Delicious LiveJournal Links for 8-6-2009

All the latest research on the brain showed that much of a child's capacity to think and to learn was set in the first three years of life.

Middle-class families were spending those years talking, singing and reading to their children. Poor children weren't getting any of that.

They were arriving at school with an average of 25 hours of one-to-one reading behind them. Middle-class children had had 1,700 hours, and their vocabulary was twice as large. They had learned to argue and discuss, and had been introduced to conceptual thinking.

Above all, the middle-class children arrived with confidence. They had been encouraged. By the age of three they had heard six times as many encouraging words as discouraging ones. Poor children had been reprimanded two and a half times more than they had been praised. Meanwhile, James Heckman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, showed that by the late teenage years, deprived children were very hard to help or teach new skills.

(tags: education children politics society)

(tags: virus genetics health AIDS)

Have I mentioned that I have no intention of ever buying an iPhone? Ever?

(tags: Apple iphone censorship dictionary EpicFail)

Nominated for a Hugo this year.

(tags: fiction scifi)

If the government gets your data wrong then, well, tough luck, apparently.

(tags: database government law)

(tags: books charity UK business oxfam)