WhatAreKidsSaying.com, founded by University of Michigan graduate and former NFL Linebacker, Ian Gold, offers kids and teens a platform to express their thoughts and opinions, without fear of judgment or criticism.

“The greatest resource on our planet is not measured by the NASDAQ or the Dow. Our greatest resource is the innocent and profound nature of our kids and teens, and it is extremely important that we began to capture it,” says founder, Ian Gold.

Adding to a growing list of his “off the field” endeavors is NFL superstar Wide Receiver, Greg Jennings. The Green Bay Packer is the WhatAreKidsSaying.com National Spokesperson. Jennings, a self-proclaimed poet, is excited about the opportunity to begin encouraging kids and teens to let their voices be heard.

Gaining national notoriety as a vehicle of self-expression and creativity, WhatAreKidsSaying.com is loaded with features! After kids and teens become members, they can participate in a variety of creative writing contests. They will also be given their very own time capsule, where they may store personal writings, photos, and music, rediscovering their treasures for years to come!

The site says WhatAreKidsSaying.com is not a social network. It is a safe and secure environment where kids and teens have the freedom to express themselves freely. The website is for kids and teens that are 18 years old and younger. Please feel free to contact us at rsvp (at) whatarekidssaying (dot) com.

The Radio Two presenter will be quizzing the new BBC boss on his northern roots and his plans for the BBC’s move to MediaCityUK in 2011 during the Q&A session.

The event, held at the Lowry, Salford Quays, and organised by Salford University’s International Media Centre, will also see Mark’s co-presenter, Stuart Maconie speaking about how the UK must recognise television outside London.

The Pies and Prejudice author will be criticising the fact that, while 80% of viewers live outside London, the same percentage of all television content focuses on London and the south of England - and will call for the balance to be redressed.

The 16th annual conference is the only national event to focus on television outside London, and will feature the industry’s biggest names such as Channel 4’s Head of News and Current Affairs, Dorothy Byrne; Commissioning Editor of Channel Five, Sue Davidson; and Director of ITV Regions, Mike Jermey.

Salford University’s Professor Ron Cook said: “With the advent of MediaCityUK, there has never been a better time to be involved in TV production outside London.

“We’re delighted that Peter Salmon will be making his first public appearance at our event, and we are honoured to welcome Mark Radcliffe, Stuart Maconie, and our other prestigious speakers. It promises to be a fascinating insight into the future of television in the nations and regions.”

Technorati Tags: MediaCityUK, radio two, DJ Mark Radcliffe

Manish Malik, electronic and computer engineering lecturer at the
University of Portsmouth, learned the proverb when he was a boy growing
up in New Delhi. It tells the story of how four blind men perceive an
elephant as a pillar, a snake, a rope and an ancient fan, depending on
which part they touch. It is only when the blind men’s guru asks them
to share their ideas that they can visualize the creature.

Manish uses this proverb to illustrate to students that each man had
his own version of the truth; he wants students to share their own
‘versions of the truth’ by tapping into each other’s brain power online.

“By sharing contrasting viewpoints I really feel that students’
learning is enhanced. It is important that they do not restrict
themselves to only studying one perspective,” he said.

Manish said that it can be difficult to see who needs the most help
in the classroom but using online communities allows him to identify
those who are struggling.

“As students communicate online it encourages the less confident
students to have a voice. I can observe their interaction 24/7 and
facilitate knowledge building and sharing. I hope that they benefit
from being in the vicinity of their ‘guru’ in this way.”

The Higher Education Academy’s engineering subject centre is sponsor
of the national teaching awards and Manish is one of only three
academics who have been short-listed.

Head of Department, Dr Misha Filip said: “Manish’s innovative
approaches to enhancing the learning experience are popular with our
students and we are delighted that his work has been recognised.”

Manish will have his teaching assessed in February 2009 and the
winner will be announced at the annual teaching awards ceremony in July.

Archaeologists from York Archaeological Trust, commissioned by the University to carry out the exploratory dig, made the discovery in an area of extensive prehistoric farming landscape of fields, trackways and buildings dating back to at least 300 BC.

And they believe the skull, which was found on its own in a muddy pit, may have been a ritual offering.

As Finds Officer Rachel Cubitt cleaned the soil-covered skull’s outer surface, she felt something move inside the cranium. Peering through the base of the skull, she spotted an unusual yellow substance.

“It jogged my memory of a university lecture on the rare survival of ancient brain tissue. We gave the skull special conservation treatment as a result, and sought expert medical opinion,” she said.

York Hospital’s sophisticated CT scanner was used to produce startlingly clear images of the skull’s contents. Philip Duffey, Consultant Neurologist at the Hospital said: “I’m amazed and excited that scanning has shown structures which appear to be unequivocally of brain origin. I think that it will be very important to establish how these structures have survived, whether there are traces of biological material within them and, if not, what is their composition.”

Dr Sonia O’Connor, Research Fellow in Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford added: “The survival of brain remains where no other soft tissues are preserved is extremely rare. This brain is particularly exciting because it is very well preserved, even though it is the oldest recorded find of this type in the UK, and one of the earliest worldwide.”

The find is the second major discovery during archaeological investigations on the site of the University’s £500 million campus expansion. Earlier this year, a team from the University’s Department of Archaeology unearthed the skeleton of a man believed to be one of Britain’s earliest victims of tuberculosis in a shallow grave. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the man died in the fourth century late-Roman period

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of York, Professor Brian Cantor, said: “The skull is another stunning discovery and its further study will provide us with incomparable insights into life in the Iron Age.”

There are now plans for a team of specialists to carry out further tests on the skull. They hope to solve the mystery of why such brains survive death and burial, what this might tell us about burial practices, the nature of the burial environment and, perhaps, about the individual whose brain it was.

TODAY ONLY 8 December 2008

FREE signature gift wrap on iPod touch, and FREE SHIPPING on all products on the Apple Online UK Store.

Sorry its such short notice, I literally JUST this minute got it through!

These are the findings of new ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) funded research, by Professors Paul Gregg, Carol Propper and Katharina Janke from the CMPO (Centre for Market and Public Organisation) at the University of Bristol.

The study set out to investigate whether left-handedness for contemporary children - for whom handedness is no longer a source of stigma - is associated with differential cognitive development.

The research, which looked at over 10,000 children from the Children of the 90s study, uses clinical measures of handedness. These are matched to data on each child’s performance at school on national tests - the key stage 1, 2 and 3 tests, taken at the ages of seven, 11 and 14 respectively, and an IQ test.

The analysis shows that:

· Left-handed children perform slightly less well in terms of the IQ test and the key stage 2 and key stage 3 tests.

· In addition, there is no evidence that the gap in cognitive tests diminishes as children get older.

· But the size of the effect is modest. A typical left-handed child has test scores one per cent below those of their right-handed contemporary.

· While there is some penalty to being left-handed, particularly for girls, the main penalty is to children who do not have a dominant hand early in life.

· Children with ‘mixed-handedness’ have lower development, which first appears in the early years but remains present at age 14, particularly for girls.

The researchers comment:

“Our results suggest that schools could use mixed-handedness as a marker for children who are likely to need greater intervention.

“As tests for mixed-handedness are simple to administer, they would be a cheap way of identifying children who otherwise might slip behind their peers.”

The detail of the Children of the 90s data means that the researchers can rule out other factors that might have caused a gap in cognitive development between left- and right-handed children - for example, being from a poorer home background, family size, parents’ handedness and child’s birth weight.

The University’s Centre for Market and Public Organisation is a leading research centre, combining expertise in economics, geography and law. The Centre’s objective is to study the intersection between the public and private sectors of the economy, and in particular to understand the right way to organise and deliver public services. The Centre aims to develop research, contribute to the public debate and inform policy-making.

Link to full story at the University of Bristol

When did you first become interested in art?
For as far as I can remember I have always enjoyed drawing.  My parents say that I started around age 3 and that they had to buy me a brick of paper otherwise I would have drawn on anything that I could get my hands on; [...]

   It could be said that the calming, civil and proper mannerisms so readily attributed to the people of the British Isles arises from the descriptive terms of their representational language, and that the language itself helps humanity arrive close to (if not at) a common understanding of the world.

The cultivated patterns of thought wrought by the compartmentalized tenses and mental schematics inherent in the uses of the English language allows there to be an open ended form of culture to evolve across various cultures. 

       Of course, America took that and ran with it, sometimes to ends that baffle and amaze the rest of the world, yet it is the language which is the subtle catalyst for such practice as attempting to describe the world with accurate linguistic symbols.

     If it comes to language as the source of our communications, then what value is art?

That question was raised by others before me, and will most likely be asked and answered in some quasi-certain fashion fitting for the era in which the answer is given ad infinitum.

In that spirit, I call attention to two possible answers and dance, with the skill of my lexicon, about how promotion of artistic endeavors is the universal appeal of art, as this paragraph has interjected the notion with careful, open-ended, intention.

     If the arts were simple reflections of the world as viewed by the artist, then the art would mirror reality so closely that there would be little to no detectable difference between art and reality due to the perception of each viewer of the work differing from every other viewer. 

Once the recognition of reality is made, the placement of the artifice (the Art) itself, lends to reality a sheer notion of how reality should be (a correction of sorts) in the eyes of the artists as transmuted through his or her skills.

      The best rendition I can think of to illustrate this point is the wonderfully eccentric Hyper-Realist artist, J. Seward Johnson, who created many illustrious works and keeps running that 10 acre park in Hamilton, New Jersey called Grounds For Sculpture http://www.groundsforsculpture.org/c_jjohn.htm

    My favorite of his works, although there are many throughout the world, would have to be “Were You Invited?” based on Renoir’s “The Luncheon of the Boating Party.” The sculpture is a three dimension rendering of the scene depicted in the painting with the hilarious addition of four contemporary gentlemen behind the persons in the painting.  Seeing it is worth a trip across the Atlantic, and I recommend it for any artist and any lover of artistic works.

      Off the beaten path of the realm of the International Sculptors Center (www.sculpture.org) there are the grassroots artists that contend, with their own lives, that art needs to be created with more fervent reaction to the status quo; that the norms as we would like to believe them to be are much higher than the qualities of daily life that most people cope with. 

       In that realm we find artists who make use of the debris of society to create distorted reflections of the society in order to foster a correction of perception in others so that they may view our shared reality as the base of churning imagery meant to entrance and encapsulate the minds of persons comprising the culture.  Those artists do not play upon the classic and tradition forms of artistic expression, but rather inflict a reorganization of cultural images with the status of artistry, and thus compel their contemporaries to glance with an honest intention of awareness upon the world in which they exist.

   The best of such daring persons, in my humble opinion, to elucidate the meaning within the last paragraph is that multi-forum artist in NYC who weighs his life and time, energy and creativity against the immense tempest of mass media market culture, George Leutz (http://www.goddessdelirious.com )

   Be sure to click on the “art” link a take a look.  The twister board land mine piece started an interesting discourse in Trenton, New Jersey a couple of years ago, and the collages are displayed in various locations.

     So there.

Crafted with the expertise of a Bachelor of English, this post has relayed a couple of really good artists to you for your interest.  And, seeing as all people use a language of one kind or another, and that people like to communicate, it seems to me that it is the celebration through discussion of artists which is a universal quality of art; despite the symbols used, we all like to discuss the arrangers of those symbols.

All good things.

Jo