Breakthrough in Down Syndrome – Cognitive dysfunction reversed in mice

Back in the 90’s, a woman named Dixie Lawrence made a splash on the internet by describing how her daughter with Down Syndrome experienced improved growth, health and cognition after starting a regimen of nutritional supplements and piracetam. I recall reading that she noticed that her infant daughter was not actually retarded – at least not yet.

Dixie’s routine for changing diapers always ended with a playful rub of Madison’s stomach. One morning, when Madison was eight months old, a fatigued Dixie said to her, “Well, honey, I’m tired, you’re going to have to rub your stomach yourself.” And Madison did just that.

It hit Dixie like a ton of bricks. She realized that her daughter was not retarded, and that if she wasn’t retarded, she would develop retardation. If this was the case, there had to be something that could slow it down or stop it! In a modest bedroom in rural Louisiana, Dixie Tafoya “looked through the telescope,” and in spite of what everyone “knew,” she saw perfectly round planets. With that insight, she jumped light years ahead of all the “experts.”

from Looking Through A Telescope, by Julian Whitaker M.D., Whitaker Wellness Institute

In other words, this was a view of Down Syndrome as a developmental problem, where the cognitive deficits increase with age.


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Problems with Photoshop filters

Recently I’ve been using the Photoshop Filter Gallery filters more than usual, and experienced a few apparent problems, particularly with the grayscale filters. First all the grayscale filters suddenly seemed to stop working. All of them showed nothing but a completely blank screen, no matter what settings were tried.

Picture 1.jpg

I really thought this was some sort of bug with CS4. But a search of the Adobe forums turned up nothing. Clearing the plugin cache and Filter Gallery preferences reverted the filters to their defaults, and fixed the problem.

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Drupal: set up a draggable card sort view – Part 3

<= Back to previous section “Part 2 of 8”


  1. Once the fields have been selected, each can be configured with display and behavior settings.

    Under Fields, click the blue text "Node: Body" to view the settings for that field. If you wish, enter some text that will be displayed if there is no body text in a node or, alternatively, check "Hide if empty."
    (see below)


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My Creative Commons Images

All my public images on Flickr are licensed under the Creative Commons. You are free to share and remix them as long as you attribute them to me by including a link back to the original flickr page or by including the following link code back to this page:

<a href="http:thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000704.html" target="_blank">Photo by ellenm1</a>

View the pictures that have been used so far


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