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7 Steps for Dealing With Difficult People

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Life is a web of relationships. Human beings are social creatures, deeply entangled in countless relationships throughout life. It's natural to gravitate toward those relationships that bring you the most happiness, growth, and fulfillment. However, despite your best efforts and intentions to the contrary, you're sometimes forced to deal with challenging relationships and difficult people.

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Food Shortage

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The world faces widespread food shortages due to global warming: Crops will become scarce as droughts ravage Africa and Asia

Warning has been made by the head of the World Meteorological Society

Parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia will be worst affected by drought

Some 2.8 billion people will live in 'water scarce' areas by 2025

UN has announced parts of Southern Africa, including Malawi is facing food shortages a s drought stunts crops across the region

Widespread water shortages caused by rising global temperatures could lead to food shortages and mass migration, an expert has warned.

The head of the World Meteorological Society, Michel Jarraud has warned that of all the threats posed by a warming climate, shrinking water supplies are the most serious.

It is predicted that by 2025, some 2.8 billion people will live in 'water scarce' areas - a huge rise from the 1.6 billion who do now.

Parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia will be worst affected, with pockets of Australia, the US and southern Europe also predicted to suffer.

Mr Jarraud told Carbon Brief that although it has been a few years since a spate of major food crises, 'all the ingredients are there for a food crisis to come back on a very large scale.'

Earlier this week the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) announced that Southern Africa faces food shortages, as drought, exacerbated by the El Nino weather pattern, delays planting and stunts crops across the region.

'The presence of a strong El Nino episode in 2015/16 raises serious concerns regarding the impact on food insecurity,' the FAO said in the alert.

A COFFEE SHORTAGE IS LOOMING

Droughts in Brazil are expected to cause harvests of popular Robusta and Arabica beans to drop by almost 10 per cent over the next year.

Combined with the fact that global demand for the product is predicted to increase, a shortage of coffee looks inevitable.

Foreign Agricultural Service's global coffee production report says Brazil's Robusta harvest is forecast to decline 3.7 million bags to 13.3 million.

'Arabica output is forecast to fall 1.2 million bags to 36.1 million on lower yields following January's dry growing conditions in Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo, two regions that account for about 80 percent of output.'

The report warned 'global exports and consumption are forecast at record quantities,' meaning there will likely be a shortage in future when growing conditions are not as exceptional in other regions, which are currently making up for Brazil's deficit.

Regional harvests last season were also badly affected by drought conditions, raising the spectre of back-to-back production declines of key cereal crops such as maize.

'In 2015 maize production, accounting for nearly 80 percent of the total cereal output, declined by 27 percent on account of adverse weather,' the FAO added.

Unicef revealed it is particularly concerned about the fate of Malawi, which is struggling with food shortages.

The charity has launched mass screening for malnutrition in children under five across 90 per cent of the country, amid reports food shortages and rising prices are causing increasing hunger.

Malawi has been struggling to cope with drought and the first maize deficit in a decade, Unicef said.

Torrential rains in January forced the south east African country to declare half of its land a disaster zone as floods destroyed crops, killed more than 100 people and displaced 340,000, leading to a 28 per cent fall in the staple maize crop this year.

Experts predict food scarcity will cause a refugee crisis as huge swatches of land become uninhabitable, forcing mass migrations.

'Often we think about climate change in terms of temperature but actually the most important parameter which will be affected is the water cycle,'Mr Jarraud said.

'In a water-stressed area, there will be even more stress on the water resources.'

He believes global warming will make the problem worse, by disrupting established weather patterns, leading to less rainfall in certain areas, depleting groundwater supplies.

'The frequency and intensity of heatwaves will increase and the frequency and intensity of droughts in some parts of the world will increase,' he warned.

Mr Jarraud also warned that diseases will likely affect new parts of the world that didn't have to battle them before.

As the world's population grows, the food shortage problem is set to get worse, The Independent reported.

The UN has predicted the global population will rise to 11.2 billion by the end of the century, from its current level of 7.3 billion - with a lot of the growth coming from Africa - an area that is already stretched for resources.

FOOD SHORTAGES THREE TIMES MORE LIKELY DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE

Global food shortages will become three times more likely as a result of climate change and the international community needs to be ready to respond to price shocks to prevent civil unrest, a joint US-British taskforce warned in August.

Rather than being a once-a-century event, severe production shocks, including food shortages, price spikes and market volatility, are likely to occur every 30 years by 2040, said the Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience.

With the world's population set to rise to nine billion by 2050 from 7.3 billion today, food production will need to increase by more than 60 per cent and climate-linked market disruptions could lead to civil unrest, the report said.

'The climate is changing and weather records are being broken all the time,' said David King, the UK foreign minister's Special Representative for Climate Change, in the report.

'The risks of an event are growing, and it could be unprecedented in scale and extent.'

Globalisation and new technologies have made the world's food system more efficient but it has also become less resilient to risks, he said.

Some of the major risks include a rapid rise in oil prices fuelling food costs, reduced export capacity in Brazil, the United States or the Black Sea region due to infrastructure weakness, and the possible depreciation of the US dollar causing prices for dollar-listed commodities to spike.

Global food production is likely to be most impacted by extreme weather events in North and South America and Asia which produce most of the world's four major crops - maize, soybean, wheat and rice.

But such shocks in production or price hikes are likely to hit some of the world's poorest nations hardest such as import dependent countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the report said.

'In fragile political contexts where household food insecurity is high, civil unrest might spill over into violence or conflict,' the report said.

'The Middle East and North Africa region is of particular systemic concern, given its exposure to international price volatility and risk of instability, its vulnerability to import disruption and the potential for interruption of energy exports.'

To ease the pain of increasingly likely shocks, the report urged countries not to impose export restrictions in the event of wild weather, as Russia did following a poor harvest in 2010.

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World faces food shortages caused by global warming

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Warning has been made by the head of the World Meteorological Society Parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia will be worst affected by drought Some 2.8 billion people will live in 'water scarce' areas by 2025 UN has announced parts of Southern Africa, including Malawi is facing food shortages a s drought stunts crops across the region Widespread water shortages caused by rising global temperatures could lead to food shortages and mass migration, an expert has warned.

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The Science of Sleepy Teenagers

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Photo by Design Pics/Thinkstock Photos

"Making teens start school in the morning is 'cruel,' brain doctor claims." So declared a British newspaper headline in 2007 after a talk I gave at an academic conference. One disbelieving reader responded: "This man sounds brain-dead."

That was a typical reaction to work I was reporting at the time on teenage sleep patterns and their effect on performance at school. Six years on, there is growing acceptance that the structure of the academic day needs to take account of adolescent sleep patterns. The latest school to adopt a later start time is the UCL Academy in London; others are considering following suit.

So what are the facts about teenage slumber, and how should society adjust to these needs?

The biology of human sleep timing, like that of other mammals, changes as we age. This has been shown in many studies. As puberty begins, bedtimes and waking times get later. This trend continues until 19.5 years in women and 21 in men. Then it reverses. At 55 we wake at about the time we woke prior to puberty. On average this is two hours earlier than adolescents. This means that for a teenager, a 7 a.m. alarm call is the equivalent of a 5 a.m. start for people in their 50s.

Precisely why this is so is unclear, but the shifts correlate with hormonal changes at puberty and the decline in those hormones as we age.

However, biology is only part of the problem. Additional factors include a more relaxed attitude to bedtimes by parents, a general disregard for the importance of sleep, and access to TVs, DVDs, PCs, gaming devices, cellphones, and so on, all of which promote alertness and eat into time available for sleep.

The amount of sleep teenagers get varies between countries, geographic region, and social class, but all studies show they are going to bed later and not getting as much sleep as they need because of early school starts.

Mary Carskadon at Brown University, who is a pioneer in the area of adolescent sleep, has shown that teenagers need about nine hours a night to maintain full alertness and academic performance. My own recent observations at a U.K. school in Liverpool suggested many were getting just five hours on a school night. Unsurprisingly, teachers reported students dozing in class.

Evidence that sleep is important is overwhelming. Elegant research has demonstrated its critical role in memory consolidation and our ability to generate innovative solutions to complex problems. Sleep disruption increases the level of the stress hormone cortisol. Impulsive behaviors, lack of empathy, sense of humor, and mood are similarly affected.

All in all, a tired adolescent is a grumpy, moody, insensitive, angry, and stressed one. Perhaps less obviously, sleep loss is associated with metabolic changes. Research has shown that blood-glucose regulation was greatly impaired in young men who slept only four hours on six consecutive nights, with their insulin levels comparable to the early stages of diabetes.

Similar studies have shown higher levels of the hormone ghrelin, which promotes hunger, and lower levels of leptin, which creates a sense of feeling full. The suggestion is that long-term sleep deprivation might be an important factor in predisposing people to conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.

Adolescents are increasingly using stimulants to compensate for sleep loss, and caffeinated and/or sugary drinks are the usual choice. The half-life of caffeine is five to nine hours. So a caffeinated drink late in the day delays sleep at night. Tiredness also increases the likelihood of taking up smoking.

Collectively, a day of caffeine and nicotine consumption, the biological tendency for delayed sleep, and the increased alertness promoted by computer or cellphone use generates what Carskadon calls a perfect storm for delayed sleep in teenagers.

In the United States, the observation that teenagers have biologically delayed sleep patterns compared with adults prompted several schools to put back the start of the school day. An analysis of the impact by Kyla Wahlstrom at the University of Minnesota found that academic performance was enhanced, as was attendance. Sleeping in class declined, as did self-reported depression.

In the U.K., Monkseaton High School near Newcastle instituted a 10 a.m. start in 2009 and saw an uptick in academic performance.

However, a later start by itself is not enough. Society in general and teenagers in particular must start to take sleep seriously.

Sleep is not a luxury or an indulgence but a fundamental biological need, enhancing creativity, productivity, mood, and the ability to interact with others.

If you are dependent upon an alarm clock or parent to get you out of bed; if you take a long time to wake up; if you feel sleepy and irritable during the day; if your behavior is overly impulsive, it means you are probably not getting enough sleep. Take control. Ensure the bedroom is a place that promotes sleep-dark and not too warm-don't text, use a computer, or watch TV for at least half an hour before trying to sleep, and avoid bright lights. Try not to nap during the day and seek out natural light in the morning to adjust the body clock and sleep patterns to an earlier time. Avoid caffeinated drinks after lunch.

It is my strongly held view, based upon the evidence, that the efforts of dedicated teachers and the money spent on school facilities will have a greater impact, and education will be more rewarding when, collectively, teenagers, parents, teachers, and school governors start to take sleep seriously. In the universal language of school reports: We must do better.

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Starting School Later Makes Teenagers Happier and Smarter

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"Making teens start school in the morning is 'cruel,' brain doctor claims." So declared a British newspaper headline in 2007 after a talk I gave at an academic conference. One disbelieving reader responded: "This man sounds brain-dead." That was a typical reaction to work I was reporting at the time on teenage sleep patterns and their effect on performance at school.

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Seven hours sleep needed to avoid mental decline, Vancouver Alzheimer's conference told

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VANCOUVER -- Seven hours - not more and not less - appears to be the magic number when it comes to how much sleep we need to keep our brains sharp and possibly avoid mental decline or even Alzheimer's disease, according to the researchers of new studies presented in Vancouver Monday.

The preliminary (unpublished) research was discussed at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference, being held here this week for about 4,000 researchers and Alzheimer's experts.

Too much sleep - either all at once or including naps during the day - may be just as bad as too little; both are associated with mental decline. People who have disrupted sleep because of snoring and sleep apnea, or daytime sleepiness, are also more likely to experience mild cognitive impairment or dementia.

But whether sleep problems are a cause of mental decline, an effect, or both, is still open for more study, debate and proof.

"Is it a chicken or egg scenario? The truth is, we don't yet know, and at this point, my guess is it's bi-directional," said researcher Elizabeth Devore, conceding that sleep problems aren't exactly uncommon in people over 65. Indeed, more than half of those over that age have sleep disturbances that are also associated with many other health conditions like depression, stroke and cardiovascular disease - also risk factors for dementia.

However, Devore, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and other researchers, said that in all their studies, they took into account those confounding factors, and they still came up with results showing sleep and cognitive decline are linked.

"What we can say is that extreme sleep durations [too little or too much] may contribute to cognitive loss," she said.

The research conducted by Devore and colleagues was based on data from more than 120,000 nurses who were aged 30 to 55 when they enrolled in the Nurses' Health Study. They have answered questionnaires every few years and queries about sleep were added in 1986 and 2000. Cognitive testing was also done between 1995 and 2001, when the nurses were all at least age 70.

The researchers found that nurses who slept five hours a day or less had lower average memory and cognition scores than those who slept seven hours a day.

Those who slept at least nine hours a day also had lower cognition scores than those who slept seven hours.

An analysis of the results revealed that women whose sleep changed by at least two hours a day had worse mental function than those with no change in sleep time.

Dr. Kristine Yaffe of the University of California (San Francisco) said that in other studies on more than 1,300 women over age 75, those with sleep apnea or some other disordered breathing had more than twice the odds of developing cognitive impairment or dementia over a five-year study period, compared to those with no such breathing problems.

Women who had greater nighttime wakefulness, or insomnia, were more likely to get worse scores on cognition and verbal fluency tests. Sleep apnea (suspension of breathing during sleep) and snoring - which a third of the elderly experience - both decrease oxygen levels in the blood, causing a state called hypoxia.

Yaffe said she thinks hypoxia deserves far more study in the context of dementia. Referring to an unrelated study, she noted that in resuscitated cardiac arrest patients, there was a rise of blood amyloid levels immediately afterwards. Amyloid is a protein that accumulates in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, causing sticky plaques. There may be a connection, then, between oxygen deprivation from something as banal as snoring, and dementia.

In light of the new findings, Devore said doctors should be assessing patients for sleep problems and referring them to sleep specialists who may be able to prescribe treatment to perhaps delay or prevent dementia. Machines called CPAPs have been shown in some small studies to improve cognition, she noted.

Presenting results from a continuing eight-year three-city study done on nearly 5,000 people in France, Dr. Claudine Berr told delegates that excessive daytime sleepiness, often necessitating napping, was an independent risk factor for cognitive decline.

By contrast, difficulty staying asleep was not associated with cognitive decline; in fact it appeared to have a protective effect, according to data from the National Institutes of Health and Medical Research study.

"It may be that excessive sleepiness, which was shown in our study to be associated with a 30-per-cent increased risk of cognitive decline, may be due to early stage brain lesions in areas [of the brain] associated with circadian rhythm abnormalities," she said.

During the question and answer session with delegates, an American neurologist noted that some patients who are prescribed a hormone supplement called melatonin experience vastly improved sleep patterns. So instead of prescribing sleeping pills, doctors should think about recommending melatonin because of its safer profile.

There was general agreement that studies on melatonin and dementia prevention should be done and that doctors also need some standard prescribing guidelines for melatonin, which some people use for jet lag and insomnia.
Sun Health Issues Reporter pfayerman@vancouversun.com

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Seven hours sleep needed to avoid mental decline, Vancouver Alzheimer's conference told

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Seven hours - not more and not less - appears to be the magic number when it comes to how much sleep we need to keep our brains sharp and to possibly avoid mental decline or even Alzheimer's disease, according to researchers of new studies presented in Vancouver Monday.

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topic:Smoking

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At the end of 1999 Kingsley Wheaton found himself in the middle of a coup d'état. At 23, he had joined the cigarette manufacturer Rothmans, who sent him to Dubai. When British American Tobacco acquired Rothmans, Wheaton was given the option of relocating to West Africa. He moved to Abidjan, the commercial capital of Ivory Coast, to promote a portfolio of brands including Craven A, Benson & Hedges and Rothmans. Abidjan, colloquially known as the "Paris of Africa", was considered a desirable posting, but, at the turn of the millennium, a period of stability was ending. On Christmas Eve, President Henri Konan Bédié was overthrown. "We were locked in our houses with gunfire going on for three days," Wheaton recalls. "It was quite spicy."

Exactly 15 years later, Wheaton found himself in the middle of another potential conflict. In the intervening years he had run the Russia office for BAT, and become the youngest-ever board member at the world's second largest international tobacco firm. At the end of 2014, BAT rewarded his hard work by putting him in charge of their "next generation products", responsible for devices that deliver nicotine without smoking. Now 41, thickset and goatee-bearded, Wheaton was charged with steering his company's efforts to enter a field that had the potential to destroy its traditional operations.

"Now you've got to deliver, and the world awaits, and BAT wants results," he says. "But that's fine. That's all part of that excitement, I suppose."

Since the 1950s, the world's major tobacco companies have faced one setback after another. In a study of 40,000 British doctors beginning in 1951, British epidemiologists Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill demonstrated the link between tobacco smoking and disease. In the years that followed, Western governments introduced increasingly punitive regulatory and taxation regimes. The US banned TV advertising in 1970. Cigarette logos gradually faded from Formula 1 cars, and health warnings on packs proliferated in size and punch. Finally, in March 2015, the British government followed Australia's example and introduced plain packaging. Tax now accounts for about 80% of the price of cigarettes in the UK and adult smoking prevalence - 22% for men and 17% for women - is less than half its levels in 1974. (According to the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association, the typical price of a packet of 20 premium cigarettes in Spain is £3.78 and in Poland £2.74, compared to £8.99 in the UK. Thirty eight per cent of Polish and 33% of Spanish adult males smoke, according to the latest World Bank data [2011].)

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Though the odds were stacking higher against them, the firms could still cope. Big Tobacco acclimatised to falling demand; the developing world offered a growing market and, paradoxically, heavy tax regimes in the West disguised price hikes by the manufacturers. When much of the retail price is taxation, the manufacturer can have a significant increase in their share of the price with a relatively small increase at the retail level. The big four global tobacco companies made $32bn in pre-tax profits in 2014.

Lately, though, a more drastic change has arrived. In 2003 a Chinese technologist called Hon Lik invented the electronic cigarette, a device that delivers nicotine through an aerosol of propylene glycol and glycerin rather than via the combustion products of dried tobacco leaves.

Independent producers pioneered the product, and the first "e-cigarettes" were crude. For a while Big Tobacco stood on the sidelines, content with the status quo. Soon, though, e-cigarettes improved and the market scaled up. Last year global sales accounted for $4-$5bn, a fraction of the $722bn that conventional cigarettes tallied in 2013, but still a significant sum. Pundits suggested that, in time, e-cigarettes would change the way nicotine was consumed worldwide.
See all of the best photos of the week in these slideshows
"It's game-changing," says Bonnie Herzog, an analyst at Wells Fargo in the US and one of the most bullish exponents of e-cigs and other "reduced risk products". "I'm of the view that in the next decade consumption of these products will surpass consumption of tobacco cigs."

Big Tobacco began to realise that, rather than just a temporary fad, e-cigarettes represented a new threat to their established markets. And that wasn't all - they might be the prototype of a product the industry had long searched for in vain: the safer cigarette.

"The Kodak scenario, they talk about that," says David Sweanor, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and veteran of tobacco control, referring to the film manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy in 2012, pole-axed by digital photography. "They don't want to do a Kodak."

"The potential for a product which satisfies their customers but doesn't do anything like the harm is something they've been dreaming of for a long time," adds Jonathan

Fell, who runs Ash Park Capital, a fund that invests in tobacco stocks. Latecomers to the party, the tobacco firms now began to move. Their mergers and acquisitions teams started to buy up independent e-cigarette producers. In April 2012, American brand Lorillard purchased Blu for $135m. In 2014, Japan Tobacco took Zandera, maker of E-Lites. Imperial Tobacco concluded a deal with Hon Lik, the Chinese inventor of the e-cigarette. Philip Morris International, the makers of Marlboro, bought Nicocigs. And in December 2012, British American Tobacco purchased a Manchester start-up called CN Creative.

"They want a dog in the fight," says Clive Bates, a former head of the campaign group Action on Smoking and Health, who now blogs on the e-cigarette industry.

This is the story of BAT's dog.
The dancing devil
BAT's research and development facility sits in a former cigarette factory in Southampton on the south coast of England. Downstairs, a production line remains for trialling new products. All UK workplaces went smoke free in 2007. However, BAT has, by special dispensation, a room where their internal blenders and testers can still work in a smoke-wreathed environment.

At the centre of this complex sits Dr David O'Reilly, BAT's group scientific and R&D director. O'Reilly, who has silver hair and makes carefully measured movements, explains that BAT's experiments with alternative products predated the advent of the e-cigarette. The R&D department itself was created in the 1950s in response to Doll and Hill's report on the dangers of smoking. The first head of R&D was the physicist Charles Drummond Ellis. His remit: to invent a safer cigarette. "The report came out," O'Reilly says. "The response of the board was, 'Okay, so we need to find out what's causing this in cigarette smoke and remove the problem'."

In O'Reilly's version of events, when e-cigarettes first appeared the company was uninspired by the initial iterations of the technology, and believed that European regulation would categorise such products as medicinal - a threshold that would be hard to meet using the propylene glycol model. In June 2011, therefore, BAT entered into a partnership with Kind Consumer, a company working on a nicotine inhaler that uses HFA, a chemical found in asthma inhalers. In September 2014, BAT became the first tobacco company to gain a UK medicines licence for a product it called Voke.

The founder of Kind Consumer is 32-year-old Alex Hearn. As an undergraduate at Oxford University, medical invention fascinated him. A smoker himself, he read scientific papers suggesting that the real harm came from the smoke, not the nicotine.

Hon Lik, the inventor of the e-cigarette, had had a similar idea. Yet Hearn ruled out heating vapour, wary of the potential of that process to create unwanted chemicals. He founded Kind in 2006. The company attracted investment from former Tesco CEO Terry Leahy. However, he says, the cost of medical licensing made going it alone difficult.

Hearn says he pitched the idea to pharmaceutical and consumer goods companies but that neither wanted to know. That just left Big Tobacco. "Do we partner with the old 500lb gorilla, the dancing devil, which was BAT and others, or do you try and do it yourself?" he says.

The young inventor chose the dancing devil.
The whole addiction element
The collaboration with Kind required BAT, in effect, to construct an in-house pharmaceutical firm. The architect of that institution was Kevin Bridgman, chief medical officer at Nicovations, BAT's subsidiary for medically licensed products.

I meet Bridgman one January afternoon at Globe House, BAT's headquarters on the banks of the River Thames in London. The building's lobby includes a photomural of cheerful smokers titled "Satisfying Consumer Moments", and the hints of eccentricity run deeper. Occasional "Cigar Store Indians" - carved statues of Native Americans traditionally found in tobacconists - adorn the otherwise modern offices.

Bridgman himself has dark hair and is 51 years old. After eight years as a medical doctor he moved into the pharmaceutical industry, where he spent two decades at Pharmacia & Upjohn, Pfizer and then Johnson & Johnson. He had set himself up as a consultant when BAT called in 2012.

"I was, as a physician, a little bit cautious about a tobacco company," Bridgman admits. "So I said, 'I'll come and join as a consultant'." After six months, he enlisted full time. "I actually very quickly became very comfortable with what was going on here," he adds. Doing a pharmaceutical job inside a tobacco company brings complexities, though. Some scientists refuse to accept funding from the tobacco industry. Likewise some academic publications, including the British Medical Journal and its sister publications, refuse to publish research funded by the tobacco industry, suggesting it can be biased.

Voke, which BAT plans to bring to market by the end of this year, consists of a red and white cuboid the size of a normal cigarette packet. A hinge at one side reveals a removable cigarette-like object. There are no electronics; no heating. Compressed HFA powers the device and the consumer inserts the mouthpiece into a port at the base of the packet to recharge it. Unlike an e-cigarette, no vapour is visible when you breathe out.

The scale of the cultural collision Voke is creating is clear on another day in February this year at Globe House. In a seminar room Bridgman briefs Kingsley Wheaton on the extensive regulations that apply to medically licensed products. The process takes hours. Bridgman's slides explain the mechanisms required for recording unforeseen events and the ways advertising claims need to be backed up. Tobacco veteran Wheaton looks like a boy on his first day at school.

He turns to Bridgman, who has spent much of his previous career working on pharmaceutical nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products. "With all the power of big pharma companies," he asks. "With all the insight, everything they have in their toolkit, their inability to really break through with NRT still amazes me," he says.

"There's a major fear, among some parts, of having a product that looks like a cigarette," Bridgman replies. "They don't want any kind of reputational challenge with their core customers, who are doctors. Secondly there's the whole addiction element."

"I see," Wheaton muses. "Because addiction is a disease. Because they're giving people nicotine, they're saying, 'I'm giving them a disease'."
Spaghetti hoops and baked beans
In parallel to the Voke project, BAT bought CN Creative. When questioned, BAT executives suggest the production of a more conventional e-cigarette in parallel to the Voke medically licensed product is an attempt to produce a wide range of products. A device that heats rather than burns tobacco is also in the pipeline for 2016, though BAT will say little about it at this time.

Not everyone agrees. One public health operative, who did not want to be named because of her public profile, suggested that a BAT executive called Adrian Marshall pursued the medical licence route with Voke until a separate faction in BAT witnessed the boom in e-cigarettes, and then purchased CN Creative without consulting him. Marshall, now working for an independent e-cigarette firm, Gamucci, did not respond to an interview request. In a statement, BAT says Marshall was "fully consulted regarding British American Tobacco's e-cigarette business plans".

BAT's initial e-cigarette offering, the "Vype", was first launched in July 2013, eight months after the acquisition of CN Creative. In its compact "eStick" form, Vype comes in a container with a U-shaped cross section just over 9cm long. Flipping the translucent lid reveals a removable, cigarette-like object, its base squidgy like a conventional cigarette filter. The eStick starter kit costs £12.99 and the product is available in "blended tobacco," "crisp mint" and "dark cherry" flavours.

The larger ePen, which sells for £14.99 in the UK, features replaceable cartridges in the same flavours. Refills are £5.99 for three. For the time being Vype is only available in the UK.

One day at Globe House Kingsley Wheaton breaks down the "value chain" for "combustible" versus e-cigarettes. With conventional cigarettes in the UK some 80% of the price goes in excise and VAT (elsewhere in Europe taxes are lower). Cigarettes shift rapidly and in large quantities, though, so retailers will accept low margins, and production cost is relatively low due to scale. Profit remains substantial: in 2013, BAT's global operating margin was 38.1%. By comparison, the 10 largest carmakers worldwide averaged a 6% profit margin according to last year's Forbes's Global 2000 survey.

With e-cigarette refills the picture is different. Product cost is higher, as is the retail margin, given that sales are unproven. Yet for the time being there is no excise to pay, just standard VAT at 20%. BAT documentation suggests that, in the UK, a higher profit margin is possible for e-cigarette refills than for cigarettes - more than 20% as opposed to less than 10%.

"There's just two very different shapes," Wheaton says. He would not give figures for current sales of Vype. David Graham, a senior vice-president at the independent e-cigarette firm NJOY, is among those who suggests there is "a powerful conflict" between Big Tobacco's e-cigarette ventures and their existing combustible businesses. Wheaton pointed out, though, that in the UK BAT's share of cigarette sales is just under 10%. If e-cigarettes or Voke take smokers away, there is a good chance they will prise them from another manufacturer. That situation would be different for the two firms that dominate the UK's cigarette market: Japan Tobacco (which markets Benson & Hedges and Camel) and Imperial Tobacco, which sells Lambert & Butler. Others are sceptical of the cannibalisation argument. "Does selling spaghetti hoops hopelessly conflict with selling baked beans?" Clive Bates asks. "Heinz do both."
Gone in seven seconds
How best to market e-cigarettes is a complex question. One Wednesday afternoon in February I accompany Wheaton to Knightsbridge in West London. Three letter acronyms are in triple union at this meeting. BAT has come to WPP, the world's largest advertising agency, to refine its strategy for selling NGP: next generation products.

"This is the year in which it's exploded; it's become part of society and culture," a WPP digital planning director called Malky Brown says, in a Scottish accent. He runs through the advertising tactics of BAT's rivals in the e-cigarette market. Britain banned televised tobacco advertising in 1965 but since November 2014, e-cigarette promotion has appeared, controversially, on screen, as well as in print and online.

Brown shows a campaign from Blu, the brand owned by Lorillard. Up flashes a slide of Blu's "party bus", which traverses bars and clubs disbursing product. The black vehicle sports the slogan, "Freedom for the Taking", in large letters.

"It doesn't look like a party bus, does it," Wheaton says. "If you're, like, 19 years old, Kingsley, you'd think that was a party bus," Brown replies.

Now comes NJOY, the independent brand in which a man steals the oversized head from an American football team mascot. "Friends don't let friends smoke," a voice announces. "Give them an NJOY King electronic cigarette."

For Brown, these efforts fall into two categories. Either they suggest freedom and excitement, like Blu, or they present a healthier alternative to cigarettes, à la NJOY. "It's always about how we can position ourselves as close to cigarettes as we can," he says.

When the presentation is done Wheaton addresses the ad man. "So, Vype?" he asks. "Which of those two do we sit in?" Brown replies. "That's the question."

The answer, he insists, is neither. Brown presents research, suggesting smokers who might switch over to vaping are baffled. "There's this over here and people saying 'let's just get one that looks like a cigarette' over here," he says. "Niche and unrecognised brands. Who do you trust, which one's good?" His solution is to disregard the lifestyle choice idea and the better alternative to smoking. Instead, the line would be "simple, quality vaping products".

Up spins a Vype TV spot. Tingly music plays. Fingers rotate a black ePen against a white field. "We gave ourselves 10 seconds to change the cartridge on our Vype ePen," a voice announces. "We only needed seven."

Wheaton is pleased. "I think it's fantastic," he says. "It's clever, it's clear, it's smart, it's of now. It's cerebral in a way. Very hard to define."
The Golden Dragon
On a number of levels, the e-cigarette situation represents an encounter between individuals and behemoths, though it is not always clear who will prevail.

In Amsterdam in February, fog hangs over the canals and the Dutch cycle with casual disregard for head protection. I have come to meet Hon Lik, the father of the electronic cigarette.

I arrive at the headquarters of Fontem Ventures, Imperial Tobacco's own e-cig subsidiary. It is a strange meeting. Fontem HQ has a start-up feel. Young people tote laptops and wander past stacks of "Puritane" e-cigarettes. In this funky world Hon presents a contrast - a bespectacled middle-aged Chinese man in a dark suit. In close proximity follows his translator, Annie Zheng Yi.

Hon's development of the e-cigarette began when he worked at a Hong Kong-listed healthcare firm called Golden Dragon. At that time he was a heavy smoker - three packs per day. "He had some physical reactions to it, for instance itchy throat, coughing," Zheng Yi explains. "So he realised there are some adverse effects of smoking."

In late 2002, Hon began experimenting with alternative vehicles to deliver nicotine. The idea to use propylene glycol (PG) came from a method of dust removal, in which water mixed with PG is boiled, creating a mist that coats dust particles in the air, pulling them down to the ground.

Later, Fontem sent me a photograph of the initial prototype that he made at Golden Dragon. Its mouthpiece was attached to an external circuit board by umbilical wires. The contraption was designed to test automation; a coil passed through a nicotine solution carried a current, creating vapour. "You can assume that's a test ground," Hon says. "It's not a product, not having the current look and feel. You would not realise it is an e-cigarette."

The first device to come to the market, in October 2004, was called Ruyan. Hon's translator explains the etymology. "Ru means "likewise", and sometimes it even means beyond, or better. Yan actually means smoke, and cigarette."

In 2013, Imperial bought the patents from Hon and his firm Dragonite for $75m. In March last year Imperial instigated lawsuits against 11 American e-cigarette manufacturers, including NJOY and Logic Technology Development, claiming their products infringed their freshly acquired IP.

There is a wider lesson here: Hon pioneered the product that threatened to disrupt Big Tobacco; 12 years on, he now works for Big Tobacco. Like Alex Hearn in England, he partnered with the 500lb gorilla. Wells Fargo's Bonnie Herzog is among those who believe Big Tobacco will probably emerge as the eventual sector winner, though the market will retain room for "several smaller or independent players".
The Vapelab
Another Goliath vs David case is emerging between Big Tobacco and what has become loosely known as "vaping culture". Vapelab is one of its institutions, based in Shoreditch in East London. In some ways Vapelab is atypical of an alternative culture - "the Harrods of the market", as one vaper says, its prices reflect the cost of London's commercial real estate. Despite that, the atmosphere amid its hipster chic furnishings illustrates how vaping has burgeoned into a phenomenon.

Inside, an ATM is denominated in Bitcoin and bare bulbs hang from long cables. At the counter, serried "e-liquids" - nicotine solutions - sit in tanks. Flavours include "tropical toucan", "bananaquit", and "crème de la vanille". William Francome, a documentary filmmaker, discusses with Leonardo Verzano, one of the shop's employees, how he can follow up on an e-cigarette he has acquired from the United States. Verzano talks Francome through four devices that Vapelab offers as starter kits: the Joyetech Joye510CC, the eCom-C Twist and two products made by TECC: the Curve and the Curve Mini. These range from £30-£50 (€42-€70). None resembles a cigarette.

In this diverse new world, the kinds of devices pioneered by Hon Lik are now known as first generation e-cigarettes, more recent products as second or third generation. The categories are slippery. However, broadly, the following divisions can be drawn: first generation e-cigarettes mirrored conventional cigarettes in form, hence the alternate name of the "cig-a-like". These used sealed reservoirs of nicotine solution - cartridges - that cannot be refilled. Examples in the UK included E-Lites and some incarnations of NJOY. Conventional cigarette dimensions constrained battery size with a consequent impact on performance. Many smokers found cig-a-likes fundamentally unsatisfying.

"Products that look like a cigarette are, for the most part, unfeasibly expensive and, in reality, under normal user conditions, little more than a placebo," says David Joyce, a 44-year-old vaper from Telford.

Third generation products are more elaborate still, distinguished by options for user customisation. Users say second and third generation devices are more effective at weaning them off conventional cigarettes.

"I started off with a ciggie lookalike, seven years ago in July," says Chrissie Gray, a property developer from St Blazey in Cornwall. "It helped me cut down drastically, but it wasn't till I got better kit and e-liquids that I managed to completely give up smoking."

That finding is supported by a paper published in the journal Nature last year, which showed that new generation devices produced blood plasma nicotine levels 35-72% higher than first generation devices, though delivery was still slower than with conventional cigarettes.

The growth of the vaping subculture is significant for Big Tobacco: it is not entering a virgin market. There are already loyalties, a knowledge base and, in many cases, profound scepticism of traditional cigarette manufacturers. "We've already given them tens of thousands of pounds over the years each," says Kevin Inskip, a 61-year-old graphic designer from West Yorkshire. "There's a certain amount of resentment about giving them any more." This scepticism was apparent in responses to a thread I started on the E-Cigarette Forum (e-cigarette-forum.com), one of the leading vaping sites, canvassing responses to BAT's "Next Generation Products".

Among some 60 responses scepticism of Vype fell into three main areas: the first was the efficacy of the device itself and how it compares to the offerings of independent producers. The posters suggest the small version, the eStick, is fatally constrained by size limitations on its battery, while even the larger ePen, which has a 640mAh battery, still lacks adequate muscle.

The second area of criticism is the cost. The Vype, in both variants, is a closed system, compatible only with proprietary BAT consumables. The disposable razor blade is analogous; the manufacturer's profit lies with the consumable rather than the initial purchase.

"I would not buy/use anything with proprietary cartridges or threading," says one poster using the handle Klynn. "All that does is keep you hooked to one supplier, creating a monopoly."

Another calculates that Vype would cost four times the amount he currently pays with his independent system to vape the same amount of e-liquid for a year. So far, so negative. However, several posters acknowledge a desire for a simple product that does not require extensive modification.

"I would love it if I could get it down to the convenience similar to reaching into your pocket, pulling out a pack of cigarettes, pulling one out," says "Lunar". Vaper opinion then suggests there is a market for a plug-in-and-play e-cigarette. Vype may though not be that product. When it comes to Voke, BAT's pitch is that there is an untapped market of smokers who would like the reassurance of a device with medical certification. On this theme too the vaping community is unconvinced: "The MHRA will certainly license a product that may look like an e-cig," says Chris Price, who runs the website E-Cigarette Politics. "It won't be an e-cig though, it will be a repackaged asthma inhaler of some kind, and will appeal to consumers like an expensive and not very efficient enema does."
Quit, die, or vape
Ultimately, the deciding factor in Big Tobacco's entry into the e-cigarette field lies beyond the vapers' control, and in the hands of regulators. When e-cigarettes first arrived in Europe, medicines regulation looked like the probable path. However, the EU's second Tobacco Products Directive, which was approved in February 2014 and will come into effect in May 2016, will instead provide two channels, first with e-cigarette specific legislation that, in some ways, resembles tobacco laws and second as a medical device. The first category will be limited to maximum e-liquid strength of 20mg/millilitre. Most forms of advertising including broadcast and print media will be banned. Refill tanks will be limited to 2ml, which will outlaw some more sophisticated devices.

Taking the medical device route will require a costly regulatory approval process, likely out of the reach of the independent players who pioneered the market. "These developments are central to a view held by many e-cigarette users, that regulators have massively over-reacted to e-cigarettes, encouraged by public health organisations in a way that will choke off the supply of the most effective second- and third-generation products," says Bates. Totally Wicked, a UK e-cigarette company that aspires to be a "modern day tobacconist", is bringing a legal challenge to the TPD. "The metaphorical genie is now out of the bottle, you can't now put it back in," says its MD Fraser Cropper. It remains to be seen whether his challenge will succeed.

Much of the drive for strict regulation has come from those concerned about the health and safety of e-cigarettes. Here, a fierce debate is under way: what is the impact of long-term nicotine use? What is the presence and consequence of contaminants in e-cigarette vapour? Could vaping provide a gateway to traditional tobacco use?

Many point to another reduced-risk product, the Swedish refined oral tobacco, Snus, which the EU banned in 1992. Sweden obtained a dispensation to continue selling Snus when it joined the EU in 1995, and the product accounts for much of male nicotine consumption there. European median occurrence of lung cancer deaths for men aged 60-69 is 220 per 100,000. In Sweden the figure is 87. Yet the Snus ban prevents the export of those benefits beyond Scandinavia.

Not all agree. Much of the fissure depends on a basic, and in many ways ideological, division central to tobacco control, and indeed broader drug policy: whether to subscribe to a cessation approach, colloquially categorised as "quit or die", or instead to "harm reduction", acknowledging that a certain fraction of the population is likely to use the product and working out how to limit the damage incurred by those who do so.

The paradox is that while many of the most outspoken advocates of strict e-cigarette regulation come from public health - and are themselves vehemently opposed to tobacco companies - the winners from tight regulation are likely to be the tobacco companies themselves, who have the deep pockets to negotiate it.

Professor Peter Hajek, director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at Barts School of Medicine in London, is concerned that some figures within public health, wary on instinct of anything to do with nicotine, are pushing for levels of regulation that will make e-cigarettes uncompetitive and will maintain the market monopoly of deadly conventional cigarettes.

"I fear the irrational view that the main priority is to eradicate nicotine use - even if it means that smokers are going to continue to die unnecessarily - is going to win," he says in an email. "I'm doing what I can to make regulators realise that they are in danger of repeating the serious mistake made previously with banning Snus."

In November 2014, the second "E-Cigarette Summit" was held at the Royal Society in central London. Traditionally, the tobacco industry convenes at tobacco industry conferences and public health groups get together at tobacco control conferences. Rarely do the twain meet, but the arrival of e-cigarettes has broken this rigid divide. The public health crowd blended - with evident suspicion - with tobacco and independent e-cigarette executives in the lobbies of John Nash's edifice on Carlton House Terrace. At its dénouement, the conference became public theatre. Clive Bates took the stage, calling out "useful idiots", in public health, blindly doing the bidding of tobacco firms through evangelical opposition to anything involving nicotine.

The large firms, tobacco control veteran David Sweanor suggests, are trying to "figure out what to do, while waiting to see if regulators and anti-smoking groups rescue them again". If Big Tobacco carries the day with e-cigarettes, many believe it will have done so with the support of an unlikely fifth column.

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Big Tobacco Fights Back: How the Cigarette Kings Bought the Vaping Industry

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At the end of 1999 Kingsley Wheaton found himself in the middle of a coup d'état. At 23, he had joined the cigarette manufacturer Rothmans, who sent him to Dubai. When British American Tobacco acquired Rothmans, Wheaton was given the option of relocating to West Africa.

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Zhao,Charles
Topic:Smoking

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WASHINGTON - A decade after electronic cigarettes were introduced in the United States, use has flattened, sales have slowed and, this fall, NJoy, once one of the country's biggest e-cigarette manufacturers, filed for bankruptcy.

It is quite a reversal for an invention once billed as the biggest chance to end smoking as we know it and take aim at the country's largest cause of preventable death. Use of the devices is slumping because they are not as good as cigarettes at giving a hit of nicotine. Dealing another strike against them, the country's top public health authorities have sent an unwavering message: Vaping is dangerous.

The warning is meant to stop people who have never smoked - particularly children - from starting to vape. But a growing number of scientists and policy makers say the relentless portrayal of e-cigarettes as a public health menace, however well intentioned, is a profound disservice to the 40 million American smokers who could benefit from the devices. Smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans a year.

"We may well have missed, or are missing, the greatest opportunity in a century," said David B. Abrams, senior scientist at the Truth Initiative, an antismoking group. "The unintended consequence is more lives are going to be lost."

American public health experts, led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have long been suspicious of e-cigarettes. The possible risks of vaping are vast, officials warn, including the potential to open a dangerous new door to addiction for youth. Scientists will not know the full effect for years, so for now, they caution, be wary.

But mounting evidence suggests vaping is far less dangerous than smoking, a fact that is rarely pointed out to the American public. Britain, a country with about the same share of smokers, has come to the opposite conclusion from the United States. This year, a prestigious doctors' organization told the public that e-cigarettes were 95 percent less harmful than cigarettes. British health officials are encouraging smokers to switch.

The American approach "is the same as asking, 'What are the relative risks of jumping out a fourth story window versus taking the stairs?'" said David Sweanor, a lawyer with the Center for Health Law, Policy and Ethics at the University of Ottawa. "These guys are saying: 'Look, these stairs, people could slip, they could get mugged. We just don't know yet.'"

E-cigarettes are much less harmful because they do not have the deadly tar found in regular cigarettes. They instead provide the nicotine fix smokers crave through a liquid that is heated into vapor and inhaled. There is no long-term data yet, but evidence does not show the vapor to be particularly harmful in the short term.

That e-cigarettes are less harmful is a message American smokers rarely hear, partly because American regulation prevents it. Companies are banned from making such claims unless they go through a long process to prove it, and so far, no e-cigarette maker has done so. More states are also passing laws that lump e-cigarettes in with traditional cigarettes, levying taxes on them and banning their use as part of local smoke-free rules.

"When they are regulated just like tobacco, people draw the conclusion that they are just as dangerous," said Daniel I. Wikler, an ethicist at the Harvard School of Public Health. "You didn't say it, but you didn't have to. People make that assumption and you don't try to disabuse them of it."

Last week, Georgia State University published a report finding that the percentage of Americans who thought e-cigarettes were as bad as cigarettes or worse than them had tripled, to 40 percent in 2015 from 13 percent in 2012.

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A vape and a safety notice at Sababa Vapes in Philadelphia. The United States' top public health authorities have often discouraged vaping. Credit Mark Makela for The New York Times

If smokers have tried everything else, and use an e-cigarette to quit completely, "that's a good thing," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the C.D.C. He has heard anecdotes about that happening, he added.

"But the plural of anecdote is not data," he said. "And counterbalancing that good trend, there are at least three negative things that might be happening," like people who have never smoked using them, children picking them up as a path to smoking, or smokers using them to perpetuate their habit.

But smoking has been declining. The 2015 adult smoking rate dropped by more than 10 percent from the previous year, the biggest decline since the government began tracking the measure in 1965, said Kenneth E. Warner, a professor of public health at the University of Michigan, citing the government's National Health Interview Survey. Past dips have always been linked to some event, he said, like a tax. But there was no single event to explain this one, and some suspect e-cigarettes may have played a role.

Terry F. Pechacek, a professor of public health at Georgia State University, estimated that in 2015, more than four million Americans reported that e-cigarettes had helped them quit smoking over the past five years, up from about 2.4 million in 2014.

Youth cigarette smoking has gone down, too - by about half since 2007, around the time e-cigarettes started to be sold in the United States. In fact, youth smoking had its biggest-ever drop in 2015, Professor Warner said, citing Monitoring the Future, a federally funded survey. The rate is now 7 percent, a historical low. (Dr. Frieden noted that hookah use had been rising, as had the share of young people using e-cigarettes.)

Science is filling in the blanks, said Dr. Thomas Glynn, a consulting professor at Stanford University and the former director of cancer science and trends at the American Cancer Society. "We've been wringing our hands for years, saying we don't have enough research, but we're getting to the point where we can't say that anymore," he said.

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By some estimates, more than four million Americans reported last year that e-cigarettes had helped them quit smoking over the past five years. Credit Mark Makela for The New York Times

British policy makers say that they were also skeptical of the devices at first, but that they have become more convinced of their benefit as data has accumulated. Rates of successful quitting are up. The smoking rate is down. Surveys by Action on Smoking and Health, a British antismoking group, have found that half of Britain's 2.8 million e-cigarette users no longer smoke real cigarettes. Among people who are trying to quit smoking, e-cigarette users are 60 percent more likely to succeed than those who use over-the-counter nicotine therapies like gum and patches, a British study found.

Americans tend to value abstinence above all else, an all-or-nothing approach that British advocates see as rooted in the United States' Puritan culture, said Deborah Arnott, the chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health.

"It's a bit fundamentalist in the U.S.," Ms. Arnott said, adding that the intense focus on children missed the potential utility of e-cigarettes for current smokers, often some of the poorest and least educated members of society. "What about the smokers? What about the people who are dying now as a result of this habit?"

Dr. Glynn said the American approach was well meaning, and had in the past achieved spectacular success. But it comes with a deep suspicion of the tobacco industry that goes back decades, he added.

"We know there's a big, bad tobacco industry, and that's the enemy," he said. "But e-cigarettes do not fit that narrative. We are fighting a 2016 insurgency with nuclear weapons from the 1980s."

Some researchers think they cannot speak openly, and in many organizations, "advocacy is leading the charge, as opposed to science," Dr. Glynn said. "Public health is suffering as a result."

Professor Wikler said, "You want to be married to the science, but in this case, I think there's been a kind of unmooring, and that's a somewhat dangerous game."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Experts Say Vaping Alarm Is Overdone. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can't Shake Their Reputation as a Menace

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WASHINGTON - A decade after electronic cigarettes were introduced in the United States, use has flattened, sales have slowed and, this fall, NJoy, once one of the country's biggest e-cigarette manufacturers, filed for bankruptcy. It is quite a reversal for an invention once billed as the biggest chance to end smoking as we know it and take aim at the country's largest cause of preventable death.

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7 Steps for Dealing With Difficult People

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Life is a web of relationships. Human beings are social creatures, deeply entangled in countless relationships throughout life. It's natural to gravitate toward those relationships that bring you the most happiness, growth, and fulfillment. However, despite your best efforts and intentions to the contrary, you're sometimes forced to deal with challenging relationships and difficult people.

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Steven Loung |@loung_s

Steven Loung@loung_s

TORONTO - It was a typical weekend at the Air Canada Centre. Passionate fans wearing their teams' colours, popcorn and beer being spilled in the aisles and thundersticks getting banged way too hard. There were also bunny ears being worn, cosplay and chants of "TSM" being screamed out every 20 minutes.

OK, so maybe it wasn't so typical.

Welcome to the NA LCS Summer Finals, the conclusion to the North American region of the League of Legends Championship Series season that saw heavy-favourite Team Solomid (the aforementioned "TSM") triumph over Cloud 9 3-1 in a best-of-five championship set Sunday evening.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, a quick primer for those who have no idea what any of that means.

League of Legends (LoL) is the most popular video game in the world. A game of the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre, LoL pits two five-man teams against each other in a battle to destroy the other's base core, called the "Nexus." On the path to accomplishing this goal, teams will attempt to take down one another's defences, claim specific objectives on the map and engage with each other in combat - a lot.

(Photo Credit: Riot Games)

The LCS is the official LoL esports league that features competition in three regions: North America, Europe and South Korea. Sort of the posterboy of the exploding competitive video game scene, the LCS builds upon the game's immense following as the most popular esport tournament series, complete with a pro-style broadcast streamed online and a weekly schedule similar to that of the English Premier League's.

This past weekend saw Riot Games bring the LCS north of the border for the first time ever, packing the home of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors with more than 15,000 LoL diehards.

Whatever your thoughts on esports are as a whole, these two days in Toronto should serve as notice that esports is here and isn't going anywhere.

(Photo Credit: Riot Games)

Already having run sold-out events at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, Madison Square Garden in New York City and the Manadalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas, Riot has proven in the past their product travels well in the U.S., but never before had they tested it out in the Great White North.

Given that LoL's popularity hasn't escaped Canada's borders, the result was predictably successful for Riot in Toronto, but validating nonetheless.

"It's a little surreal, honestly," says Joshua "Jatt" Leesman. "Because it's been happening for a couple years now I'm a little bit more used to it, but knowing that I watched a bunch of Raptors playoffs games on television and this is one of the best arenas in all of Canada, and when we did Madison Square Garden in 2015, we did Staples Centre in 2013, like all of these things are surreal. ...

"Especially now that I'm back in Canada and getting interviewed by the CBC, talking to Sportsnet, like they're all the sports networks and TV networks that I watched growing up which is actually really cool and it's some affirmation that what we're doing is working."

(Photo Credit: Riot Games)

Leesman is a Canadian shoutcaster (esports term for broadcaster) who works for Riot Games as a main analyst on their North American LCS streams. Growing up in Cranbrook, B.C., he found his way into the LCS and esports in general first as a professional player and then transitioning into the broadcast side of things. He was part of a strong Canadian contingent on hand over the weekend.

The other notable Canadians included Isaac "Azael" Cummings Bentley, who works with Leesman as an LCS commentator and analyst, Vancouver boy and TSM support player Vincent "Biofrost" Wang, Calgary native and Cloud 9 support Andy "Smoothie" Ta, Canadian-born California-native Counter Logic Gaming (CLG), top-laner Darshan "Darshan" Upadhyaha, CLG team owner and founder George "HotshotGG" Georgallidis and Jason "WildTurtle" Tran, who plays the attack damage carry role for Immortals.

(Photo Credit: Riot Games)

For Tran, in particular, to play at the ACC was special because he's a Toronto local who had never been inside the building until this weekend despite growing up just 20 minutes away on Dundas street and attending Humberside Collegiate Institute during his high school years when he cultivated the LoL skills that would eventually lead him to LCS stardom.

"I think my folks love where I am now," Tran said of what his parents think of his unconventional career choice. "It's just crazy to play in the Air Canada Centre, and I think they see that's insane, too."

Tran helped Immortals edge CLG 3-2 in a back-and-forth affair that clinched third place for them in the LCS Summer Split. The 21-year-old played a key role in Game 5 with 10 kills to just one death and five assists with his Ezreal in that game.

The sold-out crowd loved every second of Tran's performance and on many occasions a loud "Turtle, Turtle" chant would break out.

This kind of spontaneous enthusiasm was common throughout the weekend, and seemed to be woven into the fabric of the event. From providing fans with ways to make their own custom signs, to the commentators themselves (who can be heard in the arena) rising their level of hype to match that of the crowd's, this was an event that wanted its fans to get loud, rowdy and just have a great time.

Considering the fact my ears will still be ringing by the time you read this, I'd say mission accomplished on that front.

Air Canada Centre has played host to all sorts of sporting events in its 17-year existence, but never had it hosted a video game tournament before. The atmosphere inside the building over the last two days was comparable to any Toronto Raptors playoff games over the last three years, so it should be safe to say the NA LCS Summer Final won't be the last.

Esports has officially arrived in Canada. Get used to it.

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Esports has arrived in Canada, and it isn't going away - Sportsnet.ca

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Steven Loung |@loung_s Steven Loung @loung_s TORONTO - It was a typical weekend at the Air Canada Centre. Passionate fans wearing their teams' colours, popcorn and beer being spilled in the aisles and thundersticks getting banged way too hard. There were also bunny ears being worn, cosplay and chants of "TSM" being screamed out every 20 minutes.

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This week, 112-year-old Yasutaro Koide died in Japan, passing on his title of the world's oldest man to a compatriot, Masamitsu Yoshida, aged 111. These men are part of one of Earth's most exclusive clubs - supercentenarians, or humans who live beyond 110 years old.

According to the Gerontology Research Group which keeps track of these rare few, there were 82 living supercentenarians in the world as of 2015. For decades, scientists have been obsessed by the secrets to long life - what slows down the usually relentless body clock? What genetic clues can reveal the key to extending our longevity?

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This week, 112-year-old Yasutaro Koide died in Japan, passing on his title of the world's oldest man to a compatriot, Masamitsu Yoshida, aged 111. These men are part of one of Earth's most exclusive clubs - supercentenarians, or humans who live beyond 110 years old.

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food shortage

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esports: is professional video-gaming a sport? - cnn

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Hordes of fans queue outside, eagerly awaiting a glimpse of their heroes. But this isn't the Champions League final. This isn't the Super Bowl. This is eSports.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/08/11/spike-in-drug-impaired-driving-could-follow-pot-legalization-documents_n_11449142.html

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It is a biological inevitability that just about every living organism will die-it's the how and the when that are up for debate. Some species barely make it to adulthood, while others go on for centuries. Ninety-nine percent of all species have already gone extinct. In nature, death is everywhere.

One might ask why this is so. After all, the ability to survive seems on the surface to be a pretty desirable trait to evolve. If something is around longer, wouldn't that give it more chances to reproduce? Could a species evolve to live longer and longer-until, eventually, it can live forever? On an even more fundamental level, how well defined are our basic notions of life and death to begin with?

Jules Howard-a zoologist, writer, and broadcaster based in the UK-tackles some of these questions in his new book, Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality. I reached out to him and we talked about it via Skype.

VICE: For starters, is there a consensus on the definitions of "life" and "death"?
Jules Howard: In the British education system, when we do science at around age fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, we do a module about "what is life?" I don't know if it's the same for you in America, but we were taught the MRS GREN acronym. It stands for Movement, Respiration, Sensitivity, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion, and Nutrition. I kind of went into the book thinking: We can define life. Therefore death is just the bit where life ends.

But it's not as simple as that. Mules aren't able to sexually reproduce. They're sterile. So technically, by some definitions, they're not "alive"-but clearly a mule is as alive as anything else. So it's kind of amorphous. It's a nebulous concept, what life and death is. There's a [former Supreme Court] judge's line about pornography: "I know it when I see it." That's kinda where I ended up, really.

In the book, you use NASA's definition for life as a working solution, where life is anything "capable of going through Darwinian evolution."
Correct, for life.

What about for death?
With death, there was the Victorian "not breathing, goodbye, game over." But after the knowledge of [how] to resuscitate someone who was assumed to be dead [started spreading], suddenly the definition of death has changed. And to a lesser degree, brain death. We now know people can give birth in such a state. So what I thought would be a simple label, was kind of anything but. Death is sort of a spectrum of categories.

What are some examples from the animal kingdom that make it hard to draw the line between life and death?
There's tardigrades. They're these little animals where all the water is pulled out of their body, and they become nothing but a little husk of proteins really. Once water splashes on them, they activate again. In that state, when they're literally just a bag of potential, are they dead? Chemically, they kind of are not dead. So there's all sorts of definitions, and I'm not sure we're all agreed on it. I'm sure our current definitions are going to change with medical advances and things like that.

"Evolutionarily, we die because there's only so much sex one can have." - Jules Howard

Do we know why animals age?
There are two ways to go with that. One is we age because living is so tough. Replicating cells is tough business, and we age because when we metabolize, we build up these reactive oxygen atoms, called free radicals. So the more metabolizing we do, the more we build up these free radicals, the more these nightmare particles bump around in our cells and smash up proteins, and the accumulation of those free radicals, one could say is what aging is. So that's what it looks like.

The other one is this idea of DNA strands being like [shoelaces]. The more replications of DNA you have, the more those shoelaces get worn away at the end because you have a set number of potential replications to your cells before telomeres, [which are like the plastic ends of a shoelace], will go.

Do we know why we die?
For me, evolutionarily, we die because there's only so much sex one can have. In all environments, one of the coolest things about animals is you can almost predict their life span according to how much death there is. Insects are going to get eaten by birds. There's no point in them evolving longevity. There's no point in them evolving a long life. They're gonna die. They just quickly get their sex done, as quick as possible. Boom, bash, bin, bop, they're off.

Whereas other animals, where those chances of dying are [smaller], for birds, for us, you see aging become a thing. You see life start to stretch out.
Related: Has the First Person to Achieve Immortality Already Been Born?
Are there any actually immortal animals?
The classic is the immortal jellyfish. Normally, jellyfish just die at that point once they've had sex. But this one species starts to reverse age back into larval form. That is the only animal that has hit upon that as a strategy, which is really interesting.

Bodies are built through pathways. Imagine them as a set of instruction manuals. So to have pathways that can reverse themselves is amazing really. As far as other animals, you also have hydras, which are in ponds and puddles the world over. It's like a freshwater jellyfish-like creature. [Their] stem cells also have an infinite capacity for self-renewal. So they're not limited by the number of cell divisions they can do. They can just live and live and live.

What about bigger animals?
Birds, bats, and tortoises all have cellular tricks through which they can tame free radicals and slow aging. That's potentially a rich scene for humans to investigate. My favorite is a mussel-a freshwater shellfish-that produces a larva. The larva swims and grabs along to the gills of a salmon. Once attached, the larva injects a little protein, and that protein causes the salmon to deal with free radicals better. So the salmon ends up living not one or two years, but three years. An extra year without cancer or classic diseases of old age in fish. The parasite extends the life of its host basically through chemicals. Imagine if we could potentially engineer little larvae and sniff it! This is what the future might look like for us.

In your book, your biggest concern for humans being able to expand their longevity is the ability to keep our brain healthy. Why is that?
The atoms in our [bodies] are constantly cycling through, so only a few parts of our body are more than ten years old. One of those is the brain. The cells don't replicate in the same way. So if you want to keep your brain running past one hundred twenty years, it's going to be difficult. Because once you get those cells to replicate, you lose experience. You would lose... yourself, in a way. You lose the thing that is you. Are we going to overcome that? Maybe, but it's tricky.

Some male American songbirds, at the end of the breeding season, the lower parts of the brain basically gets recycled. So the following year they have to relearn their songs. If you replace your brain cells, it might help you last longer, but you're going to have to relearn some things along the way.

As part of your research for the book, you went to an anti-aging convention. What impression did it leave with you?
The message I've come away with after writing this book is that actually the idea of living longer is actually an emergent property of not making enough of the life we have. The key message that I've come away with is that this is the bit where we're alive. We've got to acknowledge that this bit is the fun bit and make more of it. That's my feeling about this growing industry of [trying to achieve] immortality.

Let's say that humans became immortal. Does that mean humans would stop evolving at that point?
For me, nothing evolves without death. Animals evolve very quickly in environments with lots of death. With humans, we've kind of gotten rid of our predators. We've invented medicine. Many of the things that killed us in the past no longer kill us now. I think most evolutionary scientists would say our evolution has slowed. So I'm not sure we're evolving much anyway.

So going back to the original NASA definition: If we stopped evolving, would we still be alive?
Wow, that is a brilliant wrap around. Did you plan that?
Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality Follow Simon Davis on Twitter. will be published on May 10.

As a matter of fact, I did.
Well, there's no doubt about it. I am not undergoing Darwinian evolution anymore. But I am alive. We know life. We know death when we see it. So I'd say we're still alive.

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Humans Could One Day Evolve to Live Forever

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It is a biological inevitability that just about every living organism will die-it's the how and the when that are up for debate. Some species barely make it to adulthood, while others go on for centuries. Ninety-nine percent of all species have already gone extinct. In nature, death is everywhere.

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Aris Jinwoo

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Nearly two-thirds of adult Americans are overweight or obese. Despite the attention of the health profession, the media, and the public, and mass educational campaigns about the benefits of healthier diets and increased physical activity, the prevalence of obesity in the United States has more than doubled over the past four decades. 1 Add the relatively few Americans who practice the habit of regular physical activity to the many who practice the habit of "super-sizing," and it is no revelation why this has occurred.

We have inherited our genetic makeup from our ancestors, hunters and gatherers who ate diets rich in low-fat meats and grains, who had to stalk and capture the entrée for dinner. During times of feast, their bodies were designed to store nutrients as adipose tissue to be used for fuel to survive periods of famine. We are descended from these survivors, and we share this ability to store fat when food is in overabundance. However, famines in the United States are fewer and farther between nowadays, so this added fat is not used up and continues to accumulate through the years. We no longer have to stalk and capture our dinner; we can use the drive-through.

Despite an abundance of evidence of the benefits of maintaining a healthy weight and a physically active lifestyle, we continue to eat larger portion sizes than we need and remain less physically active than we should be. Sedentary adults in the United States eat an average of 500-800 calories more per day than needed to maintain weight. 2 At that rate, they will gain a pound to a pound and a half a week. Food is available everywhere, and people are bombarded with food ads. There are fewer opportunities for exercise, and in many places, no bike paths, sidewalks, or easily accessible stairways. The poor may be especially hard hit; grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods may be poorly stocked with healthy fruits and vegetables, and such neighborhoods may not be safe enough to get out and walk around in. In addition, people from all economic backgrounds often eat for social, cultural, and emotional reasons-not just for hunger.

As health care providers, we don't know how to help our patients lose weight. Fortunately, organizations such as the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and the North American Association for the Study of Obesity (NAASO) are mounting increased educational efforts to fight the growing epidemic of obesity in this country, which confers increased risk for diabetes, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and other serious comorbid conditions.

A jointly sponsored scientific meeting on obesity held in October, 2003, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was evidence of this commitment. Presentations focused on clinical interventions, present and future, population studies, and molecular mechanisms of obesity regulation, aimed at educating health care providers who take care of patients with weight problems.

In a feature article in this issue ( p. 23), I've summarized a few of the exciting topics from this meeting. The amount of knowledge that is rapidly accumulating in the field of weight management will undoubtedly lead to safe and effective interventions to help us more effectively deal with this most pervasive health problem.

What can be done about this problem today? What approach do we take to help our patients now? Low-fat diet? Low-carb diet? What works? It appears that the jury is still out on this question. Longer and larger studies are needed before specific recommendations regarding dietary content can be made with confidence.

It may be that different diets will work in different people. Experts recommend a blend of diets, emphasizing portion control, calorie-counting, self-monitoring, and gradual increases in activity, starting with everyday activities. 3 These simple measures do work if people practice them.

Get away from talking about "diets" or "exercise"; rather, advise patients to "make better food choices" and "increase physical activity." Patients on diets feel deprived and don't stick with them. Encourage patients to choose foods they like to eat within the context of varied, healthy choices; adherence will improve and so will success.

Successful weight loss results from a combination of motivation, physical activity, and caloric restriction. Maintaining weight loss requires a lifelong commitment to balance caloric intake and energy expenditure. I recommend using resources such as those mentioned at the end of my feature article about the NAASO/ADA meeting, as well as in the references, to assist in helping patients help themselves to become thinner and healthier.

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Nearly two-thirds of adult Americans are overweight or obese. Despite the attention of the health profession, the media, and the public, and mass educational campaigns about the benefits of healthier diets and increased physical activity, the prevalence of obesity in the United States has more than doubled over the past four decades.1 Add the relatively few Americans who practice the habit of regular physical activity to the many who practice the habit of "super-sizing," and it is no revelation why this has occurred.

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Gay marriage

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A Chinese judge has rejected a gay couple's attempt to secure the right to marry in the country's first same-sex marriage case.

Sun Wenlin, 27, from the central province of Hunan, had sued the civil affairs bureau in the city of Changsha for the right to marry his 37-year-old partner Hu Mingliang, a security guard.

Sun decided to take legal action after authorities refused the couple's request to have their relationship officially recognised as a marriage last June, on their first anniversary together.

In January a court in Changsha agreed to hear their case, which activists said was the first of its kind in China.

At lunchtime on Wednesday a judge in Changsha announced he was dismissing the case shortly after the three-hour trial hearing had ended.

Speaking to the Guardian after the unexpectedly quick verdict, Sun said he believed the court had not taken enough time to consider their case and had been "too cautious".

He vowed to continue his quest for the right to marry.

"We will continue to appeal. I think it is worthwhile. It catches people's attention and it will help our opinions spread," Sun said.

"What we are trying to achieve is freedom and equality."

Shi Fulong, the lawyer representing the couple, claimed the court had provided insufficient grounds for dismissing the case but said gay marriage was destined to become a reality in China in the not-so-distant future.

"If the law is unable to provide people with equality and justice, it means the law needs to be changed," he said.

Earlier hundreds of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) campaigners had gathered outside the court to show their support for the couple's case.

John Shen, a prominent gay rights activist, said he was optimistic about the future for China's LGBT community, pointing to legal cases in which Chinese citizens had sought to safeguard their rights.

"Even though the case was rejected by the court I still think it is a big step since it has already raised huge attention and discussion, which was the case's original goal," said Shen, who is programme manager at the Beijing LGBT Centre, China's oldest and largest advocacy group. "It is a monument on the way to victory."

Nearly 20 years after China decriminalised homosexuality, in 1997, Shen said the LGBT community continued to face challenges. Homosexuality was still considered a mental health issue by many Chinese doctors and the country had no anti-discrimination law.

Some Chinese psychiatrists continue to prescribe electric shock treatment to gay patients in an attempt to "cure" them.

A recent survey conducted by the Beijing LGBT Centre found that most members of the LGBT community faced discrimination at university or work. "The situation was actually worse than we thought," Shen said.

A separate study of the views of Chinese medical professionals found that 67% considered sexual orientation to be something that could be changed.

However, Shen, whose group has campaigned for gay marriage since 2009, said recent legal cases, in which Chinese citizens had sought to safeguard their rights through the courts, represented huge progress.

In September last year the filmmaker Fan Popo sued China's censorship department in an attempt to discover why his 2012 documentary, Mama Rainbow, had been removed from the internet. The film tells the stories of six gay and lesbian characters coming out to their parents.

Two months after that case, the LGBT cause returned to the courtroom when a university student sued the ministry of education for permitting homophobic material to circulate in state-sanctioned school textbooks.

On Monday a Chinese court heard the country's first transgender discrimination case.

"It is a very amazing time for us right now. One year ago we couldn't have imagined such things in China. It is very inspiring," said Shen, noting that China's gay rights movement only started to take shape in the late 1990s.

"We are 30 years [behind] the west," he said. But change was coming.

"Last year, if you'd have asked me [when China would allow gay marriage] I would have said maybe 20 years. Today I think maybe it will come a little sooner," he said.

"I think we will have more litigation like this in the future, on many other topics, and we will also encourage other communities to join this kind of litigation with us to use the Chinese law to change the Chinese law."

Additional reporting by Christy Yao
Topics

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China court refuses to allow gay marriage in landmark case

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A Chinese judge has rejected a gay couple's attempt to secure the right to marry in the country's first same-sex marriage case. Sun Wenlin, 27, from the central province of Hunan, had sued the civil affairs bureau in the city of Changsha for the right to marry his 37-year-old partner Hu Mingliang, a security guard.

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Mark

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Smartphones are here to stay. These miniature computers we all carry around in our pockets all day, every day are now outselling feature phones, meaning new smartphone owners are being created all the time.

This is good news for Apple, Google, Samsung, HTC, and all the other companies making money from smartphones. But it may not be so good for the human race as a whole, or individual smartphone owners. Yes, I'm talking about you, the person currently reading this article while sat on a bus.

Having already detailed several reasons why you shouldn't buy a smartphone in the first place, it's time to plead with those of you who have already succumbed to the lure of this magical technology. Your smartphone could be ruining your life, or at least have the capacity to do so in the future.

Harming Human Relationships

Your smartphone may be capable of connecting you to the whole world via email, messaging services, social networks, and the wider Web, but it's also capable of disconnecting you to those people around you.

Phubbing (phone snubbing) is a serious issue, with couples choosing to spend their time together staring at their phones rather than interacting with each other. This is merely the thin end of a very large wedge that could harm our ability to connect and communicate with other people face-to-face.

Fix: Don't choose your smartphone over real-life interactions.

Living Life Through A Lense

Most smartphones possess good cameras, leading to many people ditching their expensive DSLRs in order to concentrate on experimenting with smartphone photography. Having a capable camera with you at all times makes it very hard to resist taking pictures at every opportunity, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

The problem comes when people live their life from behind their smartphone, which is permanently glued to the end of their fingers ready to take photos. Photos make nice keepsakes to remember an occasion by, but eschewing the actual experience to get the best shots is a hiding to nothing.

Fix: Remember that photos aren't as important as the experience itself.

Dominating Your Free Time

Smartphones are extremely versatile gadgets, offering endless opportunities to use your time up, whether productively or wastefully. While it's hard to see a downside to this, there is one that could lead to you living a less-fulfilling life.

If you let your smartphone dominate your free time to the exclusion of all other interests and hobbies then you're doing yourself a disservice. Is playing Angry Birds really better than reading a book? Is tweeting all about your life better than eating out at a restaurant? Is surfing pointless websites for hours on end better than learning to speak another language?

Fix: Don't give up other hobbies to spend more time on your smartphone.

Encouraging Oversharing

The holy trinity of smartphones, the Internet, and social networking have led to many people overdoing it when it comes to sharing details of their lives. But smartphones are, I believe, the biggest cause of this trend of oversharing.

Smartphones mean you can share details about your life whenever and wherever the fancy takes you. You can tell people what you're doing, where you're doing it, and who you're doing it with. You can upload photos or video. You can provide a running commentary that includes the most banal details. Which is all well and good until you bore your nearest and dearest with these pointless updates.

Fix: Pick and choose what you share with the wider world.

Getting Away From It All

In the days when desktop computers ruled the roost you had no option but to leave the digital realm behind whenever you left the house. Notebooks and netbooks added a mobile element, but most people still knew when to shut the lid and bid the online world goodbye. Now, that no longer happens.

Smartphones mean that wherever you are in the world, you have the capacity to head online and converse with people. Or do some work. Or read email. Or play some games. Making it insanely tough to disconnect and get away from it all, even for short periods at a time.

Fix: Switch off your smartphone and escape the digital realm once in a while.

Relying On Technology

While we should all welcome advances in technology when they occur, there is a danger associated with letting this technology do everything for us. Which is that we forget how to do even the most basic tasks for ourselves.

Smartphones can be used to do all kinds of different things, from simple arithmetic to planning a trip, from fixing typos to waking us up in the morning. These are all things we used to be able to do but which we're now losing the ability (and need) to do. Which isn't good for the longterm health of the human race.

Fix: Don't turn to your smartphone before trying to do something for yourself.

Conclusions

This is a light-hearted piece with a serious message at its core. You may think criticism of new technology means being a luddite, but this isn't the case. It's more about being aware of how you use this technology and how that can affect your life for both better and worse.

All of these reasons your smartphone may be ruining your life, and the fixes that accompany them, are about people, whether you as an individual or the family and friends you share your life with. Is there anything more important than people?

And there endeth the lesson for today.
Image Credits: Esther Vargas, Petrr, Dave Lawler, Robert Couse-Baker, Arend, Mark Hillary, Office de Tourisme

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Smartphones are here to stay. These miniature computers we all carry around in our pockets all day, every day are now outselling feature phones, meaning new smartphone owners are being created all the time. This is good news for Apple, Google, Samsung, HTC, and all the other companies making money from smartphones.

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Being Mean to Fat People Is Pointless: A Good Old-Fashioned Plea for Civility

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Being Mean to Fat People Is Pointless: A Good Old-Fashioned Plea for Civility

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Aris Jinwoo

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"Obesity will crush the United States into oblivion." That's the final line of the trailer for HBO's upcoming fatpocalypse documentary Weight of the Nation (which, as far as I can tell, was directed by Roland Emmerich and ends with Will Smith blowing up the fat-people mothership with a nuclear warhead). That's right, you guys. The fat people are coming. To crush the entire nation. Into oblivioooooooooon. This is why we can't have nice nations.

New numbers came out this week, forecasting national gloom and doom at the sticky sausage-hands of the "dangerously obese." Kind of. By 2030, the study predicts, 42 percent of American adults will fit the clinical definition of obesity, and the result of that will be..."costs." Cue bottomless hand-wringing about "choices" and "self-control" and "eat less, exercise more." The fat people must be stopped!

"If we don't do anything, this is going to really hinder any efforts to contain future health-care costs," Justin G. Trogdon, an economist and one of the authors of the projection, told experts Monday at the start of the two-day "Weight of the Nation" conference in Washington.

Now. Here's the thing. Maybe obesity is a gruesome scourge that's going to literally sink the United States like a new-timey Lost City of Fatlantis (w-evs, suckers! Fat is buoyant!)-but that's actually not what this post is about. I do not want to talk about whether or not BMIs are bullshit, or whether or not the obesity "epidemic" (PANIC! PANIC! PANIC!) actually leveled off more than a decade ago, or the way that pretty much everyone erroneously conflates size with health. I'm not going to sit here and try to convince the internet that real-world weight loss is infinitely more complicated and painful than calories in/calories out. I want to put all that contentious shit in a jar right now (and put a cloth over the jar so the contentious shit goes to sleep like some idiot parrot) and just talk about the way we talk about fat people.

Fat people in America are reduced to nothing but fatness. A fat person has a health problem of any kind? It's because they're fat. A fat person is single? Well, duh. Fat. They deserve it. A fat person is poor? That's not surprising-obviously they have bad judgment and no impulse control! Because why would a smart person choose to be fat? If a fat person goes to a restaurant and sits on a broken chair and the chair collapses under them, it's because they're fat. But if a thin person sits on the same broken chair and the chair collapses under them, it's because they sat on a broken chair.

And that kind of reductive, simplistic thinking makes it incredibly easy to rest a whole nation's problems on the shoulders of the "obese."

I know this is a terribly uncool, bleeding-heart thing to say, but language like "crush the United States into oblivion" hurts people. It sets up fat people-in case you forgot, fat people are people-as not just the adversaries of our own health or some lady's airplane elbow room or your boner (the usual crimes), but as the future downfall of humanity itself. The assumption that you have a right to legislate another person's body "for their own good," or "for the children," or even "because they're gross," is its own kind of crazy-but to inflate that assumption to apocalyptic proportions, railing against the nation-obliterating medical bills of nebulous future straw-fatties, is fucking bonkers. Actively pushing this idea that fat people, via their choices or lack of willpower (or whatever it is you've decided turned their body into a shape you don't like), are ruining the country just makes the country a worse place for fat people to live. Which isn't going make fat people any less fat; it only makes them more miserable and you more of a dick.

The way that our country treats human bodies, fat and thin and in between, is barbaric. (And if any of you are gearing up to huff and puff and pretend not to know what I'm talking about, spare me-just go read the comments on literally any blog post that mentions the word "fat.") We substitute shame and bullying for the kind of systemic infrastructure changes that might actually improve people's health-then shake our heads in judgy dismay when our lazy, self-serving shortcut doesn't "fix" anything. We frame people's bodies as physical manifestations of their supposed moral failings, just so that we can congratulate ourselves on not being them. We publicly humiliate and dehumanize children to prop up the multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry. And then we tell fat people that they're the villains.

Like, okay. Air travel sucks. I get it. You're mad because you spent $300 to sit inside a hurtling sky-dildo and breathe other people's recycled farts, and on top of that you have to have a fat person's fat elbow a little bit in your area for a few hours. I'm so very sorry. But do you know what? I'm on Team Fat Person's Elbow no matter what (and not just because I am a fat person with elbows). Because the pain and degradation that's built in to that fat person's life lasts a lot longer than your eight hour flight. If I was about to get on a long international flight and the stewardess was like, "FYI, ma'am, if you publicly humiliate this bearded lady, we'll give you free vodka all the way to Heathrow," I would totally want the free vodka, but obviously I wouldn't do it. Because my conscience is more important than temporary comforts. (Also then I would call the FAA because that is some hella fucked-up carnival airline.)

Here's my point. People, right now, are actively campaigning against kindness, and treating it like a legitimate and productive political stance. But that's insane. Even if shaming and hurting people was the "solution" to the obesity "problem"-which it isn't-it still wouldn't be worth it to me. Because humanity is more important. Maybe being kind to fat people (and, really, I mean all people) isn't a perfect system-maybe you're going to be uncomfortable on a plane once in a while, and it's possible that some fat weirdo somewhere is going to, uh, game the system and get hella free open-heart surgeries ON UNCLE SAM'S DIME (or whatever stupid con you think we're running in the name of cake). But, being a compassionate human being, I can absorb that margin of error and I am proud to do so.

Last year, Kenlie Tiggeman and her mother were flying home for Easter when, during a layover in...
Read more Read

Whether or not you believe that fat people actually cost our nation money, the real problem with this whole shame industrial complex is that it doesn't fucking work. Not only does it hurt people, it's embarrassingly ineffective-a cruel hobby, not a political act. Everyone on earth who is concerned about this issue-whether you're a person who thinks that fatness is irrelevant, or someone who's bullied because of your body, or a concerned citizen who genuinely wants to improve the health of the nation-should be on the same side here. Be fucking nice.

Campaign for better P.E. programs and healthier school lunches. Work to overhaul our country's horrific food-production system. Seek logical solutions for how to cope with a physically larger populace. Because believe me, Americans aren't going to miraculously start getting smaller once you yell at us enough. Shame is stagnation. It won't fix anything. Bullying is not activism. Hurting is not helping. Cut it out.

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Being Mean to Fat People Is Pointless: A Good Old-Fashioned Plea for Civility

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"Obesity will crush the United States into oblivion." That's the final line of the trailer for HBO's upcoming fatpocalypse documentary Weight of the Nation (which, as far as I can tell, was directed by Roland Emmerich and ends with Will Smith blowing up the fat-people mothership with a nuclear warhead).

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Do you know the feeling when you go out and realize you left your phone at home? Some might run scared others are completely lost - I think we can sum it up: it's not very enjoyable. Smartphones have become a vital part of our lives and without them we feel like only half a person.
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Most of us use their smartphone every day, to surf the internet and social media platforms, check emails, manage calendars, listen to music, play games, watch videos, take photos, read the news, write text messages and also, every now and then we use them for their original purpose, to make phone calls. Now all these activities can be done using one single device. If you think back some 25 years ago, some of them were not even possible. Consequently, smartphones have changed the way we live quite drastically.

How Smartphones Change the Way We Consume Information and Communicate

The way we consume information has changed from talking to each other to reading the newspaper to watching television, to gathering info on the web using a computer and now a smartphone. Today we can access any kind of information 24/7, wherever we are. That's both, convenient and overwhelming. Same is true for communication. Our smartphone offers us several ways of communication: calls, text messaging, instant messaging, email, social media, blogs, etc.

The fact that we can get any information anytime we want has quite an impact on our way of living. A recent study by Columbia University found that we are very likely to forget information which we know we can easily retrieve again. Also, when we are asked questions, we tend think about how we can find the answer on the internet rather than thinking about the actual question and answering it ourselves. Basically, we're getting lazier, because we know that we can access all kinds of information anytime.

How Smartphones Change the Way We Behave and Feel

It starts early in the morning. The first thing we do is reaching for our smartphone to turn off the alarm clock. As the day goes by we use our smartphone on the way to work, during mealtimes, at work, on the way home, in the bathroom and in bed. The smartphone has made us more sociable, or is it the other way around?

We are constantly connected and expected to have a mobile phone with us at all times. Of course, that's convenient, but being available 24/7 is tiring, it's a blessing and a curse. "Sorry, I wasn't at home" has worked as an excuse 20 years ago. Today it's like you never leave the office.

How Smartphones Change the Way We Use Technology

Our society tends to use devices that make our lives easier and more convenient. Taking this fact into account the mobile industry developed one device that made several others obsolete. Sales dropped for landline phones, desktop computers, digital cameras, mp3 players, gps devices, etc. Not too long ago there was a time, when you needed to carry all those things with you.

The desktop computer used to be the most irreplaceable tech piece in our lives, but during the last months the smartphone has taken its place. We still like to use desktop computers to handle practical tasks, while we prefer our smartphone to handle emotional ones.

Our smartphone is our personal assistant that helps us mastering our everyday life. I wouldn't wanna live without it anymore, would you? I'd love to read your opinion in the comments!

Finally, have a look at this infographic about how phones influence our family lives:

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Do you know the feeling when you go out and realize you left your phone at home? Some might run scared others are completely lost - I think we can sum it up: it's not very enjoyable. Smartphones have become a vital part of our lives and without them we feel like only half a person.

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topic: obesity

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topic: obesity

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Gay marriage

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TAIPEI, Taiwan - Sitting in the third row of a small chapel, Ms. Liou wiped away tears of joy as her sister exchanged wedding vows with her new husband. A few feet away, Ms. Liou's partner stood alone, maintaining their public charade of being just friends.

Ms. Liou - who asked that her full name not be disclosed because she had yet to come out as gay - said she would feel more comfortable holding her partner's hand or embracing her in a society that did not view their way of life as out of the ordinary.

"If we could realize marriage equality in Taiwan, people in our situation could lead fuller lives," she said.

That day could be coming soon, although it is not assured. Bills that would legalize same-sex marriage are moving through Taiwan's legislative system, bringing the island closer to becoming the first place in Asia with marriage equality. Some predict it could happen early next year.

The political climate in Taiwan has never been more favorable. President Tsai Ing-wen, who took office in May, has spoken out in favor of same-sex marriage. Her Democratic Progressive Party, which is largely sympathetic to gay rights, holds the majority in the Legislative Yuan.

Some cities are already extending symbolic recognition of same-sex relationships. In May, Kaohsiung became the first city in Taiwan to register same-sex couples. Shortly afterward, Taipei, the capital, followed suit.

This month, Kaohsiung issued its first same-sex "partnership cards" to gay couples, and the Taipei city government announced that it would soon do the same. The deputy director of the Kaohsiung civil affairs bureau, Chen Shu-fang, said the cards would make it easier to contact partners in emergencies and for hospitals to include partners in medical decisions.

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Cindy Su, left, and Lana Yu with one of their children in Taipei. The couple married in Canada, but their union is not recognized in Taiwan. Credit Chiang Ying-Ying/Associated Press

The governing Democratic Progressive Party; the opposition Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang; and the smaller New Power Party have each proposed same-sex marriage bills. As of Friday, the bills were in the hands of a Legislative Yuan judiciary committee.

Taiwan has considered marriage equality before. Hsiao Bi-khim, a legislator from the Democratic Progressive Party, submitted a same-sex marriage bill in 2005 that was blocked outright. In 2013, a bill reached the committee review stage but stalled. Now, Ms. Hsiao said, things are different.

"We have a much better chance this time around," she said. If a bill comes to a vote in the Legislative Yuan, it will need the support of at least 57 of the body's 113 lawmakers for passage. So far, Ms. Hsiao said, the bills have collectively received backing from 56 legislators.

All of the bills would legalize same-sex marriage and permit gay couples to adopt, said Yu Mei-nu, a legislator who submitted the Democratic Progressive Party's proposal. The author of the Kuomintang bill, Hsu Yu-jen, also co-signed the Democratic Progressive Party draft, highlighting the momentum that marriage equality has gathered in both major parties, although some members of each party oppose it.

Public support for legalizing same-sex unions is robust, Ms. Yu said. She noted the large turnout last month for the 14th L.G.B.T. Pride Parade in Taipei, which attracted about 80,000 participants from Taiwan and around Asia.

Ms. Yu said legalization had a good chance of passing in Taiwan's next legislative session, from February through May. But if the proposal fails then, its chances in the sessions that follow - ahead of the local elections in November 2018 - could be lower, she said, as the issue remains controversial.

"This is a golden opportunity," Ms. Yu said. "But the opposition is strong."

She noted that legislators who had initially signed on to the 2013 bill withdrew their support after being pressured by groups opposed to same-sex marriage.

On Thursday, thousands of people protesting legalization, dressed in white, occupied the street outside the judiciary committee proceedings in Taipei, denouncing what they called a "black box" in which the bills were being considered. They chanted demands for the legislature to hold public hearings on the issue, and some called for a plebiscite. Late Thursday, the legislative caucuses of the Democratic Progressive Party and the Kuomintang agreed to each hold a hearing to air opinions on legalization before continuing deliberations.

Thousands of people in Taipei on Thursday protesting the proposal to legalize same-sex marriage. Credit Billy H.C. Kwok/Getty Images

Among the opposition is the Alliance of Religious Groups for the Love of Families Taiwan, which was formed to block the 2013 bill, and is now focusing its attention on presenting its views to legislators.

"We don't use the term 'lobbying,'" Andrew Chang, the alliance's secretary general, said in an interview. "We're going to explain in detail the social impacts, and they can make their own decision."

Miao Poya, a gay rights advocate, said, "Society on the whole has become more accepting" than it was a decade ago, when patrons of gay clubs were often harassed by the police. "Support for marriage equality is especially strong among younger people."

Gay-friendly sex education in Taiwan's public schools and support from straight celebrities have helped increase tolerance, she said.

Among those celebrities is the pop singer A-Mei, who is from the aboriginal Puyuma tribe.

"In our tribe, we don't see love as complicated," A-mei wrote in an email. "So for me, L.G.B.T. love and the right to marry are as natural as breathing. And nobody should be able to deprive others of the right to breathe."

Last month, A-mei received the Generation Award for her support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights at the inaugural Queermosa Awards, organized by the Taiwan International Queer Film Festival. Queermosa's goal is to spotlight people working to make those voices heard, said the festival's director, Jay Lin. He cited the United States as an example to emulate, noting that television there includes many characters of varying sexual orientations.

"I really do see a lot more potential for media to have an impact," Mr. Lin said. "After the Queermosa Awards, TV producers and film producers actually came up to me and said, 'O.K., what can we do to have more diversity on TV and in film?'"

For now, Mr. Lin said he was focused on "finding out who the allies are" to ensure that marriage equality became a reality.

"If we don't capitalize on this moment," he said, "I don't know when the next opportunity will be."

Correction:
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the 2018 elections. They will be local, not legislative, elections.

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Taiwan May Be First in Asia to Let Gay Couples Marry. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Taiwan May Be First in Asia to Legalize Same-Sex Marriage

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TAIPEI, Taiwan - Sitting in the third row of a small chapel, Ms. Liou wiped away tears of joy as her sister exchanged wedding vows with her new husband. A few feet away, Ms. Liou's partner stood alone, maintaining their public charade of being just friends.

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John Lam and Ross

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A fishery is a marine environment concerned with breeding and or or harvesting populations of fish and other forms of marine life, such as bivalve molluscs (e.g., mussels, clams). "Fishery" often refers to the area, the type of fish, the method and tools of fishing (including the vessels if any, used in fishing) and the people responsible for stewardship, harvesting and other forms of managing the fishery. BC fisheries are a key natural resource to both the physical and material wealth of the province, yet they are complex environmental systems. While fish are a renewable resource, they are difficult to manage. Estimating populations, as we shall see below, is increasingly difficult due to their mobility, the changing nature of global and localized environmental processes and considerations for other human activity in the region.

Ten thousand years before European settlers arrived in BC, Aboriginal people were sustained by the abundant marine life available along the Pacific Coast and up through the many lakes and rivers. For example, the oolichan harvest was, and remains, an important first spring harvest of fish, coming before the spring salmon runs. Oolichan, rich in nutritionalvalue, was sought after not only as a food but also for the oil that was rendered from it. Oolichan oil was transported along "grease trails," or trade routes that extended south and east beyond the borders of what is present-day BC, and into southern California, Alberta and Saskatchewan. These same trade routes supported other trade and migration in the area. When European settlers and fur traders travelled west, they did so using Aboriginal guides taking them along the established trade infrastructures that were made for transporting the bounty of Pacific coast fisheries.

The same fisheries that sustained people in the region for the past 10,000 years were also seen as an abundant renewable natural resource by European settlers. With colonization camecommercial fishing in a form similar to what we know today. Commercial fishing is the harvesting of wild fish for sale on in the marketplace. It stands in relation to aquaculture, which is the farming of marine life under controlled conditions.

In BC today, there are both commercial fishing and aquaculture industries. Over 80 ocean and freshwater species of fish are traded from BC. This includes several types of salmon, with five species dominating trade: coho, sockeye, pink, chum and chinook. As of 2012, salmon has a declining overall share of the overall seafood harvest.

Salmon fisheries in BC, much like other resources, have been subject to technological change and to boom-and-bust cycles related to the global marketplace and food safety. Most salmon are caught in the ocean, which is under federal management. Salmon are anadromous (i.e., they live in the ocean and breed in fresh water), and while the Fisheries Act mandates that the federal government is responsible for both fresh and saltwater salmon habitat, freshwater marine areas are also under provincial management during a key point in the life cycle of the salmon, during their early life and when they return to fresh water to spawn after four years.

Technology has changed the way salmon are fished and prepared, from drying, salting and smoking in the early 19th century and before, to canning, which gained popularity during the 1850s gold rush because of its compact and protected format. In the subsequent 1898 gold rush, authorities required all miners going into the north have 1,100 pounds of provisions.

By the early 1900s, BC was producing 837, 489 cans of salmon a year. This was made possible by the introduction of the Smith Butchery Machine in 1903. A good butcher could remove fins, head, tail and innards from about 2,000 fish per 10-hour day. But the machine could clean 22,000 fish in nine hours, or about 40 fish per minute, drastically increasing production capacity. Changes in marine vessels, on-board refrigeration and the use of radar and sonar all contributed to increased fishing in BC and globally.

Challenges for Management

Salmon return to the same rivers in which they were born to spawn, so each river has its own salmon run. The Fraser River sockeye run is one of the largest in BC. Managing the salmon can be difficult due to mixed demands by industry, First Nations, sport fishers and the need to maintain a sustainable population. Overfishing during the "fish wars" between the United States and Canada has affected the salmon populations, as have competing land use claims.

Look at the chart in Figure 1, which shows a drastic drop from recorded salmon runs, which had numbered in the range of 25 to 41 million in the early 1900s to less than 5 million in the years around 1917. Why do you think that is?

The answer doesn't lie in the mismanagement of fisheries, as you might suspect. Instead, the culprit is the Hell's Gate slide. In 1912 and 1913, the Canadian National Railway was being built along the steep narrow bank of the Fraser River at Hell's Gate. Railroad construction necessitated blasting into the rock, which fell into the Fraser River in the canyon below, which contributed to an already steep and difficult passage for the salmon. In 1913, a rock slide occurred in the same place in the season just before the salmon returned to their spawning grounds. As you can see in Figure 1, salmon levels remained staggeringly low until 2010. Despite the significant jump in 2010, the Fraser River run is still recovering from the the 1913 slide, over 100 years ago.

More contemporary threats to the BC salmon fishery include oceans, climate change, fish farming and hatcheries. Oceans house natural predators of salmon, such as seals and sea lions. Mackerel is moving north as waters warm, competing for food sources with the salmon. In the oceans salmon also face over-harvesting in international waters, which is exhibited by the many disputes over salmon harvesting rights. Climate change affects salmon due to warming waters, which are not favoured by salmon, who tend to thrive in colder temperatures.

Salmon Farms

Salmon farms have seen exponential growth since the 1980s. Salmon farming entails raising salmon in net pens, which are stationary in bays or inlets, rather than existing in the open ocean. Fish farming contrasts with hatcheries, which use and maintain freshwater hatching beds to artificially increase salmon production.

In 1984 there were only 10 salmon farms in BC, and five years on, there were 135 farms run by 50 companies. In 2004 there were 129 farms in operation by 11 companies. The spike in farms lead to overproduction, driving the world price of salmon down and increasing environmental and biological risk. From 1994 to 2002, BC put a moratorium on new fish farms, which helps to explain the drop in their number from 1989 to 2004.

Disease transfer is the largest concern of fish farms. Some salmon, such as coho, cannot be farmed because they experience high stress levels due to containment and therefore do not reach maturity. Higher levels of disease among farmed salmon pose a risk to wild salmon populations if the farmed salmon escape and mix with wild salmon populations. Salmon farms use nets to hold Atlantic salmon populations of 700,000 to 1.3 million fish close to the rivers where pink and chum salmon are at their smallest and most vulnerable, and therefore most susceptible to disease transfer. The major solution to the risks of salmon farming is to produce the fish on land in tanks; this, however is a significantly more expensive option.

One of the major biological risks to the salmon population come from sea lice, which are increased by salmon farming. Larvae hatching from sea lice on wild adult salmon migrating into rivers infect the farm salmon in the fall. The close quarters of the fish in the net pens allows the sea lice to spread. Researchers in Norway have found a young salmon or sea trout can bear approximately one louse for every gram of the fish's weight. Research suggests that at 0.3 to 0.4 grams pink and chum fry are much too small to survive even a single louse.

There are two species of sea lice commonly found on farmed and wild salmon in BC: Gravid Lepeophtheirus salmonis, which are only known to live on salmon and appear to damage juvenile salmon. The Gravid Caligus clemensi can live on many fish species and appears not to damage fish. Sea lice exist in large numbers near fish farms and are virtually absent elsewhere in the ocean.

Summary

As we have seen from this case study, there are many threats to a key resource in our food system. Additionally, it is a complex system to manage between economic and environmental sustainability pressures. Some of the challenges, as in the case of the Hell's Gate slide, happened over a century ago, and we are still dealing with the consequences.

The Pacific salmon was added to the list of B C' s official symbols in February 2013 (as the fish emblem) in recognition of its huge impact on the environment, culture and the economy. What sort of solutions do you see to help manage the BC salmon fishery?

Attributions

Figure 5.10 Fraser River Sockeye salmon by Hilda Anggraeni derived from Pacific Salmon Commission (http://www.psc.org/)

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Case Study 2: Managing the BC Salmon Fishery

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A fishery is a marine environment concerned with breeding and or or harvesting populations of fish and other forms of marine life, such as bivalve molluscs (e.g., mussels, clams). "Fishery" often refers to the area, the type of fish, the method and tools of fishing (including the vessels if any, used in fishing) and the people responsible for stewardship, harvesting and other forms of managing the fishery.

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John Lam and Ross

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Each spring, the gates open in federal hatchery facilities in British Columbia and about 295 million salmon are released in an attempt to restore stocks damaged by dams, resource development and overfishing.

But each fall, except for rare exceptions, there are poor returns. This year, so few sockeye came back to the Fraser River - about 650,000 fish instead of the 2.2 million expected - that widespread fishing closings were imposed. Coastwide, the abundance of the six Pacific species (coho, chum, chinook, pink, sockeye and steelhead) fluctuates widely over time, but the trend over the past 30 years is down.

This is occurring despite the best efforts of the Salmonid Enhancement Program (SEP). Since the program was launched by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in 1977, more than $1-billion has been spent helping salmon spawn in 23 major hatcheries, in artificial spawning channels and in a number of small community-based hatcheries. Although scientists generally blame poor ocean survival for the low returns, increasingly questions are being asked about whether hatcheries, once seen as a miraculous technological fix, could be part of the problem.
Related: The Food 53: People whose environmentalism is central to their food choices
"It's hard to have a single answer to whether hatcheries are good or bad," said Aaron Hill, executive director of British Columbia's Watershed Watch Salmon Society. "They are definitely necessary in situations where you are trying to save a run of fish from becoming extinct ... But we are certainly guilty of overusing hatcheries in B.C. and not using them in the most responsible manner."

In the United States, where $15-billion (U.S.) has been spent since 1978 in a failed effort to restore salmon runs in the Columbia River, Portland's leading newspaper, The Oregonian, questioned the role of hatcheries, asking in an editorial this spring: "Is the world's most ambitious wildlife recovery plan doomed?"

Hatcheries became beacons of hope because they are remarkably productive, with a 75-per-cent survival rate from egg to smolt. In the wild, only 4 per cent survive that life-stage transition.

But the growing fear is that hatcheries are producing fish that are genetically inferior, which more easily perish at sea.

Those concerns about genetic change were highlighted this year by a U.S. study showing that after just one generation, hatchery-raised steelhead differed from their wild relatives in more than 700 genes.

"This new study builds on a mountain of scientific evidence that hatcheries pose a number of risks to wild salmon, including the genetic risk," said Mr. Hill, whose non-profit organization is dedicated to the restoration of wild salmon in British Columbia.

"I think when a lot of these hatcheries were built back in the seventies, we didn't know how detrimental these operations could be to our wild salmon populations," he said. "Decades later, we now have a really good idea."

But it's not a black and white issue.

In some cases, streams have been brought back to life by hatcheries after wild salmon stocks were extirpated by overfishing or environmental damage. For example, in Nile Creek on Vancouver Island, a small stream where a run of pink salmon had vanished was dramatically restored by a small community-operated hatchery.

But Mr. Hill said when large numbers of hatchery fish flood the environment, they out-compete small runs of wild fish for a limited food supply. Wild fish are also accidentally killed when they mingle with hatchery fish, which are the focus of commercial fisheries.

"There is growing evidence that the North Pacific Ocean is totally overcrowded with hatchery fish and that is having real impacts on wild salmon," he said.

Data from the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission show that Canada, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States released 5.2 billion salmon from hatcheries into the Pacific last year.

Hatcheries have many supporters. One is author and former commercial fisherman Eric Wickham, who argues that British Columbia is not producing enough hatchery fish and that's why stocks are depressed. Alaska released 1.6 billion hatchery fish last year, he notes, while B.C. released 294 million.

"Alaska caught 260 million salmon this year, while the numbers for British Columbia are less than 10 million," he stated in an e-mail. He called on government to "do what our neighbours have done and be more generous helping the salmon in their critical period of spawning."

The role of hatcheries has been under scrutiny for years and the research of Michael Blouin, a professor of integrative biology at Oregon State University, is often cited by those who feel artificially reared fish are an environmental threat.

But Dr. Blouin said in an interview that his work is sometimes spun by the critics of hatcheries.

"[Hatcheries] are always going to have ecological effects. There's no getting around that, but I really hate to opine on the greater issue of whether hatcheries should be there or not," he said. "People have taken our work and made comments that made me cringe, like you know, 'Well here's more data showing that hatcheries should be shut down' or 'Hatcheries are a failure,' and I'm like, uh, that isn't really what we said."

What he has shown is that wild fish and hatchery fish are different at the DNA level.

Dr. Blouin's most recent study found 700 genes are expressed differently in hatchery fish, giving rise to a theory that hatchery fish are adapting to the unnatural crowding that takes place in hatchery tanks. In nature, juvenile wild salmon are more solitary and hardier. But they may not survive if overwhelmed with a flood of "inferior" hatchery fish.

Despite such concerns, DFO spokesman Dan Bate said the government is committed to hatchery operations in British Columbia.

"DFO supports salmon hatcheries as a tool in the federal government's efforts to conserve, rebuild and manage Pacific salmon stocks. The department continues to evaluate and refine its hatchery operations using new, relevant information to ensure maximum benefits for fisheries and wild stocks," he stated in an e-mail.

"Since the beginning of its hatchery program in the 1970s, the department has taken steps to address concerns about the potential impact of hatcheries on wild stocks," he said. "DFO follows guidelines and operating practices designed to minimize genetic and ecological impacts on wild-salmon populations. A key goal is to minimize genetic divergence of a hatchery population from the existing local wild population."

An evaluation of SEP completed last year by the DFO concluded that "there is a continued need" for the program, which gets about $26-million a year in federal funding.

SEP is trying some new approaches. One method being studied, in conjunction with Carol Schmitt of privately owned Omega Pacific Hatchery Inc., involves raising juvenile chinook in a more "natural" way, mimicking stream conditions. By using colder water, providing less food and holding juvenile fish a year longer before release, Ms. Schmitt has more than doubled survival rates.

British Columbia runs a much smaller program for freshwater fish through the independent Freshwater Fisheries Society of B.C., which operates eight hatcheries, releasing more than eight million trout, char and kokanee salmon into 800 lakes.

Tim Yesaki, vice-president of operations for the society, said freshwater fisheries managers "have really been proactive in trying to reduce the impact of hatchery fish on wild fish populations," and has taken note of Dr. Blouin's latest research.

"We've been monitoring the literature and up until this study, we were quite well aware of the genetic impact of hatchery fish, or the potential impact. However, the results of this study are more acute - within one generation. So it's on our radar screen. We're definitely looking at ways to mitigate the effects," he said.

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Scientists question whether B.C. fish hatcheries do more harm than good

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Each spring, the gates open in federal hatchery facilities in British Columbia and about 295 million salmon are released in an attempt to restore stocks damaged by dams, resource development and overfishing. But each fall, except for rare exceptions, there are poor returns.