All Things Considered, March 29, 2009 · Beware on your next trip to the bookstore — zombies have invaded a classic. The living dead have come to Longbourn, the land of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Author — make that co-author — Seth Grahame-Smith altered Jane Austen's original text ever so slightly to accommodate brand new scenes of the Bennet girls forming "The Pentagram of Death" and taking on hordes of the undead, along with a ninja or two.

Grahame-Smith talks to Jacki Lyden about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.




Excerpt: 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies'

by Seth Grahame-Smith

As Mr. Darcy walked off, Elizabeth felt her blood turn cold. She had never in her life been so insulted. The warrior code demanded she avenge her honour. Elizabeth reached down to her ankle, taking care not to draw attention. There, her hand met the dagger concealed beneath her dress. She meant to follow this proud Mr. Darcy outside and open his throat.

But no sooner had she grabbed the handle of her weapon than a chorus of screams filled the assembly hall, immediately joined by the shattering of window panes. Unmentionables poured in, their movements clumsy yet swift; their burial clothing in a range of untidiness. Some wore gowns so tattered as to render them scandalous; other wore suits so filthy that one would assume they were assembled from little more than dirt and dried blood. Their flesh was in varying degrees of putrefaction; the freshly stricken were slightly green and pliant, whereas the longer dead were grey and brittle – their eyes and tongues long since turned to dust, and their lips pulled back into everlasting skeletal smiles.

A few of the guests, who had the misfortune of being too near the windows, were seized and feasted on at once. When Elizabeth stood, she saw Mrs. Long struggle to free herself as two female dreadfuls bit into her head, cracking her skull like a walnut, and sending a shower of dark blood spouting as high as the chandeliers.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance — Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
by Seth Grahame-Smith
Paperback, 320 pages
Quirk Books
List Price $12.95

  MSNBC.com

Willie repeatedly yelled ‘Mama, baby’ and flapped wings to alert babysitter
The Associated Press
updated 8:07 a.m. CT, Tues., March. 24, 2009

DENVER - A parrot whose cries of alarm alerted his owner when a little girl choked on her breakfast has been honored as a hero.


Willie, a Quaker parrot, has been given the local Red Cross chapter's Animal Lifesaver Award.

In November, Willie's owner, Megan Howard, was baby-sitting for a toddler. Howard left the room and the little girl, Hannah, started to choke on her breakfast.

Willie repeatedly yelled "Mama, baby" and flapped his wings, and Howard returned in time to find the girl already turning blue.

Howard saved Hannah by performing the Heimlich maneuver but said Willie "is the real hero."

"The part where she turned blue is always when my heart drops no matter how many times I've heard it," Hannah's mother, Samantha Kuusk, told KCNC-TV. "My heart drops in my stomach and I get all teary eyed."

Willie got his award during a "Breakfast of Champions" event Friday attended by Gov. Bill Ritter and Mayor John Hickenlooper.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

I don’t think I’ve read a productivity blog yet that didn’t suggest kicking the coffee habit. I’ve kicked many bad habits in the last few years, something that seemed impossibly hard at first—such as dumping dairy—but coffee is one thing that I never succeeded with. That’s probably because I never really wanted to.

While it truly is best that you cut caffeine out of your diet or curtail your consumption, for many of us it’s the one thing we’ll hold onto even when making other drastic changes in our lives. Never fear—there are still many benefits to drinking coffee, and I’ll show you how to defend your manic addiction to the world when confronted by an overzealous stampede of crusading lifehackistas!

A Reduced Risk of Disease

Have you seen all those tea advertisements that claim it’s the best source of antioxidants? Apparently, coffee is the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet. Tea comes second. Of course, that’s a statistic measured on the level of consumption rather than the quality of the source.

Antioxidants prevent and slow disease and oxidative damage. When the body uses oxygen, the process creates harmful by-products that antioxidants destroy. This reduces the risk of disease and promotes optimal health.

This is one of the few benefits of coffee not derived from its caffeine content, so if you want to avoid high blood pressure or a heart attack, you can drink decaf without losing any health points—if you have a stomach strong enough to keep it down.

Counter-defense: fruits and vegetables are an even denser source of antioxidants.

Increased Mental Performance

This is why we start drinking coffee in the first place, right? I started binge drinking coffee in order to stay up all night working on various projects, though it didn’t take long for coffee consumption to become a hobby in its own right.

Drinking coffee improves your concentration, alertness and staves off a tired mind. For me, work comes to a halt when I’m missing any of the above, especially concentration or alertness. Ten or twenty minutes after a cup of coffee, I can be back to work for a few more hours.

Apparently coffee improves your short term memory, which indicates that I’m not drinking nearly enough of it. Did I mention that coffee improves your short term memory?

Counter-defense: eating a diet low in meat and dairy and high in vegetables and fruit will provide increased mental performance and higher energy on a more consistent basis.

Make Shift Work Slightly More Tolerable

Shift work forces the body into strange sleeping patterns, or more accurately, a lack of a sleeping pattern. Your body relies on patterns to tune and operate the whole circadian process which tells you when you’re in need of sleep or when it’s time to be awake. Lacking a solid pattern means you’ll be pumping melatonin or adrenaline through your body at very strange times.

I know someone who took their car through a street sign (and escaped without getting caught) because of the way shift work destroys your sleeping patterns, so for these workers caffeine is not as much of a luxury - it becomes a necessary part of safely performing the work and getting there and back. Drink 200mg (two espressos) to keep yourself attentive on the job for a period of five or six hours. If you’ve got a killer twelve hour shift, throw back a few more halfway through.

Drinking 400mg of caffeine in one night isn’t the healthiest thing you could be doing, but neither is shift work.

Counter-defense: become a freelancer!

Improve Endurance and Stamina in Physical Activities

It is well known that coffee improves endurance and stamina in physical activities, especially sports. The last time I played any team sport, I could count my age on two hands. Nevertheless, a cup of coffee before the morning run makes it go that much faster and easier.

If you’re starting an exercise routine (or returning to one) and having trouble with the adaption, drinking a cup of coffee before starting may make it easy enough to get over the hump and make it a habit. If all you need is an adaptation tool you can stop drinking it once you can get through each session on your own.

Counter-defense: with stamina and endurance training, you don’t need a cup of coffee to enable your body - you can apply these traits at any time.

Improve Your Ability to Socialize

A few cups of coffee can really help the introvert or cynic to come out of the shell and enjoy social situations. Coffee houses first formed in the Middle East hundreds of years ago and became popular as social locations, a tradition that has continued to this day. It’s got to do with not only the great atmosphere, aroma and architecture of most coffee houses, but of course, the effects of caffeine kicking your mind into gear and boosting your mood.

There is evidence to show that coffee doesn’t boost your mood so much as reduce stress by eliminating the hormone cortisol. Cortisol is responsible for the frazzled, distressed feeling brought on by day-to-day stress.

This one works well for me—especially for making visits to the wife’s family much more bearable!

Counter-defense: get a life, make some friends!

Truly, there is no substitute for replacing a caffeine dependency with the optimal diet for your body and lifestyle. Drinking too much coffee can wreak havoc on your system, especially your sleep patterns and blood pressure.

The latest research shows that drinking 200mg of caffeine or more a day can double the risk of miscarriage in pregnant women. If you’re pregnant, watch your intake, or better yet, just stop consuming caffeine altogether.

That aside, coffee drinking has a far worse reputation than it deserves; the benefits are real, and in moderation, it’s actually a good idea to get some coffee in your system. Go ahead. Have a cup—you know you want to!

By Garrison Keillor
March 10, 2009

In hard times a man must consider new options, and right now I'm thinking about going on disability. I read in the Washington Post about the wonderful deals that police in Montgomery County, Md., negotiated for themselves way back when, whereby after a few years on the force if you twist your back reaching for a jelly doughnut and are no longer able to dash down dark alleys and leap picket fences while firing your revolver with deadly accuracy, you apply for disability and a committee of gentlemen who report to nobody whomsoever and whose deliberations are highly confidential award you $50,000 per year tax-free. And then, though disabled, you pass the physical and are hired as a security guard at John F. Kennedy High School, named for the man who said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but on the other hand don't turn it down when it's easily available," and all this at a time when they are cutting music and art out of the schools and children must start classes at 7 a.m. due to a shortage of buses.

Meanwhile, in and around Long Island, everyone who's been working on the railroad is collecting disability for paper cuts, motion sickness, acid reflux and halitosis.

The Authors Guild, of which I am a member, has done zilch to secure disability protection for writers. In my line of work, disability comes down to two things: memory loss and something else, I forget what. You lose the vocabulary retrieval skills you had when you were 30 and interesting words such as "parietal lobe" and "sedimentary rocks" flocked to your brain, and now you sit inert at the laptop for a number of horrendous minutes trying to remember the word for the thing that if you picked it up and dropped it on your foot it would be very, very bad — anvil! This is a disability, and a writer should be able to receive payments, and also for the other thing, whatever it is.

When it comes to disability pensions, you ought to include congressmen, especially these remarkable Republicans who, in the midst of a serious banking crisis, are recycling Herbert Hoover and decrying socialism and paying homage to a fat sweaty guy living alone with his cat in a five-mansion compound in West Palm Beach. At the moment, he seems to be steering the Republican Party like it's his personal power boat and Mitch McConnell is the girl in the bikini on water skis.

"I am at the top of the mountain of what I do. Everybody underneath it wants what I've got," Rush said on his show the other day. "As such, they'll do what they can to take me down or to criticize me or what have you. It is beneath my dignity to be critical of those beneath me. It's just a waste of time."

For similar delusional megalomania, you have to go back to the rock stars of yesteryear, but they were 30 or so, and Rush is somewhat north of there. You have to wonder if the man doesn't need to get out of the compound more and converse with real people and not just talk to his cat. Has he ever sat at a bar and talked to other men over a beer? One of the problems with OxyContin is that it's such a lonely drug: Guys don't get together to toss back a few pills and tell jokes, so an Oxhead like Rush is missing the social skills that one might develop over beer and bourbon. At the bar, a man can rant and rave about Obama and hope he will fail, but when he stops for breath, he has to listen to someone else point out that we are in an economic crisis and the country seems to want a change of course.

But delusion is no disability in broadcasting, my friends. Au contraire, it is the very lifeblood of the trade, and so there will be no pension check for the fat man. But what about me? It's almost spring and a big winter storm is about to sweep across the tundra and here I sit trying to bring this piece of writing to a — what is the word for it? I think it starts with C. I think it's a C-word. Conniptions. Connecticut. Cougars. The U.S. Coast Guard. Sorry — I am no longer able to function as a columnist and I respectfully request that I be compensated for it.

Dog Daycare and Dog Boarding in south florida that is taken to a new level of animal love and care.

Deerfield Beach, FL, March 11, 2009 --(PR.com)-- Despite Sluggish Economy, Passionate Family of Dog-Lovers Create a Unique Canine Campus where pampered pooches flock for Doggie Daycare, Boarding and Training.

View the video blogs at www.dogstownuniversity.com to get the real picture.

What do you get when passionate dog lovers design a “home away from home” for dogs? An over-the-top doggie daycare and boarding service that combines state-of-the art high technology with the warm, personal nurturing only a “real dog person” could provide.

Mother and son Iris and Adam Feingold were so attached to their family pets they never found a boarding facility that met their stringent requirements. This year they finally decided to create their own.

“What makes Dogstown University so different from your typical daycare and boarding business is us,” explains Iris. “We created the ideal environment we knew our own dogs would love. Then we built it large enough to invite lots of other canine friends.”

“If your dog has a weight problem, we’ll provide a personal exercise routine on the treadmill,” says Adam. “Once they learn the art of treadmill walking, they really enjoy it. And I’m at their side every minute.”

Dogs with behavior problems find themselves learning to get along with the group, or they miss out on treats and activities. Behavior modification skills go a long way toward molding more cooperative personalities.

The campus took close to a year to design and build, based on the Feingold’s vision. “Even the most cautious and protective “parents,” who are reluctant to leave their pets anywhere but at home, will feel confident about DTU”, she adds. “We offer unique play group games, all-day activities and in-house training programs - all overseen by our highly capable, canine instructors.”

Mother and son explain that everyone on the DTU faculty is an enthusiastic dog lover and owner, which they say assures that every canine student is treated “like our own.” “That’s something only true dog-people can understand,” says Adam.

The Feingolds say DTU is based on the concept that dogs love to learn as well as play, so every experience on campus is both fun and educational. The instructors interact and play with the “students,” teaching social skills that will please the dogs and their “parents.”

Owners can see all the fun for themselves via the multi-camera 24-hour live streaming doggie cam. “We want you to leave with peace of mind, knowing this will be a fun and positive learning experience for your beloved pet,” adds Iris.

Once a new pet is properly tested and introduced to the others, the fun and games begin. The student, who is always grouped according to size, can enjoy the climate-controlled play areas or lounge pool-side on the custom-built doggie deck. They can test their skills on agility equipment or play a friendly game of flyball. Students also participate in supervised group play on a specially designed astro-turf for pets where ramps, tunnels and bridges create stimulation and athletic challenges.

Pets can also take advantage of an optional, carefully supervised physical education class designed to relieve stress or enhance a weight-loss program.

Scenic hand-painted murals transform the indoor, climate-controlled play rooms into lush and lovely dog-park settings. Flat screen TVs tuned to Animal Planet and soothing music add to the total doggie environment.

The 7500 square feet of indoor and outdoor classrooms are created to maximize stimulation during playtime and peaceful relaxation when it's time for a nap.

Canine daycare guests come away with a daily personal “Report Card” noting activity participation as well as behavior and socializing progress.

Felines are also welcome at DTU, where they enjoy a separate room with spacious cat condos and a large fish tank for viewing stimulation.

Behind-the-scenes technology makes the new facility even more attractive. A state-of-the-art air purification system keeps dog odors at bay while seamless impact resistant floors maximize safety and sanitation.

When asked whether the dogs are ever left alone, the Feingolds answer with a resounding No! “One of us is always there, even sleeping on-site all night,” says Adam. “That means you can sleep at night knowing your pet is getting the best care possible every day they are our guests.”

Reasonable full and half-day rates and special packages for frequent visits (some dogs spend three or four days a week in daycare while their owners are at work) make DTU affordable for short or long-term visits by day or over night.

Dogstown University serves all of South Florida and is located on South Powerline Road close to the Sample Road exit on the Turnpike in Deerfield Beach . Both Iris and Adam welcome visits to check out the facilities. For more information, visit www.dogstownuniversity.com or call 954 422-5764.

Ask about some wonderful photos – or come take them yourself!

Rosalind Sedacca: talk2roz@bellsouth.net
561 742-3537

-- And seriously, the economy could be worse verse. That's what Planet Money editor Jonathan Kern tells us, in his villanelle for the economic crisis.

Villanelle for Uncertain Times

Though banks are suffering a lack of liquidity
And teeter on the edge of nationalization,
Do not succumb to economic stupidity.

Though Congress is demanding more rapidity
And tugs the strings behind the Administration,
Keep at bay financial rigidity.

The credit markets all crave liquidity
And Wall Streeters contemplate defenestration.
Do not succumb to economic stupidity.

While Keynsians say the budget reeks of tepidity
And scorn what's left of privatization,
Keep at bay financial rigidity.

Zealots always demand philosophical solidity.
Hasty action always trumps contemplation.
Do not succumb to economic stupidity.

Human nature involves some cupidity.
Self interest is the market's salvation.
Keep at bay financial rigidity.
Do not succumb to economic stupidity.

-- Jonathan Kern

Look, the economy is bad. It's even very bad. But if you gaze across the span of history, says economist Ken Rogoff of Harvard, this particular crisis starts to seem not so unusual after all. Rogoff talks about the ideas behind his paper, "This Time Is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises."

Click to read it ...

BY MICHAEL J. WEINGARTH

- - - -

K-K-K-K-K-KARENNNNNNNNN,

This SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY, I'd like you to have all your stuff moved OUT OUT OUT of MY MY MY APARTMENT APARTMENT APARTMENT, because I'm b-b-b-b-b-breaking up with YOU YOU YOU!!! I don't know what to say, really. I feel b-b-b-b-bad about all this, but it's like we're just not c-c-c-c-c-c-communicating like we used to.

Let's just be m-m-m-m-mature about this and try to remain friends. We should get coffee sometime, in case one of us needs some CLOSURE CLOSURE CLOSURE. I know no one PLANS PLANS PLANS for things to turn out this WAY WAY WAY.

Call me if you think this is a MISTAKE MISTAKE MISTAKE MISTAKE.

Sorry,
Keith

by Linda Holmes

I learned something new while researching the new Pussycat Dolls version of "Jai Ho," the Oscar-winning song from Slumdog Millionaire.

It turns out that everybody and their three-year-old is posting YouTube videos of themselves dancing to "Jai Ho." Up there at the top is an unnamed small child getting his groove on, and believe me, there's much more.

Here's "Tyler," whose dance is more minimalist, and who -- hilariously -- covers up a mistake with a yawn:

Mick and Rachel want you to know it doesn't take much floor space to do the "Jai Ho" dance:

Computer-aged Brad Pitt in 'Benjamin Button'

You Mustn't Read This: Linda didn't much like Benjamin Button, but there are those who argue the movie's still better than the book

By Linton Weeks

The literati can't stand to hear it, but sometimes a movie is better than the book it's based on. Even when the book is pretty good: Jaws comes to mind. And, arguably, Forrest Gump.

This year theaters are teeming with movies based on books. And some reviewers who've had a look at both are saying that the movies are better.

Take The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The tale, about a man who ages in reverse, is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"Having seen the movie and read the story," writes Fritz Lanham in the Houston Chronicle, "I'd say there's no comparison. As a book guy it pains me to admit it, but the movie is better. A lot better."

The film critic for the Montreal Gazette, meanwhile, avers that the movie Slumdog Millionaire is better than the Vikas Swarup book it's based on.

Read more ...

Andrew Delbanco, director of American studies at Columbia.

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: February 24, 2009

One idea that elite universities like Yale, sprawling public systems like Wisconsin and smaller private colleges like Lewis and Clark have shared for generations is that a traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation. Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose: They are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice.


Anthony T. Kronman in his office at Yale.

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.

Read more...

Adam Allington, KWMU ST. LOUIS, MO (2009-02-25)

The state Department of Agriculture seized over 200 dogs from an unlicensed breeder in southwest Missouri on Wednesday.

It case marks the third incident involving Missouri puppy mills in two weeks.

The owner of the River Valley Kennel in Ozark County is alleged to have set fire to the facility after officials contacted him about not having a breeder's license.

Matt Rold of the Missouri Department of Agriculture says most of the dogs were English Springer Spaniels and German Shorthair Pointers.

"The dogs that are currently en route to the central Missouri Humane Society, some of them will go to English Springer Rescue of America as well as Mutts and stuff down toward the St. Louis area," says Rold.

The Humane Society of Missouri recently rescued more than 100 Yorkshire Terriers from a breeder in Greene County, and six days later seized 208 dogs, a domestic cat and a Bengal tiger from a facility in Seneca, Missouri.

Italian cops were called to catch a poodle that bit off the nose of it's female owner and then ran into the garden with its new snack.

Loredana Romano, 34, from Forli in northern Italy said. "My little Vale often climbed into bed with me, I don't know why she suddenly bit off my nose."

Cops chased the poodle and managed to prize the well chewed morsel from the dog's  mouth - which was reattached in hospital.

The woman has already forgiven her dog but says it will not be allowed to sleep in her bed again.

Austrian Times

By Garrison Keillor
February 3, 2009

Ten a.m. A phone call from my daughter's school, and instantly the father's mind goes to Dark Foreboding, but no — this is her teacher calling to say that the child scored 96 on the spelling test. The child's instant reward is the phone call home and the words of praise. She sits at her desk pretending not to listen, basking in the acclaim. Well done.

Having begotten a good speller is no small matter to a writer. Writing is an act of paying attention, and if you don't care about the difference between "their" and "there" or "needle" and "noodle," then I am sorry for you.

The teacher's praise of my child is a large moment in the day. I live with fear as any parent does. I know people who've gone through catastrophes — schizophrenia, the suicide of a child — the skin shrivels at the words, and so the life of a parent is one of constant wordless prayer. Today, my child scored 96 on spelling. A good day.

Read the rest of the article here:

by Linda Holmes

I have a long history with romantic movies of all kinds. Goopy musicals, kicky-girl rom-coms, masterpieces of banter -- you name it, and I've probably fallen for it at one time or another. Unfortunately, the older one gets, the more some of these fall apart, and the more others don't work at all. I give you five (of many) Un-Romances. Be warned: all descriptions contain spoilers.

1. Jerry Maguire

Dec. 21, 2008(CBS) Can you imagine an orphanage that's a happy place? 60 Minutes couldn't, but then we found one. The kids don't arrive here smiling. Like orphans all over the world, they've been abandoned. They're hungry, sad and desperate. But after a few years, they're healthy, well-fed and happy.

As correspondent Bob Simon reports, this orphanage is for elephants, located outside Nairobi, Kenya. They've been orphaned because their parents - their mothers mainly - have died, or more likely, been killed in the bush.

Poachers kill large elephants for their ivory. A young elephant can only survive a day or two without milk. So, the orphanage's first job is to find the orphans, fly them to the orphanage, and, before anything else, feed them.

The principal of the orphanage, head mistress, head nurse and CEO, is Dame Daphne Sheldrick. She founded the place and has been working with elephants for 50 years.

"This is little Saguta. This is the one that was in a coma," she told Simon. "When she arrived, was on a drip for 24 hours. We never thought she'd be alive in the morning. So she's our little miracle, this one."

But Daphne's problem is that she is caring for too many miracles: poachers are killing more and more elephants for their tusks, and in the process creating more and more orphans.

There are a record number of orphans at the orphanage right now because Daphne says the sale of ivory has been legalized for the first time in ten years. A few African countries have been given the right to sell their stockpiles - more than 100 tons of tusks to China and Japan - and conservationists point out that this is yet another blow to the elephants.

Asked if she sees any correlation between the decision to auction off the ivory and the number of orphans, Daphne said, "We do. Every time ivory is auctioned legally, there's a rise in poaching. And we also see the correlation in the price that's paid to the poacher for illegal ivory."

And that price has gone up. "It's gone from 300 shillings a kilo to 5,000," she explained.

That's about $1,000 a tusk here in Kenya, where the sale of any ivory is still prohibited. Yet the number of elephants killed by poachers this year has increased by 45 percent.

Daphne says it's a scary, frightening rise.

Poachers were behind the death of one elephant whose trunk was caught in one of their snares and she had no way of feeding herself or her six-week-old baby boy. He just couldn't accept the fact that his mother was dead, so he continued trying to suckle. Eventually the keepers got him to drink their milk. They called him Shimba. He was in such bad shape that nobody thought he would survive.

But then Shimba was brought to the orphanage and things started going his way. He's 27 months old now, and he's in very good shape. He's very strong, very muscular, and his tusks are beginning to grow. He never stops eating.

In fact, that is the first love of every one of Dame Daphne's orphans - eating.

The institution has a dining area and that's not all: as 60 Minutes found out when we first dropped by three years ago, it has everything you'd want in an orphanage. There are dormitories - each orphan has a private room. There is also a communal bath and a playground. The regimen at the orphanage is anything but Dickensian. Unlike Oliver Twist, when one of these orphans asks for more, that's what he gets - more.

Ultimately, Daphne finds elephants more sympathetic than people.

Asked what the most extraordinary things is she has learned about elephants, she told Simon, "Their tremendous capacity for caring is, I think, perhaps the most amazing thing about them, even at a very, very young age. Their sort of forgiveness, unselfishness. So you know, I often say as I think I've said before, they have all the best attributes of us humans and not very many of the bad."

Just about the best people you've ever met are the gentle men who work at the orphanage. Keepers, they're called, and they have extraordinary jobs. There's one keeper per elephant. He'll spend 24 hours a day with his charge, seven days a week. A keeper feeds his elephant every three hours, day and night, just like mom would. He keeps his elephant warm, not like mom would, but with a blanket. And when it's sleep time, he beds down right next to his elephant. If he leaves, if ever so briefly, the baby wakes up and broadcasts his displeasure.

The keepers are rotated now and then so that no elephant gets too terribly attached to any one of them. At dawn, the elephants are taken from their dorms out to the bush. They hang out for awhile, play some games; soccer is a favorite.

They days are pretty much the same there, but on Fridays the orphanage becomes a spa, when the keepers give the elephants a coconut oil massage.

"We can't do exactly what the mother can do but we can do something close to that," explained Edwin Lusichi, the head of the keepers. He is the chief elephant man.

"This one here is Lualeni. Lualeni is the oldest female we have, 16 months as well. The tiny one here is Makena," he told Simon. "Always want to be close with Lualeni."

"Yes. Well, they always want to be close to each other and to you, don't they? I'm afraid this interview with Edwin is getting rudely interrupted," Simon remarked.

"Yes," Lusichi replied.

"But there's really not that much to do. They may be little, they may be orphans, but trust me... they're not as little as they look. In fact, I feel like I'm in an elephant sandwich," Simon commented, standing between two elephants.

Perhaps the problem was Simon and the elephants had not been properly introduced. There's a protocol to meeting an elephant: he will offer up his trunk and he expects you to blow in it. That way, he will remember your scent forever. You will never be strangers again.

The orphanage gets distress calls from all over Kenya, from all over East Africa, that a baby elephant is on his own, often because his mother has been killed by a poacher. It is then a matter of great urgency. An orphaned elephant can only survive a few days without its mother. The baby elephant is loaded on to a plane and flown back to Daphne Sheldrick's orphanage, where he'll stay until he's strong enough to go back into the bush.

Dame Daphne has been running the orphanage for almost 30 years. She was born and raised in Kenya, and married David Sheldrick, Africa's leading crusader against poaching. When he died in 1977, she founded the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

Daphne saw her mission as saving as many elephants as possible. But she has never permitted herself too much hope. That's because she loses half the elephants that arrive at the orphanage - some from pneumonia, some from trauma. One of the elephants probably witnessed its mother's death and remembers everything.

That's the double-edged sword of having the memory of an elephant: They never forget. "You know, he's still grieving for his elephant family, he's in shock. He's distressed," she explained.

She also said a baby elephant can actually die of grief. "They're terribly, terribly fragile. You've got to try and turn the psyche around, duplicating what that elephant would have had in an elephant family. Touching them, talking to them gently."

"In other words, love?" Simon asked.

"Tender loving care. TLC, and a lot of it," she replied.

Daphne and the keepers may run this place officially, but it's the elephants who are really in charge. For example, when a new keeper is hired, he's on probation for three months. Then, if the elephants like him, he's got a job. If not, he's out.

Asked what he tries to teach one of the elephants, head keeper Edward Lusichi said, "Well, we have to teach them not to be naughty and not to push around with the others. To obey one another, just like you have to do with children, your own children, to respect the others."

And the keepers teach the elephants how to be elephants. There are wild elephant things these kids don't know how to do, since their mother wasn't around to teach them. It's things like covering themselves in dust to prevent sunburn; the keepers do it with shovels until the elephants pick it up themselves.

The orphanage has an infirmary and the doctor had a call to make when Simon visited. One of the elephants was not doing well at all. He had been on antibiotics for two days but could barely breathe.

The elephant's room looked like an intensive care unit. The doctor, Daphne and the keepers didn't leave him for a minute. They did everything they could, but it wasn't enough. By dawn, he was dead.

"How do you manage going through this all the time?" Simon asked.

"Well, you don't have much option, do you? There's another one to look after, and then another one coming, and, you know, you just have to turn the page," Daphne replied.

"And you get attached after one..." Simon commented.

"But I'm not very good at it," she admitted.

"And you're not going to get any better, are you?" Simon asked.

"No, not after 50 years," Daphne replied.

But when she goes out to the other orphans who are doing so well, Daphne did say it brings joy to her life.

It's actually a pretty lush life for these elephants at the orphanage, but it's nothing like a wild elephant. It's not their destiny. So like any good school, this place prepares its students to leave, to get ready for life in the real world, to go back to the wild from whence they came.

Ten years ago, one young female elephant left Daphne's orphanage to go live in the wild. Her name is Mpenzi, and a couple of years ago she became pregnant and decided to go off on her own to give birth, without the protection of her extended family. That was a mistake. Before the sun could set, Mpenzi and her baby were surrounded by a pride of 16 lions.

Keeper Joseph Sauni was called to the scene and captured the events on his still camera. "Mpenzi was standing there, trying to scare off lions with her trunk. But when they came, she tried to push them on this side. Others came from the back. So, she could not do anything," he recalled.

Sauni said Mpenzi didn't have a chance. Asked what was going through his mind while this was happening, he told Simon, "That was so sad. Everybody was crying."

And there was nothing they could do to save the baby. It was a brutal lesson for Mpenzi. Nature has its own laws, and they are a long way from the sheltered world of the orphanage. But this story has a happy ending: just days before 60 Minutes arrived, Mpenzi gave birth to another little girl. The keepers have all come out to cheer her on. They named her A Sante, which in Swahili means, "thank you."

Mpenzi has learned her lesson. This time she makes sure her bundle of joy is surrounded by other members of the family. They help her up when she falls down and rescue her when she tumbles into a mud hole.

So for the moment A Sante will be safe, at least until she grows tusks.





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Garrison Keillor
Inner Tranquility and Unread Books
January 27, 2009

It is God that has made us and not we ourselves, we are his people and the sheep of his pasture, and George W. Bush is no longer the top sheep. Altogether a cause for rejoicing as we forge ahead in the struggle to achieve inner tranquility, which for me the other morning included misplaced glasses, a madcap dash to the airport, and en route in the taxi a call from my wife saying, "You forgot your billfold." One more sheep with a thorn in his hoof.

Tranquility. A woman you barely know comes to your home with a sheaf of papers and explains what the documents are about and you don't understand a word and the papers are a blur of fine print but you sign them. For all you know, she could take them to the bank, get a hundred grand in fifties, jump in the Jaguar and be in Toronto by midnight. You trust not. You hope not.

Paranoia belongs to the fringe right and left, not to genteel burghers like you and me. We sit under our fig tree and enjoy our cheeseburger without brooding too much about toxic chemicals used by meatpackers or thought-control drugs injected into the beef. Every morning in the newspaper, some columnist cries out in alarm that yet one more disaster is creeping toward us like a cougar about to spring and chew our throats, and we read a few paragraphs and turn the page and warm up another Danish.

We are a hopeful people. I have at home a traveler's phrasebook that tells you how to say you have a toothache in French (mal de dents), German (Zahnschmerzen), Italian (mal di denti) or Spanish (dolor de muelas), which, of all my investments, was the most hopeful and most foolish. I bought it in the airport years ago, imagining that on the flight over the Atlantic, I'd pick up an active vocabulary of maybe four hundred words or so, and be able to converse with cabdrivers and hotel clerks about the weather or the arrival of trains or location of suitcases, and so forth. I had a couple of old uncles who got along with small active vocabularies, things like, "OK then," or, "Oh for goodness sake," or, "Well, you never know" — and I thought I could do the same in other languages.

The little book stayed in my suitcase. Cabdrivers in Berlin had no need of conversation with me, and I never experienced a Zahnschmerzen or mal de dents over there, and if I had, the dentist surely would've known the word "toothache." My attempt to say "mal de dents" might actually have made the French think I had a sharp pain in my left ventricle and they would've thrown me down and torn my shirt open and slapped the paddles on my chest and there I'd be with a toothache and also convulsing helplessly on the Rue de Tutti and regretting my attempt at international understanding. I'm sure this sort of thing happens all the time.

The second most unused book, I suppose, is the Holy Bible, a perennial best-seller thanks to our good intentions to attend to the Word and divine the Lord's Will, which one does for a few days until you realize that you already know the Lord's Will and you would prefer not to.

After that come diet books, which are bought in vast number and perused and put away. Twenty bucks for nothing, when the secret of dieting is simply: "Eat when you're hungry." And then the spiritual books about achieving inner tranquility and "How to Achieve Orgasm in 30 Days or Less" and inspiring books of all sorts.

We are a hopeful people.

One ponders that as we see the fresh faces in Washington replace the bullheads who've been bottom-feeding for eight painful years, and one is full of hope that the replacements will do the right thing and serve the common good, but then we are the same people who planned to converse in French about toothaches, and that didn't happen either.

Meanwhile we have this classy family in the White House, overachievers but gracious about it, mischievous kids and a smart man and a woman who sometimes tosses him glances that say, "Oh just get over yourself." What their presence says about the decency and generosity of this country is huge, friends, just huge. Rejoice, America. Je suis Americain. Ich bin ein Amerikaner.

Weekend Edition Sunday, January 18, 2009 ·

Thirty Things I Believe

by Tarak McLain

I believe life is good.

I believe God is in everything.

I believe we're all equal.

I believe we can help people.

I believe everyone is weird in their own way.

I believe hate is a cause for love.

I believe that when I meditate I feel peaceful.

I believe we should be generous.

I believe brothers and sisters should be kind to each other.

I believe kids should respect their parents.

I believe I should not whine.

I believe people should wake up early.

I believe people should go outside more.

I believe in nature.

I believe people should use less trees.

I believe we should help the Arctic and rainforest animals.

I believe people shouldn't throw litter on the ground.

I believe people should not smoke.

I believe God is in good and bad.

I believe in magic.

I believe people should not give up.

I believe love is everywhere.

I believe that God helps us to have a good time.

I believe we live best in a community.

I believe we can protect people in danger.

I believe we should help the poor.

I believe it's OK to die but not to kill.

I believe war should not have started.

I believe war should stop.

I believe we can make peace

January 13, 2009

by Garrison Keillor

I like this government report saying that more Americans than before are reading novels and short stories, 113 million, in fact. Fiction is my cash crop, and that's good news. Too bad, though, that the report was issued by the National Endowment for the Arts. A deep-down aversion to a-r-t is one big reason half of America stays away from fiction.

They're afraid they'll come across a sentence like, "She looked out the window and saw the reflection of her own pale face against the drifted snow." Something girlish and moody like that.

These are guys who like to play video games in which you shoot people and spatter their blood on the wall. And what they might go for is manly fiction.

— "Read my book, buttface," said the novelist standing in the dim doorway of Brad's garage. "Pick it up and read it." "I ain't gonna read your book, it's got a lot of weird words like 'languid' and 'luminous' in it," said Brad. He wondered if that was a real gun in the novelist's hand. It was. BLAM BLAM BLAM. Blood spattered all over the garage and his workbench. Blood glittered on the gunstock that Brad had been sanding for his shotgun. He wouldn't be sanding it no more. No sir.

Something like that.

Read more here:

   By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Drinking coffee may do more than just keep you awake. A new study suggests an intriguing potential link to mental health later in life, as well.

A team of Swedish and Danish researchers tracked coffee consumption in a group of 1,409 middle-age men and women for an average of 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 with Alzheimer’s disease.

After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less. People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions.

Dr. Miia Kivipelto, an associate professor of neurology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and lead author of the study, does not as yet advocate drinking coffee as a preventive health measure. “This is an observational study,” she said. “We have no evidence that for people who are not drinking coffee, taking up drinking will have a protective effect.”

Dr. Kivipelto and her colleagues suggest several possibilities for why coffee might reduce the risk of dementia later in life. First, earlier studies have linked coffee consumption with a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes, which in turn has been associated with a greater risk of dementia. In animal studies, caffeine has been shown to reduce the formation of amyloid plaques in the brain, one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, coffee may have an antioxidant effect in the bloodstream, reducing vascular risk factors for dementia.

Dr. Kivipelto noted that previous studies have shown that coffee drinking may also be linked to a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease.

The new study, published this month in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, is unusual in that more than 70 percent of the original group of 2,000 people randomly selected for tracking were available for re-examination 21 years later. The dietary information had been collected at the beginning of the study, which reduced the possibility of errors introduced by people inaccurately recalling their consumption. Still, the authors acknowledge that any self-reported data is subject to inaccuracies.

By Stanley Coren, Ph.D. on January 16, 2009 in Canine Corner

On January 11, 2009 Mickey Rourke won the Golden Globe Award for best actor for his performance in Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler." When actors give acceptance speeches for such awards it is quite common for them to thank God and their family for the win, but Mickey Rourke thanked his dogs. If it had not been for the therapeutic effects of his relationship with his dogs, Mickey Rourke might not have been alive to accept this award.

In the film, "The Wrestler," Rourke plays the part of Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a professional wrestler who is now well past his prime, holding on to the remains of a once-famous career, and presented with the opportunity for a comeback. These are circumstances that run more than little parallel to the actor's own life story.

Rourke seemed destined to be a superstar in the 1980's. Most critics agreed that his performances in "Diner" (1982), "Rumble Fish" (1983) "9 ½ Weeks" (1986), and "Angel Heart" (1987) seemed to contain signs that the world was witnessing the appearance of another James Dean or even Robert De Niro.

Unfortunately Rourke's acting career eventually became overshadowed by his personal life and some seemingly eccentric career decisions. Directors such as Alan Parker found it difficult to work with him. Parker stated that "working with Mickey is a nightmare. He is very dangerous on the set because you never know what he is going to do". In addition Rourke began to show the effects of substance abuse. He associated with motorcycle gang members and was involved in several aggressive instances including a charge of spousal abuse (later dropped). Ultimately he virtually disappeared from the cinematic world.

Rourke's career was revived when director Robert Rodriguez cast him in the role of a sinister hit man in "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" (2003). Two years later Rodriguez again called upon him, this time to play Marv, one of the antiheroes from writer-artist Frank Miller's crime noir comic book series "Sin City" (2005). In that film Rourke delivered a unforgettable performance, alternately chilling and amusing, that reminded any doubters that he was still a force to be reckoned with. However to get to this stage in his life Rourke required the intervention of a dog.

The possibility that dogs can produce major psychological and health benefits for their human companions has been a subject of much recent serious psychological research. Scientific evidence about the health benefits of a relationship with a dog was first published about 30 years ago by a psychologist, Alan Beck of Purdue University and a psychiatrist, Aaron Katcher of the University of Pennsylvania. These researchers measured what happens physically when a person pets a friendly and familiar dog. They found that the person's blood pressure lowered, his heart rate slowed, breathing became more regular and muscle tension relaxed-all of which are signs of reduced stress.

A recent study published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine not only confirmed these effects, but showed changes in blood chemistry demonstrating a lower amount of stress-related hormones such as cortisol. These effects seem to be automatic, they do not require any conscious efforts or training on the part of the stressed individual. Perhaps most amazingly, these positive psychological effects are achieved faster-after only five to 24 minutes of interacting with a dog-than the result from taking most stress-relieving drugs. Compare this to some of the Prozac or Xanax-type drugs used to deal with stress and depression. Such drugs alter the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the body and can take weeks to show any positive effects. Furthermore, the benefits that build up over this long course of medication can be lost with only few missed doses of the drug. Petting a dog has a virtually immediate effect and can be done at any time. Recently, researchers extended this research by looking at a group of people aged 60 and older, living alone, except for a pet. Non-pet owners were four times more likely to be diagnosed as clinically depressed than pet owners of the same age. The evidence also showed that pet owners required fewer medical services and were more satisfied with their lives.Mickey Rourke and Loki

Depression was, indeed, Mickey Rourke's problem in the 1990's. In his case when all friends left him he was left with only his dog, for solace. Rourke admits that things had gotten bad enough so that went into a closet with his beloved dog Beau Jack, locking the door and planning to commit suicide with a drug overdose. In the end he just couldn't go through with it because of his relationship to his little Chihuahua-cross dog. Rourke describes the scene saying, "(I was) doing some crazy s**t, but I saw a look in Beau Jack's eyes, and I put the s**t down. That dog saved my life."

Rourke's life took a major turn after these events. He became active in animal welfare issues, including an involvement with PETA and its spay and neutering campaign. He increased the number of dogs in his house, first by adding Beau Jack's daughter, Loki. The depth of his bond to his dogs became obvious when Beau Jack died in 2002. He recalls, "I gave him mouth-to-mouth for 45 minutes before they peeled me off. Depressed? He died at my home, and I didn't go back for two weeks."

Rourke's canine family has continued to grow. He says "I have five now - Loki, Jaws, Ruby Baby, La Negra and Bella Loca--but Loki is my number one." In describing his relationship to Loki he added, "My dog [Loki] is very old, she is 16 and she is not going to be around for long so I want to spend every moment with her. When I was filming "Stormbreaker" in England, I had to have her flown over because I missed her so much. I had to get her from New York to Paris and Paris to England, and also pay for someone to come with her. The whole thing cost about $5,400."

Rourke seems to understand the therapeutic value of dogs. He says of Loki, "She's like a giant Xanax, you know? I'm not going to get religious on your ass, but I truly believe God created dogs for a cause. They are the greatest companions a man could ever have."

So it was that following his remarkable comeback to a successful acting career, and following his rise from the depth of depression, that Mickey Rourke was able to stand in front of colleagues to accept his Golden Globe award. However his speech was different from the others. It not only included references to the contributions and the support of colleagues and professional associates, but also contained the lines, "I'd like to thank all my dogs, the ones that are here, the ones that aren't here anymore, because sometimes when a man's alone that's all you got is your dog, and they meant the world to me."

* 24 January 2009 by Laura Spinney


JILL, 19, from Michigan, wants to go to university to read political science. There is just one problem: she keeps failing the mathematics requirement. "I am an exceptional student in all other subjects, so my consistent failure at math made me feel very stupid," she says. In fact, she stopped going to her college mathematics class after a while because, she says, "I couldn't take the daily reminder of what an idiot I was."

Last November, Jill got herself screened for learning disabilities. She found that while her IQ is above average, her numerical ability is equivalent to that of an 11-year-old because she has something called dyscalculia. The diagnosis came partly as a relief, because it explained a lot of difficulties she had in her day-to-day life. She can't easily read a traditional, analogue clock, for example, and always arrives 20 minutes early for fear of being late. When it comes to paying in shops or restaurants, she hands her wallet to a friend and asks them to do the calculation, knowing that she is likely to get it wrong.

Welcome to the stressful world of dyscalculia, where numbers rule because inhabitants are continually trying to avoid situations in which they have to perform even basic calculations. Despite affecting about 5 per cent of people - roughly the same proportion as are dyslexic - dyscalculia has long been neglected by science, and people with it incorrectly labelled as stupid. Now, though, researchers are starting to get to the root of the problem, bringing hope that dyscalculic children will start to get specialist help just as youngsters with dyslexia do.

For hundreds of millions of people this really matters. "We know that basic mathematical fluency is an essential prerequisite for success in life, both at the level of employment and in terms of social success," says Daniel Ansari, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. A report published in October 2008 by the British government claimed that dyscalculia cuts a pupil's chances of obtaining good exam results at age 16 by a factor of 7 or more, and wipes more than £100,000 from their lifetime earnings. Early diagnosis and remedial teaching could help them avoid these pitfalls.

People with dyscalculia, also known as mathematics disorder, can be highly intelligent and articulate. Theirs is not a general learning problem. Instead, they have a selective deficit with numerical sets. Put simply, they fail to see the connection between a set of objects - five walnuts, say - and the numerical symbol that represents it, such as the word "five" or the numeral 5. Neither can they grasp that performing additions or subtractions entails making stepwise changes along a number line.

Dyscalculics fail to see the connection between a set of objects and the numerical symbol that represents it

This concept of "exact number" is known to be unique to humans, but there is long-standing disagreement about where it comes from. One school of thought argues that at least some elements of it are innate, and that babies are born with an exact-number "module" in their brain. Others say exact number is learned and that it builds upon an innate and evolutionarily ancient number system which we share with many other species. This "approximate number sense" (ANS) is what you use when you look at two heavily laden apple trees and, without actually counting the apples, make a judgement as to which has more. In this view, as children acquire speech they map number-words and then numerals onto the ANS, tuning it to respond to increasingly precise numerical symbols.

The debate over exact number is directly relevant to dyscalculics, as tackling their problem will be easier if we know what we are dealing with. If we have an innate exact number module that is somehow faulty in people with dyscalculia, they could be encouraged to put more faith in their ability to compare magnitudes using their ANS, and learn to use calculators for the rest. However, if exact number is learned, then perhaps dyscalculia could be addressed by teaching mathematics in ways that help with the process of mapping numbers onto the ANS.

So how do the two models stand up? The innate number module theory makes one obvious prediction: babies should be able to grasp exact numbers. This was explored in the early 1990s. Using dolls, a screen and the fact that babies stare for longer at things that surprise them, developmental psychologist Karen Wynn, then at the University of Arizona in Tucson, showed that five-month-old infants could discriminate between one, two and three. They look for longer if the number of dolls that come out from behind the screen does not match the number that went in.

Some teams have taken a different approach to show that we are born with a sense of exact number. They argue that if exact number is learned, it ought to be influenced by language. Brian Butterworth from University College London recently did tests of exact number on children aged 4 to 7 who spoke only Warlpiri or Anindilyakwa, two Australian languages that contain very few number words. He found no difference in performance between the indigenous children and a control group from English-speaking Melbourne (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 13179). This, he says, is evidence that "you're born with a sense of exact number, and you map the counting words onto pre-existing concepts of exact numbers".

Both of these approaches, however, have been criticised. Neuroscientist Stan Dehaene of the Collège de France in Paris points out that Wynn's finding also fits the rival theory - that babies enter the world with only an intuition about approximate number. This is because the ANS is concerned with ratios, so is reasonably reliable when the numbers involved are small, but falls off as the proportional size difference shrinks. A size ratio of 1:2 is more easily discernable than 9:10. Wynn tested babies on small numbers and, as Dehaene points out, "one versus two is a large ratio".

Count on learning

What is more, Dehaene has worked with an Amazonian tribe whose language only contains words for numbers up to five, and says it provides good evidence for the idea that exact number is learned (see "One, two, lots").

Supporters of the idea that exact number is learned also point to research showing how young children actually acquire an understanding of numbers. First they learn what the number word "one" means, then "two" and so on until, around the age of 4, they suddenly grasp the underlying concept of the number line and counting. "There is something very special occurring in development with exact numbers, and with the understanding of number words," says Dehaene.

First children learn what "one" means, then "two", and so on until they suddenly grasp the underlying concept

For now, the idea that exact number is learned has the upper hand, suggesting that dyscalculia is a learning problem. To complicate things further, however, new research indicates that this may only be part of the story.

It was long thought that the ANS contributes little to performance in mathematics. As it is essential for survival skills such as foraging, it was assumed that everyone would have comparable abilities with approximate number. This myth was exploded in 2008 when Justin Halberda of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, tested the ANS in 64 14-year-olds and was "blown away" by the variability he found (Nature, vol 455, p 665).

The teenagers, all of whom fell within the normal range for numeracy, watched an array of dots made up of two colours flash onto a computer screen. In each case, they had to say which colour was more numerous. As expected, their judgements became less accurate as the size ratio of the two sets shrank towards 1:1. The surprise was how much faster accuracy fell off in some kids than in others, with the poorest performers having difficulty with ratios as large as 3:4.

There was a further surprise in store when the team compared the teenagers' ANS scores with their mathematics test results from the age of 5 and up. "I literally jumped out of my seat when I saw the correlation going all the way back to kindergarten," says Halberda. The link remained even after IQ, working memory and other factors had been controlled for, and it only held for mathematics, not for other subjects. A subsequent larger study, including some children with dyscalculia, confirmed the suspicion that those with the number disorder had markedly lower ANS scores than children with average ability. This implicates a faulty ANS in dyscalculia.

Case closed? Not quite. The problem is that two other groups have come up with conflicting findings. In 2007, Laurence Rousselle and Marie-Pascale Noël of the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) in Belgium reported that dyscalculic children, when asked to compare the magnitude of collections of sticks - say, five sticks versus seven - performed no worse than controls. However, they struggled when asked to circle the larger of two numerals, such as 5 and 7. Ansari's team has obtained a similar result. Both teams conclude that in dyscalculic children the ANS works normally, and the problem comes in mapping numerical symbols onto it.

How to account for these contradictory findings? Halberda, Ansari and Dehaene believe that there may be different types of dyscalculia, reflecting different underlying brain abnormalities. So in some dyscalculic individuals, the ANS itself is damaged, while in others it is intact but inaccessible so that individuals have problems when it comes to mapping number words and numerals onto the innate number system.

The existence of such subtypes would make dyscalculia harder to pin down, and make it difficult to design a screening programme for schoolchildren. At the moment, the condition goes widely unrecognised, and testing is far from routine. But where it is tested for, the tests are relatively crude, relying on the discrepancy between the child's IQ or general cognitive abilities and their scores in mathematics. Nevertheless, perhaps one day all children entering school will be assessed for various types of dyscalculia. Then teachers may be able to start intervention programmes based on teaching tools that are currently being tested.

One such tool, called The Number Race, in which children compete against a computer for rewards in a series of treasure hunts and other games, has been created by Dehaene and his colleague Anna Wilson. It assumes that the problem lies with the exact number system, so begins with tasks that the ANS is good at, involving numerical comparison, and gradually moves to more difficult tasks such as addition and subtraction. Testing of its effects is ongoing, but early indications are that it may help to bolster dyscalculic children's concept of number and simple transformations of numerical sets.

Even those researchers who remain convinced that dyscalculia is caused by a faulty exact number module believe that intervention could help. "After all, genetics isn't destiny - well, not entirely - and the brain is plastic," says Butterworth. His team is testing a piece of software that it designed in collaboration with the London Knowledge Lab to strengthen dyscalculic schoolchildren's basic number concepts. He suspects this will not be enough, however: "It may be the case that the best we can do is teach them strategies for calculation, including intelligent use of calculators, and get them onto doing more accessible branches of mathematics, such as geometry and topology."

Ansari also points out that children with dyscalculia could be helped immediately by practical measures already in place in schools for pupils with dyslexia, such as extra time in exams. And, of course, simply recognising dyscalculia as a problem on a par with dyslexia would make a huge difference. As Jill says, now that she knows what her problem is, "it's easier to have the confidence and the perseverance to keep working until I get it". That, in turn, means the condition becomes less damaging to her self-esteem and perhaps, ultimately, to her chances in life.


One, two, lots

Amazonian hunter-gatherers called the Mundurucú only have words for numbers up to 5. Does this affect the way they think about mathematical problems? Experts who think that the human concept of exact number is innate would predict not. However, Stan Dehaene of the Collège de France in Paris is among a growing number who believe that exact number is learned and therefore affected by our culture. He decided to test this idea with the Mundurucú.

Working with his colleague in the field, Pierre Pica, and others, Dehaene has found that the Mundurucú can add and subtract with numbers under 5, and do approximate magnitude comparisons as successfully as a control group. But last year the team discovered a big cultural difference. They asked volunteers to look at a horizontal line on a computer screen that had one dot at the far left and 10 dots to the right. They were then presented with a series of quantities between 1 and 10, in different sensory modalities - a picture of dots, say, or a series of audible tones - and asked to point to the place on the line where they thought that quantity belonged.

English-speakers will typically place 5 about halfway between 1 and 10. But the Mundurucú put 3 in the middle, and 5 nearer to 10 (Science, vol 320, p 1217). Dehaene reckons this is because they think in terms of ratios - logarithmically - rather than in terms of a number line. By the Mundurucú way of thinking, 10 is only twice as big as 5, but 5 is five times as big as 1, so 5 is judged to be closer to 10 than to 1.

The team conclude that "the concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education". With only limited tools for counting, the Mundurucú fall back on the default mode of thinking about number, the so-called "approximate number system" (ANS). This is logarithmic, says Dehaene. When it comes to negotiating the natural world - sizing up an enemy troop or a food haul - ratios or percentages are what count. "I don't know of any survival situation where you need to know the difference between 37 and 38," he says. "What you need to know is 37 plus-or-minus 20 per cent."

Laura Spinney is a writer based in Lausanne, Switzerland

What Is He Thinking?
Michael Bader, D.M.H.
What Is He Thinking?

Decoding the male psyche.

By Michael Bader, D.M.H.

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Thursday , January 22, 2009

Former French President Jacques Chirac was rushed to a hospital after being mauled by his pet dog who is being treated for depression, in a dramatic incident that rattled the ex-president's wife.

The couple's white Maltese poodle, called Sumo, has a history of frenzied fits and became increasingly prone to making "vicious, unprovoked attacks" despite receiving treatment with anti-depressants, Chirac's wife Bernadette said.

"If you only knew! I had a dramatic day yesterday," she told VSD magazine. "Sumo bit my husband!"

Mrs. Chirac, 74, did not reveal where the former president was bitten, but said, "the dog went for him for no apparent reason."

"We were aware the animal was unpredictable and is being treated with pills for depression. My husband was bitten quite badly but he is certain to make a full recovery in weeks."

Chirac was taken to a hospital in Paris where he was treated as an outpatient and later sent home.

The 76-year-old was president of France for 12 years until 2007.

You need the absolute cutest Valentine's Day gift available? Look no further; the Teacup Poodle cannot be beaten in cuteness.

Little Poodle Puppies apparently like to sleep in small teacups for some reason.

If you take the puppy out of the teacup, it will wake up and speak some puppy talk. Put the puppy back in the teacup and it will go back to sleep with a little snore - sooo cute!

The Teacup Poodle is available in three color combinations. You can buy the cutest Valentine's Gift for $29.99 on Gizmine.

The following is a transcript of the inaugural poem recited by Elizabeth Alexander, as provided by CQ transcriptions.

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.