Just found a great price comparison site

Went out into the ether there for a while, no updates, no contacts. Needless to say its been a very busy year. Grad school is well under way, and in fact, almost done. Still poor, and still scrounging around for money :) I will start off this year with an effort to catalogue my ways of saving money, until my education is done, and I will bring these saving techniques into the non academic world. First off, book comparisons, since I still am in college and still need books. There are quite a few, but Compare Books is a recent one that I have found to be simple and easy to use, without a lot of the extra fluff that some sites give you. In addition, it searches prices in real time, vs sites that catalogue prices and return results that may be weeks old. Sure the search is slower, but at least I am most probably getting the lowest price around. Book prices are something that can change by the hour, so this is quite handy. Happy new years everyone!

Apathy on Campus

Continuing this theme of inaction by recent generations, I would like to illustrate some examples going on at the campus I attend right now. Most of these policies do not affect me, but the ones just entering college. No one protests however:

1. Playboy magazines banned for sale on campus.

Sales were banned based on the preferences of a few, and not the student body on a whole. There will always be a minority that objects to anything, but banning something like this on a college campus, an inherently liberal institution, strikes me as strange. Sales have not been re-instituted because no one has said anything. Never mind the simple reason of the first amendment.

2. ...But crazy preachers are given free reign

What is even more disturbing is that a nomadic preacher, Brother Micah, was given free reign in the name of free speech, even though he was downright offensive. There was a ton of student protest but nothing happened, which actually I believe was for the best. Freedom of speech was protected. People are protesting the wrong things. For reference, here is a good synopsis of this guy from thedmonline.com (no this is not exaggerated):

"Micah Armstrong, also known as Brother Micah, is a nomadic preacher who graced the University of Old Mississippi with his presence last week. He's a friendly bloke who yells at students walking to class, tells them they're going to hell, makes everyone feel bad about themselves and has probably never had any friends his entire life.

Micah Armstrong comes from Miami (City Motto: "Crazy people. Drugs, too.") and has been traveling across the United States judging people and making babies cry.

Brother Micah carefully outlined that most people in this world do not get to go to heaven. Some of those who don't are as follows:
•Mother Teresa
•People in sororities
•People in fraternities
•Independents, obviously"

3. Students are now required to an 8 hour!! alcohol safety examination before they are allowed to register for classes.

OK this one is pretty nuts. Everyone except seniors basically has to do this before any semester. This does not affect me, but to get the full sense of absurdity for this policy, you must read number 4:

4. No alcoholic beverages containing less than 5% alcohol will be permitted in any area before football games.

That's right. Whiskey will not get you more drunk than beer. I am really really not sure what this was supposed to accomplish. Again there was a general sense of WTF around campus, and questions were asked, but there was no widespread involvement to try to get answers to this policy or even try to change it. Actually, I found lots of people asking questions online:

"Can anyone explain to me how they came up with the conclusion that liquor is permitted in the grove over beer? I mean who in there right mind beleives that liquor is safer than beer."

But, as Colbert illustrated, armchair protests. What people need to do is come together for a common cause. From the short time I have been in college, I have seen it go from a pretty liberal state to a pretty restricted state. I cannot imagine what people from decades ago think of the college culture now. I can't help but think that students today are become more and more like automatons, and I sincerely hope this changes before my daughter starts absorbing this kind of thinking.

Colbert on Solitarity

I was watching the Colbert Report last night and his "The Word" segment was quite...moving for lack of a better word. His Word was regarding the student getting tazered at a Kerry debate. If you have not seen it, well basically, it looks as if the kid was asking questions, someone cut off the microphone, and police hustled him away and tazered him. More poignant however was the total look of boredom and apathy seen on his fellow students faces. No one stood up to protest, no one said anything, they just looked on with apathy. What happened to the people of this country? Colbert implies it is because that most have become armchair protesters, posting on their blog, and Digging their way to make a difference. Colbert cleverly equates Digging to masturbating :) It is made even more ironic by the fact that every week or so there is a surge of people calling for action instead of sitting on their computers on Digg, yet you never see anything come of it.



I cannot quite put my finger on what has made the current generations, my own included, so apathetic. I am aware of my own apathy at times, and strive to overcome it, and I hope I can pass on a more involved sense of action to my daughter. In my opinion, apathy is contagious, and the more indifferent people there are the harder it is to overcome the apathy gradient. It's depressing really.

Non-stick chewing gum!

Wouldn't it be great if gum never got stuck on your shoes, carpet, in your kids hair? Gum is popular, especially with kids. So if you have a kid, chances are your kid has chewed gum, whether you let them or not, and chances are you have had gum stuck in the strangest of places.

"Revolymer, a Bristol University spin-out company, claims that it has created a new material which can be added to gum that makes it much easier to remove from surfaces."

"The material is formed from long chains of molecules, called polymers, which have both water-loving (hydrophilic) and water-hating (hydrophobic), and therefore oil-loving, properties.

The polymer's affinity for oil means that it can be easily mixed into the rest of the ingredients needed to create chewing gum; but it is its attraction to water that gives it its non-stick abilities.

Chief Scientific Officer of Revolymer, Professor Terence Cosgrove, said: "The hydrophilic coating means that you always get a film of water around the gum and that is one of the reasons it is easy to remove - and, in some cases, doesn't stick at all.""

The only problem I see is that it may dissolve very fast in the mouth. Oh well small price to pay for the following results:

"The team also tested the gum on one of the most tricky surfaces - hair. Using the company CEO's daughter - who said she was due a haircut - as a volunteer, they attached commercial gum to one side of her hair and Rev7 to the other.

The commercial gum eventually had to be cut out, but Rev7 could be mostly removed using water, shampoo and a comb. "

There is no telling where and when this will be released into the United States though.

Children can step into the minds of storybook characters

A large part of enjoying a good book is getting immersed in the life of a character, especially a character's thoughts and feelings. A new University of Waterloo psychology study shows that preschoolers can already perform this impressive perspective-taking feat and get into the minds of story characters.

The study used an innovative approach to explore children's storytelling ability, focusing on how well they comprehend stories instead of how well they tell them. The study, entitled The Emergence of the Ability to Track a Character's Mental Perspective in Narrative, was published in the July issue of Developmental Psychology.

"Children around the ages of three to five are fairly limited in their verbal abilities, and many previous studies have relied on methods requiring children to tell a story orally, potentially underestimating what they can do," says lead researcher Daniela O'Neill, who did the study with graduate student Rebecca Shultis.

O'Neill, an associate professor of developmental psychology and head of the UW centre for child studies, says that's why the study introduced an innovative approach to look at children's storytelling ability. It offers a new method to evaluate storytelling ability that can pick up differences in the abilities of the younger children.

"I believe children as young as age three to five are developing in important ways with respect to their narrative ability, we just need new ways to look at it."

"In essence, rather than looking at how children are able to tell stories, it looked at how children understand stories, and whether, like adults, children build up a 'mental model' of the story," O'Neill says. "By this, I mean, are children, like adults, able to build up a model of the story in their mind and 'step into the mind,' so to speak, of a character.

"It turns out, from the results of our study, that indeed this is one important way in which children appear to be developing with respect to their understanding of stories during the preschool years."

The researchers had the children listen to a story about a character who was in one location, but was thinking about doing something in another. "Tracking the thoughts of characters to different locations they are thinking about is something we do very easily as adults and really is an impressive perspective-taking feat," O'Neill says.

"But can children also do this" It turns out that five-year-olds can, pretty much like adults, but that three-year-olds have much more difficulty doing this."

The youngest children tracked a character if he or she physically moved between two locations, but they did not seem able to track a change in location if it only happens in the character's mind.

In the study, two models were placed in front of the children depicting the two locations -- a barn and a field. In both locations there was a cow. Children were told that the character was in the barn, but was thinking about feeding the cow in the field. Then, immediately after this sentence, children were asked to point to the cow.

"This is an ambiguous request, since there are two cows present," O'Neill explains.

"But we hypothesized that if children were tracking the thought of the character to the new thought-about location (the field), then they would point to the cow there. If they were only able to think about the character where the character physically is, then they would point to the cow in the physical location (the barn)."

It turns out five-year-olds pointed to the cow in the thought-about location and three-year-olds pointed to the cow in the character's physical location, and only switched if told the character had actually gone to the other location.

"We are excited about these results because they help us to better understand how children's narrative ability is changing and developing very early on in a new way we didn't know about before when studies focused mainly on having children tell stories which they are really not very good at yet," O'Neill says.

"Children with delays in their language use also often have difficulty with comprehending and producing narratives," O'Neill says. "This can become quite an issue once children reach school and are faced with many more tasks that require good story comprehension skills."

The study potentially provides a new way to understand some of these difficulties and differences in perspective-taking ability that may hinder story comprehension and production.-Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council

Mother’s milk a gift that keeps on giving

The University of Texas Medical Branch has released a research paper that, surprise, there really is a ton of benefits to breast feeding over formula feeding! I think the main idea is that people are still uneducated about what is best when having a baby. Many still believe that formula=breast. People do not realize that they have no control of what goes into formula, except for the purity of water they use. The paper is not freely available online, unfortunately, but the University of Texas Medical Branch has released a news article about it. Here is an excerpt:

"UTMB professor of pediatrics David K. Rassin, a co-author of the paper (with Baylor College of Medicine assistant professor of pediatrics Judy M. Hopkinson), said, “Although many of us assume that everyone knows breastfeeding is best for infants and the American Academy of Pediatrics has come out with really strong recommendations in favor of it, the prevalence of breastfeeding in the United States is only about 65 percent right now.” Rassin elaborated: “Historically, we had a rapid increase from about 25 percent in the Sixties up to the area of 60 percent in the late Eighties, and it’s only very gradually crept up since then.”

“Within the United States, where we’ve got clean water and don’t have a lot of the diseases associated with formula feeding in Third World countries, I think we still have this concept that there really isn’t any difference between breastfeeding and formula feeding,” Rassin said. “One of the points we tried to make in this article is that even in this country there are definitely some health risks associated with formula feeding - they just tend to involve diseases that take a long time to emerge but may reflect lack of breastfeeding.”

Bias Against Mothers

There is a great article over at Huffingtonpost.com about the bias against mothers in this country. Not sure how to go about addressing these problems, but I wholeheartedly agree that paid new mother leave, as well as child care reforms and health care reforms. To be fair and avoid bias, I believe the following article could be applied to single father's as well:

"..Very few Americans realize that there is deep bias against mothers in this country and that we are undermining family's ability to care for children. I began to understand this a few years ago when I learned that equal pay for equal work is just as big a problem today as it was 40 years ago. I was shocked! Women without children now earn 90 cents to a man's dollar, mothers earn 73 cents, and single mothers earn about 60 cents to a man's dollar. A study done last year revealed that a mother is 79 percent less likely to be offered a job when all other factors -- including resumes, education, and job experience -- are equal. Ever wonder why there are so many women and children in poverty? Every wonder why there are so few women in leadership? Since over 80 percent of women become mothers I would say that women have a long way to go before they have equal opportunity in this country. Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner and I wrote The Motherhood Manifesto and launched www.MomsRising.org in 2006 and FamiliesRising.org in 2007 with policy and culture change in mind.

Why is there deep bias against mothers? It turns out our country lacks basic supports for families. Out of 173 countries, only four have no paid leave for new mothers -- Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, Liberia and the U.S.A. (One of these countries is not like the others.) Our health care system is the most expensive in the world per capita, yet our child mortality rate is 37th. Paid sick days are not required, quality child care is hard to line up and often more than parents can afford, the list goes on. It turns out that having a child is the top cause of a "poverty spell" for families, a time when income dips below what's needed for basic living expenses like food and rent. What a sad statistic. Frankly, the U.S. is missing basic family supports, which most other countries take as a given -- and the kicker is that countries with family-friendly policies and program in place don't have the wage gaps we do here. We know how to fix this problem...."

Before getting that new toy on sale, check this out!

We all know how hard it is to be vigilant at watching prices when shopping (OK maybe it's not hard for everyone, but it is for me!), but keep this new article from Science Daily in mind when shopping for toys, clothes, anything really that is marked at a discount. Everyone knows that sometimes things aren't even on sale, and stores just put a sale sticker on it anyway, but this is another trick to keep in mind when shopping!

Sales Prices: How Right Digits Affect Perception of Discounts

Science Daily — The amount of the discount may be less important than the numerical value of the farthest right digit, explains a new study from the Journal of Consumer Research. Keith S. Coulter (Clark University) and Robin A. Coulter (University of Connecticut) are the first to identify a visual distortion effect that may influence how consumers look at sale prices.

The researchers show that "right-digit effect" influences consumer perception of sale prices. When the right digits are small, people perceive the discount to be larger than when the right digits are large. In other words, an item on sale for $211 from the original price of $222 is thought to be a better deal than an item on sale for $188 from an original price of $199, even though both discounts are $11.

In addition, the researchers find that when consumers view regular and sale prices with identical left digits, they perceive larger price discounts when the right digits are "small" -- less than 5 -- than when they are "large," or, greater than 5.

"When consumers examine multi-digit regular and sale prices in an advertisement, they read those prices from left-to-right. If the left (hundreds) digits are identical, consumers will pay less attention to those digits, and instead will focus primarily upon the disparate right-most (tens and units) digits in the price comparison process.," the authors explain.
"Our findings indicate that comparative price advertising can distort consumers' perceptions in ways unintended by the seller."

Reference: Keith S. Coulter and Robin A. Coulter. "Distortion of Price Discount Perceptions: The Right Digit Effect" Journal of Consumer Research: August 2007.

Conditioning kids to be fearful of men?

Just read something that I had not thought about before, and really, am not too sure about. Are we teaching our kids to be fearful of men? I've never thought about it before, as my child is never really in a situation where she could be easily separated or on her own right now, but these lessons are coming up soon. Would I tell her to seek a safe person such as a pregnant lady or older woman? Does this instill an un-spoken notion that all men are by nature unsafe? I would like to think not, but the truth is that it does. I would not tell my daughter to seek out an older male for example, even though I do not think this stereotype is necessarily true in all regards, however, it is true that most predators are male (reported ones anyway). Instead, what ever happened to find a person in uniform? Find the manager's office? Go to a public place, restaurant, etc?

"Are we teaching children that men are out to hurt them? The answer, on many fronts, is yes. Child advocate John Walsh advises parents to never hire a male babysitter. Airlines are placing unaccompanied minors with female passengers rather than male passengers. Soccer leagues are telling male coaches not to touch players."

"TV shows, including the Dateline NBC series "To Catch a Predator," hype stories about male abusers. Now social-service agencies are also using controversial tactics to spread the word about abuse. This summer, Virginia's Department of Health mounted an ad campaign for its sex-abuse hotline. Billboards featured photos of a man holding a child's hand. The caption: "It doesn't feel right when I see them together."

What worries me is what attitude our children will have towards males as they develop, not to mention how it must make men feel! It doesn't feel right when I see them together...I mean really, did an advertisement even have to go there? What if it was a woman's hand in the billboard, would it be as offensive? I guess I should really be more outraged at this, there are some easily influenced people in this country that will take this to heart and really get a grudge against males, but I guess I am so used to seeing this kind of bias everywhere that it is starting to affect me less.

Negative Effects Of Plastic's Additive Blocked By Nutrient Supplements

OK This is geared toward pregnant people, which I am NOT right now, nor plan to be in the near future :) but I wish I was as interested in science articles as I am right now. It really isn't that hard to keep abreast of the latest findings and may potentially make new mothers-to-be more aware of their environment, which is always good for the baby. Anyway here goes an excerpt, it will be so tantalizing, that you will have to click on the link and read the rest!

"Science Daily — Experiments in animals have provided additional and tantalizing evidence that what a pregnant mother eats can make her offspring more susceptible to disease later in life.

This susceptibility is the result of a process that alters how a gene is expressed without actually changing or mutating the gene itself. Appreciation of this phenomenon has spawned a new avenue of genetic research known as epigenetics, a name which refers to changes happening over and above the gene sequence without altering its code.

In their most recent experiments, Duke University Medical Center investigators demonstrated that exposure within the womb to bisphenol A (BPA), an ubiquitous chemical used in the production of plastics, caused noticeable changes in the offspring without altering any of the offspring's genes. Additionally, the researchers discovered that administration of folic acid or genistein, an active ingredient in soy, during pregnancy protected the offspring from the negative effects of BPA.

In their experiments, the Duke team studied a well-documented strain of animals known as agouti mice. Normally, these mice tend to be slender and brown. While past epigenetic research at Duke has focused on nutrients given to pregnant agouti mice, the current experiments represented the first tests of a potential environmental toxin...." Full story here.

The 1lb baby born at 30,000 ft... and kept alive with a straw

As Nicola Delemere struggled through the pain of contractions, she was gripped with greater fears than the average expectant mother. She and her husband were 30,000ft in the air on a plane to Crete, she was 25 weeks into her pregnancy - and there were no doctors on board.

Now that is an amazing story! You don't see that in the news too much, simply unbelievable!

Printable Chart of First-Aid Procedures [PDF]

Lifehacker : "The guide comes in PDF format and provides emergency care instructions for a bloody nose, eye irritation, burns, sprains, blows to the head, choking, poisoning and open wounds. Since most people haven't thought much about this stuff since high school health class, a brush-up isn't a bad idea."

Handy little thing here! Go to http://www.realsimple.com/realsimple/web/pdf/0307/injury.pdf
to download.

More on the Word Spurt

Calculating the Word Spurt (SCIENCENEWS.ORG)

By Julie J. Rehmeyer

When children first begin to talk, they learn perhaps a word or two a week. Then suddenly, at around 14 to 18 months, they seem to soak up new words like a sponge, learning as many as ten a day.

Child psychologists have long been puzzled by this dramatic acceleration, and they have developed a variety of theories to explain it. Some researchers have argued that as the brain develops, it reorganizes to become much more efficient at storing new words. Others have argued that babies are able to use their knowledge of a few words to deduce the meanings of other words.

Bob McMurray, a child psychologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, now says that a bit of mathematics is enough to explain the phenomenon. Children's word absorption, he says, is the logical consequence of two basic principles: (1.) children work on learning many words at the same time, and (2.) some words are more difficult to learn than others.

A new mathematical theory explains toddlers' "word spurt." Photodisc

McMurray created a simple mathematical model that assigned point scores to words based on how difficult they are to learn. A word like "mommy," for example, might be assigned just one point, whereas a word like "elephant" might get 10 and a word like "aptitude" might get 100.

For purposes of the model, he assumed that children are regularly exposed to all the words they learn and that the higher a word's point score, the more times a baby will have to hear the word to learn it. So kids will learn "mommy" quickly, but a rarely used and more abstract word such as "aptitude" may come much later.

McMurray notes that languages have only a small number of very easy-to-learn words and many more intermediate words. So when a baby has been exposed to enough language to learn the easy words, she will acquire just a few words. As she is exposed to more language, she begins to learn the medium words. And because there are a lot of medium words, she is likely to pick up a lot of words at this stage. This, McMurray says, is the vocabulary explosion.

"It shows how computation can illustrate some very complex implications of really simple theories," McMurray says.

In McMurray's model, the rate of word acquisition is initially slow but increases rapidly. McMurray

McMurray notes that because researchers don't know exactly what factors make a word easy or hard to learn, it's difficult to pin down the number of hard and easy words in a language.

As a first approximation, he assumed that a word is more difficult the less frequently it appears in written language or in mothers' speech to their children—statistics that are both readily available. He then noted that many other factors must influence difficulty, such as the part of speech, the complexity of the sound pattern, and whether the word's meaning is concrete or abstract. Putting all of these factors together, he came up with a roughly bell-shaped distribution with fewer easy and hard words than intermediate words. That distribution, plugged into McMurray's model of learning, naturally produced a rapid rise in rate of words learned following a relatively slow start.

"The explanation lies in the mathematics of learning," McMurray says.

Jennifer Ganger, a child psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, says other psychologists have argued that children may not undergo a word spurt at all, and that if they do, it isn't caused by any significant cognitive change. But McMurray's argument that the word spurt is caused by a single learning mechanism, working at the same rate throughout development, is novel. "This is important," she says, "because too much energy has been wasted trying to understand the causes of the spurt."

From: SCIENCENEWS.ORG, a great place for science news.

Possible Sighting of Madeleine

From: Possible sighting of Madeleine McCann in Belgium

photo

A supposed sighting of Madeleine McCann in Tongeren, Belgium was reported to the police last weekend.

A woman informed the police of this possible sighting, after seeing a couple, a Dutch-speaking man and an English-speaking woman with a small girl at a roadside cafe.

Police are now conducting DNA tests on a bottle and straw that Madeleine assumed to have drank from. Results of the tests will be known next week.

source

That's great news for the parents, really, but am I the only one that worries about all the other missing kids? I am not being disrespectful in any way, just like to keep a wider view. I know everyone says "you wouldn't feel that way if your daughter went missing", and they are probably right, but I probably would not get the same quality search either. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why this is more tragic than half of the stuff I see on my local news. God that sound horrible, but horrible news is all they show on TV these days! Gosh I am being snarky today :)

I sympathize and send my prayers out, hopefully this is the break they are looking for.

Potential Health Risks Of Plastic Drink Bottles

Wow, learn something new everyday. I would definately be concerned over this more than the fact that Pepsi uses tap water! A compound used in the manufacture and lining of many products, including baby bottles and bottled water, may pose certain health hazards.

From Science Daily —

"An independent panel of scientists convened by the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR) of the National Toxicology Program (NTP) will review recent scientific data and expects to reach conclusions regarding whether or not exposure to a widely used chemical, Bisphenol A (BPA) is hazardous to human development or reproduction."

Interesting. So what kind of evidence is there pointing to the effects this chemical has in humans? First a little background. From the limited research I undertook I found that BPA "Bisphenol A was investigated in the 1930s during the search for synthetic estrogens. At that time, another synthetic compound, diethylstilbestrol, was determined to be more powerful than estrogen itself, so bisphenol A was not used as a synthetic estrogen." (Wikipedia) I cannot find if any human trials were done, but it was being investigated as a stynthetic estrogen.

"Bisphenol A is known to be an estrogen receptor agonist which can activate estrogen receptors leading to similar physiological effects as the body's own estrogens.^[3] The first evidence of the estrogenicity of bisphenol A came from experiments in the 1930s in which it was fed to ovariectomized rats.^[4][5] Some hormone disrupting effects in studies on animals and human cancer cells have been shown to occur at levels as low as 2-5 ppb (parts per billion). It has been claimed that these effects lead to health problems such as, in men, lowered sperm count and infertile sperm. Recent studies have confirmed that bisphenol A exposure during development has carcinogenic effects and produce precursors of breast cancer.^[6] Bisphenol A has been shown to have developmental toxicity, carcinogenic effects, and possible neurotoxicity. ^[7][8] Recent studies suggest it may also be linked to obesity by triggering fat-cell activity. ^[9] " (Wikipedia)

Sounds scary doesn't it? I am not trying to be one sided, and freak out over every little thing a la hypochondriac lady. Everyone knows that every chemical in the world has some group saying that it is killing us all slowly and painfully, so here is the flip side of the account:

"In January 2006, the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment announced that polycarbonate baby bottles are safe, stating that published research is "difficult to interpret and [is] occasionally contradictory".^[15] A subsequent study by the European Union’s Food Safety Authority reached a similar conclusion, and sharply criticized the methodology used in many of the low-dose exposure studies on rodents.^[16]

Bisphenol A has been known to leach from the plastic lining of canned foods and, to a lesser degree, plastics which are cleaned with harsh detergents or used to contain acidic or high temperature liquids.^[17] Infants fed with concentrated (canned) infant formula have among the highest exposures of anyone eating canned foods. Infants fed canned formula with polycarbonate bottles can consume quantities of bisphenol A up to 13 µg/kg/day.^[18] The chemical is found in most people who live in developed countries at low concentrations. Debate continues on what is the safe limit of this compound. Within the United States, an exposure of up to 50 µg/kg/day (50 ppb) is considered safe - satisfying a thousand-fold margin of safety^[13] - by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.^{[19]"(Wikipedia)}

If anything I hope this makes everyone be more aware of the chemicals round us. I am not saying if this one is OK or not, the studies are still being done, but it is good to have an awareness. The Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction is performing a study right now (see Science Daily link) and the draft report is available at http://cerhr.niehs.nih.gov/chemicals/bisphenol/BPA_Interim_DraftRpt.pdf

Quirky Discipline Rules That Work

A handy, and very useful, list of rules. From CNN.com surprisingly: Quirky discipline rules that work. Give it a read!

Story Highlights

• Clarity, enforceability make quirky parenting rules work
  
• Successful rules usually give kids some measure of control
  
• Parents have to be consistent for any rule to work

My favorites are:

"I don't work past 8 p.m.

Goal: Regular bedtimes and time off for you

You can't just announce a rule to your husband and kids that says, "Bedtime has to go really smoothly so I can get a break at the end of the day." It won't happen. But if you flip the problem and make a rule about you instead of telling everyone what they have to do, it all falls neatly -- and miraculously -- into place...."

"I can't understand you when you speak like that

Goal: Stopping whining, screaming, general rudeness

This one requires almost religious consistency of application to work effectively. But, essentially, you simply proclaim incomprehension when your child orders (rather than asks) you to do something, whines, or otherwise speaks to you in a way you don't like. Whispering this helps..."

On the Issue of Stem Cells

I figured I would do my duty and help educate more people about stem cells. I am of the firm belief that stem cells are a promising area of research. If you have moral, ethical, religious, etc...issues about stem cells, there are now ways that may be available soon to produce stem cells without fertilization. These technologies will help better your children's life.

Recommended reading:

Full text answers about stem cell research

Researchers create embryonic stemm cells from unfertilized eggs

Child Eats Mother's LSD

Child Eats Mother's LSD



DISCLAIMER: Before quoting the text of the article, I would just like to say that some of this story seems dubious at best. First off I do not know what kind of mother would just throw something that looked like candy on the coffee table, within a kids reach, and then proceed to "crash". Can anyone be that dumb? (oh wait, yes they can) It doesn't matter if it was LSD or acetaminophen, the kid probably survived some other candy eating incidents before this! Parenting issues aside, the article states that the kid was intravenously detoxified in the hospital. This is simply untrue, there is no such thing for LSD. At most they might have injected the kid with thorazine or Versed to knock him out for 12 hours or so. So, in other words, don't take the article at face value.

"WEST BEND, Wis. -- A West Bend mother faces charges including child abuse after police said her 2-year-old daughter ate LSD-laced candy that her mother left out.

According to the criminal complaint, 23-year-old Donielle Maki bought 10 hits of LSD on Tuesday that came in the form of Sweet Tarts.

It says Maki took the LSD home with her, put her daughter to bed and passed out on the couch.

The complaint said when Maki woke up the next morning, her daughter was holding one of the LSD-laced Sweet Tarts in her hand and said, "I like these, Mommy."

That's when Maki grabbed them from the toddler's hand, the complaint says, and saw that only eight of the 10 candies were left.

The West Bend Police Department was called in when the 2-year-old was admitted to St. Joseph's Hospital to be treated for accidental ingestion of LSD.

The criminal complaint says she was transferred to Children's Hospital, where she received intravenous detoxification.

Maki faces charges including child abuse, possession with intent to deliver LSD and possession of narcotic drugs.

She's scheduled to appear in court on Aug. 22.

The child has been released from the hospital and is with her father, 12 News reported."