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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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?

[aliiis.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

I only saw the response not the original and I was amazed the secondhand booksellers would even try and play the sympathy card.

[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.

[aliiis.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly this. I was also pretty surprised that the Guardian seemed to just be going along with that slant rather than trying to put it into any kind of context. I hadn't seen the response, thanks!

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?

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

The article discusses a programme designed to ameliorate the circumstances.

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.

[andrewducker]

Members of this year's and last year's WorldCon are eligible to nominate/vote.

[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.

[andrewducker]

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

[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.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

The responses here are also worth looking at:

One criticism is that Oxfam bookshops are part of a homogeneising chain, just like Starbucks etc., that squeeze out the independent to reduce the character and diversity of the high street.

Or "Oxfam claim to support fair trade - yet do everything possible to ensure that they have a monopoly in the second hand trade. They boast of their dominance on websites.

Sadly their destruction of the book trade doesn't even particularly help the third world. Oxfam do good work - but not from the money that comes from their retail arm.
Look at their own published accounts:

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/downloads/reports/report_acounts07_08.pdf

So They raise £77.7 million from retail. They have internal costs leaving a profit of £17.1 million. (that in itself is incredibly low given the advantages they have) Less than a quarter of the cost of the book you buy is profit to "Oxfam Retail Ltd"

This is then handed as a donation (tax free) to Oxfam the charity. They then have 15% admin and 15% "money spent making money" (marketing to the rest of us). Very little remains. This out of a total income of £299.7 million in the year ending 2008. their retail operation brings in 5.7% of total income before their administration costs.

From a budget of £300 million, the amount raised is very small - certainly not worth the effort put in. It seems that the PR and publicity that Oxfam achieves is of more interest to them."

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).

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

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