“It was nice growing up with someone like you – someone to lean on, someone to count on – someone to tell on!”
- Unknown

(The following excerpt from What Birth Order Can Predict About You by Sue Varma, M.D., originally appeared on doctoroz.com on March 12, 2913. To view it in its entirety please click on the link below.)

According to psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, our birth order predicted our personality to a great extent. His theories from the early 1900s still stand in many respects. However, it is new research that is now reviving these ideas and, particularly, we are seeing the interplay of our biology and psychology. New research is showing that birth order can predict health consequences.

I like to caution folks and say that we should not let our destiny limit us. These factors may put us at greater likelihood for a particular outcome; however, it’s up to us to change that course. We also need to factor in family size, education and socioeconomic status. We tend to see that the smaller the families, the more the available resources. It’s not just whether you are first- or second-born – but if you are first or second in a family of 2 or 10, as this would dilute time, attention and resources. Also, it’s up to you what you are willing and able to do with your resources.

First-borns (like Dr. Oz) are natural-born leaders (no surprise, right?)

Middle Children are typically the mediators and peacemakers.

 Youngest are the individuals in the family.

Only children in some ways have the best of both worlds – characteristics of both oldest and youngest, leaders but also risk takers. 

http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/what-birth-order-can-predict-about-you

(The following excerpt from Is Your Child A Budding Psychopath? Now There’s A Way To Find Out originally appeared on news.com.au on May 3, 2013. To view it in its entirety please click on link below.)

Brain scans can be used to identify children who may grow up to be psychopaths, scientists have discovered.

A study compared 37 boys with serious conduct problems, including causing harm to others, dishonesty, general aggression and other antisocial traits, with a control group of 18 boys who had no such behavioural issues.

Researchers placed them in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine that identifies which parts of the brain respond to stimulus.

The brains of ”problem children” showed reduced activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and in the insula, both of which are critical to empathy

Professor Paul Frick of the University of New Orleans – who was not involved in the study but specialises in childhood psychopathology – lists 10 warning signs to look for in youngsters:

1.  They persistently hurt, bully or fight others, or violate their rights by stealing or vandalising.

2.  They break major rules, such as running away from home or staying out late.

3.  They show no guilt when told off for doing wrong, e.g., pushing another child into the road.

4.  They show a persistent callous disregard for other people’s feelings — not just siblings (e.g., pushing another child off a swing and being unmoved by their distress).

5.  They persistently don’t care about how well they do in, say, school, even when the expectations are clear and they are capable.

6.  They seem cold and unfeeling, only showing emotions to intimidate or manipulate.

7.  They blame others for their mistakes, rather than accept responsibility themselves.

8.  They are fearless and like doing novel and dangerous activities.

9.  They are unmoved by the threat of punishment (e.g., ‘if you do that, I am going to take away your bike’).

10.  They are highly motivated by reward or what they’ll get out of something, even if it hurts others (e.g., stealing).

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/is-your-child-a-budding-psychopath/story-fnet08ui-

1226634514379

– Albert Einstein

We stumbled on this enlightened quotation recently, and it immediately triggered a connection to inventor Darrell Mann, CTO of consulting agency Blackswan, who speaks passionately and often about the failings of modern innovation.

“Twenty-five percent of failures were due to people trying to solve the wrong problems,” says Mann (@darrellmann), former chief engineer at Rolls-Royce, where he studied innovation duds and dynamos for 15 years. A scant 2 percent of all companies’ innovation attempts end in success, he goes on to tell John Kennedy ofSilicon Republic.

How do these successes differ from the vast majority of failures? “They follow a certain path and rules,” Mann explains, which begins with the presumptions that innovation is problem-solving, problem-solving is innovation, and “defining a problem clearly and completely represents 90 percent of the difficulty in innovation.”

Mann details his approach with copious charts and graphs in the book Hands on Systematic Innovation: For Business and Management. He also uses systematic innovation to drive product-development strategies for clients ranging from Intel andHewlett-Packard to Nestlé and Procter & Gamble.

Here, we distill the approach into four steps:

1. Be an Einstein
Invest time, money, and brainpower in boiling down your problem to its root cause before proposing even one solution. Mann once worked for six weeks with a helicopter-engine manufacturer to define the problems its engineering team needed to solve. The outcome? “Improvement by a factor of 50 in terms of engine life and reduction in maintenance scheduling,” notes the Blackswan website. Sounds like innovation to us.

2. Find Comparables
What other industries have faced a core challenge similar to yours? Make a list of three problems (and be creative).

3. Name the Winners
OK, so who devised and delivered the best solution to each of those industry problems you identified in No. 2? What companies cracked the code in a world-class way? Name them and their winning products. Blackswan recalls a client that makes compressors for household refrigerators. The company studied a database of 3 million successful inventions and innovations across myriad industries to come up with practical ideas for its niche.

4. Steal the Solution 
Now for the hard part: Apply the winning principles of those world-class solutions to your situation. The fix should evolve and morph to meet your circumstances, but its core promise should remain largely the same. “You need to break down the silo walls,” Mann tells Silicon Republic, “and recognize the customer is trying to get a job done.”

http://www.inc.com/thebuildnetwork/you-cannot-solve-what-you-dont-understand.html?nav=featured

If this isn’t karma, we don’t know what is.

A suspected poacher was trampled to death by the elephant he was trying to kill in a national park in Zimbabwe,according to news reports.

More from GlobalPost: Elephants for sale

The bloodied remains of Solomon Manjoro were found by park rangers after he was charged by a jumbo elephant he was attempting to gun down in the Charara game reserve, the state-run Sunday Mail reported.

His alleged accomplices, 29-year-old Noluck Tafuruka and 52-year-old Godfrey Shonge, were later arrested in the park.

They appeared in court last week on charges of possessing a firearm without a license and contravention of local wildlife laws, according to The Telegraph.

More from GlobalPost: Wildlife News: Elephants poisoned in Zimbabwe

While an international ban on ivory trade was passed in 1989, demand has risen in recent years and, with it, the number of elephant poachings.

According to LiveScience, an estimated 25,000 elephants are killed in Africa each year.

No word on what became of the elephant in this incident.

One can only hope he’s getting the last laugh with his buddies somewhere in the Charara game reserve.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-wide-web/zimbabwe-elephant-tramples-poacher-death

(The following excerpt from 10 Lessons From 10 Quotes That Changed My Life by Angel originally appeared on marcandangel.com. To view it in its entirety please click on the link below.)

Today I want to share ten life lessons with you.  I learned them when I was young by reading and re-reading some of my favorite books and quotes.  And over the years I have validated each of them gradually with firsthand experience.  Together these lessons have positively changed my way of thinking and my life.  I hope they do the same for you.

1. Your thoughts create your reality.

2. You will regret the chances you didn’t take.

3. Change is the only constant thing in life.

4. What you resist persists.

5. You judge others for the deficiencies you haven’t yet accepted in yourself.

6. You have far less control over the behavior of others than you think.

7. You are what’s on the inside.

8. You can’t force love in relationships.

9. Sometimes the only healthy option is to move on.

10. Life as you know it doesn’t last forever.

http://www.marcandangel.com/2012/12/24/10-lessons-from-10-quotes-that-changed-my-life/

Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/05/the-world-according-to-twitter-in-maps/#ixzz2TAvIGQUw
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/05/the-world-according-to-twitter-in-maps/

“When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.” – Sophia Loren

(The following excerpt from The Power of a Mother’s Love by Jill Savage and posted on focusonthefamily.com was taken from My Heart’s at Home Copyright © 2007 by Jill Savage, published by Harvest House Publishers. To view it in its entirety please click on the link below.)

A mother’s love needs to be given unconditionally to establish trust and a firm foundation of emotional intimacy in a child’s life.

A child should never feel as if they need to earn a mother’s love. This will leave a void in their heart all of their life. A mother’s love needs to be given unconditionally to establish trust and a firm foundation of emotional intimacy in a child’s life. If love is withheld, a child will look for it in a million other ways, sometimes throughout their lifetime unless they come to some sort of peace with their past. The emotional foundation we give our children at home is foundational to their life. We cannot underestimate the value of home and the power of mother love.

http://www.focusonthefamily.com/parenting/parenting_roles/value-of-stay-at-home-moms/power-of-a-mothers-love.aspx

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“Truth is stranger than fiction.” – Mark Twain

(The following excerpt taken from The Cicadas Are Coming: Billions Of Insects To Emerge After 17 Years Underground originally appeared on huffingtonpost.com. To view this article in its entirety please click  on the link below.)

If you live on the East Coast between Georgia and Connecticut, get ready for the air to be filled with billions of large, buzzing insects known as cicadas, a massive brood of which have been feeding on roots underground for the past 17 years — all in preparation for this one moment.

A small number of the “Brood II” cicadas, which are one of seven different species of the insect, have already begun emerging in some eastern states, according to Magicicada.org, a website run by John Cooley, a cicada expert and research scientist at the University of Connecticut.

By the end of May, the inch-and-a-half-long insects will come out in full force, swarming in massive, noisy clouds up and down the eastern seaboard, reports CBS New York.

The red-eyed insects, also known as Magicicada, tend to form denser clouds than other varieties of cicada. These swarms can be as dense as 1.5 million cicadas per acre, Cooley notes on his website. A single Brood II female, the website also says, can lay as many as 600 eggs before she dies, but we’re much too scared to do the math on how many eggs per acre that would be.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/06/the-cicadas-are-coming-locusts-17-years_n_3223584.html?utm_hp_ref=green&icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl4%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D309216