The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters — phonics.

Similarly, the moral foundations theory originally put forth by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham purports that humans have (in the most common and widely discussed versions of the theory) five innate moral building blocks: care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal (associated with in-group/out-group consciousness); authority/subversion; and sanctity/degradation (“sanctity” is also often referred to as “purity” in the relevant discussions). Liberals are highly attuned to care/harm and fairness/reciprocity, but conservatives, while valuing care, also emphasize authority and purity, which means that their approach to care/harm will be very different from that of liberals. (In fairness, many on the far Left also emphasize purity and fall into authoritarianism.)

“INFORMATION RULES”—published in 1999 but still one of the best books on digital economics—Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, two economists, popularised the term “network effects”,

To support text and data mining as a standard and essential tool for research, the UK should move towards establishing by default that for published research the right to read is also the right to mine data, where that does not result in products that substitute for the original works. Government should include potential uses of data for AI when assessing how to support for text and data mining.

Video Shows Halladay Flying Low

Harvey Weinstein’s Army of SpiesThe film executive hired private investigators, including ex-Mossad agents, to track actresses and journalists.

“You Can’t Go Any Lower”: Inside the West Wing, Trump Is Apoplectic as Allies Fear ImpeachmentAfter Monday’s indictments, the president blamed Jared Kushner in a call to Steve Bannon, while others are urging him to take off the gloves with Robert Mueller.

Is the Modern Mass Extinction Overrated? We are ignoring the gains that balance the losses.

Why tax cuts will not make America great again

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday that the U.S. military has more than 1,000 personnel in the region, an apparent reference to an area that includes Niger as well as Mali and Nigeria.

It’s a Fact: Supreme Court Errors Aren’t Hard to Find A ProPublica review adds fuel to a longstanding worry about the nation’s highest court: The justices can botch the truth, sometimes in cases of great import.

The First Government To Secure Land Titles On The Bitcoin Blockchain Expands Project

But these are also all characteristics that make What3Words completely unsuitable as either a global or national address register. So I was dismayed to read that Mongolia have decided to adopt it as their national register. I’m hoping that this isn’t really the case and that story is similar to the apocryphal tales of Honduras’s blockchain based land registry.

The problem is that What3Words is a proprietary, closed system. The algorithm is patented. The data is closed, with the terms and conditions spelling out in great detail all of the things you can’t do with the system

Trump blindsides advisers with promised opioid plan Officials are scrambling to produce an emergency declaration by next week.

The Boomtown That Shouldn’t Exist Cape Coral was built on total lies. One big storm could wipe it off the map. Oh, and it’s also the fastest-growing city in the United States.

Ten Steps the Federal Government Should Take Now to Reverse the Opioid Addiction Epidemic

Kids? Just say no You don’t have to dislike children to see the harms done by having them. There is a moral case against procreation

Justice John G. Roberts Jr., arguing that the South had taken great strides that made the protections of the act unnecessary, based his decision in part on a Senate Judiciary Committee analysis that misinterpreted how the Census Bureau reports race and ethnicity data and wrongly suggested that registration gaps between minorities and whites had shrunk significantly, an error that neither he nor his clerks caught.

Neil Postman noted in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death

Previously, intensity-dependent metabolic changes have been found with positron emission tomography and blood oxygen level dependent magnetic resonance imaging after TMS to motor/prefrontal cortex; bilateral motor/prefrontal and auditory activation is induced, which becomes stronger with increasing pulse intensity [Bohning et al.,1999,2000; Fox et al.,1997; Nahas et al.,2001; Siebner et al.,1999; Speer et al.,2003]. However, these results are not directly comparable with our EEG findings. Arising a few seconds poststimulus, metabolic changes reflect relatively long-lasting activity of interconnected neuronal networks, whereas we were interested in the TMS-evoked events that occurred within a fraction of a second.

That is what Barack and I think about every day as we try to guide and protect our girls through the challenges of this unusual life in the spotlight, how we urge them to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith.

How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country.

So, look, so don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on earth!

Low-shot visual object recognition

Why Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is A State Of Matter, Like a Solid, A Liquid Or A Gas

Starters and Maintainers

riting to read strategies

McDonald, R. J., Cloft, H. J. & Kallmes, D. F. Fate of submitted manuscripts rejected from the American Journal of Neuroradiology: outcomes and commentary. Am. J. Neuroradiol. 28, 1430–1434 (2007)

Schroter, S, et al. What errors do peer reviewers detect, and does training improve their ability to detect them? J. R. Soc. Med. 101, 507–514 (2008)

common appropriation regimes do not give a complete answer to the sustainability of motivation and organization for the truly open, large-scale nonproprietary peer production projects we see on the Internet.