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...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.
17 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Seeing the Species for the Ecosystem
The authors comment that from this perspective, it could be stated that multiccellular beings are also ecosystems. That is, we are formed by different types of cells that cooperate and compete for resources; we are colonized by diverse types of bacteria (in the intestines, in the skin, etc.) whose activity is linked to other processes in our organism: we are invaded by viruses, which can be harmful or can take part in processes that regulate our DNA. "These beings are constantly being changed...It is helpful to think of species in the context of the ecosystem in which they live, as they are an part of it, indistinguishable from it in very important ways. Any single species' ecosystem includes all of the other species within it.