Lead researcher Scott Frank and colleagues from Case Western Reserve University presented a study this week at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA).

“Hyper-networking” (spending more than three hours daily on social networking sites) and “hyper-texting” (sending more than 120 text messages daily) were associated with all kinds of problems:

• fighting
• smoking
• binge drinking
• drug use
• depression
• sexual activity
• sexual activity with four or more partners (presumably sequentially, not concurrently)
• television viewing
• parental permissiveness (my favorite of the findings)

“The startling results of this study suggest that when left unchecked texting and other widely popular methods of staying connected can have dangerous health effects on teenagers,” reported Frank.

What remarkable findings! At least in Cleveland, young geeks are rebellion dynamos, on a course of hell-raising that would seem incompatible with intensive computer and cell phone use.

Frank’s study does not seem to have looked into hyper-networked hyper-texters’ recourse to video games or rap music, but one can assume the worst.

More seriously, might the findings stem from small numbers and survey respondents who jokingly “checked the box” to everything, answering every question in the affirmative? And the study doesn’t seem to assert a causal relationship, so why not simply assert a preference for moderation in all things, including texting and networking?

Of course, the APHA’s annual meeting itself has a formidable social media presence.

In the United States, the Society for Science & the Public has run a contest for students in their final year of secondary school. From 1942 through 1997, Westinghouse sponsored the contest; since 1998, Intel has sponsored it.

The Intel Science Talent Search fields about 1,600 entries from young people who do independent (individual, original) research in math and science. Each entrant submits:

• a 20-page research report;
• a statement from a supervising scientist;
• recommendations from teachers;
• details on educational and personal background;
• various essays that:
  • abstract the research project (akin to what a scientific journal would print);
  • summarize the research in plain-language;
  • answer the question: What is a major scientific question in your field whose answer you believe will have a significant impact on the world in the next 20 years, and why?
  • answer the question: What have you done that illustrates scientific attitude, curiosity, inventiveness, and initiative? (The STS is not for the modest.)

An initial round of judging yields 300 semifinalists; each receives $1,000, and his or her school also receives $1,000. A pool of 40 finalists is invited for a week in Washington, D.C., for additional judging, cultural events, and group interaction. All receive at least $7,500 in awards. The top ten finalists receive larger awards, culminating in a $100,000 award for the first-place winner. The awards are intended to finance higher education.

Intel and the Society for Science & the Public generously posted short presentations by finalists.

This year’s first-place winner is Erika de Benedictis, from Albuquerque, New Mexico; she investigated spacecraft navigation.

The second-place winner this year is David Liu, from Saratoga, California; he developed a system to recognize and understand digital images (and tells a great story about his consulting experience).

The 2010 third-place winner is Akhil Mathew, from Madison, New Jersey; his math project examined Deligne categories.

Nearly all the finalists would like to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which deserves an award for its outreach and marketing among  scientifically inclined youth.

The Intel STS comforts those who are concerned about scientific talent in the United States. To my European friends, I would ask: why isn’t a similar contest done in Europe?

The next French initiative will probably be a national campaign for nutrition and against obesity.

Is an anti-obesity campaign needed in France? Aren’t French people thin enough as things stand today? Aren’t there more pressing concerns, such as persistent unemployment or flagging purchasing power?

While nutrition and obesity may join a list of national causes, the issues are taken very seriously in France.

President Sarkozy created a high-profile commission last year to study the issues and make recommendations. The commission’s report has not yet been made public, but a summary of its advice. Among the points that caught my eye:

• Encourage more physical activity (exercise) at and out of school. This is important because the French school day tends to be long and sedentary, not conducive to daily exercise.
• Promote nursing (by mothers of infants). In 2005, 55% of new mothers nursed their baby; French health authorities hope to increase this percentage, to 70%, given that 75% of expecting women say that they want to nurse.
• Install water fountains in public spaces: schools, sports facilities, government buildings, trains stations, airports, work sites.
• Promote Type 80 flour (household flour is Type 45, more heavily refined) and less than 18 grams of sale per kilogram of flour in breadmaking.
• Offer food stamps specifically for fresh fruits and vegetables (€10/month).

The City of Paris (which has administrative responsibility over elementary schools in the capital) has launched its own initiative in favor of nutrition and against childhood obesity. It has a collection of action plans to prevent and treat obesity, none of which seem especialy innovative. What struck me most was this statistic, from a study the city carried out: among third graders, 15.6% –about one in six– are overweight.

This might be the most remarkable aspect of the French campaign against obesity: the problem seems small, by US or UK standards, yet the response in uncontroversial and coordinated.

What I notice most are waist sizes: men seem to wear trousers sized for teens, and women seem especially thin-waisted. I’m not alone in this observation. Others have noticed, and made best-sellers from their investigations.

The French instititute for preventive health and education (French acronym: INPES) has just come out with a survey –the third in a series– with data on eating and exercise. It’s a serious work, with a lot of data.

Where relative thinness is concerned, three points struck me:

1. French people don’t snack. Only 5% of French people (age 15-75) eat repeatedly outside three daily meals. (There’s a definition issue here: having one snack doesn’t count, but eating twice outside meal times counts, for the French, as “snacking”.) The result is generation and age-sensitive: close to 10% of those age 12-25 snack, compared to 2.8% of those age 55-75.
2. French people eat at home. Images of cafés and restaurants aside, most French people eat at home most of the time. Specifically, 65% of French people, age 15 to 75, eat lunch at home. (More than 92% eat breakfast at home and 87% eat dinner at home.) When you consider only people who work, a majority –55.9%– eat lunch at home. Most French people mostly eat home-cooked meals, at home, with their family.
3. French people don’t drink often. The stereotype of French people downing glasses of wine also doesn’t exactly reflect how people live. Only 37.4% of French people (age 15-75) had one or more drinks (with alcohol) the day before they were interviewed. This percentage has fallen consistently over the past decade –44.7% had had at least one drink the day before being surveyed in 1996– and has fallen most for people over 35. This point struck me less for what it says about alcohol and drinking than for its insights into hidden calories.

• The suicide rate among incarcerated men in France is six times higher than the rate among the general male population;
• The French rate has increased over 50 years, from 4 in 10,000 in 1960 to 19 in 10,000 in 2008;
• French prisoners exhibit the highest suicide rate among prisoners in the 15 members of European Union for the period 2002-2006;
• Prison overcrowding does not explain the French suicide rate among the incarcerated;
• In France, suicide is most likely to occur at the beginning of detention. This aggravates the suicide rate among those who are detained before trial or judgment. Among those tried and sentenced, suicide correlates with gravity of the offense committed, with convicted murderers and rapists being most likely to commit suicide.

Granted that there are definition and measurement problems, but there’s important social science still to be done on this subject, in Europe and beyond.

I admire Lévi-Strauss because he led a transatlantic life. He did anthropologic field work and teaching in Brazil, and subsequently taught in the United States.

I also admire Lévi-Strauss because he was a superb writer.

His most well-known and most accessible work is Tristes Tropiques. English translations usually keep the French title, which literally means “sad tropics”; one English edition entitled it “World on the Wane”, which captured the work’s spirit or feeling.

Tristes Tropiques is accessible because it need not be read cover-to-cover. The casual reader will find selected chapters worthwhile, or can put the book down, then resume it later. It’s also accessible because its prose is beautiful to read, although its structure and the ideas Lévi-Strauss expresses are intricate and complex. For those who are short on time or attention span, I’d recommend the first three chapters, which have enough content to inspire a full and stimulating college or executive education class.

I’ve read and recommend another book by Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage. The book’s title is usually translated in English as “The Savage Mind”, but the French is a pun: it also means “The Wild Pansy”. To drive the point home, French editions show the flower on the book cover. It’s a typically French work, heavy on theory, in this case structuralism.

Levi-Strauss’ death has been widely reported in France. He was arguably the last well-known French intellectual. There are others, especially in biology or physics, who are prominent but not familiar to the reading public.

Ulva armoricana, referred to colloquially in French as algues vertes and in English as sea lettuce, proliferates along the Brittany coast.

Fertilizer runoff and animal waste from intensive agriculture cause the proliferation.

Its effects include large amounts of plant matter that wash ashore. When the plants decay, they can generate toxic fumes that may have caused the death of animals and a worker.

In an interview with French daily Libération, the French junior minister for ecology, Chantal Jouanno claimed to seek transparency about adverse health effects for people and animals, and hopes that a study will lead to an action plan.

What sort of action does Jouanno envisage? Picking up more sea lettuce, including at sea. The junior minister doesn’t venture an estimate of what collection efforts cost now or are likely to cost in the future.

What about reducing the effluents responsible for the problem? Don’t expect much, replies in essence Jouanno. At least not for two years. What’s special about two years? Nothing, so far as the environment is concerned. Everything, where politics are concerned: French presidential elections will occur in 2012.

To my eyes, sea lettuce is a classic example of a failure to address a problem. Indeed, sea lettuce is a problem, recognized as such; there are no defenders of sea lettuce. There are, however, defenders of intensive agriculture, that has made Brittany an agri-business powerhouse. Some of the costs of this achievement have been socialized and passed on to commons: rivers and sea coast, and the flora and fauna that inhabit them. So long as the official French response ignores costs and benefits, and focuses on harvesting-at-sea, I have trouble giving credence to bolder French schemes on issues like global warming.

Now sea lettuce is suspected as the possible cause of death of a person.

On June 22, a 48-year old truck driver transported several loads of sea lettuce to the Lantic area dump, more precisely to a compost site.

After shuttling between the seashore and the dump, on his third visit to the dump, something happened.

The driver was later found dead, next to his truck. At the time, the death was attributed to heart failure.

Voices have been growing in number and in volume to look into the cause of the driver's heart failure, particularly whether it was attributable to the noxious fumes that decaying sea lettuce produce.

The proliferation of sea lettuce results from identified activity, particularly intensive agriculture and livestock. Unlike global warming, a change in human behavior would influence the proliferation, probably halting or reversing it. Change would, of course, entail costs (just as sea lettuce does). To date, no one openly discusses what these costs might be and whether they should be imposed.

The culprit was quickly identified: green algae, more exactly Ulva armoricana, commonly referred to as sea lettuce. It’s common in Brittany. The photo below shows the beach at Saint-MIchel-en-Grève, where the death occurred; the numbers indicate where samples were subsequently taken for analysis.

What’s more intriguing are the origins of the sea plants. They’re indigenous to the area. But their proliferation isn’t natural; it results from human activity.

Other areas of France are sunnier or more populous, but Brittany is an agricultural powerhouse. It’s home to 60% of French pig farms, 45% of French poultry farms, and 30% of French dairy farms. The regions is the leading producer in France of cabbage, artichokes, green beans, spinach, and potatoes; Brittany is also the runner-up producer in France of peas and tomatoes. With its Atlantic coastline, Brittany is the leading French region for fish and seafood capture.

This bounty comes at an environmental price. Extensive fertilizer use boosts nitrate levels in the water, to which livestock add impressive quantities of waste. This soup flows from streams and rivers to the sea, where it becomes a nutritious brew for sea lettuce. This plant thrives, but as it proliferates it takes up oxygen and pushes out other, slower-growing plants. When the tides sweep the sea lettuce to shore, sunny weather accelerates decomposition and production of dangerous gases.

Here’s the problem, and the paradox: the problem has a human origin, and human action could stop it. Fertilizer use could be curtailed, and animal waste disposed of otherwise than by discharge into waterways. Is there an economic incentive for doing so? Today, there is not. Is there the political will to require behavioral change? Certainly not. Environmental protection is not about aspirational efforts to “save the planet”; it requires tradeoffs and exacts real costs. People in France are prepared to make neither, whether as consumers or as voters. My bet is that sea lettuce will enjoy a good future in Brittany.

I’m grateful to Hall for The Silent Language, The Hidden Dimension, and The Dance of Life. (Hall wrote other books, but these are the ones I know.) And I’m indebted to Hall for expressing novel ideas clearly, and for using evidence from everyday life.

As a modest gesture in memory of Edward T. Hall, this post aims to spread an observation about time and life in France: what sets the rhythm or beat of French life today is the school calendar.

I think that others have made this observation before me (and I’d be happy to cite them if they’d send me references). Original or not, here are the points that I’d like to make about the pace of French life:

• The year really begins with the rentrée, the “re-entry” period when the school year begins. In terms of how people think and act, this means something. It certainly means more than the start of the calendar year or a religious calendar (with the possible exception of rosh hashanah, the Jewish new year, which falls soon after the French rentrée). It’s also an odd inversion of the agricultural year: the beginning coincides with fall harvests, not plantings.
• The rentrée is meaningful for all families with school-age children. But it’s extended to basically all of society. It’s when publishers release new titles. It’s a time when people make resolutions (to lose weight, to join a gym, to subscribe to a magazine), when business and government make plans. It’s part clean slate, part new beginning, part the building of a new level or the writing of a new chapter.
• The school year lasts about ten months, just a bit longer than a human pregnancy. This makes necessary a summer recess (in July and August) and a tradition of summer vacation: without a recess, there couldn’t be a rentrée and a new beginning.