Ever seen a flight plan ?
Some fathers who stay at home to take care of their childrenappear not to provide the same quality of intellectual stimulation to their young sons as the children's mothers do, a new study has found. Scientists at Bristol University in Britain looked at the early childcare experiences of over 6,000 children born in the Bristol area in the early 1990s who lived at least their early lives in a household with both parents.
The scientists said there is strong evidence to suggest that boys who spent at least 15 hours a week in their fathers' care as toddlers perform worse on academic assessments when they start going to school, reported the online edition of Guardian Unlimited.
The study however finds no significant effects on children - either positive or negative - of paternal involvement in childcare in the first year of life.
It is when children pass their first birthdays that parenting differences between mothers and fathers begin to matter.
A father may be more inclined to see his job as monitoring the child and be less inclined to devise creative activities that develop the child's intellectual skills, the researchers said.
But the study found that girls seem immune to the ill effects of being looked after by their fathers. This may be because fathers may interact differently with sons and daughters, or daughters may simply be less sensitive to the degree of cognitive stimulation in the home environment.
Moderate amounts of paternal care of toddlers are associated with better behavioural outcomes at the start of school, and this is the case for both boys and girls, the scientists said.
What’s the secret behind the glowing Greek skin tone, Spanish ardour, Italian creativity, French je ne sais quois and Turkish delight? Being the cerulean Mediterranean may be one reason. But the subtler one could be their olive oil. Now that Indians are sipping and spitting olive oil at the International Olive Council’s tastings, ahead-of-the-curve buyers like you are scanning the market for the good stuff.
Health experts vouch for samplings that can help you go olive.
Heavy-duty frying or roasting
Light and easy Italian Bertolli’s Olio di Oliva. Less flavourful but familiar Figaro in its deep green can which has been on Indian shelves for the longest time. Or Olitalia’s
Pomace Oil.
From pastas to non-veg grills
Bertolli’s pure Classico or full-bodied extra virgin Robusto. Olitalia’s or Leonardo’s regular olive.
Drizzling over salad, pasta, fish or veggies
Mild and herby extra virgin Gentile from Bertolli. Olitalia’s extra virgin which won the Superior Taste Award in 2006. Or the special Family Reserve from Borges of California, which is cold-pressed from handpicked Arbequina olives.
For dipping your warm bread in like the Italians do
Bertolli’s fruity and well-rounded extra virgin Originale. Or the one our Trendy Taster gave the thumbs up to: the stronger flavoured and more aromatic Fillipo Berio’s extra virgin.
Oil’s well that tastes swell.
There are many ways to eat a masala dosa .What ever the way one eats; there is a very good reason for doing that. It shows some traits of the person that is you...
True Love Waits. Wait Training. Worth Waiting For. The slogans of teen abstinence programs reveal a basic fact of human nature: teens, sex, and waiting aren’t a natural combination.
Over the last fifty years the wait has gotten longer. In 1950, the average first-time bride was just over 20; in 1998 she was five years older, and her husband was pushing 27. If that June groom had launched into puberty at 12, he’d been waiting more than half his life.
If he *had* been waiting, that is. Sex is the sugar coating on the drive to reproduce, and that drive is nearly overwhelming. It’s supposed to be; it’s the survival engine of the human race. Fighting it means fighting a basic bodily instinct, akin to fighting thirst.
Yet despite the conflict between liberals and conservatives on nearly every topic available, this is one point on which they firmly agree: young people absolutely must not have children. Though they disagree on means-conservatives advocate abstinence, liberals favor contraception—they shake hands on that common goal. The younger generation must not produce a younger generation.
But teen pregnancy, in itself, is not such a bad thing. By the age of 18, a young woman’s body is well prepared for childbearing. Young men are equally qualified to do their part. Both may have better success at the enterprise than they would in later years, as some health risks—Cesarean section and Down syndrome, for example— increase with passing years. (The dangers we associate with teen pregnancy, on the other hand, are behavioral, not biological: drug use, STD’s, prior abortion, extreme youth, and lack of prenatal care.) A woman’s fertility has already begun to decline at 25-one reason the population-control crowd promotes delayed childbearing. Early childbearing also rewards a woman’s health with added protection against breast cancer.
Younger moms and dads are likely be more nimble at child-rearing as well, less apt to be exhausted by toddlers’ perpetual motion, less creaky-in-the-joints when it’s time to swing from the monkey bars. I suspect that younger parents will also be more patient with boys-will-be-boys rambunction, and less likely than weary 40-somethings to beg pediatricians for drugs to control supposed pathology. Humans are designed to reproduce in their teens, and they’re potentially very good at it. That’s why they want to so much.
Teen pregnancy is not the problem *Unwed* teen pregnancy is the problem. It’s childbearing outside marriage that causes all the trouble. Restore an environment that supports younger marriage, and you won’t have to fight biology for a decade or more.
Most of us blanch at the thought of our children marrying under the age of 25, much less under 20. The immediate reaction is: "They’re too immature." We expect teenagers to be self-centered and impulsive, incapable of shouldering the responsibilities of adulthood. But it wasn’t always that way; through much of history, teen marriage and childbearing was the norm. Most of us would find our family trees dotted with many teen marriages.
Of course, those were the days when grown teens were presumed to be truly "young adults." It’s hard for us to imagine such a thing today. It’s not that young people are inherently incapable of responsibility-history disproves that-but that we no longer expect it. Only a few decades ago a high school diploma was taken as proof of adulthood, or at least as a promise that the skinny kid holding it was ready to start acting like one. Many a boy went from graduation to a world of daily labor that he would not leave until he was gray; many a girl began turning a corner of a small apartment into a nursery. Expectations may have been humble, but they were achievable, and many good families were formed this way.
Hidden in that scenario is an unstated presumption, that a young adult can earn enough to support a family. Over the course of history, the age of marriage has generally been bounded by puberty on the one hand, and the ability to support a family on the other. In good times, folks marry young; when prospects are poor, couples struggle and save toward their wedding day. A culture where men don’t marry until 27 would normally feature elements like repeated crop failures or economic depression.
That’s not the case in America today. Instead we have an *artificial* situation which causes marriage to be delayed. The age that a man, or woman, can earn a reasonable income has been steadily increasing as education has been dumbed down. The condition of basic employability that used to be demonstrated by a high school diploma now requires a Bachelor’s degree, and professional careers that used to be accessible with a Bachelor’s now require a Master’s degree or more. Years keep passing while kids keep trying to attain the credentials that adult earning requires.
Financial ability isn’t our only concern, however; we’re convinced that young people are simply incapable of adult responsibility. We expect that they will have poor control of their impulses, be self-centered and emotional, and be incapable of visualizing consequences. (It’s odd that kids thought to be too irresponsible for marriage are expected instead to practice heroic abstinence or diligent contraception.) The assumption of teen irresponsibility has broader roots that just our estimation of the nature of adolescence; it involves our very idea of the purpose of childhood.
Until a century or so ago, it was presumed that children were in training to be adults. From early years children helped keep the house or tend the family business or farm, assuming more responsibility each day. By late teens, children were ready to graduate to full adulthood, a status they received as an honor. How early this transition might begin is indicated by the number of traditional religious and social coming-of-age ceremonies that are administered at ages as young as 12 or 13.
But we no longer think of children as adults-in-progress. Childhood is no longer a training ground but a playground, and because we love our children and feel nostalgia for our own childhoods, we want them to be able to linger there as long as possible. We cultivate the idea of idyllic, carefree childhood, and as the years for education have stretched so have the bounds of that playground, so that we expect even "kids" in their mid-to-late twenties to avoid settling down. Again, it’s not that people that age *couldn’t* be responsible; their ancestors were. It’s that anyone, offered a chance to kick back and play, will generally seize the opportunity. If our culture assumed that 50-year-olds would take a year-long break from responsibility, have all their expenses paid by someone else, spend their time having fun and making forgivable mistakes, our malls would be overrun by middle-aged delinquents.
But don’t young marriages tend to end in divorce? If we communicate to young people that we think they’re inherently incompetent that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it was not always the case. In fact, in the days when people married younger, divorce was much rarer. During the last half of the 20th century, as brides’ age rose from 20 to 25, the divorce rate doubled. The trend toward older, and presumptively more mature, couples didn’t result in stronger marriages. Marital durability has more to do with the expectations and support of surrounding society than with the partners’ age.
A pattern of late marriage may actually *increase* the rate of divorce. During that initial decade of physical adulthood, young people may not be getting married, but they’re still falling in love. They fall in love, and break up, and undergo terrible pain, but find that with time they get over it. They may do this many times. Gradually, they get used to it; they learn that they can give their hearts away, and take them back again; they learn to shield their hearts from access in the first place. They learn to approach a relationship with the goal of getting what they want, and keep their bags packed by the door. By the time they marry they may have had many opportunities to learn how to walk away from a promise. They’ve been training for divorce.
As we know too well, a social pattern of delayed marriage doesn’t mean delayed sex. In 1950, there were 14 births per thousand unmarried women; in 1998, the rate had leapt to 44. Even that astounding increase doesn’t tell the whole story. In 1950 the numbers of births generally corresponded to the numbers of pregnancies, but by 1998 we must add in many more unwed pregnancies that didn’t come to birth, but ended in abortion, as roughly one in four of all pregnancies do. My home city of Baltimore wins the blue ribbon for out-of-wedlock childbearing: in 2001, 77% of all births were to unwed mothers.
There are a number of interlocking reasons for this rise in unwed childbearing, but one factor must surely be that when the requirements presumed necessary for marriage rise too high, some people simply parachute out. It’s one thing to ask fidgety kids to abstain until they finish high school at 18. When the expectation instead is to wait until 25 or 27, many will decline to wait at all. We’re saddened, but no longer surprised, at girls having babies at the age of 12 or 13. Between 1940 and 1998, the rate at which girls 10-14 had their first babies almost doubled. These young moms’ sexual experiences are usually classified as "non-voluntary" or "not wanted." Asking boys to wait until marriage is one way a healthy culture protects young girls.
The idea of returning to an era of young marriage still seems daunting, for good reason. It is not just a matter of tying the knot between dreamy-eyed 18-year-olds and tossing them out into world. Our ancestors were able to marry young because they were surrounded by a network of support enabling that step. Young people are not intrinsically incompetent, but they do still have lots of learning to do, just like newly-weds of any age. In generations past a young couple would be surrounded by family and friends who could guide and support them, not just in navigating the shoals of new marriage, but also in the practical skills of making a family work, keeping a budget, repairing a leaky roof, changing a leaky diaper.
It is not good for man to be alone; it’s not good for a young couple to be isolated, either. In this era of extended education, couples who marry young will likely do so before finishing college, and that will require some sacrifices. They can’t expect to "have it all." Of the three factors—living on their own, having babies, and both partners going to school full-time—something is going to have to give. But young marriage can succeed, as it always has, with the support of family and friends.
I got married a week after college graduation, and both my husband and I immediately went to graduate school. We made ends meet by working as janitors in the evenings, mopping floors and cleaning toilets. We were far from home, but our church was our home, and through the kindness of more-experienced families we had many kinds of support-in fact, all that we needed. When our first child was born we were so flooded with diapers, clothes, and gifts that our only expense was the hospital bill.
Our daughter and older son also married and started families young. Things don’t come easy for those who buck the norm, but with the help of family, church, and creative college-to-work programs, both young families are making their way. Early marriage can’t happen in a vacuum; it requires support from many directions, and it would be foolish to pretend the costs aren’t high.
The rewards are high as well. It is wonderful to see our son and daughter blooming in strong, joyful marriages, and an unexpected joy to count a new daughter and son in our family circle. Our cup overflows with grandchildren as well: as of July we have four grandbabies, though the oldest is barely two. I’m 49.
It’s interesting to think about the future. What if the oldest grandbaby also marries young, and has his first child at the age of 20? I would hold my great-grandchild at 67. There could even follow a great-great-grand at 87. I will go into old age far from lonely. My children and their children would be grown up then too, and available to surround the younger generations with many resourceful minds and loving hearts. Even more outrageous things are possible: I come from a long-lived family, some of whom went on past the age of 100. How large a family might I live to see?
Such speculation becomes dizzying-yet these daydreams are not impossible, and surely not unprecedented. Closely-looped, mutually supporting generations must have been a common sight, in older days when young marriage was affirmed, and young people were allowed to do what comes naturally.
Three years ago I listened to a lecture on cognition that changed the way I think about intelligence. This is the crux. There are two types of cognition. The first is normal cognition. This is the ability to retrieve knowledge from memory. When you are asked a question on a test and produce an answer, that’s a display of cognitive ability. The second type of cognition is metacognition; the ability to know whether or not you know.
Have you ever been asked a question that you knew the answer to, but you couldn’t find the right word? This is called the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon and I’m sure we’ve all experienced it. You know that you know the answer, but you fail to produce it. If someone said an answer, you would know instantly if it was correct or not. In these cases metacognition exists without cognition.
In short, cognition is knowing, metacognition is knowing if you know or not. Both can exist together, but many times they don’t.
So what importance does this have and how is it relevant to self improvement? The fact that there are two different kinds of cognitive ability means that there are different types of intelligence.
In traditional education, intelligence is measured by cognitive ability. For some people this is works well. They can easily produce everything they know on a test. But for others it doesn’t work out so well. The people that know something cold but can’t find the right words on a test are awarded with poor grades and considered inferior.
But does this inability make them any less intelligent? They know the answer. If the question came up on a task, they could refer to a book or a quick Google search. In reality they’re just as effective as the people that aced the test. They just can’t prove it as easily.
Unless you’re taking a test or playing Jeopardy, metacognition is more important to success than cognition. In real life, when you’re faced with a question the first decision is whether you know the answer or not. With strong metacognitive ability this is easy. If you know the answer, but can’t come up with it, you can always do a bit of research. If you know for sure that you don’t know, then you can start educating yourself. Because you’re aware of your ignorance, you don’t act with foolish confidence. The person who thinks they know something that they really don’t makes the worst decisions.
A person with poor cognitive ability, but great metacognitive ability is actually in great shape. They might do poorly in school, but when faced with a challenge they understand their abilities and take the best course of action. These people might not seem intelligent at first glance, but because they know what they know, they make better decisions and learn the most important things.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are people with great cognitive ability but poor metacognitive ability. These people are proclaimed geniuses at a young age for acing every test and getting great SAT scores. Unfortunately, they’ve been ruined by poor metacognition; they think they know everything but they really don’t. They are arrogant, fail to learn from mistakes, and don’t understand the nuances of personal relationships; showing disdain for persons with lower cognitive ability.
So who is superior? In a battle of wits the higher cognitive ability prevails, but life is not a single encounter. It is a series of experiments in succession, each building upon the last. Learning requires knowing what you don’t know, and taking steps to learn what you need to. People with poor metacognitive ability never realize that they don’t ‘get it’. They also don’t realize what’s important.
This doesn’t preclude them from material success. But, perhaps that’s a poor measurement of intelligence as well. There are many people who become rich and successful by their cleverness and cognitive ability, but as human beings are quite mediocre. Is the man that makes a million dollars, but is cruel and abusive to his employees and family, really more intelligent than the poor man who lives a modest and loving life? I don’t intend to demonize wealth, only to state that it should not be the measure of virtue.
So what do we know and what do we not? And how can we tell the difference? There is so much to know in the world that the most brilliant human minds can grasp only the tiniest fraction. For this reason we should always be in doubt of what we know. The closed mind is oblivious to its surroundings, while the open mind absorbs them. Like a sponge, it soaks up observations, becoming fuller and more robust.
But we can’t live in total doubt. If we did we would never act, paralyzed by our inadequate knowledge. We must trust our intuition. If something makes you feel a certain way, that feeling is real and must be respected. Act based on your own convictions, not those of others, and keep an open ear for new ideas.
The most important mental power is the ability to know what you don’t know. The recognition of a fault is the first step to improvement. Don’t try to hide a lack of knowledge. People will see through it and you’ll appear foolish and arrogant. If you admit your ignorance, people will help you learn and respect your humility. For intelligent people this is the toughest lesson to learn. We are used to being right, and consider being wrong shameful. We’re afraid to lose status by looking stupid. This vain arrogance is a great weakness and the source of many problems. To crush it and embrace humility is the mark of true wisdom.
A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He
held up a sign which said: "I am blind, please help." There were only
a few coins in the hat.
A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped
them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote
some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would
see the new words.
Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to
the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came
to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked,
"Were u the one who changed my sign this morning? What did u write?"
The man said, "I only wrote the truth. I said what u said but in a
different way."
What he had written was: "Today is a beautiful day & I cannot see
it."
Do you think the first sign & the second sign were saying the same
thing?
Of course both signs told people the boy was blind. But the first
sign simply said the boy was blind. The second sign told people they
were so lucky that they were not blind. Should we be surprised that
the second sign was more effective?
Moral of the Story:
Be thankful for what you have. Be creative. Be innovative. Think
differently and positively. Invite the people towards good with
wisdom.
Live life with no excuse and love with no regrets.
When Life gives you a 100 reasons to cry, show life that you have
1000 reasons to smile.
Face your past without regret. Handle your present with confidence.
Prepare for the future without fear. Keep the faith and drop the
fear.
Don't believe your doubts and doubt your beliefs. Life is a mystery
to solve not a problem to resolve. Life is wonderful if you know how
to live
THE HISTORY OF THE INDIAN FLAG.
The flag that was first hoisted on August 7, 1906,
Called the 'Saptarishi Flag', this was hoisted in Stuttgart
Associated with the names of Dr. Annie Besant and 
In the year 1921, a young man from Andhra presented
this flag to Gandhiji for approval. It was only after
Gandhiji's suggestion that the white strip and
the charkha were added.
This flag was suggested during the All India Congress
Our National Flag, which was born on July 22, 1947,
Lt .Shri Pingali VenkayyaIndia 's flag is a tricolor standard, with bands of saffron, white, and dark green. The saffron represents courage, sacrifice, patriotism, and renunciation. The green stands for faith, fertility and the Land . The white is in the center, symbolizing the hope for unity and peace. In the center of the white band is a blue wheel with 24 spokes. This is the Ashoka Chakra (or "Wheel of Law"). The Chakra represents the continuing progress of the nation and the importance of justice in life. It also appears on the Sarnath Lion Capital of Ashoka " .
JAI HIND JAI BHARAT
Just 10 minutes of talking with another person may prove helpful in improving an individual's memory and intellect, according to researchers at the University of Michigan.
"In our study, socialising was just as effective as more traditional kinds of mental exercise in boosting memory and intellectual performance," said Oscar Ybarra, a psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research and a lead author of the study with ISR psychologist Eugene Burnstein and psychologist Piotr Winkielman from the University of California, San Diego.
During the study, funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the researcher examined ISR survey data to see whether there was a relationship between mental functioning and specific measures of social interaction.
The survey data included information on a national, stratified area probability sample of 3,610 people between the ages of 24 and 96. Their mental functions were assessed through the mini-mental exam, a widely used test that measures knowledge of personal information and current events.
Participants' level of social interactions was assessed by asking how often each week they talked on the phone with friends, neighbours and relatives, and how often they got together.
The researchers also looked at the connection between frequency of social contact and level of mental function on the mini-mental exam.
The study showed that the higher the level of participants' social interaction, the better their cognitive functioning. The relationship was reliable for all age groups, from the youngest through the oldest.
In another experiment, the researchers conducted a laboratory test to assess how social interactions and intellectual exercises affected memory and mental performance.
They assigned 76 college students, ages 18 to 21, to one of three groups-social interaction group, intellectual activities group, and control group.
Participants in the social interaction group engaged in a discussion of a social issue for 10 minutes before taking the tests, while those in the intellectual activities group completed three tasks before taking the tests, which included a reading comprehension exercise and a crossword puzzle.
Participants in a control group watched a 10-minute clip of Seinfeld.
Thereafter, all participants completed two different tests of intellectual performance that measured their mental processing speed and working memory.
"We found that short-term social interaction lasting for just 10 minutes boosted participants' intellectual performance as much as engaging in so-called 'intellectual' activities for the same amount of time," Ybarra said.
"To our knowledge, this experiment represents the only causal evidence showing that social interaction directly affects memory and mental performance in a positive way," he added.
As per the findings, he says, visiting with a friend or neighbour may be just as helpful in staying sharp as doing a daily crossword puzzle.
Check this out …… it's a true story of most women in Indian society …direct Dil se !
The woman in your life...very well expressed...
