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Step 1: give every kid a laptop. Step 2: learning begins?

http://arstechnica.com/business/the-networked-society/2012/02/step-one-give-e...Step 1: give every kid a laptop. Step 2: learning begins?

Peru has its 700,000 laptops deployed across much of the country. As of 2007, the Peruvian government made a conscious decision to focus at first on the country's most rural poor in the parts of the country that are hardest to reach and that have the least access to paved roads, electricity, and Internet access.

Independent studies of the Peruvian OLPC program have been less than stellar.

"In the classes that were observed during the qualitative evaluation, it was noted that laptops were being regularly used between two or three times a week and daily, but in most cases their use has not substantially changed the practices,"

 

"When you give a kid a laptop connected to the Internet—many people expected kids to do teach themselves programming, read Wikipedia, or do these enriching things, but what kids tend to do unless they're directed is to download games, music, and movies,"

Drug abuse, impulsiveness and heritability.

Abnormal brain structures hint at poor self-control and vulnerability to drug addiction

Karen Ersche from the University of Cambridge found that drug users have abnormalities in parts of the brain that are important for inhibiting unwanted actions. These same anomalies even exist in the brains of their siblings, who don’t have any drug problems themselves. They could act as a marker for people who are vulnerable to addiction. “Our findings provide further evidence for drug addiction being a brain-based disorder,” says Ersche.

 

These connections were weaker among both the drug users and their relatives, compared to the healthy unrelated volunteers. The fibres were particularly sparse around the right inferior frontal cortex (IFC), an area involved in controlling our inhibitions. These abnormalities were linked to the volunteers’s scores on the stop-signal test – the weaker the connections, the slower their reaction times. With its communication lines weakened, the IFC was less able to exert its suppressive influence.

 

This is a key point. Drug dependence runs in families, and it is clearly influenced by a person’s genes. But genes do not determine behaviour; they merely influence it. The non-addicted siblings in Ersche’s study illustrate the point beautifully. “They share so much,” says Ersche. “They have the same vulnerabilities as their drug-dependent brothers and sisters. They had a lot of domestic violence and troubled childhoods but they didn’t get into drugs. Their average age was 33. They may have had many opportunities to develop dependence, but they didn’t.”

Perhaps the other one had environmental influences that set them down a different path. Perhaps they also had inherited some “resilience factors” that their siblings did not.  In an earlier study with some of the same siblings, Ersche found that all of them are more impulsive, but only the drug users were “sensation-seekers”. These are subtly different traits. “Impulsive people act on the spur of the moment,” Ersche explains, “but sensation-seekers crave excitement and adventure. In contrast to the drug-dependent individuals, their siblings do not seem to crave for excitement and sensations, which might have protected them from taking drugs in the first place.

 

Reference: Ersche, Jones, Williams, Turton, Robbins & Bullmore. 2011. Abnormal Brain Structure Implicated in Stimulant Drug Addiction. Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1214463

Blog special: Alain de Botton on his ‘temple of atheism’….

The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton has a new book out on atheism, and some press reports suggest that he wants to build a ‘temple to atheism’ in the City of London.  Some religious folk have then argued that this shows atheists have finally found a sense of awe and wonder in the world.  I sent out a tweet saying that I thought the idea of a temple of atheism was a very silly idea.  Alain then emailed me to say that he had been misreported in the press.  I suggested that he wrote something to set the record straight, and he kindly sent me the following piece….

“ Beyond ‘Temples for Atheists’ – An explanation.

I am conscious that the phrase ‘temple for atheists’ has had the power to annoy a great many good and clever people – and because my idea is as I conceive it inherently non-contentious, it’s clear that I must have explained it extremely badly, for which I’m sorry. Let me start again.

My starting point is that a great many religious buildings are powerful works of architecture: even committed atheists like myself recognise that many cathedrals, mosques, temples and churches are extremely successful and beguiling as buildings. The religious explanation for this power has often invoked God in the creative process. Medieval Cathedral builders quite literally believed that the hand of God was guiding them in their extraordinary creations.

As an atheist, I can’t believe in the supernatural explanations for the greatness of religious architecture. I analyse the power in terms of such features as mass, scale, material, sound, air quality and so on.

My suggestion is that contemporary architecture look more closely at the examples of religious architecture, in order to give their buildings some of the qualities that are most appealling in religious buildings; to put it bluntly, in order that these effects not reside heretofore only in the cul-de-sac of religious architecture.

The architects I have come across who have already been at work on this, and very brilliantly, are Louis Kahn, Tadao Ando and Peter Zumthor. In the world of art, James Turrell has explored similar ground – as did Mark Rothko, with his astonishing Rothko Chapel in Texas.

What unites Kahn, Ando, Zumthor and Turrell is that they know how to create abstracted sonorous spaces that take us out of the everyday and encourage contemplation, perspective and (at times) a pleasing terror. Especially in the work of Turrell, science is not far from the surface as a tool for generating such effects. It’s about playing with scale, and confronting us with a new perspective on ourselves. The dividing line between museum, observatory and meditation chamber are blurred in fascinating ways.

My suggestion is that places like the Rothko chapel or Turrell’s Skyspace are valuable exercises. I wouldn’t mind if there were a few more of them in the world.

This idea has been greeted with complaints that these places already exist: there already are science museums and observatories and even religious buildings. Why do anything more? Why create anything new?

The answer has to be personal, it has to do with one’s appetite for taking on something unusual. As someone heavily involved professionally in the world of architecture, I look forward to a new generation continuing to build on the achievements of the past. I don’t have a set plan for what might be built. I am not architect, but I find it fascinating to see what architects might design. It’s a struggle to get any building off the ground, and Thomas Greenall’s idea began life as a piece of paper architecture to illustrate a point in a book. I’m not sure it will ever take off quite as it is, perhaps it will, but I feel that things like it should – even though I’m not personally entirely sure how.

Evidently the term ‘temple for atheists’ has set up uncomfortable associations. People have imagined I might be interested in worshipping an absent deity, or perhaps setting up a cult. Nothing as dramatic or as insane is on the cards. I’m simply arguing that contemporary architecture analyse the high points of religious architecture throughout history – and that we should allow a new generation of architects to tread in the footsteps of great secular creatives indebted to the ecclesiastical, people like Kahn, Ando and Zumthor.”

What do you think?  Do you agree with Alain’s point of view?

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This entry was posted on January 31, 2012 at 7:00 am and is filed under Quirky stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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