Good cop, bad cop helpful for children's emotional development

Well, sorta.

From Science Daily:

A new University of Illinois study in the September/October issue of Child Development suggests that young children benefit when mothers and fathers differ in their reactions to their child's negative emotions.
The researchers found that when one parent provided little support in response to a child's feelings of anger or anxiety and the other parent provided a lot of support, the child had less conflict with friends and a better understanding of emotions.

It's important for parents to be supportive, but having one parent offer support and problem solving, while the other parent let the child sit with their feelings to learn to process them, seemed to let kids both build their own emotion modulation skills and maintain healthy egos.

When that happens, the child is more likely to gain experience in understanding and controlling his emotions. He may also benefit from seeing different types of reactions, realize that there are different ways of looking at things, and thus develop more complex thinking about and understanding of emotions, she said.
"We're hypothesizing that if both parents rush in to help the child, the child doesn't have a chance to experience negative feelings and learn how to manage them," she said.
The researcher emphasized that "hanging back" isn't the same as punishing a child for being upset or minimizing those feelings. The second parent should also be supportive, but quietly so, she said.

The article also talks about differences between boys and girls, and also smaller differences around whether the mother or the father plays the less supportive role.
Some of their closing conclusions:

Of the study's findings, McElwain said, "They're somewhat counterintuitive. You'd think the more support a child receives when she's upset, the better off she'd be. But the study shows that sometimes less is more."
She encourages couples to think about how they respond to a young child's anger, anxiety, or frustration as a parental unit, not as individuals. That's particularly important if a child has many negative episodes, she said.
"When you react to a negative emotion, I'd suggest that one parent step back a bit and let the other parent handle it," she said.

Makes sense to me.

Babel Fish photocopier?

From Digital World Tokyo:

The device, currently on show [Subscription link] only in Japan, can scan a printed sheet of Japanese text from a newspaper or magazine and churn out a translation of it in Chinese, English or Korean while retaining the original layout. Flip a switch and the linguistic parsing works in the opposite direction too.
Fuji Xerox’s secret lies in networking the unnamed copier to a dedicated translation server and combining this with algorithms that can distinguish between text, drawings and lines for maintaining page layouts.

Still gotta wonder how well is actually translates, though? It sounds like it's trying to do too much, being able to translate between four different languages interchangeably. I wonder how well it plays telephone? (ie. translating a paragraph through all the different languages it is capable of, and then translating it back into the original language?)

Video: Theremin played by a robot

From a Wired article about Handmade Music happening tonight in Brooklyn, NY.

Cute video of a theremin played by a robot. In this video, Lev the robot has been programmed to play Crazy, by Gnarls Barkley.

Drug companies shaping medical literature 'behind the scenes'

From Science Daily:

Drug companies control or shape multiple steps in the research, analysis, writing, and publication of a large proportion of the medical literature, and they do so behind the scenes, according to a policy paper recently published in PLoS Medicine.

The essay can be found at: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040286

They talk about ghost writers, who in turn end up 'ghost managing' the studies that the prescribing population depend on for information about medications.
Drug companies hire medical education and communication companies (MECCs) to help produce and place company-funded articles in medical journals, says Dr Sismondo. These articles are "managed," he says, because those MECCs "shape the eventual message conveyed by the article or by a suite of articles."

To demonstrate this, he tracked studies of zoloft (sertaline), an antidepressant manufactured by Pfizer.

His analysis suggests that between 18% and 40% of the literature on this drug published between 1998 and 2000 was ghost managed by a single MECC acting on behalf of the drug's manufacturer. Ghost managed studies, says the author, "affect medical opinion, practice and ultimately, patients," says Dr. Sismondo. "I suspect that most researchers -- even those participating in the system -- don't have a good sense of the extent to which this happens."

Creepy to think that an unknown amount of information that we as clinicians rely on may have been secretly planted there by the drug companies.

Bluetooth biofeedback sensor game system for stress reduction

The device is called a PIP, or personal input pod. You hold it in your fingers (see picture), and it measures galvanic skin response (electrical resistance of the skin, an indication of stress levels).

Since this is a bluetooth enabled biofeedback device, it is compatible with any platform that supports bluetooth, though their initial offering of 3 games is only for cell phones and PDAs.

I'm definitely looking forward to this becoming available. If it's effective, it could open up the door to the masses learning to self soothe and calm in many more activities of life.

Caffeinated potato chips

I wonder how this would go with a Red Bull, Jolt gum, or maybe even Penguin mints? There are so many caffeine added products out there today, that adding it to the definitive 'junk food' should be no surprise. Even better than olestra chips!

Apparently, http://www.nrgsnax.com/ has created a potato chip with numerous additives, such as caffeine, taurine, and b vitamins. You can buy them by the case here.

Play Anti-Phishing Phil

Pic: A screen shot of the game. (Credit: Image courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University)

From Science Daily:

Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists have developed an interactive, online game featuring a little fish named Phil that can teach people how to better recognize and avoid email "phishing" and other Internet scams.

Researchers gave people pre and post tests after a 15 minute game session, and determined people learned more from the game than they did spending the time reading about, or taking other tutorials about the subject.

More information about Anti-Phishing Phil is at: http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/antiphishing_phil/

Or, go here to play the game. (They are also offering a raffle for a $100 amazon.com gift card for participants who leave an email, and participate in a post test 1 week later.)