Weight Loss Programs For Women

Read more

The Wing Girls – Online Dating Tips

I just found this health related video on YouTube … and thought you might enjoy it!

youtube.com/watch?v=Z5P4qU8G3XY%3Ff%3Dvideos%26app%3Dyoutube_gdata

Is your online profile just not cutting it? The Wing Girls give you some ways to make your profile just as hot as you are! The Wing Girls is a weekly dating advice show for guys. Hosts Jet and Star give their opinions and how-to advice about relationships, sex, kissing, dating, and everything every guy wants to know about girls. New episodes every Wednesday. www.thewinggirls.com http ADD US ON FACEBOOK

Tell us what you think about this video in the comments below, or in the Battling For Health Community Forum!
credit-n.ru/zaymyi-next.html

Cyber bullying is a major source of depression among children

Bullying is a real part, if rather sad fact, of life. I always worry over my 2 second graders and what is going on in the school yard where the traditional bullying usually happens

And then there is the new form of bullying – cyber bullying – which is more sinister and destructive. Bullying leads to physical as well as psychological damage.  In the traditional bullying situation, depression is common among the victims but also the bully victims (“those who both dish it out and take it”) and even the bullies themselves. According to researchers, this type of bullying peaks at middle school.

Cyber bullying, on the other hand, is more “toxic”, according to Dr. Jorg Srabstein, medical director of the Clinic for Health Problems Related to Bullying at Children’s National Medical Center. This is because the burden of depression, which is rather high, falls largely on the victim alone. To illustrate the difference between traditional and cyber bullying, Srabstein gives us the following example:

Traditional bullying: “somebody writes an insult on the bathroom wall and it’s confined to the environment of the school.”

Cyber bullying: “in the majority of victimization, there is a wider resonance of abuse, to all corners of the world.”

Cyber bullying has been linked to cases of suicide and murder.

How common is cyber bullying?

The School-Aged Children 2005 Survey showed a more than 50% prevalence of verbal bullying (e.g. name-calling). Relational bullying, e.g. isolation from peers, are also common (about 50%). About 20% of school children have had been bullied physically and 14% experience cyber bullying.

In an anonymous, online survey of 1454 teens aged 12 to 17:

Online bullying was associated with increased distress, as well as with in-school bullying, with 85 percent of respondents who reported at least one online incident also reporting being bullied in school. Most of the bullied teens did not tell their parents about the online incidents. They felt the need to deal with the problem on their own and were fearful of parental restrictions on internet use.

Recent statistics showed that Americans spend 2.6 million minutes on Facebook each day. These so-called social medial platforms, led by Facebook, followed by My Space and Friendster are the most common media for cyber abuse. One site is especially is cause for concern. The relatively new formspring.me allows anonymously virtually uncensored comments and remarks such as:

Go kill yourself and make the world a better place,” or “Is that you in your profile picture? It looks like a dead old man.”

A third of formspring users are under 17.

Government agencies are trying to keep up with technological developments in order to protect those who are online, especially the minors. In August of this year, Facebook, in cooperation with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), launched a new safety feature in its site, basically a panic button called ClickCEOP. According to CEOP chief Jim Gamble:

“By adding this application, Facebook users will have direct access to all the services that sit behind our ClickCEOP button which should provide reassurance to every parent with teenagers on the site. We know from speaking to offenders that a visible deterrent could protect young people.”

The Internet is here to stay and cyber bullying will continue. It is up to us, parents, as well as policymakers, to check on what is going in our children’s cyber lives.

Harnessing the power of social media to #beatcancer

Remember the post I had a couple of months back on how the Internet is spreading health news? Well, this was recently demonstrated by the #beatcancer campaign whose aim was to get into the Guinness Book of World Record as the most number of social media messages in a span of 24 hours. The campaign achieved started on October 16 at 9 am PDT and ended at the same time the following day with a total of 209,771 social messages. But before we continue, let us first try to define social media. Can we? We can only try except that there are too many definitions out there. My favorite definition is from bottlepr which says that social media are:

“…software tools that allow groups to generate content and engage in peer-to-peer conversations and exchange of content.”

Examples of social media tools are YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Twitter, etc. but there are many more.

Now the #beatcancer campaign did not go for all of these but only for the two most popular ones – twitter and facebook. When I logged in to my twitter account on October 17, I got a message that says there are too many tweets coming, thus I’d have to wait for a moment. That was the first time ever that I got such a message.

So who’s behind the campaign?

“#BeatCancer is a social media experiment and movement created by Everywhere, a social media communications and content company based in Atlanta, Georgia. [The purpose is] …to see if they could compete to set a record for the distribution of the largest mass message through social media.”

But it wasn’t just any other social media publicity stunt. It was for the benefit of a social cause, a cancer that everybody knows – battling cancer.

For every tweet, Facebook update, or blog post mentioning “#beatcancer”, corporate sponsors Ebay/Paypal and MillerCoors Brewing Company donated a penny to the cause.

The beneficiaries are four non-profit organizations accredited by The American Cancer Society, and are listed below:

• Stand Up To Cancer is a new initiative created to accelerate groundbreaking cancer research, getting new therapies to patients quickly and saving lives.
• Alex’s Lemonade Stand’s mission is to raise money and awareness of childhood cancer causes and educate others, especially children, to raise money for childhood cancer by holding their own lemonade stands.
• Bright Pink is a national non-profit organization that provides education and support to young women who are at high risk for breast and ovarian cancer.
• Spirit Jump is a grassroots non-profit organization with a mission to provide hope and comfort to the many men, women and children battling cancer.

The record has been set but the campaign in not over. Check out the #beatcancer site to see how you can help.