Lee.org

I took note of this article because our preschool participated in the study and did the right thing. They replaced their carpets (and lots of other people should too!!) with natural wool because it’s been found that the chemicals that made rugs stain resistant have chemicals that are bad for people… especially people that crawl a lot!

The science: there are a lot of related chemicals that use flourine to make themselves stain resistant. The Teflon in pans,  PFAS (poly-flouroalkyl substances), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), and a bunch more. They put them in rugs to make them stain resistant but it’s bad stuff. It rubs off on kids hands, they lick their hands, and messes with their bodies in serious, long term ways.

Here are some community resources for students with disabilities in the bay area

SNAP swim program in Berkeley and Challenger baseball leagues

Bay Area Outreach & Recreation Program (BORP)
Xenophon Therapeutic Riding Center

Kids Gym, Berkeley
This 10,000-square-foot facility is the crème de la crème for indoor play when you’ve got a kid who needs to get moving! Their open gym is available for kids up at 11 years old (plus their caregivers) and offers swings, an indoor zip line, toys for fine motor skills development, crash mats, pillows and more. Kids will work on skills like balance, coordination and sharing without even knowing it! Need a break from all the stimulation? Head to the quiet room for some down time. Check the schedule for special events like circle time, kids yoga and everyone’s favorite–the dance party.
2920 Seventh Street
Berkeley, CA

Magical Bridge Playground, Palo Alto
Touted as one of the nation’s most inclusive playgrounds, the Magical Bridge opened its Palo Alto location in April 2015 to pleased children and parents alike. With five different “play zones” to choose from, kids can swing, sway, spin and slide to their heart’s content. The music zone was provided to motivate interaction, facilitate socialization and improve social skills among children. Pretend play is encouraged throughout the playground but especially in the two-story playhouse that is fully accessible to all children via ramps and bridges.
Mitchell Park
600 East Meadow Road
Palo Alto, CA

Grins ‘n’ Giggles Party Space
Established by Gatepath, a nonprofit serving individuals with developmental disabilities and their families for more than 98 years, Grins ‘n’ Giggles party space was designed with specialized indoor and outdoor play structures to accommodate children of all abilities and accessible for those with special needs and disabilities. Best of all, it’s available year-round, rain or shine. Grins ‘n’ Giggles is staffed by credentialed early childhood educators with experience in caring for children of all abilities, who will help parents plan a fun-filled day of activities, which could include face painting, art projects, bounce house jumping, parachute games and guided play.
Grins ‘n’ Giggles
McCarthy Center for Children & Families
1764 Marco Polo Way
Burlingame, CA

Rotary PlayGarden, San Jose
Donated by the Rotary of San Jose in 2015, this park aims to enable children with special needs to play alongside their siblings and friends. Right near the airport (with loads of planes flying overhead!), the park offers a wheelchair accessible merry-go-round (moved by kid power!), slides, swings and all sorts of kinetic art to get kids exploring. The entire play area is fenced for safety but there’s not a ton of shade there so go on a cloudy day. Read more about our visit here.

Guadalupe River Park
Coleman Avenue at Autumn Street
San Jose, CA

Sky High Sports, Special Needs Jump Time
Sky High Sports turns off the music, dims the lights and dials down the distractions on Tuesdays from 3-6 p.m. for the comfort of guests. Jump sessions for kids with special needs and their families is a passion project for Sky High founder Jerry Raymond. The father of a special needs son, Jerry has witnessed how jumping can help improve motor and sensory skills, social interaction and overall fitness for kids and young adults on the Autism spectrum as well as young people with Down Syndrome, Muscular Dystrophy and other disorders. During special jump sessions, each jumper is $5 from 3pm until 6pm with one parent or therapist free. Family members who jump are also just $5.

Sky High Sports
2880 Mead Ave.
Santa Clara, CA

Sensory-Friendly Movies at AMC
On the second and fourth Saturdays of the month, select AMC theaters offer a sensory-friendly screening of kid-friendly new releases. They turn the lights up and the sound down to make it more comfortable for kids. Everyone is free to sing, dance, shout and walk around as needed throughout the film. These theaters offer this amazing program so check their online schedule for upcoming showings:

San Francisco: AMC CLASSIC Deer Valley 16, AMC Showplace Manteca 16
Oakland: AMC Bay Street 16
San Jose: AMC Mercado 20

Swim and Gym Inclusion Program At the Downtown Berkeley YMCA, families with children with special needs are welcomed to participate in regular programming, but also catered to with tumbling and swimming classes for ages 2-6 and creative movement, games, and friendship building workshops for ages 4-12. Contact Rachel or Eden with questions about accommodations or these programs: 510.665.3280.

E-Sports includes several Bay Area community service programs: E-Soccer, E-Karate, E-Hoops, E-Fitness, and our newest, E-Dance. Each program specializes in inclusion, which partners kids with typical and special needs alongside each other in various athletic capacities. These programs have pioneered the inclusive sports philosophy and made an impact on families from California to Kenya.

E-Hoops Locations
UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO
ST. MARY’S COLLEGE
RIVERBANK
HERCULES
OAKLAND

E-Soccer Locations
SUNNYVALE
SAN FRANCISCO
ALAMEDA
FOSTER CITY
HAYWARD
MODESTO
PLEASANTON
WALNUT CREEK
PIEDMONT
MORGAN HILL
FAIRFIELD

“Hope is a force of nature, don’t let anyone tell you different.”

– Jim Butcher from the book Changes

“You can’t manipulate someone with candor and truth. That is called enlightenment.”

– (slightly paraphrased) from the book Changes by Jim Butcher

I had to stay home sick. Blah. Just lots of mild “blah” symptoms all over my person. I’m laying low so I feel better for my trip to Florida over Thanksgiving break!

Hypothetically, if you had three student loans totaling about $100,000 at different interest rates… say $3%, 5%, and 6%, would you push to pay them off or invest the “extra” money in the stock market?

My first thought was that the stock market generally pays 7% interest so I should pay down the 6% loan and put all the rest of the money into the stock market, but now I’m second-guessing myself. Thoughts?

Of course, first priority is to make a rainy day fund and pay into any matching 401(k) programs.

…

I found some answers for myself….

Look at this cool chart (via) (local copy). This chart shows how the S&P 500 index performed over the past hundred years. There is a “20 year” diagonal line, I highlighted it in red in the image to the right. Read the numbers on that line. For investments put in from 1930 until today, the S&P 500 has made pretty reliable 7% interest (as low as 4%, as high as 14%) per year. If you can wait 30+ years (highlighted in yellow in the image to the right), it’s a VERY reliable 7-9% interest rate, you can see that by looking at the far right side of the chart. Looking at the 10 year diagonal, the interest rates are more variable, -4% to 14%.

I’ve got about 20 years to retirement. With a 20 year window, the S&P 500 should always beat a 4% loan. Everything else is a crap-shoot. For example, with a 10 year window, $100,000 could balloon into $370,000 (that’s 14%, compounded yearly) woo hoo! That’s a nice nest-egg to retire on!   Or, it could eviscerate $100,000 into $66,000 (4% loss, compounded yearly). [sad trombone] enough to get me into a chichi cardboard-box retirement community.

So what to do?

Since I’ve got 20 years left, invest in the stock market (claiming my 4 – 14%), making sure to diversify enough to match the S&P 500. But in 5 years, it’ll be time to switch to the safer (3 – 6%) investing of paying down student loans instead of continuing to invest in a riskier 10 year plan that pays (-4% – 14%).

There was this awful noise that I’d sometimes hear in my room at school. It sounded like a machine in the walls suddenly turning on. Sometimes for a half a second, sometimes for a minute. On and off, on and off! It’d come on a bit more around 11am or so so I thought it might be related to kids going to the nearby bathroom. When it was happening and I had the opportunity, I’d run around the building looking for the source. It wasn’t the air conditioning, wasn’t the bathrooms, wasn’t the heaters, wasn’t the neighboring classrooms playing with power tools. I talked to the school custodian, to the neighboring teachers. But they all thought I was mad. I wasn’t mad! I wasn’t! I swear it!

Then, a few days ago, more than a YEAR after first noticing the sound, I found it! A water hammer in the sink of the classroom two doors down. So simple! When the kids were cleaning up from morning work, they’d turn on the water. Curiously, it was quieter in the room with the offending sink than in mine.

I got the most joy when Ms. S. the teacher one door down told me how for the last DECADE she was explaining-away that horrible sound to her students. We were both beaming!

I went to the custodian and explained what was going on. We wrote up a work order for the plumber together. And 3 days later, with one gentle turn of a wrench, the problem dissolved into the mists!

My in-laws’ two homes are each about 1 mile away from the flames of the Kincaid fire in Santa Rosa. Please send good wishes!

TL;DNR: Keeping the humidity at 40-60% dramatically decreases airborne infection rates!

Here are snippets from an article in Forbes, shown to me by Winnie Chen.

Oct 17, 2019, 09:30am
This Inexpensive Action Lowers Hospital Infections And Protects Against Flu Season
Leah Binder
Healthcare

“Harvard Medical School graduate and lecturer, Stephanie Taylor” heads this research…

“The one factor most associated with infection was (drum roll): dry air.”

“Taylor finds one of the most interesting studies from a team at the Mayo Clinic, which humidified half of the classrooms in a preschool and left the other half alone over three months during the winter. Influenza-related absenteeism in the humidified classrooms was two-thirds lower than in the standard classrooms–a dramatic difference.”

“They used to assume the microbes in desiccated droplets were dead, but advances in the past several years changed that thinking.”

In looking up hand research for work, I came across this super-cool machine learning article. In brief: a computer can read an X-Ray and tell if a person is a boy or girl really accurately and (at least some) doctors can’t! Maybe by paying attention to what the computer sees, doctors can figure out how to determine the gender of the hand in the X-ray.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10278-018-0148-x

Abstract
Despite the well-established impact of sex and sex hormones on bone structure and density, there has been limited description of sexual dimorphism in the hand and wrist in the literature. We developed a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model to predict sex based on hand radiographs of children and adults aged between 5 and 70 years. Of the 1531 radiographs tested, the algorithm predicted sex correctly in 95.9% (κ = 0.92) of the cases. Two human radiologists achieved 58% (κ = 0.15) and 46% (κ = − 0.07) accuracy. The class activation maps (CAM) showed that the model mostly focused on the 2nd and 3rd metacarpal base or thumb sesamoid in women, and distal radioulnar joint, distal radial physis and epiphysis, or 3rd metacarpophalangeal joint in men. The radiologists reviewed 70 cases (35 females and 35 males) labeled with sex along with heat maps generated by CAM, but they could not find any patterns that distinguish the two sexes. A small sample of patients (n = 44) with sexual developmental disorders or transgender identity was selected for a preliminary exploration of application of the model. The model prediction agreed with phenotypic sex in only 77.8% (κ = 0.54) of these cases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that demonstrated a machine learning model to perform a task in which human experts could not fulfill.