First Test For College Hopefuls? Decoding Financial Aid Letters Colleges send each prospective student a letter detailing a financial aid award package — but many families say the letters are difficult to understand. iStockphoto hide caption itoggle caption iStockphoto Colleges send each prospective student a letter detailing a financial aid award package — but many families say the letters are difficult to understand. iStockphoto Around the country, millions of parents of prospective college freshmen are puzzling over one big question: How will we pay for college? The first step for many families is reviewing the financial aid award letters they receive from each school. Chris Reeves, a guidance counselor at Beechwood High School in Fort Mitchell, Ky., tells NPR's David Greene that he fields lots of questions from families trying to decipher their award letters. But loans "don't really reduce your costs," explains Mark Kantrowitz, founder of the financial aid website FinAid.org and publisher of Edvisors Network.
6 TED Talks on beauty In today’s bold TED Talk, model Cameron Russell — who has walked runways for Victoria’s Secret and Chanel — mulls over what it means to be beautiful. To her, being beautiful is a matter of chance; she happened to be one of the people in the world born with a set of physical traits — height, femininity, white skin, shiny hair — that our cultural views as attractive. And while her beauty has been a cornerstone of her career, she has very mixed feelings about the doors it’s opened for her. “I’ve gotten these free things because of how I look, not who I am,” says Russell. “And there are people paying a cost for how they look, not who they are.” As Russell explains, physical beauty — or at least the brand of it that we see in fashion magazines — is very carefully constructed. Richard Seymour: How beauty feels How do we know when a face — or object, for that matter — is beautiful? Rick Guidotti: From stigma to supermodel Fashion photographer Rick Guidotti was used to shooting models.
The Rite Journey Peter Doolittle: How your "working memory" makes sense of the world Close Help with subtitles Desktop / laptop users: please make sure you have the most updated versions of your browser and Flash player, and that Flash is enabled when you visit TED.com. iOS users: to access subtitles, start playing the video, then tap the speech bubble icon that appears in the bottom row of video controls. Android users: although Android devices do not support subtitles, you can download the TED app from the Google Play store.
discover your superpowers :: karen walrond My daughter is 10 years old. Overall, she's a pretty confident kid, for which I'm incredibly grateful. But I'm not naive: she's fast approaching the age where most girls' self-esteem begins to plummet, when self-worth becomes tied to appearance, to the exclusion of everything else. (These statistics are horrifying: 80% of 10-year-old girls are afraid of being fat, while body satisfaction hits rock bottom at ages 12-15 -- when their bodies are changing the most! So how do we convince our kids that despite the hype, even weeds are beautiful? I was talking with a group of girlfriends about this recently, and I mentioned a few of the things that I'm pretty intentional about in our house, in order to help Alex navigate this time of her life in the best way possible. 1) I'm a big proponent of telling your kid he/she is beautiful. (Besides, the fact is that I truly, honestly believe Alex to be very beautiful. 2) I'm also (unsurprisingly) a proponent of advocating different as beautiful.
Lost innocence: Why girls are having rough sex at 12 Teenager girls are under more sexual pressure than ever before. The good news is we can help them through it, although that requires a few lessons of our own. It’s human nature to judge adolescents by our experience. It wasn’t like that in our day, we scold. For one thing, girls are becoming women earlier than they used to. Children with ‘precocious pubescence’ can start menstruating at five or six. “When dads aren’t around, they’re more likely to move into puberty earlier,” says parenting expert Michael Grose. In the past 60 years, the age at which girls lose their virginity has dropped from 19 (when many women were married in the 1950’s) to 16, but many start much earlier. Anne Mitchell, the director of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, says rates of oral sex are climbing. Most worryingly, there has also been a marked increase in unwanted sex, an experience that can have a long-term effect on how a woman feels about herself and her sexuality.
Depression What Is Depression? Everyone occasionally feels blue or sad. But these feelings are usually short-lived and pass within a couple of days. When you have depression, it interferes with daily life and causes pain for both you and those who care about you. Many people with a depressive illness never seek treatment. There are several forms of depressive disorders. Major depression,—severe symptoms that interfere with your ability to work, sleep, study, eat, and enjoy life. Persistent depressive disorder—depressed mood that lasts for at least 2 years. Some forms of depression are slightly different, or they may develop under unique circumstances. Bipolar disorder, also called manic-depressive illness, is not as common as major depression or persistent depressive disorder. Causes Most likely, depression is caused by a combination of genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological factors. Depressive illnesses are disorders of the brain. Some types of depression tend to run in families.
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