15 April 2013

Items to Share; 14 April

Education Focus
  • Brain-Training Games Don't Actually Make You Smarter : The New Yorker 'Last year, the New York Times Magazine published a glowing profile of the young guns of brain training called “Can you make yourself smarter?” The answer, however, now appears to be a pretty firm no—at least, not through brain training. [Meta-analysis concludes] the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence. Playing the games makes you better at the games, in other words, but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.' 
Other Business
  • Tom Lehrer’s Mathematically and Scientifically Inclined Singing and Songwriting, Animated | Open Culture 'Nobody can deny the importance of learning how to subtract or how to tell one element from another, but we’d do well to keep Lehrer’s sharp human insights, present implicitly in all his music and explicitly in some of it, in mind. So put one of his records on the next time you have a birthday of your own, taking a bracing shot of his wit before you continue, as he put it in “Bright College Days", "sliding down the razor blade of life.”'  He's just celebrated his 85th birthday
  • Anxiety and Avoidance - NYTimes.com  'When avoidance prevents one from dealing with life, it is maladaptive. But when avoidance is proactive and part of active coping and agency, it helps the person control the accelerator, brakes, and the track switches. It is a useful adaptive activity.' 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments welcome, but I am afraid I have had to turn moderation back on, because of inappropriate use. Even so, I shall process them as soon as I can.