Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-13-2009

[andrewducker]

• Ancient virus gave wasps power over caterpillar DNA
  Ewww! Ewwwww!
  (tags: biology virus insects Parasites)
• Let's get our fats right
  Pointing out that the advice to avoid eating all fats is...complete nonsense without scientific backing.
  (tags: diet food science)
• Pointing can boost toddlers' language skills
  Once in school, the children who gestured most as toddlers scored on average 26% higher in the language test than the other children.
  (tags: children learning)
• Quotes from the website of the bishop recently rehabilitated by The Pope
  That girls should not be in universities flows from the nature of universities and from the nature of girls: true universities are for ideas, ideas are not for true girls, so true universities are not for true girls... If a girl devotes several years of her youth and much money of her parents to acquiring a university education, especially a decent one, how easily will she submit to her husband, especially if he has not had that education?
  (tags: religion catholicism)
• How the Crash Will Reshape America
  "One thing seems probable to me," said Peer Steinbruck, the German finance minister, in September 2008. As a result of the crisis, "the United States will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system." You don't have to strain too hard to see the financial crisis as the death knell for a debt-ridden, overconsuming, and underproducing American empire.
  (tags: economics culture America)

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Argh! That toddler-pointing one is a correlation/causation roadcrash. We already know (as the authors of the actual study point out) that high SES is strongly correlated with lots of education-related metrics. There's also a lot to suggest that it's a direct rather than an indirect cause - e.g. the famous Freakonomics finding that having lots of books in your house when you're growing up is correlated with being better at reading - but not because the parents do more reading with the kids. So it's far more likely that kids of high-SES parents do better across the board (which we know in lots of ways already), and are more expressive in both verbal and non-verbal ways as a manifestation of that.

This is pants evidence that doing more gestures to your toddler will give them a better vocabulary.