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Monday Muster: 1.30.12

By now, you know the drill.  These are links to help you survive the work week, assuming you hate your job, which I don’t.   (Mine, that is.  I might hate yours.)

1.  Originally stumbled across this via boingboing some time ago.  It’s a brief (but fascinating) account of how one becomes a shaman in Iquitos, Peru, along with a rudimentary recipe for hallucinogenic ayahuasca. Throw in the disconcerting revelation that apparently Peruvian shamans look a lot like out-of-work house painters, and it’s golden.

2.  Less tedious fare:  be careful what you tweet, since two British kids found themselves caged, questioned, and deported this week for hinting that they were coming to “destroy America.”  Evidently, “destroy America” also involved facetiously tweeting their plans to dig up Marilyn Monroe.  I assume that order came from the ghost of bin Laden himself.

3.  I’m sure RIM’s new CEO has many plans to revive the floundering, aging giant.  However, I primarily find myself mesmerized by the fact that he appears to be an elongated, Germanized near-clone of NewsRadio star Dave Foley.

4.  Via challies, a short piece in Wired magazine on the concept of interleaving, which involves studying or practicing multiple related items simultaneously over time, rather than the hyperfocused “cramming”  that many students insist on utilizing.

over time, the sum of these small steps is much greater than the sum of the leaps you would have taken if you’d spent the same amount of time mastering each skill in its turn… [When] information is studied so that it can be interpreted in relation to other things in memory, learning is much more powerful…

This is something I’ve been telling my students for years, and it may also explain why a curriculum like Saxon Math works so freaking well–just do the lesson, and don’t panic if you’re not getting it perfectly correct already–and why people who read widely and nonacademically are still so freaking smart.

5.  Speaking of people who read well:  in 1988, the average 5th grader was reading 4.6 minutes per day outside of school.  5th graders in the 90th percentile read 21.1 minutes per day.  This accounts for an additional 1.6 MILLION words per year.  It turns out that 5th grade reading volume is a pretty doggone good predictor of high school GPA and future standardized test scores.  And what’s a good predictor of 5th grade reading volume?  BOOM.  FIRST GRADE READING ABILITY.  No pressure.  It just looks like if you don’t teach your own kid to read before first grade, you’ve doomed them to live under a bridge and drink rainwater from an old boot.  All of that (minus horrible prophecies) is presented very convincingly and clinically right here.

6.  Here, Clay Shirky argues against the apocalyptic case for internet-induced “digital stupidity” and in favor of the proposition that the internet “restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.”  I’m inclined to agree.  But then, I love Clay Shirky.  Warning:  this piece is fairly long (but well worth it).

7.  Fantastic analysis by David Friedman which suggests that the murder rate in the US can’t be linked to rates of gun ownership:  rather (by comparing it to Prohibition and doing fancy numerical graphy-type things), he claims that we keep killing each other because of the War on Drugs.  Food for thought, indeed.

… if the objective is to reduce violent crime, there is a presumption… that drug prohibition is an inefficient way of achieving that objective–that one can get a greater reduction at the same cost by targetting [sic] violent crime directly.

8.  Hey…remember that time we accidentally dropped two…TWO(!?)…nuclear bombs on Spain in 1966?

That’s all for today.   If you see me this week, ask me about my experiment in pig ownership.  I’m tempted to make an “EPORK FAIL” joke, but I won’t.

Sling Some 36 Around:

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