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Friday, 3 April 2015

Curiosity drives infant learning, Hopkins research shows

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Want to make your baby smarter?

New research by the Johns Hopkins University has found that it may be as simple as throwing some surprises his or her way.


All babies are born with some natural smarts, but youngsters learn more about the world when this innate intelligence is challenged, cognitive psychologists Aimee E. Stahl and Lisa Feigenson discovered in a study that will be published Friday in the journal .


The researchers took babies, who could not yet talk, through four experiments to prove their theory. They presented the babies with situations they could predict, as well as some that were unexpected, and gauged their reactions.


The unexpected roused the babies' curiosity. As they tried to figure out what happened, learning was taking place.


Further research is needed to determine how the study results can be applied to child raising and education, but the researchers said it has the potential to help guide the way babies are taught new skills and concepts.


Perhaps a parent could do activities, such as hiding a ball to see if a baby goes to look for it, Stahl said. Or when parents take an older child to a children's museum or science center, they could ask them to predict how magnets and other objects might work.


"This raises some exciting, intriguing questions about whether surprise could be used by parents and teachers to shape how babies learn," Stahl said.


Early childhood is an important developmental period in a person's life because infant brains quickly absorb and process reams of information. A small child will pick up a foreign language easier and faster than a teenager or an adult will.


Studies like the one at Hopkins have the potential to help better leverage that key learning time, said Claire Lerner, a child development specialist with Zero to Three, a national nonprofit organization that looks at ways to nurture early development.


One of the indicators of academic success is a child's ability to master a challenge and to confront new experiences with confidence.


"What is so exciting about this research is that the message to parents and other adults who are nurturing young children's development is how much, at such a young age, they are processing and problem solving and figuring out," Lerner said.


Prior research has shown that novelty enhances memory for adults. Novel events stimulate a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which compares new sensory information with existing memories. When something is new, it triggers a rush of the hormone dopamine, which helps the brain store new memories.


What the Hopkins psychologists discovered about the babies is no different from the way adults learn, Stahl and Feigenson wrote in their paper. Scientists, for instance, think more intently, run more experiments and try to develop new theories when they run across an unusual or unexpected finding.


One way the Hopkins researchers studied the children was by using a ball and a wall. They rolled the ball down a ramp and toward the wall. In one trial, the ball hit the wall, as a baby would naturally expect. In the other, the ball passed through a hidden door in the wall, sparking the babies' inquisitiveness.


The babies didn't pay much attention to the ball that hit the wall — the predictable one. But they grabbed the other ball and banged it on the table.


When shown a ball that appeared to be suspended in air, the babies grabbed it and threw it on the floor.


The response by the infants was not reflexive or automatic, Stahl said, but a contemplative attempt to figure out what happened.


The findings show that when confronted with the unexpected, babies learn about the object better, explore the object more and come up with their own hypothesis for why the object behaved in a certain way.


"Our results show that not only do babies have this sophisticated knowledge about the world, but can use it to find out and learn more," Stahl said. "When things don't go as you would expect them to go, it provides a significant and special opportunity to update your knowledge about it."


Amy Stephens, a Hopkins postdoctoral research fellow, put her daughter Elisabeth in the study. She hopes the research will help in teaching children.


"There is a lot of information and knowledge before they to go to preschool and kindergarten," Stephens said. "We need to have a better understanding of what that foundational knowledge is. What is it that kids already know that we can build from?"


Thursday, 2 April 2015

CrossTalk on RT: The Yemen "template of success"

Amazingly the Obama administration still calls Yemen a "template" of success when it comes to its counterterrorism efforts. Closer to the truth is probably still another poorly thought out foreign policy adventure. And double standards abound - what is deemed legitimate for Yemen is denied in the case of Ukraine.

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Comment: Some interesting contrasts drawn between the response of the US to the toppling of the legitimately elected leader of the Yemen vs the response to the toppling of the legitimately elected leader of the Ukraine. Bottom line, there is no pretense of consistency. Whatever course appears to preserve US hegemony is the one they will follow. Without this lens, the actions of the US appear incomprehensible to normal people.

13yo Logan LaPlante shares his experience with Hackschooling, an alternative to traditional education

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When 13 year-old Logan LaPlante grows up, he wants to be happy and healthy. He discusses how hacking his education is helping him achieve this goal.

Transcript:


When you are a kid, you get asked this one particular question a lot, it really gets kind of annoying. What do you want to be when you grow up? Now, adults are hoping for answers like, I want to be an astronaut or I want to be a neurosurgeon, you're adults in your imaginations.


Kids, they're most likely to answer with pro-skateboarder, surfer or minecraft player. I asked my little brother, and he said, seriously dude, I'm 10, I have no idea, probably a pro-skier, let's go get some ice cream.


See, us kids are going to answer something we're stoked on, what we think is cool, what we have experience with, and that's typically the opposite of what adults want to hear.


But if you ask a little kid, sometimes you'll get the best answer, something so simple, so obvious and really profound. When I grow up, I want to be happy.


[Logan LaPlante] Source: LYBIO.net

For me, when I grow up, I want to continue to be happy like I am now. I'm stoked to be here at TedEx, I mean, I've been watching Ted videos for as long as I can remember, but I never thought I'd make it on the stage here so soon. I mean, I just became a teenager, and like most teenage boys, I spend most of my time wondering, how did my room get so messy all on its own.


Did I take a shower today? And the most perplexing of all, how do I get girls to like me? Neurosciences say that the teenage brain is pretty weird, our prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped, but we actually have more neurons than adults, which is why we can be so creative, and impulsive and moody and get bummed out.


But what bums me out is to know that, a lot of kids today are just wishing to be happy, to be healthy, to be safe, not bullied, and be loved for who they are. So it seems to me when adults say, what do you want to be when you grow up? They just assume that you'll automatically be happy and healthy.


Well, maybe that's not the case, go to school, go to college, get a job, get married, boom, then you'll be happy, right? You don't seem to make learning how to be happy and healthy a priority in our schools, it's separate from schools. And for some kids, it doesn't exists at all? But what if we didn't make it separate? What if we based education on the study and practice of being happy and healthy, because that's what it is, a practice, and a simple practice at that?


[Logan LaPlante] Source: LYBIO.net

Education is important, but why is being happy and healthy not considered education, I just don't get it. So I've been studying the science of being happy and healthy. It really comes down to practicing these eight things. Exercise, diet and nutrition, time in nature, contribution, service to others, relationships, recreation, relaxation and stress management, and religious or spiritual involvement, yes, got that one.


So these eight things come from Dr. Roger Walsh, he calls them Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes or TLCs for short. He is a scientist that studies how to be happy and healthy. In researching this talk, I got a chance to ask him a few questions like; do you think that our schools today are making these eight TLCs a priority? His response was no surprise, it was essentially no. But he did say that many people do try to get this kind of education outside of the traditional arena, through reading and practices such as meditation or yoga.


But what I thought was his best response was that, much of education is oriented for better or worse towards making a living rather than making a life.


Wednesday, 1 April 2015

State Legislators Pushing Bills To Shield Police Officers From Their Own Body Camera Recordings



Police accountability remains a major concern. Lawsuits alleging improper police conduct are filed seemingly nonstop. The Department of Justice continues to investigate police department after police department for a variety of civil rights violations. More and more police departments are equipping body cameras on their officers in hopes of trimming down the number of complaints and lawsuits filed against them.



Meanwhile, the public has taken police accountability into its own hands, thanks to the steady march of technology -- which has put a portable phone in almost every person's hands, and put a camera inside most of those phones.



So, we have two entities viewing accountability from seemingly opposite directions. Over the years, many officers have made it clear through their actions that being filmed isn't something they're comfortable with. This has resulted in additional misconduct and abuse of existing laws to shut down recordings. But what are these officers going to do when a city council -- or worse, a Memorandum of Understanding with the Justice Department -- directs them to start generating their own recordings?



One answer has already been presented by the Denver Police Department. They simply won't activate the cameras.
During a six-month trial run for body cameras in the Denver Police Department, only about one out of every four use-of-force incidents involving officers was recorded.



Cases where officers punched people, used pepper spray or Tasers, or struck people with batons were not recorded because officers failed to turn on cameras, technical malfunctions occurred or because the cameras were not distributed to enough people, according to a report released Tuesday by Denver's independent monitor Nick Mitchell.

This is a case-by-case "solution," self-applied as needed by certain officers. For other departments, it appears the imposition of recording devices will be greeted by legislation. Legislators cite "privacy concerns" but their bills do little more than hand law enforcement agencies full control over body camera recordings.
Lawmakers in at least 15 states have introduced bills to exempt video recordings of police encounters with citizens from state public records laws, or to limit what can be made public.



Their stated motive: preserving the privacy of people being videotaped, and saving considerable time and money that would need to be spent on public information requests as the technology quickly becomes widely used.

A small amount of redaction (face-blurring, etc.) would address the privacy concerns. After all, reality TV pioneer COPS has run for years with minimal privacy complaints and that's all it's ever used. As for the latter concern -- expenses related to open records requests -- there are ways to address this that won't cede complete control to law enforcement agencies. Seattle's Police Department worked with a local activist to find a solution that would provide footage, protect privacy and stay ahead of voluminous public records requests. Unfortunately, the result of these efforts has produced nothing more than extremely blurry footage in which everything is "redacted" by default.



Justifications offered by legislators try desperately to skew law enforcement's total control of body camera footage as some sort of win for the general public.
"Public safety trumps transparency," said Kansas state Sen. Greg Smith, a Republican. "It's not trying to hide something. It's making sure we're not releasing information that's going to get other people hurt."

The problem is that if it's the public being abused in these videos, there are very few options available to obtain recordings of misconduct.
The Kansas Senate voted 40-0 last month to exempt the recordings from the state's open records act. Police would only have to release them to people who are the subject of the recordings and their representatives, and could charge them a viewing fee. Kansas police also would be able to release videos at their own discretion.

The "fix" for possibly overbroad public records requests includes a) making acquiring a recording unaffordable, even for the person on the receiving end of alleged abuse and b) allowing the Kansas police to push out a steady stream of exculpatory video. The latter of the two is perfectly acceptable, but only if it's balanced by the public's ability to obtain less-than-flattering video of interactions with police officers. Nothing about this bill makes the public any "safer," no matter what Sen. Greg Smith says.



The potential for abuse of laws like these is so obvious even the cops can see it.
"I think it's a fair concern and a fair criticism that people might cherry pick and release only the ones that show them in a favorable light," said former Charlotte, North Carolina, police chief Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

Arizona's legislation goes even further than its Midwestern counterpart.
The bill declares that body camera recordings are not public records, and as such can be released only if the public interest "outweighs the interests of privacy or confidentiality or the best interests of the state."

Not even the subject of the footage can demand a copy of the recording without somehow talking a judge into issuing an order for its release. Washington's proposed legislation similarly exempts all body camera video from public examination and routes footage requests through the courts. In both cases, bill sponsors claim publicly-released video could be used for "criminal purposes," but have yet to explain how a properly-redacted video would become a tool for "extortion" by "unscrupulous website owners."



The attendant irony hypocrisy, of course, is that law enforcement agencies and local governments have declared arrest mugshots to be public records and have allowed "unscrupulous website owners" to post the shots and demand payment for their removal. But mugshots only involve members of the public, making them of lesser concern than footage that will also contain police officers. This sort of legislation is nothing more than the codification of a double standard, if that's the motivation behind it.



On the other hand, some states are at least moving to ensure the general public can continue their unpaid police accountability efforts.
The Colorado bill, which you can read here, states that if a cop seizes a camera from a citizen without permission or a warrant or deliberately interferes with a citizen’s right to record by intimidation or destruction of the camera, the citizen is entitled to $15,000 in civil fees in addition to attorney fees.

This bill will help ensure at least one recording of an officer-involved incident remains intact, seeing as Denver police officers aren't all that into capturing their end of these interactions.
Another bill in Texas which has not gotten nearly as much publicity comes from democratic representative Eric Johnson, which seeks to protect citizens from bullying officers as well as criminalize cops who confiscate cameras, only to destroy footage.

This pushes back against Texas Congressman Jason Villalba's recently-introduced bill, which hopes to add a 25-foot no-recording "halo" around police officers at all times -- stretching to 100 feet if the camera operator happens to be armed. Villalba has openly stated that "officer safety" is a greater concern than violated First Amendment rights, which would actually be criminalized if his bill passes.



California has also introduced a bill involving citizen recordings -- one that will make an incredibly obvious statement into law… presumably because that's the only way the state will get law enforcement to respect it.
In California, Senate Bill 411 would amend the state's penal code to say that simply filming or taking a photograph of an officer performing his duty in a public place does not automatically amount to interference.

"Filming isn't interference" would seem to be something that shouldn't need to be inserted as an amendment to criminal statutes. As would the following, which is perhaps even more infuriatingly obvious than the sentence above:
Supporters say it protects the First Amendment and clarifies that filming alone does not give police officers probable cause to search or confiscate an individual's property.

Undoubtedly, there will be law enforcement pushback against the proposed legislation, which should be referenced in the future as the "We Shouldn't Even Need to Be Telling You This" Act, with "SMDH" as the short title.



Both sets of cameras will help increase law enforcement accountability, but one set is receiving the majority of proposed legislative protections. Shielding body camera recordings from the public eye limits their effectiveness as misconduct deterrents -- the very reason they've been instituted.

We are at the end of the age of privacy

Privacy as we once knew it is dead. We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology—specifically the technology employed by the government against the American citizenry. As a result, warns John W. Whitehead in this week's vodcast, we are becoming a nation where even the most virtuous citizen risks becoming an outlaw.

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Tuesday, 31 March 2015

Iceland to take back the power to create money

Who knew that the revolution would start with those radical Icelanders? It does, though. One Frosti Sigurjonsson, a lawmaker from the ruling Progress Party, issued a report today that suggests taking the power to create money away from commercial banks, and hand it to the central bank and, ultimately, Parliament.

Can't see commercial banks in the western world be too happy with this. They must be contemplating wiping the island nation off the map. If accepted in the Iceland parliament , the plan would change the game in a very radical way. It would be successful too, because there is no bigger scourge on our economies than commercial banks creating money and then securitizing and selling off the loans they just created the money (credit) with.


Everyone, with the possible exception of Paul Krugman, understands why this is a very sound idea. reports:



Iceland Looks At Ending Boom And Bust With Radical Money Plan


"The findings will be an important contribution to the upcoming discussion, here and elsewhere, on money creation and monetary policy," Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson said. The report, commissioned by the premier, is aimed at putting an end to a monetary system in place through a slew of financial crises, including the latest one in 2008.


According to a study by four central bankers, the country has had "over 20 instances of financial crises of different types" since 1875, with "six serious multiple financial crisis episodes occurring every 15 years on average". Mr Sigurjonsson said the problem each time arose from ballooning credit during a strong economic cycle.


He argued the central bank was unable to contain the credit boom, allowing inflation to rise and sparking exaggerated risk-taking and speculation, the threat of bank collapse and costly state interventions. In Iceland, as in other modern market economies, the central bank controls the creation of banknotes and coins but not the creation of all money, which occurs as soon as a commercial bank offers a line of credit. The central bank can only try to influence the money supply with its monetary policy tools.


Under the so-called Sovereign Money proposal, the country's central bank would become the only creator of money. "Crucially, the power to create money is kept separate from the power to decide how that new money is used," Mr Sigurjonsson wrote in the proposal. "As with the state budget, the parliament will debate the government's proposal for allocation of new money," he wrote.


Banks would continue to manage accounts and payments, and would serve as intermediaries between savers and lenders. Mr Sigurjonsson, a businessman and economist, was one of the masterminds behind Iceland's household debt relief programme launched in May 2014 and aimed at helping the many Icelanders whose finances were strangled by inflation-indexed mortgages signed before the 2008 financial crisis.



Freak snow storm swallows bridge in Siberia

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