Friday, January 25, 2013

Career Opportunity: Deadline, February 8, 2013. USDA Executive Potential Program, GS-13 to GS-15 (permanent, full-time employees) Nomination Period Re-opened


USDA Executive Potential Program, GS-13 to GS-15

Main Content
USDA Executive Potential ProgramGS-13 to GS-15 (permanent, full-time employees) Nomination Period Re-opened
Program Overview:  The Executive Potential Program is hosted by the USDA Graduate School and is designed to enhance participant’s leadership effectiveness. The core curriculum is centered around the Office of Personnel Management’s Executive Core Qualifications with an emphasis on Leading Change. 
Eligibility:  All applicants must be permanent, full-time employees.
Funding:  Tuition funded through the Agency centralized training funds. The participant’s office, directorate or region is responsible for all associated travel costs.
Nomination Requirements: 
  • Current resume
  • Applicant Program Expectations (memorandum to Executive Review Board discussing purpose for applying, potential leadership ability and application of new skills and knowledge)
  • Supervisor’s Letter of Recommendation
  • Standard Form 182 Form (Request, Authorization, Agreement and Certification of Training Form)
  • USDA  program application including essays responses
Nomination Deadline:  February 8, 2013
Point of Contacts:  Dynia.Beaty, 202-212-2084 or Darren.Moten, 202-212-2082
Last Updated: 
01/17/2013 - 16:28

Saturday, January 19, 2013

What Are Your Rights During a Police Traffic Stop?


What Are Your Rights During a Police Traffic Stop?thumbnail
Speeding is among the most common causes of traffic stops.
Getting stopped and questioned by police is a reality that nearly all drivers face at some point in their traveling life. Whether the outcome is a citation, verbal warning or criminal charge, most motorists have only a hazy understanding, at best, of their constitutional rights. Knowing when to stand on those rights can make a big difference in how the actual traffic stop turns out.

Driver Responses

Acknowledging the stop by slowing down and pulling over to the nearest safe area is the driver's first response. For stops that occur at night, drivers fearing the possibility of police impersonators are within their legal rights to proceed to a more visible public place, such as a service station, for example.
Driver Responses (Photo: Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images)


Remaining Silent

Refusing to answer questions beyond providing insurance, license and registration information ranks among the most basic legal rights, as outlined by the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment. As long as the driver's attitude isn't misread as combativeness, there is no immediate problem from invoking this right against self-incrimination.
Not speaking to officers is a basic legal right. (Photo: Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images)

Vehicle Searches

Searching a vehicle is limited under the "plain view doctrine," which requires officers obtain warrants for looking at the interior, such as the glove compartment, or any area that's not visible at a glance. Unless the driver consents, the officer must find a probable cause to search the

Vehicle searches are governed by specific constitutional doctrines. (Photo: Thinkstock Images/Comstock/Getty Images)

Body Searches

If an officer requests a body search, he is only allowed to pat down outer layers of clothing to check drivers and passengers for possible weapons. If necessary, the officer may reach into a pocket to pull out the weapon. Otherwise, going through someone's pockets is only permissible at the time of arrest.


Body Searches (Photo: Thinkstock/Comstock/Getty Images)


http://www.ehow.com/list_6309838_rights-during-police-traffic-stop_.html?utm_source=outbrain&utm_medium=test24#page=0




Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Monday, February 20, 2013. Washington, D.C. AN EVENING WITH DANNY GLOVER, PRESENTED BY AFRICAN PASSION WINES


AN EVENING WITH DANNY GLOVER, PRESENTED BY AFRICAN PASSION WINES

JOIN US:

FEBRUARY 20, 2013

AN EVENING WITH DANNY GLOVER,

PRESENTED BY AFRICA PASSION WINES 


African Passion Wines, a new South African wine making its debut in the United States, will raise funds to support human rights and social justice in Africa during “An Evening with Danny Glover,” a party and meet and greet on February 20 at 6 p.m. at Eatonville restaurant (2121 14th St NW) in Washington, D.C.

Join us at “An Evening with Danny Glover” which will include a band, heavy hors’ doeuvres, an opportunity to meet and take photos with Danny Glover, as well as a special gift for each guest as they depart. 

African Passion and TransAfrica Forum are launching the fundraising partnership featuring renowned actor, activist and TransAfrica board chair Danny Glover, who also will serve as spokesperson for African Passion wines. In addition to this fundraising event, 10 percent of the profit from the sale of African Passion wines nationwide will benefit TransAfrica Forum.

TransAfrica is the oldest and largest African American human rights and social justice advocacy organization in the United States.

It promotes diversity and equity in the foreign policy arena and justice for the African World. TransAfrica is an educational and organizing center that encourages human interest viewpoints in the U.S. foreign policy arena and advocates for justice for the people of Africa and the African Diaspora.



http://transafrica.org/events/2013/1/14/an-evening-with-danny-glover-presented-by-african-passion-wi.html

Some children who are accurately diagnosed in early childhood with autism lose the symptoms and the diagnosis as they grow older


DHHS, NIH News

http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jan2013/nimh-15.htm

Study documents that some children lose autism diagnosis


Small group with confirmed autism now on par with mainstream peers-NIH-funded study


Some children who are accurately diagnosed in early childhood with autism lose the symptoms and the diagnosis as they grow older, a study supported by the National Institutes of Health has confirmed. The research team made the finding by carefully documenting a prior diagnosis of autism in a small group of school-age children and young adults with no current symptoms of the disorder.

The report is the first of a series that will probe more deeply into the nature of the change in these children’s status. Having been diagnosed at one time with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), these young people now appear to be on par with typically developing peers. The study team is continuing to analyze data on changes in brain function in these children and whether they have subtle residual social deficits. The team is also reviewing records on the types of interventions the children received, and to what extent they may have played a role in the transition.

"Although the diagnosis of autism is not usually lost over time, the findings suggest that there is a very wide range of possible outcomes," said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. "For an individual child, the outcome may be knowable only with time and after some years of intervention. Subsequent reports from this study should tell us more about the nature of autism and the role of therapy and other factors in the long term outcome for these children."

The study, led by Deborah Fein, Ph.D., at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, recruited 34 optimal outcome children, who had received a diagnosis of autism in early life and were now reportedly functioning no differently than their mainstream peers. For comparison, the 34 children were matched by age, sex, and nonverbal IQ with 44 children with high-functioning autism, and 34 typically developing peers. Participants ranged in age from 8 to 21 years old.

Prior studies had examined the possibility of a loss of diagnosis, but questions remained regarding the accuracy of the initial diagnosis, and whether children who ultimately appeared similar to their mainstream peers initially had a relatively mild form of autism. In this study, early diagnostic reports by clinicians with expertise in autism diagnosis were reviewed by the investigators. As a second step to ensure accuracy, a diagnostic expert, without knowledge of the child’s current status, reviewed reports in which the earlier diagnosis had been deleted. The results suggested that children in the optimal outcome group had milder social deficits than the high functioning autism group in early childhood, but had other symptoms, related to communication and repetitive behavior, that were as severe as in the latter group.

The investigators evaluated the current status of the children using standard cognitive and observational tests and parent questionnaires. The optimal outcome children had to be in regular education classrooms with no special education services aimed at autism. They now showed no signs of problems with language, face recognition, communication, and social interaction.

This study cannot provide information on what percentage of children diagnosed with ASD might eventually lose the symptoms. Study investigators have collected a variety of information on the children, including structural and functional brain imaging data, psychiatric outcomes, and information on the therapies that the children received. Analysis of those data, which will be reported in subsequent papers, may shed light on questions such as whether the changes in diagnosis resulted from a normalizing of brain function, or if these children's brains were able to compensate for autism-related difficulties. The verbal IQs of the optimal outcome children were slightly higher than those with high functioning autism. 

Additional study may reveal whether IQ may have been a factor in the transition they made.

"All children with ASD are capable of making progress with intensive therapy, but with our current state of knowledge most do not achieve the kind of optimal outcome that we are studying," said Dr. Fein. "Our hope is that further research will help us better understand the mechanisms of change so that each child can have the best possible life."

The mission of the NIMH is to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery and cure. 

For more information, visit the http://www.nimh.nih.gov.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. 

For more information about NIH and its programs, visithttp://www.nih.gov.

NIH...Turning Discovery Into Health ®

Reference
Fein D, Barton M, Eigsti IM, Kelley, E, Naigles L, Schultz RT, Stevens M, Helt M, Orinstein A, Rosenthal M, Troyb E, Tyson K. Optimal outcome in individuals with a history of autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry DOI: 10.111/jcpp.12037 

Project Number: R01 MH 076189

Saturday, January 12, 2013

The Greater Good Science Center: The Wisdom of Babies

CORE THEMES:     Gratitude    Altruism    Compassion    Empathy    Forgiveness    Happiness    Mindfulness

By Mary Gordon | July 27, 2011 |
 
As Roots of Empathy gears up for its U.S. expansion, founder Mary Gordon reveals how the program has nurtured compassion around the world, one child at a time.

This month, we feature videos of a Greater Good presentation by Mary Gordon, the founder of Roots of Empathy, a world-renowned program that brings babies into classrooms to help teach emotional literacy. In this excerpt from her talk, Ms. Gordon describes the inspiration for her program and shares moving stories of its success.

For years I worked with families who were very abusive to their children. Over time, I came to realize that all of the suffering that the children collected—whether it was domestic violence or child abuse or neglect—was a result of the absence of empathy in the parent.

Roots of Empathy

There wasn’t one of those parents who woke up and decided, “Today is the day I’m going to hurt my child.” These were not monsters; these were people who I loved, actually.

I remember working with a group of teenage mothers who had all lived through sexual or physical abuse as children and were now struggling with addiction. They had great difficulty empathizing with their children. When the children would fall down, the mothers would say, “No pain, no gain.” And this could be a little toddler learning how to walk.

I saw that if you haven’t experienced love, it’s very difficult to know how to love.

So what can we do to break this cycle of abuse and neglect?

My idea was to focus on the attachment relationship between parent and child. I believe that we inherit the capacity for empathy—that we are all intuitively empathic—but this capacity can wither on the vine if a child never experiences empathy in the attachment relationship with his or her parents. So why not learn from the attachment relationship?

That idea motivated me to launch Roots of Empathy in 1996. Roots of Empathy is a classroom-based program for children in kindergarten through grade eight. Our mission is to build more caring, peaceful, and civil societies by raising levels of empathy in children.

Really the heart of the program is bringing the attachment relationship into the classroom: Every month for nine months, we bring an infant into the classroom with its parents, accompanied by a Roots of Empathy instructor. Children watch love grow over a whole school year; they watch confidence and security and emotional attunement between parent and child grow as well.




In addition to the family visits, the Roots of Empathy instructor visits the classroom days before the family visit, to help the children prepare for it, and days after the family visit, to help the children reflect on it, for a total of 27 Roots of Empathy visits over the year.

Through these visits we teach emotional literacy. Every time the baby demonstrates some emotion, the children talk about the baby’s intention and what the baby must be feeling. They are learning the language for their feelings.

I remember once when we had children in a fourth grade class talking about a time when they felt sad; we were helping them understand that we all feel sad and lonely at times, but we can help one another. And this little girl, out of the blue, said, “I felt sad when my mommy gave me away because we didn’t afford good food.”

Nobody said anything at the time. But the next day, most of the children in the class came with food. The majority of the children quietly in the cloakroom gave the food to the little girl. But what was so poignant was how some of the children said, “This is for your mommy, so your mommy can get you back.”

Clearly we’ve not begun to plumb the depths of the human heart, and I think it beats most deeply in our children. Very often little children are more emotionally literate than we are.


Roots of Empathy


I think we in North America are emotionally illiterate. We worry about our traditional literacy rates, but we should be more worried, I think, about our emotional literacy, our ability to connect to ourselves and one another. In schools, we teach children to read, but if we don’t teach them to relate to others, they will be lost in life—lost in their relationships, they will not have success in their jobs, and we will not have peace in the world. It’s our mountains and our continents and our oceans that divide us. But it is our similarities through our emotions that connect us.

In Roots of Empathy, children can see their similarities to others through the baby. When children observe every dimension of “their” baby—every hiccup, every smile, every anxious glance—they learn about the baby’s temperament traits.

For example, is the baby high intensity or low intensity, and what does that mean? The baby cries frequently, loudly, and long—that’s an intense baby. This helps the children to understand themselves and gives them permission to love themselves if they are intense, because we all agree we love the baby, whether the baby is high intensity or low intensity.

“Oh I think you’re very intense, Billy,” one child said to another after a visit from their baby.

“Why do you think I’m very intense?” asked Billy.

“Because you have meltdowns all the time.”

“Yes,” said Billy, “so I’m like our baby! Pretty cool!”

Another thing we do in Roots of Empathy is keep an emotion barometer, where the children say whether they’re feeling great, not so great, or in the middle. Then we look at the whole list and ask the children what they observe. Nobody particularly notices who said what, but they’re astounded if they are one of the children who isn’t feeling too happy that day and they see there are other people who aren’t happy. There’s such isolation in our negative feelings: It’s easy to be happy together, but it’s hard for a child to talk about being lonely and scared.

And the lovely thing that happens when children have insights into how another person feels—empathy—is that it provides a break against aggression.



Sure enough, we know from independent research on Roots of Empathy that its greatest effect is in decreasing aggression among children—a hugely important result, because aggression is the gateway to all other kinds of bad outcomes for children. Many people have applauded the program for combating bullying. I had never intended for it to be an anti-bullying program; it was a happy accident that it did reduce all kinds of bullying.


The research also suggests we are improving children’s emotional literacy. When compared with other students, Roots of Empathy students demonstrate significantly better understanding of their own and others’ emotions.

What’s more, the research shows that Roots of Empathy creates more caring and supportive children—they’re kinder, more likely to share and help their classmates. They also feel more supported by their classmate and teacher, and they feel a greater sense of autonomy than other children do.
Amazingly, students at every grade level continue to show these improvements in their behavior three years after completing Roots of Empathy.

Children in Roots of Empathy also have much more knowledge than other children about parenting and the needs of babies. So many parents with whom I used to work shook their babies to paralysis, deafness, blindness, or death simply because they didn’t understand that babies cry because of their emotional needs, not just their physical needs—they could be crying just because they wanted to be held. If children really can understand the emotional life of a baby, they can parent beautifully as adults.

After starting as a pilot program with 150 children in Toronto 15 years ago, Roots of Empathy has now spread across Canada and across the world. This past school year, more than 47,000 children participated in Canada, in about 1,900 classrooms and 1,300 schools. In the fall of 2011, every Canadian province will be taking part in the program. It is delivered in English and French and reaches rural, urban, and remote communities, including Aboriginal communities in Canada. To date, Roots of Empathy has reached more than 363,000 children across the country. We have also launched a “sister” program, Seeds of Empathy, for younger children, three to five years of age, in childcare centers.

We also have programs in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Northern Ireland, New Zealand, and Germany. The program is just now taking off in the United States, with a program in Seattle and new ones launching in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area this fall. We are planning to reach other countries soon.

Roots of Empathy


When we pair some of these Roots of Empathy classrooms—when Aboriginal children in northern Ontario communicate with Maori children in New Zealand, for instance—they see how very alike they are. They say exactly the same kinds of things about their babies. They say exactly the same kinds of things about their families. They say exactly the same kinds of things about their friends.

And at the end of the year, when they make wishes for their babies, as all Roots of Empathy classes do at the end of the year, they wish for the same things. And what they wish should be on the policy tables of every country on the planet. They wish that the baby will be happy. They wish that the baby will be healthy. They wish that the baby will always have a good friend. They wish that the baby won’t have asthma—that’s clearly the little children with asthma. They wish that the baby will never be bullied—that’s some child who has suffered. They wish that the baby will have a daddy, and they wish that the mommy won’t have to go to work.

Every classroom has an armada of broken hearts, and poor teachers have such an incredible job. I had one teacher call me up last year. “I didn’t want to have Roots of Empathy,” he said. “I don’t know anything about babies—what did I want a baby in my classroom for? But my principal made me have it.”
“Really, I don’t know what to say to you,” he continued. “But I had intended to retire in June, and now because of Roots of Empathy I’m teaching for two more years to catch up on all those children I didn’t see.”

There’s no child that we should ever give up on. What Roots of Empathy offers is a pedagogy of hope, helping children find their voice—often through art—to share what’s in their heart.

Childhood is a very short season, and we know so much can be done to allow children to lead happy and productive lives. In the folds of a child’s brain, we have the potential for compassion, we have the makings of dreams, and we have without question the hope of tomorrow. Because it’s really on the breath of little children that the moral future of the universe rests.



Copyright 2013 The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley

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