background preloader

FC Blog

Facebook Twitter

How Bloomberg's soda ban is a classic example of 'choice architecture' A hard-hitting sign against the proposed 'soda ban' that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has suggested. Photograph: Andrew Burton/Reuters A general piece of advice for people organising public protests: don't use the word "million" if you're not fairly sure of getting at least a few thousand people to show up. Sadly, this tip comes too late for the mysterious body calling itself NY Liberty HQ, which – according to The Atlantic Wire – mustered a mere 50 people to yesterday's Million Big Gulp March in Manhattan yesterday, to protest Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposed ban on the sale of sugary drinks in containers larger than 16 fluid ounces.

(Oh, and the crassness of echoing the title of the Million Man March in your noble struggle for the rights of America's beverage conglomerates? Let's not go there.) The ineptitude of the march mirrors the drinks industry's more broadly inept efforts, thus far, to create the impression of a grassroots uprising against the "soda ban". Better food labelling 'would reduce stomach cancers linked to salt' | Politics. Better "traffic light" food labelling is needed to reduce the number of stomach cancers linked to salt, experts have said. Too much salt is believed to promote cancer by damaging the stomach lining. An estimated 14% of stomach cancers in the UK – one in seven cases – could be avoided by reducing salt intake to recommended levels, it is claimed. People in the UK consume an average of 8.6 grams each a day, much of it hidden in processed food. This is 43% higher than the maximum recommended amount of six grams, equivalent to one level teaspoonful.

A standardised form of colour-coded "traffic light" food labelling would help consumers monitor their consumption of salt, sugar and fat, according to the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF). Kate Mendoza, head of information at the charity, said: "Stomach cancer is difficult to treat successfully because most cases are not caught until the disease is well-established.

£200,000 test-tube burger marks milestone in future meat-eating | Environment. Lab-grown burgers will be served up in October Link to video: Lab-grown burger to be served up in October Lurking in a petri dish in a laboratory in the Netherlands is an unlikely contender for the future of food. The yellow-pink sliver the size of a corn plaster is the state-of-the-art in lab-grown meat, and a milestone on the path to the world's first burger made from stem cells.

Dr Mark Post, head of physiology at Maastricht University, plans to unveil a complete burger – produced at a cost of more than £200,000 – this October. He hopes Heston Blumenthal, the chef and owner of the three Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant in Berkshire, will cook the offering for a celebrity taster as yet unnamed. The project, funded by a wealthy, anonymous, individual aims to slash the number of cattle farmed for food, and in doing so reduce one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. "You can easily calculate that we need alternatives. The recipe for meat grown in the lab. Jamie Oliver. You might want to hate him, but you can't help cheering | Jay Rayner. TEDxLiverpool - Ian Wharton - A Mobile Future. Food's New Foot Soldiers. FoodCorps, which started last week, is symbolic of just what we need: a national service program that aims to improve nutrition education for children, develop school gardening projects and change what’s being served on school lunch trays.

I’ve been looking forward to this for months, because it’s such an up: 50 new foot soldiers in the war against ignorance in food. The service members, most of them in their 20s, just went to work at 41 sites in 10 states, from Maine to Oregon and Michigan to Mississippi. (FoodCorps concentrates on communities with high rates of childhood obesity or limited access to healthy food, though these days every state has communities like that.)

I’d be even more elated if there were 50 FoodCorps members in each state. Or 5,000 in each, which approaches the number we’re going to need to educate our kids so they can look forward to a lifetime of good health and good eating. But FoodCorps is a model we can use to build upon. Is FoodCorps necessary? Visit Mr. FoodCorps. Foodblogging – Do’s and Don’ts. March 7th, 2007 If you are -skimming across this post- now thinking “wow where is that coming from”? Well, deliciousdays.com just turned TWO (Yay!) And we thought about sharing some of our thoughts around blogging. With two years of food blogging experience on our backs today, we felt it was time for a little reflection, a compilation of the most important do’s and don’ts of foodblogging.

Some are obvious and relate to blogging in general, others may not be, and I’m sure there are some you’ll think totally different about. All of them reflect our very personal point of view and are supposed to give food blogging newbies a condensed survey over the most relevant topics when starting your own blog adventure. Create value – Reader come back! Blog outfit – Dress code! Usability: Another big issue, a 7 pixel font looks great on a 640×480 screen, but the de-facto standard has already passed 800×600 screen resolutions.

Technology & tools – Make ‘em work for you! Blog identity – Blog ID, please! The Winklevoss twins are only the beginning of Zuckerberg’s problems | Technology | guardian.co.uk. Mark Zuckerberg might have to create a “Don’t like” button for people claiming they own all or a fraction of Facebook. Having already seen off the Winklevoss twins who claimed he stole the idea for Facebook from them, Zuckerberg now faces a convicted fraudster who says he has a contract giving him 84% of the social network. Paul Ceglia, from Wellsville, New York, said Zuckerberg signed a contract with him that shows he should be entitled to the lion’s share of the business – and late on Monday night released, through his lawyers in the US, a tranche of emails that purport to show him and the Facebook chief executive discussing, between July 2003 and July 2004, various matters relating to “thefacebook” – as the site was known in its early days.

Ceglia claims that in 2003 he hired Zuckerberg, then an 18-year-old first-year undergraduate at Harvard, to do some coding for a site called Streetfax (later Streetdelivery) that he was planning.