Hong Kong Snaps - Old Factory Buildings

10 Things the Food Industry Doesn't Want You to Know

1. Junk food makers spend billions advertising unhealthy foods to kids.

2. The studies that food producers support tend to minimize health concerns associated with their products.

3. Junk food makers donate large sums of money to professional nutrition associations.

4. More processing means more profits, but typically makes the food less healthy.

5. Less-processed foods are generally more satiating than their highly processed counterparts.

6. Many supposedly healthy replacement foods are hardly healthier than the foods they replace.

7. A health claim on the label doesn't necessarily make a food healthy.

8. Food industry pressure has made nutritional guidelines confusing.

9. The food industry funds front groups that fight anti-obesity public health initiatives.

10. The food industry works aggressively to discredit its critics.

Source: 10 Things the Food Industry Doesn't Want You to Know

Fire Dragon Dance @ HK (Moon Festival 08)

About the Tai Hung@HK Fire Dragon Dance
(source: http://www.taihangfiredragon.com)

The Tai Hang Fire Dragon has its origin in 1880 . At that time , Tai Hang was only a small Hakka village and the villagers , most of them farmers and fishermen , Led a simple and peaceful life . The tale started when the villagers once killed a serpent in a stormy night , but in the next morning , the dead body of the serpent had disappeared . A few days later , a plague spread out in Tai Hang and many people died of infection . Meanwhile , a village elder saw Buddha one night in his dream and was told to perform a Fire Dragon Dance and to burn fire crackers in the Mid-Autumn Festival. The sulphur in the fire crackers drove away the disease and the villagers were saved. Since then , every year the Tai Hang residents would perform the Fire Dragon Dance for three nights in the Mid-Autumn Festival in memory of the incident. The Fire Dragon is altogether 220 feet long with its body divided into 32 segments , all of which are stuffed with straw and stuck full of incense sticks. So it is known as the “ Fire-Dragon ” .

HK Snap Shot

Lamma Snap Shot - Tin Hau Festival 2008

Sexploitation

Here is a production of my friends.

The video shows that too much commercial are sexually objected a person for boosting sales, which is a phenomenon of "sex-exploitation" all around us. We should think about to "respect ourselves, resist conformity. Boycott the sexploitation economy".

Funny Signpost in China

Got some interesting pictures from my friend in mainland. These signposts are going to be fixed before the Beijing Olympic....

Today's Snap Shot

PR War? Current Food Safety Scandals in Hong Kong

Food Safety is a very hot issue in the city at the moment.

Last Tuesday (2007/01/22), environmental pressure group Greenpeace claimed banned chemicals have been found in samples of mainland strawberries and tangerines being sold in Hong Kong local markets. They campaigned for urgent food safety legislation as well as clear standards for residual pesticides on fruit and veggie. Greenpeace than converged on the Centre for Food Safety (CFS) and dumped buckets of fresh fruit at its front door in order to blast the authorities for being incompetent in halting imports of tainted food products into the territory.

This action was held between 10:30am-11:30am. Around 40 medias attended the actions and the news become the headline news for the mid-day TV and radio news broadcasts. An official response was released by the CFS saying that “the department would not comment on the results of tests carried out by other organizations” and emphasized their test is based on International standard.

Around 3:00pm the same day, CFS suddenly called up all medias that they were going to have a PC at 6:00pm to announce “something”. Information Officer from the CFS did/could not explain details about the PC and just mentioned that they would release something about “fish”. The PC turned out was the CFS said it had received complaints from 14 people who fell ill after consuming oil fish said to have been wrongly labeled as codfish, which the products were bought from the supermarket giant ParknShop. Than, this food scare erupted across the whole city and ParknShop becomes the main target for public impeachment.

If people view these two issue cynically, it can be concluded the CFS uses one food scandal to override another food scandal, than shifting all/part of the public’s target from CFS to ParknShop. Using a scandal to prevail another scandal is an old, simple and direct media/PR strategy, but it does work at most time.

Maybe it is too skeptical and the comment is a bit in hindsight, but the current food scandals is a good demonstration about how the HK authorities to tackle humiliations.



News Links:

Greenpeace in toxic fruit fight

Label mistake revealed in oilfish saga

Beer Lovers' Rationalization

“Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest.”
– The Buffalo Theory

It is from one of my friends’ email I received recently. He tried to show me a very valid reason for drinking beer by using Darwin’s Natural Selection Theory. In the email, the Buffalo Theory explains:

"When the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first.This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular culling of the weakest members.

In much the same way the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells.Excessive intake of alcohol, as we all know, kills off brain cells, but naturally it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, constantly making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. That's why you always feel smarter after a few beers!.”

If only this were true, we'd all be genius!

How China involves in the Germany World Cup

Photo Source: Yahoo! FIFA World Cup

Although China is unable to qualify for the Germany World Cup, everyone one in Germany is still able to feel China’s “involvement”- it is because most of the flying German National flags are made in China!!

Some flags manufactures announced that the number of different national flags used in the Germany World Cup is far more than the number in 2002. In the past few months, one flag manufacturer already used more the 300 thousands square meter of clothes to make national flags and half of them are used for the German one’s. The company now produces 30 thousands flags every month instead of 150 before the World Cup. The cheap price of the flags(1 euro to 2 euro) is also another reasons for the drastic sales boost. It is believed that such cheap price is solely because they are “Made in China”!

Relater Article: How China involves in the Germany World Cup 2006 (Chinese Article)

The Dying Out of April Fool's Day

(Source: Star Wars' Funny)

Just wonder if anyone celebrates April Fool's Day anymore. It seems to me that the official day of practical joking appears to be as flat as a deflated cushion. In the past, people would make hoaxes during the day to bring in some funs and sense of humor in the unexcited everyday life.For example,

The Left-Handed Whopper
In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a "Left-Handed Whopper" specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, "many others requested their own 'right handed' version."
(Source: The Top 100 April Fools Day Hoaxes of All Time)

Well, there still has some April Fool's jokes in recent years, but most of them are circulated within Internet instead of mainstream media. One joke made by Nature.com last year that an lunar image taken by the Floating Optical Orbital Lens (F.O.O.L) revealed that the moon surface was being heavily eroded by the bacteria that Apollo lunar mission left behind!
I’d really like to have more these kinds of jokes around us. People nowadays become more serious, feeling insecure or even scare because of different sorts of instability and threats (terrorism, natural disasters, environmental degradation, more competitive and demanding workplace etc.). Depression, psychiatric or psychological problems due to pressure become more and more common, and even becomes a social problem in some big cities. So, the celebratipn of April Fool's Day may refresh our world with a bit more humours.

Interesting Links:
The Origin of April Fool's Day
The Top 100 April Fools Day Hoaxes of All Time

How fast should I run in the rain?

This is an age old question that whether we need to run or walk under the rain if we don’t have an umbrella with us. By common sense, we have to run as fast as we can to stay as dry as possible. Even there has a possibility that we are colliding with extra rains drops if we run instead of walk. We still believe that run is better than walk to keep ourselves drier.
However, some mathematicians found that there is a surprising twist to this understanding. They used mathematics formula and calculation to find out the answer and have such conclusion”

If you are a person of typical build and the rain is
coming from behind you at the speed of a gentle walking pace, you will be hit by less rain if you amble along than if you run full pelt.
- “Why Do Buses Come in Threes? The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life” by Rob Eastaway, Jeremy Wyndham

Well, I haven’t thought about such question seriously before. It is so easy for us to ignore and neglect something which is so common in our everyday life. But I found that I’ll have much more funs if I pay a bit more attention to something so normal to me. One of the best examples is the hidden mathematics of our daily life. For example, what is the best way to cut a cake, why the honeycombs build as hexagons, why bad things always happen in threes, etc. All of such questions are related to mathematics. So even of the people who has math phobia are actually dealing with math everyday.
I highly recommend you guys to read the book Why Do Buses Come in Threes? by Rob Eastaway, Jeremy Wyndham. It is an easy-reading and fascinatic book that gives the amusing, interesting, and practical aspects of math around us, helps you to look your daily life with one more interesting perspective.

Sleeping - Way out for big decisions

Thinking hard about a complex decision will bamboozle our mind. Most people are only able to consider a subset of information or part of the multiple factors in conscious mind, which they may weight inappropriately and resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. Sleeping on a big decision, in contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with, the scientists suggested.
How many big decisions I have ever made and how I made them? Those are the questions come up to my mind. Honestly, I can’t remember any big decision I made recently so far. Um….buying a car? Not really. I did spend some time to search but once I found the car I made the decision very soon. How about quitting my job to seek for further study opportunity? I couldn’t remember I had weighing up the pros and cons to come.
I thought I am a person who always makes snap decisions or judgments, with feeling or the sixth sense. Maybe it is a bit risky but I always remain lucky, happy and satisfy with the results produced, no matter it is wanted/expected or not. How lucky I am! Of course I am not always depend on luck, efforts sometime are required to make things nicer.

Related News: 'Sleeping on it' best for complex decisions -

A thought on laziness

By dictionary definition , laziness is “the lack of desire to act or work in general or to do an act or work that is expected of the person. The general tendency to do nothing”. This “natural instinct” is being dominant in my daily life recently after the starting of my long vacation. Just lost incentives to do any mental works but unfortunately, I have to finish 4 ecology field trip reports before the deadlines in mid January.
Being lazy is always considered as an undesirable quality in the social context. This concept is unpreventable to be part of my value system that makes me feel a bit guilty of not working hard or doing nothing. A typical Hongkonger's thought. Well, I think I should consider laziness in the "health discourse", that it is just a kind of inborn and inherent character of everyone to do nothing that makes me get healthy rest. Just like what the French writer Jules Renard said, “Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired." I feel much better now.
By the way, I am still confident that I can finish my assignments before the deadline as I am always a person who works better with time limit and pressure. =P

The McDownload

After the popularisation of televisions, people watch TV instead of chatting with their friends and family in the dinning table. Similar situation for the computer and Internet users, it becomes more and more usual to eat in front of the screen. This triggers the McDonald’s an innovative idea to further commercialise their junk foods:

The McDownload
Author: Barry Fox
Movie, music or game with your Big Mac, sir? That’s what The Walt Disney Company in Hollywood has in mind. Patents filed by Disney reveal plans to drip-feed entertainment into a portable player while the owner eats in a restaurant.
You only get the full programme by coming back to the restaurant a number of times to collect all the installments. McDonalds could use the system instead of giving out toys with Happy Meals, suggests Disney’s patent.
Portable players and modern cell phones store entertainment files in memory cards. They often have built-in Bluetooth or WiFi, too, for wireless downloading. Big files, such as a movie, take a long time to capture, so Disney will break the file into several segments that can be downloaded separately and spliced together by the player.
When the owner buys a meal they get an electronic code that authorises a partial download. If the file is in five parts there is a strong incentive to come back for four more meals.
In the future, a dedicated player sold or even given away by the restaurant could help the scheme to run more smoothly – and create a new market opportunity for electronics companies.
Source: New Scientist (Dec 05)

To be honest, I really appreciate this weird but intriguing idea. In term of business patent application, it is an exciting strategy and I’d like to see how it works and the impact on McDonald’s business. However, the business practices and ethics of McDonald’s are always controversial or even unethical in the environmental and social aspects. Being one of the biggest worldwide operations, I strongly feel that they need to show their commitment and responsibility to integrate social and environmental priorities of being a good neighbor in the community, not just having fancy ideas to prompt their revenues. Although McDonald’s starts showing their responses by publishing biannual Corporate Responsibility Report and working high-profile on charities, their actions seem like greenwash rather than fulfilling corporate responsibility. A little bit worry about our future generation if they cannot think about the McDonald’s practices more critically but being attracts or addict to the “McFantasy” and ignore their negative impacts on health, social and environment.

Link:McDonald's Worldwide Corporate Responsibility Report 2004