2 for $1 honey buns are just part of the problem
Temple’s Center for Obesity Research recently published a study which found that for a little over a dollar, young children can go to their local corner store and load up on things like chips, candy and soda – and add a whopping 360 extra calories to their daily intake.
Research has shown that school based programs can help cut obesity rates among urban school children in half, but the folks at CORE are afraid that external factors like these corner stores – which some children frequent twice a day, everyday – could be undermining those efforts.
Lead researcher Kelley Borradaile says that knowing the price points and preferences for these students can help store owners come up with healthier options – single serving snack packs, or dried fruit, or baked chips, for example.
The Christmas holidays are a little more than two months away and more people than ever will be doing their shopping online as opposed to brick-and-mortar retail stores. With October being National Cybersecurity Month, now is the time to make sure you make those online purchases safely, so as not to become a victim of credit card, or more importantly, identity theft.
“Most people confuse credit card theft with identity theft and they are really two different things,” says Abbe Forman, a computer and information science instructor in Temple’s College of Science and Technology.
Credit card theft is the theft of either your physical credit card or credit card number by someone who wants to spend up to your credit limit and max out your card, while identity theft is the swiping of someone’s actual identity, says Forman, an expert in computer ethics.
“Generally, with identity theft, someone will get hold of your social security number and use it to get themselves credit cards in your name or take out a mortgage–which can be a huge amount of money–in your name or take out loans in your name and just spend, spend, spend,” she says. “Meanwhile, they’re destroying your credit which can take seven years of very hard work to correct.”
While most credit card companies have mechanisms in place to catch fraudulent charges on your credit card, people who have had their identity stolen may not be aware of it for a long period of time.
Forman suggests routinely checking your credit card and bank statements for suspicious activity 
on your accounts. She also recommends checking your credit report, which you can often acquire for free, every year or two.
If you are going to buy something online, make sure the Web site is legitimate and secure.
“When making an online purchase from a legitimate site, make sure that the Web address bar starts with ‘https’ as opposed to the normal ‘http,’” Forman says. “When the ’s’ is included, it tells you that the Web site is using secure socket layers and that your information is being encrypted both ways.”
And lastly, Forman warns, never, ever respond to an e-mail that requests you to supply your personal information, no matter how legitimate the e-mail might look.
“Thieves have gotten so good that they’re using Photoshop to recreate actual looking Web sites in their e-mails,” she says. “If you get an e-mail that says your account has been compromised, call the company to verify it.”
Students, staff and faculty from Temple School of Podiatric Medicine participated in the Step Out Philly walk on Saturday, to raise awareness (and funds) for diabetes research. All told, Temple teams raised more than $12,000! For more information, visit the Step Out website. Check out photos from the walk below, courtesy Dr. Kathya Zinszer:
As another way to promote the University’s sustainability goals, Temple has launched a new initiative to encourage and build a bike culture on campus.
“Bike Temple was begun as a way to make Temple more bike-friendly,” said Glenn Eck, assistant superintendent of grounds in the Office of Facilities Management and a member of the bicycle subcommittee under the Office of Sustainability. “We want people to see bicycles as a reliable, routine form of transportation, not just a toy, or sorely recreational.”
A campus survey conducted last spring found that a lot people are interested in riding a bike for commuting to and from campus, but are hesitant because they don’t know where to purchase a bike or where they would get it serviced. They also indicated a need to learn bicycling skills that would give them a comfort level riding on busy city streets.
Temple has partnered in this initiative with Fuji Bicycles; Breakaway Bikes, a Center City bike shop; and the Neighborhood Bike Works, a non-profit organization headquartered in West Philadelphia. Fuji is offering about a dozen styles of bikes to Temple students and employees at a
discount though Breakaway Bikes, which has opened an on-campus shop/repair facility outside Barton Hall on 13th Street, between Berks Mall and Norris Street.
Bike Temple is part of Temple’s total movement towards carbon neutrality and part of its climate action plan, said Sandra McDade, director of Temple’s Office of Sustainability.
“By biking to and from campus, you reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that you put into the air,” she said. “Many things that you do to reduce greenhouse gases have to do with behavior changes and clearly the bike culture is very well organized in how it’s moving its agenda forward. I would like to see that culture change where people accept biking as a reasonable transportation alternative to driving or even taking public transportation.”
Additional information about Bike Temple can be found at http://www.temple.edu/sustainability/.
There’s a great article in today’s USA Today about the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, and how it bans all flavors of cigarettes, except for the most popular: menthol. Studies have repeatedly shown that adolescents and African-Americans prefer menthol cigarettes, yet this sweeping ban does not include them, and some health experts want to know why.
One researcher, who in 2002 said that “Any proposed legislation should consider the special problems of menthol and its relationship to high cigarette consumption, especially for African-American adolescents,” just last week said banning menthol cigarettes would create an illegal market for them.
Perhaps, but public health professor Jennifer Ibrahim thinks it’s just politics as usual.
“Earlier versions of the ban included menthol cigarettes,” she noted in June. “But they were taken out of the final version because it wasn’t politically feasible to include them.”
The bill, such as it is, is a good first step, but it leaves a big hole by leaving menthol out, she says; more aggressive legislation will be needed in the future.
A learning tool for future med students?
Will medical students and residents at Temple one day work side by side with art students, learning about human suffering through iconic works of art such as Frida Kahlo’s “Suicide of Dorothy Hale? (left)” Will they one day collaborate with journalism students and professors, interviewing members of the community to learn more about their health woes and difficulties accessing care?
It’s starting to happen now, thanks to a grassroots effort started last fall, in which students and faculty from all over the University have come together to explore how applying the humanities, social science and the arts to medicine will make medical students better doctors.
This spring, that movement culminated in the form of opening if the Center for Urban Bioethics and Humanities, housed at the medical school.
What could studying things like art, music, law, philosophy, ethics and anthropology have to do with making a better doctor? Plenty, according to Brad Hayward, a resident in Temple’s department of medicine, who feels that this interdisciplinary approach will help train future doctors to treat the patient, not just the symptoms.
“Doctors are forced to do more with less and can only focus a small amount of time on treating a patient. Sometimes that means less than 15 minutes to figure out a treatment and send the patient on their way, without a more deep understanding of their lives,” he said.
But many who are new to the concept of “medical humanities” still aren’t quite sure what that means. To that end, the CUBH is hosting a symposium in November to help explain it. Doctors from institutions across the country will present their thoughts on topics ranging from studying the arts to end of life care.
Temple’s own Scott Burris, professor of law at the Beasley School of Law, will discuss enacting ethical practices into law. The event is free, and open to everyone.
IF YOU GO
When: Saturday, Nov 14, 2009, 1-5:30 pm.
Where: Medical Education and Research Building, Room 105 and Stone Commons, 3500 N. Broad Street
Registration: Is free, but required. For more information, visit the CUBH website or contact the center’s co-chair, Kenji Saito, at medlaw@gmail.com.
Eric Borguet (right) will receive the 2009 Philadelphia Section ACS Award
Next month, Temple Chemistry Professor Eric Borguet will be honored with 2009 Philadelphia Section Award by the American Chemical Society. The award recognizes an individual “who aims by conspicuous scientific achievement through research, has made important contributions to man’s knowledge and thereby aided the public appreciation of the profession.” Borguet, whose research focuses on interfacial and nanoscale phenomena at a fundamental level, becomes the tenth current or former member of Temple faculty to receive this honor since the award’s inception in 1962. He joins current faculty members Robert Levis, Bradford Wayland, Michael Klein, Hai-Lung Dai, Franklin Davis and Magid Abou-Gharbia, and former faculty members Daniel Swern, Mortimer Labes and Sidney Weinhouse as Philadelphia Section ACS Award recipents.
Temple medical students are nothing if not invested in the North Philadelphia community. While most aren’t originally from the area, they do develop an affection for it, even taking pride in it, as evidenced from these photos of a group of students who recently helped helped revive a community garden at 17th and Westmoreland Streets. Photos are courtesy of Jennie Johnson, TUSM class of 2012.
Read more on how Temple’s med students are helping their community, both in North Philly and beyond.
Any child of divorced parents will attest to the the pain felt when they hear one parent say something negative or spiteful about the other. Divorce lawyers and child psychologists alike all advise parents not to speak ill of each other in front of the children, if nothing else, to spare their feelings.
The Gosselins, while not saying anything nasty to each other, seem to be telling anyone else who will listen exactly how they feel about each other. And it’s all documented in the public forum.
“Reality television has provided a new avenue of research in this area,” says Brian Daly, a child psychiatrist in Temple’s College of Health Professions. “We know what happens in the real world, but the effects of being under the scrutiny of television cameras could mean something totally different.”
He also says the fact that everything going on in the family – from the slow unravel of the Gosselins’ marriage documented on their TLC show, to the recent Good Morning America interview in which Jon Gosselin said he “despised” his soon-to-be ex-wife, is now preserved in an archive of sorts, and there’s no clear indication of what kind of effect this will have on their children.
“It could help the children to see it, or it could hurt them,” he said. “We can speculate, but in the end, we won’t know if there’s been any damage until the children are older.”
In a year in which we celebrated the 40th anniversary of man first walking on the moon, tomorrow marks another such remembrance. On Sept. 1, 1969, the first node was installed at UCLA in the the creation of ARPANet, the first mini-Internet between four western universities: UCLA, Stanford, University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf, who as a graduate student at UCLA in the late 1960s helped build ARPANet and was later called the “Father of the Internet,” spoke at Temple in 2004.
“First of all, I interpret (being labeled the “Father of the Internet”) as a misnomer, because there were thousands of people involved in the process,” Cerf told several hundred students and faculty who came to hear him speak in Walk Auditorium.
“If you think the Internet could happen because one or two or three people were the only one’s that made it happen, let me tell you, it’s not that way,” he said. “You know the old story about success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan. It’s true.
“It’s absolutely true that the success of the Internet is a direct side effect of a number of people who decided to commit themselves, their career, their money and their ideas to making it happen,” Cerf added. “The lucky part for me is having been around in the early stages of all this, doing something that so many other people decided that it would be a lot of fun and important to do.”
Cerf, who is also credited with creating the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) which forms the basis of the entire Internet and allows the follow of information through the World Wide Web, told his audience that day that the Internet has been especially important to researchers.
“If you’re a researcher, I don’t think you can do a good job without the Internet,” said Cerf. “It’s become an integral tool for collaborative work. I think if you talk to any serious scientist today and said, ‘If I took away your Internet, what would you do?’, the answer is always ‘a lot less effective research.’”
Watch this video on the history of the Internet
