35pc Oz overweight women have "surrendered to obesity"

Report from Asian News International brought to you by HT Syndication.

Melbourne, Jan. 14 -- A new survey has revealed that 35 per cent of Australian women, who consider themselves to be overweight, do not have any urge to lose weight.

The Newspoll survey, conducted for international company Weight Watchers, has also shown that these women have not tried to lose weight in the previous one year.

The company, which offers various dieting products and services to assist weight loss and maintenance, says that overweight women's denial to losing weight is partially due to the fact that the term "fat" has become politically incorrect.

"For a start, language has changed and it is no longer politically correct to use the word 'fat'. Instead, we use terms like obese, which are easy to disengage from for most people who consider themselves not too heavy," theage.com.au quoted Weight Watchers general manager Sarah Verne as saying.

"People are starting to think that being overweight is normal and therefore acceptable and not something they need be concerned about," she added.

Verne also blames reality television programs like 'The Biggest Loser', which pits obese people against each other in a battle to shed the most kilograms, for overweight women's disinterest in weight loss.

"(The programs) feature the most extreme examples of obesity, and we take solace that we are not that big," she said.

The survey was conducted last July among a national sample of 600 adult women.

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ANI 080 (Technology/Internet)

Google, Wikipedia are 'white bread for young minds', says university professor

London, Jan. 14 -- The Internet is putting a bad impact on the students' expertise levels because it often make them rely on unreliable data, and they give the same credibility to every piece of information, says a professor of media studies.

Tara Brabazon said, while delivering her inaugural lecture at the University of Brighton, that easy access to information had dulled pupils' curiosity.

She said that most of the undergraduates could not discriminate between anecdotal and unsubstantiated material posted on the internet.

"I call this type of education 'the University of Google'. Google offers easy answers to difficult questions. But students do not know how to tell if they come from serious, refereed work or are merely composed of shallow ideas, superficial surfing and fleeting commitments," Times Online quoted her as saying.

"Google is filling, but it does not necessarily offer nutritional content," she said.

Professor Brabazon, who has an 18-year teaching experience, says that she does not consider schools for students' cut-and-paste attitude to study because the Internet is proving to be important these days due to decline in libraries and diminishing stocks of books.

She, however, believes that says that teachers at all levels of the education system should equip their students with the skills that are necessary to use the Internet properly.

"We need to teach our students the interpretative skills first before we teach them the technological skills. Students must be trained to be dynamic and critical thinkers rather than drifting to the first site returned through Google," she said.

Professor Brabazon does not allow her students to use Wikipedia or Google as research tools in their first year of study.

She instead provides them with 200 extracts from peer-reviewed printed texts at the beginning of the year, supplemented by printed extracts from eight to nine texts for individual pieces of work.

"I want students to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels - both are fine but I want students to have both - not one or the other, not a cheap solution," she said.

Published by HT Syndication with permission from Asian News International.