One thing I learned from our stay at a Waldorf Astoria: There's a limit to how much luxury I can appreciate. I've become leery of cheap motels (especially along the notorious I-95 corridor) with their reputation as the lodging of choice for bedbugs and manufacturers of crack cocaine, but to stay at a Hampton Inn (Hilton's low-rent district) or Fairfield Inn (Marriot's) is all the luxury I want. For me, the higher-end hotels add little. In fact, they take away: The big guys charge (a lot) for amenities that matter to me, whereas the price of a room at their poorer relations includes unlimited tea, cocoa, and coffee (and sometimes cookies!) in the lobby, a breakfast buffet, and in-room Internet. It seems the more you pay for your room, the more they expect you to pay in miscellaneous charges. Mind you, the higher-end hotels are nice, just not worth the extra cost.
One notable difference between the Waldorf and a Hampton Inn that did matter to me: Instead of a USA Today at the door in the morning, we received the Sunday New York Times. Now there's a newspaper that still carries content! About a month's worth of reading, I'd say. Part of that content is the Sunday Times crossword puzzle, which has always intimidated me as the epitome of difficulty. But no more. It was no harder than the three-star (highest difficulty) puzzles in my World of Puzzles magazine. And, alas, no more free of pop culture clues. Reference an obscure vocabulary word or something in Shakespeare I don't know, and I'll happily look it up and thank you for the lesson—but spare me current movie and popular song trivia, please.
Gee, thanks, bank. Here's the good news from one of our credit card companies:
We are always looking for new ways to meet your borrowing needs on your terms. Effective January 15, 2012, you may receive new promotional offers that include an increased Minimum Payment Due, which can help you pay the promotional balance down faster.
Silly me, I thought you could always pay your balance down faster by remitting more than the minimum payment due.
George Orwell would be proud.
Babies are born geniuses, as Buckminster Fuller and observant parents could tell you. Scientists are finally catching up. Here's Looking at You, Kid is a not-to-be-missed article on the research of Richard Aslin, professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. Advanced technology has enabled his team to back mothers' intuition with reproducible data.
[B]abies just months old have mental capacities formerly believed to be the domain of children much older. “We knew babies could learn—I mean, obviously they can learn. Your grandmother knows that,” Aslin says. “It’s the rapidity, the ease, with which they learn things that I think has just been startling.”
The key is measuring and interpreting babies' eye-gaze patterns. For example, the idea of object permanence—that something continues to exist even when it is hidden—had been thought to develop by nine or ten months, because that's when a child will reach out and reveal a covered object. It turns out that children as young as two months, who don't have the physical ability to remove a cover, already understand the concept.
A baby's language-learning capacity is particularly dramatic (emphasis mine):
[A recent study] conducted on infants, showing them multiple objects and giving them the name of the object in a sentence, demonstrated that they could pick out the object and learn its name by six months of age rather than the expected 17 months. While other such studies conducted elsewhere have given babies the words in isolation rather than in the context of sentences, ... the complexity of conditions in [this] experiment may account for the babies’ performance—the more complicated task of picking the word out of the sentence may actually have been easier for them because that’s the way they hear language every day.
[In another study, researchers] brought babies to the lab, where the children encountered a simple nonsense language the researchers had created to ensure they wouldn’t bring any prior knowledge to bear on the experiment. “We wanted to find out what they could learn in the lab, not what they’d already learned in the environment,” Aslin says. The children listened to the language, “and then we tested them to see whether or not they’d learned the underlying structure of this little language.” They had.
“They learned the language in just a couple of minutes—and just by listening. Nobody was telling them what to listen to. They were only eight months old.”
When you consider that only 50 - 60 years ago scientists were asserting that newborns are blind and deaf, it's a good thing that mothers have been in charge of their babies all along.
The Stradivarius of Windchimes. A scene from our recent trip to the gift shop at Bok Tower Gardens:
"Come listen to these beautiful windchimes! Aren't they wonderful? Just don't look at the price; leave it to me to desire the most expensive chimes on display."
"But you hate windchimes."
"Are you crazy? I love windchimes! I have since childhood."
"But I disinctly remember you saying how much you dislike them."
"Hrumph. Must have been one of your other girlfriends."
After this exchange with my husband, we determined that perhaps he was remembering a conversation with his sister, or our friend who is also named Linda, or our neighbor. I sure hope it wasn't our neighbor, because someday there will be windchimes gracing our back porch. I gravitate to any windchime display I see, listening and pondering, though I haven't yet gone so far as to make a decision. Maybe now that we have that little misunderstanding cleared up....
The chimes that so captured my heart are made by Music of the Spheres in Austin, Texas. Choose "Chime Tunings" from their main menu, and you can hear recordings of their chimes in various tunings (Pentatonic, Quartal, Chinese, Mongolian. Westminster, Hawaiian, Japanese, Balinese, Whole Tone, Aquarian, Gypsy) and sizes (Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass, and more). Here's a link to the Japanese mezzo-soprano. And the Gypsy soprano. I can't stop myself: The Whole-Tone tenor.
The price? There's more than one reason they're called the Stradivarius of Windchimes: from $90 for a Soprano (any tuning) to $2950 (plus shipping) for the 200-pound Basso Profundo.
Educators, please don't miss this post on innovation from the Occasional CEO.
Children in America used to want to become cowboys and Indians, doctors and firemen, astronauts and acrobats. Now they want to become entrepreneurs and innovators. They are told they must change the world, often before they enter it.
But 90% of the population should not become innovators.
It’s not because they can’t do it well, though that’s possible too. It’s just that innovation can cause great damage to the things we love. To the guy making the fries at McDonalds or the pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks: Don’t innovate. To the person building the next lot of iPhones from which I’ll be purchasing one: Please don’t innovate. To my tax accountant: Do Not innovate. The mechanic fixing my car. The pilot flying my plane. To the fine people at Apple: For goodness sake, stop sending me updates and new operating systems. I hate em. Just when I get everything the way I like, you innovate me into something that costs me two hours at the Apple Bar. Where, incidentally, I want zero innovation from your hip kids in blue shirts. Just follow the FAQs and fix my iPad.
When we complain that schools are not teaching our kids to innovate, I say: Bravo! People who can innovate will always find ways to innovate, while most of the rest of us need a serious tutorial in how to follow directions. Show up on time. Do our jobs. That’s not something that comes naturally for many human beings.
There’s nothing less intelligent or inferior about people who practice consistency. Consistency takes extraordinary talent, just like innovation. ... We have made innovation glamorous and consistency somehow mundane and less worthwhile. That’s our fault, not the fault of talented people whose consistency, attention to order, willingness to show up all the time and insistence on a little good ol' tradition improves our lives.
Here endeth the lesson; the following is my editorial comment:
Children do not need to be taught to be innovators and inventors. They need to be taught the facts and skills that will become the tools with which they can innovate, practice consistency, or both. Then they need freedom and time and opportunities to learn to use those tools effectively.
Those of you who enjoyed the TED talk by Temple Grandin, or the movie about her life, or any of her books, will probably like this TED lecture on the importance of perception, by Daniel Tammet, a high-functioning, synaesthetic, autistic savant who is also an artist and a writer.
Our personal perceptions ... are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge. Aesthetic judgements, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.
For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!
One aspect of the push for innovation is hurting our schools - good teaching is increasing defined as doing innovative things in the classroom. A tried-and-true method that works is scorned. An untested gimmick is great teaching.
Yes, Kathy! And it may be more prevalent now, but I'd say it's not new, at least on the elementary school level. I saw so many apparently random innovations and was all but certain I could tie each one of them to some educator's recent PhD thesis.
I usually find it's not worth my time to look up when a baby is "supposed" to do something or other. But I did note when Joy showed that she had object permanence and it seemed "early". I think it's neat that they're finding this out and hopefully it will help open up more understanding that non-verbal doesn't mean unintelligent.
your quick takes take me a long time. (:
Let's see if I can get this straight (I asked my Favorite Economist.) Credit card companies sometimes send out promotional offers, such as "Zero percent interest for six months on balance transfers." The trick is that the 0% applies only to the balance transferred (from another credit card), not existing balances or future charges. And any payment you make is applied first to the "promotional balance" (that covered by the 0%), so if you don't pay it all, you'll be accruing interest charges mostly at the higher rate.
It's bad—but there are so many new rules affecting the fees banks can charge that they have to find other ways to keep afloat. Banks are considered "bad guys" these days, and with some reason, but credit card fraud is a huge problem, and the banks have to absorb the losses because consumers are protected, so they have to find some way to stay profitable. This is one of them. That's not to say we have to fall for it....
non-verbal doesn't mean unintelligent
I knew that when we went to the zoo when Noah was not quite three, and he mostly ignored the animals in favor of close examination of everything mechanical. :)
your quick takes take me a long time.
Me, too, actually, especially when they generate comments that take a while to answer. There's really no reason why most of them couldn't be made into separate, short posts, but I like the format. I also like Janet's Seven Quick Thanks Friday—I'll have to figure out some way to do that, too, but Friday's already pretty overwhelming....
