children
oracknows | April 29, 2015As hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when I didn't think that acupuncture was quackery, an ancient "Eastern" treatment that "evolved" from bloodletting not unlike bloodletting in ancient "Western" bloodletting. This time was, hard as it is to believe, less than eight years ago, right around the time just before I got involved with my not-so-super-secret other blog. I figured that, because acupuncture involves sticking needles into the body, maybe there might be something to it. That doesn't mean that I thought that there was something to it, only that back then I was a lot more…
aardvarchaeology | April 24, 2015My house is near an LSS housing unit. Lagen om stöd och service till vissa funktionshindrade, "The Law of Support and Service for Certain Disabled People", mainly caters to the needs of people with autism and the like. In 6½ years on Boat Hill, the young people living there have never caused us any trouble at all.
But I still cringe a little when I recall my phone conversation with the man who runs the municipality's LSS housing units. I called him because I was curious about who the young folks living next door are, what diagnoses they have etc. I made it very clear that I was not afraid of…
aardvarchaeology | April 3, 2015In Roald Dahl's last book, Matilda (1988), we are invited to laugh at the main character's parents. They hate books, love TV, dress tastelessly and subsist on microwave TV dinners. Yet only when I saw the musical at the Cambridge Theatre in London this past Tuesday, where the mother additionally practices competition ballroom dancing and both parents speak in a broad Cockney accent, did I realise what the whole thing is actually about.
It's an opportunity for us middle-class bookworms to laugh at a tasteless working-class family who's come into a bit of money (through the husband's fraudulent…
lborkowski | November 8, 2013According to the latest figures from the Census Bureau, 15% of the US population lives in poverty. The figure’s even worse for children: 22% of those under 18 are living in households with incomes below the federal poverty level. The US economy is officially out of the recession, but an estimated 95% of all the income gains since 2009 have gone to the 1% of the US population with the highest incomes. For millions of people, food stamps (technically, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) make the difference between buying groceries and going hungry. Yet Congress has allowed…
aardvarchaeology | September 11, 2013Though I really enjoyed my late 70s childhood visits to Disneyland and Disneyworld, I am no friend of disnification, and I've always seen the Paris Disneyland as a bit of a joke. But my mom wanted to treat my kids to a visit last week, and so I came along too.
The Paris Disneyland has five sections. The US small-town nostalgia section full of Disney memorabilia shops, the faux-16th century fairytale section, the adventure movie section and the wild west section didn't do very much for me – though the Pirates of the Caribbean ride is admittedly hugely atmospheric, and the Small World ride…
aardvarchaeology | August 30, 2013I'm weeks late to the party here. If you pay attention to atheist issues you've probably heard that a recent major meta-study* concludes that at the population level, atheists are a bit smarter than religious folks (mainly Protestant Americans and English in this case). Not dramatically so, but in a statistically significant way. The difference persists even if you control for gender and education level. This means that if you look only at poorly educated people, the unbelievers are a bit smarter, and likewise if you look only at highly educated people, or women, or men. Here are some…
lborkowski | August 7, 2013After years of hearing about alarming increases in states' obesity rates, it was nice to get some good news: CDC reports that the percentage of low-income preschool children classified as obese has declined in 19 states. (Height and weight data came from 11.6 million children aged 2-4 participating in the Pediatric Nutrition Surveillance System, which monitors the nutritional status of low-income children. Children whose body mass index was at or above the 95th percentile on CDC's growth charts were classified as obese.)
Improvements among obesity rates of school-aged children have been…
aardvarchaeology | May 4, 2013Current World Archaeology #58 (April/May) has a seven-page feature on the 8th century mass graves in ships at Salme on Saaremaa in Estonia. This astonishing find interests me greatly as the ships and the dead men's equipment are Scandinavian, and so I mentioned it here back in 2008. One of the sword pommels is an example of the animal-figurine weaponry Jan Peder Lamm and myself have published on and suggest Finnish involvement. And boat burial in and of itself is a theme with which I have worked a lot. Here we seem to be dealing with Scandies who got badly beaten when attempting a raid, and…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2013Juniorette's best buddy Betty looks a lot like Juniorette and is almost like a second daughter to me. Her mom is Korean and her dad is Turkmen, great people both. The other day Betty got into a fight at school with another girl who started calling her names. (Betty, by the way, is a very well put together child and not overweight at all.)
Other Girl: You fat Chinese!
Betty: You can be a fat Chinese!
Other Girl: But I'm not Chinese!?
Betty: Me neither!
aardvarchaeology | December 12, 2012A perennial annoyance for me as a parent is the many odd ways in which schools force parents to organise the funding for trips and stays at camp collectively. The general idea is sound: it would not be fair to make the parents pay up front, because then the poorer families might not be able to send their kids. But our specific cases are ridiculous, because my kids' schools cater to some of the most affluent communities in the history of the world. I'm by far the poorest of the parents involved, and I can easily afford to pay for my kids' trips and camp stays.
What's particularly silly is that…
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2012Our municipality has contracted a survey firm to evaluate the after-school activities for children that it supports. Circus school, piano lessons etc. Questionnaires have been sent to (some? all?) enrolled children.
My kid is in three of these activities. I got three almost identical questionnaires, interpreted them as a mail-merge glitch, responded to one and threw two away unexamined. Then I was nagged about those two.
If I were running the survey I would purposely avoid collecting data on the same kid for more than one activity.
aardvarchaeology | November 27, 2012I found this lovely portrait on Wikipedia. 18th century portraits almost exclusively show people with European looks. But here a Russian painter has painted a Kalmyk girl in 1767. The Kalmyks are a Western Mongolian group living in south-west Russia. The girl looks just like Juniorette's buddy whose parents are from Afghanistan and Korea! This picture presses all my dad buttons.
Her name was Annushka and she was a serf and protegée of Countess Varvara Sheremeteva (later Countess Razumovsky). In the picture, the girl is holding a portrait of the Countess. The painter, Ivan Argunov, is a major…
aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2012The former Swedish state church has been reasonably independent for twelve years. Now Juniorette's school plans to send the kids walking in festive procession with flaming torches to the Swedish church's local branch for an "Advent gathering". Good fun no doubt, and Juniorette would probably be most displeased if I made her stay in school with the more orthodox among the Muslim kids and a temp teacher.
I don't enjoy being pushed to make this call. So I've drafted a letter of protest to the headmistress where I point out that such non-educational favouritism for one of the country's many…
lborkowski | September 13, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
“Organic, schmorganic,” wrote New York Times foreign editor and International Herald Tribune editor-at-large Roger Cohen, summing up his “takeaway” from the study by Stanford University researchers that examined studies comparing the nutritional value and pesticide residues in organic and “conventionally” grown food. The study concluded that evidence was lacking to show that organic food is more nutritious than conventionally grown food, but that organic food did have about 30 percent fewer pesticide residues. “I’d rather be against nature and have more people better fed…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2012Facebook is swamped with pictures of cats at shelters that face imminent euthanasia. Meanwhile, the World Wildlife Fund has an ad on the Tradera auction site that says "Soft, Orange and Homeless" and invites me to support orangutan shelters.
There's a reason that these campaigns don't feature fish or lizards. And that reason is that cats and young orangutans happen to be cuddly and the size of human babies. But disregarding our parental reflexes, there is no more (or less) reason to mourn a dead cat than the chicken you had for dinner yesterday.
But I'm willing to believe that an orangutan is…
lborkowski | April 27, 2012By Rena Steinzor, cross-posted from CPRBlog
Yesterday evening, when press coverage had ebbed for the day, the Department of Labor issued a short, four-paragraph press release announcing it was withdrawing a rule on child labor on farms. The withdrawal came after energetic attacks by the American Farm Bureau, Republicans in Congress, Sarah Palin, and--shockingly--Al Franken (D-MN).
Last year, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said: "Children employed in agriculture are some of the most vulnerable workers in America." "Ensuring their welfare is a priority of the department, and this proposal is…
aardvarchaeology | April 7, 2012In order to find her easter egg, my daughter first had to solve a +1 transposition cryptogram with appended translation table. It gave her the location of a note with a +9 cryptogram where she was given the offset but had to write her own translation table. This led to a +9 cryptogram that resolved into Mandarin written with pinyin. She needed little help. Though since there were no tone indicators in the encrypted pinyin, she at first searched beneath a window (chuÄng) instead of under a bed (chuáng).
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2012Junior's been through an extended period of various lighter ailments that have affected his school attendance record (but not his grades) considerably. I believe this may be partly due to his sedentary lifestyle. He's thin as a rake, like his old man, but also like his old man he's not exactly spending his free time on a rugby court. I need to take him cycling.
My wife worries about the amount of time Junior likes to spend on the computer. I think it's more a question of him not exercising rather than what he does specifically while not exercising. And I've realised that he actually does…
aardvarchaeology | February 24, 2012Juniorette: "So Thomas had his semla cream bun and he said he liked it, but later he threw up."
Me: "Thomas? Is he a new boy in your class? Haven't heard of him before?"
Juniorette: "No, he's not annoying. Not very."
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2012
Somehow I suddenly remembered the Sesame Street album I loved when I was a kid, 1977's Signs!. And sure enough, all the songs are on YouTube now!