children - Taryn . on Diigo

see Orszag's "Demographics, Access and Costs: A Federal Perspective on Health Care Policy and Innovation"
@13:00 Information Technology is "necessary but not sufficient [to increase efficiency]..."
@17:00 "...an affront to traditional econ 101 thinking...the default mattered more than the financial incentive...[placebo effect in medicine]...simply telling people that what they do every day is physical exercises generates results that are similar to actual exercise..."

Tags: inequity, social_change, innovation, healthcare, reform, economy, behavior, psychology, medicine, placebo, economics, information, technology, nutrition, exercise, children, video on 2008-10-29 -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromhealthpolicy.stanford.edu

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Consumed - Milk Cartoon

Tags: food, school, education, marketing, children on 2008-10-12 -All Annotations (3) -About

more fromwww.nytimes.com

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PLoS ONE: Sucrose Exposure in Early Life Alters Adult Motivation and Weight Gain

see first paragraph of discussion re:science_is_a_method, implications for social policy

Tags: obesity, sugar, metabolism, genome-environment_interaction, behavior, genetics, marketing, children, development, science_is_a_method on 2008-10-05 -All Annotations (7) -About

more fromwww.plosone.org

These results suggest that early, unlimited exposure to sucrose reduces motivation to acquire sucrose but promotes weight gain in adulthood when the cost of acquiring palatable, energy dense foods is low. This study demonstrates that early post-weaning experience can modify the expression of a ‘thrifty genotype’ and alter an adult animal's response to its environment
Our findings suggest the window for developmental effects of diet may extend into childhood, an observation with potentially important implications for both research and public policy in addressing the rising incidence of obesity.
Efforts to understand the recent rise in obesity focus on discerning the relative contributions of, or interactions between, genetic and environmental factors in adulthood [6], [7], [19], [23], [24]. Developmental contributions and interactions are only recently being investigated and have focused almost exclusively on maternal over- and under-nutrition affecting the fetal or neonatal nutritional environment. Arising from the fetal origins hypothesis, termed the ‘thrifty phenotype,’ first proposed by Hales, Barker and colleagues [25], [26], this work proposes that pre- and peri-natal nutritional status developmentally programs the organism's adult metabolism and energy balance to form a “predictive adaptive response” [27].
unlimited access to sucrose early in life reduces motivation to acquire sucrose, but only when work is required to obtain it. When high-sugar/high-fat foods were made freely-available, mice exposed to sucrose early in life preferred and consumed this food as much as non-exposed animals, but in this environment gained more weight than controls. These data provide clear empirical support for the often asserted but rarely demonstrated link between childhood diet and later adult feeding behavior and body weight and suggest that the impact of early diet on adult obesity risk may be contingent upon the adult environment.
These results suggest that with a population raised on a diet high in sugar, environmental manipulation of the costs associated with energy-dense foods is likely to be an efficacious obesity-reducing intervention during adulthood.
suggests that early experience can alter the incentive motivational processes that determine goal-directed behavior in response to hunger resulting in different behavioral choices and consumption.
sucrose-exposure does not effect weight gain when animals eat standard chow. However, differences in energy metabolism and storage may arise in response to chronic food deprivation which may contribute to the observed differences in sucrose-seeking.

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Mediterranean Diet Declines, and Weights Rise - NYTimes.com

Tags: map, audio, food, diet, health, disease, italy, children on 2008-09-24 -All Annotations (1) -About

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Artist views city garden as method to reach kids - RecordOnline.com - The Times Herald Record

Tags: home, new_york, hudson_valley, agriculture, food, nutrition, children, ReadNex on 2008-09-23 -All Annotations (1) -About

in list: the hudson valley

more fromwww.recordonline.com

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JAMA -- Bisphenol A and Risk of Metabolic Disorders, September 17, 2008, vom Saal and Myers 300 (11): 1353

Tags: plastic, bisphenolA, health, genome-environment_interaction, development, endocrine, metabolism, disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, women, children, pregnancy on 2008-09-17 -All Annotations (4) -About

more fromjama.ama-assn.org

The biphasic or nonmonotonicdose-response curves observed in this and many other studiesof BPA follow an inverted U shape, which is a common findingfor endocrine-active chemicals and drugs, for which high dosesinhibit (down-regulate) the low-dose response system while initiatinga wide array of other adverse effects via different responsemechanisms.¹⁰
A fundamental problem is that the current ADI forBPA is based on experiments conducted in the early 1980s usingoutdated methods (only very high doses were tested) and insensitiveassays. More recent findings from independent scientists wererejected by the FDA, apparently because those investigatorsdid not follow the outdated testing guidelines for environmentalchemicals, whereas studies using the outdated, insensitive assays(predominantly involving studies funded by the chemical industry)are given more weight in arriving at the conclusion that BPAis not harmful at current exposure levels.
causalrole for BPA in these trends is plausible because BPA can alterthe programming of genes during critical periods in cell differentiationduring fetal and neonatal development. This process, referredto as "epigenetic programming," can result in the expressionof metabolic disease and cancers during later life.
worldwide BPA production has now reachedapproximately 7 billion pounds per year

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6 Food Mistakes Parents Make - NYTimes.com

Tags: food, health, diet, parenting, children, women on 2008-09-16 -All Annotations (6) -About

more fromwww.nytimes.com

Adding a little butter, ranch dressing, cheese sauce or brown sugar to a vegetable dish can significantly improve its kid appeal. And adding a little fat to vegetables helps unlock their fat-soluble nutrients.
By exposing young children to erratic dieting habits, parents may be putting them at risk for eating disorders or a lifetime of chronic dieting. “Most mothers don’t think their kids are soaking up this information, but they are,” Dr. Birch said. “They’re teaching it to their daughters even though it doesn’t work for them.”
Don’t bring foods that you feel the need to restrict into the house. Instead, buy healthful snacks and give children free access to the food cabinets.
put the food on the table and encourage a child to try it. But don’t complain if she refuses, and don’t offer praise if she tastes it.
When children are involved in meal preparation, “they come to at least try the food,”
Sibling dynamics and friendships can also change a child’s eating habits.

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James Patterson: 'Publishers are lost in the Middle Ages' - Features, Books - The Independent

Tags: writer, publishing_industry, novel, children, fiction on 2008-09-16 -All Annotations (3) -About

more fromwww.independent.co.uk

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Photo Journal : Pictures of the Day

Tags: photo, women, war, children, obama on 2008-09-09 -All Annotations (4) -About

more fromblogs.wsj.com

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Obama on Education - Ezra Klein

lot of lame argument, but better toward the end

Tags: obama, speech, education, innovation, children, testing on 2008-09-09 -All Annotations (8) -About

more fromwww.prospect.org

chance to fulfill their God-given potential
children here in Dayton are growing up competing with children not only in Detroit, but in Delhi as well.

What matters, then, isn’t what you do or where you live, but what you know
Without a good pre-school education, our children are less likely to keep up with their peers. Without a high school diploma, you’re likely to make about three times less than a college graduate. And without a college degree or industry certification, it’s harder and harder to find a job that can help you support your family and keep up with rising costs.
an education agenda that moves beyond party and ideology and focuses instead on what will make the most difference in a child’s life. My plan calls for giving every child a world-class education from the day they’re born until the day they graduate from college. It’s a plan that starts with investing in early-childhood education because we know that children in these programs are more likely to score higher in reading and math, more likely to graduate high school and attend college, more likely to hold a job and earn more in that job. And it’s a plan that will finally put a college degree within reach for anyone who wants one by providing a $4,000 tax credit to any middle class student who’s willing to serve their community or their country.
We need assessments that can improve achievement by including the kinds of research, scientific investigation, and problem-solving that our children will need to compete in a 21st century knowledge economy.
Service Scholarship program that will recruit top talent into the profession, and place these new teachers in overcrowded districts and struggling rural towns, or hard-to-staff subjects like special education in schools across the nation. To prepare these new teachers, I’ll create more Teacher Residency Programs that will build on a law I recently passed and train 30,000 high-quality teachers a year, especially in math and science. To support our teachers, we’ll expand mentoring programs that pair experienced, successful teachers with new recruits.
when our teachers succeed in making a real difference in our children’s lives, we should reward them for it by finding new ways to increase teacher pay
we can increase the number of students taking college-level courses; expand innovation and school choice; invest in the schools of tomorrow; and put a quality teacher in every classroom – all for the cost of just a few days in Iraq

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Mom's Mood, Baby's Sleep: What's The Connection?

Tags: sleep, depression, women, children, parenting, pregnancy on 2008-09-07 -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromwww.sciencedaily.com

Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves | Video on TED.com

descriptive, intriguing but not a rock-solid argument

Tags: video, education, teaching, learning, school, india, computer, children on 2008-09-04 and saved by20 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.ted.com

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Hoover Institution - Education Next - How Do We Transform Our Schools?

Tags: education, school, learning, computer, innovation, children, software on 2008-09-01 and saved by20 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.hoover.org

At first glance there appears to be little non-consumption of education in the United States since students are required to receive schooling. Looking deeper, however, reveals many pockets of non-consumption where students would be delighted with computer-based learning rather than the alternative, nothing at all.
When a new approach or technology substitutes for the old, the pace of substitution almost always follows an S-curve, as depicted on the left side of Figure 3. The initial adoption is very slow, and then at some point the world flips and the substitution proceeds rapidly. The problem is that the S-curves are sometimes steep and other times gradual, so it is hard to know when the rapid adoption will begin. But there is a way to forecast the flip. First, one must plot the percentage of market shares held by the new, divided by the old (if each has 50 percent, the ratio will be 1.0) on the vertical axis. Second, the vertical axis needs to be arrayed on a logarithmic scale—so that .0001, .001, .01, .1, 1.0, and 10.0 are all equidistant. When plotted in this way, if disruption is truly happening and there is an S-curve developing, the data will fall on a straight line. Sometimes the line slopes upward steeply, and sometimes it is more gradual. But it is always straight. The reason is that the mathematics linearizes the S-curve. When the pace of substitution is plotted in this way, one typically can tell before the new approach accounts for 2 to 3 percent of the total what the slope of the line is. That makes it easy, then, to extend the line into the future to obtain a sense of when the new innovation will account for 25 percent, 50 percent, and 90 percent of the total. We call this line a “substitution curve.”

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100 books every child should read - An introduction by Michael Morpurgo - Telegraph

Tags: reading, education, children, literature, united_states, finland on 2008-08-31 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.telegraph.co.uk

Interesting that Finland finds itself at the top of a recent child happiness table as well as child literacy levels.
the boy loved it because his mother loved it. He could hear it in her voice, in her laugh, in the tears in her eyes. He loved the fun, shared the sadness. He loved the music in the words. He never wanted storytime to end.
Then "unwillingly to school" he went, trudging the leafy pavements through pea-souper London smogs. From then on the stories were not magical, and they weren't musical either. Words were to be properly spelled, properly punctuated, with neat handwriting. They were not story words any more, but nouns and pronouns and verbs. Later they were used for dictation and comprehension, and all was tested and marked. A multitude of red crosses and slashes covered his exercise books, like bloody cuts.
We have to stop proclaiming reading as a ladder to academic success. Treated simply as an educational commodity, some kind of pill to be taken to aid intellectual development, it is all too often counter-productive and ultimately alienating.
We get ourselves all hot and bothered about the teaching of reading, about synthetic phonics and the like, and we forget that none of it is much use unless children want to read in the first place. The motivation must come first, horse before cart. We all know that unless a child is motivated to learn, then there will be apathy or resistance in the learning process.

Taking On Poverty and Inequality

sobering numbers - note stupid stupid commentary

Tags: poverty, inequity, united_states, children, economy, election, katrina_vandenheuvel on 2008-08-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.thenation.com

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How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science - Chronicle.com

Tags: science, education, children, teaching, learning, school on 2008-08-06 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (10) -About

more fromchronicle.com

Gates has a compelling point — largely because the shortage of Americans holding or pursuing advanced degrees in fields like computer science defies conventional market explanations. The average annual salary in the field is more than $100,000. Meanwhile, we have a robust supply of high-IQ baristas and college graduates with jobs that a generation ago would not even have required a high-school diploma.

So while Gates didn't make the point in so many words, his call for more H-1B visas was really testimony to the incapacity of American education to inspire children to take an interest in science and motivate young adults to follow though.
Students respond more profoundly to cultural imperatives than to market forces. In the United States, students are insulated from the commercial market's demand for their knowledge and skills. That market lies a long way off — often too far to see. But they are not insulated one bit from the worldview promoted by their teachers, textbooks, and entertainment. From those sources, students pick up attitudes, motivations, and a lively sense of what life is about.
Success in the sciences unquestionably takes a lot of hard work, sustained over many years. Students usually have to catch the science bug in grade school and stick with it to develop the competencies in math and the mastery of complex theories they need to progress up the ladder. Those who succeed at the level where they can eventually pursue graduate degrees must have not only abundant intellectual talent but also a powerful interest in sticking to a long course of cumulative study
The intellectual lassitude we breed in students, their unearned and inflated self-confidence, undercuts both the self-discipline and the intellectual modesty that is needed for the apprentice years in the sciences. Modesty? Yes
willingness to play by nature's rules runs in contrast to the make-it-up-as-you-go-along insouciance that characterizes so many variants of postmodernism and that flatters itself as being a higher form of pragmatism.
The aversion to long-term and deeply committed study of science among American students also stems from other cultural imperatives. We rank the manufacture of "self-esteem" above hard-won achievement, but we also have immersed a generation in wall-to-wall promotion of diversity and multiculturalism as being the worthiest form of educational endeavor; we have foregrounded the redistributional dreams of "social justice" over heroic aspirations to discover, invent, and thereby create new wealth; and we have endlessly extolled the virtue of "sustainability" against the ravages of "progress." Do all that, and you create an educational system that is essentially hostile to advanced achievement in the sciences and technology. Moreover, those threads have a certainty and unity that make them not just a collection of educational conceits but also part of a compelling worldview.
in a curriculum dissolved in the sea of minutiae and professorial enthusiasms, the opportunity to pass through moody introspection and back into the sturdy world of real people grows rare.

Taryn .'s Bookmarks tagged children → View Popular

Vital Signs - Gestational Diabetes Linked to Language Delays in Children - NYTimes.com

The Frontal Cortex : Poverty and the Brain

Isabel Allende tells tales of passion | Video on TED.com

WNYC - The Leonard Lopate Show: Please Explain: Jealousy (October 24, 2008)

CHP/PCOR conference brings entrepreneurs, industry leaders together to discuss innovation in health care reform - CHP/PCOR

Consumed - Milk Cartoon

PLoS ONE: Sucrose Exposure in Early Life Alters Adult Motivation and Weight Gain

Mediterranean Diet Declines, and Weights Rise - NYTimes.com

Artist views city garden as method to reach kids - RecordOnline.com - The Times Herald Record

JAMA -- Bisphenol A and Risk of Metabolic Disorders, September 17, 2008, vom Saal and Myers 300 (11): 1353

6 Food Mistakes Parents Make - NYTimes.com

James Patterson: 'Publishers are lost in the Middle Ages' - Features, Books - The Independent

Photo Journal : Pictures of the Day

Obama on Education - Ezra Klein

Mom's Mood, Baby's Sleep: What's The Connection?

Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves | Video on TED.com

Hoover Institution - Education Next - How Do We Transform Our Schools?

100 books every child should read - An introduction by Michael Morpurgo - Telegraph

Taking On Poverty and Inequality

How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science - Chronicle.com

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