Dolly Parton sends books to Rotherham

A reading scheme developed by the US country singer Dolly Parton is a proving a big hit in the UK

Elizabeth Smith was in hospital having had her first child when she learned about the free books. The nurses gave her the form as part of an information pack and six weeks later a book – a Peter Rabbit story – addressed to her son, Aaron, slipped through the letterbox of her Rotherham home. The following month, another book arrived for Aaron and another the next month, until the little boy became used to the sight of the postman delivering a fresh title every month.

"He calls it 'Aaron post' and he knows the books are for him," says his mother. "When the postman comes Aaron runs to check, and if there is a book he wants me to open it straight away. The books have been a wonderful way to bond, and reading the stories before bedtime has become part of his routine." Aaron is now 22 months and he will go on receiving a new book a month until his fifth birthday. He is one of 13,000 children in Rotherham, aged under five, who are sent a book every month because of a woman the children refer to as 'The Book Lady', but who is better known as Dolly Parton.

Parton is one of the all-time great country singer–songwriters, but for the past 15 years she has also been spearheading a campaign to get children reading. Her Imagination Library started in her home town of Sevier County in Tennessee where she had grown up in a two-room wooden shack with her 11 siblings. When I met Parton in Dollywood, the theme park she co-owns in eastern Tennessee, she explained why she started the library. "Many of my own relatives didn't get a chance to go to school or get an education," she told me, "and my dad didn't learn to read and write because he was born into a very large family and they had to go out and work in the fields to make money. My dad felt crippled by that – so I thought this book scheme would be a wonderful tribute to him."

Parents at the Coleridge children’s centre in Rotherham said the Imagination Library scheme had inspired them to read more, as well as enthusing their children. Photograph:

From those modest beginnings the Imagination Library has grown. "In 1999, the library was mailing books to 2,300 children every month", says David Dotson, president of the Dollywood Foundation, which looks after the administration of the scheme. "Today, it is mailing to just under 700,000 children every month in the US, Canada and, since 2008, Britain. The scheme was launched with a visit by Parton to Rotherham in December 2007."

I met some of those children, along with their mothers, at the Coleridge children's centre, which offers family learning programmes that look at the benefit of sharing books and the importance of reading out loud to children. One woman told me that reading to her baby had inspired her to start reading more herself, to set a good example; while an Asian woman said that the books were helping illiterate parents to learn to read English – the children were reading to their parents."Rotherham borough council was the first to sign up and we started registering children at the start of 2008", explains Alison Lilburn, project manager for the scheme in the town, "and since then we have registered over 18,000 children and we are sending out books to just over 13,000 children each month – which is 85% of the population under five years old."

Rotherham's council leader, Roger Stone, heard about the Imagination Library while on a visit to the US. Convinced the book scheme could raise literacy standards in Rotherham, he set about trying to bring it to the UK. Following Rotherham's lead, Sheffield, Luton, Sheerness, Nottingham, Wigan and two communities in London have joined in, and recently the Scottish Book Trust announced that it would be adopting the scheme for "looked after" children across the whole of Scotland, funded by the Scottish government.

There are, of course, other book schemes operating in Britain – Bookstart, for example, offers free books to children before they start school and the NationalLiteracy Trust has many reading schemes. "The Imagination Library complements other book-gifting programmes", says Natalie Turnbull, the UK director of the scheme, "simply by the volume of the books we send – one a month – and also the fact that the books are being delivered by post to the home, so there is a guarantee that the book is going to reach that child."

The fact that the scheme carries Parton's name has led some to think that Parton herself funds the library; in fact, while her Dollywood Foundation pays for all the administration costs in maintaining the database, it does not pay for the actual books. It is, however, able to ensure that the books are bought at a hugely discounted rate: Penguin, which supplies all the books, sells them to the scheme for an average price of £2, which is up to a quarter of their usual cost.

In Rotherham the cost of the scheme is met through donations from the Chamber of Commerce, the NHS and, this year, the local authority. In Luton, the scheme is being paid for by the Wates group and it is anticipated that around 24,000 books will be sent out each year.

While the scheme is undoubtedly laudable, is there any need to spend money giving families free books when they can easily visit their local library? "Not everybody is that way inclined", says Lilburn. "The difference with this scheme is that the book is addressed to the child and, based on all the parental feedback we get, the children are really excited when that book comes through the door."

Rotherham is now trying to measure the impact of the Imagination Library. "Because we have other initiatives to assist reading, it isn't easy to measure how much the Imagination Library has helped," says Lilburn. "But we do know that year on year Rotherham has improved in terms of its education, language and literacy development and we are now the same level nationally, when in previous years we have been way below the national average."

By the time children start school they are coming to the end of their eligibility for the Imagination Library, but schools in Rotherham are, Lilburn says, increasingly recognising the part that the book-gifting scheme can play in developing reading. "What we are getting back from teachers is that where they use Imagination Library books, the response from children is really positive," she says. "There is a commonality among kids because they know each other has had the book, and they are familiar with the books."

Aaron has not yet started school, but he has already started putting sentences together from books he has read with his mother. She believes the Imagination Library should be expanded so that every child has the opportunity that her son has. "I don't think it is just schools' job to encourage reading," she says. "What is so great about the Imagination Library is that it is not means-tested. When things are means-tested it means that there can be a stigma to being part of the scheme, but with the Imagination Library every child has the opportunity to allow their imagination to grow."

Sources:

Dolly foundation : from wikipedia

Country Music Legend Dolly Parton’s New Role: ‘Book Lady’

Pheromones in Male Perspiration Reduce Women's Tension, Alter Hormone Response that Regulates Menstrual Cycle

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia have found that exposure to male perspiration has marked psychological and physiological effects on women: It can brighten women's moods, reducing tension and increasing relaxation, and also has a direct effect on the release of luteinizing hormone, which affects the length and timing of the menstrual cycle.

The results will be published in June in the journal Biology of Reproduction and currently appear on the journal's Web site.

"It has long been recognized that female pheromones can affect the menstrual cycles of other women," said George Preti, a member of the Monell Center and adjunct professor of dermatology in Penn's School of Medicine. "These findings are the first to document mood and neuroendocrine effects of male pheromones on females."

In a study led by Preti and colleague Charles J. Wysocki, extracts from the underarms of male volunteers were applied to the upper lip of 18 women ages 25 to 45. During the six hours of exposure to the compound, the women were asked to rate their mood using a fixed scale.

"Much to our surprise, the women reported feeling less tense and more relaxed during exposure to the male extract," said Wysocki, a member of the Monell Center and adjunct professor of animal biology in Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine. "This suggests that there may be much more going on in social settings like singles bars than meets the eye."

After the women's exposure to the underarm extract, further testing revealed a shift in blood levels of luteinizing hormone. Levels of this reproductive hormone, produced in pulses by the pituitary gland, typically surge right before ovulation but also experience hundreds of smaller peaks throughout the menstrual cycle.

Preti and Wysocki found that application of male underarm secretions hastened onset of these smaller pulses. Duration to the next pulse of luteinizing hormone was shortened by an average 20 percent, from 59 to 47 minutes.

Preti and Wysocki are now looking at the several dozen individual compounds that make up male perspiration to determine which may be responsible for the effects they observed. They also plan to study whether female pheromones can affect men's moods or physiological functions.

"This may open the door to pharmacological approaches to manage onset of ovulation or the effects of premenstrual syndrome or even natural products to aid relaxation," Wysocki said. "By determining how pheromones impact mood and endocrine response, we might be able to build a better male odor: molecules that more effectively manipulate the effects we observed."

The underarm extracts used in the study came from men who bathed with fragrance-free soap and refrained from deodorant use for four weeks. The extracts were blended to avoid reactions to individual men's odors. None of the women involved in the study discerned that male sweat had been applied right under their noses; some believed they were involved in a study of alcohol, perfume or even lemon floor wax.

Half the women received three applications of the male secretions during a six-hour period, followed three controlled exposures to ethanol, used as a control substance, over a six-hour period. For the other half, the regimen was reversed. The women did not report feeling any more or less energetic, sensuous, tired, calm, sexy, anxious, fatigued or active after exposure to male perspiration.

Preti and Wysocki are joined in the Biology of Reproduction paper by co-authors Kurt T. Barnhart and Steven J. Sondheimer of Penn's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and James J. Leyden of Penn's Department of Dermatology. Their work is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

SOURCE: 
Biology of Reproduction, June 2003. News release, University of Pennsylvania.
           
Carter, C. Sue. "Hormonal Influences on Human Sexual Behavior," Behavioral Endocrinology (MIT, 1992, 0-262-02342-3), p. 134
Nelson, Randy J. An Introduction to Behavioral Endocrinology, Second Edition (Sinauer Associates, 2000, ISBN 0878936165), p. 250
Kary, Tiffany. "Crying Over Spilled Semen," Psychology Today, September/October 2002, p. 24.
Moir, A. Jessel, D. Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men & Women (Delta, 1989, ISBN 0-385-31183-4), p. 44.

Elderberry Cough Syrup

    Last spring I ordered a number of seedlings from the Missouri Conservation Department including blackberries, aronia berries, and elderberries.  After getting them planted in early April, I discovered that I already had a number of wild elderberry shrubs growing on my land.  They are pretty easy to recognize after they begin to bloom because their small clusters of flowers are very distinctive.  By July and into August the berries on my wild shrubs were ripe and ready for picking.  Each cluster of flowers ripens into a nice little bunch of deep purple berries.  It was a struggle to stay ahead of the birds that seemed to really like them.  To harvest them, I just clipped off the entire bunch and put them in freezer bags, stems and all.  I then froze them, so that I could remove the berries from the stems as I had the time to do it.  As time permitted I would take out a bunch of frozen berries and use a fork to scrape them from the stems into another freezer bag.  You have to keep as many pieces of stem out of the berries as you can, because the stems themselves can cause nausea and stomach cramps if digested.  You are not going to get all of the little pieces of stems out and a small amount isn't going to hurt you.  So you don't have to spend hours picking through the berries, just get out the big ones.  After harvesting and removing all of the stems, I really wasn't sure what I was going to do with them.  I knew that they made good jelly, and I knew you could make elderberry wine, but other than that I was not sure.  I started doing some research on elderberries and found that they have antiviral qualities, I also discovered that they have been used for centuries to treat coughs and respiratory problems.  I eventually found some recipes for homemade cough syrup, so I though I would give this a try.  Most of the recipes included a large amount of sugar and some form of alcohol, but I really wanted to avoid these things so that I would feel good about giving it to my kids.  I finally came upon one that only used elderberries, water, honey, and lemon.  It appeared to be very easy to make, and I knew that honey and lemon are also commonly used to treat coughs, so I decided to give it a try.  Here is the recipe:

Elderberry cough syrup

   1 to 2 cups of frozen elderberries

   1 cup of honey

   2 tablespoons of lemon juice

   1 cup or less of water

    You start out by putting the elderberries in a sauce pan and cover them with just enough water that they won't burn or stick to the bottom of the pan.  Bring them to a boil and let them simmer for about half an hour.  You then remove them from the heat and strain out the berries and bits of stem, being sure to mash the berries in order to extract all of the juice.  This will leave you with only juice.  You then put the juice back in the sauce pan and simmer for another half hour until it reduces by 1/4 or 1/2 depending on how thick you want the syrup to be.  I prefer it to be on the thick side myself.  When it is done simmering and has cooled a little, you add the honey and lemon juice, and stir until it is well blended.  Then after it cools completely, you can put it in a mason or jelly jar or whatever and put it in the refrigerator until it is needed.  The honey and lemon juice will naturally preserve the berry juice for several months.  You just have to give it a shake each time you use it.  As far as dosing, I used 2 teaspoons every 4 hours or so when I needed it.  For the kids, I cut that down to 1 teaspoon.  It seemed to me to be just as effective as over the counter cough medicine, but is all natural, and tastes good.  I was lucky enough to have some honey from a local apiary that was not processed or pasteurized, just wonderful raw honey.  Honey has natural antibiotic qualities and is good for treating seasonal allergies, so I thought this cough syrup would cover all the bases, antiviral from the elderberries, antibiotic and good for allergies from the honey, and good for suppressing coughs from the combination of the elderberries, honey, and lemon juice with no sugar or alcohol added.  I have to say that I am pretty pleased with the results so far. 

Found In Used Book, Early Texas 25-Cent Note Brings $63,250

SEE ALSO:
Average dog can learn 165 words, count up to 4 or 5 and even have a basic understanding of arithmetic.

A 168-year old piece of early Texas paper money, found in one of the dozens of used textbooks purchased for only $10 last year by an Austin, Texas, area couple, sold for $63,250 in a public auction in Tampa, Florida, on January 6, 2011.

“It’s a rare Republic of Texas Exchequer note in the amount of 25 cents, dated on May 1, 1843 and hand-signed by Sam Houston, President of the Republic of Texas,” said Allen Mincho of Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, (www.HA.com), the company that sold the note during its auction at a rare coin and paper money collectors convention in Tampa.
“These notes were printed in various denominations between 1842 and 1845, but probably less than two dozen Texas Exchequer notes are known to survive today.”
The presale estimate by Heritage was $50,000 or more. The name of the winning bidder who paid $63,250 was not revealed.
Mincho said Bill and Cindy Farnsworth of the Austin area were surprised to find the old piece of paper money in September in a used book after returning home from a Southeast Texas auction where they had purchased 11 boxes of old textbooks for $10.
Bill Farnsworth recalled: “My wife called to me and said, ‘I thought you might like to have this.’ The first thing I noticed was that the paper was real thin. I knew enough to know that (modern) reproduction currency is made on much thicker paper.”
He said he previously didn’t enjoy going to auctions as much as he wife did. “I just wasn’t a big auction fan, but I am now.”
Mincho said most of the historic Texas Exchequer notes were destroyed when they were redeemed in the 1840s because they were backed by gold. Although it has signs of wear, the surviving note sold in the auction shows no sign of cancellation, and apparently was never redeemed for its 25 cents face value.

Source:
Rare Early Republic of Texas Paper Money Sold At Auction
January 25, 2011: James Buchanan’s Liberty, Proof 70 Graded Coins, Rare Coin Market

Barbados vs Grenada: The Craziest Game in History of Soccer

You would think a basic winning tactic in Soccer would be to kick the ball between the posts. Your opponent's posts, that is. The team that is best at this wins the match.

Most of the time that's true, but an infamous game between Barbados and Grenada in 1994 turned logic upside-down.

Going into the last group game in a Caribbean Cup tournament (the Shell Caribbean Cup), Barbados needed to beat Grenada by two goals in order to reach the final. A draw after 90 minutes would result in extra time whereas anything less than winning by two goals would see Grenada through to the final. The catch, however, was that the organisers had decided that in the case of extra time a golden goal would count as two goals.

Barbados took an early 2-0 lead, but Grenada made it 2-1 with seven minutes remaining. Barbados were heading out unless they scored a goal—any goal!

One Barbadian striker realised that his team were unlikely to score another goal against Grenada, with only a few minutes to go and Grenada playing an ultra-defensive tactic. Instead, he decided that their best chance of winning was to make the game go into extra time and score a golden goal, which would count as two goals.

So he promptly powered the ball past his own stunned goalkeeper to make it 2-2.

Now, Grenada needed to score a goal—at either end—to avoid extra time and to go through to the final. The Grenada players, initially stunned by the goal and suddenly realising what was going on, turned around and headed for their own net.

Now the comedy really starts as the Barbadians had anticipated this move and rushed to defend the Grenada goal—in addition to their own—until the whistle went for extra time. Now be honest, who could make up a story like this?

In the end, Barbadian ingenuity was rewarded as one of their strikers scored the winning goal four minutes into extra time, which sent Barbados to the final.

As was to be expected, the Grenadians were not amused. Grenada manager James Clarkson was furious. "I feel cheated, the person who came up with these rules must be a candidate for the madhouse.

"The game should never be played with so many players on the field confused. Our players did not even know which direction to attack; our goal or their goal. I have never seen this happen before. In Soccer, you are supposed to score against your opponents in order to win, not for them."

It took a few seconds to sink in, but when Grenada had realized what happened, they knew what to do. They had to score an own goal as well to avert the extra time. With only 5 minutes remaining the crowd witnessed the spectacle of Barbados now defending both goals. They managed to hold on. Once extra time began, the Barbadians switched back to normal tactics and scored the decisive goal. The rules meant they had won by 4-2. A place in the final round was rightfully theirs.

Video Link: Barbados vs Grenada