Delicious LiveJournal Links for 8-6-2009

[andrewducker]

• Why poor children do less well - and what can be done about it
  All the latest research on the brain showed that much of a child's capacity to think and to learn was set in the first three years of life.
  
  Middle-class families were spending those years talking, singing and reading to their children. Poor children weren't getting any of that.
  
  They were arriving at school with an average of 25 hours of one-to-one reading behind them. Middle-class children had had 1,700 hours, and their vocabulary was twice as large. They had learned to argue and discuss, and had been introduced to conceptual thinking.
  
  Above all, the middle-class children arrived with confidence. They had been encouraged. By the age of three they had heard six times as many encouraging words as discouraging ones. Poor children had been reprimanded two and a half times more than they had been praised. Meanwhile, James Heckman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, showed that by the late teenage years, deprived children were very hard to help or teach new skills.
  (tags: education children politics society)
• Structure of HIV genome decoded
  (tags: virus genetics health AIDS)
• Apple Censor the Fucking Dictionary
  Have I mentioned that I have no intention of ever buying an iPhone? Ever?
  (tags: Apple iphone censorship dictionary EpicFail)
• Article of Faith, by Mike Resnick
  Nominated for a Hugo this year.
  (tags: fiction scifi)
• High Court shields database state from blame
  If the government gets your data wrong then, well, tough luck, apparently.
  (tags: database government law)
• Oxfam killing second-hand books shops
  (tags: books charity UK business oxfam)

Comments

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Article of Faith, by Mike Resnick

From the now defunct Baen's Universe which can no longer inflict this crap on us.

[andrewducker]

I quite enjoyed it, although I didn't think it was great.

But then I'd be voting for 26 Monkeys... and found Exhalation pointless and dull, so I seem to be in a minority :->

[nwhyte]

I found "Article of Faith" so bad that I couldn't bear to finish it.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

No, it is pointless and dull.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I didn't like it. It didn't do anything which hasn't been done plenty of times before, usually in a more interesting or sophisticated way, since at least the 50s. The conversation about whether the robot has a soul is almost identical to the one in Short Circuit 2. And it was badly proofread. I persevered to the end in the hope that it would redeem itself with an unexpected twist, but it didn't.

What do you have to do to be nominated for a Hugo? Can anyone nominate anything, or is there a committee that makes nominations, or what?

[diotina.livejournal.com]

Re: the first link--indeed--an interesting discussion between Hillary Clinton and Aamir Khan (extremely well-known Indian actor) on education in India last month brought up exactly this point...that even if we do manage to get children from poorer backgrounds into schools, they would still lag behind because they didn't have the kind of environment that middle-class children were privy to at home.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. You can try and minimise the differences, but changing how people are at home is the real answer - and that's incredibly hard and takes generations to set in.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

"Middle-class families were spending those years talking, singing and reading to their children. Poor children weren't getting any of that."

But that just begs the question. Is anyone asking why that should be the case, or indeed whether it actually is the case? Surely there are plenty of rich parents who ignore their children, and poor ones who spend time with them? To say otherwise sounds like the kind of 19th-century conservatism that says the poor are morally inferior and deserve what they get.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

The article discusses a programme designed to ameliorate the circumstances.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I know, I read it. That doesn't answer why it should be necessary.

[andrewducker]

Or less likely to be as literate, afford books, etc., because _their_ parents were caught in the same cycle...

And it's not going to be universal - just more/less common.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

The article mentions reading, talking and singing - the factors you mention only apply to one out of the three. It also mentions praise as opposed to criticism; I can't see any financial link for that. AFAICT it's talking about poor parenting, not being poor.

And saying "it's how their parents in turn treated them" is again completely begging the question.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

As far as I am aware these "plenty" of rich parents or poor parents who behave as you describe are not actually a statistically significant amount.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I keep seeing that thing about reading to your kids, but it doesn't get connected to adult (il)literacy-- how are people who can't read supposed to read to their kids?

[andrewducker]

Which is why schools, etc. have to be used to make a difference.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That too, but it doesn't seem crazy to work on teaching adults to read.

[aliiis.livejournal.com]

I was really shocked by that Grauniad article the other day about Oxfam shops! Missing the point much?!

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

So was I.
I can understand that the booksellers might annoyed in private, but I wouldn't expect them to rant about it in a public newspaper and make themselves look mean and selfish. AFAICT their argument amounts to "I need that £2.99 more than a starving African does." I can't be the only one who's less inclined to buy books from the individuals quoted after reading the article.

I preferred the article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2009/aug/04/oxfam-second-hand-books) which came out the next day in response to it.

[autodidactic.livejournal.com]

I'm lucky -- I came up in the ghetto, but I learned to read before I even went to preschool. Mom was all into those child development books in nursing school. She read to me constantly and instilled love for reading as well. She did me a solid.

Thanks, mom.

[dalglir.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed Article of Faith. A harmless and amusing short story.

Especially

“You can be switched off," I pointed out. "Ask any roboticist.”
“So can you,” replied Jackson. “Ask any doctor. Or any marksman.”

made me laugh out loud.

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

Why poor children do less well - and what can be done about it
Oh yeah. My Hubby, an economist, has says it's all about class and money.

I for one am hoping the Harlem project ROCKS the WORLD! Amen and I wish them all the best.

The Harlem scheme is fantastic...

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

...but it's expensive, and paid for out of money earned by other people who work long hours to support their own children when they'd rather be reading to them. Wouldn't it be simpler and more moral to find ways of persuading unsuitable parents not to breed?

Re: The Harlem scheme is fantastic...

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

One of the aims of the program is to reduce teenage pregnancy. I suspect that the investment in family planning advice and free contraceptives is also being made.

Re: The Harlem scheme is fantastic...

[andrewducker]

1) I generally think that designating parents as "unsuitable for breeding" because their parents were too poor and illiterate to give them a good education is, itself, immoral.

2) Investing money in children pays back vastly over time - raising someone out of illiteracy pushes up their potential earnings and increases the taxes they pay over their life massively. $5,000 per year is peanuts compared to this.

3) This is helping existing children. If you want to reduce new children then that's a separate question - existing children should be helped.

4) Contraception use increases with education levels - and also with perceived potential. People who see a bright future for themselves hold off on having children for longer and have less. If you want to reduce birth levels then education seems to be the only method that works (outside of something like the Chinese one-child approach, which isn't getting traction over here any time soon).

Re: The Harlem scheme is fantastic...

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

With declining birth rates in the Western world is that really a desirable outcome?