Image from Scientific American

According to Scientific American, they way girls use abstract thinking to grasp language learning skills give them an advantage over boys, who require visual aids:

The finding suggests that although linguistic information goes directly to the seat of language processing in the female brain, males use sensory machinery to do a great deal of the work in untangling the data. In a classroom setting, it implies that boys need to be taught language both visually (with a textbook) and orally (through a lecture) to get a full grasp of the subject, whereas a girl may be able to pick up the concepts by either method.

While I am skeptical that these findings mean that all men are no good at learning a language, it does show that learning general ideas makes for a easier and faster learning experience. Rather than memorizing phrases and sentences, you should try to think how a sentence is formed and why. You can then apply this same thinking to other grammar points, making them easier to grasp.

This article does make me think about the kids I teach English to.  I try my best to teach them broad grammatical concepts instead of pure memorization, which is common in Japan (and why they’ll spend years and years trying to learn English.)  I have to admit that the boys do seem to lag behind the girls, who seem to be more eager to learn.  Whether it has to do with any of the points the article mentioned or it’s just societal expectations for girls to sit still while boys goof around, I’m can’t say.  But hopefully more studies will be done to explore how we can better bridge gaps in our learning styles.

Source: Girl Talk: Are Women Really Better at Language? - Scientific American 

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Maybe this explains why I suck at Magic Eye

 According to an article from Wired, it does:

“As an adult, color categorization is influenced by linguistic categories. It differs as the language differs,” said Kay, who is renowned for his studies on the ways that different cultures classify colors. He cited recent research on the ability of Russian speakers to detect shades of blue [pdf] that English speakers classify as a single color.

Apparently babies, who have not yet assigned labels to colors, are not limited to how they can interpret colors. As they get older, their language determines how many colors they can perceive based on how many words there are to associate with certain shades of the same color.

I noticed this by chance when I purchased a 24-color colored pencil set to teach children with–there were a few reds that were remarkably the same color, but in Japanese the words were completely different.  Same with blue and orange.

All the more reason to learn a foreign language–your world can become more colorful!

Source: Babies See Pure Color, but Adults Peer Through Prism of Language (Wired Science)

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This is an visually stunning site featuring a gallery exhibition at MoMa entitled Design and the Elastic Mind:

Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations. The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use.

You can easily spend hours here, as I’m sure you could at the actual Museum of Modern Art in New York. But since I’m oceans away, I have to live vicariously through their website and behold the genuis of these designers in the form of a flash interface.  (I recommend watching the mesmerizing Electric Sheep video–I’d like the see Windows come up with a screen saver so moving.)

If you’re lucky enough to be in the area, be sure to check out the exhibition, which runs until May 12, 2008.  (And tell me about it!!)

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According to this article from the New York Times, there is a chance that we are merely living in someone else’s simulated fantasy:

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

But don’t worry, kids! Life is still worth living! Your faith-inspired living styles just don’t have any validity anymore, that’s all.

You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.

So anyway, when do we get our trench coats and sunglasses?

- Do Women Learn Faster? Using Abstract Thinking To Learn a Language
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We’ve learned from Jurassic Park how survival of the fittest can include the changing of one species’ sex. Amphibians do it when numbers of the opposite sex are low. But what happens when they aren’t in charge of their own sex-changing? Scientists have tested the impact of this by adding synthetic estrogen to municipal wastewaters where a variety of fish live.Why synthetic estrogen? Because excessive estrogen that comes from birth control pills are having adverse effects on fish in which the males are now producing eggs.

The results of this study?

clipped from news.nationalgeographic.com The result was an impaired ability of the minnows to reproduce, which caused the population to collapse in the second year of the study, the researchers found. The population even failed to recover in the two years after the researchers stopped adding estrogen, indicating the effects were quite persistent, according to Kidd.

- Do Women Learn Faster? Using Abstract Thinking To Learn a Language
- Does Language Change the Way We See Colors?
- Design: Design and the Elastic Mind

A scary article from the Washington Post covers an increasing outbreak of “popcorn worker’s” lung, which is causing irreversible damage to those who work in the factories that produce artificial flavoring for popcorn.

“It’s not some carcinogen where you get cancer 30 years from now or something. The people are dying right in front of you,” Michaels said. “You can’t wait until you have all the evidence. You have to regulate it.”

Nowadays we don’t think twice about eating products with artificial flavoring in it. But what are the long-term consequences of consuming them?

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This is an exciting find that blood types A, B and AB may be more efficiently converted to the universal donor, blood type O.

“Think of the sugar molecules attached to a blood cell as a string of pearls,” Clausen said.

“We carefully clipped away one pearl that was the ‘A’ and ‘B’ in the blood groups A, B, and AB, making the blood acceptable to all recipients,” he added.

The article states that this option have been available for a while, but scientists have been looking for a more efficient way of doing this. This find will help end blood type O shortages and avoid death from a mistaken blood transfusion. And blood donors can feel even better about their generosity spreading further.

- Japan Bans American Beef...Again
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- Do Women Learn Faster? Using Abstract Thinking To Learn a Language
- Simple Ways to Get Great Skin
- Does Language Change the Way We See Colors?