The aim of this article is to discuss how changes in tomato food regulation, production and consumption, can be seen as part of a broader societal change from Modernity to Late Modernity.
Based on evidence from the Swedish and European food systems we demonstrate how a system, which has been successfully managing development in food production for several decades by stressing rationality, homogeneity and standardization, is being challenged by a system that has adapted to, and also exploited, consumer preferences such as heterogeneity, diversity and authenticity.
The article shows how tomato growers develop differentiation strategies, adapting to and cultivating this new consumer interest, and how authorities responsible for regulations of trade and quality struggle to adapt to the new situation. As the products become more diversified, taste becomes an important issue and is associated with a view that traditional and natural are superior to standardized and homogeneous products.
Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co-founder of Facebook, renounced his U.S. citizenship before an initial public offering that values the social network at as much as $96 billion, a move that may reduce his tax bill.
New York City agency pushes plan to prevent cyberattacks on elevators, boilers
What would happen if an attacker broke into the network for the industrial control systems for New York City’s elevators and boiler systems and decided to disrupt them?
“You could increase the speed of how elevators go up or down,” says Steve Ramirez, business analyst, analysis and communications in the Office of the CIO of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), which provides public housing for low- to moderate-income families in the five boroughs of the city. And if attackers ever successfully penetrated the network-based industrial control systems (ICS) for the boilers, they could raise the heat levels for municipal boilers, causing them to explode.
A new study suggests that, by disrupting your body’s normal rhythms, your alarm clock could be making you overweight.
The study concerns a phenomenon called “social jetlag.” That’s the extent to which our natural sleep patterns are out of synch with our school or work schedules. Take the weekends: many of us wake up hours later than we do during the week, only to resume our early schedules come Monday morning. It’s enough to make your body feel like it’s spending the weekend in one time zone and the week in another. […]
Previous work with such data has already yielded some clues. “We have shown that if you live against your body clock, you’re more likely to smoke, to drink alcohol, and drink far more coffee,” says Roenneberg. […]
The researchers also found that people of all ages awoke and went to bed an average of 20 minutes later between 2002 and 2010. Work and school times have remained the same, meaning that social jetlag has increased during this period.
The hypothesis was that people who used particular basic word orders would have more children. Testing this hypothesis directly, basic word order is a significant predictor of the number of children a person has (linear regression, controlling for age, sex, if the person was married, if they were employed their level of education and religion, t-value for basic word order = -18.179, p < 0.00001, model predicts 36% of the variance).
It turns out that speakers of SOV languages have more children than speakers of SVO languages, while speakers with no dominant order have the fewest children on average.
Small children (age 4-6) who were exposed to a large number of children’s books and films had a significantly stronger ability to read the mental and emotional states of other people. … The more absorbed subjects were in the story, the more empathy they felt, and the more empathy they felt, the more likely the subjects were to help when the experimenter “accidentally” dropped a handful of pens… Reading narrative fiction … fosters empathic growth and prosocial behavior. […]
Psychologists have found that people who watch less TV are actually more accurate judges of life’s risks and rewards than those who subject themselves to the tales of crime, tragedy, and death that appear night after night on the ten o’clock news. That’s because these people are less likely to see sensationalized or one-sided sources of information, and thus see reality more clearly.
{ Anything, including liquid water, can be a touch-screen thanks to a new sensory system designed by a scientist from Disney Research | TPM | full story }
We’ve been told by the New York Times, you know, the newswpaper of record, that Apple only paid a 9.8% tax rate last year.
As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent.
This really is the most gargantuan ignorance on their part. The $3.3 billion has nothing, nothing at all, to do with the $34.2 billion: something which any accountant at all could have told them.
Put aside your stereotypes about the sex industry and consider that many people, of all sexes and genders, can find the work empowering and healing. Wrenna Robertson is one such person, having worked for 18 years as a stripper. In this piece she talks about her own experiences as well as those of others, including escorts, porn actors, tantric practitioners and erotic masseurs.
Employees are often required to cede the rights to their designs and inventions to their employers. But Twitter Inc. has recently upended that tradition by drafting a policy that will put control over how such patents are enforced into the hands of its engineers and employees. […]
Come Lague, the chief executive of Zetta Research, which buys patents from failed start-ups and sells them to other companies, believes Twitter’s new policy could affect the value of its own patents.
Tel Aviv University research finds that smart phone users develop new concepts of privacy in public spaces. […]
Smart phone users are 70 percent more likely than regular cellphone users to believe that their phones afford them a great deal of privacy, says Dr. Toch, who specializes in privacy and information systems. These users are more willing to reveal private issues in public spaces. They are also less concerned about bothering individuals who share those spaces, he says.
The fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia) was examined in its relations to concepts from positive psychology in Austria, China, and Switzerland.
It was related to satisfaction with life and Peterson et al.’s (2005) three orientations to happiness; the life of pleasure (hedonism), life of engagement (related to flow-experiences), and life of meaning (eudaimonia).
Participants (N = 744) completed self-report measures of gelotophobia, satisfaction with life, and orientations to happiness. The results revealed that gelotophobia could be found in all three countries.
The participants exceeded cut-off points indicating gelotophobia in Austria (5.80%), China (7.31%), and Switzerland (7.23%). The fear of being laughed at was negatively related to life-satisfaction in all three countries.
Gelotophobes described themselves with lower overall estimations of their lives.
In sports, on a game show, or just on the job, what causes people to choke when the stakes are high? A new study by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) suggests that when there are high financial incentives to succeed, people can become so afraid of losing their potentially lucrative reward that their performance suffers.
It is a somewhat unexpected conclusion. After all, you would think that the more people are paid, the harder they will work, and the better they will do their jobs—until they reach the limits of their skills. That notion tends to hold true when the stakes are low, says Vikram Chib, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and lead author on a paper published in the May 10 issue of the journal Neuron. Previous research, however, has shown that if you pay people too much, their performance actually declines.
What, you didn’t know the Internet was self-destructing? Well it is.
Bufferbloat, my #1 prediction from 2011, is an artifact of cheap memory and bad planning in the Internet Age. In order to keep our porn streaming without interruption we add large memory buffers in applications, network cards or chipsets, routers, more routers, and even more routers until the basic flow control techniques of the TCP protocol are completely overwhelmed. Data glugs through the system like a gas can with no vent. Our solution to date has been to make our pipes (and therefore our glugs) bigger, but in the long run that won’t help. Latency increases and performance declines.
Many Internet users are unaware of bufferbloat because it has been masked by faster computers and bigger pipes and because it sneaked up on us slowly over time. But here’s a test. Think back to your first broadband cable or DSL Internet connection, right after you finally got rid of dial-up. How much faster is your Internet connection today than it was back then? Don’t think in terms of numbers but of subjective performance. It’s not much faster at all, is it? That’s bufferbloat.
Two years after Europe bailed Greece out to protect the euro, the rescue has become a debacle that threatens to unravel the common currency.
After Greece’s May 6 elections left pro-bailout parties too weakened to govern the country, more elections are likely in June, with no guarantee a stable government will emerge. By next month, Athens must identify €11.5 billion, or $15 billion, in fresh spending cuts or face suspension of the international loans it needs to pay pensions and run schools. If it doesn’t get the money, it would eventually have to print its own.
Greece’s growing turmoil is the culmination of a radical austerity experiment and botched economic overhaul that have pushed the nation to the brink of social and political breakdown. The story of the ill-fated bailout suggests that forcing deep austerity on individual member states won’t save the euro and may worsen its crisis.
Above all, Greece’s example illustrates the conflict between Germany’s tough terms for aiding other euro members and the amount of pain other societies can bear. […]
Greece’s bailout by the EU and International Monetary Fund is the costliest financial rescue of a nation in history, with paid or pledged loans totaling €245 billion. It has already involved the biggest-ever sovereign-debt default, a debt restructuring that wiped out more than €100 billion of Greek bond debt. […]
Greek premier George Papandreou says that when he asked German Chancellor Angela Merkel for gentler conditions in 2010, she replied that the aid program had to hurt. “We want to make sure nobody else will want this,” Ms. Merkel told him.
Over recent years a body of research has accumulated showing the psychological benefits of nostalgia. For example, reminiscing about the past can combat loneliness and off-set the discomfort of thinking about death. Now a team led by Xinyue Zhou has shown that nostalgia brings physical comforts too, making us feel warmer and increasing our tolerance to cold.
