Stepping up to help Moms, babies | HeraldNet.com - Local news

Published: Tuesday, December 25, 2012, 12:01 a.m.

As a student-teacher in the 1990s, Krista Linden met children who suffered from a lack of positive parenting.

She met children who started life under circumstances that hampered their physical and mental well-being, she said. Working with a little girl who had fetal alcohol syndrome hurt her heart.

Linden wanted to find a way to help mothers be more successful, and babies more healthy.

Her nonprofit, Step by Step, brings medical professionals and volunteers to 1,400 families every year in three counties, including Snohomish County.

Recent local events included a diaper drive at the Lynnwood Police Department and a holiday party for families just south of the county line. Most families served in Snohomish County live in the Lynnwood, south Everett and Bothell areas.

Step by Step is about "giving Moms that little dose of the encouragement, the resources, the support, to parent well," Linden said.

"If life can be better and start out better for one child, and we can impact hundreds of children, it's very worth it to me," she said.

The group serves families who are expecting babies or who have new babies, Linden said. The families must meet state requirements for need. All of the clients are low-income and have risk factors in the home such as a history of medical problems, substance abuse or domestic violence.

Clients are referred by community partners including the Department of Social and Health Services, schools, medical professionals and churches, said Gail Danforth, a Step by Step administrator and behavioral health specialist. People also arrive by word-of-mouth.

Step by Step helps mothers identify and address concerns in their homes, Linden said. The group also connects families with community resources.

"When you're sitting in the home and you're establishing a relationship with them and you can see what's going on, you can just really get to the root of the problem," she said.

The nonprofit has about 30 paid staff, many of whom are licensed nurses and counselors.

There also are about 700 volunteers who meet with families and help organize events, such as community baby showers in Snohomish County for moms who don't have anyone to throw them a shower.

Volunteer Liz Pakkala, 38, offers interpreting services in multiple languages, especially Spanish, she said.

Step by Step lets her use her language skills in a meaningful way, she said. She can help mothers who need help with their pregnancies and new babies but don't have family support or medical insurance.

"This organization can come and relieve a little of that pain, so the family and the woman can concentrate on taking care of themselves," she said.

The diaper drive held earlier this year in Lynnwood netted hundreds of diapers, police spokeswoman Shannon Sessions said.

Several families in Lynnwood are served by Step by Step, Sessions said. The police department often hosts toy drives and food drives, and diapers seemed like a good idea.

"Diapers to new moms in need can be like gold," she said. "Diapers are expensive. They need them. It was something consumable that we could gather."

The word caught on, and earlier this month a class of fifth-graders at Lynnwood Elementary held a diaper drive for Step By Step as part of a program focused on learning about empathy, school officials said.

Step By Step always needs donations of cash, diapers and electric breast-feeding pumps. Newborn and size-one diapers are the most needed. For more information or to request services, call 1-888-996-0903 or go to stepbystepnews.org.

Rikki King: 425-339-3449; rking@heraldnet.com

Source: http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20121225/NEWS01/712259939

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/science/overstating-roma-history.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Column: Seattle isn't just sleepless, it's loud!

That dull roar still rumbling between your ears a day later is not your imagination.

It's the echo from the 49ers-Seahawks game Sunday night, when an already notoriously loud hometown crowd outdid itself. How?

Start with CenturyLink Field, a U-shaped stadium with cantilevered roofs extending over most of the 67,000 seats in the grandstands, a configuration designed to bounce back sound. Then throw in some fans presumably hopped up on espresso and, thanks to a later starting time, some more who stopped at Safeco Field on the way over to quaff 24-oz. beers offered through a promotion at a mere $4.50 each.

Next, mix in their dislike for a nasty NFC West rival and especially coach Jim Harbaugh, who smacked the Washington Huskies every chance he got when he was at Stanford and has been tormenting Seahawks coach Pete Carroll ever since.

Finally, throw in that early, unexpected lead and ? voila! ? a near-perfect sound storm.

Just know it could have been worse.

"Obviously, they were jacked up last night," said Fred Gaudelli, the innovative producer of "Sunday Night Football" on NBC. "But in my mind, it's one of the underrated sports towns in America. Actually, the special challenge there is always to convey how loud it actually is.

"We knew that going in, plus we knew the 49ers were the team their fans hate the most. So at Wednesday's regular 'brainstorming session,' we turn to our head audio engineer and said, 'How do we make viewers understand you can't hear the person next to you most of the time, even if he's yelling?' We wanted to be ready."

Gaudelli knows what can happen to a team that ventures into Seattle without preparing for the wall of noise.

In 2005, the visiting New York Giants collected 11 false-start penalties in a single game, the start of a five-year span when opponents piled up league-leading totals, averaging twice as many there as the Seahawks. The Carolina Panthers once practiced for a game there by dragging loudspeakers down to the practice field and simulating the sound of a jet engine. If that sounds over the top, it is, by about 18 decibels. Jets are routinely measured at around 130, Century Link's best is only 112.

Gaudelli and his crew hatched a plan to demonstrate that by having sideline reporter Michele Tafoya speak into a microphone as the sound reverberated, then take a step back and try again. When they ran through it before the game, he had a stadium staffer simulate the crowd noise over the PA system. At the point Tafoya's words were drowned out the system was cranked to 50 percent of volume.

"So I asked the guy, is it really going to be that loud? He looked at me," Gaudelli chuckled into the phone, "and said, 'Double it.'"

The guy was right. That much was apparent at the start of the broadcast, when Tafoya interviewed Carroll ? remember, the game hadn't even begun ? and didn't dare stand anywhere but uncomfortably close.

Uncomfortable might be the right word to describe the 49ers as well, at least in the early going, when they had to burn timeouts as relatively inexperienced quarterback Colin Kaepernick was having trouble getting the play calls from his sideline. Right about then, he probably wished the 49ers had devoted more time to mastering their silent snap counts.

"The crowd's explosive, it really is," Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson said. "They love us so much, and it brings so much energy to our football team. They keep us in the game, obviously, and they keep us alert."

Experts have been arguing over the worth of home-field advantage for decades. Most concluded that in those places where it's statistically significant, it's usually because of a number of factors and not just one, such as noise. Since CenturyLink opened up in 2002, Seattle is 58-29 at home, a 67 percent winning clip that ranks the Seahawks sixth in the NFL over that span. That's a far cry from New England's league-best 72-15 record (83 percent).

But the Seahawks haven't had Tom Brady at quarterback, and their road record is dismal enough (33-55) that the boost the fans at CenturyLink have provided might be best measured by their last four playoff appearances. If that's not exact enough, try this: After a 2001 earthquake shook a viaduct that runs along the water and near the stadium, the University of Washington set up a lab to track future "seismic events." One of them actually occurred during Marshawn Lynch's thundering, winning, 67-yard touchdown run in a memorable upset of the then-defending Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints on Jan. 9, 2011.

Yet while we know how Seattle fans make so much noise, why remains the subject of much speculation. Gaudelli, like a lot of people, blames coffee. But I'm going with a theory advanced Sunday night by announcer Al Michaels, who suggested the locals roar non-stop because showcase games gives them a rare chance to remind the rest of the country they're there.

"For media people on the East Coast," he said half in jest, "Seattle might as well be Bulgaria."

___

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org and follow him at Twitter.com/JimLitke.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/column-seattle-isnt-just-sleepless-loud-231910992--nfl.html

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Decision to give a group effort in the brain

Dec. 23, 2012 ? A monkey would probably never agree that it is better to give than to receive, but they do apparently get some reward from giving to another monkey.

During a task in which rhesus macaques had control over whether they or another monkey would receive a squirt of fruit juice, three distinct areas of the brain were found to be involved in weighing benefits to oneself against benefits to the other, according to new research by Duke University researchers.

The team used sensitive electrodes to detect the activity of individual neurons as the animals weighed different scenarios, such as whether to reward themselves, the other monkey or nobody at all. Three areas of the brain were seen to weigh the problem differently depending on the social context of the reward. The research appears Dec. 24 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Using a computer screen to allocate juice rewards, the monkeys preferred to reward themselves first and foremost. But they also chose to reward the other monkey when it was either that or nothing for either of them. They also were more likely to give the reward to a monkey they knew over one they didn't, preferred to give to lower status than higher status monkeys, and had almost no interest in giving the juice to an inanimate object.

Calculating the social aspects of the reward system seems to be a combination of action by two centers involved in calculating all sorts of rewards and a third center that adds the social dimension, according to lead researcher Michael Platt, director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

The orbital frontal cortex, right above the eyes, was activated when calculating rewards to the self. The anterior cingulate sulcus in the middle of the top of the brain seemed to calculate giving up a reward. But both centers appear "divorced from social context," Platt said. A third area, the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACCg), seemed to "care a lot about what happened to the other monkey," Platt said.

Based on results of various combinations of the reward-giving scenario the monkeys were put through, it would appear that neurons in the ACCg encode both the giving and receiving of rewards, and do so in a remarkably similar way.

The use of single-neuron electrodes to measure the activity of brain areas gives a much more precise picture than brain imaging, Platt said. Even the best imaging available now is "a six-second snapshot of tens of thousands of neurons," which are typically operating in milliseconds.

What the team has seen happening is consistent with other studies of damaged ACCg regions in which animals lost their typical hesitation about retrieving food when facing social choices. This same region of the brain is active in people when they empathize with someone else.

"Many neurons in the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACCg) respond both when monkeys choose a drink for themselves and when they choose to give a drink to another monkey," Platt said. "One might view these as sort of mirror neurons for the reward system." The region is active as an animal merely watches another animal receiving a reward without having one themselves.

The research is another piece of the puzzle as neuroscientists search for the roots of charity and social behavior in our species and others. There have been two schools of thought about how the social reward system is set up, Platt said. One holds that there is generic circuitry for rewards that has been adapted to our social behavior because it helped humans and other social animals like monkeys thrive. Another school holds that social behavior is so important to humans and other highly social animals like monkeys that there may be some special circuits for it, Platt said.

This finding, in macaques that have only a very distant common ancestor with us and are "not a particularly prosocial animal," suggests that "this specialized social circuitry evolved a long time ago presumably to support cooperative behavior," Platt said.

The research was supported by grants from the Ruth K. Broad Biomedical Foundation, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, National Institute of Mental Health (MH095894), and Department of Defense (W81XWH-11-1-0584).

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Duke University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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Journal Reference:

1. Steve W C Chang, Jean-Fran?ois Gari?py, Michael L Platt. Neuronal reference frames for social decisions in primate frontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3287

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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/VCVs1pkBLcg/121223152732.htm

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