The research will be unveiled by The UK Council for Child Internet Safety (The UKCCIS) on 2013-02-05, which is the 10th annual Safer Internet Day, when a ‘Charter of Rights and Responsibilities for Children On-line‘ will also be launched.

The research findings suggest that UK coalition government policy, spearheaded by Prime Minister, Rt. Hon. Mr. David Cameron (Conservative MP for Witney) to block sexual content and pornography through parental controls, and filters via Internet Service Providers (ISPs), only goes part of the way to securing the on-line safety of children.

The survey, conducted for The UKCCIS by academics, asked 24 000 children 25 questions about Internet use, including ‘have you ever seen anything online that has upset you?’ Hundreds of schools around Britain were enlisted to help canvass the children, who were aged up to 16.

Mr. Andy Phippen, Professor of Social Responsibility at Plymouth University, who helped to devise the report, said:

‘Upset is caused by a broad range of issues, very varied, and not all sexual content.’

One memorable answer from a primary school child who was asked what most upset him was:

‘when my Dad told me on Facebook he didn’t want to see me any more’.

The report, ‘Have Your Say‘, is consistent with research Mr Phippen was already carrying out. The examples he heard included:

• a video of a zebra being killed,
• ‘someone swearing at me’,
• ‘a picture of my baby brother, who I don’t live with any more’, and
• a picture of a cat that ‘looked like my pet that had to be put down’.

Mr. Phippen said:

‘There is no silver bullet to “crack” child safety on-line. Government’s obsession with filtering is OK, but too narrow.’

Ms. Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology at The London School of Economics (The LSE), told The Oxford Media Convention last month that The LSE research, in which 8 000 children aged nine to 16 were asked about the disturbing things they had seen on the Internet, supported this picture. She added:

‘There is a lot of attention given to pornography and bullying on social media, but they also mentioned beheadings, flaying, cruelty to animals.’

Mr. Phippen agreed:

‘Any channel used for communication is potentially a channel for upsetting content, but certainly YouTube is the most prevalent as far as video content is concerned.’

Ms.Livingstone said that the issue of on-line bullying was not covered by efforts to filter-out inappropriate content…

‘Filtering is only about content on established websites’

… while filtering and blocking controls could be very clunky to use and problematic.

However, ‘Have Your Say’ also finds many positive aspects to the Internet; the survey shows that what under-11s do most is play games on sites such as Moshi Monsters, followed by schoolwork and keeping in touch with friends. For older children, social networking takes over from playing games. Mr Phippen said:

‘I think, in this age group, violent images and upset from abusive nasty comments from their peers are the concerns.
‘It is spoken about as so-and-so is so mean to me. “Cyber bullying” – they don’t use that term’,

• Evidence from the children of being groomed or facing predatory behaviour on-line is also scanty.

Accessing pornography on-line, the main concern of parents responding to a UK government consultation last autumn, did not feature highly in the teenagers’ responses.

However, there is a growing problem of ‘sexting‘ messages in school, when pupils share personal sexual content via smartphones and tablets.  Mr. Phippen said one answer was better education.

‘You come back to media literacy.
‘About understanding how to conduct yourself on-line, and what the impact can be of behaviour, when you don’t see the impact of your behaviour, on the victim in front of you.’

• CLIPPED FROM: ‘Children are “upset” by online violence, study finds‘, The Guardian, 2013-02-02

This will include better services for Glaswegians; the city council will create an ‘app’ for reporting issues such as pot-holes and missing bin collections, and there will be  real-time information about traffic, and ‘apps’ to check that buses and trains are on time. Plan include linking up the CCTV cameras across the city with its traffic management unit in order to identify traffic incidents faster.

It will use analytical software and security cameras to help identify and prevent crime in the city and monitor energy levels to find new ways of providing gas and electricity to poorer areas where fuel poverty is a big issue.

• Glasgow was among 30 cities in the UK bidding for the money, with the shortlist including London, Peterborough and Bristol.

Mr. Scott Cain, The TSB’s project leader for Future Cities, said,

‘Glasgow has some quite extreme challenges; it has the lowest life expectancy of any city in the UK for instance, and the hope is that if we bring together energy, transport, public safety and health, it will make it more efficient and a better place to live’.

 

Scotland’s Deputy First Minister Ms. Nicola Sturgeon welcomed the news.

The Technology Strategy Board (The TSB), is a body set up by The UK’s New Labour Government (Brown Ministry) in 2007 to stimulate technology-enabled innovation. Its “Future Cities Demonstrator” is intended to act as a blueprint for other cities. Mr. Cain added,

‘The thinking behind it is to have somewhere in the UK where firms can look at the efficiencies, the investments, and how you can address the challenges of a city’.

Glasgow will not be the UK’s only smart city;  others, including Birmingham, Sunderland and London are beginning to roll out technologies to make services work more smartly.

The Universities and Science Minister, The Rt. Hon. Mr. David Willetts (Conservative MP for Havant in Hampshire) was in Glasgow to make the announcement.

‘With more people than ever before living in our cities, they need to be able to provide people with a better quality of life and a thriving economy,’ he said.

‘From transport systems to energy use and health, this “Demonstrator” will play a key part in the government’s industrial strategy and give real insight into how our cities can be shaped in the future,’ he added.

• CLIPPED FROM: ‘Glasgow wins ‘smart city’ government cash‘, BBC, 2013-01-25

Meals by Mr. Jamie Oliver, Ms. Lorraine Pascale, Ms. Nigella Lawson and Mr. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall were compared to those from Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco.

The meals in TV chefs’ cookbooks contained more calories, fat, saturated fat and sugar — but less salt.

The researchers said this was not about ‘bashing’ chefs as many campaigned to tackle obesity.

The team said it was widely agreed that cooking from scratch was healthier than buying prepared meals, however, they said there was a lack of scientific testing of the claim.

In the study, published in The British Medical Journal, they compared 100 main meals from four TV chefs, who had books at the top of the bestseller charts, to 100 supermarket ready meals. These were then compared to nutritional guidelines set by the World Health Organization.

On average, meals in the chef’s books were less healthy and ‘more likely to achieve red traffic light labels’, the researchers said.

Professor Mr. Martin White, from The Institute of Health and Society at the university, said

‘Both ready meals and those by TV chefs are not as healthy as they could be.

‘We’re not bashing TV chefs, among them are chefs that have done a huge amount for healthy eating and tackling obesity.’

The study does not attempt to look at how often the meals are cooked — if they are part of people’s daily diets or just dishes for a special occasion.

However, the researchers did call for chefs and publishers to put nutritional information alongside their recipes in cookbooks to allow budding chefs to make a more informed choice about the nutritional content of their meals.

‘Educating and informing consumers should apply as much to TV chefs as for food in shops,’ said Prof White.

A spokesman for Mr. Jamie Oliver said:

‘We welcome any research which raises debate on these issues.

‘We would regard the key issue to be food education so that people are aware of which foods are for every day and which are treats to be enjoyed occasionally.’

They added Jamie’s most recent book already had nutritional information per serving.

A spokeswoman for Ms. Lorraine Pascale said:

‘Some of the recipes in Lorraine’s book are healthy, some not quite so much so.

‘There are plenty of salads, soups and light meals as well as the richer dishes.

‘Her books and shows to-date haven’t been about healthy eating, they are about cooking.’

Supermarkets said they had been making their food healthier.

• CLIPPED FROM: “Ready meals ‘healthier’ than TV chefs’ fare“, BBC News, 2012-12-18

He’s perched on a coffee table eating gummy bears. Sitting across from him on the couch in an expansive, hardwood-floored rental space in Chelsea New York USA getting ready to watch him teach ‘The Dating Workshop’, I admit that I feel, if not ‘weird’, a bit self-conscious; it’s hard to meet a master of body language (or, to quote Mr.Eastman, ‘non-verbal communication’) and not worry about what you’re doing with your hands, how solid your eye contact is, and whether he’s reading your mind. Hint: He sort of is.

For eight months, Mr.Eastman has been teaching singles on the dating scene to read minds, too, and to use their bodies to send clear signals.

For example, you can send the message, ‘If you touch me, I will gag’, by slowly moving away each time your date invades your personal space. or you can communicate, ‘Kiss me! Now!’ by playing with the buttons on his shirt, looking at his lips, or softening the tone of your voice just so.

Those moves might sound primitive, but on a first or second date, it’s difficult to say exactly what you’re thinking. Most people opt not to.

Mr. Eastman’s theory is that if you’re not fluent in body language, you’re likely to give your date the wrong idea, to inadvertently act uninterested when you’re interested or vice versa, to be left mystified by someone’s vanishing act, even though he was telling you the whole time—wordlessly, of course—that he couldn’t wait to get away.

Modern dating is one big (quoting Led Zeppelin here) communication breakdown. But ‘The Dating Workshop’ and Mr. Eastman’s other classes, including ‘Body Language Explained & Deception Detected’, are designed to help.

‘I promise you,’ says Mr. Eastman, who has a blue-eyed baby face but speaks with the quick cadence of a Mr. Aaron Sorkin character, ‘in about a year and a half, my name will be synonymous with body language.’

Arguably, the writer Mr.Neil Strauss has a corner on that market. His 2005 runaway best-seller, ‘The Game’, told the story of the years he spent with professional pick-up artists learning how to seduce women. Much of Mr. Strauss’s strategy entailed non-verbally conveying self-confidence. Mr. Eastman, however, didn’t come to the study of body language to ‘get laid’.

He says he developed his proficiency in non-verbal communication during childhood as an adaptive response to his anxiety. In social situations, he often found himself paralysed, imagining worst-case scenarios about what would happen if he made the wrong move or said the wrong thing.

So he learned to ‘read’ people to discern what they wanted from him. Years later, he obtained a master’s degree in forensics from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, started teaching psychology classes at LaGuardia Community College, and became a professional poker player.

He uses his winnings to fund his own research in non-verbal communication, conducting countless hands-on hours in the field.

Some of his lab settings are cocktail parties; he sets them up, films them, and then studies the footage.

In the summertime, he stands between two mailboxes across from the outdoor tables of ‘Blue Water Grill‘, a seafood restaurant in Manhattan’s Union Square, observes people on dates, and collects data.

He shares his findings through ‘The Nonverbal Group‘, the research and teaching company he founded and runs. In his rental space, he maintains an office—a desk and computer, shelves full of body language and pop-psychology texts including ‘The Brain In Love, Who’s In Charge?’, and a couple of books by Mr. Malcolm Gladwell (‘who I f*****g love to death’) — as well as a seminar room where he’s taught more than 2600 students in the past year.

Mr. Eastman tells me that ‘The Dating Workshop’ usually draws more women than men, but when the room fills up, the crowd is about 50-50, the majority in their 20s and 30s and got tickets to the class through Groupon and LivingSocial.

The women have nervous eyes and adjust their tights; the men look like computer programmers with their straight backs, solemn expressions, and wire-rimmed glasses. To begin, Mr. Eastman asks his students to shout out questions and writes them on a white board.

‘I can feel people making assumptions about me,’ says a guy in the back row who wears a blazer over a plaid shirt.

He asks Mr. Eastman for advice on changing that.

‘Like, I tell people I went to Harvard, and I can tell they’re thinking I’m a “douche bag”.’

Mr. Eastman nods, watching him for a moment. He tips his head and squints.

‘Well, you do have a little “douche baggery” to you,’ he says.

The room, including the Harvard graduate, erupts into laughter. ‘We’ll work on that,’ he adds. (Later, he tells me that the ‘douche baggery’ he picked-up on stemmed from a disconnect between the arrogance in the Harvard graduate’s words and the insecurity apparent in his body language.)

‘What about the nice guy theorem?’ asks another man. ‘Nice guys finish last.”Not true,’ Mr.Eastman says. ‘Those are just nice guys who don’t know how to market themselves.’

He continues to take questions until he runs out of space on the white board. Then he sets about answering them.

‘What’s cool in the world of dating,’ he tells the group, ‘is that no one’s ever telling you how they feel. They’re showing you.’

He introduces ‘the orientation reflex.’ That’s the move a person makes to orient toward what interests him — turning his head, for example. He insists that people orient toward us all the time, and we should learn to notice it.

He talks about ‘pacifying gestures’ we use to diffuse the anxiety of dating, how men rub their palms on their pants and women play with their fingers. He explains that many people do poorly on dates because they’re ’emotionally incongruent’: What comes out of their mouths doesn’t match what shows on their faces.

He uses President Obama as an example: ‘During the debates, he’d say, “Mitt, I disagree with you”, ‘ Eastman says, making a placid face. ‘Not, “Mitt! I disagree with you!” ‘ Mr.Eastman says, changing his expression to an angry one. In that case, he explains, Mr. Obama came off as weaker than he meant to. But emotionally incongruent people can also come off as odd, and that can hurt them on dates.

So if they’re doing so many things wrong, how can discouraged daters improve their skills? ‘Video,’ Mr.Eastman says.

‘You watch yourself on tape. Then you can change.’

It might be a creepy move to set up a video camera on a first date, but Mr. Eastman will approximate the experience for you in his workshop by filming you talking to your classmates.
After the first hour, Mr. Eastman tells his students to get up and mingle. Everyone stands and starts moving around the room, wearing I-can’t-believe-we’re-all-sober smiles.

I talk with one woman, an actress in her early 30s who grew up in Virginia and feels mystified by New York men.

‘Southern men are so different,’ she says. ‘Here, I’m confused. I’m always horrible on the first couple of dates.’

She’s taken two of Mr.Eastman’s classes with a LivingSocial coupon, and she believes they’ve made her more aware. She feels more comfortable and less compelled than she used to be to fill every moment of silence on a date.

I talk with a computer programmer (I knew it!) who is here for the first time and says he’s benefiting from the class.

‘I don’t agree with everything Blake says. But he’s good.’

I talk with another woman who says that meeting Mr. Eastman and his girlfriend has changed her whole life; she has new friends, a new job, a new outlook. She wears the dreamy gaze of a cult member.

I meet another man who has taken a few of Mr. Eastman’s classes and seems similarly enamoured. ‘He’s just so amazing,’ he says.

After living in New York City for six years, I’ve met (sometimes as a seeker, more often as a journalist) my share of self-help gurus: diet experts, sex coaches, life coaches, career coaches, a man who believes he can make anyone a millionaire, an older woman who wants to fill up Madison Square Garden with young women and preach against premarital sex, an angry meditation teacher who demands 2500 USD  for meditation classes.

All of them, even the angry meditation teacher, have disciples — people who think this guru must be the path to happiness; on the guru’s website, they’ll write testimonials: I don’t know where I’d be without him.

But Mr. Eastman seems far more sweet than parasitic: While we were waiting for his students to arrive, he gushed about his girlfriend, whom he met in one of his classes.

‘Most people don’t communicate,’ he says. ‘My girlfriend and I are completely transparent. We have the best relationship I’ve ever seen.’

He talked about how great his friends are, how supportive his parents are. When I asked him what learning non-verbal communication has done for him, he answered,

‘I don’t know where I’d be without it.’

Mr. Eastman doesn’t give the impression that he aims to gather admirers but rather that he yearns to help people feel as comfortable as he’s learned to feel.

‘Communication is the most important part of relationships,’ he says. ‘I want people to learn to communicate.’
Later in the night, the group engages in a second mingle. This time, they seem more relaxed. Still, Eastman has tips:

‘You were playing with your fingers behind your back,’ he tells someone.

‘And you,’ he tells another student, ‘have a low blink rate.Guess who else has that? Me. And you know what happens if you stare at people without blinking? They’re gonna think you’re creepy.’

And then, some advice we could all use:

‘You look upset,’ he tells one of the computer-programmer types.

‘Come on!’ he says with a smile.

‘Relax.’

• CLIPPED FROM “The Date Whisperer — This dating guru will fix your worst habits”, 2012-11-29, The Slate

Face-friendly food 1: Berries

Berries act as the perfect healthy skin pick ‘n’ mix as they provide a great combo of antioxidants and vitamins C and E in an easy package. Vitamin-C is really face-friendly as it helps produce collagen, the facial framework tissue which keeps your complexion plump and smooth. Blackberries, raspberries, strawberries and blueberries are some of our favourites and easy as to get into your daily diet, but make sure they are eaten fresh and unheated; you’ll get the most anti-oxidants and vitamins that way.

Face-friendly food 2: Wholegrains

Wholegrains are a facial super food as they are fantastic for your digestion, and when your body is working to get rid of waste and toxins efficiently it shows on your skin. Go for brown or wholemeal pasta, rice and breads to get your wholegrains as well increase your intake of fibre. These foods not only boost digestive transit, but they are also great sources of iron and another skin-loving nutrient, Vitamin-B, as well as helping you to feel full and satiated.

Face-friendly food 3: Cucumber

Okay, so you can slice off a couple of rounds and pop them on your eyes too, but the nutritional properties of cucumber make them a skin-friendly food to eat as well. Cucumber has high water content and staying hydrated has to be one of the golden rules when it comes to good nutrition for your skin. Boost your cucumber intake by including them as crudités, in salads and even in drinks – cucumber whizzed up with yogurt, mint and a dash of milk makes a delicious Lassi.

Face-friendly food 4: Salmon

Oily fish is super skin-friendly as its rich in the essential lipids (fats) that the skin needs to be healthy. The fatty acid Omega 3 is your friend when it comes to maintaining a healthy and young-looking complexion as it maintains skin elasticity and works to keep cell membranes healthy. Other examples of oily fish include trout, mackerel, tuna, anchovies and sardines.

Face-friendly food 5: Dark leafy greens

Spinach, kale, romaine lettuce, and swiss chard are all great examples of dark leafy greens that are fantastic for maintaining healthy skin. It’s all to do with their super levels of anti-oxidant, vitamins A, C, E and the mineral iron – which is essential for keeping your blood healthy and your skin bright. If you are not a great lover of greens you can always add them to a smoothie or sneak watercress, rocket or baby spinach into salads and sarnies to ensure you get your fill.

Face-friendly food 6: Beans

It’s the existence of isoflaves – potent anti-oxidants – that make beans a fabulous face-friendly food. Anti-oxidants are great because they reduce the free radicals in your body (which cause ageing) and make you look and feel great.  And black beans, chickpeas, lentils and soy beans are good choices of beans/ legumes to incorporate into your diet.

Face-friendly food 7: Extra virgin olive oil

Integral to the Mediterranean diet, extra virgin olive oil can help nourish your skin from the inside out. High levels of the anti-oxidant Vitamin-E and source of the ‘good fats’ are what makes extra virgin olive oil so skin-beneficial. If you don’t already, try using it in place of your regular cooking oil and include a drizzle on salads, pasta and pizza.

• CLIPPED FROM: “Top 7 face-friendly foods” Yahoo! Lifestyle UK & Ireland, 2012-08-29

This is clipped from a blog by Jonathan Jones on The Guardian website, the 1st personal style is the voice of Jonathan’s and not Clipped News’s.

It seems like only yesterday that Michelangelo Merisi, better known as Caravaggio, was killed by poisonous paints. That was a theory floated in 2010. The latest idea, proposed by yet another “expert” and reported in some papers this week, is that he was assassinated by the Knights of Malta.

I was once lucky enough to be sent by the Guardian in search of all Caravaggio’s works, and Malta was the spookiest stop on the trip, the place I felt closest to his dark heart. He went there when he was on the run after killing a man in a fight in Rome. He was ordained as a Knight of St John there, joining a holy chivalric order with roots in the Crusades. Today, the traces of the Knights are easy to find in Valletta, their fortified city perched on a high rock above a deep harbour. It is a strange, spectacular place. Down in the harbour you can see the prison that Caravaggio escaped from after getting into trouble with the Knights (trouble was his middle name). Away from the British-style pubs in the centre you’ll find the eerie, eastern-style streets that lead to the old fortifications whose massive bulwarks have withstood sieges down the centuries. The most compelling place in Valletta is, however, its cathedral, where you can see Caravaggio’s huge, dark painting of the Beheading of St John the Baptist.

In a prison yard, an executioner is using a knife to remove the partially severed head of a slaughtered captive. Other prisoners watch in fascination and horror from a window: tomorrow it might be them dying in the dust. The painting suggests direct observation, intimate knowledge of crime and punishment. It takes us straight into the twilit world of anger and vengeance in which Caravaggio lived his life.

Was he killed by the Knights he had (mysteriously) offended? It’s just another futile speculation. It does not add much to our appreciation of him. But conspiracy theories will always circle round this painter because his art invites them. Dark paranoia pervades his unforgettable picture of the judicial murder of John the Baptist: you feel he is scared about something, haunted by something, by guilt, and yes, maybe anxious that his sojourn in Malta is turning very sour.

Caravaggio in Malta had a hellhound on his trail. But wherever he went it followed him. It was his own shadow.

• CLIPPED FROM:’Caravaggio’s dark heart in Malta‘, Johnathan Jones on Art, The Guardian, 2012-04-06

He hadn’t set off at sunrise to run all day through Mexico’s Copper Canyons to visit the hidden homes of his friends, the reclusive Tarahumara Indians. He wasn’t clattering across the Mojave in an ancient pickup truck, hoping to earn a few more months of food as a vagabond furniture mover.

Instead, he filled a water bowl for his pup, told a friend he’d be back before lunch, jogged three miles down the road toward a nice, safe, American wilderness park in Gila, New Mexico – and vanished.

The news got out last Thursday. By first light on Friday, friends and fans of the Horse who’d driven all night to get there were lining up to join search and rescue teams. Among them were champion ultra-distance runners like Kyle Skaggs and Scott Jurek, the US 24-hour record holder. The actor Peter Sarsgaard would soon arrive.

I was 750 miles away when I found out, but so many people were speeding down from so many directions, it took only two calls and ten minutes to find a ride. I climbed in next to Luis Escobar, a photographer and race director I’d met when we’d last gone in search of the Horse six years ago.

I first heard about Caballo Blanco in 2005, when I was trying to learn the secrets of the Tarahumara, who call themselves the “Running People”. For centuries, fantastic tales of Tarahumara speed and endurance have drifted out of the Copper Canyons in northwestern Mexico, and on rare occasions, so have the Tarahumara.

In 1993, a 55-year-old Tarahumara runner in homemade sandals and his native toga appeared at the starting line of the Leadville Trail 100 – a gruelling race through the Rocky Mountains equivalent to nearly four full marathons – and defeated a field of elite international athletes. The following year, another Tarahumara runner shattered the course record. Then they retreated to the canyons, never to return.

If you study video of that 1994 race, you’ll see a tall, lanky figure running step-for-step with a Tarahumara runner. He’s there for an instant, then slips off to the side just before the finish line and disappears into the crowd.

He was an ex-professional boxer, I discovered, who was recovering from a broken heart with long, rambling runs across the Colorado trails. When the Tarahumara needed someone to guide them for the last 50 miles of the race, he volunteered.

Something about that night – about the experience of whisking silently through the dark by the side of a stranger from another century – must have affected him deeply, because soon after the Tarahumara left, Michael Randall Hickman went after them.

He’d be reborn – first as Micah True, self-named seeker of ancient wisdom, and then, to the Tarahumara children he entertained by snorting and stomping, as Caballo Blanco.

By the time I tracked him down, he’d spent nearly 15 years living among the Tarahumara. Their secret, Caballo told me, was simple – the Tarahumara remember that humans are creatures of constant motion, and if we forget that we survived and thrived for most of our existence as long-distance runners, we’ll suffer the same consequences as any other caged animal – disease, mood swings, eating disorders, all-around misery.

“The Tarahumara aren’t smarter than us. They’ve just got better memories.”

Learn the fine art of running, Caballo told me, and you can change your life.

“Don’t fight the trail. Take what it gives you,” he began. “Lesson two – think easy, light, smooth and fast. You start with easy, because if that’s all you get, that’s not so bad. Then work on light. Make it effortless, like you don’t [care] how high the hill is or how far you’ve got to go.

“When you’ve practised that so long that you forget you’re practising, you work on making it smooooooth. You won’t have to worry about the last one – you get those three, and you’ll be fast.”

Caballo’s dream was to let the rest of the world know there was ancient wisdom worth protecting down there in the canyons, and his method was to create a wild, multi-day running festival in the heart of Tarahumara territory.

Nine months after he’d shown me how to transform my technique, I was able to return to the Copper Canyons in 2006 with ace runners like Scott Jurek and Luis Escobar for the 50-mile Ultramaraton de Caballo Blanco. Since then, the race has grown beyond even Caballo’s wildest expectations – this year on 4 March, more than 400 Tarahumara and nearly 100 outside runners participated, including past New York City marathon champion German Silva.

“He was the happiest I’d ever seen him,” Will Harlan, one of Caballo’s friends, told me. “He seemed to have a tranquillity and centeredness, even as record numbers of Tarahumara descended on Urique to run the race.”

Barely three weeks later, Caballo began driving from Mexico to Arizona to visit his girlfriend, another runner who, like me and Sarsgaard and thousands of others, have been transformed by Caballo’s message. Along the way, he stopped off at the Gila Wilderness Lodge in New Mexico, a place he’d visited many times.

On Monday, he went for a six-hour run with Guadajuko, a Mexican mongrel he’d adopted and called “the ghost dog”. On Tuesday, he decided to do a quick 12-miler before hitting the road. Guadajuko’s paws were sore, so Caballo left him on the porch and told the innkeeper he’d be back in two hours.

Five days later, he was finally discovered by the side of a cool mountain stream not far from the lodge. His death is still a mystery.

One of the running buddies who found him said Caballo looked peaceful – as if he’d stopped for a nap at the end of a long, glorious ramble through the woods, and never woken up.

Written by his friend and Born to Run author Christopher McDougall.

• CLIPPED FROM: “Ultra-running: Who was the mysterious White Horse?“, BBC News magazine, 2012-04-05

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.

Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.

In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.

The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.

Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.

The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.

The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).

In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.

Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.

Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?