about it being a simple lease to rent land, but we’re still confused…

Over to Wikipedia, and we actually get a pretty good definition: “Lease and release is literally the lease (tenancy) of non-tenanted property by its owner followed by a release (relinquishment) of the landlord’s interest in the property. This sequence of transactions was commonly used to transfer full title to real estate under real property law. … Between its parties it achieves the same outcome as a deed of grant/transfer/conveyance.”⁷

Now we’re getting somewhere. This isn’t a lease followed by another lease (re-lease). The land gets leased by the owner person A to the ultimate buyer person B, and then the owner person A releases the buyer person B from ever having to give the land back when the lease term ends.

Okay… Got it. A lease following by a release (giving up) of the right ever to get the leased land back, and taken together, it’s the same as a deed selling the land outright. And if you want a more thorough explanation of just how that worked, the University of Nottingham Manuscipts and Special Collections has a good overview of the ins and outs of lease and release.⁸

But… but… but why? Why in the world use two documents instead of one?

Wikipedia gives a clue: “Lease and release was a mode of conveyance of freehold estates formerly common … for tax avoidance …”⁹

Aha! It’s a tax dodge! And when you consider the history of this form of land transaction, that makes sense. You see, in the 1530s, Henry VIII of England got a couple of laws passed that any document selling land had to be in writing and enrolled — recorded — in a registry maintained by public officials in the area. But neither a lease nor the release (the “landlord” giving up the right to get the land back) was considered a sale of land, so it wasn’t among the documents that had to be recorded. And what the Crown didn’t know about, it couldn’t tax.¹⁰

But… but… but… there wasn’t any requirement in colonial America that deeds be recorded. So why did this catch on here?

Nobody knows for sure. One good possibility is that that’s the way it had been done in England since the days of Henry VIII, and so much of what gets done in the law is because “it’s always been done that way.”

But the explanation on the University of Nottingham website gives a hint of another possibility — one that, personally, I’d rate as at least equally likely: “Many lease and releases are long and complicated,… Lawyers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were paid by the line. Therefore the longer and wordier a deed was, the more they got paid!”¹¹

Tax dodges and greedy lawyers.

Works for me…

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Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Releasing the land,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 13 Jan 2023).

SOURCES

Hurricanes are a common occurrence in Florida, but that’s not keeping wealthy homeowners from moving there. In fact, a new study finds rich home buyers don’t wait for neighborhoods to rebuild after a storm. They buy up real estate right away! There’s actually some pretty good reasons rich people move to Florida after a hurricane — and a main one is insurance.

A team from Resources for the Future (RFF), the University of California-San Diego, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that Florida neighborhoods hit by hurricanes tend to gentrify immediately after the natural disaster. Although the long-term housing demand stays the same, the average income in those neighborhoods shoots up over the next three years.

Related: Hot Takes for Real Estate in 2023

To reach their findings, the team looked at data from county tax assessments, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And the real estate website Zillow. This helped them gauge conditions of local housing markets and population turnover in Florida from 2000 to 2016.

“Hurricanes are projected to get stronger,” says co-author and RFF Fellow Yanjun (Penny) Liao in a media release. “Our findings show that the idea that people will naturally retreat from hazardous areas may not necessarily hold up. In Florida, at least, it appears that market forces are not encouraging people to move to safer places.”

Hurricanes drive supply down and prices up

The study notes that hurricanes striking Florida lead to a temporary jump in local home prices. That’s not surprising when you consider that devastating storm losses lower the supply of available homes for sale.

These price hikes tend to return to normal within three years. The same amount of time it usually takes to rebuild neighborhoods to pre-storm levels. While the prices are high however, researchers note that several things happen in Florida:

• The average income of new home buyers increases at the same rate as rising home prices.
• Real estate prices increase by an average of five percent.
• Socio-demographic characteristics of hurricane-ravaged neighborhoods don’t change, aside from incomes going up.
• Hurricanes fail to change the long-term demand for houses in these areas.

Study authors add that, after three years, more than a quarter of all the homes in these Florida neighborhoods are owned by people with higher incomes compared to the time before the storm. Local housing prices also return to normal. But they never drop below the point they were at before the hurricane made landfall.

As for the reason, researchers theorize that wealthier home buyers are more capable of paying higher prices and insurance cost increases than the average person. This incentivizes them to take advantage of the situation and buy up homes before Florida rebuilds.

“In some ways, this indicates a market flaw given the current state of the climate,” says co-author Joshua Graff Zivin of UC San Diego. “Policies may be needed to ensure that these communities have strong adaptation and mitigation measures in place to deal with future storms.”

The findings are published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

Story attributed to Study Finds.

The post Rich People Move to Florida Right After a Hurricane Strikes, Study Reveals appeared first on ModernGlobe.

The Gas Plant District was the second African-American neighborhood formed in St. Petersburg. The neighborhood encompassed all along Ninth Street South and south of First Avenue South. What was once a thriving community was dismantled in the 70s as the interstate was built to run right through it. Later, Tropicana Field was built and demolished any residual sense of community. However, rumblings of a new stadium are happening and revitalization may finally come to the area.

The Gas Plant District

The area’s original settlers came to this area to help finish the Orange Belt Railway. The Orange Belt Railway was a narrow-gauge railroad that carried citrus, vegetables and passengers from St. Pete to Sanford. Although most of the railroad is now defunct, there is still a stretch from Clearwater southeast to St. Petersburg that remains active.

As the population grew and prospered, businesses, homes, churches and entertainment flourished. Davis Academy, later Davis Elementary, one of the first school for Black children opened. It became a community where working-class Black families could thrive.

As Gwendolyn Reese stated in her article, “I AM: The story of the Gas Plant Neighborhood“:

The neighborhood was home to many people, me included, who still have pleasant memories of growing up there. The communal fish fries on Friday, crab boils on Saturday and barbecues were a major part of the social life of the neighborhood, as was the sound of children’s laughter as they played kickball, hopscotch and four-square in the alleys and backyards of the homes along Sugar Hill, Dixie, and Dunmore Avenues.

Making room for the Trop

The neighborhood’s dismantling came first with introducing the interstate. In 1970, plans to extend I-75 into Pinellas County took shape. There were many delays and protests as business owners and community leaders pushed against the government, stating that construction of this road would hurt their livelihoods. However, through the process of eminent domain, Black families in Methodist Town and the Gas Plant District were uprooted.

Designs for a baseball stadium in Pinellas were floated as early as 1983 as the county wanted to get in on the professional sports scene. Actual construction on what was originally called the Florida Suncoast Dome began in 1986. The two gas tanks that gave the district its name were demolished to make way for the stadium. The St. Petersburg City Council voted to refurbish the neighborhood in the early 80s to coincide with the stadium. They promised affordable housing and assured people that the new stadium would provide a wealth of new jobs.

Neither housing nor jobs came through for the Gas Plant population. When the stadium went up, what was left of the community fell.

A possibly brighter future

In June 2022, St. Pete Mayor Kenneth T. Welch announced the city is looking towards the Gas Plant District for Tropicana Field site redevelopment. In 2027, the Rays lease on Tropicana Field expires. The City of St. Pete is looking to rebuild the stadium and affordable housing, community development and “equitable access to all residents, visitors and stakeholders.”

It sounds similar to the promise made in the area 40 years ago.

However, in the proposal is the “Gas Plant Promise” which states:

The site also must effectively recognize, honor, and support the community displaced due to construction of the original stadium, in an impactful and sustainable manner. 

Perhaps the future of the Gas Plant District will honor its vibrant past.

More Hidden History Stories

• Tampa’s Mutual Aid Societies
• Armature Works
• The Tampa Streetcar
• Sunken Gardens

The post Hidden History: Gas Plant District appeared first on ModernGlobe.

Right now, for technological, ethical and political reasons, the world’s archivists are suddenly very busy.

Advances in digital imaging and communications are feeding an already intense interest in provenance, authorship and material culture. Two recent discoveries – a woman’s name scratched in the margins of an 8th-century manuscript, and John Milton’s annotations in a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio held in the Free Library of Philadelphia – are examples of how new tools are revealing new evidence, and how distant scholars are making fascinating connections.

At the same time, and even more importantly, the holdings of archives, libraries and museums – “memory institutions” – are being scrutinised as the world grapples with legacies of racism, imperialism, slavery and oppression. Some of the holdings speak to heinous episodes and indefensible values. And some of them were flat-out stolen.

The so called “post-truth” era is a third cause of the burst of archival activity. Politicians and activists, mostly from the political right, have attacked facts and science. Archives have come under pressure to rewrite history, or have done so on their own initiative. The decision of the US National Archives to obscure anti-Trump slogans in a 2017 image of the Women’s March is a case in point.

Post-truth narratives pose all sorts of archival conundrums. In Australia, for example, people raised eyebrows when the National Library began collecting the posts of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, as part of its effort to document the COVID-19 pandemic.

Buffeted by strong and competing forces, archivists are in a tough spot. Their ability to navigate a path forward, moreover, is made more difficult by non-archivists’ foggy and unrealistic expectations of what archivists actually do, and what they might do in the future.

What to save?

In principle, every detail of every kind of object is useful and valid as historical evidence. Two recent examples of this fractal property: the field of biocodicology – the study of biological traces in books and manuscripts – is turning library dust into valuable data, while the field of fragmentology is looking inside old book-bindings for hidden pieces of even older texts.

But this is not enough to justify keeping everything. And even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. In his story The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges imagined an infinite library, but here on earth there are limits.

Despite the rise of e-books and online periodicals, publishers still produce millions of physical books, journals, magazines and newspapers every year. Then there are amateur publications, along with personal, official and commercial documents, multitudes of flyers, catalogues, posters and other ephemera. We can’t keep everything in this bulging pile of paper.

Non-textual objects are also part of the story of humanity, but we can’t keep all of them, either. Not only do we lack the room and money and curators to keep it all, for reasons of civilisational self-preservation we need to recycle as much of it as we can. And for reasons of civilisational sanity, we shouldn’t even attempt universal preservation, which – the moral of Borges’s story – is a sure-fire path to madness.

The physics of digital storage are different to those of physical archives, but ultimately the same rule applies: we can’t keep all the corporate and news sites, social media posts, blog posts, computer games, AI mash-ups, YouTube videos, messages, comments, selfies, porn – all of it growing by the second.

Keeping a single, static copy of the internet at any given moment is a Google-scale task. Now imagine what would be involved in preserving all the previous copies simultaneously, not just as static versions but dynamic ones, meaningfully accessible and covering every corner of the internet. That task is beyond even the imagination of Borges.

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Read more: For the record: Digitizing archives can increase access to information but compromise privacy

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The minefield of decision-making

The work of archivists, therefore, necessarily involves decisions about what to preserve and for how long.

Those decisions are a minefield. Libraries, for example, are regularly criticised when they refuse donated books. “Why won’t you take our nineteenth-century bible,” the donors ask indignantly, “or our set of old racing guides, or Encyclopedia Britannica, or Funk and Wagnalls?”

Libraries and museums are criticised even more loudly when they are caught removing items from their collections. Every good curator knows the value of a regular cull, but patrons and funders have romantic conceptions of collection practices. Senior librarians get into trouble when people see, round the back of the library, the skips full of “deaccessioned” books.

In the global shift towards digital resources, libraries have been so trigger-happy in retiring physical holdings of newspapers and magazines, that some mastheads may no longer exist at all in physical form, their non-digital properties forever lost to research. Physical newspapers are not the only ones in trouble. Late in 2022, the National Library of Australia announced that funding for its hugely popular online newspaper archive Trove would likely run out in mid-2023.

Just as dangerous for librarians is the offloading – sometimes sheepishly, sometimes flagrantly – of valuable items via suave, big-city book dealers and auction houses, such as Christies and Sotheby’s.

In the 1980s, for example, at a time of tight budgets and financial austerity, the John Rylands Library in Manchester auctioned 98 of its best books on the grounds that they were “duplicates”. But a closer look revealed many of the books were unique in important ways. The sale sparked an outcry; author Nicolas Barker likened the disposals to the sale of a trilith from Stonehenge.

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Read more: Trove's funding runs out in July 2023 – and the National Library is threatening to pull the plug. It's time for a radical overhaul

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The benefits of hindsight

Librarians get in trouble when books leave – and when books arrive.

At the start of the 17th century, Sir Thomas Bodley revived one of the great Oxford libraries. He had firm ideas about what constituted “worthy books” for the revitalised collection. They certainly did not include “such books as almanacks, plays and an infinite number, that are daily printed, of very unworthy matters”. When Dr Thomas James, Bodley’s librarian, allowed such volumes into the collection, he earned a sharp rebuke. After Bodley’s death, James collected them with gusto.

With 400 years of hindsight, we can see Bodley’s definition of a worthy book was biased and fallible. His definition left out the first published works of Shakespeare, as well as many other early modern works of exceptional cultural and literary interest.

With our super-powered hindsight, we can also see that his 17th-century value judgements reflected explicit and implicit prejudices about class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, high and low culture, and politics.

Of course, the same is true about curatorial judgements today. There is no such thing as an apolitical archive. Even an archive that is assiduously bipartisan or multi-partisan will still reflect choices about the scope and balance of the represented perspectives.

Right now, at our strange social moment, in which “woke” – a synonym for (racial) respect – is wielded as a politicised insult, archival work is even more political than usual.

Danger areas

How things leave and how they arrive are just two of the danger areas for archivists. Archives are full of hazards, including light, air conditioners, thieves and careless handling.

Fakes are another danger. Bogus Socratic scrolls famously infiltrated the ancient Library of Alexandria. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Wrenn Library (subsequently in the University of Texas) and the British Library accumulated large holdings of Thomas Wise editions in the years before he was exposed as an audacious forger.

How should today’s archivists chart a course through this perilous terrain?

Most archival mistakes are the result of a failure to do something that is right but difficult, or doing something that is wrong but easy.

In the “easy but wrong” category, simple mistakes have led to the preventable damage of art, artefacts and books. The photo modification at the US National Archives was a grave dereliction of archival duty, but it was an easy path to follow, and technically a simple thing to do.

For an example of “difficult but right”, we need only consider that for much of the 20th century, Western “memory institutions” largely reflected a white and chauvinistic view of worthy items. It was hard for archivists to retain evidence from the cultural fringes. But many forward-looking archivists and institutions swam against the official and political tide, assembling collections focused on women, civil rights, banned books, queer literature and “low” literature, such as the cheap magazines known as “pulps”.

With hindsight, we can see that retaining and conserving those collections was emphatically the right choice. Banned and marginal texts are essential to several grand human projects, including filling in silences and erasures, and building foundations for a fairer and more inclusive society.

There are still obstacles to representation and inclusion, but the argument has largely been won. Recovering women’s history, decolonising the archive, queering the archive – these have all rightly become mainstream endeavours.

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Read more: As libraries go digital, paper books still have a lot to offer us

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Contentious material

One of the most difficult frontiers for archivists today is whether and how to record social and political phenomena that progressive people would rather did not exist.

We have just come through the Trump era (or phase one of the Trump era) and we are still going through the COVID era. Both eras have spawned populist, sometimes militant and incendiary literatures and discourses.

In Melbourne, the State Library of Victoria is collecting pandemic-era imagery, including photos of anti-vax graffiti and anti-government protests. With the help of that library and other institutions, the National Library of Australia is keeping anti-vax, “pro-freedom” websites and social media posts.

Holding this kind of material is a challenge and a paradox for archives. The anti-vax sites are symptoms of anti-truth forces that are anathema to archives’ truth-telling goals. In the 19th century, the forger Thomas Wise relished the credibility that came from the British Library holding his publications. Now, the anti-vaxxers celebrate the official preservation of their material as a similar badge of legitimacy.

But no matter how obnoxious or fantastical, these records are historically relevant. They are part of the full story of politics and activism in Australia. For future scholars looking to understand the COVID era, the records will be invaluable.

Archivists cannot and should not blind humanity to its own mistakes. But the best archivists also know the importance of context when conserving and presenting difficult material. The records from the COVID fringe need proper and honest framing.

Such framing would acknowledge that the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists did not represent a majority view, or even a significant minority one. It would also acknowledge the influence of misinformation and conspiracy theories beyond the fringe: on vaccine hesitancy, for example, and on the tactics of mainstream political parties that flirted with and even courted the anti-vax vote.

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Read more: The war in Ukraine shows how libraries play a vital role in challenging disinformation

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The value of archives

Preserving the story of humankind: that is the noble goal of archives, libraries and museums. It can sometimes seem like an abstract luxury, but it is actually very tangible, and essential. Without evidence, there can be no history. And without history, we can’t understand ourselves or chart a good course into the future.

The clichéd image of archival work as dusty, dull and benign is a long way from the truth. Archivists are continually making hard decisions at the sharp edges of politics and social change.

What can society do to help? We need a wide conversation to better understand the nature and value of archival work, and the limits of what archivists can do. We need to give archivists an explicit licence and the necessary resources to continue to make difficult decisions.

For that to work, the community needs to protect archivists from politicians and narrow interests. Only then will archivists feel safe to be transparent about what they are keeping, why they are keeping it, and the judgements they are applying in order to put the holdings in their proper context.

Looking back over the past two millennia, archivists have made every kind of curatorial mistake. They have rejected worthy items, let in unworthy ones, mishandled objects in their care, and fallen prey to fakers and frauds. But only rarely have they lost sight of their core purpose.

On the big issues of our time, we should trust archivists to make the right calls. And we should give them our understanding and protection so they can do their work in peace.

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Read more: Friday essay: the library – humanist ideal, social glue and now, tourism hotspot

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Stuart Kells does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

As you’re probably aware, now that it’s January, we’re running our annual public domain game jam, for games based on works from 1927. This is the 5th year we’ve done this, ever since the public domain (finally) returned to the US after decades with no works ever reaching the public domain, due to never-ending copyright term extension. Many people have noted that the terms seemed to extend just as Disney’s Mickey Mouse was about to enter the public domain. And while some scholars dispute the claim that Disney was the main lobbying force behind extensions, it’s uncanny how often the extensions seemed timed to Mickey’s unshackling.

A few years ago, though, it became clear that even Disney had given up on the idea of copyright term extension in the US (elsewhere, however…). After all, even one of the most extreme pro-copyright Copyright Registrars had suggested that perhaps it was time to scale back copyright terms (though only in the slightest of ways). The battle over the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, followed by the battle over SOPA has (at least) taught the legacy copyright industries that they can’t just slip through never-ending extensions any more.

That didn’t stop a weird flood of articles last summer bemoaning the horror that would come from Disney losing the copyright on the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse, as it’s set to do on January 21st, 2024. Right before the New Year, the NY Times had a slightly more balanced article looking at what to expect on the freeing of Steamboat Willie Mickey in one year’s time.

For the first time, however, one of Disney’s marquee characters — Mickey himself — is set to enter the public domain. “Steamboat Willie,” the 1928 short film that introduced Mickey to the world, will lose copyright protection in the United States and a few other countries at the end of next year, prompting fans, copyright experts and potential Mickey grabbers to wonder: How is the notoriously litigious Disney going to respond?

As the article notes, this definitely isn’t a free-for-all for Mickey. The Steamboat Willie version is quite different from the Mickey most people know of today. It is true that Disney won’t be able to stop people from showing or sharing the original animation, but the company itself put it up on YouTube well over a decade ago anyway, so it’s free for all to see.

But there are other parts of the article that clearly suggest that Disney is prepping itself to use trademark law to scare off would-be adapters. This has always been something of a concern, and the article suggests that Disney itself has been quietly getting things ready for this kind of legal attack. As we’ve explained dozens of times, trademark and copyright law are different. Trademark law is really about not confusing or tricking the consumer into believing a product was made by someone else. So, really, the issue is in not making content that anyone might think would have come from Disney, which might wipe out a fair bit of content, but still leave plenty of open space.

But, also, trademark is about commerce, and the trademark holder has to be making use of the trademark in commerce in order for it to remain valid. But, as the article notes, over the past fifteen years or so, Disney has been gradually ramping up its commerce related to the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey.

In 2007, Walt Disney Animation Studios redesigned its logo to incorporate the “Steamboat Willie” mouse. It has appeared before every movie the unit has released since, including “Frozen” and “Encanto,” deepening the old character’s association with the company. (The logo is also protected by a trademark.) In addition, Disney sells “Steamboat Willie” merchandise, including socks, backpacks, mugs, stickers, shirts and collectibles.

My sense is that Disney will be cautiously litigious around Mickey. That is, I’m guessing that the aggressive IP enforcement team will be told not to go after just random uses of the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey, but anything borderline will bring down the lawyers screaming trademark infringement.

Of course, there’s another side to this not covered in the NY Times piece, which is that it’s unlikely Disney’s copyright in the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey is even valid in the first place. Beyond the fact that Steamboat Willie was a parody of Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr. (which came out just a few months earlier, and will also be going into the public domain next January), a bunch of researchers have found pretty strong evidence that Disney screwed up the copyright filings for the film anyway, meaning it likely technically went into the public domain decades ago. It’s just that no one wanted to fight Disney’s litigation team on it.

The turn-of-the-century literary canon, using data from college syllabi

A Redditor took to /r/AITA to ask if she was wrong to report her friend's plagiarism. She wasn't, but it's easy to see why she was unsure.

The post The Complicated Ethics of Reporting Plagiarism appeared first on Plagiarism Today.

Cover image- Johann Wilhelm Cordes, Wilde Jagd Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons A ferocious storm hit my corner of California in December. The wind howled as it battered the house, moaning sounds came down the chimney, doors rattled, and we could hear branches cracking outside. A sudden popping sound, and we were plunged into darkness. […]

The post The Wild Hunt- One of the Oldest Germanic Stories appeared first on A German Girl in America.

New year, new you, new diet. It’s a familiar refrain. One popular dieting technique is to create a food blacklist. Quitting “carbs” or packaged foods is common, which can mean avoiding supermarket staples like pasta.

But do we really need to ban pasta to improve our diets?

This is what we call a reductionist approach to nutrition, where we describe a food based on just one of its key components. Pasta isn’t just carbohydrates. One cup (about 145 grams) of cooked pasta has about 38g of carbohydrates, 7.7g of protein and 0.6g of fats. Plus, there’s all the water that is absorbed from cooking and lots of vitamins and minerals.

“But pasta is mostly carbs!” I hear you cry. This is true, but it’s not the whole story. We need to think about context.

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Read more: I've indulged over the holidays. If I'm healthy the rest of the time, does it matter?

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Your day on a plate

You probably know there are recommendations for how much energy (kilojoules or calories) we should eat in a day. These recommendations are based on body size, sex and physical activity. But you might not realise there are also recommendations about the profile of macronutrients – or types of food – that supply this energy.

Fats, carbs and proteins are macronutrients. Macronutrients are broken down in the body to produce energy for our bodies.

Acceptable Macronutrient Distribution Ranges describe the ratio or percentage of macronutrients that should provide this energy. These ranges are set by experts based on health outcomes and models of healthy eating. They aim to make sure we get enough, but not too much, of each macro. Consuming too much or too little of any type of food can have consequences for health.

The ratios are also designed to make sure we get enough of the vitamins and minerals that come with the energy in the foods we typically eat. We should get 45–65% of our energy from carbohydrates, 10–30% from proteins, and 20–35% from fats.

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Read more: What is the 'carnivore diet' and is it a bad idea?

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Mangia pasta

Macronutrient ratios mean it can be healthy to eat up to between 1.2 and 6.5 times more carbohydrates in a day than protein – since each gram of protein has the same amount of energy as a gram of carbohydrates.

The ratio of carbs to protein in pasta is 38g to 7.7g, which equates to roughly a 5:1 ratio, well within the acceptable macronutrient distribution range. Meaning pasta actually has enough protein to balance with the carbohydrates. This isn’t just because of the eggs in pasta either. Wheat is another source of protein, making up about 20% of the proteins eaten globally.

If you are worried about the calorie levels and weight gain, that’s not so simple either.

In the context of an otherwise healthy diet, people have been shown to lose more weight when their diet includes pasta regularly. And, a systematic review of ten different studies found pasta was better for post-meal blood glucose levels than bread or potatoes.

Instead of quitting spaghetti, consider reducing portion sizes, or switching to wholegrain pasta, which has a higher fibre content which has benefits for gut health and can help you feel fuller longer.

Gluten-free pasta has slightly less protein than wheat pasta. So, despite being healthier for people with gluten intolerance, there are no increased health benefits in switching to gluten-free pasta for most of us.

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Read more: No, serving sizes on food labels don't tell us how much we should eat

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Pass the pesto and the leftover bolognese

Pasta is also not typically eaten alone. So, while some warn about the dangers of blood sugar spikes when eating “naked carbs” (meaning just carbs with no other foods), this typically isn’t a risk for pasta.

When pasta provides the base of a meal, it can be a vehicle to help people eat more vegetables in smooth or chunky vegetable sauces. For kids (or fussy adults) pasta sauce can be a great place to hide pureed or grated vegetables.

Not eating pasta alone is also important for the protein profile. Plant foods are typically not complete proteins, which means we need to eat combinations of them to get all the different types of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) we need to survive.

But pasta, even though we often focus on the carbs and energy, packs a good nutritional punch. Like most foods, it isn’t just macronutrients it also has micronutrients.

One cup of cooked pasta has about a quarter of our daily recommended intakes of vitamins B1 and B9, half the recommended intake of selenium, and 10% of our iron needs.

The news for pasta gets even better when we eat it as leftovers. When pasta is cooked and cooled, some of the carbohydrates convert to resistant starch. This starch gets its name from being resistant to digestion, so it contributes less energy and is better for blood sugar levels. So, your leftover pasta, even if you reheat it, is lower in calories than the night before.

Look a little closer at ‘carb’ choices

There is a lot of talk about reducing intakes of carbohydrates for weight loss, but remember carbs come in different forms and in different foods.

Some of them, like pasta, bring other benefits. Others like cakes and lollies, add very little else. When we talk about reducing intake of refined carbohydrates, think first of sweets that are eaten alone, before you cut the staple carbohydrates that are often served with vegetables – arguably the healthiest core food group!

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Read more: Health Check: how to work out how much food you should eat

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Emma Beckett has received funding for research or consulting from Mars Foods, Nutrition Research Australia, NHMRC, ARC, AMP Foundation, Kellogg, and the University of Newcastle. She is a member of committees/working groups related to nutrition or the Australian Academy of Science, the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Nutrition Society of Australia.

When William A. Smith, a scholar of education and culture, introduced the term “racial battle fatigue” in 2003, he used it to describe the cumulative effects of racial hostility that Black people – specifically faculty and graduate students – experience at predominantly white colleges and universities. In short, it takes a toll on their psychological, physical and emotional well-being.

Since then, the term has been applied by scholars to Hispanic undergraduates and women of color. Scholars have also applied the term to groups beyond the college campus, such as teachers of color and students of color at the K-12 level. Most of the research on racial battle fatigue deals with the matter within the context of education.

As a concept, racial battle fatigue is rooted in critical race theory, which holds that racism is systemic and embedded in legal systems and policies, not just something that takes place on an interpersonal level.

Smith was not the first to connect race and fatigue in one phrase. For example, in his 1990 book “Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America,” author Shelby Steele wrote about “a kind of race fatigue, a deep weariness with things racial.”

And the term “battle fatigue” has long been used to describe the symptoms that result from the stress of combat, such as depression and anxiety.

The term “racial battle fatigue,” then, likens the collective experiences of people of color who are subjected to racial hostility to that of soldiers who experience combat stress. Both are believed to result from being placed in a hostile environment filled with regular threats and attacks.

What causes racial battle fatigue?

It may come about from racial macroaggressions and racial microaggressions.

Racial macroaggressions are far-reaching race-related experiences that may be publicized and traumatic. For instance, when a video surfaced of George Floyd slowly being killed as a result of a police officer who knelt on his neck, experts say it traumatized many who saw the video. This experience is an example of how hearing about or observing experiences of racial prejudice and discrimination can add to the distress of people of color.

Racial microaggressions are defined as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.” Common racial microaggressions toward Black individuals include questions like “Where are you from?” and statements such as “You are so articulate” or “I’m not racist. I have several Black friends.” They also include asking a Black person, “Why are you so loud?” and confusing a Black professional for a service worker.

Students of color may experience racial microaggressions throughout their academic careers, beginning before college and persisting into college and university settings.

What does racial battle fatigue cause?

Chronic racial stress is associated with poorer mental health. This includes depression and anxiety. It is also associated with an increased likelihood for developing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Chronic racial stress also increases the probability that a person of color won’t get good sleep. It is associated with a diminished sense of well-being, a loss of appetite and elevated blood pressure.

Racial microaggressions in academic settings can hurt students’ academic achievement and leave them feeling out of place and invisible to teachers and administrators.

What can be done?

There are several strategies students of color can practice to minimize the damage caused by experiencing racial stress.

1. Build community: Social belonging has been found to mitigate racial stress for Black high school students. It has also been found to improve the academic achievement of Black college students.

To this effect, students of color can seek to form connections with other individuals of color to foster a sense of community, which may lessen feelings of isolation for people of color.

2. Engage in mindfulness: Research suggests the benefits of using mindfulness strategies to manage racial stress. For example, when students of color engaged in a self-affirmation exercise that involved writing about important life values, it lessened the effects of negative race-based stereotypes on their academic achievement.

Students can also learn reflective coping strategies, which involve managing stressful events by changing the situation, their emotions or their thoughts. Research has found that the use of such strategies can promote positive mental health for students of color exposed to racial microaggressions.

3. Get some exercise: Students of color can make conscious efforts to engage in regular physical activity, as exposure to racial discrimination has been found to lead to a more sedentary lifestyle, which can in turn lead to poorer health.

As long as racism persists in education, students of color may never be able to completely avoid racial battle fatigue. But by being more conscious of this fatigue and how to fight it, they can at least be equipped to deal with it more effectively and prevent it from harming their academic careers and their lives.

Geremy Grant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Volume 4 of The Complete Tom the Dancing Bug!  TOM THE DANCING BUG: ALL-MIGHTY COMICS!  Books currently being personalized, signed, sketched in, and sent out!  Let's go!   — Read the rest

One day in my high school English class, our teacher told us we were having a guest speaker.  That excited everyone because it meant no work in class.  All we had to do was sit back and listen.

So this man walks in and he’s carrying a satchel.  The teacher introduced him (his name was John) and left him alone in the front of the class.

The man seemed a little unprepared as he fumbled around in his satchel.  Eventually he pulled out a box.  It looked like a box of dry spaghetti noodles actually.

As he lifted up the box, the bottom opened up and noodles went flying everywhere, all over the floor.

What happened next was something I’d remember for decades.

John looked down at all the noodles and appeared extremely embarrassed and almost defeated.

There was some laughter in the room at his plight.

All I could think of was, “Oh wow, he must feel so embarrassed right now.  This poor man, what a first impression he’s making!”

He bent down and started picking up the noodles one at a time.  He said nothing.

The laughter stopped and the room was quiet.

What would happen next?

The longer he spent picking up noodles, the more my body twitched.  I almost got out of my chair to help him, but I didn’t want to be the only one, so I settled into my chair and hoped this poor guy would hurry.  People were uncomfortable.

Finally, a young man in our class, Mike, got out of his chair, walked to the front, and said “Here, let me help you.”  He bent down and immediately began picking up noodles with this man.

I felt relief.  Finally, someone was helping him.

No one else got out of their chair though.  Not one other person helped gather spaghetti.

Finally after what seemed like forever, they had all the spaghetti in hand and John put it back in the box.  Mike sat down.  John looked at the class and asked a question of the group.

“Why didn’t any of the rest of you get up and help me pick up the spaghetti?”

There was uncomfortable silence.  People shifted in their seats.  I, myself, felt shame.

He said again, “You saw me struggling with a problem, a problem you were physically capable of helping me with, yet only one among you got up and helped me.  Why?”

At this point we all realized he had staged the spaghetti incident to run a social experiment on us.

Still, no one answered, so he turned to Mike and said, “You, sir.  You got up and helped me.  Why did you do that?”

Mike shrugged and said, “It was the right thing to do.”

John nodded at Mike and turned back to the class.  “Did any of you want to help me but made a conscious decision not to?”

Several people raised their hand or nodded.  I was one of them.

John said, “Why?  What prevented you from getting out of your seat to help?”

A girl in class said, “I was too embarrassed.  I didn’t want to be part of your embarrassment.”

A boy said, “I didn’t want to be the center of attention.”

John nodded and said, “How many of you had no desire to help me at all?”

A few people raised their hand.

One guy volunteered, “It wasn’t my problem.  It was your problem.  I felt no desire to help you clean up the mess you made.”

A few people indicated agreement.

A girl said, “To be honest, I thought you were clumsy and stupid, and I didn’t want to be associated with you.”

John nodded and said, “I understand.”

Then he turned to the class and said, “What did you guys think of this young man here when he got up from his seat to help me?”

Responses included: 

“I thought he was an idiot.”

“I thought he was brave.’’

“I thought he was kind.”

“I was happy someone was helping you.’

“It made me feel bad because I was too afraid to help you.”

John said, “I want you to think about compassion and action.  Do you want to go through your life pointing and laughing at people who need help, or do you want to be the person that helps someone in need?”

He continued, “You can always sit back and watch people struggle. This guy over here was right, it wasn’t his problem.  It wasn’t his fault all the spaghetti was on the floor.  He was under no obligation to help me pick it up.”

Then he looked back at Mike, “But this young man chose to help me even though it wasn’t his problem.  Imagine what the world would look like if people aided others in times of stress.”

John continued, “When Mike helped me, it took half the time to get all the spaghetti up off the floor.  Imagine how quickly that problem would have been solved if 30 of you helped pick up spaghetti off the floor.”

John spoke a little while longer about character, compassion, and deciding how we wanted to show up in the world. He ended his speech and we applauded him.  

Then he took all the spaghetti out of the box and tossed it onto the floor again.

People laughed, others groaned, but about 15 of us got out of our chairs immediately and began helping him pick it up.  The rest sat in their seats and watched.

I learned a valuable lesson that day.  I decided I wanted to show up for others the same way I’d want them to show up for me if I had a problem or needed help.

I decided I wanted to be a helper, when I could, where I could, in whatever capacity I could, and that I wouldn’t let fear or shame stop me.

This principle has guided my life for decades.  I am grateful to this man, John, for helping me see who I wanted to be.

Have you had an experience like this that shaped you to your core? An experience that stayed with you for life and made you who you are today?

Join Creative Commons, Internet Archive, and many other leaders from the open world to celebrate Public Domain Day 2023. As of January 2023, a treasure trove of new cultural works has become as free as the moon and the stars — at least in the USA and many other countries. And what better way to get us feeling inspired than recalling those timeless lyrics of the 1927 hit musical composition: “The Best Things In Life Are Free“. We agree! That’s why we made it our theme. 

This year ushered in a wealth of creative works published in 1927 into the Public Domain, which now contribute to our cultural heritage. Iconic authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf, silent film classics like the controversial The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson and Fritz Lang’s dystopian Metropolis, and snappy musical compositions like “You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream”.

You can welcome new public domain works and celebrate with us in three ways:

1. Join us for a virtual party on 19 January 2023 at 1pm PST / 4pm EST / 9pm UTC, where we will celebrate our theme, The Best Things In Life Are Free, with a host of entertainers, historians, librarians, academics, activists and other leaders from the open world, including additional sponsoring organizations Library Futures, SPARC, Authors Alliance, Public Knowledge, and the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. REGISTER FOR THE VIRTUAL EVENT! 
2. The Internet Archive will also host an in-person Film Remix Contest Screening Party on 20 January 2023 at 6pm at 300 Funston Ave in San Francisco. We will celebrate 1927 as the founding year of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, while watching this year’s Public Domain Day Remix Contest winning entries, eating popcorn and ice cream. Come dressed in your best golden age of Hollywood inspired costume, and walk the red carpet with the Internet Archive as we celebrate the entry of “talkies” into the public domain. REGISTER FOR THE IN-PERSON PARTY IN SAN FRANCISCO! 
3. Celebrate Public Domain Day 2023 with the Internet Archive through creative expression! Artists of all levels are invited to submit short films 2-3 minutes in length crafted from  resources from the Internet Archive’s collections from 1927. The uploaded videos will be judged and prizes of up to $1500 awarded. All submissions must be in by Midnight, 16 January 2023 (PST). SUBMIT AN ENTRY OR FIND OUT MORE!

The post Celebrate Public Domain Day 2023 with Us: The Best Things in Life Are Free appeared first on Creative Commons.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting your home to smell nice and fresh – and from candles to diffusers, there’s no shortage of home scent products to help you achieve that.

But having rampant fragrances in our indoor air can dramatically impact air quality, coming with a host of potential problems.

Indoor air quality is a going concern

People in high- and middle-income countries spend 85-90% of their time indoors. An average person inhales up to 20,000 litres of air daily, and exposure to air pollutants in stagnant air indoors can pose risks to our health and wellbeing, causing symptoms such as eye irritation, respiratory issues and even headaches.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), levels of indoor air pollutants are typically more than three times higher than outdoors.

Sources of indoor pollution can be many: cooking, heating, scented cleaning products, and also the products we use to deodorise our living or working spaces – whether they’re candles, diffusers, room sprays, gels, beads or other products.

The sole purpose of home scents is to make the air smell nice. This means we’re intentionally releasing a mix of chemicals in an indoor environment and potentially lowering the indoor air quality.

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Read more: Common products, like perfume, paint and printer ink, are polluting the atmosphere

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Meet the VOCs

Air fresheners emit more than 100 different chemicals, including volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These are airborne chemicals that include wide classes of organic compounds: terpenes such as limonene (lemon scent), alpha-pinene (smell of pine trees), and beta-pinene; solvents such as ethanol, formaldehyde, benzene, toluene and xylene, and many other compounds.

These VOCs will react with ozone and other indoor oxidants to generate a range of oxidation products, which are potentially toxic molecules. The level of exposure and concentration determines the potential toxicity.

Fragrances and ozone can also generate pollutants such as formaldehyde, acetaldehyde and free radicals, all classified as toxic or hazardous by agencies such as the EPA.

The type and amount of pollutants created by your home fragrance will depend on many factors, such as the type of product (does it burn or is it a vapour?), its composition (although ingredients aren’t always known), and the indoor air itself.

All air freshener types produce high emissions of volatile organic compounds in some settings. How scents are delivered into the space is reported to be less important for emissions than the composition of the scent in question.

Legally, the chemicals used in air fresheners do not have to be disclosed. Studies have found vast variation in what gets disclosed on the label.

Apart from fragrance compounds, a home scent can also emit solvents such as ethanol and iso-propanol, or dipropylene glycol and tens of others. Odourless solvents are of specific concern as it is difficult for a consumer to predict the impact and to be aware of higher concentrations present in the air.

Notably, manufacturers of scents can use the words “fragrance”, “perfume” and “essential oil” in the list of ingredients without specifying which chemicals are used to form the fragrance.

Typically, it can be tens or hundreds of different chemicals that were not disclosed.

‘Green’ isn’t always better either

Even when the ingredients are listed on the label, it doesn’t mean the product is entirely off the hook.

For example, consumers can be easily misled by labels such as “green”, “organic” or “natural” on their products, also known as greenwashing.

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Read more: Greenwashing: can you trust that label?

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There is generally a lack of awareness that the scents marketed as green or organic release similar amounts of potentially hazardous materials into the air as other products, as there’s no regulation on what can be labelled “green”.

For example, essential oils are natural aromatic compounds but, once released into the air, can form nanoparticles and pollutants such as formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.

Keeping it fresh

Our ubiquitous exposure to fragranced products, even at low levels, has been associated with various adverse health effects. In a study across the United States, Australia, Sweden and the United Kingdom, 32.2% of people were reported to have a sensitivity to fragrance. In those who are sensitive, fragrances are a risk factor for asthma and headaches.

All this doesn’t mean you must throw your scented candles in the bin. But using them in moderation is highly advisable if you care about the overall quality of your indoor air.

Although there is no safe threshold for exposure to particulate matter (such as soot) and VOCs, burning soy, beeswax or other non-paraffin candles in a moderate way – along with proper ventilation and/or indoor air filtration – should be considered generally safe.

That said, removing air fresheners, fragrances and scented candles will likely improve your indoor air quality overall. It will also make your living space safer for your family, pets and friends.

Some other measures you may consider to make your indoor environment cleaner and healthier are frequently ventilating spaces, using vacuum cleaners with HEPA filters, using air purifiers, surrounding yourself with greenery, and cleaning regularly.

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Read more: We can't afford to ignore indoor air quality – our lives depend on it

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Svetlana Stevanovic receives funding from the Australian Research Council and research and industry partners such as CO2 CRC, Hyzon Motors and others. All my work is associated with the characterisation of airborne materials and complies with the research ethics and scientific research integrity code. I do not have any funding related to the scent or candle industries.

For most people around the world, physical work takes up a great amount of time and energy every day. But what determines whether it is men or women who are working harder in households? In most hunter-gatherer societies, men are the hunters and women are the gatherers – with men seemingly walking the furthest. But what’s the labour breakdown in other societies?

We carried out a study of farming and herding groups in the Tibetan borderlands in rural China – an area with huge cultural diversity – to uncover which factors actually determine who works the hardest in a household, and why. Our results, published in Current Biology, shed light on the gender division of work across many different kinds of society.

The majority of adults across the world are married. Marriage is a contract, so one might expect roughly equal costs and benefits from the union for both parties. But unequal bargaining power in a household – such as one person threatening divorce – can lead to unequal contributions to the partnership.

Leaving home

We decided to test the hypothesis that leaving your natal area after heterosexual marriage to live with your spouse’s family may contribute to a higher level of workload. In such marriages, the new person typically isn’t related to, and doesn’t share a history with, anyone in their new household. Without blood relatives around them, they might therefore be at a disadvantage when it comes to bargaining power.

The most common form of marriage around the world is where women are the “dispersers”, leaving their native home, while men stay with their families in their natal area. This is known as patrilocality.

Neolocality – in which both sexes disperse at marriage, and the couple lives in a new place away from both their families – is another common practice in many parts of the world. Matrilocality – where women stay in the natal family and men move to live with the wife and her family – is quite rare. And duolocality – where neither sex leaves home and husband and wife live apart – is very rarely seen.

Luckily, in the diverse Tibetan borderlands, all four of these different dispersal patterns can be found across various different ethnic groups.

Our study focused on rural villages from six different ethnic cultures. With our collaborators from Lanzhou University in China, we interviewed more than 500 people about their dispersal status after marriage, and invited them to wear an activity tracker (like a fitbit) to assess their workloads.

Women work harder

Our first finding was that women worked much harder than men, and contributed most of the fruits of this labour to their families. This was evidenced both by their own reports of how much they worked and by their activity trackers.

Women walked on average just over 12,000 steps per day, while men walked just over 9,000 steps. So men also worked hard, but less so than women. They spent more time in leisure or social activities, or just hanging around and resting.

This may be partly because women are, on average, physically weaker than men, and may thus have reduced bargaining power. But we also found that individuals (be they male or female) who disperse at marriage to live away from their kin have higher workloads than those who stay with their natal families.

So if you are female and move away from home at marriage (as most women do throughout the world), you suffer not just in terms of missing your own family but also in terms of workload. When both sexes disperse and no one lives with their natal families, both sexes work hard (as there is little help from kin) – but the woman still works harder. According to our study, perfect sex equality in workload only occurs in instances where men disperse and women do not.

These results help us to understand why women globally disperse, but men generally do not. Dispersal is especially bad for men – adding about 2,000 more steps per day to their step count, but only adding about 1,000 steps per day for women.

Time and energy spent on farming, herding and housework competes with free time. So substantial labour contribution to households in these rural areas can result in less time spent on rest. From an evolutionary view, giving up rest isn’t favourable unless it contributes to higher fitness – such as enhancing offspring survival.

We don’t actually know whether it is favourable in this case, as it hasn’t been researched much. It may be true in poor and rural areas around the world, but less so in wealthier settings.

In most urban areas, for example, an inactive lifestyle is becoming more pervasive. And research has shown that sedentary lifestyles in such areas among white-collar workers are becoming a significant public health issue. They are linked to many chronic health conditions such as obesity, infertility, and several mental health disorders.

Sex inequality in workload persists both in the home and outside. Now our study has given an evolutionary perspective on why women are more likely than men to be bearing a heavy work burden.

But things are slowly changing. As women are increasingly starting families away from both their partner’s and their own family, their bargaining power is increasing. This is further boosted by their increasing levels of self-generated wealth, education and autonomy. Ultimately, these changes are leading men to take on an increasing workload in many urban, industrial or post-industrial societies.

Yuan Chen receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC grant EvoBias), and previously was funded by Lanzhou University, the International Society of Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, and the HRAF institute affiliated with Yale University supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF 2022).

Ruth Mace receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC grant EvoBias). She is Editor-in-Chief of Evolutionary Human Sciences (a Cambridge University Press open-access journal). She has previously been affiliated with The Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and Lanzhou University. Ruth Mace is currently a visitor at the Institute of Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST).

The year 2022 marked the 100^th anniversary of the founding of PEN America, an organization that "stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. — Read the rest

Erin Reed is a researcher, mother, content creator, activist, and writer. As a transwoman who uses she/her pronouns, Reed works "to achieve gender justice for queer and marginalized people through education and understanding."

A recent update to the Anti-Trans legislative map that Reed has been working on reveals the breadth and depth of the legal and extralegal threat to trans people and their communities. — Read the rest

Open Culture put together a nice collection of YouTube channels offering free full-length movies.

That's why we've rounded up this collection of Youtube channels with free movies, which together constitute one big meta-collection of hundreds of films. Among them are numerous black-and-white classics, of course, but also critically acclaimed pictures by international auteurs, rather less critically acclaimed (but nonetheless enjoyable) cult favorites, documentaries on a wide variety of subjects, and even twenty-first-century Hollywood releases.

— Read the rest

For years, we’ve written about the copyright nonsense around sampling in hip hop music, and how it was treated with very, very different rules than things like cover songs and paying homage to previous artists in other forms of music. As we’ve mentioned for over a decade, filmmaker Kembrew McCleod did a full (fascinating) exploration of this in the documentary “Copyright Criminals” which is worth watching if you can find it. The trailer is here:

The group De La Soul features prominently in the movie, as their first album, 3 Feet High and Rising, has long been the quintessential example of an album that had so many samples that it would be effectively impossible to get the official licenses necessary to release it today.

Because of this, that classic hip hop album has not been available on various streaming platforms in an era where (unfortunately or not) not being on streaming more or less means the album doesn’t exist. It’s obviously been frustrating for the band. In 2014, they made everything they had ever created free for people to download from their website… but just for 24 hours. In fact, back in 2015, De La Soul did a Kickstarter project to create new music for themselves to sample as a commentary on their inability to sample others (I could have sworn I wrote about the project back then, but search is failing me in finding it). Both of these moves came with statements from the group talking about how much they want their music out there and how much they want to support their fans, but copyright law and the record labels kept getting in the way.

All of this is silly, frankly. Much of the time, samples are unrecognizable from the original. They should, easily, be covered by de minimis use or fair use. Yet, perhaps because of the nature of the music — and who frequently creates it — courts were much quicker to insist that every single sample needs to be licensed, no matter how short, no matter how transformed, no matter how unrecognizable, and even no matter how much a sample might actually help promote the original.

Still, for over a decade, people have talked about finally trying to make 3 Feet High and Rising available legally (of course, if you just ignore copyright laws, it’s always been possible to find it). Three years ago there were reports that it was finally going to come to streaming. Except that ran into problems as the plan from Tommy Boy records was apparently done without agreement with the group, and where most of the money would go to the label.

In 2021, Tommy Boy was sold to Reservoir for $100 million, and then it appears that Reservoir cut a deal with De La Soul to allow the group to acquire the rights to their own masters.

And, finally, that brings us around to the present, where De La Soul, owning its own masters, is going to put them on various streaming services (and reissue some of the albums as well).

It’s good that De La Soul controls their own masters and is able to get this music out there for more people to listen to legally, but it’s somewhat ridiculous that it’s taken all this time and had to go through so much nonsense. Of course, it’s still not entirely clear to me that the rights issues regarding the samples are all cleared. I recall a similar effort by the Beastie Boys to rerelease Paul’s Boutique that resulted in a lawsuit over some of the samples as well.

But hopefully, we can get past all that… and just let people enjoy the music.

Carrollwood just landed its very own CAVA, and residents are in for a treat. One of the top rated quick service restaurants, CAVA, is working on a major expansion down the Tampa Bay region. The restaurant known for its falafel, spicy Harissa chicken, and roasted eggplant, just recently opened at 942 S Howard Avenue in South Tampa. It’s now open at 15028 N Dale Mabry Highway in Carrollwood.

CAVA started in DC with three Greek friends who wanted to share the thoughtful ingredients and bold Mediterranean flavors they grew up loving. Now you can find their fast-casual restaurants full to the brim with all the bright, craveable ingredients you need to build a meal that fits your food-style, cravings, and appetite.

Their chef-crafted line of dips and spreads are waiting on the shelves of Whole Foods and specialty markets nationwide. The restaurant also recently debuted a location on 4th Street North in St. Petersburg. 

Hungry visitors should treat themselves to the sensational grain bowls filled with Saffron Basmati Rice, or filled up on the crunchy splendor of super greens and organic arugula. Harissa honey chicken, spicy lamb meatballs, and flavorful roasted vegetables round out the exceptional array of proteins on the menu. 

This nutrition focused restaurant also has a full menu of fresh juices. The variety of juices changes with each season.

Follow CAVA on Facebook and Instagram to learn more about the restaurant.

What to read next:

• The Peach Cobbler Factory announces grand opening
• PopStroke brings Tiger Woods’ designed mini golf course to Tampa Bay
• Finalists for Flamingo contest revealed at TPA
• Busch Gardens unveils new Springs Taproom

The post CAVA brings sensational Mediterranean cuisine to Carrollwood appeared first on That's So Tampa.

Scientific discoveries and technological innovation play a vital role in addressing many of the challenges and crises that we face every year. The last year may have come and gone quickly, but scientists and researchers have worked painstakingly hard to advance our knowledge within a number of disciplines, industries, and projects around the world. So here are the important science Headlines of 2022.

At a Glance: Important Science Headlines of 2022

Below we dive a little deeper into some of the most interesting headlines, while providing links in case you want to explore these developments further.

The James Webb Space Telescope Arrives at its Destination

What happened: A new space telescope brings promise of exciting findings and beautiful images from the final frontier. This telescope builds on the legacy of its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched over 30 years ago.

Why it matters: The James Webb Space Telescope is our latest state-of-the-art “window” into deep space. With more access to the infrared spectrum, new images, measurements, and observations of outer space will become available.

To learn more, read this article from The Planetary Society, or watch this video from the Wall Street Journal.

Complete: The Human Genome

What happened: Scientists finish sequencing the human genome.

Why it matters: A complete human genome allows researchers to better understand the genetic basis of human traits and diseases. New therapies and treatments are likely to arise from this development.

To learn more, watch this video by Two Minute Papers, or read this article from NIH

Monkeypox Breaks Out

What happened: A higher volume of cases of the monkeypox virus in non-endemic countries.

Why it matters: Trailing in the shadow of a global pandemic, researchers are keeping a closer eye on how diseases spread. The sudden spike of multinational incidences of monkeypox raises questions about disease evolution and prevention.

To learn more, read this article by the New York Times.

Related: Tampa Bay Business Accelerator Focuses on Climate Technology

A Perfectly Preserved Woolly Mammoth

What happened: Gold miners unearth a 35,000 year old, well-preserved baby woolly mammoth in the Yukon tundra.

Why it matters: The mammoth, named Nun cho ga by the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation, is the most complete specimen from North America to date. Each new discovery allows paleontologists to broaden our knowledge of biodiversity and how life changes over time.

To learn more, read this article from Smithsonian Magazine

The Rise of AI Art

What happened: Access to new computer programs, such as DALL-E and Midjourney, give members of the general public the ability to create images from text-prompts.

Why it matters: Widespread access to generative AI tools fuels inspiration—and controversy. Concern for artist rights and copyright violations grow as these programs potentially threaten to diminish creative labor.

To learn more, read this article by MyModernMet, or watch this video by Cleo Abram.

Dead Organs Get a Second Chance

What happened: Researchers create a perfusion system that can revitalize organs after cellular death. Using a special mixture of blood and nutrients, organs of a dead pig can sustain after death—and in some cases, even promote cellular repair.

Why it matters: This discovery could potentially lead to a greater shelf-life and supply of organs for transplant.

To learn more, read this article by Scientific American, or this article from the New York Times

DART Delivers A Cosmic Nudge

What happened: NASA crashes a spacecraft into an asteroid just to see how much it would move. Dimorphos, a moonlet orbiting a larger asteroid called Didymos 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth, is struck by the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft. NASA estimates that as much as 22 million pounds (10 million kg) was ejected after the impact.

Why it matters: Earth is constantly at risk of being struck by stray asteroids. Developing reliable methods of deflecting near-Earth objects could save us from meeting the same fate as the dinosaurs.

To learn more, watch this video by Real Engineering, or read this article from Space.com

Falling Sperm Counts

What happened: A scientific review suggests human sperm counts are decreasing—up to 62% over the past 50 years.

Why it matters: A lower sperm count makes it more difficult to conceive naturally. Concerns about global declining male health also arise because sperm count is a marker for overall health. Researchers look to extraneous stressors that may be affecting this trend, such as diet, environment, or other means.

To learn more, check out this article from the Guardian.

Finding Ancient DNA

What happened: Two million-year-old DNA is found in Greenland.

Why it matters: DNA is a record of biodiversity. Apart from showing that a desolate Arctic landscape was once teeming with life, ancient DNA gives hints about our advancement to modern life and how biodiversity evolves over time.

To learn more, read this article from National Geographic

Fusing Energy

What happened: The U.S. Department of Energy reports achieving net energy gain for the first time in the development of nuclear fusion.

Why it matters: People often declare that fusion is the Holy Grail of safe, clean energy, and this latest milestone brings researchers one step closer to harnessing nuclear fusion to power the world.

To learn more, view our infographic on fusion, or read this article from BBC.

Science in the New Year

The future of scientific research looks bright. Researchers and scientists are continuing to push the boundaries of what we know and understand about the world around us.

For 2023, some disciplines are likely to continue to dominate headlines:

• Advancement in space continues with projects like the James Webb Space Telescope and SETI COSMIC’s hunt for life beyond Earth
• Climate action may become more demanding as recovery and prevention from extreme weather events continue into the new year
• Generative AI tools such as DALL-e and ChatGPT were opened to public use in 2022, and ignited widespread interest in the potential of artificial intelligence
• Even amidst the lingering shadow of COVID-19, new therapeutics should advance medicine into new territories

Where science is going remains to be seen, but this past year instills faith that 2023 will be filled with even more progress.

The post Timeline: The Most Important Science Headlines of 2022 appeared first on ModernGlobe.

This reference manual for commercial bakeries includes striking pasted-in silver bromide prints and dazzling chromolithographs of bread.

On top of kickstarting a new exercise regime, the new year is traditionally a period when many people reconsider their eating habits. In recent years, intermittent fasting has become a popular habit – and has been credited with some health benefits, be it to manage excess weight, chronic illnesses or flagging energy levels. But what exactly is intermittent fasting? And does all the hype around it stand up to scientific scrutiny?

The term intermittent fasting covers several approaches, each based on different principles. It is important to note that no matter which method is used, the restrictions only affect food – never water – intake.

• The “Eat Stop Eat” method. Put forward by Brad Pilon in his book of the same name, the principle is to alternate days of normal eating and fasting, including two non-consecutive fasting days in a week.

• The 5:2 method. Developed in the 2000s by the doctors Michelle Harvie and Tony Howell, this alternates between five days of normal eating and two days (which can be consecutive) of 70-75% calorie reduction during the week.

• Time-restricted eating (also called time-restricted feeding). This is currently the most popular and most studied method. It consists of narrowing the food intake window to between 6 and 10 hours per day, and therefore fasting between 14 and 18 hours during the day.

Science’s verdict?

Outcomes vary depending on the adopted strategy.

With the “Eat Stop Eat” and 5:2 approaches, relatively few scientific studies have been conducted. The little data we have available has shown they can effectively help us lose weight and improve certain metabolic parameters such as fasting blood glucose. For example, the nutritionist Surabhi Bhutani showed the use of the 5:2 method for three months resulted in a weight loss of 3-6 kg in participants.

However, both methods are very restrictive and can cause side effects on days of total fasting or severe caloric restriction – hunger, negative effects on mood, and risk of hypoglycaemia.

In the longer term, restriction also increases the risk of developing or worsening eating disorders, as well as yo-yo dieting. These patterns often appear after the individual has attempted to lose weight by restricting themselves: despite initial progress, the deprivation is likely to generate frustrations that will encourage the return of old eating habits.

The most studied method is the one with a daily food intake but limited in time. Two “time slots” are often observed:

• When food intake starts with breakfast and ends in the late afternoon – known as “early time-restricted feeding”.

• When food intake starts with lunch – known as “late time-restricted feeding”.

This approach appears to improve metabolic regulation and slash the risk of metabolic diseases. However, these benefits vary according to the chosen time slot. When food intake starts in the morning, studies have observed weight loss and improvements in insulin sensitivity.

Conversely, there are fewer or no benefits to starting meals at midday and ending them in the evening. Ram Babu Singh’s team (Halberg Hospital and Research Institute, India) also showed positive results in participants who ate only in the morning, and not in those who ate in the evening after 8 p.m.

Why such a difference?

Research suggests our internal clock and circadian rhythms may have something to do with it. Indeed, the benefits to only eating in the morning is that the periods of food intake and fasting coincide with our biological clock.

In our previous article, we explained that in response to light cycles, our body produces hormones in a cyclical way to adapt our food intake to the body’s energy needs: the optimal period for eating is therefore from around 8 or 9 a.m. (when the sun rises) to 7 p.m. (when the sun starts to set, depending on the season).

Not eating breakfast and eating after 7 p.m. upsets circadian rhythms, and increases the risk of developing metabolic diseases.

However, while time-limited eating seems to be a good approach to metabolic health, much remains to be understood about how it works and how to optimise its effects. Work in 2022 showed no difference in terms of weight loss between opting for early- or late-morning eating. It did, however, have an effect on appetite during the day – this time to the advantage of the former.

And beyond the time of day when it seems preferable to eat, other factors may be at work that are not always measured in the studies carried out: quality and quantity of food absorbed, duration of the fasting period (which can extend from 12 to 20 hours per day), etc. It is also worth remembering every individual has his or her own metabolism and may respond differently to fasting. New, better controlled and more comprehensive studies are therefore needed to confirm the potential benefits of these methods and to understand the mechanisms involved in their effects.

In practice, what to do?

The most suitable method to avoid disrupting one’s circadian clock (and thereby limiting the risk of frustration or eating disorders) appears to be time-limited food intake by synchronising meals with circadian rhythms.

Thus, a typical day could be organised with a hearty breakfast in the morning taking place between 6 and 8 a.m., a lunch around midday and finally bringing dinner forward so that it takes place between 4 and 6 p.m., depending on the season.

This is not necessarily easy to reconcile with one’s social life. It can be complicated to practise intermittent fasting for a family, when one practises a sporting activity in the early evening or when one works in the evening until 7 or 8 p.m.

One solution would be to opt for a big breakfast and not too caloric a meal in the evening – preferably without carbs or sugars, so as not to risk shifting one’s biological clock.

Chrono-nutrition

Chrononutrition is increasingly popular and intermittent fasting appears to effectively boost metabolic health. That said, we have seen it is not a panacea. And we must ensure that the periods of fasting and food intake are consistent with our biological clock.

In the face of many existing methods, and potential risks, patients and health professionals still face a lack of information. Further research is essential to better understand their effects. Currently, there is not yet a general consensus on the ideal time to eat/fast, or on the optimal duration of each period. Moreover, these parameters may differ from one person to another, depending on their genetic make-up, history and lifestyle. It is therefore important to consider the use of this dietary strategy with qualified health professionals, with the view of setting up a healthy and balanced diet that will limit the risk of complications.

Anouk Charlot's research is funded by a scholarship from Strasbourg University.

Joffrey Zoll ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

From The Guardian:

A lawsuit filed in New York state alleges that the confectionary giant Hershey "fails to disclose" that some of its chocolate products "contain unsafe levels of lead and cadmium".

A New York man, Christopher Lazazzaro, filed the suit in Long Island federal court on 28 December.

— Read the rest