Davetrek vs The World

amazing! man who inspired Rain Man and had with worlds best memory, dies...

2009-12-31T06:38:00.000-05:00

this fellow is astounding - note how he could provide mapquest directions, knew all zipcodes, read books twice as fast because he could read 1 page with each eye and knew an amazing amount about music - he was so knowledable that he stopped going to musical performances, because he knew the composition so well that it bothered him when the performers misplayed notes...

Kim Peek, Inspiration for 'Rain Man,' Dies at 58

By BRUCE WEBER - NY Times

In 1988, the film "Rain Man," about an autistic savant played by Dustin Hoffman, shed a humane light on the travails of autism while revealing the extraordinary powers of memory that a small number of otherwise mentally disabled people possess, ostensibly as a side effect of their disability.

The film won four Oscars, including best picture, best actor and, for Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass, best original screenplay. But it never would have been made if Mr. Morrow had not had a chance meeting with Kim Peek, who inspired him to write the film.

Mr. Peek was not autistic — not all savants are autistic and not all autistics are savants — but he was born with severe brain abnormalities that impaired his physical coordination and made ordinary reasoning difficult. He could not dress himself or brush his teeth without help. He found metaphoric language incomprehensible and conceptualization baffling.

But with an astonishing skill that allowed him to read facing pages of a book at once — one with each eye — he read as many as 12,000 volumes. Even more remarkable, he could remember what he had read.

Indeed, Mr. Peek, who died Dec. 19 at home in Salt Lake City, had perhaps the world's most capacious memory for facts. He was 58. The cause was a heart attack, said his father, Fran Peek.

Almost all documented savants — people with an extraordinary depth of knowledge and the ability to recall it — have been restricted in their expertise to specific fields like mathematics, chess, art or music. But Mr. Peek had a wide range of interests and could instantly answer the most arcane questions on subjects as diverse as history, sports, music, geography and movies.

"He was the Mount Everest of memory," Dr. Darold A. Treffert, an expert on savants who knew Mr. Peek for 20 years, said in an interview.

Mr. Peek had memorized so many Shakespearean plays and musical compositions and was such a stickler for accuracy, his father said, that they had to stop attending performances because he would stand up and correct the actors or the musicians.

"He'd stand up and say: 'Wait a minute! The trombone is two notes off,' " Fran Peek said.

Mr. Peek had an uncanny facility with the calendar.

"When an interviewer offered that he had been born on March 31, 1956, Peek noted, in less than a second, that it was a Saturday on Easter weekend," Dr. Treffert and Dr. Daniel D. Christensen wrote about Mr. Peek in Scientific American in 2006.

They added: "He knows all the area codes and ZIP codes in the U.S., together with the television stations serving those locales. He learns the maps in the front of phone books and can provide MapQuest-like travel directions within any major U.S. city or between any pair of them. He can identify hundreds of classical compositions, tell when and where each was composed and first performed, give the name of the composer and many biographical details, and even discuss the formal and tonal components of the music. Most intriguing of all, he appears to be developing a new skill in middle life. Whereas before he could merely talk about music, for the past two years he has been learning to play it."

Mr. Peek, who was dismissed as mentally retarded as a child and later misdiagnosed as autistic, led a sheltered life, with few people outside his family aware of his remarkable gifts. Then, in 1984, he met Mr. Morrow at a meeting of the Association of Retarded Citizens in Arlington, Tex. Mr. Peek's father was chairman of the group's communications committee, and Mr. Morrow had helped create two television movies about a retarded man named Bill (played by Mickey Rooney).

After Mr. Peek displayed his memory skills in a conversation with him, Mr. Morrow set about concocting a story around someone like Kim Peek. "I was absolutely flabbergasted that such a human being existed," Mr. Morrow said in a 2006 documentary about Mr. Peek.

In "Rain Man," the autistic character, Raymond Babbitt, has been institutionalized since he was very young but is reunited with a cynical younger brother, Charlie (played by Tom Cruise), who had forgotten about his brother's existence. (The title comes from Raymond's recollection of the infant Charlie's name for him.) The two men take a cross-country trip, and fraternal reconciliation ensues.

The movie, a critical and box office success, was not based on Mr. Peek's life, but in preparing for the role, Mr. Hoffman visited with Mr. Peek and incorporated many of his characteristics — a shambling gait, peculiar hand movements and occasional blunt utterances — into the character of Raymond.

When Mr. Hoffman won an Oscar for best actor for the performance, he thanked Mr. Peek in his acceptance speech. Mr. Morrow went even further: he gave his own Oscar statuette to Mr. Peek, who carried it with him to public appearances for the next 21 years.

In the wake of "Rain Man," Mr. Peek became something of a celebrity, emerging from his shell to travel around the country giving demonstrations of his talent and advocating tolerance for the disabled. Fran Peek estimated that some 400,000 people have hugged Mr. Morrow's statuette.

"We called it the world's best-loved Oscar," he said.

Laurence Kim Peek was born on Nov. 11, 1951. (He was named for his mother's favorite actor, Laurence Olivier, and the title character of Rudyard Kipling's "Kim"; Kipling was his father's favorite author.) Kim's head was enlarged, his cerebellum was malformed and, perhaps most crucial, he was missing the corpus callosum, the sheaf of nerve tissue that connects the brain's hemispheres. It has been theorized that this disruption of normal communication between the brain's left and right halves resulted in a kind of jury-rigged rewiring.

"Perhaps the resulting structures allow the two hemispheres to function, in certain respects, as one giant hemisphere, putting normally separate functions under the same roof, as it were," Drs. Treffert and Christensen wrote. "If so, then Peek may owe some of his talents to this particular abnormality."

When Kim was 9 months old, a doctor said that he was so severely retarded that he would never walk or talk and that he should be institutionalized. When Kim was 6, another doctor recommended a lobotomy. By then, however, Kim had read and memorized the first eight volumes of a set of family encyclopedias, his father said. He received part-time tutoring from the age of 7 and completed a high school curriculum by 14. He spent great swaths of time absorbing volumes in the Salt Lake City Public Library. He never used computers, his father said.

"How he learned to read, I just don't know," Mr. Peek said.

Kim Peek's parents divorced in 1981, and his father cared for him alone until his son's death. Besides his father, Mr. Peek is survived by his mother, Jeanne Willey Peek Buchi; a brother, Brian; and a sister, Alison, all of Salt Lake City.

"Rain Man" changed Mr. Peek's life. In the documentary, he confessed that before the film, he never looked anyone in the face.

"Barry influenced me more than any other person," he said of Mr. Morrow. "He made me 'Rain Man.' "

Though his social skills never fully developed, he grew to be outwardly engaging. He enjoyed being among people in his travels and became comfortable as something of a showman. He began developing mental skills he had never had before, like making puns; his coordination slowly improved, to the extent that he could play the piano. He became more self-aware, even displaying a certain social agility.

During a presentation Mr. Peek gave at Oxford University in England, after he fielded students' questions about the Lusitania and about British monarchs, a young woman stood and asked him, "Kim, are you happy?"

"I'm happy just to look at you," Mr. Peek said.

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Fascinating - taking a test in a large group vs small group lowers test scores?!

2009-12-18T09:36:00.001-05:00

this is very counterintuitive in some ways, but makes sense in others - it seems when you take a test in a room with a lot of people, you compete less well against the large group - perhaps you become less motivated to succeed if many folks are in the room, vs if fewer are you have more belief in your success? hard to know about this stuff...this has a lot of implications for learning and class size though...

New Research: Taking the SAT in a Crowded Room Means Lower Scores

Wednesday, December 16, 2009 7:32 PM

By Ashley Merryman
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/12/16/taking-the-sat-in-a-crowded-room-lower-scores.aspx

Recently, University of Michigan professor Stephen Garcia and Haifa University professor Avishalom Tor published a little noticed but remarkable study in the preeminent journal, Psychological Science.

Garcia and Tor took the College Board's 2005 SAT data for all 50 states, and then they compared each state's mean SAT score to what they called "test-taker density." Essentially, test-taker density was the number of kids taking the SAT in each state, divided by the number of locations in that state where kids could take the test. (The researchers considered it a fair approximation of how many kids would be taking the test at a site at a given time.) The researchers discovered that the higher the state's test-taking density, the lower the SAT scores.

In other words, the more kids take the SAT in the same place at the same time, the lower their scores will be.

(For stats aficionados out there, the correlation between test venue / student density and SAT scores is a whopping r = -.68.)

Now, take a look at this chart of several states' mean SAT scores.

The states on the left are more rural and less populated, while those on the right are more urban and centralized.

Now, there are state differences in who takes the SAT; it could be that only the best and the brightest take the SAT in those rural states. But Garcia and Tor included ACT/SAT prevalence (and ACT scores) into their analysis. Even controlling for the ACT, the kids in the low-density states still had higher scores.

Garcia and Tor also addressed other between-state differences. They made statistical adjustments for parental education and the percentage of kids who were a minority. They also included more systemic controls, including the states' rate of SAT score improvement over the past decade and the amount of state and federal funding going into schools.

With all these things taken into account, the kids who were taking the SAT in smaller, less crowded venues still had higher scores.

Garcia and Tor wondered if the lower SAT scores were not a mere reflection of the larger pool of test-takers.

What if taking the SAT in a more crowded room actually caused kids' test scores to drop?

So the researchers pulled out data on short cognitive tests given to University of Michigan students. On these tests, they could analyze the data on a per-classroom basis—the cognitive score of the students compared with how many students were in the room when they took the test.

In those scores, Garcia and Tor found the same pattern as in the SAT data. The more students there were in the exam room at the same time, the poorer the students' scores.

Garcia and Tor now call this phenomenon "the N-effect." The larger the "N"—the number of participants involved in a task—the worse the outcome for the individuals who are participating.

The researchers have been conducting a series of experiments to better understand the N-effect. Again and again, Garcia and Tor have found that people work harder, and do better, when they are up against just a few people. It's not the wisdom of crowds. It's the stupidity of crowds.

In one experiment, the researchers gave students a trivia quiz, saying there was a prize for those who finished the test the fastest. But some students heard that they were competing against 9 students; the others were supposedly competing against 99. The students who believed they were in the smaller pool finished the quiz significantly faster than those who thought they were 1 of 100.

The N-effect is still present, regardless how difficult or easy the task. And it isn't a mere fact that people work harder if they believe they have better odds of winning.

Instead, the N-effect runs deeper than that. It's about people's motivation to succeed.

According to Garcia, "How we compare ourselves to other individuals is the engine that drives how we compete against others." When there are only a few people in the race, we put our foot on the gas, working harder and harder to outpace our competitors. And the competition becomes very personal. How we compare ourselves to others in the room becomes a referendum on our own ability.

"In contrast, when we are against many many competitors," says Garcia, "we don't care as much about how we stack up against one other competitor." Once the crowd is large enough that we don't feel the element of personal competition, the result doesn't feel like a personal statement of our worth, so we don't try as hard.

While the researchers are still testing the limits of the N-effect, already, the implications of their work are mind-blowing.

For example, the scholars argue that the N-effect should be included in discussion of class size. The argument for small classes has always been that smaller classes allow for more teacher-student interaction. But it could be that the real difference is peer to peer: "The motivation to succeed might actually decrease as the number of other students increases."

Then there is the ripple effect of the competition-based motivation. Education reformers keep wondering if teachers' salaries should be linked to performance. Garcia cautions that teachers of smaller classes may appear to be more effective when a higher level of interstudent competition may the real driver of the children's success.

(And, of course, the N-effect doesn't just apply to kids; it's operating in the workplace, at the gym...)

For parents still thinking that the best way to improve their kids' odds at getting into Harvard or MIT is an unlikely move to Arkansas, well, I've lived in Little Rock, and I can tell you that it's lovely. Nice people, gorgeous scenery, and yummy food. But Garcia says that a literal move to a less crowded state is unnecessary.

Instead, the mind-trick of the N-effect can be defeated with another mind-trick. When faced with a large group of competitors, it's important to remind yourself that what you are doing is important; your performance alone is what counts. You are competing against yourself, not the nameless, faceless hordes.

Then the N is reduced back down to an N of 1. And your fate is back in your hands.

Why (most) women like to shop

2009-12-15T16:30:00.000-05:00

Why (most) women like to shop

Mall-loving behavior may be linked to our hunting and foraging past

Discovery Channel

updated 12:13 p.m. ET, Fri., Dec . 11, 2009

Our ancestors didn't shop for holiday gifts, but the way we buy may owe credit to thousands of years of evolution.

In a new study, researchers propose that our mall-visiting behaviors harken back to the days when men hunted and women foraged.

Modern men, for example, generally want to get into a store and get right back out — just like their hunting forefathers wanted to find and bring meat home as quickly as possible. On the other hand, women get back to their foraging roots by sorting through racks of sweaters on sale — as if scanning plants for signs of ripeness.

Plenty of people defy these general trends, of course, but the findings might help men and women better understand each other and limit arguments that surround shopping, said lead author Daniel Kruger, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor, Mich.

His new theory could also help marketers design better stores that cater to gender differences.

"Women would want to have more things to search through and to be able to experience them, touch them, feel textures and see colors," Kruger said. "With a guy, he knows the properties he wants. It may be more efficient to have a counter that the guy walks up to, says what he wants, and they go get that item from a storage room."

The idea for Kruger's new study arose from a personal experience. He and his now-wife were traveling with friends through Czechoslovakia. When they arrived in Prague, the women immediately wanted to go shopping, an impulse that the men did not understand.

"We thought, 'Why do you want to go shopping? You can go shopping anywhere. There's a thousand years of culture here,'" he said. "They were adamant. They put their foots down. They took the credit cards and left."

That wasn't the end of it. When the women returned, Kruger said, they were full of joy and pride as they showed off their loot, even though many of their purchases came from a chain store that had outlets in other countries.

"For them," he said, "It was just the thrill of the chase."

In his new study, Kruger surveyed more than 450 college students about their shopping habits. Participants ranked their level of agreement to statements on a scale from 0 to 100.

Statements included "I can usually find my way around an unfamiliar store because I know what types of products are usually near each other;" "I sometimes remember an expensive item that I like, and go back when I know the store is having a big sale;" and one that Kruger couldn't resist: "If I was on vacation in a foreign country, I would make sure to check out their stores."

The results fell into the gendered trends that Kruger was expecting to find: Overall women tended to behave like foragers, and men acted like hunters. To him, that made sense.

When groups of hunter-gatherers arrived in a new place, he said, the women were eager to scope out the landscape for patches of food that they would return to again and again. Foraging was a daily and social activity, and kids often came along.

To determine whether a plant was perfectly ripe, women developed a fine attention to colors, shapes, sizes, textures and smells. All of those senses come into play when trying to find shoes that match a new dress or clothes to buy as gifts.

Seasonality was also an important part of gathering, as different foods become ripe at different times of year. The modern equivalent, Kruger speculated, are seasonal sales.

"When women go into a store and see a $200 sweater they like, but they don't want to pay that much, they are going to save it in their memories and go back to that store later," Kruger said. "When a guy has something specific in mind, he wants to go in, get it, and get out."

For men, any deer was a good deer. Any meat was good meat.

"The idea that men are more motivated to hunt mobile prey over long distances suggests that the design of retail stores and shopping malls doesn't give males enough of a challenge to make things interesting," said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque and author of the book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. "Tracking down resistant prey is an exciting thing to a male consumer."

Human behavioral ecologist Rebecca Bird had a different reaction to the new study.

"I think it's ridiculous and naive to assume that there's a gene for vegetable procurement" or for navigation through a mall, said Bird, of Stanford University in California. Context is far more important, she said, "because humans are ecologically general creatures."

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34380445/ns/health-behavior/?ns=health-behavior

MSN Privacy . Legal

Marriage wards off blues, just don't end it!

2009-12-15T16:28:00.000-05:00

Marriage wards off blues, just don't end it

Divorce linked to increased risk of depression, substance abuse, study finds

Reuters

updated 11:35 a.m. ET, Tues., Dec . 15, 2009

Marriage really is good for you, with a major international study finding it reduces the risks of depression and anxiety, but these disorders are more likely to plague people once the relationship is over.

The study of 34,493 people across 15 countries was led by clinical psychologist Kate Scott from New Zealand's University of Otago, and is based on the WHO World Mental Health (WMH) surveys conducted over the past decade.

It found that ending marriage through separation, divorce or death is linked to an increased risk of mental health disorders, with women more likely to resort to substance abuse and men more likely to become depressed.

"What makes this investigation unique and more robust is the sample is so large and across so many countries and the fact that we have data not only on depression... but also on anxiety and substance use disorders," Scott said in a statement.

"In addition, we were able to look at what happens to mental health in marriage, both in comparison with never getting married, and with ending marriage."

Scott said that the study found that getting married, compared to not getting married, was good for the mental health of both genders, not just women, as previous studies had found.

The study, however, did find that men are less likely to become depressed in their first marriage than women, a factor Scott said was probably linked to the traditional gender roles at home, as other WMH surveys have shown that as women get better educated, depression rates tend to fall.

The other gender difference the study found is that getting married reduces risk of substance use disorders more for women than for men. Scott said this may be explained by the fact that women are usually the primary caregiver for young children.

However, the downside of marriage, the University of Otago study shows, is that ending it has a negative impact on both genders.

"What our study points to is that the marital relationship offers a lot of mental health benefits for both men and women, and that the distress and disruption associated with ending marriage can make people vulnerable to developing mental disorders," Scott said.

The study was recently published in the British journal Psychological Medicine. It was conducted in association with the World Health Organization, Harvard University and a number of other international organisations.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34431543/ns/health-mental_health/

MSN Privacy . Legal

Passing of Debbie Hill, sister of Jeff Stier

2009-12-15T13:34:00.000-05:00

May we all only know good times and simcha and may the family be comforted amongst the mourners of zion and israel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Elmora Website <elmorawebsite@thejec.org>
Date: Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 1:24 PM
Subject: [ElmoraShulAnnouncement] Passing of Debbie Hill, daughter of Susan & Aaron Stier
To: ESA.mailing.list@the.net

We regretfully inform you of the passing of the daughter of Susan & Aaron Stier. The funeral will take place on Wednesday December 16th at 1pm in the JEC Elmora Avenue main shul.

Shiva will be observed at 1131 Harding Road, Elizabeth (289-7866) until Tuesday morning December 22nd. Visitng hours are 10am-noon, 2-5pm and 7-10pm. Davening times are as follows. Shacharis: Thursday and Friday at 6:45am, Sunday 7am, Monday and Tuesday at 6:50am. Mincha Wednesday and Thursday 4:20pm, Sunday and Monday 4:25pm.

Susan and Aaron will remain in their home during the entire week of shiva. However, their son Jeff will be returning to his home (in NYC) on motzai Shabbos to complete shiva. Their son-in-law Ira will return to Florida (901 West 47th Street, Miami Beach; 305-673-2009) on Sunday afternoon to complete shiva.

May the family be comforted among the mourners of Tzion and Yerushalayim.

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Ramaz teaches Sex with the Rabbi Class?

2009-12-13T09:47:00.000-05:00

excellent article - the items need to be more discussed and explored - kudos to ramaz for this type of dialogue and discussion

(Hat tip Matt!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/nyregion/12religion.html

In a Manhattan Classroom, Judaism Meets the Facts of Life
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN • New York Times

Nearing his ninth decade, formal in vested suit and cufflinks, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein strode purposefully into a classroom of Ramaz High School on Manhattan's Upper East Side one recent Monday afternoon. He checked the presence and location of his 18 students against a seating chart. He chided one for arriving moments late.

Then he led off the discussion of the homework assignment. It consisted of an article from the national Jewish newspaper, The Forward, about a married couple who participate avidly in both synagogue and swinging. "Aren't these people just being honest?" Rabbi Lookstein asked. Five or six hands immediately shot up.

So began another day in Jewish Sexual Ethics, the course better known around Ramaz, even to its teacher, as "Sex With the Rabbi." For the last 23 years, since Rabbi Lookstein devised the class, he has taught it to every 10th grader to pass through Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox institution combining rigorous secular and religious curriculums.

"This is one of the most favorite things I do in the world," Rabbi Lookstein, 77, said in a recent interview. "I love the interaction with students — and being able to open their eyes to the way in which Judaism approaches the basic facts of life."

Over the span of 18 sessions, Rabbi Lookstein covers topics from infidelity to abortion, same-sex marriage to religious divorce, as well as the Jewish laws dictating family purity, or taharat hamishpacha. The readings range from newspaper articles to theological essays, and the discussion in the classroom is unrestrained.

Once, that is, the students get over the initial shock of listening to a gray-haired authority figure talk about menstruation or homosexuality or spouse-swapping. The slang name for the course plays on the incongruity.

"Like many other students in my class, I was pretty nervous about taking the course," said Oren Neiman, a 15-year-old sophomore who took the class this year. "I wondered if a world-renowned and extremely prominent Jewish figure would be able to create an atmosphere where sophomores in high school feel comfortable to openly and honestly discuss sexuality with him."

Anna Wagner, 16, a junior who took the class last year, recalled: "It takes time, for sure. But after the first couple of classes, we warmed up."

In the kind of prep schools Ramaz sees as scholastic peers, the notion of a required course covering sexuality might seem, if anything, irrelevant by 10th grade. We're in "Gossip Girl" territory here, after all. For an Orthodox day-school or yeshiva, however, the subject is a land mine that many principals, teachers and parents would sooner avoid than risk setting off.

And on issues far beyond sexuality — conversion standards, interaction with Reform and Conservative rabbis, even the degrees of kosher for lettuce and broccoli — the Modern Orthodox sector has spent much of the last generation on the defensive against an increasingly confident and assertive haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, faction.

So maybe it takes the unique position of a Haskel Lookstein to push the limits without being pushed back. As rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, he represents the third generation of his family to preside over its pulpit. His father, Rabbi Joseph Lookstein, founded the Ramaz school, which covers all elementary and secondary grades.

"Am I playing on my stature to some extent?" Rabbi Lookstein asked rhetorically. "I guess the truth is that I am relying on the trust people have in me. I'm not worried about someone looking over my shoulder. But when I'm not able to do this class anymore, someone else will have to."

Rabbi Lookstein orchestrates the course in a manner that is at once scholarly and freewheeling. Rather than declaring moral absolutes, even where they exist in Jewish law, he plays the relativist to stir discussion. And his words fall on teenagers just at a hinge in their own sexual lives, a mishmash of Ugg boots and Hannah Montana backpacks, emerging beards and unruly cowlicks.

"What do these people think about sex?" Rabbi Lookstein asked the Monday class about the swinging Jews in the Forward article.

One girl answered: "They don't think it has anything to do with love. They think it's just fun."

Then Rabbi Lookstein said words that, while rooted in Jewish text and tradition, the students might have considered TMI (for the generationally challenged, that means too much information).

"Sex is fun," he said. "Sex is pleasurable, no question about it." He paused while the shock waves rippled. "But from the way you react to this article, it's something else. What's that something else?"

Responses poured forth. Sacred, special, holy, separate.

"It really has to do with relationships," Rabbi Lookstein said, summing up. "It isn't just something you do."

Two days later, with a different group of sophomores, Rabbi Lookstein talked about some of the obligations in a Jewish marriage, obligations that deal not with material support or safety but with sexual conduct. What does it mean to coerce a spouse into sex? Is it infidelity to fantasize about another woman while having intercourse with your wife? When is sex, even with your husband or wife, exploitative?

"The Ramaz that I've associated myself with," Rabbi Lookstein said in the interview, "prides itself on being open to all issues, to all views, while maintaining its Modern Orthodox stance. Nowhere does that get more difficult than in the area of sexual ethics.

"I keep saying to the students as we move along in the course, 'I believe there is a right and a wrong. But you're going to make a decision.' So it's better not to just come down on them with a heavy-handed moral absolutism."

Study says howling wind more likely to wake men than crying babies

2009-12-08T10:44:00.000-05:00

whats amazing is that babies are not even in the top 10 for men!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6684362/Buzzing-flies-more-likely-to-wake-men-than-crying-babies-study.html

Buzzing flies more likely to wake men than crying babies: study

Men are more likely to be woken up by the sound of a buzzing fly or howling wind than by a crying baby, new research shows.

Published: 9:01AM GMT 29 Nov 2009

However for women, whether or not they are mothers, there is no other noise more likely to stop them sleeping than that of a wailing infant, according to scientific tests measuring brain activity.

The results of the study into which sounds most disrupt the usual patterns of activity in the brain suggest a marked difference in the sexes.

For men, the sound that most stops them sleeping is a car alarm going off nearby, followed by the howling of the wind and the buzzing of a fly.

The sound of a baby crying does not even register on the top ten of sounds likely to distub their slumber, according to research commissioned by Lemsip Max All Night Cold & Flu Tablets.

The tests were carried out by experts at research laboratory MindLab as part of their research into the importance of a good night's sleep.

MindLab recreated a 'sleep environment' for each volunteer before playing the sounds and measuring the results on an EEG - electroencephalograhy - machine to measure how regular brain activity is disturbed by them.

Separate research shows 29 per cent of all adults suffer a disturbed night's sleep between five and seven nights a week and a further 27 per cent are woken up once or twice a week.

Asked what keeps them awake, 54 per cent of women said it was their partner's snoring and one in ten said they were kept awake by flatmates or others having sexual intercourse

One in three (33 per cent) of both men and women have moved to a spare room just to get some sleep, said Lemsip Max to launch a new All Night Cold & Flu Tablets brand.

Other sounds which disturb both men and women are that of drunken rowdiness, often from a nearby pub at closing time or late night revellers outside their home.

Stefan Gaa, Lemsip Director, said: We all lead busy lives, so it is important to try and get a good nights sleep.

"However with the winter months upon us, many of us could suffer from the symptoms of cold and flu which can lead to interrupted sleep.

"This is why we have developed Lemsip Max All Night Cold & Flu Tablets, which can ease your symptoms so you can sleep."

Psychologist Dr David Lewis of MindLab added: "There is nothing more likely to leave you feeling drained and depressed than disturbed sleep, especially when this happens over several nights.

"As this unique study shows while some sounds, for instance your partner coughing or snoring beside you, disturb men and women equally, other noises such as a howling wind cause men to be more disturbed than women.

"Women are more likely to be disturbed by a crying baby."

He continued: "These differing sensitivities may represent evolutionary differences that make women sensitive to sounds associated with a potential threat to their children while men are more finely tuned to disturbances posing a possible threat to the whole family."

Women are more likely than men to find their sleep disturbed and men are more likely to be able to go back to sleep once they have been woken up, said the study.

Top ten sounds most likely to wake men:

1.Car alarm; 2.Howling wind; 3.Buzzing fly; 4.Snoring; 5.Noise from drains; 6.Crickets chirruping; 7.Sirens; 8.Clock ticking; 9.Drilling/workmen 10.Dripping tap;

Top ten sounds most likely to wake women:

1.Baby crying; 2.Dripping tap; 3.Rowdiness; 4.Snoring; 5.Buzzing fly; 6.Drilling/workmen; 7.Sirens; 8.Car alarm; 9.Howling wind; 10.Noise from drains.

'herbivore' men in japan, who are more interested in sewing, baking and crocheting clothes than dating or women...

2009-11-27T13:16:00.000-05:00

has this been seen yet on the west side? they also seem to have 'carnivore women' in japan too...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120696816

this is really try - listen to the story above

November 25, 2009

The sensitive New Age man has finally arrived in the land of the salaryman. But there is a catch — a particularly important one in Japan, where the declining birthrate has caused alarm: The new Japanese man doesn't appear to be interested in women or sex.

In Tokyo on the weekends, the trendy area of Harajuku is a melting pot of urban tribes: Lolita goths bat their fake eyelashes, while the punks glower.

Away from the strutting are the retiring wallflowers, a quiet army of sweet young men with floppy hair and skinny jeans. These young men are becoming known as Japan's "herbivores" — from the Japanese phrase for "grass-eating boys" — guys who are heterosexual but who say they aren't really interested in matters of the flesh.

They are drawn to a quieter, less competitive life, focusing on family and friends — and eschewing the macho ways of the traditional Japanese male.

They include men such as Yukihiro Yoshida, a 20-something economics student, who is a self-confessed herbivore. "I don't take initiative with women, I don't talk to them," he says, blushing. "I'd welcome it if a girl talked to me, but I never take the first step myself."

Multiple recent surveys suggest that about 60 percent of young Japanese men — in their 20s and early 30s — identify themselves as herbivores. Their Sex and the City is a television show called Otomen, or Girly Guys. The lead character is a martial arts expert, the manliest guy in the whole school. But his secret passions include sewing, baking and crocheting clothes for his stuffed animals.

"I will hide my true nature," he vows in the first episode, as he sews secretly, shut away in his living room. "At all times, I will be a man — a real Japanese man," he says.

But what does that mean?

"It's not so much that men are becoming more like women. It's that the concept of masculinity is changing," says Katsuhiko Kokobun. From his perch at Guzzle, the popular Harajuku hair salon he owns, Kokobun is at the front line of the latest trends.

Over the years, he has seen more and more men coming into the salon — men who he describes as "more modest, less demanding, kind of passive; they accept what they're told." He's noticed that nowadays they're demanding more traditionally female treatments. "We do have eyebrow plucking and facials for men," he says, smiling. "Eyebrow plucking is very popular among high school boys."

It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Yasuhito Sekine's eyebrows are perfectly groomed. The changing tastes of Japanese men are quite literally what take up his days. He works for an Internet service provider and operates Sweets Club, an online group for men who like desserts. Set up in January, it already has about 1,000 members who congregate — online and in person — to debate the virtues of different brands of strawberry shortcake. It's something that Sekine says would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

Back [in the 1980s], Japanese men had to be passionate and aggressive, but now those characteristics are disliked. Our members have very mild personalities. They simply enjoy what they like without prejudice. They are not limited by expectations.

- Yasuhito Sekine, a self-described herbivore

"Back then, lots of men liked desserts, but it was considered uncool. Cool men had to like alcohol or spicy food. I've discovered my father likes eating dessert, but he never showed it in the past," Sekine says.

Put through his paces with an impromptu taste test, Sekine praises peach gelatin as fresh-tasting. He is not so keen on coffee gelatin with cream — a macho dessert if ever there was one — labeling it "retro." He believes his dessert club shows that young Japanese men are asserting their individuality, reflecting a change in values from Japan's booming 1980s.

"Back then, Japanese men had to be passionate and aggressive, but now those characteristics are disliked. Our members have very mild personalities. They simply enjoy what they like without prejudice. They are not limited by expectations," Sekine says.

Japan's top expert on herbivores, Maki Fukasawa, believes they were born from the lost decade of economic stagnation. She christened the tribe in 2006 and recently wrote a book called The Herbivore Generation, which breaks herbivores down into 23 distinct subcategories. She argues that the herbivores are rebelling against the salaryman generation of their fathers, consciously turning away from the macho mores and conspicuous consumption of that era.

"They have some feelings of revulsion towards the older generation," says Fukasawa. "They don't want to have the same lives. And the impact of the herbivores on the economy is very big. They're such big news now because sales are down, especially of status products like cars and alcohol."

She says the advent of the herbivores could bring positive changes. Herbivores may lack ambition, but they are driven by a strong sense of community and family, which she believes many of them lacked while growing up.

"In a sense, their fathers neglected their families. They were involved in Japanese-style salaryman lifestyles, going out with their bosses every night, while herbivores are closer to their families and friends," Fukasawa says.

But there are fears about the financial and social impact of herbivores. Their low levels of spending and lack of interest in sex invoke two of Japan's biggest problems: its lackluster economy and declining birthrate. Herbivores like to be friends with women — but for many, that's as far as it goes.

In the streets of Harajuku, Alex Fujita explains why he is not interested in taking it any further.

"Nowadays, women have more education and enjoy working. Women are scary now," he says.

And, of course, there is a name, too, for the economically empowered working Japanese women who know what they want: the carnivore women. With herbivore boys and carnivore girls, it seems the land of samurai, sumo wrestlers and geisha girls is remaking its gender landscape anew.

are conscientiousness & self disciplined folks less susceptible to Alzheimer's?

2009-11-25T09:16:00.000-05:00

The Alzheimer's-resistant personality
Virtue, goes the old saying, is its own reward. But a new study has found that self-disciplined, highly organized people get a bonus: They're less susceptible to Alzheimer's disease. The study, which looked at how personality and behavior may affect the incidence of Alzheimer's, began with a personality survey of 997 healthy but elderly Catholic nuns and priests in the Chicago area. Researchers then tracked their mental states between the years 1994 and 2006. Nuns and priests who received a high score for "conscientiousness'' were 89 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer's-type dementia than their less-meticulous peers. "These are people who control impulses, and tend to follow norms and rules," study author Robert Wilson tells New Scientist. Curiously, autopsies on the subjects who died during the study found no reduced incidence of Alzheimer's brain plaques among those with conscientious personalities; in fact, researchers found that the brains of the various personality types showed equal rates of tangled proteins associated with the disease. Wilson suggests that the difference may be in the way that disciplined people use their brains—they're more likely to think with their frontal lobes. Using this part of the brain, which is responsible for decision-making and planning, may make one less vulnerable to impaired thinking caused by lesions in other areas, he says.

Self-discipline may reduce Alzheimer's risk

21:00 01 October 2007 by Roxanne Khamsi
For similar stories, visit the Mental Health Topic Guide

People who are meticulous and "finish what they start" may have a reduced risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, according to a study involving Catholic nuns and priests.

The most conscientious and self-disciplined individuals were found to be 89% less likely to develop this form of dementia than their peers over the course of the 12-year study.

Robert Wilson at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois, US, and colleagues followed 997 healthy Catholic nuns, priests and Christian brothers between 1994 and 2006. Early on in the study, participants completed a personality test to determine how conscientious they were.

Based on answers to 12 questions such as "I am a productive person who always gets the job done", they received a score ranging from 0 to 48. On average, volunteers scored 34 points in the test.

Controlled impulses

Volunteers also underwent regular neurological examinations and cognitive tests. Over the lifetime of the study, 176 of the 997 participants developed Alzheimer's disease. However, those with the highest score on the personality test - 40 points or above - had an 89% lower chance of developing the debilitating condition than participants who received 28 points or lower.

"These are people who control impulses, and tend to follow norms and rules," Wilson told New Scientist.

Previous studies suggest that exercise and intellectual stimulation can decrease the risk of Alzheimer's disease. But the link between self-discipline and a reduced risk of the illness remained strong even after researchers discounted these factors from their study. Subjects still had a 54% lower chance of developing the condition.

Exactly why conscientiousness should have an impact on Alzheimer's risk remains unclear, says Wilson. He notes that brain autopsies conducted on 324 of the study's participants failed to resolve the mystery.

Alzheimer's test?

Earlier work has linked the presence of plaques and protein tangles within the brain to Alzheimer. Yet, in general, the brains of those who scored highly on the conscientiousness test had as many plaques and protein tangles as those of subjects who scored lower.

Wilson suggests that more meticulous and conscientious individuals may have more active frontal brain regions, an area that is responsible for decision-making and planning. Increased activity in this region may perhaps compensate for a decline in function in other brain regions, he speculates.

Based on the new findings, doctors could perhaps consider certain patients at greater risk of dementia, says Ross Andel at the University of South Florida, US. "This is a study about identifying people at risk," he says.

Journal reference: Archives of General Psychiatry (vol 64, p 1204)

Mental Health - Discover the latest research in our continuously updated special report.

can money buy you happiness? perhaps, but not in the ways you think...

2009-11-25T09:04:00.000-05:00

Happiness: A buyer's guide

Money can improve your life, but not in the ways you think

By Drake Bennett | August 23, 2009

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/23/happiness_a_buyers_guide?mode=PF

Can money buy happiness? Since the invention of money, or nearly enough, people have been telling one another that it can't. Philosophers and gurus, holy books and self-help manuals have all warned of the futility of equating material gain with true well-being.

Modern research generally backs them up. Psychologists and economists have found that while money does matter to your sense of happiness, it doesn't matter that much. Beyond the point at which people have enough to comfortably feed, clothe, and house themselves, having more money - even a lot more money - makes them only a little bit happier. So there's quantitative proof for the preachings of St. Francis and the wisdom of the Buddha. Bad news for hard-charging bankers; good news for struggling musicians.

But starting to emerge now is a different answer to that age-old question. A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, and they are discovering that quite possibly it can - it's just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch, it turns out, makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on a car may not.

"Just because money doesn't buy happiness doesn't mean money cannot buy happiness," says Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. "People just might be using it wrong."

Dunn and others are beginning to offer an intriguing explanation for the poor wealth-to-happiness exchange rate: The problem isn't money, it's us. For deep-seated psychological reasons, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences, ourselves over others, things over people. When it comes to happiness, none of these decisions are right: The spending that make us happy, it turns out, is often spending where the money vanishes and leaves something ineffable in its place.

Any attempt to put these findings into practice, however, has to contend with the subtle but powerful ways money itself channels our thinking, and the ways it plays on human attitudes about sharing and scarcity. Recent studies have suggested that merely thinking about money makes us more solitary and selfish, and steers us away from the spending that promises to make us happiest.

Figuring out how to clear this hurdle has implications for our daily budget decisions and our investments, and for how organizations from resorts to charities do business. Money is inseparable from our existence in society - we work for money, live on money, and hoard it and spend it for a tangled mix of reasons. As psychologists unpack these insights, their work offers a powerful new way to think about this complex and poorly understood relationship. And it gives us a chance to use our spending money, however much it may be, as a vehicle to a more fulfilling life rather than just a better accessorized one.

Despite millennia of folk wisdom on the topic, it wasn't until a decade ago that researchers started to take a hard look at whether money really does have anything to do with happiness. In the late 1990s, a psychologist named Martin Seligman founded the field of positive psychology, driven by the idea that psychologists had as much of a duty to figure out what made people happy as to study their problems. At the same time, a few economists were starting to borrow the tools of psychology to challenge some of the assumptions that their field had long held about human behavior - that people were rational calculators of cost and benefit, for example, and that looking at how people spent money could be a reliable indicator of their deeper desires.

Positive psychologists and so-called behavioral economists both turned their attention to the money-happiness nexus. Mapping financial statistics against people's self-reported happiness, the researchers sifted data from rich nations and poor nations, from people up and down the economic ladder, and from individuals as their economic fortunes improved or deteriorated. The connection between wealth and happiness, they found, was pretty weak.

"It's not a zero correlation, even at higher income levels, but it's not a very big correlation," says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside and a leading happiness researcher. Money, she says, "matters less than we think it would."

But what if that wasn't the whole story? Dunn, of the University of British Columbia, remembers wondering a couple years ago whether money and happiness were necessarily so disconnected. Partly, she was inspired by a change in her own circumstances: She had just gotten hired as an assistant professor, her salary suddenly jumping from a post-doctoral researcher's $20,000 stipend to about four times that much. She found it hard to believe that there was nothing she could do with some of that new money to make herself happier.

What if, for example, she spent it not on a new flat-screen television or sectional sofa, but on other people? One of the most consistent findings of the happiness literature is that having a strong social network is an excellent predictor of happiness, and it seemed plausible that you could use money to buy happiness that way. She teamed up with Michael Norton, a psychologist and assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and the two embarked on a series of experiments to test whether spending money on others actually makes us happier than spending it on ourselves.

First, they surveyed 632 Americans on their general happiness, along with what they spent their money on, and found that higher "prosocial spending" - gifts for others and donations to charity - was indeed correlated with higher self-reported happiness. They followed this up with a more detailed look at 16 workers before and after they received a profit-sharing bonus from their company. They found that the only factor that reliably predicted which workers would be happy six to eight weeks after the bonus was their prosocial spending - the more money people spent on charity and gifts for others, the happier they were.

But was the happiness caused by giving money away, or were charitable people simply happier to start with? To show a causative link, they then performed an experiment in which volunteer test subjects were given a small windfall of $5 to $20. Some of the subjects, chosen at random, were told to spend it on a bill, an expense, or a gift for themselves. The others were told to buy a gift for someone else or make a charitable donation. Afterwards, the second group - the ones who had given the money away - reported being significantly happier than those who had spent the money on their own needs.

Dunn and Norton published their results in the journal Science in March 2008. The lesson of their study, says Dunn, is clear. Money makes you most happy if you don't spend it on yourself.

"By that I do not mean give all your money away and live in a shack," she says. "I just mean think about increasing it slightly. Just reallocating as little as $5 on a given day can make a difference in happiness."

Another theme that has emerged in similar research is that money spent on experiences - vacations or theater tickets or meals out - makes you happier than money spent on material goods. Leaf Van Boven, an associate psychology professor at the University of Colorado, and Thomas Gilovich, chair of the psychology department at Cornell University, have run surveys asking people about past purchases and how happy they made them.

"We generally found very consistent evidence that experiences made people happier than material possessions they had invested in," says Van Boven.

Why? For one thing, Van Boven and Gilovich argue, experiences are inherently more social - when we vacation or eat out or go to the movies it's usually with other people, and we're liable also to relive the experience when we see those people again. And past experiences can work as a sort of social adhesive even with people who didn't participate with us, providing stories and conversational fodder in a way that a new watch or speedboat rarely can.

In addition, other work by Van Boven suggests that experiences don't usually trigger the same sort of pernicious comparisons that material possessions do. We like our car less whenever we catch a glimpse of our neighbor's newer, nicer car, but we don't like our honeymoon any less because our neighbor went on a fancier one.

And while we quickly grow accustomed to a new suit or a bigger house, no matter how much we originally loved it, experiences instead tend to get burnished in our memory - a year after a vacation, we look back not on the stress of dealing with lost luggage or the fights over which way the hotel was, but the beauty of the scenery or the exotic flavors of the food.

Why, then, don't we already spend more of our money this way? Of course, people do give to charity and go on vacations and treat their friends to the occasional dinner. But if the goal is to buy happiness, we still spend more on stuff and on ourselves than we should.

Part of the problem is that happiness isn't necessarily what's motivating us when we reach for our wallets. Much of the impetus for discretionary spending - even for seeming essentials like cars, houses, and clothes - comes from a desire to send certain signals about our buying power and our tastes. We might mistake that motivation for happiness, or for having a better life, but it's driven by something else, a human need to compete or to fit in. And $5,000 worth of new stuff, or even $500,000 worth, is unlikely to permanently quell that need.

Even if we learn to recognize that impulse for what it is, however, money has a psychological power of its own. It seems that simply thinking about money makes us less likely to do prosocial things. Kathleen Vohs, a psychologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, has done studies in which people were primed to think of money - by either reading text that subtly evoked it or by being surreptitiously shown images of dollar bills - while doing various tasks. Having money on one's mind, Vohs found, made people harder-working, even more resistant to pain, but it also made them more solitary. They were less likely to offer help to others or to donate money. They even chose to put more physical distance between themselves and other people when talking to them.

Paradoxically, then, money itself blinds us to the ways we might spend it to make ourselves happiest.

"People may know that being nice to other people makes them happy, but money, in and of itself, turns us around and makes us think about buying more stuff," says Norton of Harvard Business School.

The research, however, does suggest a few ways to spring ourselves from this bind. One intriguing possibility is that workplaces could change to encourage more prosocial spending in their workers. Dunn and Norton have argued, for example, that companies can improve their employees' emotional well-being by shifting some of their budget for charitable giving so that individual employees are given sums to donate, leaving them happier even as the charities of their choice benefit.

And on a more personal, everyday level, when we're drawn to a new pair of designer sunglasses, we could try to factor in the psychological return that we might get from a similar sum spent on a night out with friends.

Thinkers are trying to figure out how to incorporate these sorts of findings into a new model of consumption. Norton, along with Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist and professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, has coined the term "conceptual consumption" to describe our willingness to spend real money on abstract goods. Among other things, they argue, it helps explain the sort of long-term payoff we get from a memorable dinner with a loved one. It's a testament to the power of such conceptual goods, they argue, that in certain settings we privilege the concept over actual physical consumption - such as when we decide not to go back to the restaurant where we had the special dinner because we're afraid it would dilute the memory. The more we learn about consumer behavior, Ariely and Norton argue, the more we will realize that nearly every decision we make as consumers is primarily conceptual.

Whether or not that turns out to be true, an important change is afoot in work like Dunn and Norton's and Van Boven and Gilovich's. Talking about money and happiness in the same breath, it turns out, isn't necessarily a surrender to crass materialism - it can also be a route to a new and more humane way to think about vitally important things like consumption, satisfaction, investment, and value.

It can also turn the familiar logic of money, prudence, and charity almost on its head. Seen this way, blowing money on a bar crawl with friends isn't necessarily a waste of your hard-earned paycheck - it's something of an investment. And a generous philanthropic donation is also an act of hedonism even more gratifying than a new Lexus or a handmade watch. Making money vanish can have a payoff every bit as real, and possibly more beneficial, than putting it somewhere to make it grow. You just have to do it the right way.

"It's funny, everyone keeps saying money doesn't make you happy, but money can change the world," says Lyubomirsky. "It can support political candidates, it can drive change. And it can't buy me love, but it can certainly get you to meet people and have dates."

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.

cute - Weekdays, the Rabbi Dined Out

2009-11-25T08:59:00.000-05:00

Weekdays, the Rabbi Dined Out

By COREY KILGANNON

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/nyregion/23ritual.html?pagewanted=print

AS in many New York neighborhoods, summer brings a demographic shift in Borough Park, a predominantly Hasidic section of Brooklyn. The playgrounds are quieter than usual and the familiar sight of women dressed in wigs and long skirts, surrounded by children, is less common.

In July and August, many families there head for bungalow colonies in the Catskills, leaving behind men who work all week and reunite with their wives and children on the weekends. They call themselves summertime bachelors.

Weekday nights can be lonely for these men, who are used to returning home from work to a lively family dinner. But consolation can be found at a handful of informal supper clubs that have cropped up in Borough Park.

"The men here, their families remain upstate, so they're looking for some good, reasonably priced food, and for some company," said Rabbi Shlomo Weiss, who broke bread one recent weeknight with perhaps a dozen other men in the basement of a large building on 53rd Street near 13th Avenue that is usually used for religious education. It has been running a summer dining program for roughly 25 years, and on a typical busy night feeds 200 people over the course of several hours.

Religious books and materials were cleared away and piled against the walls, and a half-dozen long tables with plastic tablecloths held bottles of seltzer, bowls of pickles, piles of rye bread and the occasional prayer book. A serving table had chafing dishes of knishes, breaded chicken and rice.

One by one, the bearded men, dressed in heavy black clothing, entered the cool basement area, exhaling as they escaped the summer heat. They pulled off their jackets and placed their black hats on the white plastic folding chairs.

"The men don't want to sit alone in some restaurant and pay high prices, so they come here," said Rabbi Weiss, 62, a life insurance salesman from Borough Park who has 14 children, most of whom are grown and married and, he added with a wink, provide him with plenty of grandchildren. Everyone in the basement room seemed to know him — actually, everyone seemed to know everyone, the men chatting in Yiddish throughout their meals.

The 53rd Street operation is run by Volvi Weiss, 33, of Borough Park, who works by day at a local lumberyard. He collects the suggested donation of $12 — although some men pay less, and some more, depending on their income. The cash register sits at the end of the serving table, next to a big bowl of matzo ball soup.

Such meals are generally available Monday through Thursday evenings in general-purpose rooms or basements of community centers. In the insular Hasidic community, the locations are often passed along by word of mouth. Typically, one enters through some nondescript doorway; the entrance to the building on 53rd Street is down a darkened alley littered with cigarette butts.

The summer bachelors — the men chuckle at the connotations of such a label — say that they find comfort in the steaming dishes of food, and from eating with other men who are also temporarily on their own.

"This is what we like, haimish food, not some fancy stuff they try to give you in restaurants," said Moses Leifer, 50, using a Yiddish word for homey. A manager of nursing homes, he was eating recently at the 53rd Street supper club; his family was in the Catskills. "Don't get me wrong: we also like the efficiency — you're in and out, one, two, three, and there's no waiting in line."

Some local organizations offer the men nighttime lectures and study groups, but for many of them, it is the meal programs that offer the most comfort. They are often run at a loss, as a community service, the organizers said.

"The house is empty, so you come here and you eat with people in the same situation and it makes the time pass quicker in the evening," said Meir Laufer, 34, another of those eating on 53rd Street. He works in banking; his wife and six children were in South Fallsburg.

Political candidates often drop by the dining halls to chat and campaign. This night, John Heyer, who is seeking the local City Council seat, spoke to the men and shook their hands.

Generally, each meal program is operated by a separate Hasidic sect. The one on 53rd Street is run by a division of the Satmar sect that follows Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, whose father, Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, was a powerful Satmar leader. When the father died in 2006, his followers split into two groups: one loyal to Aaron, the other to Aaron's brother, Rabbi Zalmen Teitelbaum. Each brother claims to be the grand rabbi of the Satmar dynasty, and the split continues to be the subject of bitter debate.

Zalmen Teitelbaum's followers run a similar meal program nearby, but declined to let a reporter visit. When the men on 53rd Street heard this, they erupted.

"This proves we are the chosen ones," one diner joked. "You came to the real Satmar sect. The other ones kicked you out."

Another meal program, in a yeshiva on 18th Avenue, is run by the Ger sect; it is known for its copious food and for using real silverware, not plastic. On one recent night, the generous spread included herring, potato salad, pickles, pepper steak, three different chicken entrees, a plate of cold cuts, chicken soup, and rugelach for dessert.

The Ger program feeds perhaps 150 men a night for a suggested donation of $12. Regulars include Mayer Kagan, 39, a wristwatch seller whose wife and six children stay in a Catskill bungalow in Kiamesha Lake.

"I miss my family during the week, but I can come here and have company — we sit, we schmooze what's in the news," Mr. Kagan said.

Though less homey than the supper clubs, several restaurants in Borough Park have also become popular with the summer bachelors, including Big Fleishig's Express, a glatt kosher one on 16th Avenue.

A frequent customer, Mark Fuchs, said his wife and four small children were staying in a bungalow community in Monticello. After he finished his chicken dinner, his cellphone rang. It was his son Shloimy, 5, calling to show off his spelling skills. After hanging up, Mr. Fuchs sighed and said, "They're up there having a ball and I'm down here paying the bills."

Big Fleishig's owner, Moshe Samuel, works the counter and teases the men that they are helpless without their wives. "You should see them come in here, the first week their family is away," he said, while ringing up orders on Monday night. "They're like lost lambs. Their wives always tell them what to eat, so they can't even order for themselves."

Do 20somethings need constant praise? the new 'greatest generation'

2009-11-25T08:56:00.000-05:00

The Most-Praised Generation Goes to Work

Uber-stroked kids are reaching adulthood -- and now their bosses (and spouses) have to deal with them. Jeffrey Zaslow on 'applause notes,' celebrations assistants and ego-lifting dinnerware.

By JEFFREY ZASLOW - Wall Street Journal
April 20, 2007; Page W1

You, You, You -- you really are special, you are! You've got everything going for you. You're attractive, witty, brilliant. "Gifted" is the word that comes to mind.

Childhood in recent decades has been defined by such stroking -- by parents who see their job as building self-esteem, by soccer coaches who give every player a trophy, by schools that used to name one "student of the month" and these days name 40.

Now, as this greatest generation grows up, the culture of praise is reaching deeply into the adult world. Bosses, professors and mates are feeling the need to lavish praise on young adults, particularly twentysomethings, or else see them wither under an unfamiliar compliment deficit.

Employers are dishing out kudos to workers for little more than showing up. Corporations including Lands' End and Bank of America are hiring consultants to teach managers how to compliment employees using email, prize packages and public displays of appreciation. The 1,000-employee Scooter Store Inc., a power-wheelchair and scooter firm in New Braunfels, Texas, has a staff "celebrations assistant" whose job it is to throw confetti -- 25 pounds a week -- at employees. She also passes out 100 to 500 celebratory helium balloons a week. The Container Store Inc. estimates that one of its 4,000 employees receives praise every 20 seconds, through such efforts as its "Celebration Voice Mailboxes."

Certainly, there are benefits to building confidence and showing attention. But some researchers suggest that inappropriate kudos are turning too many adults into narcissistic praise-junkies. The upshot: A lot of today's young adults feel insecure if they're not regularly complimented.

America's praise fixation has economic, labor and social ramifications. Adults who were overpraised as children are apt to be narcissistic at work and in personal relationships, says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University. Narcissists aren't good at basking in other people's glory, which makes for problematic marriages and work relationships, she says.

Her research suggests that young adults today are more self-centered than previous generations. For a multiuniversity study released this year, 16,475 college students took the standardized narcissistic personality inventory, responding to such statements as "I think I am a special person." Students' scores have risen steadily since the test was first offered in 1982. The average college student in 2006 was 30% more narcissistic than the average student in 1982.

Praise Inflation

Employers say the praise culture can help them with job retention, and marriage counselors say couples often benefit by keeping praise a constant part of their interactions. But in the process, people's positive traits can be exaggerated until the words feel meaningless. "There's a runaway inflation of everyday speech," warns Linda Sapadin, a psychologist in Valley Stream, N.Y. These days, she says, it's an insult unless you describe a pretty girl as "drop-dead gorgeous" or a smart person as "a genius." "And no one wants to be told they live in a nice house," says Dr. Sapadin. "'Nice' was once sufficient. That was a good word. Now it's a put-down."

The Gottman Institute, a relationship-research and training firm in Seattle, tells clients that a key to marital happiness is if couples make at least five times as many positive statements to and about each other as negative ones. Meanwhile, products are being marketed to help families make praise a part of their daily routines. For $32.95, families can buy the "You Are Special Today Red Plate," and then select one worthy person each meal to eat off the dish.

But many young married people today, who grew up being told regularly that they were special, can end up distrusting compliments from their spouses. Judy Neary, a relationship therapist in Alexandria, Va., says it's common for her clients to say things like: "I tell her she's beautiful all the time, and she doesn't believe it." Ms. Neary suspects: "There's a lot of insecurity, with people wondering, 'Is it really true?'"

"Young married people who've been very praised in their childhoods, particularly, need praise to both their child side and their adult side," adds Dolores Walker, a psychotherapist and attorney specializing in divorce mediation in New York.

Employers are finding ways to adjust. Sure, there are still plenty of surly managers who offer little or no positive feedback, but many withholders are now joining America's praise parade to hold on to young workers. They're being taught by employee-retention consultants such as Mark Holmes, who encourages employers to give away baseball bats with engravings ("Thanks for a home-run job") or to write notes to employees' kids ("Thanks for letting dad work here. He's terrific!")

Bob Nelson, billed as "the Guru of Thank You," counsels 80 to 100 companies a year on praise issues. He has done presentations for managers of companies such as Walt Disney Co. and Hallmark Cards Inc., explaining how different generations have different expectations. As he sees it, those over age 60 tend to like formal awards, presented publicly. But they're more laid back about needing praise, and more apt to say: "Yes, I get recognition every week. It's called a paycheck." Baby boomers, Mr. Nelson finds, often prefer being praised with more self-indulgent treats such as free massages for women and high-tech gadgets for men.

Workers under 40, he says, require far more stroking. They often like "trendy, name-brand merchandise" as rewards, but they also want near-constant feedback. "It's not enough to give praise only when they're exceptional, because for years they've been getting praise just for showing up," he says.

Mr. Nelson advises bosses: If a young worker has been chronically late for work and then starts arriving on time, commend him. "You need to recognize improvement. That might seem silly to older generations, but today, you have to do these things to get the performances you want," he says. Casey Priest, marketing vice president for Container Store, agrees. "When you set an expectation and an employee starts to meet it, absolutely praise them for it," she says.

Sixty-year-old David Foster, a partner at Washington, D.C., law firm Miller & Chevalier, is making greater efforts to compliment young associates -- to tell them they're talented, hard-working and valued. It's not a natural impulse for him. When he was a young lawyer, he says, "If you weren't getting yelled at, you felt like that was praise."

But at a retreat a couple of years ago, the firm's 120 lawyers reached an understanding. Younger associates complained that they were frustrated; after working hard on a brief and handing it in, they'd receive no praise. The partners promised to improve "intergenerational communication." Mr. Foster says he feels for younger associates, given their upbringings. "When they're not getting feedback, it makes them very nervous."

Modern Pressures

Some younger lawyers are able to articulate the dynamics behind this. "When we were young, we were motivated by being told we could do anything if we believed in ourselves. So we respond well to positive feedback," explains 34-year-old Karin Crump, president of the 25,000-member Texas Young Lawyers Association.

Scott Atwood, president-elect of the Young Lawyers Division of the Florida Bar, argues that the yearning for positive input from superiors is more likely due to heightened pressure to perform in today's demanding firms. "It has created a culture where you have to have instant feedback or you'll fail," he says.

In fact, throughout history, younger generations have wanted praise from their elders. As Napoleon said: "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon." But when it comes to praise today, "Gen Xers and Gen Yers don't just say they want it. They are also saying they require it," says Chip Toth, an executive coach based in Denver. How do young workers say they're not getting enough? "They leave," says Mr. Toth.

Many companies are proud of their creative praise programs. Since 2004, the 4,100-employee Bronson Healthcare Group in Kalamazoo, Mich., has required all of its managers to write at least 48 thank-you or praise notes to underlings every year.

Universal Studios Orlando, with 13,000 employees, has a program in which managers give out "Applause Notes," praising employees for work well done. Universal workers can also give each other peer-to-peer "S.A.Y. It!" cards, which stand for "Someone Appreciates You!" The notes are redeemed for free movie tickets or other gifts.

Bank of America has several formal rewards programs for its 200,000 employees, allowing those who receive praise to select from 2,000 gifts. "We also encourage managers to start every meeting with informal recognition," says Kevin Cronin, senior vice president of recognition and rewards. The company strives to be sensitive. When new employees are hired, managers are instructed to get a sense of how they like to be praised. "Some prefer it in public, some like it one-on-one in an office," says Mr. Cronin.

No More Red Pens

Some young adults are consciously calibrating their dependence on praise. In New York, Web-developer Mia Eaton, 32, admits that she loves being complimented. But she feels like she's living on the border between a twentysomething generation that requires overpraise and a thirtysomething generation that is less addicted to it. She recalls the pre-Paris Hilton, pre-reality-TV era, when people were famous -- and applauded -- for their achievements, she says. When she tries to explain this to younger colleagues, "they don't get it. I feel like I'm hurting their feelings because they don't understand the difference."

Young adults aren't always eager for clear-eyed feedback after getting mostly "atta-boys" and "atta-girls" all their lives, says John Sloop, a professor of rhetorical and cultural studies at Vanderbilt University. Another issue: To win tenure, professors often need to receive positive evaluations from students. So if professors want students to like them, "to a large extent, critical comments [of students] have to be couched in praise," Prof. Sloop says. He has attended seminars designed to help professors learn techniques of supportive criticism. "We were told to throw away our red pens so we don't intimidate students."

At the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, marketing consultant Steve Smolinsky teaches students in their late 20s who've left the corporate world to get M.B.A. degrees. He and his colleagues feel handcuffed by the language of self-esteem, he says. "You have to tell students, 'It's not as good as you can do. You're really smart, and can do better.'"

Mr. Smolinsky enjoys giving praise when it's warranted, he says, "but there needs to be a flip side. When people are lousy, they need to be told that." He notices that his students often disregard his harsher comments. "They'll say, 'Yeah, well...' I don't believe they really hear it."

In the end, ego-stroking may feel good, but it doesn't lead to happiness, says Prof. Twenge, the narcissism researcher, who has written a book titled "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable than Ever Before." She would like to declare a moratorium on "meaningless, baseless praise," which often starts in nursery school. She is unimpressed with self-esteem preschool ditties, such as the one set to the tune of "Frère Jacques": "I am special/ I am special/ Look at me..."

For now, companies like the Scooter Store continue handing out the helium balloons. Katie Lynch, 22, is the firm's "celebrations assistant," charged with throwing confetti, filling balloons and showing up at employees' desks to offer high-fives. "They all love it," she says, especially younger workers who "seem to need that pat on the back. They don't want to go unnoticed."

Ms. Lynch also has an urge to be praised. At the end of a long, hard day of celebrating others, she says she appreciates when her manager, Burton De La Garza, gives her a high-five or compliments her with a cellphone text message.

"I'll just text her a quick note -- 'you were phenomenal today,'" says Mr. De La Garza, "She thrives on that. We wanted to find what works for her, because she's completely averse to confetti."

Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com

Verifying who is a man and who is a woman is more complex than you imagine...

2009-11-25T08:44:00.000-05:00

its fascinating to see how complex human biology is - its not just men vs women, but there are also many intermediate states where its hard to say what sex someone is - this is mostly focused on this issue from a sports perspective, but its informative of the differences between the sexes for all contexts...

Where's the Rulebook for Sex Verification?

By ALICE DREGER

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/sports/22runner.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

The only thing we know for sure about Caster Semenya, the world-champion runner from South Africa, is that she will live the rest of her life under a cloud of suspicion after track and field's governing body announced it was investigating her sex.

Why? Because the track organization, the I.A.A.F., has not sorted out the rules for sex typing and is relying on unstated, shifting standards.

To be fair, the biology of sex is a lot more complicated than the average fan believes. Many think you can simply look at a person's "sex chromosomes." If the person has XY chromosomes, you declare him a man. If XX, she's a woman. Right?

Wrong. A little biology: On the Y chromosome, a gene called SRY usually makes a fetus grow as a male. It turns out, though, that SRY can show up on an X, turning an XX fetus essentially male. And if the SRY gene does not work on the Y, the fetus develops essentially female.

Even an XY fetus with a functioning SRY can essentially develop female. In the case of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, the ability of cells to "hear" the masculinizing hormones known as androgens is lacking. That means the genitals and the rest of the external body look female-typical, except that these women lack body hair (which depends on androgen-sensitivity).

Women with complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome are less "masculinized" in their muscles and brains than the average woman, because the average woman makes and "hears" some androgens. Want to tell women with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome they have to compete as men, just because they have a Y chromosome? That makes no sense.

So, some say, just look at genitals. Forget the genes — pull down the jeans! The I.A.A.F. asks drug testers to do this. But because male and female genitals start from the same stuff, a person can have something between a penis and a clitoris, and still legitimately be thought of as a man or a woman.

Moreover, a person can look male-typical on the outside but be female-typical on the inside, or vice versa. A few years ago, I got a call from Matthew, a 19-year-old who was born looking obviously male, was raised a boy, and had a girlfriend and a male-typical life. Then he found out, by way of some medical problems, that he had ovaries and a uterus.

Matthew had an extreme form of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia. His adrenal glands made so many androgens, even though he had XX chromosomes and ovaries, that his body developed to look male-typical. In fact, his body is mostly male-typical, including his muscle development and his self identity.

O.K., you say, if chromosomes and genitals do not work, how about hormones? We might assume that it is hormones that really matter in terms of whether someone has an athletic advantage.

Well, women and men make the same hormones, just in different quantities, on average. The average man has more androgens than the average woman. But to state the obvious, the average female athlete is not the average woman. In some sports, she is likely to have naturally high levels of androgens. That is probably part of why she has succeeded athletically.

By the way, that is also why she is often flat-chested, boyish looking and may have a bigger-than-average clitoris. High levels of androgens can do all that.

Sure, in certain sports, a woman with naturally high levels of androgens has an advantage. But is it an unfair advantage? I don't think so. Some men naturally have higher levels of androgens than other men. Is that unfair?

Consider an analogy: Men on average are taller than women. But do we stop women from competing if a male-typical height gives them an advantage over shorter women? Can we imagine a Michele Phelps or a Patricia Ewing being told, "You're too tall to compete as a woman?" So why would we want to tell some women, "You naturally have too high a level of androgens to compete as a woman?" There seems to be nothing wrong with this kind of natural advantage.

So where do we draw the line between men and women in athletics? I don't know. The fact is, sex is messy. This is demonstrated in the I.A.A.F.'s process for determining whether Semenya is in fact a woman. The organization has called upon a geneticist, an endocrinologist, a gynecologist, a psychologist and so forth.

Sex is so messy that in the end, these doctors are not going to be able to run a test that will answer the question. Science can and will inform their decision, but they are going to have to decide which of the dozens of characteristics of sex matter to them.

Their decision will be like the consensus regarding how many points are awarded for a touchdown and a field goal — it will be a sporting decision, not a natural one, about how we choose to play the game of sex.

These officials should — finally — come up with a clear set of rules for sex typing, one open to scientific review, one that will allow athletes like Semenya, in the privacy of their doctors' offices, to find out, before publicly competing, whether they will be allowed to win in the crazy sport of sex. I bet that's a sport no one ever told Semenya she would have to play.

Alice Dreger is professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, and the author of "Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex" (Harvard University Press, 1998).

The man who owns the Internet?! the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of...

2009-11-25T08:40:00.000-05:00

The man who owns the Internet

Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here's how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire.

By Paul Sloan, Business 2.0 Magazine editor-at-large

May 22 2007: 2:17 PM EDT

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Kevin Ham leans forward, sits up tall, closes his eyes, and begins to type -- into the air. He's seated along the rear wall of a packed ballroom in Las Vegas's Venetian Hotel. Up front, an auctioneer is running through a list of Internet domain names, building excitement the same way he might if vintage cars were on the block.

As names come up that interest Ham, he occasionally air-types. It's the ultimate gut check. Is the name one that people might enter directly into their Web browser, bypassing the search engine box entirely, as Ham wants? Is it better in plural or singular form? If it's a typo, is it a mistake a lot of people would make? Or does the name, like a stunning beachfront property, just feel like a winner?

UPWARDLY MOBILE: Kevin Ham's kitchen-table business now inhabits the 27th floor of a skyscraper in Vancouver.

Are some men just stupid? Why do 80% of lighting strikes affect men...

2009-11-25T08:33:00.000-05:00

Why do men become so 'bright'?

http://www.canada.com/become+bright/2190382/story.html

By Arthur Black, Special to Courier-IslanderNovember 6, 2009

Men are stupid and women are crazy. And the reason women are so crazy is because men are so stupid.

George Carlin

Over the last dozen years 648 Americans have been flash barbecued into the afterworld by lightning strikes. An astounding 524 of them - more than 80 percent - had one factor (aside from citizenship) in common. Care to guess?

Pockets full of iron filings, perhaps? Horseshoes in their fedoras you think? A big sign reading GOD IS DEAD Scotch-taped to their backsides?

Nope - what they had in common was gender. More than eight out of every 10 Americans struck and killed by lightning were men. Some of them were fishing; others were out on the golf course or playing baseball. Some were just mowing the lawn.

Scientists have been mulling over this mystery for a few years now. Just what is it that causes lightning to single out such a preponderance of men over women for fatal strikes? Some deep thinkers thought it might be a variation on the 'tall poppy syndrome' - men being statistically taller than women would theoretically make them better conductors of electricity, but no, analysis showed that the men who died weren't particularly tall. Others wondered if there might be some electro-magnetic component in testosterone that was attracting those lightning bolts.

Then somebody said "Maybe we should study women to see if they have some genetic condition that protects them from fatal lightning strikes."

Turns out they do. Far fewer women are killed by lightning because when the skies start to grumble women who find themselves outdoors instinctively respond to a primordial, inbred reflex.

They seek shelter.

You won't find many women casting for trout, driving a golf ball or shagging pop flies in a thunder storm because, to put it bluntly, such behaviour is dumb.

Men? Well....

"Men take more risks in lightning storms," says John Jensenius of the U.S. National Weather Service. Why? Good question. Could be that men, too, are responding to a primordial instinct. Call it the John Wayne reflex - the one that says a man should always appear macho and fearsome when danger lurks.

Even when it's just plain stupid.

So far it's just a theory, but it goes a long way towards explaining phenomena like professional wrestling, barroom head-butting contests and the continuing adulation of Don Cherry.

Not to mention the behaviour of those two macaroons who, last month, thought it would be a good idea to sneak into the Siberian tiger enclosure at the Calgary zoo in the middle of the night.

No doubt the tiger thought it was a good idea too. It was his first taste of free-range cretin.

The two intruders were lucky to escape with a mauling, but I doubt their luck will hold. Those guys are two lightning strikes waiting to happen.

Which brings us to Steve Melvin of Madison, Ohio. Steve not only stays out in lightning storms, he's willing to drive hundreds of miles to do it. Steve is a 'storm-chaser' - a guy who gets his jollies by driving into thunderstorms, getting out of the car and taking photos. In June, 1989, Steve got his near-death wish - he was struck by a bolt of lightning.

Or rather his camera was. The lightning melted the camera right down the front of the tripod, but somehow the film inside was not destroyed. When it was developed, Steve claims that the final exposure on the film shows the ghostly outline of a human figure framed in the lightning flash.

It couldn't be Steve - he was behind the camera.

"I've heard all the guesses," says Steve. "Some say it was me having an out-of-body experience; others say it was something from a whole different dimension. My wife says it looks like my grandmother come down from heaven."

I'd go with the grandmother explanation, Steve.

And I bet if you could hear her, she'd be saying, "'Get your butt indoors, you idiot!"

Interesting - Why I am marrying a jewish girl vs intermarrying...

2009-11-25T08:13:00.000-05:00

http://sdjewishworld.wordpress.com/category/our-writers/steve-hofstetter/

By Steve Hofstetter

NEW YORK—I have spent the better part of the last four years
convincing my parents that I don't need to marry a Jewish girl. Turns
out I was wrong. It's not the first time that's happened. Though it
may be the first time I'm admitting it to them.

Every Jew of my generation grew up with the irrefutable truth that we
had to marry Jewish, or all Jews would die out and everyone who was
already Jewish would spontaneously convert.

We were told that with the current rate of intermarriage, Jews would
die out in three generations. That was a lot to put on my lanky
shoulders. While you're at it. why don't you tell me I'm Neo and offer
to unplug me from the Matrix. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the
ship in the Matrix is named "Zion."

As a 14-year-old, I was repeatedly instructed that my destiny was to
help repopulate the planet with Jews. That's hard to grasp at that
age. At that point, I'd only found one girl in the entire city willing
to kiss me – if I was going to save my religion, I'd have to get
moving.

I lived in a predominantly Latino, Indian, and Asian neighborhood, but
was exposed to plenty of Jewish girls. I was an active member of
United Synagogue Youth, I worked at Camp Ramah, and even my high
school and college had large populations of Jews (thank you, New York
City). Every
girl I dated in high school was Jewish. Though I can't fully take
credit for that choice – a lanky bespectacled bookworm might do well
at a Shabbaton, but that's not the look most wasps go for.

By the time I was graduating college, I'd traded lanky for lean and
bookworm for well read. For the first time in my dating life, I had
options – but I held on to the irrational belief that if I didn't
marry a Jewish girl, Kirk Cameron would win.

I dated a non-Jew senior year, who was convinced that the reason I
broke it off was because she wasn't Jewish. Actually, I broke it off
because she never made me laugh. Maybe if she was Jewish, she'd have
had a better sense of humor. But when she told people I dumped her was
because she wasn't Jewish, I began to feel prejudiced.

Haven't Jews always said that people should not be persecuted for
their religious beliefs? So why shouldn't I marry someone wonderful,
who just happens to pray while kneeling?

The more I traveled, the more wonderful non-Jews I met. I tried dating
all the Jewish women in Alabama, North Dakota, and West Virginia, but
I wasn't attracted to her. (Ba-zing!)

I ended up with a few non-Jewish girlfriends in a row – even buying a
Christmas tree for one of them. That led to the statement most Jewish
men of my background have said to their mothers at one point.

"Mom, I'm full."

Kidding. What I said was, "Isn't how she treats people more important
than her religion?"

After a few hours of reminding me of everyone from Moses to Sandy
Koufax, my mother had to concede that she'd rather I end up with a
sweet and loving Christian than a mean and uncaring woman whose mother
happened to be born Jewish. And thus, she had to admit that logically,
religion was not her number one priority.

I was off the hook, kind of. I had logically browbeaten my mother into
submission – into reluctant permission to marry a non-Jew. But
something strange happened. As I grew up and began looking for "the
one," I started looking for her to be Jewish. "Ha Echat," if you will.

What dozens of youth leaders and camp counselors had failed to explain
to me was the one point I took away from my debate with my mother.
That marrying a Jewish woman is simply better for me. It's not about
my kids or the future of our entire people. It's about chemistry, and
finding someone that's passionate about what I love. And one thing
that I love is being Jewish.

I love kibbitzing during kiddush, without having to explain either of
those words to someone. I love knowing what baseball players are
Jewish, and rooting for them a bit more because of it. I love eating
buttered matzah the first morning of Passover (though by the eighth,
I'm not as big of a fan). I finally realized that I don't have to be
Judah Macabee – I just have to be me. And it's a lot more rewarding to
share your life with someone who truly understands it.

I reactivated the J-Date profile my mother had encouraged me to have
in college. On day one, I IMed Sara. On day two, we met. On day five,
we were exclusive. And on day 51, I asked her to marry me.

Did I fall in love with Sara because she's Jewish? Without performing
a series of bizarre and potentially illegal experiments, I'll never
know for sure. But I do know that I enjoyed going to services with her
on the High Holidays. I enjoyed eating with her in my brother's
Sukkah. And I enjoyed looking at pictures of her Bat Mitzvah knowing
she grew up just as lanky and bookwormish as I.

So when you tell your kids that you want them to find a nice Jewish
girl,or boy, or who cares what it is as long as it's Jewish, I suggest
you tell them why. They're not looking for someone Jewish because it's
important to you. They're looking for someone Jewish because it's
important to them.

I love you, Sara. And I look forward to teaching our kids to marry
Jewish, too.

**
Steve Hofstetter is an internationally touring comedian who has been
VH1, ESPN, and Comedy Central, but you're more likely to have seen him
on the last Barbara Walters Special.

Moving help sought

2009-11-23T14:14:00.000-05:00

Folks

Clark and I are will be moving from our current location. While we are finalizing on the new place in the next day, it is in the neighborhood and has enough space so we can continue our events and meals!

I am seeking two types of help

a) does anyone know of a cheap moving service or two guys with a truck that you recommend for us to use? We will be doing most of the move ourselves on Sunday but need some help for the furniture items on Monday, November 30. Also, if you know of two or 3 guys who would be good movers we could rent the truck ourselves if need be.,..let me know ASAP!

b) I am trying to line people up on Sunday and Monday to come and help us move for a few hours.

The times on Sunday are :

11 to 2
2 to 5
5 to ?

The times on Monday are between 9 and 5, hopefully just 9 to 1 for the move of the furniture.

We will need people hopefully just for shuttling and moving things between locations, as we will hopefully be all packed up at that point. Its helpful just having bodies around, as you need someone in the car at all times if you are double parked, folks for the doors and elevators, etc, so its not like everyone will be just carrying boxes all day.

Clark and I know that this is a difficult weekend for people because of the holiday. If you are able to help at some point on either day, even if only for part of the time, we will welcome your help!

Thanks and hope to see you all 'on the other side'....

David

PS also, i think for a change i will not be cooking this shabbat, so if you know of any meals for this shabbat let us know!

is reading cook books similiar to dating and courtship?

2009-11-18T07:34:00.001-05:00

This is an interesting piece from the New Yorker on people's fascination for cookbooks…yet how little cooking they do, and the similiarities between men who like reading cookbooks and women who like reading fashion magazines…also, see the highlighted portion below, comparing cooking and cookbooks to courting and marriage…

A Critic at Large

What's the Recipe?

Our hunger for cookbooks.

by Adam Gopnik November 23, 2009

Text Size:

Can you really learn to cook from a book? How do you tell firm peaks from stiff ones? How do you define "chopped"?

With aging, its like mother, like daughter & twin study reveals secrets to looking younger...

2009-11-16T09:49:00.001-05:00

Twin study reveals secrets to looking younger

Sun, smoking, alcohol and stress can all add years to your face

Slideshow

Living young: Your skin tells all
What keeps a woman looking young? A study of identical twins reveals some surprising answers.

more photos

Can working out wear you out? & Can you shower right after exercise?

2009-11-16T09:42:00.001-05:00

Can working out wear you out?

Exercise is great for your body — just don't overdo it

By Jacqueline Stenson

MSNBC contributor

msnbc.com

updated 8:33 a.m. ET, Wed., Nov . 11, 2009

Is it true that exercising will eventually wear out your joints, heart or any other body parts? Should you wait awhile after working out before showering? Smart Fitness answers your queries.

Have an exercise question? To e-mail us, click here. We'll post select answers in future columns.

Q: I am a 53-year-old woman. I'm 5 feet, 6 inches tall and weigh 118 pounds. I walk or do step aerobics carrying 2- to 3-pound weights five days a week for one hour per day, and I do a weight routine with 5- to 10-pound weights every other day. A 68-year-old co-worker told me I'm going to wear out my body. Is this really too much exercise? I feel fantastic, and I'm not bragging, but most people think I'm in my 30s. I've been exercising for 30 years. But some people do tell me I over-exercise.

A: It doesn't sound like you're over-exercising, says Dr. W. Ben Kibler, a spokesperson for the American College of Sports Medicine and medical director of the Lexington Clinic Sports Medicine Center in Lexington, Ky.

"This volume of exercise probably is within the tolerance levels of the body, if there are no other factors, such as prior injury," says Kibler. Just make sure you're also getting at least two days of rest and recovery each week to avoid injury, he says.

Physical activity guidelines released by the federal government last year recommend a minimum of two hours and 30 minutes a week of moderate physical activity or at least one hour and 15 minutes of vigorous activity, plus at least two days of strength training a week. The guidelines also state that greater health benefits can be achieved when adults like yourself increase their physical activity to five hours a week of moderate activity or 2.5 hours of vigorous activity, or more.

Kibler commends you on sticking with a regular fitness routine for so many years, which can help keep the body strong and more resistant to injury. He also likes that you're doing both aerobic and strength-training activities to round out your program.

But what about your co-worker's comment that exercise can "wear out" the body? We get this question occasionally from readers who wonder if physical activity will inevitably wear us out like a rickety old train that's rolled down its last track.

It's true that you can overdo it with exercise and sustain overtraining injuries, particularly if you don't follow good technique or listen to your body's warning signals to taper off, Kibler and other experts say. But there's no reason to think that healthy people doing recommended amounts of physical activity and progressing at a sensible rate are going to eventually wear out their bodies. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence that exercise can go a long way to keep us healthy and strong as we age — and prevent early death.

Still, there is a fairly common concern among exercisers that high-impact exercise such as running will eventually destroy the knees. But as Dr. Ron Noy, a New York City sports medicine specialist and spokesman for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, points out, running helps the joints stay lubricated and healthy, and keeps the bones and heart strong.

"If you have a healthy knee, running is not going to damage the knee," he says. "It's not going to wear down your knee, and there are benefits to the joint from running."

It's a different story, though, if you have an arthritic or injured knee, which gives the body "less protective power" against high-impact activity, Noy says. Problems also can arise in obese people who are sedentary and then jump into a rigorous exercise program, which can overload a deconditioned body, he says, possibly leading to knee injuries, stress fractures or other problems.

So it would not be a good idea, for instance, for a 250-pound couch potato to start out running 12 miles a day, Noy says. "You have to acclimate your body to accept that load," he says, with a "slow, progressive program."

Even normal weight people with no health issues can become injured if they push too far, too fast in a range of activities. How much is too much varies from individual to individual, so as your program progresses, listen to your body, says Noy. If you're getting signals such as pain, swelling or extreme fatigue, scale back. An experienced coach or personal trainer can help recreational athletes develop a safe program that incorporates proper technique and equipment.

And it's always a good idea to get a checkup before starting a training program, Noy says. It's especially important to identify any potential heart problems or risk factors such as a family history of early cardiac death that might lead to sudden death during exercise. Be sure to discuss with your doctor any chest pain, shortness of breath or prior difficulty exercising in hot temperatures.

Kibler points out that people who die during endurance exercise often have underlying health problems or they push themselves too hard in the heat.

"There's usually some identifiable reason outside of exercise," he says. "But exercise is the trigger."

Q: I was told not to shower right after I work out. Does it make a difference how soon after you exercise that you take a shower?

A: "The street myth is that if you are hot and take a shower and get cooled down quickly, you can have a cardiac problem, and that is rare," Kibler says.

People with underlying heart conditions could potentially experience a dangerous drop in blood pressure and maybe pass out or even have a heart attack or stroke if they were exercising in excessive heat, got their body temperature up to 104 or 105 degrees Fahrenheit — and then immediately jumped into an ice-cold shower, he says.

But that's hardly a likely scenario. Most people don't exercise that hard and they certainly don't jump right into ice water afterward. At the very least, they cool off a bit while walking to the locker room or shower and undressing.

Bottom line, says Kibler, "This is no reason not to take a shower."

Jacqueline Stenson is a freelance writer in Los Angeles. A former senior health producer for msnbc.com, her work also has appeared in publications including the Los Angeles Times, Health, Shape, Women's Health, Fit Pregnancy and Reuters Health.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33796382/ns/health-fitness/

Phys Ed: The Best Exercises for Healthy Bones

2009-11-13T08:58:00.001-05:00

November 11, 2009, 12:01 am

Phys Ed: The Best Exercises for Healthy Bones

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Digital Images/Getty Images

Several weeks ago, The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that should give pause to anyone who plans to live a long and independent life. The study looked at the incidence of hip fractures among older Americans and the mortality rates associated with them. Although the number of hip fractures has declined in recent decades, the study found that the 12-month mortality rate associated with the injury still hovers at more than 20 percent, meaning that, in the year after fracturing a hip, about one in five people over age 65 will die.

Meanwhile, another group of articles, published this month as a special section of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, underscore why that statistic should be relevant even to active people who are years, or decades, away from eligibility for Medicare. The articles detailed a continuing controversy within the field of sports science about exactly how exercise works on bone and why sometimes, apparently, it doesn't.

"There was a time, not so long ago," when most researchers assumed "that any and all activity would be beneficial for bone health," says Dr. Daniel W. Barry, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, at Denver, and a researcher who has studied the bones of the elderly and of athletes. Then came a raft of unexpected findings, some showing that competitive swimmers had lower-than-anticipated bone density, others that, as an earlier Phys Ed column pointed out, competitive cyclists sometimes had fragile bones and, finally, some studies suggesting, to the surprise of many researchers, that weight lifting did not necessarily strengthen bones much. In one representative study from a few years ago, researchers found no significant differences in the spine or neck-bone densities of young women who did resistance-style exercise training (not heavy weight lifting) and a similar group who did not.

Researchers readily admit that they don't fully understand why some exercise is good for bones and some just isn't. As the articles in this month's Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise make clear, scientists actually seem to be becoming less certain about how exercise affects bone. Until fairly recently, many thought that the pounding or impact that you get from running, for instance, deformed the bone slightly. It bowed in response to the forces moving up the leg from the ground, stretching the various bone cells and forcing them to adapt, usually by adding cells, which made the bone denser. This, by the way, is how muscle adapts to exercise. But many scientists now think that that process doesn't apply to bones. "If you stretch bone cells" in a Petri dish, says Alexander G. Robling, an assistant professor in the department of anatomy and cell biology at Indiana University School of Medicine and the author of an article in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, "you have to stretch them so far to get a response that the bone would break."

So he and many other researchers now maintain that bone receives the message to strengthen itself in response to exercise by a different means. He says that during certain types of exercise, the bone bends, but this doesn't stretch cells; it squeezes fluids from one part of the bone matrix to another. The extra fluid inspires the cells bathed with it to respond by adding denser bone.

Why should it matter what kind of message bones are receiving? Because, Professor Robling and others say, only certain types of exercise adequately bend bones and move the fluid to the necessary bone cells. An emerging scientific consensus seems to be, he says, that "large forces released in a relatively big burst" are probably crucial. The bone, he says, "needs a loud signal, coming fast." For most of us, weight lifting isn't explosive enough to stimulate such bone bending. Neither is swimming. Running can be, although for unknown reasons, it doesn't seem to stimulate bone building in some people. Surprisingly, brisk walking has been found to be effective at increasing bone density in older women, Dr. Barry says. But it must be truly brisk. "The faster the pace," he says — and presumably the greater the bending within the bones — the lower the risk that a person will fracture a bone.

There seems to be a plateau, however, that has also surprised and confounded some researchers. Too much endurance exercise, it appears, may reduce bone density. In one small study completed by Dr. Barry and his colleagues, competitive cyclists lost bone density over the course of a long training season. Dr. Barry says that it's possible, but not yet proved, that exercise that is too prolonged or intense may lead to excessive calcium loss through sweat. The body's endocrine system may interpret this loss of calcium as serious enough to warrant leaching the mineral from bone. Dr. Barry is in the middle of a long-term study to determine whether supplementing with calcium-fortified chews before and after exercise reduces the bone-thinning response in competitive cyclists. He expects results in a year or so.

In the meantime, the current state-of-the-science message about exercise and bone building may be that, silly as it sounds, the best exercise is to simply jump up and down, for as long as the downstairs neighbor will tolerate. "Jumping is great, if your bones are strong enough to begin with," Dr. Barry says. "You probably don't need to do a lot either." (If you have any history of fractures or a family history of osteoporosis, check with a physician before jumping.) In studies in Japan, having mice jump up and land 40 times during a week increased their bone density significantly after 24 weeks, a gain they maintained by hopping up and down only about 20 or 30 times each week after that.

If hopping seems an undignified exercise regimen, bear in mind that it has one additional benefit: It tends to aid in balance, which may be as important as bone strength in keeping fractures at bay. Most of the time, Dr. Barry says, "fragile bones don't matter, from a clinical standpoint, if you don't fall down."

Breast-Feeding can help you lose weight?

2009-11-13T08:52:00.000-05:00

Breast-Feed the Baby, Love the Calorie Burn

Jodi Hilton for The New York Times

NURSING MOTHER Melissa Ramsay Miller of South Hadley, Mass., breast-feeds her daughter, Luella, as her husband, Oliver Miller, looks on.

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS

Published: November 11, 2009

WHEN Jessica Jochim returned to work after her three-month maternity leave, she was the envy of her co-workers at Babies "R" Us. Mrs. Jochim, who had gained 40 pounds carrying her first child, steadily slimmed until she was a size 4 again. Yet, exercise was a pre-baby relic. She wasn't dieting, either. In fact, every two hours, she snacked as if on cue.

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Evan Sung for The New York Times

Sara Juli works with her personal trainer, Taj Haris, to lose weight.

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What was her secret? Breast-feeding her newborn James on demand, and using a breast pump to take milk home to him.

"All the ladies at work started joking they were going to go in back and pump so they could start losing weight like I was," said Mrs. Jochim, a mother of three from Vancouver, Wash. "I had a baby suckling 600 calories a day out of me."

That breast-feeding gives mothers an edge shedding baby weight has long been suspected. But lately, a parade of celebrities has attributed their postpartum slimming to nursing, bringing this age-old topic back into the spotlight. Adding to the conversation is a large study that suggests that weight loss through breast-feeding is not a myth.

Earlier this year, Rebecca Romijn, who wore a shrink-wrapped outfit in "X-Men," called breast-feeding her new twins "the very best diet I've been on." After Angelina Jolie posed for the November 2008 cover of W magazine nursing one of her twins, she said that it had helped her regain her figure. (That cover made her an icon among breast-feeding advocates and inspired a bronze statue of a nude Ms. Jolie double-nursing her newborns that was exhibited in London last month.)

These days, more than ever, a mother is expected to bounce back from pregnancy and be a "yummy mummy" in no time. Skin-care lines like Mama Mio target mothers with firming creams like Boob Tube. Nursing mothers can buy form-fitting tops at YummyMummyStore.com so they can flaunt their shape as they push their Bugaboo.

Is it any wonder that some new mothers are quietly thrilled at the calorie cushion that breast-feeding provides? "Nobody wants to admit they are doing it for themselves, or 'I'm doing it to help myself look hot again,' " said Jesse Comer, from Portland, Ore., whose main motivation to breast-feed was her baby's health. "It's tough to admit to other people that everything isn't about the baby." But Ms. Comer, like many mothers interviewed for this article, "felt like until the weight was off, I wouldn't feel myself."

For those incredibly shrinking women, the time they nurse is precious not only for its skin-on-skin cuddling, but also for the Get Out of Dieting Jail Free card that comes with it.

But does breast-feeding actually speed weight loss in postpartum women? It depends.

Last year, an epidemiological study of 36,000 Danish women found that the more a mother breast-feeds, the less weight she retains six months after birth. A few factors determined how much she lost: whether a woman was overweight before pregnancy, what she gained while expecting and duration of nursing, said Kathleen M. Rasmussen, an author of the study and a nutrition professor at Cornell.

The study's convincing data impressed experts like Cheryl A. Lovelady, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. But, she said, referring to the Danish women, "we don't breast-feed as long as they do." Other studies, however, have found that breast-feeders don't necessarily shed fat quicker than women who feed their newborns formula. A small study conducted at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center found that non-lactating women lost more body fat than lactating women at six months, and at a faster rate. Karen Wosje, its lead author, suggested that the appetite stimulant prolactin could lead nursing mothers to overeat. Or the fact that non-lactating mothers were able to exercise more vigorously than the nursing mothers in the first half year may have tipped the scale in their favor.

Breast-feeding didn't mean effortless weight loss for Sara Juli. Seven months in, Ms. Juli, a fund-raiser for a dance organization, had lost only 10 of her 50 pregnancy pounds. In retrospect, she said, she realized that she had eaten too heartily while eating for two. But "everyone was like 'Don't worry, you'll lose it all while breast-feeding,' " Ms. Juli said. To which she'd respond: "Sweet! Can you pass the rice pudding?"

After birth, with her outsize habits, it was hard to change her diet. "All your energy is being sucked toward learning how to raise a baby," she said. After she weaned, she invested in a personal trainer and Weight Watchers. So far, she has lost 10 pounds in 10 weeks, no thanks to breast-feeding.

What then to make of tales of prodigious eating among thinning breast-feeders? Dr. Lovelady suspects some of them who say they eat without consequence used to be "restrained eaters." That is, they ate fewer calories than they expended — say, 1,700 calories instead of 2,000 — which, counterintuitively, slowed their metabolism. Once pregnant, they ate enough to keep their metabolism humming for the sake of their baby. Postpartum, "they are losing a pound a week," Dr. Lovelady said. Yet, "they are eating a whole lot more" since making milk requires about 500 calories daily.

Breast-feeding mothers face many obstacles: little hospital help, public squeamishness and too-short maternity leave. So advocates like Marsha Walker, a registered nurse who has helped lactating mothers since 1976, don't hesitate to tout pro-baby and pro-mother reasons to nurse. Baby can get an immunity boost, and mothers with breast cancer in the family may lower their risk. (Nursing itself also helps the uterus shrink back to size.)

Ms. Walker thinks breast-feeding mothers shouldn't feel guilty for loving the calorie burn. "We deserve it," she said. "She ought to get into those skinny jeans after 9 months of pregnancy and 20 hours of labor. That's what I tell mothers. Go for it."

Others suggest that women who view breast-feeding as a dieting tool may have "deeper body issues," said Claire Mysko, an author of "Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat?" She was troubled by our cultural preoccupation with postpartum weight. Ms. Mysko, and her co-author Magali Amadeï, spoke to women who tried on pre-pregnancy clothes when they returned from the hospital. "Our advice is you should be motivated by the health of your child," Ms. Mysko said.

Some women say breast-feeding becomes a crutch for them. Ellen Martin, an animation producer at Nickelodeon, was sorry when she stopped. She misses that "very intimate" connection with her daughter but also the fact she could "maintain an extreme appetite without gaining."

Melissa Ramsay Miller, a nursing mother of 4-month-old Luella in South Hadley, Mass., is clear-eyed about the limits of breast-feeding's ability to "get her body back." She has five pounds left to lose, but said she has a "soft stomach." "It doesn't make sense it would go back to what it was before," she said matter-of-factly. "I'm O.K. with that."

chocolate fashion show?

2009-11-10T09:27:00.000-05:00

wearable clothing ( at least it can be worn!) made out of chocolate? Who knew!

http://cbs4.com/video/?id=86272@wfor.dayport.com

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haredi parent blocks burned toddler from Hadassah hospital

2009-11-04T09:21:00.000-05:00

its sad that people can't react on their own to health matters and need the views of a rabbi, and will allow political disagreements to get in the way of proper healthcare

Haredi father blocks burned toddler from Hadassah

Crisis between ultra-Orthodox public and Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital surfaces again. Even though his 16-month old suffered from severe burns on her body caused by boiling water spilled on her, father refuses to allow ambulance to take his daughter to Hadassah because 'rabbi advised otherwise'

Ronen Medzini

Published:

10.30.09, 13:20 / Israel News

A 16-month-old toddler, who was severely burned when boiling water spilled on her, was hospitalized Friday morning in Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, which does not have a burn unit, because her father opposed her hospitalization in Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital. The father justified his insistent refusal, claiming that "the rabbi advised otherwise."

About a month ago, the tensions aroused between the hospital and the haredi community by the 'starving mother' affair seemed to have subsided. However, now it seems as though the ultra-Orthodox boycott of the hospital is alive and kicking. Magen David Adom paramedics sought to evacuate the toddler suffering from severe burns caused by boiling water to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital because there is a specialized burn unit there.

The father, however, expressed his strong opposition. According to the medical team on the ambulance, the father caused a commotion on the ambulance and insisted that his daughter be taken to Shaare Zedek Medical Center.

"The 16-month-old toddler was apparently burned by boiling water," said to Ynet Ilya Davoner, a Jerusalem Magen David Adom paramedic who evacuated the girl to the hospital. "An ambulance arrived to evacuate her to the hospital. Halfway there, we transferred her to a mobile intensive care unit. She suffered from second-degree burns over 15% to 20% of her body. The burns were mainly on her face, chest, and shoulders."

"We wanted to evacuate her to Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital," he said, "but the father actively resisted, shouted, and caused a ruckus. He told us: 'Hadassah Ein Kerem doesn't treat our group well. That's what the rabbi suggested to me, and I am following the rabbi's recommendation.' The father insisted on going to Shaare Zedek Hospital despite our attempts to convince him to choose Hadassah Ein Kerem, where the treatment options are better considering the toddler's health condition. She is currently hospitalized at Shaare Zedek."

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Hezi Rot, on call for United Hatzalah, a volunteer emergency medical service, provided first aid to the toddler outside the family's home. "The parents came downstairs with the toddler towards the medical team," he said.

"She was naked and wrapped in wet towels that the family had dressed her in. She suffered from burns all over her body from a pot of boiling water that spilled on her. Her skin was peeling. It was a serious burn. We immediately provided her first aid with bandaging. The parents were very stressed, panicked."

Rot recounted that some neighbors on the spot pressured the parents not to take the girl to Hadassah Ein Kerem: "This is a family with children. Of course they were very stressed. At the same time, a group of neighbors messed with their minds with protest. They said, especially to the mother: 'No way should you take her to Hadassah Ein Kerem.' Apparently, the pressure worked."

Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital has withheld comment at this time

Mother suspected of starving toddler son

Neturei Karta member believed to be suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy arrested after security cameras catch her disconnecting malnourished son from feeding tube; toddler's condition improving; Jerusalem welfare office set ablaze in protest of arrest

Efrat Weiss

Latest Update:

07.14.09, 21:42 / Israel News

Cleared for publication: A haredi resident of Jerusalem was recently arrested on suspicion of starving her three-year-old son.

The toddler, whose weight dropped to a mere 15lbs, is hospitalized at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in serious condition.

Jerusalem Magistrates' Court Judge Alexander Ron, presiding over the woman's remand hearing Tuesday, called the affair "the worst of the worst."

According to suspicion, the woman – who so far has not been cooperating with the investigation – suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychiatric disorder which causes those affected to inflict physical harm to someone else, typically a child, in order to draw attention or to themselves.

Psychiatric disorder. Mother enters courtroom (Photo: Dudi Vaaknin)

During the court hearing it was revealed that the child was hospitalized for the first time at Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital in September 2007, at the age of 19 months, with a fever and inflamed oral wounds. He refused to eat or drink and vomited. The toddler was released after two days and has since been admitted to the hospital on seven different occasions. He was transferred to Hadassah Ein Kerem in February 2009 and has been there ever since.

The medial staff became suspicious after the child's condition showed no signs of improving despite the intensive care he had received and they installed a hidden security camera in his room. To their dismay and horror, the footage showed the woman disconnecting her son's feeding tube and in some cases pouring an unknown substances down the tube.

The hospital immediately alerted the Jerusalem Municipality Department of Social Services, as well as the police. The Police arrested the mother shortly thereafter.

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Further investigation revealed that the woman is a member of the Neturei Karta community – a radical Orthodox, anti-Zionist faction. She has other children and is currently pregnant.

Hospital officials said there was an improvement in the toddler's condition since the mother's arrest and that he is now able to eat without the use of a feeding tube.

Several hundred haredim rioted on Bar-Ilan Street and at the Shabbat Square in the capital Tuesday evening in protest of the mother's arrest. The demonstrators torched dumpsters, also in protest of the City's decision to open the Karta parking lot on Shabbat. One person was lightly injured.

Social workers in Jerusalem said they were threatened by members of the haredi community for their part in the mother's arrest.

Earlier in the day ultra-Orthodox residents of Jerusalem distributed flyers urging people to take to the streets in protest of the fact that the mother was arrested as she was leaving the welfare office.

On Sunday the municipal welfare office, located near the Jerusalem's Ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood was set on fire in protest of the woman's arrest. No suspects have been detained as of yet, but police investigators said they knew who was behind the act.

Yael Branovsky contributed to the report

First Published:

07.14.09, 17:26

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Dreidel robbers?! - rabbis take on shadchanim who set up men with much younger women..!~

2009-11-03T14:05:00.001-05:00

its insane that this is in the ny post...its like the frum tabloids! (hat tip - clark!) I do support this effort, and think its a shame men aren't willing to date people closer to their age...

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/dreidel_robbers_mbSeeelLPmPxWpFhd6DqUI

Dreidel robbers

Rabbis taking on mismatch-makers

By REUVEN BLAU

Last Updated: 5:46 AM, November 1, 2009

Posted: 3:32 AM, November 1, 2009

There's an epidemic of kosher cradle snatchers -- and a group of rabbis is out to tame them. The Talmudic titans, based here and in Israel, are calling for matchmakers to stop setting up Jewish men with much younger women, claiming the practice is leaving too many older women unmarried. Matchmakers should set up men only with women whose ages are "within a year or two of the boy's, or even older," the 60 yeshiva rabbis declared in a letter. The marriage missive, issued in late September, also suggested that shadchanim-- Jewish matchmakers -- concentrate on girls "age 20 and above." Local singles bristled at what they saw as an implication that women who aren't even of the legal drinking age are already old maids. "That mindset is the reason there's a crisis," said Allison Witty, 30, a communications director. "Women in the Orthodox Jewish world shouldn't have an 'expires by' stamp on them." Sima Greenstein, a volunteer matchmaker in Cedarhurst, LI, had "mixed feelings" about the letter. "When 30-year-old men say they want a 19-year-old girl, it's just unfair to the ones who are the right age for them," she said. But, she added, "I'm not closing my doors to anybody. There are some 19-year-old girls who want to get taken by an older man." About five years ago, the rabbis assembled an emergency meeting to address the growing number of single Orthodox women -- the so-called shidduchcrisis. Those rabbis concluded that older men marrying teen women was the primary cause. They sponsored ads in Jewish publications promoting close-in-age matches. Some even suggested that matchmakers get paid double for making such connections. Rabbi Shmuely Boteach, author of "The Kosher Sutra," a relationship guide, welcomed the latest edict. "Men need to grow up," he said. "Rather than appreciating a woman who has matured like a fine wine, they often look for someone who is all cover and no book." He said he knows many women in their 40s and 50s who have completely given up on love. "This is getting worse because we live in a visual age. Men are only looking for wrinkle-free women," he said. Michael Salomon, author of the book "The Shidduch Crisis," said the rabbis need to do more. "I think this [edict] is a feeble attempt to address a situation that has never been addressed properly," said the Orthodox Jewish psychiatrist from Long Island. He said the crisis is also reflected in spiking divorce rates and domestic violence among observant Jewish couples. Singles are being bullied into marriage by pushy matchmakers, the therapist said. Ilana Hostyk, 18, called it "good advice" to marry someone close in age, but noted, "When love comes around, I don't think you can place rules on it." <a href="mailto:rblau@nypost.com">rblau@nypost.com</a>

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There's an epidemic of kosher cradle snatchers -- and a group of rabbis is out to tame them.

The Talmudic titans, based here and in Israel, are calling for matchmakers to stop setting up Jewish men with much younger women, claiming the practice is leaving too many older women unmarried.

Matchmakers should set up men only with women whose ages are "within a year or two of the boy's, or even older," the 60 yeshiva rabbis declared in a letter.

The marriage missive, issued in late September, also suggested that shadchanim -- Jewish matchmakers -- concentrate on girls "age 20 and above."

J.C. Rice

AGE-OLD ISSUE: Ilana Hostyk (left), 18, here with pal Abby Vishniavsky, 20, agrees with rabbis' bid to stop matchmakers from hooking up older guys with young gals.

Local singles bristled at what they saw as an implication that women who aren't even of the legal drinking age are already old maids.

"That mindset is the reason there's a crisis," said Allison Witty, 30, a communications director. "Women in the Orthodox Jewish world shouldn't have an 'expires by' stamp on them."

Sima Greenstein, a volunteer matchmaker in Cedarhurst, LI, had "mixed feelings" about the letter.

"When 30-year-old men say they want a 19-year-old girl, it's just unfair to the ones who are the right age for them," she said.

But, she added, "I'm not closing my doors to anybody. There are some 19-year-old girls who want to get taken by an older man."

About five years ago, the rabbis assembled an emergency meeting to address the growing number of single Orthodox women -- the so-called shidduch crisis.

Those rabbis concluded that older men marrying teen women was the primary cause.

They sponsored ads in Jewish publications promoting close-in-age matches. Some even suggested that matchmakers get paid double for making such connections.

Rabbi Shmuely Boteach, author of "The Kosher Sutra," a relationship guide, welcomed the latest edict.

"Men need to grow up," he said. "Rather than appreciating a woman who has matured like a fine wine, they often look for someone who is all cover and no book."

He said he knows many women in their 40s and 50s who have completely given up on love.

"This is getting worse because we live in a visual age. Men are only looking for wrinkle-free women," he said.

Michael Salomon, author of the book "The Shidduch Crisis," said the rabbis need to do more.

"I think this [edict] is a feeble attempt to address a situation that has never been addressed properly," said the Orthodox Jewish psychiatrist from Long Island.

He said the crisis is also reflected in spiking divorce rates and domestic violence among observant Jewish couples.

Singles are being bullied into marriage by pushy matchmakers, the therapist said.

Ilana Hostyk, 18, called it "good advice" to marry someone close in age, but noted, "When love comes around, I don't think you can place rules on it."

rblau@nypost.com

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/dreidel_robbers_mbSeeelLPmPxWpFhd6DqUI#ixzz0VpBDMZ7K

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Davetrek vs The World

amazing! man who inspired Rain Man and had with worlds best memory, dies...

Kim Peek, Inspiration for 'Rain Man,' Dies at 58

Fascinating - taking a test in a large group vs small group lowers test scores?!

New Research: Taking the SAT in a Crowded Room Means Lower Scores

Wednesday, December 16, 2009 7:32 PM By Ashley Merrymanhttp://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/12/16/taking-the-sat-in-a-crowded-room-lower-scores.aspx

Why (most) women like to shop

Marriage wards off blues, just don't end it!

Passing of Debbie Hill, sister of Jeff Stier

Ramaz teaches Sex with the Rabbi Class?

Study says howling wind more likely to wake men than crying babies

whats amazing is that babies are not even in the top 10 for men!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6684362/Buzzing-flies-more-likely-to-wake-men-than-crying-babies-study.html

Buzzing flies more likely to wake men than crying babies: study

Men are more likely to be woken up by the sound of a buzzing fly or howling wind than by a crying baby, new research shows.

'herbivore' men in japan, who are more interested in sewing, baking and crocheting clothes than dating or women...

are conscientiousness & self disciplined folks less susceptible to Alzheimer's?

Self-discipline may reduce Alzheimer's risk

Controlled impulses

Alzheimer's test?

can money buy you happiness? perhaps, but not in the ways you think...

Happiness: A buyer's guide

Money can improve your life, but not in the ways you think

cute - Weekdays, the Rabbi Dined Out

Weekdays, the Rabbi Dined Out

Do 20somethings need constant praise? the new 'greatest generation'

The Most-Praised Generation Goes to Work

Verifying who is a man and who is a woman is more complex than you imagine...

Where's the Rulebook for Sex Verification?

The man who owns the Internet?! the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of...

The man who owns the Internet

Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here's how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire.

Are some men just stupid? Why do 80% of lighting strikes affect men...

Why do men become so 'bright'?

Interesting - Why I am marrying a jewish girl vs intermarrying...

Moving help sought

is reading cook books similiar to dating and courtship?

A Critic at Large

What's the Recipe?

Our hunger for cookbooks.

by Adam Gopnik November 23, 2009

With aging, its like mother, like daughter & twin study reveals secrets to looking younger...

Twin study reveals secrets to looking younger

Sun, smoking, alcohol and stress can all add years to your face

Can working out wear you out? & Can you shower right after exercise?

Phys Ed: The Best Exercises for Healthy Bones

Phys Ed: The Best Exercises for Healthy Bones

Breast-Feeding can help you lose weight?

Breast-Feed the Baby, Love the Calorie Burn

Readers' Comments

chocolate fashion show?

haredi parent blocks burned toddler from Hadassah hospital

its sad that people can't react on their own to health matters and need the views of a rabbi, and will allow political disagreements to get in the way of proper healthcare

Haredi father blocks burned toddler from Hadassah

Mother suspected of starving toddler son

Dreidel robbers?! - rabbis take on shadchanim who set up men with much younger women..!~

its insane that this is in the ny post...its like the frum tabloids! (hat tip - clark!) I do support this effort, and think its a shame men aren't willing to date people closer to their age...

Dreidel robbers

Rabbis taking on mismatch-makers

Wednesday, December 16, 2009 7:32 PM

By Ashley Merryman
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/12/16/taking-the-sat-in-a-crowded-room-lower-scores.aspx