Back in the 1990s, I did a physical on a boy in fifth or sixth grade at a Boston public school. I asked him his favorite subject: definitely science; he had won a prize in a science fair, and was to go on and compete in a multischool fair. The problem was, there were some kids at school who were picking on him every day about winning the science fair; he was getting teased and jostled and even, occasionally, beaten up. His mother shook her head and wondered aloud whether life would be easier if he just let the science fair thing drop. Bullying elicits strong and highly personal reactions; I remember my own sense of outrage and identification. Here was a highly intelligent child, a lover of science, possibly a future (fill in your favorite genius), tormented by brutes. Here’s what I did for my patient: I advised his mother to call the teacher and complain, and I encouraged him to pursue his love of science. And here are three things I now know I should have done: I didn’t tell the mother that bullying can be prevented, and that it’s up to the school. I […]
SAN FRANCISCO — There is a revolution under way in the classroom with the Terminator in the vanguard. Arnold Schwarzenegger is throwing textbooks out of schools in a move that head teachers say could be followed in Britain. The attempt to save much-needed cash was announced by Mr Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, on a school visit in Los Angeles – and dressed up as advantageous for pupils burdened with piles of books. The governor is struggling to plug a 24 billion pound gap in state funding for the coming year. He said: ‘Kids are feeling as comfortable with their electronic devices as I was with my pencils and crayons. So why are California’s school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?’ It is a question asked increasingly in British schools. Many teachers are turning to worksheets that children print from the internet, rather than insisting on bulky books for each subject. Companies have sprung up offering specialist websites for schools, allowing pupils and parents to download information on different academic subjects, test papers and access chat rooms. Yet many say this puts pupils from poorer backgrounds at a disadvantage, as they are […]
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Google Inc is closing in on its goal of producing renewable energy at a price cheaper than coal, the company’s so-called green energy czar, the engineer in charge of the project, said on Tuesday. The search company in late 2007 said it would invest in companies and do research of its own to produce affordable renewable energy — at a price less than burning coal — within a few years. Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl said the odds of success had gone up in the last year or so from a long shot to a real possibility of demonstrating working technology in a few years. ‘It is even odds, more or less, I would say,’ he said in an interview with Reuters. ‘In, you know, three years, we could have multiple megawatts of plants out there.’ The company has made investments in advanced geothermal and wind, but engineers in the company are focused mostly on solar thermal, a type of solar energy in which the sun’s energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam to turn a turbine. Mirrors focus the sun’s rays on the heated substance. By […]
Animals have personalities, too. That may be biasing studies of them That people have personalities goes without saying. There are the shy, the cruel, the kind, the sceptical. Pet owners will quickly argue that their animals have personalities too. It is hardly uncommon to hear a dog described as friendly or inquisitive, and scientific research has confirmed that dogs do indeed have personality traits similar to those found in people. In dogs, for instance, these are usually referred to as energy-level, affection-aggression, anxiety-calmness and intelligence-stupidity; in people they are extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience and conscientiousness. Yet in spite of all this, rather little has been done to find out if such characteristics exist in wild animals. One such study, published recently in Animal Behaviour, shows not only that some do, but also that the presence of such traits is skewing the way data are collected by researchers. The animals in question are birds-collared flycatchers, to be specific. László Garamszegi, who was at the University of Antwerp at the time of the study (he is now at Doñana Biological Station in Spain), and a team of his colleagues monitored the courtship behaviour of this species. The […]
Migration. The word evokes for me, and perhaps for you, images from the Bible. Charlton Heston’s Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, and into the desert that lies beyond. Masses of people collectively on the move with common purpose, bringing with them all their goods and chattels. Never expecting to return. More than war, more than climate catastrophe, more than pandemics-migrations are a force for change. And this is as true for first world countries like the United States, Europe, or Japan, as it is for developing nations like China or Third World countries such as the nations of Africa. Migrations come in two varieties: glacial and volcanic. The 1994 Tutsi flood that poured out of Rwanda and the several million non-Islamic Sudanese forced from their villages by the progovernment Janjaweed militias are volcanic migrations-violent ejections of populations based on immediate crisis. The volcanic time frame is short term, because just as the Rwandans-both Hutu and Tutsi-came back as soon as it was possible, those ejected by a volcanic migration do not surrender their allegiance to their homeland and always hope to return. Theirs is the commonsense response of simple people caught in the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
