http://www.vulture.com/2016/08/actresses-over-60-are-now-box-office-powerhouses.html

Actresses Over 60 Are the New Box-Office Powerhouses

On August 12 — the moment in the summer movie-release calendar when blockbuster season traditionally gives way to blockbuster-fatigue season — Paramount Pictures will release Meryl Streep’s new movie Florence Foster Jenkins, a period comedy-drama about a famously incompetent and famously undeterrable aspiring soprano. The date is not an accident: Streep is a veteran of August, when her movies step in to pick up the disheartened and franchise-weary; this is roughly the same weekend that brought her to us in Ricki and the Flash (2015), Hope Springs (2012), and Julie & Julia (2009).

But this release, a modestly budgeted indie (Paramount acquired it after it was shot) feels slightly different: Streep, at 67, is no longer an outlier defying all conventional wisdom about the box-office viability of an actress north of 50; she’s part of a trend. It began a little more than a year ago, when I’ll See You in My Dreams, a tiny independent drama from a fledgling company starring the then-72-year-old Blythe Danner, a well-liked actress with no box-office track record whatsoever, grossed an unexpectedly strong $7.4 million in theaters. Last September, another indie, Grandma, with Lily Tomlin (76), took in $7 million as well. And the beginning of 2016 brought Maggie Smith (81) in the British import The Lady in the Van ($10 million), Helen Mirren (70) in the drone thriller Eye in the Sky ($18.7 million), and Sally Field (69) in the comedy-drama Hello, My Name Is Doris ($14.4 million).

These aren’t blockbuster numbers, to be sure — the total U.S. grosses of those five films combined don’t add up to what even a mid-level franchise movie like Star Trek Beyond made in its first weekend. On the other hand, profit is profit, and I very much doubt any of these distributors is complaining. Indie grosses are measured on a different scale, and on that scale, the numbers for movies driven by older women aren’t good — they’re great. For some perspective: Of the more than 100 films to show at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival a year and a half ago, most of those that were actually released grossed less than $1 million, and only six grossed more than $6 million. Two of them were Danner’s and Tomlin’s. Or, to yardstick it another way, these numbers are either comparable to or way ahead of what 2016’s buzziest art-house success, The Lobster, has grossed, and they have left many 2016 indies that were intended to skew younger — Swiss Army Man, The Neon Demon, Green Room, Sing Street — in the dust.

It is not surprising that five actresses with decades of great work to their credit would have fans, but the fact that those fans — especially in the era of streaming and VOD — would be so willing to leave their homes and head for theaters comes as a jolt. The very notion of mobile, active, committed older entertainment consumers is a bad fit for a pop culture–industrial complex that has long been demographically indifferent to them. In television, 18- to  49-year-olds are the prized quarry, and viewers over 50 (or 60) are treated by advertisers as people who never buy anything but adult diapers and medic-alert systems and sit in their adjustable beds leaning forward with ear horns to make sure they hear the list of dangerous side effects in the commercials.

None of those stereotypes, however, should matter in the non-advertising world of independent movies, where, after all, a 65-year-old’s Fandango dollars are worth exactly as much as a 15-year-old’s. This boomlet should be especially welcome news since the economic narrative for art-house indies for the last few years has not been great. Foreign-language films that might, a decade ago, have grossed $2 million or $3 million in theaters now take in $500,000; and for “breakout” indie hits, $5 million is the new $20 million. In the movie business, the prevailing wisdom has it that everything is migrating inexorably toward your living room, your laptop, your pad, or your phone, and also that an older audience that’s pickier about its entertainment choices and more mindful of leisure-time management is not worth chasing. That’s one reason big-studio movies are now geared so completely either to young adults (a demographic susceptible to advertising, open to being in a large group, undemanding about atmosphere, and eager for instant gratification), or to people with kids (desperate for activities that will keep them occupied). They’re happy to go out; everyone else is considered too hard to lure.

But this trend flies in the face of that; it is a reminder that older audiences actually have a lifelong habit of going to the movies that they’re not particularly interested in shedding, a kind of muscle-memory loyalty to the theatrical experience that, given the right actor in the right movie at the right price, may make them the most potent consumer force in indie movies right now. (Last year’s single biggest Sundance hit, the amiable amble A Walk in the Woods, starred Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. If you’re under 35, you've probably never heard of it, but it grossed more than Ex Machina.)

These movies aren’t all in the adorable-oldsters mode of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel either (although any indie company would fall to its knees in thanks for that film’s $33 million U.S. gross). Eye in the Sky is steeped in current geopolitics about the ethics of war technology; Grandma deals with abortion rights and leaves no ambiguity about where it stands; Hello, My Name Is Doris is frank about loneliness, sexual desire, and — perhaps this hits too close to the bone — society’s tendency to write off older women as dear little “characters” without passions or aspirations of their own. No wonder the movie struck a chord with an audience that’s almost systematically ignored.

It would be a mistake for any part of the industry — indie or studio — to write this off as a statistical blip. And, although recognition of an undervalued audience comes with maddening slowness in the movie business, there are signs that this dawning reality is being acknowledged. Netflix, perhaps looking at the success of its own Grace and Frankie, is backing the drama Our Souls at Night, which will reunite Redford with Jane Fonda 50 years after their first movie together, and it can’t be an accident that Universal, always looking to expand the reach of its Fast and Furious franchise, has added Mirren to the cast. The audience is real, and so is its appetite. And those who get it — who don’t simply view this particular group of movie lovers as the “about to die” demographic — may, a few years hence, look like very smart early adapters. In 1968, well before demographics were a subject of serious discussion at the studios, Variety reported the results of a study that showed 48 percent of American moviegoers were 24 or younger. For the middle-aged men who then ran Hollywood and thought they were making movies for themselves, the news was revelatory. Baby-boomers — the pig in the python — were coming of age, and over the next 15 years, the way movies were conceived, made, and marketed would undergo a revolution as a result. Now, almost 50 years later, that demographic is coming of old age, and making itself heard again. And if anyone wants it, they’ve still got money to spend.

Sent from my iPhone

http://www.littlethings.com/1950s-good-housewife-guide/?utm_source=hcr&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_campaign=nostalgia

This 1955 ‘Good House Wife’s Guide’ Explains How Wives Should Treat Their Husbands

It’s so fascinating to learn about how people used to live — especially when we discover that not much has really changed. 

Advertisement

However, sometimes you come across some old traditions that you simply can’t believe people ever followed — like these odd dating rituals throughout history. 

But what women in the 1950s were expected to do for their husbands? Well, those traditions have certainly flown right out the window! 

In May of 1955, Housekeeping Monthly published an article entitled, “The Good Wife’s Guide,” detailing all the ways that a wife should act and how best she can be a partner to her husband and a mother to her children. 

Advertisement

It may feel a little strange to accept these rules today, but it remains so interesting to see how society once behaved. 

Scroll further to see what rules mothers and housewives once had to follow, and let us know your thoughts in the comments below! 

Sent from my iPhone

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/7-strengths-super-readers

7 Strengths of Super Readers

Summer is a time of promise, when the light is golden and the sound of children’s voices echo in the air, even after darkness begins to come across the sky. For us as teachers, and for the families we serve, summer can be a period of great joy, but it can also stretch in front of us in a way that worries us: Will our children thrive as readers in these months?

It is during this time that children are at risk for the “summer slide,” a phenomenon that occurs when they are not reading or connecting with books in a rich and robust way. These “lost” months are not only a time when students may remain static in their reading progress—they can also “fall back” and lose ground. 

In a landmark study, Richard Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen, coauthors of Summer Reading: Closing the Rich/Poor Achievement Gap, discovered that the summer slide accounted for as much as “85 percent of the reading achievement gap between lower-income students and their middle- and upper-income peers.” However, another study found that if children read four or more books over the summer, they did better on reading assessments in the fall than their peers who read one or no books during that time, regardless of any differential. The summer slide is real and it is profound, but the good news is this: It is solvable.

The “Super Reader” movement that we hope to ignite with our book Every Child a Super Reader invites you as teachers to enroll families as partners in telling a new summer story of learning for all our children—supporting them to take a giant leap forward as readers, writers, and learners. In this way, we can create 365 days of super reading that will ensure no child suffers the consequences of the summer slide.

Celebrate Independent Reading

Twenty minutes a day of independent reading is all it takes to expand vocabulary and turn reading into a lifelong habit. Ask your students: “What are your reading goals for the summer?” “Who is someone you can read with?” “What is one book you definitely want to read before the summer is over?” Create a blog or use an online portal, such as VoiceThread, so that students can keep in touch with one another as readers all summer long. As an incentive, give them a challenge: Record individual minutes read and set a collective reading-minutes goal. When they return in the fall, celebrate as a school. We must strive to create the kind of world where children count words and time spent reading as valuable, whether they are reading poetry, nonfiction, comics, blogs, or the backs of cereal boxes.

Summer Read-Aloud Fun

The read-aloud not only improves reading, writing, vocabulary, and listening skills—it also invites readers to form bonds, to become part of a literary community, to connect. Together, create a list of favorite read-alouds from the school year. Send the list home, and tell families to look for the books at their local library or at a nearby bookstore—or lend class copies you may have on hand.

While school is still in session, have kids practice reading aloud to one another, and then suggest they do the same with younger siblings or friends throughout the summer months. Encourage them to turn one of their favorite read-alouds into a play, use it to make a recording, or even create an art project around it.

Create Super Reader Families

Send home the Super Reader Summer Countdown and Family Summer Reading Tips sheets to get families started on thinking about how they can build reading rituals into the coming months. (If you can, also send a selection of leveled books with children whose families may not have many on hand.) Let families know that their participation counts, and that you and their children are counting minutes this summer, so read-alouds will also count! The Scholastic Kids and Family Reading Report (2015) notes that having parents as reading role models or having a large book collection at home has a greater impact on children’s reading frequency than does household income. Let parents know that reading aloud or side-by-side with their child and taking books along with them on trips help build lifelong Super Readers.

• Download the Super Reader Summer Countdown and Family Summer Reading Tips Packet

7 Strengths for 7 Weeks of Summer

Children often believe that when they struggle as readers, it indicates a lack of ability. But depending on the text, any reader can struggle. It’s part of what we do as we wrestle with words and strive to make sense of a challenging text. By focusing on a strength-based approach in our Super Reader 7 Strengths Model, we say to every child: You can succeed, practice matters, and what you bring to the reading of a book—your ideas and processes—are all strengths. We developed the framework through our longtime work with LitWorld, a global literacy organization.

By naming their own strengths—from curiosity to courage to kindness—children begin to see themselves as readers who are facing struggle with joy and purpose. This shift in perspective changes the learning landscape for children. Suddenly, when confronted with a challenging text, they know they have the skills to overcome difficulties and tackle the content rather than feel defeated. Super Readers are bold and brave and not afraid to push forward into new territory to discover new meaning.

In Every Child a Super Reader, we focus on seven strengths for reading success: belonging, curiosity, friendship, kindness, confidence, courage, and hope.

Week One: Belonging
Invite children and families to create a sense of belonging as readers at home. Make a cozy nook for reading. Collect favorite books from the library or on a digital device and designate an area at home for this reading life. Create a “reading on the go” kit so that when there is a sibling’s soccer game or a long subway trip, that bag of books or tablet can come along for the ride. Encourage families to make a refrigerator chart called “We Are All Super Readers,” and feature each family member’s photo. Make the home a place of belonging and safety for the reading experience.

Week Two: Curiosity
Suggest that your Super Readers build a “Curiosity List” of things they and their families most want to learn about this summer, and then find books on some of these fun and interesting topics. They should keep the list in a prominent place, and add to it as the summer unfolds.

Week Three: Friendship
Have families encourage their children to reach out to another reader—a grandparent, a neighbor, an aunt, a friend from class—to share what they are reading at that particular moment.

Week Four: Kindness
Challenge students to take a kindness action from a book or a story they are reading. What might this book inspire them to do for another person?

Week Five: Confidence
Encourage affirmation. Have parents identify one or two things they are seeing their child do as a reader this summer, whether that is trying a new genre or having breakthroughs in reading hard words. They can celebrate these small steps by posting a compliment on their child’s bedroom wall or having a special family dinner together.

Week Six: Courage
Suggest Super Readers read a book about a courageous person in the world, and then have a family conversation about what courage means and where they see small or big examples of courage in the world.

Week Seven: Hope
Have parents initiate a conversation based on this question: What about your reading life this summer makes you feel more hopeful? Have families create a “Hope Map” together that encompasses their hopes for one another, their hopes for the world, and how reading something this summer inspires them to hope bigger and dream bigger for themselves, for one another, and for the world.

Click Here to Subscribe to Scholastic Teacher Magazine

Photo: JuliarStudio/iStock (blast); Tintin75/Dreamstime.com (background);
Rob Hainer/Shutterstock (kids); Rodrigo Osornio/The Noun Project (book icon)

Sent from my iPhone

http://www.fromthegrapevine.com/health/chocolate-cake-breakfast-new-research-says-it-might-actually-help-you-lose-weight

Chocolate cake for breakfast? Research says it's good for both your brain and your waistline

We all know breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Here's why it should also be the sweetest.

File this one under "studies we would definitely volunteer for:" New research says eating chocolate regularly can actually improve brain function.

Yes, that sweet, sticky treat you seem to crave at the most inopportune times is now being associated with a host of cognitive benefits, including memory and abstract reasoning. It's all part of a long-term, large-scale study out of Syracuse University in New York that measured the effects of chocolate consumption on 968 people aged 23 to 98, without changing their overall dietary habits.

"Habitual chocolate intake was related to cognitive performance, measured with an extensive battery of neuropsychological tests," the researchers wrote. "More frequent chocolate consumption was significantly associated with better performance on [these tests]."

Eating chocolate in the morning pretty much guarantees you'll have a great day. (Photo: Altin Osmanaj/Shutterstock)

We're willing to bet that's not the first time you've heard about a study touting the benefits of chocolate on your health. A few years ago, researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel reported that eating chocolate in the morning – yes, every morning – was found to help people lose weight, despite long-held beliefs that chocolate is one of those occasional splurge foods that dieters must resist in order to achieve their weight-loss goals. 

The biggest takeaway of this research, according to study leader Dr. Daniela Jakubowicz, is that eating a higher-calorie breakfast in the morning reduces cravings throughout the day and prevents late-night snacking.

Researchers say eating a full, high-calorie breakfast can help people control their cravings throughout the day. (Photo: Joshua Resnick/Shutterstock)

"When you wake up, your brain needs energy immediately," said Jakubowicz, whose book "The Big Breakfast Diet" became a bestseller. "This is the time of the day when your body converts food into energy. Later in the day, when you eat, your body and brain are still in high-alert mode, saving the energy from food as fat reserve. This is how you gain weight even eating less."

So what kind of breakfast does she suggest? Breakfast with dessert, of course. Jakubowicz said in her study, people who were given a 600-calorie breakfast that included dessert as well as proteins and carbohydrates lost more weight than people who were given a 300-calorie breakfast but ate more later in the day.

What is it about chocolate that's so beneficial? Experts say it's a nutrient called a flavonoid that's commonly found in plant-based foods and represents up to 20 percent of the compounds present in cocoa beans. High levels of flavonoids are also found in tea, red wine and fruits such as grapes and apples.

So next time you're thinking about that chocolate cake looking all lonesome on your counter, sleep on it – and indulge in the morning. Your brain – and your waistline – might thank you.

Looking for creative chocolate dessert ideas? Check out our extensive Israeli Kitchen recipe collection. Here are a few to get you started:

• Chocolate cake with triple glaze
• Chocolate zucchini cake
• Chocolate cupcakes with mocha cream and chocolate ganache

Sent from my iPhone

http://www.jamespatrickriley.com/index.php/religious-spirit/

DONALD TRUMP AND THE PHARISEES

When you finally come to the conclusion there is a God, you’re likely to try to attempt to please Him.

Max Lucado, Pharisee

And this is where it can get dangerous.  You might be on your way to the sanctuary for worship, and you see a man curled up by the side of the road, bloody and beaten by robbers.  Something tells you the man needs your help (that’s God talking to you), but you are wearing your Sunday best, and you’re not trained as a first responder, and you’ve been given the honor of opening today’s meeting in prayer, and, besides, this guy is probably a drug addict and you have little children you’re responsible for — so you hurry on to church and you prove that you have the spirit of the Pharisee — that weird inclination to ignore what Jesus called “the weightier matters of the law.”

The #NeverTrump movement is defined by this Pharisee spirit.  It is chock full of it.  Texas pastor Max Lucado is a great example.  Max leads what he calls a “red state” church, but Max has a maxim:  ”I don’t want anybody to know how I vote.”  Max does this to make sure the Democratic voters in his church, the ones who support abortion on demand, Islamo-pandering, and class warfare are not made to feel uncomfortable.   However, Max recently broke his neutrality pledge when Donald Trump called a bimbo a bimbo. According to Max:

I would not have said anything about Mr. Trump, never — I would never have said anything if he didn’t call himself a Christian. It’d be none of my business whatsoever to make any comments about his language, his vulgarities, his slander of people, but I was deeply troubled … that here’s a man who holds up a Bible one day, and calls a lady “bimbo” the next.

 Think on that for a moment. Max closes his eyes to another “Christian,” Barack Obama, who stands foursquare for the slaughter of millions of unborn babies, at your expense, but Donald Trump called a lady a “bimbo?”  Intolerable!  Unthinkable!  Impolite! Time to engage the Pharisee warp engines.

Donald is a blunt customer, but it looks like he does have a heart. When asked about abortion, Trump related a story close to home. He said that he knew of a pregnancy that was going to be terminated.  ”That child today,” Donald continued,  ”is a total superstar. It is a  great great child.”

When Donald Trump picked the most pro-life running mate in history to be his partner in the quest for the presidency, Governor Mike Pence, he backed up that claim.  He made good on his conversion to the life issue, and, in so doing, he proved to be the opposite of the Pharisee spirit — a man who cares about the “weightier matters of the law.”  Max Lucado may value political fence-sitting in church, a pleasant smile, and a polite manners, but Donald Trump risked the wrath of a baby-killing culture, and even repudiated his own past, by embracing the politics of life.

Who is the real Christian here?  The one who acts like it, or the one who puts on a polite show of neutrality?

Another of my Pharisee correspondents on Facebook wrote this about Donald Trump:

“If you are unconvinced that a foul mouthed, arrogant, strip club and casino owning, philanderer who boasts about being able to shoot people in the streets without losing voters, is immoral then I’m not really sure where to go with this conversation.”

Yet another invoked scripture in his rejection of Trump:

“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”

 I’ve been around church people all of my life.  Even at Stanford, where humanism was the prevailing denomination, I can tell you the religious spirit — whether it is lamenting “gambling” or shaming someone who didn’t recycle his bottle of Pepsi — brings out the worst side of human nature, and it brings ignorance into high relief.

Let’s take a few of these, one by one, starting with wagering.  The Bible, folks, doesn’t say much about gambling.  Our pious ancestors in New England used lotteries to build churches.  If your only objection to Donald Trump rests in casino ownership, you really would feel right at home with the Christ-killing band because you have imbibed legalism as doctrine.

Foul mouthed?  I’m guessing you haven’t read scripture with any real scrutiny, because when God gets angry, He doesn’t hold back.  His prophets call harlots harlots.  His Son called religious hypocrites, “white washed tombs full of dead men’s bones.” “Vipers.”  ”Sons of the Devil.” But even if you value a polite tongue, and that’s your virtue, don’t begin comparing that virtue to being courageous in the face of Islamic jihad.  I will take a foul mouth defender of life over a church-sitting coward any day.

Arrogant?  I always get a kick out of people who spend all day in some corner of the bureaucracy, who never need to make a sale, who never need to appear confident, because they get paid every day, whether they do anything useful or not.  Donald has to convince people a skyscraper is worth building, folks.  You are mistaking confidence, faith even, for arrogance, because you’ve never had to really make a sale.  Try it sometime, and see if you can do it without boosting your confidence and risking looking a little “arrogant.”

Strip clubs and philandering. I won’t make any defense for that, but I would ask you to look to yourselves.  Do you buy television cable services from a company that also offers pornography?  Do you stay in hotels with adult content on their television screens?  Is your stock portfolio scrubbed clean of anyone who profits from soft porn? What’s in your wallet and where are you spending it?  The press has been watching Donald pretty closely now for 18 months.  Have you seen any philandering stories?  I haven’t.

And I would ask you to look to your Bibles again. God uses some pretty gritty characters to work His glorious and sovereign will. Jacob was a trickster who lied to his father. Abraham had wives and concubines.  Samson kept a harlot.  Solomon had hundreds of concubines.  Peter betrayed Christ.  Saul of Tarsus, was a murderous wretch.

You actually know all about that, but when you see a flawed man, in the flesh, you act just like a stoning torch mob, and you won’t even admit it.

Jesus knew all about this dismissive, self-righteous character of ours.  He knew our nature.  He knew there’s a Pharisee spirit in us that takes pride in being faithful to our wives, even as our horn-dog spirit wrestles with Donald Trump’s beauty pageants.  Are we righteous, or just jealous?  When the harlot adorns Jesus’ feet with precious ointment, are we accusing or praising God for forgiveness?

Donald Trump is more righteous than you think.  He wants to protect you from Islamic zealots.  He wants to protect your right to defend your families with firearms.  He even wants to exempt your pulpits from IRS tyranny.   He wants to end the death tax, so you can pass on your farms and your family business to your children.  He wants to lower your taxes.  He wants to protect the lives of unborn children and appoint Constitutional judges.

But you and Max Lucado don’t like his style.

Your priorities are all mixed up, just like the people who killed Christ.

Sent from my iPhone

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/opinion/sunday/what-babies-know-about-physics-and-foreign-languages.html?WT.mc_id=2016-AUG-FB-AMPvsMWEB-AUD_DEV-0809&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=AUDDEVGate&referer=

What Babies Know About Physics and Foreign Languages

Parents and policy makers have become obsessed with getting young children to learn more, faster. But the picture of early learning that drives them is exactly the opposite of the one that emerges from developmental science.

In the last 30 years, the United States has completed its transformation to an information economy. Knowledge is as important in the 21st century as capital was in the 19th, or land in the 18th. In the same 30 years, scientists have discovered that even very young children learn more than we once thought possible. Put those together and our preoccupation with making children learn is no surprise.

The trouble is that most people think learning is the sort of thing we do in school, and that parents should act like teachers — they should direct special lessons at children to produce particular kinds of knowledge or skill, with the help of how-to books and “parenting” apps. Studies prove that high-quality preschool helps children thrive. But policy makers and educators are still under pressure to justify their investments in early childhood education. They’ve reacted by replacing pretend corners and playground time with “school readiness” tests.

But in fact, schools are a very recent invention. Young children were learning thousands of years before we had ever even thought of schools. Children in foraging cultures learned by watching what the people around them did every day, and by playing with the tools they used. New studies show that even the youngest children’s brains are designed to learn from this simple observation and play in a remarkably sensitive way.

Young children today continue to learn best by watching the everyday things that grown-ups do, from cleaning the house to fixing a car. My grandson Augie, like most 4-year-olds, loves to watch me cook, and tries manfully to copy what I do. But how does he decide whether to just push the egg whites around the bowl, or to try to reproduce exactly the peculiar wristy beating action I learned from my own mother? How does he know that he should transfer the egg yolks to the flour bowl without accidentally dropping them in the whites, as Grandmom often does? How did he decide that green peas would be a good addition to a strawberry soufflé? (He was right, by the way.)

Experimental studies show that even the youngest children are naturally driven to imitate. Back in 1988, Andrew Meltzoff of the University of Washington did a study in which 14-month-olds saw an experimenter do something weird — she tapped her forehead on top of a box to make it light up. A week later, the babies came back to the lab and saw the box. Most of them immediately tried to tap their own foreheads on the box to make the light go on.

In 2002 Gyorgy Gergely, Harold Bekkering and Ildiko Kiraly did a different version of this study. Sometimes the experimenters’ arms were wrapped in a blanket when she tapped her forehead on the box. The babies seemed to figure out that when the experimenter’s arms were wrapped up, she couldn’t use her hands, and that must have been why she had used her head instead. So when it was the babies’ turn they took the easy route and tapped the box with their hands.

In 2013 David Buttelmann and his colleagues did yet another version. First, the babies heard the experimenter speak the same language they did or a different one. Then the experimenter tapped her head on the box. When she had spoken the same language, the babies were more likely to tap the box with their foreheads; when she spoke a different language they were more likely to use their hands.

In other words, babies don’t copy mindlessly — they take note of who you are and why you act.

Children will also use what they see to figure out intelligent new actions, like putting peas in a soufflé. For example, in our lab, Daphna Buchsbaum, some colleagues and I showed 4-year-olds a toy with lots of different handles and tabs. A grown-up said, “Hmm I wonder how this toy works” and performed nine complicated series of actions, like pulling one of the handles, shaking a tab and turning the toy over. Sometimes the toy played music and sometimes it didn’t.

The actions followed a pattern: Some of them were necessary to make the machine go and some were superfluous. For example, the children might see that the toy lit up only when the experimenter shook the tab and turned over the toy, no matter what else she did.

Then she asked the child to make the music play. The children analyzed the pattern of events, figured out which actions actually made the toy go, and immediately produced just those actions. They would just pull the tab and turn over the toy. They used their observations to create an intelligent new solution to the problem.

We take it for granted that young children “get into everything.” But new studies of “active learning” show that when children play with toys they are acting a lot like scientists doing experiments. Preschoolers prefer to play with the toys that will teach them the most, and they play with those toys in just the way that will give them the most information about how the world works.

In one recent experiment, for example, Aimee E. Stahl and Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins showed 11-month-old babies a sort of magic trick. Either a ball appeared to pass through a solid wall, or a toy car appeared to roll off the end of a shelf and remain suspended in thin air. The babies apparently knew enough about everyday physics to be surprised by these strange events and paid a lot of attention to them.

Then the researchers gave the babies toys to play with. The babies who had seen the ball vanish through the wall banged it; those who’d seen the car hovering in thin air kept dropping it. It was as if they were testing to see if the ball really was solid, or if the toy car really did defy gravity.

It’s not just that young children don’t need to be taught in order to learn. In fact, studies show that explicit instruction, the sort of teaching that goes with school and “parenting,” can be limiting. When children think they are being taught, they are much more likely to simply reproduce what the adult does, instead of creating something new.

My lab tried a different version of the experiment with the complicated toy. This time, though, the experimenter acted like a teacher. She said, “I’m going to show you how my toy works,” instead of “I wonder how this toy works.” The children imitated exactly what she did, and didn’t come up with their own solutions.

The children seem to work out, quite rationally, that if a teacher shows them one particular way to do something, that must be the right technique, and there’s no point in trying something new. But as a result, the kind of teaching that comes with schools and “parenting” pushes children toward imitation and away from innovation.

There is a deep irony here. Parents and policy makers care about teaching because they recognize that learning is increasingly important in an information age. But the new information economy, as opposed to the older industrial one, demands more innovation and less imitation, more creativity and less conformity.

In fact, children’s naturally evolved learning techniques are better suited to that sort of challenge than the teaching methods of the past two centuries.

Interactive Feature | Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, The Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

New research tells us scientifically what most preschool teachers have always known intuitively. If we want to encourage learning, innovation and creativity we should love our young children, take care of them, talk to them, let them play and let them watch what we do as we go about our everyday lives.

We don’t have to make children learn, we just have to let them learn.

Sent from my iPhone

JR: The science is, as always, are inconclusive, given all of the variables. This we do know, mankind can be traced back to "the Fertile Crescent"... A place of origin. Science supports that. We are ALL related and probably to ancestors of color. "The modern-day countries with significant territory within the Fertile Crescent are Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, beside the southeastern fringe of Turkey and the western fringes of Iran." --Wikipedia

"Almost every man alive can trace his origins to one man who lived about 135,000 years ago, new research suggests. And that ancient man likely shared the planet with the mother of all women."

http://www.livescience.com/38613-genetic-adam-and-eve-uncovered.html

Genetic 'Adam' and 'Eve' Uncovered

Almost every man alive can trace his origins to one man who lived about 135,000 years ago, new research suggests. And that ancient man likely shared the planet with the mother of all women.

The findings, detailed today (Aug. 1) in the journal Science, come from the most complete analysis of the male sex chromosome, or the Y chromosome, to date. The results overturn earlier research, which suggested that men's most recent common ancestor lived just 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.

Despite their overlap in time, ancient "Adam" and ancient "Eve" probably didn't even live near each other, let alone mate. [The 10 Biggest Mysteries of the First Humans]

"Those two people didn't know each other," said Melissa Wilson Sayres, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study.

Tracing history

Researchers believe that modern humans left Africa between 60,000 and 200,000 years ago, and that the mother of all women likely emerged from East Africa. But beyond that, the details get fuzzy.

The Y chromosome is passed down identically from father to son, so mutations, or point changes, in the male sex chromosome can trace the male line back to the father of all humans. By contrast, DNA from the mitochondria, the energy powerhouse of the cell, is carried inside the egg, so only women pass it on to their children. The DNA hidden inside mitochondria, therefore, can reveal the maternal lineage to an ancient Eve.

But over time, the male chromosome gets bloated with duplicated, jumbled-up stretches of DNA, said study co-author Carlos Bustamante, a geneticist at Stanford University in California. As a result, piecing together fragments of DNA from gene sequencing was like trying to assemble a puzzle without the image on the box top, making thorough analysis difficult.

Y chromosome

Bustamante and his colleagues assembled a much bigger piece of the puzzle by sequencing the entire genome of the Y chromosome for 69 men from seven global populations, from African San Bushmen to the Yakut of Siberia.

By assuming a mutation rate anchored to archaeological events (such as the migration of people across the Bering Strait), the team concluded that all males in their global sample shared a single male ancestor in Africa roughly 125,000 to 156,000 years ago.

In addition, mitochondrial DNA from the men, as well as similar samples from 24 women, revealed that all women on the planet trace back to a mitochondrial Eve, who lived in Africa between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago — almost the same time period during which the Y-chromosome Adam lived.

More ancient Adam

But the results, though fascinating, are just part of the story, said Michael Hammer, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study.

A separate study in the same issue of the journal Science found that men shared a common ancestor between 180,000 and 200,000 years ago.

And in a study detailed in March in the American Journal of Human Genetics, Hammer's group showed that several men in Africa have unique, divergent Y chromosomes that trace back to an even more ancient man who lived between 237,000 and 581,000 years ago. [Unraveling the Human Genome: 6 Molecular Milestones]

"It doesn't even fit on the family tree that the Bustamante lab has constructed — It's older," Hammer told LiveScience.

Gene studies always rely on a sample of DNA and, therefore, provide an incomplete picture of human history. For instance, Hammer's group sampled a different group of men than Bustamante's lab did, leading to different estimates of how old common ancestors really are.

Adam and Eve?

These primeval people aren't parallel to the biblical Adam and Eve. They weren't the first modern humans on the planet, but instead just the two out of thousands of people alive at the time with unbroken male or female lineages that continue on today.

The rest of the human genome contains tiny snippets of DNA from many other ancestors — they just don't show up in mitochondrial or Y-chromosome DNA, Hammer said. (For instance, if an ancient woman had only sons, then her mitochondrial DNA would disappear, even though the son would pass on a quarter of her DNA via the rest of his genome.)

As a follow-up, Bustamante's lab is sequencing Y chromosomes from nearly 2,000 other men. Those data could help pinpoint precisely where in Africa these ancient humans lived.

"It's very exciting," Wilson Sayres told LiveScience. "As we get more populations across the world, we can start to understand exactly where we came from physically."

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

The Top 10 Intelligent Designs (or Creation Myths)

Sent from my iPhone