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ranes are large birds with long legs and necks. In Japan and other East Asian cultures, they represent luck and long life.
Japanese tradition says a person who folds one thousand paper cranes gets the right to make a wish. Some schoolchildren in the United States have been folding cranes. They want to show they care about the victims of the March eleventh earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
Almost forty Japanese-American students attend Somerville Elementary School in Ridgewood, New Jersey. But all five hundred twenty-five students at the school have heard about the disasters. So they have decorated their school with paper origami cranes. Their wish is for a speedy recovery for the Japanese people.
Art teacher Samantha Stankiewicz says the activity gives students a way to express empathy for victims.
SAMANTHA STANKIEWICZ: "For children, the folding of the cranes has been a really positive way for them to feel like they’re actively engaged, even though the cranes are symbolic."
These students thought out loud as they folded cranes in the school library.
BOY: "The crane is a symbol of hope, so we try to have a lot of hope for those people in Japan."
GIRL: "It makes me feel really happy that everyone's caring for another country."
GIRL: "I feel sad for them, like really sad for them. But I also feel happy for us, because we are really trying to help out."
And that help is not just in the form of paper cranes. The school principal, Lorna Oates-Santos, says children at Somerville Elementary have raised about two thousand dollars for disaster relief agencies.
LORNA OATES-SANTOS: "We will be donating that money to the American Red Cross and Save the Children. They are two groups that are ready on the ground in Japan to help the people of Japan."
The school has a television club that produces weekly programs on different subjects. Fourth-grade teacher Gabrielle King is director of the club, and says the students are involved in the school's efforts.
GABRIELLE KING: "When the earthquake happened, the children wanted to know what they could do to inform other students and raise awareness for the people in Japan. So, we decided to do a show on the earthquake, and to also making the cranes, the origami cranes."
Some American children have shown their feelings for the victims in Japan in other ways. Yasuhisa Kawamura is Japan's deputy consul general in New York.
YASUHISA KAWAMURA: "One American young girl dropped by the consulate a couple days ago with her own painting. The painting shows the two countries, Japan and the United States, shaking hands over the ocean, and saying 'We are with you.' So, we are very, very moved and touched by this young girl's expression."
Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I’m Faith Lapidus. And I’m Steve Ember.
This week: some places to see in Chicago.
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Early last century, the poet Carl Sandburg described Chicago, Illinois, as the "City of the Big Shoulders." That still seems right. Chicago does a lot of things in a big way.
For example, the city is a big transportation center in the Midwest for trains, trucks, ships and planes.
Manufacturing is one of the biggest industries in Chicago.
And Chicago has one of America’s busiest ports. The city stretches for about 40 kilometers along the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. The Saint Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959. It connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.
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Chicago is big on music. Visitors can find all kinds, from classical to hip-hop. Some of the best places for jazz and blues are along Rush Street.
There are lots of things to see and hear in Chicago.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, people can see fine Asian art and much more.
At the Museum of Science and Industry, visitors crowd a working coal mine and a World War Two submarine.
At the Adler Planetarium, people see stars and learn about space. And at the Shedd Aquarium, they see colorful fish and learn about life under the sea.
Not surprisingly Chicago has a lot of big buildings. The two tallest are the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Building.
Many people take architectural tours around Chicago. There are many interesting landmarks and building designs to see.
The Wrigley Building, near the Chicago River, opened in the early 1920s. This office building is hard to miss. It is bright white.
Downtown Chicago, the business center, is known as the Loop. There are many offices and stores. The Loop includes the financial district around LaSalle Street. The financial district is home to the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Stock Exchange and many banks.
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Another big thing to see, and feel, is the weather. After all, another name for Chicago is the "Windy City." People turn their shoulders to the strong winds off Lake Michigan. In winter, Chicago gets a lot of snow; in summer, the weather is hot and sticky.
Almost three million people live in Chicago. Chicago is America's third largest city, after New York and Los Angeles. More than nine million people live in surrounding communities.
Over the years many immigrants have settled in Chicago. Many of its people have ethnic roots in Poland, Germany, Ireland and Italy. More recent immigrants have come from all over the world.
Today just under half the population of the city of Chicago is non-Hispanic white. The city has large black and Hispanic populations. Four percent of the people are Asian.
When people in Chicago want to be outdoors, one place to go is Millennium Park. In this City of Big Shoulders, almost everything about Millennium Park is big. It covers ten hectares. It took almost nine years to finish.
Millennium Park is on Michigan Avenue near Lake Michigan. It officially opened in 2004. It cost 475 million dollars.
Millennium Park has gardens and places for music, dance and ice skating. It also has one of the largest outdoor sculptures in the world. Anish Kapoor of Britain created this work of public art. It weighs one 110 tons.
A huge rounded form of shiny steel captures a looking-glass image of the Chicago skyline and the clouds above. The sculpture is called "Cloud Gate."
The Spanish artist Jaume Plensa designed the Crown Fountain in Millennium Park. The fountain is surely one of the most unusual in the world.
The artist set a pool of water between two tall glass towers. Video images appear on the towers. The images are a series of pictures of nature and people’s faces. The water appears to pour from their mouths. The faces represent the many different people of Chicago.
Millennium Park has music in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion. The architect Frank Gehry designed this modern-looking structure. It can seat 4,000 people under its open-top steel ribbons. There is also an area called the Great Lawn to listen to the music. The sound system makes the music seem like it is coming from inside a concert hall.
The pavilion is a home for the Grant Park Music Festival. Listen as the Grant Park Symphony plays "Julius Caesar: Symphonic Epilogue After Shakespeare," Opus Twenty-eight, composed by Robert Kurka.
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In warm weather, people eat outdoors in the McCormick Tribune Plaza and Ice Rink in Millennium Park. In winter, skaters come out to enjoy the ice.
Visitors can also walk and ride bicycles in several areas of the plaza.
An indoor space has room for 300 bicycles. There are also places where people who ride their bikes to work can clean up and change clothes.
Another part of Millennium Park is the Lurie Garden. This one-hectare area is bordered by what is called the "Shoulder Hedge." Trees almost five meters tall form a living wall around the garden.
"Shoulder" in this case is meant to honor the poet Carl Sandburg. One hundred thirty-eight kinds of plants grow in the Lurie Garden.
Many people enjoy the activities at Millennium Park. But critics wonder why the city needed a park so big and costly. They say the city should have spent the money instead on its more than 600 public schools. They say it could have helped the poor.
Twenty-one percent of people in the city of Chicago were living below the poverty level in 2004. The official poverty rate nationally that year was about 13%.
Other people say Millennium Park has improved the appearance of the area where it was built. The mayor and many other city leaders believed a big park would bring more people, more homes and more businesses to the area.
Mayor Richard M. Daley is the son of former Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley. The father is still remembered for his control over the local Democratic Party organization. The city has not elected a Republican mayor since 1915.
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Another big development, the Chicago Cultural Center, stands across Michigan Avenue from Millennium Park. It contains the city's official Visitor Information Center. It is also a showplace for the arts.
The building that now houses the cultural center was completed in 1897. It held the first permanent collection of the Chicago Public Library. It served as library headquarters until 1991.
There are white walls made of marble from Carrara, Italy. And there are two Tiffany domes. The bigger dome is one of the largest Tiffany designs in the world. It rises almost 12 meters above the floor.
People say the restored Chicago Cultural Center looks like a home for kings and queens. Some call it "the People’s Palace."
Visitors can listen to all kinds of music at the Chicago Cultural Center. For example, Monday through Friday, there are free LunchBreak Concerts. Listen now to Middle Eastern music performed by Safwan Matni, a popular LunchBreak Concert guest artist.
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Dancers from Hubbard Street Two in Chicago have also performed at the Cultural Center. Hubbard Street Two is a six-member dance group. It trains promising dancers between the ages of 17 and 25. They perform works by young choreographers.
Carl Sandburg would probably not have been surprised by big projects like the Chicago Cultural Center and Millennium Park. The poet wrote: "Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive … "
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Our program was written by Jerilyn Watson and produced by Caty Weaver. I’m Steve Ember.
And I’m Faith Lapidus. Read and listen to our programs at voaspecialenglish.com. And join us again next week for THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. We leave you with Frank Sinatra singing about "My Kind of Town."
Assignments assigned so far Assignment # 6: Click here for the instructions - Due June 30, 2011. Assignment # 5: Write a >1000 words long essay in which you argue for and against various views about the origin of human beings on earth. Due April 30, 2011. Assignment # 4: Make a 1 (or little more) minute long video of yourself presenting on any topic in English and send it to me via email or bluetooth on or before March 24, 2011. Or conduct a mini search on a topic of your choice and prepare an oral presentation to be done in class before March 24, 2011. Assignment # 3: Write an academic essay (typed) of any length on any topic. Due and to be handed in on or before March 25, 2011. Assignment # 2: Join Walter Sisulu University: Academic Literacy on facebook and upload a short video in which you tell us (in English) about you. Or, under the discussions link, write your biography from a third person perspective (ie as if someone is writing about you). Your biography should not be less than 100 words and should NOT mention the names of your parents/guardians and your siblings. Due on March 15, 2011. NB Bios posted after the due date will not be graded. Assignment # 1: Go to any university library and get a book. You should bring the book to class on Tues, February 8, and be able to explain how (ie the steps you followed) you got the book in the library. Due February 8, 2011, but was turned in a week later due to certain circumstances.
Topics covered so far
Note-Taking
Parts of Speech & Meaning making- Basics
Info Gathering:Using the library and Online Resources.
Writing an Essay - Intro/Expository/Supporting/Concluding paragraphs
Have you ever felt lumps under the skin on the sides of your neck when you were sick? Those might be lymph nodes. They can get swollen and painful but their job is to fight infection. Lymph nodes are part of the body's defenses known as the lymphatic system.
This complex system throughout the body makes and transports a protective fluid called lymph. Lymph is made of white blood cells, proteins and fats.
In a patient with breast cancer, the cancer can spread to the large number of lymph nodes under the arm. Doctors have traditionally removed many of these lymph nodes in the hope of removing all the cancer.
But the latest research finds nothing to gain by removing so many lymph nodes.
Doctors have two choices when breast cancer starts to spread. They can do what is called a sentinel node biopsy. They remove the main growth and one or two lymph nodes nearest to it.
Or they can take more aggressive action and remove a lot of lymph nodes. But that can lead to shoulder pain and permanent swelling of the arm.
Dr. Armando Giuiliano at the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, California, was a leader of the study. He found that a sentinel node biopsy can be enough to eliminate all of the cancer. And the patient does not need to stay in a hospital to have it done.
Dr. Giuliano and researchers at other American cancer centers studied almost nine hundred breast cancer patients. In each case, the cancer had spread to no more than two lymph nodes.
Half of the women had the traditional surgery. Doctors removed an average of seventeen lymph nodes. The other half had the simpler operation with just one or two nodes removed. Then both groups received radiation treatment and chemotherapy drugs.
Doctor Giuliano says rates of survival five years later showed that the less invasive operation was just as successful as the more aggressive action.
ARMANDO GIULIANO: "The five-year survival was about ninety-two percent regardless of which operation. And, wonderfully, women who had the sentinel node biopsy alone did just as well as the women who had the more radical operation."
The study appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Some experts say the findings could change the way surgeons treat early breast cancers that have spread to the lymph nodes. But other doctors say they want more proof before they make a change.
Do you dream? Do you create pictures and stories in your mind as you sleep? Today, we are going to explore dreaming. People have had ideas about the meaning and importance of dreams throughout history. Today brain researchers are learning even more about dreams.
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Dreams are expressions of thoughts, feelings and events that pass through our mind while we are sleeping. People dream about one to two hours each night. We may have four to seven dreams in one night. Everybody dreams. But only some people remember their dreams.
The word "dream" comes from an old word in English that means "joy" and "music." Our dreams often include all the senses – smells, sounds, sights, tastes and things we touch. We dream in color. Sometimes we dream the same dream over and over again. These repeated dreams are often unpleasant. They may even be nightmares -- bad dreams that frighten us.
Artists, writers and scientists sometimes say they get ideas from dreams. For example, the singer Paul McCartney of the Beatles said he awakened one day with the music for the song "Yesterday" in his head. The writer Mary Shelley said she had a very strong dream about a scientist using a machine to make a creature come alive. When she awakened, she began to write her book about a scientist named Frankenstein who creates a frightening monster.
People have been trying to decide what dreams mean for thousands of years. Ancient Greeks and Romans believed dreams provided messages from the gods. Sometimes people who could understand dreams would help military leaders in battle.
In ancient Egypt, people who could explain dreams were believed to be special. In the Christian Bible, there are more than seven hundred comments or stories about dreams. In China, people believed that dreams were a way to visit with family members who had died. Some Native American tribes and Mexican civilizations believed dreams were a different world we visit when we sleep.
In Europe, people believed that dreams were evil and could lead people to do bad things. Two hundred years ago, people awakened after four or five hours of sleep to think about their dreams or talk about them with other people. Then they returned to sleep for another four to five hours.
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Early in the twentieth century, two famous scientists developed different ideas about dreams. Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud published a book called "The Interpretation of Dreams" in nineteen hundred. Freud believed people often dream about things they want but cannot have. These dreams are often linked to sex and aggression.
For Freud, dreams were full of hidden meaning. He tried to understand dreams as a way to understand people and why they acted or thought in certain ways. Freud believed that every thought and every action started deep in our brains. He thought dreams could be an important way to understand what is happening in our brains.
Freud told people what their dreams meant as a way of helping them solve problems or understand their worries. For example, Freud said when people dream of flying or swinging, they want to be free of their childhood. When a person dreams that a brother or sister or parent has died, the dreamer is really hiding feelings of hatred for that person. Or a desire to have what the other person has.
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung worked closely with Freud for several years. But he developed very different ideas about dreams. Jung believed dreams could help people grow and understand themselves. He believed dreams provide solutions to problems we face when we are awake.
He also believed dreams tell us something about ourselves and our relations with other people. He did not believe dreams hide our feelings about sex or aggression.
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Today we know more about the science of dreaming because researchers can take pictures of people's brains while they are sleeping.
In nineteen fifty-three, scientists discovered a special kind of sleep called REM or rapid eye movement. Our eyes move back and forth very quickly while they are closed. Our bodies go through several periods of sleep each night. REM sleep is the fourth period. We enter REM sleep four to seven times each night. During REM sleep, our bodies do not move at all. This is the time when we dream. If people are awakened during their REM sleep, they will remember their dreams almost ninety percent of the time. This is true even for people who say they do not dream.
One kind of dreaming is called lucid dreaming. People know during a dream that they are dreaming.
An organization in Canada called the Dreams Foundation believes you can train yourself to have lucid dreams by paying very close attention to your dreams and writing them down. The Dreams Foundation believes this is one way to become more imaginative and creative. It is possible to take classes on the Internet to learn how to remember dreams and use what you learn in your daily life.
There is a great deal of other information about dreams and dreaming on the Internet. There is even a collection of more than twenty thousand descriptions of dreams called the DreamBank. People between the ages of seven and seventy-four made these dream reports. People can search this collection to help understand dreams or they can add reports about their own dreams.
Scientists have done serious research about dreams. The International Association for the Study of Dreams holds a meeting every year. At one meeting scientists talked about ways to help victims of crime who have nightmares. Scientists have also studied dreams and creativity, dreams of sick people and dreams of children. The group will be meeting next month in Chicago, Illinois. An Australian professor named Robert Moss will talk about how dreams have influenced history.
For example, he says Harriet Tubman was able to help American slaves escape to freedom because she saw herself flying like a bird in her dreams. Mister Moss also teaches an Internet course to help people explore and understand their dreams.
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Scientists who study dreaming often attach wires to the head of a person who is sleeping. The wires record electrical activity in the brain. These studies show that the part of the brain in which we feel emotion is very active when we dream.
The front part of the brain is much less active; this is the center of our higher level thinking processes like organization and memory. Some scientists believe this is why our dreams often seem strange and out of order.
Researcher Rosalind Cartwright says the study of dreams is changing because scientists are now spending more time trying to understand why some people have problems sleeping. Miz Cartwright says for people who sleep well, dreaming can help them control their emotions during the day. Researchers are still trying to understand the importanceof dreams for people who do not sleep well and often wake during the night.
Other researchers are studying how dreaming helps our bodies work with problems and very sad emotions. Robert Stickgold is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University in Massachusetts. Doctor Stickgold says that when we dream, the brain is trying to make sense of the world. It does so by putting our memories together in different ways to make new connections and relationships. Doctor Stickgold believes that dreaming is a biological process. He does not agree with Sigmund Freud that dreaming is the way we express our hidden feelings and desires.
Scientists believe it is important to keep researching dreams. Doctor Stickgold says it has been more than one hundred years since Sigmund Freud published his important book about dreaming. Yet there is still no agreement on exactly how the brain works when we are dreaming or why we dream.
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This program was written by Karen Leggett and produced by Mario Ritter. I'm Barbara Klein.
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A new programme, funded largely by the United States President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), will provide $130-million in grants to African institutions, with the aim of strengthening medical education and research training. Dr Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health (NIH), said the goals of the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (Mepi) are ambitious. "The intention here is, over five years, to train no less than 140 000 healthcare workers and to provide a real platform for a wide variety of research activities going forward. This is not something that has been attempted before," he said.
In addition to supporting doctors, nurses and community healthcare workers, the programme will help train individuals who can be successful in applying for grant support to carry out research.
Collins said that for too many years, research in Africa has been unsupported and that often it has been carried out by foreign institutions. The future of healthcare in Africa would be brightest if the capacity for research on the continent is strengthened, he added.
SA medical schools to benefit
Two South African institutions -- the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and Stellenbosch University -- are among the dozen African universities involved in the programme and will receive a portion of the funding through a series of grants. US officials and representatives from the medicals schools are meeting in Johannesburg this week to build networks and finds ways to collaborate.
Dr Umesh Lalloo, dean of the faculty of medicine at UKZN said that, based on the huge shortage of health workers in the country, the Mepi grant couldn't have come at a more opportune moment. "It empowers us as an institution to train the next cadre of healthcare academic leaders and ensure that these come from the communities of the people who we wish to serve," he said.
Lalloo said the programme would be useful in light of Minister of Health Aaron Motsoaledi's drive to increase the intake of students at medial schools. "They plan to expand the size of our academic health complex so that we would hopefully be able to double the intake of doctors," he said.
"It's easy to say we can admit double the number of medical students but if you do not provide the appropriate faculty support, you would undermine your training and create frustrated graduates." The fuding would provide a platform to train clinical scientists and academics who could support that greater numbers of students.
Plugging the brain drain
Delegates at the Mepi meeting discussed the implications of the brain drain on healthcare in Africa. According to the NHI, one-fifth of the physicians trained in Africa migrate to high-income countries within five years of completing their training.
Eric Goosby, the United States Global Aids Coordinator, said the issue was a complex one but he believed that when people are given a living wage and provided with incentives, such as research opportunities, many would choose to stay at home, near their extended families.
Dr Jean Nachega, from the department of medicine at the University of Stellenbosch, agreed, saying there are ways to influence highly trained professionals to stay in the country. "Providing a supporting environment for clinical work and research, supporting [doctors] with some small-scale research support would be the way to go," he said. FARANAAZ PARKER -on Mail & Guardian Mar 09 2011 07:43
In the early nineteen fifties, researchers found that people scored lower on intelligence tests if they spoke more than one language. Research in the sixties found the opposite. So which is it?
Researchers presented their newest studies last month at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The latest evidence shows that being bilingual does not necessarily make people smarter. But researcher Ellen Bialystock says it probably does make you better at certain skills.
ELLEN BIALYSTOCK: "Imagine driving down the highway. There’s many things that could capture your attention and you really need to be able to monitor all of them. Why would bilingualism make you any better at that?"
And the answer, she says, is that bilingual people are often better at controlling their attention -- a function called the executive control system.
ELLEN BIALYSTOCK: "It’s quite possibly the most important cognitive system we have because it's where all of your decisions about what to attend to, what to ignore, what to process are made."
Ms. Bialystock is a psychology professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. She says the best method to measure the executive control system is called the Stroop Test. A person is shown words in different colors. The person has to ignore the word but say the color. The problem is that the words are all names of colors.
ELLEN BIALYSTOCK: "So you would have the word blue written in red, but you have to say red. But blue is so salient, it's just lighting up all these circuits in your brain, and you really want to say blue. So you need a mechanism to override that so that you can say red. That’s the executive control system."
Her work shows that bilingual people continually practice this function. They have to, because both languages are active in their brain at the same time. They need to suppress one to be able to speak in the other.
This mental exercise might help in other ways, too. Researchers say bilingual children are better able to separate a word from its meaning, and more likely to have friends from different cultures. Bilingual adults are often four to five years later than others in developing dementia or Alzheimer's disease.
Foreign language study has increased in the United States. But linguist Alison Mackey at Georgetown University points out that English-speaking countries are still far behind the rest of the world.
ALISON MACKEY: "In England, like in the United States, bilingualism is seen as something special and unique and something to be commented on and perhaps work towards, whereas in many other parts of the world being bilingual is just seen as a natural part of life."
And that's the VOA Special English Health Report, written by Kelly Nuxoll. Tell us about your experience learning languages. I'm Steve Ember.
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