A heart-affecting story of the reality so many children face when they have to grow up without parents.
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Lesbian Parents & Their Well-Adjusted Kids: What the Study Really Means | 80beats
The U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, a quarter-century look at the welfare of kids born to lesbian couples, has finally come out in the journal Pediatrics this week with the headline-grabbing finding that those children not only do as well as the rest of the population, they might actually fare better. You can download the paper by lead author Nanette Gartrell for free right now, but here are the key parts:
Select population only
Census data says that there are more than 270,000 American kids in same-sex households, with twice that many having a single gay parent. Gartrell’s study follows a particular slice: Lesbian couples who were together before the child’s birth, identified themselves as a lesbian couple, and went through the artificial insemination process. It didn’t include, for instance, women who may have had a child in a previous heterosexual relationship and then entered into a lesbian one later.
Better than the rest?
The study, which began in 1986, ended up following 78 kids from lesbian couples who were recruited for the study in Boston, Washington D.C., and San Francisco.
The mothers were interviewed during pregnancy or the insemination process, and additionally when the children were 2, 5, 10 and 17 years old. Those children are now 18 to 23 years old. They were interviewed four times as they matured and also completed an online questionnaire at age 17, focusing on their psychological adjustment, peer and family relationships and academic progress [CNN].
The children of these lesbian couples were just as well-adjusted as the kids of heterosexual couples to whom the researchers compared them. Indeed, the kids in the study proved superior in some areas, like academics, self-esteem, and behavior, as shown by the standard “Child Behavior Checklists” that were part of the surveys.
Planning, and parenting
This is a quantitative study, so the “why” question becomes the subject of speculation. But for Gartrell, the fact that she studied families with planned pregnancies and involved parents was the key.
Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory puts the first point more forcefully:
One factor that seems awfully important here is that these pregnancies were all planned. Like, really, really planned. There were no forgotten pills, broken condoms or one too many glasses of red wine; these women had to actively seek out sperm donors and then undergo artificial insemination [Salon].
The parents in her study, Gartrell says, “reported using verbal limit-setting more often with their children” (as opposed to any kind of corporal punishment). They had dealt early with the difficult conversations about sexuality and prejudice, she says. That may have contributed to the fact that at 10 the kids of lesbian families appeared to have experienced more anxiety from being stigmatized, but by 17 that effect no longer showed up.
“They are very involved in their children’s lives,” she says of the lesbian parents. “And that is a great recipe for healthy outcomes for children” [TIME].
That is, good parenting is what matters, not gay parenting.
D-I-V-O-R-C-E
Buried in the study is a curious stat: When heterosexual first marriages end in divorce, 65% of the time mothers end up with sole custody. But, in the study of lesbian couples, things ended up much differently.
The percentage of separation was about the same: about 50% for heterosexual couples and 56% for the lesbian couples in the study. But when the study couples split up, they retained joint custody in 70% of the cases. The paper says, “Custody was more likely to be shared in these families when the mothers had previously completed a co-parent (second parent) adoption agreement.”
Weaknesses
The study’s long-term view of families headed by lesbian couples is its strength, along with the fact that gathering study participants before they gave birth meant the study wouldn’t be skewed by “families who volunteer when it is already clear that their offspring are performing well.”
But it does have weaknesses. For one, Gartrell’s funding came in part from gay and lesbian organizations like the Gill Foundation and the Lesbian Health Fund from the Gay Lesbian Medical Association. That has led anti-gay organization to respond to the study with charges of bias. Indeed, if Gartrell had been able to secure complete funding from an independent source like the National Institutes of Health, that would have been nice. But there have been easier things to do in the last quarter-century than glean government grants to study families led by same-sex couples.
A more pressing scientific question is: How much you can extrapolate the study’s data to 2010? As the study says, the differences between 1986 and today made recruiting a nationally representative sample quite difficult:
The NLLFS sample is drawn from the first-wave planned lesbian families who were initially clustered around metropolitan areas with visible lesbian communities, which were much less diverse than they are today; recruiting was limited to the relatively small number of prospective mothers who felt safe enough to identify publicly as lesbian, who had the economic resources to afford DI, and who, in the pre-Internet era, were affiliated with the communities in which the study was advertised.
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Image: iStockphoto
LPIN Podcast: Chris Spangle, Executive Director
The Executive Director of a State Party gets little sleep during the election season, especially before an event like a state convention. LPIN Ed Chris Spangle details what his office has been doing in the days before the convention, and will be doing in the half year leading up to November’s [...]
How Scientists Measure Distances of Stars Light Years from Earth
How scientists measure the distances of star which are several several light years away from earth.
New telescope is an exoplanet TRAPPIST | Bad Astronomy
The European Southern Observatory has unveiled a new planet-hunter: TRAPPIST: TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope. I know, I know, but we’re running out of acronyms here, folks. If it makes you feel better, it was named after a beer.
It sits in the high and dry Atacama desert in Chile, rapidly and autonomously scanning the sky, looking at millions of stars and recording their brightnesses. It does this over and again, looking for the tell-tale dip in starlight caused when a planet passes in front of its parent star.
In the meantime, it also takes incredible pictures of the sky:
That’s the Tarantula Nebula, a sprawling complex of gas and dust churning out stars at an incredible rate. To give you an idea of how luminous it is, at 180,000 light years away (that’s 1.8 quintillion kilometers, or more than a quintillion miles!) it’s still visible to the naked eye (if you live in the southern hemisphere, that is). TRAPPIST’s primary mission is to look for transiting planets as well as comets visible in the southern skies, but like any good telescope pointing up it’s capable of all sorts of good science — if, for example, there are any changes in the Tarantula (a star explodes, or flares up) TRAPPIST will catch it.
This is all pretty amazing considering the telescope is only 60 cm (20 inches) in diameter! Because the transit method looks for dips in a star’s brightness, it’s best to look at bright stars; they give off so much light that even a small dip is easier to see. You don’t need a honking big ’scope to look at bright stars, and in fact something smaller is even better: it can see larger areas of sky at once, and won’t overexpose the detector like a bigger ’scope might do when it floods the camera with starlight.
Small telescopes are less expensive and easier to design, too; TRAPPIST went from being just an idea to getting its first images in only two years. And it’s fully robotic! It does its thing on its own, preprogrammed to sweep the heavens and send the data to astronomers without them ever having to actually be at the dome.
Other such smaller-scale projects are popping up all over the planet, and I think that’s terrific. You don’t always need a huge expensive piece of equipment to do solid science, and, amazingly, even a telescope no bigger than one you can keep in your garage can actually be used to discover planets orbiting other stars!
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The Bright Heads of Levi van Veluw | Visual Science
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The first image in this gallery of images from Dutch artist Levi van Veluw shows the result of van Veluw covering his head with light-generating foil. Photographed in total darkness, the radiant bright blue light produced by this material defines the shape of his head. Van Veluw’s photo series are self-portraits, created and photographed by himself in a completely solo process. The work simultaneously suggests visions of primitive and futuristic humankind, in the archetypal language of fairy tales.
Of his own work, Levi van Veluw writes: “The images that I make consist of often unlogical combinations of materials, patterns, colours, forms, with my head as the only constant factor. Each element is consciously chosen so as to affect a pre-determined transformation. By playing with the value of the each material and by using them for a purpose that was not originally intended for them, I construct within the image, in a very small way, a different perspective on the world.”
All images courtesy Levi van Veluw
Light II, 2009
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Steps to Design a Piping System
Dear experts,
I am a new junior piping engineer. I have question here. Anyone can actually explain to me or guide me in designing a new piping system?
Eg: I am given 2 vessels and I need to develop a piping system to connect these 2 vessels. So, what is the steps in designing the right sys
Welder Certification.
I am checking the design of a welded stainless steel structure. What official confirmation can I ask for to assure the welder is qualified? A copy of his American Welding Society (AWS) certificate? Or something from his employer? Thx.
Bar Codes Used for More Than Just Groceries
From USATODAY.com Technology News:
It used to be that the only time you'd notice a bar code was at a store, maybe when a cashier scanned your groceries. But lately bar codes are showing up in more places around town — and getting more sophisticated.
Read the whole a
Study Turns Up Viral Key That Might Lead to Universal Flu Treatment
From Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now:
Researchers have found a novel method for stopping the spread of influenza viruses, a finding that could lead to a universal treatment for flu. The method involves stopping the genetic process by which the virus
I Have Water in My Heat Vents, I Live on a Slab
Hello! It's me again (the gutter over flow girl)..... So there's a new problem that has assisted sense the water seepage in my livingroom wall and second bedroom. I cleaned my heat vents which is also my central air vents and there is water in all of them. I've read everywhere and I'm getting - ther
World Science Festival: Surprising Smarts in the Animal Kingdom | Discoblog
We’re not that special.
At least, not for the reasons we thought we were. Our knack for acting altruistically, for communicating, for putting a complicated brain to good use: We’ve claimed all these as our own, as the things that set humans apart from every other species.
But recently, science has shown that we have a lot more in common with other animals, from bonobos to bees, than you might expect. On Saturday, five researchers helped set the public record straight by busting up a few humanocentric myths during “All Creatures Great and Smart,” a panel event at the World Science Festival in New York.
Myth #1: Humans are the only altruistic animals.
From proffering a shovel in the sandbox to writing a check to our favorite charity, humans commit altruistic acts whenever they do something for someone else without any concrete benefit for themselves. But you can cross sharing off the “uniquely human” list; in a simple experiment, anthropologist Brian Hare demonstrated that bonobos do it, too.
Alone in a room with some delectable snacks, each bonobo in the study had two choices: Enjoy the snacks on his own, or open a door to let another bonobo in an adjoining room come share the feast. Hare found that, time and again, bonobos in this situation chose to voluntarily share.
“It could be that they feel bad for the other guy, or maybe they’re just being politicians,” sharing now with the expectation they’ll be shared with later, Hare said. “Or maybe they just want to go on a blind date.” The fact that altruism might come with an agenda doesn’t make the bonobos’ actions any less remarkable, Hare added. These same motivations prompt a lot of the sharing we do, too.
Myth #2: Humans are the only true communicators.
When scouting for potential dangers, monkeys in the rainforest go by the same rule people do: If you see something, say something. What’s more, what monkeys say depends on what exactly they see, said primatologist Klaus Zuberbühler. One alarm call signals “Oh no, a leopard!”, while another signals “Look out, an eagle!” It’s clear the calls mean different things because they don’t just sound different, they elicit different responses. Play a leopard alarm call, and a monkey will start peering down at the forest floor; play an eagle alarm call, and he’ll start scanning the skies. “Calling it a conversation might be too much,” Zuberbühler said, but monkeys can convey detailed information using their voices.
Some animals can even dabble in the languages of other species. Hornbills, birds that live a safe distance off the ground, ignore monkeys’ leopard alarm calls, but they’ll flap their wings in panic when the monkeys say an eagle’s nearby.
Myth #3: We can learn because of our big brains.
Even insects, far from us on the evolutionary tree as they are, are capable of some surprising mental feats. Understanding how their neural circuits work and what they do can give us insight into the building blocks of our own brains and behavior. “Insects are incredibly sophisticated,” said insect neuroscientist Jeremy Niven. “When you see what they can do with their tiny brains, you wonder why we need an extra billion neurons or so.”
– by Valerie Ross
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Best Environmental Protective Coating Over Silver
What is the best environmental, protective coating over silver?
I'm busy with an electric and magnetic field sensor to measure harmonics strengths etc, have vacuum metalized onto glass fiber reinforced plastic housing.
Unfortunately used silver instead of Aluminum.
In anyc
Remember The Blue Planet | The Intersection
In an ever more connected and globalized world, we're increasingly confronted with the ways in which our actions--whether political, economic, or other--can have enormous impacts in other regions. Unfortunately, when it comes to oceans, it has been easy to ignore the devastation that occurs below a seemingly pristine surface. Today is World Oceans Day and as Brett Israel points out, they make up 70 percent of the planet's surface. And given that 95 percent remains unmapped, the marine realm is our generation's great unexplored frontier. After a disaster like the BP spill, images like this brown pelican drenched in oil remind us that we ought to be better stewards of oceans. But too often, we forget as soon as we turn the newspaper page or click a different url. Jeremy Jackson's right: We're wrecking oceans through overfishing, climate change, and pollution. So watch, listen, and most importantly, remember...
Decapitated, Lion-Chewed Remains = Ancient Gladiator Graveyard | Discoblog
As archaeologists dug up the ancient corpse, something looked a little off. For one, it didn’t have a head. Second, one of the skeleton’s arms looked like it supported a lot more muscle than the other. Third, it seemed a lion had chewed on it.
Meet a dead Roman gladiator. Archaeologists uncovered around eighty such skeletons in York, England over the past seven years. Though they admit that the 1,600- to 1,800-year-old corpses might have had other origins, the researchers say all signs point to the ancient circus. A decapitated corpse suggests that individual got a thumbs down from the jeering crowds, the mismatched arms signify much swordplay, and the bite marks imply that a lion, tiger, or bear had taken a taste in battle.
Michael Wysocki, who examined the remains in the forensic anthropology laboratory at the University of Central Lancashire, discussed those tell-tale bite marks with CNN:
“Nothing like them has ever been identified before on a Roman skeleton…. It would seem highly unlikely that this individual was attacked by a tiger as he was walking home from the pub in York 2,000 years ago,” he said.
One other clue comes from the fact that the skeletons, despite their violent lives and deaths, had what appears a ceremonial burial, resting in their graves with some great ancient goodies (i.e. horse bones and cow remains, the believed leftovers from a feast). Still, archeologists speculate that none of these fighters were the stars of their day, and that many bit the dust after only one or two battles.
“You’re seeing the losers instead of the Russel Crowes,” archeologist Kurt Hunter-Mann said in a CNN video.
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Image: flickr / storem
Selecting Digital Output Module
Hi ,
There are Start /Stop Commands Generated From DCS going to MCC, For Digital Output Module which Type of scheme is most Recomended and safe type ,
1) Like I have the Option either to Use Relay Contact Module (Potential Free ) or
2) 24 VDC Output Module with Interposing Relay aft
CR4 Tool
Is CR4 a good resource to use for training to become a better long distance telephone customer service representative?
World Science Festival: Will Scientists Ever Know Everything? | Discoblog
A mathematician, a philosopher, a physicist, and an artificial intelligence expert get together to define the limits of human knowledge. Chaos ensues.
That’s the short version of Friday evening’s World Science Festival discussion, The Limits of Understanding, where panelists Gregory Chaitin, Rebecca Goldstein, Mario Livio, and Marvin Minsky bravely tackled the scientific and philosophical implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem for a packed house.
Gödel’s work has perplexed thinkers for decades, but the on-stage team dispensed with the basics pretty quickly. As philosopher Goldstein put it, Gödel’s infamous proof from 1931 revealed that “there are true propositions [in mathematics] that can’t be proved.” Livio took a stab at incompleteness via analogy to physics: “We physicists look for a theory of everything in physics; Gödel showed that there is no theory of everything in math.”
In keeping with the theme of a theorem that overflows with philosophical implications, the ensuing conversation leapt from Gödel’s proof to evolution, the effectiveness of mathematics at describing the universe, and even the nature of consciousness. (Consciousness, Minsky insisted, is not a single thing, but is actually a catch-all term philosophers and psychologists use for 26 distinct problems about the human mind that they don’t fully understand. It was around this time that the moderator, Nobel-prize-winning biologist Paul Nurse, announced that he was “giving up” on corralling the discussion.)
One of the more interesting ideas that crept up was whether, in the wake of Gödel, math can reveal any objective, independent truths that exist “out there” in the real world, or whether it’s just a system of rules built by humans, relying on our peculiar perceptions of the universe. Livio proposed a compromise: “Are we discovering mathematics, or inventing them? It might be an intricate combination: We invent concepts and then discover the relations among them,” he said, pointing to the square root of negative one—the imaginary unit—as an invention that opened up whole new realms of discovery in math.
As for Gödel, mathematician Chaitin’s take was probably the most honest and salient: “Eighty years later, we still don’t know what the hell Gödel proved,” he said. The audience seemed happy to agree with him on that one.
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How Ancient Beekeepers Made Israel the Land of (Milk and) Honey: Imported Bees | 80beats
It took Turkish bees to make Israel flow with milk and honey.
When archaeologist Amihai Mazar and colleagues turned up 3,000-year-old remains of hundreds of preserved beehives from the ancient town of Tel Rehov in 2007, it was the first confirmation of the ancient beekeeping suggested by Egyptian paintings and Biblical references. Now, three years later, the team has published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with the analysis of the “honeybee workers, drones, pupae, and larvae” found inside those hives. Surprise—they’re from Turkey, hundreds of miles away.
The findings “would imply an incredible amount of commodity trading of bees,” said bee expert Gene Kritsky of the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, editor of American Entomologist. The importation of Italian bees to the United States in the 1860s “was thought to be a big deal then,” he said, “but the Israelis may have been doing this as far back as the first millennium BC” [Los Angeles Times].
Why go to all the trouble? The Syrian bees native to Israel are aggressive and uncooperative. The Turkish bees, by contrast, are more docile and much more efficient at honey-making: They produce eight times as much.
This ancient trade shows those beekeepers back then were skilled: Not only did they manage to move bee colonies across hundreds of miles of bouncy ancient roads, they also adapted Turkish bees to the hotter and drier climate of Israel. And the finding shows that modern beekeeping in Israel is just a little bit of history repeating:
In fact, “Jewish settlers in Israel in the 1900s may have unwittingly followed in the footsteps of the ancient bee-keepers of Tel Rehov,” says Bloch. When they arrived in Israel, they attempted to farm Syrian bees – but failed and had to resort to importing the less aggressive Turkish strains [New Scientist].
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Image: flickr / cygnus921
