This is Maggi at Tower 7 at Jinshanling.

It was very damaged...and quite dangerous in places, but the view was wonderful

We took a tour bus from Beijing to Jinshanling...nearly 4 hours travel, then took a cable to the wall and this is the second Tower at Jinshanling

Great wall of China at Simatai...Tower 8 which is where the Cable Car and mini Train, and a steep walk takes you.

http://Picasaweb.google.com/ladymaggic

Great Wall of China..Simatai  Tower 7

An ancient Greek astronomical calculator that showed the positions of the sun, Earth and the moon, and outshined any known device for 1,000 years after it, also kept track of something more mundane: when the next Olympics would take place.

Classic Colors: Fauvism

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

http://wordle.net/

Secret to Being Smart...and raising a Smart Kid

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids

Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.

A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son’s confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.

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