The thing about Christmas is that it almost doesn't matter what mood you're in or what kind of a year you've had - it's a fresh start.
I was raised in Connecticut. And I honestly wasn't aware that my dad was a celebrity until I moved to Los Angeles a year ago.
My dad worked for Nestle for 26 years and ended up being the mayor of our hometown. One of the lessons I learned from him was to never mistake kindness for weakness.
I would say the most help I got was from my dad. My dad is a civil engineer in Switzerland; he's 90 years old now, so he's no longer active as a civil engineer, but still a very active person.
I lost my mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, and we had to relocate my dad after 58 years in the family home. That was tough.
My dad has a really great record collection that basically went up to the year I was born: 1984.
I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.
My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.
Mum doesn't like it when I mention that Dad's a better cook than her. He was born in Spain and spent eight years in Portugal and is exceptional at lots of cuisines.
Around 20 million premature and low-birth weight babies are born every year and are at high risk of death or disability because of hypothermia.
My life was very tenuous last year. My daughter's death, in March in 2007, was unexpected. It was a shock. I didn't know if I'd survive it.
The doctor asked what my diet was like and I had to sit down and realize it's not normal, and hadn't been normal for about 20 years.
'The Lake of Dreams' grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel.
If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old.
Eight years of work can be copied in six months. It wasn't inevitable that it was going to work. A stolen design is stolen time.
Teachers say their schools of education did not adequately prepare them for the classroom. They would have welcomed more mentoring and feedback in their early years.
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
During consideration in the Education and the Workforce Committee this year, Democrats and Republicans worked constructively together to improve the delivery of Head Start services to the target populations.
Christianity, democracy, science, education, wealth, and the cumulative inheritance of a thousand years, have not preserved us from the vain repetition of history.
What's got me excited about the education space is the growth of the Internet over the next 10, 20, 30 years.
Illegal immigration costs taxpayers $45 billion a year in health care, education, and incarceration expenses.
