WWE?s two most prestigious championships will collide tonight on Raw when WWE Champion John Cena battles World Heavyweight Champion Alberto Del Rio in the main event of tonight?s show.
The marquee bout was announced via Twitter by Raw Managing Supervisor Vickie Guerrero, who has attempted to impress the McMahon-Helmsley family of late with her performance as Raw?s de facto leader. In this case, she has chosen her main event wisely.
I've made a historic #WWE Champ @JohnCena vs. World Heavyweight Champ @VivaDelRio match tonight on #RAW! @VinceMcMahon, what do you think?
? Vickie Guerrero (@ExcuseMeWWE) July 1, 2013
Not only does Cena share a storied history with The Essence of Excellence, but the Champion vs. Champion Match has long been the hallmark of a friendly rivalry of sorts between the two most exalted titleholders in sports-entertainment. The standard-bearer for WWE has always had a formidable counterpart in the competitor who carries the World Heavyweight Championship even before its current iteration under WWE?s banner. Ever since the WCW Title (the World Title?s most recent forebearer) came to the house that Mr. McMahon built, this rivalry has only grown, giving the two top competitors in the sports-entertainment landscape regular opportunity to do battle on the biggest possible stages.
Playlist:?Champion vs. Champion Matches
To date, Champion vs. Champion Matches are the rarest and most prestigious of bouts, reserved only for the most special of occasions. Recently, CM Punk and Sheamus (then the WWE and World Champion, respectively) met in a classic bout on the maiden episode of WWE Main Event. With two competitors well-versed in each other?s skills and currently atop the tallest pedestals in WWE, tonight?s bout between Cena and Del Rio will only add to the glorious history of both championships, whatever the result may be.
Tune in tonight at 8/7 CT on USA Network to see the epic bout unfold!
DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) - President Barack Obama tried on Monday to reassure European allies affronted by reports of U.S. spying by suggesting all the world's intelligence services were involved in finding out the thinking of opponents and allies alike.
The European Union has demanded the United States explain a report in a German magazine that Washington was spying on the bloc, calling such surveillance shocking if true.
French President Francois Hollande said the alleged action was intolerable and could hinder U.S. relations with Paris and the EU. "We want this to stop fast," he said.
Obama, on a visit to Tanzania, promised to supply all the information requested by European allies regarding the spying allegations, which he said Washington was still evaluating.
"Every intelligence service, not just ours, but every European intelligence service, every Asian intelligence service, wherever there's an intelligence service, here's one thing they're going to be doing: they're going to be trying to understand the world better and what's going on in world capitals around the world from sources that aren't available through the New York Times or NBC News," Obama said.
"If that weren't the case, then there would be no use for an intelligence service. And I guarantee you that in European capitals, there are people who are interested in - if not what I had for breakfast - at least what my talking points might be should I end up meeting with their leaders. That's how intelligence services operate."
His secretary of state, John Kerry, who is in Brunei for an Asian security conference, said the United States was not alone in using "lots of activities" to safeguard its security.
Revelations about the U.S. surveillance program, which was made public by fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, have raised a furor in the United States and abroad over the balance between privacy rights and national security.
The Guardian newspaper said on Sunday the United States had also spied on non-European allies, including Japan, South Korea and India - all represented at the Asian security conference.
Kerry confirmed that EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton had raised the issue when he met her in Brunei. He said he had yet to see details of the newspaper allegations.
"I will say that every country in the world that is engaged in international affairs and national security undertakes lots of activities to protect its national security and all kinds of information contributes to that. All I know is that it is not unusual for lots of nations," Kerry told a news conference.
Several EU policymakers said talks on a U.S.-EU free trade deal should be frozen until Washington clarified its activities.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has asked officials to carry out a security sweep of EU buildings, said Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen, spokeswoman for the EU's executive body.
Martin Schulz, president of the EU Parliament, said the United States had crossed a line.
"I was always sure that dictatorships, some authoritarian systems, tried to listen ... but that measures like that are now practiced by an ally, by a friend, that is shocking, if it is true," Schulz said in an interview with France 2 radio.
STRONG TIES, SNOOPING CONCERNS
Obama emphasized that U.S.-European ties were strong.
"The Europeans are some of the closest allies that we have in the world. And we work with them on everything, and we share intelligence constantly," he said.
"I've asked my team ... to evaluate everything that's being claimed. When we have an answer, we will make sure to provide all the information that our allies want."
Officials in Japan and South Korea said they were aware of the newspaper reports and had asked Washington to clarify them.
A U.S. State Department spokesman said talks with allies about the issue were already underway.
In an article that sparked EU outrage, Der Spiegel said on Saturday that the National Security Agency (NSA) bugged EU offices and gained access to EU internal computer networks.
On Sunday the German magazine reported that the U.S. agency taps half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany in a typical month, much more than any other European peer and similar to the data tapped in China or Iraq.
Hollande said he had told Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to contact Kerry for an explanation and that Fabius would also meet the U.S. ambassador in Paris "to make the point that we cannot tolerate this kind of behavior between allies and friends".
The French president said France and the EU, if not all U.S. partners, would need guarantees on the spying issue before going ahead with negotiations and dealings with the United States.
"We know there are systems that need to be monitored, notably in the battle against terrorism, but I don't think this risk exists within our embassies or the European Union," he said.
A Mexican official said Washington should apologize.
"In my view, the first thing should be to offer an apology to the countries affected," said Gabriela Cuevas, head of the Mexican Senate's foreign relations committee.
In Berlin, German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said the spying reports recalled Cold War hostilities. "It goes beyond any imagination that our friends in the United States view the Europeans as enemies," she said.
Peer Steinbrueck, Social Democrat candidate for German chancellor, said the EU and European parliament should halt trade talks with Washington until "these activities are ruled out" in future.
The European Commission was cagy on whether the row would affect the EU-U.S. free trade talks set to begin in Washington on July 8. Spokeswoman Hansen said: "All I can say is we are very much focused on the question of these allegations and we are looking for a clear statement from our American partners."
Snowden is now holed up at an international airport in Russia, from where he has applied for asylum in Ecuador.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would never hand Snowden over, but that if he wanted to stay in Russia he must "stop his work aimed at harming our American partners".
(Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton in Brunei, Adrian Croft in Brussels, Pierre-Henri Allain in Paris, Catherine Hornby in Rome, Alissa de Carbonel in Moscow, Noah Barkin in Berlin, Paul Eckert in Washington, Simon Gardner, and Simon Gardner in Mexico; Writing by Stuart Grudgings and Jeff Mason; Editing by Alistair Lyon and Andrew Heavens)
July 2, 2013 ? Some may assume that low-income residents of run-down, crime-ridden neighborhoods do not care about their communities. However, research from the University of Missouri suggests otherwise.
Mansoo Yu, an assistant professor of social work and public health at MU, studied levels of community care and vigilance among residents living in high-crime, low-income areas. Community care and vigilance refer to individuals' desires to improve their communities, to take pride in their neighborhoods and to monitor and report unwelcome happenings, such as crimes, near their homes.
"We hypothesized that individuals with higher incomes would have higher levels of community care and vigilance, but the opposite was true," Yu said. "Residents with lower incomes were more likely to care about their communities than their higher-earning neighbors."
Yu said he and his colleagues were somewhat surprised by the findings that lower-income residents cared more about their communities.
"One possibility is that, because these individuals had such low incomes, they were more likely to stay in the same area for a long time," Yu said. "Low-income residents might lack the resources to move to other communities, whereas their neighbors with relatively higher incomes might be more able to move to better neighborhoods with safer environments."
Yu said community workers and organizers as well as public health professionals should find ways for residents to develop pride in their neighborhoods and encourage them to take actions, such as volunteering, to improve their communities.
"Healthy local environments are related to overall well-being and good mental and physical health," Yu said. "Individuals tend to feel safer in their local communities when they have low levels of depression and high levels of self-esteem. More work is needed to improve low-income areas into healthy environments so individuals' well-beings can improve."
July 1, 2013 ? We rely on our physical environment for many things -- clean water, land for crops or pastures, storm water absorption, and recreation, among others. Yet it has been challenging to figure out how to sustain the many benefits people obtain from nature -- so-called "ecosystem services" -- in any given landscape because an improvement in one may come at the cost of another.
Two ecologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison report this week (July 1) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a novel approach to analyzing the production and location of 10 different ecosystem services across a landscape, opening the door to being able to identify factors governing their synergies and tradeoffs.
Monica Turner, the Eugene P. Odum Professor of Zoology, and graduate student Jiangxiao Qiu mapped the production, distribution, and interactions of the services in three main categories: provisioning (providing resources like food, fiber, or fresh water), cultural (such as aesthetics and hunting), and regulating (including improving ground and surface water quality, handling floodwater, preventing erosion, and storing carbon). They focused on the Yahara River watershed, which covers much of central portion of Dane County and parts of Columbia and Rock Counties in southern Wisconsin and includes the chain of Madison lakes.
"We found that the main ecosystem services are not independent of each other. They interact spatially in very complex ways," says Qiu, lead author of the new study.
Some of those interactions were not surprising -- for example, higher levels of crop production were generally associated with poorer surface and ground water quality. However, two other sets of services showed positive associations: flood regulation, pasture and freshwater supply all went together, as did forest recreation, soil retention, carbon storage and surface water quality.
"If you manage for one of these services, you can probably enhance others, as well," says Turner. "It also means that you can't take a narrow view of the landscape. You have to consider all of the things that it produces for us and recognize that we have to manage it very holistically."
Even in the expected tradeoff between crop production and water quality, the researchers found something unexpected.
"There is a strong tradeoff between crop production and surface and groundwater quality," Qiu says. "But despite this, there are still some locations that can be high for all three services -- exceptions that can produce high crop yield and good water quality in general."
Preliminary analysis of these "win-win" areas suggests that factors like flat topography, a deep water table, less field runoff, soil with high water-holding capacity, more adjoining wetlands and proximity to streams with riparian vegetation may contribute to maintaining both crop production and good water quality.
The results also show that nearly all of the land in the watershed provides a high level of at least one of the measured services but that they are not uniformly distributed. Most areas offer a high level of just one or two services. But a few, termed "hotspots" and making up just three percent of the watershed (largely parks and protected areas), provide high levels of at least six of the measured services.
"A single piece of land can provide different kinds of services simultaneously but you cannot expect that this land can provide all of the benefits," Qiu says.
The work was undertaken as part of a larger project to improve water sustainability in a mixed urban and agricultural landscape, supported by the Water Sustainability and Climate Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
"This paper is an initial assessment that gives us a picture of the spatial distribution of ecosystem services in contemporary times, a starting point for comparison," says Chris Kucharik, a UW-Madison professor of agronomy and environmental studies and principal investigator of the overall NSF project. The project aims to use a combination of contemporary and historical data to understand how the watershed may change over the next 50 to 60 years.
"We ultimately want to be able to look at future scenarios for this watershed," Turner says. "If climate changes or land use changes, what's going to happen to the values that we care about?"
RIVERHEAD, N.Y. (AP) ? It was moving day Monday for a newlywed mentally disabled couple from New York who launched a court fight to be able to live together.
Paul Forziano and his wife, Hava, who fell in love seven years ago and were married in April, welcomed visitors including their parents, attorneys and reporters into their new second-floor apartment in a large house run by an agency that operates several group homes in Riverhead, on eastern Long Island.
"Happy, not sad," said Hava Forziano, who has limited verbal skills. "We can be together all the time now," added her husband.
The couple and their parents filed a civil rights lawsuit this year, seeking to compel the group homes where they had lived separately until Monday to accommodate their wishes to live together as a married couple. Although the newlyweds were able to find a place to live, their attorney said Monday that the court fight will go on.
"You don't know what's going to happen in the future," said attorney Martin Coleman. "People like Paul and Hava have to have the ability to move around if they want to. There's only a limited number of providers. We need to be sure they're not closed out of places."
The federal civil rights lawsuit contends Paul Forziano's facility refused to allow the couple to live together because people requiring the services of a group home are by definition incapable of living as married people, and it says his wife's home refused because it believes she doesn't have the mental capacity to consent to sex.
Legal experts are watching the case closely as a test of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which says, in part, that "a public entity shall make reasonable modifications in policies, practices, or procedures ... to avoid discrimination on the basis of disability." The group homes are licensed as nonprofits by the state and receive Medicaid funding on behalf of their clients.
The facility where the former Hava Samuels lived has declined to comment because of the pending litigation. The group home operators where Paul Forziano lived said they didn't have facilities available for a married couple.
Also named in the lawsuit is the state Office of Persons With Developmental Disabilities, which the couple claims sided with the agencies in refusing to accommodate their wishes and has not done enough to find a solution. The office has declined to comment.
Gus Lagoumis, director of programming at East End Disability Associates ? operators of the facility the newlyweds now call home ? said his agency has no objections to mentally disabled people living as married couples.
"Gone are the days where parents are told a kid has a disability, institutionalize them and forget they ever existed," he said. "Now we have people growing up in the community and they want to do things just like everybody else does and getting married and possibly getting divorced is one of the things that goes on in a community."
Paul's mother, Roseann Forziano, said her son and his new wife likely would still be looking for a new place had it not been for the legal action.
"I don't think it would have happened without a lawsuit." she said. "All of a sudden once you file a lawsuit there's a whole lot of cooperation. I don't want that to have to be the norm."
Head Start children and parents show robust gains in new interventionPublic release date: 1-Jul-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jim Barlow jebarlow@uoregon.edu 541-346-3481 University of Oregon
University of Oregon project quickly delivers cognitive gains and lowered stress levels in families
EUGENE, Ore. -- An eight-week intervention involving 141 preschoolers in a Head Start program and their parents produced significant improvements in the children's behavior and brain functions supporting attention and reduced levels of parental stress that, in turn, improved the families' quality of life.
The findings -- from the first phase of a long-term research project by University of Oregon neuroscientists that will monitor the families over time -- appear this week online in advance of regular publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The new UO initiative is designed as an addition to the regular Head Start program, which was launched by the federal government in 1965 to enhance the education, health, nutrition and parental involvement for families living under the poverty line.
A preliminary economic analysis, not included in the new study, estimates that implementing the program widely at Head Start sites would add just $800 per family and could yield a strong return on investment, said project leader Helen Neville, who holds the UO's Robert and Beverly Lewis Endowed Chair in Psychology and heads the Brain Development Lab.
"This intervention didn't come out of thin air," Neville said. "It came out of basic research on neural plasticity that we have done in our lab for many decades." Neural plasticity refers to the brain's ability to shape and reshape itself over a lifetime.
"We've studied neural plasticity by looking at deaf people, blind people, children with language impairments, bilinguals and typical people," Neville said. "We've found that some systems of the brain don't show much neural plasticity. Some show a lot but only in a specific time period. So we targeted this second kind of system, focusing on selective attention of the developing brain."
Children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) often have more problems with attention skills than do children from higher SES backgrounds, because, on average, they have more difficulty suppressing, or ignoring, non-attended information, Neville said. Such difficulties likely arise as children in lower SES families grow up amid chaos and unpredictable environments, she added.
The UO team developed learning exercises (see link below for description), including games, appropriate for kids ages 3-5. The exercises, said co-author Scott Klein, require clear focus from the children.
Parents or other primary caregivers attended weekly two-hour sessions in which they learned standard parenting practices that build strong relationships and about the value of the attention skills their children were receiving. Much of the discussion centered on reducing negative components of parenting and fostering a positive atmosphere, such as providing guided choices for children, establishing expectations and praising good behaviors, said Klein, a research assistant in the Brain Development Lab. Training was reinforced with weekly phone calls to the parents to help address specific problems.
"We try to have all activities done with children embedded with the parents all of the time," Klein said. "We are building a systematic change one step at a time. We start small. Each step scaffolds on each other." (Audio from Klein on the reduction of parental stress, 38 seconds, link below)
The parenting component said co-author Eric Pakulak, a research associate in the lab, is based on work done by the Eugene-based Oregon Social Learning Center, a non-profit, collaborative research center founded in 1977 by Gerald R. Patterson, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the UO. "In our observations, we saw changes quickly, often in a week. Parents begin to see results that they like -- benefiting the children and themselves," Pakulak said.
A control group of children and parents engaged only in traditional Head Start programming. A second experimental group included the children's learning exercises but less parental involvement.
"The more parent-focused program was the clear winner," Neville said. The children showed significant improvements in their ability to focus -- gains that are holding up over time, based on subsequent preliminary data from ongoing brain-monitoring assessments, she added.
The children's selective attention abilities, as seen in event-related brain potentials (ERP), were measured before and after the intervention using non-invasive electroencephalography, which records electrical activity along the scalp. The children also were evaluated for changes in cognitive abilities with standardized assessments of non-verbal IQ and language skills, both of which rose significantly in children whose parents received training.
In families where both the children and caregivers received the interventions, children were more likely to perform similarly to children from higher SES backgrounds, and caregivers reported significant reductions of stress in the home, particularly in dealing with their children.
"Chronic stress is literally toxic to the developing brain," Pakulak said, citing years of previous research in neuroscience. "The same parts of the brain that are important for learning in early development are the same parts of the brain that help moderate the stress response."
Many parents, Klein said, reported feeling as if portions of their personal lives had been restored, opening time for reading and outside activities.
Back in the classroom, Neville said, improvements were visible. "With the children having changes at home that help their attention -- this is a multiplier. It helps in learning in the classroom, playing games and sports. It helps kids focus. It is rewarding for the kids and for the parents. With less stress, the children are better able to focus their attention."
###
The research -- supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (R305B070018) and National Institute's of Health National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (RO1DC000481) -- will continue to track the participating children as they move through their school years. Neville's team also plans to test the intervention in programs other than Head Start.
The other four co-authors on the paper were: Courtney Stevens, assistant professor of psychology at Willamette University and who was a member of the Brain Development Lab while completing her master's degree and doctorate at the UO; Theodore A. Bell, adjunct research associate; Jessica Fanning, professor in the UO Department of Communication Disorders and Sciences; and psychology doctoral student Elif Isbell.
About the University of Oregon
The University of Oregon is among the 108 institutions chosen from 4,633 U.S. universities for top-tier designation of "Very High Research Activity" in the 2010 Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The UO also is one of two Pacific Northwest members of the Association of American Universities.
Sources:
Helen Neville, professor of psychology 541-346-4260 neville@uoregon.edu
Scott Klein, research assistant Brain Development Lab 541- 346-4248 srklein@uoregon.edu
Eric Pakulak, research associate Brain Development Lab 541-346-4248 pak@uoregon.edu
Links:
About the children's exercises: http://uonews.uoregon.edu/content/brain-development-labs-approach-training-attention-preschool-children
Neville faculty page: http://psychweb.uoregon.edu/people/neville-helen-j
Brain Development Lab: http://bdl.uoregon.edu/mainindex.php
Free video program on brain development: http://changingbrains.org/
Pakulak page: http://bdl.uoregon.edu/Personnel/people.php?page=people_staff&people=eric
Klein page: http://bdl.uoregon.edu/Personnel/people.php?page=people_staff&people=scott
Audio: Scott Klein on reduction of parental stress (38 seconds): http://bit.ly/13do33u
Follow UO Science on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/UniversityOfOregonScience
UO Science on Twitter: http://twitter.com/UO_Research
More UO Science/Research News: http://uoresearch.uoregon.edu
Note: The University of Oregon is equipped with an on-campus television studio with a point-of-origin Vyvx connection, which provides broadcast-quality video to networks worldwide via fiber optic network. In addition, there is video access to satellite uplink, and audio access to an ISDN codec for broadcast-quality radio interviews.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Head Start children and parents show robust gains in new interventionPublic release date: 1-Jul-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jim Barlow jebarlow@uoregon.edu 541-346-3481 University of Oregon
University of Oregon project quickly delivers cognitive gains and lowered stress levels in families
EUGENE, Ore. -- An eight-week intervention involving 141 preschoolers in a Head Start program and their parents produced significant improvements in the children's behavior and brain functions supporting attention and reduced levels of parental stress that, in turn, improved the families' quality of life.
The findings -- from the first phase of a long-term research project by University of Oregon neuroscientists that will monitor the families over time -- appear this week online in advance of regular publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The new UO initiative is designed as an addition to the regular Head Start program, which was launched by the federal government in 1965 to enhance the education, health, nutrition and parental involvement for families living under the poverty line.
A preliminary economic analysis, not included in the new study, estimates that implementing the program widely at Head Start sites would add just $800 per family and could yield a strong return on investment, said project leader Helen Neville, who holds the UO's Robert and Beverly Lewis Endowed Chair in Psychology and heads the Brain Development Lab.
"This intervention didn't come out of thin air," Neville said. "It came out of basic research on neural plasticity that we have done in our lab for many decades." Neural plasticity refers to the brain's ability to shape and reshape itself over a lifetime.
"We've studied neural plasticity by looking at deaf people, blind people, children with language impairments, bilinguals and typical people," Neville said. "We've found that some systems of the brain don't show much neural plasticity. Some show a lot but only in a specific time period. So we targeted this second kind of system, focusing on selective attention of the developing brain."
Children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) often have more problems with attention skills than do children from higher SES backgrounds, because, on average, they have more difficulty suppressing, or ignoring, non-attended information, Neville said. Such difficulties likely arise as children in lower SES families grow up amid chaos and unpredictable environments, she added.
The UO team developed learning exercises (see link below for description), including games, appropriate for kids ages 3-5. The exercises, said co-author Scott Klein, require clear focus from the children.
Parents or other primary caregivers attended weekly two-hour sessions in which they learned standard parenting practices that build strong relationships and about the value of the attention skills their children were receiving. Much of the discussion centered on reducing negative components of parenting and fostering a positive atmosphere, such as providing guided choices for children, establishing expectations and praising good behaviors, said Klein, a research assistant in the Brain Development Lab. Training was reinforced with weekly phone calls to the parents to help address specific problems.
"We try to have all activities done with children embedded with the parents all of the time," Klein said. "We are building a systematic change one step at a time. We start small. Each step scaffolds on each other." (Audio from Klein on the reduction of parental stress, 38 seconds, link below)
The parenting component said co-author Eric Pakulak, a research associate in the lab, is based on work done by the Eugene-based Oregon Social Learning Center, a non-profit, collaborative research center founded in 1977 by Gerald R. Patterson, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the UO. "In our observations, we saw changes quickly, often in a week. Parents begin to see results that they like -- benefiting the children and themselves," Pakulak said.
A control group of children and parents engaged only in traditional Head Start programming. A second experimental group included the children's learning exercises but less parental involvement.
"The more parent-focused program was the clear winner," Neville said. The children showed significant improvements in their ability to focus -- gains that are holding up over time, based on subsequent preliminary data from ongoing brain-monitoring assessments, she added.
The children's selective attention abilities, as seen in event-related brain potentials (ERP), were measured before and after the intervention using non-invasive electroencephalography, which records electrical activity along the scalp. The children also were evaluated for changes in cognitive abilities with standardized assessments of non-verbal IQ and language skills, both of which rose significantly in children whose parents received training.
In families where both the children and caregivers received the interventions, children were more likely to perform similarly to children from higher SES backgrounds, and caregivers reported significant reductions of stress in the home, particularly in dealing with their children.
"Chronic stress is literally toxic to the developing brain," Pakulak said, citing years of previous research in neuroscience. "The same parts of the brain that are important for learning in early development are the same parts of the brain that help moderate the stress response."
Many parents, Klein said, reported feeling as if portions of their personal lives had been restored, opening time for reading and outside activities.
Back in the classroom, Neville said, improvements were visible. "With the children having changes at home that help their attention -- this is a multiplier. It helps in learning in the classroom, playing games and sports. It helps kids focus. It is rewarding for the kids and for the parents. With less stress, the children are better able to focus their attention."
###
The research -- supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (R305B070018) and National Institute's of Health National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (RO1DC000481) -- will continue to track the participating children as they move through their school years. Neville's team also plans to test the intervention in programs other than Head Start.
The other four co-authors on the paper were: Courtney Stevens, assistant professor of psychology at Willamette University and who was a member of the Brain Development Lab while completing her master's degree and doctorate at the UO; Theodore A. Bell, adjunct research associate; Jessica Fanning, professor in the UO Department of Communication Disorders and Sciences; and psychology doctoral student Elif Isbell.
About the University of Oregon
The University of Oregon is among the 108 institutions chosen from 4,633 U.S. universities for top-tier designation of "Very High Research Activity" in the 2010 Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The UO also is one of two Pacific Northwest members of the Association of American Universities.
Sources:
Helen Neville, professor of psychology 541-346-4260 neville@uoregon.edu
Scott Klein, research assistant Brain Development Lab 541- 346-4248 srklein@uoregon.edu
Eric Pakulak, research associate Brain Development Lab 541-346-4248 pak@uoregon.edu
Links:
About the children's exercises: http://uonews.uoregon.edu/content/brain-development-labs-approach-training-attention-preschool-children
Neville faculty page: http://psychweb.uoregon.edu/people/neville-helen-j
Brain Development Lab: http://bdl.uoregon.edu/mainindex.php
Free video program on brain development: http://changingbrains.org/
Pakulak page: http://bdl.uoregon.edu/Personnel/people.php?page=people_staff&people=eric
Klein page: http://bdl.uoregon.edu/Personnel/people.php?page=people_staff&people=scott
Audio: Scott Klein on reduction of parental stress (38 seconds): http://bit.ly/13do33u
Follow UO Science on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/UniversityOfOregonScience
UO Science on Twitter: http://twitter.com/UO_Research
More UO Science/Research News: http://uoresearch.uoregon.edu
Note: The University of Oregon is equipped with an on-campus television studio with a point-of-origin Vyvx connection, which provides broadcast-quality video to networks worldwide via fiber optic network. In addition, there is video access to satellite uplink, and audio access to an ISDN codec for broadcast-quality radio interviews.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) ? More than 5,000 anti-government protesters marched Sunday near the Maracana football stadium before a major international match, venting their anger about the billions of dollars the Brazilian government is spending on major sporting events rather than public services.
About a half hour before the match started, small clashes between police and some of the protesters who massed at security blockades broke out, with some protesters hurling rocks at authorities who responded with tear gas and shock grenades.
Though smaller in size, the march was the latest in a wave of protests that has spread across this continent-sized country in recent weeks. Many are calling the protest movement the biggest seen here in decades, with more than 1 million people having taken to the streets nationwide on just the night of June 20.
The demonstrations have dwindled in size and frequency in recent days as officials from all levels of government have scrambled to calm public anger with woeful public services and a heavy tax burden.
Still, the atmosphere was tense outside Maracana on Sunday. Some clusters of protesters tried to break through the security perimeter police set-up around the stadium, but were pushed back and not able to get past authorities.
Despite the smaller protests, demonstrator Eliane Milazzo, a 54-year-old high school teacher marching with her daughter and son-in-law, said the Brazilian people won't let their leaders off the hook and that the protests will go on.
"They've got to continue because the reasons people are out on the street are not going to go away overnight," she said. "I know I will continue to go to the streets and so will my family until we see real changes in our everyday lives."
President Dilma Rousseff has suffered the brunt of the political damage. The first national poll conducted after the protests ignited showed a steep drop in her approval rating and throws in doubt what had seemed an easy re-election next year.
Rousseff decided to not attend Sunday's final match of the Confederations Cup football tournament, which pits Brazil against Spain in what's seen as a warm-up for next year's World Cup to be hosted in Brazil.
Other top government officials and even football legend Pele are also skipping the match in a major embarrassment for a government that had hoped to use the World Cup and the 2016 Olympics in Rio to showcase Brazil's arrival as a global power.
"People are angry with Congress, angry with the terrible hospitals and worse schools," said Tania Nobrega, a 56-year-old psychologist protesting near Maracana in Rio. "But they don't want Dilma's head. People are sick of the status quo here, and that means they're fed up not only with the (ruling Workers Party) but also with all parties."
The demonstrations began earlier this month over a 10-cent hike in bus and subway fare in Sao Paulo before morphing into a nationwide movement denouncing a range of problems such as government corruption, poor education and health care.
The sudden outrage has bewildered the country's political class, which took several days to find their footing and respond to the demonstrations, both with words and action.
Several city and state governments reversed the hike on public transportation fares that sparked the first protests, but the demonstrators had moved well beyond that issue.
On June 21, Rousseff delivered a prerecorded prime time speech on TV that did little to calm the protests. She then convened a June 24 meeting with protest leaders and all the governors and mayors of capital cities, in which she announced $23 billion in new transportation investments. She also said she would import foreign doctors to work in underserved areas while promising a five-point plan to focus on public services and corruption.
The president is expected to deliver to Congress early this week her proposal for a national plebiscite letting citizens vote on political reforms.
The protests have mostly died down since the proposals were made.
The Estado de S. Paulo newspaper reported Sunday that 490 protests had taken place in Brazil in the last three weeks, peaking at 150 on June 20, when violent clashes between protesters and police were seen in several cities.
Many demonstrators have said they had learned their mass actions could prompt a quick government response. They also said they anticipated other high-profile events they could use to speak out, including July's visit by Pope Francis, next year's World Cup, a presidential election a few months later and the Rio Olympics three years from now.
"I don't think the demonstrations will stop people from coming to the World Cup, but I hope they don't come," said Tatiana Poggi, a history professor at Sunday's protest near Maracana. "It's a way foreigners help us protest. Boycott the big event."
Brazilian officials were doing all they could to make sure Sunday's protests didn't interrupt the finals match, which would be watched by millions around the world.
Officials were mobilizing the biggest security operation yet seen for a football game in Brazil, with about 6,000 regular police and almost 500 police investigators patrolling the area around Maracana and a large contingent of elite federal troops also on patrol.
No clashes between protesters and police were reported a few hours before the match was set to begin, but demonstrators remained fierce in their anti-government chants.
"Here in Brazil we took too long to wake up to discover they spent billions on stadiums, but they say there's no money for hospitals, no supplies for doctors," said protester Mariela Simao. "They tried to take action to show the population they are doing something, but they could do more."
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AP writers Stephen Wade in Rio de Janeiro and Bradley Brooks in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.
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Public release date: 1-Jul-2013
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