Aide Memoire 6

Granddad from Head Rambles on The Irish Holocaust.

Steven Novella from Neurologica on Answering Some Autism Questions.

Various posts on Rom Houben, the Belgian man who allegedly recovered from coma and is now communication via facilitated communication: Respectful Insolence 1, Neurologica 1, Respectful Insolence 2 and Neurologica 2.

Neuroskeptic on Deconstructing the Placebo.

Vaughan from Mindhacks on Autism, desperation and untested treatments.

Jonah Lehrer from Frontal Cortex on The Reading Brain.

Bob Sutton on: The Tension Between Getting it Done and Getting it Right

Deric Bownds from Mindblog on The sooner you can sleep, the better you learn.

From ScienceDaily: Cognitive dysfunction reversed in mouse model of Down syndrome.

Steven Novella from Neurologica on Evidence in Medicine: Correlation and Causation.

Jonah Lehrer from Frontal Cortex on The Tiger Woods effect.

Vaughan from Mind Hacks on the Forer effect: You are kind, strong willed, but can be self-critical.

From Bill Cohen on the Leader Blog: Drucker on The seven deadly sins of leadership.

From Neurophilosophy: Dyslexia and the Cocktail Party effect.

Occam's Donkey on Skeptics' Circle

My post on Brain Profiling as a mind myth has been taken up on Skeptics' Circle for 20 November.

Aide Memoire 5

More catching up to do. More ideas for future posts and for readers who may wish to follow up on.

Raymond Tallis on The Humanist: Neurotrash, on the abuse of neuroscience.

Steven Novella from Neurologica: Memory.

From Scientific Blogging: Telepathy and the quantum.

Bob Sutton: Intuitive vs. data-driven decision making.

From ScienceDaily: Poor Start Between A Class And Its Teacher Almost Impossible To Rectify.

From eSkeptic: Sagan and skepticism.

From ScienceDaily: Baby's language development starts in the womb.

Donald Clark from Donald Clark Plan B: Gardner's multiple intelligences seductive nonsense.

Donald Clark from Donald Clark Plan B: Gardner's multiple intelligences and scientific stupidity.

Jonah Lehrer from Frontal Cortex: The personality paradox, on the context dependency of personality and fundamental attribution error.

Jamie O'Leary from Flypaper: Teacher quality the most important (in-school) factor.

Jonah Lehrer from Frontal Cortex: Learning from mistakes.

Steven Novella from Neurologica: A culture of science-based practice, something sorely needed in education.

Donald Clark from Donald Clark Plan B: Future is free, about all the free educational opportunities out there.

Aide Memoire 4

More ideas that readers may want to look at and that I may blog about more extensively in future.

Tracey Allison Altman from Evidence Soup on Martin Gardner, the amazing author of Fads and fallacies in the name of science, as well as books and columns on recreational mathematics.

Bob Sutton on a meta-analysis of the most effective factors for predicting job performance.

Donald Clark from Donald Clark Plan B demolishes Piaget.

Vaughan from Mind Hacks on 40 years of brain research.

From Derick Bownds on Mindblog: Rational irrationality.

From ScienceDaily: Copper bracelets and magnetic wrist straps are ineffective in relieving arthritis pain.

From PsyBlog: How Rewards Can Backfire and Reduce Motivation.

Scientific Blogging on supernatural coincidences.

From Vaughan at Mind Hacks: Changes in illiterate adults' brains when they learn to read.

From Jonah Lehrer at Frontal Cortex: The reversal of neurodevelopmental cognitive deficits in animal experiments, specifically with mice.

From Vaughan at Mind Hacks: The significance of blinking.

From Derick Bownds on Mindblog: The role of dopamine in seeking stimulation.

Brilliant article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times: How did economists get it so wrong?

Krugman's article commented on from physics points of view by Sean and Daniel at Cosmic Variance.

Bio-Strath is at it again

It's examination time in South Africa and the purveyors of products that are supposed to help children improve their results are targeting parents with aggressive marketing campaigns. One of these is Bio-Strath. Their advertising budget must be enormous. We've seen half-page colour advertisements in a number of Sunday newspapers and heard sponsored talks on a dozen radio stations. Their incredible claims are backed by anecdotes and vague references to research. I won't waste time on the anecdotes, but let's look at the claims and the presented evidence.

Bio-Strath generally claims improvement in the cognitive performance of young and old. In this case, they base their claim on a so-called biometric analysis of a cohort of 390 children, Bio-Strath claims 85% improvement in concentration, 88% improvement in resistance (whatever that may be) and 90% improvement in study fatique. These are extraordinary claims and surely require extraordinary evidence (Carl Sagan). So what evidence does Bio-Strath offer? I have had to do some searching and eventually found the abstract, which I have re-produced below:

Is this extraordinary evidence? Hardly. It is a simple survey of feedback reports from parents of children who took Bio-Strath. There is no indication of just how the parents evaluated improvement in concentration, resistance and fatique. Surveys like this are subject to sampling and confirmation bias. As research they are of little value. To use the survey so prominently in an advertisement and to represent it as research is to put it mildly, questionable.

In my opinion Bio-Strath supplies very little evidence to support its extraordinary claims. It's been seventeen years since the survey in question. Had the product performed as claimed, there should have been solid evidence by now.

My previous post on Bio-Strath was entitled Bio-Strath for ADD/ADHD and critically evaluated another deficient Bio Strath study.

Has human evolution turned the corner?

A hat tip to Deric Bownds from Mindblog for this cartoon, which he in turn got from the New Yorker:
As a school principal and South African citizen, some experiences I've had, and observations I've made in the past few weeks, makes me believe that we're rapidly devolving.

In a post entitled The educational leader: what else than a social entrepreneur?, Walter Baets from UCT wrote as follows:

"In many aspects, the successful principal is a social entrepreneur. ... A few thoughts of interest of Charles Maisel on what a social entrepreneur is might explain my argument. A social entrepreneur needs to see things differently, start flipping things around. Entrepreneurship is about seeing, seeing the possibilities. In fact, it is all about learning to look at things differently. A social entrepreneur is not in for maximising profit, but for solving a pressing social problem on a population-wide scale. He or she creates."

In a society where common decency and common sense are increasingly rare and where the lowest common denominator has become the norm (bad punning intended), I'm not sure that I'm up to the task.

Fortunately Robert Frost has encouraging words for every discouraged educator:

"The woods are lovely and dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep."