Babies track word patterns long before word-learning starts. From the moment they're born, babies are highly attuned to communicate and motivated to interact.
And they're great listeners. New research from the University of Notre Dame shows that during the first year of life, when babies spend so much time listening to language, they're actually tracking word patterns that will support their process of word- learning that occurs between the ages of about 18 months and two years. "Babies are constantly looking for language clues in context and sound," says Jill Lany, assistant professor of psychology and director of Notre Dame's baby lab, where she conducts studies on how babies acquire language. "My research suggests that there are some surprising clues in the sound stream that may help babies learn the meanings of words.
Ending the Infographic Plague - Megan McArdle - Business. Now that Obama's dog has won the War on Christmas, or something, it's time to get down to a war that really matters: the war on terrible, lying infographics, which have become endemic in the blogosphere, and constantly threaten to break out into epidemic or even pandemic status.
The reservoir of this disease of erroneous infographics is internet marketers who don't care whether the information in their graphics is right ... just so long as you link it. Has the PG-13 Rating Outlived Its Usefulness? If you see that a movie is rated PG-13, what does that tell you?
If you're a parent, it may suggest to you that the film is OK for your kids, or at least your older kids. The 30 Most Useful, Interesting, And Surprising "Today I Learned" Threads On Reddit. The Genius of 'Doug,' 'Rugrats,' and 'Ren & Stimpy,' 20 Years Later - Spencer Kornhaber - Entertainment.
Nicktoons, which began two decades ago today, represented a new kind of kids' TV Nickelodeon Forget nostalgia.
The real contribution of Nickelodeon's new, chatter-causing block of programming from the '90s isn't that it provides 20-and-30-somethings a chance to wallow in childhood memories. Rather, we should revisit grunge-era Nick programming because grunge-era Nick programming was good. And it mattered. Are People With Schizophrenia Living a Dream? When I lay my head down at night to go to sleep , I, like many of you, enter a fantastical dream world. In these worlds, American Idol contestants sing in tune, bright redheaded women are fighting for my affection, and every street corner is full of panhandling turtles with Viking hats singing Carmina Burana in perfect harmony. Once I awaken, I, also like most of you, quickly lose the vividness inherent in the dreams . The turtles' chants die down, the red hairs aren't as intense, and the positive emotions I felt actually hearing good singing in a singing competition quickly fades away.
Sure there are still traces in my system of these emotions and sensations, but they quickly disappear as I set out to accomplish the (mostly not nearly as interesting) tasks before me. But is this the case for everyone? The article got me thinking though about some recent research on the relation between the default network and schizophrenia . So what does the schizophrenic brain look like? References. Amy Smith shares simple, lifesaving design. Give A Shit. Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?
Is long-term solitary confinement torture? Human beings are social creatures.
We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people. Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence.
Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys. He happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of importing them from India. At first, Harlow and his graduate students couldn’t figure out what the problem was. Some hostages fared worse.
Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus. 24 hours as a Tokyo Internet café refugee. The homeless in Tokyo are always haunted by sleep.
You see them trying to scrape together a few minutes or hours of decent rest in cardboard caves or nodding off while riding the endless Yamanote loop line. Harder to see are the sleeping rituals of the working poor, an emerging group of workers, sometimes homeless, who make up 7.5% of the Japanese adult population, according to a 2007 study by the Health Ministry of Japan. The Ministry's report claims that at least 5,400 of these working poor have adopted Tokyo's Internet cafés as a temporary home.
Dubbed 'Internet Café Refugees,' these (mostly) men are human fallout from an expensive city filled beyond its capacity.