A Good Fight May Keep You And Your Marriage Healthy

Researchers looked at 192 couples over 17 years and placed the couples into one of four categories: both partners communicate their anger; in the second and third groups one spouse expresses while the other suppresses; and both the husband and wife suppress their anger and brood, said Ernest Harburg, professor emeritus with the U-M School of Public Health and the Psychology Department, and lead author. The study is a longitudinal analysis of couples in Tecumseh, Mich.

"Comparison between couples in which both people suppress their anger, and the three other types of couples, are very intriguing," Harburg said.

When both spouses suppress their anger at the other when unfairly attacked, earlier death was twice as likely than in all other types.

"When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about conflict," Harburg said. "Usually nobody is trained to do this. If they have good parents, they can imitate, that's fine, but usually the couple is ignorant about the process of resolving conflict. The key matter is, when the conflict happens, how do you resolve it?"

"When you don't, if you bury your anger, and you brood on it and you resent the other person or the attacker, and you don't try to resolve the problem, then you're in trouble."

Of the 192 couples studied, 26 pairs both suppressed their anger and there were 13 deaths in that group. In the remaining 166 pairs, there were 41 deaths combined.

In 27 percent of those couples who both suppressed their anger, one member of the couple died during the study period, and in 23 percent of those couples both died during the study period.

That's compared to only six percent of couples where both spouses died in the remaining three groups combined. Only 19 percent in the remaining three groups combined saw one partner die during the study period.

The study adjusted for age, smoking, weight, blood pressure, bronchial problems, breathing, and cardiovascular risk, Harburg said.

The paper only looks at attacks which are considered unfair or undeserved by the person being attacked, said Harburg. If the attack is viewed as fair, say an abused child or woman who believes they deserved the attack, then the victim does not get angry, Harburg said.

Harburg stresses that these preliminary numbers are small, but the researchers are now collecting 30-year follow-up data, which will have almost double the death rate, he said.

Co-authors are: Niko Kaciroti, Center for Human Growth and Development; Lillian Gleiberman, Department of Internal Medicine; M. Anthony Schork and Mara Julius, both SPH emeritus.

The paper, "Marital Pair Anger Coping Types May Act as an Entity to Affect Mortality: Preliminary Findings from a Prospective Study (Tecumseh, Michigan, 1971-88) will appear in January in the Journal of Family Communication.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Michigan.

source: Science Daily

Learn to Walk

.
Tax on petrol exceeds it original price.Now its time to share the vehicle or learn to walk...
double click the picture above to open and read the details.

CBSE-Admission to Class XI and Pass Criteria for Class IX - XI

CENTRAL BOARD OF SECONDARY EDUCATION
2, COMMUNITY CENTRE, PREET VIHAR, DELHI-110092.

No. CE/PA/2007/14151-21150 20thJune,07

To all the Heads of Institutions
Affiliated to CBSE

Subject : Admission to Class XI and Pass Criteria for Class IX/XI.

Dear Principal,

As you may be aware, many schools follow the practice of starting class XI along with other classes in the month of April in the new academic session to utilize the period before summer vacation for instructional purposes. Academically, this seems to be correct practice so that the children may remain busy with meaningful activities. So the schools admit students of class XI provisionally before the announcement of the results of class X Board examination and accordingly allow them the subjects’ choice/Stream as per their performance in pre-boards and unit tests.

It is understood that some schools resort to the un-psychological practice of forcing students to change their subjects/steams in class XI after the class X results are announced. Students are often forced to change from Science subjects to Commerce or Humanities subjects.

Once the students get admission to class XI with a particular combination of subjects, they buy the textbooks and start attending the classes for nearly a month. A forced change of subjects later demoralizes the students, causing mental and emotional stress. Further, parents are compelled to take on the additional burden of buying a second set of books for the newly allotted subjects.

This practice has to be discouraged. Hence, schools are instructed not to force the students to change their subjects in class XI once they have been admitted with a particular combination of subjects. If there is any change in subject(s), the request has to come from the student and it has to be dealt as per the Clause 26 of Chapter 4 of the Examination Bye-Laws.

You are further informed that the Board has prescribed pass criteria for Class IX & XI in the Examination Bye-Laws of CBSE and the same is as under :-

Rule 40.1(vi) “ in order to be declared as having passed the Class XI Examination a candidate shall obtain 33% marks in all the subjects. The pass marks in each subject of examination shall be 33%. In case of subject involving practical work a candidate must obtain 33% marks in theory and 33% in practical separately in addition to 33% marks in aggregate in order to qualify in that subject “

Rule 41.1(vi) “ in order to be declared as having passed the Class IX Examination a candidate shall obtain 33% marks in all the subjects. The pass marks in each subject of examination shall be 33%.”

It is understood that many schools do not follow the Pass Criteria for Class IX and XI as prescribed by the Board. It is reiterated that the above Pass Criteria be implemented by all the schools for Class IX and XI.

Yours faithfully,


( M.C.SHARMA )
CONTROLLER OF EXAMINATIONS

Indian experiments in micro gravity provide new insights

UDHAGAMANDALAM: The first results from the microgravity experiments on board the space capsule that was successfully launched and recovered (after its re-entry into the atmosphere) last year were presented at the ongoing 15th National Space Science Symposium (NSSS-2008) on Wednesday.

The results from the two experiments that were carried out in the maiden flight are highly encouraging — and even somewhat unexpected — said Kamanio Chattopadhyay of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), the National Coordinator of the Indian Microgravity Programme. The success of these experiments seems to suggest that materials processing in space, in particular biomaterials, could be a promising area to be pursued in the future microgravity platforms.

Microgravity refers to the condition of “weightlessness” that one obtains in a spacecraft, which, while in orbit around the Earth, is in a state of “free fall” under Earth’s gravity. Both the spacecraft and the objects in it are experiencing the same amount of gravitational pull of the Earth with no counter reaction force (due to, say, an anchored floor) that gives the feeling of “weight” to the objects. Till date, 44 microgravity experiments in 42 missions by 15 countries and the European Space Agency (ESA) have been conducted.
Unique in execution

According to Prof. Chattopadhyay, the Indian experiments were unique in their conceptualisation and execution. As a consequence, the results are absolutely new in the field of materials processing in space, he added.

Called the Space capsule Recovery Experiment (SRE-1), ISRO’s first microgravity platform was launched aboard the PSLV-C7 on January 10, 2007, in a circular polar orbit at an altitude of 635 km and was recovered after its splashdown 150 km east of Sriharikota in the Bay of Bengal on January 22, 2007. SRE-1 was launched along with three other satellites: ISRO’s Cartosat-1, LAPAN-TUBSAT of Indonesia and PEHUENSAT of Argentina.
Experiments

The two experiments on this scientific mission were:

Biomimetic synthesis of the particles of the inorganic chemical hydroxyapatite (a calcium-nitrate based substance). (Biomimetics refers to mimicking biological systems in nature for designing engineering systems and applications in modern technology.)

Growth of magnesium-zing-gallium (Mg-Zn-Ga) quasicrystals in an isothermal heating furnace (IHF) through a ‘peritectic’ reaction. (Quasicrystals have the unusual five-fold symmetry, like the icosahedral patches on the surface of a traditional leather football. A ‘peritectic’ solution is a mixture of substances in different phases, like a mixture of a solid and a liquid, and the mixture has the lowest melting point. During crystallisation, the two phases crystallise simultaneously from the molten solution.)

Bones and hard tissues in mammals, in particular the enamel of teeth, are made predominantly of hydroxyapatite (HAP), whose chemical formula is Ca10 (PO4)6(OH)2. The self-assembly of HAP rods in the teeth, for example, occurs in a matrix of the body protein collagen. Scientists have tried to grow this in large molecules in the laboratory (under normal gravity conditions) but have been unsuccessful, said Prof. Mukhopadhyay. The idea was to see if this biological process could be reproduced in the microgravity environment of a spacecraft. Instead of a collagen matrix, for making HAP in space, the scientists brought the appropriate chemicals to combine in a gel matrix of the polymer polyvinyl acetate (PVA), which resulted in the successful self-assembly of the molecules into the typical rod-like structures. “Initially I was sceptical, but contrary to intuition the self-organisation of HAP in the presence of large molecules is better in space,” Prof. Chattopadhyay said.
Cause rock formation

Speaking about the second experiment, Prof. Chattopadhyay said, “It is peritectic reactions that result in the formation of rocks, materials in asteroids etc. But in the presence of Earth’s gravity, these reactions rarely go to completion because sedimentation of one of the substances due to gravity cannot be prevented.” On the Earth the crystallisation of an Mg-Zn-Ga peritectic mixture was found to result in a mixture of structures with Mg-Zn crystals, Mg-Zn quasi crystals and the original peritectic solution coexisting. “The peritectic reaction could not be completed,” he observed.
Increase in crystal spacing

“But in space,” Prof. Chattopadhyay said, “the pathways of solidification seem to be different. The significant thing here is the crystallization of gallium from the solution. Electron microscopic images have clearly revealed the formation of magnesium-zinc-gallium quasicrystals. The morphology of the crystals is also different in space where the crystal spacing shows an increase.” According to him, only a French group studying aluminium-nickel peritectic mixture had earlier observed such an increase in crystal spacing while others had found a decrease. The reasons for this need to be studied, he said.
Next platform in 2009?

The next microgravity platform SRE-2 may be flown next year, Prof. Chattopadhyay said. This is likely to be bigger than the SRE-1 platform to include slightly scaled-up versions of the earlier experiments as well a new biomaterials experiment in collaboration with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Scientists of JAXA are currently in India to discuss the possibility of such a payload on SRE-2.

source: The Hindu