Tuesday, January 7, 2014
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News For The Day


First Thoughts: The GOP Still Faces an Empathy Gap – NBC

By Mark Murray and Domenico Montanaro

*** The GOP still faces an empathy gap: After losing the 2012 presidential election, after that 47% comment, and after a majority of voters (according to the exit polls) said that Mitt Romney’s policies favored the rich, Republicans acknowledged that they needed to close the empathy gap with Democrats. “The Republican Party must be the champion of those who seek to climb the economic ladder of life,” the RNC declared in its post-election autopsy. But the GOP didn’t come close to meeting that goal in 2013. For the first time ever, House Republicans decided to split food stamps (which benefit the poor) from agriculture subsidies (which benefit well-off farmers) in the farm bill. In addition, many of the party’s governors and GOP state legislators opposed expanding Medicaid to provide health insurance to low-income Americans. And in the first few days of 2014, Senate Republicans could filibuster a measure this morning at 10:30 am ET -- co-sponsored by a colleague, Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) -- that would extend unemployment benefits for three months. Per NBC’s Kasie Hunt, four Republicans (Heller, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Kelly Ayotte) have signaled they will vote on the motion to proceed on the legislation, but that’s one vote shy of the 60 needed to clear the procedural hurdle. 

*** And it’s still trying to fix it: President Obama is scheduled to deliver remarks on unemployment benefits after this vote -- at 11:40 am -- and don’t be surprised if he uses that as an opportunity to chastise the GOP (if the legislation is filibustered). He might re-use this line from the economic speech he delivered a month ago in DC. “If Republicans have concrete plans that will actually reduce inequality, build the middle class, provide more ladders of opportunity to the poor, let’s hear them.” But as the Washington Post reports, Republicans are trying to respond to Obama’s challenge. Tomorrow, marking the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s “War on Poverty,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) will give a speech on income mobility and the American Dream.

(Rubio previewed his remarks in a video he released over the weekend.) Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who was Romney’s running mate in 2012, is also planning to address poverty. And as NBC’s Mike O’Brien wrote last month, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) recently traveled to Detroit to propose “Economic Freedom Zones” that could turn around Motown and other troubled urban areas. Former George W. Bush aide Peter Wehner recently argued that the Republican Party had an obligation to close the empathy gap. “I want to underscore the fact that focusing attention on those living in the shadows of American society is the responsibility of a great political party; and how to create greater opportunity and social mobility for those stuck on the bottom rungs of society should be part of any conservative governing vision." 

*** But will the action meet the rhetoric? The question for the GOP, however, is whether this Rubio/Ryan/Paul activity is more than words, especially as Democrats press to extend unemployment benefits and raise the minimum wage. Because right now, the GOP has a perception problem here with American voters. Per last month’s NBC/WSJ poll -- which was brutal for Democrats after all the problems associated with HealthCare.Gov -- the GOP trailed the Democratic Party by a whopping 28 points (45%-17%) on which party does a better job “showing compassion and concern for people.” And here’s one more political point here: As we wrote yesterday, the 2014 midterms could very well come down to whether the focus is on health care (which favors the GOP) or on income inequality (which favors the Democrats). Today, the main political focus is on income inequality. Here’s a release from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee: “Tom Cotton Has Nothing But Disdain For Unemployed Workers, Opposes Extending Unemployment Insurance for Arkansans Looking for Work.” 


The Republican Party has a conflict of interest. They want to win out over the Democrats as the most influential party, but they don't want to change what they are currently doing. A few of them are speaking up for change, so maybe they will move a little way toward the center. The Congressional and Senate GOP members need to stop being afraid of the Tea Party candidates and work with the Democrats on some more generous and flexible policies, and allow a focus on the Middle Class and the poor. “The Market” doesn't solve all problems, as they have been taught to think, and especially not in dealing with a social conscience.

The survival of the fittest is a poor rule to follow in social policy. We have to care about individuals or our whole society will be weakened and polluted with negativity. Sooner or later, those at the bottom will be rioting or turning to crime again and nobody wants that. Unfortunately, I think the changes in our country involving the integration of blacks and other poor people into the system of upward mobility were stimulated, to a great degree, by those riots of the sixties and seventies more than by the purity of Republican hearts. There's a carrot and there's a stick, and both were required. We still need to continue to make progress along those lines if we are to have true prosperity, so I hope a sufficient number of cooperative Republicans will step up and work for beneficial changes.




Israel migrant worker protest: Strike over human rights enters third day – NBC

By Paul Goldman and Dave Copeland

TEL AVIV, Israel – A strike by thousands of migrant workers entered its third day Tuesday amid anger at new laws that allow Israel to indefinitely detain immigrants without visas.

The measure, approved by Israel’s parliament in December, has been condemned by critics as a violation of human rights.
Tens of thousands of migrants – mostly from north and east Africa – have crossed into Israel, seeking asylum from conflict.

However, the Israeli government fiercely contests their status as refugees, saying they left their countries only to seek work. It has begun a controversial process of mass arrests, taking the migrants to a mass detention center in the south of the country.

Eritreans and Sudanese have replaced the Palestinians as cheap workers ever since Israel built a security fence and wall around Gaza and the West Bank. Now they can be found working in cleaning and construction – doing the jobs that ordinary Israelis do not want.

“We're not criminals but we are people seeking freedom,” said Mohamed Khalil Osman Haron, a 25-year-old Sudanese migrant who has been in Israel since 2008.

“Our message to the world is that we need your help. We are called criminals and we're not.”
He was among hundreds of migrants and supporters who gathered for a demonstration at Lewinsky Park in southern Tel Aviv Tuesday. It followed a mass protest on Monday that saw a crowd of 20,000 convene at Rabin Square urging the Israeli government to change its policy.

Shewit Gheze, a 28-year-old woman from Eritrea, said: “Israelis are afraid that we are coming here to seek work but the truth is that we had to leave our houses and family.
“I have no problem to go back to my country one I feel safe but until that happens I must receive my rights here which we deserve. If we need to, we will walk all the way to Jerusalem to make our point.”

African migrants in Lewinsky Park in south Tel Aviv listen to speeches during a demonstration against Israeli government policies.

Walyaldin Suliman, 30, from Sudan, added, described Israel's government as "racist," adding: “We came from a dictatorial state looking for human rights and stability as refugees. Israel is not giving us our rights as refugees."

However, many Israelis remain unconvinced and believe the rising migrant population has also brought higher levels of crime.
Hamdan Rami, a Tel Aviv shop owner, said: “They are not refugees but people who are seeking to work here and who are taking jobs from Israelis. I'm not racist but it is a well-known fact that in Africa they earned $20 a month and here they earn $1,000. Having them here is not easy for us, a lot of Israelis are scared and we have lots of thefts.”


I can't help wondering how these Africans were prompted to go to Israel in the first place. Did Israelis encourage them to come in and take the place of the Palestinians, and then find that there were too many of them to accommodate, or that black skin is scary?

This sounds just like the viewpoints of some people in the US toward the Hispanics who have come across the border from Mexico. Wealthy farmers here in some places say that the Hispanics take jobs that Americans won't do. That's really not true. Poor people here will work in farm fields and chicken processing factories if they are hired, but they want higher wages than the Hispanics will work for and better working conditions, so the Hispanics are hired instead and are said to be “needed” as workers. Yet, there is social pressure against the Hispanics because they didn't come with a visa, when it comes to offering them citizenship. We may not have one big detention center for Hispanics here, but the INS does put many of them in detention in prisons before deporting them.

This is a problem of a strong, wealthy country attracting immigrants, but being unwilling to work with them fairly, especially to the extent of allowing them to merge into the mainstream culture. Much of the problem is likely racism, as the Israelis are said to be afraid of the Africans, and worried about a rise in crime. I wonder how they are being treated in the detention center. Hopefully there will be some followup articles on this subject.





Tiny ancestor of lions and tigers and bears discovered (Oh my!) – NBC
Stephanie Pappas LiveScience


Lions, tigers, bears and even loyal pups and playful kitties all come from the same line of carnivorous mammals, a lineage whose origins are lost in time. Now, scientists have discovered one of the earliest ancestors of all modern carnivores in Belgium.

The new species, Dormaalocyon latouri, was a 2-pound (1-kilogram) tree-dweller that likely fed on even smaller mammals and insects.
"It wasn't frightening. It wasn't dreadful," said study researcher Floréal Solé, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. What it was, Solé said, is a clue to the beginnings of today's toothy beasts. [In Photos: Mammals Through Time]

"It is one of the oldest carnivorous mammals which is related to present-day carnivores," Solé told LiveScience.

Carnivore history
All modern carnivores descend from a single group, one of four groups of carnivorous mammals found in the Paleocene and Eocene periods, Solé said. The Paleocene ran from 66 million to 56 million years ago, and the Eocene followed from 56 million to 33.9 million years ago.

The carnivoraforms, as they're known, appear widespread during the Eocene, but without earlier fossils, paleontologists are unsure about their origins. Solé and his colleagues examined fossils from the very earliest Eocene, about 56 million years ago, from Dormaal, Belgium, east of Brussels.

The site was first discovered in the 1880s and has yielded 40 species of mammals over the years. Richard Smith, also of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and a colleague of Solé's, has sifted nearly 14,000 teeth from the soil in Dormaal.
Among them are 280 new specimens of teeth from a species hinted at previously from only two molars. With the new information from the teeth (including baby teeth from juveniles) and some ankle bones, Solé, Smith and their colleagues described this species on Monday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The ankle bone fossils reveal that Dormaalocyon lived an arboreal life, scampering through the trees in what was then a humid, subtropical forest, the researchers report. It likely looked like something of a cross between a tiny panther and a squirrel, with a long tail and a catlike snout.

Reconstructing the family tree
The study confirms previous work suggesting that carnivores emerged during the Paleocene, before Dormaalocyon's time, said Gregg Gunnell, the director of the division of fossil primates at the Duke Lemur Center in North Carolina, who was not involved in the research.

"It really shows that there is a lot of diversity very early in the Eocene, and we have absolutely no idea where it came from," Gunnell told LiveScience.
Part of the challenge of uncovering carnivore history is that, on the whole, meat-eating mammals aren't that common, Gunnell said — there are many more herbivores and omnivores on the planet and in the fossil record. In addition, Solé said, fossils from Europe, which appears to have been an important stop for, and potentially the origin of, carnivore evolution and spread, are rarer than fossils from North America.
The geographical origin of the carnivoraforms remains mysterious, however. One theory holds they originated in North America and spread to Europe; the relationships of the fossils in Dormaal seem to suggest something more complex, Solé said. It's possible that carnivoraforms began in Asia and made it to North America through Europe.
With the current fossil record, it's just not possible to say for sure. Solé and his colleagues will soon publish a paper on a new fossil site in France from the late Paleocene — and a new carnivorous mammal found there — that may hold answers.
"We need to find some Paleocene deposits that produce some kind of ancestors of these carnivoraforms," Gunnell said. "We're lacking a big chunk of information."


The search for information about the development of a species is so much a guessing game and always based on meager clues that, while it's interesting, it is almost a losing battle. DNA testing can't be used on bones that old, either, I don't think. Still, every new find adds some information to the whole, and scientists can try to see trends by comparison of one study to another. Being a paleontologist is not a field for the average person who lacks the patience and ability to stay abreast of new finds, while remembering the amassed background information of the old to see the trends.

I'd like to learn more about the earliest mammals in their development from the dinosaurs. Some dinosaurs were, I read, believed to be warm-blooded. The early mammals and birds must have developed from those. I wonder if any fossils from that stage of development have been found.

There is one bird called a cassowary that has a large, horny crest on top of its head and a dangerous claw on its toe, which it uses for fighting and will attack humans who get too close. This bird is close to six feet tall, so it's really dangerous. Those characteristics remind me of a dinosaur, perhaps like the “raptors” of the sci-fi movie Jurassic Park. Was there such a dinosaur as those raptors, or was that invented from whole cloth?

According to Wikipedia there were two species of velociraptor in the Cretaceous that are thought to be related to birds. That's an exciting connection. So I wonder what dinosaurs gave birth to the earliest mammals.


http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/otherprehistoriclife/a/earlymammals.htm


The First Mammals
The Early Mammals of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods
By Bob Straus

Ask the average person (or high schooler) on the street, and he’ll guess that the first mammals didn't appear on the scene until after the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago--and that the last dinosaurs evolved into the first mammals. The truth, though, is very different: in fact, the first mammals evolved from therapsids ("mammal-like reptiles") at the end of the Triassic period, and coexisted with dinosaurs throughout the Mesozoic Era. But part of this folk tale has a grain of truth: it was only after the dinosaurs went kaput that mammals were able to evolve beyond their tiny, mouselike forms into the widely specialized species that populate the world today. (See a gallery of Mesozoic mammal pictures.)

The monotremes are egg-laying mammals. One of those, the duck-billed platypus, has another reptilian characteristic – it has a spur on its hind feet that is equipped with poison that can be injected into the wound, and will use the spur to defend itself. Enough on this for today. I should get a book about it.



­ Despite Scandals, Nation's Crime Labs Have Seen Little Change – NPR
by Deborah Becker
­
The nation's crime labs are no strangers to scandal. Last year in Massachusetts, bogus testing by former chemist Annie Dookhan called into question tens of thousands of cases and led to the release of more than 300 people from the state's prisons.
There are currently no uniform standards or regulations for forensic labs. Congress could take up legislation this year to improve oversight, but critics are skeptical.

Scrutinizing The Analysts
Dookhan was sent to prison in November for falsifying drug tests, but many of the criminal cases affected by her misconduct are still in limbo.
"We're basically in this holding pattern where we keep waiting," says Boston defense attorney Todd Pomerleau, who represents about two dozen people convicted based on Dookhan's tests. "We've been waiting for the proverbial day in court."

When the scandal broke in August 2012, those incarcerated based on evidence Dookhan had tested did have a day in court. Many were identified immediately, and had their sentences stayed. More than 3,200 "drug lab" court hearings have been held.
Matt Segal, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, is looking at legal ways to try to get the state to deal with the affected cases more quickly.

Related NPR Stories

Law
Scandals Call Into Question Crime Labs' Oversight
"The state has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this scandal, and what have we gotten for that expenditure? The answer is almost nothing," Segal says. "Certainly hasn't been justice; it hasn't been a better approach on the drug war."

Prosecutors say they're waiting for a court ruling on how to deal with all of the affected cases, and an investigation into all lab operations.
Massachusetts has the nation's largest lab scandal, so defense attorneys there are now more likely to question forensic testing, says Pomerleau, and to scrutinize the analyst involved — especially because Dookhan was convicted of lying about her credentials.

"She's testifying under oath apparently that she had a master's degree, and the Commonwealth couldn't even confirm whether she went to the school?" Pomerleau says. "I require my interns to show me a transcript, and apparently the lab had different protocols in place for employment."

“ The forensic science community is not like any other community. It's not beholden to anyone other than the police and prosecutors. The question is: Are we creating crime fighters, or are we creating scientists?

- Forensic consultant Brent Turvey
In fact, there are no national regulations governing forensic analysts' credentials, and no uniform standards for the labs themselves. And there is more than one group that accredits labs.

'An Ethical Issue'
The nonprofit that accredits most of the crime labs in the U.S. is the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB). Its chief operations officer, John Neuner, says that accreditation can only go so far, and that the issue in Massachusetts probably was deeper.

"It just sounds like an ethical issue," Neuner says. "Certainly a laboratory can have all the policies and procedures in the world, but if you don't have ethical people working there, then you're going to have problems."
Accreditation from Neuner's group lasts for five years. It requires yearly inspections, which are announced, and corrective action plans are drawn up if violations are found. Neuner says that to his knowledge, no lab has ever had its accreditation revoked. The now-closed Hinton Drug Lab, where Dookhan worked, was not accredited. But forensic consultant Brent Turvey says that might have made things worse.

"In the Hinton Lab, if they were accredited, the incentive to commit the kind of fraud that Annie Dookhan was committing would have been higher, because the issue would have been maintaining accreditation," Turvey says. "In fact, the majority of labs where forensic fraud [is] exposed, the majority of them are ASCLD/LAB accredited."

Turvey says there have been at least 12 crime lab scandals in the U.S. in the past two years. With more criminal cases relying on forensics, he adds, lab oversight is something Congress needs to address.

"The forensic science community is not like any other community. It's not beholden to anyone other than the police and prosecutors," Turvey says. "The question is: Are we creating crime fighters, or are we creating scientists? And do we require them to tell the truth, or do we require them to help the police and prosecution?"
A report to Congress raised that same question five years ago, but there has been little movement toward change. In the Senate, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and John Cornyn of Texas are working to introduce legislation this year, according to a spokesperson.

In Massachusetts, most forensic testing is now overseen by state police. A chemist who had worked with Dookhan but was moved to the state police lab after the scandal broke was fired in November — for lying about her credentials.


Annie Dookhan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Annie Dookhan (born 1977) is a former chemist in a Massachusetts crime lab [1] who admitted to falsifying evidence affecting up to 34,000 cases.[2]

Brief biography[edit]
Annie Dookhan was born Annie Sadiyya Khan in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago in 1977.[3] She moved to the United States when she was a child and eventually became a citizen.[4] In 2003, she was hired as a chemist at the Hinton State Laboratory Institute in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston.[5] She married Surrendranath Dookhan in 2004.[3]

Evidence falsification incident[edit]
In June 2011, an evidence officer at the lab discovered that Dookhan had tested 95 samples without properly signing them out. Further investigation revealed that she'd forged the initials of an evidence officer in her log book, and she was suspended from lab duties.[6] However, she was still allowed to continue testifying in court until February 2012, when district attorneys throughout the Boston area were notified of the breach in protocol and Dookhan was placed on administrative leave. She resigned in March.[5]

During Dookhan's decade at the Hinton lab, it had been run by the Massachusetts Department of Health's Office of Human Services. However, in a cost-cutting move, the Massachusetts General Court transferred control of the lab to the Massachusetts State Police forensics unit in 2011. The state police mounted a more exhaustive probe into the Dookhan case.[5] The probe revealed that Dookhan's superiors had ignored several red flags surrounding her before 2011. For instance, she reportedly tested over 500 samples per month—five times the normal average—even though her supervisors and colleagues claimed to have never seen her in front of a microscope. She also had a bad habit of misidentifying samples.[7] Additionally, Dookhan's productivity remained steady after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts that chemists who perform drug tests in criminal cases can be subpoenaed to testify in person. According to an independent data analysis by NPR member WBUR in Boston, Dookhan's turnaround time for tests actually dropped from 2009 to 2011.[8] The problem was severe enough that Governor Deval Patrick ordered the lab shut down.[9]

In August, police interviewed Dookhan at her home in Franklin, where she admitted to altering and faking test results in order to cover up her frequent dry labbing, or visually identifying samples without actually testing them. She even went as far as to add cocaine to samples in which no cocaine was present.[6] She said had been dry-labbing for as long as three years. At one point, she broke down, saying, "I messed up, I messed up bad. I don't want the lab to get in trouble."[10]
Charges[edit]

On September 28, 2012; Dookhan was arrested and charged with obstruction of justice and falsification of academic records. The latter charge came because she had claimed both on her resume and in sworn testimony to have had a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. However, school officials revealed that Dookhan had no such degree, and had never taken master's level classes there.[11]
On December 17, Dookhan was formally arraigned on 27 charges—17 counts of obstruction of justice, eight counts of tampering with evidence and one count each of perjury and falsification of academic records. Prosecutors alleged that whenever a second test failed to confirm the initial results, Dookhan would tamper with the vials to make them consistent with the inaccurate results obtained by her dry labbing. She was also charged with falsely certifying results that she knew to be compromised; these certifications were admitted as evidence in court.[12]


I hope I see some followup stories about this to find out what Patrick Leahy and John Cornyn do about it. It seems to me that the crime lab should be independent of the supervision of the police and prosecutor to minimize fixing the evidence to agree with them. Also, there should be tight regulations about what qualifications are required to hold positions at the crime lab. In her case, nobody checked to see that she really did graduate from a graduate program in chemistry. The results of crime labs are too important in the trying of cases for their results to be suspicious.



­
Closing The 'Word Gap' Between Rich And Poor – NPR
by NPR Staff
­
In the early 1990s, a team of researchers decided to follow about 40 volunteer families — some poor, some middle class, some rich — during the first three years of their new children's lives. Every month, the researchers recorded an hour of sound from the families' homes. Later in the lab, the team listened back and painstakingly tallied up the total number of words spoken in each household.

What they found came to be known as the "word gap."
It turned out, by the age of 3, children born into low-income families heard roughly 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers.

Research since then has revealed that the "word gap" factors into a compounding achievement gap between the poor and the better-off in school and life. The "word gap" remains as wide today, and new research from Stanford University found an intellectual processing gap appearing as early as 18 months.

That study led to some increased calls for universal preschool, but some say that's not early enough.
"I recognized that we need to really start in the cradle," says Angel Taveras, mayor of Providence, R.I.
He says two-thirds of kindergarteners in the city show up on their first day already behind national literacy benchmarks.

Next month, with funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Taveras' city will launch "Providence Talks," a new effort to take on the "word gap." Providence will distribute small recording devices — essentially word pedometers — that tuck into the vest of a child's clothing. These will automatically record and calculate the number of words spoken and the number of times a parent and child quickly ask and answer each other's questions.

“ I recognized that we need to really start in the cradle.
- Angel Taveras, mayor of Providence, R.I.
"We are very hopeful that we can be the laboratory here in Providence, and as we have success we can share it with the rest of the country," Taveras says.
The idea was inspired in part by a research program called 30 Million Words in Chicago.

Aneisha Newell says that program taught her to talk to her young daughter in new ways. She says she never realized bath time — with colors and shapes of bubbles and toys to describe — could be a teachable moment. She ended up breaking the program's record for the most words spoken.

And then there was the moment her daughter — not yet 3 years old — used the word 'ridiculous' correctly. Newell was amazed.
"It was just something that made me feel good as a parent," she says.
Progress like Newell's stems from a special kind of parent-child interaction, says Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, who started the 30 Million Words program.

"We can't just have people saying 30 million times 'stop it!' It's got to be much more," she says.
The parent should "tune in" to what the child is looking at, talk about it and ask questions that can create a sort of "serve and return" between parent and child.
Suskind says that research shows overhearing a cell phone conversation or sitting in front of a television program doesn't cut it when it comes to building a child's brain.

She and others hope to expand their style of training to day care centers and beyond. She says she hopes to eventually have it be routine for parents to learn about this at their newborn's first hearing screening. She wants them to understand that their talk matters well before their baby starts talking back.


This is one of the most important articles I've run across since looking at news stories for this blog. It is about the absorption of information by the minds of babies at a time before we think they are even paying attention. The brain needs data to process, and as it grows it apparently becomes more intelligent if it has information to absorb. Familiarity with a word starts well before the child is expected to learn to read it and is an important step toward reading well. More wealthy parents are expected to be more eloquent and interactive verbally than the poor. This is the first thing I've seen that actually explains why poverty is a cause of children doing poorly in school.

The other thing about poor parents, I'm afraid, is that they are much more likely to command their children to be silent and passive, on the grounds that they aren't supposed to “talk back” to their parents. A quiet child is a good child.

There is also a warning in here to parents about those heated and vicious family arguments that babies are sometimes witness to, because they frighten and depress children; and if you don't want your child to start to curse, then don't say those things in front of them. They are listening by the age of at least 18 months.

About vocabulary and verbal interaction, though, that varies from home to home based on the actual abilities of the parents, which are not fairly represented by simply keeping track of their financial position in society. Some poor people are inclined toward education and artistic and intellectual growth, and don't tend to repress their children's self-expression as much as others. Those kids will want to learn and make logical connections in their classroom experience, and will make better grades. Some wealthy parents, on the other hand, are not responsive to their children, involved mainly with their clubs and community activities or their work. Their kids will suffer for that in acquiring a good verbal ability, not to mention the fact that they probably won't feel that they are loved by the parent who has no time for them.