A Daily Fight To Find Food: One Family's Story

by PAM FESSLER


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128618224

Eating Nutritiously A Struggle When Money Is Scarce

by PAM FESSLER


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128621057&sc=fb&cc=fp

Watch the video then play the game Spent

Video
http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/video?id=8466939

Game
http://www.playspent.org/

I played and could not make it to the end of the month with out running out of money

Blog Posting update as of 12/12/11 - Do not respond

Twizinz - 16
Southrenboy - 15
Candylemons - 5
Blondie10 - 55+
Boots - 55+
BellaDancerella11 - 23
Zebra19 - 55+
Bobbersboy - 15
Kat - 12
Mouse - 3
DaBoss - 12
Chamsiin94 - 11
Redneck - 12
Meow Bark - 10
Superman - 8

above are the numbers I came up with. If you do not agree, count up your post and prove to me that you have more or less.

Singsank

Football's Leap of Faith

By Sean Gregory


Time

Go ahead and "Tebow." You know: crouch on one knee, put your fist to your forehead and close your eyes in prayer as Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow does during NFL games. If you're unfamiliar with Tebowing, the latest meme to mesmerize the nation, a quick search will reveal people Tebowing at the Eiffel Tower, on a wedding dance floor, on the curling ice. Not a fan of praying, or of Jesus, or of getting your pant knee dusty? It doesn't matter. Because if you appreciate football, you need to Tebow just a little. You need to give thanks to Tebow, for he has given NFL fans one of the most captivating tales in years.

"I think it's cool," Tebow tells TIME when asked about the Tebowing craze, unruffled by the notion that some people are mocking his display of faith. "You don't know the heart of people. But I tend to think the best of people and believe they are doing it for the best reasons."

Tebow understands clearly that, for better and for worse, he is known for his strong faith as much as his football skills. Even before going 6-1 as the Broncos' starter after replacing Kyle Orton in October and leading the 7-5 Broncos to a first-place tie atop the AFC West division, Tebow was a symbol of America's intense division over public displays of piety. His constant annunciations of his Evangelical faith, dating to his days as a Heisman Trophy--winning quarterback at the University of Florida--and even to high school, when this son of a pastor was the subject of an ESPN documentary segment called "The Chosen One"--make fellow Christians ecstatic. "Tim Tebow is the figurehead for Christianity in sports ... I believe he is fighting against the devil himself," declares the creator of one of several "Pray for Tim Tebow" Facebook pages. But there are hate pages too, and legions of detractors who see no position for God in the huddle and groan at the notion of an NFL star who's a virgin and never curses. Former Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer recently said he wished Tebow would "just shut up" about religion.

For most of his 2010 rookie year, Tebow waited silently on the sideline, holding a clipboard, not the hopes of Christians, in his hands. Since becoming Denver's starter, however, he has won in ways that even an agnostic might call downright divine. He's engineered four fourth-quarter comebacks in seven games, driving the cult of Tebow to epic heights. Searches on Yahoo! for Tebowing skyrocketed in early December, and NM Incite, a social-media-consulting company, says Tebow has generated far more online buzz over the past month than any other NFL quarterback.

Tebow is a chiseled 6-ft. 3-in. (190.5 cm)quarterback who is built--and sometimes throws--like a linebacker. His off-balance, windup delivery is like the golf swing of a weekend hacker somehow playing on the PGA Tour. The Broncos quickly realized he would not succeed in the typical drop-back scheme. "If we were trying to run a regular offense, he'd be screwed," Denver coach John Fox noted last month. So the Broncos pass with prudence. Tebow is averaging 15 tosses per game over his past four starts--Green Bay Packers star Aaron Rodgers, in contrast, has averaged 36 throws a game over that span--and is running an old-fashioned option-style offense, which favors his mobility. Tebow's 20-yard scoring dash against the New York Jets was the NFL's longest last-minute game-winning touchdown run by a QB.

On Dec. 4 he completed 10 of 15 passes for 202 yards and two touchdowns in a 35-32 win over Minnesota. Still, says former Super Bowl MVP Kurt Warner, "he's just not a great passer right now." Warner, another man of deep faith, labels Tebow's success "a modern-day miracle."

But miracles are by definition rare. According to some stats geeks, Tebow is just lucky. Denver's defense has played better in Tebow's starts. A recent post to a Harvard sports-analytics blog, titled "A Statistical Analysis of the Miracles of Tim Tebow," argues that his raw stats have yielded an unexpected number of wins and notes that young NFL quarterbacks who get off to fast starts tend to regress to the mean as opposing teams decipher their weaknesses. "If Tim Tebow continues to play how he's been playing," says co-author Chris Bruce, an MIT grad and Harvard MBA student, "he's not likely to win as he's been winning."

So the debate rages on. NFL.com linked to Bruce's piece; so did SpiritDaily.com a Catholic news site. Even political pundits are weighing in. "Critics have a problem with who Tebow is as a man," conservative commentator Bill Bennett recently wrote on CNN.com "They are bothered by his faith, character and conviction."

Those hoping Tebow will hush up about Jesus should prepare for a letdown. "People say, 'Why isn't it enough to do it one time?'" says Tebow, who addresses interviewers as "Mr." and "Ms.," stays out of trouble and is raising money to build a hospital in the Philippines, where his family has long done missionary work. "But say I'm getting married. Is it enough for me to tell my wife on the day of our wedding that I love her? Or do I tell her at every opportunity?"

Tebow calls his faith a tonic for Tebowmania itself. "I know who holds tomorrow," he says. "That's what gives me comfort in all situations, from the praise to the haters. Because thank goodness I don't have to live the roller coaster that everybody else lives about my life."

Putting the Social into Science

By Nicholas A. Christakis
Time

Look at the words on this page. No one needed to teach you how to see; evolution has hardwired us for this complex task. Now try to understand them. No child is born able to read; this task is learned from parents and teachers in a social setting. In other words, one of our most essential abilities as humans--reading--is the product of a combination of innate and learned traits.

The distinction between nature and nurture was always a false dichotomy even before it became a clich, yet we still tend to think of biology and culture as warring explanations for human experience. But recent scientific discoveries are putting this mind-set on a collision course with reality. Things we once thought were entirely determined by culture--like our choice of friends or our voting patterns--turn out to have deep evolutionary roots. For example, a recent study I co-authored found that people seek out friends who have the same genetic variants that they do, way beyond physical characteristics. Conversely, we also know that early social experiences, such as education, poverty, malnutrition and child abuse, can modify the expression of a person's genes. We even have evidence that a specific kind of cultural activity--the domestication of cattle over the past 7,000 years--has actually altered our genes to make us more lactose-tolerant.

This synthesis of the natural and social sciences is being spurred not only by biological discoveries but also by technological advances. For example, it is now possible to use the Internet to instantly enlist thousands of subjects in virtual labs and conduct social experiments that were previously impossible. Moreover, we now have access to vast amounts of data since we can inconspicuously track the behaviors, purchases, movements, interactions and thoughts of millions of people in real time via credit cards, cell phones and online social networks.

This new biosocial science not only reshapes our understanding of humanity but also holds promise for public policy and public health. Organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institute on Aging (which has funded some of my work) see that some of our most vexing health problems--malaria, for example--cannot be solved by pharmacological and engineering solutions alone. We can develop novel insecticides and special bed nets to prevent mosquito bites and distribute them via clever supply chains to remote villages. Yet if the people there don't change their behavior--and if we can't pair our biological understanding with an understanding of that behavior--then we will continue to fail.

But that's just the start of the potential of biosocial science. Imagine you could reduce devastating market swings by understanding people's biological responses to risk. Or figure out how to control the behavior of dangerous crowds. Or predict the course of an epidemic weeks before it strikes the general public (something we have already done).

The melding of the biological and social sciences can feel threatening. On the political right, people resist because they want to see humans as separate from the natural world and not unmoored from moral or religious absolutes. On the left, they resist because they don't want to believe we have an intrinsic biology that could play a role in human affairs.

For the past 100 years, people have looked to the physical and biological sciences to solve societal problems and have reaped great rewards with discoveries, from nuclear power to plastics to antibiotics. But in the 21st century, it is biosocial science that holds the key to improving human welfare. If we were to see humans as fully part of nature, we might even solve the hardest problem in all of science: the origin of human consciousness itself.

Blood on the Ice

By SEAN GREGORY Monday, Dec. 12, 2011

In Hockey circles, they're known as tough guys, goons, enforcers. They're sluggers on skates. The job description is simple: You touch one of our talented players, our goal scorers, I pummel your face. Underneath the cocky, growling exterior of some hockey fighters, however, is something surprising: fear. Crippling fear. The kind that can keep you up all night before a game, stomach churning, half-wishing that when you do fall asleep, you don't wake up the next day.

Jim Thomson knew the feeling. A former enforcer, he played for six National Hockey League teams from 1986 to '94 and protected, among others, Wayne Gretzky. For Thomson, a steady diet of booze and painkillers helped untangle the late-night knots in his gut. He'd never let on, but whenever Thomson knew he'd have to fight the next day, he was terrified of getting his ass kicked in front of 15,000 fans howling for blood--his blood.

The NHL's enforcers, many of them marginally skilled at best, often become rent-a-fighters who drift from team to team until their usefulness runs out. Thomson says he sustained six documented concussions in his pro career and failed to report dozens of others. He's convinced that these blows to the head, received in dozens of fights, contributed to his anxiety, depression and addiction. Recent scientific research suggests such a connection. After Thomson's playing days ended, his addiction intensified and his depression worsened. At his low point, he curled up in bed, strung out on drugs and alcohol, thinking about taking his own life. "I know what being an enforcer did to me, how it destroyed me," Thomson says.

Thanks to stints in rehab, Thomson was able to bounce back. He now trains hockey players and does some motivational speaking. Others haven't been so lucky. The recent deaths of three enforcers highlighted the potential link between head trauma and mental illness and ignited a debate about whether fighting should have a place in the NHL. In May, the New York Rangers' Derek Boogaard, whose 2010--11 season was cut short by a concussion, died of an accidental overdose of a painkiller and alcohol. Boogaard had a history of substance-abuse problems. On Aug. 15, Rick Rypien, a former Vancouver Canucks player who had just signed with the Winnipeg Jets, killed himself after a decadelong struggle with depression. Two weeks later, Wade Belak, a recently retired defenseman for the Nashville Predators, hanged himself. (Belak's parents have described his death as an accident.)

While of the three, only Rypien's issues with depression were well known, we are aware that mental illness carries a stigma in pro sports and can go hidden. And while only Boogaard had a documented history of concussions, we know that pro athletes often refuse to report concussions, afraid that time off the ice will cost them a job. Belak, Boogaard and Rypien got into over 400 pro-hockey fights combined; accumulated subconcussive blows to the head may lead to addictive behavior and depression.

You can't draw definite conclusions about the root cause of this year's tragedies, but some scientific hints are disturbing. A Boston University research center has diagnosed two former enforcers with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease found in people who have sustained repeated blows to the head. The enforcers were Bob Probert, one of the toughest players of all time, who died in 2010 of heart failure, and Reggie Fleming, who played in the prehelmet days and passed away in 2009 at 73. Fleming, a fierce and fearless player, had suffered from dementia and other CTE symptoms for 30 years. (CTE symptoms include substance abuse and depression and can be diagnosed only postmortem; the Boston University lab is conducting a study on Boogaard's brain.)

After several NFL players were diagnosed with CTE, football took steps to make that game safer. Hockey is trying to do the same. In January, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman noted that concussions are on the rise. If the league wants to reduce head trauma and the risk of its players going through hell, why not scrap a tradition that involves multiple bare-knuckle punches to the head? "The role of the enforcer must go," says Thomson. "What are we waiting for?"

Hockey fighting has passionate defenders, though, even among the ex-enforcer ranks. "The beauty of our game is the diversity," says former enforcer Ryan VandenBussche, who served 70 penalty minutes for each of the 10 goals he scored in nine years in the NHL. "We give the fans what they want." In early October, one of hockey's highest-profile figures, irascible ex-coach and Hockey Night in Canada broadcaster Don Cherry, went so far as to call Thomson and two other enforcers "turncoats," "hypocrites" and "pukes" because Cherry thought they wanted to eliminate fighting. (Two of them didn't; Cherry later apologized.)

Bullies and Blood Sport

Since the dawn of hockey, fighting has been ingrained in the game. Screamed one Toronto Star headline during the NHL's first season, in 1918: "Two NHL Players Under Arrest in Charge of Fighting, Fighting Players Remanded for Sentencing." After the Philadelphia Flyers of the 1970s, known as the Broad Street Bullies, intimidated their way to back-to-back Stanley Cups, teams started an arms race (a fists race, really) to stockpile enforcers. The 1977 film Slap Shot--which starred Paul Newman as a player-coach of a minor-league team that signs a trio of bespectacled goons--glorified hockey as blood sport.

By the early '90s, the NHL began dishing out 10-game suspensions to players who left the bench during a brawl. After a lockout shut down the 2004--05 season, the NHL allowed longer passes and enforced rules against hooking and holding in order to emphasize skill and win back fans. These changes have allowed the game to flow, and with fewer stoppages and less clutch-and-grab defense, players are not as inclined to drop their gloves and square off. Today, according to the NHL, fighting is down more than 50% from its late-1980s peak, to less than a fight every two games.

Not only is fighting less prevalent; its defenders point out that it's far from the main cause of concussions. According to research from St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, fighting causes 8% of all diagnosed NHL concussions. Moreover, fighting proponents insist that throwing punches actually makes the game safer. If the NHL were to ban fighting, the argument goes, concussions could increase: without fear of retribution from enforcers, players might feel freer to take cheap shots. "It's not a gratuitous 'We like fighting,'" says ex-player Brendan Shanahan, now the NHL's chief disciplinarian. Players may be more likely to use their sticks as weapons, for example.

But the NHL is already handing out stiffer penalties for egregious hits to the head while the puck is in play. So why, if fighting were banned, would stick-waving maniacs suddenly emerge? Dr. Robert Cantu, a co-director of the Boston University concussion lab, labels as "horsebleep" the assertion that fighting causes just 8% of hockey concussions, since the research measures only diagnosed concussions. Judging by the enforcers he has examined, he says hockey fighters suffer concussion symptoms "about once every four fights."

And even if we suppose that fighting causes only 8% of concussions, aren't these worth eliminating? Football refs immediately break up brawls. If you fight in a soccer match, your team plays a man short for the rest of the game. Hockey in the Olympics and at the collegiate level in the U.S. survives without fisticuffs. Why can't the NHL? "We evolve with the times," says Thomson. "We once smoked on airplanes, but we stopped doing that when we found out it was killing us. Where do you see more head shots than in a hockey fight? Why don't we start at the top?"

Monday, Dec. 12, 2011 Penn State Of Mind By Sean Gregory with Kayla Webley

In the days following the revelations of the sex scandal at Penn State, the horrific details of a football coach's alleged rape of young boys were difficult to believe. The community's response bordered on incomprehensible: students rioting in defense of Joe Paterno, the revered football giant who lost his job as head coach for failing to do more to stop the abuse; alums at a tailgate party, arguing that Paterno's indifference was no big deal and chanting, "You gotta fight/ For your right/ For JoePa!" to the tune of the Beastie Boys classic; the funeral-home director, escorting a grieving man from the room where he had just identified his deceased mother, saying, "Don't you think there has been a rush to judgment on Joe Paterno?"

"From the outside looking in, you can't understand it," says Andrew Hanselman, a senior majoring in marketing, on the close-knit Penn State culture. "From the inside looking out, you can't explain it."

But as more and more campuses confront the cost of an insular culture, the need to understand--and take action--will only grow. In another college-sports capital, Syracuse University assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine was fired Nov. 27 after being accused of molesting at least three boys during his 36-year career.

In places like Syracuse, N.Y.; State College, Pa.; and Columbus, Ohio, college sports are now too-big-to-fail economies, and this has implications for everything from the safety of students to the mission of the universities. "Some campuses have a misguided perspective," says Brett Sokolow, a managing partner at the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, "that covering these things up will help them in the long term." But if there is a lesson being learned in State College, it is not just danger that comes in the cover-up; it is the risk you face from what you can't see in the first place.

The Happy Valley Bubble

Penn State sees itself as a place that breeds an intense, familial sense of loyalty. It's partly the university's setting--nestled in Happy Valley, the third safest metropolitan area in the U.S., in a town Psychology Today once called one of the least stressful places to live in America. People tend to show up as students and stay forever, in spirit if not in fact. "Even when you leave State College," says Scott Kretchmar, a professor of exercise and sport science who arrived on campus in 1984, "it's attached to you like an umbilical cord." The Penn State Alumni Association, with more than 165,000 members, is the largest dues-paying alumni group in the world. Most senior athletic-department officials are Penn State grads who have worked at the school for decades.

And why would they leave a place where football is cause for epic celebrations that draw more than 100,000 people on Saturdays to the second largest stadium in the western hemisphere, where players are kings and coaches are gods, and none more so than Paterno, presiding for more than 45 years over a $72.7 million empire, the fifth richest among college programs? Penn State football made a $53.2 million profit last year, second only to the University of Texas' $71.2 million. Paterno earned millions from Penn State; he and his wife donated more than $4 million to the school.

With his philanthropy came great power. According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, Paterno thwarted the efforts of Vicky Triponey, the school's former standards-and-conduct officer, to discipline football players for, among other transgressions, beating up other students. Paterno even threatened to stop fundraising if she was not fired. Triponey resigned in 2007. "It's no secret that Penn State football acted unfettered," says Donald Heller, an education professor at Penn State, "and without institutional control."

Matt Paknis, like Paterno an alumni of Brown University, was a graduate assistant coach for Penn State in the late 1980s. "I always scratched my head about that place," says Paknis, now a leadership-development consultant living in Massachusetts. "You had to fit into the approval system that was out there. There wasn't a lot of challenging, saying, 'What's going on here?'"

Paknis, maybe because of his low status, was never welcomed into the inner circle, he says. "There was this projection outside of Penn State that he was the dean, this nice old guy," he says of Paterno. "That's the furthest thing from the truth. He ruled with an iron fist." In that environment, Paknis believes, Penn State would be loath to look too closely at the accusations swirling around former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, for fear of damaging the brand. But other Penn State veterans strongly dispute that self-protection played a role. "There was never a reluctance for Joe to involve people in deep thinking, to tap into creative minds," says Craig Cirbus, an assistant coach for Paterno from 1984 to '94 who became head coach at the University at Buffalo. "He wanted all different views provided." And Paterno's defenders have argued all along that had he and other coaches and administrators understood the extent of Sandusky's alleged crimes, they would have intervened more aggressively. So what is it they weren't able to see?

The Psychology of Protection

Within a college bubble, say organizational psychologists, the urge to shape your mental picture of the world can be overwhelming. "Culture trumps everything," says Laura Finfer, a psychologist and a principal at a New York City executive consulting firm. Colleges, Finfer has found, can be quite clannish: "Cultures define you, and you become blind to everything in front of your eyes."

Or the way you see things changes. Ray Aldag, a management professor at the University of Wisconsin's School of Business, points to two cognitive tricks: selective perception and subjective perception. Selective perception is our bias toward ignoring information that is at odds with our worldview. Subjective perception explains our tendency to couple uncomfortable information with reaffirming facts in order to make ourselves feel better. For example, Penn Staters decry abuse. But pair that with anger over the indignity of Paterno's dismissal, and Paterno becomes a victim.

Cohesive groups like the Penn State football leadership tend to draw boundaries around themselves. "We apply rules of fair and just behavior to our own groups and people within them," says Michelle Duffy, an organizational-behavior professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "But we morally exclude outsiders. In some ways you are dehumanizing out-group members--in this case, the victims."

That dynamic helps explain the problems that can come from campuses that act like city-states, with law-enforcement systems operating independently of local and federal officials. Many campuses have their own police departments, staffed with sworn officers who have the authority to investigate everything from break-ins to murders. Depending on the transgression and how it is reported, some alleged crimes are dealt with on campus, and some are passed to local prosecutors. The colleges have unusual discretion, although stronger enforcement of federal laws is affording them less latitude. The Clery Act, signed into law in 1990, requires colleges and universities that receive federal funds to disclose the number of criminal offenses recorded on campus. Until recently, however, the Clery Act has lacked teeth.

Less-than-transparent reporting of campus crime is a problem beyond Penn State, especially when athletes are involved. So the Obama Administration has created a team dedicated to strengthening enforcement. In early October, the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation of Marquette University after two female students accused athletes of sexual misconduct. The university has been accused by a local prosecutor of failing to report the allegation to Milwaukee police as mandated by Wisconsin law. This year, six institutions are facing fines. That's the same number of schools that the Department of Education fined in the first 18 years of the law's existence. Now 49 schools have been investigated, 26 of them in the past three years. Six-figure fines are the new norm. "We're just beginning to break the silence of sexual violence that exists on campuses," says Alison Kiss, the executive director of Security on Campus, a college safety-advocacy group.

The Grand Experiment Revisited

During his 45-plus years as head football coach, Paterno conducted what he termed "the grand experiment": the idea that major-college athletes could contend for national championships while excelling in the classroom. For the most part, it succeeded. Out of this current painful event, Penn State has a chance to try a new grand experiment. The school could drop football for at least a year.

Such a decision would not be unprecedented. In 1939, University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins, scornful of schools that drew too much attention for their sports teams, ditched football. "We Americans are the only people in human history who ever got sport mixed up with higher education," Hutchins wrote in a 1954 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED article explaining his decision and advocating that others follow suit.

Through the Penn State example, schools across the U.S. would be forced to think about rebalancing academics and athletics. Nearly a third of the players on the Texas Tech football team don't graduate. But in the Big 12 conference, Texas Tech is actually the top academic performer. Among 65 schools with major-college-football programs, only three--Northwestern, Boston College and Duke--graduate 90% or more of their football players. According to Duke University economist Charles Clotfelter, salaries for football coaches at 44 major public universities have grown 750%, on an inflation-adjusted basis, since 1985. Salaries for professors at these schools have risen 32%.

Six months ago, Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel resigned under pressure after trying to cover up NCAA violations. It was a chance for Ohio State president Gordon Gee, who once abolished the athletics department at Vanderbilt University to better integrate sports with that school, to reset the terms on his campus. But on Nov. 28, he announced the hiring of Urban Meyer as football coach, with one of the richest contracts in college-sports history--$24 million plus a country-club membership and a private plane for personal use. The campus bubble keeps inflating; is Penn State, or anyone else, going to pop it?