02.24.11
Posted in Education, society at 7:47 am by site admin
Check out this article discussing how focusing on your child’s reading ability at a young age can impair the development in other life skills.
Patricia Appel, a learning specialist at Glenelg’s primary school, said that many times, if pre-kindergarten children learn a word, it’s simply a picture they’re internalizing.
“Then, as they enter school, it’s almost re-learning,” she said. “We still have to back them up and teach them phonics and syntax.”
She added that with early readers, teachers try to even out the other skills the children need to be successful in the classroom.
“This year we have two pre-kindergarten boys who can’t hold a pencil and write but read at a first-grade level,” she said. “We try to boost up the areas that are weaker to make a child more balanced.”
The author points out that reading is a great pastime as well.. And is not simply a learn to read or hold a pencil. Just a reminder that time is limited and there is always an opportunity cost associated with everything we do.. Even as a toddler.
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04.10.10
Posted in Education at 9:04 am by site admin
Check out this opinion column discussing the need to reform the education system. With the current economic recession, there has been alot of news about budget constraints and teacher layoffs. The problem is that most public schools are still in many cases poorly funded and also unable to recruit, and keep talented and passionate teachers.
But states and districts could take a smarter, more effective approach in trimming education budgets, particularly when it comes to teacher layoffs. Most use a “last hired, first fired” approach that does not look at teacher effectiveness. The result is that many schools could end up pushing out some of their highest-performing teachers while keeping their least effective ones.
I also found this point interesting (albiet nothing totally new):
But we know some teachers should not be teaching. While most educators work to meet student needs, a recent survey of teachers found that almost 60 percent said there were educators in their schools who failed to do good work and were just going through the motions.
If we are going to maintain our competitiveness in this ultra-competitive global economy, we need to reform and improve our education system. We hear alot these days about coporates improving their bottom lines (profits) by streamlining their work force and finding employees willing to work for less. So how do we distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world? We need to stop focusing on all the quantifable numbers and focusing more on abstract quality and creativity.
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04.08.10
Posted in Education, society at 8:50 am by site admin
Check out this link talking about more affordable options to learning a foreign language.
But why pay at all? There are hundreds of free language-lesson podcasts floating around the Internet. There are dozens on iTunes alone: Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Thai and so on. Of particular note is SurvivalPhrases, which offers 3- to 5-minute episodes that cover basics like “Where is the bathroom?” in 19 languages, including Vietnamese, Russian, Greek and Brazilian Portuguese.
Of course, SurvivalPhrases’ free iTunes downloads, which offer 15 phrases, are there partly to hook you into paying $25 for 45 more at SurvivalPhrases.com.
Another podcast, the nearly five-year-old ChinesePod, has another, more innovative selling point. While many of its 1,300 podcasts are free, access to all of them costs $14 a month, and $249 gets you three months of access to all of them, plus a virtual classroom where you and three other students have — via Skype — weekly hourlong lessons with a Chinese teacher.
Although high-tech solutions are providing lower cost entry for language learners, more comprehensive language programs still cost a pretty penny. If you are looking for a comprensive solution, going old-school can be a suprisingly affordable option:
And for that amount of money, you could learn a language the old-fashioned way – by immersing yourself in a foreign county. For the price of Rosetta Stone’s five-level course, you could do two or three weeks of “super intensive” study at the Casa de Lenguas in Antigua, Guatemala, one of many schools around Latin America that arrange both language lessons and home stays with local families ($85 a week via Casa de Lenguas).
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12.25.09
Posted in Education at 9:06 pm by site admin
Check out this article on games for thinkers. Top three on the list are:
- Chesss
- Scrabble
- Monopoly
Of the top 3, the top two are really easy to play on the go on your mobile phone. One of my favorite games (not in the top 10), is Go. Go is an intense game. Its simplistic enough for a four year old to learn, but complex enough that there is still not any robust Go AIs that can go head to head with the masters of the game.
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10.02.07
Posted in Education, society at 1:25 pm by site admin
Check out this article at the nytimes talking about how in the recent years the happiness of men have improved, while that of women has decreased.
Mr. Krueger, analyzing time-use studies over the last four decades, has found an even starker pattern. Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more.
Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes
One part I find particularily amusing is the hottie theory:
When Ms. Stevenson and I were talking last week about possible explanations, she mentioned her “hottie theory.†It’s based on an April article in this newspaper by Sara Rimer, about a group of incredibly impressive teenage girls in Newton, Mass. The girls were getting better grades than the boys, playing varsity sports, helping to run the student government and doing community service. Yet one girl who had gotten a perfect 2,400 on her college entrance exams noted that she and her friends still felt pressure to be “effortlessly hot.â€
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04.26.07
Posted in Education at 1:45 pm by site admin
It’s been a while. Right now I’m just cleaning up all these pesky windows I have open. Check out this article talking about how participating in a theatre group is better for ur brain than Brain Age, crossword puzzles, etc. The article says that theatre requires more focus and more conscientious and uninterrupted attention than these other activities.
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04.09.07
Posted in Education at 1:08 pm by site admin
This article talks about how a gene can activate the liver to repair itself.
This article abcnews talks about how to complain and win at it. It talks about how to complain about cell phones, airlines, and credit cards.
Bounds said that late fees are one of the easiest fees to waive, and consumers should always try to get rid of them.
“They’ll often take it off your bill if you just call and ask politely: ‘I was on vacation, I’m a good customer,’” Bounds said. “This has a good chance of working if you really are a good, reliable customer. This isn’t going to work if you do often pay your bill late. Just as with airlines, the better a customer you are, the more likely they’ll try to satisfy you.”
This article talks about how most teaching does not take into account the way we learn:
“Problem-solving places a great demand on working memory, so teachers are better off giving students solved problems so they have the learning to take home,†he said. “The reason is that the cognitive processes involved in learning and solving problems are different, so we need to cater to the way the brain works.”
“Everything we are aware of goes through working memory, which has a limited capacity of only three to four items of information that can be held for only three to four seconds without rehearsal,†he said. “Almost all information goes after 20 seconds, unless there is rehearsal.â€
On the list of bad learning methods is poor powerpoint presentations where the speaker regurgitates everything on the slide.
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03.12.07
Posted in Education at 6:31 am by site admin
Check out this article on scientific american talking about why we divide a year into 12 months, a day into 24 hours, an hour into 60 minutes, and a minute into 60 seconds. No more asking why!
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12.28.06
Posted in Education at 8:56 am by site admin
Check out this link with tons of cool tests from the BBC. Tests include: Explore your memory. What sex is your brain?, Face perception, Morals, Adultery, Self-control, and Perfectionism.
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12.27.06
Posted in Education at 10:32 pm by site admin
Check out this article on reforming the english language: Nuspelynh. Its an interesting idea, but its much more dramatic of a change than tradtional changes in a language. e.g., colour to color, or whats up to sup, etc. For pronounciation, I would prefer using the International Phoentic Alphabet, but I can see where, for the english language, cleaning up our own alphabet would suffice.
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12.19.06
Posted in Education at 10:03 pm by site admin
Check out this article on wired.com discussing why Shakespeare mystifies us. In short, Shakespeare employees a linguistic technique known as functional shift that uses one part of speach in the place of another, e.g., using a noun to serve as a verb.
Professor Philip Davis, from the University’s School of English, said: “The brain reacts to reading a phrase such as ‘he godded me’ from the tragedy of Coriolanus, in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don’t appear to fit, when we know they should, the brain becomes excited. By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity – a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things.”
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12.12.06
Posted in Education, society at 9:39 am by site admin
Check out this article that discusess how using taboo words (sexual body part and cuss words) helps people remember what you said. Taboo words are not considered too negative, but they have a higher arrousal rate.
The cool lesson is that we remember words for sexual body parts and swear words really well, and the memory benefit extends to the context in which they were presented! So, next time you’re having a conversation with someone, and you really want them to remember what you’re saying, use as many swear words and words for sexual body parts as you can.
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11.15.06
Posted in Education at 9:07 pm by site admin
Check out this article that suggests more homework actually hurts students. The article states that more work strains strains a students limited time (homework, athletics, extracurricular activities, chores), and creates more tension in the home (Decreases the amount of quality family time).
Undue focus on homework as a national quick-fix, rather than a focus on issues of instructional quality and equity of access to opportunity to learn, may lead a country into wasted expenditures of time and energy,” LeTendre says.
But suprisingly, this article suggests that testing improves memory. There is a fine line here. The article states that the when students are actively retrieving a concept they boost their recollection of related issues. But too much homework is bad because it becomes repetitious. The conclusion I’m reading out of all this is practical application helps translate information into knowledge. So having homework is good, but if it becomes overly repetitious the brain shuts off, or overly difficult, then perhaps the student may shut down.
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10.19.06
Posted in Buddhism, Education at 9:37 am by site admin
I was listening to a talk on zencast.org and found an interesting lecture on the difference between renunciation and resignation.
re‧nun‧ci‧a‧tion–noun
an act or instance of relinquishing, abandoning, repudiating, or sacrificing something, as a right, title, person, or ambition: the king’s renunciation of the throne.
res‧ig‧na‧tion–noun
1. the act of resigning.
2. a formal statement, document, etc., stating that one gives up an office, position, etc.
3. an accepting, unresisting attitude, state, etc.; submission; acquiescence: to meet one’s fate with resignation.
Its a fine division that I have had only brief glimpses of. In some respects, it reminds me of being active versus passive. If you are active, you choose to abandon certain possesions. If you are passive, your possesions are lost, and you simply accept it. (I can see how this you still act in this case, but this mentality does not always address the root causes.)
And finally, did you know the origin of sac·ri·fice means to make sacred? The word to me has always meant loosing something valuable for the sake of something more valuable. But I never put it in a spiritual light. Kinda like there is a difference from saying life is precious and life is sacred.
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08.10.06
Posted in Education at 1:00 pm by site admin
Check out this article titled How we make memories. The gist of the research is the following:
“Chunking” occurs when otherwise unrelated items are perceived as a unit. For example, the three-letter combination FBI—but not, say, SVQ or TMY—is chunked because it’s associated with an entity, and we hear the grouping so often. Items that are chunked take up less of our mental resources to encode since each item doesn’t have to be encoded separately.
But when something is not a chunk, it can’t be bound to a context, which is important for memory.
In other words, we can remember things better if we can associate them together, and/or previous experiences. So while in some cases we may remember our first experience at something because it was unique or exciting, it will probably seem like a blur if it went by too fast.
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Posted in Education at 12:42 pm by site admin
Check out this article about our ability to see change over time. More info can be found in the research paper: Sustained Change Blindness to Incremental Scene Rotation: A Dissociation Between Explicit Change Detection and Visual Memory” (Perception and Psychophysics, 2004).
This obvious but puzzling behavior is proof that our brains perceive a basically stable world.
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06.27.06
Posted in Education, Environment, Evolution, Humor at 9:28 am by site admin
King tut’s glass beetle came from outer space. The glass beetle is piece of yellow-green glass, carved in the shape of a scarabe beetle found in the tomb of King Tut, who died in 1323BC. Fish with asymmetric brains multitask better. They can hunt for food and avoid predators more efficiently than those with more symmetric brains. This matters because humans (and well as all vertebrates) have some degree of asymmetry in their brain, with males having a higher degree than females. This is of course why many men have a hard time combining connect logic (left) with emotions (right). If thats too much thinking for you, check out this link on the 10 strangest japanese gadgets. My favorites would be the sauce dispensing chopsticks (my guess would be that one does soy and the other does ponzu?), the shower cap (its up there on the WTF?!?), and the MP3 toilet. If your not much of an indoors person, check out how to makeFire from Ice. This is perfect for your next vacation in the Artic.
If you need something closer to home, read about how Immaturity Levels Rising. This is a good read, here is a teaser:
A “child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge†is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world, Charlton believes. Formal education now extends well past physical maturity, leaving students with minds that are, he said, “unfinished.â€
and heres the ugly:
The faults of youth are retained along with the virtues, he believes. These include short attention span, sensation and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness.
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Posted in Education, Evolution at 9:02 am by site admin
Check out the evolution of the alphabet. This was a comment submitted by another guy, so if you want a direct link, click:here.
So the interesting thing is that complex letters were depreciated for more simplistic letters. Since there is no sound available (it might be possible to look online), I’m not sure if any of the new letters correctly replaced an older letter. (I am curious to know how the phonological evolution follows the evolution of the alphabet). If you watch the animation, you’ll see how a corruption of sound resulted in a new letter. For example, a corruption of I created J, and a corruption of V created W. Also, if you watch the arrows during the evolution, you’ll see how elements of the older language reappeared in later derivations. A good example is the letter y, which is called i-grec (or the greek I) in french.
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06.20.06
Posted in Education at 9:18 pm by site admin
Here is an article on cheating in China. Cheating is very important because there are approximately 9.5 million students that compete for only 2.6 million vacancies.
Another student’s earphones required an operation for their removal, the paper said, while an electronic device connected to headphones and strapped to a third student’s body exploded, leaving a bleeding hole in his abdomen.
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06.12.06
Posted in Education, health at 6:33 pm by site admin
This article talks about the use of smart drugs by high school and college students. For those who dont know too much about the subject its a good read. If you’ve heard about smart drugs, then theres not much new. What I found interesting was the following discussion about how scholastic intelligence is not the only type of intelligence out there.
Howard Gardner of Harvard is the godfather of the idea that smart is more than what IQ tests test. In his seminal 1983 book, “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” and later works, he laid out a then-novel model of cognition that included many other kinds of sagacity.
“I feel that what we call ‘intelligence’ is almost always ‘scholastic skill’ — what it takes to do well on a certain kind of short-answer instrument in a certain kind of Western school,” he writes in an e-mail. “Other uses of intellect — musical competence, facility in the use of one’s hands, understanding of other people, sensitivity to distinctions in the natural world, alertness to one’s own and others’ emotional states etc. — are not included in our definitions of intelligence, though I think that they should be. Unless performances in these other domains were directly tapped, we’d have no idea of whether ‘performance enhancing pills’ affect these other forms of intelligence as well.”
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