The first national survey led by Oxford University,
in collaboration with the Institute of Education, London, about the
relationships that adolescents have with their grandparents shows that
grandparents who are involved in the upbringing of their grandchildren
can contribute to a child’s well-being.

The
research surveyed questionnaires from 1,596 children, aged between
11-16 from across England and Wales, and researchers conducted in-depth
interviews with 40 children from a range of backgrounds. Another key
finding of the research was that almost a third of maternal
grandmothers provided regular care-taking for their grandchildren, with
40% providing occasional help with childcare. The survey reveals that
grandparents often have more time than working parents to support young
people in activities and are well placed to talk to their grandchildren
about any problems the young people may be experiencing. They were also
found to be involved in helping to solve the young people’s problems,
as well as talking with them about plans for their future.

Principal investigator Professor Ann Buchanan,
Director of the Centre for Research into Parenting and Children in the
Department of Social Policy and Social Work at Oxford University, will
launch the research findings at the annual meeting of the Grandparents’ Association in London on June 4. Professor Buchanan
says: ‘We were surprised by the huge amount of informal caring that the
grandparents were doing and how in some cases they were filling the
parenting gap for hard working parents. Most adolescents really
welcomed this relationship. What was especially interesting was the
links we found between ‘involved grandparents’ and adolescent
well-being.

Closeness
was not enough: only grandparents who got stuck in and did things with
their grandchildren had this positive impact on their grandchildren.’
It was found that close relationships between grandparents and
grandchildren buffered the effects of adverse life events, such as parental separation, because it calmed the children down.

This
suggests future investigations should pay more attention to the role of
grandparents in developing resilience in young people. A range of
factors predicted the involvement of the grandparents in the upbringing
of their grandchildren including: living in a less deprived area,
frequent contact, and the good health of the grandparent.

For more reports to this path-breaking survey, please visit: The Link

Introduction to Detecting Lies

The following techniques to telling if someone is lying are often used by police, and security
experts. This knowledge is also useful for managers, employers, and for
anyone to use in everyday situations where telling the truth from a lie
can help prevent you from being a victim of fraud/scams and other
deceptions.

Warning:
Sometimes Ignorance is bliss; after gaining this knowledge, you may be
hurt when it is obvious that someone is lying to you.

Signs of Deception

Body Language of Lies:

•
Physical ex-pression will be limited and stiff, with few arm and hand
movements. Hand, arm and leg movement are toward their own body the
liar takes up less space.

• A person who is lying to you will avoid making eye contact.

• Hands touching their face, throat & mouth, touching or scratching the nose or behind their ear. Not likely to touch his chest/heart with an open hand.

Emotional Gestures & Contradiction:

•
Timing and duration of emotional gestures and emotions are off a normal
pace. The display of emotion is delayed, stays longer it would
naturally, then stops suddenly.

•
Timing is off between emotions gestures/ex-pressions and words. Example:
Someone says “I love it!” when receiving a gift, and then smile after
making that statement, rather then at the same time the statement is
made.

• Gestures/ex-pressions don’t match the verbal statement, such as frowning when saying “I love you.”

•
ex-pressions are limited to mouth movements when someone is faking
emotions (like happy, surprised, sad, awe) instead of the whole face.
For example; when someone smiles naturally their whole face is
involved: jaw/cheek movement, eyes and forehead push down, etc.

Interactions and Reactions:

• A guilty person gets defensive. An innocent person will often go on the offensive.

• A liar is uncomfortable facing his questioner/accuser and may turn his head or body away.

• A liar might unconsciously place objects (book, coffee cup, etc.) between themselves and you.

Verbal Context and Content:

• A
liar will use your words to make answer a question. When asked, “Did
you eat the last cookie?” The liar answers, “No, I did not eat the last
cookie.”

•A statement with a contraction is more likely to be truthful: “I didn’t do it” instead of “I did not do it”

• Liars sometimes avoid “lying” by not making direct statements. They imply answers instead of denying something directly.

• The guilty person may speak more than natural, adding unnecessary details to convince you… they are not comfortable with silence or pauses in the conversation.

• A liar may leave out pronouns and speak in a monotonous tone. When
a truthful statement is made the pronoun is emphasized as much or more
than the rest of the words in a statement.

•
Words may be garbled and spoken softly, and syntax and grammar may be
off. In other words, his sentences will likely be muddled rather than
emphasized.

Other signs of a lie:

•
If you believe someone is lying, then change subject of a conversation
quickly, a liar follows along willingly and becomes more relaxed. The
guilty wants the subject changed; an innocent person may be confused by
the sudden change in topics and will want to back to the previous
subject.

• Using humor or sarcasm to avoid a subject.

Conclusion

Obviously,
just because someone exhibits one or more of these signs does not make
them a liar. The above behaviors should be compared to a person's base
(normal) behavior whenever possible.

What
makes you want to smoke? For most people, smoking becomes a routine
part of daily life. Certain people, places, feelings, events, and even
moods, called “triggers,”
are linked with smoking. For instance, a trigger can be drinking a cup
of coffee, talking on the phone, or seeing a friend who smokes.

Smoking routines become smoking triggers
Do you smoke a cigarette because you have a cup of coffee? Or do you have a cup of coffee so you can smoke a cigarette?

For most people, it’s hard to know. That’s why a smoking routine may become a smoking trigger.

Smoking routines may be automatic

Everything you do creates pathways or connections in the brain. Let’s
say you routinely smoke in the kitchen. You’re actually training your
brain to know that the kitchen is a place to smoke. Eventually, if you
walk into the kitchen, your brain will have an automatic response - light up.

Unlearn old behavior

Because both nicotine addiction and your smoking routine have a
physical effect on your body, it can feel beyond your control to change
your behavior. That’s why it’s important to be aware. It helps to talk
to your doctor about your smoking triggers. And see if treatments and
quit smoking support plans can help you get cigarettes out of your life.

Watch Out!!!

The first step in changing your smoking routines is to know your own personal triggers. Below is a list of common triggers.

Identify
which ones make you feel the urge to smoke. You can print out a list of
your smoking triggers along with some tips on how to manage those
situations.

• When you drink coffee
• When you drink wine or beer
• After lunch or dinner
• When you talk on the phone
• When you are driving
• When you are with other smokers
• When you are watching TV
• When you are waiting for a bus or train
• After an argument
• When you feel anxious or stressed

If
you’ve tried quitting before, you may have felt irritable when you
didn’t have a cigarette. Why has quitting smoking always been so hard?
The answer has a lot to do with nicotine.

Nicotine addiction cycle

• For most
  people, smoking is more than a habit. It’s a nicotine addiction.
  Nicotine withdrawal is why you probably feel irritable or anxious when
  you don’t have a cigarette.
• When you smoke, nicotine goes to the brain in seconds.
• When nicotine
  is in the brain, it causes the release of a chemical called dopamine,
  which gives the feeling of pleasure and calm.
• Your body doesn’t want that feeling to stop. But when you’re between cigarettes, the level of dopamine drops.
• Even if you want to quit, the body craves nicotine. This makes you keep smoking.

The more you smoke, the more nicotine you need

Over time, each cigarette you smoke may become less and less effective.
That’s because, as the brain gets used to nicotine, you may need to
smoke more to have the same feeling of pleasure and calm. Of course,
the more you smoke, the more you inhale toxins in cigarettes that are
linked to smoking-related illnesses.

How does it feel to quit?

On top of feeling the urge to smoke, you may also feel some of these common physical nicotine withdrawal symptoms.

• Dizziness (at first)
• Trouble sleeping
• Tiredness
• Trouble concentrating
• Restlessness
• Headache
• Increased appetite
• Coughing and dry throat
• Constipation
• Slower heart rate

These effects will lessen over time.

Next, better health

Smoking-related health risks are actually caused by the other
ingredients found in your cigarettes. For example, tobacco smoke has
more than 60 ingredients known to cause cancer in humans. Luckily, once you quit, your risk of getting a smoking-related illness can start to drop—almost immediately.

How your doctor can help

Quitting smoking is hard, but possible. Your doctor can talk to you
about nicotine addiction and tell you about treatment options and
behavior support that may be right for you.

Tips to stop smoking

Get ready to quit

Ready to start planning your quit? Here are some ways you can get ready to say good-bye to cigarettes.

1. Make a personal commitment to yourself
2. Are you
   worried about your health? Or do you want to quit for your kids or
   family? Think about what will make you want to give up smoking. Write
   those reasons down.
3. Start building a support network to help you quit smoking
4. Tell your friends and family that you need their support. Talk about your reasons for quitting with them, too.
5. Make an appointment with your doctor
6. Talk to your doctor about wanting to quit. Ask about treatment options and support. Then decide on a quit date.
7. Set a quit date
8. Pick a date within the next 2 weeks. That’s enough time to get ready, but not so long that you’ll lose your will to quit.
9. Mark your calendar. You may be more likely to go through with your quit if you see your quit day in writing.
10. Enroll in a support program to help you quit smoking
11. Look for a program that helps with your urge to smoke and helps you break your smoking routine.
12. Clean up your living spaces
13. Get rid of
    anything that reminds you of smoking. Don’t forget to throw out
    lighters, ashtrays, and cigarettes the night before.
14. Anticipate withdrawal symptoms
15. Withdrawal symptoms are part of quitting smoking. Start to plan what you will do when you feel a symptom.
16. Know your smoking triggers
17. Be aware of your triggers so you can understand why you get the urge to smoke.

Things to do on the day of quit

With Texas-seized fanfare, complete with fireworks and a chili cook-off, Carrol finished his 85th lap of the sun this past March.

For, on the same day he clicked off 85 years, the first example of the latest and perhaps the greatest car to bear his name, the 2008 Shelby GT500KR (as in “King of the Road“),
rolled out of the company’s Las Vegas shop. This new KR, which is
essentially a 2008 Shelby GT500 Mustang turned up to eleven, was created to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the original King of the Road, a hotted -up version of the already plenty hot 1968 Shelby GT500.

Chatting with Mustang architect Lee Laccoca one day in 1967, ol’ Shel
got the wind of plans within Chevrolet to announce a King of the Road
version of the Corvette in a scant 2 weeks. The car debuted in April of
1968 with 428ci Cobra Jet V-8 engine, very conservatively rated at
335hp and 440 pf of torque. Before they were done, Shelby and Ford had unleashed 1571 GT500KR Mustangs
on an unsuspecting America; 1053 fastback coupes and 518 convertibles.
The new KR is a coupe-only model, and among the modern-era Mustangs, it
perhaps best recalls the dizzyingly fast Cobra R from 8 yrs ago. Like
the Cobra R, the GT500KR as first seems almost too
savage and single minded for its own good, monumentally powerful and
possessed of preternatural racetrack reflexes.

But
the King is vastly more civilized, offering a surprisingly tame Highway
ride and amenities the Cobra R never did, including AC, a stereo, and a
back seat. You can even specify a DVD-based navigation system and a Sirius Satellite Radio.

The sprawling facility, now home to the Ford Racing High performance Driving School,
is the grand undertaking of Utah businessman, Larry Miller, who, in
addition to owning more than 40 car dealerships and the Utah Jazz
basketball team, happens to be a Shelby and Ford fanatic. Among the
inestimably valuable cars in his tidy museum is the very first
production Shelby Cobra (CSX2002) and the 1966 Le
Mans-winning GT40. There is very little about the Shelby GT500KR that
can be described as restrained. To their credit, however, SVT and
Shelby exercised a remarkably light touch in the appearance department.
Everything that looks different here is different for a purpose.

The KR is a bit more hunkered down than the GT500;
it is lower by 20mm up front and 15mm at the rear. A broad carbon fiber
front splitter increases downforce over the front wheels by a
significant 31% while reducing drag by 3%, and a revised rear spoiler
(more petite than the GT500’s) helps cut the car’s drag coefficient from 0.384 to 0.372.

Otherwise, there are the expected stripes and rocker-panel graphics, a handful of the 40^th anniversary badges,
embroidered head-rests we could do without, a numbered plaque on the
dashboard and the hood – a scooped and vented tumescent sculpture in
carbon fiber. The suspension is fundamentals unchanged from the rest of
the Mustang range – struts up front and a solid axle at the rear – but
SVT has revised every aspect of its tune for KR service. During discussions with engineers from SVT and Shelby regarding KR’s handling,
the conversation turned to that live axle. “Surely there is a better
solution than a big hunk of iron b/w the rear wheels,” say journalists.

“Surely a sophisticated independent rear suspension would better befit a vehicle of the King’s stature and price tag.”

With
a burly iron block and aluminium 4-valve heads, the KR’s suprcharges
and intercooled 5.4l V-8 is an impressive sight, filling the Mustang’s
engine bay like Ray Lewis fills a bathtub. The engine
barks to life with 540hp and 510 pound-feet of torque, which is 40
horses and 30 pound-feet more than the standard GT500. Don’t be
deceived by this relatively modest bump in output, however. The
difference in character b/w the two cars is dramatic – every bit is
pronounced as the differences b/w the base Mustang and the GT, and b/w
the GT and the GT500. Aerodynamics and underhood air management
figured prominently in the KR’s development, motivated by the
expectation that more than a few KR owners actually know their way
around a racetrack.

Far more than just a style statement, the car’s visually defining twin-nostril
carbon fiber composite hood is a terrifically clever piece of kit and a
masterfully engineered tool for managing the flow of air.

Technical Specification:

A quantum computer is a device for computation that makes direct use of distinctively quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. In a classical (or conventional) computer, information is stored as bits; in a quantum computer, it is stored as qubits (quantum bits).

The
basic principle of quantum computation is that the quantum properties
can be used to represent and structure data, and that quantum
mechanisms can be devised and built to perform operations with this
data. Although quantum computing
is still in its infancy, experiments have been carried out in which
quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number
of qubits. Research in both theoretical and practical areas continues
at a frantic pace, and many national government and military funding
agencies support quantum computing research to develop quantum
computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis.
If large-scale quantum computers can be built, they will be able to
solve certain problems exponentially faster than any of our current
classical computers (for example Shor’s algorithm).

Quantum computers are different from other computers such as DNA computers and traditional computers based on transistors.

Some
computing architectures such as optical computers may use classical
superposition of electromagnetic waves, but without some specifically quantum mechanical resources such as entanglement,
they have less potential for computational speed-up than quantum
computers. The power of quantum computers Integer factorization is
believed to be computationally infeasible with an ordinary computer for
large integers that are the product of only a few prime numbers (e.g.,
products of two 300-digit primes). By comparison, a quantum computer
could solve this problem more efficiently than a classical computer
using Shor’s algorithm to find its factors.

This ability would allow a quantum computer to “break” many of the cryptographic systems
in use today, in the sense that there would be a polynomial time (in
the number of bits of the integer) algorithm for solving the problem.

In particular, most of the popular public key ciphers are based on the difficulty of factoring integers, including forms of RSA.

These are used to protect secure Web pages,
encrypted email, and many other types of data. Breaking these would
have significant ramifications for electronic privacy and security. The
only way to increase the security of an algorithm like RSA
would be to increase the key size and hope that an adversary does not
have the resources to build and use a powerful enough quantum computer.
It seems plausible that it will always be possible to build classical
computers that have more bits than the number of qubits in the largest quantum computer.

In one of my previous posts, I had spoken about how the LG Prada and
Samsung smartphones are giving iPhone, a run for its money. But, this
looks as a totally new WAR.

The Canadian company behind the BlackBerry smartphone has struck back at Apple’s iPhone
by launching a new device with a high-resolution screen, fake leather
casing and enhanced access to music and videos. The BlackBerry Bold got
an enthusiastic reception from technology experts on its debut at a
conference in Florida, sending shares in the manufacturer, Research in Motion, up by 4.7% to an all-time high of $137.10 (£70) in early trading on Wall Street. RIM
described its new model, also known as the BlackBerry 9000, as
“incredible speed and functionality, all wrapped up in a beautiful and
confident design”. The Bold has retained BlackBerry’s
one-letter-per-button keyboard, eschewing the iPhone’s touch-screen
technology.

RIM’s president, Mike Lazaridis,
says business customers preferred a physical keyboard. “People tell us,
don’t futz around with your keyboard,” he told PC Magazine in Orlando.
“They say, whatever you do, don’t get rid of that keyboard.”

The
BlackBerry held a 41% market share for smartphones in the US last year,
but iPhone went from zero to hold 28%, according to research firm Canalys. The BlackBerry Bold,
which goes on sale this summer, has a 624MHz processor, which can
download email attachments more quickly. In an apparent nod to Apple’s
success, it has a new synchronizing device for downloading music from
iTunes. Jim Suva, an analyst at Citigroup,
described the model as “really, really appealing”. He expects RIM,
which is based in Ontario, to ship 200,000 to 400,000 of the devices
each quarter. In March, Apple set up a $100m “iFund” to support entrepreneurs who are developing applications for the iPhone.

RIM teamed up with Thomson Reuters today to launch a $150m fund to help people building technology based on the BlackBerry platform.

Before telling you about the latest supernova that had been discovered recently, Let me explain what exactly a Supernova is:

A supernova (plural: supernovae) is a stellar explosion. They are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy
before fading from view over several weeks or months. Each explosion
ejects from one to several tens of solar masses at speeds ranging from
thousands to tens of thousands of kilometers per second. The total kinetic energy, 10⁴⁴ joules (2.5 × 10²⁸
megatons of high explosive), is about 100 times the total light output,
making supernovae some of the highest-energy explosions in the
universe. The most recent supernova in our galaxy
has been discovered by tracking the rapid expansion of its remains.
This result, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National
Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array, will help improve our
understanding of how often supernovae explode in the Milky Way galaxy.

The
supernova explosion occurred about 140 years ago, making it the most
recent in the Milky Way. Previously, the last known supernova in our
galaxy occurred around 1680, an estimate based on the expansion of its
remnant, Cassiopeia A.
Finding such a recent, obscured supernova is a first step in making a
better estimate of how often the stellar explosions occur. This is
important because supernovae heat and redistribute large amounts of
gas, and pump heavy elements out into their surroundings. They can
trigger the formation of new stars as part of a cycle of stellar death and rebirth. The explosion also can leave behind, in addition to the expanding remnant, a central neutron star or black hole.

The recent supernova explosion was not seen with optical telescopes
because it occurred close to the center of the galaxy and is embedded
in a dense field of gas and dust. This made the object about a trillion times fainter, in optical light, than an un-obscured supernova. However, the remnant it caused can be seen by X-ray and radio telescopes.

Astronomers
regularly observe supernovae in other galaxies like ours. Based on
those observations, researchers estimated about three explosions every
century in the Milky Way. The tracking of this object began in 1985, when astronomers, used the Very Large Array
to identify the remnant of a supernova explosion near the center of our
galaxy. Based on its small size, it was thought to have resulted from a
supernova that exploded about 400 to 1000 years ago. Twenty-two years
later, Chandra observations revealed the remnant had
expanded by a surprisingly large amount, about 16 percent, since 1985.
This indicates the supernova remnant is much younger than previously
thought.

That
young age was confirmed in recent weeks when the Very Large Array made
new radio observations. This comparison of data pinpoints the age of
the remnant at 140 years - possibly less if it has been slowing down -
making it the youngest on record in the Milky Way. Besides being the record holder for youngest supernova,
the object is of considerable interest for other reasons. The high
expansion velocities and extreme particle energies that have been
generated are unprecedented and should stimulate deeper studies of the
object with Chandra and the Very Large Array. These results are scheduled to appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra’s science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass.

Here is the excerpts of something which has the potential to trigger the revolution of the millenium…

The whole idea and all kudos must go to Mr. Michael Rea
and Duncan Price. A zero carbon house has been built on Britain’s most
northerly island of Unst, which will bring obvious benefits to the
environment.  The carbon neutral home lowers the carbon footprint by
producing its own energy and storing it to heat the home.

Background of the project

“Our zero carbon house is being built on the island of Unst,
Britain’s most northerly island in the UK.  We have owned the site on
which we are building since 1983. The original building was the Unst
headquarters for Alexander Sandison Ltd (still
trading on the island to this day) which included a shop, a chandlery,
a sail making/repair and net repair service and two ovens for baking
bread.  Prior to this it was also home to the Old Batavia
hotel”, says Michael. Sadly, in 1992, the island was hit by hurricane
force winds and the building was so badly damaged that we were ordered
to take it down completely, leaving us with just a Brownfield site.
This occurence hastened a new beginning.  We decided to build a new and
completely different house on the site and set out off to Canada and
Scandinavia, as well as areas of the UK, for ideas.  After much
research, we opted for an off-the-shelf house from Scotframe - a company based in Inverurie, Scotland, whose houses were found to be the most efficient and easy to heat.  In 2001, we met Dr Jeff Kenna, Chief Executive of Energy for Sustainable Development, now an AIM-listed company and one of the largest sustainable energy consultancies with offices throughout the world.

When Dr Kenna learned of our plans to build on the most northerly isle of