China kung fu monks seek apology for ninja affront

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070831/wr_nm/china_ninja_dc_1&printer=1;_ylt=AmJ_KvImlt2AT5c.67kbeRgh2.cA

Fri Aug 31, 2:05 AM ET

China's Shaolin Temple, the cradle of Chinese kung fu, is demanding an apology from an Internet user who said its monks had once been beaten in unarmed combat by a Japanese ninja, Chinese media reported on Friday.

Shaolin Temple, in the northern province of Henan, became famous in the West as the training ground for Kwai Chang "Grasshopper" Caine in the 1970s "Kung Fu" TV series.

Ninjas -- professional assassins trained in martial arts -- date back to mediaeval Japan.

"The so-called defeat is purely fabricated, and we demand the Internet user to apologize to the whole nation for the wrongs he or she did," the Beijing News said, citing a notice announced by a lawyer for the Shaolin monks.

Relations between Chinese and Japanese are sensitive at the best of times, with emotions still running high over Japan's invasion and occupation of parts of China in the first half of the 20th Century.

The Internet user, calling themselves "Five Minutes Every Day," said on an online forum last week that a Japanese ninja came to Shaolin, asked for a fight and many monks failed to beat him, the newspaper said.

"The facts that the monks could not defeat a Japanese ninja showed that they were named as kung fu masters in vain," the Internet user was quoted as saying in the post.

The Shaolin temple "strongly condemned the horrible deeds" of the user, the newspaper said.

"It is not only extremely irresponsible behavior with respect to the Shaolin temple and its monks, but also to the whole martial art and Chinese nation," it quoted the monks as saying.

Chicago GSB adds powerpoint to application

 

Top Business School Announces Creative Way for Applicants to Present Themselves

Written by EditorsChoice

Wednesday, 01 August 2007

MBA students to present to submit up to four slides with application. A departure from text-only applications of past. Chicago, Illinois (PRWEB) July 16, 2007 -- To enable prospective full-time MBA students to present a more complete picture of their candidacy, applicants to the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, one of the top business schools in the world, will now submit up to four slides about themselves with their application, the school announced. (www.ChicagoGSB.edu)      In announcing the new requirement, the school noted that prospective students are asked to supply facts about themselves throughout the application, but the slides will allow applicants to be creative and tell the admissions committee about themselves using a medium that parallels the communication tools used for professional and social networking.      "This is a departure from the text-only application that we used in the past because under the old format we were unable to capture important information showing how prospective students define themselves," said Stacey Kole, deputy dean at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.      The slides may contain pictures, graphs, text or anything else that prospective students want to include, according to the school.           The requirement applies to students seeking to start the MBA program in September 2008. Applicants must still submit two traditional essays as part of the application process in addition to a maximum of four slides. More information about the school's full-time MBA program is available at http://www.chicagogsb.edu/fulltime/index.aspx      "There is no right or wrong way to satisfy the new requirement," said Rosemaria Martinelli, associate dean for student recruitment and admissions for the school's full-time MBA program. "The important thing is that applicants can express themselves in ways they could not before in essay form," she said.      In today's business environment, communication is fast and concise, Martinelli said. "Whether it be e-mail, PowerPoint or a two-minute elevator speech, successful businesspeople need to learn how to express their full ideas in very restrictive formats. We feel the new application requirement represents this very common challenge," she said. "But instead of using this tool to sell a product or request new business, applicants are using it to present themselves."      In addition to the slides, applicants for next year's entering class must also answer two essay questions. The first essay, limited to 1,500 words, is: "Why are you pursuing an MBA at this point in your career? What are your personal and professional goals and the role an MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business plays in your plans to reach these goals?"      The second essay, limited to 500 words, asks: "If you could step into someone else's shoes for a day, who would it be and why?"      "Feedback from our current students shows that one of the unique things about our MBA program is that it challenges people to think in different ways and to be prepared for the unexpected," Martinelli said. "We keep that in mind as we select our essay questions. The new requirement for slides just takes that to another level."      The slides submitted with the application will not be judged on technical ability but rather the self-expression that is revealed, the school said. "Slides allow people to stretch beyond just the written word and one inch margins into a different space where an applicant can be much more expressive," Martinelli said.      "The slides will be printed and placed in each applicant's file for review, which means all the bells and whistles such as Flash, video clips, embedded music and hyperlinks won't be considered in the evaluation process," she said. "This clearly levels the playing field for everyone."

 

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Fewer Mexicans seen sending money home from U.S.

Wed Aug 8, 2007 6:52PM EDT

By Adriana Garcia

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A lower percentage of Latin American workers living in the United States is sending money to family members back home, a report showed on Wednesday.

The percentage of Mexicans living in the United States who regularly sent remittances home fell to 64 percent in the first half of 2007, from 71 percent in the same period last year, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) said in a study of remittance patterns.

The reduction was deepest in 40 U.S. states where Latin American immigration is a more recent trend, such as Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where it plunged to 56 percent this year from the average 80 percent in 2006.

"In the new destination states, around half a million migrants have stopped sending money home," said Donald F. Terry, the IADB's Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) official who commissioned the survey.

"This means that over the past years two million people in Mexico have lost a vital lifeline," he added. Mexico is the primary destination for U.S. immigrant remittances.

Remittances to Mexico grew 23 percent from January to June of last year, but grew by only 0.6 per cent on the same period of 2007, according to the Central Bank of Mexico.

Remittances sent by Central American immigrants, meanwhile, grew at 11 percent in the same period.

A major difference between them is that almost all Central American immigrants live in traditional destination states, like California or Texas, while about 18 percent of Mexicans have spread to the "new destination" states.

"They have been more adventurous and more aggressive in the search for new jobs," said pollster Sergio Bendixen of Bendixen Associates, a Miami-based firm that conducted the survey.

Bendixen says this group of Mexicans is facing difficulties that have made them less optimistic, such as the lack of well-paying jobs, education and proficiency in English, and lack of legal immigration documents.

He also suggested that immigrants might be saving more money, instead of sending it abroad because they feel uncertainty about their own future.

About half of the 900 immigrants, both Mexican and Central American, were interviewed for the survey were illegal immigrants, he added.

"They just don't feel welcome in the United States any longer," Bendixen said.

About one in three of the Mexicans living in the "new states" thinks they will go back to Mexico in the next five years, against one in four in more traditional states, according to the survey.

The same proportion of Mexicans think that discrimination is the main problem they face now in the United States, while Bendixen said fewer than 10 percent of Hispanics used to think that discrimination was their chief problem here.

The survey was done in June by telephone in 50 U.S. states, the margin of error is +- 3 percentage points.

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"McFood" Better Than Food, Kids Say

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/06/health/webmd/printable3139085.shtml

"McFood" Better Than Food, Kids Say

Aug 6, 2007

---

(WebMD) Whether it's french fries or carrots, preschoolers say food tastes better when it comes in a McDonald's wrapper.

It's not the food, it's the brand name. Marketing strongly affects 4-year-olds' food preferences, find Stanford University pediatrics researcher Thomas N. Robinson, M.D., and colleagues.

Robinson and colleagues studied 63 low-income children enrolled in Head Start centers in California. The kids ranged in age from 3 years to 5 years.

Told they were playing a food-tasting game, the kids sat at a table with a screen across the middle. A researcher reached around either side of the screen to put out two identical food samples: slices of a hamburger, french fries, chicken nuggets, milk, or baby carrots.

The only difference between the pairs of food samples was that one came in a plain wrapper, cup, or bag, and the other came in a clean, unused McDonald's wrapper, cup, or bag. The kids were asked whether they liked one of the foods best, or whether they tasted the same.

In all cases, the majority of the kids said the "best" foods were those linked to the McDonald's brand, even though the only differences between the bags were the McDonald's logos (no special advertising materials were used).

77 percent of the kids said the same french fries, from McDonald's, were better in a McDonald's bag than in a plain bag (13 percent liked the ones in the plain bag; 10 percent could tell they were the same).

61 percent of the kids said milk tasted better in a McDonald's cup (21 percent liked milk in a plain cup; 18 percent could tell it was the same).

59 percent of the kids said chicken nuggets tasted better in a McDonald's bag (18 percent liked them in a plain bag; 23 percent could tell they were the same).

54 percent of the kids said carrots tasted better in a McDonald's bag (23 percent liked them in a plain bag; another 23 percent could tell they were the same).

48 percent of the kids liked hamburgers better in a McDonald's wrapper (37 percent liked them in a plain wrapper; 15 percent could tell they were the same).

Kids who preferred "McFood" tended to live in homes with a greater number of television sets and tended to eat at McDonald's more often than kids not influenced by the McDonald's brand name.

"Children preferred the taste of carrots and milk if they thought they were from McDonald's," Robinson and colleagues conclude. "This is an opportunity for heavily marketed brands to respond to rising rates of childhood obesity by changing their product offerings."

McDonald's spokesman Walt Riker says McDonald's is doing just that.

"McDonald's is only advertising Happy Meals with white meat McNuggets, fresh apple slices, and low-fat milk, a right-sized meal of only 375 calories," Riker tells WebMD. "Additionally, our recent program with 'Shrek' was our biggest-ever promotion of fruits, vegetables, and milk, another indication of our progressive approach to responsible marketing."

Riker says McDonald's own research "confirms that we've earned [parents'] trust as a responsible marketer based on decades of delivering the safest food, the highest quality toys, and the kind of choice and variety today's families are looking for."

In December 2005, the prestigious Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a CDC-funded study on food marketing to children. The study found that advertisers used highly sophisticated techniques to target children who are too young to know the difference between advertising claims and truth.

As a result, the IOM study showed, companies succeed in getting children to eat ever more high-calorie, low-nutrient, and high-profit, junk food.

The Robinson study appears in the August issue of Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. The journal last year published a series of studies linking media messages to harmful effects on children's health, including child obesity.

Three-year-olds, one of the studies found, are three times more likely to be overweight if they spend two or more hours a day in a room with a TV on.

"Past studies have shown that the content of children's TV commercials is overwhelmingly about junk food," University of Michigan researcher Julie C. Lumeng, M.D., told WebMD last year. "And if you show kids commercials, they ask for the junk food. So it may be the TV, even at this early age, is shaping their food preferences."

By Daniel DeNoon
Reviewed by Louise Chang, M.D.
©2007 WebMD, Inc. All rights reserved.