Miserable cold

I haven't posted much in the last day or so, because I have a miserable cold and have no ability to follow a thought more complex than the plot of Gilligan's Island. Maybe tomorrow.

Another good thing about play

This study looked at how kids negotiate with each other during play.

The study looked at children aged two and three. In their negotiations they demonstrated invention, creativity, enthusiasm, industry, involvement, activity and problem-solving strategies.

The results show that children's negotiations form part of their play, and that these negotiations have a clear purpose: to agree on both how they can be together in their play and the content of their play. ...

"A pedagogical consequence of the results is that adults shouldn't intervene too early in children's negotiations," says Alvestad. "Just give the children time!"

This is the sort of thing where I say, yeah, I knew that; I've seen it. But it's clearer when someone points it out.

The meaning for child care is that kids should have lots of unstructured play where they can do this sort of thing. Three kids putting blocks together are learning a more useful skill than three kids separately doing worksheets.

Infant brain scan for schizophrenia

In a rush this morning, so I don't have time to find the links, but I've talked several times about being able in the future to scan newborns' brains and find signs of mental illness, so that early intervention means the first day. Well it's here. They found characteristic signs of schizophrenia in the brains of babies a few weeks old.

So the problems I talked about are here now.

• How do you treat a kid you know to be at high risk of some mental illness. One presumes medication will be involved, but do you treat the kid differently? For schizophrenia, probably not. For autism, maybe. Maybe knowing at birth that a kid has, say, 90% chance of becoming autistic, do you arrange the kid's room or experiences in a way not to trigger it? I don't know. How about a kid with the gene for uncontrollable aggression? Do you treat them the same way you treat another kid who smacks a playmate? I don't know, but we should be thinking about it.
• Not every kid with these characteristic brain signs will develop schizophrenia, or probably whatever is being tested for. If there is a 90% chance of some bad thing, do you risk screwing up the 10% who don't have it by treating them as though they do? I don't know.

Another way gay men's brains are like women's

Here's another case where gay men's brains are wired more like heterosexual women than heterosexual men.

The study ... found that when memorizing and discriminating between faces, homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality – the usage of both sides of the brain – similar to heterosexual women. Heterosexual men tend to favour the right hemisphere for such tasks.

"Our results suggest that both gay men and heterosexual women code faces bilaterally. That allows for faster retrieval of stored information," says study lead author Jennifer Steeves, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health. 

Can anybody see this and believe homosexuality is a lifestyle choice? Nobody you'd have any respect for.

Home computers lower test scores

A 5-year study of 150,000 kids in 5th through 8th grades in North Carolina found modest drops in test scores for kids, especially poor kids, who got a home computer during that period. The time they spend on the computer comes out of reading, TV, and homework time. The study ended in 2005, so it missed the recent Facebook* phenomenon, where the computer takes the place of everything.

I guess what it shows is parents have to pay attention to how much time a kid is spending on the computer. No biggie.

*I wouldn't have capitalized that, figuring that the word has achieved a genericness, like Kleenex, that allows it not to be capitalized, but this stupid program kept putting an annoying red line under it unless I capitalized it. Worse, it did the same to Kleenex. Don't the Google programmers know Kleenex is generic now? How about thermos? Yep, understands that. And aspirin.

Anonymity revisited

Recently someone contacted me after seeing this blog for the first time and questioned why I felt it necessary to remain anonymous, since I mostly just point at recent research and post pictures of my cats.

Well, it's the rude things I say about Republicans. My organization mostly attracts liberals and independents, but at my level and higher, there are several Republicans I deal with daily. It is not a firing offense to say over and over that voting Republican is a character fault, and voting Republican enthusiastically is a personality disorder, but it would be harder to work with these people day to day if they knew I consider them political cretins, which I pretty much do. They're nice people, and they're good at their jobs, some of which involve budgeting, but they are dangerously wrong about things like, oh, the 2/3 requirement for a state budget.

Friday follies on Saturday

With all the plants and cushions around, you'd think Old Cat would find a more comfortable napping place than a rock, but I guess not.

Boy Cat is not sure what to think of the red light that precedes the flash. They were weighed and vaccinated last week. If they weigh a kilo or more in two more weeks, they'll get neutered and adopted out. Otherwise, we keep them another week or two.

SB 797 is out of the inactive file

Just got my weekly child care legislative update, and one of my hobbyhorses has jumped the fence. Assembly Member Bradford has filed a Notice of motion to remove SB 797  from the inactive file. This is really good news. As I've said again and again and again, bisphenol A is a dangerous chemical that should be banned from food containers. I hope this means it has a chance of passing. I regret, though, that baby formula bottles were exempted.

Good on Bradford.

When do babies start to feel cold?

It seems in mice, the protein that enables sensing cold doesn't start being expressed until just before birth, and the cold-sensing nerves don't connect to the spinal cord for a couple of weeks after birth.

This would explain, the researcher says, why adolescent humans who were born prematurely are less sensitive to  temperature than full-term kids. The circuitry may stop developing at birth.

This is interesting. I have always assumed that the reason I am more sensitive to cold than others had some biological reason, but it's always nice to have at least one path toward that difference identified. Of course, there are probably other things that will do it, but I like having one possibility.

Orangutans use sign language

Orangutans in different zoos use intentional gestures with specific meanings, "to initiate an interaction (contact, grooming or play), request objects, share objects, instigate joint movement (co-locomotion), cause a partner to move back, or stop an action."

Okay, so it's a zoo, not the wild, so they might have picked it up from how their human handlers act with them, but nobody intentionally taught it to them, so, Jesus, this is as impressive as knowing that vervets have vocalizations that distinguish having seen an eagle in the sky from a snake in the grass. It would be interesting to compare the gestures with how their handlers act with them.

It immediately makes you think about how human language began, step by step, a few calls, a few signs, a lucky mutation or two, more complex calls, and pretty soon you're planning a hunt or telling someone where the mongongo nuts are ripe.

And if anyone still has doubt, it puts paid to the notion of special creation. We and orangs and vervets came out of the same stock. Darwin wrote that every once in a while he would begin to think there was something special about people's creation, but then he would remember that human cognition evolved, and he would snap out of it.

For babies, number is related to size

It seems every time a researcher looks at how early babies can grasp some concept, it turns out to be earlier than we had thought. This time,

"We've shown that 9-month-olds are sensitive to 'more than' or 'less than' relations across the number, size and duration of objects. And what's really remarkable is they only need experience with one of these quantitative concepts in order to guess what the other quantities should look like."  

They showed babies computer screens with objects on the screen that were either big and striped or smaller and polka-dotted. They they showed them a screen where the difference was not size but number. If the more numerous objects were polka-dotted, they stared at the screen longer. The researcher says she thinks this means they expected the pattern on the more numerous to be the same as on the larger on the previous screen.

The article also says "adults associate smaller numbers with the left side of space and larger numbers with the right." I wonder if that's true of readers of languages that go right to left or top to bottom.

Also, "when adults are asked to quickly select the higher of two numbers, the task becomes much harder if the higher number is represented as physically smaller than the lower number." That's like the tests requiring people to read the name of a color if it is printed in a different color, such as RED or BLUE.

Kids raised by lesbians turn out just fine

This is an article in Time about a study published in Pediatrics saying kids raised by lesbian partners get teased some, but then end up just as psychologically balanced as kids with straight parents.

(C)hildren in lesbian homes scored higher than kids in straight families on some psychological measures of self-esteem and confidence, did better academically and were less likely to have behavioral problems, such as rule-breaking and aggression. ... In addition, children in same-sex-parent families whose mothers ended up separating did as well as children in lesbian families in which the moms stayed together.

I can't say I'm all that surprised that someone raised by two women might be less aggressive than someone raised by a man and a woman. I'll bet they would score higher on social tolerance, too. And I'll bet two moms are on average more engaged in a kid's school than a mom and a dad.

Who moves where

I found this  interactive map from Forbes Magazine at Kevin Drum's blog, who found it at Andrew Sullivan's. You click on your county, and it shows black lines indicating immigration and red lines indicating emigration. This is the map for LA. People move to San Francisco and Seattle but never the other way, but it's a magnet for the North-East. Who wouldn't rather live in LA than Detroit? It only shows moves of 10 people or more.

Superstitions can be good for you

About 35 years ago, I had a friend who was interested in astrology, and he got me to take an astrology class with him. I read books and cast horoscopes and came to the conclusion that astrology works. That is, you can go to a competent astrologer and learn true things about yourself that you did not know.

Of course, it has nothing to do with the stars. Their random position in the sky is a mandala to structure the conversation, a coach's list of plays one might call  in a given circumstance. A "competent astrologer" is a cold reader. It's a carnie trick. A skilled cold reader can, indeed, direct a conversation about you that will give you new insight into your character. I suspect this is the basis of psychoanalysis.

Now imagine a world in which everybody believes in astrology, believes the stars' and planets' positions in the sky affect our daily lives. If people saw that Mercury was in retrograde (which is supposed to hinder all types of communication), not only would they attribute any lost mail to Mercury (and ignore the mail that got through), but it is also likely that more mail would be lost than usual, because it would be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Knowing the likelihood of lost mail might make people more careless. Or people might be more expansive and loving when Jupiter is in conjunction with the Moon, because they expect to be.

In such a world, astrology would look true. It might as well be true.

Which brings me to this study on superstition. They had 28 college students who believed or did not believe in good luck (about 80% did) putt a golf ball into a hole and told some they were using a lucky ball and some that they were using the same ball everybody else had. Then 51 kids did a motor-dexterity task putting balls in holes by tilting a box. Some were told the observer would keep his fingers crossed, and others were just told to start. Then they took 41 kids who had a lucky charm and had  them do a task with or without it.

The kids with the lucky ball, or who had been told the observer had his fingers crossed, or who had their lucky charm with them did better.

So it appears that believing a superstition can make you perform better. Or worse, if you've lost your lucky charm.

This has an obvious application to religion. People who believe their god will make them strong might well be stronger than people who do not.

Being around murder is a risk factor for bad reading scores

Comparing 9 years of homicides and  a survey of kids and families in the same area over the same period, a researcher has found that kids who live around murder have lower reading and verbal test scores, but only for a week or so.

To measure the impact of a local homicide, Sharkey compared the test scores of children who were assessed directly after a homicide in their neighborhood with other children in the same neighborhood who were assessed at different times. He took into account three geographic areas of increasing size: "block groups," which are small sets of city blocks that have about 1,500 residents; "census tracts," which are slightly larger and have about 4,000 residents; and "neighborhood clusters," which have about 8,000 residents. Because all comparisons were made among children living within the same neighborhoods, the analysis can be thought of like an experiment in which some children are randomly picked to be assessed in the days following a local homicide while other children are picked to be assessed at a different point, further removed from the date of the homicide.

Sharkey examined separately the potential impact of a local homicide on African Americans and Hispanics. Whites and other ethnic groups were excluded because they were almost never exposed to local homicides in the samples Sharkey used for his study. ...

Overall, the results showed that African-American children who were assessed directly after a local homicide occurred scored substantially lower than their peers who live in the same neighborhood, but were assessed at different times. As the duration of time between the homicide and the assessment increased beyond a week, the estimated effects of homicides faded away. Further, as the distance between the child's home and the location of the homicide widened, the impact of the homicide became weaker. While the results were extremely strong for African Americans, there was no effect of local homicides for Hispanics—a finding that Sharkey plans to explore in ongoing research. Very similar patterns were found when the analysis was replicated in the second dataset, the Three City Study. Again, the effects of local homicides were extremely strong for African Americans and non-existent for Hispanics. (My bold.)

I have no problem believing that living in a bad neighborhood is a risk factor for being a bad reader, but this study mainly tells me how resilient kids are. Somebody was murdered in their neighborhood a couple of days ago, and we give them a test on reading and verbal skills, and in a week or so, they're back to normal.

It also means that, if schools want to find out a kid's true reading ability (especially after No Child Left Untested), they should be flexible in the testing schedule, and not test kids when someone has been killed in their neighborhood in the last week or so.

Personality and politics

I've talked about this several times. A new study finds a strong relationship between a person's politics and personality. Liberals are nicer than conservatives. Conservatives are more tight-assed than liberals.

"Conservatives tend to be higher in a personality trait called orderliness and lower in openness. This means that they're more concerned about a sense of order and tradition, expressing a deep psychological motive to preserve the current social structure ... (and)  liberalism is more often associated with the underlying motives for compassion, empathy and equality."

This makes me think so much of Jane Jacobs. If you didn't go out and read Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics when I talked about it before, do so now. It will change your life. Or not. It permanently changed the way I think about people.

Why are poor kids fatter than rich kids?

It used to be that being fat indicated wealth. You could afford a lot of food, and you didn't work it off the next day.

Now, it is related to poverty and, presumably, the kind of diet poor people have.

The researchers found obesity most common in children living in neighborhoods with the least-educated females, most single-parent households, lowest median household income, highest proportion of non-white residents, and fewest homes owned. Together, these five socioeconomic factors accounted for 24 percent of the variability in childhood obesity rates across neighborhoods.

 So these 5 environmental factors account for 24% of the variability among neighborhoods. While I believe that much of obesity is caused by genetic factors, that would not explain variability among neighborhoods, unless you believe that neighborhoods are sorted by genes. (Okay, to some extent they are, such as many more Somalis living in this neighborhood and many more Vietnamese or Samoans in that one, but that's irrelevant here.)

That leaves 3/4 of the variability to be due to what? If it's not genes, and it's not education, single-parenthood, income, race, or home ownership, what else can it be? Which commercials are shown on the TV shows they watch? What car they drive? Access to routine medical care? Number of meals eaten out of the home divided by the cost of the meal? Number of fast-food restaurants per 10,000 population? That's a lot of variability to account for when you have already used the best ones.

How do gender behaviors start?

We know that little boys and little girls act differently very young. In particular, boys are more aggressive. And we know that parents treat little boys different from little girls. This study relates the two.

Researchers looked at the way moms and dads talk to kids during snack time and playtime. The snack time conversation was context oriented, the adult was in charge, and there was no gender difference.

At play time, things were kid-centered, the kid was an equal partner, and parents acted differently. Dads were more aggressive, and moms were more facilitative. The authors suggest the play differences teach little kids how adult men and women are supposed to act.

Could be. I still think much of it is the biology of the brain. I wonder how this relates to the fact that dads didn't play much with their kids until recent decades.

FYI, I blame typos on kitty on the keyboard.

Friday follies

Our foster cats, boy cat and girl cat, playing on a wicker chair, which they like because it's easy to climb. They did warn us about diarrhea from the canned Friskies. They were right.

Genetics of autism

Pharyngula, at Science Blogs, has an excellent summary of genetic research into autism. The bottom line:

... Autism Spectrum Disorder has many different genetic causes: there isn't one single gene responsible for ASD, but a constellation of hundreds, each with the potential to affect the development of the brain and cause the symptoms of autism. They don't know exactly how each of these genes contributes to the disorder, but they have found that many of them are involved in growth and cell communication and the formation of synapses in the brain.

The bottom line is that there are many different ways to cause the symptoms of autism, and it's a mistake to try to pin it all on single, simple causes. Any hope for amelioration lies in understanding the general functional processes that are disrupted by mutations in various pathways.

The article is well worth reading. In today's EurekAlert, there are four new studies describing new genes associated with autism.