Leahgates

Hello, my name is Winnie and I'm a toy poodle. I love attention and humans! When I grow up I want to be a therapy dog because I spread happiness everywhere I go and I just love to be cuddled. I am very gentle and kind and I love to sleep! When I'm not sleeping, I like to play with my toys, spend time with my best friend, Ruby, and chew on stuff (Momma is not happy about that one!). My human is really shy so I have been focusing a lot of energy on socializing her with other humans when we go for walks. I'm sure she will be fine in a couple months after I make her talk to all the humans about my cuteness!

Percy is an 11-week-old Saint Bernard pup. We made a 10 hour round trip from Michigan to Pennsylvania to bring him home. He has the most adorable personality and has a heart of gold. He is picking up leash training quick and has little bouts of energy. His favorite thing to do is eat!

Sketch is a wonderful Whoodle. That's a combination of poodle and Wheaten Terrier. He learns commands after one session, but will later ignore them when involved in mischief, which is often. He loves to splash the water out of his water dish, and then carry the dry bowl around the house asking for water! Sketch is a true character, but a loyal friend who is always up for a cuddle.

Teens with a parent or a sibling who has been deployed are more likely than their nonmilitary peers to feel depressed and contemplate suicide, according to a survey of more than 14,000 adolescents in California.

Children whose family members have been deployed many times were at even higher risk of feeling sad or hopeless, the findings suggest.

“Given the link between separation and emotional health, it is not surprising that adolescents experiencing deployments were more likely to report feeling sad or hopeless, depressive symptoms, and increased suicide ideation and that more deployments further exacerbated these experiences,” says Julie A. Cederbaum, the lead author of the study and one of a team of researchers from the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California.

Data used came from the California Healthy Kids Survey given to all 7th, 9th, and 11th graders in California. The current study looked at a subsample of California schools with high concentrations of military students.

Unlike most studies on the mental health of military-connected children, this one was drawn from a nonclinical sample of students in public schools.

It also compares military-connected youth with nonmilitary-connected youth attending the same classrooms and schools, and living in the same communities. Past studies have been conducted in settings such as mental health clinics, hospitals, or at therapeutic summer camps specifically designed for military-connected children.

Thoughts of suicide

Analysis shows that 33.7 percent of students with a parent in the military and over 35 percent of those with a sibling in the military said they felt sad or hopeless during the past year. Almost 25 percent of 9th and 11th grade students with a military parent and over 26 percent of students with a military sibling thought about ending their lives.

That compares to 31 percent of students with no one in the military who said they felt sad or hopeless during the past year. And 19.1 percent of 9th and 11th graders with no one in the military who thought about ending their lives.

“These findings match those published earlier this year in a similar, separate analysis which focused on substance use among military youth,” says Tamika Gilreath, a co-author for this study and a lead researcher for a series of several papers on the well-being, health behaviors, and experiences of school-age children in military families.

“It is not military family connection itself but the youths’ and families’ experiences associated with the past 10 years of war. It is important that we begin to take necessary steps to prevent and intervene in the well-being of our military-connected youth.”

Harder on girls than boys

As in other studies, girls are more likely than boys to report poor well-being. One reason, the researchers suggest, is that adolescent girls may take on more responsibility at home when one parent is deployed.

The authors also offer other possible explanations for why military children in their early teen years may be experiencing feelings of sadness, suicidal ideation, and other depressive symptoms.

Adolescents, more than younger children, may have a better understanding of the consequences of war. And even if they support their deployed parent they may also “perceive deployment as a burden on them and on the nondeployed parent,” the authors write.

Previous research suggests that an adolescent’s mental well-being may also depend on how well the parent at home is handling the stress of the deployment.

Deployed siblings matter, too

The study’s focus on siblings as well as parents in the military is fairly rare. A sibling’s deployment can also lead to changes in family roles and dynamics.

Less is known about how a young person is affected by a sibling’s deployment—but since adolescence is a time of increasing independence from parents—and a teen may feel more connected to an older brother or sister than a parent during this time, it’s possible that a sibling going off to war may have an even greater impact.

The authors suggest public schools, mental health providers and physicians systematically screen adolescents—especially those in military-connected families and those experiencing parental or sibling deployment—for depression and suicide ideation.

“Providers can be trained to identify warning signs that an adolescent may be experiencing problems and should be supported with referrals to evidence-based interventions that can reduce the long-term consequences of deployment-related stressors,” the authors write.

“Increasing capacity of support personnel in medical and school settings can help identify the mental health risks and needs of adolescents with military-connected parents and siblings,” Cederbaum says.

Researchers from Bar Ilan University in Israel and the Chapman University College of Educational Studies contributed to the study.

Source: USC

The post Kids of deployed soldiers more likely to consider suicide appeared first on Futurity.

A study conducted before Typhoon Haiyan struck the islands earlier this month looked at the aftermath of tropical cyclones in the Philippines over the last 25 years and found dramatically high death rates for baby girls after the storms.

While officials report roughly 740 deaths on average every year due to typhoon exposure in the Philippines, post-typhoon mortality among baby girls is approximately 15 times higher than that, likely due to the storm’s indirect poverty-worsening effects.

Because the Philippines is so hard hit by typhoons every year, the authors estimate that these delayed infant deaths account for approximately 13 percent of the country’s overall infant mortality rate.

The risk of a baby girl dying after a typhoon doubles if she has older sisters in the home, and the risk doubles again if she has older brothers—suggesting that the competition for resources among siblings may play a key role in these deaths.

The researchers did not find a spike in the mortality rates for baby boys, but they uncovered an elevated mortality risk among baby girls that lasts up to two years after a typhoon.

“It seems unlikely that the households in which female infants die are intentionally allowing these infants to perish,” the researchers say. “It is more plausible that parents believe their newborn can cope with higher-than-average levels of neglect, and that there will be limited permanent damage. Unfortunately, for a small number of unlucky families, the assumption proves false.”

Better care for baby boys?

The authors also speculate that parents may provide more or different food or care to baby boys than girls, perhaps unconsciously.

The high death rate for baby girls is probably the specific result of the economic aftermath that follows a typhoon’s destruction and the coping strategies used by families that struggle economically for months or years after a typhoon.

The researchers document how families dramatically reduce spending on healthcare, education, and nutritious foods for years after they lose their homes, property, infrastructure, and income.

“Infants are more fragile than other family members, and some can’t handle it when families cut back. Their health deteriorates gradually, and then one day, they just don’t pull through,” says Solomon Hsiang, assistant professor of public policy at University of California, Berkeley.

“We think that economic factors are key, because roughly half of the baby girls who die weren’t even born or conceived when the various storms hit.”

The spike in female infant deaths underscores the huge economic adjustments for typhoon survivors. The study found that in an average year, the income of Filipino households in typhoon-hit areas is depressed 6.6 percent due to typhoons that occurred the year before, leading to a 7.1 percent reduction in average household spending.

Planning for typhoons is rare

However, when particularly strong storms strike, incomes may fall more than 15 percent the following year—compounding loss from damage to a family’s home and belongings. And although or maybe partially because typhoons are a regular weather feature in the Philippines, families don’t seem to save in advance or borrow much money for recovery expenses.

Instead, during a difficult year families reduce spending, primarily on medicine and education by about 25 percent, transport and communication by about 35 percent, and high-nutrient foods that include meat, dairy products, eggs, and fruit by about 30 percent.

Researchers used a physical model that Hsiang developed in 2010 to replicate and record typhoon exposure in individual provinces.

To measure household impacts, they matched their reconstructed storm data with economic information collected every three years by the Filipino government on family income, consumption, and physical assets. They then linked both datasets to a third data set on births and infant mortality.

This triad of data sets allowed the researchers to characterize the multi-dimensional household responses and provide an alarming look at climate adaptation and mitigation practices.

The researchers suggest several policies to help improve the post-storm situation for Filipinos:

• Develop credit subsidies for low-income families
• Expand insurance networks over larger regions, to reduce risk
• Educate parents about the risks of post-typhoon child neglect
• Tax goods like tobacco and alcohol to finance subsidies for children
• Enhance enforcement of building codes
• Increase typhoon-related research and development funding

“The fact that we continue to observe large typhoon impacts in one of the world’s most intense typhoon climates where populations have already adapted suggests that costs are so high that populations think that they are better off suffering typhoon losses rather than investing in additional protection,” Hsiang says.

“This indicates that a central challenge for policy makers is to convince people to spend on costly investments that will protect them in the future.

“It’s a bit like trying to convince people to wear a seat belt while driving a car or a helmet while riding a bike.”

Jesse Anttila-Hughes of the University of San Francisco was a co-author on the study.

Source: UC Berkeley

The post Death rates for baby girls spike after typhoons appeared first on Futurity.

The country’s economic and social safety net expanded to catch many Americans during the economic downturn of 2008 and 2009, working as it was designed to do, a study finds.

“The programs did their job and made a difference,” says Johns Hopkins University economist Robert A. Moffitt. “There’s no question about it.”

Aggregate safety net spending rose $500 billion from 2007 to 2010, Moffit found. Caseloads rose too, from 276 million to 310 million. Carrying the bulk of the load, he says, were the Earned Income Tax Credit, unemployment insurance, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Together, the three programs accounted for about a third of the spending increase.

Other programs that expanded to meet the demand included Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security retirement and disability benefits.

“Our results show that there was a major response from the safety net to the Great Recession,” Moffitt says. The study appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Spending on SNAP—food stamps—more than doubled, Moffitt found, vaulting from $30 billion in 2007 to $65 billion in 2010. The program was not only helping more people, Moffitt says, but also those people were each getting slightly more assistance.

The Earned Income Tax Credit, a federal income tax refund for low- to moderate-income working families, grew from $49 billion to $59 billion. Spending per person actually dropped, however, and the growth was entirely due to an increase in the number of recipients, Moffitt says.

Medicaid spending also rose during the recession, from $327 billion in 2007 to $401 billion in 2010, Moffitt found. Social insurance programs grew substantially as well, with unemployment insurance showing the steepest incline—from $34 billion to $142 billion during the recession.

Not everyone benefited equally from the welfare increases, Moffitt discovered. He reported that families just above and just below the poverty line received most of the aid, more than the lowest earners.

The additional money went to a wide range of demographic groups, and families with and without children, he found. Somewhat less of the increase went to the elderly and the disabled.

“There have been many complaints that the US safety net has been shredded and is inadequate to serve those who in need. And there have been other voices saying that government is ineffectual and that much of the money is wasted,” Moffitt says.

“My findings—which I did not expect—showed that neither of these is correct. The US safety net is very healthy and was extremely responsive to the Great Recession, helping families of all different types and at all different income levels.”

Source: Johns Hopkins University

The post ‘Safety net’ programs worked in Great Recession appeared first on Futurity.

Children with Asperger’s, a high-functioning form of autism, and those with a condition known as “nonverbal learning disability” may have similar symptoms, however the underlying causes are very different, according to brain scans.

The finding, published in Child Neuropsychology, could ultimately help educators and clinicians better distinguish between—and treat—children with a nonverbal learning disability, or NVLD.

“Children with nonverbal learning disabilities and Asperger’s can look very similar, but they can have very different reasons for why they behave the way they do,” says Jodene Fine, assistant professor of school psychology in Michigan State University’s College of Education.

Understanding the biological differences in children with learning and behavioral challenges could help lead to more appropriate intervention strategies.

Children with nonverbal learning disability tend to have normal language skills but below average math skills and difficulty solving visual puzzles. Because many of these kids also show difficulty understanding social cues, some experts have argued that NVLD is related to high functioning autism—which this latest study suggests may not be so.

Fine and Kayla Musielak, a doctoral student in school psychology, studied about 150 children ages 8 to 18. Using MRI scans of the participants’ brains, the researchers found that the children diagnosed with NVLD had smaller spleniums than children with other learning disorders such as Asperger’s and ADHD, and children who have no learning disorders.

The splenium is part of the corpus callosum, a thick band of fibers in the brain that connects the left and right hemispheres and facilitates communication between the two sides. Interestingly, this posterior part of the corpus callosum serves the areas of the brain related to visual and spatial functioning.

In a second part of the study, the participants’ brain activity was analyzed after they were shown videos in an MRI that portrayed both positive and negative examples of social interaction. (A typical example of a positive event was a child opening a desired birthday present with friend; a negative event included a child being teased by other children.)

The researchers found that the brains of children with nonverbal learning disability responded differently to the social interactions than the brains of children with high functioning autism, or HFA, suggesting the neural pathways that underlie those behaviors may be different.

“So what we have is evidence of a structural difference in the brains of children with NVLD and HFA, as well as evidence of a functional difference in the way their brains behave when they are presented with stimuli,” Fine says.

While more research is needed to better understand how nonverbal learning disability fits into the family of learning disorders, Fine says her findings present “an interesting piece of the puzzle.”

“I would say at this point we still don’t have enough evidence to say NVLD is a distinct diagnosis, but I do think our research supports the idea that it might be.”

Source: University of Michigan

The post Brain anatomy separates Asperger’s from learning disability appeared first on Futurity.

Engineers have demonstrated a thin, scalable invisibility cloak that can adapt to different types and sizes of objects.

The researchers designed and tested a new approach to cloaking—by surrounding an object with small antennas that collectively radiate an electromagnetic field.

The radiated field cancels out any waves scattering off the cloaked object. Their paper appears in Physical Review X.

“We’ve taken an electrical engineering approach, but that’s what we are excited about,” says Professor George Eleftheriades of the University of Toronto. “It’s very practical.”

How it works

Picture a mailbox sitting on the street. When light hits the mailbox and bounces back into your eyes, you see the mailbox. When radio waves hit the mailbox and bounce back to your radar detector, you detect the mailbox.

Eleftheriades and PhD student Michael Selvanyagam’s system wraps the mailbox in a layer of tiny antennas that radiate a field away from the box, cancelling out any waves that would bounce back. In this way, the mailbox becomes undetectable to radar.

“We’ve demonstrated a different way of doing it,” says Eleftheriades. “It’s very simple: instead of surrounding what you’re trying to cloak with a thick metamaterial shell, we surround it with one layer of tiny antennas, and this layer radiates back a field that cancels the reflections from the object.”

Their experimental demonstration effectively cloaked a metal cylinder from radio waves using one layer of loop antennas. The system can be scaled up to cloak larger objects using more loops, and Eleftheriades says the loops could become printed and flat, like a blanket or skin.

Currently the antenna loops must be manually attuned to the electromagnetic frequency they need to cancel, but in future they could function both as sensors and active antennas, adjusting to different waves in real time, much like the technology behind noise-canceling headphones.

Better cloaking

Work on developing a functional invisibility cloak began around 2006, but early systems were necessarily large and clunky—if you wanted to cloak a car, for example, in practice you would have to completely envelop the vehicle in many layers of metamaterials in order to effectively “shield” it from electromagnetic radiation.

The sheer size and inflexibility of that approach makes it impractical for real-world uses. Earlier attempts to make thin cloaks were not adaptive and active, and could work only for specific small objects.

Forging ‘signatures’

Beyond obvious applications, such as hiding military vehicles or conducting surveillance operations, this cloaking technology could eliminate obstacles—for example, structures interrupting signals from cellular base stations could be cloaked to allow signals to pass by freely.

The system can also alter the signature of a cloaked object, making it appear bigger, smaller, or even shifting it in space. And though their tests showed the cloaking system works with radio waves, re-tuning it to work with Terahertz (T-rays) or light waves could use the same principle as the necessary antenna technology matures.

“There are more applications for radio than for light,” says Eleftheriades. “It’s just a matter of technology—you can use the same principle for light, and the corresponding antenna technology is a very hot area of research.”

Source: University of Toronto

The post Invisibility cloak hides objects from radar appeared first on Futurity.

As scientists continue to debate how organic solar cells convert sunlight into electricity, a recent study suggests the predominant working theory is incorrect.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Materials, could steer future efforts to design materials that boost the performance of organic cells.

“We know that organic photovoltaics are very good,” says study coauthor Michael McGehee, a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University. “The question is, why are they so good? The answer is controversial.”

What causes the split?

A typical organic solar cell consists of two semiconducting layers made of plastic polymers and other flexible materials. The cell generates electricity by absorbing particles of light, or photons.

When the cell absorbs light, a photon knocks out an electron in a polymer atom, leaving behind an empty space, which scientists refer to as a hole. The electron and the hole immediately form a bonded pair called an exciton.

The exciton splits, allowing the electron to move independently to a hole created by another absorbed photon. This continuous movement of electrons from hole to hole produces an electric current.

In the study, the team addressed a long-standing debate over what causes the exciton to split.

“To generate a current, you have to separate the electron and the hole,” says senior author Alberto Salleo, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford. “That requires two different semiconducting materials.

If the electron is attracted to material B more than material A, it drops into material B. In theory, the electron should remain bound to the hole even after it drops.

“The fundamental question that’s been around a long time is, how does this bound state split?”

The hot effect

One explanation widely accepted by scientists is known as the “hot exciton effect.” The idea is that the electron carries extra energy when it drops from material A to material B. That added energy gives the excited (“hot”) electron enough velocity to escape from the hole.

But that hypothesis did not stand up to experimental tests, according to the team.

“In our study, we found that the hot exciton effect does not exist,” Salleo says. “We measured optical emissions from the semiconducting materials and found that extra energy is not required to split an exciton.”

So what actually causes electron-hole pairs to separate?

“We haven’t really answered that question yet,” Salleo says. “We have a few hints. We think that the disordered arrangement of the plastic polymers in the semiconductor might help the electron get away.”

In a recent study, Salleo discovered that disorder at the molecular level actually improves the performance of semiconducting polymers in solar cells. By focusing on the inherent disorder of plastic polymers, researchers could design new materials that draw electrons away from the solar cell interface where the two semiconducting layers meet, he adds.

“In organic solar cells, the interface is always more disordered than the area further away,” Salleo explains. “That creates a natural gradient that sucks the electron from the disordered regions into the ordered regions. ”

More efficient

The solar cells used in the experiment have an energy-conversion efficiency of about 9 percent. The Stanford team hopes to improve that performance by designing semiconductors that take advantage of the interplay between order and disorder.

“To make a better organic solar cell, people have been looking for materials that would give you a stronger hot exciton effect,” Salleo says. “They should instead try to figure out how the electron gets away without it being hot. This idea is pretty controversial. It’s a fundamental shift in the way people think about photocurrent generation.”

Contributors include researchers from the University of Potsdam; the Institute for Applied Photophysics; the University of California, Berkeley; the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology; the Colorado School of Mines; and the University of Oxford.

The Stanford Center for Advanced Molecular Photovoltaics and the US Department of Energy supported the work.

Source: Stanford University

The post How organic solar cells (really) work appeared first on Futurity.

In the wake of George Zimmerman’s arrest for aggravated assault, I wanted to revisit an aspect of Predator Theory that often goes overlooked: that the undetected rapists that Lisak’s research identified are non-specialist offenders.

Back in Meet The Predators, the most viewed post in this blog’s now five-year history, I wrote:

Lisak & Miller also answered their other question: are rapists responsible for more violence generally? Yes. The surveys covered other violent acts, such as slapping or choking an intimate partner, physically or sexually abusing a child, and sexual assaults other than attempted or completed rapes. In the realm of being partner- and child-beating monsters, the repeat rapists really stood out. These 76 men, just 4% of the sample, were responsible for 28% of the reported violence. The whole sample of almost 1900 men reported just under 4000 violent acts, but this 4% of recidivist rapists results in over 1000 of those violent acts.

If we could eliminate the men who rape again and again and again, a quarter of the violence against women and children would disappear. That’s the public policy implication.

I don’t know if there is a more specific look at this elsewhere, but Lisak found a correlation between rape of adults and sexual abuse of children, and between rape of adults and intimate partner violence.  On the whole, one would anticipate that this would mean that there is a correlation between sexual abuse of children and intimate partner violence.  That struck me because of what we’re learned over time about George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin but was acquitted:

He is under arrest for pointing a shotgun in his girlfriend’s face.

His girlfriend now alleges that he choked her in the past, and that he previously threatened to kill himself if she left him (a common abuser tactic of emotional manipulation).

This is the girlfriend he got together with after his wife filed for divorce.  He allegedly punched his ex-wife’s father, threatened them with a handgun, and shattered her iPad to prevent video of his violent acts from being used against him.

He precipitated the confrontation with Martin, an unarmed teen who went to the store for snacks.  It is undisputed that he shot and killed Martin.  (Even some jurors have admitted that this acquittal was a travesty.)

So we might expect there to be a higher likelihood that he also sexually assaulted a child.

That’s exactly what one cousin alleges.  The audio was released last summer, and you can hear her in her own words here, describing a pattern of abuse that lasted ten years and started when she was just six: “he would reach under the blanket and try to do things, and I would try to push him off, but he was bigger and stronger and older, and it was in front of everybody, and I don’t know how I didn’t say anything, but I just didn’t know any better …” 

Folks make excuses for these people, until they don’t.  After Trayvon Martin, there was too much attention on Zimmerman to take advantage of the cover he got earlier in life.  But how many other people are out there, molesting relatives, abusing partners, doing damage to the world around them, while people try hard not to see a pattern?

 

Filed under: Uncategorized

Woopee tee tiny yi yo…

“In recognition of Nosevember, my Boston terrier, Rupert. His nose is rather small. But it’s still cute. And in the wintertime, it’s usually the only thing peeking out from under whatever blanket he’s wrapped up in.” -Rachael H.
“My dog Buddy, who I lost last month to kidney failure. He was a sweet little boy who lived a year after his diagnosis.” -Yumiko T.
“This is our 12 week old English Bulldog, Bucky. Had to get a pic of her little schnozzle while she was sleeping, as she moves around too much when she’s awake!” -Lex S.
“I submit for your consideration: Mr. Darcy.” -Gabby W.
“This is Pip!” -Roxann S.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Nosevember 2013, Pups

Overheard at a store last week from little boy riding on Dad’s shoulders, “Daddy, do bunnies have tongues?” ..beat.. (Dad’s not sure! Customers hold their breath.) …..”Yes, son, bunnies have tongues.” (whew)

These are for you, cute kid (and Dad), wherever you are:

Via jpockele, Realm of Sleep, Disapproving Rabbits.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Bunnies, Encore Presentayshe

A lot of you have been writing in, and hollering things like HEY! WHERE IS THE 2014 CUTE OVERLOAD CALENDAR!? I NEED ONE FOR MY AUNT/COUSIN/MOTHER-IN-LAW ETCETERA!

Well People, I’m afraid to be the bearer of bad news – we don’t have one this year!

[Ducks]

Why? When the twins arrived last year, and all attention focused on them, I knew we wouldn’t have time for the calendar project. Something had to give, People! I’m sorry we don’t have one this year, but there are other calendars we’d highly recommend instead. More posts to follow on that topic.

Fear not, Peeps. There will be a 2015 Cute Overload Calendar—we just finished it! (Like, literally, today. That’s a sneak image preview below.)

Now if you will excuse me, I hear two small mouths yelling for supper. Amazing lung capacity for their size.

2015 Calendar image by Sakurako Shimizu.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: mea culpa

I don’t know,

Oh, I don’t know,

I don’t know,

Where I’mma gonna go,

When the schnozzola blow!

“This is Doralice Ribeiro. She has a cute white goatee.” -Leila P.
“My best furry friend, Buns (AKA Satchel). Bonus: bunny leeps.” -Joanne P.
“This is my sheltie, Dengar.” -Liisa M.
“My donkey saying hello!” -Jaclyn J.
“Miso!” -Deborah N.
“Volcano” song lyrics by Jimmy Buffett, Keith Sykes, and Harry Dailey.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Bunnies, Donkeys, Kittens, Nosevember 2013, Pups

Hank just knows you’re going to make your next move soon. But, take your time. It’s OK. (STARE!)

“This is Hank, we like to call him Hanky Panky because he’s so full of beans! He loves all other puppeh’s and people and likes to play. We think he just the cutest bulldog, and he’s pretty photogenic too. Photo by Annisa M.” -Kristy and Josh C..

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Pups

Cuteporter Quinn E. sent this great photos in. “This is our ResQte dog, Boo Radley,” she says.

“November 10th was the 1-year anniversary of adopting this snuggly mutt!”

“It would be a dream come true to have his shiny, black, extremely boopable schnozzle featured on Cute Overload for Nosevember!”

“These photos were taken by my husband, Aaron E.”

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Nosevember 2013