Emergency clothing kits

Police in Barcelona have handed out more than 100 emergency clothing kits to bathers who return from a swim to find everything they left on the beach has been stolen by the thieves who plague the city’s shoreline.

The “robbery kits”, made up of a T-shirt bearing the city council logo, a pair of shorts, flip-flops and a metro ticket, are particularly appreciated by swimmers on the city’s nudist beaches of Sant Sebastià and Mar Bella whom thieves have left exposed.

The kits handed out by officers of the city’s Guàrdia Urbana have saved the blushes of 174 bathers since this year’s summer season officially began on 27 May. The number given out has increased each year since they were introduced in 2016.

Barcelona has five kilometers of beaches of which the most popular, with both bathers and thieves, is Barceloneta. By the end of last week, 853 thefts had been reported to the local police station, including 17 cases of robbery with violence.

A dedicated group of officers, some in plainclothes, have patrolled the city’s 10 beaches from May to September for the past eight years in cars and on foot, bicycles, scooters and quad bikes.

Thieves are not the only problem. Anyone hoping to relax in the sun will be interrupted every few minutes by hawkers offering beer, water, mojitos and cannabis while others try to sell you a sarong or offer a massage or a henna tattoo.

Police have so far this year confiscated more than 100,000 drinks and brought more than 9,000 charges for selling refreshments on the beach without a licence.

From The Guardian

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Selfies vs Posies

When checking out someone's photos on social media, what are the factors that determine how you perceive that person? One major factor, according to new research, is who's holding the camera.

In a new study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, psychologists found that people who post selfies are far more likely to be perceived negatively than people who post "posies" – photos of the poster taken by another person.

The researchers asked 30 undergraduates to fill out a personality questionnaire and for permission to use 30 of their Instagram photos for an experiment. These 30 Instagram posts were coded based on theme – such as physical appearance, affiliation with others, and accomplishment – and stripped of captions and other text.

Then, the researchers asked a second group of undergraduates to rate the Instagram profiles for 13 attributes, such as self-absorption, self-esteem, loneliness, and successfulness. The results showed that Instagram users who posted more posies than selfies were rated "higher in self-esteem, more adventurous, less lonely, more outgoing, more dependable, relatively fond of trying new things, more successful, more likeable, and as potentially being a good friend," the researchers wrote.

In contrast, users who posted relatively more selfies were rated as "having lower self-esteem, disliking adventure, more lonely, less outgoing, disliking trying new things, less successful, and less likeable."

"Even when two feeds had similar content, such as depictions of achievement or travel, feelings about the person who posted selfies were negative and feelings about the person who posted posies were positive, It shows there are certain visual cues, independent of context, that elicit either a positive or negative response on social media." Chris Barry, Washington State University professor of psychology and lead author of the study, says.

Interestingly, the results showed that posting selfies wasn't associated with self-reported narcissism, but posting posies was. Also, having many followers and following many people was associated with narcissism. But in general, the Instagram users' self-reported personality traits didn't match up strongly with how others judged them.

It remains unclear exactly why people react negatively to selfies and positively to posies. The researchers suggested it might be because posies look more natural, similar to how you'd view someone in person. 

While the findings of this study are just a small piece of the puzzle, they may be important to keep in mind before you make that next post.

From Big Think (edited)

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Iceland's teenage drinking crisis

Teenagers gathered at the Tjornin youth center in Reykjavik

Iceland is successfully treating a crisis in teenage drinking. The island nation has one of the lowest rates of teen substance abuse in Europe.

How did Iceland do it?

The country combined local involvement and an increase in music and sports activities for students. The actions have helped shrink a teen culture of smoking and drinking.

One of these actions was the establishment of curfews for teenagers. Now children under 12 are not allowed to be outside after 8 p.m. without parents and those 13 to 16 not past 10 p.m. Over summer, when school is out, the curfew is two hours later.

Parents are involved in enforcing the curfew: Every weekend across Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, they take a two-hour early nighttime walk around their neighborhood. These “parent patrols” visit teen “hangouts”— places where young people like to meet and spend time together. 

 “We tell the kids if they are out too late, polite and nice, and then they go home,” said Heidar Atlason, a long-time member of the patrol group.

Reykjavik Mayor Dagur B. Eggertsson said the Icelandic plan “is all about” people giving teens better choices than substance abuse. He believes the large mix of activities that now keeps students busy and interested has very much changed the country’s youth culture.

However, better options cost money. Local areas like Reykjavik have invested in music schools as well as sports and youth centers. To make the programs widely available, parents are offered $500 every year for sports or music programs for their children.

Other countries are paying attention. The Icelandic Centre for Social Research and Analysis has been running the youth project for the past twenty years. The center says it now advises 100 communities in 23 countries, from Finland to Chile, on how to cut teen substance abuse.

“The key to success is to create healthy communities and by that get healthy individuals,” said Inga Dora Sigfusdottir. She is a sociology professor who started the “Youth of Iceland” program, which now has been renamed “Planet Youth.” The secret, she says, is to keep young people busy and parents involved without talking much about drugs or alcohol. 

In 1999, studies showed that 56 percent of Icelandic 16-year-olds drank alcohol. A similar number had tried smoking. Years later, Iceland has the lowest rates for drinking and smoking among the 35 countries measured in the European School Survey Project on Alchohol and Other Drugs.

On average, 80 percent of European 16-year-olds have tasted alcohol at least once, compared with 35 percent in Iceland, the only country where more than half of those students never drink alcohol. Denmark — another wealthy Northern European country — has the highest rates of teen drinking, along with Greece, Hungary and the Czech Republic, where more than 90 percent have consumed alcohol.

Anyway, Iceland’s youth are not without troubles. Today’s news stories say rates for anxiety and possible depression have never been higher among Icelandic teenagers.

From VOA News

Emoji - The language of the digital age?

Emoji are more than just smiley faces. 

Trillions are exchanged in text messages, on social media, and in networking apps each year.

Though emoji have become commonplace, we’re only starting to understand their communicative possibilities. Those cute little images serve as a powerful form of shorthand, and can be used as a tool to evaluate how we relate to each other in the digital age. They also convey emotions in a way that words sometimes can’t.

3,019: Emoji in the Unicode Standard as of March 2019

5 billion: Emoji sent daily on Facebook Messenger

346: People and smiley-face emoji

92%: Share of all people online who use emoji

>50%: Share of Instagram posts that contain emoji

A 2016 study found that people who rated themselves as agreeable were more likely to use emoji on social media sites. The study also found that people who commonly used emoji were more socially receptive and empathetic. Researchers in Colombia found the use of emoji faces produces neural responses similar to those observed in face-to-face communication.

In 1999, 25-year-old Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita  designed the first set of emoji for Japan’s main mobile carrier, NTT DOCOMO, drawing inspiratio from manga, Chinese characters, and international signs for bathrooms. Soon after, other companies started to take notice.

In 2007, a team from Google led a petition to get emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization that maintains text standards across computers. In 2009, Apple engineers Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg joined in and submitted an official proposal to adopt 625 new emoji characters into the Unicode Standard. Unicode finally accepted the proposal in 2010, paving the way to make emoji accessible everywhere.

As prevalent as they are, emoji can get lost in translation. Depending on the device and the carrier they may appear as empty boxes or question marks, as a different visual, or not at all. And that’s because not all emoji that exist in the Unicode are available everywhere. Unicode sets the emoji symbols, but it’s up to Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and other owners of operating systems to update operating systems accordingly. (Emojipedia is a useful resource to see how emoji translate across different platforms.)

Emoji are not an actual language since emoji have no grammar and cannot be combined into more complex units of meaning.. Still, emoji help provide nuance and context to messages, as we convey meaning not only with words but also with gestures and facial expressions.

Linguist Gretchen Mcculloch compares them to gesticulatin and says that, for children, they may be a useful precursor to reading. He adds that claiming that Emoji will make us poorer communicators is like saying that using facial expressions in conversation makes your ideas more difficult to understand.

 “After millennia of painful improvement, from illiteracy to Shakespeare and beyond, humanity is rushing to throw it all away. We’re heading back to ancient Egyptian times, next stop the stone age, with a big yellow smile on our faces.”  

                                             Art and design critic Jonathan Jones 

  
 From Quartz (edited)

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Team sports teach life lessons

On a bright summer morning, many young swimmers gather at a local swimming pool in the state of Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C. They are members of a competitive summer swim team. 

Swim team teaches the team members skills like discipline and focus. 
There is also responsibility, goal-setting and working within a group.

An article published in the magazine Fast Company notes reasons why a company should consider employing former athletes. The writers argue that people who played sports in school are:

·         focused on goals,

·         strong communicators,

·         team players,

·         good at managing their time, and

·         resilient -- meaning they do not give up when things get difficult.

Some studies have found that team sports could be especially good for women. A series of studies by the company Ernst & Young found that 90 percent of women in so-called “C-suite” positions at several major companies had played sports.

C-suite describes a corporation's most senior executives. These positions usually begin with a “C” for "chief." Examples are chief executive officer, or CEO and chief financial officer, or CFO.

Other studies have shown that students who play sports are more likely to go to college and less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. 

But playing team sports is not without harm. Some sports can be hard on the body. Young athletes can suffer serious injuries that follow them into adulthood.

Coach Wass explains that swimming is different from most sports in two important ways. First, the risk of injury is less than most sports.

The second difference relates to how swim teams are structured. Swimmers compete as a team but each individual swimmer races with the goal of improving their own personal time

From VOA  (edited)

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Cristiano Ronaldo South Korea's no-show

Juventus’ Cristiano Ronaldo on the bench during the friendly football match

 

Football fans in South Korea are planning to sue Italian soccer club Juventus and its star player Cristiano Ronaldo. Over 2,000 fans want compensation after Ronaldo failed to play in a pre-season friendly against an all-star K League team.

Juventus signed a contract to play Ronaldo for 45 minutes of the game, but he stayed on the subs bench and did not even lace up his soccer boots.

Many fans at the game switched from chanting Ronaldo's name to chanting the name of his great rival Lionel Messi. There were also boos around the stadium. A fan wrote: "He betrayed the 60,000 audience and belittled us. I'm no longer a Ronaldo fan."

The angry fans are now seeking compensation. They have gone to a law firm in South Korea's capital city, Seoul. They want Juventus to return their $60 ticket price and pay $850 to each fan for the "mental anguish" they suffered because of Ronaldo's no-show.

A-Please ask questions so as to get the underlined answers

1.      Juventus bus arrived at the venue 15 minutes after the match was supposed to start,

2.      Football fans in South Korea are planning to sue Italian soccer club Juventus and its star player Cristiano Ronaldo.

3.      Many fans at the game switched from chanting Ronaldo's name to chanting the name of his great rival Lionel Messi.

4.      Representatives from Juventus will visit Korea this week to apologize for the incident.

5.      Since the no-show match, disappointed fans have been voicing their anger at Ronaldo on social media.

B.  Fill in the blanks with one of the following linkers, without repeating any

Anyway -  As  -  Although  -   Due to  -  However   -  In spite of  -  Since

1.      The League All-Stars was scheduled to start at 8:00 p.m.

        __________________   the kick-off was delayed about one hour because the Italian  team arrived at Seoul World Cup Stadium at 8:15 p.m.

2.      __________________ Juventus arrived late, they asked to play 40 minutes in each half, not 45 minutes. It also wanted a shortened half-time break, from 15 minutes to 10 minutes. 

3.      __________________ the advance publicity, Ronaldo, didn’t play citing muscle fatigue and exhaustion.

4.      Local law firm Myungan said those who purchased the expensive tickets were not treated in the way they expected  __________________Ronaldo's absence from the field.

5.      A lawyer told Reuters that normally fans get their money back for their tickets, but this is "a special case  _______________ the agency that organized the match took advantage of the football star's fans through false advertising

C.  Please fill in the blanks with the word in parenthesis

Ronaldo, who ________________________ (play) for Juventus since 2018, _______________________(spend) the entire game on the bench to the dismay of many of the 66,000 fans . Many of them ______________________ (boo) as they _____________  (see) Ronaldo on the big screen sitting on the bench and eventually __________________________  (leave) the stadium during the second half when they _____________  (lose)  hope that he would compete in the match.

The K League says that they  _____________ (feel)  "indignation and disappointment," when they _____________ (find) out that Ronaldo would not take part 10 minutes into the second half.

According to Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli his club _____________  (do) nothing wrong because Ronaldo _____________(be not) 100% fit due to muscle fatigue.

From BBC (edited)