Click on link below to see the videos and read the responses, then come back to this page to post your response:
http://singsank.blogspot.com/2012/01/anorexia.html?showComment=1327622855075
More people die from Eating Disorders than all other mental illness combined, but ED research receive the lowest federal funding of all mental illnesses!! Because WE are to blame.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Why Kids Can’t Search?
- November 1, 2011 |
- 12:30 pm
We’re often told that young people tend to be the most tech-savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan tried to find out. Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the web pages at the top of Google’s results list.
But Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren’t assessing information sources on their own merit—they’re putting too much trust in the machine.
Other studies have found the same thing: High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the authors’ credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?
Who’s to blame? Not the students. If they’re naive at Googling, it’s because the ability to judge information is almost never taught in school. Under 2001′s No Child Left Behind Act, elementary and high schools focus on prepping their pupils for reading and math exams. And by the time kids get to college, professors assume they already have this skill. The buck stops nowhere. This situation is surpassingly ironic, because not only is intelligent search a key to everyday problem-solving, it also offers a golden opportunity to train kids in critical thinking.
Consider the efforts of Frances Harris, librarian at the magnet University Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois. (Librarians are our national leaders in this fight; they’re the main ones trying to teach search skills to kids today.) Harris educates eighth and ninth graders in how to format nuanced queries using Boolean logic and advanced settings. She steers them away from raw Google searches and has them use academic and news databases, too.
But, crucially, she also trains students to assess the credibility of what they find online. For example, she teaches them to analyze the tone of a web page to judge whether it was created by an academic, an advocacy group, or a hobbyist. Students quickly gain the ability to detect if a top-ranked page about Martin Luther King Jr. was actually posted by white supremacists.
“I see them start to get really paranoid,” Harris says. “The big thing in assessing search results is authorship—who put it there and why have they put it there?” Or, as pioneering librarian Buffy Hamilton at Creekview High School near Atlanta says, “This is learning how to learn.”
One can imagine even more entertaining ways to help kids grok the intricacies of the search world. Why not let students start a class blog on a subject and see how long it takes for it to show up in search results?
Mind you, mastering “crap detection 101,” as digital guru Howard Rheingold dubs it, isn’t easy. One prerequisite is that you already know a lot about the world. For instance, Harris found that students had difficulty distinguishing a left-wing parody of the World Trade Organization’s website from the real WTO site. Why? Because you need to understand why someone would want to parody it in the first place—knowledge the average eighth grader does not yet possess.
In other words, Google makes broad-based knowledge more important, not less. A good education is the true key to effective search. But until our kids have that, let’s make sure they don’t always take PageRank at its word.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Monday, September 10, 2012
Legal Challenges to Voter-ID Laws: Too Little, Too Late?
In this year’s heated battle over voter-ID laws, the critics have scored a big victory: a federal court overturned Texas’ strict new ID law last week. It is not hard to see why. The state law was a combination of a poll tax and a logistical nightmare. But critics of voter-ID laws should not get too excited. Courts are still far too willing to approve these laws, and there will be plenty of them in place on Election Day on Nov. 6.
Texas’ law, which was enacted last year, would have been the nation’s strictest. (It could yet return; Texas says it will appeal the ruling blocking it.) It required voters to present one of an approved list of photo IDs in order to vote. There was a certain slant to the list: gun permits counted; student IDs did not. The law would have made at least 600,000 voters without valid ID ineligible to vote, according to the Justice Department, and it hit minorities hardest. Hispanic voters in Texas are at least 46.5% and perhaps 120% more likely than non-Hispanics to lack a photo ID.
For voters without ID, the state law made many people pay to vote, the way poll taxes once did. To get the necessary ID, voters had to present documents like a birth certificate, which can cost $22 or more. With 2 in 5 households living paycheck to paycheck, the law forced some people to make a choice between putting food on the table or a ballot in the ballot box.
(PHOTOS: Scenes from Voting Day)
Then there was the physical inconvenience. Voters were supposed to go to a driver’s-license office to get their ID, but 81 of Texas’ 254 counties do not have a working driver’s-license office. As a result, some voters had to travel up to 250 miles if they wanted to vote.
Supporters of the law made the usual argument that they just wanted to prevent voter fraud. But there are almost no cases of people impersonating other people at the polls — in Texas or anywhere else. One study found that voter fraud occurs in about 0.00004% of votes or less — about as often as Americans are struck by lightning.
The driving force behind voter-ID laws is actually the desire to suppress turnout, particularly minority turnout — as it was with the Florida law that made it harder for groups to register new voters and Ohio’s recent edict stopping early voting for most voters. (The Florida and Ohio laws were also struck down last week.) Not surprisingly, there is evidence that voter-ID laws do keep eligible voters away from the polls. A 2008 study in Indiana found that 7% of eligible voters who did not vote cited lack of the correct form of ID as one of the reasons.
The special three-judge court that struck down the Texas law did not get into anyone’s motives. It just made a point of simple logic. The Voting Rights Act prevents states from passing laws diminishing minority voting rights. Texas’ law made it harder for poor people to vote. And Hispanic voters in Texas are poorer than non-Hispanic whites.
(MORE: How to Solve the Voter-ID Debate)
The ruling is good news, but of a limited sort. The law was struck down because Texas is one of only 16 states that are covered, in whole or in part, by this part of the Voting Rights Act. Thirty-four states, and large parts of another seven, are not covered by the act, so in most of the country, the arguments that persuaded the court would not apply. On the broader question of whether unduly harsh voter-ID laws violate the Constitution, the Supreme Court has been of no help. In 2008, in Crawford v. Marion County, it upheld Indiana’s law, which requires a photo ID. That ruling has given an unfortunate green light to other states to pass strict ID laws.
There are still two major challenges to voter-ID laws working their way through the courts. Pennsylvania’s ID law was upheld last month, but the ruling is on appeal. South Carolina’s law is in federal court, being challenged under the Voting Rights Act. But however those cases come out, roughly two-thirds of the states will likely have a voter-ID law on Election Day.
If there were a lot of voter fraud going on, the case for voter-ID laws would be stronger, and even many opponents might be persuaded to support them — particularly if the laws made it easy and free to get ID. But when this fraud happens with lightning-fatality frequency and the laws put up sizable obstacles to voting, it is hard to view them as anything but vote-suppression laws. They should not be passed, and if they are, courts should strike them down.
Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/04/legal-challenges-to-voter-id-laws-too-little-too-late/#ixzz267dXhI3E
Is Facebook the New Reality TV?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/millennial-media/201209/is-facebook-the-new-reality-tv
Click on above link and read the article then respond back on this blog.
Click on above link and read the article then respond back on this blog.
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