Hasta La Gadget!

In 2012, South Korean singer PSY took the world by storm with his “Gangnam Style” music video, which eventually turned into a super, mega hit and an overall internet sensation. Along the way, the video also became the first one ever to get to 1 billi…

When we were young, we were taught that food was for eating, not playing. Food has always been fuel for our bodies, and it’s important to eat it, but what’s so wrong with having a little fun along the way? Not to be misunderstood, I’m not talking about squishing your spaghetti around your plate. Everything can be artistic and fun in its own way, so it only makes sense that giving you a way to draw on your food will make it more entertaining rather than just shoveling it in your face.

This is a bird shaped pen which you stock full of a spice, with which you can draw on your food or plate. You’ll have to press a button for anything to come out, so there’s no worry of it spilling out at a pace faster than you were expecting. It can be used with a myriad of spices, but you’ll want to check and make sure which ones are truly “compatible”.

The Cinnibird is easy to clean as it has a removable drawer, and the internal battery should last for about 3 months before needing to be replaced. This is the perfect way to leave notes on food for loved ones, for your morning coffee, or to add a little decoration to your evening meal. This is currently available through a successfully funded crowdfunding campaign for $45, and will retail for $60 once it hits the market.

Available for crowdfunding on Kickstarter

 
[ Cinnibird encourages you to play with your food copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

 Lightbulbs, washing machines, thermostats, fridges and locks. If you believe the Internet Of Things salespeople, over the next 10 years, everything in your home is set to become connected. Imagine a world where you could turn on your porch light from the office, or unlock your door for a visitor, all from a smartphone app. Well, like a growing number of early smart home adopters, I have seen… Read More

Virginia’s Board of Health voted Thursday to begin a process of revising tough restrictions on abortion clinics, in a setback for abortion opponents.

Both abortion rights advocates and opponents had rallied in Richmond, Virginia, ahead of the decision, which was set in motion with the election of Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe last year. The board voted 13-2 to move ahead with the Notice of Intended Regulatory Action, as six new McAuliffe appointees joined seven other board members to amend the current rules that single out such clinics from those performing other outpatient procedures.

The regulations pushed by former Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli were a part of a wave of so-called “TRAP Laws,” or Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, advanced by Republican legislators in a number of states. Such laws require abortion clinics to comply with the same construction standards as new hospitals. Five clinics had already been forced to close in Virginia because of the prohibitive cost to expand hallways and parking lots and install locker rooms, janitors’ closets and ventilation systems.

Reproductive rights proponents say that such regulations are medically unnecessary and aim to restrict access to the procedure, while abortion opponents say they’re instead meant to make the procedure safer for patients. The Virginia Department of Health estimated that complying with the regulations could force each of the state’s 18 remaining abortion clinics to spend over $2.5 million each.

The board met to reconsider the rules under the direction of Virginia Health Commissioner Dr. Marissa Levine, who announced in October that, in her view, the regulations ought to be amended “to be aligned more accurately with medical best practices.” Of the 14,279 public comments the state’s health department received ahead of its decision, more than 10,000 requested that the regulations be repealed.

NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia hailed the board’s decision to move ahead with amendments to the regulations after the vote.

“We are absolutely thrilled with the Board’s vote to move forward with amendments to medically-inappropriate restrictions on women’s health centers,” the group’s executive director, Tarina Keene, said in a statement. “The Board’s decision today is a first, crucial step towards ensuring that these politically-motivated restrictions are revised, and that our safe, trusted women’s health care centers can remain open and accessible for Virginia’s women and families.”

McAuliffe also commended the board in a statement Thursday.

“These clinics provide essential preventive care and cancer screenings to many women and families and unfortunately were facing closure due to onerous regulations that were the result of politics being inserted into the regulatory process,” he said.

Existing rules dictating clinic architectural and operational requirements will remain in place for up to two years as the state’s executive branch, health department and board of health consider specific amendments.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, 22 states require facilities where abortion services are provided to meet ambulatory surgical center standards, even though less than 0.3 percent of abortion patients experience complications that requires hospitalization.

Tonight I stand before you with several goals. I want you to leave this beautiful place, Cipriani, on Monday night, November 17, 2014, armed with a lot of facts about the state of the world of children and what you can do to make a difference. I also want you to know me, and why I continue to have passion and personal resolve to advocate and protect at-risk children whether in the US or abroad. Finally, I want you to know that WWO does a great job. There are no borders when it comes to the care and safety of children on the Earth.

We salute all parents in the audience tonight who created families thru adoption, me included. November is National Adoption Month. I thank all of you who were inspired to support the kids “left behind” after you adopted your children.

Zayna Mahbub, who is here tonight, with her parents, is 11 years old and was adopted from Pakistan as a very young infant. She is one of the many reasons why I was inspired to work with orphans. She is an artist and has a brilliant painting in our silent auction. Go see it. She is gifted and resilient. She was adopted from abroad and eager to celebrate her own adoption. She is committed to supporting orphans in their own countries.

There are 550 guests tonight, both new and old guests. It is key that you leave this event knowing why you came tonight and to understand why you need to support WWO going forward.

I am a pediatrician and former teacher and had a destiny to be a doctor through my family history, but more importantly, I became an adoption medicine specialist, assisting parents preparing to adopt orphans from Russia, China, Korea, Guatemala, Taiwan, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Romania, Kazakhstan, among many other countries. I followed these children long term and grew to understand their many medical, developmental and psychological challenges; it was that bird’s eye view as an adoption pediatrician that led me to conceive of WWO in 1997, to provide services to children in their own communities; it was obvious that adoption would be an option for a very small few, but not the solution for the millions of unprotected children here and around the world.

I would never have evaluated orphans in institutions in their countries and discovered that there are millions of orphans around the world unless I had been the “orphan doctor”. Many of you in this audience know WWO from its early years when I was practicing pediatrics and traveling abroad and learning about the outrageously unjust, tragic and unimaginable conditions of children living in orphanages.

WWO started sending Orphan Rangers/volunteers in 1998 to Russia to work to collect essential statistics on growth failure, developmental delays, attachment disorder/depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in orphans and vulnerable/disabled children. We were — and we are — about metrics so that we can design programs based on data and prove their efficacy. That will never change.

I am a scientist and I am curious. Our program officers ask questions so that WWO can know the needs of the children in their communities. We now have a research department at WWO, headed by Dr. Anthony Salandy. He creates logic models and teaches research to our teams abroad. We have data for all our programs to test them and grow them and to report and publish our data. We attend and participate in academic conferences to present the data and we are about excellence and science, not just about doing good.

On November 20, 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), was born; we celebrate its 25th year anniversary this week.

“Millions of children have their fundamental rights violated every day” in spite of the agreement of 200 nations that this convention/international law is necessary and likely the most comprehensive human rights document that exists to date…”
This is an important statement from Dr.Susan Bissell, Chief of Child Protection, in her recent report on this important anniversary when she first started at UNICEF.
The Convention calls for:

• Freedom from violence, abuse, hazardous employment, exploitation, abduction or sale
• Adequate nutrition
• Free compulsory primary education
• Adequate health care
• Equal treatment regardless of gender, race, or cultural background
• The right to express opinions and freedom of thought in matters affecting them

Safe exposure/access to leisure, play, culture, and art -this is the work of WWO along with the work through which we help children heal from the trauma of loss and abandonment. It is one of my goals in life that all children can reflect on their own thoughts and imagination. We want them to know their creativity intimately and love, enjoy and revel in it. That is the beauty of being a unique human being.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD is a book that I recently read. It instructs us about the effects of psychological trauma and it teaches us how to heal.

Trauma happens to us — our friends, our families and our neighbors. Those dark secrets about trauma are here in this room tonight.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research reveals:

• 1 in 5 Americans was sexually molested as a child
• 1 in 4 was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body
• 1 in 3 couples engage in physical violence
• 1 in 4 of us grew up with alcoholic relatives
• 1 out of 8 witnessed their mother being beaten or hit
• 3 million children in the US currently have a history of abuse and neglect
• 12 million women currently have been raped in the US

I have wondered all these years why I loved orphans so deeply and why I was drawn to them as if I were one. I finally realized that I was one of them. I was sexually molested, when I was a 5 year old, by my brother’s gym teacher, while he played basketball in the gym. I spent years trying to piece this part of my early life together and I went to therapy to try and figure out how it played a role in my life, but not a single therapist thought it was important enough to explore. My life is a story of resiliency. The brains of young children who are sexually abused are altered by this trauma. Responses to stress can cause activation of this early trauma and make it hard for these children to self-regulate and comfort themselves. They are in a state of fight or flight unnecessarily. This is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

It was not until the early 80s that PTSD became a diagnosis for psychiatrists. Hundreds of thousands of veterans suffered from PTSD from the atrocities of war. They had no one to go to and they lived fragmented and tortured lives. I am grateful to be able to openly discuss my personal experience and there is now a lot of support for survivors, from organizations like Joyful Heart started by Mariska Hargitay and her husband, Peter Hermann, who encouraged me to be open and who sits here tonight in support of WWO and its work. Thanks Peter.

In an article Titled “America’s Youngest Outcasts” the report being issued Monday, November 17, 2014, by the National Center on Family Homelessness, “The number of homeless children in the U.S. has surged in recent years to an all-time high, amounting to one child in every 30, according to a comprehensive state-by-state report that blames the nation’s high poverty rate, the lack of affordable housing and the impacts of pervasive domestic violence. The National Center on Family Homelessness calculates that nearly 2.5 million American children were homeless at some point in 2013. The number is based on the Department of Education’s latest count of “1.3 million homeless children in public schools, supplemented by estimates of homeless pre-school children not counted by the DOE…”

At a recent conference held by the Atlantic Health System in New Jersey, I heard Dr. Leslie Lieberman discuss ACE…Adverse Childhood Experiences. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study is one of the largest investigations ever conducted to assess associations between childhood maltreatment and later-life health and well-being. The study is a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego.
More than 17,000 Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) members undergoing a comprehensive physical examination chose to provide detailed information about their childhood experience of abuse, neglect, and family dysfunction. To date, more than 50 scientific articles have been published and more than 100 conference and workshop presentations have been made.

The ACE Study findings suggest that certain experiences are major risk factors for the leading causes of illness and death as well as poor quality of life in the United States. It is critical to understand how some of the worst health and social problems in our nation can arise as a consequence of adverse childhood experiences. Realizing these connections is likely to improve efforts towards prevention and recovery.
Tonight I want you and I to face this trauma and violence toward children so that you know more about why Worldwide Orphans thrives and grows…we are part of a global offensive against violence toward children.

3 new branches of science have led to the understanding of the effects of psychological trauma, abuse, and neglect:
• neuro-science,
• interpersonal neuro-biology,
• developmental psychopathology

WWO’s perspective and unique approach to the needs of orphans and vulnerable children around the world is holistic, organic and scientific. We use camp, recreation, toy libraries, sport and the arts to help kids become independent and successful in their own communities.

Our programs are about healing and reconstituting the inherent resilience of the child. “Resilience is the capacity of an individual to prepare for disruptions, to recover from shocks and stresses and to adapt and grow from the disruptive experience. As an individual builds resilience, you become more able to prevent or mitigate stresses and shocks. You can identify and be better able to respond to those you can’t predict or avoid. You can bounce back from a crisis, learn from it, and be revitalized.” This amazing quote is from Dr. Judith Rodin’s new book, The Resilience Dividend.

We are a community in this room every year and I want to grow this community.
I like to think that rather than humanitarian, we are communitarian. We are active members of our American communities, but more importantly we see the significance of not having borders. We are part of a global community.

The escaping children from Central America in 2014 were victims of violence. The sign held up by frightened misinformed US citizens at our border, “Not our children, not our problem” is not an American core value. There must be equitable and humane solutions for all children running from the threat of violence. This is our responsibility. Syrian children in refugee camps dying, nearly 10,000 of them last year, are our responsibility. Kidnapped Nigerian girls are ours to cherish. Please don’t hide from it all… it’s not too big. Don’t run for cover, just pick a piece and do what you can…a little bit counts.

I always see the gala as a moment of recommitment for Worldwide Orphans and its supporters. I hope we can all pledge tonight to advocate fiercely against violence and trauma against children. Cherishing and protecting all the world’s children is the way to ensure the future of our world. Thank you.