Three Common Options For Childcare

For a parent who works, especially full-time, it can be hard to find the right kind of care for your child or children. Doubtless, you want to have your child in the best kind of situation with the best people available - but it can be difficult to know what the best kind of childcare is for your child's specific needs. Below, we'll take a look at a the most common types of childcare.

As an example, where I live in Brooklyn childcare options mostly come down to a childcare center or day care center. This is one of the most common and economical forms of childcare available to most people. Childcare centers, or nursery schools, are facilities dedicated to the care of children. There are actually many benefits to a childcare center: for one thing, your child will be a part of a structured learning program in a licensed facility (and you should ensure that it is licensed before enrolling your children!) Kids will also have a chance to participate in and spend time with a diverse group of children, which can help develop their social skills.Another benefit is that most childcare centers offer flexibility in their schedules so that it's easy to find the right fit for your needs.

Another childcare option is a family childcare home. This means that the childcare is provided in someone's home. This may offer more individual care for your child, but it might be difficult to find a family childcare facility that is licensed, reliable, and safe.

The last childcare option is in-home care - hiring a nanny or au pair to take care of your child in your own home. This results in one-on-one care for your child, but is the most expensive childcare option.

Weight Loss

Maybe it's a silly way to feel, but having lost 50+ lbs so far (and no sign of slowing down), I've been getting progressively more annoyed with people asking me "how'd you do it?" - as if there was some secret formula or magic wand. They *know* how I did it; it's the same way anybody who loses weight does it. There's no magic wand - although there are better ways of thinking.
The hard part to losing weight is not the eating less, or the exercise (I actually haven't been exercising at all, in part as an experiment.) The hard part is making the commitment - and then, making the second commitment to Keep Your Eye On The Ball. You'll slip; you'll make mistakes (if you didn't have the habit of making them, you wouldn't be fat in the first place); you'll forget and do the wrong thing. As long as you Keep Your Eye On The Ball, none of that will matter.
Learn to have pride in yourself; attach it to the commitment that you've made if you have nothing else to be proud of. Eat only the things/amounts that wouldn't shame you if the whole world knew about them. Build your sense of self while you're at it, and design that self out of the best, cleanest, sanest parts of who you are. Then, grow (or shrink) into it.
See? Dirt simple.

Quote of the Day

"The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the  reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to  explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until peoples learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion,and intolerance as crimes in themselves - as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government - this sort of thing will continue to occur." -- George Kennan

Just ran across this; it's what I've been saying, in very much the same words, for most of my life on this topic. I feel retroactively plagiarized. :)

Erase fear at the molecular level

"This may sound like science fiction, the ability to selectively erase memories," Richard Huganir says. "But this may one day be applicable for the treatment of debilitating fearful memories in people, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome associated with war, rape, or other traumatic events." (Credit: iStockphoto)

JOHNS HOPKINS (US) — Researchers working with mice discovered that they can permanently erase traumatic memories by removing a protein from the region of the brain responsible for recalling fear.

Share this article

 Email This Post

 Print This Post

Related Articles In

Amygdala (11) | Brain (109) | Fear (9) | Johns Hopkins University (49) | Memory (45) | Neuroscience (117) | Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (7)

More in Science & Technology

• How molecules move through crowds
• Templates let graphene grow
• Earlier date for skilled tool sharpening
• Fruit fly embryo in focus
• Equation could advance OLED displays
• Hidden X-ray source found in Milky Way

Their report on a molecular means of erasing fear memories in rodents appears this week in Science Express.

“When a traumatic event occurs, it creates a fearful memory that can last a lifetime and have a debilitating effect on a person’s life,” says Richard Huganir, professor and director of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University. “Our finding describing these molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in that process raises the possibility of manipulating those mechanisms with drugs to enhance behavioral therapy for such conditions as post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Behavioral therapy built around “extinction training” in animal models has proven helpful in easing the depth of the emotional response to traumatic memories, but not in completely removing the memory itself, making relapse common.

Huganir and postdoctoral fellow Roger Clem focused on the nerve circuits in the amygdala, the part of the brain known to underlie so-called fear conditioning in people and animals. Using sound to cue fear in mice, they observed that certain cells in the amygdala conducted more current after the mouse was exposed to a loud, sudden tone.

In hopes of understanding the molecular underpinnings of fear memory formation, the team further examined the proteins in the nerve cells of the amygdala before and after exposure to the loud tone. They found temporary increases in the amount of particular proteins—the calcium-permeable AMPARs—within a few hours of fear conditioning that peaked at 24 hours and disappeared 48 hours later.

Because these particular proteins are uniquely unstable and can be removed from nerve cells, the scientists proposed that they might permanently remove fear by combining behavior therapy and protein removal and provide a window of opportunity for treatment.

“The idea was to remove these proteins and weaken the connections in the brain created by the trauma, thereby erasing the memory itself,” Huganir says.

In further experiments, they found that removal of these proteins depends on the chemical modification of the GluA1 protein. Mice lacking this chemical modification of GluA1 recovered fear memories induced by loud tones, whereas littermates that still had normal GluA1 protein did not recover the same fear memories. Huganir suggests that drugs designed to control and enhance the removal of calcium-permeable AMPARs may be used to improve memory erasure.

“This may sound like science fiction, the ability to selectively erase memories,” Huganir says. “But this may one day be applicable for the treatment of debilitating fearful memories in people, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome associated with war, rape, or other traumatic events.”

This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

More news from Johns Hopkins: releases.jhu.edu

via futurity.org

http://www.futurity.org/science-technology/erase-fear-at-the-molecular-level/

Ocean Champions (OceanChampions) on Twitter

via twitter.com

Converting all the major roads in the US to solar would provide enough energy to power almost the entire world; Solar Roadways has already built a prototype.

Peak Oil in Alaska

The 896 million barrels that are now predicted (as opposed to the 10.6
billion from the 2002 estimate) would last the US about 43 days.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/10/27/alaska.oil.reserves/index.html

45 Amazing Photos from Odd Pespectives

Beautiful, odd, and sometimes breath-taking.

http://gizmodo.com/5672971/45-photos-from-clever-sometimes-unbelievable-persp...

And people ask why/how I got into photography.

Well, aside from having a professional photog father - this was back in
Russia, when "color photo" meant "tinted with aniline dyes and color
pencils" - I always had an appreciation of... let's not call it
"beauty", which would take us into an area where I don't feel like going
today, but "definition". A perception of a scene, or a view, that could
be cut off here and there, extracted from the world,
framed as a separate object that would still tell its story (or
sometimes, a story that I wanted told but that was unrelated to the
actual situation. This happens a lot, actually; a camera can lie, or
mislead, or lead you on a merry chase as much, or perhaps even more,
than a pen. But I digress.)

I got into it because I wanted to tell visual stories. Much later, I
expanded to the other kind - but the love of crafting a visual novel, or
even a short, pithy quote, remained: whether a tiger lily growing brave
and wild in the midst of a spring forest (where from? How? All alone in
a meadow of tall grass, with the morning dew still trembling on the
petals? I got soaked to the bone because I just had to lie down and get
that low perspective) or an old car on a freezing Seattle night,
distorted into a harsh, ghostly-gray, stretching-to-infinity, grainy
perspective with glaring lights by a wide-angle lens and black-and-white 32ASA PXP film pushed
to 1600ASA (the magic of doing your own film processing and enlargement)
- all these, uniquely my stories. My conversations with the world; both
the one that exists only in my head, and the one in which pedestrians
hurry by but sometimes pause, arrested by my images for a moment...
affected in some way.

Is Genius Genetic?

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/genetic/genius-genetic.htm

The Dead Design Trends Quiz

If you're still kicking back in your fave papa-san chair while your TV
dinner sizzles in your avocado-colored toaster oven, you might want to
skip this - or prepare to be shocked. Yes, Elvis *is* dead.

http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/home/dead-design-trends-quiz.htm

This One is for All My Chums

So, blogging. Or blagging, as xkcd would have it. What's it for?

In my case, I suppose it's much the same as it ever was: sharing what I know (and the fun stuff that I find while cruising the Net) with my friends, family, and - the Internet being what it is - any random stranger who may happen across my blag.

Welcome to these shark-infested waters. Be careful... there are really dangerous critters here. Let me finish my shark steak, and I'll tell you all about it...