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Reading Test 49
Unexpected benefits to the human brain
1.
James Paul Gee, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, played his first video game years ago when his six-year-old son Sam was playing Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside. He wanted to play the game so he could support Sam’s problem solving. Though Pajama Sam is not an “educational game”, it is replete with the types of problems psychologists study when they study thinking and learning. When he saw how the well the game helped Sam’s attention, he wondered what sort of beast a more entertaining video game might be.
2.
Video and computer games, like many other popular, entertaining and addictive kids’ activities, are looked down upon by many parents as time-wasters, and worse, parents think that these games rot the brain. Violent video games are readily blamed by the media and some experts as the reason why some youth become violent or commit extreme anti-social behavior. Recent content analyses of video games show that as many as 89% of games contain some violent content, but there is no form of aggressive content for 70% of popular games. Many scientists and psychologists, like James Paul Gee, find that video games actually have many benefits – the main one being making kids smart. Video games may actually teach kids high-level thinking skills that they will need in the future.
3.
“Video games change your brain,” according to University of Wisconsin psychologist Shawn Green. Video games change the brain’s physical structure the same way as do learning to read, playing the piano, or navigating using a map. Much like exercise can build muscle, the powerful combination of concentration and rewarding surges of neurotransmitters like dopamine, which strengthens neural circuits, can build the player’s brain.
4.
Video games give your child’s brain a real workout. In many video games, the skills required to win involve abstract and high level thinking. These skills are not even taught at school. Some of the mental skills trained by video games include: following instructions, problem solving, logic, hand-eye coordination, fine motor and spatial skills. Research also suggests that people can learn iconic, spatial, and visual attention skills from video games. There have even been studies with adults showing that experience with video games is related to better surgical skills. Jacob Benjamin, doctor from Beth Israel Medical Center NY, found a direct link between skill at video gaming and skill at keyhole or laparoscopic surgery. Also, a reason given by experts as to why fighter pilots of today are more skillful is that this generation’s pilots are being weaned on video games.
5.
The players learn to manage resources that are limited, and decide the best use of resources, the same way as in real life. In strategy games, for instance, while developing a city, an unexpected surprise like an enemy might emerge. This forces the player to be flexible and quickly change tactics. Sometimes the player does this almost every second of the game giving the brain a real workout. According to researchers at the University of Rochester, led by Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive scientist, games simulating stressful events such as those found in battle or action games could be a training tool for real-world situations. The study suggests that playing action video games primes the brain to make quick decisions. Video games can be used to train soldiers and surgeons, according to the study. Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, says gamers must deal with immediate problems while keeping their long-term goals on their horizon. Young gamers force themselves to read to get instructions, follow storylines of games, and get information from the game texts.
6.
James Paul Gee, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that playing a video game is similar to working through a science problem. Like students in a laboratory, gamers must come up with a hypothesis. For example, players in some games constantly try out combinations of weapons and powers to use to defeat an enemy. If one does not work, they change hypotheses and try the next one. Video games are goal-driven experiences, says Gee, which are fundamental to learning. Also, using math skills is important to win in many games that involve quantitative analysis like managing resources. In higher levels of a game, players usually fail the first time around, but they keep trying until they succeed and move on to the next level.
7.
Many games are played online and involve cooperation with other online players in order to win. Video and computer games also help children gain self-confidence and many games are based on history, city building, and governance and so on. Such games indirectly teach children about aspects of life on earth.
8.
In an upcoming study in the journal Current Biology, authors Daphne Bavelier, Alexandre Pouget, and C. Shawn Green report that video games could provide a potent training regimen for speeding up reactions in many types of real-life situations. The researchers tested dozens of 18- to 25-year-olds who were not ordinarily video game players. They split the subjects into two groups. One group played 50 hours of fast-paced action video games “Call of Duty 2” and “Unreal Tournament,” and the other group played 50 hours of the slow-moving strategy game “The Sims 2.” After this training period, all of the subjects were asked to make quick decisions in several tasks designed by the researchers. The action game players were up to 25 percent faster at coming to a conclusion and answered just as many questions correctly as their strategy game playing peers.
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War Debris Could Cause Cancer
A.
Could the mystery of how depleted uranium might cause genetic damage be closer to being solved? It may be if a controversial claim by two researchers is right. They say that minute quantities of material lodged in the body may kick out energetic electrons that mimic the effect of beta radiation. This, they argue, could explain how residues of depleted uranium scattered across former war zones could be increasing the risk of cancer and other problems among soldiers and local people.
B.
Depleted uranium is highly valued by the military, who use it in the tips of armourpiercing weapons. The material’s high density and self-sharpening property help it to penetrate the armor of enemy tanks and bunkers. Its use in conflicts has risen sharply in recent years. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that shells containing 1700 tonnes of the material were fired during the 2003 Iraq war. Some researchers and campaigners are convinced that depleted uranium is left in the people exposed to it. Governments and the military disagree, and point out that there is no conclusive epidemiological evidence for this. And while they acknowledge that the material is weakly radioactive, they say this effect is too small to explain the genetic damage at the levels seen in war veterans and civilians.
C.
Organizations such as the UK’s Royal Society, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and UNEP have called for more comprehensive epidemiological studies to clarify the link between depleted uranium and any ill effects. Meanwhile, various test-tube and animal studies have suggested that depleted uranium may increase the risk of cancer, according to a review of the scientific literature published in May 2008 by the US National Research Council. The authors of the NRC report argue that more long-term and quantitative research is needed on the effects of uranium’s chemical toxicity. They say that science seems to support the theory that genetic damage might be occurring because uranium’s chemical toxicity and weak radioactivity could somehow reinforce each other, though no one knows what the mechanism for this might be.
D.
Now two researchers, Chris Busby, and Alex Schug, have a new theory that they say explains how depleted uranium could cause genetic damage. Their theory involves a well-known process called the photoelectric effect. This is the main mechanism by which gamma photons with energies of about 100 kiloelectronvolts (keV) or less are blocked by matter: the photon transfers its energy to an electron in the atom’s electron cloud, which is ejected into the surroundings.
An atom’s ability to stop photons by this mechanism depends on the fourth power of its atomic number – the number of protons in its nucleus – so heavy elements are far better at intercepting gamma radiation and X-rays than light elements. This means that uranium could be especially effective at capturing photons and kicking out damaging photoelectrons: with an atomic number of 92, uranium blocks low-energy gamma photons over 450 times as effective as the lighter element calcium, for instance.
E.
Busby and Schug say previous risk models have ignored this well-established physical effect. They claim that depleted uranium could be kicking out photoelectrons in the body’s most vulnerable spots. Various studies have shown that dissolved uranium – ingested in food or water, for example – is liable to attach to DNA strands within cells, because uranium binds strongly to DNA phosphate.
Photoelectrons from uranium are therefore likely to be emitted precisely where they will cause the most damage to genetic material,” says Busby.
F.
Busby and Schug base their claim on calculations of the photoelectrons that would be produced by the interaction between normal background levels of gamma radiation and uranium in the body. “Our detailed calculations indicate that the phantom photoelectrons are the predominant effect by far for uranium genotoxicity, and that uranium could be 1500 times as powerful as an emitter of photoelectrons than as an alpha emitter.” Their computer modeling results are described in a peer-reviewed paper to be published this month by the IPPSS in a book called Loads and the Fate of Fertiliser-Derived Uranium.
G.
Hans-Georg Menzel, who chairs the International Commission on Radiological Protection’s committee on radiation doses, acknowledges that the theory should be considered, but he doubts that it will prove significant. He suspects that under normal background radiation, the effect is too weak to affect many of the “double hits” of energy that are known to be most damaging to cells. “It is very unlikely that individual cells would be subject to two or more closely spaced photoelectron impacts under normal background gamma radiation,” he says. Despite his doubts, Menzel raised the issue last week with his committee in St Petersburg, Russia, and says that several colleagues “intended to collect relevant data and perform calculations to check whether there was any possibility of a real effect in living tissues”. Organizations in the UK, including the Ministry of Defence and the Health Protection Agency, say they have no plans to investigate Busby’s hypothesis.
H.
Radiation biophysicist Mark Hill of the University of Oxford would like to see a fuller investigation, though he suggests this might show that the photoelectric effect is not as powerful as Busby claims. “We really need more detailed calculations and dose estimates for realistic situations with and without uranium present,” he says. Hill’s doubts center on an effect called Compton scattering, which he believes needs to be factored into any calculations. With Compton scattering, uranium is only 4.5 times as effective as calcium at stopping gamma photons, so Hill says that taking it into account would reduce the relative importance of uranium as an emitter of secondary electrons. If he is right, this would dilute the mechanism proposed by Busby and Schug.
I.
The arguments over depleted uranium are likely to continue, whatever the outcome of these experiments. Whether Busby’s theory holds up or not remains to be seen, but investigating it can only help to clear up some of the doubts about this mysterious substance.
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The significant role of mother tongue language in education
A
One consequence of population mobility is increasing diversity within schools. To illustrate, in the city of Toronto in Canada, 58% of kindergarten pupils come from homes where English is not a language of communication. Schools in Europe and North America have experienced this diversity for years, but educational policies and practices vary widely between countries and even within countries. Some political parties and groups search for ways to solve the problem of diverse communities and their integration in schools and society. They see the positive consequences for the host society and worry that diversity threatens the identity of the host society. Consequently, they promote ‘assimilation policies’ that will make the ‘problem’ disappear. If students retain their culture and language, they are viewed as less capable of identifying with the mainstream culture and learning the mainstream language of society.
B
The challenge for educators and policy-makers is to shape the evolution of national identity in such a way that the rights of all citizens (including school children) are respected, and the cultural, linguistic, and economic resources of the nation are maximized. To waste the resources of the nation by discouraging children from developing their mother tongues is quite simply unintelligent from the point of view of national self-interest. A first step in providing an appropriate education for culturally and linguistically diverse children is to examine what the existing research says about the role of children’s mother tongues in their educational development.
C
In fact, the research is very clear. When children continue to develop their abilities in two or more languages throughout their primary school, they gain a deeper understanding of language and how to use it effectively. They have more practice in processing language, especially when they develop literacy in both. More than 150 research studies conducted during the past 35 years strongly support what Goethe, the famous only one language does not truly know that language. Research suggests that bilingual children may also develop more flexibility in their thinking as a result of processing information through two different languages.
D
The level of development of children’s mother tongue is a strong predictor of their second language development. Children who come to school with a solid foundation in their mother tongue develop stronger literacy abilities in the school language. When parents and other caregivers (e.g. grandparents) are able to spend time with their children and tell stories or discuss issues with them in a way that develops their mother tongue, children come to school well-prepared to learn the school language and succeed educationally. Children’s knowledge and skills transfer across languages from the mother tongue to the school language. Transfer across languages can be two-way: both languages nurture each other when the educational environment permits children to access to both languages.
E
Some educators and parents are suspicious of mother tongue-based teaching programs because they worry that they take time away from the majority language. For example, in a bilingual program where 50% of the time is spent teaching through children’s home language and 50% through the majority language, surely children’s won’t progress as far in the latter? One of the most strongly established findings of educational research, however, is that well-implemented bilingual programs can promote literacy and subject-matter knowledge in a minority language without any negative impact on children’s development in the majority language. Within Europe, the Foyer program in Belgium, which develops children’s speaking and literacy abilities in three languages (their mother tongue, Dutch and French), most clearly illustrates the benefits of bilingual and multilingual education (see Cummins, 2000).
F
It is easy to understand how this happens. When children are learning through a minority language, they are learning concepts and intellectual skills too. Pupils who know how to tell the time in their mother tongue understand the concept of telling time. In order to tell the time in the majority language, they do not need to re-learn the concept. Similarly, at more advanced stages, there is transfer across languages of other skills such as knowing how to distinguish the main idea from the supporting details of a written passage or story and distinguishing fact from opinion. Studies of secondary school pupils are providing interesting findings in this area, and it would be worth extending this research.
G
Many people marvel at how quickly bilingual children seem to ‘pick up’ conversational skills in the majority language at school (although it takes much longer for them to catch up to native speakers in academic language skills). However, educators are often much less aware of how quickly children can lose their ability to use their mother tongue, even in the home context. The extent and rapidity of language loss will vary according to the concentration of families from a particular linguistic group in the neighbourhood. Where the mother tongue is used extensively in the community, then language loss among young children will be less. However, where language communities are not concentrated in particular neighbourhoods, children can lose their ability to communicate in their mother tongue within 2–3 years of starting school. They may retain receptive skills in the language but they will use the majority language in speaking with their peers and siblings and in responding to their parents. By the time children become an adolescent chasm. Pupils frequently become alienated from the cultures of both home and school with predictable results.
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