Cold Fusion?

View 776 Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Could this be the beginning of a new era?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/05/20/finally-independent-testing-of-rossis-e-cat-cold-fusion-device-maybe-the-world-will-change-after-all/

It purports to be an announcement of independent verification of low temperature fusion, with not merely measureable but commercially useful energy output.  I know little about any of this.

Mike Flynn sends this:

ADHD

You may find this interesting:

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/05/20/why-american-kids-have-adhd-and-french-kids-dont/

MikeF

The thesis is that the symptoms of ADHD are real but not due to biological factors: ADHD can be “cured” by non-medical means. Thirty years and more ago a major pediatrician referred cases to me during the brief period in which I toyed with the idea of doing psychological consulting. The cases were bright boys who were not doing well in school. I was able to help them, but it was a lot of work and I had to charge a lot for doing it, and I discovered I’d rather write; I’d never set out to be any kind of practicing psychologist.

What I found in my few cases was that you can teach kids to control themselves.  I was pretty sure of that since I had to learn it myself: in my case the incentive was teachers with the legal power of corporal punishment.  Since my pediatrician partner did not want to use drugs, and I legally couldn’t prescribe anything, it was convince the kids their lives would be better if they developed better habits, or admit defeat.  As I said, hard work, too hard for me: I discovered that I am not going to save the world one boy at a time.  But I did learn, as I had thought, that the techniques I had used to teach myself back when I was in grade school can be taught to bright boys, but it takes time and patience.

That doesn’t mean that there are not cases of ADHD that require drugs; it does mean that neither I nor my pediatrician referral source found any.

The author of the Forbes article tends to blame the parents. I’d prefer to blame the culture. But it is interesting that as the influence of the DSM had grown, so have the number of cases of ADHD.

Thirty years ago a national commission on education concluded that “If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.”  We still have the same system of education, only now in Spades with Big Casino. It is not getting better, and the teachers unions are powerful enough to continue their war against the children of these United States of America.  For more http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/videos/?show=425168643

Basically we have surrendered. Those who can find niches of decent education in this vast wasteland. But we don’t take it seriously any more. We have given up.

The schools don’t even pretend to teach all the kids to read now.  They just have good reasons for why they didn’t learn.  And an increasing number can’t read but are pronounced literate because the can read at grade level, which means that they can read controlled vocabulary books. And the costs of this rotten system continue to rise, and the effects of bad grade schools reach up into the increasingly expensive universities, which have to try in four years to remedy twelve years of awful education.

For those who wonder if their children can read, try nonsense words on them. If your child in second grade or above cannot read monopolyastrid and conviducation, that child can’t read.  By read I mean look at the word and figure out how it is pronounced. And if your teacher tells you that isn’t what reading is, then you have a problem you will never solve by any kind of action inside the school system. Get a good reading program. The best one I know is my wife’s rather hokey old DOS program which clunkily works on any version of Windows. About seventy lessons of half an hour a lesson will do the job. After that it’s a matter of finding good and interesting books that kids like. I’ve written a few. There are a lot of them out there. But first they have to be comfortable at reading. Seventy lessons will do it, and it will last the rest of their lives. You don’t have to wait until second grade. English upper and upper middle class pupils were taught to read at age four by nannies, and that worked for a hundred years. English four year old protoplasm is no better than your kids’.

I still haven’t given up on meaningful school reform and here and there it happens, but by and large the battle is lost. The teaching colleges no longer teach their student teachers that kids can and should be expected to learn to read English before the end of first grade; and since they have never been taught to expect that result, they seldom get it. Reading instruction in college is mostly diagnosis of problems, i.e. learning good excuses for why you didn’t teach the child to read.  And the beat goes on.