Saturday, February 15, 2014


News Clips For The Day


Tough Calif. teacher has a tender heart – CBS
BySteve HartmanCBS NewsFebruary 14, 2014

LOS ANGELES -- At St. Francis High School in La Canada, Calif., there's something to be said about math teacher Jim O'Connor. The question is, what is that something?

For whatever reason, none of his students would tell me what they really think of him.

"Oh, what's the word," one student says.

 None of the boys came in and said, "Oh, we have hated him at times." I wonder why.
"He's going to be seeing this, right?" the student asks.
Oh yeah, that's why.

Truth is, O'Connor can be a bit of a drudge. But the 70-year-old Vietnam vet says he's not here to entertain his students.

"It drives me crazy when people say school should be fun," he says. "I mean, it's nice if it could be, but you can't make school fun."

 And for years, the kids thought that's all there was to him -- until last November, when senior Pat McGoldrick learned they didn’t know the half of him.

Pat was in charge of a student blood drive and had just come to Children's Hospital Los Angeles for a meeting. And he says it was weird: whenever he told someone he went to St. Francis High School, they all said, "Oh, you must know Jim O'Connor. Isn’t he wonderful?"

"It was disbelief, really," Pat says. "It was almost, like, kind of finding this alter ego that he has."

Inside the blood donor center, Pat found a plaque listing all the top blood donors at the hospital, including the record holder, Jim O'Connor. Then he learned something even more unbelievable: that whenever O'Connor isn’t torturing kids with calculus, he's on a whole other tangent -- cuddling sick babies.

Three days a week for the past 20 years, Jim has volunteered at the hospital, stepping in when parents can't, to hold, feed and comfort their children.
Nurse Erin Schmidt says he's invaluable.

Three days a week for the past 20 years, Jim has volunteered at the Children's Hospital

  "They tend to calm for him," she says. "They tend to relax with him. They fall asleep with him."

"I just like them and relate to them somehow," O'Connor says.
O'Connor has never been married; he has no kids of his own. But he has fallen hard for these babies.

"I don’t want to see them alone," he says. "You can't do that."
He's not a tough guy at all.
"I know, but don't tell my students," he says.

Sometimes you think you know someone, but you don't have the slightest. Sometimes you think you're learning calculus, but the real lesson is life.

"I've always respected him, but now it's to an even different degree -- really to the point where I try to emulate him," Pat says. "He's the epitome of a man of service.”




“ you can't make school fun.” Here is a teacher of the old school; after all , he is 70 years old. I must say my favorite teachers in high school were those who imparted a large amount of information. They rarely had a discipline problem, because they were focused on the coursework, and kept the students on track. The best of them encouraged discussion and student participation in class, which kept interest alive.

Of course, there were very few loudly undisciplined students in that school, because the school was small and each student was known to the administration, and it did not hesitate to flunk students who didn't study. If they were serious discipline problems and really gave the teacher or other students trouble, they were expelled. I believe we learned more in our path through high school in those days than so many do now. Of course, there were some members of the football team who weren't good students, and may have had some tutoring or even lenient grading from teachers. I think Jim O'Connor's students are lucky in todays school scene. They are going to exit his class with some solid learning. That he is a very generous person is a bonus.




Calculation error? Math majors send massive snowball rolling into dorm
AP February 14, 2014

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Two math majors at Reed College lost control of a massive snowball that rolled into a dorm, knocking in part of a bedroom wall.
No one was injured.

Rare snowstorm in Oregon
A rare snowstorm left a foot of snow in Portland, Oregon Thursday. More snow is expected Friday. Charlie Rose reports.

The students began making the snowball last week during a rare snowstorm in Portland, Ore.

Nobody weighed it, but college spokesman Kevin Myers says it was estimated to weigh 800 pounds or more.

The students responsible for the runaway snowball reported the incident and have not been disciplined. Myers says they didn't intend to cause damage and feel awful about what happened.

A maintenance manager  told Reed Magazine it will cost several thousand dollars to repair the building.



This news article is short, but sweet. A good snowfall is one of the most exhilarating of life's experiences. These kids got caught up in the spirit of it, and it got a little out of hand. I'm sure they didn't imagine the snowball would weigh 800 pounds, or roll downhill with enough force to knock out a wall. I'm sure the people living on this campus will not forget the incident, and will get lots of laughs out of it. It certainly gave me a chuckle or two.




Rand Paul: Without change, GOP will "not win again in my lifetime" – CBS
ByJake Miller CBS News February 14, 2014

Just days after warning his party that it will lose its electoral grip on Texas if it doesn’t broaden its appeal, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., offered an even more dire prediction on Thursday: Forget losing Texas – the GOP might never win a presidential election again if it doesn’t change its tune.

“I think Republicans will not win again in my lifetime…unless they become a new GOP, a new Republican Party,” Paul said during an interview with conservative radio host Glenn Beck that aired Thursday. “And it has to be a transformation. Not a little tweaking at the edges.”

The Kentucky Republican said the GOP needs to do a better job of tailoring specific messages to specific groups.

With young people, he said, he would stress an opposition to excessive government surveillance and a respect for personal privacy. And among minority communities, he said, a message of criminal justice reform – including changes to the “war on drugs” and sentencing laws – would resonate.

“There are many people who are open among all these disaffected groups, who really aren’t steadfast supporters of Obama or an ideology,” he explained. “I think they’re open to listening, but we have to have a better message and a better presentation of it.”

Paul said he welcomes a robust debate within the party about how to move forward.
“There is a struggle going on within the Republican Party,” he said. “I tell people it’s not new, and I’m not ashamed of it. I’m proud of the fact that there is a struggle. And I will struggle to make the Republican Party a different party, a bigger party, a more diverse party, and a party that can win national elections again.”

And he compared this new attempt to rejuvenate the GOP to Ronald Reagan’s own effort to refashion the party after Watergate, when he challenged then-President Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976.

“Everybody told Reagan to sit back and shut up,” Paul recalled. “They told him it wasn’t his time, and it wasn’t going to be his time. The establishment wanted Ford…It was bitterly fought, but in the end, Reagan won and the party became a better place, at least for a while. We need to have that debate again, and we need to be a bigger, stronger party.”

It may surprise Paul to hear that even some Democrats are hoping the Republican Party can resuscitate itself.

 Vice President Biden told the House Democratic caucus at a policy conference on Friday that Democrats should hope Republicans can pull themselves together – if only for the sake of having a viable negotiating partner.

“There isn’t a Republican party,” he lamented. “I wish there were, I wish there was a Republican party. I wish there was one person we could sit across the table from and make a deal and make the compromise and know when you got up from the table that the deal was done.”

“All you had to do was look at their response to the State of the Union, what were there, three or four?” he added. “I think we should get a little focused here, let's get a little focused.”




The Republican Party didn't used to be rabidly racist. It was Eisenhower who sent troops into the high school scene at Little Rock, Arkansas to protect nine black students who desegregated the school. The southern Democrats were the racists. Most of those highly “conservative” southern Democrats have now joined the Republican Party, which is the party that most strongly supports a social class structure based on race and wealth and a free hand for big business. That is still strong in the south and in much of small town America. The religious right is supporting that, too. The Republicans in many cases are Evangelical Christians, some of whom would like to see a theocracy in this country. Now that's radical! The Tea Party appeals to those people.

Very few Democrats, including in the south, are now “conservative,” but are carrying the banner for voter rights for black and Hispanic people, union membership, socially liberal issues such as gay marriage, a government safety net for the very poor and seniors, and other such issues. I think as long as the right tries to cut back on funding for social security and medicare, limit voting rights for minorities and to deport or jail immigrants, either legal or illegal, those minorities and poor seniors will become more and more hard set against the Republicans. Therefore, maybe Rand is right. The Republican Party, while not really disappearing, is transforming under the influence of the Tea Party. I think they are outnumbered and the Democrats, if they stand and fight consistently, can win out against them. I hope that is true. We can't let civil rights and aid to the very poor be defeated if we are to have a truly democratic country.




Speaking to babies in long sentences boosts language development – CBS
CBS/AP February 14, 2014

WASHINGTON -- If you want your kids to learn to talk in the best possible way, a new study suggests you should ditch the baby talk and speak to them in normal sentences.

The findings suggest that videos that claim to teach toddlers, or flash cards for tots, may not be the best idea. Instead, simply talking babies was found to be key to building crucial language and vocabulary skills -- but sooner is better, and long sentences are good.

For example, instead of just saying, "Here's an orange," it would be better to say: "Let's put the orange in this bowl with the banana and the apple and the grapes."
"It's making nets of meaning that then will help the child learn new words," explained study author Dr. Anne Fernald, a Stanford University psychology professor.
Her new research aims to explain, and help solve, the troubling "word gap": Kids from more affluent, professional families hear millions more words before they start school than poor kids, leaving the lower-income students at an academic disadvantage that's difficult to overcome.

That gap starts to appear at a younger age than scientists once thought, around 18 months, said Fernald.

Her research was presented this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The results suggest that it's not just hearing lists of words that matters as much as rich, varied language with good grammar that trains babies' brains to learn through context.

"The advice I give mothers is to have conversations with your babies," added Erika Hoff, a psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University. "Children can hear lots of talk that goes over their head in terms of the meaning, and they still benefit from it."

The research comes amid a growing push for universal preschool, to help disadvantaged youth catch up. But it also raises the question of whether children from low-income, less educated families need earlier intervention, such as preschool that starts at age 3 instead of 4, or higher quality day care or even some sort of "Let's talk" campaign aimed at new parents to stress talking, singing and reading with tots even before they can respond. That can be difficult for parents working multiple jobs, or who may not read well or who simply don't know why it's important.

Scientists have long known that before they start kindergarten, children from middle-class or affluent families have heard millions more words than youngsters from low-income families, leaving the poorer children with smaller vocabularies and less ready to succeed academically. Fernald said by some measures, 5-year-olds from low-income families can lag two years behind their peers in tests of language development.

Brain scans support the link, said Dr. Kimberly Noble of Columbia University Medical Center. Early experiences shape the connections that children's brains form, and kids from higher socio-economic backgrounds devote more "neural real estate" to brain regions involved in language development, she found.

How early does the word gap appear? Around age 18 months, Stanford's Fernald discovered when she compared how children mentally process the language they hear. Lower-income kids in her study achieved at age 2 the level of proficiency that more affluent kids had reached six months earlier.

To understand why language processing is so important, consider this sentence: "The kitty's on the bench." If the youngster knows the word "kitty," and his brain recognizes it quickly enough, then he can figure out what "bench" means by the context. But if he's slow to recognize "kitty," then "bench" flies by before he has a chance to learn it.

Next, Fernald tucked recorders into T-shirts of low-income toddlers in Spanish-speaking households to determine what they heard all day - and found remarkable differences in what's called child-directed speech. That's when children are spoken to directly, in contrast to television or conversations they overhear.

One child heard more than 12,000 words of child-directed speech in a day, while another heard a mere 670 words, she found. The youngsters who received more child-directed speech processed language more efficiently and learned words more quickly, she reported.

But it's not just quantity of speech that matters - it's quality, Hoff cautioned. She studied bilingual families and found that whatever the language, children fare better when they learn it from a native speaker. In other words, if Mom and Dad speak Spanish but aren't fluent in English, it's better for the child to have a solid grounding in Spanish at home and then learn English later in school.

Next, scientists are testing whether programs that teach parents better ways to talk to tots really do any good. Fernald said preliminary results from one of the first - a program called Habla Conmigo, Spanish for Talk With Me, that enrolls low-income, Spanish-speaking mothers in San Jose, Calif. - are promising.

Fernald analyzed the first 32 families of the 120 the program will enroll. Mothers who underwent the eight-week training are talking more with their toddlers, using higher-quality language, than a control group of parents - and by their second birthday, the children have bigger vocabularies and process language faster, she said Thursday.

Tips for parents:
-The sooner you start talking with babies, the better. Their brains are absorbing vital information well before they're able to respond.

-The high-pitched, sing-song tone that many people take with babies does get their attention. But don't dumb it down: Use rich, varied language and longer sentences, said Erika Hoff of Florida Atlantic University.

-Don't just label things, make connections. "The dog is wagging his tail" isn't as effective as, "Look how fluffy that dog's tail is. It's much fatter than the cat's skinny tail."

-What matters most is speech directed to babies and toddlers, not what they overhear, said Anne Fernald of Stanford University.

-Turn off the TV. "Television does not help the brain learn language," said Noble. Babies and toddlers especially require personal interaction to learn.

-Reading a book for 10 minutes a day adds up fast, Fernald noted. If Mom or Dad isn't a good reader, just talk about the pictures.

-Fit conversation into everyday activities. Instead of turning on music while fixing lunch, talk about the bowl of fruit on the table.




I think people do tend to ignore young babies when they talk. They just don't think they are listening. Often parents will say profane or emotionally disturbing things, as though the baby can't hear. Then when the two year old has learned to say “damn it” or something much worse, they are shocked. Parents are not generally aware of many things that they need to pay attention to, and the thought of focusing lots of talk in long sentences on a baby who has not begun even to try to talk, sounds like nonsense. I would love to see many training courses for parents set up across all demographics and locations in the US, with the attendance being voluntary of course, but giving early intervention. While they are learning to engage their babies in learning language, also intervene when the oldest baby hits the younger one or pulls their hair as well. Teaching them not to become bullies starts as early as nine months, according to a recent news article. Abuse in the home also works against the development of language and other mental abilities. There is a lot for parents to learn in order to be really effective and fair.




­ 1 In 4 Americans Thinks The Sun Goes Around The Earth, Survey Says
by Scott Neuman
February 14, 2014
­
A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation.

The survey of 2,200 people in the United States was conducted by the NSF in 2012 and released on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

To the question "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth," 26 percent of those surveyed answered incorrectly.

In the same survey, just 39 percent answered correctly (true) that "The universe began with a huge explosion" and only 48 percent said "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals."

Just over half understood that antibiotics are not effective against viruses.
As alarming as some of those deficits in science knowledge might appear, Americans fared better on several of the questions than similar, but older surveys of their Chinese and European counterparts.

Only 66 percent of people in a 2005 European Union poll answered the basic astronomy answer correctly. However, both China and the EU fared significantly better (66 percent and 70 percent, respectively) on the question about human evolution.
In a survey compiled by the National Opinion Research Center from various sources, Americans seemed to generally support science research and expressed the greatest interest in new medical discoveries and local school issues related to science. They were least interested in space exploration, agricultural developments and international and foreign policy issues related to science.




When there is still an ongoing argument about the Evolution question and the Biblical version of the origin of the universe, you can't expect students in high school to go against what their conservatively religious parents believe, and embrace “the big bang theory” or the descent of man from more primitive forms. Those same students may come to mistrust information coming from “the government,” and advocate smaller and smaller government.

Somehow, between 1950, when an academically accepted version of what is “true” information was taught in school, and today when many citizens bombard the school boards with law suits over various issues that concern what, exactly, is being taught, the result is going to be a knowledge gap. The states have lost some of the control they had then, including even simple discipline in the classroom, and kids aren't being effectively taught some of the basic things. Science isn't the only place where there is a gap.

When a religion disputes the right of science and philosophy to explore the origins of the world and the nature of social interactions, those dogmatic people will not be sufficiently interested in classical academic subjects to learn them effectively. The student's parents too often are not continuing to try to learn new things as they grow older either, and don't or can't help the kids with their school work. We are not a very intellectually inclined nation, even including many fairly well-to-do people. It's more about spending money and buying "bling" here. There is no question that we have a serious problem in this country.




­
Sexually Transmitted Food Poisoning? A Fish Toxin Could Be To Blame
by Michaeleen Doucleff
February 14, 2014

­ Twenty-five years ago, two pals went out for a seafood dinner while vacationing in the Bahamas. What could be better than some fresh grouper steaks and a night on the town without the wives?
Um, plenty.

A few hours after dinner, the men started having stomach pains and diarrhea. Their legs began to tingle and burn. And their sense of temperature went haywire: Ice felt hot while fire felt cool.

All the while, their wives were completely fine — until they had sex with their hubbies.

The men had ingested a potent fish toxin, a team of doctors wrote at the time in the journal Clinical Toxicology. And they had passed the poison along to their wives through their semen, the doctors hypothesized. For several weeks, the women had terrible pain and burning in their pelvis.

With fish now imported to the U.S. from all over the world, the toxin has since appeared outside its endemic tropical regions — in Vermont, North Carolina and New York. Some researchers are now worrying that warming seas could make the poison even more common.

The toxin causes the strange foodborne illness, known as ciguatera fish poisoning. The molecules open little holes in nerves, triggering an array of crazy symptoms: reversal of how you experience temperature, vertigo and the sensation that your teeth are falling out.

"Patients find the symptoms of ciguatera so strange," says neuropsychologist Melissa Friedman, who treats patients for the toxin at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. "I have heard people say they wake up and step on a cold floor and have a burning or uncomfortable sensation."

And then there's dyspareunia, otherwise known as painful sex.
This symptom isn't commonly reported, possibly because "it's information people don't normally volunteer to their doctors," Friedman tells The Salt.

But since the two men in the Bahamas first reported a link between dyspareunia and ciguatera in 1989, a few others have also had the unfortunate symptom. For instance, six of nine people who got the fish poisoning from eating amberjack in North Carolina in 2007 complained of painful intercourse, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. (The Bahamas cases, so far, have been the only ones in which sexual transmission was suspected.)

The toxin can also cause hallucinations or "giddiness," Friedman says, if the fish came from the Pacific or Indian Oceans.

Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Apparently, You Can Make Beer In Your Gut
Although ciguatera is new to most people, poisonings are fairly common in tropical and subtropical regions, Friedman says. "In South Florida, ciguatera is considered endemic. It's not foreign to our emergency rooms here." (The CDC says it gets reports of about 30 cases of poisoning by marine toxins, including ciguatera, each year in the U.S.)

The ciguatoxin is produced by a single-celled protozoan that sticks to algae on tropical reefs. The poison then moves up the food chain and eventually accumulates in large, predator fish, such as red snapper, grouper, amberjack and barracuda — species that also happen to be quite tasty.

There's no cure for the poisoning. One treatment can reduce the symptoms, but it must be given within three days of ingestion. Otherwise, just a few bites from an infected filet, and you may be stuck with the strange neurological problems — and a restrained sex life — for a few weeks, Friedman says.

So what can you do avoid this nasty toxin?
Fish And Spices Top List of Imported Foods That Make Us Sick
Don't order the red snapper or grouper caught in areas associated with ciguatera outbreaks, she recommends. "You can't detect the toxin by smell or sight. So you really don't know when you're eating it."

Plus, you can't cook, clean or freeze the toxin away from the fish. "That's what's so frustrating about the illness," she says. "It doesn't occur because of improper cooking, storing or fish handling."

And when you do eat fin fish that hang around coral reefs, Friedman says, go for the smaller ones, less than about 3 pounds. Or eat a limited portion.

"If you think you have ciguatera fish poisoning, try to save a piece of the fish," she adds. "Then you can send it into the Food and Drug Administration for testing."
At least then you might have a better chance of finding out if your dinner is to blame for an unwelcome interruption of your sex life.




I wonder what other harmful things this poisoning does. The effect does seem to wear off after a few weeks, and doctors have a treatment that diminishes the symptoms. Still, it's pretty scary. That's like botulin toxin, one of the most deadly of poisons. It has no taste or smell and you don't suspect that anything is wrong with the food. Luckily, I almost never order fish in a restaurant, as I prefer oysters or other shell fish. This is a surprising piece of new information to me, and the transfer of an ingested toxin to the sexual function is going to be explored by medical scientists, I suspect. If I hear more about it I'll collect the article.