UP, aming minamahal.
Good ole oble. I study at the University of the Philippines. My course is major in social anthropology, minor in poli sci. I just started tho, because I shifted course. My original course was educ, – I do still intend to take educ units.

I just got back from classes a few minutes ago. My Pol Sci 14 teacher is a terror! Or at least he is quite intimidating. He’s huge, talks real fast, hits the board, the table, the chairs, talks real loud- as if almost yelling, and even just the way he looks at people is kinda scary, but at least I know he’s a genuine male specie! I don’t mean to offend anyone, but sometimes I wonder who’s truly male and who isn’t. Being of the supposed “female” specie, of course the males are quite intriguing. Speaking of intriguing, the “foreign language syndrome” is quite a story! Do check out these women who just woke up one day with a different accent!

In the meantime, kita kita nalang sa lobby!

I just started reading the “Chinese System of Food Cures, Prevention & Remedies” by Henry C. Lu today. Here are some interesting excerpts from the book:

Five Flavors of Food
The five flavors of food include pungent (acrid), sweet, sour, bitter, and salty.

Pungent foods include green onion, chives, cloves, parsley, and coriander.
Sweet foods include sugar, cherry, chestnut, and banana.
Sour foods include lemon, pear, plum, and mango.
Bitter foods include hops, lettuce, radish leaf, and vinegar (I list vinegar as bitter because the Chinese call vinegar “bitter wine”. Vinegar tastes both sour and bitter; it is common for some foods to have two simultaneous flavors.)
Salty foods include salt, kept, and seaweed.

The flavors of food are important in Chinese diet, because different flavors have their respective important effects upon the internal organs. Food that have a pungent flavor can act on the lungs and large intestine; foods with a sweet flavor on the stomach and spleen; with sour flavor on the liver and gall bladder; with a bitter flavor on the heart and small intestine; foods that have a salty flavor can act on the kidneys and bladder.

At the beginning, some foods with obvious flavors found to act on some internal organs perform specific actions in the human body. The basic relationships between flavors and internal organs and the actions are studied and analyzed by a process in science called the inductive method. As time goes on, other foods whose flavors are more difficult to determine may be found capable of active upon some internal organs and performing some specific actions.

In general, the common action of foods in regard to their flavors are as follows:

Pungent foods (ginger, green onion, and peppermint) can induce perspiration and promote energy circulation.

Sweet foods (honey, sugar, and watermelon) can slow down the acute symptoms and neutralize the toxic effects of other foods.

Sour foods (lemon and plum) can obstruct the movements, and are useful, therefore, in checking diarrhea and excessive perspiration.

Bitter foods, reduce body heat, dry body fluids, and induce diarrhea (which is why many Chinese herbs recommended to reduce fever and induce diarrhea taste bitter)

Salty foods (kelp and seaweed) can soften hardness, which explains their usefulness in treating tuberculosis of the lymph nodes and other symptoms involving the hardening of muscles or glands.

Mmm… it’s nearly been exactly a year since I went to China. I loved the place we went to, and the food! I never ate so much street food in my life. If only I hadn’t accidentally deleted all the pictures we took of our trip. :’( I just have a few left now.

I read this article which is questioning whether kids should be encouraged to go to college by the time they’re 16. Here in the Philippines, almost all the kids are in college by the time they’re 16. Some people are in college at 14. There are pros and cons to this system. The pro of course is that you finish school much earlier. You can learn more faster- i.e., you could finish your masters by age 21 or 22, and take a doctorate degree if you’re really into it. Or go for a double degree. But for the most part, I find that there are more cons to this system.

First of all, here in the Philippines, once you get to college, you’ve still got a year or year and a half of math, chemistry, english, science, etcetera. How many times over do you have to study that stuff anyway? The Comm 3 course I took – I basically learned as a 12 year old when I had one of my aunt’s friends (a professor from La Salle) come and teach us. And for people like me who are hopeless at math, it’s just depressing to be faced with “Math 11″ in college.

Anyhow, it can also be difficult for a person to decide what course to take. It’s fine if you’ve got parents around or active guidance counselors who can guide you well on what course to take according to your personal strengths or weaknesses, otherwise you’ll see a lot of course switching- and in short, time wasted. And in situations where the 16 year old students move to a totally different place, situation etc to do their schooling, especially if the student comes from a far away, simple province, a lot of people just get ruined that way. They’re unable to take or deal with the peer pressure, etc etc. It can be quite a headache. Nobody said anything in this world would be easy tho.

Should Kids Be Able to Graduate After 10th Grade?

By KATHLEEN KINGSBURY Kathleen Kingsbury – Fri Nov 7, 4:50 am ET

High school sophomores should be ready for college by age 16. That’s the message from New Hampshire education officials, who announced plans Oct. 30 for a new rigorous state board of exams to be given to 10th graders. Students who pass will be prepared to move on to the state’s community or technical colleges, skipping the last two years of high school. (See pictures of teens and how they would vote.)

Once implemented, the new battery of tests is expected to guarantee higher competency in core school subjects, lower dropout rates and free up millions of education dollars. Students may take the exams – which are modeled on existing AP or International Baccalaureate tests – as many times as they need to pass. Or those who want to go to a prestigious university may stay and finish the final two years, taking a second, more difficult set of exams senior year. “We want students who are ready to be able to move on to their higher education,” says Lyonel Tracy, New Hampshire’s Commissioner for Education. “And then we can focus even more attention on those kids who need more help to get there.”

But can less schooling really lead to better-prepared students at an earlier age? Outside of the U.S., it’s actually a far less radical notion than it sounds. Dozens of industrialized countries expect students to be college-ready by age 16, and those teenagers consistently outperform their American peers on international standardized tests. (See pictures of the college dorm room’s evolution.)

With its new assessment system, New Hampshire is adopting a key recommendation of a blue-ribbon panel called the New Commission on Skills of the American Workforce. In 2006, the group issued a report called Tough Choices or Tough Times , a blueprint for how it believes the U.S. must dramatically overhaul education policies in order to maintain a globally competitive economy. “Forty years ago, the United States had the best… read full article

This was taken in La Union, Philippines, soon after one of the big typhoons hit the area.

First of all, congratulations, President-elect Obama! I usually follow the US elections quite closely, but this year I only just started following the election news a few days before the election itself. I was not really eagerly wishing and praying either one would win. I do not exactly fancy Palin, although I am a republican, or maybe I should just start saying I’m an independent. Anyhow, Obama has made history, and I hope the best for him during his term(s).

Now for my day- I just finished enrolling this morning. The second semester starts next week. Yay. I love learning, but sometimes it is hard to keep up with all the different responsibilities, and some teachers are just down right terrors.

During the semester break I took advantage of the extra time I had to work on the projects I am working on. I come from a middle class family with an upper class background. My dad has done community service for the past 30+ years or so, and I think it’s rubbed off on me. I love working with people and know community service is definitely very fulfilling. As the old saying goes, “Good is the man who strives to do his best. Honorable is the man who lives not just for himself, but for others. Glorious is he who lives for the Lord, dedicated to His cause.” Not that I am saying I’m honorable or anything.

Yesterday, it was in our headlines that the Philippines is top 5 in the world for hunger. Knowing that, it is not surprising to know that there is a very high amount of malnourished people in the country. Just in the little elementary school that I volunteered my community service hours for school last semester, over 90% of the children are malnourished. The irony of it all is that these people live in farms and are farmers! Unfortunately the consumerism attitude has greatly influenced these people, and our politicians are no help either. Instead of growing food and eating it, they grow food and sell everything they grow then buy some “goods” wrapped in plastic from the store. What was common knowledge in the past has now been forgotten. People no longer know the herbs to take as medicine, nor do they know the basic foods to eat to keep their bodies strong and healthy. It is this that I want to change. I would like to make it so that my fellow people can have the basic needs and rights that all living beings deserve – at least a full belly, good health, and of course, real education. I have started out outlining my plans and am working with the mayor and other government officials and a big group of my friends and fellow volunteers to get this project to lessen hunger (and hopefully eliminate it) going. After all, how painful and difficult is it actually to reach out and help a fellow human being? A single smile of thanks from someone else can erase all personal sacrifices in such work.

With that, I leave you with some pictures. The first one is one is a picture of rice terraces, as you can see, that my friends took during our hike up to a beautiful waterfall I’ll post about tomorrow. The second one is a nice little river that is just about 200 meters away from the elementary school I teach in. The kids brought me there during their school break the other day, when I was walking around their school taking pictures. The following picture is a picture of the great garbage control system they’ve got going. I especially like how all the plastics and non-degradable wastes are thrown as near the water as possible. (In all the schools I’ve been to the situation is the same) And finally, pictures of my 1st grade students. Just look at those smiles! One thing I really like about working in the rural if not- provincial areas, and with children like these guys is that despite the fact that they’ve hardly got anything, their eyes seem to retain a clarity and the bright freshness like that of cool winds blowing through shady bamboo, and they are definitely much quicker to smile than city folk. As you can see tho, they need some major dental help. That’s another project I’d like to do to help the people around here.

Who would have thought..

Killers In Paradise

The tropics are home to the world’s most venomous creatures-jellyfish with 4 brains, 24 eyes and stingers that can kill you in a minute flat

The sky is an immense bowl of blue and the boiling-hot sun speckles the flat green waters gold as our boat edges out of Port Douglas, Australia, just north of the tropical resort town of Cairns. On board, tourists from around the world are heading for the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest natural structure—stretching for 1,400 miles along the continent’s northeastern coastline.

After a 90-minute journey, we arrive at Opal Reef, a chunk of the Great Barrier Reef five miles long and three miles wide, where frothy white waves break gently over shadowy outcrops of coral as big as houses. We throw on our snorkeling gear and slip quickly into the water, drifting over the shallow reef facedown, entranced by the multihued coral—some resembling giant brains, others massed like stag horns and mammoth fans—and the neon-colored small fish that dart in and out. Not one of the crew members has bothered to warn us that Opal Reef is where one of the planet’s deadliest creatures killed a visitor three years earlier.

Robert King, 44, from Columbus, Ohio, was snorkeling over the same underwater landscape when he felt a mild sting on his chest and came back onto the boat. Within 25 minutes his face flushed tomato-red as severe pain gripped his stomach, chest and back muscles. The skipper radioed for a medevac chopper, whose crew injected King with a massive dose of pethidine, an opiate-like painkiller, then winched him from the boat and rushed him to Cairns.

By the time he was wheeled into the emergency ward at CairnsBaseHospital, King’s speech was slurred. He was put on a ventilator, as doctors pumped him full of painkillers while racing to save his life. A local zoologist, Jamie Seymour, was called in to take a scraping of the sting site. While he worked, Seymour noticed that King’s blood pressure was spiking dramatically. King lost consciousness; then, Seymour says, “an artery or vein in his brain blew.” Blood flooded King’s brain tissues, and two days later he died.

After analyzing the shape and size of the stinging cells, which were about an inch long, Seymour blamed King’s death on a nearly transparent jellyfish the size of a thumbnail. Covered from the top of its head to the tip of its four tentacles with millions of microscopic spring-loaded harpoons filled with venom, it’s one of at least ten related species of small jellyfish whose sting can plunge victims into what doctors call the Irukandji syndrome. “The symptoms overwhelm you,” says Seymour, 40, who himself was stung by an irukandji on the lip, the only part of his body uncovered as he scuba-dived looking for specimens near an island off Cairns in late 2003. “On a pain scale of 1 to 10, it rated between 15 and 20,” he says, describing the vomiting, the cramps and the feeling of panic. “I was convinced I was going to die.” But he was lucky; not all species of irukandji administer fatal stings, and he recovered within a day.

So far, only King’s death—and perhaps that three months earlier of an Englishman, 58-year-old Richard Jordan, farther south on the Great Barrier Reef—can be attributed to irukandji venom, but Seymour cites research suggesting that because the symptoms may resemble strokes or decompression sickness, and can lead to drowning, countless more swimmers have probably fallen victim to Irukandji syndrome in offshore waters throughout the tropics. Stings from the irukandji species who live in waters closer to shore are rarely fatal but are still excruciatingly painful: for centuries before the tiny jellies were identified as the culprit, the local Aborigines at Cairns, the Irukandji tribe, knew that to swim in the shallows in the rainy season, from November to May, was to risk getting stung, although they didn’t know by what.

More ominously for residents of North America, doctors at the U.S. Army Special Forces Underwater Operations School at Key West, Florida, have treated military divers suffering from symptoms similar to the syndrome; U.S. Navy divers have seen Irukandji-like jellyfish in the waters off Cuba’s GuantánamoBay; swimmers have been badly stung in Hawaii; and the Gulf of Mexico and the adjoining southern U.S. Atlantic coastline have seen an increase in people being sickened by stings that almost certainly come from an irukandji or a related jellyfish.

Most jellyfish are passive; they drift up and down in the water column, or are pulled to and fro by the tides and winds. They float through the oceans devouring tiny fish and microscopic creatures that bumble into their tentacles, and are no threat to humans.

Click here to read the rest of the story

It’s funny how life’s best lessons can be learned not in classrooms – not in the most expensive, most prestigous universities.. but right in our much-loved play grounds…

In life…
sometimes you’re up. Everything’s going well, going great! Nothing could be better… or – if things could be better- at least it’s all going quite well as it is.

Then, sometimes, you’re down.
When nothing’s going right. Everything just seems to be getting worse and worse and you’re thinking, “How could anything get any worse?” But they do. But, have faith, have patience.. soon you’ll be up again.. but then, don’t get your hopes too high. Every now and then you’ll have your downs too, and it’s just the way life is.

We all look for stability and peace, and it’s in a whole nother realm we can find that peace – that happiness, which is so deep that no ups or downs could possibly affect it.. it’s a place, once you go to- will give you the foundation and fulfillment you look for, so that the ups and downs that we inevitably experience in this world will not affect us any more than the passing clouds in the sky affect us. And there we’ll find rest.

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Heres the new pic of the day. It’s a cabbage tree. Ever heard of that? they’re pretty cool trees.

Since time immemorial, people have been looking for ways to stay fit and healthy for as long as possible. The Chinese were definitely not left behind in this search for immortality.

For thousands of years, traditional Chinese medicine experts have taught that each day you should eat 5 different types of food. It’s not quite like our regular food pyramid- it’s more color based. It is said that the white foods (like radish/jikama), are good for the lungs, while red things (ex: radish/tomatoes) are good for the heart, green food (like veggies etc) are good for the gallbladder, yellow food (like Bananas, sweet potato, or squash) are good for the liver, and finally, black foods (Ex: black beans/seaweed) are good for the spleen. It’s a very interesting science of health.

This little article is quite a nice reminder of it:

Back in Black: Your Favorite Foods, Only Healthier
Tips and tricks from our resident dietitian, Julie Upton, RD

When it comes to plant-based foods, deep, vibrant colors are one of the best indicators of what’s healthiest. The pigments that give plants their color also provide the antioxidants that protect against heart disease, inflammation, and certain cancers. A simple swap can provide a big nutritional payoff, like choosing pink grapefruit over white, or dark greens over pale lettuce. So it may come as little surprise that black foods can pack a potent health benefit too. That’s exactly the case with the midnight-hued rice, beans, tea, and berries I can’t seem to get enough of lately. Here’s why:

Black rice
This grain—along with the red and purple varieties—is becoming increasingly popular in the United States, and has long been consumed throughout Asia. Black rice is a 100% whole grain food just like brown rice, but it is thought to have a higher anthocyanin content due to its deeper color. A study in China found that when people’s diets were supplemented with black-rice pigments, their risk factors for cardiovascular disease decreased–including levels of C-reactive protein in their blood, an indicator of inflammation.

Black beans
These high-fiber antioxidant powerhouses pack more disease-fighting power than lighter-colored beans. New research shows that the black skins contained 24 plant compounds including 12 terpenoids and 7 flavonoids. The researchers also found that these compounds halted the growth of colon, liver, and breast cancer cells.

Black tea
It comes from the same plant as green and oolong tea, but the dark stuff has a slew of good qualities all to its own. Numerous studies have shown that drinking several cups of flavonoid-rich black tea a day may provide heart-health benefits, offer protection against neurological decline as we age, and provide anticancer properties. Plus it’s got the added benefit of being calorie-free (as long as you don’t drink it with milk and sugar), and its caffeine may help improve your workout.

Blackberries
These tangy treats are rich in polyphenols that have been shown to have antioxidant activity. University of Kentucky researchers isolated blackberry extract in lab studies, and found that its chemicals stopped the growth of colon-cancer cells. They may also help prevent diseases related to chronic inflammation. Don’t like them on their own? Pair them with blueberries and ginger syrup in this light and fruity dessert.

Black mushrooms, potatoes, carrots, and many other specialty black crops are, well, cropping up these days. Let us know if you’ve seen any at your local farmers market and whether you’ve tried them.

By Julie Upton, RD

From: Health.com

Food, (pun not intended) is an all devouring topic and issue in our world today. Time has a very interesting photo gallery of what people from around the world eat. I posted some of those pictures here. It’s interesting that my diet is most similar to the people from Shingkhey Village- wherever that may be.

Here in the Philippines, as of the news report the other day, hunger has gone up by 18.74 percent. It is too bad that people have become so dependent on what has been referred to time and time again as the “colonial mentality”, and so they starve. In a tropical country like the Philippines, almost all the weeds that grow quite abundantly around are edible. Of course it is not just ignorance that has brought about hunger in my country, but also the corruption of our leaders. Of course the next question will be – “Then who put them in power?” And so it goes, the endless cycle.

In my own little ways I work to help educate the Filipinos about their previous way of life, when food that grew around them would be eaten, and not sold and exchanged for store bought foods wrapped in plastic or packed in cans.

What I find most ironic however, is that it seems sometimes, that the bigger problem in our planet is obesity and weight control rather than hunger! For the most part, there seem to be more people running around and trying to lose weight rather than gain weight. Then again, I suppose that is a good thing… but still points down to very basic yet deeper problems/questions that none of our educational systems tackle or even dare go near.