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leaving aside the fact that from the figures given by Prof Feng, about 80 per cent of obese people are NOT "perfectly healthy with normal cholesterol and blood sugar", and 70 per cent of people who die suddenly of heart attacks ARE obese (see my take on the 'fat but fit' argument here), and that Prof Feng has written in a previous letter of obesity being "a serious medical problem and [that] studies in the United States show that obesity will be the No. 1 public health problem and cause of death in five years' time", I am amused by Prof Feng's definition of good health as "not a number... [but] a sense of well-being physically, mentally, socially and spiritually".

much of what we do in "medicine" today is about numbers. Your "weight, body mass index, how often you jog or the number of kilometres you run", your "cholesterol and blood sugar", your smoking, alcohol intake, exercise, sexual behaviour, diet and family history are all quantified and studied, because they give us an idea of your risk for certain diseases. Our interventions, pharmacological or otherwise, aim to modify or reduce these risks. These are numbers that translate to concrete events in real-life.You may argue that one can have bad risk factors and still have a sense of "physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being", in which case you don't need a doctor or drugs to make you feel better - but that doesn't mean you are not going to die of a heart attack at 40 either.

The problem with using the term "well-being" in defining something as important as healthcare or medicine, is that it is a vague term (a weasel word, I like to call it) that allows quacks to ply their trade, and for people to medicalise their problems of living - and that is something Prof Feng disapproved of, isn't it?Do I have a better definition for "health"? Well, not yet - but I certainly don't think my job is only about giving people "a sense of well-being".

My column today is about the need for birth control as a key to fighting poverty. In short: let’s make contraception as available as sex.

all the numbers on a subject like this are dubious. The U.N. or research groups put out nice reports with figures for all kinds of things, and I sometimes worry that they imply a false precision. The truth is we have very little idea of some of these numbers.

in my column today, I refer to the 215 million women around the world who have “an unmet need for contraception.” That means they want to delay pregnancy for two years or more,  are married or sexually active, and are not using modern contraception. I use that figure because it’s the best there is, but in the real world many women are much more ambivalent. They kind of don’t want another pregnancy, unless maybe it’s a boy. Or you ask them if they want to get pregnant, and they reply: “Not really, but I leave it to God.” Or they say that in an ideal world, they’d prefer to wait, but their husband doesn’t want to wait so they want another pregnancy now. So many people answer in those ways, rather than in the neat, crisp “yes” or “no” that the statistics suggest.

Mendick, H. and Moreau, M. (2010). Monitoring the presence and representation of  women in SET occupations in UK based online media. Bradford: The UKRC.

Mendick and Moreau considered the representation of women on eight ‘SET’ (science, engineering and technology) websites: New Scientist, Bad Science, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, Neuroskeptic, Science: So What, Watt’s Up With That and RichardDawkins.net. They also monitored SET content across eight more general sites: the BBC, Channel 4, Sky, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter.

Their results suggest online science informational content is male dominated in that far more men than women are present. On some websites, they found no SET women. All of the 14 people in SET identified on the sampled pages of the RichardDawkins.net website were men, and so were all 29 of those mentioned on the sampled pages of the Channel 4 website (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 11).

WOMEN'S advocacy group Aware's plan to distribute a set of DVDs of its dramatic extraordinary general meeting (EGM), held in May 2009, has hit a snag.

The Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) has not been able to distribute the DVDs, as it is appealing against a requirement that it needs a government licence to do so.

The MDA has, in the meantime, given the DVD an M18 rating - meaning it should be seen only by those aged 18 and above.

Researchers Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin report their conclusions in a new book, The Longevity Project. "Everybody has the ideas — don't stress, don't worry, don't work so hard, retire and go play golf," says Friedman, a psychology professor at University of California-Riverside. "We did not find these patterns to exist in people who thrived."

At the core of their 20 years of research is a study started by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921. Terman died in 1956, but other researchers carried on the study. One participant was biologist Ancel Keys, whose life-long work helped popularize the Mediterranean diet. He died in 2004 at age 100. He enjoyed gardening as an activity much of his life.

if your activities rise or stay high in middle age, you definitely stay healthier and live longer," says Martin, a research psychologist at University of California-Riverside.

Ben Summerskill, chief executive of gay rights group Stonewall, said: "At Stonewall, we've all been on this app since 8am and we can assure your readers it's having absolutely no effect.

A new petition letter addressed to Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive, posted on the Change.org site last week said: "Apple doesn't allow racist or anti-Semitic apps in its app store, yet it gives the green light to an app targeting vulnerable LGBT youth with the message that their sexual orientation is a 'sin that will make your heart sick' and a 'counterfeit'.

The technology giant is notoriously efficacious in deciding which apps it allows on to its popular iPhone and iPad handsets. Last year Apple withdrew a similar anti-gay iPhone app called Manhattan Declaration after Change.org, the online activism site, handed over an 8,000-strong petition.

As one of those who have in fact read the book, I would like to place on record that Lelyveld at no place in the book has described Gandhi as a racist. In fact, as one of the foremost authorities on apartheid and racial discrimination, Lelyveld has shown the cultural distance that Gandhi traversed in a short span of only four months in his understanding of the ‘native question’ in colonial South Africa.

As we seek to ban the book on the ground that it constitutes insult to the Father of the Nation, we should remember that the book itself makes no statements of the kind which are attributed to it. But, that cannot be the sole ground on which the decision to ban or not ban a book rests.

No civilised, democratic society can ban a book, however blasphemous or salacious. The only response to a book can be a book, a counter-argument.

1. One cannot criticise if one has not read the articleMr Singh said that between the reporter (Ms Sim) and himself, they had received 7 email complaints, with many more criticisms online. However, he said that most of these complaints had come from people who were reacting solely to the front page without reading the article. Mr Singh said that he had expected most intelligent and educated Singaporeans to have read the article before jumping the gun to judge TNP for their article.

2. "Are Singaporeans ready for a gay MP?" was the angle TNP chose to take because they thought it was an important issue concerning votersEven though the PAP said that Dr Wijeysingha's sexual orientation was not an issue for them, TNP felt that it was an issue for Singaporean voters. They therefore went out to poll Singaporeans about whether they were ready for a gay MP. 76% of the Singaporeans polled said that they would be fine with a gay MP. This, Mr Singh said, actually helps SDP more than the PAP, and therefore he felt that it was quite "ballsy" of TNP to have taken this angle. However, TNP only polled approx. 130 (I forget the real number) people and so it would not have been statistically correct for the headline to say "Singaporeans are ready for a gay MP". (This was in response to my question about why the headline could not have reflected the poll.) He also said that TNP decided to do a poll about lowering the age of consent in Singapore because it was an issue raised in the video (albeit not by Dr Wijeysingha) and they felt that it was relevant to Singaporeans. 

3. It is only a smear campaign if what the PAP say about Vincent Wijeysingha is untrue Mr Singh said that it would only be accurate to say that the PAP has launched a "smear campaign" against Dr Wijeysingha if what they are saying is untrue. However, what the PAP has said is true, and so it cannot be labelled a "smear campaign".He said that he had asked the SDP if they had attempted to suppress the video in question, and that the SDP said yes. So the PAP hadn't been "smearing" the SDP by implying they were trying to suppress the video, because they were

mandatory data retention legislation. The bill that they have proposed requires that Internet Service Providers, such as Comcast and Time Warner, save records of the IP addresses they assign to their customers for a period of 18 months.

Data retention is a controversial topic and loudly opposed by the privacy community. To counter such criticism, the bill's authors have cunningly (and shamelessly) named it the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. This of course means that anyone who opposes data retention must go on record as opposing measures to catch sexual predators.

The bill includes a curious exception to the retention requirements: it doesn't apply to wireless data providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, or operators of public WiFi networks, such as Starbucks and McDonalds. When questioned about this, a Republican committee staffer told CNET in May that the wireless loophole was added because wireless networks are designed in such a way that IP addresses are assigned to multiple users or accounts and they are "not technologically capable of retaining the type of data that law enforcement needs because that's not how their system works."