Why are some children just bad? This is a question which has followed society for hundreds and hundreds of years. And, despite the advances in science and technology, we still have no idea why some children who come from seemingly good homes have to act out on a consistent basis.
But a study which was published in the scientific journal Pediatrics believes there may be some visible signs involved. The study claims to have found a link between behavioural issues in children and sleep-disordered breathing; sleep-disordered breathing is defined as apnoea in this case.
The study was carried out at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and followed over 13,000 children from infancy through their early childhood.
The study originally found that 45% of this group remained free of any sleep-disordered breathing. 8% of children fell into a worst-case group, which involved children who had breathing problems which persisted after the ages of two and three; a group dubbed by the researchers involved in the project.
By age seven, the research team discovered that those with so-called sleep-disordered breathing were more likely to develop some form of behavioural or emotional disorder by age seven. These disorders included anything from ADHD disorder to anxiety and depression. This link was discovered because 13.5% of children had these kinds of symptoms, as opposed to only 8% of children who had no sleep-disordered breathing problems.
But here’s where the problems with this study arrive. The researchers admitted that they weren’t sure about whether any of these children actually had these disorders out rightly or not because the results are based off of questionnaires given to parents. Now isn’t that a reliable way to gain results? Obviously, it’s not which already leads to much scrutiny.
Ok, so they claimed that they accounted this link by using variables such as parental income, education, race, birth weight, and whether parents smoked. This is all well and good, but did it take into account how much a parent smoked or exactly how much the parent weighed? Of course it didn’t. So, these figures are already looking very sketchy already. And this is before we get into the fact that people who smoke already underestimate exactly how much they smoke.
Continuing on, the researchers went on to say that even with these variables they discovered that sleep-disordered breathing was the biggest factor involved as the researchers plucked out a figure which said that there was a 72% chance of behavioural or emotional symptoms in children at age seven.
Now, this seems like they just pulled this figure out of nothing because if 45% of children didn’t have any breathing problems whilst sleeping then that means 55% did. If 55% did and only 13.5% of these children had any of these behavioural or emotional issues by age seven then where is the 72% figure coming from? Luck?
And let’s look at the figures they gained from sleep-disordered children versus children who had no issues when it comes to any symptoms and issues when they got older. 13.5% and 8% are incredibly close to each other as a 4.5% difference in a study of 13,000 is marginal, to say the least. If another 13,000 study was conducted then would these figures necessarily be the same? I think not, but if they are then I would be surprised.
For now, this writer will be blaming bad parenting and poor discipline when a child decides that it would be funny to throw a brick at another child’s head.
Apparently there just isn’t enough Justin Bieber news in the world already – the videos, songs, pictures, stories and books that adorn every facet of stores and Twitter fall short of the cravings of preteens the world over. With this in mind, Bieber’s mother Pattie Mallette has apparently signed a deal with Revell Books to release the currently titled Nowhere But Up: The Story of Justin Bieber’s Mom, due on September 18. The story reportedly explains her role in turning her offspring from regular Canadian youth into the world’s most famous (and perhaps annoying) teen on the planet.
The main curiosity is knowing just what can be said in a tell-all book about a person who is barely eighteen years of age. Aside from tedious stories about his romantic life with Selena Gomez, even the press has a hard time delving into his private life; and with his mother as his chaperone, how much can there be to tell? Maybe if he’d accepted Slash’s invite to a strip club the book could have a juicy chapter or two.
To make sure no one accuses her of just cashing in on her son’s success though, the book will also detail her own personal trauma, which includes the “abuse and addiction” she suffered in her youth, as well as her attempted suicide at the age of seventeen. As with all such memoirs, she told told Billboard.com that she wants the book to inspire anyone who faces similar hardships (although the cynics among us may well claim that such people are unlikely to be fans of Bieber and thus unlikely to read the book): “I want them to see that no matter how desperate their circumstances may be, they can have hope for a better future.” To prove her dedication to inspiring others, part of any profits from the book will be donated to charity.
Of course, with her son a literary genius it comes as no surprise that Justin will get credited not only in the text but in the crafting of the book too, as he will be contributing the foreword.
Aside from recording, touring, writing the foreword to his mother’s book and courting controversy in the media, Justin will be following up the success of his existing book (First Step 2 Forever: My Story, published in 2010) with Justin Bieber: Just Getting Started later this year. It has also been rumoured that he will be releasing a third book in 2015, entitled Let’s See What Happens Now I Can Legally Drink. Whether his fifteen minutes of fame will be up by then remain to be seen.
America is a country that many revere for its accomplishments and advances in such fields as medicine, technology and military power. It isn’t all stellar news though: America has its fair share of negative reports. One is the well-documented case that it has the highest rate of obesity anywhere in the world, another that it spends more per person on healthcare in the developed world but also ranks last in effectiveness of healthcare in the developed world also. And the latest finding that America would rather stayed a secret is a recent report from the World Health Organisation which shows that America leads the world in smoking-related deaths.
The report shows that of the deaths occurring in the USA, a whopping 23% are supposedly linked to smoking, while Japan and France, renowned as amongst the heaviest smokers on the planet, have 12% and 5% respectively. China, another country with high smoking rates, was spoken of in the report thusly: “The results for China were also interesting with crude proportions of death attributable to tobacco being 12% for men and 11% for women.”
On the surface, these figures are troubling and highlight the need for America to work harder on stamping out the habit. However, a little further analysis portrays a wholly different picture. How is it that a country with a relatively low smoking rate takes the top spot for smoking-related deaths? In fact, 23% is not only the highest in the world but almost twice the global average of 12%. Not only do Japan and France have lower rates of smoking-related deaths than America, they both have higher rates of smoking and lower rates of mortality as a whole. This begs the question: How is it that the people of these countries smoke more, live longer and suffer fewer illnesses related to tobacco? It isn’t the case that these are countries with a life expectancy low enough for the population to die before reaching an age that cancer can kill them – Japan does after all have one of the longest life expectancies in the world. While it has been hypothesised that the Asians have a degree of resistance to lung cancer, this has not been said of other continents and so cannot apply to those in Europe. The vast geographical distance and huge difference in lifestyle between these countries further confuses this issue.
The figures suggest interesting places to focus future research – could it be the type of tobacco Americans smoke that causes the problem, or the way it is cured? Could it be certain additives that American tobacco companies are adding to their cigarettes that other countries do not? Either of those is possible, but it could also be a simple case of miscalculation.
While everyone knows that “smoking-related diseases”, despite their name, afflict non-smokers too, and can be caused by things other than smoking – such as diet, lifestyle and genetics – a number, if not all, of the American states have a check box on the death certificates to state whether tobacco was a primary or secondary factor in the cause of death, and some states have the requirement to tick the box simply if the deceased smoked. In at least some of these states, it isn’t a case of the physician’s final say, but a simple mandatory requirement that if a person smoked and died of a certain disease, they are automatically categorised as a death resulting from smoking. What this means is that a morbidly obese person with a sedentary lifestyle, appalling diet, a genetic history that predisposes him or her to a heart attack and who also smokes will be put down as a smoking-related death – even though there’s a very high chance that any of the numerous lifestyle factors, or indeed genetic history, could have been the real cause of death. This bolsters the number of deaths associated with tobacco, which is ideal for anti-smoking campaigners who can use such numbers to secure further funding to continue their campaign, but in a more objective view, such as the WHO report, it is rather alarming and also detrimental to a real understanding of worldwide health priorities.
America has the largest anti-smoking campaign in the world, and a lot of money is spent at the state and federal level to facilitate it. In 2001, Tobacco Control received $883 million solely from the Master Settlement Agreement – an agreement whereby the tobacco companies paid money to each of the American states to recoup the medical bills of treating smokers. While the $883 million to Tobacco Control will likely be somewhat lower today as part of that money is redirected to other essentials, the anti-smoking movement still commands hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The pharmaceutical industry donates hundreds of millions of dollars to anti-smoking organisations and to back smoking bans in an attempt to encourage smokers to move from tobacco to their own nicotine replacement therapies. Much money is also raised from and donated by the prominent cancer, lung and heart charities. To emphasise the sway held by these groups, in Texas one such foundation has threatened that if the Texas University does not ban smoking on the entire campus, both indoors and out, then it will give its $10 million grant money to another institution – and when the funding group has that sort of leverage over the receiver, there’s never any doubt as to what the results of any grant-funded research will be.
While it’s not easy to determine if America’s unusually high mortality rate from smoking is based on real deaths or falsifying the numbers, it is more than a little peculiar that a country with smoking rates as low as America can have death rates that are so high. The mandatory requirement of classifying any death of a smoker as a smoking-related death may work well for increasing the bank balances of anti-smoking groups, but it does a tremendous disservice to science and true world health efforts as whole. Perhaps if the figures were calculated in the same way as they are in other countries, the percentage would drop considerably.
In the last Ice Age it was thought that all of the existing vegetation at the time of the massive ice sheets had been wiped out by the freezing temperatures and excessive pressure caused by the sheets themselves. But scientists have shown that some vegetation did survive in Scandinavia, which challenges this long-held scientific “truth”.
Originally, modern Scandinavian trees were thought to have arrived when some of the southern species of tree migrated north after the ice age, which was about 9,000 years ago. However, research published in the Science Mag science journal has shown that some conifers survived the ice age by existing on large peaks above the ice or on islands and on the coast.
Professor Eske Willerslev of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen reported that the species survived in small pockets which the ice couldn’t touch, before spreading outwards after the ice melted. But how did they survive in the ice, how did they find the room and shelter needed to stay alive amongst the fraught surroundings?
The answer is nunataks. Nunataks are common in glacial regions and pop out of the ice like a tiny island. They don’t have any ice or snow within its structure, or on the edges of it, which makes them the perfect place for a plant to grow and survive.
To find these results, the researchers used the DNA of two types of modern plant and the composition of the plants in the sediments of lake-core samples; yes, this is incredibly complicated. But to explain it in English, they compared the DNA of the old and the DNA of the new to see how much they matched up. If they were the same, or incredibly similar, then that means they are probably the same species.
However, the only issue with this theory is that modern nunataks in Greenland don’t have any plants growing on them, so how could this have happened in the age of ice? Of course, this doesn’t attack the fact that they have discovered that certain species around today may have existed before the Ice Age, but it does attack their theory as to why.
On a side note, this is why we have to love science because something which has stood as fact for so long has now been challenged. It sure as hell beats other fields of study where most things tend to stay the same all the time.
What do you think about these new findings, and how do you think these plants survived the Ice Age?
One word has dominated the news this week: “Homs” And quite frankly I’m getting tired of it now because nothing different happens from day to day, all they report on is a few more deaths. And then we had to listen to lots of people attempting to analyse something which doesn’t really need to be analysed. But, on the plus side, at least the meaningless talks surrounding the NHS managed to die down for a week; it gives us time to prepare for another week of Jeremy Kyle-style points scoring.
Political Oops of the Week
In hindsight, this was something which really shouldn’t have carried as a story, but at least it provided some needed relief from the cycle of “You are ruining the economy!”, “No, you ruined the economy first.”, and “You are trying to bring Thatcherism back!” crap we are forced to sit through on the Miliband and Cameron show.
This week we were introduced to the media-dubbed “Horsegate” which involved the PM and Rebecca Brooks’ borrowed police horse, and whether he rode it or not.
On Wednesday we started with the PM attempting to laugh off the affair, but still implying that he hadn’t rode the horse by saying that: “the only horses I am interested in are the ones you can put a bet on.” That should have been the end of it, right? Wrong!
On Thursday Mr. Cameron was asked again, but this time he claimed that it was “a matter of record” that he had been riding with Charlie Brooks (Rebecca’s husband) before, but he hadn’t rode with him after the election. Ok, so now we have gone to a denial to begrudgingly agreeing that he has ridden a horse with the husband of the owner of the horse. So that’s a little suspicious, but it wasn’t over yet.
In a surprising twist, it was Jeremy Clarkson who then felt he wasn’t getting enough attention, so he chimed in. He then went on to say that he lives there and he could confirm that the PM hadn’t ridden the horse; along with a Tory source which said that it didn’t know.
And finally, the PM admitted that he had ridden the horse repeatedly. But like any good politician, he went on to provide a eulogy to the now-deceased horse. Create some sympathy, David? Good job, you really are a great politician.
It was like watching a dog attempting to chase its tail all week. Oh, David!
The Painful…
Later this week we all got to watch the vile scenes as militants in Libya were seen on a YouTube video destroying a British war cemetery just outside Benghazi where the heroes of Churchill’s famous desert rats were buried. This was partially painful because Britain had helped, both now and in the Second World War, to free the country from oppression, and that’s the thanks it gets.
But what was painful for many people was the fact that only one day previously David Starkey had attracted a lot of controversy on Question Time when he claimed that: “People don’t like to be freed” [when asked about whether Britain should liberate Syria]. The media and people all across the nation slaughtered him for such “disgusting” remarks, but he’s clearly right as one day later the videos emerge of recently-liberated Libyans destroying a British war cemetery.
He demonstrated through his historical knowledge that the French people were ashamed after they were liberated in the Second World War, and the media just proved how right he was about the Libyan people who, evidently, felt the same way too. David Starkey really should be in politics, but it’s just a shame how someone who’s so right is slammed because he doesn’t conform to the politically correct style of the day.
And the Pointless…
Zynga is breaking away from Facebook! Oh no! Wait, you don’t know who Zynga are? Well Zynga are the American games company which created such “fantastic” and “revolutionary” hits as Farmville and Cityville.
But they are now tired of living in the shadow of Facebook so they are planning to move away from the social networking giant. So, assuming the move goes well, those who want to play their favourite games will now be able to play them away from Facebook. But I just have one query. Who cares?
This is so irrelevant and meaningless that it’s really only relevant to those directly involved in the corporate side of Zynga and Facebook because even if the move goes ahead successfully users will still be able to play the same games through Facebook. So how exactly is this news at all? The answer is that it’s not because nothing is changing for anyone but those behind the scenes, and generally when something only applies behind the scenes of something you don’t find it necessary to report it to the world.
Hey, in the place I work we are deciding to paint the backroom soon, but don’t worry because I contacted the BBC with this important information.
The so Outrageous that it’s Borderline Hilarious
Great news! Now you get to pay even more for your petrol as petrol prices hit a record high this week, again.
Currently, petrol prices after the rise now stand at 137.44p per litre and diesel has now ascended to the dizzying heights of 144.60p a litre. But the kicker is that oil prices have actually fallen from their record high. So why have petrol prices gone up and why are experts still predicting that prices are still going to keep rising regardless?
The answer is that they are going to try and squeeze as much out of us as possible because when was the last time anyone ever saw petrol prices go down for any reason? This writer certainly can’t answer that. But this is only going to spell bad news for the economy as people are naturally going to cut spending on petrol or cut spending in shops because people just don’t have the money to pay for it anymore.
Ah, this is a familiar position.
At this point, the fact that petrol prices just keep going up has stopped being annoying and outrageous and its now just kind of funny because we all know that this is going to come to a bitter end one day. Either electric cars will arrive and the fuel companies will go out of business or people will be protesting, rioting, and the market for stealing fuel will boom just like copper theft did.
And I don’t think many of us will fear that day.
A Positive Outlook for the Week Ahead
With the Syrian army crushing the city of Homs we will be able to see some sort of development in the conflict in Syria, so that’s something to look forward to because we would all like to think that most people want to see some sort of end to the fighting. The conflict will certainly be entering its next destructive phase now.
The subject of gay marriages is appearing again in the news, both in the US and in the UK, and it looks like it’s a victory for common sense and a defeat for bigotry and intolerance as politicians are now starting to challenge the established religions on the subject of marriage. In the past few weeks we have seen a few US states legalise gay marriage, too, and the UK looks like it’s fully on its way to a brighter tomorrow too.
In the US, we will be one step closer to setting the scene for the November elections to determine who will take the most powerful post in the world. With next week’s ‘Super Tuesday’ we should see a comprehensive victory for religious nutcase Rick Santorum or a comprehensive victory for tax-dodgy Mitt Romney. Either way, I’m not predicting anything other than an Obama win this November.
So maybe next week won’t be as bleak and irritating after all…
