Is that a flashing "Z" in your pocket, or are you just glad to still have your cell phone?

The Z stands for Zomm, a little multipurpose gadget for your pocket, purse or keychain whose main function is to prevent you from walking off and leaving your phone somewhere. It does so by lighting up and sounding an alarm when it's more than 30 feet from the device to which you have electronically linked it.

A lot of technology products are irritating by accident. The Zomm -- and the Phone Halo, a similar-in-concept but less- versatile competitor -- intend to irritate, and by and large do a good job of it.

Before you head over to Trader Joe's to stock up on cheap snacks for your Labor Day weekend festivities, stop and consider shopping somewhere else. Labor Day was enacted not as a general holiday to rest in honor of laborers, but in response to the tragic deaths of striking workers. And good old cheap Joe -- which just agreed to stop selling eggs from Jack DeCoster's vile operations -- is one of the remaining holdouts in this decade's most high-profile, life-or-death farmworkers' rights campaign.  

Two weeks ago, my coworker Karen and I left the office a little early and walked across Manhattan to the Trader Joe's store in Chelsea, where a small group had gathered making signs and chatting. Among them were members of the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a grassroots group working to improve wages and working conditions for farmworkers. Over the course of about 45 minutes, dozens more people filled the sidewalk in front of the store, including labor activists from the Jewish Labor Committee, Just Harvest USA and the Farmworker Solidarity Alliance, as well as local youths and a handful of musicians from the Rude Mechanical Orchestra.

Trader Joe's, along with Publix, Kroger, and the Dutch-held Ahold grocery chain (which includes Giant, Stop & Shop, Martin's, and Peapod), are the most recent targets of CIW's Fair Food Campaign. Over the last nine years the Coalition, together with partner organizations like the Student/Farmworker Alliance, has managed, through well-organized consumer campaigns and sometimes boycotts, to convince some of the food industry's largest corporations (including Taco Bell/Yum Brands, McDonald's, Subway, Whole Foods, and Compass -- see Grist's Tom Philpott's coverage) to agree to the tenets of Fair Food: an extra penny a pound for tomatoes (nearly doubling the wages for pickers, who've not seen a raise since the mid-1970s), a labor Code of Conduct, greater transparency in the supply chain, and incentives for growers that respect human rights.

French impressionist giant Claude Monet at the Grand Palais is expected to be Paris's autumn arts hit. The season's big contemporary show is Mexican Gabriel Orozco at the Pompidou Centre, while the Quai de Branly museum offers the mysteriously titled Baba Bling.

Here is some of what art lovers can look forward to in Paris as 2010 draws to an end and 2011 begins.

The conclusions of a Danish report on female as opposed to male longevity, suggest that an andropausal reduction in the hormone testosterone in men in mid-life is the main reason why males become gradually weaker than females in later life.

According to researchers Tom Skyhøj Olsen and Klaus Kaae Andersen, the fact that women live longer than men has more to do with a developing male physical inferiority, than female superiority.

"Our findings dispute the effects of female sex hormones as the underlying cause of female survival superiority over men. Instead we propose that the progressive deficiency of male sex hormones (testosterone) beginning in men in middle age is the underlying cause of the gap in survival rates between men and women," the two say in a survey in Gender Medicine.

"Accordingly the female survival advantage is rooted in male inferiority rather than innate female superiority," the conclusions of the report say.