"Long before it's in the papers" November 06, 2009 Language learning may start in womb Nov. 6, 2009 Courtesy Cell Press and World Science staff From their first days, babies cry differently depending on the language their parents speak—showing some learning has already started in the womb, according to a new study.
“These data support the importance of human infants’ crying for seeding language development.” The findings were published online Nov. 5 in the research journal Current Biology. Human fetuses can memorize sounds from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language, earlier studies found. Newborns prefer their mother’s voice over others and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation in maternal speech. Their preference for the surrounding language and ability to tell apart different languages and pitch changes are based primarily on melody, Wermke said. Although prenatal exposure to native language was known to influence newborns’ perception, scientists had thought that the surrounding language affected sound production much later, the researchers said, but it now seems that’s not so. Wermke’s team recorded and analyzed the cries of 60 healthy newborns, 30 born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families, when they were three to five days old. French newborns tended to cry with a rising melody contour, whereas German newborns seemed to prefer a falling melody contour in their crying. Those patterns are consistent with characteristic differences between the two languages, Wermke said. This imitation of language “melody contour” by infants doesn’t depend on skills in articulation, which tend to develop a few months after birth, the scientists said. “Newborns are probably highly motivated to imitate their mother’s behavior in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding,” they wrote. “Because melody contour may be the only aspect of their mother’s speech that newborns are able to imitate, this might explain why we found melody contour imitation at that early age.” |
Sunday, 25 April 2010
"Long before it's in the papers" April 23, 2010 Mostly-male book images may reduce girls’ science scores April 23, 2010 Special to World Science Part of the reason boys tend to outscore girls in science classes may be that most textbooks show predominantly male scientists’ images, a small exploratory study has found. The study, on 81 young high-school students, saw the “gender gap” apparently reversed when youths were tested based on a text containing only female scientist images, investigators said. The gap returned in its usual form when male-only images were used—and vanished when the photos showed equal numbers of men and women scientists, researchers said.
Nonetheless, the findings hint that “providing students with diverse role models within textbook images” may be an important step, the researchers wrote in reporting their results. The study, by Jessica J. Good of Rutgers University in New Jersey and colleagues, is published in the March-April issue of the Journal of Social Psychology. Other researchers have proposed that society can wipe out the performance gap—which has already shrunken in recent years—by making stronger efforts to give both sexes similar resources and opportunities. A 2004 report by the U.S. Center for Education Statistics noted that the previous year, science scores for eighth-grade boys exceeded those for eighth-grade girls in 28 out of 34 countries surveyed. In the study on textbook images, ninth- and tenth-grade students, 29 male and 52 female, were asked to read a three-page chemistry text with one photo per page. Students were randomly assigned one of three versions of the reading: one whose pictures showed all male scientists, another with only female scientists and one with equal numbers of scientists of both sexes. The text itself was the same in all cases. The students, who had no prior formal chemistry training, were next directed to take a short test on the reading. Girls did significantly better when using the text with women-only images, the investigators reported. Boys did better with the men-only images, though the difference here didn’t reach a statistically significant level. Overall, average scores were higher for girls than boys among all students who got the women-only version. The common predominance of male-scientist images in textbooks is a case of what some readers would perceive as “stereotype threat,” a phenomenon first described by researchers at Stanford University in California in the mid-1990s, according to Good and colleagues. Stereotype threat occurs when a test-taker is presented with, or freshly reminded of, a stereotype that reflects negatively on his or her abilities in the subject matter at hand. Studies have found that stereotype threats push down the test-taker’s score, in the same direction the stereotype would predict. Thus a predominance of male-scientist images in the majority of science textbooks may reinforce popular notions that girls are worse at science, and then lead to results in line with those ideas, said Good and colleagues. Stereotype threats have been found to affect minorities as well as females. And the new findings suggest stereotype threat might work both ways—hurting not only those disfavored by a common stereotype, but those favored as well. In particular, although the popular stereotype is that boys are the top performers in science, Good’s results hinted that boys’ scores, too, might suffer if they saw pictures that cut against the flattering stereotype. A simple solution that presents itself, though it requires more research, would be “mixed-gender textbook images,” the researchers wrote. These “may represent a simple and cost-effective way to remedy the negative effects of stereotypic textbook images.” They cautioned that notwithstanding the latest results, other studies have found that removing stereotype threats doesn’t completely eliminate performance gaps among different groups, though it helps. How exactly stereotype-threat effects work is unknown, Good and colleagues said, although there is evidence that they operate largely subconsciously. Possible reasons may include anxiety or intrusive thoughts caused by the stereotype threat, they wrote. Another explanation may be that there is a subconscious tendency to conform to societal expectations. “Research should investigate the influence of diverse role models presented in textbooks as a way of improving performance of multiple stereotyped groups, not just women,” the investigators concluded. “Although eliminating gender bias in textbooks will most likely not eradicate the gender gap in science interest and achievement, it will begin to chip away at an ever crumbling foundation.” * * * |
Saturday, 17 April 2010
The Father of Video Games
The Father of Video Games
In 2006 Ralph H. Baer was awarded the National Medal of Technology by the President of the United States for his “groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialisation of interactive videogames”. In fact many
believe he invented the gaming industry. Quite an accomplishment. Would it surprise you to learn that Ralph is 88 years old?Born in Germany into a Jewish family and the son of a shoe factory worker life could not have been too easy. At the age of eleven Ralph was expelled from school for being Jewish and in 1938 the his whole family left Germany for America just in time to avoid the anti jewish purge of Kristallnacht. Once in America Ralph took a job in a factory on minimal wage, self educated himself and two years later graduated from the National Radio Institute in Chicago. In 1943 with the world at war he was assigned to work for US military intelligence. After the war ended Ralph went back to studying and chose the American Television Institute of Technology from which he graduated from in 1949 with a degree in Television engineering. His f
uture as the father of video gaming was beginning to take shape.In 1949 he worked as chief engineer at a small electronic medical equipment firm responsible for making electrical surgical equipment. Two years later he went to work as a senior engineer at a company that made equipment for the computer company IBM. By the age of 30 he had changed jobs and moved up again and was the vice president for a company that made semi conductors. Finally, four years later, he went to work for a US defense contractor that made aircraft electronic systems and he stayed there for the next 31 years until he retired. It was while he was working here that he established his name in the video gaming history books.
In August 1972 the release of the ‘Brown Box’, or the Magnavox Odyssey, heralded the birth of the first home video game console. Designed by Ralph Baer the Magnavox Odyssey predated the next video game console by 3 years. Ralph saw his invention build up 24 game titles, he pushed for the development of sound but his idea was rejected. So too was his idea to make an
add on cartridge that you could use to ‘load’ games on to the console with. However, some ideas were accepted and the first add on peripheral is credited to the magnavox - the light gun. This was a plastic moulded gun that when pointed at the screen registered the light emitted from a television set.Quite an impressive story but it was not over. Ralph’s story of inventions goes on. One of these was the single-chip micro-processor controlled handheld game called SIMON that became a cult hit in the 80s. This game had four large coloured buttons that lit up in a random sequence starting with one colour and then adding one more each round. The object of the game was for players to repeat the sequence by pressing the correct buttons and the game ended when a mistake was made. Other inventions included a recordable talking doormat called the ‘chat mat’ and a talking speedometer for a bike.
Ralph has retired now and has donated all the original game units he owned to the Smithsonian Institution This government run educational and research institute owns just under twenty public access museums and if you want to see some of Ralph Baer’s inventions then you can go and visit them there. Alternatively you can play any one of the half dozen home video consoles and appreciate the legacy that he has left.
Sunday, 4 April 2010
Children Educate Themselves III:
The Wisdom
of Hunter-Gatherers
How hunter-gatherer children learn without schools.
For hundreds of thousands of years, up until the time when agriculture was invented (a mere 10,000 years ago), we were all hunter-gatherers. Our human instincts, including all of the instinctive means by which we learn, came about in the context of that way of life. And so it is natural that in this series on children's instinctive ways of educating themselves I should ask: How do hunter-gatherer children learn what they need to know to become effective adults within their culture?In the last half of the 20th century, anthropologists located and observed many groups of people--in remote parts Africa, Asia, Australia, New Guinea, South America, and elsewhere--who had maintained a hunting-and-gathering life, almost unaffected by modern ways. Although each group studied had its own language and other cultural traditions, the various groups were found to be similar in many basic ways, which allows us to speak of "the hunter-gatherer way of life" in the singular. Wherever they were found, hunter-gatherers lived in small nomadic bands (of about 25 to 50 people per band), made decisions democratically, had ethical systems that centered on egalitarian values and sharing, and had rich cultural traditions that included music, art, games, dances, and time-honored stories.
To supplement what we could find in the anthropological literature, several years ago Jonathan Ogas (then a graduate student) and I contacted a number of anthropologists who had lived among hunter-gatherers and asked them to respond to a written questionnaire about their observations of children's lives. Nine such scholars kindly responded to our questionnaire. Among them, they had studied six different hunter-gatherer cultures--three in Africa, one in Malaysia, one in the Philippines, and one in New Guinea.
What I learned from my reading and our questionnaire was startling for its consistency from culture. Here I will summarize four conclusions, which I think are most relevant to the issue of self-education. Because I would like you to picture these practices as occurring now, I will use the present tense in describing them, even though the practices and the cultures themselves have been largely destroyed in recent years by intrusions from the more "developed" world around them.
1. Hunter-gatherer children must learn an enormous amount to become successful adults.
It would be a mistake to think that education is not a big issue for hunter-gatherers because they don't have to learn much. In fact, they have to learn an enormous amount.
To become effective hunters, boys must learn the habits of the two or three hundred different species of mammals and birds that the band hunts; must know how to track such game using the slightest clues; must be able to craft perfectly the tools of hunting, such as bows and arrows, blowguns and darts, snares or nets; and must be extraordinarily skilled at using those tools.
To become effective gatherers, girls must learn which of the countless varieties of roots, tubers, nuts, seeds, fruits, and greens in their area are edible and nutritious, when and where to find them, how to dig them (in the case of roots and tubers), how to extract the edible portions efficiently (in the case of grains, nuts, and certain plant fibers), and in some cases how to process them to make them edible or increase their nutritional value. These abilities include physical skills, honed by years of practice, as well as the capacity to remember, use, add to, and modify an enormous store of culturally shared verbal knowledge about the food materials.
In addition, hunter-gatherer children must learn how to navigate their huge foraging territory, build huts, make fires, cook, fend off predators, predict weather changes, treat wounds and diseases, assist births, care for infants, maintain harmony within their group, negotiate with neighboring groups, tell stories, make music, and engage in various dances and rituals of their culture. Since there is little specialization beyond that of men as hunters and women as gatherers, each person must acquire a large fraction of the total knowledge and skills of the culture.
2. The children learn all this without being taught.
Although hunter-gatherer children must learn an enormous amount, hunter-gatherers have nothing like school. Adults do not establish a curriculum, or attempt to motivate children to learn, or give lessons, or monitor children's progress. When asked how children learn what they need to know, hunter-gatherer adults invariably answer with words that mean essentially: "They teach themselves through their observations, play, and exploration." Occasionally an adult might offer a word of advice or demonstrate how to do something better, such as how to shape an arrowhead, but such help is given only when the child clearly desires it. Adults to not initiate, direct, or interfere with children's activities. Adults do not show any evidence of worry about their children's education; millennia of experience have proven to them that children are experts at educating themselves.[1]
3. The children are afforded enormous amounts of time to play and explore.
In response to our question about how much time children had for play, the anthropologists we surveyed were unanimous in indicating that the hunter-gatherer children they observed were free to play most if not all of the day, every day. Typical responses are the following:
• "[Batek] children were free to play nearly all the time; no one expected children to do serious work until they were in their late teens." (Karen Endicott.)
• "Both girls and boys [among the Nharo] had almost all day every day free to play." (Alan Barnard.)
• "[Efé] boys were free to play nearly all the time until age 15-17; for girls most of the day, in between a few errands and some babysitting, was spent in play." (Robert Bailey.)
• "[!Kung] children played from dawn to dusk. " (Nancy Howell.)
The freedom that hunter-gatherer children enjoy to pursue their own interests comes partly from the adults' understanding that such pursuits are the surest path to education. It also comes from the general spirit of egalitarianism and personal autonomy that pervades hunter-gatherer cultures and applies as much to children as to adults [2]. Hunter-gatherer adults view children as complete individuals, with rights comparable to those of adults. Their assumption is that children will, of their own accord, begin contributing to the economy of the band when they are developmentally ready to do so. There is no need to make children or anyone else do what they don't want to do. It is remarkable to think that our instincts to learn and to contribute to the community evolved in a world in which our instincts were trusted!
4. Children observe adults' activities and incorporate those activities into their play.
Hunter-gatherer children are never isolated from adult activities. They observe directly all that occurs in camp--the preparations to move, the building of huts, the making and mending of tools and other artifacts, the food preparation and cooking, the nursing and care of infants, the precautions taken against predators and diseases, the gossip and discussions, the arguments and politics, the dances and festivities. They sometimes accompany adults on food gathering trips, and by age 10 or so boys sometimes accompany men on hunting trips.
The children not only observe all of these activities, but they also incorporate them into their play, and through that play they become skilled at the activities. As they grow older, their play turns gradually into the real thing. There is no sharp division between playful participation and real participation in the valued activities of the group.
For example boys who one day are playfully hunting butterflies with their little bows and arrows are, on a later day, playfully hunting small mammals and bringing some of them home to eat, and on yet a later day are joining men on real hunting trips, still in the spirit of play. As another example, both boys and girls commonly build play huts, modeled after the real huts that their parents build. In her response to our questionnaire, Nancy Howell pointed out that !Kung children commonly build a whole village of play huts a few hundred yards from the real village. The play village then becomes a playground where they act out many of the kinds of scenes that they observe among adults.
Children Educate Themselves III: The Wisdom
of Hunter-Gatherers
How hunter-gatherer children learn without schools.
The respondents to our survey referred also to many other examples of valued adult activities that were emulated regularly by children in play. Digging up roots, fishing, smoking porcupines out of holes, cooking, caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine ladders, using knives and other tools, making tools, carrying heavy loads, building rafts, making fires, defending against attacks from predators, imitating animals (a means of identifying animals and learning their habits), making music, dancing, story telling, and arguing were all mentioned by one or more respondents. Because all this play occurs in an age-mixed environment, the smaller children are constantly learning from the older ones.
Nobody has to tell or encourage the children to do all this. They do it naturally because, like children everywhere, there is nothing that they desire more than to grow up and to be like the successful adults that they see around them. The desire to grow up is a powerful motive that blends with the drives to play and explore and ensures that children, if given a chance, will practice endlessly the skills that they need to develop to become effective adults.
Nobody has to tell or encourage the children to do all this. They do it naturally because, like children everywhere, there is nothing that they desire more than to grow up and to be like the successful adults that they see around them. The desire to grow up is a powerful motive that blends with the drives to play and explore and ensures that children, if given a chance, will practice endlessly the skills that they need to develop to become effective adults.
What relevance might these observations have for education in our culture?
Our culture, of course, is very different from hunter-gatherer cultures. You might well doubt that the lessons about education that we learn from hunter-gatherers can be applied effectively in our culture today. For starters, hunter-gatherers do not have reading, writing, or arithmetic; maybe the natural, self-motivated means of learning don't work for learning the three R's. In our culture, unlike in hunter-gatherer cultures, there are countless different ways of making a living, countless different sets of skills and knowledge that children might acquire, and it is impossible for children in their daily lives to observe all those adult skills directly. In our culture, unlike in hunter-gatherer cultures, children are largely segregated from the adult work world, which reduces their opportunities to see what adults do and incorporate those activities into their play.
Yet, in the next installment, I am going to argue that the same natural means of learning that work so well for hunter-gatherers indeed do work equally well for our children, when we provide an educational setting that allows those means to work. My next installment, which I expect to post on Wednesday, August 13, will be about a school in Framingham, Massachusetts, where, for the past 40 years, children and teenagers have been educating themselves with extraordinary success through their self-directed play and exploration.
Saturday, 3 April 2010
Prescriptions for Life
How to be yourself (it's about time!)
After I gave a workshop based on my book, Life a Life You Love: 7 Steps to a Healthier, Happier, More Passionate You, a participant sent me this anonymous comment, in response to the first step in the workshop, "Allow Yourself to be You":"I would love to learn how to allow myself to be myself - but what does that mean and how do you do this?"
You'd be surprised how often people ask me this, often with tears in their eyes. Our culture doesn't encourage us to be ourselves. Quite the opposite - we're encouraged to follow a formula that's supposed to guarantee us happiness and wealth. Get an education in a traditionally approved field, get a "good" job, find "The One" (preferably one who society would approve of) and marry them, buy as big a house as you can, get two matching cars, go on vacation somewhere nice once a year, and if you're lucky you'll retire with a nice fat pension. Given the current economic climate, the latter items are slipping out of the grip of many.
The good news is that research shows that income and things beyond our basic comforts don't make us happier, and may actually have been making us unhappier. Particularly, in my opinion, if you've been squishing your real self down all along in order to create this picture-perfect "ideal" life.
When life is falling down around you, or if it just feels blah, lifeless or even hopeless, the quickest way to add hope and life back in is to re-connect with the real you.
Here are five ways to do this:
1) Look back and think of when you were happiest
When did you thrive the most in your life? Looking back, there were key joyous moments for me: practicing my "Solid Gold" dance moves in the basement when I was 8; traveling to visit European relatives in a jumbo jet with my parents; dancing all night in the disco during a Mexican trip with other students in 3rd year medical school; dancing and singing as a "Spice Nurse" in 4th year medical school's "Skits Night"...notice a couple of themes here? Dance, and travel. Small wonder that when I moved my base to Mexico and started a flamenco dance company in Cabo, my whole life changed. I laughed more, loved more, and felt filled with energy. I felt like I was finally truly alive. That's not selfish, or silly - I was simply being who I was meant to be, all along. Who are you meant to be?
2) Open your eyes and pay attention to what goes by
Instead of automatically just moving through each day, be on the lookout for things that light you up, or spark an interest. What movies capture your interest or move you the most? Do you never miss an episode of Dancing with the Stars? What activities do you observe someone else doing - whether in life, or in a book, or on TV - that you would love to try?
3) Notice what makes you mad or upset
What do you resent the most frequently in your life? If you're having a particularly grumpy day, what set you off? What's most likely to put you in a bad mood? If I don't have enough time to write or dance, I can get really irritable. If you find yourself feeling annoyed or jealous of something that someone else is doing, ask yourself why. Are they doing something you want to do? Are they preventing you from doing something you need to do? Emotions are great signposts, if you're willing to do the digging to find out what they're really about.
4) Write in a journal every day
For years I sensed that the real me was supposed to be doing something unrelated to my traditional job as a doctor. It showed itself through a deep frustration and even grief that set in after I finished a day's work or got back from vacation. At the time, I didn't really know who I was and wasn't sure how to figure that out. By journaling, day after day, surprises and clues began to show up on the page. I wanted to dance more. I wanted to perform professionally. I wanted to move to another country. I wanted to become a writer, and then a speaker. Through my journal, the real me found her voice and told the day-to-day me who she was and what she dreamed of doing. She turned my life upside down and I've never been happier since she finally had the guts to show up!
5) Listen to your body
Your body will tell you what resonates most with the real you, and when you've gone off your path or are betraying yourself. What makes you feel lighter and full of energy? What leaves you feeling drained? What makes you laugh? What makes you cry? (in a good way, and in a bad way) When do your neck and back ache? When do you get headaches? What makes your stomach churn with dread or unease? Pay attention to these physical clues - they will let you know when you're getting closer to, or farther away from, yourself.
As you pay attention to each of these areas, you'll discover more and more about the real you. Next, begin to act in ways that honor who you really are. Start doing more of those things that you've noticed move you, bring you alive, or give you more energy. Begin to avoid or change things that drain you, tense you up, or deaden your spirit. Over time, you'll be more and more yourself, and you'll be amazed by the experiences and circumstances that life will start to send your way.
It will be like God and Life were just waiting, all along, for the real you to finally show up and take the stage.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
Just enjoying having a mother is the most appropriate thing by Barton Goldsmith Published on May 8, 2010 This Mother's Day might be ...
-
May 12, 2010, Child Development Do schools crush our creativity? P...
