DOG GUARDIANS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN THIS!

DOG GUARDIANS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN THIS!
Okay, we (all of us who have dogs in our families)already know this. But read on, below, to feel the joy!

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Dogs as Smart as 2-year-old Kids
Jeanna Bryner
Senior Writer
LiveScience.com Jeanna Bryner
Senior Writer
livescience.com

The canine IQ test results are in: Even the average dog has the mental abilities of a 2-year-old child.

The finding is based on a language development test, revealing average dogs can learn 165 words (similar to a 2-year-old child), including signals and gestures, and dogs in the top 20 percent in intelligence can learn 250 words.
And the smartest?
Border collies, poodles, and German shepherds, in that order, says Stanley Coren, a canine expert and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia. Those breeds have been created recently compared with other dog breeds and may be smarter in part because we've trained and bred them to be so, Coren said. The dogs at the top of the pack are on par with a 2.5-year-old.
Better at math and socializing
While dogs ranked with the 2-year-olds in language, they would trump a 3- or 4-year-old in basic arithmetic, Coren found. In terms of social smarts, our drooling furballs fare even better.
"The social life of dogs is much more complex, much more like human teenagers at that stage, interested in who is moving up in the pack and who is sleeping with who and that sort of thing," Coren told LiveScience.
Coren, who has written more than a half-dozen books on dogs and dog behavior, will present an overview of various studies on dog smarts at the American Psychological Association's annual meeting in Toronto.
"We all want insight into how our furry companions think, and we want to understand the silly, quirky and apparently irrational behaviors [that] Lassie or Rover demonstrate," Coren said. "Their stunning flashes of brilliance and creativity are reminders that they may not be Einsteins but are sure closer to humans than we thought."
Math test
To get inside the noggin of man's best friend, scientists are modifying tests for dogs that were originally developed to measure skills in children.
Here's one: In an arithmetic test, dogs watch as one treat and then another treat are lowered down behind a screen. When the screen gets lifted, the dogs, if they get arithmetic (1+1=2), will expect to see two treats. (For toddlers, other objects would be used.)
But say the scientist swipes one of the treats, or adds another so the end result is one, or three treats, respectively. "Now we're giving him the wrong equation which is 1+1=1, or 1+1=3," Coren said. Sure enough, studies show the dogs get it. "The dog acts surprised and stares at it for a longer period of time, just like a human kid would," he said.
These studies suggest dogs have a basic understanding of arithmetic, and they can count to four or five.


Basic emotions
Other studies Coren notes have found that dogs show spatial problem-solving skills. For instance, they can locate valued items, such as treats, find better routes in the environment, such as the fastest way to a favorite chair, and figure out how to operate latches and simple machines.
Like human toddlers, dogs also show some basic emotions, such as happiness, anger and disgust. But more complex emotions, such as guilt, are not in a dog's toolbox. (What humans once thought was guilt was found to be doggy fear, Coren noted.)
And while dogs know whether they're being treated fairly, they don't grasp the concept of equity. Coren recalls a study in which dogs get a treat for "giving a paw."
When one dog gets a treat and the other doesn't, the unrewarded dog stops performing the trick and avoids making eye contact with the trainer. But if one dog, say, gets rewarded with a juicy steak while the other snags a measly piece of bread, on average the dogs don't care about the inequality of the treats.
Top dogs
To find out which dogs had the top school smarts, Coren collected data from more than 200 dog obedience judges from the United States and Canada.
He found the top dogs, in order of their doggy IQ are:
Border collies
Poodles
German shepherds
Golden retrievers
Dobermans
Shetland sheepdogs
Labrador retrievers
At the bottom of the intelligence barrel, Coren would include many of the hounds, such as the bassett hound and the Afghan hound, along with the bulldog, beagle and basenji (a hunting dog).
"It's important to note that these breeds which don't do as well tend to be considerably older breeds," he said. "They were developed when the task of a hound was to find something by smell or sight." These dogs might fare better on tests of so-called instinctive intelligence, which measure how well dogs do what they are bred to do.
"The dogs that are the brightest dogs in terms of school learning ability tend to be the dogs that are much more recently developed," Coren said. He added that there's a "high probability that we've been breeding dogs so they're more responsive to human beings and human signals." So the most recently bred dogs would be more human-friendly and rank higher on school smarts.
Many of these smarty-pants are also the most popular pets. "We like dogs that understand us," Coren said.
We also love the beagle, which made it to the top 10 list of most popular dog breeds in 2008 by the American Kennel Club. That's because they are so sweet and socialable, Coren said. "Sometimes people love the dumb blonde," Coren said.
And sometimes the dim-wits make better pets. While a smart dog will figure out everything you want it to know, your super pet will also learn everything it can get away with, Coren warns.
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Our beloved Australian Shepherd(a "cousin" to Border Collies),"Frisco",has been gone now(she was stricken with spleen cancer at age 10-and-a-half)for a long time.
We still have sweet, goof-y "Louie", our Golden Retreiver, who we adopted as a one-year-old, from Golden Retreiver Rescue of Atlanta, back in 1998.
We added "Afton", our German Shepherd (found abandoned with five puppies)when we discovered her through Big Canoe Animal Rescue, only six weeks ago.
All these dogs were/are incredibly smart. "Frisco" liked entertaining herself, and taught herself tricks like bouncing the tennis ball on her nose, seal-like, and then bouncing it on the ground. I often caught her all alone, doing this(she did not know I could see her)!
"Louie" is what I'd call "craft-y", as he will sneak around to find treats, and even hide them(!) from the other dog, or me. And "Afton", our newest addition--is clever, resourceful, and a quick-study.
In playing hide-and-seek the other day, she found me quickly, then immediately went to the pantry door, and nudged me to open the door. Curious, I did. It was then that I realized what she was after: the dog-treats are stored there, and she quickly pushed her nose to the box, then sat immediately and looked up at me, then at the box, then at me, then the box.
It was hilarious! And needless to say, it worked(I gave her a treat!).
Later in the day, I was remembering this, and suddenly recalled that the first day we brought her home, I took her to the pantry, had her sit, and then rewarded her. I guess she figured out if she does any "task" or "trick", she can get rewarded.

How about you? Do you have any smart-dog-stories to share?


Peace, kids.

CHILD-LIKE FREE PLAY.

CHILD-LIKE FREE PLAY.
What's happened to childhood? Though I was more of an "indoor" girl myself(constantly reading and playing records), I certainly knew, as all kids back then did, that outside was where we did our real playing: running, tag, flying kites, hiking, hide and seek, "treasure hunt", (where you look for a list of items--whoever gets most or all of the items first, wins!)"statues", where another child calls "freeze" and whatever position you are in, you must stay in, until "action" is resumed).
This article illuminates what kids, adults--and therapists--are discovering nowadays.
If you did not get "free play" as a child, I highly recommend engaging in this, as an adult. I bet you'll feel more relaxed, and if you have any rage and anger in you, I bet you'll see it begin to melt.
Here's that article:

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New Theory: People Need to Play More
By LiveScience Staff

Goofing around goes way back, according to a new theory that suggests society can break down when we don't take time to play.

Early hunter-gatherers used playtime, humor and inclusive joking around to overcome the innate tendencies toward aggression and dominance, the thinking goes, and all that play was necessary to make a cooperative society possible.

"Play and humor were not just means of adding fun to their lives,"explains Boston College developmental psychologist Peter Gray. "They were means of maintaining the band's existence — means of promoting actively the egalitarian attitude, intense sharing, and relative peacefulness for which hunter-gatherers are justly famous and upon which they depended for survival."

Other research has shown that humor makes us hopeful. And a recent study indicated that sarcasm is part of human nature and probably an evolutionarily good thing. Other researchers have shown that choosing to work while foregoing vacations and other play leads to regret among adults, and the regrets grow as we age.

Gray looks at all this but focuses on a less-studied area: child-like free play.

No competition

To understand his theory, you have to think back to a type of play that may be unfamiliar to many.

Gray figures hunter-gatherer children in early human history developed into cooperative adults with the help of a type of play similar to that which once characterized American children's summers and after-school hours in contemporary culture. This play is freely chosen, age-mixed, and, because it is not adult-organized, non-competitive, he explained. This "free play" is distinct from leisure pursuits such as video games, watching TV, or structured extracurricular activities and sports.

"Even when children are playing nominally competitive games, such as pickup baseball or card games, there is usually relatively little concern for winning," Gray said. "Striving to do well, as individuals or teams, and helping others do well, is all part of the fun. It is the presence of adult supervisors and observers that pushes play in a competitive direction — and if it gets pushed too far in that direction it is no longer truly play."

The most important skill for social life, Gray said, is how to please other people while still fulfilling one's own needs and desires. In self-organized play, he contends, children learn to get along with diverse others, to compromise, and to anticipate and meet others' needs.

"To play well," he said, "and to keep others interested in continuing to play with you, you must be able to see the world from the other players' points of view. Children and teenagers in hunter-gatherer cultures played in this way more or less constantly," he figures, "and they developed into extraordinarily cooperative, egalitarian adults. My observations — published in previous articles — indicate that age-mixed free play in our culture, in those places where it can still be found, has all of these qualities."

The value of play

Social play counteracts tendencies toward greed and arrogance, and promotes concern for the feelings and well being of others, Gray writes in the current issue of the American Journal of Play. But, he thinks, we've gotten away from our roots.

Certainly other studies show that U.S adults have less time to play. Over the past 30 years, time spent at work has jumped 10 hours a week. Meanwhile, many parents make sure their children are involved in structured activities and competitive sports — and many of them find time to show up and yell at their children or the opposing team or the referees.

"People are beginning to realize that we have gone too far in the direction of teaching children to compete," Gray said in a statement this week. "We have been depriving children of the normal, noncompetitive forms of social play that are essential for developing a sense of equality, connectedness, and concern for others."

Gray even says it "may not be too much of a stretch ... to suggest that the selfish actions that led to the recent economic collapse are, in part, symptoms of a society that has forgotten how to play."

Hunter-gatherers used humor, deliberately, to maintain equality and stop quarrels, Gray contends, and their means of sharing had game-like qualities. Their religious beliefs and ceremonies were playful, founded on assumptions of equality, humor, and capriciousness among the deities. They maintained playful attitudes in their hunting, gathering, and other sustenance activities, partly by allowing each person to choose when, how, and how much they would engage in such activities.

"Professor Gray's novel insight sheds new light on the question of how such societies can maintain social harmony and cooperation while emphasizing the autonomy of individuals," said anthropologist Kirk M. Endicott, a hunter-gatherer expert at Dartmouth College. "Conversely, his demonstration of the wide-ranging role of play in hunter-gatherer societies focuses attention on the importance of play in the evolutionary success of the human species."
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I personally believe without play, we have become less empathetic. I feel certain the lack of civility we see so often--the rude-ness, lack of consideration for others, the extreme hostility on the highways, etc. etc. is a direct result of learning to compete, which has cost many the ability to co-operate!
What do YOU think?

Peace, kids.

MATTER OF FACT.

MATTER OF FACT.
Buried beneath the minutae of Michael Jackson's "mysterious" death, tucked behind the updates on who's calling who a racist in the Professor Gates/Cambridge police officer/President Obama incident/aftermath, and the moment-by-moment developments in the Octomom's new reality-tv series, I found a piece of something genuinely surprising, and uplifting:
REAL NEWS! Read what I found at the wonderful website, LiveScience, below:
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Scientists Claim New State of Matter Created
LiveScience Staff

LiveScience.com livescience Staff


Scientists claim to have created a form of aluminum that's nearly transparent to extreme ultraviolet radiation and which is a new state of matter.
It's an idea straight out of science fiction, featured in the movie "Star Trek IV."
The work is detailed in the journal Nature Physics.
The normal states of matter are solid, liquid and gas, and a fourth state, called plasma, is a superheated gas considered more exotic. Other experiments have created strange states of matter for brief periods. This one, too, existed only briefly.
To create the new, even more exotic stuff, a short pulse from a laser "knocked out" a core electron from every aluminum atom in a sample without disrupting the metal's crystalline structure, the researchers explain.
''What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before," said professor Justin Wark of Oxford University's Department of Physics.
"Transparent aluminum is just the start," Wark said. "The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of 'miniature stars' created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth."
Fusion is a dream of scientists who would create cheap and plentiful power by fusing atoms together, as opposed to nuclear fission that generates electricity today.
The discovery was made possible with a high-powered synchrotron radiation generator called the FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany. It produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.
The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminum turned transparent.
While the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period - an estimated 40 femtoseconds - it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.
"What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminum into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser," Wark said. "For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminum atom into silicon: it's almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light."
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How remarkable that this is possible! If we can create a new state of matter, we can create a new state of being(which means World Peace is not only possible one day, but likely).
Peace, kids.