Wait, Gingrich is the humane one?

I scanned the results of the latest GOP debate and while it didn\'t turn up anything earth shattering, it speaks volumes that in the current GOP, Newt Gingrich is the humane voice. I\'m not sure if he was ever an anti-imigration partisan, or if he\'s genuinely not a nice, likeable person. But when he led the Republican house in the 90s, I recall a lot of anit-immigrant sentinement too. In fact, its what finally motivated my family to get our U.S. Citizenship. For additional weirdness, lets create a \"red card\", which to most non-Americans, means you\'re getting expelled from a soccer game.

At Tuesday\'s Republican debate, Gingrich didn\'t call for making all illegal immigrants citizens, or even allowing all 11 million or so to stay in America, but for some who\'ve been here for decades to get \"red cards,\" establishing a special new class of non-citizens.

Gingrich Is Brave for Calling for the Humane Treatment of Humans

Tags: Family, Immigration, Politics, Soccer

Grokking Zend Framework 2

I\'ve found these to be helpful in porting a ZF1 app to ZF2, which is in Beta1 status at the moment.  Rob Allen\'s tutorial -updated for the beta, worked for me out of the box using git submodule.  The programmers reference manual for groking new concepts, although sometimes it takes a couple of reads. Finally, looking at the code for the EdpUser module helped me figure out how to use DI and how to structure a functional module.

Once you start to understand the Dependency Injection container and the new Module bootstrap, in many ways its easier to get up and running than with ZF1.  I love that modules are first class citizens in the new MVC implementation.

Tags: Zend Framework

Debunking the sugar hyperactivity myth

And yet, I\'m sure countless parents will rather trust their own anecdotal experience.

Let's cut to the chase: sugar doesn't make kids hyper. There have been at least twelvetrials of various diets investigating different levels of sugar in children's diets.  That's more studies than are often done on drugs. None of them detected any differences in behavior between children who had eaten sugar and those who hadn't.  These studies included sugar from candy, chocolate, and natural sources.  Some of them were short-term, and some of them were long term. Some of them focused on children with ADHD. Some of them even included only children who were considered "sensitive" to sugar. In all of them, children did not behave differently after eating something full of sugar or something sugar-free.

Sugar, and candy, do not make kids hyper

Tags: Science