Obesity and Global Health

Newsweek interviews Barry Popkin, author of "The World is Fat," who offers some suggestions on why obesity is on the rise globally. His main argument seems to be the growth of an "obesogenic environment," i.e a surplus of food plus a culture of inactivity.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/175954

Some interesting points at the end, too, on the subject of intervention:

Some people are going to respond to all this by saying it should be a matter of individual responsibility — that diet and weight are a matter of choice and the government shouldn't meddle.
That's OK if those people want to pay for the extra health-care costs that come with obesity. But right now this is affecting everyone in America, because we all pay those costs. It's the same issue we had with seatbelts. People who didn't use them were only hurting themselves, physically, but in the process, they were raising insurance costs for everyone. Now we are at a point where people can't even walk and they need scooters to get around, where we have to build special beds and chairs in hospitals, where we're taking toes and feet off people that have diabetes. If the government is going to pay for all of this, that affects everyone, and we need to do something about it. But America is a society that prefers to break things and then pay to fix them.

Unemployment

Brief article on the state of joblessness in America right now.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/18/news/economy/jobless_claims/?postversion=2008121810

Takeaway:

The Labor Department said that initial filings for state jobless benefits fell to 554,000 for the week ended Dec. 13. That was a decline of 21,000 from the 26-year high of a revised 575,000 claims a week earlier.

A week ago, the government reported the highest number of jobless claims since Nov. 27, 1982 when initial filings hit 612,000.

Moral Obligation

Peter Singer argues that the affluent have a moral obligation to help the poor in his extremely influential article Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his position, this is definitely worth a look.

http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972----.htm

FTA:

My next point is this: if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it. By "without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance" I mean without causing anything else comparably bad to happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent. This principle seems almost as uncontroversial as the last one. It requires us only to prevent what is bad, and to promote what is good, and it requires this of us only when we can do it without sacrificing anything that is, from the moral point of view, comparably important. I could even, as far as the application of my argument to the Bengal emergency is concerned, qualify the point so as to make it: if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it. An application of this principle would be as follows: if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

More from Peter Singer and the morality of consumption:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magazine/17charity.t.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Found via MetaFilter.

Poverty and the Youth

A poverty-related article from ESPN? Believe it: they compare the football careers of two high school students from the same area, one a rich school and the other.. well.. read on!
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=sandiegohs&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab1pos1

Hard times have fallen on even the upper-middle class. Falling allowances? Kids getting jobs? Tragedy in suburbia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/nyregion/13teens.html?em

Girl receives a $2 unemployment check:
http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-158591

Compare our youth situation with that of those in Greece. (Spoiler: they were selling rocks for throwing in protest. Yes, that's right, selling rocks.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/14/greece-riots-youth-poverty-comment

Cost Calculators and Financial Success

Mint.com is a lovely site that offers an incredibly useful tool for personal finance management, and also some general advice on how to manage your money:
http://blog.mint.com/blog/finance-core/three-principles-of-personal-finance-all-you-need-to-know-for-financial-success/

Pulled from the above article, a series of "cost calculators" for just about everything you can imagine...

What's the cost of raising a child? Find out here:
http://www.babycenter.com/cost-of-raising-child-calculator

What about the cost of moving to a new city?
http://www.bankrate.com/brm/movecalc.asp

The "real cost" of a car?
http://www.edmunds.com/apps/cto/intro.do

Finally, how long will it take you to pay off that credit card debt?
http://finance.yahoo.com/calculator/banking-budgeting/det-01

Tackling the doctor shortage

What do you do when there aren't enough doctors to meet the primary care needs of a community? Rosenberg profiles one relatively successful answer in India: train community health workers from among the laypeople. Whom do you pick from, considering everyone probably has a busy life and won't want to work for free? Try a historically disadvantaged population, thereby giving them a chance at higher social status (the Untouchables, in this case)!

[ Special note here: I actually really want to start a similar program like the one detailed in the article in the future. So the article has a little extra meaning, at least for me. ]
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/12/community-doctors/rosenberg-text

There's a problem of "medical migration" out of developing nations for better-paid jobs elsewhere. This colorful diagram depicts it quite artistically:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/12/community-doctors/follow-up-text

Found via Metafilter.

Help for the Homeless

Today, some facts and figures about homelessness in the US from PBS:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/305/homeless-facts.html

A neat LA Times article about a new technology designed to improve upon the living conditions of the homeless.. kind of.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-edar10-2008dec10,0,5253031.story

Visit the Home of the EDAR for more info on that.

In other news, Dr. Helene Gayle offers Obama some advice: Fight Extreme Poverty!
http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/fight-extreme-poverty/article113161.html

Yet women and girls are disproportionately marginalized. Women work two-thirds of the world's working hours and produce half its food, yet earn only 10 percent of the world's income and own less than 1 percent of its property. Approximately 500,000 women die each year in childbirth—a number unchanged in more than 20 years—and almost all those deaths are due to preventable causes.

Found via MetaFilter.