TheDoGooder

Facebook Opens at $42, Valued at $116.6 Billion

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:00:49 +0000

Facebook shares started trading at $42 a share on Nasdaq around 11:30 a.m. Friday morning under the symbol “FB.” The company’s 421.2 million shares offered to the public will now raise $17.7 billion, bringing its valuation to $116.6 billion.

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A Way Up for Women in Business

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:46:28 +0000

THE HAGUE — Using Mount Kilimanjaro as a metaphor for business, 15 business students set out to climb Africa’s highest peak last September as part of an elective course at the Rotterdam School of Management. One of the aims of the difficult nine-day trek was to force participants to work together to overcome physical and mental barriers, according to Dianne Bevelander, an associate dean of the school and the chief organizer of the trek. All students participating in the exercise were women, and that, according to Ms. Bevelander, is the point.

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Congressman Jared Polis Revisits ‘Pizza = School Food Vegetable’

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:03:30 +0000

One of the most dismaying aspects of the recent passage of new federal school meal standards was the collective caving by Congress to pressure from various food manufacturers seeking to protect profits. The most notorious of these episodes was the fight over the continued classification of pizza as a school food vegetable. To recap: a quirk in prior regulations allowed schools to count pizza as a school meal vegetable serving due to the nutritional content of the tomato paste. When the USDA, following a sensible recommendation from the Institute of Medicine, sought to change that rule, huge food companies like Schwan and ConAgra — major producers of frozen pizza for the National School Lunch Program — went into high gear and successfully lobbied against the change.

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Crayola Petition: Marin County Children Ask Crayon Company To Be More ‘Green’

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:59:06 +0000

The kids over at Sun Valley School in San Rafael are lamenting the fact that the Crayola markers they use to draw, write, and color, are pretty … pretty polluting. And because the students are sick of seeing so much wasted plastic, they started a petition on Change.org asking the company to give consumers a convenient way to recycle the millions of Crayola markers manufactured every year. As the kids astutely note, currently there’s no method to recycle the nearly half a billion markers made every year, which is they they are explicitly asking Crayola to create a “take-back” program, giving consumers a safe way to recycle markers.

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Adventures in Wellness

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:00:23 +0000

New York City apartment dweller Sarah Thaler shares her experiences with wellness, composting, farmers markets and healthy living in an urban environment.

With the warmer seasons upon us we also have a wider variety of local, fresh produce available to us. As I said in my last blog, I take full advantage of the farmers markets in Manhattan. I find I can get almost everything I am looking for and then supplement it with trips to a regular supermarket or health food store every two weeks or so to get anything I am missing. I go to the farmers market for a many reasons but for me the most important ones are that I want to support small local farms, and it is important to me to eat organic and non GMO produce. I always strive to make my diet full of as many whole foods as possible.

I try to eat foods that haven’t been processed or altered in any way (think fresh fruits, vegetables, free range, organic meat, organic free range eggs). These natural foods haven’t been depleted of their natural nutrients and haven’t had anything added to them to change their nutritional value and integrity. Going to a farmers market makes selecting these foods simple because hardly anything has been processed

I won’t pretend that a lot of processed foods aren’t convenient and tasty, but it is harder to resist them when I’m walking through the grocery store which is why going to a farmers market is great because I don’t even feel the temptation. Going to a farmers market also forces me to be a little creative with what I am eating and cooking. Because I am limited to whats in season, I find myself coming up with new recipe ideas depending on what is available to me. Farmers are also great resources for recipes. They are the experts on their produce and can be a wealth of information.

Each blog post, I will include a recipe with all foods I got at the farmers market that week (with a few exceptions-a few spices and things I bought at a supermarket)

Recipe of the Week: Kale salad

Dressing:

1 ripe avocado
Honey
Olive Oil
Sea Salt/Pepper for seasoning

Directions: Get a very ripe avocado that you can mash up into a smooth consistency like guacamole. Add a little bit of honey. Add more if you would like the dressing to be sweeter. Mix in olive oil so the mixture becomes more of a dressing consistency but not too thin. (Kale is a tough green and can take a heavier dressing without being weighed down or wilting.) Add salt and pepper to taste and any other seasonings you might like. I have tried it with lemon and a little garlic too.

Salad:

Kale
Celery
Apples or dried fruit
Carrots peeled

Directions: Chop the kale into long thin pieces that will be easy to eat in one bite. Cut celery into small chunks and add them into the mix. Add either small pieces of apple or dried fruit such as cherries or golden raisins into the salad. I then use a peeler to cut the carrot into long thin pieces. I think the carrots look prettier that way and are easier to eat than having a larger chunk of carrot in the salad. Put the dressing on the salad up to an hour before eating it, it will help soften the kale.

Extras: For animal protein boost, add, grilled chicken, duck, hard boiled egg, steamed fish or scallops, all of which can be bought from local, organic and humane farmers at the farmers market.

Facebook Increases Number of Shares for I.P.O.

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:46:00 +0000

Facebook said on Wednesday that it would offer more shares to investors when the company goes public this week, the latest sign of high demand for the eagerly anticipated offering. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook said the number of shares for sale would be increased to 421 million, 25 percent more than it had previously planned to offer. At $38 a share, the maximum price Facebook says it plans to seek, the social networking giant’s offering would raise nearly $16 billion, making it one of the largest I.P.O.’s in history.

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The Past 12 Months Were the Warmest Ever Recorded

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:37:19 +0000

Data released yesterday shows that the last 12 months were the hottest ever recorded in the United States. In Texas, the droughts were so bad that some towns ran out of water. Wildfires burned millions of acres of dried-out land. In the Northeast, winter never really came. February felt like spring. Some of this warm weather can be traced to a weather pattern called La Niña. And most climate scientists are still reluctant to blame climate change for causing any particular weather event. But consider the context: This is the 326th month in a row that temperatures across the nation have been above average. The last time a month’s temperatures fell below global averages was February 1985.

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Lead Poisoning Threshold Lowered By CDC, Five Times More Children Now Considered At Risk

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:11:53 +0000

The number of children considered at risk of lead poisoning jumped by more than five-fold on Wednesday, as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lowered its threshold for the diagnosis. Children’s health advocates applauded the decision, but also expressed concern that recent congressional budget cuts will drastically limit funds that could help affected kids and prevent further poisoning.

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Education Report: Chronic Absenteeism Undermines Over 5 Million Students

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:44:51 +0000

Between 5 million and 7.5 million students miss a month of school every year, according to a report that will be released Thursday by Johns Hopkins professor Bob Balfanz, who runs the university’s Everyone Graduates Center. And many of them go unnoticed: Schools’ overall attendance rates don’t reveal the percentage of students who are absent too often. The paper, titled “The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools,” is the first to quantify chronic absenteeism at a national level.

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Dinner Conversation Starters for the Week Ahead

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:43:15 +0000

What are you looking forward to most about the summer?
What are some of your favorite outdoor warm-weather activities?