Bronson's article contains a number of revealing tidbits, including:
1. Lying is related to intelligence. The smarter the kid, the better they are at lying.
2. On average, a 4-year-old will lie once every two hours, while a 6-year-old will lie about once every hour and a half.
3. Scholars have found that kids who live in threat of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars, at an earlier age—learning to get caught less often.
4. Children lie because they see their parents lie, and learn to imitate them. Adults inadvertently teach children that honesty only creates conflict, and dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict.
5. Permissive parents don’t actually learn more about their children’s lives.
6. Most rules-heavy parents don’t actually enforce them since its too much work.
7. Parents view arguing with their teenager as destructive to their relationship, while teens see it as strengthening their bond.
That's gross!
...the Orange County government [takes] sewer water and, instead of dumping it into the ocean after treatment, clean[s] it a second time using technology that renders the water almost distilled, exceeding all state and federal drinking standards, officials said.
The water then goes from the new $480 million water plant in nearby Fountain Valley to the drinking supply that lies beneath Anaheim—percolating many months through the earth into an aquifer serving 2.3 million people in 20 cities.
The process departs from the routine: Treated sewage typically is returned to the environment at large, such as in rivers and lakes, and after it dilutes in the vast bodies, the water is reharvested. The Orange County process skips the return-to-the-great-outdoors step.
...a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”
As climate change warms the nation, giant Burmese pythons could colonize one-third of the USA, from San Francisco across the Southwest, Texas and the South and up north along the Virginia coast, according to U.S. Geological Survey maps released Wednesday.
The pythons can be 20 feet long and 250 pounds. They are highly adaptable to new environments.
We know that children's capacity for self-regulation has diminished. A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked kids ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn't stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the researchers asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at the National Institute for Early Education Research says, the results were very different.
"Today's 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today's 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago," Bodrova explains. "So the results were very sad."
Sad because self-regulation is incredibly important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ. Children who are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are better able to learn. As executive function researcher Laura Berk explains, "Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain."
Yet for humans, pretend play is one of the most crucial forms of play, occupying at its peak at about age 4 some 20 percent of a child’s day. It includes some of the most wondrous moments of childhood: dramatic play, wordplay, ritual play, symbolic play, games, jokes and imaginary friends. And it is the kind of play that positively screams out for hyperbole when outsiders try to describe it.
This desire on the part of many middle-class and affluent parents to help their kids get ahead is understandable. We've all heard the predictions about how, in the downsized and outsourced economy of tomorrow, our children may be the first generation of Americans to be worse off than their parents. Into this vat of anxiety, two forces have been poured that are turning up the heat even more. First, advances in brain research have offered tantalizing clues about the magic at work in our infants' gray matter. Second, market forces have exploited these tantalizing clues and used them to sell billions of dollars' worth of educational toys and programs, often by making claims wildly beyond the conclusions drawn by the scientists who did the actual research.
Spend enough time in suburban preschools these days, and you're bound to hear one parent or another uttering a boast masquerading as a complaint about how they just can't keep the books coming fast enough for their precocious 3- or 4-year-old reader. Odds are, there's probably no reason to boast. Researchers who've been marinating in reading studies for years say a tiny percentage of children - maybe 3 percent, maybe a little more or less - can be classified as truly early readers. These 3- or 4-year-olds understand phonics and context, and they will likely keep up their accelerated reading pace throughout their school years. Bravo to those kids. Reading is the gateway to so much of life's important learning, so a few years more of it can't hurt them.
But most of the other early readers bringing smiles to their parents' faces aren't really reading at all. They're demonstrating merely that they've memorized lots of words by sight. Instead of understanding the discrete sounds and segments that make up the word CAT, and understanding that each letter in the word has both its own name and its own sound or group of sounds, these children - like our early ancestors - see it as just a whole symbol for the furry feline. Change the first letter to E, and they might still think feline, until they memorize the new word. Studies have demonstrated that the early reading advances these kids show typically wash out a few years down the line.
A classic study in the 1930s by noted researcher and Illinois educator Carleton Washburne compared the trajectories of children who had begun reading at several ages, up to 7. Washburne concluded that, in general, a child could best learn to read beginning around the age of 6. By middle school, he found no appreciable difference in reading levels between the kids who had started young versus the kids who had started later, except the earlier readers appeared to be less motivated and less excited about reading. More recent research also raises doubt about the push for early readers. A cross-cultural study of European children published in 2003 in the British Journal of Psychology found those taught to read at age 5 had more reading problems than those who were taught at age 7.
This doesn't mean that early exposure to learning isn't important for kids. It is vitally important. It should just be the right kind of learning, and the right kind of exposure. Study after study shows the best thing parents can do for their children is give them a nurturing, rich, vibrant environment, reading to them often and exposing them to lots of language in organic ways...
[But]...in fact, ...this heightened push for early learning might even slow down normal brain development through a phenomenon known as neurological "crowding," where information jams up the synapses in the brain that might best be reserved for more creative tasks in later years. Remember that in his early years, Einstein was considered just an average student.
All of this brings us back to that surprising brain study giving late bloomers cause for celebration. Researchers from the National Institutes of Mental Health performed periodic MRI brain scans on children and teens ranging in age from 5 to 19, tracking the relationship between the thickness of the brain's outer mantle, or cortex, with the subject's IQ. They found that the people whose IQ scores put them in the "superior intelligence" category had cortexes that matured much later than those of average intelligence. The cortexes of the smartest kids peaked by around age 11 or 12, whereas the average kids' peaked by around age 8. Jay Giedd, one of the lead researchers, says he and his colleagues were initially taken aback by the findings, but with more reflection they realized they made all kinds of sense. "By having this peak period of plasticity later," he says, "the brain is adapting to the 12-year-old world, which is more complicated, more similar to the adult world, than the 8-year-old world."
The idea is, patience pays off.
It seems that in the rush to give children every advantage — to protect them, to stimulate them, to enrich them — our culture has unwittingly compromised one of the activities that helped children most. All that wasted time was not such a waste after all.
How might the church respond to this phenomenon in our culture? Here are my suggestions.
1. The church will encourage maturity, not the opposite. “Do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Corinthians 14:20)....
Raising church kids in the suburbs may be setting them up for psychological distress in their 20s and 30s. A few weeks ago at a youth group from a very large church in a middle class suburb of St. Louis, I asked the following question: 'What are your parents doing to you right now that will probably guarantee that you will be in counseling when you’re in your 20s and 30s?'
I knew about the nearly irreversible lacerations of divorce or the nuclear fallout when negative comments about appearance are delivered to daughters. I was shocked by the other laments. Here is just a small sample from that night...
Once this dam broke the youth pastor had to cut it off so he could give his talk about how the Gospel addresses all of their issues related to past pain. Many hands were still up in the air. It was sad. Dr. Madeline Levin, in The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, summarizes new national data saying, 'America’s newly identified at-risk group is preteens and teens from affluent, well-educated families. In spite of their economic and social advantages, they experience among the highest rates of depression, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, somatic complaints, and unhappiness of any group of children in this country.' It seems that this is no different in churches of affluence. What happened?
The strangest [bottle voyage] case was perhaps that of Chunosuke Matsuyama, a Japanese seaman who was wrecked with 44 shipmates in 1784. Shortly before he and his companions died of starvation on a Pacific coral reef, Matsuyama carved a brief account of their tragedy on a piece of wood, sealed it in a bottle, and then threw it into the sea. It was washed up 150 years later in 1935 at the very seaside village where Matsuyama had been born.
hit home to me after my own experience. How hard it is to walk the violent streets, content to be used by the depraved if they so choose. Shane tells of walking with 11-year-old Cassim in the streets of Philadelphia and facing down a group of young toughs. After they've somehow left them be after a minor beatdown, Cassim asks,Shane, why am I taking boxing lessons?
I asked Cassim if he thought Jesus was happy with how we acted. He thought about it, and then nodded with a smile. I told him that, honestly, I wasn't sure exactly what Jesus would have done if he were in our place … but there are two things I know Jesus would not have done. He would not have fought. And he would not have run. I told him Jesus may have thought of something else, or he may have done something weird to throw them off, as he often seems to do – like drawing in the dirt with his finger (or writing on the road with sidewalk chalk, "you are better than this"), or maybe pulling a coin out of a fish's mouth (or pulling a piece of candy out of a pigeon's mouth). But I think Jesus was happy with how we acted, and that we were good representatives – good witnesses – of Christ to them. Cassim agreed, and then we prayed for them together. And finally, as he was leaving, Cassim reminded me that each of those boys has to go to bed thinking about what they did that day, and so did we.
I'm not sure about those other boys, but Cassim and I both slept well that night...
Our brains are terrible at assessing modern risks. Here's how to think straight about dangers in your midst...
These days, it seems like everything is risky, and worry itself is bad for your health. The more we learn, the less we seem to know—and if anything makes us anxious, it's uncertainty. At the same time, we're living longer, healthier lives. So why does it feel like even the lettuce [with pesticides on it!] is out to get us?
The human brain is exquisitely adapted to respond to risk—uncertainty about the outcome of actions. Faced with a precipice or a predator, the brain is biased to make certain decisions.
I. We Fear Snakes, Not Cars
Risk and emotion are inseparable.
Fear feels like anything but a cool and detached computation of the odds. But that's precisely what it is, a lightning-fast risk assessment performed by your reptilian brain, which is ever on the lookout for danger. The amygdala flags perceptions, sends out an alarm message, and—before you have a chance to think—your system gets flooded with adrenaline...Emotions are decision-making shortcuts.
As a result of these...emotional algorithms, ancient threats like spiders and snakes cause fear out of proportion to the real danger they pose, while experiences that should frighten us—like fast driving—don't. Dangers like speedy motorized vehicles are newcomers on the landscape of life. The instinctive response to being approached rapidly is to freeze. In the [past], this reduced a predator's ability to see you—but that doesn't help when what's speeding toward you is a car.
It's like the little boy with a pile of horse manure, I kept digging cheerfully in that and found a pony in there -- the pony is free public transportation for all seniors in the state of Illinois.
In American pop culture, the face of abortion is often a frightened teenager, nervously choosing to terminate an unexpected pregnancy. The numbers tell a far more complex story in which financial stress can play a pivotal role.
Half of the roughly 1.2 million U.S. women who have abortions each year are 25 or older. Only about 17 percent are teens. About 60 percent have given birth to least one child prior to getting an abortion.
Brains, bodies and beauty
Human capital — a buzzword among economists — simply means people. Think of it as raw material made up of bankers, traders, consultants, advertisers, engineers, artists and others who, through brainpower and creativity, turn ideas into money.
"The comparative advantage of cities is determined by how smart, how trained, how innovative, how entrepreneurial the people are in that city," says Edward Glaeser, a Harvard urban economist who advised the Chicago Council on Global Affairs' study group.
Chicago's human capital is strong. Among U.S. cities, Chicago ranks first in the concentration of young people (ages 25 to 34) living within three miles of downtown. It's second only to New York in the number of those with college degrees. Its universities are world class. The University of Chicago has been home to 20 Nobel Prize laureates, while both the U of C's Graduate School of Business and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management rank among the world's best business schools. Chicago also has the quality of life that keeps people here — vibrant art and music scenes, restaurants, museums, parks and recreational facilities.
." The book, based on interviews with scientists and other experts from around the world, describes what would happen across the planet if, for some reason, human beings were suddenly to disappear."The foliage in [Lincoln Park] will definitely be the seed source from which the forests will start succeeding down the streets and eventually inside of the buildings. Winds will blow all kinds of seeds out of the park.
Helping the process along will be squirrels throughout the city, taking up residence in bungalows, two-flats and high-rises. They'll bring in seeds of all sorts, and, pretty soon, trees will be growing out of living room windows.
Within a few decades you'll find a tremendous wild snarl of stuff growing over buildings, coming up from the streets. Just imagine, no one maintaining the streets anymore. And the plastic bags would be clogging the sewers, and you'll get all this leaf litter because nobody would be raking leaves.
Gone will be the cockroaches, which only survive in the northern climate in the comfort of our heated buildings.
Gone, too, will be the rats -- no garbage for them to eat, and a lot more raptors to prey on them.
On the other hand, you'll get wildlife coming back in here. Certainly there will be plenty of coyotes. They will outcompete the dogs. Eventually wolves will probably range all over America. They'll be eating deer. There's going to be plenty of deer. Whether moose will make it down here or not, it's a function of climate change.
The predators are going to get the cattle. As the cattle go, buffaloes should regenerate and spread."
Note: This post got long-winded. However, my campaign pledge to you is that I intend for this to be my last political analysis post on IJAB, or anywhere else, for quite a long while!By not following the conventional model outlined above, Thompson has put himself in a game of perpetual catch-up. Aside from being way behind in money and trying to ward off accusations of not having the required “fire in the belly,” one can only wonder how many thousands of Republicans working for Giuliani, Huckabee, McCain, Romney and others would have gladly worked for Thompson’s campaign had he only asked them first?
Okay, so how about McCain? There’s a poll out today showing him leading the GOP field nationally and running a strong campaign in
As much as McCain is respected both within the Republican Party and among Independents and Democrats, he is going to have great difficulty translating that widespread appeal into actually winning the GOP nomination. If one were to analyze the core values of the Republican Party (as difficult a task as that would be), McCain is just a little bit too much out of step on a few key issues to win the GOP nomination. In
First up, let’s look at the former governor of
Romney has raised a lot of money (and has much of his own to add), and he’s appealing to a wider spectrum of GOP voters than any of the other candidates, evidenced by the fact that he is the only one polling in the top two for each of the first five states to vote: Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, and South Carolina. Although, Romney has not made the deepest inroads, which is why some national polls currently have him running fourth.
Perhaps a bigger area where Romney will be attacked by his opponents is when he was running for office in
And then there’s former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has executive experience, a record of cleaning up crime and a high-profile name from his steady leadership in the aftermath of 9/11. Last year both Giuliani and McCain were considered the frontrunners, but naturally, the field has been changing.
Giuliani is a tough politician, which is a great asset both for dealing with public criticism as well as for formulating strategies to attack your opponents. Despite the fact that he’s not in step with much of the GOP on social issues, he’s been leading in the national polls for a long time and has been able to raise a lot of money. He will be a formidable candidate at least up until the eve of Super Tuesday (Feb. 5). In fact, if every state had to vote today, then Giuliani would win the nomination because he leads in many of the most populous states such as
While both
Back in 1980 when a little-known candidate named George Bush scored a surprise victory in the GOP’s
So what about momentum? Is it real? Does it matter? Well, I don’t think that a state’s voters base their decision on how another state voted per se. But they do base it in part on how the media portrays the different campaigns. If you win a state, then the press is asking you, “Why did you win?” and they're asking your opponents, “Why did you lose?” In that sense, some (not all) of the press coverage turns to your favor. By winning a state, the perception is not just that your campaign did something well, but also that you the candidate did something right. On the flip side, if you start to lose too many states in a row in the early going, then a perception starts to build that you the candidate are doing something wrong.
Giuliani won’t win
Average IQs are rising sharply from generation to generation.
...sets out his explanation for a mysterious phenomenon that bears his name: the rise in IQ from generation to generation. Your IQ is likely to be higher than those of your parents, and your children's IQs is likely to be higher than yours.
The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from...years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person's mind but the quality of the world that person lives in.
Home ownership grew among white middle-class families after World War II when access to credit and government programs made buying houses affordable. Black families were largely left out because of discrimination, and the effects are still being felt today.
I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon). And I’ve seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 — a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property.
People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.
2) Now,
3) Okay, are the purple lines straight or bent?
4) Do you see gray areas in between the squares? Now where did they come from?
5) Next, you should see a man's face and also a word...
6) Now, if you take a look at the following picture, know it's not animated. Your eyes are making it move. To test this, stare at one spot for a couple seconds and everything will stop moving. Or look at the black center of each circle and it will stop moving. But move your eyes to the next black center and the previous will move after you take your eyes away from it.... Weird.
7) And finally, 
There is a basic truth about the geography of young, educated people. They may first migrate to cities like New York, Los Angeles, Boston or San Francisco. But they tend to flee when they enter their child-rearing years.
Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.
The problem with this neat separation...is that science has its own faith-based belief system...
...until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.
Pro basketball has had some truly bizarre disappearances of several athletes over time. And I'm not talking about players just leaving the game or losing their talent at the drop of a hat. I'm talking about guys literally disappearing.
The most recent bizarre disappearance involves former Washington State University player Tony Harris...
This year he decided to return to Brazil to get a "financial cushion" before the birth of his first child with his wife.
[She] said her husband left Seattle for Brasilia in central Brazil on Oct. 31. She last heard from him early November...
But farms still cover most of our land, consume most of our water and produce most of our food. If you eat, drink or pay taxes--or care about the economy, the environment or our global reputation--U.S. agricultural policy is a big deal.
“There is nothing new under the sun.” The oft-quoted saying from the book of Ecclesiastes is especially true of John Edwards’ well-intentioned but misguided “poverty tour.” Edwards’ proposals to help the poor are nothing more than a remix of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and, like those previous initiatives, miss the mark.
Government wealth redistribution schemes, larger labor unions, and expanded government social programming have never helped the poor in the past and will continue to fail the truly disadvantaged in the future.
How could this have possibly happened? Okay, maybe they overlooked it. And the actual source of this picture and the supposed award aren't clear. Regardless, not something that happens often. But then last year, I saw this.
It was described as the winner of the 2006 "Not My Job" Award. Hmm, I was beginning to sense a theme. First of all, what are the chances of this happening again? In this case, there was no argument that it wasn't noticed. Sheer utter laziness was at fault. Were these pictures real? The only references to so called "Not My Job" awards seemed to come with these pictures. Where were they from? Surely this sort of thing couldn't keep happening.
But yes, this fall, yet again some road painting crews have been caught. And this time the location was verified. Right here in suburban Chicagoland crews painted over a roadkill racoon. Yikes.
Any others out there?
