Green Energy Reporter will be back after the Christmas break.

About that Google shopping spree, which has seen the company buy six companies since August: It’s actually only four companies so far.

That’s because Google’s plans to buy video compression outfit On2 have been held up by disgruntled shareholders. And the company’s plans to spend $750 million on AdMob, the mobile ad start-up, can’t go through until federal regulators sign off.

That may take a little longer than Google (GOOG) would like. The company announced today that the Federal Trade Commission has asked for more information–formally, a “second request”–as part of its review. From a post on Google’s Public Policy Blog:

…we know that closer scrutiny has been one consequence of Google’s success, and we’ve been talking to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over the past few weeks. This week we received what’s called a “second request,” which means that the FTC is asking for more information so that they can continue to review the deal.

While this means we won’t be closing right away, we’re confident that the FTC will conclude that the rapidly growing mobile advertising space will remain highly competitive after this deal closes. And we’ll be working closely and cooperatively with them as they continue their review.

Google was well aware that it was going to face regulatory scrutiny on this deal; in fact, CEO Eric Schmidt says the company assumes regulators will now look at every big deal it makes, simply because it’s Google.

And also because Google’s competitors are doing their best to make sure there is regulatory scrutiny. Microsoft (MSFT), which knows a thing or two about regulatory headaches, helped slow down Google’s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick for a very long time. And it’s quite clear that Redmond intends to holler loudly in Washington about other deals. Googlers tell me they also believe AT&T (T) agitates against them.

I’ve tried getting Googlers to guess at how long they think the AdMob deal will take to clear, but they’ve been pretty reluctant to do so. “I thought DoubleClick would take a few months, and it took more than a year,” one would-be bettor told me recently. “I’m not making that mistake again.”

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On the 10th of December a tongue-in-cheek demo of a failure of a HP webcam was published on YouTube. The video shows the failure of a software which is designed to recognize the speakers face and react so it is always centered on the face.

The failure is that the software does not recognize a black persons face, while it clearly identifies the white persons face.

In the meantime several other videos appeared that further analyze this situation. It appears that a person with very dark skin is not recognized unless there are perfect lighting conditions, since the camera cannot distinguish between the facial features.

This only adds oil to the fire on the issue of the facial recognition in biometrics IDs. It is now proven that facial recognition can fail miserably on a nice chunk of the world population.

Does this mean that black people should not use biometric ID’s. What do you think?

Related posts
A Simplified Analysis – Can you Forge a Biometric ID?

Japan, Asia | Incredible Ruins

In Japan, ‘Hostess Bars’ are bars where men pay to be flirted with. Attractive women sit by them, pour them drinks, stroke their thighs, pay them compliments, and these girls can make a fortune from big-spenders seeking to impress them with the most expensive champagne and caviar. Of course, not all Hostess Bars make the grade and the ones that don’t pull in the businessmen by the bucket-full end up as ‘Haikyo,’ a Japanese term for ruins.

The Akeno Gekijo haikyo in Ibaraki is something of an oddity in Japan, as one of only a few actual strip clubs. Of course there are similar venues; hostess bars, soaplands, love hotels, but they each cater to a slightly different crowd and provide a slightly different flavor of tawdry service. To find a straight-up strip club complete with central podium, viewing seats, and dancing poles seems a feat beyond expectation. But there it is, on a small back-road in a quiet rural area surrounded by bamboo, half-burnt to the ground and buzzing with mosquitoes.

The stripper poles still stand though it has been some time since anyone has taken a swing on them.

Written by Japanese Haikyo expert and explorer Michael John Grist. More about this place and other Haikyo can be found on his site here.

Ever been cut off by a bad driver and wished you could have given them a piece of your mind? Well, now you can. Virginia startup CarPong recently launched and is letting users write short messages to other drivers.

The site is simple and like most other social networking sites you must be registered to use it. Users can either send a message to a particular license plate or receive notifications on messages for up to three plates. All of this is done on a user profile page on the website, similar to a Facebook profile.

Here’s how the service works: To send a message, users are required to enter a license plate number and the state in which the vehicle is registered. They are then able to leave a message up to 250 characters. If the owner of that vehicle is registered on the site, they will receive the email instantly. However, if they aren’t, the message will go live on the site, become searchable and eventually be delivered if that driver ever joins. Users are also able to follow their own plates as well as others and be notified when those plates receive messages. For example, a father might be “following” his college daughters license plate to make sure she isn’t driving like a maniac while at school.

Founder Tony Mastrorio notes in a recent blog post that the service isn’t just for denouncing bad driver habits, but has other social possibilities too. For example, you can now drive by a good looking women and send her a message or let someone know their brake light it out. There are several more useful services for the site as well. My favorite is that drivers could learn when their vehicles have been towed, improving an archaic archaic process that usually leaves a driver not knowing when their car was moved or where it now resides. For businesses, it could allow business owners to track their fleet of vehicles — bringing a new meaning to those stickers on mack trucks that say “How’s My Driving – Dial …..”

Currently, the company is generating revenue through online advertising. However, as users are only allowed to follow three plates, a future revenue model will involve charging a small fee for users wishing to follow more than three plates.

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We’ve got Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts, Delicious accounts, Flickr accounts and more, all vying for our constant attention and maintenance. All that means learning new systems for different applications with different purposes, remembering to use each service, and generally spending quite a bit of time keeping everything going.

That’s where Yoolink, a great new service, comes in. It’s a mix of tools like AddThis and ShareThis, bookmarking tools like Diigo and Delicious, and social news sites like Digg and Reddit. Its first and simplest use is as a universal sharing tool – as you’re browsing the Web, you click one button to share your current page with any or all of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn and more. There’s a plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer, and a bookmarklet that works across browsers, so no matter what you use, Yoolink will work for you.

There’s also a section of the site, for every Yoolink user, that’s your own personal bookmarks reservoir. Every time you share or bookmark something, it gets saved into your Yoolink account, meaning Yoolink can replace Delicious or Diigo for you, although it also supports saving pages directly to Delicious.

Yoolink also pulls in all of the links and sites being shared, and creates a page full of the most popular things people are sharing, which has exciting potential. If one tool can be used to share things to all of the sites we already use, Yoolink (or whoever pulls this off) would be able to track, with incredible accuracy and size, what the Web as a whole is really talking about. As it is now, sites like Yoolink only track what’s shared using their tools, so the data is segmented across various apps; if one could dominate, the implications would be great.

What I really love about Yoolink is how devoted it is to working with the ecosystem of apps you already use. You can sign up via Twitter or Facebook, thus saving the creation of yet another account. There’s a WordPress plugin that lets you post your bookmarks on your blog and share them with your readers. Yoolink also supports Bit.ly links and Gravatar images, all of which means joining Yoolink requires almost no extra work for users. Yoolink’s product isn’t necessarily unique, but the ease with which it lets you work and the simplicity of getting started certainly is.

Though this social bookmarking from Yoolink is new, Yoolink has been around for a while, particularly in Europe. Its Yoolink Pro product lets employees of a company share and discuss various items and topics internally, creating a private social network.

With these new features, Yoolink is trying to extend its reach to the average user and make the Web a little more social, and a little more inter-connected.

Yoolink is a Paris-based company with six employees. It raised $800k in funding in 2008.

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From left: Seoul Nat’l Univ. / Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci / AP

Glow-in-the-dark puppies, a naked “Mona Lisa” and gay-penguin parenting were among the weirder science stories of 2009. But wait … there’s much, much more.

So much weird science … so little time. It’s time to look back on the past year’s research and pick the winners of the 2010 Weird Science Awards.

In previous years, the top Weirdies have included glow-in-the-dark cloned cats and the rediscovery of an ancient marijuana stash. But if you think those stories are weird, this year’s candidates kick it up a notch. Heck, we’ve got glow-in-the-dark puppies and mushrooms as well as poop armor and gay penguin parents. (The last subject turns out to be surprisingly controversial.)

The problem is, there are so many deserving candidates that it’s hard to narrow them down to a manageable list of finalists. We’ve put 30 on the ballot, plus a few extra honorable mentions, and it’s up to you to decide which 10 topics win 2010’s Weirdies.

If you’ve ever believed that semantic search is meant exclusively for researchers, then Meaning Tool might prove you wrong. Through Popego, the semantic search engine allows you to add your online profile and interests such as “gadgets” or “current news”. From here, Meaning Tool serves you entertaining content from across your social graph. ReadWriteWeb took a look at how the tool works and how it just might bridge the gap between scholars and social media junkies.

Sponsor

Meaningtool – Demo from Popego on Vimeo.

Meaning Tool is a semantic engine that offers users a chance to extract concepts from text using specific semantic trees. As mentioned, you define your categories of interest by creating search parameters and training them with related websites or RSS feeds. Similar to Open Calais, the service appears to use the linked data standard to retrieve data via dereferenceable URIs on the web. From there you can search text in any Romantic language to produce relevant words and categories. Categories such as “technology” and “security” are then shown in a pie chart to represent the percentage of relevancy the text has to these key categories. The system also offers a tag cloud of relevant keywords and key concepts. And finally, Meaning Tool extracts entities such as mentioned companies, people and places.

Unlike many other semantic search services, your satisfaction with results as a researcher, marketer or general consumer weigh heavily on how you train the system. To find out more about the semantic web, check out our article on semantic search’s myths and realities. To add some of your own interests to Meaining Tool visit meaningtool.com.

Discuss

Just a few weeks ago Motorola’s Droid, available exclusively on Verizon Wireless, was raising the public’s awareness of Google’s Android mobile operating system. Now Google is preparing to release its own branded handset, the Nexus One.

By all accounts, the new phone, manufactured by HTC but prominently branded as a Google phone, is a “Droid killer.” Describing his brief experience playing with the new phone, Jason Chen of Gizmodo said the Nexus One will “certify (Google) as the premium Android phone brand out there right now. Even though it doesn’t have a hardware keyboard, it basically beats the hell out of the Droid in every single task that we threw at it.”

Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research, agreed. “For sure, it’s a Droid killer,” he said. “Droid is just a really clunky design in my view.”

A ‘Really Fast Phone’

Two things stand out on the Nexus One, Sterling said: Screen quality and speed. “It has a really big screen, even though the handset itself is not much bigger than a conventional handset,” Sterling said. “And it’s noticeably high-resolution.”

Even more striking, “It’s really, really fast,” Sterling said. In Chen’s testing, the speed difference was most noticeable in loading web pages.

“In loading a web page over Wi-Fi, the Nexus One loaded first, the iPhone 3GS came in a few seconds later, and the Droid came in a little while after that. This was constant throughout many web-page loads, so it’s indicative of something going on inside with the hardware,” Chen wrote.

While Google’s search business and free online and desktop apps have been consumer-oriented, conventional wisdom has been that Android was a platform play, not a consumer one. So the news that Google will sell its own phone has confused some observers.

‘What the Heck Are They Doing?’

“I’m not sure what to make…

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by Margaret Swink

So Copenhagen is over, with forests mentioned in one paragraph of a politically ambiguous “Copenhagen Accord” and an incomplete REDD agreement stapled on the back with major safeguard and finance issues still unresolved. Clearly, high hopes of a deal that might save the world’s forests and reduce the 15-20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and degradation will have to wait, at least till next year’s December meeting of the UNFCCC in Mexico City, if not beyond.

So along with many other people, you might be wondering, what happens now for REDD and for the world’s tropical forests?

Not much it seems. Forests remain under threat for all the same reasons that we’ve historically cut them down—illegal logging, industrial agriculture expansion, and destructive “development” projects. At least for one more year, business as usual is certainly going to continue and tropical forests will probably continue to be lost at the shocking rate of one acre per second.

Things are going to keep moving, however.

The UNFCCC process will continue as the REDD working group meets again in Bonn in June to work out technical issues, hopefully starting where they’ve left off in Copenhagen and further strengthening key provisions rather than going back to square one. Political negotiations will continue at least through Mexico City—a continuation of the process that started in Bali.

As Kevin Conrad, executive director of the Coalition of Rainforest Nations, aptly put it to the AP:

“It’s depressing,” he said. “It means I’ve got to spend another year … coming to meetings and talking about the same things.”

Various other processes intended to address the rapid destruction of the world’s tropical forests will also continue, but without resolution of critical environmental and social safeguards (notably including recognition and respect for indigenous people’s rights) that a Copenhagen forest agreement might have provided. The most notable of these include the U.N.-REDD initiative, the World Bank Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, and new initiatives started to help countries with “REDD readiness” planning.

This proliferation of initiatives, plus the consideration of a U.S. Senate climate bill with its large REDD provisions linked to dodgy offset approaches, results in a divide and conquer approach for forest protection—keeping advocates of a more rights-centric and environmentally friendly approach sorely stretched.

But the most depressing fail for the forests out of Copenhagen is the lack of binding targets to reduce fossil fuel emissions and start to halt climate change. If global temperatures rise above 2 degrees C, most scientists predict that tropical forests will be profoundly affected, experiencing extreme droughts, increased forest fires and other catastrophic weather events. Even if a separate deal to reduce deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries had been agreed upon, the lack of commitment to deep fossil fuel emissions in a legally binding climate change agreement would continue to threaten the world’s forests.

We can’t save the forests if we don’t save the climate. And that means that REDD without a larger climate deal is no deal at all.

Related Links:

Copenhagen coal in the stocking?

What you need to know following the Copenhagen climate summit

The Copenhagen Accord: A Big Step Forward

Today I had the tree main Windows Mobile Verizon phone. I wondered, maybe I should make a video to put them head to head and maybe help you guys make your choose this holiday a lot easier.

I would Go with the Omnia2 because it is nice, fast and has software to the infinity number(just kidding). The only fault I hate about the device is the standby freeze and the never ending error massages, but I bet that all of the problems can be fixed with an update/flash.

It’s official. The Obama administration is going to take over the largely vacant Thomson Correctional Center in the countryside west of Chicago and convert it into a federal maximum security prison that will house Guantanamo detainees. Predictably, Obama critics have decried the move, arguing that transferring Gitmo detainees stateside will court terrorist attacks on our home soil.

More surprisingly, many local residents of Thomson have applauded the decision on the grounds that it will bring badly needed jobs to their economically depressed town. Though liberals might well support Obama’s efforts to close down Guantanamo, I think they should unequivocally reject this prison-providing-employment justification. It unwisely categorizes incarceration as an economic good.

Of course, there is no denying that prisons provide jobs and that too many Americans need jobs. But a far better idea for reducing unemployment was Obama’s campaign-trail promise to create millions of Green Jobs. Promoting green employment means creating economic incentives to improve the environment. Promoting prison employment, on the other hand, creates an economic incentive to put more people in cages. Putting even more people in prison pollutes our social environment.

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by Lou Bendrick

Can eco-cocoas melt away holiday stress?Photo: Jason HoustonLet’s just say for the sake of argument, that you’re a little busy this time of year. (This is the part where you snort, as if to say, “You have no idea, sister.”) Also, let’s say that it’s cold outside where you live. (Is the pope an old German guy?) Lastly, let’s assume that, because you’re reading this on an environmental news site, you have green inclinations.

This all leads me to conclude that what you need at this very moment is a steaming cup of hot cocoa that is not only quick but also environmentally principled.  (I.E., not made by the handful of corporations known as “Big Chocolate” that buy cacao from heavily sprayed plantations and pay farmers poverty wages or, worse yet, use child labor. )

For you, my frozen, frantic reader, I bullied my friends assembled a panel of tasters, one of whom brought a light-up holiday animal that resembled an electrified Westie (see photo).  I supplied the organic cocoa mixes, a can of whipped cream for the kids, and an array of kitschy mugs.  (Note: The kids, much to their disappointment, were left out of this tasting. I thought it best to avoid full-blown pancreatic shut-down during the holidays.)

Please note: Most of these products were powdered mixes (just add water, milk or your “favorite non-dairy alternative”), but in one case we tried a quickie beverage made from chocolate “discs.” The mixes were largely certified organic as well. They were also, comparatively speaking, pricey. You can get a honkin’ 50-pack box (50 ounces) of Swiss Miss hot coca mix for $12.49 at Staples. (Of course, why the hell you’d want to buy any “food” at Staples is beyond me.)  I paid substantially more in general for the eco hot chocolate drinks—in one case I ponied up $13.95 for 3.5 ounces (go ahead, exhale that breath you just sucked in) for the discs.

How did they taste? Read on.
Our results:
 
Green & Black’s organic hot chocolate drink
Ingredients: Organic raw cane sugar, organic fat-reduced cocoa powder, organic dark chocolate powder (organic chocolate liquor, organic raw cane sugar, organic cocoa butter, soy lecithin, (emulsifier), organic vanilla extract).
Price: $4.29 (on sale), for 5.3 ounces
Special notes: Sports the USDA organic seal. Directions call for hot milk rather than hot water, which you’d think would make your beverage somehow better.
 
Who knew hot cocoa mix could taste tannic? This mix made our tasters pucker.  “That’s not right,” quipped one taster who sported a festive holiday sweater. She then reached for the whipped cream. Strangest comment: “Kind of vegetal.” Most passionate comment:  “What the hell are people thinking?” Kindest comment: “It’s not that bad,” said one taster, who, it should be disclosed, was jet-lagged to the point of stupor because he had just returned from an international trip wherein he ate cicada thoraxes and chicken feet, and whose opinion no one trusted.
 
Dagoba organic drinking chocolate
Ingredients: Organic cane sugar, organic coca, organic  chocolate, organic milk (less than 0.1%)
Price: $6.99 for 12 ounces
Special notes: Certified organic and fair trade certified. The directions for this mix included this line: “When the vapors of the milk rise the milk will be at its most receptive to accept the chocolate into its embrace.” Sorta sexy, in this way! This, um, sexyness, might be due to the fact that Dagoba’s eccentric founder, Frederick Schilling,  according to an inside source is “way hot.” Then again, Dagoba was bought by Hershey’s (see Big Chocolate, above.)
 
Again, tasters were freaked out by the smell: In this case, “like the inside of a tire.” Though the panel thought this drink was creamier than the others, some found it to have a bitter aftertaste.  The bug-eater thought it had a “more of a darker chocolate flavor.” To be fair though, this mix may have been more chocolatey because the directions called for four tablespoons of the stuff per your “favorite mug.”  (As opposed to the more common two-tablespoon-per-favorite-mug directive.)
 
Full Circle Organic Milk Chocolate Flavor Hot Cocoa Mix
Ingredients: Organic dehydrated can juice solids, organic whey, organic non-fat dry milk, organic cocoa (processed with alkalai), sea salt, calcium carbonate, natural vanilla flavor, xanthan gum (a natural vegetable product).
Price: $3.49 for 10 1-ounce packets
Special notes: Certified organic. This is my conventional grocery store’s bargain brand of organic products. Slogan: “Return to a natural way of living.”
 
For those prone of nostalgia, this is the most Swiss-Missy of the cocoa mixes—or, as one taster put it, it’s “the cocoa of my youth.” Like all of the add-water mixes, its texture is depressingly thin. Overall, tasters found it to be “synthetic” and “overly sweet.” Strangest comment: “It tastes like Playdoh!” Most damning: “You can get way better stuff at the ski lodge.” Ouch.
 
Equal Exchange Organic and Fairly Traded Hot Cocoa
Ingredients: Fair trade certified organic evaporated sugar cane juice, organic nonfat dry milk powder, fair trade certified organic cocoa-processed with alkali, organic guar gum, sea salt, organic carob bean gum, organic vanilla powder (organic vanilla extract, organic maltodextrin, organic gum Arabic).
Price: $9.29 for 12 ounces
Special notes: Equal Exchange is a worker-owned Fair Trade organization; this mix is certified organic and fair-trade certified. Container is made from recycled cardboard.
 
Q: “What’s that terrible smell?”
A: “I dunno, something weird.”
 
All in all, this product was slightly more chocolatey than the others, but also “cardboardy.” Most disaffected comment. “It has an underlying whatever.”
                           
Pierce Brothers Hot Cocoa
Price: $7.99 for 8 ounces
Ingredients: Organic evaporated cane juice, organic nonfat dry milk, fair trade certified organic cocoa, salt, natural flavor, guar gum.
Special notes: Fair trade and certified organic. Directions warn that “due to all natural organic ingredients, some setting (sic) may occur.”
 
The entire panel winced at the smell of this cocoa, which one taster said was “like ammonia.” The adjective “burned” was used most often to describe its flavor, as in “burned milk” and “burned rubber.” This un-chocolately mix actually made the tasters angry. “Who decided that this was okay?” demanded festive holiday sweater lady.  “I can’t understand how anyone would bring this to market,” scowled another taster. (Hey you kids, get off of my lawn!)
 
Ah!Laska Certified Organic Cocoa Chocolatey Chocolate Mix
Ingredients: Organic cane sugar, organic non-fat milk, organic cocoa powder (non-alkaline), organic rice syrup solids, xanthan gum (a natural thickener), carrageenan (a natural seaweed extract emulsifier), maltodextrin, organic vanilla powder.
Price: $7.99 for 12 ounces
Special notes: Certified organic. Cartoon mascot: AH! Bear.
 
Tasting results. “It’s got that smell again,” someone wailed.  Overall, the panel thought this mix was watery and without chocolate flavor.  One found it “vaguely soap-like.” The grub-eater, who evidently was taking a hatecation,  said it was “not offensive.”
 
Patric Fine Hot Chocolate Disks
Ingredients: cocoa beans, cocoa powder
Price: $13.95, for 3. 5 ounces (!)
Special notes: This product is hot chocolate, not hot cocoa. We’re talking solid form here, not powder. As you might have guessed from the price, this is super-duper premium micro-batch, bean-to-bar artisinal stuff. And although it doesn’t tout its organic ingredients, its cacao from Madagascar is certified organic. (Even though organic chocolate is no tastier than conventional, according to Patric’s founder). Note also that there is no sugar in this stuff—you are trusted to add your own “to taste.” Further, the directions call for you to use an actual whisk and to serve this beverage in “small tea cups.” I’m not sure what happens if you add mini marshmallows—I think someone rings your doorbell and slaps your face with leather gloves. In other words, this is not a hot beverage for the kiddies to swill.
 
“No comparison!” hooted one taster. Another said, “This is the only one I’d drink regularly.” In general this non-mix, which was added to milk, yielded very rich, very creamy results. Once the giddy gratitude died down a bit, the descriptions started to sound like wine-speak: “It’s got legs!” and “lots of complexity.” Then someone mentioned the price tag. The group got quiet and a glum as we collectively realized that we had just fallen in love above our social rank. Not even the Christmas Westie could cheer us.
 
Photo: Jason HoustonThe bottom line: I know it’s blustery out there and you’re busy (okay, really freakin’ busy), but if you buy hot chocolate from a mix, we can’t be friends. It’s that simple. Can you get something quick and delicious and principled? You can. It’s the Patric chocolate discs, but they’re priced like contraband and you’ll have  to have sell plasma to support your habit. Therefore, I’m going to give you an option to avoid other mixes that have that smell:  Get some cocoa powder (fair trade and organic if you’re flush) and sugar from the pantry and mix them in equal parts (say, one heaper of each per mug) in a glass measuring cup. Add a dash of vanilla. Next, add a little water and whisk it all into a syrupy liquid. Then whisk this into a pan of simmering whole milk. (For love of any god you choose, don’t use skim. Please. It’s the holidays.) Pour the result into your favorite mug (yes, it must be your favorite mug—anything less will screw this up royally). Next, bring on the whipped cream. Then, once you’re infused with warm-fellow feeling, and if you have two cents leftover, send a donation to the world-saving organization of your choice.

Related Links:

PETA on one side, FOX on the other … now that’s a conundrum

Umbra on chocolate

THQ’s WWE SmackDown vs. Raw won’t be going anywhere soon. The publisher has secured the license for an additional eight years, beginning next year.

“This agreement ensures that WWE games will continue to be an important cornerstone of THQ’s annual release schedule for the long term,” said THQ CEO Brian Farrell.

“We look forward to working directly with WWE to expand their brand in the video game space through continued game play innovation and increased online delivery of WWE content.”

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Every year for the past few years some health expert has come out against Santa, saying that the big man is just too big to be a good role model for our children. One year there was even a skinny Santa who refused to wear padding because he didn’t want the kids on his lap to think that being as heavy as Santa is typically portrayed was a good thing.

This year the criticism of the jolly elf comes from Nathan Grills of Monash University in Australia, who says that Santa should start walking instead of relying on his sleigh to get around.

The trouble with Santa

Grills noted in his report in the British Medical Journal that there’s “very high Santa awareness” among young children, but he is a poor role model because of his size, frequent reports of cookie binges and refusal to wear a helmet when he slides down chimneys.

He said there’s a correlation between countries that have Santa as part of their tradition and overweight children, and Santa “is a late adopter of evidence-based behavior change and continues to sport a rotund, sedentary image.”

What’s more, Santa presents a public health nightmare as a potential vector for the spread of colds and flu among children who sit on his lap. (While the report is light-hearted, this is probably a real concern.)

The paper suggests Santa should ditch the cookies and start sharing carrots with the reindeer.

Skinny Santa no help

We’ve noted before that we don’t think a slimming Santa would help kids get the message about healthier eating, mostly because kids understand that he’s not real and therefore shouldn’t be a role model for any sort of behavior.

As we noted a couple of months ago in reference to a British anti-obesity campaign featuring “The Simpsons,” most kids know the difference between stories and reality and know not to take advice from folks who aren’t real. Which is a good thing, or we’d have a lot more kids trying to be superheroes out there.

(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

From the RSS feed of CalorieLab News (REF3076322B7)

Santa’s too fat, the annual edition