Patti from Baked Ideas made this amazing edible gingerbread typewriter for benefit of City Harvest, and it is displayed at NYC's Parker Meridien Hotel.
So…. typewriter came to mind… a sort of gingerbread house for the letters that live inside!! Christmas unplugged, a letter to santa, granny’s laptop …… it was fun to think about.
First we made a model of the typewriter in cardboard, and then baked all the parts and crafted the roller, paper and metal keys out of sugar paste.
The “glue” is royal icing, and cookies, stacked up, are the inner supports. The keyboard letters are cookies, iced in ivory and trimmed in silver.
The iced gingerbread alphabet letters are frolicking in the sugar snow, sometimes spelling out words (fun, skip, eat, joy.)
I am glad we chose to make a typewriter. It is an image that is a reminder of a simpler time … wintery, happy and unexpected. I hope both kids and adults enjoy looking at it.
It’s 100% edible, down to the rice paper ribbon.
New research show that risks of developing bipolar affective disorder is increased if a woman experiences a psychiatric episode within the first 30 days after childbirth.
"Childbirth has an important influence on the onset and course of bipolar affective disorder, and studies have shown that episodes of post-partum psychosis are often best considered as presentations of bipolar affective disorder occurring at a time of dramatic psychological and physiological change," the researchers said in the report which was published in Archives of General Psychiatry.
The researchers led by Trine Munk-Olsen, Ph.D., of the National Centre for Register-Based Research, Arhus University in Denmark, collected data on 120,378 women from 1950 to 1991who had a history of a first-time psychiatric contact with any type of psychiatric disorder excluding bipolar affective disorder.
A total of 2,870 of these women had their initial psychiatric contact within the first year after delivery of their first child. During follow-up, 3,062 of the 120,378 women were diagnosed of bipolar affective disorder, of which 132 had their initial psychiatric contact 0 to 12 months post-partum.
Researchers found a significantly higher conversion rate to bipolar affective disorder in women having their initial contact within the first post-partum month. In addition, evidence that the severity of the initial post-partum psychiatric episode may be important, as inpatient admissions were associated with a higher conversion rate than were outpatient contacts, were found.
After fifteen years from initial psychiatric contact, 13.87 percent of women with onset in the immediate post-partum period (0 to 30 days) had converted to bipolar disorder, the study said.
"The present study confirms the well-established link between childbirth and bipolar affective disorder and specifically adds to this field of research by demonstrating that initial psychiatric contact within the first 30 days post-partum significantly predicted conversion to bipolar affective disorder during the follow-up period," the authors conclude.
Professor Uta Frith came from a grey post war Germany to Britain in the swinging sixties, when research into conditions such as autism and dyslexia was in its infancy.
At the time many people thought there was no such thing as dyslexia and that autism was a result of cold distant parenting, but Professor Frith was convinced that the explanation for these enigmatic conditions lay in the brain and she set out to prove this through a series of elegant experiments.
Together with her students (Prof) Francesca Happe and (Prof) Simon Baron Cohen she developed the idea that people with autism find it hard to understand the intentions of others, known as theory of mind.
Neuro-imaging experiments carried out with her husband Professor Chris Frith, meant she was able to show that there is a region in the brain which is linked to dyslexia.
Uta Frith talks about her pioneering work that has changed how we view these brain disorders with Jim Al Khalili.
Sir Ken Robinson, PhD is an internationally recognized leader in the development of education, creativity and innovation. He is also one of the world's leading speakers with a profound impact on audiences everywhere. The videos of his famous 2006 and 2010 talks to the prestigious TED Conference have been seen by an estimated 200 million people in over 150 countries.
He works with governments in Europe, Asia and the USA, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies and some of the world's leading cultural organizations. In 1998, he led a national commission on creativity, education and the economy for the UK Government.
All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education(The Robinson Report) was published to wide acclaim in 1999. He was the central figure in developing a strategy for creative and economic development as part of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, working with the ministers for training, education enterprise and culture.
The resulting blueprint for change, Unlocking Creativity, was adopted by politicians of all parties and by business, education and cultural leaders across the Province.
She was a legendary pirate of the high seas around Ireland but Grainne Mhaol is now set to help children with dyslexia and other reading problems.
An animator whose child has dyslexia has developed a unique online game to encourage others with the learning disability to read.
Linda O'Sullivan, from Co Clare, came up with the idea for her 'Reading Bridges' programme by combining her background in children's animation with her 10-year-old son Oisin's experience with dyslexia.
"This is the first product of its kind designed in Ireland and it's all about creating a fun environment for children who are struggling with reading, or even reluctant to read.
"Children learn better when they're having fun and this game is all about fun-based learning, without the fear of failure," she said.
Embrace
To encourage children to embrace the written word, she based the game on the ancient legend of Grainne Mhaol, the legendary pirate 'Sea Queen of Connacht'.
The game follows the adventures of Jack, a modern boy who falls through a time portal. He meets Grace, a feisty 16th century girl, who is determined to become a pirate like her father.
Together they set off on a series of adventures, which take children through games that helps them with word building, word recognition, short-term memory and visual skills.
The animated game uses phonics -- the building blocks of reading -- in which children learn to pronounce words by associating letters or groups of letters with the sounds they represent.
The phonetic pronunciation of the word -- such as "c - a - t" -- is then reinforced with an animated image and sound of the word.
The games -- aimed at children aged 7 to 12 -- are also designed for children who are reluctant to read or who are falling behind their peers' reading levels at school.
"It's all about building up enthusiasm to read," Ms O'Sullivan said.
Children are encouraged to tackle more complex words through a series of rewards -- such as being awarded gold stars on a chart or getting a loyalty badge, she added.
The game can be particularly helpful, she said, for children who have been diagnosed with dyslexia -- a neurological condition which affects their ability to read.
"While these kids have skills that are enormously important in our world, many quickly turn off reading because of difficulties with perceptual or auditory skills related to dyslexia. Their default is often to find any excuse to avoid reading at all and so much learning is lost as a result.
"Everybody knows somebody with either dyslexia or an undiagnosed reading difficulty," she said.
"Approximately 10pc of all children are somewhere on the dyslexic spectrum, and these children are bright, creative and often visually and spatially very talented.
The IM program provides a structured, goal-oriented process that challenges the patient to synchronize a range of hand and foot exercises to a precise computer-generated reference tone heard through headphones. The patient attempts to match the rhythmic beat with repetitive motor actions.
A patented audio or audio and visual guidance system provides immediate feedback measured in milliseconds, and a score is provided.
Musical skills may translate into reading skills — particularly for children with dyslexia. Research published by Martina Huss, Usha Goswami, and colleagues in Cortexindicates that musical games may be useful in treating dyslexia in young children because an inability to distinguish between strong and weak “beats” is closely related to dyslexia.
Huss and Goswami asked 10-year-old children to listen to pairs of simple songs in which certain notes were accented. To make the songs different, the scientists changed the length of the accented notes.
Non-dyslexic children were able to distinguish between identical and non-identical song pairs by perceiving “rise time,” which is the time it took for notes to reach peak intensity. Dyslexic children had more difficulty using rise time to distinguish between tunes.
According to the research team, these results show that the ability to perceive the pattern of beats in music and the ability to read are closely linked. Early interventions based on music may allow children to perceive the sounds of language more efficiently, leading to greater success when they learn to read.
Non-dyslexic children may benefit from music training too: Research published by Sylvian Moreno in the October issue of Psychological Science shows that preschoolers can improve their verbal intelligence after 20 days of music-based cognitive training cartoons.
References and Further Reading:
Huss, M., Verney, J. P., Fosker, T., Mead, N., & Goswami, U. (2011). Music, rhythm, rise time perception and developmental
Posts
