20 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
The Death of Technocracy
What we are witnessing is the beginning of the final breakup of industrialism and, with it, the
collapse of technocratic planning. By technocratic planning, I do not mean only the
centralized national planning that has, until recently, characterized the USSR, but also the
less formal, more dispersed attempts at systematic change management that occur in all the
high technology nations, regardless of their political persuasion. Michael Harrington, the
socialist critic, arguing that we have rej... 1 
notes
notesThis is not a dichotomy--there can be degrees of planning and emergence--but the problems with technocracy are true challenges.
24 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Training Memory in Preschool Children
Psychologists have tested memory performance in people all over the world and found that those who have completed at least a few years of formal education score higher than those from the same culture and economic status who did not attend school; and the more years completed, the better the performance. Where formal schooling especially helps is in learning memory strategies, deliberate tricks like verbal rehearsal, information clustering, and note-taking that children use to make it through...
1 Schooling appears to be the most influential factor in training memory in children, but parents can do more by coaching children to remember things and build narratives as a tool for memory.
24 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Word Explosion in Infants
Babies first bridge the gap between sounds and meaning as early as nine or ten months of age. They learn the names of family members and pets, the meaning of no! and perhaps a few general labels like shoe and cookie. By his first birthday, the average child understands around seventy words, mostly nouns like people's names and terms for objects, but also certain social expressions, like hi and bye-bye. Of course, he cannot say nearly that many. The median number of words spoken by a one-year-... 1 notes
notesWhen children learn about four-dozen words, they suddenly begin to learn many more at an accelerated pace.
19 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Effects of Smoking on the Fetus
Most women also realize that smoking is bad during pregnancy. Unfortunately, it can be a very hard habit to give up, even for the best-intentioned parent. Smoking is not as detrimental to fetal brain development as heavy alcohol drinking, but it acts on many other organ systems. like the heart and lungs, that compromise the baby's health in a lasting way. Babies born to heavy smokers are substantially smaller than babies born to nonsmokers, averaging about half a pound lighter. In fact, smoki... 1 notes
notesThe evidence suggests that smoking has longterm cognitive effects on children due to compromised brain development in the womb.
